Two weeks ago, I unhooked the magical cable that connects my television to the world’s wide sea of entertainment and ephemera. The divorce was my own idea, prompted by a wandering eye: I still wanted to watch a lot of television, just not through cable anymore. After decades of cruising by on their duopolistic haunches, cable and its cousin, satellite TV, which together rank lower in customer satisfaction than the airlines, the post office, even health insurance firms, face the vanguard of consumer choice. Television (the content, not the box) can now come to us in so many ways — delivered to the door in stacks of postage-paid DVDs, ordered up through Apple for the cost of an appetizer at an Indian takeout, and most recently, available for free on online services like Joost. In my separation from cable, I tried several of these alternatives, including Apple TV and Joost. And while they held some promise — especially Joost — they’re not quite ready, alas, to replace the pipe coming through the wall.
The pain caused by cable TV is a recurring condition; it flares up once a month, felt in pocketbooks across the land. The industry’s standard model forces customers to pay more than they want to pay in return for a whole lot of what they don’t need. For $18 a month, my own service provider in San Francisco, Comcast — more unloved by its customers than nearly any other company in America — has a package called “Basic Cable,” so named because it offers basically nothing. Other than local channels (which are free anyway, over the air), Basic gets me two flavors of C-Span, the Discovery Channel, and various shopping networks, including Jewelry TV. A fellow of simple tastes, in truth, I only really need a couple of additions to basic — I’d like Comedy Central and perhaps one of the three 24-hour-news networks. But to get even a single channel more, I’d have to pay almost three times as much. Comcast’s next-cheapest programming feed (“Standard Cable”) is $52 a month, for which I get dozens of channels I’d never watch — Spike TV, Disney, Jade TV, many others — but of course no premium channels like HBO, and none of it broadcast in high-definition format.
But what am I going to do? Satellite, which costs around $40 for a good set of channels, is an option for some. But for me and millions of other apartment-dwellers, cable is my only fix, and Comcast is essentially making an offer it knows I can’t refuse. And so I’ve been paying. And so have the rest of us. Cable rates rise faster than the rate of inflation; cable companies swim in higher and higher revenues; customers routinely report dissatisfaction; but still we go on subscribing because we have no choice. At least until recently.
I’ve been getting TV through my computer for several years, much of it, as I’ve written before, illegally, using file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent. In the past couple years, though, programmers have begun to offer their shows legally on the Web, and since late 2005, Apple has sold more than 50 million shows through iTunes (they go for $2 per episode, or $35 for a show’s entire season). In theory, Apple’s model is a fantastic idea because for many of us, paying for specific programs works out cheaper than paying for cable. The digital media consultant Jeremy Toeman points out that if you regularly watch 10 TV shows, you can get them all through iTunes for $350 a year, or $29 a month. If you watch 15 shows, your monthly iTunes bill would be $44. The only problem with this setup has been the screen — there’s been no easy way to get your iTunes programs from computer monitor to the TV. And this is what Apple aimed to solve when, in March, it released the Apple TV.
But Apple TV — a cute, shiny $300 box that wirelessly joins your television in the living room to the shows you’ve bought on your computer — is half-baked. I agree with the reviewers who’ve praised its easy setup and elegant user interface, and it sure does look pretty next to my TV. The trouble is, Apple TV doesn’t do much other than look pretty. You can’t sit down to Apple TV and choose to watch a show from the iTunes Store because Apple TV — in the sort of major usability blunder one never expects from Apple — does not connect to the iTunes Store. Instead, it can only play the shows you’ve already purchased through your computer. Worse, shows are downloaded, not streamed, which means you’ve got to wait 20 or 30 minutes, at least, to start watching something. Instant gratification is the soul of television, and by forcing you to leave the screen, and then to twiddle your thumbs, Apple TV ruins the fun. (And if you’re OK with this halting experience, buy a $250 video iPod instead; it will connect to your TV and play music, too.)
Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, recently called TV a “hobby” for Apple alongside its three main businesses (computers, music and phones). I hope Jobs isn’t picturing one of those weekend hobbies like stamp collecting or stone skipping, and instead is aiming for something along the lines of jousting or Civil War reenactment, something Apple really throws itself into and make its own. Apple TV could be a killer device, and perhaps in their downtime from creating the God machine, Jobs and his team might be working to make it one. Right now, though, Apple TV is of little use to those looking to ditch cable.
Like Apple, Joost, a new service created by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the rock-star European programmers behind Kazaa and Skype, also carries television shows over the Internet, but Joost rests on a very different economic model. Joost is free to viewers, but it carries ads. The software, which is currently in invitation-only “beta” mode (but invitations are easy to come by), essentially turns your Mac or your PC into a television. I’ve been testing it on both platforms since April, and I found the experience sometimes thrilling and sometimes frustrating; mainly, Joost has made me drool over what it may one day become.
