Letter From New York May 4, 2011

May 4, 2011

Or, as it seems to me…

I am traveling on an Acela; as always, I find time on trains a good time to reflect. The greening countryside is rolling by; a soft rain is falling – it’s on the dark and drear side. Good contemplative time.

Osama bin Laden is dead and that has filled the newspapers and the minds of the world the last few days.

But my mind is much more on the weekend I have just experienced. Business had taken me to Minneapolis last Friday; I stayed over for the weekend. The trip began magically. Early for my flight, I went for coffee. Two ladies were behind the counter. As I finished paying they got great smiles on their face and beamed at me, telling me I was the best put together person they had seen for awhile. My hair, my glasses, the color of my shirt, my demeanor – I was a good looking, well put together man and they thought I should know. I didn’t know what to say, except thank you and what a wonderful way to start the day, the trip. I smiled back. And walked away, shaking my head, glad for the “God Shot.” I wasn’t feeling any of those things at that moment, having roused myself at oh dark hundred to catch the flight.

The business meetings went well and I segued into a dinner with my friend Christine Olson. We talked for hours and she blessed me with an affirmation of the importance of our friendship over the years. The next morning I had brunch with my sister-in-law, Sally, who looked radiant and centered. I basked in the long, good years we have loved each other, having liked her from the moment I met her in my pre-pubescent years.

Coffee followed with another old friend, Jean Cronin Olson, who had written me at Christmas, hoping for coffee my next visit. Sitting down and chatting, we picked up as if we had spoken the week before. And that was followed by time with another friend who is in recovery. I observed that people in recovery are usually much more open with their emotions and thoughts. He agreed; for them it is a matter of life and death. That set me thinking on how much better we would all be if we were better able to articulate our feelings, our emotions, fears and joys to one another rather than stuffing them down, killing them with substances or releasing them through violence.

There was a family dinner on Saturday night. My brother, his friend Deb, two of my nieces, the oldest, Kristin, and the youngest, Theresa, her boyfriend Steve, all gathered at a round table in a restaurant, La Chaya Bistro. We laughed. We teased. We cried. Theresa sat next to me and held my hand quietly for a while, occasionally resting her head on my shoulder. Thinking of it, I feel tears on the edges of my eyes. Kristin and I laughed. My brother and I teased each other, laughing hardily over things in the past.

Later that night Kristin and I texted. She affirmed me. Hopefully I affirmed her. Sunday was more family, more affirmation and then the flight home, wrapped in the quiet of travel and thought, realizing I had had the best visit to my hometown I had ever had, feeling from the time I ordered my coffee on the way out, I was bathed in love, moving towards integration of past and present with a glimpse of future goodness, looking for time with those I love and who love me.

I experienced the magic of family and love while across the world, we hunted down the greatest criminal of our time, a man who somewhere lost his ability to comprehend and respect our common humanity, regardless of religion. It is only through common respect, if not love, we will survive our burgeoning troubles and challenges.

The strength gained this weekend is helping me face my challenges. May the same happen for all.

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Letter From New York, April 26, 2011

April 26, 2011

Or, as it seems to me…

It is the end of the long Easter weekend and, as I often do at the end of Easter, I find myself thoughtful. I was raised Catholic and am infused with that tradition. I will always be infused with that. As my friend Robert said to me last year about this time: once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And I will always, on some level, be Catholic, an inescapable state.

I do not practice Roman Catholicism though I sometimes attend Catholic services, not often though. I sometimes attend Episcopal services. I have done so since I was in college.

And it was while I was in college that Easter became something more than it had been in my Catholic childhood. It became a time of reflection, of personal stocktaking, of understanding that there is a place in history that this weekend represents which is important in the course of human events. Regardless of your belief structure, it is impossible to deny that the life and death of Jesus changed the world forever.

My most important Good Friday happened when I was in college. My roommate Ron and I were driving back from Toronto where we went frequently; he was marrying a girl from there. As we drove back from Toronto on that Good Friday, driving as we were day and night, we read THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE by C.S. Lewis to each other. As Aslan was resurrected, the sun burst through the dismal skies of that day and the sun made a glorious appearance through the hills of Wisconsin.

