Bandwidth

2009.04.23 - Thursday

Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Trees?

Here is an absolutely fantastic article on the cold, hard realities of the so called "Web 2.0". I knew the situation was bad for the YouTubes and Facebooks of the world, but I had no idea the actual financial losses were so dramatically high. Unless someone comes up with a game-changing business model soon, I'm not really sure how all of this isn't going to lead to a second, and probably worse, dot com crash.

Look, I love YouTube and Facebook, but let's be honest about them for a second. YouTube is mostly junk videos. Sure, it's a great way for certain individuals to self-promote. I've seen lots of cool little animations and edited clips that suggest people have lots of talent out there. The problem is that no one is, or ever will, pay for any of it. The internet doesn't just exist out there in the ether. It's a hugely complicated computer system that draws massive amounts of power and runs on inconceivable numbers of computers which are constantly replaced and upgraded, and all of that costs huge amounts of money. For the most part service providers have been willing to foot the bill, but how much longer is that going to continue. People aren't emailing or chatting anymore, they're using Skype, video conferencing, transferring computer backups to remote servers, and downloading films and television shows. The infrastructure for that kind of activity has to come from somewhere and it has to be paid for by somebody.

All of those concerns are only about basic access. Companies like YouTube and Facebook have their own servers to maintain, data to store, and offices filled with employees to run. Money, money, and more money. Are people so naive that they actually think advertising is somehow covering the cost of running their favourite websites? It's ridiculous. These companies are hemorrhaging money on faith; faith that this big internet experiment will somehow make them all rich beyond their wildest dreams. Apart from speculative stock prices, however, has YouTube earned Google a single dollar? Has Facebook made even a penny? Well, apparently the answer is "no", and I just don't see how that's going to change.

The internet public isn't going to start paying for access to YouTube. They're just not. Personally, I might consider paying a small monthly fee for my Facebook account, but I would have to assume an improvement in services, total lack of advertising, and my complete personal ownership of any and all content I publish to the site. Facebook users have viciously lashed out at attempts by the company to leverage its users' photos, videos, and writings for profit. If the company can't use that, what have they got? If they started a subscription business, would the site even be useful anymore once 80-90% of its user base abandons it for still-free competitors?

The bottom line, it seems to me, is that no one has figured out how to really make money off of the internet itself yet. It's given us fantastic access to online retailers selling real, physical goods. We've seen the wonderful possibilities of simple, cheap communication over distance. What we haven't seen yet is the internet as anything other than a massive enhancement of business and social activities that have actually been going on forever. We haven't seen anything that would make me want to part with hard-earned money to keep in touch with my friend Chris in Mexico, when I can just as easily pick up a phone for pennies, or send a picture or video email for free. Until that changes, I don't expect Google to start raking in the profits from YouTube, or Facebook to climb its way out of spending as much as $2 million per week on server and storage upgrades. All I see right now is a huge bubble, and sooner or later all bubbles pop.

Watchmen

2009.04.10 - Friday

I finally got around to seeing "Watchmen" in theatres on Monday. I have to admit I wasn't particularly excited to see it, which explains why it took a few weeks. I was surprised, however, to find a mostly full theatre, but I've never found Vancouver to be a great model for viewership numbers. Given the film's subject matter, I'm not at all surprised at the sharp dropoff it experienced at the box office. I walked in knowing very little about the story, and honestly I'd never so much as heard of this "classic" graphic novel before talk of a film version cropped up. It's easy to see why. Even amongst the comic book lexicon the story and characters are niche, and this film was obviously made specifically for fans of the book and no one else.

Personally, I only found two of the characters to be interesting. Dr. Manhattan, the blue, God-like apparition who can do pretty much anything he wills, and Rorschach, who's basically Batman without the conscience; he beats criminals nearly to death, or flat out kills them without remorse in the name of justice. He's even got the same voice, taken to the extreme. In one of the film's more memorable scenes, and after he's been imprisoned for his ultra-violent vigilantism, Rorschach beats and mutilates a convict in the prison cafeteria, and while being restrained by guards, screams at the other prisoners in a way that only a psychotic hero can: "You just don't get it! I'm not in here with you, you're locked in here with ME!" Yeah, he was pretty awesome.

Dr. Manhattan is interesting on a more cerebral level, as an exploration of what someone who's given the powers of a God, literally, would be like. There's no insanity, no mindless slaughter of people, no need to prove anything to anyone. He just becomes more and more indifferent, eventually leaving Earth all together because he just doesn't care anymore. He says at one point that "the world's smartest man is no more a threat to me than the world's smartest termite", and that's exactly how it's played throughout the film. The effects used to create Dr. Manhattan are really well done, too, so it was a pleasure to see each of those scenes for that reason as well.

As far as the other characters and the plot goes, I honestly did find it kind of forgetful. The other heroes could have been anyone, and I never really cared about what happened to them. I guess they were good for a couple of cool fight scenes. There is an interesting moral conundrum at the end, however, that I hope left a few people talking. At nearly three hours, however, "Watchmen" is definitely too long. I'm sure a lot of the comic's fans appreciated some of the extended scenes and details, but a lot of it did nothing at all to advance the story and could certainly have been cut down if not dropped altogether.

I was glad to see the style of the film wasn't too digital, however. Zack Snyder, who also directed "300", makes do with quite a few real sets and it definitely helps to separate"Watchmen" from the "moving comic book" genre and into the realm of normal films. Still, there are obviously entire scenes and compositions ripped straight from the pages, and that's fine, but I think trying to do a stylized environment like "300" with the real-world settings of "Watchmen" would have spelled disaster. Personally, I wasn't crazy about "Sin City", and the recent "The Spirit" was, by all accounts, a steaming pile, so I really do hope the overly stylized comic book film goes away for a while. "Watchmen" still grossed over $100 million domestically, and should enjoy a good run on disc, so I have no doubt that it will make lots of money despite its being pushed in the media as a flop. It's a good film, but it's not amazing, and there are times when it does take itself too seriously. Despite comic book fans relentless attempts to push their beloved medium into the realm of classical literature, most of the time, it's just not good enough.