THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE RIGHT BACK [513]

We already know nothing comes for free, and signing up to receive a free television has compromises for its viewer. 

The “Telly”, taking a generic, colloquial name for its own, and only available in the United States at present, is exactly that, a free TV, and one that receives channels over the air in addition to the internet. Furthermore, it has two screens: a 4K HDR “Theater Display”, and a second strip screen under the built-in soundbar, a “Smart Screen” that acting as an assistant for video calls, news, weather and other information, while acting as the settings menu for the device without overlaying the main picture...

It also constantly plays ads. They cannot be turned off. Turning off the “Theater Display” won’t turn off the “Smart Screen” – only turning off the entire unit will do this. Blocking that part of the screen violates the user agreement.

I first heard about the “Telly” through the technology website The Verge, and Emma Roth’s review of it that begins: “The last few months, I’ve felt like I’m living in a cyberpunk movie.” The delivery driver brought Roth’s Telly to her house queried her about it, saying he read that the device takes its user’s data: “‘I know,’ I said, ‘That’s basically part of the deal.’”

The “cyberpunk” nature of the device is in line with similar stories I have seen recently about some Chinese toilets purportedly requiring users to scan a QR code and see an advertisement before receiving toilet paper, and Samsung showing ads on screens embedded into their smart fridges.

The answer from Telly Inc. to the question, “If Telly is free, how do you make money?”, sounds reasonable at the very least: “All smart TVs come with ads. But you’re still paying for the TV. All of that changes with Telly. Telly is so smart, that it pays for itself with the help of advertisers and data partners. We think it’s well past time you got cut in on the deal.”

The ”Telly” user agreement is a long one: you must be at least eighteen years old, commit to using the “Telly” as the main TV in your house, keep it connected to the internet, and not use any software or other items that interfere with or block it, or make any modifications to it, or sell, transfer or dispose of it yourself.

Once you have the “Telly” in your house, you must also abide by a privacy policy, for the device automatically collects activity and viewing data, information collected by its built-in camera and motion sensor – although the camera does have a privacy window – along with any voice commands, purchases made through the device, along with details of the network it is connected, along with any other devices connected to that network. This is required to help Telly Inc. personalise and improve the service provided, monitor trends, detect and prevent security issues and comply with legal and financial obligations.

This is on top of any information collected about yourself through the viewing of the device, like your name, location, contact details, demographic details, professional or employment-related information, education, user preferences and choices made. This information will be required for further improving the user experience, but also for advertising and market research purposes. You will have already given some of this information when you set up your Telly profile: “During the profile creation process, we ask questions about you and your household to provide a useful and relevant ad experience. Brands, in turn, pay for the non-intrusive ad on the second Smart Screen. That’s how you get Telly for free. Plain and simple. We think it’s well past time you got cut in on the deal.”

One thing I have not done with Apple, however, is provide them with debit or credit card details to prove my identity to them, or to help with fraud protection, or confirm I am complying with their user agreement - Telly does require this, specifically for those purposes, even if you are not to be charged for anything. 

“Smart” televisions come with similar user agreements for use of its apps and programs – I instead use a separate device for those needs, an Apple TV box that effectively extends the agreements I already made by using other Apple devices. Curiously, the “Telly” comes with a separate Android TV dongle for accessing streaming platforms like Netflix or Disney+, for only Telly’s own services, and Zoom for video calls, are built into the device.

So long as you can square all the above, the “Telly” is free to use. The user agreement states that if you cannot, its service could be restricted, or your ability to use the device will be stopped. Failing to return the device to Telly Inc. following this authorises them to charge a thousand dollars for the device... at which point the TV is presumably yours, and you can do what you like with it, reconnecting and modifying it however you wish. If that price sounds reasonable for what it can do, you probably already spent that on a similar screen without so many obligations.

PRESS YOUR FACE UP AGAINST THE SCREEN [467]

Well, my television broke again, losing power to the screen for the second time in four years, in the same way it happened last time. With the memory of the previous two-week wait for it to be fixed rising to the surface, I threw up my hands and bought a replacement. Provided this one lasts for a few more years, I have realised this may be the last regular television I will buy.

My first personal TV was a fourteen-inch cathode ray tube TV bought for £139 in 1996, weighed seven kilograms (15.4 lbs), had two one-watt speakers, no subtitles or teletext ability, and used approximately 150 watts an hour, CRT screens holding high voltages even after turn-off. The back of it was riven with ventilation holes, because they were surely needed.

