inconsequence

In the British paperback market, having a gigantic spaceship on the cover of a book used to mean "it's science fiction" regardless of the substance of the story. Suffice it to say that there are no gigantic spacecraft in "The Face" and no indication anywhere in this picture that the artist read the book or had it in mind when he created the picture.

One of my ambitions is to write a science fiction novel. Or two. I have some fairly elaborate ideas sketched out, but I’m a little short of spare time right now. I also don’t think that creative endeavors such as writing are a “zero sum game”. Science fiction is in a pretty dreadful state right now, and it’s no use to me if it withers and dies before I get around to making my contribution to the genre.

Here's the latest printing of the same series (this is volume 1, the second volume is very similar). Note what looks like some kind of space carrier on the cover. Aha, it must be "science fiction". (You can guess how many "space carriers" figure in the series.)

Here’s the basic problem: for a hundred years or so science fiction writers have been pretending that “the future” will involve interstellar travel by faster-than-light travel. Sure, there are notable exceptions who write stories set in near-future dystopias (e.g. much of Philip K. Dick’s work, all of William Gibson’s or Neal Stephenson’s work, or David Brin’s Earth and The Postman), but in large part we haven’t advanced beyond E. E. Doc Smith’s “60 parsecs/hour” via “inertialess drive”. Certainly SF in popular culture, which means TV and movies, is essentially a species of fantasy with spaceships and energy bolts instead of dragons and wizards. (Not that this kind of fantasy can’t be fun!) The flipside of the problem is that most science fiction ignores or negates the advances in technology in fields other than warp engineering. Star Trek features fabulous spaceships but no voicemail.

I’ve complained elsewhere that SF does a lousy job of envisioning a future that grapples with today’s problems. Where is a science fiction setting which addresses energy conservation the way the original Star Trek addressed racism? At least BSG had something to say about the War on Terror, but as a piece of speculative SF it was simply dreadful; we can’t make anything remotely resembling the Galactica, but we have firearms way beyond the crap they were using.

It doesn’t help that the few writers who have taken a stab in this direction, e.g. Pamela Sargent’s Venus series and Kim Stanley Robinson’s horribly overrated Mars trilogy, have written ridiculously overlong and generally dull doorstops.

I’d like to see a speculative science fiction setting (on network TV or in a decent series of novels, say) that is not near-future (e.g. Star Trek timeframe or beyond) and does not go beyond our Solar system. Ideally, it wouldn’t make stupid assumptions about, say, the rate at which we can realistically terraform other planets, but let’s not expect miracles. I’d also like to see a speculative science fiction setting that involves interstellar travel using some kind of plausible technology and deals with the implications rather than wishing them away.

I have two fairly solid ideas for settings that satisfy these constraints (I think I have an actually brilliant idea for the second); what I don’t have is a good idea for a plot. Maybe I’ll just steal something from Shakespeare.

Can guess the source of the screen image?

According to this article in AllThingsD, Apple is pitching the idea of subscription-based TV via iTunes to content producers. I’m assuming the idea is “pay $30/month and see as much stuff on iTunes as you like”. I further assume that Apple’s business model will remain “we make money on hardware, you make money on content” (i.e. 30% for Apple to cover costs, 70% to … someone … for content). I’m certainly no expert, but from my random readings on the subject, Apple’s deals generally favor content-producers to a staggering degree compared to pretty much anyone else. (Amazon, purportedly, takes 70% of eBook revenues from the Kindle, which is quite a lot given the pretty much total lack of added value on their part. Similarly, Cable TV companies pay only a tiny fraction of subscriber fees to content producers.)

The main thing preventing iTunes from being the best deal for TV as things stand (aside from piracy, of course) is the lack of content. Only two-thirds of the TV shows I’d want to watch are available via iTunes, and many of those are available for free (with ads) from Hulu. The cost of buying all the TV shows I’d like to watch and/or buy each month (that aren’t available for free on Hulu or elsewhere) is significantly lower than the cost of digital cable (but not basic analog) if they were available.

