Most of the time, friends and sometimes family encouraged me to tell stories about my days in the comedy, music, and tech companies. And all this time, I have been reluctant. However, with the pandemic and the impending birth of my first grandchild, I reconsidered. My wife’s passion for genealogy reminded us that stories get lost quickly. People die, forget, move away, losing track of the family tree. It takes real effort to rebuild these connections over time. Our kids don’t care about all of this now, but later they will. And the genealogy of friendship is the story of our time, the things we find important and the friends we choose to share. A few months ago, I started working on a book. Every now and then I’ll include some of that work here.
The second season of The Morning Show has arrived on Apple TV +, just as our subscription to the service went from free with a new iPhone purchase a year ago to $ 4.99 per month. The first season went pretty well with its baseball mix inside the TV newscast business. Production values ​​were strong, reminiscent of the West Wing’s treatment of Washington’s Ring Road policy. MeToo’s story included A-List performances by Jennifer Anniston, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell and a complicated trick by Billy Crudup. Not bad for $ 4.99, but even with the surprise, dormant football hit Ted Lasso barely enough to keep himself afloat in the Netflix / Disney + fight for streaming leadership. And there’s Apple’s interest in it amid the challenges of competing with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and the rest of the tech giants.
For me, Apple TV + has gone from a question mark to a staple, much like CNN when it debuted in 1980, and HBO, which grew out of the very young Z channel that we enjoyed in a house of Malibu that David Sanborn rented the same year. . Dave had arrived in town to play on a Pure Prairie League record produced at the group’s Shangri-La recording studio on a hill overlooking the Pacific. I was home to the League’s Malibu Beach House while on vacation when Dave showed up at the front door unexpectedly.
At this point, I had known Sanborn since 1973, when he played on the soundtrack of the Firesign Theater film Proctor and Bergman, TV Or Not TV. I had produced the TV Or Not TV record and performed a stage version of the show on a West Coast tour that ended with a performance at a Columbia Records promotional event in Los Angeles. Among the guests was George Harrison, who greeted all three of us with the tagline from Firesign’s debut album: “Civilization Ho.”
After the Pure Prairie League session, Dave decided to rent another house down the street on Broad Beach. The house quickly became a rallying point for such characters as Gary Busey, the band’s Richard Manuel, and Sanborn partner Marcus Miller who wrote much of the material for Dave’s records. He was coming back from a tour with Miles Davis and working the new songs on a PortaStudio and a MiniMoog that I had set up in the living room. Eventually, Sanborn invited me to leave my tiny room in Shangri-La and enter the beach house. This is where the Z chain comes in.
This was the first cut on premium TV. Each month, Channel Z would broadcast several films in rotation throughout the week and several times a day. Busey, who first surfaced on a local Tulsa TV station with late-night comedy cuts starring Gaillard Sartain, was an icy genius at deciphering everything on TV. And Channel Z turned that into an intense ritual where repeat viewings of films like Spielberg’s in 1942 took on such hilarious undertones that the only way to escape Busey’s comedy styles was to leave the building bent over laughing. For casual observers, of whom there were none, it suggested a new paradigm shift as improv met the Hollywood window system – and produced HBO.
Outside of HBO, streaming television has grown, as original productions like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones led to the production model of frenzy that Netflix has hoisted to the top of the charts. In recent years, this tsunami of economic restructuring has led to the unbundling of television networks and the realignment of studio production around relentless demands for streaming and subscriptions. Pay TV has become Pay Media, Data has become the competitive part of the kingdom. And the pandemic has imposed the underlying principles of a new economy that we still struggle to understand even if we vote for it with our feet and our behavior.
After 15 months at home, we finally took advantage of the early summer to drive to our bungalow in South Carolina. Our children were born and raised there until we moved to the Bay Area as the tech edition realigned and the valley bubble collapsed. Software has become a service and mobile has become the dominant platform. Blogging and podcasting has transformed into streaming and social with current investments in the creator economy – newsletters and live audio.
