I had heard of Kanopy, but not its competitor, hoopla. Until writing this, I had never used either and after polling some friends I’m guessing that’s probably the case for most of you as well.

For the uninitiated, Kanopy and hoopla are completely free streaming services, with no ads, available with your local library card. It works like this: We pay taxes, a tiny portion of which is used to fund the library system. The libraries pay the streaming services every time you watch something, and the streaming services pay the studios to license content.

The content on Kanopy is not going to blow anyone away, but it’s better than most entertainment content on free AVOD and FAST streamers, and it’s ad free. A lot of library content, but they also have deals with Criterion, A24, A&E, and Kino Lorber. A ton of classics, documentaries, BBC, a curated section for kids, and movies I would actually enjoy watching.  I was not as impressed with the selection of content on hoopla, but it did include comics, ebooks, audiobooks, and music, and they do have support for offline viewing where Kanopy does not. Kanopy’s parent company, OverDrive, also owns Libby, which has ebooks and audiobooks.

What was most shocking to me though, is that according to Kanopy’s GM, Jason Tyrrell, in an interview in IndieWire – it is profitable.  This blew my mind, considering that we don’t pay for it (directly), and it’s not like public libraries are swimming in cash. There is a catch, in that you can’t watch an unlimited amount of content. It’s limited for a large portion of the catalog, due to the pay per view model the libraries use with Kanopy.  But still, it’s sort of amazing that this is profitable, while Peacock, Paramount+, Max, and Disney+ are not.

I have started a new job. Here’s what I learned on the hunt and hopefully someone out there gets something out of my experience:

• I have LinkedIn Premium so I can see who has viewed my profile, and while that is useful, I don’t know if that’s worth $29.99/month unless you are actively looking for a new job. Even then, it’s questionable. I did not find the additional search filters to be useful, and most InMail gets ignored. I certainly ignore most InMail.

• I took a year off, so I had a gap in my resume, and no one seemed to care. I was honest about it when asked, and obviously, I could have been eliminated from contention before I got an interview and would have never known, but I was getting interviews at a pretty good clip, and never felt like it was a hindrance.

• There were 3 different jobs I was interested in, qualified for, and I had an interview with a recruiter, but ultimately had to pass on because it meant that I had to move across the country. I thought we were past this in a post-COVID world.

• I was surprised to see so many on-site jobs (or at least hybrid 2-3 days per week). Everyone has different preferences and opinions on remote work, but the average American spends 54 minutes/day commuting, which is awful. Getting that hour back (1.5 hours for me personally) has been life changing. I think a lot of post-COVID return to office movements were covert self-layoff schemes, and I’m sure some companies need to justify expensive leases. My guess is that long term, people are going to vote with their feet and self-sort into whatever they prefer. I’m fine with 2-3 days hybrid if there is a reason for it, but I think it’s a mistake to rule out full remote and shrink your potential talent pool. Also, don’t make me come into an office to sit on Zoom all day. We all know at least one person who is forced to come to an office and never interacts with someone face to face because the rest of their team is located elsewhere.

• Shortest interview: less than 5 minutes. We spoke briefly about salary requirements, and then it was revealed to be a position that I could not take for ideological reasons. I ended the call. Some people have no problem clubbing baby seals for a living if it pays well, but I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night. I had the luxury of not being forced to pursue something I had a problem with, but many people don’t. Don’t judge, it’s tough out there for a lot of folks.

• Matthew Katz over at Freewheel says you must make a custom LinkedIn URL. It’s probably a good idea to have a professional looking personal email account too, and not something like techbro420@gmail.com.

• I was talking with a former Turner colleague, about another former colleague who had recently died. I noted that I went to the service, and shared that at least 40 Turner employees and alumni showed up. She told me that no one at her current company would be coming to my funeral if I got a job there. Consider if that sort of thing matters to you and ask questions in interviews that give you a feel of the place you’re applying to if it does.

• Weirdest application question: What is your religion? The dropdown had all the major ones, “None”, and “Other”. “Other” did not give you the opportunity to write-in. It was framed as an optional, demographic question, along with other traditional D&I stuff, but is this even legal unless you are applying to be clergy?

• LinkedIn search is terrible. Search for “foo”. You get some proper matches, but also some jobs without “foo” in the title, description, skills, etc. Later, you will stumble upon a job with “foo” in the description that didn’t show up in your search.

