April 13th, 2010, Las Vegas —  Speaking at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vegas this morning, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, a bright, young man with a seemingly legitimate sense of humor started by sharing how he has been received a little like the villain around some back alleys of the convention. He went on to describe how journalists are reporting on increasingly diverse platforms, often many at once (the new buzz word for this multi-platform broadcasting is “transmedia ” and it is being used liberally at this year’s show).  But this belies the increase in data, much of it wireless being pushed and pulled from millions of devices throughout North America and especially the US.

“We are in the midst of a transformative digital age” but that in a recent study the US broadband infrastructure was recently ranked 40th out of 40 in its rate and capacity for change in order to accommodate increasing demands for broadband space. He noted that today’s typical Smartphone i/o’s 35% more data than ye olde cell phone. A netbook 450%.

“Our country faces a serious issue, and while its not the time to panic, it is the time to plan – [broadband will become] a significant cost to our economy and global competitivenes. In order to deliver the mobile internet future we need new spectrum efficient technologies and spectrum efficient policies.” He invited the broadcasters to a discussion and search for solutions with a disclaimer that not all broadcasters would be exactly excited about the establishment of FCC regulations over broadband to be regulated much like airwaves have been.

The National Association of Broadcasters released a statement in response to the speech delivered by FCC Chairman Genachowski.

NAB Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton released the following statement:

“We welcome an ongoing dialogue with Chairman Genachowski. His remarks on the National Broadband Plan as related to television spectrum reclamation were reassuring, and we will reach back to work with the chairman.

“We also intend to work with the Chairman and his colleagues on the issue of retransmission consent, which we believe is working just as Congress intended. We’re hopeful that policymakers will allow these free market negotiations to continue on behalf of consumers, and not tilt the scales of power in favor of giant cable operators.”

I left the FCC keynote to catch Ray Kurzweil talking about tech and media acceleration in the 21st Century. He was mostly rehashing what he talks about in his books, but after the talk I did ask him what he thought about this concern among the top brass at NAB 2010 over broadband spectrum.

“The spectrum will be there,” Ray responded, smiling calmly. “But it will not just build itself. Someone will have to innovate and create the right technology.” OK at this point I am really just paraphrasing, because even if this is was Ray said, his understanding of the complexity of broadband spectrum and its effects on global markets is likely way over my my own. “It will be a question of what paradigm wins.”

It will be a question of what countries are ready, because they will have a huge market advantage. But it’s not as if broadband spectrum could be exported. The FCC and NAB are talking looming crisis here because everyone is switching to iPads and Androids and there won’t be enough pipe for all the water wanting to rush through. But I don’t know that having to wait for Hulu to buffer will really equate to a national emergency. Am I naive in thinking that things will simply scale with the demand? I mean, billions are already being invested in updating infrastructure by the same companies that are investing in fresh water reserves – they know where the future “gold veins” lay.

One may wonder – if the fiber cable isn’t laid fast enough, can’t we just add massive wireless hubs and relays and use Wi-Fi and 3G / 4G to get all the bandwidth we need? Even as I ask the question, it becomes obvious that this is expressly the issue: there is limited bandwidth in the spectrum and so wireless relays will not be able to be the quick band-aid we might wish for when the far more fragile and tenuous fiber optic infrastructure can’t keep pace with demand.

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I recently wrote a paper for a marketing and distribution class at UCLA concerning the outlook shared by Gill and a year later James Stearn on the health of independent cinema and the movie industry as a whole.  Gill offered a sobering reality check having to do with the glut of films that flooded the increasingly frugal marketplace whereas Stearn saw opportunity for improving the quality of the films as the best would rise to the top.  What follows are my reaction to their positions.

While I appreciate Gill’s sober stance on the realities of the industry, one that became even more dire in the subsequent year when EndGame’s James Stearn took his place at the lectern, particularly due to the fact of the perfect storm that was the collapse of the global economy and the indie equivalent of the dot com bubble bursting, I feel Gill’s take on the music industry and why it collapsed is not only smug but fundamentally flawed and somewhat dangerous. It would behoove the movie industry to bear in mind that they had a ten-year grace period due to the fact that bandwidth for showing high quality video was ten times larger than that of music. The “Movie Industry” didn’t get things right where the “Music Industry” got it wrong – they just had more time to sit back and get a sense of what the massively disruptive technology that was the Internet was really going to mean to the bottom line.

Nonetheless, the music industry blew it in that they forgot that they were part of the Entertainment Industry and not singularly the Music Industry. The hubris and competition amongst these industries is often their Achilles heel. Rather than laud Sean Fanning, creator of Napster, as the solution to distribution in the new model, Fanning was sued right and left and ostracized like Alan Turing.

