Dana Blankenhorn

The Coming Disney Breakup

Walt Disney Co. is in play. (I remember getting one of these sent to me after the Disney Channel's launch in 1980.)

CEO Bob Iger fired his replacement and can’t find another one. The company is killing its streaming service by reducing content and raising prices. Its deal with Penn Entertainment, directly running a sportsbook, means ESPN is now incompatible with the main company’s business model. The resorts business is tanking, thanks mainly to climate change.

My guess is that the entertainment company will be sold to Apple, probably within a year. ESPN, ABC, and the parks will be spun out as separately traded companies. It might happen all at once.

The only reason to keep the whole thing together was “synergy.” A bad year for one division might be offset by a good year in another. The combination would then be a better investment than the parts.

But that’s not working. The movie business is dying. Disney is doing all it can to hasten that by refusing to bargain with its unions. If management and labor aren’t partners, you can’t do business.

The TV business was dead years ago. This includes cable.

The resorts business is increasingly divorced from the rest of the company.

The Internet is doing to the streaming business what it did to print. Paywalls take away 90% of your audience. Advertising rates keep declining because there’s too much free content. Live sports are viable but the billionaires who control teams and leagues keep pricing fans out of the market. If it’s all just about money, the players will gravitate to whoever offers more of it.

The Streaming Winners (And Losers)

This is something I saw coming years ago at Investorplace.

Streaming will be owned by the Cloud Czars.

All the entertainment companies with their lawyers, producers, and lobbyists are going to fade away. Together, they’re worth a fraction of what Amazon or Alphabet are. Amazon and Alphabet are, in turn, worth barely half what Apple is.

It’s game over.

The reason is simple. Think of the cloud as the operating system of our time. Control what’s beneath and you control what’s above. IBM understood this in the 1960s. Microsoft understood it better in the 1980s.

Heidelberg One: LaLa Lab

First in a series of essays showing how my book, Living with Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future, interacts with the bleeding edge of software development at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, where some of the biggest brains in software history try to inspire the next generation, and be inspired by it. 

To learn more about the book, especially if you're an agent or publisher, write me and we'll talk

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I got a demonstration of just how powerful Moore’s Law of Software has become at LaLa Lab, an exhibit being held in conjunction with the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.

LaLaLab is subtitled The Mathematics of Music. It demonstrated the value of Digital Signal Processor, or encoders as Texas Instruments’ competitors call the. DSPs turn analog input into digital output or vice versa. Here they’re used not just to move the music, but to graphically show what’s going underneath, and let you interact with it.

A microphone and some instruments demonstrates how this works with a Fast Fourier Transform. Speech, the input of a variety of instruments, or just playing music comes up as beautiful diagrams ,showing just how “saturation arithmetic” fills a computer with input over time. The degree to which a note is played during each bit of a second is shown as white against the black of time itself. Each channel of input is separated, showing how a DSP can pick up a variety of types of sounds separately, giving a mixer control of it.

Nearby is a demonstration of how easy it is to control music. A tablet has sensors which turn your waving hand into output, “conducting” music from Chopin or Beethoven. The hand’s movements, and the system’s response, are displayed on a screen overhead. 

There’s a lot to learn here about math, about music and about outputting results on a screen so people can understand it. I asked one of the people manning the booth how you can get the software. It’s all online, downloadable. All music teachers, or math teachers, need to do is build a curricula around it, using the extensive documentation in the booklet she handed me and the tools at Imaginary.org.

 

The Death of Cable (and what comes after)

On March 25 Apple announced the death of the cable television model.

What replaces it is, in a word, the Internet. Streaming services, yes, but with far more interactivity than cable or broadcasting ever offered. True integration between audiences and programming, whether you need news, sports, or entertainment. Available wherever you happen to be. All you need is a mobile phone.

This is the entertainment model of the future.

Sounds great. People are now paying $200-250 per month for bundled Internet and TV service, with the TV taking up two-thirds of that bill. They’re paying another $60 or so for mobile Internet service, with calling bundled in.

There’s a lot of money at stake.

I covered the birth of the present world. I covered it twice.

Resurrection

Almost a decade ago, I dedicated a week of this blog to the story of Bruce Springsteen. 

I told the tale of a musician called to public service by the horrible events of 9/11 and recounted how he told America’s story through his music during that decade.

Today I want to tell a different, more private story. It’s a story of redemption and triumph, through the power of love, starting with the bitter acceptance of loving yourself.

It’s the story of Jason Isbell 

When I wrote my Springsteen story, Isbell was a mess. As he admits. In 2009 he was a 31 year-old guitarist and singer for the Drive-By Truckers, a southern rock band in the tradition of Lynyrd Skynyrd based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, near Huntsville.

