Tag: just-passing-by

Can We Have It Back ?

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Well, here we are, London is apparently hosting the next Bretton Woods.. So moronic anarchists (guys, why don’t you just kill each other and get it over and done with before making a mess on our TV screens if that’s your world view…). Actually, let’s keep with anarchists. My local anarchist when I grew up became a town planner,  ended up sending a flyover dug forty foot deep through my home town and built a supermarket on the beautiful, beautiful seafront of my home town. Thanks, Mark. I’m sure you’re now very senior within the council and due to lead the whole of Wales into bunkerdom one day soon.. 

So, anarchists are real people who can’t be bothered to work as hard as the rest of us, who manipulate and use anyone who they come across. And then compromise beyond belief… They are parasites and morons, but thankfully, do not take this the next step into islamic nihilism.
A bit like the bankers they loathe. Except they do things on an industrial scale. The City of London in the past decade makes the British Empire look like a global welfare state.
The bankers have taken trillions from poor people and ordinary people and spent it on their domains in offshore resorts (of course, they don’t pay tax), as well as their houses in the Cotswolds and art by that moron Damian whatshisname, who even managed to take the money people in and got some of that ill gotten lolly into his lil ol bank account – just a half billion or so (nice one fella…). They put up with stupid socialism because it was, well, stupid, like everything else Tony did, and Gordon lapped up with glee and that stupid smile…
So, now. Totally straight question. When do we get our money back, Gordon ? And Tony, when are you going to pay all of that back; a question I couldn’t even ask of that ogre Thatcher ?
You get paid bonuses for success, but there were  no successes, just short term scams. So now, can we have our money back ?
G1, G3, G7, G20, G30, G50. Whatever. Can we now, please, have our money back. And our morality with it ?
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In Support Of Common Sense

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Having taken a small company public on the US markets in the eye of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, all I can do now is to implore the US to adopt the agenda set out in the latest edition of Wired magazine.

Quite simply, it says that all companies that should adopt equivalent reporting standards defined by metadata, or markup language.
It sound simple, but would have avoided Enron and RBS, Fanny Mae and HBOS, because we, the people who own these companies, would have know what was really going on.
If we didn’t like something we could have clicked and looked at the derivative Trash Junk Mortgage Package III and then made up our own minds about the viability of a $30bn business. It’s the way things were meant to have been.
Business hates transparency; opaqueness leaves room for spin and inflation and, frankly, for lies. So, let me add a couple of further simple steps to sort out this mess.
The ability of traders to borrow more stock than exists in a company and then bet this against the company’s failure is only likely to have one consequence – the destruction of nascent businesses and the lining of pockets of cynical traders who are not investing in business, but are actually involved in an act of wanton destruction.  The financial markets that were allowed to do this have resulted in huge destruction of wealth for many hundreds of millions of people, transferring the power to the hands of thousands of the ultra-wealthy – the kind who feed tidbits to political parties to keep them sweet. 
Finally, hedge funds were an interesting concept, but to have such power operating unregulated in a ‘highly regulated’ market basically skewed the market beyond any reason. As such they had a natural advantage against a competitors (i.e. the pension and 401 funds of the rest of us) that they stole (yes, stole) huge amounts of money from ordinary people and gave it largely to already obscenely wealthy individuals. All hedge funds should be forced to declare all trades and all positions at all times and should be fully regulated like any investment manager.
So, there you go, it’s not really that difficult is it, Mr Brown, Mr Obama, Mr Sarkosy…
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Where Did The Video Long Tail Go ?

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments

There has been one underlying theme to my past ten years plus in internet TV – the lack of advertising in the industry. Or, rather, the lack of interest by media companies.

Actually, this is no longer true. There’s plenty of money being spent in the US on Internet TV at premium rates (as high as $60 CPM), but the problem is that all of this is still being bought with an old world mindset. (To be fair, this perhaps isn’t surprising considering that traditional TV is still being bought for $20-25).
But, television is still about scale. It’s about piling them high. Not about targeting.
So, you might run a very ‘successful’ Internet TV station with 500,000 unique users a month all interested in ‘Subject Y’. Great, but the trouble is this audience is spread over 102 countries, with the highest viewing (85,000 per month) in the US.
Now, the problems being:
1) All ad budgets are national, not global
2) 85,000 is ‘far too small’ to be considered by a mainstream advertiser in the US (or rather, their media agency, where such tiddlers are a pain in the proverbial monthly reporting spreadsheet).
Such concepts as ‘targeting‘ do not even come into play.
The old world just can’t help themselves. But, there again, maybe the answer is an aggregated video service, a kind of long tail Google for the video world… Any ideas, anyone ?
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Back To The Farm

Sunday, March 29th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments

It’s interesting to see the BBC placing its long running Countryfile series on prime time on BBC1. After the tidal wave of home and garden programmes, which would have seemed a total anathema to a commissioning editor ten years ago, it seems that the next wave is back to the country.

However, the concurrent decision to put a country walking programme on late Sunday morning shows how far from the farm the schedulers live – er, that’s when most people who enjoy walking and enjoy the country are, er… walking in the country. But perhaps even the schedulers are now feeling that time shifting is the norm.
So, the turkeys have voted for Christmas and welly boots and HD cameras at the ready for the rest of us…
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Back To The Farm

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Serial Killers

Sunday, March 29th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments

One of the major difference between UK and US TV is the length of series. In the UK they last for seven or eleven weeks. In the US a 26 part ‘season’ is often the norm.

The longer season can work for ‘series’, where there is often only a tenuous strand from one programme to the next, such as the West Wing or the CSI franchise, but can struggle in ‘serials’ such as the iconic Twin Peaks, or the current hit Damages, which both seem interminable.
On the other hand, The Office was a series that was well translated to the US, but taking the original handful of programmes and churning them out as an endless formula resulted in a distillation of talent.
We are, it seems, one people divided by TV formats…
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Serial Killers

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