Jens Lekman

Last Night Jens Lekman played. I love Jens Lekman.

Here is a video showing a little of the kind of charisma and musical style he has, it is similar to the performance last night in that it was pretty much just him. Although last night he had a friend accompanying him on the bongos and he had an electric guitar. But you’ll get the idea…

Below is a story I was trying to write for Rip it Up, but for reasons that will become apparent it never quite got finished. So it is rather at the draft stage -- but I share it here to try to spread the Jens message!

Whenever the sun comes out I reach for my favourite summer album.
It is called Night Falls over Kortedala and is by a man named Jens Lekman.

Not everyone seems to know about Jens. But they should.

He is a Swedish native. He started out recording his own tunes and distributing them on CDRs. A few of these tunes got going on Swedish radio and next thing you know he was a hit.

His music is unlike any other music. It is a little like Morrissey and a little like what I Imagine the Love Boat would sound like if it were a song.

What he does is he tells the most intriguing stories involving wordplay, humour, prosaic everyday occurrences or seemingly nonsensical off-hand comments and threads behind them a level of epic production – strings, horns damn near choruses of angels. He has used samples in place of a band – and once he got the chance he has used what feels like an old Radio City orchestra for Night Falls Over Kortedala.

One of the favourite stories/songs of his for me is the song A Postcard To Nina. In it he tells of a trip to Berlin. It was meant to be a social trip but his friend Nina takes him to dinner at her fathers’ apartment. Nina is lesbian and wants Jens to pretend to be her boyfriend to deflect attention. They devise a system whereby if he is asked a question he doesn’t know he looks to her to see how her eyebrow is raised as to what the answer is:

(Here it is with the full album production -- so you can see what I mean about the kitchen sink approach)

Oh God, Jesus Christ
I try to focus on your eyes
we’re having dinner with your family now
keep a steady look at your left eyebrow

If it’s raised, it means yes,
If it’s not it means take a guess
Hey! You! Stop kicking my legs
I’m doing my best
can you pass the eggs
(A Postcard to Nina)

It is everything I love about Jens – ridiculous, optimistic, playful, funny, over-produced to all hell, upliftingly nonsensical, the out-there followed by the down here (can you pass the eggs) thought provoking and beautifully sung and scored.

I had read he was living in Melbourne. I was actually considering heading over there to try to see him play. But he doesn’t play an awful lot and some of the news you read can be somewhat mischievous -- you see Jens likes to weave unusual stories that may be fictional or may be truer than we know through his songs. He also does this in his life. He announced at one stage that he was quitting music to work at a bingo parlour. Officially, he lasted two days before hading back to music. He also contracted Swine Flu. I think that one is true, but how would you know?

Another of his songs that I love is called Maple Leaves. In it he tells the story of mishearing the words Make Believe as Maple Leaves. It is this poignant funny song, one of his more melancholic – that I always think talks about the way people sometimes just don’t match up, even though they’d want to. Like I say, I like this guy’s music.

I think you’re beautiful
but it’s impossible
to make you understand
that if you don’t take my hand
I’ll lose my mind completely
Madness will finally defeat me

She said it was all make-belief
but I thought you said maple leaves
and when she talked about a fall
I thought she talked about a season
I never understood at all
(Maple Leaves)

So it was with great excitement I learnt he was heading to New Zealand to play in shows in support of Joanna Newsom – and even a solo show in Auckland!

I quickly dashed off an email to try to score an interview for this piece.

I asked for a phone interview, saying I was a big fan and wanted to spread the message ahead of the show. They were polite but said that seeing as we were dealing with the Holiday season it’d have to be written questions.

No problem. I fired off these questions with more than two weeks before the Jan 4 deadline.

I was pretty excited to get the chance to ask Jens about some of these things:

Jens! So cool you are coming over to New Zealand -- tell me -- -are you living in Melbourne and is that a wee way from home originally?

What led you there?

In New Zealand we have a habit of always asking people from overseas if they like New Zealand and if they have been to Piha (a West Coast beach with black sand and brooding hills). So -- do you like NZ and have you been to Piha!

What have you been up to since the excellent Night Falls over Kortedala?

Can I ask you a few questions about your songwriting? I love the way the lyrics sometimes on first approach sound understatedly prosaic almost kind of afterthoughts or thoughts on the fly but the composition and production are so orchestrated -- -is that contrast something you work at?

Tell me about how you write the songs -- do the words come first -- do you think of a story to tell, do you remember a conversation or scenario or do you hear the tune?

