McAdams On: Regulatory Relief

Regulatory intervention makes for a bad business plan, and broadcasting unfortunately is so wound up in regulatory relief Houdini would be challenged to free it. The industry has become reliant on must-carry, retransmission consent and various other shards that keep competitors from eating it alive. Now NBC stations are looking down the barrel of a retrans rival from whom they must also negotiate network affiliations. They’re now on the front line of a rapidly evolving media environment in which dependence on traditional regulatory structures yields ever-greater vulnerability.

A merger of Comcast and NBC Universal would represent the first time a cable operator would take majority ownership of one of the nation’s largest broadcast networks. It would put non-O&O NBC stations carried on Comcast systems at the mercy of a mega corporation with interests diametrically opposed to those stations. The head of their affiliate board yesterday implored Congress to create yet another regulatory structure by which retrans and affiliation negotiations are completely separate.

Few things seem more unlikely. Congress has no say over the proposed merger. Comcast chief Brian Roberts and NBCU head Jeff Zucker just showed up on Capitol Hill to be polite. Members of the House Commerce communications subcommittee were polite back. They got a bit of a spleen venting from Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) over in the Senate Judiciary Committee. He will therefore look tough on big business to the folks back home.

Other lawmakers will posture accordingly. Roberts and Zucker will promise to be nice. Zucker will then be relegated to the content community where hubris is a requirement. Roberts and his deputy Steve Burke will repair to the castle in Philly and craft a business-integration plan that will assure the further growth of Comcast. The company started 47 years ago with 15 people, when Brian Roberts was four. It now employs more than 100,000 people, in spite of regulatory controls on rates, content and access to its infrastructure. It could just be that Roberts and Burke know how to compete. That would seem to be the whole idea of capitalism, until someone gets knocked off the top of the heap.

Broadcasting enjoyed exclusive residence to that rarified air for many decades. Now its advocates have to witness its desperate attempt to slow its descent by clutching at regulations. For years, that community has wondered why broadcasters didn’t mass market free DTV long, long before the transition date. It could have emerged a true competitor to cable and satellite. But that didn’t happen. It instead opted for retrans, the long-term sustainability of which seems highly unlikely.

Comcast-NBCU is a simultaneous shot over the bow of retrans and the affiliate model. The future of TV stations might well be 24/7 generators of local content for any type of platform from cable to ATSC-enabled iPads. Whatever it becomes, it’s unlikely to be limping along entirely dependent on regulatory relief. It’s seriously time for the broadcast industry to stop looking back.

McAdams On: Broadband Flimflam

WASHINGTON: Everyone has a cell phone, so service providers have but one way to increase revenues–sell more features. One of those features is full-motion video, e.g., TV. Cell-phone TV is just getting legs, so the last thing service providers need is a bunch of broadcasters offering the same thing for free. One way to make sure they don’t is to relieve them of spectrum, and two lobbies in Washington have figured out how.

The CTIA–The Wireless Association representing the big cell-phone service providers, and the Consumer Electronics Association, are proposing that over-the-air TV be moved to a low-power, distributed transmission scheme. The pair claim that TV stations with distributed transmission won’t need as much buffer spectrum, aka white space. They suggest repacking broadcasters in order to free up the white space for broadband.

Let’s not even bother with the fact that the white space has already been handed to Google and Microsoft. Let’s play like that regulatory abuse never happened, and that we can all have free broadband and cell service on Google’s ad-supported Nexus.

The broadcast lobbies objected to the DTS strategy, saying it would never provide the same coverage as high-power broadcasting. The technology for DTS was approved by the broadcast industry’s standards body to fill gaps digital signals don’t reach. TV stations across the country continue to work out reception issues from last summer’s DTV transition, when substantial areas of coverage were lost by many moving to VHF assignments.

Whether or not a distributed transmission system could adequately replace the current one is beside the point. Redesigning the broadcast television infrastructure while the last redesign continues is a waste of taxpayer money. The federal government put up a few billion dollars to transition public TV stations and the public to digital television. Towers, transmitters and antennas weighing tons have been put in place for a channel plan that was conceived of within the last five years. Studios and broadcast facilities have been outfitted with the necessary, corresponding digital technology.