I cried that day at the power of the story. And ever since that day I have paid deep attention to Good Friday, every Good Friday since then has captured my attention, my notice, my contemplation. This past Good Friday was grey, rainy, cold and full of intimations of mortality – as a Good Friday should be or so I think now.

When three o’clock came, the time Jesus died on the cross, a death so horrible I cannot even imagine, I was listening to Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor and thinking on that powerful day in college when I viscerally understood the story of death and resurrection. As I regularly do on Easter weekend, I read the story of Jesus’ death, his resurrection. The Gospel of Matthew, of course.

On Holy Saturday, the rains continued, a soft, sad nature song that fitted the Easter story, fitted the story that Jesus was in his grave. I thought about the silence of the grave, which awaits us all and that is part of what I think about on Easter weekend, mortality. And the brief mortality of the man who was named Jesus and called the Christ.

Easter itself was a special day. The sun played with the clouds, mists rose from the creek, there was time with friends, lamb was eaten, people were met and I thought about resurrection. There is a Christian Evangelical Minister named Ron Bell who is attracting attention and some derision as he is thinking of a universe without hell. He was written up in Time last week, or the week before last.

I think, at the end of the day, God is the spirit of Easter, the spirit of resurrection and hope, of forgiveness. Did not Christ say on the cross, as he died his agonizing death, “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do?”

And that is the spirit of Easter. If we do not live in the spirit of Easter and if there is no spirit of redemption there is no hope for us. It does not matter what religion you practice; there is universal truth in Easter, in forgiveness, in resurrection. It is the essence of what I struggle with – I need to believe in the spirit of redemption because only in redemption will we find salvation. And salvation, even if only from ourselves, is what we seek while we plod our way across this mortal coil.

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A Letter From New York, April 19, 2011

April 19, 2011

As it seems to me

Last Thursday night was April 14th.

I took the time to mark that April 14th/April 15th, 2011 was the 99th anniversary of the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic, the “Ship of Dreams” which, went it went down on its maiden voyage, spawned stories, legends, lore, parables, allegories and quite a number of movies, the first a silent film starring one of the survivors, Dorothy Gibson, who was a screen star returning on Titanic from a vacation in Italy. It was called SAVED FROM THE TITANIC and was a huge hit; presaging many other films about Titanic including A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, TITANIC [with Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb] and TITANIC [with Kate Winslet and Leonardo diCaprio], which was the highest grossing film of all time for a decade. There has been a Broadway musical, documentaries and another television mini-series on its way.

We have coined the phrase “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” referring to a hopeless reorganization of anything.

It is a story that has romance to it – the rich and famous, sailing with light hearts toward New York, aboard the most glamorous ship of the day, unaware or unworried that the ship sailed with lifeboats for only a fraction of the passengers aboard.

Then came the iceberg, the swift sinking of the ship and the stories. It was a sobering message to an age that thought technology could solve anything, that nothing was impossible. Titanic was never advertised as unsinkable but it gained that reputation. It rapidly demonstrated it wasn’t.

The event provided examples of great courage. I walk regularly by Straus Park on Broadway, dedicated to Isidore and Ida Straus. He owned Macy’s; she was twice offered a place in a lifeboat but would not leave her husband of 41 years. 6000 people attended their memorial service. The eight men who had been hired to play music on board have recently been immortalized in a book, THE BAND THAT PLAYED ON. They played until almost the very end. It was said their last piece was NEARER MY GOD TO THEE.

The disaster gave us “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” a wealthy, colorful Coloradan who took command of her lifeboat when she found the crew wanting.

Below decks, men worked to give the ship as much time as possible, perhaps extending the ship’s life by two hours, giving time for all the lifeboats to get away, and keeping the lights on until the very end, suspecting they were doomed, not unlike the “Nuclear Samurai” working in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Facility, laboring on to prevent a larger disaster, while knowing they are likely dooming themselves in the process.