$30/month is the same as the cost of 15 TV episodes on iTunes (or 10 HD episodes). A lot of people would do the arithmetic and figure — OK which episodes will I end up buying on DVD or similar? If you’re like me and end up buying about five seasons of TV per year ($150-250) and would be just as happy to have a digital copy (I, for one, would prefer to give up on DVDs which are fragile and easy to misplace) then you can figure in another $15-20/month. Who has time to watch 17-25 episodes of TV each month? TV via iTunes is already competitive with broadcast/cable/DVD in terms of price to viewers and, I suspect, return to content producers, but the question is whether everything you want to watch is available.

And the real problem is that if you want a good broadband connection in the US, you’re basically stuck with cable or DSL, both of which come bundled with TV in some way or another. So Apple has two problems — making more content available and overcoming the bundling of legacy TV content with broadband.

US TV Network Death Watch, Revisited

There’s been some talk about hulu delivering content via the iPhone lately, and I’ve been pretty much ignoring it, but my boss sent me a link to this piece on CNN, which is almost spectacular in its lack of accurate content. Just so you don’t need to read it, here are some key points of from the article.

• Hulu has deals with all the major networks except CBS (wrong, it doesn’t have a deal with ABC) OK my stupidity burns too. The whole starting point for the article is that Disney and hulu cut a deal, abc.com’s content will go on hulu and Disney owns a chunk of hulu. Oops, my bad.
• Hulu is hurting for traffic (wrong, it’s way ahead of ABC and CBS, for instance, on traffic; not ESPN though)
• Hulu would need Apple’s approval to distribute video on the iPhone (wrong, it doesn’t need Apple’s approval to deliver content via the web, only via an app)

This is exactly why we need the mainstream media to report the news. Obviously bloggers aren’t professionals who can research facts and chase up key details. Obviously a mere blogger can’t log on to hulu and attempt to watch an ABC show to see if it works, or visit Alexa.com to find out what Hulu’s traffic is like, or visit developer.apple.com to figure out whether it’s possible to deliver content to the iPhone without needing Apple’s approval. It takes a media insider with contacts and professional journalism skills.

Aside: hulu’s Alexa ranking is particularly impressive when you consider that it’s not a site designed for maximizing page counts. A typical user will go there, look up a show, and then watch that show for 50 minutes. That’s maybe three or four page views in an hour compared with sites that break up a two page article into four page views.

The Real Issues

There are two definite issues Hulu would face in delivering content to the iPhone and two probable.

First, Hulu suffers from a really embarrassing technical problem: often, when you watch one of its shows, it gets to the place where an ad would go, and — miracle of miracles — it actually has an ad to show you, but, for some utterly unbelievable reason, it doesn’t show you the ad, but instead shows you 15s or 30s of black. This is “dead air” and is a fiasco. Getting this stuff right should not only be a top priority, it should be easy to do. Speaking as someone who put together a video advertising system for Valueclick Media in about three months with the help of two other people, it isn’t rocket science, and this is where they make their money. It’s like trying to create McDonalds and forgetting to make sure the cash registers work.

Second, Hulu doesn’t have any advertisers. (Well, it has so few it’s embarrassing.) If you watch hulu much at all, you’ve probably seen a ridiculous number of PSAs (public service announcements). These are ads produced by the Ad Council to be used as filler when no paying ad is available or to fulfill a public service requirement (e.g. TV stations are required to show a certain amount of stuff for the public good, which is how you occasionally see an ad against teen drunk driving in prime time). In short, Hulu’s problem isn’t traffic (page hits) but fill (ads to put in page hits). If Hulu were a magazine it would be thin and have very few ads in it, and there would be subscription cards offering lifetime subscriptions for only the cost of three issues at the news stand.

This leads to the first probable problem. Clearly, hulu has terrible cash flow (i.e. it’s bleeding money), and spending its cash reserves to get more traffic when it actually needs more fill only makes sense if its investors take a long view. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, maybe they’re on the fence. But convincing them is going to be an issue. (It’s possible that hulu’s investors are simply insane, since they don’t seem to be too incensed about the first issue mentioned.)

And the final probable problem is that hulu almost certainly has a contractual restriction against serving video content to a range of IP addresses which the IP owners (NBC and Fox) can change at whim. It’s quite possible that serving video to cell phones (Apple’s or anyone else’s) might require renegotiating their licensing deals. And we all know how reasonable and sane the networks are.