I really enjoy the stories you tell -- -like in Maple Leaves or Nina, do these stories relate to real happenings -- did you really have diner with a Lesbian friend to be her beard in Berlin and did you really mishear Maple Leaves?

Who are you listening to -- -where do you draw the more dare I say schmaltzy love boat style sounds that are in NFOK from?

What are you working on at the moment, when will we have more music from you?

What can we expect from your New Zealand shows -- are you going to invite local musicians to join you as you have in the past or are you bringing anyone?

Is there anything you would like to talk about or that you think we should know?

Please tell me about the backyard shows you have been doing -- what a cool idea! And also about the newsletter you have to stay in contact.

That last question related to this cool newsletter Jens has. You sign up to it through his personal website. A site that he maintains and updates himself. On it he has a blog: smalltalk that he posts photos, news and the rest of the things people blog about up on. It was through this I saw he had done some backyard concerts in Australia. Now that would be cool – Jens, at a backyard party! I’d like to know how that came about and how they went.

Weeks went by. No reply. I harassed the label people a bit:

Hello!

Any word?

Cheers!
Simon

Little passive aggressive apostrophes litter the emails.

Still no word. They hoped he was getting back, maybe tomorrow, so sorry. Another couple of weeks go by. We push the deadline out. The dates are fast approaching. The editor is losing his patience.

The questions weren’t too annoying I hope. It is always a problem for artists like Jens – they get asked the same broad questions for every mainstream publication -- - and then obsessively detailed questions on fan forums. I went on to these and found answers for a bunch of mine. Maybe he was just bored of answering them.

One last shot – sent on the 18th of Jan. But it is a no-go. He hasn’t answered the questions or sent anything back. Looks like we’ll just have to maintain the sense of mystery and the half-explained that he creates in his songs.

Although he hasn’t talked to us this time he does talk a wee bit on his blog: and he has that newsletter. Sign up to those maybe. And on his website he also has a page called Presents For You, which is a whole bunch of free downloads. Go check him out and maybe  next time he comes I’ll see you at his show.

—--

So that was the story as far as I got it. Obviously it would be a bit better if he had replied -- and because he didn’t the story never ran so I miss out on the work, but I’m not mad. The show last night was smashing -- -and maybe the fact that he is a bit secret and little-known means that it was a smaller more intimate affair and the better for it.

The Ad Show new promo

This was a lot of fun to shoot. Here is a pretty representative still from the day:

Tourism NZ, Pretty onto-it alright

This is a video from Radio Wammo breakfast. Glenn has an amazing video production set-up that makes his radio sing on non-radio mediums. I did a story on that here a while back, but since then his set-up has improved again. Behold ye the future.

I will post up a story on what I’m yabbering on about in this clip as soon as I can persuade TVNZ to post the clip for me -- but the short version is that Toursim NZ do some innovative and very clever engagement activities with international TV productions to help spread the NZ message. America’s Next Top Model -- who were recently here -- were in part persauded by their cunning plans…..

When Cougars Attack

There has been quite the bruhaha over the Air New Zealand Cougar campaign.

It was an internet-only promotion for trips to the sold-out Sevens competition in Wellington.

The promotion consisted of a video that in a mock nature documentary tone described the habits of the Cougar -- an older sexually predatory woman.

180,000 views and that is just on the YouTube version.

It was tied to a competition where women who chose to self identify as a cougar could send in pictures of them and their cougar packs out on the town hunting and whatnot.

If these woman chose to do so they might win tickets to the Sevens.

Once there 10 young Fresh meat men supplied by a separate but linked radio promotion would be thrown to them. They also would have costumes provided. One rule was that the women had to be over 35. Which seems youngish but I don’t think they were saying everyone over 35 is a cougar, more that entries to the competition was open to everyone over 35. Although sure enough people have seen it in the negative, rather than the positive.

The promotion and the video drew a lot of flak from some women, some women’s rights groups and some rape prevention and rape education advocates.

It also drew plaudits from some supporters in online forums.

But most importantly of all it drew a veritable truckload of coverage.

There were stories in the Herald, Stuff, Herald on Sunday, on TVNZ’s Close Up, it got to Fark.com, the SMH (as if Oz needed the material) and on and on. It is already being highlighted by influential Advertising blogs.  In the HuffPo and on Digg... The Daily Telegraph, The Economist etc etc

So -- -what was the fuss, was it justified, is the ad ok, is the campaign reasonable, and most importantly, was it successful?

