The “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” as ESPN brands itself, laid off scores of journalists and on-air talent on Wednesday, showing that even the most formidable media kingdom was vulnerable to the transformation upending the sports broadcasting industry as more and more people turn away from cable television.

...

In October 2015, ESPN laid off about 300 people, most of whom were not on camera. The network has been periodically culling its staff as it searches for ways to cut costs and adapts to changing consumer habits, with fans increasingly watching video clips on their smartphones at the expense of traditional highlight shows like “SportsCenter.” With ESPN locked into long-term contracts for programming rights with various sports leagues, savings must primarily come from a reduced staff.

They buried the real lede:

The ESPN layoffs come as Disney accelerates efforts to introduce an ESPN-branded subscription streaming service. The offering, expected this year and made possible by Disney’s $1 billion purchase in 2016 of part of BamTech, Major League Baseball’s streaming division, will include coverage of sports like hockey, tennis, cricket and college sports — mostly rights that are owned by ESPN, but not televised.

Disney bought BamTech (the best streaming infrastructure in the business, powering services like HBO Now and WWE Network; I should know, I used to work there) and is using it to build an OTT streaming platform for live sports!

Correction: Disney acquired a minority stake in BamTech, 33% of the company, for its $1 billion. Makes sense; when I was there, before BamTech was officially spun out of MLBAM, the expected valuation for BamTech was about $2.5 billion.

The profusion of ESPN channels was originally supposed to support multiple simultaneous games, but then they needed to fill all the programming hours and invested in legions of talking heads. A corrosive "fandom" culture took hold in which viewers embraced the shouting matches and venom (seriously, take a look at the comments of any YouTube video featuring the Golden State Warriors or the Cleveland Cavaliers), but it started to turn some off.

Remember this?

Nevertheless, what seemed like intense viewer loyalty and spectacular ad rates helped inflate the cost of broadcast rights, even as improving online streaming and increasingly questionable cable bundle pricing led to "cord cutting" on the fringes.

You know how this movie ends.

A hypothetical "ESPN Now" doesn't need "channels," which means there's less dead air time to fill. It can offer a primary "live" stream of games interleaved with short highlights and analysis segments, while potentially offering on-demand access to full-length streams of all the sports ESPN holds broadcast rights to. It just doesn't need as much conventional on-air talent.

There will be new opportunities around scripted content like 30 for 30 or Outside the Lines across the entire range of sports, because a streaming platform doesn't inherently prioritize any one over the others. Got a compelling deep dive into the world of Russian women's pro curling? There's now potentially room for that, on equal footing with the annual hagiography of the Super Bowl-winning team.

By the way, Disney's acquisition of investment in BamTech makes me wonder about the prospects for Netflix's "exclusive streaming partner" relationship. With BamTech in-house, Disney could spin up a Netflix competitor of its own, and it has the depth of catalog in film, tv, animation and (via ESPN) sports to make it a compelling alternative.

Live sports has been viewed as the final frontier in cord cutting, and between Twitter's NFL streaming last season, Amazon's $50 million deal for those same rights in the upcoming one and this Disney/ESPN/BamTech development, we may be approaching the tipping point in VODs usurpation of broadcast television.

As someone who's been cable-free since 2009, but who loves sports, I can't wait for ESPN Now in 2018!

On Thursday, March 31, 2016, Tesla Motors unveiled its much awaited "more affordable" fully electric sedan, the Model 3. It began taking pre-orders, with a USD 1,000 deposit required, and within hours had racked up in excess of 100,000. As of this writing, the number is over 276,000.

This is a big deal. This is a huge deal. This is a fantastic success for Tesla, and a wonderful moment for electric vehicles (EVs) as a whole, and should roundly be celebrated.

But.

In our excitement, let's not get ridiculous. I see people tweeting that Tesla racked up billions in sales in just a few hours, and how this has to have BMW/Mercedes/Audi/Lexus/whoever "shitting bricks." I see people saying the price of oil will never rise again. I see people suggesting that Tesla has "disrupted" the auto industry, and that all the other OEMs must now be scrambling to adjust their product mix to go all-EV, too.

Financialization

Let's put aside the softball that Tesla hasn't actually received the full funds for each pre-order; conversion rates on the Model S were reportedly stellar, and even with some fall-off I expect that to be a marginal impact. The real problem is that revenue should be properly spread out across the delivery interval. Tesla won't begin production of the Model 3 until late 2017, and it's unclear what its capacity will be and how quickly it will rise. Tesla produced 50,580 vehicles in 2015, but that does not mean its facilities are at full capacity. I've seen speculation that the max capacity of the Fremont facility is circa 2,500 vehicles per week. That's still only 130,000 cars per year.

Looking at Toyota's most recent available vehicle production figures, from 2012, this is close to how many cars it makes in Africa, per year. Globally, in 2012, Toyota made some 8,736,500 cars. Let's just keep that in context.

(A little data quirk: Visiting Toyota's Global Investor Relations site and looking at the Fiscal Year 2012 financial summary, the total number of vehicles produced is given as 7,435,781. However, this covers the interval April 1, 2011 through March 31, 2012. The numbers above indicate a slight uptick in the 12-calendar-month interval of 2012. The global production figures also provide a better breakdown by region, where the financial summary collapses Africa and Oceania into "Other.")

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, is on the record as aiming for 500,000 vehicle per year by 2020. Assuming full production capacity on the current assembly line at Fremont by production start of the Model 3 in late 2017, that still calls for more than tripling production within three additional years. Between now and the delivery of the first units to customers in late 2017, the backlog of pre-orders will also continue to grow, likely to well in excess of 350,000. So it will take at least two years of production for Tesla, with growing production capacity, to meet up to concrete pent-up demand in the form of pre-orders.

What this means is that the sales amounts represented by the pre-orders need to be accounted for over a two-or-more-year period, starting in 2017. Not this quarter. Not this fiscal year. And in all likelihood, Elon Musk is spot on with his assessment of Tesla's capacity/demand sweet spot in the near term as being around 500,000 units a year—and that seems like a lot, but, as we just discussed above, Toyota made 16 times as many cars globally in 2012. (8,929,887 in 2015.)

In plain terms, as nice of a PR bump as the single-weekend pre-order total of some USD 8.15 billion is, assuming the base price of USD 35,000—though Musk expects the average selling price to be closer to USD 42,000—in real accounting terms it's a more modest USD 4 billion per year. That's nothing to sneeze at! But Toyota made almost twice as much revenue in a single quarter.