Aboard Titanic was John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the world. All his wealth couldn’t save him; his body was recovered, appearing that one of the ship’s four smoke stakes had fallen on him. Mrs. Astor gave birth to a son, John Jacob V, who went on to marry a woman named Brooke, who gave away millions and millions to New York and whose son now faces jail time for having swindled his mother.

Legend has it that Titanic was the first ship to send out the distress call, SOS. One radio operator survived, the other did not.

The event presaged the end of an age. It shook the world to its core. That glittering world in which the rich were the celebrities of the time, where titles mattered dearly, and technology could overcome ended absolutely when the First World War tore it all apart.

It was a sobering moment. The Coast Guard began monitoring icebergs; ships were never again allowed to sail without sufficient lifeboats, rules changed. J. Bruce Ismay, head of Titanic’s owner, White Star Line, survived the night though his reputation did not and he lived his life out in scorned exile.

There are no longer living survivors of the night, the last, a baby then, passed away in 2009. Yet the sinking of Titanic lives on, a real event that became legend, large in life, larger in legend – a powerful allegory of pride that goes before the fall.

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April 11, 2011

Letter From New York
April 11, 2011
Or, as it seems to me…

There hasn’t been a missive in a couple of weeks; it’s not for lack of effort – there have been several drafts.

But I was never happy with what I have seen on the page. Coming back from SXSW, I felt the hope that was in the crowd at the Interactive portion – people could use technology to make the world better.

However, when I returned I was overwhelmed by events in the world. Libya. A third war for the U.S. Ongoing troubles across the Arab world, the price of oil soaring, budgetary crises in Washington, nuclear meltdown in Japan, a flurry of publicity and chitter chatter about the iPad 2.

I ask myself all the time: what is really important? The arrival of the iPad 2? Yes, it’s important. Apple and its devices are BIG news. But so is what is happening in Kabul and Baghdad. And all of that is pretty incredible and we have become, I’m afraid, immune to it – we have lived with this for too many years. We are at war in a lot of places: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, as someone noted to me today, how about Mexico, which is on the edge of exploding? That’s the way it is in the world today.

I can’t ignore it. And I can’t do much about it. I write regular letters to my Representatives and hope they hear what I am saying. There is a huge dialogue in the country about bringing down the deficit but it seems focused on Amtrak and NPR and PBS and all kinds of social service programs that really represent a fraction of the budget while no one talks about the cost of the wars we are engaged in or how do we make Social Security really viable for the next 100 years. We’re not having the conversations we really need to have.

I’m angry with everyone right now. I think the Republicans are demagogues and the Democrats aren’t offering real alternatives. And I don’t like waking up in the morning to NPR because the news seems all bad but I don’t change the channel because I feel I need to know what is really going on. And while I am depending on NPR to give the ugly news of what is going on I am also faced with a Congress that wants to defund NPR so that I won’t wake up in the morning knowing how bad things are. Because then we can live in the America that they think we’re living in which is not the America we’re living in.

We are, as a country, way down on the lists of good things. We’re not at the top of lists of almost anything. And that really worries me. It doesn’t seem to worry many people how far down the list we are in terms of medical care. Doesn’t it worry anyone else that Costa Rica is better than we are in medical care overall? It does me. Now granted, that’s overall and not necessarily a specific situation. In a specific trauma situation we may well be the best but we’re not overall.

We’re 17th in math and science these days. And should I really worry about this? Yes, because this is my home. Once in the long ago and far away, I thought about emigrating to Canada or Australia but didn’t because America is my home, my homeland.

The United States is so many different things to so many different people, all inhabiting the boundaries, physically and psychologically of this unique, strange, wonderful, magnificent, convoluted thing called “America.” It is the dichotomies, rabid politics of some, the yearnings and tensions, the palpable ache for something better that makes this country what it is and today it is am much a riot as it ever has been if not more so.

