Then and Now

I’m looking forward to the anticipated prompt engineering being swallowed up with voice UI in the next generation. The lower third of wishful thinking on MSNBC suggests the 14th Amendment push to remove Trump from the ballot is picking up steam. Well, that is something for RINOs and DINOs to hang their hat on, but the reality is unmistakably Trump in the primary and then Biden in the election. In the wacky world of nothing ventured nothing gained capital, it’s AI all the time. The Beatles have finally broken up with the help of machine learning, and I’m OK with that.

Have we really run out of things to conquer? Congress seems so caught chasing its tail that the news media has entered a spiral of conflicts and irrelevance that is blamed on the crisis of advertising and the churn of subscription triage. I’m hearing social media critics buying the idea that there are no experts left to trust, that the dearth of authority (read: gatekeepers) is destroying our culture. Never mind that podcasts are filled with talking heads purporting to know what’s really happening with the economy. On the Gang, Frank Radice insists This Is Us is returning for another season; Google has no record of that. My bet is with Frank even though there’s no data to support it. Yet.

I like This Is Us. But it’s a vestigial tail of the old TV, linear. Now FAST or free ad-supported TV is gobbling up Netflix’s binge model by giving us weekly drops of shows. Even that trend is better than the wasteland of non-scripted content blanketing the old linear networks. Reality may be attractive to older viewers, but the new generations could care less about TV in general. We’ve shifted to YouTube TV, a virtual bundling product with unlimited recording in the cloud, and away from Comcast’s (NBC) rollup of linear, sports, and bundled subscription networks. Drop Comcast, which is now almost entirely shifting from television as a product to broadband, go direct to broadband via fiber, and cut the cost overall by half. The shift by big tech to buy direct access to sports has made it less difficult to imagine an emerging bundle that streams over fiber with more and more services to emulate the binge-and-shift model to cut streaming subscription costs.

We usually wrap an episode of the Gang with callouts to our favorite new shows. The leaderboard: Bosch Legacy, The Morning Show, Lessons in Chemistry, Yellowstone and its prequels, Lupin, and pretty much any limited series on Netflix. On a network basis, it’s Apple TV +, Disney + (ABC), ESPN, Paramount + (CBS), and new FAST entries such as FreeVee (embedded in Amazon’s Prime TV. Certain stars are emerging as executive producers of popular franchises: Taylor Sheridan, Reese Witherspoon, Jason Bateman, and Kevin Costner are seen as frequently in production and showrunner roles, trading on their Hollywood rolodexes to hire film stars like Stallone and McConaughey Netflix funds films with directors like Scorsese and A-listers like DeNiro and DiCaprio to release in the theaters before reaching the big audiences on fiber. In the most recent production deal, Apple TV + will release one 3-hour director’s cut version of the new biopic Napoleon in theaters and an at least 4-hour and maybe more than 6-hour + limited streaming series on fiber. Peter Jackson’s Beatles Get Back documentary morphed from a projected 2-hour film to an 8-hour + 3 part streaming series on Disney +.