First -- the fuss:

I think a bit of context has to be applied here.

This was never intended to be a wide audience campaign, it was for an internet audience, it was a clip that people could choose to watch and choose to stop watching, they didn’t have to send it on.

It was linked to a light-hearted promotion for a prize that involved attending a festival sporting event known for outrageous costume wearing and activity. It was also aimed at women who would choose to self-identify as a cougar.

It is a bit rich for people to take an enormous amount of offence at something they have had to seek out. This reminds me of the pretty sad situation last year where about a million times more people complained about the Russell Brand/Jonathon Ross answerphone Andrew ‘Manuel’ Sachs drama than actually heard it or ever would have.

A media-whipped sense of outrage is a pretty weak starting point for an emotional response to a joke.

I’m not saying everyone who objected had no grounds, just that the level of exposure of the ’sin’ was met with disproportionate attention taking the communication places it was never meant to go.

Unless of course it was. The makers of this could only have dreamed of receiving this attention.UPDATE:  And to be frank -- it is not their best work. .99 the agency responsible also did the excellent worldwide smash hit Nothing to Hide work. Those videos received millions of hits on YouTube. This safety video has over five million views. 5 million views. Holy wow. Cumulatively the clips have had over ten million views worldwide.

These worked because the tone, idea, execution were magic..99 are evidently a tremendous agency.

UPDATE -- Having gone and done some primary research I have found a lot more. While the struck through parts are correct in part, as in 99 did the excellent Nothing to Hide campaign -- -they did not do this campaign. My source for this information was wrong -- as I found out by calling a very helpful member of the Grabaseat team Sunil Unka. The agency responsible was Projector Media. They are the agency that Grabaseat use.

The distinction between Grabaseat and Air NZ is an important one. The Grabaseat brand is there for the very reason that they can do things that Air NZ can not. They are competing in the online space for a different traveller than the Air NZ brand proposition. They are there to mix things up, take risks and deliver a different result. They do many small promotions for low budgets that are highly targeted. The cougar campaign is a perfect example of one of these.

It was fast turn-around -- less than a week from script to filming. It was low budget -- less than 20 grand to produce. It was highly targeted: it was giving away only 60 tickets to an event -- not even airfares down. It was aimed to exist only on the online Grabaseat portal. Or as shared video. It was aimed to exist for Grabaseat, not Air NZ -- if you see the difference.

It was of course meant to be funny -- and it was funny if you hold it to the standard of a late night sketch show -- which would be an appropriate comparison on turnaround and budget then it was. If you held it up as the best viral ever then it wouldn’t quite hit that mark.

The cougar campaign did not quite hit the mark like that. There were flashes of brilliance -- -the Cougar Expert that flashed up, the line about cougars working extra hours in HR and marketing consulting and a few other moments did it for me. But it didn’t quite gel and isn’t quite magic. But it is a very good version of what it is trying to be -- a socially observant, humorous clip worth watching and sharing and talking about. It also is a social catalyst -- look at all it caused to happen. But it isn’t unalloyed gold. The pretend to be gay line doesn’t quite pay off, the P addict is a bit of a clanker for me, the accent isn’t quite Attenborough -- -just little things but I see where they were going and overall they have done well.

I said to Penny Ashton on facebook that if it was funny then the rest of the complaints it has generated wouldn’t matter, although I didn’t mean it wasn’t funny at all, more that if it was classic gold-plated magic then no problem.

Penny was not stoked with the ads -she was quoted as being incensed. I kind of feel that if this was the major new brand position for Air NZ with TV spots, billboards etc then it would be fair to see it as dismissive or derogatory to women -- but as a single grabaseat promotion to a festival….I don’t see it as a big sin. But then again, I’m not anywhere near the targets of the ads and I don’t really get offended -- so what do I know?

It is interesting that people overlooked the obvious points on context, intended audience, medium (the internet viral) and genre (spoof, parody, comedy) and were still offended.

Do the aggrieved have a point though all the same?

Rape prevention advocates reckoned that it trivialised and made male rape victims relive their ordeals.

In terms of the rape concern. If the ad showed stupification, the slipping of a Mikey Finn then that would be a concern. Or if she knocked him over the head. Or if she was so much physically more intimidating and was aggressive and stand-overy, or if he was legless then maybe or if he was in real distress instead of a weak sweaty-pitted  act gay thing -- maybe then -- he looked into it and totally able to escape if he wanted -- during the Enya =could have been a good time -- but as the ad ran -- what a nonsense.It is an obvious joke and is not advocating, endorsing or glamourising rape. If they had showed him tied down and screaming, well, that is another story.