My angst doesn’t change that the sun is shining in while I am working on this, with a nice Italian white wine while waiting for an old friend, which is also much of what life is about, so we can sit at lunch and talk about all of these strange things.

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Letter From New York, SXSW, Day Four the day after, 03 15 11

March 15, 2011

SXSW, Day Four, in retrospect… March 15, 2011

So I am beginning this blog before I go to bed but won’t finish it until after I am awake again in the morning though I am doing my best to figure out all the things that have happened today which was, really, another interesting day of information overload.
We did an interview with Macky Alston of Auburn Media of the Auburn Seminary and an Odyssey member along with Jeanine Caunt, who is his cohort and Associate Director. He said some amazing things, mostly about how the last “generation” of tech kids was all about social media but that the next “generation” of tech aficionados was all about gaming.
And that’s something we’ve been hearing regularly here at SXSW – that it is the time of gaming and the way we might use it might actually be the savior of education as well as any other number of intellectual pursuits. Gaming is BIG! Gaming is HUGE! And if we can harness the power of gaming on the web and turn it to productive purposes such as educational opportunities we might have a “win-win” situation.
Which brings me to the keynote of the day, a one on one with Felicia Day, an actress from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER who is also an avid game player who then took her passion for gaming online to developing a series for the web called THE GUILD which has had one hundred million streams that then led to her developing another program which is now being sponsored by Microsoft and Sprint and she is in a bit of online hog heaven in what is happening to her and her series online. She hit the web jackpot.
And from listening to her, she deserved to hit the internet jackpot because she devoted herself passionately to making what she was doing online work – her presence was witty, funny, passionate, driven, emotionally engaged, desperately charged to make things work and profoundly lucky.
As she was talking about making Dragon Age: Redemption, her new web series, she was casting about for a Director of Photography. In what seemed a really devil may care attitude she entrusted someone who had volunteered to work on the production to come up with a DP. When he told her he had someone and that he was okay, she thought may be she should actually check out his credits and it turned out to be the DP from the first six seasons of LOST, who happened to be a fan of her work.
It’s her karma, she thinks, that these things work out the way they do. And it seems that she may be right – she has that aura of Kismet about her. It came through in her speech but what also came through was that she was absolutely 111% committed to what she was doing.
And that was wonderful and amazing and inspiring.
There were other good things about the day. I had an interesting conversation about Transmedia with Matt Mullin who is pulling together a Transmedia event this fall in San Francisco.
Transmedia? Telling the same story across a multiplicity of platforms. And that is the way the future of story telling is headed. How do we convey the same story across a variety of platforms? It’s the buzzword of the time and it is also the necessity of the time. This is what all folks who are working in the media need to be conquering – the ability to tell the same story across multiple platforms with multiple nuances. It’s a huge challenge and it is the demand of the time – and of the technology we are utilizing.
I also heard Richard Bullwinkle, Chief Evangelist for Rovi; speak, talking about making Channel Guides easier and more cost effective. And, interestingly enough, that was all about driving things to the mobile platform where software development was easier and quicker than software development for the set top box. And what I came away with was a sense of how vulnerable are the current giants in the field, the Comcasts, the Cablevisions, the Cox cable systems. As I said in an earlier blog, Goliath is in the field and he currently controls it but David has entered the competition with his slingshot ready to go…

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Letter From New York by way of Austin, TX and SXSW March 13, 2011

