BigShinyThing

It features both Cash and his wife very shortly before both of them died. The song is from Cash’s last album of cover versions which also features his extraordinary version of ‘Personal Jesus’.

Isn’t it great when you see something on TV one night and the next day you can just find it on the web, at YouTube?

A posting on Slashdot flags a Forbes report in which an analyst predicts that Google may be making a move into online music distribution:

Robert Peck speculated that it makes sense for Google to create a rival for the popular iTunes service by Apple Computer, given the explosive growth of unique visitors to the iTunes’ Web site. Further, ‘Nielsen indicates that iTunes users form a distinct target audience with brand preferences along autos, alcohol beverages, magazines, and television,’ he added.

Things that make you go hmmm.

Accompanied by Pure Evil bunny rabbit.

Hot on the heels of the news that a possible new TV show won’t be distributed via television, today sees a movie released simultaneously in cinemas and on cable, heralding a threat to the traditional $25 billion-plus worldwide ‘theatrical window’ during which first-run films are only screened at cinemas.

Technology Review has the story:

Today is the release date for Bubble, a new film directed by Soderbergh and released by HDNET Films, an upstart film company cofounded by Mark Cuban. Setting Bubble apart [...] is that the film will be available in cinemas and on the HDNET cable channel on the same day. What’s more, just four days later, it will be out on DVD. In other words: there will be no “window” between its theatrical release and its availability for home viewing.

The gap between theatrical release and viewership on cable and home video sales has been shrinking steadily for some time. In 1993, the average time between theatrical debut and availability on video was 191 days. By 2003, it had shrunk to 155. Occasionally, poor-performing titles will be rushed to DVD, to capture any remaining interest in them; but Bubble’s release is the first time a film is set for both a theatrical and cable television release.

Cinema owners don’t share Hollywood’s enthusiasm for quick DVD and cable releases as a cure for current the slump in film revenues, however. Quoted in The Hollywood Reporter in August 2005, National Association of Theatre Owners president John Fithian rebuked a call for compressed windows from soon-to-be Disney CEO Robert Iger thus:

(Iger) should know that Hollywood studios would be merely one shriveled vendor among many in that new world of movies-as-commodities-only.

This rather self-defeating view — that given instant availability of DVD or online delivery, people will simply stop gong to cinemas — has sparked a passionate riposte from HDNET’s Mark Cuban asking ‘just what business are the cinemas really in?’:

How sad is it when the President of the National Assoc of Theater Owners doesn’t think his members can create a better movie going experience than what we can see in our houses and apartments ?

Guess what John, I can whip up a mean steak, but I still like to go to restaurants. Because I enjoy it. I enjoy getting out of the house with family, friends, who ever.

Every single Mavs [basketball] game is on TV. It wasnt that long ago that some people in the sports business thought that having games on TV would reduce attendance. After all, why go to the game when you can watch it for free on TV ? Then someone decided to do some research and as it turns out, the more games you broadcast on TV, the more people who go to your games. At the NBA, when we do our analysis to determine the revenue opportunity in any given market, the number of games broadcast is one of the criteria analyzed.

He’s got a point: surely the experience of the cinema, is — or should be — about more than the films? Maybe it’s time for the multiplex chains to start re-examination of their ‘pack em in’ strategy and start looking at why people go out to see films in the first place…

According to a profile of the social networking site in Businessweek, MySpace is the runaway Internet property of the moment — and it’s getting bigger all the time. MySpace currently has 43 million users, with 150,000 new ones arriving every day. A major driver of growth on the site is its affiliation with music — there are currently 10,000 pages for UK bands alone and Madonna launched Confessions on a Dance Floor on MySpace. Bands like Arctic Monkeys have built their careers using p2p sites like MySpace instead of conventional channels like radio to spread their music. Both acts have MySpace profiles. Ten percent of all advertising impressions across the Internet happen on MySpace — twice as many page views as Google. All NewsCorp have to do now is the leave the site the hell alone…

Joss (creator of the Buffy franchise) Whedon’s cult SF TV series Firefly was axed after its first series. The movie based on it, Serenity, met with moderate box-office success. Now the production company is mooting a second series, which will be available in a number of formats — but on TV won’t be one of them. According to their web site:

We are looking to push the envelope of episodic television by offering Season Two of Firefly in a groundbreaking new format. Each episode (or the entire season) would be made available for purchase in Standard or Hi-Definition.