• When posting on LinkedIn, you have no idea what it will look like when it is condensed down and the “…see more” is injected, and you have no idea how close you are to the 3k character limit until you exceed it. Use a preview generator, it’s insane that LinkedIn doesn’t have this.

• JobsInAdTech.com is worth a follow, check out the site as well. Video-Dev slack has a jobs channel. AdTechGod is worth a follow, slack here, there’s a jobs channel.

• I did not use an Easy Apply bot, but they exist, along with other automated application services. I have no idea if this is against LinkedIn ToS. I would use something like this if I wasn’t looking for something niche and was reasonably sure I wouldn’t lose my LinkedIn account over it.

• You should follow Evan Shapiro and read his Substack. Same for Alan Wolk and his outlet, TVREV. I’ve also been enjoying NEXT TV and Puck.

• The signal to noise ratio on the LinkedIn feed is atrocious. More on this in another post.

• It’s getting kind of bleak out there. I’m seeing some people post some pretty personal, heartbreaking stuff. Check on your friends, take care of each other.

A post randomly came across my LinkedIn feed over the weekend that had gone viral1 about hero ball – not Kobe Bryant hero ball, but the practice of employees going to extraordinary lengths to save a project or a system.

According to the post, a “no-heroes” memo went around Google, which states that “when there is a system that takes too high a workload to be kept alive, let it fail. Don’t be a hero.” You let it fail and fix the root cause postmortem. Since LinkedIn is on the internet, it immediately devolved into ACKCHYUALLY contrarian hot takes in the replies, which largely missed the point. Obviously, this isn’t about life and death. I chuckled and kept scrolling.

But it did make me think of March Madness Live (MML), the app for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament that you are currently filling out a bracket for, and the biggest thing I worked on every year, taking up most of my time in Q1. And while no one dies if something catastrophic occurs, there was a non-trivial amount of money on the line that everyone is acutely aware of.

So, I reluctantly played hero ball. A lot of people on shared platform teams like me did as well. Repeatedly. Not by choice or in search of accolades (I’m quite lazy in my personal life and would much rather shut my laptop at 5 and play Xbox), but I can’t let things fail. In my 30s, this trait turned from an asset (I’m dedicated!) to a fault (I wish I had more free time to spend with my family). It’s hard to completely dismiss it, as I was promoted 3 times in 5 years. I hired other broken people like me, forging ahead until I completely burned out and snapped a decade in, committing to some semblance of work/life balance. A large part of my ability to do that was that I had surrounded myself with competent people I trusted, so I wasn’t in a position where I really had to sweat it as much.

The first MML after I left Turner, 3 months after my last day, there were some feelings of Stockholm syndrome2. Another year removed, its more akin to survivor guilt. Most of this was because of the great people, who you end up spending more time with than your family, and in my case, stuck in a windowless pit. I don’t remember Henry Hoyle’s bridge code anymore, and it sort of makes me sad, like another chapter in my life has ended.

I’ve come to believe that the only way “no-heroes” doctrine works is to actively cultivate it, from the top down. Which means – you can’t just let things fail in a company without that culture and expect everything to go well for you. Maybe no one holds it against you, maybe they do. Maybe true balance is achieved by not caring either way, but I can’t imagine it would have gone well for me if I intentionally let something with MML fail.

I try to walk away from every job with one big thing I learned. In my first coding gig out of college, that thing was: No one is going to come tap you on the shoulder and say, “you’re great, here’s your raise and promotion”. In other words, you must advocate for yourself, or you may end up on the pay-no-mind list. With Turner, I think the lesson is: take care of yourself, and finding balance is on you. At some point, it becomes your fault for continuing to play hero ball.

To all my Turner friends out there, or anyone working tentpole events: good luck, Godspeed, and hopefully there isn’t too much overtime.

Best Buy, which like the mall1, I haven’t been in for over a decade, has finally ditched physical media. News also broke last week that Disney is licensing their production of DVDs, Blu-ray Discs and 4K Ultra HD Blu-rays to Sony. I am a realist, this was inevitable. So while I lament another step towards the end (old man yells at cloud, film at 11)2, there are legitimate reasons why everyone who loves movies should be concerned.

