TEN JACK TEN

HD-DVD is dead, killed by the movie studios and Best Buy and Blockbuster and Netflix and Wal-Mart.  The last one is kind of surprising, since they were selling the heck out of HD-DVD players last Christmas.  At least most of the folks who bought stand-alone players will be able to use them as overpriced DVD players in the future, unlike those who ended up with Betamax videotape players and nothing to play on them.  And unlike those who bought the HD-DVD add-on player for their Xbox 360s.  Those are just useless now, except for playing the handful of releases already out.

Not that there wasn’t enough screwing to go around.  Early Blu-ray players can’t support the additional features being added into the specification by Sony, and can’t be upgraded.  They’ll still play the movies, but you might not be able to see the picture-in-picture of Micheal Bay offering commentary on why he thought one of the Transformers should be urinating oil in this scene.  Big loss there.

The idea of a format war for high definition movies was ridiculous anyway, neither format offered the leap in quality and accessibility that DVD offered over VHS.  What you got with the HD formats was greater picture detail and enhanced color fidelity.  There was also the prospect of uncompressed surround-sound, but the amount of people with the amp and speaker hardware to take advantage of that is only a fraction of the number of folks with HD sets.  That barely made up for what you lost in portability.  I know I’m a gadget freak, but a quick mental inventory gives me 12 things in my house that can play DVDs (including game consoles and PCs), along with 2 parked in the driveway, versus one that can play Blu-ray disks.  DVDs aren’t going anywhere; Blu-ray is for enthusiasts and perfectionists.

Oddly enough, one of the best current Blu-ray player options is a PS3.  For $400 at the low end, it’s competitive in price with stand-alone players and it can be easily updated via WiFi or ethernet.  If you use HDMI, it will also upscale DVDs.  It’s not perfect, HD cables and the bluetooth media remote are extra.  And because the remote uses bluetooth, you can’t use your IR universal remote with it unless you buy a third-party dongle.

Last Monday, my sister called me to ask how to use the new Sansa MP3 player she just bought for one of her kids.  She was frustrated that it wasn’t really doing anything when she plugged it into her PC and she wanted put some songs onto the player.  The CD that came with the Sansa player only had the Sansa Media Converter program, which is only useful for moving movies or pictures to the player.  I own a few Sansa players, and Sandisk doesn’t provide any software to transfer music to the player.

Because I thought we had a connection problem, I had her updating the player’s driver in Windows Device Manager and trying to register the player as a standard USB device rather than the DRM-hobbled mode that will only allow copying with the most recent version of Windows Media Player.  (By the way, hisses to Sandisk for stating in the manual that there’s a USB and then taking it out of the player.)  We go around and around with these issues and she eventually gets frustrated and puts it aside for a while.

She calls back and we try again.  I ask her to try to copy a small sample MP3 file that I’ve emailed to her. 

“Can’t I just use iTunes?”  She’s got an iPod Nano that she enjoys, but (completely understandably) didn’t want to spend the money on something for a child to use.

I explain that no, you can’t.  There’s no reason for Apple to support players from any other manufacturer.  Or to let the songs you’ve bought from Apple play on anyone else’s player.  This was not welcome news.

I ask her where her music files are.  She doesn’t know, iTunes takes care of all that for her.  I’m now understanding that we don’t have a connection problem as much as a user experience problem.  Sandisk can market the Sansas to people all day and night, but they don’t provide an integrated solution like iTunes, which saves your purchases, rips your CD’s, copies your music, and doesn’t make you “pop the hood” on your PC.  The same features that make me dislike iTunes are the ones that make it an easy, one-stop solution for someone who is not a nerd and has no desire to be one. 

Sadly, an integrated user experience probably is never going to be a feature on a sub-$50 MP3 player.  Either you’re already ripping your CD’s and managing your metatag data (or just knowing it exists), or you’re innocently picking one up at the store and figuring it will “just work” with your computer.

She took the player back to the store.

And I don’t think it will be missed. I went in the Frisco store today to see if there were any bargains to be had. Nope. The only sales they were going to make were from people who didn’t know any better.

Everything was 10% off, 15% at the most. And all sales final, no returns. Which might be interesting except for CompUSA’s long history of keeping prices high long after they’ve dropped other places. So, I could get a Microsoft Habu gaming mouse for 10% off $70, but I can get one from Dell for $51 with free shipping. Playstation 2 games selling for $20 everywhere else were 10% off $40. Blank CDs and DVDs were higher than the sale prices at Best Buy or Office Max.

Amazing. They can’t even go out of business competently.

The US Post Office charges about $15 to send a letter by Express Mail, which will show up the next day, unless it’s kind of hard to deliver it the next day. And if you read the fine print, a lot of their next-day promises are contingent on the person you’re mailing to going to the post office to pick it up themselves.

