The ways people are consuming content on new video platforms remind me of how I sometimes eat one of my favorite foods – shrimp fried rice.

Traditional linear TV is consumed the way fried rice is intended to be eaten.  The rice, the veggies and the shrimp or chicken or whatever meat is at hand are consumed together.  However, online clips and on-demand video in general tend to promote a bit of cheating.  It’s like those occasions when I’m not all that hungry, and after a few bites I find myself starting to skip over the vegetables and rice, seeking out the shrimp and just eating those.

Think YouTube, and here we are hunting out a clip of one particular segment we like from a TV show, the rest of which didn’t impress us.  And we certainly don’t want to see all of those commercials that ran in the program.  So we go online and find a clip of what we want.  Yum, tasty shrimp!

Even if we watch a full episode of a program on cable on-demand or on Hulu or a network website, we’re still enjoying a distilled version with few, if any, commercials.  An hour long show often magically becomes a 45-minute experience.  And if the streaming software allows it, we may skip around in that and watch only the program segments that particularly interest us.  It’s not just the cable or broadcast network ads that vanish.  Those couple of minutes or more from each hour that the cable systems sell to local advertisers are gone, along with the local inserts in broadcast shows sold by your local affiliated stations.

Lots of people make their living selling these local availabilities.  You can hardly blame them if they feel threatened by digital technology.  There are new revenue opportunities, but there may be periods of starvation before we can develop them to the point of company and personal profit.  For example, “dynamic” on-the-fly commercial insertion in on-demand TV offerings at either the network or local level is still more a promise than reality.  And we haven’t even touched on the effects of DVRs in the viewing mix.

Meanwhile, audiences are learning to skim the cream and pitch out the skim milk.  Pass the shrimp.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

Did you know that Sears used to sell houses?  Yep, right out of the catalog.  When I was growing up, our neighbors two doors down lived in a house they had bought from Sears.  It was one of the older houses in the neighborhood, and they had bought it back in the 1930s.  They said it arrived on a truck with all of the parts pre-cut and ready for assembly.  I don’t know how Sears erected houses.  Probably used a local contractor.

By the 1950s houses were no longer in the catalog, but they were selling their own brand of cars.  They were built by Kaiser and carried the Allstate brand, the name of the insurance company Sears owned at the time.

The point is that Sears knew what business they were in.  They knew they were not in the clothing business or the hardware business.  They were not in the department store business or the mail order business.  They were in the merchandise supply business.  The precise mix of offerings might change with the vagaries of the market, but if you wanted it, chances are they had it and would figure out a way to get it to you.

Now The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are squaring off against each other.  The Journal is going after a share of the up-market New York general audience long dominated by the Times.  It’s a good time for everyone involved to remind themselves what business they’re in.

They are not in the newspaper business or the broadcasting business or the film business.  They are in the business of supplying entertainment and information.  If you want it they should have it or be able to get it for you and get it to you by whatever means suits you best.  I have a feeling that the people at the Journal and the company that owns it know this.  I’m not sure the folks at the Times do.  I have a nagging feeling they still think they are in the newspaper business.

Neither The New York Times nor The Wall Street Journal are simply newspapers.  They’re media brands now.  Any of their execs who don’t get this probably never lived in a Sears house.

Photo Credit: The Arlington, circa 1908-14, Sears Kit House (Model No. 145); (priced from $1,294 to $2,906) Sears Archives

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

How long does it take for a format or technology to migrate from one medium to another?  Take wide-screen pictures for instance.  In the early 1950s they were in your neighborhood movie house.  Only a half-century later, wide-screen TVs were on display at your local electronics emporium.  I have a feeling 3D is going to move a lot faster than that.

3D was around in the early 1950s too, but not seriously.  Used mostly in low-budget novelty films, audiences considered it a joke and it soon vanished.  One of the first was Bwana Devil, a jungle epic with spears thrown directly at the audience for shock value.  It was perhaps best known for its ad slogan “A lion in your lap.”

This time the studios are very serious about 3D.  They’ve discovered a gold mine.  Witness Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.  And the TV set makers aren’t sleeping through it.  They’re pushing their own 3D systems.

The cinema 3D technology is essentially an improved version of the 1950s spear-tossing films in that the glasses worn by the audience are “passive.” They contain a lens material that filters out the portion if the picture each eye is not supposed to see.  The new TV systems tend to use “active” glasses, mechanical devices that open and close shutters rapidly to admit the proper images for each eye.