The quality of streaming is sometimes not that amazing, and often dependent on your gear and internet connection. Do you walk into someone else’s home and recoil in horror at the Soap Opera Effect3? If so, you’re probably with me on this. You’re going to get better, deeper blacks on Blu-ray, and there will be less compression versus a stream over the internets. That means less black crush and fewer artifacts like pixelation, macroblocking, banding, blurring, etc. The exception might be a 4k stream with HDR vs a standard Blu-ray without HDR, but that’s not really an apples to apples comparison. A 4K UHD Blu-ray (with HDR) is the gold standard.

The other issue is audio, and a good primer on the different formats available is here. Blu-ray was way out in front on audio, with streamers on mostly lossy formats, but they have been rolling out more and more titles with Atmos (still, compressed). So there’s still a gap, but it is closing.

But none of this really matters. For every one of me, there are likely 100 or 1000 people who either don’t care, or can’t tell the difference. And the ecosystem is not designed for me, it’s designed for everyone else, where convenience is valued over quality, and it’s irrelevant for bingeing a 90s sitcom anyway. A lot of cheap TVs purchased by price sensitive consumers are garbage compared to the high end OLEDs. No one actually calibrates their TV, and a lot don’t even flip over to the best picture preset, usually “filmmaker” or “cinema”. Motion interpolation is left on. The placement of the TV is suboptimal and proper lighting is not considered, leading a lot of people to take a pass on a superior OLED for a brighter, cheaper backlit LCD/LED they saw in the store. TV speakers are not great. A sound bar is better. A receiver and surround-sound system is best. So if you’re the average consumer, you probably won’t notice the banding, or the missing details in a darker scene anyway.

The one time I can think of where this actually mattered was Game of Thrones, season 8, episode 3 - “The Long Night”. You may remember this as that episode where everything went black and you just heard dragon noises for a minute. The uproar on the internet was instantaneous. The compression, along with the congestion of millions trying to stream from Max, was an example of where streaming just couldn’t keep up, and everyone noticed, with the problem exacerbated by the shortcomings of many people’s setups mentioned in the previous paragraph. But that’s one extreme example, not the norm.

Which brings me to the larger problem: Our ability to watch these films in the future may be dependent on streaming rights that regularly come and go, bouncing between services you may or may not have. Websites exist solely to track these moves, and many sites do regular monthly features on this shuffling.

Take Gladiator for example: Gladiator left Netflix at the end of 2023. It resurfaced on Paramount+. 4K? Nope. Special features? Nope. Extended cut? Nope. Any extras whatsoever? Nope.

Meanwhile, the 4K UHD Blu-ray from Amazon is on my front porch tomorrow via Prime for $22, with everything missing from Paramount+ and more. You could at least rent it in 4K, but that feels sort of stupid if you’re already paying for Paramount+. The only place you can digitally purchase the extended cut in 4K is DIRECTV, which I believe requires you to have a DIRECTV subscription. It could be worse though, as many notable films4 have fallen into rights black holes that make streaming impossible.

But even if you could purchase it elsewhere, I wouldn’t advise it. Because you don’t really own it, you license it, and that license can be revoked at any time5. We’ve seen this repeatedly with books, movies, and music, even from big tech companies that still exist. This is not a compelling case against piracy.

So what can we do? Support boutique, indie outfits like Criterion (there is no better provider of physical media) and Kino Lorber - which will probably be all that’s left in another decade. If you’re looking for a replacement for the old school Netflix disc in the mail service, check out Scarecrow. And if you’re lucky enough to have a brick and mortar store in your town, like I do with Videodrome6 in Atlanta, support them, and hope that one day, we see a vinyl-like resurgence of Blu-ray.

2

One of the first non-kids movies I remember seeing was American Ninja. Sporting a full Blutarsky, 0.0% on Rotten Tomatoes, this cinematic atrocity (and it’s 4 sequels) was a staple of kids growing up in the mid to late 80s, as it was available for rental at Blockbuster, and despite the R rating, contained no nudity, key for parental permission. Ninjas? Check. Gratuitous violence? Check. America? Fuck yeah. If you have any edibles available, you can stream this masterpiece for free on Pluto.

Once this door had been (roundhouse) kicked open, I was able to beg my mom to take me to action movies in the theater, mostly early 90s classics like T2, Speed, True Lies (underrated), Lethal Weapon 3, and Die Hard 2 (1 > 3 > > > 2), where my real love of movies began. I got my first DVD player in late 1999 or early 2000. It was a nice, early Panasonic model that I could not afford, but was able to acquire with an open box discount at Circuit City (I had no idea this place still existed until I made that hyperlink). The Matrix was the first movie I watched on it.

