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Battlestar Galactica Season 4 in Australia (Rather Late)
So, Australia is finally getting Battlestar Galactica season four on television: TV Tonight reports that the season will kick off with the ‘Razor’ double ep-cum-telemovie on September 4th. Given my interest in the tyranny of digital distance, I find it noteworthy that Razor will arrive eight and a half months after it was screened in the US (and will, in fact, be released on DVD in Australia just over a fortnight before it’s televised down under)! Presuming that the entire season is played thereafter, the rest of BSG season four will be five months behind the US.
Ten will be playing BSG exclusively on their High Definition channel (great for those who get it, no doubt infuriating for those who don’t) but, really, the audience they’ll pull will be infinitesimal compared to the eyes they’d get if BSG was concurrent with the US schedule. Meanwhile, a few people might just have downloaded BSG via BitTorrent given the series is amongst the most downloaded TV shows of this year (and last).
Links for August 11th 2008
Interesting links for August 10th 2008 through August 11th 2008:
- having “exclusive rights” in a region is a remnant of the twentieth century’s mass media [jill/txt] – “The tyranny of digital distance is most often experienced by people outside of the United States. … Another aspect of these cultural blockades where being outside of the US has been an advantage is baseball. In the US, if you’ve moved away from where the team you support is based you often won’t be able to watch their games because the local television stations won’t broadcast them. So MLB.tv lets you subscribe to watch all baseball games – except local ones, because the local television stations have exclusive rights to them. If you live outside of the US, you have no local games – so you can watch every baseball game live, no holds barred.”
- Wizard People, Dear Reader by Brad Neely (NOT Harry Potter) [Illegal Art] – Brad Neely’s hilarious “unauthorized re-envisioning of Harry Potter and the Philosophers/Sorcerer’s Stone”, released in 2004. It’s a long audio parody to be played at the same time as the DVD of the first Harry Potter film. Like a DVD commentary for evil! [YouTube Version] [Script] [Wikipedia Entry]
- 1.8 million hits in four days for grocery pricing website. [WA Today] – “The new GROCERYchoice website received 1.8 million hits in its first four days, showing consumers are interested in the information it provides, federal Assistant Treasurer Chris Bowen says. GROCERYchoice was launched last week by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to provide consumers with more information about grocery prices.”
- How to Get Your Indie Film on iTunes (…It’s Not Easy) [CinemaTech] – Scott Kirsner’s really useful guide to distributing independent films via iTunes and (more feasibly) via their main competitors like Amazon Unbox. For the upcoming filmmakers of tomorrow, this is essential information! (Especially if you’re already planning your own Dr Horrible!)
- Amazon Adds Universal Wish List [Micro Persuasion] – Amazon.com’s Wish List feature has been around a long time – over 10 years in fact. However, recently the e-commerce site expanded it with a new feature called The Universal Wish List. Using a simple bookmarklet … you can now add any item to your list from anywhere on the web.” (I use Amazon’s wish lists a lot, both for purchases and to fill out bibliographies of new books, so this looks like a really useful little addition to me!)
Links for August 10th 2008
Interesting links for August 9th 2008 through August 10th 2008:
- Barack Roll [YouTube] – Barack Obama gets … or possibly embodies being … rickrolled.
- Tape Delay by NBC Faces End Run by Online Fans [NYTimes.com] – “NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites. In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream. As the first Summer Games of the broadband age commenced in China, old network habits have never seemed so archaic — or so irrelevant.”
- Twitter Down for Hitler [Blip TV] – DownFall Hitler parody: “Upon hearing tragic news, Hitler decides to tweet his sadness only to learn it’s down. ” LOL
- So what if you give most of it away?: The Bikini Concept. [The Road To Attversumption] – “I found out the age-old concept of the bikini to apply. That by giving away 90% of the concept, and keeping 10%, the attraction factor was just as strong, if not twice as strong (there are reasons for me saying ‘twice as strong). And yes, what the bikini didn’t reveal, was the part the audience most wanted (naturally), and was the part they were willing to pay for.”
- Hamlet Retold Via Facebook (PNG Image, 1254×1608 pixels) – “Hamlet became a fan of daggers.” Clever little retelling of Hamlet using Facebook stories.
What Dr Horrible Can Teach TV About Participatory Culture
Yesterday at the Social Networks stream of the conference attached to GO3 at the Perth Convention Centre I gave a fairly rough version of a new paper called “What Dr Horrible Can Teach TV About Participatory Culture.” As readers of this blog will be well aware, one of my ongoing interests is the way that traditional media forms, especially television, engage with participatory culture and their immediate fan networks. In my past writing on the Tyranny of Digital Distance I’ve looked at the way shows like Battlestar Galactica have harnessed a global fan network only to have that network turn sour as national media distributors insist on broadcasting shows at different times (implicitly encouraging fans to participate in peer-to-peer downloading of TV). While Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible had a few similar teething issues, it looks like a very promising model for web-based media that can actually be a fan favourite and make a decent profit in the process. My thinking on this very much in process (as, indeed, is the ongoing story of Dr Horrible’s success), but my first stab at drawing a few ideas together was in this paper. I didn’t get a chance to record my talk, but I’ve uploaded the presentation onto Slideshare if you’re interested. There’s a fair bit not on the slides, but they should give you at least an outline of the argument:
Any questions, feedback or criticism would be most welcome!