Disruption

My frequent comparisons to an entrenched competitor of course aligns perfectly with the calls of "disruption!", suggesting that dismissing Tesla as a marginal entrant is precisely how previous incumbents have ended up losing their dominance. Many have drawn parallels to Apple's entry into the smartphone space with the iPhone, the incumbents being variously Nokia and RIM, now known as BlackBerry.

Superficially this seems true, but deeper analysis is less convincing. The critical feature of a disruptive innovation is that it is not a logical progression of technology refinement along existing axes, and consequently can not easily be adopted by the incumbents.

The iPhone shifted the emphasis away from tactility and physicality (as represented by the Nokia Communicator or various Symbian devices, or the classic Blackberry) to multitouch and virtuality, requiring a deep rethink of virtually all interaction metaphors with the software. It inverted the primacies defining the smartphone from hardware to software, since all interfaces (save for the volume toggles, home and lock buttons and mute switch) were now virtual, in stark contrast to the abundance of hard keys that had long defined the mobile phone. This emphasized Apple's strengths in software and user interfaces over Nokia's and RIM's in physical manufacturing and back office operations, respectively, ultimately giving Apple time to ramp up and eventually outperform these vanquished incumbents in the areas of their traditional stengths.

The Model 3, like the Model X and Model S and even the Roadster before them, does not significantly change user behavior as concerns the vehicle. The practice of plugging into a charging station at home or at work, or taking advantage of the Supercharger network (which is a really important, really interesting part of the mix) is substitutive for stopping for petrol, but in day-to-day use you drive Tesla cars just like you drive Audi or Hyundai or Renault cars. And as for the production side, well, Tesla is actually utterly conventional. It literally uses the same metal stampers, the same construction approaches, the same assembly robots—its Fremont facility is a former Toyota factory!

There is no distinction in production method aside from the detail of how it packs Lithium ion battery cells into a flat layer, eliminating the transmission tunnel. But Chevy has done the same thing…

The incumbents have all variously demonstrated their ability to adopt electric and hybrid drivetrains into their product mix quite transparently. Lest we forget, as Toyota goes, so the plug-in hybrid vehicle market goes, because the Prius essentially defines that category. And General Motors put fully electric vehicles on the road before Elon Musk was even in college. GM has the Volt hybrid, and expects to begin selling the all-electric Bolt this year, possibly a full 12 months before Tesla's Model 3. BMW has the i3, which is a somewhat middling vehicle but at least demonstrates the engineering capability, and Nissan has the Leaf. Even Porsche has the Mission E concept, often cited as a "Model S fighter."

So Tesla doesn't disrupt the industry at all, it merely assumes the risk of serving as bellwether. If Tesla does exceptionally well, and particularly if the incumbents see significant erosions in their sales of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and plug-in hybrids, then they will adopt the fully electric drivetrain, and quite easily.

Electric Future

"Fine," says my interlocutor. "Tesla itself will not 'disrupt' the auto industry, but its success will drive all the OEMs to shift their emphasis away from dirty, polluting internal combustion engine-powered cars to clean, environmentally-friendly electric vehicles. Tesla is the sharp edge of the wedge of revolution!"

Eventually, nearly all cars will be electric. Electric vehicles are not a new idea: the Baker Electric was made in 1899. But Tesla sells a small number of vehicles exclusively in developed countries with reliable electrical grids and decent road networks. There is a huge amount of sustaining demand in places that lack one or both of those things, and that demand continues to grow.

Reaching the point where the majority of vehicles sold in a given year are EVs requires massive global investments in infrastructure that are simply not on the visible horizon. It could take more than 30 years to build out, at which point our ability to meaningfully predict the shape of the personal transportation market is likely to have been altered by forces like automation and the continuing penetration of ride/car sharing services.

There is literally no point in talking about BMW or Ford ceasing to make petrol-powered cars.

Hype Cycles

What we appear to have here is a classic Peak of Inflated Expectations. I can't help but notice that many who are suddenly speaking on Tesla seem to come at it from a Silicon Valley-centric notion of software "eating the world," and don't appear to have much interest, information or affinity for the automotive industry at large. And when presented with informed rebuttals for some of their more outlandish statements, they fall into the reflex of labeling dissenters as "trolls."

»sigh«

Electric cars are the future. There is absolutely no doubt about that. Some of us gearheads/petrolheads may wax nostalgic at the notion of losing the beloved signifiers of our internal combustion engines—the noise, the smell, the vibrations—but those losses are benefits for the majority of transportation appliance needs. And even dynamically, the flat torque delivery curve of electric motors, with max torque available at effectively 0 RPM is already transforming motorsport: see the McLaren P1, Porsche 918 and LaFerrari, all of which use electric motors for torque fill during gear change and acceleration events.

Electric cars are the future, but batteries are not. At least, not the batteries we have today. There is talk of developments like graphene batteries, with immense charge densities and much faster (10x) recharge times, and even a company claiming availability "before the end of the year." We'll see.

The current brand of "EV religion" is too tied up in zero emissions. I'm very interested in performing an EV conversion that maintains a small ICE as generator, fully decoupled from the drivetrain, which recharges a small battery bank for silent operation but can also directly power the electric motor for sustained high draw (heavy acceleration, or "sport/race mode"). Coupled with the still-unmatched energy density of petrol, this would be an EV with incredible range, high efficiency, low emissions and ready fuel availability—plus "recharge" time in minutes, likely quicker than other cars since it wouldn't need as large a fuel tank.

But I digress. Tesla Motors is a groundbreaking company and I wish it every success, but let's pump the brakes on declaring the incumbents dead in the water, throwing around the term "disruption!" and other irrationalities. Enjoy the ride!

»Sigh« Let's review.

The Fantastic Four is a mediocre comic book centered around a makeshift "family" of superheroes who receive their abilities during a botched space trip, or science experiment, or whatever the current retcon is calling it. They are corny, they have a bland rogue's gallery, and they don't even have the crime-fighting/life balance issues other superheroes have to deal with because their identities are public, which rather obviously makes no sense. In essence, the Fantastic Four are a beta release of a superhero team; they were the first draft that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Marvel used to figure out what does and doesn't work.

Because, you see, the Fantastic Four were the first superhero team at Marvel. Apparently some people think that matters, because FF keep getting television shows and attempts at movie adaptations, and they keep sucking.