Computer Science at Georgia Tech has a lot of free elective hours, so I got a minor in Film Studies. I fixed computers at Best Buy (pre-Geek Squad) and worked at Movie Gallery to pay bills and feed the addiction with employee discounts. With the Playstation 3 came my first Blu-ray player. I wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate it until a few years later when I could afford a decent plasma TV (RIP), but at this point I stopped caring about seeing films in the theater.

I romanticize all of this in a way that someone who grew up with streaming does not. The THX Deep Note will always give me goosebumps. The difference in the VHS on CRT that I watched as a child to the 4K UHD Blu-ray on OLED of today is genuinely mind blowing. Outside of the theater - this is as close to the director’s vision as it gets. And I fear that when physical media inevitably dies, we will be unable to recreate that vision at home and be left with whatever the streaming services are kind enough to offer us, which may be slightly distorted, missing the nuances in the shadows, if they offer it at all.

Some observations on the WBD/Disney/Fox “Spulu” (sports Hulu) app -

• This hastens the demise of the cable bundle, where the core demo is mostly boomers and sports fans at this point. It’s all going down eventually, but for now it’s still a profitable business and this seems…short-sighted? How does this not cannibalize linear (sub fees, ads) revenue? I assume someone smarter than me did the math and it checks out, at least in the short-term. I just can’t see how this ends in a long-term win for all the publishers involved.

• If Spulu is too successful and linear subs fall off a cliff, WBD, Fox, and Disney are in trouble.  If no one signs up because it ends up being too expensive, they are also in trouble. Evan Shapiro called it a “hail mary” – they band together, make an offensive play and maybe they aren’t bidding each other up for rights, but any of the leagues could take a walk over to Apple, Amazon, YouTube, or even Netflix. So Spulu needs enough subs to land in some mythical Goldilocks zone where they aren’t accelerating cord cutting to the point it hurts their bottom line too much on the linear side but getting enough “cord nevers” to justify the existence of the JV. Good luck with that. I think I would struggle with a project that can’t be too successful or else it would harm the company, but to be fair, the pricing (a good discussion here) will likely have a bigger impact on that more than anything else.

• Distributors can’t possibly be pleased that one of the last things keeping people that don’t qualify for Medicare on bundles is losing some of its value proposition. I wouldn’t want to be on the publisher side the next time those distribution deals come up.

• Pissing off the NFL seems like a bad idea. Publishers need the NFL way more than the NFL needs them. Goodell will do whatever it takes to protect the shield and its revenue, and the lawyers are getting involved, which is not great. John Cassillo explains why the NFL is so salty here. They could probably kill the entire JV by threating to take a walk over to our big tech overlords, right?

But assuming this app launches, does it make sense?  As a diehard1 football fan, you would need Spulu (rumored to be $40-50), an antenna, and NFL+ Premium at $15 per month.  So that’s $55-65, and another $12 if you add Peacock/Paramount+ instead of the antenna2.

Youtube TV – 72.99 + 10.99 for RedZone, so $84.

So, there’s some savings there, if you don’t care about the linear non-sports content and time shifting3 via DVR.  Julia Alexander breaks down the economics for the rest of the leagues here, and with an antenna and Spulu alone you’re in pretty good shape for NHL, NBA, and MLB—unless you’re dependent on an RSN for your local team. 

My hot take: We will never see this app launch. 

Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and author of the anti-monopoly Substack BIG, stated via Twitter that the joint venture was “pretty much designed to violate the antitrust laws”.  According to Bloomberg, the DOJ is already scrutinizing it. In our current regulatory environment, I wouldn’t bet the farm against Lina Khan and the DOJ.

Craig Moffett also hopped on CNBC to predict that “at the very least, this would seem to violate the most favored nation clauses that prohibit the programmers from offering better terms and conditions to another distributor, even if that distributor is a JV of the programmers themselves. I would be surprised if there aren’t some lawsuits.” Pluto has already filed suit.

And finally, Matthew Belloni said when the news first broke: “Will it actually launch, or was this just a press release to juice the Disney and Fox earnings calls?” I’m leaning press release.

In sum, the DOJ will be breathing down their necks with antitrust concerns, distributors are furious and will likely sue them, and the NFL is not happy about being commoditized and kept in the dark. On top of that, Spulu can’t be too successful, or else it will kill the cable bundle much faster than anticipated and impact the parent companies negatively. This does not seem like a recipe for success.

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