Over the Top But Not Enough

The Asia Pacific PayTV Operator Summit takes place in Bali in late April. Set at the former Ritz, recently renamed because of a property dispute, this is not a gathering to be missed by television execs whose wives for once do not mind coming along. Some of the key industry people in the region turn up for the event, and the two-day conference is packed with cleverly titled sessions, positive but with a reflective twist: “The Fragility of Growth”, “Gatekeepers to Digital Noise”, or “Digital Deliverance”.

The conference starts on an upbeat note, with speakers happily talking of growth and sharing tips for success, while the audience savors the good news with free refreshments, sponsored lunches and daily surprise gifts in the rooms. (One such gift – an HBO-branded suitcase–scared the sh***t out of most delegates. Having discovered it in their room they alternatively thought it was 1. a bomb, 2. not their room, 3. an industry girl-friend not realizing he was there with his wife). And so the guests are fed and entertained from morning to dawn, including the priceless sight of a local network boss karaokeing “My Way” and a Top-Chef finalist making their dinner.

Unlike stingy European industry events, held in halogen-lit venues of gloomy London hotels, this particular summit is literally over the top… yet, if you ask me, not nearly enough.

Over the Top, you see, is the issue that should be the main concern of PayTV industry. To put it simply: PayTV operator charges consumers for premium TV channels and his key business advantage is his control of the gateway. The operator decides which channels the consumer can and cannot get. Because his offer has to stay competitive, he must lure the consumer in with a basic (free) bouquet of channels. Recently he had to add other “goodies” like Internet connectivity. This simple “added-value”, which was supposed to increase his ARPU, might become his downfall: now the customer can buy a SmartTV, connect it to the Internet, and get the same premium content – channels and on demand – directly via the TV set, bypassing the operator’s gateway altogether.

The Customer Blues

The not so recent Grammies 2012 left me thoughtful. I didn’t follow much of the usual noise, as the results of the event were so obvious, with Adele looming large on every music industry radar and all over YouTube for months before the show. I’ve also never really cared for Grammies which seem both “closed circle” and “lowest common denominator” at once – the two things I dislike most about the show business. It was refreshing to read the New Yorker article the day after, the opening line of it: “There was little to redeem the 54th Grammy Awards.” I’ll spare paraphrasing but highly recommend you Google it during the precious work hours you spend on Facebook and other 2.0 distractions.

Having read the article, I decided to refresh my memory by watching promo clips for the two songs that won awards: Adele’s “Rolling in The Deep” and Kanye West/Jay-Z “Otis”. And it struck me, watching these videos back to back, that being so far apart they are actually much alike, their message being the destruction of the lifestyle that the artists in question represent.

Let’s start with Adele who is known to appeal “to all ages” – which means she is extremely popular with housewives. There she sits in her video, in the middle of an empty living room, dressed like a perfect middle aged hausfrau, her make up and hair all done and oh so desperate, water dripping from the ceiling, drop by brain-numbing drop, into a myriad of transparent water glasses. And then she just starts throwing things. Breaking the faceless Ikea homeware. Thrashing it up against the wall. Her truly amazing voice, surging up from somewhere really deep, resonates with cups and dishes breaking and breaking and piling up on the dusty floor, and they better call the cleaning lady soon as this little dame ain’t picking anything up in the near future.

The Year of Good Dragon

In 2004 Nike ran into some trouble with its commercials in Asia. It hit the first hurdle in Singapore where over 700 hundred street-art posters had to be pulled down, after 50 or so citizens complained that graffiti hooligans have vandalized their sanitary clean bus stops.

This little glitch was nothing though, compared to the fate of a multi-million dollar commercial starring the basketball prodigy James LeBron. The Hong Kong movie spoof “Chamber of Fear” featured LeBron fighting a number of opponents, Bruce Lee-style – culminating with him knocking out the ultimate enemy, “self-doubt”. The trouble is, much as the spot strived to imitate the martial arts B-movie classics, its Western creators have completely missed the point. When Chinese authorities banned the commercial for “insulting national dignity” and disrespecting “the motherland’s culture “, the Western media thought this had to do with Le Bron roughing up a grey haired sifu in the first round. They still did not get it. The real trouble was the fourth challenge, where Le Bron beats up a dragon.

If we were to look for one symbol, one single archetype to best summarize the distance that separates the West and the East, the Dragon would certainly make the shortlist. In Western mythology he is one evil spirit, spitting fire from its many heads. The hero’s task is to fight him, tame him, and eventually slay him with a nice thrust of a spear.