In terms of being Misogynist well -- if women are offended on behalf of women then I don’t really have a say in that.But I think with the elements of choice involved it actually puts the agency into female hands. If women want to engage they do, therefore having agency, power and position. If they don’t engage or say they dislike it that is agency also. It is not anti-women at essence. If it was a competition asking young men to send in examples of desperate old women trying it on in bars then that would be different.

You don’t have to think it is great, you don’t have to like it, but saying it is misogynistic when you might really mean tacky or low-class makes things more intense than they need be. But again, if women or anyone else truly feels it demeans women I haven’t a say, but I would also probably prefer not to have a dinner party full of people who see evil where lame would do.

Was it successful?

Wildly. Whether they nailed the video tone or not it generated tremendous coverage outsize to its worth. It really connected with many people even if not with me personally (just look at all the comments in favour on the forums etc) and it kept in with the overall irreverant cheeky go-for-it grabaseat tone.

Apparently over 100 cougar packs of up to four women entered. So that is somewhere north of 300 women bothering to identify with this, take the photos and submit them. Not a bad result.

And also of note:

Perhaps the most terrifying thing for me was the profucion of terrible puns that it brought about:

Claws out over Cougar Ad

Of water and Beer

I found this on Lance Wiggs’ site. I regularly read the site and enjoy his mixture of experience and opinion.

When it comes to bottled water I like Antipodes, as the bottles are artifacts in their own right, but dislike most bottled waters. I used to work as a waiter at a place that served Antipodes and customers were always asking to take the empties home.

I find myself buying Mizones or Vitamin Waters over straight bottled water because I find the concept of paying for what is freely available so weird. I wonder why the option of having refilling stations for the Pump and H2Go and all the rest isn’t more widely offered. Even at 50c for a cool topup it would be better value than buying yet another bottle…

It is these things that mark out our random (and obviously unsustainable) consumer culture as much as building ever taller buildings on sand.

Sometimes I look at a recycling bin full of beautifully produced, shipped, stored and presented Heineken bottles and wonder how we can put so much care into something that is used once and destoyed.

These empty Heineken bottle visit my thoughts more than they probably ought to….

Rattle Ya Dags

Director -- Simon Pound, DOP -- Clayton Carpinter, Editor -- Sacha Childers, Producer -- Phil Wallington, host -- Russell Brown, Media 7 on TVNZ7

We’re looking for an Intern

UPDATE: An intern has been found – thank you for the great response.

I am working on a new show for TVNZ7. It is like a Media 7 for Advertising.

It is made by the same company (TopShelf) as Media 7. It will have Hazel Phillips, the excellent Advertising writer for the NBR as host, Raewyn Rasch, ex Fair Go, and a lot more besides, as Producer,  and me as an Associate Prod/reporter/presenter/dogs body…

It is very exciting as we will be trying to involve the audience – both online and in-studio – a bit more in the show. I’m very much looking forward to that.

Right now we are doing a lot of the preperation planning and are looking for an intern to join the show.

Do you know someone who might be good?

Details are:

Intern Position on The Ad Show.

The Ad Show is going to be like a Media 7 about Advertising.

Made by Top Shelf for TVNZ 7

We are looking for an intern to work with the production.

There is a small pay available for the position – standard intern rates that are pretty low but this is a great learning opportunity (maybe 300 or so a week.)

It will involve three days a week or so, good for a part-timer who wants to learn/break into telly – -might suit an ex print or radio person or recent grad/onto-it sausage.

Broad duties, compiling and sourcing material, some story compilation.

Ideas, energy v. imp.

Should be a fun project – kicking off at the start of feb – running for at least 17 weeks

Send some details through – a bit about why you would like to work on the show and your interest in the area and also a CV.

Send to – -spound at  gmail  dot  com – -

The team will look over all of them in a week or so.Good work and good luck!

(If you can’t work the email address out then the job probably isn’t for you)

Social Media Overview for RNZ

Social Media Overview for Summer Noelle, RNZ

What is Social Media?

You will hear a lot about Social Media at the moment. It is a major trend in media, and a very broad term. But what exactly does it mean?

Well – it can be a bit of a catch all. Some people use it to talk about the social networking sites – and some people use it to describe anywhere were social information helps categorize things, like for YouTube – or even blogs where comments and ratings come into play. Some people say Social Media and simply mean interactive media.

