Newspapers Are Dead

11/24/2004 - 02:44 PM >> Tech & Society

Who reads newspapers anymore? 

The misconception among journalists is that newspapers are suffering because “kids-these-days” just don’t read anymore. Or they theorize that the blending of news with entertainment sucks in all their potential readers. Focus groups at the WaPost found that this was not the case at all. Why read a newspaper that sucks to fold, gets your hands dirty, and is filled with more advertising supplements than news? Its just so much easier to log on and read your news the way you want it.

Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn’t accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I’m not making this up): They didn’t like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.

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Your Job Has Been Outsourced

11/22/2004 - 08:59 AM >> Tech & Society

You Just Don’t Know it Yet

During my final months of film school I got the opportunity to intern for Scott Ross, Chairman and CEO of Digital Domain. I was surprised about his frankness when discussing the present and the future of digital filmmaking which has been his specialty since his stints at ILM. Even more surprising is his honesty in this LA Times interview in which he essentially says that its only a matter of time before all digital filmmaking is outsourced to Asia.

Ross sees the root of the problem as the movie studios’ inability to appreciate the value of the visual effects industry’s contribution. To illustrate, he hands me a list of the 20 all-time worldwide box-office champs. The top 18 are all special-effects-laden or animated films that opened without major stars in the billing. (The top five are “Titanic,” two “Lord of the Rings” pictures, one “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace.") The only films arguably reliant on old-fashioned star power are “Forrest Gump” (Tom Hanks) and “The Sixth Sense” (Bruce Willis), ranked 19 and 20.

“Studios continue to think movies are opened by stars, but times have changed,” he says.

This argument is not without precedent. A similar situation has already destroyed the animation industry in the United States. Animation is no longer done in this country and instead Korean animation shops dominate. While writing and development are still done here, the laborious processing of animating has moved abroad.

Digital technologies and networking mean that industries which previously had little threat from abroad are now open to almost anyone. The democratization of digital tools has many unforseen consequences, one of which may be your job.

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BitTorrent Inventor Goes Legit

11/19/2004 - 09:24 PM >> Copyfight

Most people in the entertainment industry have never even heard of BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is the tool that those “in the know” use to download large files. Amazingly BitTorrent has managed to fly totally under the radar in the entertainment industry. Having grown up amongst academics and hackers in San Francisco it was only a matter of time before I would have run into Bram Cohen. Bram is one of those colorful characters that populate the world where software engineering meets politics. Bram had been working at a startup that rewarded users with micropayments to reinforce good netizenship a perfect job for an idealist like him. He felt that users should not only be encouraged to upload but that the system should only work if users contribute as much as they take. Think of it as a sort of enforced good samaritanism.

This was the genesis of BitTorrent, a P2P technology that forces all users to upload as they download. This is why in recent weeks more than one third of all internet traffic is now BitTorrent traffic. Part of BitTorrent’s success lies in the fact that its ideological underpinnings have made the software a bit more geeky than the average Kazaa user can handle. I always laugh when talking to suits in Hollywood about piracy. They all talk about people downloading movies online, but have no idea how they download such large files. That is because, secretly, they all go home and log onto Kazaa and see how long it takes to download.

Anyway, Bram struggled in poverty and obscurity for three years before his baby became the most important invention nobody had heard of. Valve, on of the largest videogame firms, recognized the advantage of Bram’s system and have hired him to work on their new videogame distribution system called “Steam.”

To play the PC game Half-Life 2 for my review, I didn’t wait for a
copy from the publisher or have to take a break from my day job to trot
over to Wal-Mart, likely only to be told the store was sold out anyway.

Instead, I paid to download the game from the internet, directly from
the servers of developer Valve, specifically from its service called
Steam. The experience was nearly flawless. I have seen the boxless,
CD-less future of game distribution, and I’m lovin’ it.

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