Category: TV & Movies

  • Dueling Intelligences

    How realistic is the idea that flesh and blood actors will soon find themselves performing alongside long-dead movie stars? Image created by DALL-E. Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called “The Only Living Boy,” about an actor, Tom, who is the only flesh and blood performer…

  • Amazon, AI, and Ads on Prime Video

    The trillion dollar ecommerce giant is adding ads to its Prime Video streaming service because everybody else is, but the secret story is about Amazon’s growing AI capabilities.  On September 22, Amazon announced that it would follow Netflix, Max, and Disney+ and start running ads on Amazon Prime Video. Ad averse Prime subscribers can cough…

  • Batman, Business, and the Incomparable

    How one Batman cartoon from 1992 demonstrates the strategic value of looking for what makes your business impossible to compare to the competition. The most important question in business isn’t “how does your offering compare to the competition?” Instead, the question to ask is “how is your offering incomparable?” What is it about your business that…

  • What’s Next for Apple and Amazon?

    The world’s most valuable company won’t buy Disney anytime soon, but there’s a giant caveat. Plus, what else will the ecommerce giant do with Amazon One, its new biometric payment platform? Being a futurist can be glum when other writers breathlessly announce new-to-them ideas that I’ve been talking about for years while missing the broader…

  • The Hollywood Strikes, AI, Strategy, & Overfocusing

    The organization on the other side of the negotiating table from the striking writers and actors is the AMPTP, but how can one organization represent studios with such divergent interests? The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is a mysterious Hollywood trade association. Its website contains no list of member organizations: just some technical documents,…

  • Keyword: Overfocusing

    The Hollywood strikes versus what makes experiences special in the first place. This is the third piece in my keywords thread, but you don’t need to read anything else to understand this one. Bad products can yield positive experiences, but we don’t have useful tools to describe the difference because we tend to focus more on products…

  • “The Flash” doesn’t suck!

    The bad press around WBD’s new superhero action movie misses the real reason why the movie isn’t doing boffo box office. My son and I caught The Flash in IMAX on Father’s Day. It was fun! If you like popcorn movies and have any affection for the character, go see it… while you can. The most telling…

  • Keyword: Eventness

    Watching the series finale of “Star Trek: Picard” was a lonely exercise because most of the value of experiences comes from sharing them. Regret seldom punctuates my day-to-day life, but if I had Prof. Peabody’s Wayback Machine handy I would jump back a few days and then schlep up to Seattle or down to L.A.…

  • Would Anyone Under 30 watch “Picard”?

    Like “The Mandalorian” or “Loki,” the Paramount+ series “Star Trek: Picard” is unlikely ever to attract new viewers. But is that a problem? Here’s a newsflash to no one who has met me. I’m a nerd. One piece of evidence from a vast jigsaw puzzle of nerdery: Friday night, I watched the third episode of…

  • Retro Futures: “Looker” (1981), Looking Back, Looking Forward

    42 years ago, a murder mystery predicted digital twins and deep fakes: what did this howlingly bad movie get right and wrong? Writing science fiction is a what if? exercise that tells us a lot about the moment when the writer first posed the question. Looking at where those predictions went awry can help us to understand…