The fed helped pay for the digital transition because the fed ordered it. The fed ordered the digital transition to give wireless providers more spectrum, which they got last year and have yet to fully use. Now who’s spectrum-squatting?

The CTIA and the CEA, like a lot of other anti-broadcast groups, are saying that using the spectrum for broadband would generate billions of dollars. The estimates are stellar. In this case, the pair say that spectrum freed by repacking for DTS would bring anywhere from $36.5 billion to $65.6 billion. From whom? AT&T and Verizon, one would presume. Few other companies have $65 billion lying around, and the software guys know how to get spectrum for free. The CTIA/CEA filing suggests that such lucrative auction proceeds could help underwrite this new broadcast transmission system, though they don’t factor in the cost of the one that’s not yet entirely completed. Granted, cameras wouldn’t have to be swapped out, but just about everything necessary to transmit a signal would.

The many, many tons of gear Americans just paid for to accomplish the digital transition? That would be called, “scrap.”

There is the economic argument that nationwide access to broadband has the potential to increase small business opportunities for people in even the most remote areas. That might well be true, but phone companies will wrench underwriting from the fed to serve remote and rural communities, just like they’ve done for years with voice service. Estimates for the universal broadband service fund haven’t been floated. The end cost to the consumer has not been floated.

Money is the singular reason that every U.S. household, school and business does not already have access to broadband. It’s not at all about spectrum. The wireless industry wants to hold everyone hostage to exorbitant monthly subscriber fees for using what is purported to be the public airwaves. And by marginalizing broadcasters, they eliminate potential competition for mobile video services.

Tooth fairy, Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, free market.

McAdams On: The HD-to-3DTV Transition

HDTV is about to become as passé as Zip Drives, dot-matrix printers and vacuums that have to be pushed around. Or so it seems from the rhetoric surrounding 3DTV. It’s compelling, no doubt. The migration of television to a digital infrastructure opened the medium up to the same sort of fluidity characteristic of all silicon-based industries. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, remains the same for long, and the obsolescence curve keeps shortening. TrueCycle, a consumer electronics recycler in Pasadena, Calif., says the average lifespan of a computer in 1997 was four to six years. By 2005, it was said to be less than two years, “which means that one computer will become obsolete for each one put on the market,” McAdams wrote from her antique Dell.

Now television as a platform is much the same, precisely because the hardware has morphed into a computer platform. Around half of U.S. television households bought high-definition TV sets within the last four years or so. Prices for HDTV sets are about half of what they were even two years ago. A 46-inch, 1080p, 60 Hz Samsung is less than $900 at Walmart. That TV would have easily run $1,600 or more in 2008.

So it is by necessity–at least in part–that the consumer electronics industry has wrapped itself around 3DTV. The phenomenon is also a natural progression of the possibilities presented by silicon, and a certain breed of engineers are of the George Mallory school of motivation. They are pursuing the technical challenges of 3DTV precisely “because it is there.”

Predictions abound about 3DTV; that it will take hold quicker than HDTV, that the 3D format itself will be a multi-billion business within two years time, etc. “Avatar” certainly advanced that mileage gauge, though it’s arguably the first widely accepted 3D movie, and James Cameron spent years and at least a quarter-of-a-billion dollars on it. It looks good for a reason. A lot of other 3D preceding it–not so much. And the early attempts at 3D sports, meaning football in the United States, generated mixed reactions. “Some of it was really tough on your eyes,” offered Shon Lucas on last year’s 3D coverage of the BCS Championship Game. Diane Pucin of The Los Angeles Times noticed the “jerky cameras, unusual angles and just a general sense that it was an experiment with kinks not worked out.”

To be fair, that was a year ago. A lot has happened since then, but there’s miles to go according to the TV experts who came together recently at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. There are multiple ways of formatting 3D, for one thing. There’s no single mastering standard, though the work is under way. Inserting ads is an issue unto itself. Perhaps most complex is the challenge of syncing 3D video images properly for human visual perception. That is, not making people sick.