I found it astounding that Mark Gill points out the 5,000 entries to Sundance in 2007 versus the 500 it had fifteen years prior. Then only a year later, James Stearn submits that the number of entries in the subsequent year was closer to 9500. If this is correct, that means the number of entries to Sundance doubled in one year!

Not only are the good people of the world making more movies at home (and this during the economic meltdown) but they are becoming increasingly cognizant of marketing, distribution and monetization opportunities. Of course, this doesn’t mean there is more audience of more money, in fact it creates an even deeper glut of film, but it does mean that not only will quality matter in order to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, but so will how and where and why things are marketed and distributed as the competition in these areas becomes stiffer and more accessible.

James Stern is correct in highlighting the virtue of the short-form film and responding to the Millennial Boomers with the format. Attention Deficit Disorder is not a function of age but of the times. We are all real-time curators and tastemakers and should be targeted at the micro-niche level. A person I spoke with who works at Live Nation constantly expressed his chagrin at the fact that marketing to a general demographic (for example 18-24) is utterly myopic. Among those 18-24 year-olds are, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology, Tastemakers, Mavericks and Connectors. They need to be isolated and the systems to delineate them must be supported, not battled in court. In fact, doing so openly, like Netflix does, is a far more rewarding effort, than doing it covertly through cookies and trackers and 3rd party data collection apps.

That film, as Gill puts it, allows us to target highly specific demographics in one part. Delivering high quality, thoughtful, engaging and memorable content is second, but making it bite sized and a la carte is paramount. We are waiting for the Kubrick of YouTube to arrive. Where is the Spielberg of Vimeo?

The app store effect is not a function of Apple but rather an effect of the widget economy. We are all master chefs in Kitchen Stadium [a reference to popular Japanese cook show Iron Chef] selecting the finest ingredients to concoct our tasty masterpieces on the fly.

From Netflix and E-Bay account piping into a sandbox aggregator like Squidoo, alongside Facebook’s status updates and Twitterstreams, we are irrevocably moving into the era of the real-time web; it is not the tomato we care about but whom the person will be that uses it most creatively. It is no less a tomato as a result, but it is merely a color with which the master will paint and, we will mash-up, mod and repurpose the content to ultimately render the portrait of our essence, personality, our souls. A portrait, whose real meaning will emerge when we cross our tired eyes slightly and gaze upon it like a magic eye.

NOTE: I originally wrote this draft in October.  At that time, I read a Tweet from Mashable that Google Wave is going live to 100,000 pre-registered users. The realtime web is not a theory or conjecture, it has literally arrived and nothing will ever be the same.

UPDATE 12-07-2009 – It’s a little strange that I am publishing this article after the one I posted earlier this morning about Google’s announcement of Realtime search.  GoogleWave now seems like an ancillary to the central eye-raising explosion of technologies that Google has innovated in bring all content to our eyeballs at near light speed.

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“For decades now, the networks and production studios have held a creative stranglehold over the industry. If you were a writer with a brilliant idea for a new show, you had to go through “the system” if you held any hope for your idea to see the light of day and come to fruition as an actual television show. “The system” meaning everything so frustrating and wrong and cliched with modern day Hollywood—-An endless clusterfuck of pitch meetings to tone-deaf underlings, countless script re-writes birthed from asinine notes from dunderhead executives (“I see on page 16 you have Sally eating a peanut…shouldn’t she be eating a cashew instead?!”) who’d never written a thing in their lives but love handing out business cards to aspiring starlets with the word “Producer” under their names, a dizzying array of focus groups and trend research studies so the higher-ups can get their fingers on the “pulse” of the modern viewer and force the creator to change accordingly, and everybody and their wife and cousin has got a fucking opinion to the point where the whole thing gets utterly mutilated. Someone could have the most brilliant idea and these people will more often than not find new and innovative ways to destroy it, all in the hopes of making it more appealing to Harriet and Clarence McAverage in Des Moines, Iowa.”

My response:

Not really.  I mean, it would be nice to think the internet, the platform that made you “famous,” Gawker,  was all that, but not yet. Last year 99% of television was still watched on a “TV.” I was surprised myself by that number, but guess what – Hulu+YouTube+Piratebay+Demonoid and all of it still equals less than 1% of the viewing audience.

People have been crying “Kill Your Television” since it began. And every year we declare its death, but it won’t go away.  Next year when all those new xmas-gift HDTVs start broadcasting 3D content, Lost in 3D, UFC in 3D and the rest of it (sure YouTube 3D is coming soon too) the internet will still be a relative drop in the bucket. Perhaps it is for the same reason radio won’t die; sometimes people don’t WANT to think, they don’t want to make their own choices. Sometimes they just want to sit back and have their entertainment programmed for them by a curator, by a collective group of people who are experts in storytelling, lighting, editing, acting, post-production etc.

