We'll Always Have Chicken

DRIVING AROUND CENTRAL Florida last week was a bit of an unsettling experience.  A few of years ago, everywhere you looked there were blue tarps, and smashed trees, and the occasional FEMA trailer -- legacy of a recent hurricane. 


This time, the signs pointed to the financial tsunami that hit Florida harder than a lot of other places in the U.S.  Foreclosure sales, unemployment stories, storefronts left fallow and vacant, and even boarded up walkaways -- where people flew their underwater mortgages, seemed to be everywhere. 


Nothing caught my eye more, however, than the liberal sprinkling of men standing on Street Corners, waving signs for a retail chain. "This location: 70% off! Closing Sale! Everything including the fixtures!"   I counted four or five of them, advertising different locations where Everything Must Go, during my week away.  It was a sobering antidote to the Black Friday hype.


I'm the first to admit that my mind for business has never been a steel trap.  I think back to high school and my Intro to Business class. I don't remember a thing about it -- except for the teacher holding up a computer punch card, and soberly intoning, "no matter what happens, you're always going to need to know how to use these."


Seven days in the sun and the American mediascape, looking back on things here, following the testimony of this group or that group at the CRTC just made me realize with full force how much the supposed Captains of the Industry here are a bunch of old white guys waving punch cards.


First, let's talk about Hulu.


Like a lot of Canadians, I've experienced Hulu only sporadically. (The site is geo-blocked from Canada.) Now, even most of the proxy server workarounds you once could use to see content don't work.  They never worked that well anyway -- as the processing power the proxy sucked up made the video you'd watch stutter if you were on anything other than a screaming fast computer on a wicked fast broadband connection.


But last week, I got the full Hulu.  Late night, catching up on Modern Family, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Family Guy -- and a score of other shows.  A couple of streamed ads. Perfect playback, even on the "light" connection where I was staying.  It worked great. Give me a Boxee or Apple TV interface to my TV -- or hell, WiFi enabled TV, and I am over the moon and don't need another thing to get all the tv I want.   And the only reason I want to make that jump to the TeeVee is demographic -- teens and twentysomethings are just fine leaving it on the computer. 


A massive library of current content. Ready right now.  Whenever I want. New eps posted the day after they first air.  Without fail. Robust interface and playback.  Wicked.


Meanwhile, back in Canada, representatives of the broadcast networks, in pushing their "value for signal" -- made the following suggestions:  they want to extend the Simultaneous Substitution policy so that they can now "delete" programs that they buy the rights to, if they play on a U.S. channel at a different time.  So if you're a cable subscriber, you should get used to seeing a lot more blue screens and "this program not available" warnings.  Hmm. There's value for you.


Well, no matter. Maybe you could watch online too. Rogers just announced a Canadian Hulu, right?  Oh.  Uh. Except it only works if you're a Rogers subscriber. And there's not a lot of content. And like the clunky on Demand channels where programs disappear without rhyme or reason, the interface is kind of lame.  So, uh, it's not like Hulu at all, really.


So it's like the comparison of broadcast websites all over again?  With the Canadian offerings shoddy, scattershot, hard to navigate poor shadows of the American versions? 


Yup.


Hmm.  Let's explain that "value for signal" again?


But let's not be churlish here.  it's not just the broadcasters who've been running annoying ads for months. Let's look at the Cable side.


Bright House Networks is the cable provider in Central Florida.  The picture is sharper and clearer.  There are no artifacts. The HD channels "pop." TCM is a revelation -- I never realized how compressed and shoddy the quality of the signal I was getting from Rogers was.   Plus, when you call Bright House, they're efficient and friendly.  You book an appointment, you get a two hour window and they're always there.  They're pleasant to deal with, and customer focused. 


I don't know a single person in Canada who would use that phrase to describe their cable or satellite provider. 


What else?  Ah yes. There's the matter of the digital transition.  The U.S. has more or less completed the transfer of signals to the digital spectrum. Those analogue frequencies are being auctioned off. Everything's proceeding apace.


In Canada? One by one the broadcasters revealed that they don't really have much of a plan to make the transition, and that there's no way they're going to make the 2011 deadline the CRTC set. The deadline they've known about for years.


So there's going to be a delay in auctioning that spectrum here. So innovations in telephony, more communications choices for Canadians... none of that is going to happen here yet. Hurry up and wait. 


So the Canadian picture seems to be: poor BDU service & innovation, substandard on demand delivery, bad pictures, bad customer service, bungled "Hulu-like" service launches -- everything, in fact, relying on the protections afforded by the fencing of the CRTC, while not living up to any promises or responsibilities under the Broadcast Act. 


Broadcasters solutions to the new reality that people want to be able to watch programs when they want, how they want? Lock down and restrict them more. 


Who are these guys?