How long before 3D is an everyday item for the home?  I’m guessing less than 10 years.  Expect the consumer electronics marketers to position it as necessary for “true HDTV.”  That lion is coming to your living room.  Don’t let it scratch-up your furniture.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

Vegetables are a natural and necessary part of a well-balanced meal.  My mother felt that way and made sure there were veggies on my plate and that I ate them.  I grew up listening to radio, watching TV and reading newspapers.  For all three, news coverage was a necessary part of their content.

It was there not because their audiences liked it, but because their audiences needed it.  This was what made media outlets different from hardware stores.  There is nothing wrong with being an honest, hard-working hardware merchant, but it does not involve the public service obligation traditionally associated with media and journalism.

Ever wonder why news audiences are so old these days?  They’re the last generations who grew up thinking news was necessary to round out a well-balanced media meal.  Younger people are hard to find in the audience because news coverage has been marginalized out of their list of priorities.

Radio was the first to turn programming into a fast food menu.  Five minutes of news hourly shrunk to two minutes outside of AM and PM drive, then to no news outside of drive time, then to no news at all.  News is a downer.  It makes listeners tune to stations that don’t have news.  I’d better not carry news on my station either.  If people want news, let them listen to the all-news stations.  Except that few under the age of 60 do so, and we’ve raised a couple of generations of Americans who, when it comes to knowing what’s going on in their communities, governments and world affairs, are as dumb as a scrapyard full of cast-iron fireplugs.

The transition from print to digital is not the central cause of the newspaper industry meltdown.  The problem is that so many of their younger potential readers have little interest in newspaper content whether it’s in print or online.  It my parents had removed vegetables from my plate and told me I could find them in the kitchen if I wanted any, a green bean never would have passed my lips.

There is importance in telling people not just what they want to know but also what they need to know.  As programmers, we often have lost sight of this and may have killed journalism in the process.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

Having given away the store on their websites, newspapers are talking about going back behind a pay wall.  It didn’t work before, so, of course, it will work this time.

Few seem to be discussing the broader picture of how the internet has changed the way people use newspapers.  It’s more than simply substituting electronic delivery for the carrier throwing the paper through your rose bushes.

Except for a handful of news and political junkies, consumers of print newspapers read no more than one or two papers a day.  So far, nearly all pay models seem to assume that internet users follow this same pattern.  They just want their daily New York Times or Washington Post fix, and now they get it for free without paying that annoying subscription fee.  Force them to pony up and they will.  Well some will, but many won’t because of a changed usage pattern.

Henry Ford did more than build lots of cheap cars for people.  He freed them from having to go downtown on the trolley company’s schedule.  The internet frees me from having to rely on one or two newspapers, regardless of how good they may be.  I can read a columnist I like in the L.A. Times, catch an editorial cartoon in another paper and a backgrounder on energy policy in a third. I’ll be happy to pay a reasonable rate for the news and features I read, as long as I can read them from whatever publication strikes my fancy today.  Tomorrow I might want to sample a different one.  News grazing might be a good term for it.

Maybe the club model would work.  Many of us have belonged to gyms or clubs where our membership entitles us to privileges at associated facilities in other cities.  So let’s say I subscribe for internet access to The Boston Globe, paying about what I would pay for a print subscription.  But my subscription also gives me access to the Web content of The New York Times, the Journal-Constitution from Atlanta, the Chicago Tribune and dozens of other papers across the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and other parts of the world who are members of a subscription co-op.

Now that I would pay for.  But I don’t want to be limited to one or two online newspapers just to avoid a hunk of dead tree being thrown through my rose bushes.  C’mon publishers, you can figure out how to do this.  BMI, ASCAP and SESAC collect fees for music rights owners from thousands of radio and TV stations and other venues, and they started long before the invention of modern computer-based accounting systems.  Find a way to shift the money around, and I’ll be happy to pay for my news nibbling.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

See also: Thinking Outside of The Polybag, Cynopsis Weekender, November 2005

There’s something about “the pitch” that fascinates me.  Billy Mays was probably the greatest TV pitchman.  His hard-driving, move-the-merchandise-now approach was as basic as advertising and selling gets.

