Nowhere is the mess we’re in more volatile than the media war on its rationale for economic survival. As broadcast television gives way to cable and now subscription television, the news networks are caught in a market crash. Trump’s loss in the election and social excommunication has made it super hard for the 3 main cable news channels to make a living. In turn that has rippled through the news economy and put pressure on the difference between the old nightly news hosts and the new landscape.

Mobile phones have made it easier to wait for notifications of breaking news than climb on the hourly analysis model that endlessly recycles the same talking heads we’ve already abandoned. Many of those experts have morphed into the Trump bookstakes, where old breaking news about January 6th and the 2020 election is carved up into soundbites and graphics, and then debated by the roundtables. Fox remains the ratings leader as MSNBC passes CNN, but overall viewership is down massively. MSNBC’s star Rachel Maddow made news recently by negotiating with the network to cut her daily show back to a weekly show and focus more on long-form programming with podcasts and books or even events. While her new deal seems to continue her daily shows for at least the next year, the handwriting is on the wall for the entire structure of hosts and anchors.

It was therefore not coincidental when Brian Williams announced he’s leaving NBC for greener or perhaps techier pastures. We’ve talked about the news restructuring on the Gillmor Gang, so Frank Radice and I took the opportunity to record a Clubhouse conversation about Williams and his move. Frank has known and worked with Brian for some thirty years, first at WCBS and then at NBC, where Williams was the anchor of the NBC Nightly News half hour broadcast. After a scandal involving his description of being under fire in a helicopter that turned out to be at best an exaggeration, he was removed from the show for a six month unpaid leave.

Eventually, he resuscitated his career as a breaking news anchor on MSNBC and started a nightly 11th hour show just outside prime time that drew good ratings and a highly paid grandfathering of his multimillion network salary.“At 11:00 East Coast and and obviously 8:00 right in the middle of dinner on the West Coast,” observes Radice, “there was a huge financial problem for MSNBC, especially under a new sort of tight fisted leader.” Something had to give. The Maddow negotiations took some considerable money off the table, and Williams’ ratings seemed to be less of a huge priority for the network. My guess is that Williams was not given much of a choice; he thought he might be able to do better in the news climate of streaming and tech replatforming Maddow is exploring.

“What I would do if I were Brian,” says Radice, “because he’s not old, but he is in terms of what people are buying online and on television and on the air these days. It seems like they’re not buying experience, they’re buying some kind of cultural thing. He has to remain culturally relevant. I would go to CNN Plus and go back to work with Jeff Zucker and and actually own news online.

“The fact is that when you lose in the news business, certainly in the sort of old boy’s club, which Brian may be the last vestige of, is gone. And you’re in that sort of atmosphere. The idea that somebody would be your godfather is what would be a strong mentor today. And both of the people that were there for him are gone—the chairman of the company, Andy Lack and the president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin,” Frank continues. “And his contract is up at the end of the year. And he’s got a high salary. And there’s a move afoot to change the on air, if not the appearance and look and vibe of, but the structure and content of primetime through late night. So all of those factors added up at the same time. From my perspective, if you’re going to go out, you’ve gone from being on top to being on the bottom to being back sort of on top again, go out sort of on top instead of not the other. The other argument, by the way, against going to CNN is why would he go from the No. two network to the No. three network? I don’t believe that. That’s just looking at the numbers and not really looking at the viable importance of CNN globally.”

We ponder Williams’ ability to add a wry sense of humor to the mix, the blend of news and late night talk show storytelling he got in trouble with. Frank pushes back and runs the CBS job up the flagpole one more time: “I can see that he makes a deal with a CBS to replace Norah O’Donnell and get 4 1-hour specials a year to do that. And that could be valuable to CBS. He comes with a built in audience, it’s over a million people, so you know that that’s valuable. Tom Snyder? He can do that, but I don’t think that anything like that will work in today. Look, it could be… it’s kind of like what we’re doing right now, except one of us is famous and maybe smarter.”

I suggest the only thing I’ve seen in the press about a CBS move is that he’s not interested in that. Frank: When you hear from someone that they’re not inclined to want to do something, that’s probably exactly what they’re inclined to do.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, November 12, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

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Short-form video apps have seen major successes, like TikTok, as well as dramatic failures, like Quibi. Now, a new app called Snax wants to offer a twist on the popular vertical video format by giving users a way to not just watch mini-movies on their mobile devices, but also interact with them. The subscription streaming service in Snax includes a growing catalog of original movies which combine traditional storytelling elements with interactive gaming. Users may be asked to solve a puzzle to help move the story forward, look for clues in a murder mystery scene, make a choice for the characters in a choose-your-own-adventure mode, engage with 360-degree video elements, and more.

The idea for this new type of interactive movie experience comes from the Paris-based app developers at Marmelapp, co-founded by Alan Keiss, Stéphane Fort, and Jérôme Boé. To date, the company has launched 15 apps totaling over 30 million downloads and generates double-digits millions (in euros) per year across its apps.

Marmelapp’s more recent titles include the party game Picolo and the text-based choose-your-own-adventure app Blaze. The latter actually served as the starting point for Snax, we’re told.

“We really enjoyed [Blaze] and got some great feedback. We developed and published 75 original stories on there,” explains Snax’s Head of Content, James Davies. “That was actually quite a lot content because, with all the branching paths, we had multiple endings,” he notes. The team later realized that Blaze could be a lot more fun if it included more than just text — like mini-films to go along with its stories. They initially thought to try to incorporate that concept into Blaze, but it became too complicated.

“It became pretty clear to us that it needed to be a separate project,”  Davies says. That’s how, around 18 months ago, Snax began its development.

Image Credits: Snax

Today, the app features a collection of bite-sized movies (hence the name “Snax) which are meant to be watched as vertical videos. Each episode lasts about 3 to 5 minutes long, and includes stopping points where the user is meant to engage with the content in some way. They may need to solve a puzzle or a brain teaser. They may need to make a choice or find a hidden item in the room. They may need to text with a character. And so on. (Don’t worry, if you’re stumped, there is a “hint” option.)

Users will sometimes do more than just tap on a choice. For example, in one murder mystery movie, you’re presented with a text box where you write in your answer, freeform. To make this feature work, Snax developed a database of possible answers and their potential misspellings, so it would be able to determine when the user got it right.

Image Credits: Snax

The movies themselves are also higher-production quality than you might expect from an entertainment app like this.

Snax explains its seven-person team handles script development and adding the interactive features, but works with professional filmmakers and partnered production companies to create the video content. Currently, these shoots cost in the ballpark of $100,000 euros per project, but Snax is working to streamline production costs by filming more series back-to-back with the same team on different scripts.