My new TV, a Sharp 32FH8KA, weighs half as much, has a thirty-two-inch LED screen like my previous Toshiba model, but this time with high dynamic range so effective that the backlight can be turned down to save power. Along with two twelve-watt speakers that have some bass, the unit is only a few inches thick – the circuit board and connectors stick out from the back of the TV, and is the only part that remains ventilated, because the screen hardly produces any heat, and because so little energy is lost through heat, it only uses twenty-six watts an hour. It is also fully Android compatible, making it pretty much a computer, into which other computers can be connected. With inflation, £139 in 1996 is now £271 – this new TV cost only £199.

Aside from the minimum expectations of a TV’s ability having greatly expanded over time, connectivity has also greatly changed. I only ever connected a VHS video recorder to the old portable TV in the 1990s, via the single SCART connector, but I now have an Apple TV box – “Android” is something that other people do – a Blu-ray player, a separate DVD player that accepts region 1 DVDs from North America, and an Atari Flashback console, all connected at once, covering all possibilities. 

While I am happy with the speakers on my new TV, a sound bar is usually the first add-on others would buy nowadays, especially if streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and the BBC iPlayer are accessible through the TV itself – apart from the Sky Glass TV, made for subscribers to that service, TVs with built-in soundbars have not appeared, as if better sound is expected to be something that needs to be added to a TV. I could easily have bought a large computer monitor with enough connectors for what I require, but these doesn’t really exist either.

The ability to just buy an all-purpose screen may arrive if no unified decision is made on the future of broadcasting. It is not clear if “5G Broadcast”, using the mobile phone network to deliver TV signals, is the ultimate choice if more of the current TV signals are repurposed for mobile use, while satellite TV, my main source for “regular” broadcasts on my new TV, may only remain if Sky commits to continuing with it beyond the end of the 2020s – if not, why should SES build more Astra satellites? If then, my TV will become that all-purpose screen, but I should never fear, for the box and manual states it supports the H.265 video codec, should any UK broadcaster decide to start using it – that’s good, I suppose.

COME ON BEFORE WE CRACK [450]

“Put on the corned beef hash” is a well-known misheard lyric from Kenny Loggins’s song “Footloose”, as I discovered when I misheard it myself being played on a speaker at a food festival.

I immediately wanted to check the correct lyric, but I could not get a signal on my smartphone to check. I am very used to the impulse of checking what I don’t know with my phone, so when I couldn’t, that impulse had to be used up a different way, so I checked how many steps I walked so far – that was something the phone could count by itself.

This was the point I realised I had the perfect opening to an article about smartphones, so I opened my note-taking app to make an early start.

I have previously talked about Marshall McLuhan’s delineation of media as being “hot” or “cool” in terms of how demanding they are of their user’s attention, with television being defined as “cool” because of its lower fidelity picture and sound relative to the real world, and it having to compete for attention in the settings they are usually found.

However, is the smartphone a “medium”, or a Swiss Army knife-type delivery system for many different media? Does the device demand my attention, or the combination of all the things it can do?

Having explained the delineation of hot and cool media in his 1964 book “Understanding Media” subtitled “The Extensions of Man”, McLuhan looks at many different media to determine where they stand, and what their true message is, for example the telephone removing walls and distance from human conversation.

It is entirely possible for me to create a table from the different media McLuhan discusses, taking an average of whether the smartphone is overall “hot” or “cold”. My phone is expected to reproduce both the spoken word, through radio and recorded music, and the written word, simulating print media from newspapers and magazines to comic books and various forms. It is expected to make photographs and act as their frame. It is a telegraph, through telephony, various messaging apps and in submitting information to the internet and recalling from it. It displays various advertisements. It is my television. It is my typewriter. It can be used to light up a room. I could also throw it... but I need it so much I fear breaking it.

However, the smartphone leaves me “cold”, as it were, because it relies entirely on my attention. It may be one step on from having separate devices for each of its individual uses, but it takes you one step away from the advantages those devices had: larger screens and surfaces, better sound systems, better microphones, brighter light, and so on. I have to bring more to my smartphone to make it work the way I need it to work, which may require me to compromise to bridge the gap created by the loss of fidelity that I could have achieved with a proper camera, a book, a pen, a Blu-ray player, a torch and so on. The smartphone is a new level of compromise.

BY THE MAGIC RAYS OF LIGHT [445]

The opening of BBC Two on Tuesday 21^st April 1964 marked the first time British audiences needed to update their televisions, to receive the more detailed 625-line pictures sent over the air by the new channel. Early adopters may have had a Baird mechanical set from the first experimental transmissions in the 1930s, but this was the first time that the regular TV standard changed. This switch happened at a glacial speed: 625-line versions of BBC One and ITV began later in 1969, two years after BBC Two became Europe’s first colour TV channel, but the old 405-line system used by them continued until 1985 as households and television rental firms slowly replaced their sets.