So, if you need to send something to or from a small town, forget anything USPS says about committments or refunds; they took it back in the fine print. They’ll charge you the same rate they charge everyone else in the country, but with absolutiey no promises.

But this is just the standard, background-level mix of indifference and incompetence that we’ve learned to accept from the USPS. As if to show that things can always get worse, the USPS delivers an “Express” envelope with legal documents printed on an inkjet printer to My Lovely Wife’s office yesterday:

A day late.

Soaking wet.

There were no survivors. Clearly, the stakes have been raised in the grand Not Giving a Damn tournament that is government work. And just in time for Public Service Recognition Week!

Texas has abandoned any moral authority on the issue of gambling by instituting endless varieties of state lotteries. Scratch cards, Pick 3, Pick 6, Powerballs, we got ‘em. But Texans have figured out that the odds suck (the legislature has been cutting the payouts to squeeze a few more bucks out of it) and it’s really not much more than a Stupid Tax.

So, the Texas Lottery buys ad time to convince people they’re not really pissing their money away by handing it to them.  Here’s the latest campaign:  

Ad 1: A dressmaker is fitting a bride for her wedding gown.  She sees NUMBERS on the measuring tape she’s using, so she immediately stops working and leaves so she can play these numbers in the Texas Lottery.  We then see the bride with her half-assed dress at the altar.  This is, I think, supposed to be funny.

Ad 2: Two movers are carrying a grandfather clock out of a truck.  One mover sees the house NUMBERS painted on the curb, so he drops the clock and leaves to play these numbers in the Texas Lottery.  We then see the other mover still holding his end of the clock, while the other half rests on the ground.  This final shot also appears to have been intended to amuse us.

These two ads lead me to the conclusion that every large organization needs to create a new position of authority:  The Bullshit Detecting Officer, or “BDO.”  Business schools can offer MBAs in this bold new area, requiring aspiring BDOs to take courses in areas such as logic, pop culture, and symbolism.  The BDO will be answerable only to the highest members of the organization and will have the power to immediately stop the organization from doing something really obviously stupid. 

Like, for instance, approving an ad campaign based on positive depictions of people abandoning their responsibilities to go gamble.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. In that spirit, there’s a list of every discrete ad shown during the Super Bowl broadcast in the DFW area, kickoff to the end of the fourth quarter, after the jump.

VIEW THE NATIONAL ADS

Now, the overanalysis.

Most spots: Anheuser-Busch, 9; Coca-Cola, 6; General Motors, 3; Frito-Lay, 3; CareerBuilder.com, 3

Internet companies with ads: CareerBuilder.com, SalesGenie.com, E-trade, GoDaddy.com

Major advertisers who cheaped out and had a standard-def ad: Revlon, Doritos, Blockbuster, Schick, Motorola, Taco Bell, Prudential

Retail food ads: Snickers, 1; Emerald Nuts, 1

Retail beverage ads: Bud Light, 5; Coke, 4; Budweiser, 2; Sierra Mist, 2; Snapple 1; Budweiser Select, 1

Only national restaurant ad: Taco Bell

Automotive parity: Chevrolet, Honda, and Toyota each had 2 national ads. No other nameplate had a national spot, with the possible exception pf GM’s “Fired Robot,” but they weren’t selling any particular make.

Only ad shown twice: GoDaddy.com

Local to network ads ratio: 13:102

Goods to services ratio for national ads: 41:14

Ads to promos ratio: 65:47

Specials to series ratio for TV show promos: 12:27

Most promoted CBS shows: The CSI’s, 6; Survivor, 4; CBS Evening News, 3

Currently broadcast prime-time CBS shows that did not get a Super Bowl promo: The Class, Close To Home, Cold Case, Ghost Whisperer, Numb3rs, Without a Trace. Don’t spend that money from the next season just yet.

Sorry, Katie!: The CBS Evening News is sinking further down despite the expensive new host. So what does CBS News do? They promote the show withw exactly the kind of “soft news” features that Little Miss Serious Journalist was trying to get away from on the Today show.

Lamest: Honda’s “Burnin’ Love” and “Fuel Economy” are what we always get from Honda, the smug belief that all they need to do is show you a car and you’ll buy it. Amusing us is beneath them. Revlon thinks we give a damn about Cheryl Crow’s hair, what Cheryl Crow’s prissy hair stylist thinks, and whether Cheryl Crow has any integrity with regard to sponsorship deals. That’s a hat trick of wrong guesses. And then they give us an ad about hair COLOR and shoot a lot of it in black & white. Also, why the hell would you pick the theme “never fade away” and then admit in the ad that you have to re-do it every week?