Image Credits: Snax

The filmmakers don’t share in the subsequent subscription revenue the app generates, but are paid upfront. At launch, Snax is charging $4.99/week, $8.49/mo, or $47.99/year for its subscription service. (You can watch a couple of episodes for free to try it out, though).

The company began by offering Snax in France earlier this year, but just introduced the app to English-speaking audiences in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia in October. For now, the app features French movies that are dubbed in English, but the long-term strategy is to now start producing content in the English language as well as Spanish.

Since its launch, about half of Snax user base is now in an English-language market and the team expects this to rise to as much as 90% in the near future.

Snax users tend to be young, in the 18 to 24-year-old age demographic, and evenly split between male and female. So far, Snax has found that U.S. users, in particular, seem to be more engaged with talking about and sharing the app, and with the app’s content.

“We noticed that American men and women are a lot more engaged in the content than French users — the uptake of people completing episodes or completing stories…is considerably higher than it has been in France,” says Davies. “That means we need to be producing things for a North American audience.

While some of its earlier movies were with unknown actors, Snax is now ramping up production with higher-profile stars in France, including France’s third-largest YouTuber Norman, actor and comedian Ludovik, and actor Bastien Ughetto. It plans to do more of this as it expands in the U.S.

Snax is now working on adding more variety to its interactions to make them more exciting and more involved. It’s also further developing its own internal software used for formatting its scripts.

Marmelapp plans to spin out Snax as its own company in 2022, and may consider fundraising at that time.

My favorite show right now is Succession, the fictionalization of the Murdoch family and its media empire. It’s relentlessly funny, as the patriarch and children vie for being the most reprehensible. It’s a big tie; each of the principals vacillates between nervous self-doubt and over the top belief that they are somehow close to omnipotent in the struggle for control of the family business. Characters from last season who seemed somewhat exaggerated are this year normalized in their interactions with the others. My favorite is one of the Culkins, who uses the Culkin look to explain how he interchangeably got the part. It reminds me of Bogart, who history remembers a star because there’s no way of prying his strength as an actor apart from the cumulative roles he played. Of all the gin joints….

These were the early catchphrases, before Bill Cosby and his Noah routine with God, and Bob Newhart’s phone conversations with himself. Buy the setup, buy the bit. Kubrick further compressed this in Dr. Strangelove with Peter Sellers’ “precious bodily fluids.” Then George Harrison in Hard Days Night: “She’s a drag, a well known drag…” George Martin had produced live albums with the Goons, and Richard Lester when he and Sellers directed the Goons’ short film. Now it was the two first Beatle films. Hard Days Night was black and white, the feel of the French New Wave with lightweight cameras and location photography seamlessly intertwined with Kubrick’s 2001 Space Opera. Each method informed the other. The onboard computer HAL in 2001 used the same laconic detached attitude (I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that) to reject his captive astronaut, that George Harrison did when threatened with losing the part he was ostensibly up for (I don’t care.) Each was a role reversal, as the Beatle took over from the arrogant adman whose office he’d wandered into, and the computer took over from his ostensible human boss. HAL is not sorry, and George really doesn’t care.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but the other shoe dropped as Clubhouse released Replay. It doesn’t let you record private sessions, or even sessions visible only to those you’ve followed. Makes sense for promoting the people (called creators) who think their work should be preserved or post-produced as we do to add music and titles. I do care about these things, and suspect there are lots of others who do too. Catchphrases stick because the combination of rhythm and resignation (I don’t care) produces a calming effect. Many enjoy podcasts, but I prefer the serendipity of conversation to the mountain made out of a molehill. Streaming may replace podcasts as the government deems broadband an inalienable right. What’s left to determine is the economic model that incentivizes production.

By default, Clubhouse record is enabled if the session is public. Upon completion, each speaker’s profile adds a link to the room. If you are the host of the room, you can download an MP4 and post produce it, but my favorite is to share a link to a notification stream like Twitter or a newsletter. By clicking on the Listen To button, you can listen to the session and skip forward from speaker to speaker. So, three steps: start a room, share the conversation, and follow the thread as it forks over the social networking landscape. Low friction, ubiquitous tools and broadband, and the economic model of establishing trust in the fruits of collaboration. Not bad for a few good minutes in the gig/creator economy.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, November 5, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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Vimeo, the B2B video platform that spun out from IAC earlier this year, has made a pair of acquisitions aimed at building out the suite of features and tools it offers to businesses to create and run their own video strategies. The company has picked up short-form AI-based video creation platform Wibbitz; and Wirewax, which has built technology for marketers and other non-technical creatives to make objects in videos “shoppable” or linkable to other outside content.

Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed, but for some context, New York-based Wibbitz originally made its name as an Israeli startup that had built AI-based technology that automatically turned text into videos, a service that helped it raise around $30 million from investors that included a number of strategic backers (that is, customers) like the Associated Press, Bertelsmann, France’s TF1, and the Weather Channel, as well as traditional VCs like Horizons Ventures and Kima Ventures. London-based Wirewax, meanwhile, also had a strategic backer in the form of the BBC, and other investors included Passion Capital and the Plug and Play incubator. It had raised around $7 million. Both have large customers on their books.

Vimeo plans to keep both platforms operational and continue serving existing customers, which include the likes of Walmart, Disney, Google, and Nike for Wirewax and HubSpot, Bloomberg, Condé Nast, and Harvard University for Wibbitz. It is also planning to integrate its features into its wider video creation dashboard to over time sell a wider set of tools both to those customers and those already with Vimeo.

The idea behind the deals is to bring in more tools specifically targeting Vimeo’s larger enterprise customers, CEO Anjali Sud said in an interview, to provide more creative tools that are less technical to help them feed the video beast: video consumption has skyrocketed in the last couple of years, fueled in no small part by Covid-19 and people spending more time at home and on their screens rather than in public places.

That’s accelerated a lot of organizations’ video strategies, whether that involves providing tools for internal teams to get work done, or creating marketing campaigns, or building new products themselves.

“Companies are going from reactive to proactive, and employees are demanding it,” Sud said of the video push and how its customers are looking for more functionality in their video software. The knock-on effect for Vimeo, she added, has been to become a consolidator of many of the smaller video companies that have emerged over the years to address different aspects of the creation process, to make a bigger product that is easier to address that demand, with “several acquisitions helpful in expanding our product suite to create an all-in-one professional video solution. Our belief is that every startup has an interesting video feature to provide. We want to get every company using video every day, to get 1 billion knowledge workers using video. To do that you have to materially lower the barriers.”