“User-created content” may find ways of reaching large audiences, it may even prove to be innovative and of high standard, but what makes television relevant is that it concentrates an audience and its collective experience. The internet lets anyone watch anything anytime – but they do not share in the moment and TV, as the modern campfire creates a certain sense of social unity. You can watch the Superbowl a week later on Hulu, but that kind of misses the point doesn’t it? The collective excitement is gone, the dueling sides, the excitement of participation is lacking in this regard.

Sure this idea of choose-your-own-adventure is neat, but it is still time-intensive and requires research and thus actual work. TV is a passive sport and so long as we work and get tired and just want to chill on the couch and be entertained, TV will be around.

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Which is kind of my point: last year the NAB glitterati were busy sweating and lamenting the bells tolling for TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, the record industry and all other antiquated media platforms.  This year however, we saw a revitalized community – aggressively interested in emerging platforms for communication of our collective stories and in innovating new technologies to address the zeitgeist.

At his opening day keynote address, NAB president and CEO David K. Rehr began:

“There is no place I’d rather be than right here…right now…with all of you.” Donning a sticker that read “I Matter” he continued:

“We are demonstrating that broadcasters are forging ahead…spurring innovation and creating multiple platforms to deliver our content from moving 3D into the home to incorporating FM chips in cell phones, to exploring all the possibilities of the Internet – we are planning for the future and seizing opportunities in this digital age.”

It’s Not A Recession – It’s A Reset

And though these words can be taken as cautionary, post-mortem and defensive, they were certainly not delivered that way. As author Dr. James Florida delineated later during the opening ceremony – we must consider that we are not going through a new Great Depression, but rather a Great Reset. Where once the economy was built on God-given resources like water, food, ore and wood, and then later the resource of human energy and labor post-industrial revolution, what we are seeing now is a new kind of economy built on that of the output of the Creative Class. What Juan Enriquez called Human Evolutis at TED. As the work of building and crafting is increasingly outsourced to China and India and other countries abroad, in North America the primary export is being that of the human mind itself – of imagination and ideas and creativity. This of course, is not to say that these do not exist abroad, but rather that the North American GDP is shifting the source of its wealth.

Ideas were found in abundance at NAB as CEO’s, Presidents, General Managers and inventors from such companies as Disney, Adobe, Electronic Arts met with independent directors, producers, post-production experts, radio broadcasters and content creators of every type and platform to exchange ideas and talk about what the world will look like and respond to over the next few years.

Mary Tyler Moore, Kelsey Grammer and Bob Newhart were all honored for their contributions to the television programming lexicon.

Henry Selick, director of Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and Coraline was interviewed about the development of stop motion and its marriage with new digital techniques.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of groundbreaking social analysis books Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers was interviewed before the NAB attendees by NAB President David Rehr.  He extrapolated his process for coming up with his book subjects and confided that one of his most powerful techniques was avoiding Google searches altogether; Google is essentially empty he explained, it is merely an index of what is on the Web but to go beyond it is to mine massive sources of information available that afford us remarkable insights on who we have been, are and will be especially when seen with our new eyes in this high-speed information exchange society.

The Jim Henson Creature Shop demonstrated their digital puppeteering system wherein one puppeteer controls a head and mouth and another the body via a motion tracking suit and capture grid.  Without any intermediate, they are able to create real-time 3D animation that captures all the nuances and gravity of a real moving body.  Rather than illustrate a variety of movements, they simply shoot another “take” and then use the best take as the final output (after a polish render in Maya).  I asked them whether we might one day see a turnkey system from Jim Henson Company but they reminded us that the puppeteer and experience with working with such technology is really the thing, not so much the computers, mo-cap stage and proprietary software.

Lectures given in morning sessions were echoed in afternoon sessions, but now modified, expanded and reconsidered. By week’s end there were new consensus emerging about how to implement and innovate our proverbial campfires about which we sit and exchange our common experiences through this incredible life we share.

And now more than ever we are sharing it in ways we couldn’t have ever predicted or even imagined.

The Amazing Future of Broadcasting

Beyond all the pontificating – incredible products were on display – Autostereoscopic (which you will come to know as AS-3D) 3D TV sets -(meaning 3D screens for which no intermediary viewing glasses are needed), real-time video cameras displaying in 3D, super high resolution screens that add almost ten times the pixel count of existence HDTV screens, HD radio, FM tuners in all cell phones, HD movies on cell phones that run below real-time Flash based menus, technology that allows every word spoken within a video to be searchable, real-time holographic interview wherein the interviewee appears to be sitting or standing in front the interviewer in spit of any geographic disparity (think Princess Leia’s holographic appeal for help at the beginning of Star Wars except at a resolution almost indistinguishable from reality) and yes YouTube 3D.