2Q12

The Holiday Season is upon us. Just back from South East Asia, where the temperature never fell below 28 and I had a dragon-fruit juice every morning, I am now gastronomically jetlagged and thermally out of sync. On the flight back I picked up a hefty volume of Haruki Murakamis 1Q84, a book about a parallel universe. I keep staring at it’s sci-fi cover, a mix of Bladerunner and Wong Kar Wai.

A part of me is still in Hong Kong and Singapore, where the future is now and the past always present. Back home I browse through technology news every morning, only to find them already passé. In search for new ideas, I watch an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, and it occurs to me that the only other guy I know who doesn’t blink is a friend from MIT who also made millions right out of college. It must be a genetic “tell”, a mark of 2.0 genius.

Out of Fashion

I do not know how relevant fashion is to you. Do you know that this season the fuzzy stuff is in? You know, the fluffy white element which leaves white residue on your car seat, and, when you put it on, makes you look like an unshaved mutton version of LMFAO? No, perhaps you do not know what I am talking about, and the images of last spring’s runways are not floating through your brain like a Style.com slide show. Then you might not care to read the rest of this column, which is too bad because the point I’d like to make matters, even if the last designer purchase you made was when Ralph Lauren still went by Ralph Lifshitz.

Fashion, as Oscar Wilde defined it with great authority, “is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Over a century later we still stick to this calendar, though for the stars and the insanely wealthy we also have couture and cruise collections (not to mention pre-fall) to make life more bearable in between the sacred four weeks of spring and fall runways.

As the fashion editors jet between New York, Milan, London and Paris, there’s a lot of excitement and a desperate search for new words to describe something no one involved really needs – new clothes. The editors still live under the impression that it is their duty to tell a woman what to wear. They do so by ingesting hundreds of catwalk parades and regurgitating a succinct version of what’s in this season – kind of like my fuzzy white thing (which I have bought, by the way, and that’s how I know about the car seat).

Yet what the editors do not know, as they jetset in IRL (“in real life” – e-speak), is that their world is being slowly eroded by the new media geeks they have hired to run the online pages of their magazines.

Dangerous Tides

A curious thing happened at my final high-school exam. “ Why don’t we skip the questions”, smiled the literature teacher “ You’ve worked so hard, I don’t even need to test you. Just read me your favourite poem”. A straight A student with a mousy demeanor, I happily recited a beautiful piece by Sergei Esenin. I will never forget the teacher’s eyes turning wide and slightly scared, as the final verse went something like this: “I cherish a dream that one day… I too will slit someone’s throat… They will lead me in chains up the rocky slope, where the free mountain air will cure my sadness…”

Brain Games

A sultry Tuesday afternoon in Bali. A gentle breeze flutters the white curtains of my beach bed, making it look like a magic white carpet floating above an untouched beach. I should really be doing yoga, or at least getting up to get a drink, instead of waving the pool boy over. Or should I?

Star Wars 2.0

The entrance to Google’s new Parisian headquarters is a non-descript door on a non-descript street. There is no sign, just a shabby printout saying “Are You Feeling Lucky?” Once the reception buzzes you in, a makeshift cardboard hallway leads you through a leafy courtyard of a sprawling hotel particulier…

Once Upon A Wedding

An hour or so after two billion people, none of whom I know, happily endured an endless royal wedding broadcast, I made myself a cup of tea and decided to wait for the return of the British sense of humour.

A typical offspring of Russian intelligentsia, I am a born and bread anglophile, brought up on Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, not to mention the collected works of Mine Reed, a British writer who seems to only be read in Cyrillic (The Headless Horseman, anyone?) From Wilkie Collins to Rudyard Kipling, from Conan Doyle to Lewis Carroll, my childhood’s bookshelves careened under the weight of hefty tomes, all telling stories of a far off land that was, most certainly, the centre of the universe. There was a swing in my grandpa’s dacha, where I would sit for hours composing yet another novel – they all began at the Tower of London which I assumed was the only acceptable backdrop for a self-respecting story…

When Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed To Tweet A Battle…

Alice in Wonderland was the first book I ever read, and throughout my childhood it comforted me against the absurdities of the world. The main absurdity of all was the Soviet Union, a universe of subtle lies transparent even to the eyes of a twelve year old. At the age when everything appears exactly as it is, albeit a lot bigger, how else do you vote in an election with only one candidate, respect some obviously senile man as he rambles on TV about his illustrious leadership, or take seriously a teacher as she extols the virtues of the economic regime, while you queue for hours to buy a piece of meat and know you will never be as popular as the girl in your class whose dad brings her Levi’s from the West?