What likely happened to Shon Lucas is similar to what affected folks at Cowboy Stadium Dec. 13, when a 3D version of the action on the field was displayed on the venue’s 160-by-72-foot video screen, Pupils are a fixed distance apart, and vision converges at around 60 feet, where vision naturally becomes two-dimensional. The big-screen 3D effect caused people’s eyes to veer out of alignment. With home 3DTV, this so-called “vergence” occurs at around two feet behind the viewing screen, giving large venues an on-screen appearance of a diorama.

3DTV is exciting as much for the technical challenges as for the format itself, but I don’t look for it to supplant HDTV any time soon. Half of the TV-equipped households in the country have standard-definition TVs, and a significant portion of those have converters or a pay service hooked up to a cathode-ray tube. Those of us in the press, and certainly the consumer electronics and video industries, will hype 3DTV as if it’s the commercialization of cold fusion.

It is not. It will be an enhancement in a constantly shifting landscape of evolving media platforms, one day coming to an iTablet near you.

McAdams On: 2010

The first week of the new year’s been a doozey, starting with a cage match between Time Warner and Fox over retransmission fees. They settled on New Year’s Day after a holiday greeting from Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). Sinclair and Mediacom also made nice for another year. The first ever trial activation of the national presidential alert system was conducted in Alaska. It worked but for a few glitches, though some informed observers noted that if there is actually ever a need for a presidential alert, no one would be around to hear it.

“Avatar,” in the meantime, broke the $1 billion mark at the box office. James Cameron’s 3D sci-fi epic movie segued nicely into the Consumer Electronics Show, where even Vizio, the Wal-Mart of TV makers, announced a new line of 3D-capable TV sets. Samsung, Panasonic, Toshiba, Sony and JVC did likewise. DirecTV, Discovery and ESPN revealed plans to launch 3DTV networks. This is clearly the year 3D video breaks fully into the mainstream market.

The timing of CES assures an avalanche of tech news during the first week of the year, although Google unveiled its Nexus One on its home turf in Mountain View, Calif. The first Google phone runs on the Google operating system and will eventually transmit on Google’s free spectrum courtesy of the Federal Communications Commission.

It’s good to be Google.

FLO TV meanwhile got into the iPhone while Samsung introduced a handset with mobile DTV reception, and LG said it had one on the way along with a likewise equipped portable DVD player.

Automaker Ford demonstrated a dashboard touch-screen for smartphone app interaction.

In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, two veteran Democratic senators announced their retirement. Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said they wouldn’t see re-election this year.

Across town, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission asked for another month to complete a National Broadband Plan before presenting it to Congress.

Broadcast stocks began to rebound after Sinclair revises its fourth-quarter guidance upward, and NBC appeared to be ending its Jay Leno experiment in prime time.

Congress reconvenes in Week No. 2 of the New Year. Let the games continue…

Roasting the Regulators

From the first January 2010 issue of TV Technology…

At least the FCC’s not pretending to be impartial about handing more spectrum to cell-phone companies to satiate that industry’s shareholders. The hiring of Duke University Professor Stuart Benjamin as the commission’s first so-called Distinguished Scholar in Residence represented the most blatant thumb-nosing at broadcasting by the agency to date. The professor’s “Modest Proposal” to regulate the broadcast industry out of existence suggests he may not be altogether impartial. It’s just a hunch.

Benjamin is of the school that everyone subscribes to cable or satellite already, so why not use the airwaves for broadband, which to hear tell is going to cure obesity, attention deficit disorder and pattern baldness throughout America.

It can be deducted that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s ordination of Benjamin smacks of laziness. There is little intellectual rigor evident in the pursuit of wholesale, nationwide spectrum reallocation based on pay TV subscription numbers.

First of all, a substantial portion of those households still use over-the-air reception. Second, dismantling the broadcast TV industry is anticompetitive. These regulators may believe a majority of Americans can choose between multiple cable and DBS providers, because Washington, D.C. is a collection of buildings under a bubble of delusion.