March 13, 2011

I started this blog yesterday, sitting in a room of people who are becoming untethered. The panel was entitled: The Last Broadcast: Entertainment is Social – What’s Next?
10% of this audience of about 500 have either never been a cable or satellite subscriber or have cut the cord; which I have done. These are the folks who are at the center of digital transition and so one would suspect are changing faster than others. It’s most noticeable in college graduates. Ten years ago when folks graduated from college and set up housekeeping for the first part of their adult lives, they didn’t order landlines for their apartments. Now they’re not just ordering landlines, they’re not putting in cable or satellite, relying on Internet sources for their video content.
We are now co-viewing with people all over the world thanks to Twitter, Facebook, etc. And this is expanding our natural impulse to want to co-view with people. Jeff Cole pointed out the he and his wife “watched” the Academy Awards together while she was in Los Angeles and he was in Abu Dhabi.
3rd party recommendations rule our life; Twitter and Facebook make it even more so. And we have reached a point where there is DEEP fan engagement in a way that is different from fan engagement in the past. For example, people tweet as characters in dramas that air. For example, there is a woman who tweets as Betty Draper in Mad Men. [At first AMC wanted to shut her down then went, hey! what good p.r.]
After the panel was over Greg and I interviewed Jeff Cole from the Digital Center at the Annenberg School of Business who underscored the rapidity with which the world is moving to mobile devices and the opportunities he sees for faith communities in the mobile world .
We then tracked down and got to spend some time with Daniel Hope, from the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest who had led the panel: Everything is amazing and nobody is happy…
In this panel he and his fellow presenter, Zach Pratt, talked about how we seemed to be living in a time of technological entitlement. We have amazing technologies and we expect them to work flawlessly and are perhaps inappropriately angry when they do not. We’re living in a time of a new set of addictions generated by use of technology – of people alienated from the rest of the world because of their too deep involvement with the net. However, on the flip side of that is that technology also allows us to reach out and offer compassion to folks quickly. [My experience recently: a colleague I have been out of touch with for several years was fired from her job; I was able through the net to reach out and give my condolences and support almost instantly and have it received and appreciated almost instantly]. We are able through the net to be able to give tangible support to victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in a more timely fashion than ever in history. We are able to see and experience their tragedy in ways unimaginable in the past and if we allow ourselves to be open to the information technology brings we are able to open our compassionate selves to a wider range of people and situations. As with most things, we can use technology to help better ourselves or to indulge the darker parts of ourselves.
Again, I was struck by the dizzying array of interesting choices at SXSW Interactive. I need five of me to get to as many places as I would like to get to. Topped by the fact that yesterday the Film portion of SXSW opened, the buzz has only intensified with the glitterati now joining the digirati for an intoxicating brew of people and technology.
One of the reasons that SXSW has become such an important hub is that it mixes culture with technology, technology with hope. While the decline of America is debated pro and con all the time these days, here the streets are filled with hope and exuberance for a future that is bright with possibility, not just in America but also in the world.

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Day One at SXSW

March 11, 2011

SXSW – Day One, March 11, 2011

Greg and I arrived at SXSW Interactive, Film and Music Festival safely. The security lines at Newark Liberty Airport were eerily non-existent and we got through in record time, which was the theme of our travels – all went smoothly, which is how you want travel to go.
Austin itself is, at night, a jewel of city, rising up out of the Texas plains, glittering, beckoning and promising. We arrived at the hotel, checked in, settled and walked across the parking lot to the legendary Threadgill’s Restaurant, a down home Texas place which, in its various incarnations, has nurtured many an artist, including Janis Joplin.
Over dinner, we poured over the SXSW official app, which is available on the iPhone, Android and Blackberry smartphones. There is a prodigious amount of material there; it’s free. If you have an interest in finding out what is going on at SXSW and have a smartphone, I suggest you go into your app store and download the app. It gives a blow-by-blow account of what is happening, what kind of panels there are and who is on them.
It also lets you know the 579 companies that are exhibiting at SXSW and how to find them. It has comprehensive maps, helps you create and organize a schedule. It seems to be a great app for this event. I found a few glitches in the search function but still pretty amazing.
There are a couple of conference calls I have to do and then I’m headed off to pick up my credentials and to get down to what is happening. The number of panels that I would like to attend is overwhelming. Each time slot has more than one that would be worth attending. Two that have caught my attention so far are “Lessons Learned from the Arab Spring Revolutions” and “The Potential for Augmented Reality”.
There is also a panel about digital changes happening to the Cargo Container business; new digital tools are apparently about to radically improve that business. You can also learn about creating your own event around digital advances, and another one about how textbooks may be morphed into social gaming opportunities, a radically new way of imagining education. Apparently in both Texas and California, states followed by most others in education, the traditional textbook is on the path of the dodo bird.
There are at least six panels happening at 2:00 I would like to attend. Same for 3:30 and same for 5:00, which has a panel on “Hate Gone Viral” as well as one discussing the impact of “singularity” – when machines are smarter than we are. Hello, Watson!
And as the days go on, over 2000 bands will be performing at SXSW and hundreds of films will premiere. There are classes offered by the festival on how not to be overwhelmed by the festival. Sounds like a good thing to me.
And so it goes. Greg and I have arrived and overwhelm begins. We’re excited. All of Austin has been taken over by the festival, a hotel room is impossible to find and the streets are crowded with an interesting mix of people. Right now, it’s the place to be if you are a digirati – or a film buff or a music aficionado. 100,000 people are attending, the biggest SXSW yet. More to come…

