Tag: television

Tech Used To Be Magical. Why Isn’t It Anymore?

I’ll ask you kindly to get the fuck off my lawn now.

I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But f*ck it, this is my site, and I think it’s time to air this one out: Technology isn’t delivering on the magic anymore. Instead, it feels like a burden, or worse.

For decades, digital technology delivered magical moments with a regularity that inspired evangelical devotion. For me, the very first of these moments came while using a Macintosh in 1984. Worlds opened up as that cursor tracked my hand’s manipulation of the mouse. Apple’s graphical user interface – later mimicked by Microsoft – was astonishing, captivating, and open ended. I was a kid in college, but I knew culture, business, and society would never be the same once entrepreneurs, hackers, and dreamers starting building on Apple’s innovations.

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No. TV Advertising Is Not Going to Become “Performance Driven”

Remember the “year of mobile”? That was the five-year period from roughly 2007 to 2012, when industry pundits annually declared that everything was about to change because of the smart phone. Mobile eventually did come to dominate the marketing landscape, but the shift took far longer than anyone expected.

I’m starting to think we’re in a similar cycle with streaming – only the transition from cable to digital television has taken far longer, and has been far, far messier.  I recall editing the February, 1994 cover story for Wired, in which we asked – thirty years ago! – if advertising as we knew it was finally dead. We opened that piece with a futuristic scenario in which advertising had changed completely:

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Why Prime Time TV Might Make a Comeback

I hate to admit it, but I miss prime time.

For those of you born after Seinfeld went off the air, “prime time” dominated an era when television viewers only had three or four choices at any given time. Before streaming took over our devices, before cable devolved to 500 channels with nothing to see, there was “prime time television.” If you’re old enough to remember when Friends ruled “Must-See TV,” you (and tens of millions of others) likely spent a fair amount of your weeknights engaged with prime time’s three-hour post-dinner programming block.

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Why Is The Streaming Experience So Terrible?

I wrote this for P&G’s Signal360 publication, but I thought I’d toss it up here as well. I know I’ve been very, very absent from writing for – well, for the entire pandemic. I plan to change that, but for now, here’s a mini-rant (I could have gone on forever) about the state of the television experience for us cord cutters out there. 

I can’t believe I’m about to write these words, but…I kind of miss cable TV.

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