The social networking sites are the most obvious examples, let’s run through them.

Facebook is now bigger than most countries with something like 350 million users. Apparently one in four NZers is on it. As with all these numbers I take these numbers with a fist-full of salt. A great many people seem to sign up, look around, kick some digital tyres and find it is not for them and never really come back. So while one in four may have joined, I would think that frequency of use would be more useful as a measure – and from observing my fellows I’d say that one in ten users are highly active, at best.

For anyone who doesn’t know it is a site that started out as a way for American College students to stay connected and has morphed into this social organisation phenomenon. It is great for keeping in contact or regaining contact with old friends and is very good for sharing things of interest and curating conversations – -the quality of debate or polite exchange is generally better than on other internet sites with people having to use their real names and really good information can come from all sorts of people.

Facebook have recently changed their privacy policies in quite a fundamental way. Setting the default option to public rather than private for a range of content and making more pieces of information – such as pages that members are subscribed to (like fan pages for musicians, for example) and friends lists public. In a funny way this will make the site more useful the more people are involved and the freer the connections between like items. It will also make much more content searchable – opening up unforseen interactions. It will cause links between people that would not otherwise have come about – much like blogging has but in a much more ‘real’ manner. I say this because in blogging many of the commenters and authors still use pseudonyms and anonymity. No such choice on facebook.

There will be good and bad things to come out of this greater societal move to less privacy, with the state surveillance and the inability to edit out unfortunate moments in the future being obvious drawbacks (go check this link for the site lamebook – dedicated to cataloguing the lamer moments)- – -kids these days post a distressing amount of content online, and on the internet, it never really disappears….

One thing driving this change in privacy is the next social media to talk about -  Twitter. It has been in my opinion tremendously over-hyped. Apparently the number of active tweeters in NZ is about that same as the number of people with iphones, which is about the size of Timaru. I hear a lot more about Twitter than Timaru.

It is the site where you post the 140 character updates. And for somethings it is very useful – but as part of a balanced media diet.

It is fantastic at sharing information and providing linkages. For example the other week a guy who tweets under the handle @travilain posted a photo where he was about to play a scrabble move. On his ledge he had a six letter word for a female body part, in plural making it a seven letter word. He had the witty caption – along the lines of – I’m about to freak out my friends’ parents playing with my next scrabble move.

I saw this and retweeted it – which is what you do when you see something you think others would find interesting. About ten other people retweeted it too. Each of these retweeters has a different collection of people following them and so seeing what they publish. One of these people, somehow, had Ashton Kutcher following them. He is an American actor married to Demi Moore. He has over 4 million followers. He retweeted this guy Anthony who lives in Wellingtons text. Quite amazing that that can happen. It doesn’t happen with any other media, certainly not that fast.

It is also useful for networking, and playing around.

At the moment there has been a game playing on twitter where people have taken up the challenge of finding Dunedin a new city slogan. This is acomplished (the game) by having people use what is known as a hashtag to categorize their entries to a topic. So people can search under that hashtag and see what everyone else has thought about something. This is accomplished by simply makinga # symbol and putting the word after. The words are kind of accepted by group think.

The twitterers, twerps or what-have-you sprang to action. some of the results were pretty good  – my favourites would be one that played on the current slogan that is on the way out – that is – -I AM Dunedin. Someone suggested – I WAS Dunedin. And I also liked Dunedin: I can see Antarctica from my house – and I liked Manuel Bundy’s offering – where the bloody hell is everyone?

There were some good ones playing on the toga parties and riots – Dunedin – It’s a riot or It’s all-riot here.

And a few on the unfortunate mass-murder connotations of the city – including my offering – -Dunedin: All Pain, No Bains.

This Dunedin game shows the kind of people active on twitter – they like immediacy, (there are always races to be first with news, developments, scandal etc) they like word play – in that you have to be economical and concise to communicate well – and they like a joke – many of the things that spread best are jokes, pithy observations or photos of humourous note. It is like one big high brow Sideswipe column in some ways – and indeed the Sideswipe author Ana Samways is a very good tweeter.  Above all the people have to be active online or never far from an internet enabled phone.

There is linked in – -an overgrown business directory. So boring that is all I’d say.

Bebo, for children and the child-like.  A visual cacophony of html DIY, it is migraine and siezure inducing and truly the most awful spelling in the world is to be found here. Most of it in that strange up and down case writing. LIkE ThiS IsN’T It ANnOyIng?