It’s been a years-long strategy for the company, with other acquisitions including the purchase of Livestream, which it says now powers town halls and other live events (a platform that was expanded earlier this month by way of a new virtual events product); and Magisto, another short-form video creator tool.

Wirewax will be bringing more interactive video functionality to Vimeo, specifically with a drag-and-drop interface. One of the most obvious applications will be in the realm of e-commerce where users will be able to use the tech to build “shoppable” videos with links within the videos themselves to buying featured items; but other applications can be technical (eg to product demonstrations) or education (for further information about something in a video), or internal training for employees (for example links through to quizzes).

Wibbitz, meanwhile, is more focused on video creation, and specifically tools for marketing, internal communications and media teams to manage large amounts of video while keeping the content consistent with company branding and style. It also still offers a product for using AI to transform text to video automatically, although this is no longer the core service. Sud said that AI IP will be integrated into its existing products that also provide the same functionality (which it acquired via Magisto).

“Wirewax was built for the video-first future, evolving video to be a lean-in, fully engaging experience,” said Steve Callanan, CEO, Wirewax, in a statement. “Marrying Wirewax with Vimeo’s video leadership and global scale will put the power of next-generation interactive video into the hands of millions of users. It’s an exciting step to be joining Vimeo and contributing to helping organizations unleash their creativity and produce engaging experiences that drive better business outcomes, from shoppable videos to boost sales, to entirely new ways to improve training, education, and customer service.”

“Wibbitz and Vimeo have a shared goal of making video creation so simple that any employee can easily and quickly make beautiful, professional-quality videos at scale,” added Zohar Dayan, CEO, Wibbitz. “We have spent over 10 years honing our product to serve marketing, HR, and communications teams at some of the largest companies in the world, and are thrilled to join Vimeo’s world-class platform to accelerate the video transformation taking place across the enterprise.”

The pair of acquisitions nevertheless come on the heels of a mixed year for Vimeo. The company spun out as a public company from IAC in May, debuting at $57/share. However, it saw its stock dip on its first day of trading ending up with a market cap of $8.4 billion on its closing day. Today, its share price and valuation are more than halved, with a market cap of $4 billion. Some of the skepticism in the market appears to hinge on the fact that it’s spinning out into what has become a highly competitive space, with many a company with deep pockets also looking to address the same gap in the market for providing video services to businesses that want to do more in video.

Despite this, the fact remains that we have seen record-breaking levels for all kinds of video providers, from on-demand premium content companies like Netflix through to those focused as well on user-generated content like TikTok and YouTube, and those with more business focus, such as Zoom for conferencing.

That rising tide has also lifted 10-year-old Vimeo’s boat. The company posted quarterly revenues of $100 million in Q3 (it debuted in May with quarter revenues of $89.4 million). Sud tells us that the company now has “hundreds of millions” of free users and 1.6 million paying users (that latter figure is flat compared to May, when Vimeo disclosed 200 million free users).

Since its pivot to B2B four years ago, Vimeo’s customer base has settled on a pretty wide mix, ranging from SMBs through to startups and some 6,000 large enterprises including Starbucks, Amazon and Spotify. Enterprise revenues grew 60% in the last quarter compared to a year ago, figures that the company is holding in place as it looks to the future.

“We think in the long term of decades, not years,” Sud said.

YouTube is looking to give its TikTok rival, Shorts, a competitive advantage. The company confirmed it’s expanding a recent global test that defaults the YouTube mobile app to open directly in Shorts if the user had previously watched Shorts videos before exiting. In other words, instead of being taken to the YouTube homepage when you return to the app, you’d be dropped into the short-form video experience.

The company said the test, announced publicly last week, has been running on iOS only for a small percentage of global users. YouTube now says it’s preparing to expand the experiment to Android, as well.

The test will only target users who are engaging with YouTube’s answer to TikTok, known as Shorts. First launched over a year ago, initially in India, YouTube Shorts arrived in the U.S. this March and has since expanded to other global markets over the course of 2021. The short-form video platform allows users to create up to 60-second videos set to music, original audio, or “remixed” content sourced from other YouTube videos — unless creators have opted out of having their content repurposed in Shorts.

Like TikTok and its competitors from Instagram and Snapchat, Shorts includes video creation tools that let users either upload videos or film new content directly in the app. It also offers a set of basic editing features to do things like adjust the video’s speed, set a timer, combine clips, or even use a green screen effect, among other things.

According to a YouTube spokesperson, the company is looking to understand with the new test whether or not users find it helpful to start off from where they left off the last time they closed the app.

But the test also signals how YouTube sees TikTok, and the broader shift to short-form videos, as a potential threat to its business. Although TikTok popularized the short-form, vertical feed format, it has since been inching into YouTube’s territory. This summer, for example, TikTok officially extended the maximum video length to 3 minutes, up from 60 seconds. And it’s been spotted testing 5-minute videos in recent months.

To better take on TikTok, YouTube this year announced its plans to directly pay Shorts creators with the introduction of a $100 million YouTube Shorts Fund that will run over the course of 2021 to 2022. These payouts may range anywhere from $100 to $10,000, based on viewership and engagement with the Shorts videos.

But simply incentivizing the creative community may not be enough to give YouTube an edge. So it’s now trying a more aggressive tactic — dropping users back into Shorts upon relaunching the app, if that’s what they had last watched. By doing so, it’s possible those users will scroll and watch a few videos before they do whatever they came to do in the app. And if they were just launching YouTube because they had time to kill, the app will aim to capture their attention with Shorts’ content.

The test arrives at a time when the use of Shorts has been growing. During its Q2 earnings, YouTube parent comapny Alphabet announced Shorts had surpassed 15 billion daily views, up from 6.5 billion in Q1. But some of this increase could be attributed to market expansions, and not necessarily increased user demand.

YouTube declined to specify how long these new tests will run, saying only that it will make that determination based on user and creator feedback, in addition to metrics.

On the last Gang recording session in early October before the birth of our first grandchild, I tried to stir the pot by attacking Democratic Progressives for capsizing the second of two Infrastructure bills. The moderates, led by the recalcitrant Joe Manchin and his silent sidekick Kyrsten Sinema, were successfully gumming up the Democrats’ best chance for holding control of the House and perhaps Senate. What else is new, you say?

In tech news, Facebook was busily exploiting the tone deaf policy of getting slightly irritated with growing pressure from whistleblowers, former venture capital critics who built their careers on the company’s early success, and a two-fisted teamup from a Congress in over its head and the media looking for a good story to replace Donald Trump’s devolution as credible threat. Today, Facebook ads talk of reforming Section 230 and otherwise providing rules for the company to follow. Infrastructure bingo has whittled down the cost by 60%; the plan is to get it passed in time to influence the election of the Governor of Virginia.