Note that the only technical issue here is (I would hope) pretty simple and actually applies to hulu’s existing business — delivering ads (when there are ads to deliver) should be the absolute top technical priority for a company whose bottom line is entirely dependent on doing so. Hulu needs to fix that whether or not it targets cell phones. Note that the second problem (convincing investors it’s worth doing) isn’t a consequence of it being hard to do — it’s perfectly possible to be sitting in a high tech company with money sitting in a giant pile “on the table” and have a perfectly good, inexpensive or free no-risk plan to get that pile of cash, and be unable to convince anyone that the company should do it. Believe me, I’ve been there. (“We wouldn’t want to cannibalize our other [non-existent] revenue streams.”)

So will hulu do it? No clue. But there’s no technical issue, and the only third-party dependency are hulu’s network partners. But we all know how reasonable and sane they are.

Technical Aside: isn’t Hulu flash-based?

To deliver video on iPhone without requiring Apple’s approval requires using a codec supported by the iPhone. Luckily, the iPhone supports the best video codec available (H264) and so does Flash. Now, I don’t know how Hulu’s video is currently encoded, so they might well have to re-encode everything for the iPhone (et al), but doing so is technically trivial and — really — you want lower video bandwitch (and resolution) for small devices anyway. It wouldn’t hurt hulu to be able to deliver a lower-bandwidth version of its content to non-mobile devices and laptops anyway, since a lot of folks (like me) are bandwidth constrained by wireless rather than their internet connection, and mobile users always are.

Having re-encoded video in an iPhone (or whatever) friendly format, the only remaining issue is inserting ads and providing a seamless experience. Luckily this is easily done using either Quicktime’s interactivity features (i.e. building a QuickTime shell around streamed content) or fairly simple JavaScript. If this is seriously an issue for hulu (or anyone else) I can knock something up for them in a week or so (from scratch so you don’t get sued by my former employer). Seriously, I’m cheap!

Post Script: Disney Deal

While hulu’s inability to place ads where they go is pitiful, abc.com’s was worse. Not only does — or should I say did? — abc.com require you to download a special “player” to watch their content (presumably Adobe AIR, which is to say Flash in a web page pretending to be an application), but the player would drop out of full-screen mode to play ads, occasionally hang on ads, and — like hulu — often show dead air instead of ads which, combined with hanging and disabling the UI during ads, was truly annoying. So if anyone had a good reason to go the hulu route it was Disney.

Now, given Jobs is Disney’s single largest shareholder, and Disney now owns a chunk of hulu, maybe hulu will get fixed.

The King is dead. Long live the King. NBC's best new drama is best viewed on Hulu, where it is only interrupted by 15-30s public service ads, because NBC and most ad buyers are retarded.

It’s quite strange to see the TV networks self-destructing alongside the Newspaper industry. The death of the latter is widely accepted as inevitable, while many are still on the fence about the former.

In my opinion, TV is going to become — and is becoming — exactly like radio. In other words, cheaply produced disposable content of no interest ten minutes after it’s broadcast. There’s no TiVo for radio, because no-one wants to timeshift radio — except for NPR (or similar public broadcasters elsewhere), and they give away everything online as podcasts anyway. (And unlike the rest of radio, TV, or newspapers, NPR is gaining market share.)

I started work at the University of Alabama last Monday and discovered that one of the perks of the job is access to free copies of the New York Times (and USA Today, but I’m not sure that’s a perk). Reading the Times is kind of an elitist wank, and being an elitist wanker I tried to actually read a physical copy of the Times for the first time in years. (Pretty much the only time I buy newspapers is when I’m bored out of my skull — e.g. when I was stuck in hospital when my daughter was ill (don’t worry, not serious) a few months back or when I’m flying and run out of interesting stuff to read.)

Penny Arcade describes the situation in a nutshell

What immediately struck me is how little the New York Times seems to have learned about being a newspaper, let alone a media outlet. I recently saw an interesting video from TED of a fellow who has actually increased the circulation of several European newspapers by redesigning them — not in the purely graphic sense, but in the Apple sense. Design and function being considered synonymous, rather than the former being merely a thin veneer on the latter. It’s an interesting talk, but so short and lacking in detail that I’m not exactly sure whether I would be terribly impressed by the papers themselves. But, I imagine that they might have considered:

• Abandoning the idiotic broadsheet format (why is it that “good” newspapers must be incredibly inconvenient to unfold and read, unless they’re financial papers?)
• Figuring out a way to put articles on a single page (why do we have short leaders, and then articles vomited across random subsections of different pages?)
• Making the paper actually interesting or attractive to look at

This is all of course a tangent from the more important point that the New York Times needs to redefine itself as a vendor of time-sensitive written articles subsidized by advertising, and not a newspaper. (There was a nice little back of envelope calculation on Twitter a few weeks back — if the New York Times could abandon printing altogether the cost savings would allow it to give a Kindle to every subscriber.)