It’s possible that subscribers may choose one of three playback options; monthly DVD deliveries, TV On-Demand using your cable or satellite provider, or computer viewing via Streaming Download.

Must help when your core demographic is teen-age early-adopters who are well kitted out with broadband. Even so — remember that they’re just a bit further ahead on the curve. Direct distribution is here to stay.

[via Slashdot]

We’re forever banging on about wonderful, world-changing photo-sharing site Flickr. And now people are tinkering with it to create exciting new applications — like this. Go play.

We’ve written before about the power of open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), whereby anyone with a modicum of programming ability can hook into API-enabled online resources (Technorati, Skype, Google Maps, Flickr etc) to build their own tools and toys, but we’re still amazed what people come up with.

Link courtesy of Wired.

The ever-busy people at the Pew Internet & American Life Project have today released their latest report, The Strength of Internet Ties, which finds, in summary, that:

The Internet helps maintain people’s social networks, and connects them to members of their social network when they need help. 60 million Americans have turned to the Internet for help with major life decisions.

Given the strength of the ‘the Internet is disruptive to real relationships’ meme, this is newsworthy.

Amongst the other findings in the report:

• Heavy users of email are heavy users of other media as well — email adds to the possibilities of communication, rather than replacing other channels for it.
• The only activities that increased online activity steals time from are watching television and sleeping!

Don’t take our word for it — read the whole report, and the original questionnaire on which it’s based, online.

In a nice sign o’ the times, the Financial Times article makes clear the difference between old and new marketing techniques. Cendant argues that it is investing in newspaper ads in an attempt to ‘bring brands to life’ and differentiate itself from its online rivals.

We’ve noted before how online retailers such as Lastminute and eBay have exploited offline media in an attempt to make their brands ‘huggier’ and more ‘real world’. It’s also a classic ploy to draw in any straggling technophobes out there. And we wonder how much of this is designed to placate digital immigrants who still draw a line between the online and offline worlds, unlike their kids — already digital natives who see everything glommed together.

Randy Wagner, chief marketing operating officer of Cedant draws a distinction between the ‘art and science’ of traditional and online advertising — aligning online with measurable impact and offline with emotional reach. Now all traditional marketers have to do is convince everybody else… The Wall Street Journal reported just this week: “Newspapers are losing their single biggest category of classified advertising: auto ads. Revenue from car classifieds has been falling for seven straight quarters, and analysts are beginning to wonder if the drop-off is permanent.”

A report by Booz Allen Hamilton has predicted that more than half of European homes will be plugged into ‘triple play’ services of TV, broadband internet and telephony from the same provider by the end of the decade.

The study also suggested that these digital homes will trigger more than €100bn (£60bn) in investment and generate more than 100,000 jobs, mainly among infrastructure providers such as cable and telecoms operators. A further €35bn is expected to be invested by content providers. However, the consultants warned that heavy-handed regulation, blocking competition, could cut the cumulative investments by 40% and wipe out 90% of job creation.

The report comes days after France Telecom confirmed that it had lost 600,000 fixed-line subscribers last year, mainly to ‘triple play’ competitors such as Neuf Cegetel and Alice in France, Europe’s third largest economy. Issuing a profits and sales warning, the group’s finance director said that Internet based telephony (VoIP) would account for 40% of fixed line traffic by the end of the year, compared with 15% in 2005 and 1-2% in 2004.

Full details of the report are available via Mediaguardian.

John Galliano out-did himself again this haute couture season, sending models down the runway in blooded, torn gowns and 1789 neck tattoos. Galliano says that the collection references last summer’s riots in France, telling US Vogue,

There was a lot of political unrest happening. I wanted something bolder and toughened up. The beat of what’s going on.

During his research, which centred on Marseille and Arles, the designer also went back to the corset factory Dior himself used in the 1950’s, as well as to the home of Marie-Laure de Noailles (who he was delighted to discover was related to the Marquis de Sade). Down south, he also connected with “the passion of the bullfight,” which is a reference the Spanish designer returns to again and again.