Friendster - that was fiendishly popular but is now like a Western Set from the movies – there are lots of fronts up, but little happening behind. Except for in parts of Asia where it is massive and was recently bought by a Malaysian company.

Myspace similarly – -it was the big name a couple of years ago. So big Rupert Murdoch bought it – only to watch an awful lot of the individuals move to Facebook – and it is now back where it started – a very active resource for musicians and music fans – but less important as a social congregating point.

Anyway – so those are the main social networking sites. Other major social media are blogs(the first major social two way media maybe) and YouTube.

A good rule of thumb is that if there is two-way communication available and if the rating, sharing, distribution and categorization of content is up to individuals and outside of traditional top-down control then it is truly social.

What does the rise of social media mean?

Well – -just before I go any further I’d like to say that the worst thing that social media has caused is a rash of social media experts.

Most of these people have mistaken it for a religion. And they believe that by telling people how to tweet and have conversations they are somehow dealing in extraordinary profundity. Well they aren’t. Although it is true that the biggest change that social media presents is a move from communication to – to communication with. And that it becomes about two way communication. And you can’t just tell and get away with things, the hive mind will out you and win. That is pretty much all there is to know really.

The rise of social media does mean big changes – -like in how people find content and how people decide how to trust things and even what to think. The opinions of peers are going to be more persuasive than ads – so a big injection of honesty has been happening around the world.

It is in advertising that some of the biggest changes are happening.

As the Palm Oil Cadbury case last year showed. That was where the formula for the blocks was changed to include palm oil. An online social media series of campaigns – a movement as the pseudo religious sm experts like to say – sprang up to protest on behalf of the rainforests and orangutans being destroyed and about the size and texture of the bars changing. Cadbury ignored this onlne drama until it was so widespread it snuck into the mainstream media. So they then ran ads in the papers, full page ones, saying why the online people were wrong. This may the case that is studied in future as the turning point here. (For the full story with all the links go here)

It was pretty silly to not talk to the people where they were talking – and sillier again to not listen and engage but in effect yell and ignore in a traditional form (in that they went to Newspaper, the very traditional form of advertising). They ended up losing market share and having to do a massive backdown. They learnt though – to the degree that they sought out influential online voices that had dissented and sent the blocks of the chocolate that went back to the non palm oil recipe. Very clever, though very late.

While Cadbury were late to embrace social media many companies embraced it for no reason. Pretty much everyone was starting twitter accounts and blogs. Which is a silly thing to do unless you have something to say. People say let’s start a blog – -well – ask yourself – would you start a magazine? What would you fill it with? What do you have to say?

But, that said, SM has really had an impact already  – -RNZ National tweets and reads out emails and texts -  that is a big change from a broadcast out model to one that responds and collaborates where it can.

And into this year 2010 we can expect to see more of it. At the moment there is a lot of activity online but not so much advertising. This is changing. As the money flows in the content will improve and the feedback loop continues.

At the moment the online spend is small compared to say, newspapers – about 9% vesrus 30 odd percent – and TV is at around 27 % of all spending – but is is catching up – and has tripled in the last three years – -it will keep tripling for a long while yet – and that spending will be in interactive spaces.

Righto – that is enough of that – lets play a clip that emerged from social media: this is a song that links two of the acts coming for the Laneway festival – -The XX and Florence and the Machine – - it gained prominence through influential music blogs – -and has gone on to receive strong airplay on bfm, among other stations. A sign of what’s to come with all kinds of media

you can download the song here:

http://rcrdlbl.com/artists/Florence_and_The_Machine/track/Youve_Got_the_Love_The_xx_Remix

Could 2009 be the turning point for the TV network?

Over the course of Summer Noelle on National Radio Noelle has invited me to come up every Tuesday to talk about something media related.

I find National Radio quite daunting – as I know how discerning and bright the audience is. Of course every audience is like this but seeing as National was what I grew up to as my folks are avid listeners  – it still feels kind of more grown up or something.

Anyway – this is a long way of saying that in not wanting to be a flake I over-prepared for last weeks’ spot. What eventuated was a quite dense on-air lecture of sorts. I post it here and you can see what I mean.

Year in Review-

2009 – - Year of: TV not on TV.

I think 2009 may be looked back on as the turning point for Network TV. It has been the dominant entertainment medium and networks have been in powerful positions – but a whole bunch of things are shaking the networks up.

