Category: TV & Movies

  • Experience Stacks, Competitive Advantage, and Netflix’s “Wednesday”

    The new Netflix series about the daughter from The Addams Family going to a Hogwarts-style high school doesn’t ignore the earlier versions of the story: it embraces them, which is part of why it succeeds. One difference between artificial intelligence and the human kind (at least for now) is that AI is amazing at pattern…

  • Frontiers of Scale

    As media continues to fragment in the face of changes in legislation and technology, where will new big audiences come from? A few issues back, I explored how changes in legislation and technology are signaling the end of cheap digital scale for media. (Don’t worry: you don’t have to read that issue to understand this one.) If…

  • Mediapocalypse 2025

    Peak TV is here, but it’s not going to last because there isn’t enough audience to go around. The collapse and consolidation is just a bit more than two years away. Here are my predictions. What happens after you reach a peak, any peak? You descend from the height… whether it’s summiting Everest, climbing that hill near…

  • Nostalgia and Pseudo-Nostalgia in TV

    “Happy Days” portrayed the 1950s when the 1950s weren’t even 20 years in the past. Last week saw the premieres of two new series, “Quantum Leap” and “Reboot,” that explore similar territory. For kids in the 1970s the biggest star in the world was Henry Winkler, who played The Fonz on Happy Days. The show was…

  • Why Walmart Should Buy Paramount

    Note: I wrote and first published the following column on Sunday, August 14, before the rumors came true the following day: Walmart had signed an agreement with Paramount. You can find a review of that news here. However, nothing about the news changes my argument that Walmart is missing a bigger opportunity, which is the topic of what follows. …

  • Experience Stacks, Movie Stars, and the Problem with Facebook

    How we experience the work of movies stars is different than how we experience the work of actors, and that difference also helps to understand what we lose when we spend a lot of time on Facebook. The job of an actor and the job of a movie star are similar—they overlap—but they are not…

  • Experience Stacks: Top Gun, Star Trek, Spider-Man

    What are Experience Stacks? And why is it important for businesses and customers for a wide range of industries to understand them? Many companies refer to their selection and arrangement of software and hardware as a “Tech Stack” that focuses on the creation, management, production, and tracking of business activities.  On the reception side, we…

  • What Fox News Should Have Said

    A new campaign by Check My Ads to get advertisers to stop supporting the conservative news network prompted an entirely inadequate response.  On Thursday, the folks at Check My Ads received widespread coverage about their new campaign to stop advertisers from supporting Fox News. The three Check My Ads founders—Claire Atkin, Nandini Jammi, and Mikel…

  • A Simple Test for What Counts as “The Metaverse”

    Lots of walled gardens and videogame platforms are now touting themselves as part of the metaverse, but there’s an easy way to tell if it’s true. Plus, revising Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Two shorter (although slightly connected) main stories this week… 1. Revisiting Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” If you subscribe to…

  • 2007 Post about a new “Artistic Middle Class” plus Web3 in 2022 and beyond…

    My first blog was called “Mediavorous,” and it’s long gone and therefore hard to find but for the noble work of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Lately, with the rise of Web3, I’ve been thinking about an old post from 2007, “Yes, box office is up this summer, but don’t get comfy“, which I’ve re-published…