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Letter From New York, March 7, 2011

March 8, 2011

Letter From New York

March 7, 2011

Or, as it seems to me…

Long ago, in the distant galaxy that was my high school years, I enacted a character in THE BIRDS, a play by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, a comedy.  The first line of which was:  Here we are, ready and willing to go the birds, and we can’t even find the way!  It was about two men off on a hunt for knowledge — and power.

And that’s a bit like what I am about to do, go off on a hunt for knowledge – and I suppose power if one accepts that knowledge is power.  Greg Nelson, who works with me at Odyssey Networks and has been fondly called by one Odyssey member “Inspector Gadget”, are about to depart for the South by Southwest Interactive, Film and Music Festival, an annual rite of the digirati for the last several years when SXSW [as it is commonly known] began to become not just a place for those who had films to show or music to be listened to but also a place where the newest digital adventures were announced, and you could find the hottest software, the coolest sites, the breaking edge.

Our technical partner in our Call on Faith mobile app, GoTV, is going to be present and I know that many others are.  Video serving solution Kaltura, who is working with Odyssey, will be there as will Snag Films, which runs a website that features non-fiction films and has a section devoted to Religion and Spirituality.  Odyssey has provided them with some short form and will be giving them, too, some long form that will be featured.

Jeffrey Cole will be there.  Jeff runs the Digital Center for the Future at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications.  Here’s from the announcement made when Jeff moved to USC from UCLA:

“At UCLA and now at USC Annenberg, Cole founded and directs the World Internet Project, a long-term longitudinal look at the effects of computer and Internet technology on all aspects of society, which is conducted in over 20 countries. At the announcement of the project in June 1999, Vice President Al Gore praised Cole as a “true visionary providing the public with information on how to understand the impact of media.”

And I luckily know Jeff [and his wife Suzanne].  Jeff and I helped produced the Superhighway Summit at UCLA with Vice President Gore back in 1994 and have remained friends since.  His insights into the future are amazing.  He spoke, by the way, at last year’s RCC Conference in Chicago.  We’re planning on having dinner on Friday evening.

The array of events is absolutely dizzying.  Each day has somewhere between thirty and forty programs and I will have to in the next few days pick which ones I’ll be attending.

What will I be doing there?  Well, based on the fact I’ve been an active blogger for the last oh too many years, and that I am working with Odyssey, the kind folks from SXSW have given Greg and I press credentials so I will be actively blogging from there.  I’ll tweet too!  And Greg is going to have a camera and will be showing some of the sites of SXSW and there may be a little of me doing video blogs.  That one is a little scary to me.

But I am looking forward to it – SXSW has become one of the fertile places for finding out what is happening in the digital universe.  To get behind the scenes is going to be fun for me.  And hopefully for you, if you feel like following our adventures at www.odysseynetworks.org.  There’s going to be a page devoted to our blogs and I’ll be posting as often as I can.

And if there is anything you’d like me to look out for, please let me know.  I’ll see if I can find out.  Just ping me at mtombers@odysseynetworks.org.

Here we are ready and willing to go the birds, but unlike the hapless guys in THE BIRDS, Greg and I know where we’re going.