But Galliano is as savvy as he is spectacular. Genuine couture buyers number in the hundreds and few will be up for a blood-soaked ballgown, however beautifully constructed. No, the real value of the show is in its marketing power for the Dior brand — in all those sunglasses, perfumes and handbags that will be sold off the back of the mystique of the House. And Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette biopic opens next month…

It’s a contemporary truism that at the turn-of the century, TV drama has high ambitions. After the HBO-led watershed heralded by The Sopranos, no new series feels complete without an epic sweep, massively interlinked story arcs, and intricate character development over multiple series. The freedom given to the writers of these prime-time operas is of course due as much to the opportunity for long-term revenue from DVD sales and repeat screenings, as it is about exploring the possibilities of TV as a genuinely cinematic medium. But it doesn’t hurt that high-def widescreen, and digital surround sound give at least a veneer of ‘going to the movies’ to the actual viewing experience as well.

But are we the only ones wondering about the current crop of high-budget, eye-candy series — Lost and Invasion come to mind — where a new formula seems to be being applied: borrowing the lushness and high-concept from the groundbreaking early HBO series, but slowing the action and story arcs down into an ultimately narcotic dream state, where even the mandatory end-of-episode cliff-hangers only stir the viewer enough to take notice of the preview for the next episode. And with plots that really could have been squeezed into a single prime-time slot, rather than stretched languidly over a whole season.

So what’s going on? There’s a body of theory which suggests that the lure of TV is the passivity of the viewing experience: that a tuned in, chilled out, lean-back theta state is at the heart of televisual pleasure. If so, then the creators of these series have distilled the essence of that state into dealer-grade opiate.

We’re wondering if this is a sign of things to come: that as home entertainment technologies offer increasingly immersive experiences – and let’s face it, Lost on a 42″ HD plasma screen in Dolby Digital is one hell of a step jump from Land of the Giants on a wobbly old 12″ TV — then content creators will exploit this immersion to deliberately induce ever-more dream-like states in the audience. And just maybe there will be an unexpected pay-off for those still peddling interruptive advertising…You are feeling… sleepy… do NOT fast forward through the following commercial messages…

Digital Rights lobbyists the EFF have unearthed a catchy new euphemism: ‘ customary historic use’, a powerful little timebomb of a clause in draft US legislation, which is designed to outlaw any future nasty surprises (nasty to the established media order, that is) like PVRs or MP3 players before they even leave the drawingboard. A post on the EFF’s blog elaborates:

You say you want the power to time-shift and space-shift TV and radio? You say you want tomorrow’s innovators to invent new TV and radio gizmos you haven’t thought of yet, the same way the pioneers behind the VCR, TiVo, and the iPod did?

Well, that’s not what the entertainment industry has in mind. According to them, here’s all tomorrow’s innovators should be allowed to offer you:

“customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law.”

Had that been the law in 1970, there would never have been a VCR. Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod.

Fair use has always been a forward-looking doctrine. It was meant to leave room for new uses, not merely “customary historic uses.” Sony was entitled to build the VCR first, and resolve the fair use questions in court later. This arrangement has worked well for all involved — consumers, media moguls, and high technology companies.

Now the RIAA and MPAA want to betray that legacy by passing laws that will regulate new technologies in advance and freeze fair use forever. If it wasn’t a “customary historic use,” federal regulators will be empowered to ban the feature, prohibiting innovators from offering it. If the feature is banned, courts will never have an opportunity to pass on whether the activity is a fair use.

Voila, fair use is frozen in time. We’ll continue to have devices that ape the VCRs and cassette decks of the past, but new gizmos will have to be submitted to the FCC for approval, where MPAA and RIAA lobbyists can kill it in the crib.

They’re only getting my hand-built, custom-designed audiophile music library when they prise the remote from my cold dead hand.

Dance music might be oh-so-90s right now, but as the wheel turns, one day you’ll need to brush up on the taxonomy of trance, or explain the heritage of hardcore to your disbelieving offspring (who will of course think that they invented the whole thing, about 10 years from now — face it, you’re getting old, B-Boy). And what better (and funnier) resource could there be than Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music? Lovingly weird diagrams show how the flavas feed off each other, there are plenty of streaming samples, and all the irreverant insight you could ask for. For example:

• Hip House:”It’s more popular than you think; people are just whack bitches and don’t give it their props like they should.”

This is the Word of Ishkur. Listen up.

Sienna Miller, Hayden Christensen and Guy Pearce are currently filming Factory Girl, in which Miller plays Andy Warhol’s muse Edie Sedgwick. Huge Edie fans that we are, BST has always been dumbfounded at the choice of Miller in favour of Edie’s modern day doppelgänger: Kate Moss. Who cares if she can act, Moss is the epitome of modern day rock chic. We’re siding with Lou.

Story from New York Daily News via Gawker. For proper Edie-worship, read Edie: American Girl.