Yet another pesky reality is that if it were economically feasible for every man, woman and child in the United States to have access to broadband, they would have it by now. The phone companies would have made sure of it. But there is a great big space between Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles where lots of people live, but some just very far apart. The most remote households in the country–those most unlikely to have broadband, are probably the most likely to rely on over-the-air TV reception.

Are they calling their comments in to the new Web 2.0 FCC?

The only salient point of the currently espoused Big Bang approach to broadband provision is that a few political aspirants will feel really good about themselves before returning to lucrative private sector jobs with the benefiting companies. In the meantime, it will be a decade more before the households that do not have broadband get access to it at a price only former regulators can afford.

The national broadband “plan,” should begin with a thorough inventory of radio frequency spectrum. Layers of broadband availability and broadcast TV reliance should be added to the Census Bureau’s TIGER data base, so planners could look at a map of the country, see areas of most immediate need, assess existing infrastructural resources and determine which would be easiest to light up first. Then the feds could instigate and support local agencies to develop, coordinate and deploy broadband systems.

The strategy worked in Claudville, Va. It may seem daunting and prohibitively cumbersome to consider deploying a national communications system community by community, but it has been done–by broadcasters and by phone companies. It would take more planning upfront, and more than likely save a lot of mop-up time in the long run.

A sweeping, one-size-fits-all plan may be attractive for the inevitable press conference, but the application will likely devolve into chaos. If this broadband plan actually is about people rather than Wall Street, perhaps the developmental focus out to be shifted accordingly.

Year of the Ox

From the Dec. 23 issue of TV Technology…

Perseverant and reliable–the qualities most inherent in the Chinese zodiac for 2009, the year of the Ox. Had the broadcast industry not had a bit of the Ox, very little may have been left of it for the year of the Tiger.

A new administration arrived in January. The DTV transition, scheduled for February, was pushed back to June so more people could prepare. The fed spent $1.4 billion on a subsidy program to equip old analog TVs with digital reception.

Julius Genachowski was just then taking the reins of the FCC with a charge of developing nationwide, wireless broadband. The radio frequencies that the public and broadcasters had just invested billions in for DTV became a takeover target for the wireless industry and its powerful lobbies in Washington, D.C.

Twenty-two weeks after the DTV transition, the FCC commenced the process of relieving the broadcast industry of spectrum.

Meanwhile, the television broadcast industry had its worst year on record.

January: The 10 Pappas TV stations were sold out of bankruptcy in January. Broadcasters in 22 markets commit to launch mobile DTV during the year.

February: Some 400 TV stations ceased analog broadcasting on Feb. 17. The FCC gets 28,000 calls within hours. Mobile media ad revenues are projected at $3.1 billion for 2013. Young Broadcasting files Chapter 11. Hearst-Argyle writes off $940 million.

March: The Connecticut School of Broadcasting abruptly shuts down. LIN TV, Fisher, Gray and Barrington write down a collective 1.4 billion on TV licenses. Belo imposes pay cuts. Gannett furloughs employees. Charter files Chapter 11.

April: Journal Communications cuts pay. LG demos mobile DTV receivers. Barrington defaults. Equity Media TV stations are sold at auction. Chrysler, the seventh largest advertiser in the country, files for Chapter 11.

May: Hearst takes Hearst-Argyle private. ION Media files Chapter 11. David Rehr steps down as chief of NAB. The founder of the Connecticut School of Broadcasting buys it back.

June: GM files Chapter 11. Analog TV broadcasting end; 2.5 million homes lose service. Michael Jackson’s death dominates TV news.

July: Lawmakers press for spectrum inventory. Sinclair warns of bankruptcy. New Vision Television files Chapter 11. Broadcast revenues average double-digit declines.

August: Microsoft unveils “WhiteFi.” LIN TV writes off another $40 million. The main TV transmitter site serving Los Angeles, Mt. Wilson, is engulfed in flames.

September: Gray conducts mobile DTV tests. Freedom Communications files Chapter 11. Former Sen. Gordon Smith is tapped to lead the NAB. A tsunami hits American Samoa, where broadcast EAS is credited for saving lives.

