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Race to End for ‘Breaking Bad’ Fans Who Got Behind

September 27, 2013 by

At the University of Pittsburgh, where Mr. Bauer is studying engineering, students cram into his dormitory lounge every Sunday night to watch the latest episode. But not Mr. Bauer, who was, as of Monday, still about 20 episodes behind. That night, he started binge-viewing so that he can be in the lounge for Sunday’s all-important finale — figuring that if he’s not there to see the ending when everyone else does, someone will spoil it for him.

“My friends are telling me it’ll be the best decision of my life,” he said Wednesday night, without even hitting pause during his marathon to talk to a reporter.

In its final season, “Breaking Bad” on AMC has become the It Show on cable television. All over the country, converts to the series about a mild-mannered teacher turned drug lord have set aside schoolwork, dishes and laundry to try to catch up on old episodes through Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and other Internet services.

The hype around hit television show finales has always been intense, but what has happened with “Breaking Bad” exemplifies a twist in the relationship between the parallel universes of live, linear television (the kind symbolized by Comcast and DirecTV) and on-demand TV (as embodied by Netflix).

On-demand services are typically thought to hurt live television viewing. In this case, they are fueling it.

“Breaking Bad” made its debut in 2008 to an underwhelming 1.2 million viewers — which would have caused many programming chiefs to drop it. But the show dodged cancellation and slowly built a following — especially once the old episodes were made available en masse on Netflix.

By mid-2012, about 2.6 million viewers were watching live episodes; now, as the ending approaches, that total has more than doubled to 6 million, which might be small for a network television show but makes “Breaking Bad” one of the biggest phenomena on cable.

“What’s remarkable about this show is we’ve created urgency to see it,” said Charlie Collier, the president of AMC, which has been running a marathon of every episode since Wednesday.

DVDs and, before that, VHS tapes have allowed audiences to catch up on shows for a long time — in fact, the popularity of “Family Guy” DVDs were partly credited with the 2005 revival of the once-canceled Fox animated comedy. But binge-viewing behavior has become much more pronounced in the last few years, mainly because Netflix and services like it have made it so easy to do.

Last Sunday, as “Breaking Bad” was finally winning the television industry’s highest honor, an Emmy award for outstanding drama, the show set a new ratings record for itself — 6.6 million, according to Nielsen — making it the biggest program on cable that night. At the same time, many people were just starting their marathons. According to Netflix, each day for the last two weeks, the most-streamed episode of the show has been the very first one, during which Walter White crystallized methamphetamine for the first time.

The show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, credited the Internet when accepting his Emmy. “I think Netflix kept us on the air,” he told reporters backstage, adding that he did not believe that the show would have survived more than two seasons without the audience and revenue lifts that Netflix provided, along with online chatter. As first reported by AdAge, the network sought $300,000 to $400,000 for a 30-second ad in the final episode. AMC confirmed on Friday night that the episode was sold out. The network declined to comment on pricing, but assuming it achieved $300,000 a spot, it will be earning more for the airtime than even the highest-rated network dramas normally do.

“It’s a new era in television,” Mr. Gilligan said, “and we’ve been very fortunate to reap the benefits.”

Mr. Bauer is ready for the finale — as of Friday afternoon, he had only five more episodes to watch, and he was saving them for Sunday.

Justin Carroll, a bank employee in Lexington, Ky., started to binge a little bit earlier — Sept. 12 — because he “wanted to be part of the discussion” with his friends.

Judy Weinstein, a human resources consultant in Sherman Oaks, Calif., started on Sept. 22 because of media coverage of the show and a crucial endorsement from a more personal source: her spin class instructor, who would “come to class every Monday morning and talk about how she couldn’t sleep the night before after watching,” she said. Ms. Weinstein is glad she did — although after she finished her marathon on Thursday, there was one downside. “In retrospect, it is a difficult show to binge-watch because it just keeps getting darker and darker,” she said.

Mr. Collier of AMC said that social networking Web sites had amplified all the chatter about the show. (Nielsen estimates that the average person’s Twitter message about a TV show is seen by about 50 other people.) “Word of mouth is still a great thing,” he said.

Netflix’s licensing contracts do not cover the eight most recent episodes of “Bad,” so for those, new fans must rely on AMC, an online rental service or a less legal route. AMC’s marathon has been a big draw this week. In prime time, it had 1.0 million viewers on Wednesday and almost 1.2 million on Thursday. (The totals will increase after digital video recorder viewing is factored in.)

Perhaps aptly for a show about a meth dealer, Melodie Holmes has noticed its addictive tendencies. Ms. Holmes, of Kitchener, Ontario, said she and her husband “generally watch two episodes a night, and look at each other seeing whether or not we could stay awake on a ‘school night’ for more,” she said. More often than not, they stayed up — and now they are all caught up.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/business/media/breaking-bad-race-to-the-end.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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F.A.A. Nears New Rules on Devices

September 22, 2013 by

This week, an F.A.A. advisory panel will meet to complete its recommendations to relax most of the restrictions. The guidelines are expected to allow reading e-books or other publications, listening to podcasts, and watching videos, according to several of the panel’s members who requested anonymity because they could not comment on the recommendations. The ban on making phone calls, as well as sending and receiving e-mails and text messages or using Wi-Fi, is expected to remain in place, the panel members said.

The panel will recommend its new policy to the F.A.A. by the end of the month and it will most likely go into effect next year.

The coming change represents a cultural milestone of sorts for the digital age, the moment when mass travel and mass communication finally meet.

Airlines and pilots have reported hundreds of instances over the years where they suspect electronic devices caused some cockpit instruments to malfunction. But the evidence is largely anecdotal, and regulators have never been able to establish conclusively that electronic devices interfered with flight instruments.

