OUTSIDE HEAVEN’S GATES – DAY

Little Anne Frank steps up to St. Peter.

ANNE FRANK: Hi, I’m Anne Frank. I represent the element of humanity that the Nazi’s could never defeat — the undying belief that humans, inherently, are good. My words will go on to inspire billions of people, as well as be required reading in the seventh grade.

ST. PETER: You’re not on the list.

ANNE FRANK: But… why?

ST. PETER: Looks like you picked the wrong team. Sorry.

ANNE FRANK: Blarg.

ST. PETER: Hey, you’re blocking the sidewalk. Please step over there.

He points to a roped off waiting area holding Thomas Jefferson, some Cavemen, several billion other people, and Ghandi.

CUT TO–

SALT LAKE CITY – HALF A CENTURY LATER

MITT ROMNEY SUPPORTER #1: Poor Anne Frank, she’s been waiting to get into heaven for so long. Her feet must be tired.

MITT ROMNEY SUPPORTER #2: If only there was a way for us to let her get into heaven.

MITT ROMNEY SUPPORTER #1: Hey! We could baptize her!

MITT ROMNEY SUPPORTER #2: But she’s dead, silly! How can we convert her without her consent?

MITT ROMNEY SUPPORTER #1: We’re not converting her (wink, wink), we’re merely giving her a choice!

MITT ROMNEY SUPPORTER #2: That’s right! We’re just giving her — and anyone we posthumously baptize — a choice (wink, wink). If anyone has a problem with this, we’ll just keep saying that over and over again: We’re only giving them a choice! (wink, wink)

MOMENTS LATER, BACK IN HEAVEN–

ST. PETER: Frank? Is there a Frank comma Anne here?

ANNE FRANK: That’s me! Can I come in now? It’s cold out here. And all the Catholics are depressing me.

ST. PETER: Yes, but only if you renounce your Judaism — the religion you died for — and accept all the practices and tenets of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

ANNE FRANK: Wait– So I can either sit out here in the cold for eternity, or I can accept the one true religion I should’ve been all along and enter Heaven to party with all the awesome people from the funnest state of America? And all I have to do is violate the fifth commandment by dishonoring the teachings of my parents — not to mention all my ancestors — and accept a belief system that was completely foreign to me while I was alive? I’m in!

ST. PETER: Damn straight, you’re in!

And he opens the gates…

THE END.

Listener fatigue is real.  You really can have “too much of a good thing.”

I know what you’re thinking:  ”But Eric, podcasting is cheap and there’s no restriction on length or posting frequency, so I’ll just put as much out there as possible and let my listeners pick what they want to listen to!”

First off, if that’s what you’re saying… you’re a liar.  Every podcast of yours that isn’t getting downloaded will send you into a tizzy.  If you don’t believe me… well, just ask anyone who’s been podcasting for a while.

And secondly… What kind of message is that?  Treating your podcast as something optional/disposable reduces it’s inherent value in the minds of your audience.  There’s a lot of free podcasts out there.  Too many, actually.  Don’t do potential listeners any favors by encouraging them seek more substantial entertainment elsewhere.

But most importantly…  There’s a fallacy in thinking podcasts are free to consume.  They do have a cost:  Time.  Podcast listeners tend to like variety.  The more they feel one podcast monopolizes their time, the more they question its value.  For you business majors out there, I’ll submit that podcasts are a prime example of the law of diminishing marginal utility.

I also believe there’s another business theory at play.  It’s called the “paradox of choice.”  In a nutshell, it’s the belief that people love options, but they hate actually making decisions.  I learned about it in a podcast.

Put those two business theories together and you get “Less is more.”  The truest words in writing.

The podcasts I never miss are those that tend to run less than an hour and don’t post more than once a week (except for special occasions).  Anything else I’ll only download if time permits and there’s a topic/guest I’m really interested in.   But that’s just me.   Individual results may vary.

Side note:  I know some of the most popular podcasts go way over an hour or post way more than a couple times a week or — in the case of the most popular podcast out there — both.  It’s amazing what you can get away with if you’ve been on TV for over a decade and were once designated the heir apparent to Howard Stern.  But that’s not you.

