MMO-focussed site Massively is also covering the smacktalk coming from Corey Bridges, founder of Multiverse.

A while back someone said that it would take at least a $1 billion dollar super project to take on World of Warcraft. But maybe, as it was with the Roman Empire, the wolves at Blizzard’s gate will be countless smaller tribes made up of the so-called unwashed hordes.

There’s something very appealing about talk like this. It’s the “root for the underdog” spirit in me that really yearns for this kind of turnaround. It also doesn’t hurt that i happen to be the very underdog Bridges describes - a self-funded start-up with MMO ambitions. Of course, his talk should all be taken with a grain of salt, being that Multiverse is a MMO-building platform targeted at those same small teams to whom Bridges makes these promises.

Bringing Down the Old Guard

For part of Bridges’ talk at SXSW08, he mentioned how technology is chipping away at the root of the film and music industry power structure. i’ve had that conversation many times in the past few years, and in posts like To the Victor, the Eyeballs. The trouble that many of us young bucks face is that so many Old Guard media moguls are entrenched in antiquated ways of doing business, and have been getting so fat on those tried-and-tested methods for so long. The industry can only move forward with the help of two people: Mr. Retirement and Mr. That Guy Just Got Hit by a Bus.

Nielsen Shenanigans

Nielsen ratings are a great example of these entrenched business practices that are effing with my ess. The Nielsen company’s bread and butter is their television ratings system. It’s based on a sample. A sample of country-wide random families are assembled and given a box that tracks their teevee viewing habits. These data are used to keep certain shows on the air, and to pull certain other shows off the air. The shows that remain on teevee are, invariably, the ones that i don’t enjoy (Third Rock from the Sun, Everybody Loves Raymond), while the truly great shows get the axe (Arrested Development, Firefly).

Enough of my personal preferences. The flaws in the Nielsen system are many and varied, and should be obvious. Here are a few stories friends have shared with me that punctuate these problems:

1. Nielsen requires its families to expend a bit of effort. A friend of mine was in a Nielsen family in the 80’s. You had to tell the Nielsen box who you were, when you started watching teevee, and when you stopped. More often than not, his family would leave the teevee on after the show was over and absent-mindedly wander out of the room, forgetting to clock out of the system. Hours of television flickers by with no one watching it, and Nielsen carefully collects the data on what little Stephen, age 9, enjoys watching. (Dateline NBC, Stephen? Really?)

2. Sample groups might generate accurate numbers when you’re talking about the really big shows (CSI, Cheers), but when it comes down to the niche-market programming, things get a little flukey. A friend of a friend had a show on Canadian specialty teevee. Someone he knew became a Nielsen family. He offered to pay the guy to watch his show whenever it was on, to help the ratings. All of this is, of course, highly dodgy and quite possibly illegal. But whatever. Listen:

Every so often, the Nielsen guy would forget to watch the show. Maybe he took ill, or went out for a cheeseburger or whatever. As a result, the show’s ratings would dip wildly, reflecting a loss of hundreds or thousands of viewers. The show’s fate basically hinged on whether one guy in the Nielsen sample remembered to watch it.

These days, we have the technology to determine who is watching a show and for exactly how long. We can also tell that viewer’s name, age, sex, geographical location, favourite bands, and deodorant preference. We can do all of this. We can determine all of these things right now with content we deliver on the Internet. But are Internet-streamed shows worth more to advertisers than the same shows airing on teevee? Somehow no.

An Empire of Misspent Money

Here’s another one: i used to build advergames targeted at kids. The sales guys, also part of the Old Guard, made their money based on the number of unique gameplays on these games. Certain games didn’t fare so well in that department, but when i looked at the stats, i’d see that they had (for example) a fifteen minute average play length. Fifteen minutes. That’s fifteen minutes of a kid actually interacting with your brand, staring at your sugar cereal logo and piloting your venerable mascot around the screen.

How much would a fifteen minute commercial cost you on teevee? A damn site more than you would pay for a game. And the kicker: Nielsen can’t even tell if the viewer is watching the commercial! Advertisers are paying all this money for a thirty second passive experience that viewers may not even be looking at, while a fifteen minute experience that engages the player and has him focussed intently on your brand sells for a minute fraction of that teevee ad. Sick sad world.

How Fast can a Dinosaur Run?

i was talking with someone from a large teevee station yesterday. He’s no spring chicken, but he’s embraced technology far more quickly than the stuffed suits at the top of the food chain. He told me that the station had a show aimed at young, hip viewers, which they scheduled for Friday night at 9. Logically, the young hip viewers were out cavorting and having anonymous sex instead of watching this show, so the show was cancelled. An impassioned viewer wrote a letter explaining that the slot was terrible but the show was great. She said that she and all of her friends (and she said they were many) taped the show via TiVO or PVR while they went out to do Jell-O shooters and make out with some guy who said he had an MBA.

Nielsen claims to know a thing or two about viewers’ PVR habits, but again, it’s all based on their nonsense sample system. They’re not factoring in things applications that auto-filter out commercials, and especially teevee piracy. If Nielsen was really a company worth its salt, they’d be tracking and researching torrents and filesharing to get a far more accurate picture of the content people actually value.

Don’t Fear the Reaper

Retirement or death. These are the only two factors that will allow the entertainment industry to move forward in a significant way. The Old Guard has to take its rapidly-dwindling pile of money and move over so that those of us who understand technology can move into the space and have our turn.

i think Tenacious D put it best:

Dio has rocked for a long, long time,
Now it’s time for him to pass the torch.

It’s time to pass the torch,
You’re too old to rock, no more rockin’ for you.
We’re takin’ you to a home.

And finally in 40 or 50 years, our grandkids can complain about how slow we are to adapt to nano-gleep gleep, and how we can’t use flying motion-sensing holo-wizwands for crap.