Links for July 30th 2008
Interesting links for July 28th 2008 through July 30th 2008:
- Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog [Hulu] – Joss Whedon’s 3 Dr Horrible webisodes – availble for one week only – are now back – for 4 months – on Hulu. Only, of course, if you live in the US. Or know how to circumvent Hulu’s region locking.
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Trailer [Moviefone] – The new trailer for the Harry Potter 6 film looks amazing. The embedded version seems geo-locked to the US, but the HD versions should load anywhere (or, at least, they loaded in Australia). Evil Young Lord V looks very creepy!
- Conroy welcomes ISP filtering [Australian IT] – “The federal Government will embark on the next step of its internet filtering strategy after initial trials proved successful, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said. … today released the findings of a recent … ISP-level internet filtering trial…
- Scrabulous pulled from Facebook in US and Canada [ABC News] – “The creators of online Scrabble knock-off Scrabulous say they have pulled their application from US and Canadian Facebook pages due to a lawsuit filed by game-making giant Hasbro.”
- Google enrolled for schools email deal [The Age] – “Google has snatched what is believed to be its biggest single client in the world – the NSW Department of Education – away from its rival Microsoft to claim up to 1.3 million new users of its free email product.”
- Joss Whedon’s online musical comedy Sing-Along Social Media Blitz [Chief Marketer] – “WWJWD. What Would Joss Whedon Do. Marketers looking to capitalize on the power of social media could do worse than keep that mantra in mind next time they want to launch a campaign.” (A look at the success of Dr Horrible.)
- China becomes biggest net nation [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “China now has the world’s largest net-using population, say official figures. More than 253 million people in the country are now online, according to statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).”
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Absurdly Implausible Excess [NYTimes.com] – Has the phrase “jump the shark” jumped the shark? Or, more to the point, should we be saying that it has “nuked the fridge”? …which emerged from a 1980s dorm-room discussion of a particularly ridiculous episode of the TV show “Happy Days”…
Dr Horrible’s International Debut Debacle
30 … 20 … 10 … nothing. That’s the experience fans outside of the US had earlier today when Joss Whedon’s web-based musical webisode experiment Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog went live using Hulu, a video-streaming service geo-locked to stream to US IP addresses only:
Now, it’s not unusual for content to be limited to US internet addresses, especially television, but Dr Horrible is a different kettle of fish. Joss Whedon has done an amazing job of courting the fans and getting them on side to view promote (and eventually buy) Dr Horrible’s adventures, so it came as something of a shock to most international fans (with whom Whedon usually has a pretty good rapport) when discovered they weren’t able to get the free stream of Dr Horrible’s first act (or even buy the episodes on iTunes).
On Whedonesque – the main Joss Whedon appreciation blog (to which Joss posts from time to time) – the thread initially celebrating Dr Horrible’s release was inundated with international fans lamenting the fact that they couldn’t view the new web-based show. Dr Horrible’s Facebook page and MySpace page similarly received a vitriolic helping of international fan dismay!
Now, if Dr Horrible was an NBC or Viacom property, that would be the end of the story. However, given Joss Whedon’s track record, it seems reasonable that the geo-blocking was unintentional or accidental. And now we can see that’s exactly right … on various forums Whedon’s team have posted that they’re trying to get a globally-viewable version up. It seems that this may very well be the case that the tools for online distribution simply aren’t quite up to the demands being put on them by content creators. Ironically, this experience might actually lead to more fans working out how to circumvent Hulu’s geo-restrictions as Whedon has sided with the fans once more and in the short term the official Dr Horrible Twitter feed has linked to instructions on how to circumvent Hulu! Indeed, for long-time Whedon fans this might be reminiscent of a moment in 1999 when Whedon encouraged Canadian viewers to “bootleg that puppy” after Fox postponed the season three finale due in the wake of the Columbine shootings.
For Dr Horrible, it has been a rough start, but Whedon’s track record and the excitement from US fans who’ve already enjoyed Dr Horrible leave the rest of us waiting eagerly, knowing that Whedon and his team are doing all they can and will surely learn a lot from this experience. (And thus, I should add, we can reasonably expect that acts two and three of Dr Horrible will, indeed, get a simultaneous global release!).
Update: Drs Horrible (aka Mutant Enemy) have risen to the challenge, and the first act of Dr Horrible is now viewable by everyone! Go watch Act One (’tis funny!).
Update 2: It seems that Dr Horrible’s first day had one more obstacle: popularity. Dr Horrible’s servers were completely overloaded and the site diappeared for a while, but now they’ve moved onto “monster servers” so all should be good … or is that evil?
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