John Lagomarsino
Video · Photography · Music · Motion Graphics

Last week, Netflix announced that it would be spinning off its physical disc rental business and rebranding it as “Qwikster.” A lot of pundits seem to think this is totally crazy, and anti-consumer. Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, has said multiple times that this move is forward-thinking, and will position the company better in the future. My suspicion (and I’m surprised I haven’t heard this elsewhere) is that this will indeed purposely kill their disc rental business, but it will also bolster their streaming offering pretty drastically.

Netflix has become a behemoth of a service. Blockbuster, their closest competitor in the disc rental space, was driven to Chapter 11, and Redbox isn’t really competing much at all with their kiosks. Other than those two, can anyone even name another disc rental chain? Netflix completely dominates physical rentals, which means that the majority of rental licenses paid to film studios comes from Netflix. In a nutshell, the rental business belongs to Netflix.

I suspect many of Quikster’s subscribers will wind up there just because they were Netflix subscribers. If that service fails, I doubt many will go out and seek a new disc rental option. They’ll learn to embrace streaming instead. This leaves the lion’s share of rental customers leaving physical discs behind altogether.

Then, what do content owners do? If the whole disc rental market tanks completely, there are vast swaths of content that no one can rent. Studios will have to make more of their catalogues available through steaming in order to make any money on those properties at all.

I think Qwikster is a calculated move not just to kill Netflix’s disc rental business, but to kill disc rentals entirely. Reed Hastings is making the bet that without the old-time distraction of physical disc rentals, the studios will be forced to focus on new streaming licenses, and Netflix will be ready and waiting to negotiate them. And that’s great news for consumers.

Was local news ever good? Because recently it’s gone from bad to downright hilarious.  Between ridiculous human interest stories, to complete and utter misinformation, it’s no wonder cable news stations are doing so well right now.

Last week Improv Anywhere set up an awesome April Fools prank in which they randomly “invaded” a funeral.  Turns out it was a hoax set up for April Fool’s and no actual funeral was involved.  However, some local news station picked it up, and reported it as fact.

Apparently, in order to make it onto the nightly news, a story doesn’t have to go through any fact-checking, or verification at all.  Really, all it needs is a YouTube video, and it’s fit for broadcast.

And if I need to watch Al Roker struggling with a newfangled piece of technology one more time, I’m going to throw up.  Network news caters to the lowest-common-denominator, and the result is a newsroom staffed with people in that very bracket.

No one has been as much a staple in my network news upbringing than Sue Simmons.  This woman must be a complete nutjob off the air, because if you Google her name, you’ll find a few choice YouTube videos.  I really can’t say anything about them that the clips themselves don’t say.  Click on to watch.

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This article from Slate, about an NYC reality TV school is downright disturbing.  The point seems to be that this course will give you a leg-up on being cast in a reality series.  Now, I’m not going to dwell on the fact that of course the people who will pay to learn how to depict reality are exactly the ones that belong on these shows.  No, instead, I think it’s more important that we step back and look at what this means.

This Robert Galinsky fellow has quite a racket going, and I wonder if he even knows it.  See, the whole point of this class seems to be to teach students how to be an amplified and self-assured version of themselves.  I guess this is somewhat commendable – after all, being true to oneself does seem important – but Galinsky is making money off it. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s misguided information; he’s telling his students that they need to affect this behavior.  It’s a fine line, but kind of an unfair one.

What I think would be really fun is a reality show about this place.  Think about it: it’s a treat for everyone there, since they’re trying to be on TV.  It’s great for Galinksy because it gives his class more exposure.  It’s good for the networks since not only does it promise to be a hit, but it’s extra advertising for reality TV in general.  Plus, we all get to watch a bunch of crazies trying to affect their ways to stardom via trashy TV.  Who’s with me on this?

So, I’m kind of bummed. Brian and I were psyched to audition for Mark Burnett’s new reality show ‘Jingles.’ The basic premise is that teams compete to write commercial jingles for ad companies. The idea behind the show is to revive the art of the jingle.

You can imagine why Brian and I were so excited about this. Well, it turns out that we’d have to be available for six weeks this summer/fall. It would be kind of hard to justify taking a semester off to be on a reality show about commercial jingles. Maybe next season, after it becomes the most successful television venture in the history of the medium.

Also, all you web designers out there: can anyone figure out what’s wrong with my navbar? The lightup buttons display too high on Macs. I have neither a Mac nor the knowhow to fix this issue, so any help would be much appreciated.