On Who

For the record (and a day late):

Nope, didn’t see that coming. The ending, that is – Davros had been telegraphed months ago. Not entirely sure I’m happy, since Tennant pretty much rocks, but there we go. I guess we’ll see what happens next week.

Also: damn, but this series needs a better script editor. My hunch is that Davies is a great producer, but I’m sorry, the show falls into the Battlestar Galactica trap of having lousily-uneven pacing and over-ambitious storylines. As a result, huge swathes of material have to be cut, and with all that goes any semblance of character continuity. The first half of this episode was insane. ‘Breakneck’ I can cope with, but this was plain broken. Yet amongst all the ‘Wait, she said what? Why?!’ moments, there was still time for not one but three ‘We know who you are’ reprise gags? Oh, come on.

I guess the hope is that the production machinery is sufficiently well-oiled that the series can more-or-less run itself (which in practice means that the production manager needs to be hard as nails). In that situation, the job Moffat is inheriting isn’t to mould and shape a franchise: all that heavy lifting has been done for him. It’s to shape a series.

The concern, then, is that Moffat has written some outstanding scripts… but how will he cope with a larger project? Jekyll was a good sign, but still, it’s a big step.

Fingers crossed. I never like the end of Who series, as the big cliffhanger/world-in-peril stuff doesn’t really fit the character or show in my book. So I guess I’ll grit my teeth through whatever happens next week, then… roll on 2010. Or something.

Boom de yada

There’s mounting evidence that Flossie and I are – whisper it – a geek couple. The latest data point: neither of us pointed the other to this xkcd strip, we assumed the other had seen it, and were both slightly spooked that … er … most of those panels we can claim as accurate. Not sure about the skateboard at the end – does the jet-powered mountain board I commissioned a few years back count?

Anyway: here’s the original Discovery ident, and I note there are plans to get xkcd fans to make their own version, collectively.

Hmm. The BIG Event isn’t that far off…

An alternative music licensing model

Oh, I’m thoroughly fed up with explaining music licensing to people. Even when they think they ‘get it,’ they still go around describing things as ‘copyright free’. Umm… no. As a rule of thumb, any time you see the phrase ‘copyright free’ you should run a mile, because whatever you’re reading has been written by someone who doesn’t understand.

Currently, you pay twice for commercial music: first, you pay a royalty to copy it into your project (‘mechanical copying’). Second, you pay when your work is published or performed. Broadcast, web publication, public performance, whatever – you inform the Performers’ Rights Society (via ‘music returns’), and they collect performance fees from you.

In the old media model, the producer pays the first set of fees (or, more likely, uses production music that’s on a blanket deal – hence ‘royalty free’ from their point of view), then the broadcaster/publisher/venue pays the second set of fees.

With web publication you still have to cover both sets of fees, one way or another. Even if you’re using Garageband, say, you’ve already bought bundled production music (included with the software), then at point of publication you’re not a PRS member, so there are no fees to collect and hence no music return is required. But the principle still holds.

The music industry has dumped huge resources into, amongst other things, legal fees and lobbying for DRM to sustain this model.

Here’s another way things could be:

Suppose we standardised the metadata fields available in media files to include a music track URL. Now, the PRS (and other national equivalents) holds a huge database of tracks – how hard would it be to expose that via standardised URLs? http://www.mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk/publisher/artist/trackID, say?

That URL could happily redirect to the accessor’s national equivalent, but the key concept is this: the page returned by that URL holds copyright data on the track, including links to places you can buy it. Amazon, iTunes, whatever Microsoft are doing this month, and so on. PRS takes an affiliate cut from referring visitors to those sites.

Under this model, the resources PRS puts into lobbying and pushing DRM and policing usage, they now put into lobbying people writing media tools (Microsoft, Apple, Avid, Ulead, Sony, and so on) to (a.) read and write the audio URL metadata fields, and (b.) allow easy access to those links from their media player software.

Example: you’re watching a YouTube video on your iPhone, think ‘this music is cool,’ click the music button YouTube have added to their player, and a couple of links later you’ve bought the album and it’s downloading to your iTunes library. I’d do that. Wouldn’t you?

Crucially, the music industry declare that this is how you’re going to do music clearance for online media. They’re not going to do returns (huge overhead, surely doesn’t scale to millions of websites even from the collecting agencies’ end?), they’re not going to do DRM. They’re just going to make it trivially easy for people to say ‘I like this track’, find out what it is, and buy it.

In some alternative universe this is what they’ve been doing from the start. Right now, I’m scratching my head trying to work out what would be so hard about making it happen. And I’d love somebody in the industry to do the sums to work out how much it might cost, net, compared to maintaining and defending the current disaster.

!Viral

Kevin Marks has a terrific post that starts from ‘If you behave like a disease, people will develop an immune system,’ and follows on through a series of biological growth metaphors to explore social application strategies. Reads much less like twaddle jargon than this paragraph does.

Well worth a read; useful stuff to fire back with next time someone starts banging on about ‘being viral.’

Scottish Ensemble videos

A few weeks ago I shot and edited a couple of short films for the Scottish Ensemble, to give a glimpse behind the scenes and to introduce their 2008-9 programme. It was a lovely job to do from my perspective: a Radio 3 producer produced, so for once I stood entirely on the other side of the great production divide, and simply put pictures together.

The finished films have finally gone up: not embedded, curiously, but there are links to iTunes and direct podcast feeds on this page. Note that the ‘high quality’ version plays just fine on my iPod touch, and should look similarly lovely on a current nano or full-size iPod; the ‘iPod quality’ version is only necessary if you have the first model of iPod video.

Interesting experiment, anyway. We’ll see what the take-up is like. There’s lots of interest in this sort of thing around the arts community, it seems, but perhaps not much clarity on what it’s all for.