No, seriously:

• their 1978 animated series has a 5.9 score on IMDB;
• their 1994-1996 animated series does marginally better, scoring 6.4;
• and their 2006 animated series, aspirationally subtitled "World's Greatest Heroes," scores a whopping 6.9 on IMDB.
• I really don't need to tell you how bad the movies have been, given that's why we're here.

In comparison, the 1966 Iron Man TV series comes in at 6.9; the somewhat confused, two-season 1998 Silver Surfer animated series scores 7.1; the 2010 Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes scores a scorching 8.5; as does the 1992-1997 X-Men series. Feel free to look up other series roughly contemporary to the above, albeit restricted to Marvel so that we are comparing shows ostensibly from the same stables. (I could only find aggregated review numbers for these shows on IMDB. Rotten Tomatoes and MetaCritic didn't even care about them.)

This is all an aside. That the Fantastic Four are objectively not that interesting, and that nobody has figured out how to tell good stories featuring them but not the Inhumans is the reason why they shouldn't make movies about them, but we get arguments about sophomore director Josh Trank's allegedly "bizarre" behavior and friction with the studios or bloviation about release windows.

And this is where some angry, white, male nerd insists that changing the race of the character Johnny Storm from "blue-eyed, blonde-haired white male" to African American was the opening salvo in the downfall of Western Civilization. Or something.

Which, you know, they're totally entitled to do. I give as few fucks about that as I did when they railed against casting Donald Glover and Spider-man (which wasn't going to happen anyway). But then, thinking that they're making some Important Point™, they say, "What about having Leonardo DiCaprio play the Black Panther, huh?"

This is not a hypothetical. I've come across it on multiple websites, from Variety to Den of Geek (where the asshole had the tastelessness to also suggest DiCaprio do so in blackface).

I'll just quote myself:

… your retort about casting DiCaprio as the Black Panther is neither as witty nor as profound as you think.

There is nothing about the character of Johnny Storm that mandates race/ethnicity. Not even being Sue Storm's brother, given the possibilities of adoption and blended families (step-siblings). His "blue eyes and blond hair" are purely cosmetic.

In contrast, the Black Panther isn't merely cosmetically black—like Ultimate Nick Fury, or Falcon, or even Storm. His political role as the king of Wakanda, and lineage as part of the royal family, impose some ethnic restrictions. You can't recast the Black Panther as a white male without radically altering his origins—say, at the very least making him a Boer descendant from South Africa, but then how does he get access to Vibranium, etc?

(Also, the blackface comment was just gratuitously rude. It's not like Michael B. Jordan is wearing "whiteface" to play Storm. Stop it.)

It seems that some people genuinely do not understand the points of contention on issues of social justice, or even just media representation. So, on this one issue, a primer:

The ethnicity, race, complexion and other cultural markings of a fictional character are fundamentally irrelevant.

As a direct consequence, some characters may have their ethnicity and/or origins gratuitously altered. It still doesn't really matter.

For many fictional characters, gender doesn't matter either.

For comic books in particular, reinvention is the norm. What-If books, parallel universes, alternate storylines, multiple earths… all of these exist as devices to allow reframing core character traits and conflicts around different contexts as writers and publishers see fit.

Furthermore, from time to time, the entire shebang is overhauled. Comic fans call this retroactive continuity, or retcons. Nearly everything you think you remember about the superheroes of your youth isn't true anymore. (Literally: DC overhauled all of their books not under the Vertigo and Dark Horse imprints in 2011. Oh, and the current Thor is a woman.)

It is not "political correctness" to change the gender or ethnicity of an established character. Mostly, it's marketing, in the sense of altering your product to better fit your market. Publishers—and movie studios—know much more about the purchasing power of previously underrepresented parts of their audience, and they are adjusting the product to be more identifiable.

This does not constitute an attack on … well, anything. Not your gender, not your race, not your appearance, not your ethnicity, not your socioeconomic status. It's just pop cultural products being reformulated to better appeal to a broader market.

Glad we could iron that out. Peace and blessings.

"This is the age of writing iOS apps for love."

The essay was popular, spurring much social sharing, tut-tut-ing and wringing of hands. Something about this reaction began to bother me, the aww-shucks, there's-noting-we-can-do, it-just-didn't-work-out -ness of it all that felt like everyone was handing out passes all around. And then famed blogger and podcaster John Gruber drove it home when he wrote:

…indie development for iOS and the App Store just hasn’t worked out the way we thought it would.

I disagree. This outcome was entirely predictable.

I said as much two years ago:

Apple has powerful incentives to commoditize and devalue software, while tying that software to its platforms. Apps make its iPhones and iPads, and to a lesser extent Macs, more attractive as consumer electronics appliances. Having lots of cheap or free apps is great for Apple, but very difficult for all but the most riotously successful (in terms of sales volume) developers to sustain.

Put more bluntly, Apple is not your friend.

This is an unpopular opinion among Apple fans, users and developers alike, and I think it's because of Love. The iOS indie space is filled with and shaped by former and current Mac indies, especially from the years when Apple was not the dominant platform vendor, as well as lifelong fans of the company and its products. These are people who love Apple, and I think it blinded them to the fact that Apple now works at cross-purposes with them.

iOS is not the Mac; Apple is best served by having an abundance of free or cheap apps that sweeten the value proposition for a consumer considering buying an iPhone, iPad or, now, Watch; and by having those apps provide free updates in perpetuity. Apple moved to realize those benefits, and idealistic indie developers are now left holding the bag.

Before I continue, a huge caveat: my remarks pertain solely to productivity applications. If you are making indie games, or tiny little utilities that don't solve complex problems, well, sorry. I have neither answers nor suggestions. Individual artisans creating commodity goods rarely make good livings, either. How many minimalist note-taking apps do you think the market can support?

Most indie problems stem from not approaching the business of selling apps as a business. Failing to determine who our individual customers are, mistakenly assuming that every App Store user is addressable by us—that's like thinking everyone in the US is a potential customer for your winter weather smartphone cozies. Failing to take on the challenge of marketing our applications ourselves, thinking that just releasing our apps to the App Store was sufficient. Failing to price our products sustainably, chasing the entire App Store at bottom barrell prices (99¢?) even as our actual addressable users would happily pay order of magnitude multiples. Curtis Herbert covered many of these in his rejoinder to Simmons:

…being independent is hard and many of us that try will not succeed.