“But he already cashed the check”: Budweiser Select - “Virual Football” with homely rapper Jay-Z cheating at a football game with Don Shula (who should have been wearing a nametag, the world doesn’t know him by sight) by having some chick interfere with the winning field goal. I think we were supposed to think Jay-Z was smarter than Shula because he’s all hip and whatnot, but they failed to convey that in the ad. However, the fact that they’re paying this guy a boatload of money to make overproduced urban lifestyle ads for an allegedly upscale mass-produced beer says something about the relative intelligence levels involved. Yes, look serious and nod your head again, Jay-Z, you won that one fair and square.

Recycling: Coke - “Grand Theft Niceness” and “Inside the Machine” had already been made for movie theater ads. “Black History Milestones” could have been made with PowerPoint. That leaves “What Else Haven’t I Done?” as the only ad with a significant budget. I guess they figured they spent enough on the airtime. Meanwhile, Schick reuses an ad that was not that funny to begin with and was played out six months ago. T-Mobile’s “Barcley & Wade” ad would have been funny if it had been the first time I’d seen it, but it wasn’t even the dozenth time I’d seen it.

More creepy than funny: GM’s “Fired Robot” had a few laughs before the suicide attempt, but ultimately didn’t make any damn sense. Bud Light’s “Rock, Paper, Scissors” was just mean-spirited. King Pharmaceuticals “Heart Attacked” was unpleasant to watch. FedEx’s “Moon Office” ended with death by meteorite for what reason? Chevrolet’s “Topless Man Car Wash” stretched a potentially amusing sight gag over way too much of the ad’s time. E-Trade’s “Bank Robbery” never lightened the mood once it made its point.

What the hell?: Snickers’ “Man Kiss” isn’t going to sell me a candy bar anytime soon. I’ve never run across an instance where men did not regard food ACTUALLY BEING IN SOMEONE’S MOUTH as an adequate indicator of ownership. The gag doesn’t get a setup that makes sense. Sprint Mobile Broadband’s “Connectile Dysfunction” assumes we find boner pill jokes amusing. We don’t.

Funniest: Bud Light’s “Axe.” Unlike every other ad, this one elevated the joke. Emerald Nuts’ “Robert Goulet” is absurd humor at its finest.

I guess it’s funnier if you’re old: Blockbuster’s “Clicking the Mouse.” Get it? The guinea pig thinks that a real mouse is . . . oh heck with it.

Coolest: Garmin’s “Maposaurus” used campy Ultraman and Godzilla cliches to grab attention. Letterman finally gets Oprah to spend some time with him. CareerBuilder.com got rid of the monkeys and went with a Survivor/Lost theme that goes well with how people feel about work. Good use of office supplies.

Wasted cash: Chevrolet’s “Car Music” was overdone and (I think) full of celebrities I couln’t quite recognize. Budweiser’s “Artificial Dalmation” goes to the well once too many times with the “dog wishes he was on the wagon” theme. Coke’s “What Else Haven’t I Done?” asks me to believe someone can reach a very old age and never try a soda. And then resorts to the worst old-folks-doing-crazy-stuff cliches available. Snapple looked like it went over budget with its one-old-joke “ECGC” ad.

Generics: Van Heusen and IZOD settle for image ads. Taco Bell’s third or fourth helping of talking animals can’t be saved by Ricardo Montalban. Prudential phones it in with deep thoughts about stone objects. Don’t expect Budweiser’s cooler-worshiping crabs to have much staying power. Mencia’s racial humor doesn’t play well without context in Bud Light’s “Language Teacher,” while “Wedding Auctioneer” stays well inside the established beer-obsession rut. Speaking of ruts, GoDaddy.com is comfortable in the one it’s dug. Toyota Tundra does stunts that prove nothing about the truck, but were nicely executed. HP trots out another marginal celebrity to talk about what can be done with a PC.

Spoiled: Nationwide gave away the ending to “Federline Fries” in a press release a week before the game, taking away all of its impact.

Amusing: The Doritos ads relied on imagination rather than budget. Bud Light’s slapfest in “The Fist Pump Is Out” was good — wait for it — slapstick.

(more…)

The Federal Trade Commission went after several sellers of harmless but not demonstrably effective weight loss pills. These companies usually have a huge ad blitz and fade away quickly after making their money. I think the FTC fines are budgeted as just another business expense.

But then we have a presumably reputable pharmaceutical company who also got swept up in the smackdown:

Bayer spokeswoman Tricia McKernan said the company never marketed WeightSmart as a weight-loss product . . .

Because everyone knows that you should take WeightSmart for those occasional bouts of skin rashes and explosive diarrhea. Weight loss? Where did you get that?

LINK

Orbicule’s Undercover is software that goes to work when an owner reports their Mac OSX laptop as stolen. The software identfies the ISP address where it’s being used, sends screenshots, and takes pictures with the camera. That’s damn cool.