My first paying job in broadcasting involved direct sales.  It was the summer between high school graduation and my first year of college.  I hired on at a radio station as a minimum-wage gofer.  I worked nights, and one of my duties was taking the direct-marketing phone calls.

Few of the station’s regular advertisers wanted their commercials run at night.  Most people watch TV in the evening and the radio audience is slim, so we filled the breaks with direct sales “pitch” commercials.  We called them “PI” spots, which stood for Per Inquiry.  Rather than being paid a regular rate, the station was paid for each order, or “inquiry” that the station received.

This was before 800-number toll-free calling centers or online ordering.  Customers would call the station that ran the commercial.  It was my job to take these calls, which then would be passed along to the advertiser who filled the orders.  If you were a bit pudgy, we ran a pitch for a product that was supposed to help you lose weight.  Underweight?  We had one that would help you put on some pounds.  Our best one was a health insurance company that paid us five bucks for the contact info on each prospect that called in saying they wanted more details about the product.

I even worked the idea into my short-lived stand-up comedy career.  It was a pitch for a mythical product that would instantly trim off 10 pounds with each pill that you took.  I cautioned prospective customers of the danger of taking too many, such as the man who weighed 300 pounds and swallowed pills by the handful until he had taken 35.  He not only disappeared completely, he left a hole in the ground 10 feet deep.

Pitchmen have helped keep us honest as purveyors of media and advertising.  They remind us that much of what we do has a lineage dating back to medicine shows.  The entertainment draws the crowd.  The pitchman sells them the elixir.  Mays captured the magic of being both the show and the pitch.  He’ll be missed.

Maybe I’ve seen and heard too many pitch commercials.  I have this fear that someday I’ll be struggling with the problem of earwax buildup.  There’ll be a knock on the door.  I’ll answer it, and there will stand the ghost of Billy Mays holding the Awesome Auger.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

Producing a newspaper must be a humbling experience these days.  Struggling to stay afloat while watching your classifieds section dwindle to something thin enough to use as a cheese slicer can’t be fun.  The newspaper business has never been this bad, right?  Wrong, very wrong.

It depends on the point in history you pick to make your comparison.  We like to compare to the decades since WW II, the glory days when the big metro dailies have been licenses to print money and their owners counted the profits by the hundreds of millions of bucks.  Despite first radio, then television and finally the internet having the advantage for breaking news, newspapers still dominated local media markets.

This period of great riches was the exception.  To appreciate what the newspaper business has been for most of its history, warp back a hundred years or so.  Today’s papers look prosperous compared to the publications of the 1890s.  There was no competition yet from electronic media, but most newspapers were pathetic looking beasts.

I found this out while doing some historical research involving early papers in my hometown in Virginia.  Despite having had a population of only about 10,000, library-preserved copies and newspaper directories revealed that during the 1890’s the town had six newspapers – two dailies and four weeklies.  I suspect that none of them were profitable on a steady basis.  By 1900 all six had faded away and been replaced by more aggressive papers that invaded from nearby larger towns.

As to the purists who are shocked that some newspapers are selling ad space on the front page, be aware that many early papers sold all or nearly all of the front in small card ads.  Particularly popular were pitches for patent medicines and miracle healing machines that used magnetic rays to cure everything from fatigue to lumbago (whatever lumbago is.  It sounds like some sort of ballroom dance.)

Newspapers of a century ago had to be scrappy.  Only the most scrappy, ingenious and energetic survived.  Maybe the industry could use some of those publishers, editors and writers now.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

Imagine that on your next trip to the supermarket all organization of goods has been lost.  Everything is in piles on the floor with no particular order.  Fresh bananas are next to canned peach halves, while sliced peaches are over on the other side of the store next to laundry detergent.

Now imagine that you’re in the food business, and your canned chili is stacked between cat food and toothpaste.  Take one more mental leap and imagine that you’re in the business of producing original Web series, and your webisodes are trying to grab shoppers in a marketplace as disorganized as our imaginary supermarket from Hades.

That last wrinkle wasn’t too hard to imagine because that’s pretty much the way things are.  And you thought trying to promote audience growth for a new cable network in a 500-plus channel universe was a tough job.  At least with cable and satellite there is a functioning program guide.  The search and guide options for the Web are useful mostly to people who already know what they’re looking for.

It’s the chicken-and-egg challenge that the major cable nets suffered in their early days.  Without promotion you can’t get an audience.  Without a significant audience you can’t get advertisers.  Without advertisers’ bucks, you can’t afford to promote.  And the venture capital folks aren’t exactly salivating to give your risky venture lots of backing.