Skynyrd, I should note, is not my thing. Neither, at the time, were the Truckers. I had never heard of Isbell.

I first heard of him a year after what he might call his “conversion,” on Mark Maron’s WTF Podcast.  Maron had run out of comics to talk with, he was on something of a roll after a New York Times profile, and the call went out for musicians. DBT lead Patterson Hood took Maron through the Truckers’ story, and it was intriguing, because they weren’t a bunch of ignorant hippie kickers out to recapture rock for God’s own people. Quite the opposite. They were a bunch of serious, middle-aged musicians, second generation rockers really, and family men. Such is the duality of the southern thing, as Hood wrote. 

Isbell was the “genius boy” always hanging around the studio, who they brought into the group to liven things up. Which he did. He also partied. Hard. Drink and drugs and wild, wild women. The whole lifestyle. The boy was too much for the good men of the Truckers, and despite their financial success with him, including the title track to 2003’s Decoration Day he was out.

The firing was where our story begins.

Round Two of the Copyright Wars

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have been following the copyright wars since their inception, in 1997. I watched the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, and the No Electronic Theft Act.

Both had a similar aim, to keep people from stealing making and re-selling copies of material subject to copyright, now that technology allowed for clean (or nearly clean) copies.

My sympathies here are purely with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and blogs like Boingboing, which hate these laws as attacks on freedom of speech, of association, and the free exchange of ideas.

For My Conservative Friends

This was written after Bush's re-election, but I found on reflection it holds up well for my conservative friends today.

The point is, we've been there. Democrats have been where you are now, liberals have been there repeatedly. But we got off the mat, we compromised with one another, we organized, we came back. 

That's the essence of our democracy. I know you may call it a "democratic republic,"  but that is a distinction with little difference. Here, the people choose the government, and though the system may be imperfect, it works. The "revolution" Thomas Jefferson spoke of can happen any time, in any year, in any place. Change is possible in America, and that fact should reduce your paranoia.

Happy 2013. 

Clint Re-Elects the President

I'm old enough to remember when the Ronald Reagan campaign lifted Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" to sell the Gipper.

Springsteen was, and is, a Democrat. He didn't like being done that way. He complained, and ever since then musicians have been complaining when politicians have used their stuff without their direct political consent. (Not that it's stopped the politicians.)

Something similar happened during last night's Super Bowl.

Clint Eastwood re-elected President Obama.

I know he didn't mean to. Clint is a lifelong Republican, a former mayor of Carmel, California, quite outspoken in his beliefs, most of which I disagree with. But, like Springsteen, he's a brand. He represents America, and when he speaks we listen.

Yesterday he spoke for Detroit. He never mentioned the brand, Chrysler, whose message he was narrating. He didn't mention that Chrysler is, at present, a joint-venture between the UAW's health plan and the Italian auto maker Fiat, one Fiat is due to own all of in 2015.

Instead he gave a "half-time pep talk" to the country, noting that Detroit was back, that America was back, and the world better watch out for us in the second half.

It was inspiring. It was non-political. But it was political as hell.

The Magic Price is 99 cents

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 12 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Want to make a lot of money on your Internet content?

Charge 99 cents for it.

Steve Jobs was the first tech gazillionaire to prove this, with the iTunes store. Charging 99 cents per song was certainly enough for our kids. Hey, it's less than a dollar. Sales zoomed.

When music companies complained, Jobs finally offered them a new price point, $1.29. But are total revenues really higher at that higher price? Not really.

Jobs, of course, only discovered this for digital goods. Dollar stores like the one being built above in Houston have been around for many years. I remember my mother taking me to one over 30 years ago in southern California.

The price appears to be a bargain but with digital goods it doesn't have to be. Most CDs contain about 15 songs. That's $15 for a CD, more than stores charge for top-sellers today. The price is not out of line, especially when you consider the fact that there's almost no distribution cost.

But it is magic, because it is an impulse buy. You see something for 99 cents that you might not like, you may well buy it anyway because, hey, it's just 99 cents. You see the same product available for $2.99, or even $1.29, and you're going to think about it.

It's market psychology in action.

 

Open Source Process

The video above is more than a good song. It says a lot about the times we live in.

First, it's a collaboration among musicians in Africa, Europe, America and Asia who did not meet to record. They are singing the song of a Jamaican.

Many of these people come from poor backgrounds, yet they are able to use the same basic technology to make their contributions. See the headphones? Tracks are layered on tracks. The music is built using the Internet, the files passed around, additions made much as you would build a software program.

Which is the point. This collaboration was possible because people were using compatible technologies, because they had free interconnection, and because they shared a universal vocabulary.

In this case music. Other universal languages include mathematics, where equations look the same to a Chinese scholar or a Russian, and Java, which (like any computer language) uses the same structure whether you're Indian or Peruvian.