'Media' Archive
Maybe you saw it over the weekend. Fresh on the heels of its “Mojave Experiment” marketing ploy for Windows Vista, Microsoft just started running its first TV commercial featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.
The commercial is decidedly Seinfeld-esque, to say the least. Like the Seinfeld show, some people will find it rich in popular culture-based humor and non sequiturs, while others will find it confusing and not funny.
Many wonder how this commercial promotes Windows or Vista. In truth, it really doesn’t. As this blog post notes, the 90-second spot is meant to introduce a series of commercials starring Gates and Seinfeld, and I’m sure they’ll get around to mentioning Vista at some point.
Meanwhile, there was a spate of news stories marking the 10th anniversary of Google’s incorporation. All the search giant has to do is to get older, and the media’s all over it! BTW, Microsoft is nearly 33 years old (not much younger than when a certain stand-up comedian launched a TV series called The Seinfeld Chronicles).
Google got a lot of attention last week for launching Google Chrome, its open-source Web browser. Chrome will compete with not only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari, and the Opera browser, but also Firefox, Mozilla’s open-source browser that has benefited from a lot of financial and technical support from Google. The search behemoth just renewed its development agreement with Mozilla for another three years, so Chrome may not crush Firefox in the near future.
Chrome is intended as a key piece of infrastructure for Google’s Web-based tools, such as Google Docs, Gears, and Gmail.
I wouldn’t put all my chips on Chrome to overtake Internet Explorer or even Firefox in the next few years. Not everything Google touches turns to Internet gold. Google Video wasn’t a world-beater, so the company went out and bought YouTube.
Funny how Google doesn’t run any TV commercials — all it has to do is to inadvertently spill the news of the new browser, and the media goes wild in promoting the (free) product. Of course, there was a lot of savvy marketing and PR work behind that “accidental” launch. The kind of thing you’d expect from a brash 10-year-old.
Some television history was made with yesterday’s Emmy nominations. For the first time, two basic cable series, FX’s Damages and AMC’s Mad Men, scored best dramatic series nods, officially cementing the channels further up the dial as serious original programming players to be reckoned with. What’s more stunning was not only that Mad Men scored the most drama nominations of any program at 16, but that it is in a field of six shows — up from the usual five. That says to me that the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences wanted to recognize the period piece about the early days of Madison Avenue so badly that they boosted the field rather than cut something else. (Although the continued presence of the sophomorically stupid Boston Legal in this category baffles me to no end.)
I’ve blogged before about basic cable’s recent evolution from second-tier exhibitor of reruns and edited-for-television movies to full-blown networks with original shows that are now serious buzz and ratings competition for the broadcast stalwarts of NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX. First came the ratings and now come the accolades. (Otherwise known as the Tony Montana Principle: “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” Well, in this case the women would actually be Emmys, but you get the idea.) This is proof that any business — no matter how historically dominant the big players might be — can be shaken up.
The Emmy nominations also continue to provide further proof of the diminished clout of HBO post-Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and The City, etc., and that rival Showtime has largely stepped in to take its place. For the first time in 10 years, the network didn’t have a contender in the Best Drama category. Instead, Showtime’s serial killer drama Dexter scored a nod. HBO is still represented in the Best Comedy category with nominations for Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and it also did well in the Made for TV Movies — Recount, which I liked but, man, was that a painful experience to relive — and Miniseries categories. In fact, in the latter, HBO’s John Adams, the biopic about the second US president was the most nominated program of them all, scoring a whopping 23 nods.
Some other pleasant surprises this year: the return of Lost to the Best Drama category after it regained its footing with an outstanding fourth season; continued love shown to The Office for Best Comedy (when work gets bad, I have only to look as far as Dunder Mifflin and say, “At least I don’t work there.”); that they gave props to three of the funniest characters on TV with noms for How I Met Your Mother’s Neil Patrick Harris (”Legendary!“) and Entourage’s Jeremy Piven and Kevin Dillon (all manner of quotes I can’t repeat on a family website).
Perhaps the biggest surprise was the Academy’s willingness to shake things up this year. The Emmys have long been criticized for nominating the same shows and performers over and over again, regardless of quality, and rightly so. It was always very difficult for new blood to break into the race, but this year turned that story on its head. Sure, there’s still some same ‘ol that is expected and boring (Mariska Hargitay and Tony Shalhoub for the millionth time), the mind-boggling “Whys?” (the aforementioned Boston Legal and its hammy actors, Two and a Half Men, and, I’m sorry, but I just don’t get 30 Rock), and the inevitable snubs (Friday Night Lights, never even a bridesmaid much less a bride, and where are my Desperate Housewives in any of the acting categories?). But overall the Emmys finally seem to be getting it more right than not.
Now we just have to see if it holds up when the statues are handed out.
Will Smith is invincible.
No, I don’t mean his character in Sony’s superhero send-up Hancock, his latest Fourth of July extravaganza. I mean the actor himself. Hancock raked in about $107 million since opening last Tuesday and further cements Smith’s status as not only the king of Hollywood, but maybe the world in general. (Sorry, James Cameron.) I can’t think of another star who is as consistently bankable, whether the movie is even any good or not. And if you believed the critics, Hancock was not. It was pretty thoroughly spanked by the thumbs-up/thumbs-down set, but audiences didn’t care. They went anyway, despite the fact that the guy played an unlikeable booze-guzzling jerk with superpowers.
Just think about that. Big Willy is so loved that moviegoers will even pay to see him act like an ass. And every other studio in town recognizes this and simply got out of the way. During a season when there’s at least two or three big new movies opening every weekend, not a single other flick was willing to take him on. Second place during the holiday weekend went to Pixar’s WALL-E, which was a holdover from last week.