As I write this, it’s the end of October. I went to Ray Wang’s CCE conference down the coast in Half Moon Bay. The Ritz exists in a time warp, where the details of the outside world fade into the sound of the Pacific Ocean lapping up against the gentle lawns. Like the Ritz, conferences are testing the principles of the last economy against the shimmer of the next one. We could call it Work from Anywhere or Build Back Better or the last Beatle record, but I suggest we dig in to the fundamental shift and play in the surf of a new reality.

It’s a reality where each of us with a little coin in our pockets and a phone can participate in the new media. It’s not quite an even playing field, as accumulating a meaningful audience is not provided with the available cloud tools. But what is provided is plenty to start with: a free newsletter tool, free social audio tools to broadcast and evangelize the newsletter’s editorial agenda, and tickets to a dazzling array of services and streaming choices to distribute your stuff. So, a few freemium products to jumpstart things and then look out, hold on to your wallets. The net result of this is called the creator economy by vendors and prospective producers, but it’s more likely a consumers economy.

We saw this with blogs and then podcasts, born out of RSS and its attachment extension. The RSS readers gave us civilians the ability to aggregate the stuff we wanted in what looked like an email client but also a newsgroup. Twitter added a layer of social graph which broad- or narrowcast our preferences to an emerging social cloud, a sphere of influence that both aggregated media and inserted us into that media flow on equal terms. As someone who was lucky enough to find access to the technology press pre-blog, I knew full well what a powerful hand-hold this new technology proffered. I can see the same fingerprints in this new economy as certain newsletter nodes create a pecking order for what I and our virtual cohort deems valuable. Social signals provide clues and notification trails to identify, amplify, and negotiate tickets to what I perceive as the new post-pandemic conference.

At CCE, a Salesforce colleague allowed as how he’s stopped watching the Gang because our Trump talk is too depressing. Of course, who really needs another podcast anyway. To be fair, Trump has been largely replaced by Manchin, but the pain point is more and more the media’s difficulty in defining a rationale for coverage that doesn’t descend into picking fights and promoting a lifestyle of anxiety and anger for ratings. This should be good news for the new economists, but secretly we all want to become the “real” media and are subverted into a similar editorial model. So my complaining about conflict of interest in the media is about as inconsequential as worrying about Trump. If I don’t like it, build it back better.

Well, I’d like to, but I have to wait a while longer for the promised Record/Replay function to ship on Clubhouse, Twitter, and everywhere. I’ve had the ability to record for months, but what I’m waiting for is everybody to have access to the marketplace. Talent will out, and not just talent in words or one-directional podcasts but in marketing, analytical insights, pure promotion, and actionable ideas that shape all these domains. And this means holding these folks accountable to their promises. Clubhouse said “weeks” more than a month ago.

A day ago, Twitter announced new features for its Twitter Labs early look subscription service, unfortunately only available currently in Canada and Australia. I’d gladly pay $4.95 a month to test out new features. And more importantly, who else would? C’mon, @jack, I’ll even pay with bitcoin if I have to. But things are moving quickly: Twitter just announced record tools are now in beta and will ship to creators and listeners in a couple of weeks. Et tu, Clubhouse?

At CCE I met with Paul Greenberg, who, with his partner (and Gillmor Gang member) Brent Leary, are building a series of what he calls live streaming shows around the CRM Playaz banner. Paul says he looks forward to this column/newsletter and that I should write more and more often. I recognize what Paul and Brent are doing in live streaming as the leading edge of what this moment is about, so I understand what they mean by encouraging this work I’m doing. These tools, together with the experiences and network of colleagues and friends I’ve accumulated along the way, give me an extraordinary opportunity to extend ideas, styles, and the actual music of what we crave as the consumer economy. When what I do works, even I appreciate it, and in truth has always been my northern light in talking with an audience no matter how large or undetectable. And the rewards on the upside can be astonishing.

We all know how the Grateful Dead spawned a forest of recorders and microphones at their concerts, not just allowing but encouraging it by letting some of them plug into the group’s live mixing board. By the late Eighties, a band that was largely a touring outfit had transcended the record business and stood as the largest grossing live act on the planet. It also spawned a hit album and only Top Ten single, Touch of Grey, through the force of the Dead micro-community, not the other way around.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, October 29, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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Spotify has already invested around $1 billion in podcasting between its acquisitions, exclusive deals, and other partnerships. Now, it wants people to do more than just listen — it wants them to watch, too. The company announced today it’s opening up access to a new tool for creators that will allow them to begin publishing their video podcasts to its service. The tool will be provided by the company’s podcast creation platform Anchor, and expands on the global launch of video podcasts last year which encompassed only a select group of creators.

At the time, Spotify said its debut lineup of video podcasts included Spotify Originals and Exclusives, as well as some third-party podcasts. But there wasn’t a way for any creator to publish video to the service. Instead, they would have to turn to other video platforms, like YouTube.

Now, that’s changing. With Anchor, creators will be able to upload their videos through their account, similar to how they create and publish audio episodes today. Once published, fans can listen to the podcasts across platforms, including through the Spotify mobile app, desktop app, web player, and on most smart TVs and game consoles. Creators will also be able to monetize their videos as they do their audio podcasts through the use of subscriptions.

While creators can set their pricing and determine what a subscription includes, Spotify suggests subscriptions could provide access to exclusive video content or even unlock the video portion of the creator’s podcasts. The video podcasts can also incorporate the creator’s existing advertising partnerships and soon, they’ll support the newer Automated Ads, too.

While Spotify is officially opening up access to Anchor creators, the feature is being rolled out gradually. That means interested creators will have to sign up for a waitlist for the time being.

In the meantime, Spotify’s video lineup will include video podcasts from its Originals and Exclusives, like The Ringer’s Higher Learning with Van Lethan and Rachel Lindsay and The Joe Rogan Experience; and it will include other video creators who will now publish on Spotify, including Philip DeFranco, Jasmine Chiswell, The WAN Show,
Juicy Scoop with Heather McDonald, and more to come.

Spotify has tried and failed to expand into video in years past. Its first efforts in original video half a decade ago largely flopped, and the company shelved its video plans for some time. But more recently, the company signaled its potential interest in returning to video when it acquired sports network The Ringer, which came with a YouTube-based video operation. It then went on to make more deals that could translate to video, like the one with TikTok star, turned Netflix actress, Addison Rae.

