To Boldly Go Where Everyone Has Gone Before

CBS has announced plans for a new Star Trek TV series that will air in January 2017. The first episode will premiere on the CBS TV network and subsequent episodes will be available on the paid CBS All Access streaming service.

Good luck with that.

If CBS management pulled their collective heads out of their collective rears, they might be able to spot the three mountain size hurdles in their path to success.

First, as I've discussed before, CBS has the most customer hostile streaming policies of any of the major networks.

Missed the last few minutes of your show because the beginning was delayed? Have fun streaming it on demand because there's no way to fast forward. And you're burdened with this streaming restriction even if you're watching it through your cable provider, who presumably you've already paid for the "privilege" of watching CBS.

Looking at the iPhone app reviews for the big three networks shows just how far behind CBS is in customer satisfaction for their streaming service:

People are only going to watch this new Star Trek series if the show is so good that they're willing to endure a horrible viewing experience. And that brings us to the second hurdle.

CBS's recent track record with science fiction is not that good. No one's going to pay for pablum like Extant or Under The Dome. There's plenty of bad science fiction series available for free, but more importantly, there's also plenty of good science fiction series available for free. This new Star Trek series needs to be as good, if not better, than a series like Battlestar Galactica, and that needs to be apparent from the very first episode. Which brings us to the third and final hurdle.

The Star Trek TV franchise is creatively bankrupt. The film franchise reboot achieved success by focusing on the action/adventure aspects of the stories. A weekly TV show is not going to be able to compete with the special effects budget of a film. That means the TV show needs to excel at plot and character development, areas in which each Star Trek TV series in general has been progressively worse than its predecessors.

I've watched every episode of all five live action Star Trek TV series, but the idea of a new series that follows in the creative footsteps of the shows that came before it leaves me completely unexcited. I've had my fill of technobabble and cookie cutter crews.

It would be nice to be pleasantly surprised by the preview episode and watch something that's radically different from what we've seen before while still being familiar as Star Trek, but I'm not holding my breath. And I'm not paying for CBS All Access. If the series ends up being worth watching I'll wait for it on blu-ray.

Textbooks are Crazy Expensive

Doug Kari, writing for Ars Technica, on How an eBay bookseller defeated a publishing giant at the Supreme Court:

Supap’s saga started with an idea for a dorm room sort of business. Since 1978, textbook prices in the US had soared by 700 percent, but the pricing wasn’t uniform worldwide. Publishers charged more in the affluent North American market and less in other regions. They called this practice “market segmentation,” but to many it seemed like price-gouging. Supap discovered this himself: a textbook priced at $50 overseas might cost $100 in the US.

What interested me about this article is that I have some experience from the other side: I’m a textbook author. In 1989, I coauthored the first edition of Expert Systems: Principles and Programming. It was successful enough that we did three additional editions—the fourth was released in 2004—and it’s been translated to Spanish, Russian, and Chinese.

Using my royalty statement from the first half of 2011, I calculated that each domestic sale of Expert Systems generated twenty-four times more income than each international sale. That’s a huge disparity. Domestic royalty rates are twice international rates and the books are twelve times more expensive. It’s not surprising that international sales frequently exceed domestic sales by a factor of five or more.

I used figures from 2011 because that’s the last year I received any royalty income. My publisher filed in 2013 for chapter 11 relief under the bankruptcy code. They’ve since reorganized, but I have to wonder if their pricing strategies are the root of their problems.

100% True Deceptive

Sugar Flavored Toothpaste

This is one of the last things I would have expected to see on my toothpaste tube:



No ADA-Accepted toothpaste contains ingredients that would promote tooth decay, so it would have been a little more honest to say “artificial sweetener” rather than sugar, but nonetheless after reading about the ingredients it’s no wonder they don’t want you swallowing this stuff.

Candy Crush

Candy Crush is the kind of game R.J. Reynolds would make if they were peddling entertainment rather than cancer. The game itself is visually appealing, fun to play, and very addictive. It’s that last element that really adds the sleaze to the coercive monetization King Digital Entertainment uses to generate income.

I’m one of the 70% that’s never spent money on the game and never intend to, but was I tempted to pry open my wallet the other day when I saw this while playing:

Live forever! You mean I can pay something reasonable like $10 or $15 and just play the game continuously? I don’t have to wait or spend money to continue playing each and every time I run out of lives? That’s something I’d be willing to buy!

Oh, wait. By forever you mean the next two hours, not for all time. So if I lose lives at a rate of one each minute, how many “unlimited” lives can I get?

Let’s see… 117. 118. 119. Infinity. That adds up.

No thanks, I’ll spend my money elsewhere.

Just say no to coercive monetization. Play but don’t pay. Develop patience or spend your money on games that charge you upfront and allow you to play continuously.