Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Sunday, October 28, 2007

It's Like the Internet. In China.

There was nothing on tv tonight and we wanted to watch something over dinner. It's the weekend before Hallowe'en and TVO was playing Phantom of the Paradise on Saturday Night at the Movies. Thanks for completely screwing that one up, TVO. Instead, we decided to watch archive clips of The Daily Show on the laptop, since Comedy Central had put the full series archives online.

But when we went to the Comedy Central website, we got this:

See how it says, "You'll miss nothing." Actually, we missed something ... the freakin' archives, the reason we went to the site in the first place. Instead, we get some lame joke about how corporations are carving up the internet and limiting where you and I can roam. It's not just a load of crap; it's a terrible indicator of where things are headed.

You know what you get when corporations start limiting flow? You get the Path system that runs beneath the office towers in downtown Toronto. Each office building designed their portion of the path to keep people from being able to get conveniently to other portions of the path and the result was a tangled mess. For people who work downtown (I did at a consulting firm for a few years), being able to say that you can navigate the Path system carries huge bragging rights. It's like being able to say that you know how to use MicroSoft Word.

That aside, being redirected to the Comedy Network isn't exactly "good news", as that graphic claims. The Comedy Network's frat-boy branding tone has always annoyed the hell out of me and you can see a good sample of it at the bottom of that graphic, "Just close your eyes and say: "Do me!" three times ..." Oh, wow, DO ME! That's funny. If you're drunk. And living in 1974. And 14 years old.

Actually, the tone of the Comedy Network reminds me of the first -- and only -- time I went to a Yuk Yuk's comedy club. A guy on our floor in rez was performing at the amateur night and the host was one of those cheap, D-grade, sleazy Canadian stand-up comics. Like Mike Bullard except more likable and talented. Anyhow, for years afterwards I would see that comic guy EVERY TIME I was at Finch Station and he just seemed desperate and pathetic. Like the Comedy Network.

Clearly Playback needs to change Susanne Boyce's 'Person of the Year' to 'Idiot of the Year' for calling this "... a winning deal for Canadians coast-to-coast." Because, it's not really much of a win. The Comedy Network invests in homegrown productions but if you create a walled-off internet, you'll only ever get a homegrown audience. This is why people use P2P and torrents, to get away from all the walls.

And the irritating branding.

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