The expansion of video to more podcast creators directly follows news that YouTube is now also considering investing further in its own podcasting efforts. Bloomberg this month reported the company is hiring its first executive focused on podcasts. This may have encouraged Spotify to promote its own video podcasting efforts, even though the actual access to start uploading is still blocked by a waitlist.

Currently, to find video content on Spotify, you’ll need to navigate to the episode page from the show you want to watch, then hit play to start the episode. From the play bar at the bottom of the screen, you can tap to view the video in full-screen mode. You can then choose to either listen or watch the program, depending on what you’re doing.

There isn’t yet an easy way to see all the podcasts that are video-enabled, however. Spotify also declined to share how many podcasts would be available as videos at launch, but said it expected to have rolled out access to “thousands” by year-end.

It’s been several weeks now, and Clubhouse still hasn’t enabled record/replay. Neither has Twitter Spaces. Facebook just announced a live audio entry too, but no record. With all the drama about Facebook, I’m not expecting much soon, but c’mon guys, let’s get it done.

I’m loving Youtube TV, which lets me cherry pick hours of cable news repetition and cut to the chase. The collapse of one of the two major political parties puts new pressure on the other one to get things done. This edition of the Gang surfaces the oft-referenced collapse of journalism. Cable news takes a complex struggle like the two infrastructure bills and turns it into a horse race. Is it Manchin’s fault or Sinema’s rudeness to the press? Are the Progressives overreaching with not enough strength where it counts, at the ballot box? As Biden’s poll numbers decline, the chances of a Republican takeover of the House in the midterms improve. C’mon guys.

The Beatles continue to amaze, as evidenced by the latest remix extravaganza of the ill-fated Let It Be sessions. Coming as they did in the wake of the fractious White Album, Paul McCartney’s self-appointed leadership of the group spurred a struggle between rehearsals at Twickenham Studios and reconstituted recordings at a makeshift studio in the basement of the group’s Apple headquarters on Saville Row. The later sessions were topped off with a live 42-minute performance on the building’s roof.

51 years later (with a year tacked on thanks to the pandemic) the Let It Be release is deconstructed into book, remixed expansions of the eventual release of the material, and a 3-part 6-hour documentary of the project helmed by director Peter Jackson. As with earlier versions of Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles (White Album), and Abbey Road, the expansions prove over and over again how the Beatles and their producer George Martin seized control of the top of the charts and never surrendered it. Even the steady stream of failures of the Let It Be project illustrated how the band moved to blend the individual personalities of its members and their almost biochemical skills as writers to achieve what is now fairly uniformly perceived as the greatest creative force of the pop, rock, and pre-social worlds.

No small credit goes to the precision and command of the recording process by the engineers of the EMI Studios, which were renamed Abbey Road in the wake of the triumphant album recorded just after the sessions of Let It Be. The studio was fundamentally a laboratory where engineers wore white lab coats and followed a hierarchical structure that constrained climbing the ranks based on seniority and not innovation. It took the Beatles many years to subvert the process, but their global success gave them bargaining power to generate their own material, which then led to expanding recording hours from a single 9 to 5 session for their first record to all night odysseys that burned out engineers and broke open an avenue for young emergent talent.

So it was that 19-year old Geoff Emerick arrived just in time as the Beatles’ decision to end touring and precipitated the experiments that began with Revolver and blossomed with Sgt. Pepper and later Abbey Road. While EMI was slow to adopt the wave of studio innovations driven by the American studios, the careful use of mixing down 3 of the common 4 available tracks produced a composite feel of live and complex stacking of instruments, vocals, and orchestral arrangements. Th4 advent of digital recording and mixing gave today’s engineers led by George Martin’s son Giles the tools to pull apart the interim recordings and produce remixes that went beyond even what the original recordings seemed to capture.

Disney has just released a 4-minute trailer of the enhanced Get Back filming, whetting our appetite for the Thanksgiving special on Disney+. The Beatles’ film career started off smashingly with Hard Days Night, floated off in a marijuana haze with Help, and collapsed miserably with a self-produced TV special Magical Mystery Tour. But the Get Back trailer restores not only the struggles and fighting of the sick-of-each-other prisoners of Beatlemania, but also the magic of the group’s camaraderie and humor. My favorite scene of Help features the Fab Four walking up to identical doors on a London street, and entering into a common apartment on the other side of the wall. The trailer reopens that door for another minute, where the band’s self-prophetic references spurred the shared myth of the Beatles into a reality greater than the sum of its parts.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, September 24, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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Security cameras, for better or for worse, are part and parcel of how many businesses monitor spaces in the workplace for security or operational reasons. Now, a startup is coming out of stealth with funding for tech designed to make the video produced by those cameras more useful. Spot AI has built a software platform that “reads” that video footage — regardless of the type or quality of camera it was create on — and makes video produced by those cameras searchable by anyone who needs it, both by way of words, and by way of images in the frames shot by the cameras.

Spot AI has been quietly building its technology and customer base since 2018 and it already has hundreds of customers and thousands of users. Notably, its customers reach well beyond tech early adopters, spanning from SpaceX to transportation company Cheeseman, Mixt and Northland Cold Storage.

Now that Spot AI is releasing its product more generally, it is disclosing $22 million in funding, a $20 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, and a previous $2 million seed round that was led by Bessemer Venture Partners (which also participated in the Series A). Other investors are not being disclosed.

The gap in the market that Spot AI is aiming to fill is the one created by some of the more legacy technology used by organizations today: a huge amount of security cameras — in 2019 estimated at 70 million in the U.S. alone, although that also includes public video surveillance — are in use in the workplace today, usually set up around entrances to buildings, in office buildings themselves. in factories and other campus environments, and so on, both to track the movement of people as well as the state of inanimate objects and locations used by the business (for example, machines, doorways, rooms, and so on).

The issue is that many of these camera are very old, analogue set-ups; and whether they are older or newer hardware, the video that is produced on them is of a very basic nature. It’s there for single-purpose uses; it is not indexable and older video gets erased; and often it doesn’t even work as it is supposed to. Indeed, security cam footage is neglected enough that people usually only realize how badly something works or didn’t work at all just when they actually need to see some footage (only to discover it is not there). And some of the more sophisticated solutions that do exist are very expensive and unlikely to be adopted quickly by the wider market of very non-tech, analogue companies.

On top of all this, security cameras have a very bad rap, not helped by their multi-faceted, starring role in video surveillance systems. Backlash happens both because of how they get used in public environments — perhaps in the name of public safety, but still there as quiet observers and recorders of everything we do whether we want them there or not — and in how private security video footage gets appropriated in the aftermath of being recorded. In those cases, some of that is intentional, such as when Amazon’s Ring has shared footage with police. And some is unintentional — see the disclosure of hackers accessing and posting video from another startup building video systems for enterprises, Verkada.

