There’s a fairly common argument made among Apple fanboys that the difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Microsoft responds to user demands by fulfilling the demand and Apple responds to user demands by fulfilling the underlying demand that the users didn’t even realize they were asking for. It’s a cute way of saying that Apple doesn’t do what you want, it does what you need. On the surface it’s an interesting concept; of course, it’s also one that fails the test of history. No user was asking for the Ribbon UI when Microsoft started integrating it into their interfaces. They came to a decision about the Ribbon UI through extensive user testing but ultimately chose something that they thought answered the underlying needs. Apple doesn’t do user testing. That’s the big difference. Apple doesn’t care about users in the same way, they do things the way they want and expect their user base to follow them or for their new way to lead to new users in numbers that will offset the loss from their existing base. In other words, Apple don’t care, Apple don’t give a shit:

But I’m not here to incite an argument about whether or not Apple cares about their users. I’m more interested in the idea that what a person thinks they want isn’t necessarily what they actually want and how that relates to what’s happening in television right now.

What people who like television want is to pay less and have more control over what and when they watch. Those goals are generally achievable but with caveats that a lot of people don’t really think about. We might want to pay less but that will make our shows cheaper, it will make some shows not exist in the first place.

I’ve already written about the way television works and how the current system of advertising drives most of the financials for the networks, but there’s another side to this equation. The countless cable stations that mostly air syndication repeats that have flooded the market in the past couple decades, the channels that get placed in cable package bundles in annoying distributions that make you purchase five bundles of seven channels each to get the eight channels you really want to watch, are a large part of how cable providers make money as well. Those annoying distribution packages, the ones that force you to buy channels you don’t want or care about to get the ones you do care about, are a way of offsetting costs from expensive channels. This is, as far as I know, a much smaller part of the cost of generating original content, but it still factors into the cost calculus of a lot of the smaller cable channels that do produce original content.

A consequence of making cable options more flexible might be that channels that you really like, that produce shows you really like, stop being bought in generic packages by people who enjoy other channels that you don’t care about. This leads to fewer cable providers supporting that channel and that channel having less money to work with. I’m not necessarily saying this is a good way of socializing the cost of television¹, but this is the way it works now and changing that can have undesirable outcomes. But if you still want to get rid of the annoying lack of flexibility in cable packages² you have to accept the possibility of paying more for some of your preferred viewing. Either that or change your viewing, which brings me to my next point.

Earlier today, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that there should be more shows like Louie. Now I’d love to see more shows like Louie, though if it were the only type of show around — something that would basically have to happen if users get what they currently want³ — I’d have to stop watching television⁴. But Louie is certainly a poster child for a cheap⁵ show that still provides humour and pathos in strong doses, but its system of operation is not one that scales. Louis CK is a true anomaly, and I mean that in the best possible way. He is brilliant and prolific and willing to work cheap; he was offered other show opportunities and turned them down because of the limitations of network input. The only reason his show exists is because he worked for less. The only reason his show exists is because he can construct all these stories and write and film and edit them all on his own. Put simply, Louis CK works harder and better and cheaper than pretty much anyone else, and there aren’t a lot of people with both the inclination and the ability to do the same. Resting our hopes for the future of television on Louie is ultimately foolish.

This race-to-the-bottom mentality of seeking out cheap shows above all reminds me of our current political landscape⁶. Everybody wants the good parts of government, the infrastructure and public resources, without the bad parts, the taxes. Unfortunately, we have to take the good with the bad. It’s true that television can have a different configuration of good and bad, but there will be bad, and I wonder if the people who rail against the backward ways of the cable providers and networks really understand that the new economy they are demanding will fix their existing ills but introduce new ones, ones that are possibly worse. I wonder if they’ve really thought this all through⁷.

