10.17.2005

par for the laziness course

Not much accomplished this weekend creatively, though I took a really fun bike ride through Long Island City. Visited the graffiti gallery at the 5 Pointz Building, which riders of the 7 train will recognize.
Managed to .mp3-ize and distribute the salvageable manifesto readings from last weekend in Portland, and hopefully I'll get the musical portion of that proceeding handled Monday or Tuesday night.
Speaking of .mp3s, I have succumbed to the sexiness and ordered a black 60GB iPod. "Infidel Sorcerers of the Air" will be laser-engraved on the back; it'll be an artifact after I'm famous as hell. FAMOUS AS HELL. Now don't worry... in an attempt to be less than ridiculously decadent I AM selling my Archos AV420 on eBay.
Also speaking of .mp3s I wasted a tremendous amount of time this weekend adding album art to my .mp3 collection in anticipation of the iPod. By my reckoning this is in the top five of Most Completely Pointless Timewasters Ever, but it'll be COOL or something to have album art pop up on all of these tracks. And hey; maybe I'm preserving tiny album art in ephemeral digital form for the Internet Archaeologists.
Uploaded two new images to flickr, showing here> and here .
Had an interesting discussion with jm about where in the country or in other countries one would like to "settle down". Wow... guess I'm getting to that age.

10.13.2005

I coulda been a contender

The importance of the iPod Video is not the sexy media appliance itself (with its tiny screen and probably crap video playback battery life), but rather the sale of television shows via the iTunes Music Store. This is the first major step toward demolishing the advertising-based television model and that is a wonderful thing.

For the past couple of months I had been semi-seriously concocting a business plan around the sale of downloadable television in a multiplicity of formats (Quicktime, DivX, MPEG, etc.) and resolutions (320x240 up to full broadcast HD). The keys to this plan were an entire line of sexy networkable media appliances which ranged from handheld up to huge home theater devices and, of course, a web-based Video Store for the content. The time, I felt, was right. I figured I had about a year before anyone major got into the game with the specific caveat that, and I quote from my lengthy notes, "Whenever the iPod Video appliance comes out the game is over."

Obviously I was wrong about the one year lead time. However, what I was eerily right about was the price point. My conundrum was how to approach the networks and convince them that money more or less equivalent to ad revenue could be made via direct sales, and also how to keep the price down at what I felt consumers would pay for customer service and quality assurance. Here, quoted again from my notes, are my results:

How much should the content cost?
For serial programs, what are now “tv shows”, I need to see how much networks earn per viewer per show by comparing Nielsen ratings with how costly ad time is during highly rated shows.
The number one non-sports show right now is CSI with 12,854,000 viewers. It is rated #3. I need to divide the amount of ad dollars collected by the number of viewers to get an idea of how much money networks make per viewer per episode.
Hollywood Reporter, in this article, claims that :30 of airtime during CSI goes for $465,000. If one assumes 17 minutes of commercial time during a one-hour program that is a total of $15,810,000 in ad dollars per episode. Mathematics tells us that CBS receives approximately $1.23 per viewer per epsiode.
If the company charged $1.50 per episode… maybe $2. $5 for a feature film.


I am obviously a brilliant media pundit. However, doomed now never to be rich.

crossposted to my livejournal

10.12.2005

regroup

Have traveled to and returned from Portland, OR. Excellent city, wonderful trip. Lack of quality photos... I'm getting tired of the limitations of my current digital camera. It may be time to trade up, though I don't know if I can swing buying a digital SLR. At the very least a much better point-and-shoot may be worth it.
From that excursion I have some audio to edit. Recordings or friends delivering manifestos, and a band of musicians playing together in a basement.
Handed out two copies of my reel.
Hope to finalize a Black & Brown sticker design this week.
Added two songs by The Decemberists to my reepertoiree.
Work is about to get very busy.

10.04.2005

just a list of things for my brain

Here are some project ideas or things I should be working on.

Q101 - A documentary about the people who ride the bus up to Riker's Island and back to visit incarcerated friends and family members.

Untitled Oil Crash Feature - A couple of friends trying to make their way from Brooklyn to New Jersey (or similar) in the years following the Oil Crash.

Writing songs as a score to the movie Metropolis.

Finish transcribing Eurotrip journal, lay it out with pictures from the trip and publish it via Lulu (probably).

10.03.2005

His Holiness, Pimp Dis

Dis played dressup and I had some compositing fun.

Showing here.



Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

falltime

October! The weather is beautiful.
The turning of the month reset my flickr upload limit, so I was able to upload the kids-playing-in-a-fountain series. You can see them at my flickr.com page. Most of them are crops, which I hardly ever do, but I felt I had to stay somewhat back from the subject so as not to make anyone's parents wary. Anyway, it's okay stuff.
Band practice this week was recorded live to Garageband for the first time, so I now have a jam to mess with. I think our covers of Voodoo Lady and Immigrant Song were actually not half bad, but I need to listen to the recordings. Jeff is being very brave and taking on bass duties with his keys. He's getting better at it.
Discovered that Sticker Guy WILL do four-color printing on vinyl stickers and that their bulk prices really aren't bad at all. As such I started working on the first ISOTA Black & Brown sticker design. It's basically just going to be the full stamp image with the QXZ sigil and ISOTA worked into it. I can't get them printed in time for my upcoming trip to Portland, unfortunately.
Here comes the workweek.