 

 

 

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Letter From New York February 27, 2011

February 27, 2011

Or, as it seems to me…

Two days ago my friend Beverly, who receives and reads this missive, sent me an email wondering what I was thinking about Libya. What is happening there is less covered than events in Tunisia and Egypt. The difference: there aren’t that many cameras in Libya and there aren’t that many correspondents reporting out of there.

Gaddafi invited foreign correspondents to Tripoli, the capital, to demonstrate that all was under his control. It apparently backfired as some squares and streets were filled with protestors, demonstrating that all was not well and under the dictator’s control. Correspondents were eager to see things up close, particularly after a telecast from Tripoli of a long, peculiar, rambling rant of Mr. Gaddafi informing his subjects that he was still in control, wasn’t going to leave Libya, wanted to die there as a “martyr” and that all the trouble was being caused because Mr. Obama, our President, was seeing to it that young Libyans were being provided hallucinogenic drugs. I saw some of it and it was mesmerizing in a terrifying way as it demonstrated his dangerously erratic behavior and probable madness.

He is a thug; yesterday I listened on NPR to a heartbreaking report from Tripoli from a man who described the relief he and friends felt when ambulances showed up at the scene of a melee between protesters and security forces and how relief became horror as Gaddafi’s security forces burst from the backs of those ambulances to shoot into the crowd. It is such actions that have resulted in the UN Security Council recommending that Gaddafi and his cronies be referred to the Tribunal for War Crimes while placing sanctions against them, which makes me believe that Gaddafi might feel he is going to have to really embrace that martyr role because there will be no place for him [or his sons] to run.

Reviewing online some of the African press this morning, it is clear there is concern that Libya will have a Ceausescu moment when Gaddafi falls, looking back at the execution of Romania’s dictator and his wife when their communist state collapsed beneath them.

There is a provisional government that has been formed in the east of the country under a former Justice Minister who defected to the rebels a few days ago and which is currently being recognized by the former Libyan Ambassador to the U.N. who also has renounced Gaddafi. The situation is confusing and complex and frightening. Some governments are quickly evacuating their citizens but migrant workers from poorer nations are adrift with their native governments unable or unwilling to assist them. Workers from African nations are gathering in compounds and are being guarded because Libyans are confusing them with African mercenaries brought in by Gaddafi and his boys to subdue them.

It appears that it’s only a matter of time before Libya is freed from the Gaddafi family; it is only a matter of how much blood will be lost in the process. And that is the terrifying reality. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, the army is split and some of them are firing on the Libyan people though others are defecting and turning on their Colonel.

Much of the news is coming out via Twitter and Facebook because the correspondents are not there in the same force they were in Tunisia and Egypt. And the Tweets and Facebook postings are also showing that unrest remains in much of the Arab world. The Arabian King is offering significant financial assistance to his population to quell their unrest while Yemen’s dictator is under increasing pressure with old allies beginning to abandon him. Bahrain’s monarch is shuffling his cabinet as protests continue. Oman has begun to experience its first protests.

What began two months ago in Tunisia and then swept into Egypt and has now been blown into Libya and Yemen and Bahrain and Oman and Saudi Arabia. We will have to watch closely because the world is shifting before our eyes and the eventual outcomes will undoubtedly shape the geo-politic for years to come, for good or ill.

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Letter From New York, February 21, 2011

February 22, 2011

Future of TV, according to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation and Variety Magazine on February 15th in Los Angeles, CA…

As I tweeted that I was at this Future of TV Summit one wag of a friend, himself a former producer of many a series, tweeted back: TV has a future? Which I suppose was the question this Summit was called to answer. There were big names there, from legendary producer Gale Ann Hurd to the head of programming for HBO, Michael Lombardo. There were a dozen men and women from the cutting edge, those in charge of the technologies threatening the TV business. Interestingly, the regulars and the newcomers didn’t mix much on the panels. The new guys on the block were pretty much segregated from the old boys on the block, regardless of their ages.