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Footnotes

1. As much as I hate Reality Television, I’ve come to accept that without it, there would be many shows that the networks would not be able to afford to make. [↩]
2. This argument also holds for shows that are produced for a specific channel with cheaper shows socializing the cost of the more expensive fare, and is what my earlier piece mostly discussed. [↩]
3. Rosenberg’s piece talks about the stratification of television into super cheap shows like Louie and very expensive affairs subsidized by foreign markets, the latter of which is simply another unsustainable source of funding that will have to be supplanted over time as other nations get the very same options we are having to adjust for now. [↩]
4. Or maybe catch up on the great shows of the past decades that I’ve yet to see. [↩]
5. At $250,000 an episode, it’s basically cheap enough to produce while still making money at the $1 an episode price point that people seem to have decided they won’t go beyond. [↩]
6. Geeze, did I really have to shoehorn politics into this discussion? Looks like. [↩]
7. Spoiler alert: they haven’t. [↩]

There has been a lot of talk about how Google’s decision to remove H.264 support from Chrome will end up regressing the progress HTML5 <video> tag has made thus far, but I find a lot of it is too short-sighted and doesn’t consider the implications of H.264 remaining the de facto web standard video format.

People argue that dropping H.264 is going to lead to an increase of Flash. News Flash: Flash is already active on every browser that matters. Flash will stay there until there is a convenient usable alternative for its biggest use cases: specifically video and graphical rendering. HTML5 handles those through the <video> and <canvas> tags. The problem is that having a video tag doesn’t mean people can use it, because not all browsers support the same codecs and nobody wants to go around encoding their videos in half a dozen different formats for each browser permutation.

H.264 costs money for distributors and producers. In a world where we’re all slowly becoming producers this is troubling. It also has a deep patent pool backed by dozens of large companies waiting to sue someone.

WebM is open, unencumbered by patents, and royalty free. Hardware acceleration is being built into the next generation of CPUs. It has quality comparable to H.264 and has fewer caveats.

The truly baffling thing about defending H.264 is that it is equivalent to arguing for the death of Firefox. I mean this. H.264, as a closed source patented video format, cannot legally be included in Firefox because of its licensing model. If you want everyone to standardize around H.264, you don’t want Firefox to be a player in the web browser game any longer.

Some people argue that they’re not “backing” H.264, they’re simply against Flash. I don’t really know what to say about that; Flash is all-pervasive right now. H.264 didn’t make it magically disappear, precisely because it wasn’t allowed in one of the more popular browsers. For Flash to disappear, it needs viable alternatives that are as simple. When you put the burden on the user to make sure they have the right codecs installed and they’re using the right browser for the right website, that’s not as easy as Flash.

Here’s something maybe people don’t know: Google, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft have all promised WebM support in their browsers. The odd man out here is H.264 proponent (and patent-holder) Apple. Apple has made no comment on WebM, but they will soon have to; IE9, Firefox 4, Opera 11, and Google Chrome will all have WebM support this year.

Of course, the mobile landscape is different — Apple is dominating there at the moment — and tied relatively tightly to hardware cycles, but chips are already being prepared for hardware accelerated WebM video, so if Apple really cared about making HTML5 the Next Big Thing, it would start looking into integrating WebM for their next generation of chips. Then we can finally start the work of obsolescing Flash for good.

I don’t think anyone would ever call John Gruber a critic of Apple¹, but his bashing of Gizmodo with regards to their scoop on the next generation of iPhone is getting pretty ridiculous.

A recent post on his blog, Daring Fireball, asserts that what Gizmodo did was theft because the person who found the lost prototype didn’t contact the bar, where the Apple engineer who lost the phone inquired a few times as to its whereabouts, but that seems like a pretty arbitrary standard to follow. The person who found the phone — and in turn Gizmodo, who purchased the phone from them, because of the laws in California — is only guilty of theft if they don’t try to return the lost item to its owner, and the wording of the law seems intentionally vague, stating that the efforts undertaken to return it should be deemed “reasonable.” Were the phone calls with Apple employees informing them that he had a prototype phone — phone calls which were completely ignored by Apple, at least in part because Apple’s overly tight-lipped procedures left no-one aware a phone had been lost or that a new iPhone existed in any form at all — not reasonable? They seem quite reasonable to me.

Granted, maybe he should have contacted the bar, but not contacting the bar is not an inherently malicious act, it’s not the subtle machinations of someone hoping to feign ‘reasonableness’ when asked later while still scoring a payday from their discovery. It’s human error. Hindsight is 20/20.

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Footnotes

1. I personally don’t consider him a fanboy for Apple, but rather an apologist, a distinction worth making and perhaps worth clarifying in a later post. [↩]