And all of this is beside my original point that Hulu (and other things like Hulu) is going to kill television. It may not actually become a viable business in the process, but TV is dying. Oddly enough, in its death throes it is going through a Golden Age of creativity, as network programmers thrash about desperately looking for ways of attracting audiences and — belatedly — consider that good, original writing might work.

The quality of TV programs in the United States right now is nothing short of breathtaking. Consider that in the last few years we’ve had:

• The Wire
• Battlestar Galactica
• Dollhouse
• Damages
• The Closer
• House M.D.
• Heroes (Season One)
• 30 Rock
• The Office
• Arrested Development
• You Can Call Me Earl
• Scrubs (until about season six)
• Weeds (until season three)
• Entourage
• The Sopranos
• And now Kings

I keep thinking of new shows to add to this list, all produced in the last five years. It’s ridiculous.

There are also-ran TV series made in the last few years (e.g. Life, Saving Grace, or Law & Order: Criminal Intent) that would have qualified for many people’s top ten lists if they hadn’t been facing ridiculous levels of competition. In the last five years, most comedies have — finally — ditched the laugh track, the distinction between “comedy” and “drama” has been removed (including the “drama equals one hour, comedy equals a half hour” rules), “reset to zero” has been discarded: even sitcoms have arc plot — consider that I’ve failed to mention so far such shows as Stargate SG-1, Firefly, Six Feet Under, Lost, and Desperate Housewives. Everybody Loves Raymond — a conventional half-hour laugh track comedy — ranks alongside the best such comedies of yesteryear, and is thoroughly outclassed by innovative shows like Scrubs. Even a pretty-much-ignored show like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is both more coherent and has better production values than any TV action show made five years ago.

And the best way to watch most of this stuff is online via something like hulu or via iTunes. And yet there are so few ads being sold on hulu that most of the ads I see are 15- and 30-second Ad Council back fill. The networks can find four advertisers to annoy us with hopelessly untargeted TiVo-skippable ads on broadcast, cable, and satellite — but allow us to watch a show in high-def on a computer and we get told to switch off lights to save power and speak up about dangerous teen drivers.

In the long run, TV and newspapers are dead. But there’s money to be made before then if they get a clue. In the long run the iPod is dead too, but Apple is doing just fine in the interim.

Edit: I can’t believe I misspelled the name of the show!

Here’s my take on the end of the best Science Fiction TV series in history: it hit the right emotional notes, and it was reasonably satisfying, but it was not a worthy ending to the series, and I suspect that as we all go back and watch the whole thing through we’ll find a lot of threads left dangling or essentially forgotten by the writers.

Now, as usual, I’m more interested in what went wrong with the show than what went right. It was very well acted and generally well written, the special effects were unbelievably good, and it took on ambitious themes and generally handled them well. Having gotten all that out of the way, there’s quite a bit to criticize.

Scale

One of the details BSG kept returning to was just how many survivors remained. It starts (if I recall correctly) slightly under 50,000 and eventually drops to around 30,000. This is, in essence, the size of a small town. It seems slightly ridiculous that the writers seem to forget just how small a community they’re dealing with. The political and legal wrangles are treated as though they were taking place in a huge nation, not a small community where pretty much everyone knows everyone. While I can believe that the people in charge might have grandiose notions about themselves (they are, after all, the last remnants of their civilization) it seems like the writers might well have tried to bring them back to Earth from time-to-time. Just what proportion of the survivors constitute the press corps? Rather a lot, it seems.