October: Acrodyne shuts down. Lawmakers move to outlaw loud commercials. Microsoft gets its first white-space licenses. Claudville, Va., launches a white-space broadband network.

November: Half of U.S. homes have HDTV screens. California limits the energy they can use. Broadcasters sue music licensor SESAC. Pressure mounts to reallocate broadcast spectrum for broadband.

December: Comcast buys NBC Universal. The FCC opens up an inquiry into the best use of broadcast spectrum. Mobile media advertising is projected to generate $3.48 billion in 2010. No stations have launched mobile DTV commercially.

McAdams On: “Avatar”

One of the most notable things about James Cameron’s use of 3D technology in his new epic movie “Avatar” is his restraint. Nothing in this movie jumps off the screen, the way 3D is so often described. “Avatar” instead draws in the audience. First, into the austere fuselage of a cargo aircraft, where a hapless former Marine with no family sits ruefully in his wheelchair.

The opening of “Avatar” fell in sharp contrast with the 3D trailers that preceded the midnight opener at The Bridge cinema in L.A.’s Howard Hughes Center. “Piranha3D” was a wall of toothy creatures headed straight for the audience. People laughed at it. Not in a good way. If the trailer of “Dispicable Me” is any indication, the animated feature is a waste of 3D. Both were indicative of why some analysts have deemed 3D to be a gimmick. Rich Greenfield of Pali Capital said as much in November. This morning, Greenfield predicted “Avatar” would have the biggest December opening weekend in history.

The film is likely to mark the true turning point in consumer adoption of 3DTV. The glasses are not a bother with “Avatar.” It doesn’t induce nausea, possibly thanks in part to the Fusion Camera System and Cameron’s employment of it to see how the motion-captured actors looked within the digitally rendered set as the scenes were being filmed. In only a couple of instances does “Avatar” jar the optic nerves. One is the sudden and swift movement of troops off of a transport that appears to have been shot by a handheld. The other involved split-second camera sweeps in the CG environment that recall pixilation in fast-motion HD, only with the brain itself unable to process the visual information rapidly enough.

Sports was supposed to be the driver of 3DTV, just as it was for high definition, but “Avatar” may hold the key to why 3D basketball and football game coverage hasn’t really set the world on fire. The action, camera angle and capture cannot be meticulously controlled. Cameron’s taken great pains to make sure 3D enhances rather than distracts.

Only one time does Cameron point anything at his audience, doing a 180-degree frontal shot of the main character with an arrow drawn in a bow.

“Avatar” works not only from a 3D perspective. The story stands on its own. “Avatar” is James Cameron’s vision of how things might have gone in the New World if bison were 15 times larger with hammer-heads and armored skin. It’s also a contemplation of why Second Life is so madly popular, what with more obese Americans than ever before. “Avatar’s” disabled main character becomes physically capable of leaping between moving aircraft and the fluorescent pterodactyl he roped and reined in mid-air. Then there’s the light-emitting flora, the six-legged horses with anteater heads, floating mountains, quad-rotor helos, transformer soldier suits and a mining operation reminiscent of “Forbidden Planet’s” Great Machine. This is “Titanic” for sci-fi geeks.

There still will be quibbles. “Avatar” is preachy on corporate greed and the environment. There’s evil Anglo Saxons crushing an indigenous pagan population, which in turn can only be saved by a conveniently enlightened Anglo Saxon. There’s a ridiculously silly spiral light-chute effect to illustrate how characters perceive the inhabitation of their avatars, like something out of “That ’70s Show.”

It will be fashionable in some circles to savage this film, but that will not prevent it from making $2 billion for the $300 million it cost to make. “Titanic” likewise left a few people rolling their eyes, but that $200 million James Cameron epic brought in $1.8 billion.

“Avatar” comes just three weeks before the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is shaping up to be the 3D CES of 2010. Panasonic, Sony and LG all intend to roll out 3DTV sets next year. Sony is making 3D a companywide initiative, and Rupert Murdoch, whose 20th Century Fox made “Avatar,” will roll out 3DTV distribution on his U.K. satellite systems next year.