But every one of those is exacerbated when you fail to identify the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Apple, through direct control, shapes its App Stores, and through size and profitability influences the policies of others. It does not have a vested interest in your success or sustainability, just your app's availability.

Yes, Apple is just people, but Apple is also a corporation and corporations are rather ambivalent about people. Despite the sincerity of individuals at nearly any level of a large corporation, the aggregate force of shareholder interest, profit and competition will frequently drive a corporation to act against you. Dijkstra warned us not to anthropomorphize our programs. Neither should we anthropomorphize our platforms, or the corporations that control them.

It's funny—ironic, really; my impression is that the Apple indie community has always held a wary view of Google as a corporation likely to turn on you and exploit you at any time. It's disappointing to see them misplace their trust in Apple because of a sense of shared history, or deep intertwining with personal/professional actualizations and comings of age, or love. Apple Inc. isn't Apple Computer, Inc., and neither is Tim or Phil or Jony … or Steve.

Many thanks to Jeremy W. Sherman for proofreading an early version of this essay. His feedback was invaluable for honing the delivery of what I was trying to say. Any flaws are my (re-)introductions! :-)

CW actually gave up on the format when it canceled KidsWB in 2008, driving Spectacular Spider-man to Disney XD. This was the network that was home to Pinky and the Brain, the entire DCAU after Batman: The Animated Series (which originally aired on FOX, but was reaired on WB Kids)—The Batman, New Superman Adventures, Batman Beyond, Justice League, Legion of Super Heroes, Teen Titans—Freakazoid!, Xiaolin Showdown, ¡Mucha Lucha!... and those are only the shows that were owned by Warner Bros.!

"Saturday morning cartoons" died 5 years ago, in the face of growing competition from video on demand services like Netflix streaming and YouTube. Today's outpouring of sentiment is mostly nostalgia from people who don't actually care, but feel that the obsolescence of something they regularly partook of 15, 20, 30 years ago must mean something.

The Kingdom is Dead, but the King is Running for Office
The funny thing is that we're awash in more animation that ever before, it's just not on television, and not necessarily attached to "shows" adhering to old TV formulas. There are YouTube channels that produce 5-minute videos riffing on pop culture, like How It Should Have Ended, or idiosyncratic ruminations like Simon's Cat.

The gates are being flung open, their keepers falling. Yes, that means we're in a bazaar now, rather than a meticulously regimented cathedral, but the variety of works that can come to the fore now is much greater, and there are new opportunities to create services around discovery, merchandising and audience engagement. This isn't an end, it's a transition.

The majority of examples come from shows produced for public television, where budgets are more constrained, reliant as they are on endowments, grants and viewer donations, making the transition from more expensive hand-drawn methods toward the considerably cheaper Flash style understandable. All video links are to YouTube.

(Quick aside: one of the aims of my Lightbox animation software project is to narrow the expense gaps between these methods, by applying image processing, machine vision and even light artificial intelligence approaches to the animation production process. More on that some other time.)

Take Arthur, the PBS Kids TV series created by Marc Brown that revolves around the life and times of 8-year old anthropomorphic aardvark. Here's a random episode from season 5, and here's one from last year. (Skip ahead about 2 minutes, past the intro, which has been in use for years and was made using an earlier production method. So good, though!) It's subtle, indicating a tremendous level of skill applied, but you can notice little stiff shifts and stretchy "tweens" on characters that weren't there in the earlier episode. There's also a giveaway whenever a character turns its head 180 degrees, as the turning head is replaced with a different drawing facing forward, then another animated section to finish the rotation to the other side.

These are time-savers, but for someone familiar with the show from years ago and attuned to animation nuance, it's a clear decline in visual style and fidelity.

A much worse example is Caillou. Here's an early episode, and here's a more recent one. In the latter you can clearly see how appendages and even the heads take on a "paper puppet" visual character. (It doesn't help that the quality of the drawing is also much worse.)

This decline is not an intrinsic of "Flash-style" animation, but rather a consequence of linearly adapting a design prepared based on a different production method. As a counterpoint, Martha Speaks is an excellently designed show done in paper puppet fashion—and Word Girl a poorly designed and sloppily animated one, with tweens ev-er-y-where (but the writing is pretty clever).

I'm yet to see a show transition from a hand drawn design style to a puppet-and-tween-based vector production method without its visual presentation suffering for it, however slightly. In fact, this effect is so strong that even a completely new show, albeit based on the same source material and with an inevitable creative debt to its predecessor, can not seem to escape it: Bryan Redeagle (@misterpoppet on App.net and Ello) pointed out to me the 1994 to 1997 The Busy World of Richard Scarry and its decade-later sequel, 2007 to 2010's Busytown Mysteries (aka Hurray for Huckle).

At this point it is my thesis that it is an intrinsic, fundamental trait of any animation production that must be carefully considered up-front, and a part of the process that I'm now thinking about how to facilitate with digital tools.

It would also get dreadfully dull after a fan checks in a couple of days in a row. Or flits over to the college games’ summaries to see how his college team and its arch-rival(s) were doing.

I certainly think there’s a place for form-letter sports reporting, but it’ll have to be at least an order of magnitude better than what you posit, before it’s anything besides a joke.

I had written up a fairly lengthy response as a comment, but then my browser froze and after force quitting and relaunching, my text was gone. Lesson learned. Compose in a proper text editor, and any comment of more than three paragraphs is a good candidate for a blog post.

A few weeks ago I came across another piece on sports and language, this time about the disappointing limitations of television commentators for the majority of US professional sports, with particular emphasis on basketball and football. It only strengthened the point I was originally going to make.

Sports fans, in the US at least, are incredibly tolerant of cliche and repetition. They have been conditioned by terrible television coverage and bland commentators, not to mention the cesspit of "insight" that is sports radio. It doesn't take much to meet their expectations.

At the same time, there is already a laboratory for software commentators that we see improving every year, and I predict will eventually bust out of the labs and into our live broadcasts. Where is this lab? Video games. From Madden to FIFA to NBA 2K, developers have spent thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars recording bits of dialog from marquee commentators and figuring out how to string them together into naturalistic presentations. My only argument is that they haven't (yet) gone far enough.

Forget the simplisic template. All sports commentary seeks to summarize and optionally emphasize/contextualize an event or series of events that happened in the past—in the case of a live game, in the very immediate past. The heart of the matter is generating deep statistics and feeding that to the narrative synthesis engine.

Player X passed the ball.

Player X passed the ball to player Y.

Player X passed the ball to player Y, who shoots and scores.