Spot AI is entering the above market with all good intentions, CEO and co-founder Tanuj Thapliyal said in an interview. The startup’s theory is that security cameras are already important and the point is to figure out how to use them better, for more productive purposes that can cover not just security, but health and safety and operations working as they should.

“If you make the video data [produced by these cameras] more useful and accessible to more people in the workplace, then you transform it from this idea of surveillance to the idea of video intelligence,” said Thapliyal, who co-founded the company with Rish Gupta and Sud Bhatija. “It can help you make all sorts of important decisions.” Its ethos seems to come out of the idea that these cameras are here, so we need to find better ways of using them more effectively and responsibly.

The Spot AI system currently comes in three parts. The first is a set of cameras that Spot AI offers as an option to any of its customers, free of charge, currently to keep even if a customer decides to cease working with Spot AI. These cameras 5MP, IP-based devices, designed to upgrade the quality of video feeds, although Thapliyal points out that the Spot AI system can actually work with footage from any camera at all if necessary.

The second part is a network video recorder that captures video from all of the cameras you have deployed. These are edge computers, fitted with AI chips that process and begin reading and categorizing the video that is captured, turning it into data that can be then searched through the third part of Spot AI’s system.

That third part is a dashboard that both lets users search through a company’s video troves by keywords or processes, and to create frames and alerts on current streams to note when something has occurred in the frame (for example, a door opening, or a person entering a space, or even something not working as it should).

The idea is that this part of the video service will become more sophisticated over time (and indeed there are more features being added in even going from stealth into GA). While there are a number of IoT plays out there that are designed to help monitor connected devices, the pitch with Spot AI is that it can be more attuned to how connected and not-connected things are moving about in physical spaces, regardless of whether they involve connected devices or not.

I asked Thapliyal about the security issues reported about Verkada — both the incident involving malicious hackers earlier this year, and another accusation going back years about how some employees at the company itself abused its video systems. The company is close enough in targeting similar markets — and coincidentally both have a connection to Meraki, a WiFi tech company acquired by Cisco, in that both are founded by ex-Meraki employees — that I couldn’t help but wonder how Spot AI might insulate itself from similar issues, something that customers presumably also ask.

“Verkada sells hardware, and their cloud software only works with their hardware,” he responded, adding that “They’re pretty expensive; up to a few thousand dollars per camera.” (Spot AI’s cameras are free, while the deployments begin at $2,200.) “They also sell more hardware for building security – like access control, environmental sensors, etc,” he added, calling it, “a terrific set of products with terrific software.”

But, he noted, “We’re not in the hardware business. Our only focus is to make video easier to access and use. We only charge for software, and give away all camera hardware for free if customers want them. Our bet is that if we can help more customers get more value out of video, then we can earn more of their business through a software subscription.”

And on security, the company’s concept is very different, built around a zero-trust architecture “that siloes access away between customers and requires multi-factor authentication for any systems access,” he said.

“Like other technology companies, we are always reviewing, challenging, and improving our cybersecurity. Our goal is to provide a great web dashboard, and let customers choose what’s best for them. For example, cloud backup of video is an optional feature that customers can opt into, at no extra charge. The product fully works with private and local storage already included in the subscription. This is particularly helpful for healthcare customers that have HIPAA requirements.”

It’s good to see the company having a position, and product set, that is aiming to address issues around security. The proof will be in the pudding, and it still remains predicated on the basic idea of video surveillance being something that can be used without being abused. That could make it a non-starter for many.

All that aside, though, it seems that for investors, the main message is how the company has created a tech platform with enough utility that it is finding traction in as wide a way as possible, including with non-tech customers.

“There is a flood of new users and companies driving daily decisions using their cameras. In an industry crowded with legacy vendors, Spot AI’s software-focused model is by far the simplest choice for customers,” said Tomasz Tunguz, MD at Redpoint Ventures, in a statement.

“Today, only the world’s biggest businesses have access to proprietary AI camera systems, while most small and midsize businesses are left behind,” added Byron Deeter, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Spot AI’s easy-to-use technology is accelerating the consumption of video data across all businesses, big and small.”

No matter how much I rationalize the new iPhone, I always feel like I’m not fooling anyone. Do I need it? No. Do I want it? Probably. Do I have a plan for how to justify it to my family without triggering a new round of upgrades? There’s where my sales pitch becomes the script I need to debunk when my filmmaker daughter finally checks in with her iPhone 10 with broken screen and cracked glass back.

It’s a well known fact that the new iPhone feels faster, more powerful, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. For about one day. Then it settles into the rhythm of daily life where soon it feels exactly like the one it replaced. Physically, the notch at the top of the 12 Pro Max shrinks in the 13. That’s pretty much it. There’s a lot going on with the camera that’s new, but the hardware changes are in service of the software, not the other way around.

Even so, the details of the new features do not tell the real story of why I must have this 13 Pro Max or whatever the hell it’s called. Techcrunch editor Matthew Panzarino is the one who opened my eyes and eventually my wallet. Apparently every year he goes down the I5 to Disneyland and tests out the new iPhone as he tours the park. This year he combined an interview with two of the Apple engineers with the results of his camera test. The results are stunning.

On this edition of the Gillmor Gang, we handicap how soon we’ll get the 13. None of this is why we’ll jump. Not the professional rack focus pullers of which there are none. After a year of the pandemic, there’s no real percentage in showing off the new phone in meetings we’re still not having. My fundamental problem is that I am still a few months from reaching the one year mark on my Update program. I pay a monthly charge on a 2-year contract but after 1 year I can restart another 2 year contract with the latest phone. Everyone else is tipping over fast as the Gang drools over the supposed leap of innovation. Even now I’m slipping back into so what mode.

But then there’s Matthew’s video. As his conversation with Apple proves, this is not just about rack focusing. It’s all about anticipating coming into the frame and taking advantage of overscan, which uses extra pixels around the video to smooth out camera jiggle. It’s about adding a layer of sensor to create a depth map that you can control with software to draw the viewer’s eye toward the dramatic focus of the scene. It’s about inculcating the footage with a sense of the intuitive algorithms filmmakers use in sculpting the flow of the scene into a more pleasurable experience.

That’s the real hook of the new tools. It’s not about the professionals getting cheaper, lightweight, more flexible power tools. It’s about giving us, civilians, the tools to silently and subtly create a product that looks better, slicker, smoother, a more excellent version of reality that we will appreciate as we remember not the event, but the experience recorded and enhanced of the event. Matthew’s camera dollies along the Happiest Streets on Earth, and all he had to do was interact with the streetsmarts of the system. When his daughter turned from looking behind her at the camera, the focus gracefully shifted to the rest of the family in front of her.