Joost has a clean, stylish interface, with large on-screen graphics and an intuitive navigation system that allows you to quickly choose what you want to watch. Like a standard television, Joost displays a list of channels, and in each channel there’s a list of available shows. In my tests, most of the time, clicking on a show produced near-instant results — the program would start to play within a few seconds. Joost runs on a peer-to-peer network, the same brilliant concept behind Napster, Kazaa and Skype, which means it transfers shows to your machine from several other viewers. The design, theoretically, is a very efficient way of distributing large video files through the Internet, and when it did work, it was amazing. The video filled up my computer’s 20-inch screen and was as clear as a cable broadcast on my television. Like TV, the shows were sometimes interrupted by ads, though ad breaks lasted for no more than 30 seconds. But there were frequent network errors; sometimes when I tried to watch a show, I’d get a message saying it wasn’t available, and other times the show would play poorly, stopping and starting along the way, or the video would look like it had been captured on VHS. The system isn’t nearly as reliable as it would need to be to replace your cable subscription — at least, it isn’t yet.
The main problem with Joost, though, is not how the videos play, but what there is to watch. The company has signed deals with Time Warner and Viacom, and it’s in talks with several other studios to get more content, but at the moment, Joost’s lineup resembles the list of channels I’d leave out if I could choose what to get on cable (e.g., Spike TV and the Dude Channel). Even the channels I would watch — Comedy Central, MTV — don’t include the shows I’d watch on them. “The Daily Show” isn’t on Joost; you can, however, watch a lot of old episodes of “Punk’d.”
And then, finally, you’ve got the screen problem again: How do you get Joost from your computer to your TV? The tech-savvy first-adopters who now use Joost are content with just hooking up their computers to their TVs; if you use a small, silent machine like a Mac Mini, it works pretty well, too. The first thing you think about while watching Joost, though, is how perfectly it would meld with Apple TV. Apple TV, right now, is a pretty box that sits next to your TV without much purpose, while Joost is smart application that sits on your computer yearning to be near the TV. Hackers of Apple TV have reportedly already put Joost on the Apple device, allowing Internet TV to stream straight to the telly. If this was ever made easy, it could really be a cable killer. And perhaps it’ll happen. “We would love to put Joost on the Apple TV platform,” Mike Volpi, who’s just signed on to be Joost’s new CEO, told the tech news site GigaOm on Monday. “We know we can make it run on any operating system.”
Until then, I’ll be reluctantly sticking with cable.
It isn’t necessary to explain how, in the pilot episode of “MacGyver,” our mulleted, Midwestern hero gets himself trapped inside a top-secret research bunker overflowing with sulfuric acid. Suffice it to say, he needs to find a way out, and probably soon (because government agents are fixing to fire a missile at the bunker to prevent the acid from spilling into a nearby aquifer). Plus, he has to save the people he has found inside (among them a gun-wielding climate scientist who wants destroy the bunker in an effort to set back research into an ozone-layer-ruining weapon of mass destruction). Fortunately, MacGyver has a few chocolate bars, a scrap of sodium metal, a cold capsule, a pair of binoculars and cigarettes.
He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.
But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.
This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.
Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.
But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.
Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.
I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.
There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.
But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.
* * * * *
Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.
Today much of the tech world is sad that the iPhone 3G’s launch is going so miserably. But I’m sad that it’s my last day at Salon.
I’ve accepted a job at Slate, where, starting next week, I’ll be writing a twice-weekly technology column. Machinist will go on a break for a week, after which a guest blogger will bring you the latest tech dish.
I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.
I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.
– Farhad Manjoo
As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I’m getting ready to depart this space; I’ll have a fuller explanation tomorrow, sometime before or after I get in line to buy the new iPhone.
In the meantime, I thought I’d add a note about one of the more fun events related to my book’s release — the opportunity I had, in May, to speak at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.
Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:
Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.
If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.
Walt Mossberg (WSJ), David Pogue (NYT) and Edward Baig (USA Today) have been using the new iPhone 3G for a couple of weeks now, and today they all dish on their experiences.
They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.
But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.
Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:
More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits. The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.
And Pogue on GPS:
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example. Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.
None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:
I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well. These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.
The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.
I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:
Update: This post has been updated with comments from Viacom.
In the fall of 1987, a freelance reporter named Michael Dolan learned that judge Robert Bork kept an account at Potomac Video, a D.C. rental shop. This was at the height of the contentious and ultimately failed Senate confirmation hearings for Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court — so naturally, Dolan thought there was a story here, and he went to work on getting a peek at Bork’s video rental history.
It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”
That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.
Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.
In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.
I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.
Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.
The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.
Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)
Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.
But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).
But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)
All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.
But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.
As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.
What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!
In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.
——
Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.
Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.
Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”
