“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 November 19, 2017
This Week’s Podcast
(Apologies for the delay, the holiday muddled the efficiency of our usual routine here at the International Broadcast Center)
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.
Speak The Story
Back when Kid Phlipside was still a kid, there was a series of books that were absolute favorites. They were called “Choose Your Own Adventure”. The concept was simple, at various points in the story the reader is given a choice. What you choose can change how the story goes and ultimately how it ends. It made the young reader in the family a participant and, in a way, a co-creator of the adventure.
Zip forward a couple decades and get ready for a whole new version of the concept. First, the folks at the British Broadcasting Corporation have a research and development division. Maybe it’s just me, but the idea that a television network has its own R&D division is pretty cool. Then I discover that the BBC R&D folks are working to develop a new wrinkle on a long time network icon. BBC radio has made outstanding radio plays for decades. Long after American radio gave up on that kind of programming, the Beeb has continued. Now they are preparing audio plays that you interact with through your Amazon Alexa or Google Home.
This isn’t a totally new concept. There are a couple interactive audio games out there already. That includes things like “The Stanley Parable”, and “Papa Sangre”. In both cases, you can direct the action of the game based on verbal interactions.
For the BBC project, a science fiction comedy reminiscent of Douglas Adams, the team worked with many different groups of experts to try and get the most out of the technology. That included game and sound designers, technology experts plus folks from the digital storytelling and immersive theater communities. In the end, they had to invent new tools to achieve their goal. One provided a new way of telling the story and the other was to offer a way that the devices could use that story, track where the user is in the story, and decided what comes next based on the interactions.
The result is “The Inspection Chamber”, a story where you become an unknown entity being inspected so you can be classified by some large, shadowy agency. The inspectors ask you questions and you answer them. How you answer them changes the responses and therefore the story.
It’s unlike anything that the BBC has ever done before. And it’s an experiment. So it remains to be seen how the audience reacts to it. Whatever the result, it is an experiment worth doing, I think.
It’s nice to see that corporations can have a little imagination sometimes too.
Two Birds
The old school and the new. The past and the future. All stuck together in one place, the present. The solution to everyone’s problems may be found in each other. Wouldn’t that be interesting?
The problem of the moment is the news. How do we get it, how do we trust it, and how do we pay for it? Once that was a pretty simple question, not so much anymore.
As for how we get it, more and more studies show that we, the consumers, are going to social media more and more for our entry into the news. The problem is that most of what we find there is unfiltered, untested, and, all too often, untrue. And that has created the second problem, do we trust what we find?
According to a recent study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the answer is largely no. Worldwide, a full third of the folks polled said they don’t trust the news they get to be true. In the United States, we trust the mainstream media most, even though it’s with reservations. Print shows around a seventy-five percent trust score, TV and radio in the low to mid-sixties, and social media, thirty-seven percent.
Which brings us to the big question, how to pay for it? We’ve plowed this field before here, it costs money to run a journalistic endeavor. To run a good one costs a lot of money. Over the last five years, the old school folks haven’t done real well with that, while social media seems to be able to make money magically appear.
That may be the solution for everyone. If social media and traditional journalism joined forces, each bringing their strength to the table, could we all start a chorus of “What A Wonderful World”? Maybe.
A Financial Times story from last month may point to just that future. They reported that Google was looking at sharing revenues with news publishers. Google has denied that any such deal has been crafted, but that may mean they just haven’t finished the details.
Meanwhile, subscription numbers for news sources have skyrocketed since last year’s Presidential election. What is really startling are the numbers of Millenials who are represented. Once thought to be resistant to paying for services, the growth of paid streaming media services may have normalized the behavior. Plus people are growing rapidly less happy with online advertising based models.
And those three forces, coming together all at once, could offer up the solution for everyone’s problems.
Next Gen TV
I am not a big fan of determining the value of everything based on the “What’s in it for me?” equation. Sometimes there are values beyond our own personal gain that need to be taken into consideration when a decision is made.
But sometimes it is a perfectly reasonable place to start.
The FCC has announced that they will allow television broadcasters to begin using the Next Generation TV technology. That’s the actual name given to these changes “Next Generation TV”.
What is it? Well, it’s the latest techno-tweak to television. It’s going to give you something that is a hybrid of internet streaming and traditional TV. That means access to broadcast TV through your mobile device. You’ll also be able to customize your audio, get better video quality and improved reception.
All of which is a big, meh, to me. Nice, especially the mobile access to broadcast, but not overwhelming. Every time I hear someone in the industry trying to get me excited about it, they come off as trying too hard to make a little sound like a lot.
It’s the other side of the equation that worries me, however. Because like with the Internet, Next Generation TV is going to be a data mining machine. The proponents pitch this as allowing the broadcaster to customize the advertising that you see, the way they can online. My experience with that is truly less than satisfying. All it takes is one quick look at say, men’s underwear, and I’m looking at guy’s butts for two months. Don’t laugh, that’s a true story.
Even more frightening is listening to statements from folks in the industry start saying things like – “We’ll know where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing – just like you do now, just like everybody does now, the internet does, or Google, or a Facebook”. Those comments were reported by the folks a Bloomberg, from an industry conference earlier this month. I’m not 100% comfortable with how much data about me is being gathered now. The idea that television will have, again from that same conference, “perfect data all the time”, is a little bit too “1984” sounding.
Oh, and it means you will have to buy a new TV. Broadcasters will be permitted to simulcast the old digital signal alongside the new one for five years. After that, there will be no signal for your old television to receive.
So I can see the advantage to the TV manufacturers and the advertisers. But in the end, I’m not sure I see what’s in it for me.
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
Stories Are My Life 
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