SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

Today’s NY Times has an article about Cast It Systems , a company that securely catalogs, tags, shares and otherwise handles digitized auditions for casting directors and their associates. It includes tools for comments and tracking, as well as obviously making geographical location less of a factor.

The productions pay a fee to access the database, making possible events like the recently launched open casting call for Twilight – which I would assume had more value as a publicity generator than as a practical way of acquiring talent.

That cynicism aside, Cast It Systems counts all the major studios and many production companies among its customers. It has successfully been used for The Proposal, The Hangover, Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Star Trek, HBO’s Hung, and many other projects.

Eric Hayes and Chris Gantos predict their services have potential for use in sports and even placement in mainstream jobs.

(Title lyric by Johnny Russell and Voni Morrison, via Buck Owens and – later – the Beatles.)

Angel of Death, the web series by Eisner Award-winning writer/cartoonist Ed Brubaker, is morphing from 10 parts on Crackle.com into a 90-minute movie on Spike TV.

The White Rock Lake Production will air July 25 at midnight ET/PT. It stars Zoe Bell (pictured in character as Eve, the assassin of the title), Lucy Lawless, Doug Jones, Ted Raimi, Brian Poth, Justin Huen and Jake Abel. Paul Etheredge directed and John Norris produced.

It’s not the first time Spike TV has picked up a show from the Internet. In April it started running MoCap, LLC, the darkly humorous adventures of a low rent motion capture company trying to get a foothold in the world of video games. Worldwide Biggies produced six half-hour episodes exclusively for Spike TV.

(Title lyric is from Ozzy Osbourne.)

Top-rated TV shows, like The Simpsons and CSI, can now command higher ad rates online than they can for their regular prime-time showings. A Bloomberg story goes into this in some depth: The Simpsons, for example, gets $60 CPM on Hulu and $20-$40 CPM during prime-time.

Gigaom emphasizes that Hulu caps its ad breaks and therefore its potential revenue. Analyst Michael Nathanson pointed out that a Simpsons episode on Hulu has just 37 seconds of ads compared to a broadcast episode’s nine minutes.

It’s nice to get some numbers starting to prove the higher CPM value that should be obvious intuitively. (It’s also amazing how surprised some TV traditionalists are by these numbers.) Online viewers have actively chosen to watch the program instead of finding the least-bad show for while they zone out. They also know that online ad breaks are short – therefore viewers sit through them rather than go to the bathroom or refrigerator.

(Title lyric Jim Jones [nsfw].)

Mio is releasing satnav with an integrated TV tuner (via /. ) in the UK.  The Mio Spirit line was introduced at CES, but TV capabilities weren’t announced until it showed off the Mio Moov V500 (pictured) and V700 range at Computex Taipei 2009.

The device audibly warns you not to watch TV while driving, and it repeats the warning if it detects movement faster than 5 mph. What could possibly go wrong?

“It’s not intended at all for drivers to use while they are driving,” a Mio spokesperson assured PC Pro magazine, adding that the ability to watch television on the move was for users travelling by bus and for children travelling in the back of a car.

But getting back to geekphilia, the devices also have things like multiple ways of finding points of interest, a button that captures on-the-fly location and voice memos, and pre-loaded photos and travel information.

(Title lyric by Chris Cornell.)

Business analyst Henry Blodget offers his opinion that there is no way to save the traditional television industry. Basically, he suggests that the lower revenues Internet distribution provides are not sufficient to support their existing cost structures.

He details the fundamental realities that TV has relied on since its inception, then lists the Internet-enabled changes underway that are eliminating these realities. It’s a deliberately provocative but thought-provoking essay.

At no point does Blodget say that content will be free. But he does say that content providers should give up on “consumer-unfriendly” and restrictive solutions that do nothing but shore up existing and doomed business models.

(Title lyric from Blur.)

DramaFever has stopped accepting beta registrations and looks ready to meet its Q2 target launch date. The free service offers television programs licensed mainly from Korea but also from Japan, China and other Asian countries, subtitled in English for audiences in the United States.

There are more than 1.5 million Americans who identify with their Korean heritage, making this a sizable niche audience. An audience this targeted also would attract a valuable premium from advertisers.

Included among the programs that will be available are the award-winning epic The Kingdom of the Winds, the complicated modern romance of Coffee Prince (pictured), the action thriller Time Between Dog and Wolf, and many other series.

(Title lyric from Iggy Pop.)

Net neutrality is just starting to become a mainstream issue, now that Hulu, Boxee and other video sites are offering entertainment of mainstream interest. So it’s instructive to observe what’s going on in the UK between broadband provider (and telco) BT and the BBC’s iPlayer service, which makes TV programs available online to UK viewers for seven days after broadcast.

Recently, BT’s home bandwidth division decided to end what it has called a “free ride” and has cut its costs by throttling download speeds [registration required] from 8 megabits per second to less than 1 megabit per second between 5 p.m. and midnight. It has suggested the BBC share costs if it wants the speed restored.

The BBC is involved in another digital media controversy as well. As it is now, anyone with a television has to pay £142.50 ($236) a year, a license fee that goes to help finance program creation and other BBC operating costs. (Those who are legally blind and those with only a black & white set pay less.)

But there is a growing number of students and others who don’t have a TV and therefore don’t have a license, yet who are watching programs using iPlayer on their computer. The BBC wants to eliminate what in a coincidental turn of phrase it has referred to as a “free ride”.

(Title lyric from Sammy Hagar.)

June 12 is the day TV stations shut off their analog signals and complete their transition to digital programming. The government has spent more than $2 billion on converter box subsidies and education, and free setup assistance has been provided by AmeriCorps, firefighters and others.

So I was a little surprised to get a call from a family member asking if she was going to lose her programs – especially since she already has cable. Apparently she was worried because of what was said in a somewhat overwrought Time Warner Cable TV ad.

Nielsen reports 3 million homes are completely unprepared for the transition, out of the 114 million households with a television set. I now know of one household no longer on that list.

(Title lyric from the underappreciated Wildhearts.)

Kevin Spacey and producer Rob Luketic have publicly added themselves to the roster of well-known people who will abandon Twitter if Reveille / Brillstein Entertainment’s proposed tv show goes ahead.

There is a growing chorus of protest from celebrities at Reveille Productions (home of the U.S. versions of The Office and Ugly Betty) and Brillstein Entertainment’s idea of using Twitter as the basis for an interactive reality show.

According to the press release, which was slipped to a few outlets under cover of the holiday, the show will put “ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.”

The proposed show would be executive produced by Amy Ephron (sister of Norah Ephron).

Among those tweeting their vociferous objections are Alyssa Milano, Sara Gilbert and Demi Moore. As Moore put it, in the Twitter-allotted 140 characters, “If that show happens we will all leave and there will be no show.”

Ashton Kutcher, who besides being an actor also knows about unscripted programming, later added: “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets stalked.”

The not-famous are objecting, too. Nearly 500 people signed up to “follow” user No_Tweet_Show within the first hour the account went live, which was shortly after #nottwittertv showed up in the top ten of Twitter’s trending topics chart.

There’s already a book coming out in October that is simply a collection of tweets. HarperCollins got ex-Gawker Nick Douglas to edit it, and he put up a website to which people were invited to send their favorite tweets.  Although it’s not officially affiliated, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone encouraged Twitter users to participate.

At least Douglas is asking permission first and giving credit to contributors, even if he did disingenuously claim in the site’s FAQ: “It’s not about wringing money out of you.”

(Title lyric from OK Go.)