Player Y loses his man off a pin-down from Teammate Z, coming open at the elbow to receive a perfectly-timed pass from Player X and hit the game-winning jumper.

This relatively simple sequence of basketball events involves multiple simultaneous actions occurring around the court, culminating in a play whose significance must be understood to be contextualized. For the 2013/2014 NBA season, STATS LLC operated in every NBA arena Sport Vu cameras capable of tracking all 10 players on the court and the ball at once, 12 times per second. The data coming out of these cameras is already challenging established analytics perceptions.

For our purposes here, however, they provide the possibility, along with image classification algorithms, of generating a finely-grained chronological event record that we can feed into our commentary engine. By analyzing sequences of player events backwards from points of discontinuity (ball out of bounds, basket scored, timeout, etc.), the software can synthesize a narrative: Player Y took a shot… because Player X passed the ball to him… because Player Z set the pick that got him open.

Given the data of our aggregate event to be described and metadata such as time, date, venue, participants (players and/or teams), a rough outline can be prepared. This may look quite similar to the template from Kontra's essay.

A second pass can then look at the generated outline—at this point still a runtime object graph, because of the ease of traversing and parsing as well as the ability to retain annotations—and compare it against other outlines: paragraphs in the same article, summaries in the same day's releases, prior summaries/articles referencing the same player/team, in each case looking to see how structurally similar the graphs are.

The goal will then be to soften similarities by deploying euphemisms, substitutes and asides: inserting nicknames for teams, arenas and popular players, digressive paragraphs and parentheticals providing statistics on recent trendlines in players' and teams' performance, etc. The distribution of how often to pull in various types of asides should be hand-tweaked for optimal results, so as to prevent being inundated with references to players' marriages, children, affairs and divorces. Fans only care for the very biggest superstars.

Can robots write sports previews? Yes, and then some. It is only a matter of time until algorithmic synthesis of commentary, even in real-time, supersedes all but the most talented of broadcasters (and many a fan breathes a sigh of relief, freed from the inanity of a Troy Aikman or Joe Buck). They won't be deployed to the big games immediately; they'll start out churning out Automated Insights-style previews for the Yahoo! Sportses and CBSes of the world, then an affluent town might have one used for a local high school game… and then the flood gates will open.

The question will not be whether robots can write sports previews. It will first be whether we want them to, and then why we wouldn't.

I admire Ed Catmull. Yes, present tense, even after learning of his role in the anti-poaching, wage-fixing arrangements of several Silicon Valley and SF Bay Area technology and technology-related companies. I admire Ed Catmull for his contributions to computer graphics as both technology and artistic tool. I admire Ed Catmull for his thoughts on process and failure and communication and organizations.

I admire Ed Catmull, and I am disappointed by Ed Catmull.

Just a few months ago I was thinking to myself that the lead inventor of the Catmull-Rom spline could qualify as a career role model for me in many ways. Not anymore. Now he is a cautionary tale, but in my disappointment I must take caution not to discard everything I learned from him. Creativity, Inc. is still a great book, and I will finish reading it and look to apply lessons from it to my work. The journey of Pixar is still impressive and inspiring to me, and I will allow elements from it to influence how I approach some day (soon) building my own company.

However.

In reading the details about the wage-fixing scandal, I noticed something emerge that I had previously noticed when the same scandal broke about tech firms including Apple under Steve Jobs (famously Pixar's CEO and majority shareholder until its sale to Disney): a sense of entitlement, that the talented engineers and artists who created the products that brought incredible wealth to these admittedly visionary leaders "should feel grateful" for the opportunity to do so. I noticed hubris, married to a corporate delusion that dehumanizes workers, consindering them fungible "assets" or "resources" and creates the environment for this sort of abuse.

There's a rant on limiting the power and influence of corporations somewhere near here, but now is not the time for it. Now is the time to learn from my hero's mistakes. There is a tendency in today's manufactured outrage and reactionary-statement-driven social networking media madness to treat every error as equally—and absolutely—egregious. Ed Catmull did a very, very bad thing, but he's also done many very, very good things over a career that has spanned nearly 40 years. Should I discard all of the good because of the bad?

Maybe I can't put him on a pedestal anymore. Maybe I never should have in the first place. In the book of Daniel the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar has a dream in which he sees a magnificent statue with a head of pure gold, chest and arms of silver, and belly and thighs of bronze. But the feet were made partly of iron and partly of clay. A small rock shatters the feet, and the entire statue collapses, breaking into pieces.

This is what we do to people: we build them up, and then when the stone comes and causes them to fall, we overreact with such indignation. They're only human.

Fundamentally, I consider my current task sacrosanct. I therefore consider any unnecessary interruption to border on evil. I am not terribly religious about technology, and it should surprise nobody to find that I am extremely well versed in the ways of Windows (up to Vista, at least) and Windows development despite my current immersion in the Apple Kool-Aid. But the single most important factor in my full-time "switch" from Microsoft's ecosystem to Apple's was the sense that Apple had a higher intrinsic regard for how I use my devices:

Put simply, neither the operating system nor applications on the Mac stole keyboard input focus from me.

On Windows, focus stealing was rampant. Every cockamamie, two-bit dialog box about unimportant nonsense would pop to the front of the window stack, and since hitting the spacebar triggered the selected button and the default action (Yes/OK/"Sure, format my hard drive") was selected by default…

Nearly everyone has had the experience where they're typing a paragraph and a dialog box flashes but then disappears and you're left with missing words in your paragraph and the uneasy feeling about what, exactly, it was you just agreed to let your computer do.

Microsoft's "solution" to this, once the problem was realized, was typically passive: a new API, FlashWindow, and its -Ex variant, that would politely flash the window titlebar or system menu button—a solution that required developers to modify, recompile and redistribute their applications. Oh, and it only worked on Windows XP or higher (which seems reasonable in retrospect, given XP's incredible popularity).

The heights of Microsoft's pathology on this issue, for me, was the realization that circa-2007 versions of Office for Mac stole focus! On an operating system that didn't by default, meaning someone in Microsoft's MacBU spent time finding a way to emulate the user-hostile Windows behavior!

When Notification Center debuted on iOS, I moved to restore sanity to what was becoming a cacophony in my pocket. On my iPhone, only the Phone and Messages apps can show notifications on the Lock screen. Phone calls are relatively rare events (for me), so I want to know when they happen and when I miss them. Ideally only certain people's messages would show on the lock screen, but that's not an option (yet?), so I make do.