Now, if I have two bits of advice to share, the second would be…

Don’t justify laziness by calling it “your style.”
A.K.A. “Do some editing for goodness sake.”

Chances are, your podcast is supposed to offer some entertainment value to people.  The rules for what constitutes “entertainment” don’t change just because we’re in a new medium.  Boring stuff isn’t entertaining.   Too many podcasters out there just love to hear the sound of their own voice.  They excuse every dull, glitchy, or unprofessional moment as something real or authentic they’ll keep in because that’s “who they are.”  That’s B.S.  They’re just being lazy.  If you have the tools to make a podcast, you’ve also got the tools to make a good podcast.  Use them all.  Not just the microphone and the record button.

Burano

Venice

Rome

The Colosseum

The answer?  The iPhone pics are on the left in every row, except for the last row.

The pictures taken in the Colosseum show a more striking difference, likely because I was less careful with sun-placement and framing.

No touch-up work was done to any photos.  What you see up there is exactly what the “auto” settings of each device provides.  In a couple photos, you’ll see that the iPhone’s default settings naturally saturate colors a little more than the dSLR.  That’s probably intentional on Apple’s part, as color is the first thing people notice about photos, even if it’s not entirely accurate.

The dSLR I used was an Olympus E-420.  Why an Olympus when everyone else uses a Nikon or a Canon?  Because at the time it was the absolute smallest dSLR available (and I still think it’s the smallest dSLR with a full-sized sensor).  But it’s still a lug to carry around, and nothing screams “I’m a tourist, rob me” louder than a giant camera around your neck.  So on sunny days, I had absolutely no problem leaving the dSLR in the hotel safe and walking around with just my trusty iPhone.

Since a picture is worth so many words, I’ll just leave you with these photos taken only with an iPhone 4 at 7am on a Sunday morning in Venice…

I knew I wanted to do it around New Year’s — which would give us enough time to have a summer wedding — but as that day grew closer, I still found myself without any good ideas.  Should I use some of my old childhood magic skills to make the ring “appear” somewhere unexpected?  Should I use some tricks I learned in film school to do it with a heartfelt video?  At the time, I was just getting into the tech consulting biz.  Should I do something high tech?

Three days before my target date (Saturday, Jan. 1st), we went out for sushi.   My eyes kept wandering onto a TV in a corner of the restaurant.  And it hit me.  I pictured us sitting down to watch a movie at home.  Mid-way through the flick, a character would get down on one knee to propose to another, and that’s when I’d get up, walk to the TV, reach into the film, and pull the ring out of that world and into ours.  And then I’d propose with it.   No way she’d see that coming.

I had no idea how I’d do it exactly, but I knew it’d require a little bit of magic, a little bit of filmmaking, and a little bit of techie know-how.   As soon as I got home, I started working on the following plan:

On Saturday, when I’m at her place, we’d get a disc in the mail from Netflix.  But what disc?  It’d have to be both a movie that’d realistically be on our Netflix cue, but also something with a half-decent proposal scene.  I rented a bunch of DVDs, scanned through a bunch of movies, and settled on…

Leap Year, starring Amy Adams.  It was a romantic comedy that came out within the last year that neither of us saw in theaters, so it could realistically be on our Netflix cue.  It had a proposal-like scene in the 1st ten minutes.  Perfect.  I’m not going to wait two hours to do this thing.  Also, Melissa always falls asleep twenty minutes into every movie we sit down to watch together.  I mean always.  I had to beat the clock.

I’d rip open the envelope, pop the disc into the DVD player, and we’d sit back to watch the movie.  Ten minutes later, Amy Adams and Adam Scott would be on the TV, dining at a super-fancy restaurant, where Amy thinks Adam is going to propose to her (Spoiler Alert:  He’s not, but Melissa doesn’t know that).  So basically, their situation is the exact opposite of ours in every way.

Adam reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small jewelry box, and places it on the table.

Amy looks down at the box and lights up.  This is the moment her character has been waiting for her entire life.