The television standard in the UK has arguably changed three times since then, in more rapid succession. The first came after digital television began in 1998, using the DVB-T standard, the switch-off of analogue signals was completed from 2008 to 2012 – this coincided with the introduction in 2009 of the updated DVB-T2 standard used mostly for high-definition channel, prompting a further push for new TVs. But perhaps the biggest change hardly involves the television, because the inexorable move to online streaming of programmes is really the end of the physical act of “broadcasting”, as sharing one channel from a transmitter is replaced by everyone having their own discrete link their device and a content provider’s server, known as “unicasting”. 

I then remembered that BBC Research & Development had carried out a trial of something named “5G Broadcast” in 2019 on Stronsay, one of the Orkney Isles. A 5G network was constructed that provided mobile internet to one of the most poorly-connected places in the UK, while also using that network to broadcast radio stations, including BBC Radio Orkney, to devices with the software capable of receiving the signals. By all accounts, the exercise proved successful, leaving the island with more reliable internet access after the trial ended.

The 4G and 5G mobile signal standards allow for broadcast capabilities, which is a naturally more efficient use of bandwidth in situations where many people are watching the same thing at the same moment, freeing up capacity on the mobile network. The computer chip manufacturer Qualcomm, which had a hand in developing the technology used for these mobile standards, explained on their website that no extra equipment is needed to receive 5G Broadcast, as mobile devices already have the necessary technology built into them, and existing television transmitters, more physically resilient than mobile signal masts, can broadcast the 5G signal too. Furthermore, if someone is outside the range of the 5G Broadcast signal, their device will seamlessly move to “unicast” mode.

However, that depends on the will of broadcasters to keep their own transmitters going at all. Switzerland is a country that already switched their TV transmitters off, in 2019, but most viewers already received their services via cable. This shift is perhaps inevitable: the cost of keeping networks of high-powered transmitters in working order would be avoidable if you can piggy-back on the internet, but relying on that network poses problems in binding one service, once available to all over the air, into another service that requires payment to access. Even Qualcomm’s article made clear that “In the unfortunate scenario that the cellular network becomes disabled from structural damages (e.g., in case of an earthquake), public authorities could still use the broadcast infrastructure to communicate with smartphones that support broadcast services” – the will has to be there.

HE JUST STARES BACK UNBLINKING [352]

My TV, a Toshiba 32LL3A63DB

I have been without a television for a week at the time of writing. I had just finished summer cleaning, sat down to relax, turned on my TV, and found no picture. A troubleshooting phone call revealed it was still in-warranty, so I sent it away to be fixed.

Being the year 2022, this inconvenience has reduced me from four screens to only three, as my phone, tablet and computer attempt to fill the gap temporarily left by the TV, but their nature as multi-purpose devices make them poorer substitutes than I had reason to expect, as I sit over to examine programmes I am more used to seeing in a more relaxed, laid-back position.

In having to actively look for content to watch, I have missed the opportunity that TV provides in just switching it on and showing me something, to effectively switch myself off for a moment, as it were - getting to sleep has taken longer in this last week.

This would also be the week that Boris Johnson resigned as leader of the Conservative Party, his petulant speech underlining his tenure as Prime Minister as one of the most divisive and sordid in modern times. Instead of letting the TV take the strain in reporting what happened, able to recede into the background as I relaxed into the evening, I continued to scroll through news updates on my phone, like my work day never stopped.

In my experience, television is a passive medium, even if I play an increasing role in choosing the programmes, as both the number of channels, and the number of ways to send programmes to it, have increased. It is not the same as radio or podcasts, where you are listening intently by nature of its form – I found that I have not had the radio on at home in the evening to substitute for the TV, because that would force me to listen more intently at a time when I am trying to relax. There is an argument for my experiencing a withdrawal from the higher dopamine and serotonin levels experienced when watching TV, but I will only know that for sure when my TV is fixed and sent back to me.

I had intended to write about Marshall McLuhan’s concepts of “hot” and “cool” media, from his 1964 book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, which I have talked about previously [link]. His definition of TV as “cool”, through the user having to do the work in connecting with the TV’s message, and filtering out any distractions from outside it. 

This hasn’t fit with my experience – I have more control over what my TV shows me than McLuhan, who witnessed the medium’s introduction in his native Canada, and would only have access to two networks, CBC and CTV, by 1964. Bigger screens and better sound also make TV and its programmes more cinematic, film being codified as a “hot” medium through its handling more of the work in relaying its message.

However, McLuhan defined a “medium” like an extension of the human body, such as  switching on a lightbulb to change the nature of your surroundings. Even if TV is just a way of packaging what I want to see, I now realise how well it did that job.

FILL IN THE BLANK [250]

[Please see below for the script for my latest video, as seen above.]

