10 Things to Watch About Comcast-NBCU

Amidst so much other commentary, and still more possibilities for further claims about the merger's significance for industry, platform and user convergences (and beyond #10 here, synergies), a nicely grounded piece from Ben Grossman at Broadcasting & Cable.


"10 Things to Watch About Comcast-NBCU"

First came the deal, now comes the waiting. As the mega-merger between Comcast and NBCU goes through its process, here are 10 things I'm wondering about.

1 Jeff Zucker's fate. Comcast can appreciate a great cable business as much as anyone, and under Zucker, NBC Universal has grown into one. But the broadcast network's fall under his watch has industry insiders buzzing about whether he will make the cut or not.

2 Jay Leno's fate. Will Comcast share NBC's long-term view of the 10 p.m. experiment and Conan at 11:35, or will they use the ownership change as an excuse to move Leno and his 5 million faithful viewers back to 11:35 and let Conan become a free agent? Either way, you have to admire Leno's sucking up the night before the deal was announced. His guest: E!'s Kim Kardashian.

3 Versus/NBC Sports. Amortizing rights fees over the cable side could give Dick Ebersol a new sling of arrows to fire at some major sports acquisitions. While a deal like the NFL on NBC is a money loser (as are all NFL network deals) having a full-time cable outlet, as well as some regional sports nets, opens up a whole new ballgame. Whether or not they “go after ESPN” is not the point; there is plenty of room for both if Comcast can grab a big-time property or two.

4 The Olympics. Does this deal throw a wrench into the conventional wisdom that Disney will easily outbid everyone for the next Olympics package? Zucker says Comcast-NBCU will look at it “if it makes sense.” Fiscally alone it doesn't, as evidenced by the right fees NBC faced in Beijing and even more so in Vancouver. But it is a major vanity play as well, and if Comcast is serious about getting into sports as it has always planned with Versus, this would be a tough property to lose.

5 The NBC Name. Will it go away? More than one NBC insider has guessed Comcast may want to ditch the name NBC Universal altogether at some point. The guess here is Comcast Entertainment becomes the parent but the NBC network keeps its name.

6 Musical Chairs. Take Jeff Shell, Ted Harbert, Jeff Gaspin, Marc Graboff, Bonnie Hammer and Lauren Zalaznick, to name a few. There's lots of talent in this group. But will there be enough seats for all of them when the regulatory and logistical music stops?

7 Hulu. Last week, the Comcast execs said they could see network programming stay available for free on Hulu, with cable programming living behind an authentication wall to protect cable operators. By the time this deal closes, there will be a pay model for Hulu, so despite what the bigwigs said, it's really not that simple. I'm not sure a Comcast-Hulu marriage will last; at the very least, it should see some Eldrick-Elin-type bumps.

8 Xfinity. Apparently, Comcast is changing the name of OnDemand Online to “Xfinity.” If that doesn't sound like a club in Vegas that guys go to with a stack of $1 bills, I don't know what does. Not that I would know. Anyway, here's hoping the NBC creative types can help Comcast come up with a more appropriate moniker.

9 The Friday Night Lights Model. A while back, Steve Burke told me that if the right opportunity arose, Comcast would look at a similar model to the DirecTV deals, in which the satellite provider gets a first run of a show and picks up a chunk of the production tab, with the second run airing on a network. It'll be interesting to see if Comcast experiments with some reverse-windowing now that it has its own network, or if that model is just dead.

10 Synergies. Obviously, brands like Bravo and Style have crossover to spare, and Joel McHale already traversed the companies with shows on both E! and NBC, but how else will synergies pop up? A Kardashians theme-park ride? Must. Resist. Lewd. Joke.

E-mail comments to ben.grossman@reedbusiness.com

http://mobile.broadcastingcable.com/article/438679-10_Things_to_Watch_About_Comcast_NBCU.php?rssid=20065

Hollywood's Self-Fulfilling Marketing

Two recent pieces astutely cast light on the Hollywood's stubborn predilection for mainstream filmmaking. A.O. Scott in the New York Times and James Surowiecki in The New Yorker discuss why mega-franchises like Transformers continue to dominate film production. In part, as Scott observes, this is the ritual of questioning summer schlock fare. More tellingly, though, both pieces ask whether there's a failure of nerve by studios in their continuing reliance on action blockbusters aimed at the mythical teen and young adult demographic.

Surowiecki focuses on Kathryn Bigelow's excellent war drama, The Hurt Locker, which received little marketing support for its release in summer blockbuster season. He nails the issue in writing, "Hollywood decided in advance that Americans weren’t going to watch this kind of movie, and then made sure they wouldn’t." This is not just an unwillingness to take risk with a smaller film (on an admittedly uneasy topic, the Iraq War): it's a failure of imagination from an industry that is supposed to be awash in it.

