Who Knew?2007 Highlights [Or, WTF Happened?!]
I’ll be listing notable personal and cultural ephemera which occurred this year, maybe more to help myself remember than anything else. This’ll be updated regularly until the end of the year.
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MEDIA/TECH EVENTS
The WGA strike happens… and continues.
You know, I first heard the news of a possible impending writer’s strike around June, and I didn’t really care, even though I read that digital downloads were the point of contention. Even in October, when the strike seemed almost inevitable, I wasn’t all too interested: just worried that Lost would stop filming. Then I listened to This Week In Media. They brought up the writer’s strike and got excited that there could, perhaps, in the event of a prolonged strike, could be a mass exodus of writers from television into podcasting and new media ventures. Okay, now I’m listening.
See, This Week In Media’s prediction is coming true. There is definitely a move to the Internet as a hub for producing original scripted content, and it doesn’t look like the AMPTP is going to resolve this strike anytime soon. However… anything even vaguely “professional” I’ve seen developed for the Internet hasn’t been that great. FunnyOrDie.com? “The Landlord” was pretty funny but not the most amazing thing ever. And that’s their flagship video. Anything else on there by big-name actors and comedians seem like half-baked B-sides: some random sketch that Judd Apatow thought of while on the toilet on Saturday morning, found hilarious and shot on Saturday afternoon before it got dark. Revision3 programming doesn’t have any compelling visual content - you could essentially just extract the audio and listen to them as podcasts. The much-hyped Quarterlife is just crap — and its audience agrees. And look at this article again: who’s their most prominent example of someone who’s doing this specifically because of the strike? Dude wrote Air Bud and related sequels. Is 2008 going to be the year that Hollywood swamps the Web 2.0 community with mediocre content funded by venture capitalists?
Like your television, the Internet can display video, but the two mediums are entirely different - the only compelling Web video I’ve seen is either stuff that one or two people did by themselves on no budget (see Channel 101/102 and ZeFrank) or real, actual TV (whether it be Hulu, streaming eps on the network’s website or YouTube clips of random shows.) FunnyOrDie got $15 million in VC funding - that pays for less than one season of a real TV show. If other video content startups are going to get funding on that level, they could try to make a couple of viral videos that will generate hundreds of millions in ad revenue to pay for more TV-quality content (very unlikely), or they could stop a minute and think about the Internet’s characteristics as a medium, and attempt to mold their creative process to those characteristics.
The RIAA’s public reputation is slaughtered.
Towards the end of the year, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued a woman named Jammie Thomas and made her pay $222k for downloading 24 songs off Limewire. A Wired interview of Universal Music CEO Doug Morris painted him as clueless and increasingly irrelevant in the digital age. Record labels resorted to even more desperate methods to attract sales (take, for example, the “ringle”: a $5 CD single packaged with a ringtone). Artists like Radiohead, Prince and Saul Williams elected to distribute their newest releases in alternative, perhaps even experimental ways - putting up the MP3s for download on a donation basis or distributing the CDs for free with the daily newspaper. These distribution models weren’t perfect, and may not become a feasible business model for new and unheard-of bands, but they did show that there were ways to profit off one’s art besides signing away your rights to a giant media corporation.
Expect a record label to make a significant misstep within the next couple of years and accidentally set into motion the ultimate collapse of their business model.
High-definition (HD) video took significant steps towards mainstream adoption.
Affordable consumer-level HD camcorders by Canon and Samsung hit the market in the second half of the year, Flash video quality got better and better and bandwidth speeds became, on average, faster as more people signed up for broadband. Last month, the video-sharing site Vimeo rolled out HD video capability.
However, there’s still not really any incentive for people to move to HD, besides the fact that it looks better, which most don’t care about. (Look at how many users the butt-ugly Myspace has still retained even though Facebook is the hot new commodity, and at how Youtube remains ever popular despite its abysmal video quality.) The format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray stands at the same point it did last year - a virtual stalemate. But as of now, no one really seems to give a shit.
Apple introduced some amazing innovations but also made significant blunders.
2007 was definitely the year of the iPhone - and when the reviews came out which said that the iPhone wasn’t perfect yet managed to live up to the hype, well… you can guess that sales have been good. However, two major themes in 2007 dominated Apple headlines and set Apple back considerably.
The first was Apple’s arrogance: its repeated refusal to listen to the demands of its most ardent supporters in favor of its own corporate preferences. With each issue that popped up - from their refusal to open up the iPhone to allow third-party applications to the copy protection on media sold in the iTunes Store - it seemed like Apple would intervene only when the protest was close to critical mass. Apple made some great decisions this year - for example, the choice to sell DRM-free songs for only 99 cents - but they only did it after months of escalating complaints and constant consumer demand. Another example was the iPod touch, a product that came after years of demand for a touchscreen iPod, yet came to many as a disappointment by keeping the disk capacity small and randomly removing features from the iPhone’s software so as not to cannibalize sales of its flagship product. Most recently Apple’s been getting some angry letters for having their legal department force the popular Apple blog ThinkSecret to close for “revealing trade secrets”.
Secondly, some of Big Media realized that Apple scared the shit out of them. Universal’s music division decided to not renew its annual contract with Apple and NBC Universal decided to pull their TV programming off iTunes altogether. The problem is that Apple has commanded double-digit percentage points for all music sold in the United States - not just digital. When this is the case, and you’re a greedy record exec who wants to charge more than $0.99 per song, Apple’s insistence on a low price point is a real problem. Thus Universal Music Group has most of its efforts focused on finding a way to create a digital music service that will overthrow iTunes. The problem is that they’re so clueless I’m not sure they’re even remotely capable of accomplishing that.
Despite these drawbacks, Apple still remains a major player in technological innovation, and as long as their own hubris doesn’t lead them to commit a fatal error, it doesn’t look like they’re going away anytime soon.