Technology

The basic assumption in BSG is that humans have pulled back on their use of computers because they went too far and ended up getting Skynet … er, I mean the Cylons … as an emergent behavior of their computer system. OK, I’ll accept that, but you do not go back to analog phones and switchboards. The whole “retro-future” technology of BSG is cute from a production design viewpoint, but it makes no sense from any other perspective. We know that our current level of computer technology has not given rise to Skynet or the Cylons, and presumably the folks living on Caprica can remember that their electronic microwave ovens and pocket calculators never gave them grief. In any event, it’s quite impossible to expect human pilots with no advanced avionics to be able to defeat cyborgs flying computerized spacecraft. But they do. In the end, it turns out that Battlestar Galactica was sufficiently networked that they could just plug a Cylon hybrid in anyway. How odd.

Warning, Spoilers Ahead!

It was God What Done It

Perhaps the worst aspect of BSG was well-and-truly foreshadowed from day one, which is the centrality of religion and prophecy to the story. The final resolution is literally a Deus Ex Machina. We are to accept that the figmentary Six and Balthar are angels of some kind and that Starbuck is Jesus, and that the basic resolution is summed up by “All this has happened before and will happen again” (which was the great revelation at the end of an earlier season). It’s particularly annoying that a show with such a sophisticated take on — say — the nature of terrorism, should come down so squarely and definitely in the “there is one god” camp.

We Will All Go Together When We Go

The worst aspect of the Finale (as opposed to the series itself) is that we’re required to accept that the entire fleet agrees to throw away their technology and become hunter gatherers. I could accept some of the forty-odd-thousand survivors doing this, but every single one? These are people who were fractious in life-and-death situations, and every single one of them is going to give up advanced medicine and hot showers so they can start fresh? I don’t think so. (Having a character say something like “wow, I wasn’t expecting everyone to agree” would be OK in a comedy like Buffy, but it’s just stupid in this case.)

Hurry Up And Wait

The pacing and structure of the Finale are odd too. The rescue is resolved rather quickly, and most of the two hours is spent on scenes which could have been much shorter or simply omitted. It’s nice to have some time to wind down from the very exciting climax, and accept that the journey is over, but it’s not long before we, or I at least, are screaming for them to get on with it. How many scenes of Adama with Roslynn heading off to die (or whatever) do we need to see? (And, the wasting of time in the Finale is particularly galling when you consider just what a waste of time the second last episode was.)

I Knew Honda Was Up To No Good

The closing sequence, where Six (the devil?) and Balthar (the angel?) are speculating as to whether this latest incarnation of human civilization will self-destruct the same way the others all did, is somewhat undercut by the final shot of primitive robots in action in some kind of ad or documentary on a TV set in a store window. Battlestar Galactica (the remake) managed to touch on many complex issues, so returning to a not-so-subtle reminder of the perils of [robot] technology seems almost imbecilic. Not our biggest problem, sorry.

Unanswered Questions

So what the heck were the Cylons doing? Apparently, we’re going to have a spin-off movie or mini-series called The Plan explaining things from a Cylon perspective. I’d be fascinated to find out exactly how they can rationalize Cylon behavior.

And, when they said “All of this has happened before and will happen again” did it include the humans ditching all their technology and becoming hunter-gatherers? Because it sure doesn’t seem like the last two iterations did anything of the sort. And if the answer is no, then the final conversation between figmentary Six and figmentary Balthar makes no sense. (Really, they should have said “it turns out that even after giving up everything, they still ended up recreating Kobol” or something. And instead of ending with footage of ridiculous humanoid robots they had chosen footage of robot planes and vehicles being used in Iraq and Afghanistan…)

And exactly how was Starbuck the harbinger of doom?

Oh, and twelve four digit numbers doesn’t give you a very precise location within our galaxy. That’s plus or minus five light years in two dimensions. So, did the music point to Earth, Alpha Centauri, or Barnard’s Star? (There are quite a few more options, actually.)

Addendum

Another blogger points out that Earth’s fauna and climate were very different 150,000 years ago (I’m kicking myself for not noticing this, but with so many self-contained clangers it’s almost nitpicking to actually consider “facts”). Even if we accept that by 150,000 years ago they mean “roughly 150,000 years ago” and that therefore they picked a time which was by amazing coincidence relatively similar in climate to our own, this doesn’t explain away all the megafauna (mammoths, 25′ tall sloths, sabertooth tigers, wolves the size of horses, etc.) that made it through to the late stone age.