(black screen)

Do not adjust your device, or do not adjust it any more than you already have. Your screen has been intentionally left blank.

However, that might change, so don’t look away either. This is not a podcast, and this is not radio. This is a video.

This isn’t a confidence trick either. Videos need pictures, but my conscious decision to put nothing on screen still leaves a picture frame. I may also change my mind.

Mind you, that frame is never empty – even if your screen is turned off, it still reflects light. In 1951, the artist Robert Rauschenberg painted a series of canvasses with white house paint, but those paintings are not blank, for the brush strokes played off the ambient conditions in the room, and off anyone that looked at them.

The following year, Rauschenberg’s friend John Cage composed the musical piece “4’33”” [pronounced “four minutes, thirty-three seconds”] which of course, is not four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence: it is composed for any instrument, any band, any orchestra, but while the players do not play, the room, and the audience, plays with them.

Ideally, you want your work to be received hot, rather than cold, but I will explain that later.

I actually found this blank screen online, but in searching the term “blank screen”, I either get this:

(white screen)

Or this:

(black screen)

I recently bought a new television, and the energy-saving options actually affected how it dealt with the difference between black and white. When a video cut from black to white, or even if white text is added to a black screen, my television faded it in instead. For me to see a video properly, I have to turn off all of its fancy processing features... and set the picture mode to “sports,” for some reason. So, if I cut to a white screen:

(white screen)

And back again:

(black screen)

...and your screen faded instead, your settings are not acting in my best interest.

Video crosses over with both film and television, but these two media are not the same: as classified by Marshall McLuhan, in his book “Understanding Media,” there is “hot” media, and there is “cold” media, according to how much participation is required of the audience. For McLuhan, film is “hot”: the picture is dominant, and you are ideally in a cinema, so you are captivated by the image, because less is required of you to remain captivated. On the other hand, television is “cool”: there are more distractions, and you have to take account of this before you can start paying attention to whatever is coming from the TV. Films can be shown on television, but “hot” media cannot be rendered “cool” – making it harder to focus on a film may make it impossible to watch, missing out on detail television knows not to include.

When I next make a video, do I want to be hot, or do I want to be cool?

Thank you for watching. As ever, the nostalgia culture crisis continues at  [www.leighspence.net].

HE’S GOT A TV IN EVERY ROOM [109]

It has been nearly two years since I added a smart TV box to my television, and my viewing has never recovered. Unless I want to watch a programme right away, instead of catching up later, my TV will be switched from “DTV” to “HDMI-2,” so I can dive into the BBC iPlayer, YouTube and Netflix – “HDMI-1” is for my blu-ray player, having got there first. I am very suited to this arrangement, as I now have a larger screen to watch the video essays you often find on YouTube for films, music, computer games, dead shopping malls, and other subjects that may be too niche for “regular” TV.

Because I don’t often watch traditional TV programmes, my TV has turned into a multipurpose screen for whatever I can put onto it, including films and podcasts. The same can be said of my phone, as well as my tablet and desktop computers: they all are now types of computers, able to do most, if not all, the same as each other. It reminded me of a Venn diagram I copied out of a book over fifteen years ago, where Nicholas Negroponte, founder of, among other things, MIT’s Media Lab, the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and “Wired” magazine, had predicted that media, telecommunications, and consumer electronics, with few overlaps even by the 1990s, will have become a conglomeration of “edutainment” by about 2005 – Negroponte described this in the mid-1980s, even referencing the idea of “surrogate travel” using virtual reality.

Now we have our all-purpose screens, what I have realised is that, now that “television” is – was – a bit of a magpie medium to begin with. Films have been a big part of schedules since the very beginning, but that involved taking an established form out of its usual setting, a pitch-black, quiet room – and making it a background object in the corner of a room. Comedy programmes, panel games and discussion shows, especially when in front of a studio audience, have their origins in theatres and halls – drama used to be the same, but have become more filmic themselves. News is often nothing more than radio with pictures – indeed, BBC News reports are planned as a one-minute piece for Radio 5 Live or the World Service, before pictures are added further down the line. What was television offering all this time, other than making it more convenient to access moving pictures?

Decades ago, I would have asked the same question of cinema, radio and newspapers, as television has been described as the death knell for all of them, but I just don’t think that TV won if you can now access all of these through a screen. I don’t think the internet won either, because describing it as a medium, in the same way that the others are types of media, doesn’t really work either – everything is online because it is higher in quality and efficiency for getting content to you than by sending it over the air, or by printing it out. The restraints on different genres of content were also freed from TV more quickly than it took for TV to adopt them, but everything moves faster these days, and you can never say there is nothing to watch on TV anymore.