Whatever TV stations and the broadcast industry in general can do to get on this bandwagon, they should do it now, and do it right. If 3D hasn’t lit the world on fire for all the years it’s been around, it probably hasn’t been done properly.

Now, it has, and Fox has dibs on it.

McAdams On: Going Live Online

If I hear old school one more time, I might go postal. Except for going postal is probably old school. Ambivalence over egalitarian live Web broadcasting is probably old school, too. Allow me to fetch my teeth so I can chew this fat.

Much was made of the news this week that Apple adopted a live streaming app for the iPhone. Now iPhoners can iPhone in live video of themselves or whomever doing heaven only knows what on the app Web site, Ustream. I went there and watched a young woman earnestly strum a guitar and sing painfully off-key. Thanks to the wonders of technological innovation, I was able to feel a combination of dread and pity for a total stranger.

It’s not as if live Webcasting is entirely new. All one needed up to this point is a Web cam and a URL. The majority of folks uploaded video, however, giving them time to perhaps rethink the impulse.

We’ve all played with the medium. We’re all on WordPress, Linkedin, Twitter, Orkut, Ammado, Plaxo, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Tripit, TypePad, Classmates, Flickr, Goodreads, Blip and Meetup like a swarm of pseudosocial butterflies. I remember when getting a story meant putting on a headlamp, climbing a tree with ropes and saddles, showing up backstage, shadowing someone, haunting certain coffee shops. Now it’s about being plugged into the matrix and Twittering yourself all over the place.

I’m baffled this stuff holds anyone’s interest longer than it takes to Tweet something. Perhaps that’s because I’m old school.

I’m also ambivalent because I do appreciate the way the Internet allows anyone to market themselves. I appreciate being able to find just about any type of music other than the endless blargh of “classic rock” that clogs traditional radio. It’s nice that the video medium isn’t just the domain of a few movie studios and TV production houses, but rather anyone with a Flip.

But we are not all stars. Even most of the folks considered stars seem a bit tedious. Let us put down our collective need to be special and acknowledge our mediocrity There are 6.8 billion of us skittering around on this wet rock, folks. We ain’t none of us all that, though I am fan of Aung San Suu Kyi. Unfortunately, Mme. Suu Kyi will be unlikely to stream anything live on the Internet anytime soon.

Kudos in the meantime to Chrysler for making a statement that could otherwise not be made in Burma. Hence the wonder of this medium, also a conduit for the substantial assemblage that cannot spell, punctuate or otherwise think an original thought. Now this group has another way to display their particular set of skills. We must alert the media. Oh, that’s right… they are the media.

We hacks are just old school.

McAdams On: Comcasticity

Consolidation critics are already all over the Comcast-NBCU deal, mostly because it’s a doozey. The NBCU acquisition gives the Roberts family an unprecedented chunk of the nation’s video media pipeline, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

All feelings about media consolidation aside, the Robertses know how to run a business. They know the meaning of due diligence and they’ve pulled assets out of the dregs before. AT&T was being dragged down by its cable TV business before Comcast picked it up in 2002. The margins on that business improved, in part because Comcast doesn’t just buy businesses to prop up faltering legacy assets. The company actually invests the resources necessary to get the best performance from an asset.

Comcast generally has an operational strategy going in that consists of more than generalized assumptions about synergy–the type that took AOL Time Warner to the ground. One of the first things Comcast does is start communicating that strategy to employees of acquired companies, who are supplied with the resources to achieve it.

Additionally, Comcast is run by executives who are hardly corporate Visigoths. They’re not starving, to be sure. Brian Roberts received $23.7 million in total compensation last year, less than 1 percent of the company’s reported net income of $2.5 billion. But neither Brian Roberts nor any of the Comcast executive team are known for outlandish personal lifestyles and spending. They belong more in the category of consummate deal-makers like John Malone, the Liberty Media chief who has a penchant for tooling around in an RV full of pugs. Roberts and his deputy, Steve Burke, are easily among the most forthright and non-egotistical lads in the media industry.

