BCmoney MobileTV

Some may think, sure… online video. Sure… Mobile TV. Hah, like that’s really gonna fly! Some have even called it a “Pipe-dream”.

To the non-believers we say just one thing. “You are ABSOLUTELY right! Pipes.”
It’s all about pipes.

When you flop yourself down on the sofa, turn on the TV, and tune in to Fox’s latest Prime Time line-up, you’re essentially opening up a virtual pipe between your brain and Fox’s executives who make the decision on what shows are in fact “prime time”, at which time they should air, on which days they should be shown live and on which days they should be re-run. Furthermore, they make the call on which advertisements get placed in which time-slots, in order to optimize their advertisers’ return on investment for each ad.

If you think about it, when you commit to this kind of interaction, you are giving away an INCREDIBLE amount of control of your brain, to someone whose primary interests are in getting you to lower your intellectual defenses enough to start buying products from their advertisers and sponsors. This is what drives more and more advertisers to their “Prime Time line-up” and thus allows them to buy their Lamborghini’s & Ferrari’s, and kick back on tropical beaches about 5 or 6 times per year.

Now, in the past, people have tuned into Fox, NBC, ABC or even Disney, for a number of reasons, but typically, TV is watched to do one of three things:

1. Entertain
2. Educate
3. Kill Time

With TV, the problem is someone else is in complete control over what you watch and when you watch it, so the degree to which you can be entertained is limited (namely by disruptive advertisements), the degree to which you can be educated is limited by the programming selections made by the executives (which, with the bombardment of ridiculous “Reality TV” offerings is clearly designed to maximize ad revenues more than teach you anything), and finally the only area in which they seem to deliver lately, is that of killing time, by simply offering you so much programming you could get lost and spend 5 hours just flipping channels (I mean really, who needs 550 Digital TV channels, or 1800 Sattelite Channels, when all we want or need is ONE good channel that we could watch all the time). Don’t forget, that no matter how many channels you have, you can only possibly watch ONE at a time (well, you could do that annoying screen-in-screen thing but you still only get audio for one at a time so do you really call that watching)?

Have you ever really thought about that? About the fact that each time you sit down and tune in to someone else’s pipe (or as you may be more used to calling it, channel) that you are giving away a little piece of yourself for the benefit of some already rich TV exec? When you think about it, it’s kind of unbelievable that this type of blatant exploitation of your mind, attention and time, which are all such valuable things, has gone on for as long as it has. Don’t worry folks, with the internet and new distribution methods online over the web or through mobile devices, that is all starting to change. And we’ll be there for you, to make sure it changes for the better!

So, the next time you sit down and open up a pipe between yourself and the hoity-toity of Hollywood, ask yourself what you REALLY want to watch right now. If it could be one thing, what would it be? If you were trapped on an island with only one device, and only one channel to entertain you for the rest of your life, what would YOUR channel look like? Then come back to BCmoney and let us know, so that we can build it for you.

I’ll leave you now with an appropriately hilarious comic from the incredibly skilled Nicholas Gurewitch of The Perry Bible Fellowship:

Who has the pipe dream now? Us, or the greedy TV execs who think they can continue to control you in this digital era? We see their pipe dreams flushing down the toilet just like poor Mario here.