I brought this up on a Gang livestream recording session, and all hell broke loose. Basically, the consensus was that these incremental advances of Apple’s roadmap did not add up to an important moment in history or progress or just plain new cool stuff. I thought the impact on professional filmmaking might be less significant than others did. I thought back to my time in film school, first at Brandeis and later at California Institute of the Arts. I had gone to Cal Arts because of the presence of its dean, classic comedy director Alexander (Sandy) Mackendrick of The Man In the White Suit fame. He had worked his way up in the business as a writer, and in his class at Cal Arts produced a set of notes and principles of dramatic writing he later published as a book. But the blend of English filmmaking with its never-a-missed-step precision and the popular comedies of Ealing Studios was catnip for a 21 year old who had just missed the shutdown of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Cal Arts was a complete cluster of an improvisation, funded by the Disneys but commandeered by the radicals and misfits of the Golden Age of gonzo experimentalism, aka the Sixties. In the first year of its existence, we lounged naked around the pool at the earthquake-damaged campus of Villa Cabrini in downtown LA. 10 blocks away stood the Bradbury Building, where ‘40s detectives rode the gilded-caged elevators in hundreds of films and then television shows.The backlots were further West, in the process of being sold off for real estate development projects. As the Seventies neared, power was shifting to the music business in the wake of the Beatles’ overthrow of production, songwriting, graphic design, and the studio system in general.

In its first official year, Cal Arts relocated to the still under construction campus in Valencia at the upper end of the Valley. A concrete fortress at the top of a hill, the school felt much more like a trade school for burgeoning animators than the dialectic political stew of the students and their professors. In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard filmed the Rolling Stones during recording sessions for their Beggars Banquet album. As Godard’s crew dollies slowly around Olympic Studios, a song begins to take shape as the Stones’ founder Brian Jones disintegrates in the corner behind a baffle. Sympathy for the Devil documents the Stones’ recording process as it occurs, morphing from an acoustic folk song to a rhythmic samba punctuated by overdubs where Jones, Wyman, Watts, and studio denizens chant “wooo wooo” as a response to the lyric Who Killed the Kennedys.

Out of chaos comes beauty and power, staring insolently in the face of death, drugs, and dissolution. The pathetic image of Jones slumped over an unmixed acoustic guitar speaks volumes to the way the rock culture eats its young. A film performance of the track a few months later in the Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus reveals Jones playing maracas front and center in the live mix to great effect. His last public performance before his death at the bottom of his swimming pool, the alchemy that manifested itself in the early Stones proved more resilient than the players themselves. Years later, a live performance in St. Louis was the first without Charlie Watts and with session drummer Steve Jordan. It takes some time for the players to notice, but Sympathy for the Devil continues as a platform for the thing that the Stones persist. You can feel the spirit of the times, but also the possibilities for the future. After all, it’s you and me. Woooo woooo.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, September 17, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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Mostly friends and sometimes family have encouraged me to tell stories about my days in the comedy, music, and tech businesses. And for all of this time I’ve been reluctant. However, with the Pandemic and the impending birth of my first grandchild, I’ve reconsidered. My wife’s passion for genealogy has reminded us that stories get lost fast. People die, forget, become estranged as they lose track of the family tree. It takes real effort to rebuild those connections as time goes on. Our kids don’t care about any of this now, but later they will. And the genealogy of friendship is the story of our times, the things we find important and the friends we choose to share. For the past few months I’ve started work on a book. From time to time, I’ll include some of that work here.

The second season of The Morning Show arrived on Apple TV+, just as our subscription to the service flipped from free with a new iPhone purchase a year ago to $4.99 a month. The first season did pretty well with its blend of inside baseball about the the broadcast TV news business. The production values were strong, reminiscent of the West Wing treatment of Washington beltway politics. The MeToo story line featured A-List performances by Jennifer Anniston, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell, and a complicated turn by Billy Crudup. Not bad for $4.99 but even with the surprise sleeper soccer hit Ted Lasso barely enough to keep afloat in the Netflix/Disney+ struggle for streaming leadership. And there is Apple’s stake in this amid the challenges of competing with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and the rest of the tech giants.

For me, Apple TV+ has crossed over from a question mark to a must have, much like CNN when it debuted in 1980, and HBO, which grew out of the fledgling Z Channel we enjoyed in a Malibu house David Sanborn was renting that same year. Dave had arrived in town to play on a Pure Prairie League record being produced at The Band’s Shangri-La recording studio on a hill overlooking the Pacific. I was house sitting the League’s Malibu beach house over the holidays when Dave showed up at the front door unexpectedly.

At this point I’d known Sanborn since 1973, when he played on the soundtrack for the Firesign Theatre’s Proctor and Bergman film TV Or Not TV. I’d produced the TV Or Not TV record and directed a stage version of the show on a West Coast tour that ended with a performance at a Columbia Records promotional event in Los Angeles. Invited guests included George Harrison, who greeted the three of us with the catchphrase from the Firesign’s first album: “Civilization Ho.”

After the Pure Prairie League session, Dave decided to rent another house down the street on Broad Beach. The house quickly became a rallying point for characters like Gary Busey, Richard Manuel of the Band, and Sanborn associate Marcus Miller who wrote much of the material for Dave’s records. He would fly in from touring with Miles Davis and work up the new tunes on a PortaStudio and MiniMoog I had set up in the living room. Eventually Sanborn invited me to move out of my small room at Shangri-La and into the beach house. This is where the Z Channel came in.

This was the first cut at premium television. Each month the Z Channel would show several films rotating throughout the week and multiple times per day. Busey, who had first surfaced on a local Tulsa TV station with late night B-movie comedy cut-ins with Gaillard Sartain, was a stone cold genius at riffing off of whatever was on TV. And the Z Channel turned this into an intense ritual where repeated viewings of films like Spielberg’s 1942 would take on such hilarious undertones that the only way to escape Busey’s comedy stylings was to leave the building doubled over in laughter. To casual observers, of which there were none, this suggested a new paradigm shift as improv met the Hollywood windowing system — and produced HBO.

Out of HBO grew streaming television, as original productions like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones led to the binge production model that Netflix rode to the top of the charts. Over the past several years this tsunami of economic restructuring led to the unbundling of the television networks and the realignment of studio production around the relentless demands of streaming and subscriptions. Pay TV became Pay Media, Data became the competitive coin of the realm. And the Pandemic mandated the underlying principles of a new economy we are still struggling to understand even as we vote for it with our feet and behavior.

