Seth Shapiro's Blog, page 2

Dumping on Trump Pays of for Late-Night TV Shows

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Seth Shapiro, a governor for the Television Academy, describes two traditional late night philosophies: that of Johnny Carson and that of Jon Stewart. Carson stayed away from partisanship, leaving viewers guessing as to what side of the aisle he was on and making jabs that mirrored public opinion.

“Once Carson started joking about Watergate, Nixon was completely doomed because that deathblow came from the public, not from being partisan,” Shapiro say...

Insights: The History Of TV And The Future Of Digital Media ft. TELEVISION: Volume 1

Thisarticle originally appeared in TubeFilter.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana.And yet digital media’s headlong boom suggests that too few are paying attention to the hard-won experiences that built the behemoth known as TV, even as the newcomers try to replace it.

My look back, and forward, this week was occasioned by the arrival of Seth Shapiro’s first volume of his ambitious history, Television: Innovation, Disruption and the World’s...

Beachbody and on-demand Fitness content

This article originally appearedin CNBC.

“If you take the Beachbody model, there is probably a good analogy to Netflix,” noted Seth Shapiro, a digital media analyst and principal at New Amsterdam Media LLC. “Netflix began the same way that Beachbody has become a $200 million business in the consumption of fixed media, DVD sales, but increasingly over time you’re going to see more and more content shift from fixed media to online content, and so it’s likely that more and more of the stuff woul...

My Book Reading and Signing: “Television” at SXSW

I’m super excited to be launching my first book, Television: Innovation, Disruption and the World’s Most Powerful Medium this coming Saturday, March 12 at SXSW, at 5PM in Austin Convention Center Room 10AB.

Every day brings another article on the disruption of television; how the stodgy idiot box is finally being forced to evolve by Netflix and Amazon. That sounds nice, but it’s inaccurate. The truth is that TV has been disrupted non-stop from the beginning. Lucy and Desi disrupted CBS by giv...

The Unparalleled Legacy of David Bowie

If you’ve been in my class at USC, you know that I have a lot of theories.

Two of the oldest:
1. That on the passing of Paul McCartney, there will be universal acknowledgement that Lennon/McCartney are the most influential authors in the English language, along with Shakespeare. And as civilization moves further from text and towards screen-delivered sound and vision in the next few generations, the Beatles will supplant Shakespeare.

2.That some time after his death, it will become clear tha...

Download Our New Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality White Paper

We’ve finished V 2.0 of our VR/AR White Paper. As we’ve said previously, we think Virtual, Mixed and Augmented Reality represent the next generation of truly transformational content experiences.

We started this paper as a class project, and then decided to throw it open to the community at large – who have helped make it a much better document all around. We really appreciate all the great suggestions that have come in.

The VR/AR White paper includes:

A table listing 200 leading companies...