I don't mean to be impertinent, but it strikes me that there might be somebody you guys could talk to to get over this hump you all seem to be having with thinking outside the box a little bit, as the world you've known comes down around you.


Maybe you could talk to us.  


Creatives.  


Crazy idea, I know. But think about it.  A few years ago the knock on Canadian shows was that they looked cheap. And they were cheesy. And slow.


So we had crews that busted their ass and upgraded their skills. D.O.P.'s raised their lighting game.  Now, you rarely see the kind of flat, Shoppers Drug Mart lighting you used to see on Canadian TV.  Instead, there's the brilliant and vibrant frames you see on Flashpoint, or The Border, or Being Erica. 


Writers heard the knock of the slow moving story -- and many of us committed to our craft, studied, and worked to try and figure out a way to come up with excitingly paced stories that can still deliver at a lower budget.  Do we always get there? No. But we get there a lot more often than we did. We saw the need, and we changed. We also looked at the structure of how things worked and said, "well, if you want something that has pacing and where the creative fires on all levels, you have to empower us a bit."  So we slowly began the process of educating a reluctant industry here about what a Showrunner is, how it works in the U.S. system, and why it has a better chance of delivering your audience a vibrant product than the bad old way of doing things. 


There's been lots of pushback on that, of course...but there are also lots of veterans who've stuck around here who are more than capable of taking on that role.  We just need to get to the point where they hire them off the top -- not once the show is already in chaos in production.


There were other changes too.  A recognition of the importance of source music, of faster editing and more dynamic shooting.  Producers and writers on the other side of the aisle studied the lessons of Reality TV, and changed the kinds of shows they pitched.   Quietly, around the margins, Canada became a place that does great lifestyle and reality shows.  


I also watched HGTV when I was in Florida.  And I saw, literally, that half the shows on the air there are made here.  That doesn't get written about a lot. But it's true.  There's also an explosion in animation, in tween shows, in children's. Quietly, around the margins, creatives who live the most precarious of existences here have looked at the challenges of the market over the last decade -- the collapse of first-run syndication, squeezed license fees, the rise of internet-ancillaries -- and tried to adjust our way of doing things.


It's not perfect. We're not there yet.  There's deadwood and nepotism and people who shouldn't be doing what they're doing, sure. But at the same time, there is Battle of the Blades, Flashpoint, Corner Gas, Dragon's Den... I could go on... while broadcasters get up there in Gatineau and proffer no new ideas and refuse to even acknowledge the new world they're already living in -- the post Hulu, TV Everywhere world that there's no going back from -- Canadians are watching homegrown programs in numbers not seen in years.


And events like a FIVE MILLION audience for the Grey Cup game show that -- whatever the broadcasters want to claim -- that there is a hunger out there for something to watch that isn't just a rebroadcast of a U.S. show.  Canadians will watch them if they're good.


The problem is, of course, that our partners up to now have had a vested interest in, well, making sure they're not too good. And even when they are, claiming that they don't make money.  


It's pretty ironic, in fact, that just about the only part of their business these guys have mastered as well as their American counterparts seems to be the "Hollywood Accounting" part.


The comparisons and contrasts from my week in Florida were eye opening in the extreme.  But it wasn't until my last night that it all came together -- when the power went out.


Day after Thanksgiving, seven p.m.  Whoosh.  Total darkness.  Too early to go to bed. What to do?  


Rummage through the hurricane kit. Find the batteries for the radio.  Put 'em in, and tune the dial...


...And there, in the dark, for forty minutes or so, we listened to the clear, bemused voice of Ira Glass and This American Life.  


A couple of great stories -- about Poultry and the Supernatural.  A hiliarious anecdote about an Orthodox Jew who goes to heaven only to find out that God is, in fact, a huge chicken.  And the archangel Michael's job is to feed him and keep his cage clean.  "All that praying, all that suffering, and for what? God is a chicken!"


"Not A Chicken.  Just... chicken."


See, I'm really not doing it justice. And that's the point. Reaching back to an earlier form, the rules are different, the delivery different, but what was there, gloriously alive and vibrant and entertaining -- was the story.  The story will survive, no matter what form or challenge we throw at it.  For those of us whose business is story, that's got to come as a comfort, no matter how backward and antiquated and maddeningly out of touch the captains of the industry seem, it's we, who have rolled with the punches and changed what we do already over the last few years...it's we who will survive.


So maybe the business mind isn't the be all and end all. Because a business mind that can't see the change coming and get on board isn't going to be around much longer.


Don't believe me? 


Man I wish you could have seen those guys on the corner.  70% off. Everything Must Go! Fixtures Too! This location only.


This location on Hiawassee, or International Drive, or South Conroy, or Colonial...


This location only. 


Everything must go.


Blockbuster Video.