These efforts have not gone unnoticed by the remaining media giants. Substack’s one-year investment in proving a subscription base for writers and influencers has reached a combination of yes it’s possible and no it’s very difficult to scale. On the pro side, Kara Swisher is one of the major contributors moving her newsletter behind the New York Times paywall and bolstering Twitter Spaces with frequent live audio broadcast. The fact that you can’t find these shows after the fact will likely be addressed by a record / replay feature that Twitter is working on. Once you can’t distinguish live audio from a podcast, the next step is to not distinguish podcasts from streaming programming. This development prompted Rachel Maddow’s decision to straddle her Daily Show and podcast-to-book properties. CNBC’s Jim Cramer is going there too, as I noted in this edition of The Gang:
Jim Cramer, the fabulous analyst and Mad Money guy [adds Brent Leary]. He signed a new contract. It’s a bit like Rachel Maddow 2.0 or 3.0. He does something called the CNBC Investor Club, and basically he delves into the designer economy. These types of on-camera media editors slowly engage in product creation.
Frank Radice:
He doesn’t go for something like that unless he sees a real opening to make some money. Think about what he was doing before he even went to CNBC. And he’s not a stupid man. I think it’s very interesting that he can on CNBC and probably on his new ventures, make his opinions public as long as they put a line at the end, saying it’s not an opinion of CNBC, it’s is just Jim Cramer’s opinion.
Brent Leary jokes that Cramer is tapping into the 30% pool that the Epic lawsuit releases for new club members, but whatever the situation, we seem to be on the right track from cable (CNN) to pay TV (Z Channel) subscription + savings. What Netflix forged and Amazon, Disney, Hulu, HBO Max, and Paramount + chased is currently being tested by Apple TV +. Apple is doing things a little differently this time around, downsizing its AppleTV device with streaming dongles like Amazon Firestick and platform deals with smartTV heavyweights like Roku. AppleTV hardware is top of the line, but its price isn’t exclusive. The kicker is that AppleTV + is at a bargain price but exclusive in execution.
They’ve pinned HBO as a premium cable service integrated with HBO Max to combat the dying theatrical window. Apple’s original-only strategy seemed overtaken by Netflix’s volume game, but the pandemic caused production to drop to the point where the originals had to be acquired in Europe and Scandinavia to keep the pipeline open. Well-equipped frenzy blockbusters like The Crown and supposedly limited series like The Queen’s Gambit came from the HBO playbook, but they were rare for viewers struggling to keep up with poor subtitles and voice acting.
Instead, we’re in the AppleTV + equation. With the same methodical and relentless mix of hardware and software that Apple uses to dominate mobile margins, AppleTV + is expanding the platform with a product designed to eliminate linear broadcast markets. For the first time, the Emmys weren’t so much dominated by streamers as ghosts of network TV shows in nominations. CBS, long a stronghold for comedy, aired the Emmys without a single nomination, and instead focused on Hacks, a fun HBO Max original developed not for cable but for direct streaming. We are no longer in Kansas.
We watch Ted Lasso, The Morning Show and scifi epic Foundation. Not enough to fill the void created by the collapse of the network and cable TV, but more than a harbinger of things to come. When CNN first debuted, people wondered why someone would watch the news 24/7. Now they’re wondering again, with the mute button on 24/7 and notifications coming to you. indicating what is shaking. Production is moving from green screens to interactive LED screens that materialize the actors in backgrounds they can see as they perform. Projects deemed infilmable are no longer so. Blackberry, meet the iPhone.
AppleTV + has the aura of a linear broadcast network with a technological platform. Apple’s hardware and software release timeline overlaps between short-range innovations aimed at customers, such as this year’s iPhone 13 camera advancements, and long-term efforts to shift data from third party and user tracking to a first party transaction data set. The new phone’s ability to use additional mapping to perform pro-level tune-up during and after recording bodes well for more and more functionality moving to software manipulation on more powerful system hardware. AppleTV + takes advantage of a gap in the market between streaming and traditional broadcast and cable to create the same mix of quality and innovation in its physical product offering.
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The Gillmor Gang – Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live on Friday August 27, 2021.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang
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