Basically the problem for the networks is that although heaps of people are watching TV shows, they aren’t necessarily watching TV.

There are three main areas driving this –On Demand or time shifted viewing, watching content online and bittorrenting. This has been a bumper year for all three.

ON-DEMAND

Watching TV off of TV when you feel like it is not new. DVD box sets for example are a way that people are used to doing this. Like with The Wire for example, a show from HBO that had an inhospitable broadcast time in NZ but still was very popular. People aren’t waiting for shows to be on TV to follow them.

But in a new development 2009 saw the On Demand services (like here for TV3 or here for TVNZ)  – where people go to the network websites to catch up on and view the network’s content really take off.  The big problem holding the take up of these services and of the long heralded movies and TV shows on demand has been NZ’s woeful broadband.
It has been theoretically possible for people to watch content that a network sends you but it just might for a star take an awful long time to download and then once you have just downloading one full length movie might blow your entire data cap meaning that you would spend the rest of the month at dial up speed. Not much fun.

But what has changed this year is that networks started getting their content to people in an un-metered service – so if people are getting TVNZ content through a particular ISP for example – it doesn’t count against their data cap.

TVNZ has organized this for their TIVO offering – which is the PVR – personal video recorder that is hooked up to the EPG – electronic programme guide. Like mysky – except offering the ability to access content like shows and movies – and with the agreement they have struck with Telecom  they can also offer the ability to watch stuff without it being a disaster. This ties you up with Telecom – but seeing as near 60 percent of the market is already with them this is good for those 57% or so.

Orcon have done this with Youtube videos for a limited time – until the end of January – and they are also unmetered with TVNZ.co.nz content. Apparently locally sourced and stored data is very cheap to deliver  – as opposed to content that is stored overseas.  So this should be easy to maintain and will grow.

But although these moves by networks and ISPs are very interesting – -and mark a real change that is coming to the way people watch TV – they may be superseded by the further mainstreaming of the other two trends I wanted to mention – - the torrents and simply watching things online.

YOUTUBE AND INTERNET ONLY CONTENT

Which is where that Orcon move with the social media site YouTube is interesting.

In the future it may not be networks that are curating our content but social aggregators.
The situation that networks hold up to now is actually quite odd if you look at it with fresh eyes.
It has been that you watched shows at a certain time on a certain night and for the privilage of this prescription those shows were then interrupted every few minutes so adverts could run, unsolicited. For some reason this was intended to make you more likely to buy these products.

This is rather odd. We will look back quite soon and think it mad that we could only watch shows in a one hour window in a week and if we missed it well that’s that.

Networks could do this because they had a monopoly on getting and broadcasting the content.

Now (theoretically and increasingly actually) it is available to anyone with an internet connection anytime.
We won’t need TVNZ or TV3 to find or show things to us as we can find them ourselves – or more likely our friends and past tastes will guide us to good content. Much like the way that Amazon or Trade me suggest like tastes – or blogs act as curators for things you might find interesting – -there are many competing ways for people to find the content and have it shown to them.

The YouTube example is just one way – a well known way – where social information like number of views and how many stars people gave it help guide people to the clips – or people send them around – like with the phenomenon of things going viral.

More and more this kind of viewing online will be the norm – and the Orcon agreement recognises that. If you ask young folk what they watch it is a lot of short clips online – and they find them because their friends have recomended them.

And all this is assuming people are playing by the rules with content. Which when you are talking about copyrighted material on the internet you can not really assume.
BIT-TORRENTING

This was the year of the Torrent – also a trend that has been around and building but has hit the mainstream this year.

Many would not have heard about it before the high profile case in the first few months of the year that led to members of a ‘pirate’ party being elected to the European parliament.

What happened was the people behind a prominent file sharing site called The Pirate Bay were prosecuted – pretty much on behalf of some of the big copyright holding companies – people that own movies and TV shows and music and computer game intellectual property.

The prosecution was successful – they received jail sentences of a year or so and a sizable fine – in the millions. This is all being appealed against. But what it really achieved was it provided a focal point for protest against the actions of the Governments and rights holders. A political party linked to the copyright activists attracted enough votes to get them a seat in the European parliament. Due to a treaty changing proportionality they recently gained a second seat too!
This brought the torrent to mainstream attention. Especially over in Europe.

What was under argument was that this site is a searchable registery of things called torrents. They are essentially a file that allows the download of materials stored elsewhere. They are not the actual files themselves.

It is all a bit complicated – -but is enormously important in the scheme of the internet.