I keep seeing reports of clever Web series that launch with great audience levels for their initial episodes, followed by sharp audience drop-offs.  Without promotion and some sort of reasonable program guide/gatekeeper function, the audience that stumbled across the first episodes or came by word-of-mouth soon drifts away to the next attractive pile of merchandise on the supermarket floor.

There is tremendous creative potential for original entertainment material produced for the Web.  The laurels will go to whoever can organize and promote this jumble of content riches and make it a business.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

The inauguration and lots of economic news have hogged the spotlight lately.  Maybe that’s why the passing of a cultural institution went nearly unnoticed last month.  Early January saw the closing of the last of the original Woolworths stores.  800-plus outlets in the U.K. employing more than 30,000 people bit it.

The British operation, no longer a subsidiary of the American company, outlived the North American stores by more than a decade.  The U.S. Woolworth company has gone through a number of changes and now soldiers on as a specialty store operator called Foot Locker, Inc.

In my parents’ youth, Woolworths were a big deal.  Most towns worth their salt had at least one Woolworths dime store.  (As a sad commentary on what’s happened to our money, the stores closest to that format now usually are called dollar stores.)  There were a multitude of competitors, Kresges, Grants, Newberrys to name a few.  But Woolworths seemed to define the category.  The Woolworth Building, opened in 1913 to house their headquarters, was one of New York’s first skyscrapers and still is among the city’s tallest.

The classic variety stores never adjusted to the shift in retailing from central business districts to malls and strip centers.  They were lost somewhere between the ultra-low-priced, limited-selection dollar stores and the big box operators such as Walmart.  Woolworths tried with Woolco discount stores but couldn’t seem to get the hang of it, and the Woolcos closed.

Woolworths and their direct competitors were more than present-day dollar stores – larger, with a greater range of merchandise.  And there was the food service.  Most had a lunch counter/café operation where generations of downtown workers went for a moderate-priced lunch.  I was among the millions of kids who knew that good behavior on a family shopping trip could be rewarded with a lunch counter stop for a killer chocolate milkshake or an earth-shattering banana split.

A Woolworths lunch operation could even be a tourist attraction.  Wichita, Kansas claimed to have a Woolworths with the longest lunch counter in the world.  Once on a business trip I stopped in just to see it for myself.  It was awesome.  Multiple Cub Scout troops could have been served milkshakes all at once at the stools of that monument to short-order cookery.

In 1960 another Woolworths had a more profound effect on society.  At a Greensboro, North Carolina store four African-American college students couldn’t see how it was fair that they had to stand while eating and couldn’t sit down and be served like people whose skin color happened to be different.  So they sat down at Woolworths lunch counter to seek the food service to which they and all other well-behaved human beings should be entitled.  A little bit of action that helped touch off a lot of needed change in America.

Time passes and times change.  Woolworths and other eateries got their acts together on racial matters.  And in the same month we said goodbye to the last Woolworths and we said hello to the first African-American U.S. President.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

New Year’s predictions I avoid doing, but 2009 is too weird to pass up.

Does anyone think this year in the media and entertainment business is going to be pretty much like 2008 or 2007?  There’s some scary stuff being bandied about.  Some are predicting that major markets could be without print newspapers this year or next.  Others forecast high levels of industry layoffs.

So can we make money in our business in 2009?  You bet we can, just don’t count on making much of it from selling new gadgets.  The money to be made will come from adding value to the gadgets we have now.  Don’t hype hardware; sell software.  Concentrate on rising above competition to capture and stimulate target audiences.  Content won’t just be king, it will be emperor of the world.

Consumer electronics makers won’t like hearing this, but the folks at Best Buy probably will be spending a lot of time figuring out ways to make more shelf space for add-ons and apps that can make the laptops and smartphones they sold last year seem like new.

And since we’re likely to have less money to blow on new houses, cars and high-end electronics, we may find we’ll have more bucks for simple pleasures – more music or other paid downloads and streams, more trips to the cinema, more impulse purchases of cable VOD movies.

So my budget can’t stand an upgrade to the newest home theater marvel.  A pleasant ride on a pretty day can make me forget I’m not driving the latest model car.  This won’t be the year of the car dealer; 2009 will be the year of the car wash.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.