I’ll be continuing my early shift at Paramount (5:45 a.m. to 9 a.m.) today and tomorrow.
DVDs, and the paradox of choice
So it’s not just me. This Fortune blog article attributes this year’s 2% drop in DVD sales to consumer paralysis over which of the new formats to buy:
Market research showed it wasn’t just NetFlix (NFLX) or Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes hurting traditional DVD sales, either. Consumers who bought HDTVs were so afraid of backing the wrong high-definition movie format that they decided not to buy movies at all.
It’s a phenomenon that would be familiar to anyone who’s read Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice: in our desire to not pick wrong, we often don’t pick at all.
Thanks to Mike Curtis for the link.
Blu-ray on a cold day
With Warners picking Blu-ray, and Paramount rumored to have an escape clause letting it follow right behind, I finally bought my first Blu-ray disc: Big Fish. And a PS3
to play it on.1
Movies I’ve written are available on both formats, so I didn’t really care who won in the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray battle. I just didn’t want to get stuck with the loser.2 Or, better put, I wanted to pick the format that would lose last. Any disc-based format is ultimately going to fall as internet distribution increases. That’s the future. (And a primary issue in the WGA strike.)
Because you’ll ask: The Nines is a standard DVD. While it’s possible that there would be Blu-ray version at some point, it’s not on any calendar.
When I was working with Blue Collar, the folks who developed the menus and special features for The Nines, they were salivating over the sophisticated features you can build into Blu-ray discs, such interactive, animated guides with transparency. Without knowing the real technology behind it, it seems to move beyond the “decision-tree-with-loops” setup of current DVDs and closer to the realm of real programming.
Most of all, Blu-ray discs are big. My dream — which I pitched at last year’s Sundance Film Festival — is to use the extra capacity to include compressed clips of all the original source material, so ambitious viewers could recut the movie on their own systems. That’s a big thing to ask for Sony to support, so reasonable success with this month’s DVD release will be a major factor.
- Yes, I could have gotten something other than a PS3. But it was a very handy excuse for buying one. You know, for research. ↩
- Of course, isn’t really “over.” Even if all the studios sign on to Blu-ray, there may be alternative producers (porn, for example) who find a good reason why the other format is better, such as more flexible licensing terms. So here’s hoping that “universal” players are forthcoming, eliminating the confusion much the way the CD-RW+/- has largely gone away. ↩
Benazir Bhutto on Parade
I’ve pretty much given up on my campaign to mock and/or eliminate Parade Magazine. It’s an embarrassing publication that no self-respecting American newspaper should include, but it’s not worth the time to regularly dissect its inanity. Particularly when it can embarrass itself so well.
This morning’s Parade Magazine (January 6th, 2008) cover article is on Benazir Bhutto — a refreshingly newsworthy subject for the magazine. After all, Bhutto was assassinated on December 27th, and her death has brought new concerns about the future of Pakistan and the region.
However, the cover headline asks an unsettling question: “Is Benazir Bhutto America’s best hope against al-Qaeda?”
Gosh, I hope not. Considering she died ten days ago.
The article by Gail Sheehy was written before the assassination. That’s okay. But the printed version makes no clarification whatsoever about what’s happened in the meantime: in Parade-land, Bhutto is still alive, racing towards the election. She’s our best hope!
Obviously, Parade is printed in advance. From the website: “The assassination of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27 occurred after PARADE’s Jan. 6 issue went to press.”
But does Parade really need to be printed ten days in advance? Did the editors spend the last week and a half sitting on their hands, hoping their average reader would be so clueless to world events so as not to notice that the subject of their lead article was gunned down for the world to see? (Sadly, the editors’ gamble may be reasonable.)
The web enables print media to amend and expand their reporting, which Parade did to some degree. From the site: “After her assassination, PARADE immediately posted the entire interview online,” which is a great start, but then, “and Sheehy appeared on network and cable TV news shows to discuss her face-to-face conversations with Bhutto.”
So you put your journalist on television to talk about the interview, but then declined to frame the article in context for your publication?
I’ve worked in media enough to know that nothing is impossible. They could have fixed the cover. They could have added an introductory paragraph pointing readers to the web for more information. And failing that, they could have wrapped the issue with an explanatory note.
But they would have only done that if they were an actual news publication, rather than a crappy info-tainment tabloid pretending to be one.
My beef about their “long lead time” excuse is that the insert is included in daily newspapers across the country, which creates the expectation that it’s at least somewhat timely. Which it’s not.
And so the onus really falls on newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, which need to be proactive about how they’re going handle such errors. After all, the printed copy of Parade says “Los Angeles Times” at the top, in the newspaper’s logotype. In simple fact, the January 6th, 2008 edition of the Los Angeles Times says Benazir Bhutto is still alive. That’s embarrassing.
Update: I’m delighted to find I’m not the only one aggravated.