Brian Grey Blog

I’m not exactly sure how Bob Dylan and Robert McNamara — two more polar opposite icons from the 1960s — popped in my head Friday night when the news started pouring in that Hulu had requested its content be taken down from Boxee.tv.  A lot has been written about this — mostly of the tone that Hulu as a front for old media doesn’t “get it” and that they will eventually be overtaken by innovative open source community-based technologies like Boxee.

Well, this is where I guess Dylan comes in …more specifically his 1964 album “The Times They are A-Changin”.  Indeed, the speed of technology innovation and digital social networking seems to create this non-stop feeling that the times are “A-Changin”.  Look at what has happened over the last decade to the music industry.  Look at how prolific social media has become thanks to Myspace and Facebook.  Look at what is happening now with the onset of real-time messaging services like Twitter.  Not even a 15-year old girl with her hands strapped around an iPhone can keep up with it all.

Now map all of this change to what Boxee.tv purports to do:

• create a single interface on your computer that can assemble all media content — that which resides on your local hard drive as well as that which can be accessed via the Internet — combined with social networking features that enable you to see everything your friends are watching.  Then, to make matters more scary for traditional media guys, make all of this insanely easy to plug in to your big fat plasma HDTV so you can experience everything from your living room couch.

Whew!  That’s a mouthful…and at the same time a whole lot of disruption for the offline guys to deal with thanks to one service.

So Hulu’s actions that culminated with Friday’s “takedown” of their content from Boxee pits battle lines once again between the digerati creating cutting edge technologies and the contentorati creating premium content offerings.  Ah, the classic battle between software engineers and TV/movie producers.

So this is where McNamara pops in to my head.  Yes, probably the last guy you’d think of in a classic “us vs. them” matchup like Boxee.tv vs. Hulu.com, but if you happened to take in the 2003 documentary “The Fog of War” which chronicled McNamara’s life up through his tenure as Secretary of Defense, you’ll no doubt remember the 11 life lessons that McNamara delivers while telling his story.

Well one of my favorite, yet least practiced by people today and perhaps most applicable here, is his “Lesson #1:  Empathize with your enemy”.  McNamara makes this point as part of his depiction of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how during the most perilous days and hours of that event it was ultimately important to empathize with Soviet Premier Kruschev to resolve the conflict.

Now, far from me to try and equate the Cuban Missle Crisis to the Boxee-Hulu Crisis, but I do think the lesson is well served here.  You see, as someone who has worked in both Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, and who has worked closely with brilliant and passionate software engineers as well as content producers, I think right now would be a good time for both parties to empathize with their supposed “enemy” a little bit.

For Hulu e.g. NBC and Fox, it’s important for them to truly understand that what they have built with Hulu is their own path of technological change and the embracing of the new ways consumers will want to consume content — premium or otherwise.  However, once content producers wade in to the fast lane of this change, they have to understand there’s no turning back the clock.  Consumers will demand the ability to get content when and where they want it — and as evidenced by the “workaround” developed just hours after Hulu’s takedown, they will do whatever it takes to have that experience.

On the other hand, for the Boxee’s of the world e.g. technology innovators, empathizing means taking the time to truly understand what it takes to create premium content.  The next time they watch the credits at the end of a TV show or movie, watch how many people are involved in creating this premium content experience.  Producing high quality content — the stuff that people really want to watch, particularly on their HDTVs — takes time and money.  Too often the technology folks lose sight of this fact — and the fact that it’s a pretty big drop down from “24″ and “The Office” to the pool of Webisodes and what some think of as “premium UGC” (oxymoron anyone?).

Maybe it’s too Polyanna-ish for me to think that these two sides of the brain can empathize with one another to create a solution that brings the eloquent digital product experience of a Boxee together with the unparalleled premium content experience developed by the NBC’s and Fox’s of the world.  But taking a step back to truly look at what is going on through the lens of the other guy is a really good lesson — particularly when times are A-Changin.

Today I had one of those near misses in life.  My wife and the girls had headed to the North Bay for the afternoon.  A rare non-workday window opened up where I could actually try to get caught up on a thousand things like email, reviewing some pitches that made their way to my inbox last week, reading the latest book I just started…you get the idea.

So how did I experience a near miss?  Well, you see, in the digital world that we live in today, all it takes is one project — or related project — to suck you down that death spiral that I like to call “technorati hell”.  Let me stop here before I go any further to clarify that “technorati hell” has nothing to do with the fine site at http://technorati.com that my friend Rich Jalichandra runs.

What I am referring to when I say technorati hell is that experience we’ve all had where you proudly begin to dig in to your to-do list on a rainy weekend (or in this case national holiday) day, only to end up spending every second on one damn bullet on that to-do list.  Worse, often times that single bullet ends up haunting you well in to the evening after you have slept walk your way through reading to your kids and tucking them in for the night.

For me the challenge of getting Boxee.tv’s alpha to show up on my Panasonic plasma television could have very easily paved my own road to technorati hell.  The day started simply enough — an early morning workout, running a couple of errands with my younger daughter that included a tasty lunch and taking her to a place where she could dart around on her Razor scooter without me be worried that she would get hit by a car.  We fathers are such worry warts.

Back home with my very first HDMI-DVI cable and some other crazy looking cable from the Apple Store that I was informed would deal with the audio since the aforementioned cable only dealt with the video, I launched in to the project.  Getting up and running with Boxee on my MacBook Pro was no problem — though the software did lock up a couple times on me, requiring my favorite of all MacBook Pro moves:  the “forced quit” maneuver.  Boxee is after all in alpha.

Next it was on to the major initiative, trying to take the Boxee experience and get it on to my Panasonic TH-42PD50U television.  (Okay, right there you know I spent too much time on this project given that I can rattle off the exact model number of my TV set!).  Now I’m not going to bore you with all the machinations I went through to get the MacBook to pump Boxee’s video and audio up to the Panasonic, that’s not the point here.  In fact, the point isn’t even the fact that I got it to work — but let me just say, I GOT IT TO WORK!  Maybe I should take a weekend shift with the Geek Squad or hang out with the A-V superstars over at Magnolia Hi-Fi?

No, the point here is that I had come to peace with the fact that I wasn’t going to let this project consume me.  Wasn’t going to let it drag me in to an “all nighter” like so many other tech projects have in the past (yah, I’m talking to you Mr. First Time I Tried to Install WordPress.org Software Up to My Own Web Host).  I had made it clear in my mind that I would only spend a specified amount of time on this project — and if I hadn’t conquered it, well I would do what every good American does:  just quit!  Joking!  I am joking — I would of course come back to the project at a later date, after I had had a chance to ask some experts, you know, people that have a clue when it comes to piecing together the magic that is the intersection of software, hardware and the “Interwebs”.

There you have it kids.  Progress and growth.  Let this be a lesson to you all.  If you are going to walk around with a list of things that need to get prioritized and done, get good at partitioning the time you spend on any one project.  Don’t let one single project pull you down to the depths of technorati hell.  Hey, didn’t we all learn this lesson back when we were studying for the SATs?  You remember, don’t get stuck on one problem, skip it and come back to it later?

Well, now’s a good time to bring that favorite back out of the closet.