Flipbook was created by Colombian artist Juan Carlos Ospina Gonzalez. An additional clever feature lets you download your animation onto PDF and print out to create a flipbook. Via we-make-money-not-art.com.

Everyone likes a good soundbite, and none more than the team here at BigShinyThing. Imagine our excitement at the claim, in The Economist’s (rather excellent) feature on The New Organisation, published last week, that Milgram’s famous ‘6-degrees of separation‘ is now shrinking under the impact of enabling technologies and modern organisational practices:

According to more modern work along similar lines, that number has now fallen to 4.6, despite the growth in America’s population since Milgram’s time. Being able to keep in touch with a much wider range of people through technologies such as e-mail has brought everyone closer.

Lovely. We expect that meme to be showing up in every second PowerPoint slide in the next 6 months. Lo! Not only has the Internet shrunk the world, but we have a number saying how much! You heard it first here!

But: having actually studied statistics at one sad point in our lives, we were curious both about the methodology and the precision of the number — 4.6, not 4.7 or 4.5? So over the weekend, we asked some people who should know — members of INSNA, the International Network for Social Network Analysis: the professionals in this field. The (informal) consensus was that:

1. Without knowing the methodology, the number is meaningless.
2. Milgram’s original number — 6 — isn’t magic, and was never claimed as such: Milgram’s discovery wasn’t really the number 6, it was the rather astonishing qualitative result that the minimal distance between members of huge social networks is incredibly small compared to the size of the network.

So we’re under-impressed, and if you see this claim popping up over the next few months, we strongly recommend suspicion and restraint in spreading the meme. We’re willing to believe that networked communications can bring people together, but we think that the claim that we’re lost 1.4 degrees of separation as a result — while very PowerPoint friendly — is probably not worth repeating without some serious caveats.

The BBC reports that royalty collection agency PPL has quietly introduced a new levy on anyone playing downloaded music in public venues. Never adverse to making a quick buck at the expense of long-term gain, the music industry has decided to sting digital DJs a whopping £200 (+VAT) a year for the right to perform using downloaded tracks — on top of the margin the industry has already negotiated with online retailers, and the existing license fees paid by venues playing any kind of recorded music for punters. Double-dipping? Sounds like it to us. Unreasonable? PPL disagrees:

Business affairs director Peter Leathem told Radio 1’s Newsbeat: “Rather than saying stop it, don’t do it, we’ve actually tried to embrace what people want to do and come up with a licence to be able to do that.” He said the £200 charge was “reasonable”, adding: “You don’t actually have to DJ using a laptop. You can use vinyl, you can use CD, so we’re saying that if it’s not worth your while spending £200 then don’t do it.”

We think they’re missing the point of media convergence, cramping creative style, and being greedy — they’ve already been paid! Besides, £200 is a lot of money for most DJs, and after all, who is it who does most of the work in getting new music in front of the punters?

A reminder about the new broadband channel from Channel 4 where you can watch and review documentaries about, amongst other things, a glass eye-maker. Even upload your own docs.

Brandrepublic US reports that Google is now facing legal action from the US Department of Justice. George Bush’s administration claims that it needs the information in order to defend an internet child pornography law that is unrelated to Google and that has been struck down by the Supreme Court. Google has refused this request on a number of grounds including that the request was vague and unduly burdensome, and that it would reveal trade secrets. Not to mention representing a massive infringement of civil liberties. Nicole Wong, a lawyer for Google, said:

Google is not party to this lawsuit and their demand for information overreaches. We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously.

And then the story gets rather more murky. The Financial Times points out that Google does not actually cite privacy as the primary reason for refusing to comply. Instead, the company’s main objection is to the government’s attempt to use its ‘highly proprietary’ search database to access and use to defend its position in court. Fair enough - Google has a right to protect its brand. But maybe in today’s United States the ‘personal privacy’ card just isn’t worth playing.

A mere few days after this story broke, Google announced that it would backtrack on its previous position and self-censor its service in China. Looks like freedom of expression and information just isn’t part of Google’s empire-building agenda. A BoingBoinger has undertaken a little test:

Phillip sez:

To make for more transparency in the discussion on Google’s censorship in China, I’ve collected a selection of search results which differ in Google.cn and Google.com. For example, for the keyword “Tibet” over 33 million pages seem to be missing on Google.cn.

So much for the company’s much vaunted ‘don’t be evil’ code.