If you take a look at the guy’s filmography on IMDB, his resume is surprisingly not all that deep. His first big movie was Bad Boys in 1995, a nothing-special Michael Bay action movie. But then came that little alien invasion flick, Independence Day, and from then on out it’s been hit after hit.
So just what is it about Smith that’s turned him into a Hollywood cash machine? Well, Sony head of distribution Rory Bruer told the AP: “Will Smith, Mom, apple pie and the Fourth of July. It doesn’t get any better. People just so relate to him and the characters that he plays. They totally embraced it as something different, something fresh.”
That’s pretty spot on. I’m still waiting for the train wreck of a bomb that’ll break the streak of eight straight number 1 movies, but it hasn’t happened yet. And I’m starting to think it never will. If he can get audiences to pay money to see something like Wild Wild West, Will Smith will be making hits for a long time.
There really is no such thing as a long-term marriage in Hollywood, even at the corporate level. It’s expected that the pair-up of Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks will soon go the way of Jen and Brad, Bruce and Demi, and Reese and Ryan. Word is that DreamWorks principals, including Steven Spielberg and CEO Stacey Snider, are in talks to jump ship from Paramount and form a new company with backing from a little known (in the States anyway) India-based firm, Reliance ADA Group.
Rumor has it that Spielberg and company have been unhappy almost from Day 1 of the combination of Paramount and DreamWorks in 2006. Supposedly, Spielberg and DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen have chafed under what they perceived as a loss of independence under Paramount, as well as Paramount taking unearned credit for DreamWorks successes. Not to defend Hollywood execs, but what exactly did the DreamWorks team expect? You went from an independent to a shingle in one of the biggest conglomerates in the entertainment industry (Viacom). You can’t take Paramount’s money (it paid $1.6 billion for DreamWorks) and then gripe when you don’t like how it runs a business it now owns. There’s a certain arrogance there. “I’m Steven Spielberg and how dare you tell me what to do.” Sure, virtually anything the guy touches is box office gold, but does that give him the right to boss around his new bosses?
Not that Paramount didn’t benefit greatly from the DreamWorks purchase, but that was the entire point. Just before they bought the studio, Paramount had been struggling mightily with flop after flop. One of the reasons it bought DreamWorks was to bring in another pipeline of hits, and they scored big time with massive grosses from Transformers, Blades of Glory, Norbit, and Dreamgirls, among others. It was a bold business move and it paid off.
Ironically, the movies Paramount gained from DreamWorks gave the studio breathing room, and so far this summer, Paramount has been the most successful studio in Hollywood. The grosses from Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull put it at the top of the heap. And if Ben Stiller’s comedy Tropic Thunder continues the hot streak, Paramount will probably be more than happy to let their marriage of convenience drift into divorce court. After all, they have the right to distribute DreamWorks films well into 2010 (including Spielberg’s Tintin, Old School Dos, and an Abraham Lincoln biopic, also from Sir Stephen), and upcoming projects such as Tranformers 2, G.I. Joe, and the Star Trek reboot from J.J. Abrams should keep the grosses rolling in for several years to come.
Should Spielberg and company jump ship, they’ll be the ones taking the bigger risk. If they go solo again, the new studio will be in the same boat that got DreamWorks into so much trouble to start with. It’ll once again be an independent studio swimming in a pool of media conglomerates with multipile revenue streams beyond movies. Make a couple bad flicks that don’t make much money, and you’re right back in the dog house looking to the conglomerates to share the costs of production and distribution. If DreamWorks were smart, it’d stay in the Paramount fold and learn to get along.
Time Warner’s long experiment of trying to create a vertically integrated media content and distribution giant finally came to a merciful end yesterday with the news that it would get rid of its entire stake in the nation’s #2 cable company, Time Warner Cable (TWC), by the end of 2008. It’s a move that’s been expected for some time now, as shareholders have been screaming for the company to find a way to boost its lagging share price. By ridding itself of the debt-laden cable firm, Time Warner will once again become a pure content company focused on movies, television, and publishing — both online and of the magazine variety. All I can say is, it’s about freaking time.
Oh, what a difference a decade makes. It was roughly 10 years ago when AOL bought Time Warner with the grand delusion that the massive new AOL Time Warner would be a competition-killing monster that could devour rivals by leveraging powerful content and distribution brands that all work together in mass media bliss. I won’t get into the specifics about why it failed so miserably — it’s been covered ad nauseum by me and everyone else — but Time Warner to this day is still paying for the mistake in the form of not only the aforementioned poor share price and debt, but also the downright shame of having what it hoped would be a winning strategy instead become an embarrassing, if not arrogant, debacle.
While I understand what Time Warner gains from the divestiture, I really don’t see what sort of upside there is for TWC, aside from the independence to go its own way in an increasingly competitive market. The details of the divorce contain a couple eyebrow raising elements. TWC will have to pay a one-time dividend to Time Warner totalling $10.9 billion, all of it borrowed. And that’s on top of the $13 billion in debt the company already has on the books. That’s a heck of a lot red ink for any firm, much less one that’s just gained independence. TWC CEO Glenn Britt rationalized the dividend by calling it, “a statement of our confidence in our business.” I call it evidence that someone needs to introduce a pair of scissors to his credit card.
How will this split help Time Warner? It’ll allow the company to cut two-thirds of its $34 billion debt load, and free it up to focus on content and even consider getting back into the acquisitions game. But that’s just speculation. Time Warner’s next order of business should be finding someone stupid enough to buy AOL, an ISP that’s been dying a slow death and a major albatross around the media giant’s neck. Seriously, do you know anyone that uses dial-up anymore? When was the last time you heard that fingernails-on-the-chalkboard equivalent that is the sound of a phone modem firing up? I don’t think it’ll be too much longer before Time Warner is forced to just shut AOL down and take its lumps with a loss.