And it’s at that exact moment the DVD will start to get glitchy…

After a moment of skipping, the DVD will freeze on the image of a jewelry box on a restaurant table.

Melissa will think the DVD is scratched.  I’d say “let me take a look at it.”

Then, as I reached behind the TV to “fix” it, Melissa will see…

…my hand and arm, reaching into the movie, grabbing the jewelry box, and pulling it out into the real world.

“I found the problem,” I’d tell her.  “This isn’t for Amy Adams.  It’s for you.”

At least that was the plan.  And for the most part, that’s how it went down.  Read on to find out how I did it, what went right, and what went wrong…

I woke up Thursday with that plan in mind, ready to go.   I didn’t have a back-up plan, so I knew I had to make it work.  I spent all morning watching a ton of movies to find one that’d fit my criteria.  This wound up being the single hardest part of the process.  Not only did the proposal have to happen early, but I knew I didn’t have time to do any fancy visual effects work.  The movie needed a clear, steady shot of a ring, or at least a ring box.  Movement, hands, faces — the more stuff in the shot the more complicated it’d be.  The simpler the better.

As soon as I knew Leap Year was the winner, I added it to my Netflix cue and made sure it’d be the next disc to arrive on Saturday.  Why didn’t I want to propose on Friday, New Year’s Eve, at the stroke of midnight?  Because she’d be expecting that.  So to throw her off, I let her make all the plans for that weekend.  She made restaurant reservations, she could pick any parties we’d go to.  She’d do it all.  The more she planned, the less she’d be expecting me to do anything special.

Though I planned to do it Saturday, I still only had one day to prepare this proposal because we’d be spending most of Friday together.  I had to finish this all on Thursday.

So Thursday afternoon,  I set about recreating that Leap Year scene in my apartment.   I didn’t have to recreate the entire restaurant, or even a part of it.  I just had to create a shot of a table that could be the table from the restaurant.  If you watch the actual movie, the one fleeting moment where you see the jewelry box on the table doesn’t even come close to my set-up.  But it doesn’t matter.  Melissa would never see that shot (until later).

I then set up a camcorder and simply filmed my hand reaching into the shot and grabbing the ring box.  Nothing fancy.  This was the easiest part of the whole project.  The next two steps would be a smidgeon more difficult…

• You have the right to unfollow your arresting officer on Twitter.
• You have the right to talk like a pirate, even when it’s not talk like a pirate day.
• You have the right to repeatedly remind your publicly assigned defense attorney that you probably make more money than he does.
• If arrested for public intoxication, you have the right to use your one phone call to drunk dial an ex-girlfriend.
• You have the right to take your own life and save the public the expense of your trial.  Especially if you’re innocent, because putting an innocent person in prison is much more expensive than a guilty one.
• You have the right to impress the judge with your dead-on impersonation of Sandra Day O’Connor.
• If arrested by your cop roommate, you have the right to invoke the third amendment and demand that he move out.
• Thanks to legal pioneers Adam Horovitz, Michael Diamond, and Adam Yauch, you have the constitutional right to party.
• You have the right to ask for a copy of your mug shot and use it on your JDate page.

And most your most important right of all…

• If there’s a COPS crew filming your arrest, you have the right to refuse to sign the release form allowing them to show your face on TV. (Seriously, why does anyone sign those things?)

1.  Kinnear insisted he could stay in character as JFK better if everyone called him “Greg” when the cameras were rolling.

2.  It turns out that Jackie Kennedy did NOT carry around a copy of Dianetics everywhere she went.

3.  There’s no way White House televisions in 1960 could’ve had access to the Fox News Channel.

4.  According to one historian, a sex scene lacked credibility not because there’s zero proof it happened, but because he could “totally see” Kinnear’s “cock sock.”

5.  The entire Kennedy administration wasn’t the dream of an autistic child.

6.  Probably not a good idea casting the guy who’s not good enough for Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail” as one of history’s most desirable men.

7. RFK didn’t get the nickname “Bobby” because he had no arms or legs.

8.  Though it made for a more frightful climax, Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK were not roommates who met on Craigslist.

