MobLogic

» see moblogic.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

CBS bought Wallstrip in May 2007 for about four million dollars. The point of the deal was never really the one show. Everybody signed it expecting more short web video to follow, and MobLogic was the first thing that followed. Lindsay Campbell left Wallstrip on 14 January 2008 to host it, and the new show went up on 29 March.

The format was man on the street, six days a week. Campbell took one item out of the day's news and went and asked people in midtown what they made of it. Episodes came out of a New York studio and off the floor of both party conventions in the 2008 election year. The question was always simple and the answers were not supposed to add up to anything.

The Hollywood Reporter reviewed it and liked exactly the thing a network show is usually bad at: "a visually compelling news and entertainment show with nary a trace of overproduction." Their example was an episode where Campbell waded into a February snowstorm telling passers-by there was no global warming and Al Gore was full of it, and collected back a row of answers that included "I don't know, I'm cold" and "maybe God's having a party in the sky." That was the show: one prompt on a sidewalk, and whatever came back.

~ the dossier ~

~ how the show worked ~

MobLogic was built on an assumption that looks strange now and looked reasonable in 2008: that a daily web show needed a crew and a network behind it. The whole apparatus existed to put one person on a sidewalk with a microphone. Within four years anybody could do that part with a phone, which is roughly how long it took for the economics underneath shows like this one to stop making sense.

By 2008 my degree was behind me and the house ran on TTNet, and American web video of this kind reached me only as embeds that somebody linked in a forum thread. A daily show about United States politics shot on a New York street had no reason to find me and did not. What I did recognize was the form, because the same year everyone around me was watching things that were four minutes long and came in a feed.

~ the last broadcast ~

The final episode went up on 12 December 2008 and nothing replaced it. CBS Interactive did not issue much of a goodbye, which fits: MobLogic was an experiment the network ran rather than a property it was attached to, and the result of the experiment arrived on schedule. Campbell went on to direct YouTube Nation and later ran originals at IMDb, so the career the show was supposed to prove out did get proven.

moblogic.tv does not resolve today. Nobody parked it and nobody pointed it at a CBS archive, so it is a hostname with nothing behind it. Eight and a half months of daily video, and the address it lived at now returns nothing at all.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »