1:30 AM and back to Vegas we go for NATPE, the TV Programming Exec show. Usually I’m not a huge fan but this one should be good. The proliferation of variables in TV deals in the past year is unprecedented… VOD, DVR, ITunes, other download services, YouTube, all with exclusivity and rev share decisions… the deal matrix gets prettty thick for a business that’s been boilerplate for a generation. And to quote Mr. Goldman, no one knows anything. All bets are off as everyone looks for the right combination of elements in pricing, UI, rev share, branding, windowing etc. May you live in interesting times!
To explore the below for yourself, watch Gates’ keynote here and Jobs’ IPhone sermon here. Steve as eminence grise and Bill as dated adolescent. And watch the palettes on the two, Microsoft’s Motel 6 colors and out-of-touch casting choices. Amazing.
Back home for a day before NATPE. The big event of this year’s CES came from far away at the church of the faithful… the day after Gates’s mediocre keynote in Vegas, Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld and seized conrol of the media, the market and the over 100,000 milling through the Convention Center. While Gates lolled on about RFID tags on flour bags Apple revealed an integrated phone/iPod/email/net device, and a business model with all of the upside of an MVNO and none of the down. Carrier Cingular will cede branding to Apple and provide coverage via their Edge network. Questions about action by Cisco, who may own the iPhone name, persist.
We’re here. The Vista banner in front is really big.
So far people are trying to decide whether MVNOs are dead or not. And eating cookies. If you are driving allow extra time ? there’s lots of construction.
They should offer rental cots at the LACV. THAT would be a business.
PEOPLE OF EARTH: Welcome to my chronicles. I will be shooting my mouth off herein as time permits.
Tomorrow after METal breakfast we leave for Vegas for another CES. My 10th I think. Five days of surrealism, bad lighting and weird coffee broken up by sporadic meetings with old friends. In a perverse way it gets more fun as you get older and expect less from it. You always learn something, even if it’s what shoes to never wear again or who got the crap kicked out of them this year. Schadenfreude is the crack of show business.
The stupidest event last year was the competiton for largest monitor in the world, in which two companies vied to make each other rip down their COME SEE THE LARGEST MONITOR IN THE WORLD!! banners by secretly bringing larger TVs. That’s just not enough of a reason for anything.