Hawking is a British theoretical physicist whose 40-year scientific career has produced key scientific theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, the properties and natural laws of black holes, developing new models for the universe that has no boundaries in space time, and set ablaze the imagination of countless armchair enthusiasts interested in time travel, alien life, and colonization of other planets.

Another amazing fact about Hawking is that shortly after arriving at Cambridge, he began to develop systems of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, that ultimately rendered him completely paralyzed and able to communicate solely by virtue of a voice synthesizer (developed by a colleague at Cambridge) that speaks what he has written by word selection on a screen controlled by the movement of his eyes.

But this show is not about Hawking the man, it is about his ideas, and more importantly, about rendering his mind-boggling ideas and theorems into visual form so that they can be more readily appreciated and understood by the rest of us.

The result is nothing short of awe-inspiring, daring, mesmerizing. Computer models were created to simulate maps of the universe at the bleeding edge of our capacity in order to depict on screen our place amidst the interstellar layout of our Universe, and as the program zooms us in and out of it, we begin to see just how extraordinary the scope of it is; it is one thing to hear the words “two hundred billion” when speaking about time, or miles or the count of stars, but another thing altogether when seeing it depicted in a matter of seconds.


Somehow the show also succeeds in reducing to third grade level comprehension the manner in which a slight disparity in perfection of the grand order led to the creation of matter and life and of all things in the universe as we know it, by way of that irrefutable force: gravity. (Is the “divine creator” then merely instability+gravity?)

Although I have been deeply interested in the cosmos, quantum mechanics and our place in the grand scheme of things all my life, reading Hawking’s work, even the slim best-seller “A Brief History of Time,” that sold over nine million copies, proves an exercise in determination and humility. What begins as an enthusiastic exploration on the part of the reader quickly turns into a soporific bedside coaster: the ideas, the mathematical formulas simply require a deeper understanding of the underlying mathematical quandaries. Now with the ubiquity of the internet and its propensity to transform even the most staunchly inquisitive end user into a curator of sound bytes, Hawkings book must be even harder to process effectively, and for this reason the Discovery series is on my recommended viewing list.

At the NAB screening, a member of the audience stood up during the Q&A and pointed out that Carl Sagan’s series “Cosmos” (1980) was the most widely viewed television show in the medium’s history. He wondered aloud whether the creators of Into the Universe understood the gravity of this fact and how it reflected the appetite among viewers for answers and if they believed that this show could replicate those numbers.

It is an interesting question. Do we still care? Are we still capable of sustaining inquiry long and far enough to engage topics of this scope and complexity, or will the show simply become another powder keg for debate between creationists and the scientific community? The show certainly doesn’t pander to all sides; in fact, Hawking goes right ahead and asks if the way things are turning out provide evidence of a grand designer, and then immediately answers that it doesn’t.

In the very first two hour episode everything from the nature of the Big Bang, to black holes, to the lifespan of our sun, to colonization of Mars and interstellar technology is covered, never in a sensational way but rather from a simple but deliberate set of unapologetic arguments for how these things must operate to how they could be solved. That it is all beautifully realized by way of well-executed computer generated graphics makes it all the more engaging and really fun to watch.

I happened to watch it in pitiful standard definition on my HDTV (for some reason, though the show states it is also available in HD, the high definition version of Discovery Channel on my Time Warner package was running paid ads) right after watching the third last episode of Lost. It was interesting to notice how, though Lost raises question upon question as the nature of its mysteries, it often turns to the distraction of the emotional interactions between the characters than to take the more courageous path of venturing theoretical possibilities, even metaphysical ones.

So to see Into the Universe plunge in headfirst with some of the really big questions, it occurred to me that Hawking, who has been subjected to a body without functionality, essentially a brain in a wheelchair, maintaining sustained inquiry into matters that his personal experience has never encountered, and coming up with very real possibilities for solutions that will affect our species irrevocably is quite a salve to the frustrations raised by ABC’s hit show.

Whether or not you have an interest in the stars, in space exploration, in the cosmos or how we came to be here and where we may be going, Into the Universe is extraordinary programming, a great antidote to the Facebook blues, perhaps even a restoration of childlike fascination, and for these reasons I suggest you give it a look.

For more information Into the Universe visit the Discovery Channel’s TV listings.

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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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Shortly after the Wachowski Brothers released a film called The Matrix in 1999, I got a job on a film shooting in Hendersonville, North Carolina about summer camp and spent a beautiful month and a half in a small cottage reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. It was a potent combination – the movie and the book; what the Matrix was doing for me spiritually, Kurzweil’s book seemed to be prepared to manifest on Earth.

Cut to a decade later, where I will be attending my fifth consecutive NAB Show – the largest tech and entertainment media show of its kind in the world – and have the opportunity to see Kurzweil actually speak in person for a power session entitled “The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Media, Communications, and Society.”

Kurzweil will begin the session with a presentation on how information technology is transforming traditional industries, including media and entertainment, into infotech businesses. He will explore how the exponential growth of technology and the influx of new chip-driven tools is upending free enterprise as we know it and paving the way for an unparalleled change in human history. After his presentation, Kurzweil will be joined on the stage by Professor Donald Marinelli for a special discussion highlighting topics that directly impact Hollywood and the entertainment technology arena.

This is precisely what I have been asked to speak about throughout most of my career – the confluence of technology and the arts – so you can imagine how excited I am to hear these two go on about it.

To give you a better idea about Kurzweil’s relevance (besides the fact that he invented speech recognition technology) he has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes and ranked 8th among entrepreneurs in the United States by Inc. magazine. PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He is a six-time national bestselling author whose works include “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and “The Singularity is Near.” Which reminds me, Kurzweil also recently spearheaded the opening of The Singularity University where he invites the world’s foremost thinkers, doctors and technicians to figure out how to live forever, in harmony, probably with robots. And he is totally serious. And he might even pull it off.

Donald Marinelli is a tenured professor of drama and arts management at Carnegie Mellon University and is also the executive producer of that institution’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). The ETC is recognized internationally as Carnegie Mellon’s “Dream Fulfillment Factory.” Its emphasis is on bringing artists and technologists together to work on substantive, real-world projects combining the latest digital media technologies with myriad artistic, educational, and entertainment efforts. Marinelli’s book “The Comet & the Tornado” will be released on April 6th.

This event joins an impressive line-up of previously announced keynote conversations, including Dana Walden and Gary Newman, Chairmen of Twentieth Century Fox Television (TCFTV); and Stan Lee, the iconic comic book visionary who co-created Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and The Fantastic Four.

“A key theme of this year’s NAB Show is transmedia: developing, integrating and monetizing content for multiplatform distribution,” said Chris Brown, executive vice president, conventions & business operations for NAB Show. “Stan Lee has epitomized the concept of transmedia with his amazing creations, which have been turned into smash hit feature films, television series and innovative digital content.”

Did I already mention how excited I am?   This is like Christmas for prognosticators like me, never mind robotics fans. And manifesting dreams.  And wanting to live forever.  And SEO types.  And comic books.

The NAB Show will take place 10-15 April, 2010 in Las Vegas (exhibits open 12 April). It is the world’s largest electronic media show covering filmed entertainment and the development, management and delivery of content across all mediums. Complete details are available at www.nabshow.com.

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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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