9. JFK’s actual inauguration speech spent far less time railing against Obamacare.

And the miniseries’s biggest factual fallacy…

10. Though filming the entire series in real time à la 24 was an interesting creative choice, it probably wasn’t a good idea to choose 8 hours where the Kennedy’s mostly slept.

After all, why pay for stuff you aren’t using?  You don’t want the electric company forcing you to keep your lights on when you’re not home.  Paying only for the TV that you plan to consume makes sense.  More choice and lower bills?  Sign me up!  Right?

Wouldn't it be nice to order cable like we order dim sum?

There’s just one problem with that line of thinking.   There isn’t a direct correlation between the bulk of your cable bill and the number of channels your receive.  Choice is definitely good, but we could wind up paying more for less.  A lot less.

Consider this chart, which has been going around the interwebs for a while now:

That’s how much, in dollars and cents, each channel charges the cable company per subscriber that receives the channel.   Note: there’s 174 channels on that list, but only about 40 of them are considered true basic cable (i.e. delivered to every cable household in America regardless of whether they want them), and it’s not the 40 most expensive ones either.  Bravo, Cartoon Network, BET, MSNBC, TLC, VH1, Comedy Central, HGTV, The Weather Channel, TV LAND, Food Network, Oxygen, TruTV — all considered basic where I live — are in the bottom half cost-wise at under 20¢/subscriber.

Now, the chart is already over a year old, and it doesn’t have any broadcast networks (which are seeking compensation, too), but the gist is the same:  Add up ALL those above subscriber fees, and the total cost for the cable company to carry them is $34/subscriber.

If you don’t see a channel listed, that means it’s either free for the cable company to carry it, or the channel actually pays the cable company to be carried (that’s what QVC and HSN do).

So let’s say you want all those channels right now.  Here’s what it’ll cost on Time Warner Cable in my neighborhood:  $40 (Basic Cable + 1 additional tier of channels, let’s pick the Variety Tier) + $6 (Choice Tier) + $6 (Sports Pass Tier) + $6 (Movie Pass Tier).

Throw in an HD cable box and DVR service, and that’s another $20 bucks adding up to $78/month, before taxes, for just one room of cable TV.  A second non-DVR room adds $10.  Taxes and fees will then add nearly another $10, bringing the total to:  about $98 for two rooms of service (only one with a DVR).

Oh, and after a year, the price of basic cable goes up since that $40 bucks is only an introductory rate.  After 12 months, your total bill will be closer to $108/month.

So in that very common scenario, less than 1/3 of your bill ($34 out of $108) actually covers the cost of the channels themselves.

Got three rooms of cable?  It still only costs the cable company $34 to provide all those channels (remember, it’s per subscriber, not per cable box), and the monthly cable bill rises to $118.  So the percentage of your bill that covers the channels drops even further.

Now let’s break down one of those tiers…

The Choice Tier offers 28 channels, half of which aren’t even on the above chart (including two Korean channels, five religious channels, and 4 government channels).   Of the ones that are on the chart, the most expensive is SOAPnet at 15¢.  The least expensive is MTV Hits at 1¢.  The total cost to Time Warner to carry the entire package:  94¢.  Cost to you:  $6.

The Sports and Movie Tiers offer even more questionable value, because they offer four channels that are also on the Variety tier (TCM, Sundance, NBA TV, and Fox Soccer).  Get multiple tiers and you can wind up paying for them twice.

And if you want just basic cable?  In 2009, the basic tier on Time Warner cost me $45/month.  Total wholesale cost of those channels to Time Warner in 2009?  $16.42.

With the exception of people who’d delete ESPN and Fox Sports (the only channels that cost the cable operator more than a buck), I’m not sure getting rid of a bunch of penny and nickel channels is going to drastically affect cable bills.  And worse yet, an “à la carte” system might come with an added cost that won’t show up on any bill…

The Mad Men Effect

For years, AMC was known as “American Movie Classics” and that’s just what it was — a basic cable home for old black-and-white movies.  As more and more households got cable, though, the additional subscriber fees eventually gave them enough revenue to expand into original, scripted programming like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead.  If they had to rely solely advertising, no way they could do that.