This illustrates my general principle: I want to be notified about events with an immediacy proportional to their value, and inversely proportional to frequency. Social media mention? Medium value, high frequency: show in Notification Center, but no ringing or buzzing and definitely not on the lock screen. Private message? High value, low frequency: up there with Messages.app. Email? Low value, high frequency: badge, but that's it. Random IAP-laden game entreaty to "come back and play"? Delete from device :-P

I do modulate this by the intimacy, for lack of a better word, that I share with the device. My phone is extremely personal, nearly always on me or near me, so I want the fewest unnecessary interruptions possible. I remain a heavy computer user, so I similarly want few interruptions there, though I'm more tolerant of transient notifications because they take up, proportionally, so little screen real estate. My most notified device is actually my tablet, which is mostly superfluous to me and which I would have sold if new features in iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite didn't make it more valuable as a test device.

Notifications are valuable, but a constant stream of buzzes, pings and overlays—not to mention audio ducking while you're listening to music, or a podcast, or map directions because you were mentioned on a social network? Aggravating. Restricting their ability to interrupt you in inverse proportion to frequency and direct correlation to "value," for me, finds the right balance between what I'm doing now and letting me know about what's going on elsewhere.

I also love science fiction, which, if you think about it enough, is a superset of superheroes, anyway: man gains spectacular abilities after being bitten by radioactive spider? alien humanoid possesses incredible powers thanks to supercharging radiation of our yellow sun? Basically, I love genre fiction, with the glaring exception of dwarves-and-dragons fantasy. I read The Hobbit when I was nine, found the entire enterprise incredibly boring, and don't think I've given anything featuring elves a fair chance since. C'est la vie.

As a lover of genre fiction, I have watched an incredible amount of genre film, and as a film studies graduate I can't help but critically consider the entire environment surrounding their creation, recreation and eventual reception. In conversation with a co-worker about Man of Steel and the forthcoming Amazing Spider-man sequel, I phrased an idea that I now want to expound upon:

Hollywood is doing "reboots" wrong.

Let's get this out of the way: I have nothing against reboots. I sometimes hear criticisms that "Hollywood has run out of ideas" whenever yet another re-adaptation of a well-worn property is announced. This is nonsense. Retelling stories is what we do as a species. Nobody complains when yet another repertory theater company or middle school decides to put on Shakespeare; adaptations and retellings have been the norm since the very beginning of Hollywood, when stage plays were adapted for the screen.

The problem with genre film reboots, however, is the perceived need to explain origins. Who is this character? Where did he come from? How did she acquire her abilities? Why is their world so different than ours? These are substantial questions that require significant screen time to address, but the films are also saddled with needing to present some weighty conflict, a Hero's Journey, a satisfying resolution. It is putting all of this into a single film that causes genre reboots to fall flat, particularly toward their ends, and is most likely the reason Hollywood conceives of every reboot as a trilogy.

Consider: the first half of Man of Steel is almost universally appreciated; it is the second half, with the sudden conflict with Zod and the joyless fighting and killing and collateral damage that most react strongly and negatively to. Marvel's Avengers succeeded because it had done the tedious work of introducing the characters in a series of prequels that the audience was assumed to have seen; looking back on them, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger were all films that dragged toward the end as a Weighty Conflict with Great Evil was wedged into the story, killing all the fun.

It's not limited to superheroes. Casino Royale's gambling scenes and conflict with Big Bad Le Chiffre repeatedly turned a thrillingly kinetic experience into molasses. Star Trek's future Romulan threat, Nero, was the weak point of the film. Fortunately, we were presented with many more interesting interludes to allow us get to know the characters.

Sometimes these origins have something poignant to say. I haven't had a chance to see the recent Robocop film, but I'm aware of scenes that explore the question of Murphy's humanity even simply based on how much man is left more than the original did. There is value in such.

The best reboots made the origins and conflict one and the same. Batman Begins had Ra's al Ghul teach Bruce Wayne the skills to turn him into Batman, then burn his house down and poison his city. Rise of the Planet of the Apes had Ceasar born and nurtured by humans, but their ultimate disregard of him as a mere pet fuelled his rebellion. In the original version of Robocop it was the same municipal corporate partner that invested in Murphy and saved his life that turned out to be the threat to the city, and the sort of institutional threat that is not excised with a well-placed bullet and a punchline, at that. I'm curious to what extent that is true in the retelling.

[Update: I have since seen the RoboCop remake and I find it a satisfying, though not entirely necessary, addition to the canon. It retains the original's fusion of creator and ultimate criminal, though some of the updates as nods to modern celebrity culture and cult-of-personality billionaire magnates don't entirely land.]

That is one approach to reboots that yields more even films that entertain through to their endings. I would now like to propose another: ignore the origins.

Particularly for relatively popular characters like Superman, Spider-man and Batman, the rough framework of their origins never really changes. Ok, so now the spider is genetically modified rather than radioactive; does it really make a difference? I would like to see a reboot which simply accepts the existence of the hero and proceeds to deliver a compelling, exciting adventure.

I recently caught up on Green Lantern: The Animated Series (Bruce Timm does 3D!) and Young Justice, and both series are notable for mostly ignoring the question of origins. The principal actors are introduced relatively fully formed, perhaps slightly different than we know them, but recognizable and thus ready to proceed to the meat of their narratives. Young Justice even introduces a brand new character, but immediately establishes his bonafides by proxy—his relationships to familiar heroes Aquaman, Robin, Speedy and Kid Flash.

The majority of top-tier superheroes and fantasy characters have been around for decades. We all know who they are, on some level. The established comic book industry practice of "continuity" and its periodic adjustment to keep properties fairly contemporary means that, save for a few salient points, origins really aren't that important.

Of course, this may all be fairly moot soon. The success of Marvel/Disney's Avengers franchise of related films means that every studio is now plotting decade-plus-long, multi-film epics. Having gotten the actual reboot out of the way in the first film, the (infinite) sequels are now free to build richly detailed worlds with large casts that combine to reveal a much more ambitious and (hopefully) resonant story.

This could either end up very good, or very, very bad.

The emergence of broadcast television and its place at the time in the American home meant that shows needed to be suitable for the entire family. The development of the season structure and the need for 10, 20 or more episodes put immense pressure on labor-intensive animation production, leading to the birth of the limited animation techniques. From Hanna-Barbera productions in which only one part of a character's body was being animated while the rest of the frame was held still—often quite obviously, due to slight color mismatches—to Cambria Studio cartoons like Space Angel which superimposed live action mouths over completely static images, the plummeting production values and increasingly childish plotlines rapidly alienated adult audiences.