This is a very simple explanation – pretty much what happens is that a computer user downloads a program that allows them to download these torrents. Torrents are a sophisticated file-sharing tool – -what happens is that a large file – such as a movie, song or TV show or even whole TV series is shared by having many users sharing portions of the whole file – -so if it were a movie perhaps fifty people have ten minutes each – and the clever protocol knows what it needs to find to assemble the whole file from all these sources. Traditional downloads were from one source to another and if broken may have needed to restart The bit-torrent system goes for the bits that are rarest first and then the commonly available segments last. It is a very clever system that allows tremendously efficient sharing of information..
The participants in this arrangement are known as seeders and leachers. So if you have a copy of the file and are willing to share it you are a seeder. And if you are downloading it you are a lecher.(For a more detailed explanation – go here).

It sounds terribly complicated but for most users all they need to do is download a super easy to use client (software package) like Vuze – and they then search for a torrent of the content they want and then they simply click on it and get their client like Vuze to download it. And then once it is done downloading they have the option of being one of the seeds for others to be able to bit torrent from them.

And it is at places like the Pirate Bay that people find their torrents.

It is an enormous activity – this bit-torrenting. Well over a third of all internet traffic is data being sent around the place on torrents.

Isn’t that remarkable. Well over a third. And it is pretty much all nefarious.

The scope of what is available is amazing. Pretty much any popular TV show, movie, music, computer game – you name it – if it is popular it is available  – and the more popular the easier to get as their will be more of the seeders. There are whole competitive tribes trying to get content up first and best.

Many movies are cam versions. Which means someone filming in a movie theatre on a handy cam – but many are also DVD quality or better.

So people are downloading an enormous amount of content – and they are getting used to being able to do so.

In order to counteract all this there is going to need to be a total change in the way access to content is paid for. Some kind of extra per monthly payment to ISPs that content owners can then take percentages of seems to be a very good idea. At the moment the only people making any money off the wholesale theft are the ISPs – and one benefit of the internet is that you can tell – to the dot exactly how much and of what people accessed.

But what this means to TV networks is also interesting – it means that the next generation coming through are not looking to them for content. They have their own ways.
So although all these things may not be center stage this year they all mark big changes in the way TV content is delivered – and I think cumulatively will eventually mean the role networks have played is on the way out.

What will replace it:

Branded content making TV
Online networks around specialty topics
Pan border networks and trusted brands
Absorbtion into wider entertainment providers

Anyhow  – so although most of these are not new I think that the culmination of these trends mean a big shift in the power of networks is happening. What do you think?

John Hawkesby, wine enthusiast and top bloke.

John Hawkesby is a wine broadcaster, writer and enthusiast.

In this story he talks us through the process he goes through to review a wine.If he loves a wine he will then talk about it through his work.

John invites us into his vineyard and home -- and gives us a look at why he loves what he does.

It was a lovely day getting to go over to Waiheke and talk with John, as with all stories you can’t get everything you want in -- but with this one it became a case of there being so many great lines from him that I just kind of cut them together and let it stand as a series of erudite digressions.

He was very generous with his time and a wonderful host -- going out of his way to put me and Warren Green, my friend and Camera pro, at ease -- he picked us up from the ferry and made us coffee  and a gift -- he is a top man.

It was a pleasure to meet him and it seems a terrible shame that there isn’t a bigger role that such a pro broadcaster could be filling.

I very much enjoyed talking to him about wine as it is something I have a large interest in and a very small knowledge of. I was lucky enough to work as  a waiter at a restuarant with a fantastic wine list and a staff that loved educating people about wine. My time working at Dine by Peter Gordon under a very cool lady Julie Woodyear-Smith gave me the chance to have winemakers talk through what they do and have wine experts conduct tastings. Like many crafts you can only learn about wine-making from lots of tasting and talking and it is a very good job that then leaves you having learnt about fine food and wine in a way that I hadn’t been exposed to.

John said he had an introduction to wine late-ish also -- -he was in his late twenties before he really drank at all. He has been collecting wine pretty much since. These days he doesn’t have to buy much local stuff as winemakers send him so much stock to review.

It is a good thing to be a friend of John’s on Waiheke as he is in the habit of tasting and taking notes about the wine -- and then sharing the rest of the bottle around.

Director -- Simon Pound, DOP -- Warren Green, Editor -- Sacha Childers, Producer -- Phil Wallington, host -- Russell Brown, Media 7 on TVNZ7