OTHER TECH

AOL. Raised the price of dial-up access. It wants to discourage sign-ups of dial-up customers. Because this is not the future. The future is providing features, selling advertising, via broadband. It's all about AOL.com now. Go watch Welcome Back, Kotter on your computer. Endure the commercials, but watch away.

YOUTUBE. Quite possibly the Napster of its day. Whether or not the site survives, two lessons have been learned. People like user-created content. And giving something away for free has benefits! Or, the question becomes: Where in the food chain do you charge? NBC pulled "Lazy Sunday" from YouTube. Why? It was only making its cash cow, SNL, hotter.

BLOGS. People are pissed at the news media just like they were pissed at the major labels six years ago. There's barely any news on TV, only disasters and talking heads. The Washington Post and The New York Times aren't always trustworthy, and they don't understand the Net at all. So, people who do care have moved in to fill the void. And news will never be the same. To survive, old media needs freewheeling passion, and honesty. The blogs have this in spades. Maybe inaccuracy, too - but if Judy Miller helped get us into Iraq, how accurate are the establishment monoliths?

AMERICAN IDOL. Is about the music business the same way the Soap Box Derby is about Formula 1. It's a rule: You get something on TV, it sells. For a while! Didn't Buck Owens lament that all the overexposure on Hee Haw killed his music career?

MOVIELINK AND CINEMANOW. Can you say "pressplay"? It's not about demonstrating that you're moving forward, it's about giving the customer what he wants! People don't want to watch movies on their computers, they want to download them from the Net and watch them everywhere. And maybe, if movies are cheap enough and marketed well, more people will want to own them. Movies can be made for downloading. But by trying to protect the theater experience and the DVD, the studios are losing the customer's trust.

Wonder why the ratings for the Oscars sucked? The people who kept saying how great it is to see flicks in the theater are in control of the show and the business.

I watched the Oscars on a Pioneer HDTV with a B&W surround system. Shit, that's a better experience than you can get anywhere but the ArcLight cinemas in Hollywood. Further, the best of TV eclipses all the film dreck. Because it's not made for everybody! Risks are taken. It's about story, not EXPLOSIONS!

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