Seminar topics ranged from When Will The Web Kill TV to How To Blog In 140 Characters to Alternative Reality Gaming, Second Chances in Second Life and the nature of Web 3.0.

You may have noticed one word popping up an awful lot in this article: “Real Time.”  Other popular keywords at this years convention were Home 3D and Metadata.  Metadata will allow every stage of the production workflow be indexable, searchable and integrated from top to bottom.

It was indeed an extraordinary week and I hope to share and unravel some of the ideas exchanged over the coming weeks and even months. In the interim, you can hear myself and my travel partner and co-host Aimee Lynn Chadwick giddily discussed some of our findings at my podcast http://KeramCast.com

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We headed through the heavy Queen St. traffic for Film Lounge to jump in and see our friends at the pre-party for Deadgirl.  Turns out they meant the other Film Lounge on Dupont, and not the one across from the AGO.

Maneuvering past the R.I.D.E. cops (Saturday night spot-checks) towards the Scotiabank theater (wtf happened? – every goddamned building in the City of Toronto is a corporate advertisement.  No I am not old fashioned but its fucking ridiculous.  The O’Keefe Center is now the SONY center?  The Skydome is Rogers Center!  I know William Gibson predicted this, writing on his typewriter from Vancouver, but does anyone care? Is there any opposition whatsoever to this awful pattern?)  to see Steve McQueen’s (at last someone who will never change their name to McDonald’s Man or Old Milwaukee “Microsoft” McQueen) unbelievable first feature “Hunger”.  Festival vice prez of picking movies Cameron Bailey introduced the film, trying desperately to put the brakes on his gushing over its merits, but failing, before bringing Mr. McQueen himself to the stage.

Pic is amazing.  Intense, measured, perfect.  A little too much to take.  It was so quiet in the theater that the mouth-breather beside me almost stole the show.  The actors are all selfless and utterly engaged, the dialogue, the music, the framing.  See it if you have the nervous system to handle it.  On a small screen at home, I doubt it will be as challenging (in a good way) to watch.  The Dolby systems in the TIFF screenings seriously intensify these films.  Films that my never again be seen at forums this size.

And that really is a big part of TIFF isn’t it?  Large, full surround Michael Bay-ready venues playing hard-core independent films that pull no punches, prepared for today’s high-def standards that may never again be scene the way they were meant to.

Anyway, we left just before the credits, I, fighting near anxiety resulting from the combination over over-stimulation from Scotiabank cinema’s epileptic seizure inducing bing bing playground of Buy Me lightshows, the mayhem of T-dot club district, and trying to make our next screening at Ryerson in 15 minutes.

Despite this time-challenge, we did jog past the Imperial pub – enjoying a renaissance now that TIFF has triangulated the Yonge/Dundas quadrant – where Pontypool was throwing its festival bash.  Only had time to give music writer Karen Pace a hug and the producers of the film a brief congratulations before booking it up the street to the world premier of Deadgirl.  Lynh Haaga, wife of Trent, the writer of the film, and also the film’s wardrobe designer, confided that the screener’s hard drive didn’t even arrive in Toronto until earlier in the day, leaving the fest’s programmers absolutely twitching.  The film was shot entirely in Los Angeles (wait, they still shoot movies in Los Angeles?) on a Thomson Vipre – a D-Cinema – so there was never actually any film or tape – the whole movie, which looked pretty close to 35mm celluloid (except for the occasional outdoor shot or underexposed early evening shot that introduced some digi-noise when they had to bring up the levels) was shot directly to hard drive and projected at the festival via Christie digital projection.

For the most part the movie works.  Despite its insane subject matter – that is, raping a dead girl who isn’t quite dead in the basement of an insane asylum – somehow, and you’d have to see it to understand – doesn’t ever fall to exploitation or even chastisement of the “protagonists,” but rather affords the viewer an intriguing examination of character, virtue, karma, and some really cool plot twists along the way.  Some actors fare better than others, but to be fair, I won’t name names since I had just walked out of one of the most harrowing and powerful performances (Michael Fassbender in Hunger) since David Thewlis in Mike Leigh’s Naked.

Deadgirl keeps you on the edge of your seat and does alright for itself.

By the time we walked back to the Pontypool party, the bar had been cleared out.

We return to Ryerson tomorrow for our third Midnight Madness screening – Not Quite Hollywood.

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