Shaolin Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

This is a story of two boys born in Chinese countryside around 1964. One comes from a destitute family, is sickly and frail and almost dies at the age of two, like his siblings before him. The father sells his only treasure – a calligraphy brush – to pay the doctors, but they can’t help. As the boy’s shattered parents carry him home to certain death, a man in rags stops them and asks why they are crying. He tells them to unwrap the child and with a few needles brings him back to life. Convinced that the stranger was a Bodhisattva, parents take the boy to Shaolin monastery where he reveals an uncanny talent for martial arts and becomes the pride of Shaolin kung fu.

Broke In China

The trendy restaurant at the Grand Hyatt Beijing is called Made In China and looks just like what I imagined China to be like. It is one huge and shining lacquered box of red and black, every wall a backdrop from a Hong Kong filmset. A glass window separates us from the brightly lit kitchen, where smiling faces of chefs and sous-chefs emerge from clouds of steam, as they roll their dumplings and dissect crispy ducks with happy abandon…

Rain And Other Liquids

No place is more appropriate for a TV convention than Venice in November. Quiet and melancholy after the tourist season, the city is perched precariously on its own reflection. Every morning grey waters swallow the sidewalks, while sleepy shop owners lay out battered wooden planks outside their doors, so that once glamorous metropolis suddenly looks like a flooded bathroom. Come mid-day, the water releases the pavement back to its ancient grandeur, and the shining city yet again seems frozen in time, untouched by centuries. But the next flood is never too far. Venice is a great metaphor for the evolution of things… television among them…

You are what you click

On a rainy October morning, the port of Cannes was swelling in waves, both sky and sea the color of charcoal. I was drowning in my MIPCOM agenda. It was a hurricane of my own making: meetings overlapped with meetings, Wednesday clients showed up on Monday, while important looking strangers dropped by to set up appointments which I would not be able to keep. The moral of the story was clearly “Don’t change assistants mid-stream” – something I did, quite stupidly, a month before the convention…

All Hail the Little Brothers

In a recent study by a US company PC Tools, 25% of those surveyed said it was OK to be online during sex. Now that’s the news to brighten any advertiser’s day. The incessant complaints we hear about media budgets shrinking, and online advertising never quite getting there – and here you have it in a nutshell: consumers have never been an easier prey…

Desperate Spies

When in the midst of a sweltering Moscow summer Prime Minister Putin sat down with the newly repatriated Russian spy ring at an “undisclosed location” (probably somebody’s dacha), they spoke of life, promised to seek out the enemies who betrayed them, and sang a song “Where does our Homeland begin”. Any Russian born in the 20^th century knows this song by heart, as it is as much a part of the folklore as Anna Karenina or Stolichnaya. Before the days of 24 and Mad Men, it crowned the soundtrack of the first Soviet spy TV series “Shield and Sword”. The telefilm portrayed a glamorous Russian spy with a heart of gold and nerves of steel, as he successfully convinced Nazi Germans for a whole of 4 episodes that he was one of them…

Generation Who?

I abhor demonstrations and parades, and refuse to belong to any movement or group whatsoever. I have never voted in my life – not since they kicked me out of a young pioneer summit in the 5^th grade for laughing during the keynote. I staunchly distance myself from any ideology or social construct, be it feminism, nationality or digital networking. I reject any attempt to organize me in a group with a name or a mission, and have a tendency to unwillingly insult people when they sound too righteous for my taste…

All That Bling

When the Los Angeles police broke up the “Bling Ring” last month, it took all of a few days for its members to become famous. The intensely photogenic teenage burglars pillaged celebrity homes armed by Internet maps of star homes and TMZ.com information on when their intended victims will be out at some red-carpet event. In between their busy schedule, the high-school robbers found time to hang out on the beach, Twitter about offers from Playboy and sign up for reality TV shows. They hawked some of their loot for cash, but kept most of it to wear and show off to their friends…

The Box Wars

It is always fun to report a revolution. Particularly when the old king was getting doddery and, frankly, a bore – and the new ruler is young, digitally savvy and chosen by the masses. What a great story it makes, and I am certainly glad to have a story on my way back from MIPCOM in Cannes. The convention has become so repetitive over the past years, I was worried I will once again wind up writing about anxious TV executives searching in vain for answers in the prisons of their minds…

The Sad Fate Of Comedy

On a recent flight to New York I wound up watching a movie so bad it was actually painful to follow. Sadly, it reminded me of a similar film I saw on an overseas flight just a few months before. I have trouble sleeping on planes, you see, and reading for seven hours requires a really good book. So, sooner or later, I end up turning to the movie options…