If à la carte channels existed a few years ago,  how many households might have ditched AMC because it just showed really old movies and nothing else?  A lot.  And without that revenue, say good-bye to Don Draper, southern zombies, and Bryan Cranston’s Emmy.  They never happened.  But, hey, at least you were able to watch Bedtime for Bonzo.  That’s something right?

Justified, The Closer, White Collar, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Hot in Cleveland, you name it – almost all scripted cable shows owe their existence to the amount of household penetration their respective networks currently have.  If FX, TNT, TBS, USA, Bravo, Nickelodeon and so forth weren’t in as many homes as they are, most of those programs never get the greenlight.  Don’t forget, not only does fewer subscribers mean less revenue from subscriber fees, but it also means they can’t charge as much for advertising because they’ve got fewer eyeballs with access to the network.

Even shows that are cheaper to produce like The Daily Show could suffer because there’s little chance Comedy Central can afford to keep Jon Stewart under contract without their current household penetration.  Stewart would be able to make more money co-hosting a game show on CBS after The Price Is Right.

Some cable channels may be able to raise their fees enough to compensate for the reduced penetration, but many won’t.  Many newer cable channels could disappear entirely.  Sure, there might not be anything on Chiller or Sleuth you want to watch now, but who’s to say neither of them will be the next AMC?

It used to be you signed up for cable, you got 60 channels, and everyone was happy.  Complexity only gave cable companies more ways to charge us for the things we really wanted.  That’s why instead of a push towards more à la carte options, I’d rather see better “everything” plans that reduce the tyranny of tiers.  Redefine what “basic cable” means so that it includes more for less, not the opposite, especially newer channels that could use the exposure.  Oh, and allow us to ditch the cable box finally.  That would give consumers immediate, tremendous savings ($10-$20/month per box).

Can “à la carte” wind up being a good thing?  Of course it can.  But will it?  I’m skeptical.  Sports fans will clearly get the rawest end of the deal.  People who like having hundreds of channels to choose from will be screwed, too, as they’ll likely wind up paying more just to keep what they have.  And the rest of us?  Those of us eager to keep only a handful of “good” channels just to save a few bucks?  Sadly, we may never know what we’re missing…

I saw this commercial again just last night.  I get that when the HTC Evo came out in June, Sprint wanted to really play up its “first” status among 4G cell phones, which was a great idea back when it was the only 4G phone.  But all Sprint’s doing now is reminding people the Evo is the oldest 4G phone out there.  Not sure that’s the message they want to be sending.

Side note: Does anyone even remember what the first 3G or 2G phones were? Nope. I don’t, and I actually pay attention to these things. The commercial pretends like being the first 4G phone is as iconic and groundbreaking as being the first rotary phone or the first rocket into space, but as far as I can tell, only three cell phones have officially reached icon status:  the first iPhone, the Motorola Razr, and Zack Morris’s grey brick mobile phone.  That’s it.

Though it helped make Zack popular at school, it also lead to his fatal brain tumor.

I tried out Sony’s Google TV solution at a Sony store today.  No, make that:  I tried to try out Sony’s Google TV solution.   I wanted to write a quick post today about my first thoughts on it, but I can’t, because I spent more time trying to figure out the darned remote than I did actually using it.

The remote is a perfect example of “too much of a good thing.” 90% of the buttons are only needed very occasionally, which means for most basic tasks (like, say, watching TV) it’s just a lot of wasted and confusing space.  And when you do need to use one of the extra buttons, it’s not-at-all obvious which button is the right one to press.  I had to **gasp** ask a sales guy for help with something as simple as moving the cursor when using the Google TV web browser (the answer: the large round button on the upper right doubles as a mini touch-pad — cool, but not the least bit intuitive).

I still want to try Google TV at home at some point, but based on my five minutes with Sony’s solution, I’m now leaning towards giving Logitech’s Google TV box a try.  Its remote interface has to be better, right?