And one would have expected, one would have thought, someone from the invasive new services like Netflix Streaming or Hulu. But they weren’t there. Though Hulu got banged around a bit by various network executives and producers, decrying that the service streamed their programs shortly after airing but they weren’t getting an appropriate amount of remuneration for that airing.

Blame that on Nielsen said some, who, as it always seems to have done, lags in measurement of the new technologies so that actual viewership is not adequately measured. And there is truth to that; Nielsen always seems to lag behind what’s actually happening. That’s one of the gripes of the folks who make their living off the network model, pretty unchanged for decades now, especially if you’re one of the broadcast networks. But it’s certainly not the only one.

The fact that technology is changing the business was voiced by all though may be just because they felt they had to make a nod to the future. Much at this particular summit seem to be about the STATE of the television business today as opposed to a clear attempt to parse the signs and see what the future might be really like. Much of that, I suspect, has to do with that most of the people on the panels are luminaries in traditional television and as luminaries in that business are earning a very good living and are not particularly eager to face a future which might not be quite so lucrative for them.

One thread through the day was the concern of network executives about how to maintain a brand in an online world. No one really had an answer but it was definitely a concern. HBO is a brand and how does it maintain the strength of the brand as the distribution streams multiply? And what is the brand meaning now of CBS and what will it be in the future? Does CBS really stand for anything? HBO does but does CBS? Brand strength is important and there is a trend happening in which producers themselves are getting brand identity in individuals such as Dick Wolf of the Law and Order franchise and Anthony Zuiker, behind the CSI franchise, which are in some ways almost larger than the brands of the networks that distribute them.

But again, this was not so much about the future of television but commentary on the current state of affairs. Was anyone talking about the future? Yes, there were. Some. Those who were out working in the fields of the future…

Two bright lights from that world were Eric Anderson, VP of Content and Product Solutions at Samsung and Brian David Johnson, Futurist and Director, Future Casting and Experience Research at Intel. Samsung is at the forefront of integrating internet connectivity into television sets. He pointed out that it used to be televisions got upgraded once a year. Samsung now has done it about ten times in the last twenty-four months. Not on a panel with anyone from the traditional side of the business, he did try to speak out to them. Did any of them realize how fast it was all happening? Unfortunately, the people who needed to hear the question asked were probably back in the green room mingling with their peers. The Futurist at Intel announced that he had announced to his peers at Intel that the future of computing was television. Which may be the reason that this year Intel has put a chunk of change into Kaltura, an open source video-serving platform [with whom Odyssey is in business at this moment].

Notable but not noticed by the traditionalists in the business is that 25% of the TV sets sold in 2010 were internet enabled and it probably will be 40+ % in 2011, which is pretty amazing and which is demonstrating where the business is going. And it is going fast, thank you Mr. Anderson. But the reality is that TV, old style TV, is still very powerful and deeply entrenched in the way we live and consume video. AOL is aware of that and is working to make traditional TV its friend, not “frenemy,” but friend, working to augment not challenge the current behemoth. The gadgets and the gizmo boys are working to challenge the behemoth, to provide alternative distribution methods that are disruptive to a traditional business. The traditional business needs to find ways to embrace the alternative distribution methods so as not to completely disrupt their business.

Because it does take real money to produce really good content; may be it doesn’t take as much as is currently spent for traditional television series but it does take money. Content is king; always has been and pretty much always will be. The AOL folks have a phrase they’re using internally these days: content is kinging, a riff on a line in The King’s Speech. Content is kinging. In the early days of any technology almost anything will sail. When television erupted, people even watched test patterns [for those who remember test patterns]. In the early days of the Internet, silly college boys putting Mentos in Coke was entertainment. But things have moved beyond that – content is king, or kinging.

And we have to figure out a way to pay for the kind of content we want whatever the technology is that brings it to us. That’s the conclusion that the Future of TV Summit seemed to come to but what it lacked was the real dialogue between the creators and the gadget and gizmo boys and girls about how to make it all work for both creators and consumers.

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