Even with the ban, many passengers forget to turn off their devices or ignore calls by flight attendants to power off. Airlines are expanding the use of wireless systems on board, offering live television and even considering streaming movies or music directly to passengers’ own devices. But changing aviation safety policy is a slow process.

For many passengers, the ban has been a source of frustration. John Shahidi, a technology entrepreneur, ignored the order to turn off his cellphone late last year, but this time a flight attendant caught him sneaking a look at his iPhone, he said — and instead of a gentle scolding, she opted for a public shaming. She stood there, he said, staring at him, and announced that the plane would not take off until he had powered down the phone.

“It was so utterly embarrassing,” said Mr. Shahidi, the chief executive of RockLive, a start-up company from San Francisco.

Last year, the F.A.A. created the advisory panel of industry experts to update the rule. It was supposed to report back in July but requested an extension until the end of September to sort out some technical materials, an indication of just how complicated the deliberation has been.

“This is like shooting at a moving target,” said Douglas Kidd, the head of the National Association of Airline Passengers and a member of the advisory committee looking into all these issues. “We have to make sure the planes can handle this. But there’s a lot of pressure on the F.A.A. because passengers are very attached to their devices.”

The panel wants to be able to present a single policy from “gate to gate” that would apply to all airlines, and all types of airplanes, according to several of its members who requested anonymity because the discussions were private. Instead of testing devices, the F.A.A. will ask that the airlines certify that their planes can tolerate interferences — something they have done when installing Wi-Fi on board, for instance. Once that is done, the airlines can allow electronic devices, perhaps by next year.

The review has not included mobile voice communications, which are prohibited by the telecommunications regulators at the Federal Communications Commission because they interfere with transmissions between cell towers on the ground.

More than two billion portable electronic devices will be sold this year, according to the research firm Gartner. Air travelers own a disproportionately large share of these devices, particularly smartphones and tablets, whose use is growing at the fastest rate. Shipments are expected to more than double by next year compared with 2012, to 276 million units.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/technology/faa-nears-new-rules-on-devices.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: Murdoch Weighs a Newspaper Deal and Steve Harvey Surprises Daytime TV

March 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Rupert Murdoch finds himself in a familiar predicament as he considers a bid for The Los Angeles Times: awaiting rule changes from the government, Amy Chozick reports. Mr. Murdoch has increased his lobbying efforts to revise a media ownership rule that prevents companies from owning both television stations and newspapers in the same local market (News Corporation owns KTTV and KCOP in the Los Angeles area). Mr. Murdoch has given mixed signals about his interest in The Los Angeles Times, which the Tribune Company plans to sell. The resignation last week of the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Julius Genachowski, could further slow the process. Mr. Genachowski had proposed allowing a rule change to allow a single company to own both a TV station and newspaper in a top-20 market provided the station was not in the top four in audience size.

“Steve Harvey,” a daytime talk show featuring the comedian and sitcom star that debuted in September, has been the surprise hit of daytime TV, Brian Stelter writes. The show has averaged a rating of 0.9 among women ages 25 to 54 and posted a 1.0 rating in February, enough to tie Katie Couric’s syndicated talk show for the first time. The ratings have cemented Mr. Harvey as one of America’s foremost entertainers and drawn comparisons to Oprah, whom Mr. Harvey will interview this April.

NBC’s plan to replace Jay Leno with Jimmy Fallon as host of the “Tonight” show could risk the top spot in the ratings Mr. Leno has enjoyed for the last two decades, one of the few areas the network dominates, Bill Carter writes. Mr. Fallon will almost certainly start the job for a lower salary than Mr. Leno because there is much less profit to go around in late-night television than there once was. He also faces an increasingly fragmented television audience that is leaving late-night shows for diverse options like “The Daily Show” and Cartoon Network or eschewing live television for DVR or the Internet.

Ads are increasingly appropriating social media patois, Stuart Elliott writes. Commercials for brands including Toyota, Snickers Peanut Butter Squared candy and the cosmetics retailer Sephora all crib from the social media lexicon. Such commercials now include mainstream consumers, not just youthful ones, and exemplify a tactic known as borrowed interest by which brands seek to associate themselves with pervasive elements of popular culture.

The government prosecution of Pfc. Bradley Manning for leaking secret information to WikiLeaks is a public prosecution in name only, David Carr reports in The Media Equation. Basic information has been withheld throughout the lengthy pretrial hearings, and when the court agreed last month to release 84 of the roughly 400 documents requested by reporters under the Freedom of Information Act the documents contained redactions that were almost comical. The issue makes it hard going for reporters and fits a pattern of what reporters and lawyers say is a sometimes capricious withholding of information by the government.

Buzzmedia, a Los Angeles-based company that runs a handful of pop culture and music blogs, has decided that second-best is a viable way to gain Internet advertising, Ben Sisario writes. Even though Buzzmedia offerings like Stereogum and Brooklyn Vegan trail Pitchfork in audience and engagement Buzzmedia draws 41 million people a month, according to comScore, more than some of its main competitors like Gawker Media and Mashable. On Monday the company will rename itself SpinMedia, after Spin Magazine, which it bought last year, another move to attract readers.

Two movies opened with $30 million or more in ticket sales for the first time this year, giving studios hope that a dismal stretch might be behind them, Brooks Barnes reports. An animated caveman comedy, “The Croods,” and a thriller, “Olympus Has Fallen,” both broke the $30 million mark over the weekend, but movie ticket sales are still showing a 13 percent decline from the same period a year ago.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/the-breakfast-meeting-murdoch-weighs-a-newspaper-deal-and-steve-harvey-surprises-daytime-tv/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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