At the same time, the rise of television hastened the decline of the double-feature: with more moving picture content to watch at home, the cinema became a slightly less special place (a trend that continues today), and with the double-feature gone, the animated interstitial all but disappeared.

(Pixar has the tradition of airing shorts before its main features, but the main features are animated, anyway, and aimed primarily at younger audiences, even as more complex themes for adult viewers may be woven into the narrative.)

And so US animation came to be dominated by children's fare by the early 1960s, leading to a public that deemed it intrinsically so. Animation morphed from medium to genre, and the association has stuck for over 50 years.

No discussion of adult animation in the US is complete without a mention of Ralph Bakshi. Fritz the Cat, adapted from the R. Crumb comic strip, was the first animated feature to receive an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. Highly successful, he followed it up with Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, Hey Good Lookin', Wizards, the 1978 animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, American Pop and Fire and Ice. He also directed Cool World, which, like Hey Good Lookin', featured direct interaction of live action and animated characters, in the manner now most strongly identified with Richard Williams' Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.

Bakshi's films are nearly all cult classics, and the man himself is an industry legend, but they weren't all commercially or critically successful in their time. Most crucially, they didn't materially alter the perception of animation as a children's medium. In fact, Bakshi was often regarded as a maker of "dirty Disney flicks," a perception likely stemming from his use of anthropomorphic animals in sexualized situations in Fritz.

The preoccupation with sex in Bakshi's early feature work actually hurts the case for animation as an adult medium with its rather juvenile prurience. While it may have rebelled against the idea that the artform was purely for children, it didn't tackle mature themes of the heart, mind or soul the way live action did. His later films did, but by then the audience had largely been lost.

Glossing over the odd outlier, that brings us to today. Not only does the perception that animation is for children persist, but animation is often treated as a genre, not a medium. Films with no similarity in plot, characterization or narrative technique are lumped together because the images on screen are produced by drawing or (exclusively) by computers. While this is technically incorrect, a cursory glance at recent domestic animated theatrical releases reveals film after film constructed to appeal to children. Sure, there may be meditations on mortality in Up, or commentary on wastefulness and gluttony in Wall-E, but the character designs, casts and overall narrative arc are designed with children in mind.

The fact that this is not the case in Europe or Japan is interesting. The difference seems to stem from the much greater commercial pressure on American productions, and the relative obscurity or inaccessibility of the arthouse to the masses. Over time, that effect has compounded to relegate even those adult animated features that do see theatrical release in the US to limited screens and showings: The Triplets of Bellville and The Illusionist, Persepolis, The Secret of Kells, Mary and Max, The Rabbi's Cat, Chico & Rita—none of these were US productions, and none of them saw broad release stateside. The closest thing to an exception is probably Rango; Battle for Terra flopped, as did Delgo.

Perhaps the relative affluence of postwar USA in comparison to nearly all of a rebuilding Europe or Japan factored as well, with the television working its way into the contemporary fabric faster in America. Modern Manga is said to have emerged in 1950s Japan, occupied by the US and influenced by the comic books G.I.s took with them and had imported, and by images from US television. It could be that Manga occupied the place in Japanese popular culture that television was assuming in the US, and, due to the relatively constant effort required to produce any two comics of similar visual complexity, a variety of genres for audiences of all ages emerged.

This hypothesis is appealing because Americans today, unaccustomed to thinking of animation as anything other than a children's medium, have come to accept the "graphic novel" as a source of complex narratives—even though they prefer to see the live action film adaptations thereof. It would seem that in a crucial moment of openness to germination, Americans were presented with a production and distribution medium that infantilized the material and came to consider medium and message an identity, intrinsically juvenile.

So now what? US TV is in an extremely interesting place now: its reach such that complex, dark, violent, sexual, uninhibited, profound, introspective, absurdist but above all quality shows abound, their critical acclaim, commercial success and force of sheer number seemingly raising the tide and elevating the medium as a whole. Television has usurped film, the small screen affording the luxury of time and space to plumb depths of character and plot that silver screen running times simply do not.

Crucially, television has been disintermediated. Sure, what gets broadcast still has to find network approval and survive the gauntlet of upfronts, pilots, notes and pickups, but what doesn't get broadcast—or in some cases is never considered for broadcast—can find huge audiences and tremendous success online, from YouTube and Vimeo to Netflix and Amazon. So successful has on-demand streaming been that it has cracked the rigid, five-decade-old structure of TV shows.

Where an aspiring show once had to potentially offer multiples of 12 or 13 episodes in a season, possibly supplimented by a few repeats, we now see more and more mini-series with only as many episodes as required to tell the story. Where episodes were once released weekly, with a possible mid-week re-air; then made available online a day, then an hour later; we now see Netflix making entire seasons of shows available at once. Where live sports was guaranteed as the last bastion against truly a la carte programming, the WWE Network just made all of its programming available online or on supported devices, for $10 a month.

There has never been a better opportunity for a growth in adult animation in the US. The audiences are hungry, eager to explore worthwhile niches. They are seeking substantial material, with fresh presentation. They are potentially more receptive than they have ever been. Television, the medium which inadvertently consigned animation in America to a "children-only" ghetto, can be exploited to lift it into spaces previously reserved only for Serious Things.

I, for one, can't wait!

The thing that still bugs me is the bigger picture. Marcus Smart isn’t just any star, he’s the guy who turned down a place in the top three of the NBA draft and came back to school, the pride of college basketball. He was the guy who told the NBA it could wait, and college hoops loved him for it.

[…]

It’s a familiar pattern for guys who turn down the NBA draft. … Mitch McGary at Michigan … James Michael McAdoo at North Carolina.

Using colleges as a feeder system for the professional leagues is broken: every year we get a bunch of one-and-done phenoms who were never in school to get an education, and a draft class of unprepared talent who aren't ready to play the pro game—and that's before we get into the corrupting influence of the money on the collegiate programs, or the moral quandary of a system that richly rewards coaches and athletic departments on the backs of unpaid labor (athletes) often from impoverished backgrounds.