I remember once e-mailing Brian Roberts that I’d become his mother’s fan after seeing her on a local cable access show encouraging older women to belly dance for exercise. He was clearly proud of her and thanked me.

The Comcast suite has agglomerated and made successful the nation’s largest cable operation through attention and acumen. They are likely to do the same with NBCU, which Jeffrey Immelt at GE liked well enough when it needed no attention. Now, Immelt can concentrate on light bulbs and rockets, and NBCU can be run by guys that focus exclusively on media.

The combined assets of Comcast and NBCU include more than 24 million pay TV subscribers, 15.7 million broadband and 6.5 million VoIP customers; two broadcast networks, 26 TV stations, cable networks CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Bravo SyFy, E! Entertainment, Style, Golf Channel, Versus, G4, TV One, PBS Kids Sprout, New England Cable News Network, 10 regional sports networks, two professional sports teams, two movie studios TV production and syndication as well as various other retail and entertainment interests.

The deal is expected to give Comcast annual revenues of $50 billion–roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Bulgaria. In case there’s any question, this is what is meant by the term, “Comcastic.”

It’s certainly not ideal that so much American media is controlled by so few, but there are arguably few that can sustain it anymore. If the alternative to media consolidation is fewer outlets, nothing is gained. The Comcast-NBCU marriage will cause all sorts of noise in Washington, D.C., but it will go through, the dust will settle and the Roberts family will buy DirecTV, Google and Vizeo.

McAdams On: Indecent Exposure

I wonder if the Parents Television Council wouldn’t be better served by a less overt response to Adam Lambert’s performance on last Sunday’s “American Music Awards” on ABC. The group issued one of its all-points bulletins, very publicly urging members to complain to the network, the producers, advertisers and the FCC. I know righteous indignation is the charter of the PTC, and more power to them. Someone ought to be monitoring for TV dreck, but the resulting publicity just serves to draw attention to something most of us would prefer to ignore. And what could be more horrible for a performer than to be ignored?

Not much, or so it appears in Mr. Lambert’s case. I have to agree with the PTC on the point that Lambert’s performance was “vulgar” and “tasteless.” I’d have to toss “disgusting” in there as well. He held a guy’s head to his crotch and at one point sucked the tonsils out of his male keyboardist. If the youngster could actually sing, it was very hard to tell. If he hit a single note in that “song,” I missed it.

Mr. Lambert dismissed the objections to his display as discriminatory. Madonna kissing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera during the VMAs didn’t raise such a ruckus, he reasoned. Well guess what, little man? That was six years ago. Janet Jackson’s flash dance? Five years ago. Madonna’s first sexually charged, awards-show hijinks? Try 1984. Here’s the deal: It’s been done. Again and again and again and again. So the most truly offensive thing about Lambert’s performance was how boring it is to watch yet another Hollywood sausage-made celebrity exercise his marginally developed emotional intellect on stage.

Please give it a break, already. Playboy’s going broke because boorish, overt sexuality is shoved in our faces all the time. We are Clockwork Oranged, not sexually repressed as a few wee-minded ones would like to think. We’ve just had enough of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder “shocking” us.

Ho hum.

Maybe Hollywood continues to encourage this type of thing because of a propensity of NPDs running the business. Meanwhile, they can’t for the life of them figure out why ratings continue to sink through the floor. Hmm… better add something even more controversial to the mix. Let’s stage a B&D club with the new kid who just revealed his sexuality, even though that, too, is something most of us no longer care about.

I remember when Cindy Crawford came out as heterosexual. No, I don’t. And neither do you, because it’s not a big deal.

From what I understand, Mr. Lambert possesses a notable set of pipes. He’s been singing on stage since he was a kid, and he made it past that Simon Cowell guy, who’s not known for coddling off-key yodelers. He’s likely worked up a sweat to get where he is, and deserves more than to be cheaply showcased for his sexuality.

I wish the PTC luck, by all means, but I hope it’s response doesn’t make young Mr. Lambert even more determined to allow exhibitionism to overshadow his skill. He needs to remember… Madonna can’t actually sing.