Follow the link for the story of how Orbicule gets a brand new MacBook recovered, and the thief arrested, in about 3 days. 

LINK

On Forbes, science fiction author Cory Doctrow talks about distributing his novels on the net:

When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The book’s been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online.

Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.

LINK

Big business still hasn’t figured out the internet. Used to be, when you sicced your lawyers on someone, it was a personal thing between the threatener and threatenee. Now, when you threaten a website, it’s a schoolyard fight and everyone forms a circle to see what happens.

So, it comes to pass that the ESA wanted to get a story about a t-shirt parody of their ratings image (Your Mom Is Rated “E” for Everyone) off the gaming newsblog Kotaku. They threaten through their lawyers, Kotaku publishes the threat, and all of a sudden there’s more publicity for the parody than ever. Nice work, counselor.

Follow the link and see the shirt that the ESA would like to suppress, and the letter from the ESA’s lawyer.

LINK

If you’ve ever taken used games to Gamestop or used books to Half Price Books, you’ve experienced the negative sticker shock when they tell you just how much they’re willing to pay for your stuff. Selling used goods is a high-margin business for a lot of reasons, especially in the retail game sales, where prices are highly volatile.

But a screwjob is a screwjob, and the new company Goozex is looking to make game barters available to the masses over the internet. Easier than eBay, hopefully more lucrative than the pittance Gamestop and Electronics Boutique are offering.

LINK

PS: I’m not endorsing it, I just think it’s an interesting business start-up.

Ideally, Microsoft would like to rent you software, and you’d write a check each month to pay your software bill, much like other utilities.

That’ll always be the dream, but they’ve had a setback on the road to nirvana. Turns out that people hate the idea of buying their own damn operating system again when they upgrade.

On Oct. 16, Microsoft issued the new user license for Vista, including terms that would have limited the ability of those who buy a boxed copy of the operating system to transfer that license. Under the proposed terms, users could have made such a switch only one time.

However, the new restriction prompted an outcry among hardware enthusiasts and others. Microsoft is returning the licensing terms to basically what they were in Windows XP–users can transfer their license to a new PC an unlimited number of times, provided they uninstall and stop using it on the prior machine.

The software maker said it paid attention to the response both directly to the company and on blogs and decided to reverse course. Microsoft had hoped to use the change to aid its ongoing efforts to thwart piracy.

LINK

The fall is one of my favorite seasons of the year, in large part because it’s when football season begins.  And with football, unfortunately, comes football advertising.  Even with a DVR, you’re going to be exposed.

And this weekend, I officially became completely freaking tired of John Mellencamp’s “This is Our Country” song.  Didn’t this guy call other performers sell-outs for doing this sort of corporate ankle-grab back in the day? 

Bill Harris blogs about car shopping:

“What is the MSRP on this car?” I asked.

“Well, the MSRP doesn’t matter, because it’s a used car,” she says.

“Okay, but what would the MSRP be for this car?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Warning flag number two goes up. This is a Toyota dealership and they won’t tell me the MSRP of a car.

“Let me tell you, then,” I said. “The MSRP on this car is $23,105. So can you tell me why a used car costs almost four thousand dollars more than the same car new?”

“Well, we know that’s a crazy price,” she said. “Crazy. We didn’t put that price on there.”

“So what price did you put on there?” I asked.

“No price,” she said. “Tell me what you would pay.”

LINK

Or at least that’s Lik-Sang’s story.

Sony’s known for aggressively pursuing “grey market” importers who resell their products to other parts of the world. In particular, they went after Hong-Kong based Lik-Sang for selling PlayStation Portable (PSP) systems to Europe during the months-long gap between the Japanese and European releases of the system. 

Sony ultimately won, and Lik-Sang has shut down its operations, giving one last parting shot to Sony.

Furthermore, Sony have failed to disclose to the London High Court that not only the world wide gaming community in more than 100 countries relied on Lik-Sang for their gaming needs, but also Sony Europe’s very own top directors repeatedly got their Sony PSP hard or software imports in nicely packed Lik-Sang parcels with free Lik-Sang Mugs or Lik-Sang Badge Holders, starting just two days after Japan’s official release, as early as 14th of December 2004 (more than nine months earlier than the legal action). The list of PSP related Sony Europe orders reads like the who’s who of the videogames industry, and includes Ray Maguire (Managing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Alan Duncan (UK Marketing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Chris Sorrell (Creative Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Rob Parkin (Development Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited), just to name a few.

LINK

EDIT: Sony gets snippy.

Sony responded, “The purchasing of PSP consoles by SCE employees would be for investigatory purposes. We would also like to express our surprise at a company releasing personal information about its consumers, as this is contrary to data protection principles around the world.”

Ah, they were doing research. That excuse always works.

LINK