I often compare the situation with US collegiate and pro sports to the junior clubsides approach of the English Premiere League. There, an aspiring player typically joins a youth team affiliated with an adult professional team and works his way up. The player is eligible to turn professional once secondary education is completed, at age 15 or 16. (This is particularly notable in light of the NBA's consideration of a minimum age limit of 20 for draftees.)

As much as we idolize sports in the US, we don't truly respect it as a vocation. We demand that our athletes pay lip service to academic pursuits that may mean nothing to them, and we hamper their development with restrictions like the NCAA's 20-/8-hour maximum rule on athletic activity . In contrast, a 15-year old international player may out in 40 hours or more each week in supervised training and practice activities. Who is likely to be the more polished, prepared professional player by age 19?

If we let our athletes truly go pro, right out of high school, we'd have a very few prospects that would immediately leap to the top ranks and a steady cohort who would enter the developmental leagues. This would be good for everybody: the young athletes would gain developmental time and exposure, earning incomes but without the sudden influx of riches that can cause problems with rookies; the professional leagues would draft more polished, better prepared players ready for the speed and physicality of the pro game; fans would no longer have to watch players take up to two years just figuring out the game while being paid significant salaries; and "major" college sports would return to being properly amateur, played by genuine student-athletes, and no longer sucking money away from smaller programs.

If we let our athletes truly go pro, the Marcus Smart situation never happens. Sharp comes close to recognizing the possibility in his piece:

…a big part of me just wishes Marcus Smart was on the Magic this year. Being treated like an object that idiots can scream at, or a talking point in a thousand different columns, or the centerpiece of debates on national television, or just a name for a scout to criticize – all of it is kind of dehumanizing and unfair, and it’s part of life for a superstar athlete at any level. It sucks for all of them. It just sucks a lot less for the guys who get paid millions to live with it.

The thing is, had Marcus Smart remained in the NBA draft and been selected by a team, this incident, or one similar to it, as well as the general nitpicking and deconstruction of a still very young player who opts to stay in school one year longer, would simply have happened to someone else.

Blow the whole system up, it's rotten to the core.

[I]s the animation industry being held back by existing, established, players? Consider the car industry and the fact that it wasn’t a manufacturer that made the biggest breakthrough in driverless cars, it was Google.

Is animation similarly hamstrung by studios already in business? Will real innovation come from outside it? […] In other words, where is the animation ‘disrupter’?

Why, Charles, I'm glad you asked!

For starters, the analogy to the auto industry and Google is a flawed one: for all the advances of the autonomous vehicle project, you can't buy a self-driving car or ride in a self-driving taxi yet. The legislation changes in Nevada (PDF) only permitted operation of autonomous vehicles on highways in the state. Is it really meaningful to upbraid auto manufacturers for not having delivered a "breakthrough innovation" that isn't available in the market, and won't be for many years to come? Is it, then, useful to characterize a perceived failing/shortage/lapse in animation, or any other industry, as similar to this non-impactful success?

The boring truth of the auto industry is that contemporary automobiles are very, very good solutions to the energy, materials and engineering constraints we face today. The green movement wants to hype electric vehicles and hybrids as solutions for today, but the economics, range, infrastructure and so on are not  yet there at mass scale. (EVs are the future; batteries are not. Let's not even get into the rare earth minerals involved in their manufacture, and the total environmental impact from design to disposal.)

Similarly, the boring truth of the animation industry is distribution, distribution, distribution. We continue to see conventionally conceived and executed features because nobody has cracked the nut of how to profit off radically different material. The bulk of revenue for both animated television shows and feature films comes from merchandise, which puts strong pressure to make shows/movies that are somewhat "toyetic" and are on widely-seen platforms (cinemas, cable; now Netflix and, to a far less extent—and only when attached to an already notable brand—YouTube).

Clay Christiansen's Theory of Low-End Disruption has been disseminated far and wide, albeit often without the critical qualifiers that make it coherent. Attempts to apply it where it doesn't belong lead to failures like Christiansen's own miserable track record predicting Apple's success or decline. Even putting aside the fact that disruption theory holds far better for business-to-business markets (industrial animation, the spiritual successor to Will Eisner's American Visuals Corporation?), let us not forget that low-end disruption begins by siphoning off overserved customers. Who is overserved by today's animation fare?

There is no avenue for asymmetric competition here, where a product that is measurably worse in some ways but better in ways important to consumers takes market share away from the established and dominant party. Part of the problem is that, inasmuch as the things people tend to complain about with animation are concept, character and narrative, they have proven unwilling to accept shows that are much better in those regards while being much worse in, say, production values. This is a crucial differentiator between animation and film, where fans of independent movies embrace a less polished aesthetic (probably in part because the baseline for live action, people on a screen, is still pretty good).

Now, perhaps there is an opportunity for New Market Disruption—competition by serving non-consuming potential customers rather than current actual ones. But, really, how many people might be interested in animation but don't watch it in some form already?

Ultimately, dissatisfaction with currently available animation does not mean the industry needs "disrupting," or even "innovation"; those buzzwords have spilled over from the computing technology fields to infect popular discourse with their meaninglessness.

Speaking specifically of the US, the root problem with animation is that it is not viewed as an adult medium. When it is used for material aimed at adults, it tends to be of the juvenile, satirical, farcical or irrevent sort (pretty much all of FOX's "Animation Domination" line-up, [Adult Swim]'s Boondocks, FX's Archer and Chozen). Were animation considered a serious dramatic medium, all kinds of stories would be told using it. What was the last animated theatrical release not aimed at children or all-ages audiences? Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, and some purists would bemoan its rotoscoping technique as "not animation."

For proof, we need only look at the creative resurgence afoot in television (again, speaking specifically of the US). The terrestrial broadcasters, cable networks and providers haven't been "disrupted" (though keep an eye on Aereo), and yet US TV is booming. In fact, it is distribution that has fueled the growth: broadband internet access and streaming services as well as the eventual embrace of time-shifted viewing are making it easier for viewers to catch up on episodes at their leisure, breaking down the strictures of the traditional season model. At the same time, the success of AMC with Mad Men has all sorts of previously second-rate networks hunting prestige projects (Sons of Anarchy, Homeland, The Americans, Justified, etc), all of them trying to reproduce HBO's rise from repackager of third party films to purveyor of critically acclaimed original programming.

The breakthrough that animation needs, then, is nothing less than a wholesale cultural shift, altering the way millions of people see animation. That's not disruption, that's revolution. If we can blame the established, legacy players for anything, it's for sticking to the status quo and not working harder to broaden the perception of animation. But that's it.