After 15 months at home, we finally took advantage of the beginning of summer to travel by car to our bungalow in South Carolina. Our children were born and raised there until we moved to the Bay Area as tech publishing realigned and the valley bubble crashed. Software became a service, and mobile became the dominant platform. Blogs and podcasting morphed into streaming and social with the current investments in the creator economy — newsletters and live audio.

These efforts have not gone unnoticed by the remaining media giants. Substack’s year-long investment in proving a subscription basis for writers and influencers has reached some combination of yes, it’s possible and no, it’s very hard to scale. On the pro side, Kara Swisher is one of the significant contributors moving her newsletter behind the paywall of the New York Times, and bolstering Twitter Spaces with a frequent live audio show. The fact that you can’t find these shows after the fact will likely be solved by a record/replay feature Twitter is working on. Once you can’t distinguish live audio from a podcast, the next step is not distinguishing podcasts from streaming programming. This evolution is behind Rachel Maddow’s moves to straddle her daily show and her podcast-becomes-book properties. CNBC’s Jim Cramer is going there too, as I noted on this edition of the Gang:

Jim Cramer, the fabulous analyst and the Mad Money guy [adds Brent Leary]. He’s signed a new deal. This is kind of like Rachel Maddow 2.0 or 3.0. He’s doing something called CNBC Investor Club, and basically he’s delving into the creator economy. These media on camera editor types are slowly becoming engaged in creating product.

Frank Radice:

He doesn’t jump into something like that unless he sees a real opening to make money. Think of what he was doing even before he went to CNBC. And he’s not a stupid man. I think it’s very interesting that he will be able to on CNBC and probably on his new ventures, make his opinions public as long as they put a rejoinder at the end, saying this is not an opinion of CNBC, it’s just Jim Cramer’s opinion.

Brent Leary jokes about Cramer dipping into the 30% pool that the Epic lawsuit frees up for new Club members, but however the move shakes out, we appear to be on the way from cable (CNN) to PayTV (Z Channel) to the subscription+ economy. What Netflix wrought and Amazon, Disney, Hulu, HBO Max, and Paramount+ chased is being tested by Apple TV+ of all things. Apple is doing things a little different this time, undercutting its AppleTV device with streaming dongles like Amazon Firestick and platform deals with smartTV heavyweights like Roku. The AppleTV hardware is top of the line, but in price not exclusivity. The kicker is that AppleTV+ is bargain-priced but exclusive in execution.

They’ve got HBO pinned down as a cable premium service folded into HBO Max fighting off the disappearing theatrical window. Apple’s original-only strategy seemed overmatched by Netflix’s volume game, but the Pandemic knocked down production to the point where originals had to be acquired from Europe and Scandinavia to keep the pipeline open. Well-appointed binge blockbusters like The Crown and so-called limited series like The Queen’s Gambit came from the HBO playbook, but they were few and far between for nightlight viewers struggling to keep up with subtitles and mediocre dubbing.

Instead we’re in the AppleTV+ equation. With the same methodical and relentless blend of hardware and software Apple uses to dominate the mobile margins, AppleTV+ extends the platform with a product designed to wipe out the broadcast linear markets. For the first time, the Emmys were not so much dominated by the streamers as ghosting the network TV shows in nominations. CBS, long a bastion for comedies, broadcast the Emmys without a single nomination, and gave the spotlight instead to Hacks, a funny HBO Max original developed not for cable but streaming direct. We’re not in Kansas, anymore.

Where we are is watching Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, and scifi epic Foundation. Not enough to satisfy the void created by the collapse of network and cable TV, but more than a harbinger of things to come. When CNN debuted, people wondered why anyone would watch news 24 hours a day. Now they’re wondering that again, with the mute button on 24/7 and notifications telling you what’s shaking. Production is shifting from green screens to interactive LED screens that matte actors into backgrounds they can see as they perform. Projects deemed unfilmable are no longer so. Blackberry, meet the iPhone.

AppleTV+ has the aura of a linear broadcast network spiced with a tech platform. Apple’s hardware/software overlapping release schedule shifts between short range customer-facing innovations like this year’s iPhone 13 camera advances and long-range efforts to move from third party data and user tracking to a first party transaction data set. The new phone’s ability to use additional mapping to do professional-level rack focusing while and after recording augurs for more and more features shifting into software manipulation on more powerful system hardware. AppleTV+ takes advantage of a hole in the market between streaming and traditional broadcast and cable to build out the same mix of quality and innovation lock-in its physical products offer.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 27, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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Most of us count the golden age of Michael Jackson’s career with the Quincy Jones produced global smashes of Thriller and Bad. Fueled by the stream of videos and multi-single releases (5 on Bad), the records dominated the charts, radio, and MTV. But the real breakthrough came just before with Jackson’s first solo record Off the Wall.

Born in the thrall of the Disco Era, it wasn’t hip, a surrender to the feel of funk meets MGM. But in the mountains around Woodstock, we couldn’t pry this record off the turntable. Today, with a simple voice command to Siri, the mists evaporate and with them the pandemic, working, working, working day and night, the melting years. And the bass. My God but it drives us to Living Life off the wall.

Permission is what we’re given. We need it. No matter what lies in store for us, the grooves capture the essence of our future, unlock our hopes and dreams, our intuition. Can we dare to think this way, the blend of vocals, horns, percussion, and the coursing basses? A Stevie Wonder track recharges the battery. The record fades out quietly, priming the pump for Side One.

Today we lost a nightclub comedian, as Norm MacDonald called himself in a YouTube clip. Like the best of them, his comedy spooled out of him like a 50’s cop show, methodical and faux stupid. You could see his genius in the faces of the funny people who had him on their shows — Letterman, Leno, Conan, an agonizingly hilarious Dennis Miller on his foul-mouthed HBO cable show. Talk about off the wall.

Miller defined this most selfish of dark arts, the joy of being funnier in the presence of funny. In a time of excruciating not funny, these strange warriors tilt with the vagaries of the laugh. MacDonald’s careful construction of his sleight of word was all the richer for his seemingly aimless pursuit of the sweet spot, where the punchline is so McGuffin-like for its inevitability.

As the world slowly recovers its focus, Apple has released a new iPhone that can adjust reality after the fact, Knowing this feat is not possible to recover what and who we’ve lost, I’m so grateful for the time we’ve had with these greats and their great moments. When the traveler reached the top of the mountain and asked the wise man for the secret of life, he replied, “Could you give me a sec, I’m on the phone.”

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 27, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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