The global economic recession is fairly invoked as cause for contemporary caution by the media conglomerate-held studios. Yet the conservatism driving production and marketing decisions long predated the current crisis. Amidst a much farther-reaching transformation of media and fragmentation of audiences, the immediate-term thinking seems terribly short-sighted. The blockbuster mentality has been around for decades, guiding most studio operations at least since the late 1970s. At a time when diversification is a watchword for success across other troubled and evolving industries, Hollywood might do well to consider adopting it as a strategy for winning the future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/movies/09scot.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/jamessurowiecki/2009/08/the-hurt-locker-what-is-hollywood-thinking.html

Social Media and Change in Moldova

Moldova has just held another contested election. The small eastern European country, which rose to international headlines after elections in April provoked two weeks of anti-government protests (amplified, it was celebrated, by Twitter and e-mail communications), had another very close vote this week that appeared to produce a victory for opposition parties seeking closer ties to Europe. The electoral closeness emerges in part from the need of these parties to preserve a fragile coalition. Still, one could see progress in challenging the authority of the pro-Russian government by a younger generation able to mobilize in important part with new technologies.

It is possible to conclude summarily that the Twitter Revolution of April has finally succeeded, albeit after a delay of a hundred days and still only gradually. Yet we need to be cautious. If indeed it has happened, the political shift toward a European-leaning coalition and away from the Russian-supported Communists may well be more a reflection of longer-term generational changes and the continuing drift in former Soviet republics and bloc countries away from communist or socialist rule. Did Twitter accelerate this process in Moldova? Perhaps. Better to say now that events – and communication media – in the spring contributed to an array of compelling trends toward change.

However, those trends are both political and economic and finally transcend the familiar East-West reading. On the ground, in the hearts of many Moldovans desperate for greater opportunity and change, they are trends that often converge in ways that contradict distant analyses grounded in pitched oppositions of Russian and EU-supporters. The Financial Times says Moldovans "want it both ways." Quite right. Rather than this being a sign of greed or unreasonableness, though, it is more likely a symptom of wanting and needing to embrace as many possibilities as exist. As the FT piece concluded on Thursday, "Moldova has no interest in choosing between them. It needs them both."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f19164a-7d2c-11de-b8ee-00144feabdc0.html

Bauhaus: Still Teaching after 90 Years

A fascinating exhibition opened last week in Berlin on the Bauhaus. This innovative school of architecture, design and visual arts was founded 90 years ago at the end of the First World War and was closed in 1933 by the Nazis when they rose to power in Germany. For those 14 years, however, the Bauhaus represented a vibrant interdisciplinary school and community of teachers and practitioners committed at once to re-examining the very roots of Western aesthetics and design concerns and to extending the experimentation and social critique of modernity. The current exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau is the largest exhibition on the Bauhaus in history and comprises more than 1000 objects. More info at http://www.modell-bauhaus.de .

As a laboratory for exploring artistic, educational, and social issues, the Bauhaus rewards exploration from multiple perspectives. For me, as an educator committed to interdisciplinary teaching and learning, the launching of workshops involving talented students and gifted practitioners and thinkers from different fields (Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky among them) is inspiring. That this was accomplished in such a penetrating way at an historical moment of sweeping technological change and social transformation makes it all the more extraordinary. Viewing the show today, as we again confront the changes wrought by technology and a wide-scale reconceptualization of the world, Bauhaus continues to provide lessons in how we might pursue, with rigor and openness and imagination, persistent questions about creativity, what it means to be human, and how to relate to the world around us.

Media Enchantment and the Real World

I recently received a pair of e-mail announcements from The Economist magazine (I’m a happy subscriber to the print edition). The first message indicated that an electronic version of the magazine was now available for the Kindle e-reader. The second was that the latest in the magazine’s ongoing online debate series, on “Israelis and the Arabs,” was now being launched and could be followed on the e-reader.

What was telling for me was how the messages combined media and real world items. Now, media exists in the real world, I know, and a debate about conditions among Israelis and Arabs or anyone else is not the same as the conditions themselves. But those are more abstract quibbles.

The issue here is that amidst our generally justifiable techno-euphoria today, especially regarding social media, the connection of evolving technologies to what’s happening in the actual world is often neglected or at least downplayed. Our very celebration of the speed, variety, mobility, and accessibility of digital media can easily lead to an emphasis on proliferating and interconnecting technologies themselves and only a superficial or fleeting engagement with whatever information they are ostensibly communicating.

In other words, and perhaps unavoidably updating McLuhan, it’s a reminder that while (new) media are themselves an important message we can dwell over, media technologies also (still) communicate about issues that have meaning for flesh-and-blood human beings and consequences on the ground and in actual lives.