“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of September 3, 2017
This Week’s Podcast
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Streaming Failure
Just a couple weekends back we had one of the most hyped media events of the year in the Mayweather-McGregor fight. While the sports fan in me may have reservations about the sports quality of the event, there is no doubt that it was a media EVENT. And a pretty profitable one for almost everyone involved.
I say almost because the folks at Showtime aren’t going to make quite as much money in the end as they had hoped. They are being sued by some folks who paid to watch a live stream of the fight but couldn’t because of the poor quality and technical issues with the stream. The cable network is already talking about a refund policy for folks who had problems and bought the event directly from Showtime. It’s not a small issue either. Four million people paid around one hundred dollars for the event. What they got was an hour delay in the start of the fight because of widespread technical issues with the broadcast, and once it did get rolling there were drop outs and buffering issues throughout the fight. And people are angry.
Showtime isn’t the first company to have issues with streaming events. In fact, it seems the bigger the event the more likely it is to have streaming issues. In the last couple years, there have been issues with March Madness, the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards and the Grammys. Even Apple has had streaming issues for big events. Which raises the larger question of what’s going on?
The first answer you will hear is “bandwidth”. In simplest terms, that’s talking about how much information can flow into your computer or smartphone. Think of it like a water pipe. A bigger pipe means more water can be pumped to you. The experts all seem to agree that bandwidth wasn’t the problem here.
The consensus seems to be that major events streams have so many moving parts that a breakdown at some point is inevitable. The problem is that the events are already so expensive for the media companies that they don’t always want to pay for backup plans that they may not need. So they cut a few financial corners and pray. So far, the record says that those prayers are going unanswered on a regular basis.
One thing is undeniable. Streaming is becoming a mainstay for a large segment of the media audience. We want it. We want it now and we want to work smoothly. It’s no longer a new technology, so if companies expect to make big bucks, they’re going to have invest the money to make it happen.
Because none of us will pay just for the hype.
Nerd Genius
What would you get if you found some musically talented nerds and set them free in a recording studio? I’m talking the stereotypical characters here, socially awkward, a limited number of friends, tend to stay in their rooms as their skin gets paler and paler. Eventually, people start to look at them funny.
I can answer that question. You get Steely Dan. When Walter Becker and Donald Fagan first joined forces in the late ‘60s, that’s pretty much who they were. Fagan has suffered anxiety about public performance his entire adult life, both were more comfortable being in their rooms at college than out and about. They spent about eighteen months in the backup band for the pop group Jay and the Americans. Lead singer Jay Black eventually dubbed the “Manson and Starkweather of rock n’ roll”, referring to two notorious killers of the time.
This past weekend, music lost one of those nerds. Except that now we recognize them as geniuses. Walter Becker was the guitarist half of the group. Because in the end, Steely Dan is really just those two guys and a backup band. Those bands have been filled with some pretty amazing talent, like Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Rick Derringer and Jeff Porcaro. But they came and went. Only the two remained through it all.
What they created together was a fusion of pop and jazz and R&B, wrapped around sophisticated, cynical and often cryptic lyrics. The music was then polished and polished and polished in the studios until they felt it was perfect. Forty takes on a single song was not unheard of for the session players working with the duo. They found a willing partner in perfection in producer Roger Nichols. What came out of those extended sessions were some of the best-loved songs of the ‘70s.
Unfortunately, not everything would be perfect. Becker’s girlfriend died of an overdose and he was sued for seventeen million dollars. The tabloid coverage of it all sickened him. Shortly thereafter he was struck by a taxi, shattering a leg. By 1981, the stresses tore Steel Dan apart. Becker retired to Hawaii, to raise avocados and be a critic of contemporary culture. Becker would join his partner for occasional work through the ‘80s and then they revived the band in 1993. Several more albums and regular tours took place. Becker’s last performance with Steely Dan was in the spring of this year. An undisclosed illness kept him off the stage for two concerts in July.
Becker and Fagan were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. They were predictably unimpressed.
Walter Becker was 67 years old.
Fixed Game
If you have tried to buy tickets for a hot concert any time in the last decade you have probably faced enormous frustration. The reason for that is that tickets, even for venues that seat tens of thousands of people, will often sell out in a matter of minutes. Even in an age of almost instantaneous purchases, that seems unreasonable. That’s because it probably is. In fact, according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, it’s because you’re playing in a, quoting now, “fixed game”.
It’s all because of these programs known as “bots”. Using them ticket scalpers can buy hundreds of tickets virtually at once. So five minutes after you’re told that the concert is a sellout, tickets appear online at enormous mark ups. It’s a system that isn’t popular among fans, or ticket management companies like Ticketmaster, or even among the artists. They never see a dime of that markup. Current estimates make it an eight billion dollar problem for the industry.
How to un-fix the game is open to discussion. Ticketmaster is the largest seller of event tickets in the country. The company debuted the “Verified Fan” system, which asks potential ticket buyers to “register” with the company, providing a variety of personal information. With that data, the Ticketmaster system tries to verify that you are a real person and not a bot. They rolled the system out in March for Ed Sheeran’s tour and the early results looked good.
But just last week the program hit a bump. Not really Ticketmaster’s issue, but pop idol Taylor Swift’s. In addition to the usual data request, the Swift tour offered additional preference in the process if fans tweeted or did some other kind of publicity work for the artist. Ok, that’s a clever idea. The real issue is that fans could gain an even higher advantage if they spent more money on Swift merchandise. Now suddenly it didn’t look like it was about getting tickets into her fans hands. Taylor Swift was the highest paid celebrity in the world last year, with one hundred seventy million dollars in income. In the end, it just looks like a money grab. And it left a bad taste in the mouths of some of her fans.
Meanwhile, Bruce Springsteen’s highly anticipated Broadway show has been using the simpler form of the “Verified Fan” system and seen a dramatic reduction in tickets showing up in the scalper market. Which was the idea originally, of course.
Sometimes the simplest answer just might be the best. Focus on selling the tickets. The merch will take care of itself.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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