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Ring Partners With Cop Reality Show Producer To Produce New Third-Party Generated Clip Show
from the offensive-charm-offensive dept
Ring wants to bring you a cop show without most of the cops — “America’s Funniest Home Videos” but all the footage has been recorded by Amazon’s home surveillance products. Here’s Deadline’s inadvertently cheery reporting of Ring’s new charm offensive: one it hopes will win hearts, minds, and market share by showing America just what sort of wacky footage can be gathered with always-on cameras.
Wanda Sykes is knocking on the door of syndication with a new series that features videos taken from Ring doorbells.
The comedian is to host Ring Nation, a new twist on the popular clip show genre, from MGM Television, Live PD producer Big Fish Entertainment and Ring.
The series, which will launch on September 26, will feature viral videos shared by people from their video doorbells and smart home cameras.
It’s a television take on a genre that has been increasingly going viral on social media.
The series will feature clips such as neighbors saving neighbors, marriage proposals, military reunions and silly animals.
Sounds fun. It also sounds (as Deadline says) “synergistic.” By “synergistic,” Deadline possibly means “opportunistic.”
Amazon owns both MGM Television and Ring. Producers of the show claim the show will be “hilarious” and “uplifting” and will somehow bring families together by giving them a chance to bond over footage it doesn’t cost a cent for either of these entities to produce.
What isn’t highlighted in Deadline’s article are the more problematic aspects of Ring and its absurdly close relationship with law enforcement. It also doesn’t highlight the problematic aspects of the two production companies that have teamed up to bring “Ring Nation” to life. Here’s Edward Ongweso Jr., reporting for Motherboard:
The show is being produced by MGM Television, which is owned by Amazon, and Big Fish Entertainment, which ran another dystopian reality show: a piece of copaganda called Live PD which centered on commentary of police footage.
According to Deadline, the show will feature lighthearted viral content captured on Ring cameras, such as “neighbors saving neighbors, marriage proposals, military reunions and silly animals.” These types of videos frequently go viral online, but hardly represent the reality of what Ring is used for. Besides home surveillance, Ring is a source of surveillance video for police departments in the U.S. and abroad.
A&E’s “Live PD” was a police reality show that ran from 2016-2020. Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Derek Chauvin, the producers decided to pull the plug… temporarily. It appears the producers believe America is ready for another cop reality show and has brought it back (under a new name).
Most problematically, “Live PD” destroyed footage of Texas deputies tasing a black man to death during an arrest. According to the show’s producers, this was not an attempt to destroy evidence. It pointed to its agreement with the sheriff’s department, which allowed the show to destroy an “unaired footage” after 30 days. The caveat was “unless needed for an investigation.” Apparently, the sheriff’s department felt this incident needed no investigation. The end result was the indictment of Sheriff Robert Cody for evidence tampering — something aided and abetted by “Live TV.”
So, it’s clear the new show will not be playing clips showing police engaged in misconduct that happen to have been caught by Ring cameras. It will not be highlighting Ring’s insanely close relationship with law enforcement, which makes cops subservient to Ring’s PR team and rewards them with cheap or free cameras to hand out to citizens with the implicit understanding that recipients will give cops access to footage without needing to seek a warrant.
It also won’t point out cops can still access footage without warrants or customer notification by approaching Ring directly and asking it to search footage stashed in its cloud storage. It won’t mention the company’s experimentation with facial recognition AI and license plate reader capabilities. It definitely won’t be showing any of the “hilarity” that results when poorly-secured home surveillance cameras are hijacked by malicious hackers. And it certainly won’t inform viewers or Ring customers that lawmakers and law enforcement officials are making moves to turn privately-owned cameras into extensions of government surveillance networks.
No, this will be paid programming — advertising disguised as entertainment. It will be reputational rehab for a company that wants to be part of everyone’s lives, but has chosen to focus on creating law enforcement partnerships rather than serving their end users. Hopefully, this program will go nowhere quickly, buried under a wealth of far more worthwhile programming available pretty much everywhere.
Filed Under: live pd, ring doorbell, ring nation, surveillance, video clip show, video clips, viral videos
Companies: amazon, mgm, ring
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Amazon's propaganda campaign to normalize surveillance is about to hit a higher gear: Wanda Sykes is going to host a new show featuring videos taken from Ring surveillance cameras, Deadline reported on Thursday. It will be called Ring Nation.
The show is being produced by MGM Television, which is owned by Amazon, and Big Fish Entertainment, which ran ano
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ther dystopian reality show: a piece of copaganda called Live PD which centered on commentary of police footage.
According to Deadline, the show will feature lighthearted viral content captured on Ring cameras, such as "neighbors saving neighbors, marriage proposals, military reunions and silly animals." These types of videos frequently go viral online, but hardly represent the reality of what Ring is used for. Besides home surveillance, Ring is a source of surveillance video for police departments in the U.S. and abroad.
Amazon has done a lot of work to turn the U.S. into a Ring nation off-camera. Ring’s surveillance cameras and surveillance network have been aggressively rolled out by Amazon mainly by cultivating fear in suburbs about crime, and by entering partnerships with police departments to give them unfettered access to surveillance footage. Last year, advocacy groups pushed for Amazon’s Ring to be banned entirely by the Federal Trade Commission over concerns its facial surveillance technology could fuel criminalization of Black and brown people in public spaces.
It's unsurprising, then, that Ring Nation would come from the production company that produced Live PD. As Adrian Horton writes for The Guardian, "Think NFL Red Zone, but for arrests of people not given the chance to sign release forms because the show bills itself as live news." In the wake of the George Floyd uprisings, Live PD was briefly canceled along with Cops though both were revived just this year. And while Cops may be more familiar to some, Live PD was the more popular, more audacious, and more vile of the two by far.
Over the years, Amazon has tried harder and harder to roll out various forms of surveillance technology, enmesh us within this network, and normalize this encroachment of public spaces and individual privacy. In 2020, Amazon announced it was pausing (for one year) its rollout of a facial surveillance algorithm called Rekognition that it was offering to police departments after the tool was repeatedly found to be ineffective on its own terms and racially biased. In 2021, documents leaked to Motherboard detailed how Amazon’s new robot, Astro, would integrate with Ring to deploy surveillance technology to try and detect intruders.
Amazon isn’t alone in this fight to cultivate an ever-growing surveillance apparatus—most of Silicon Valley is intimately involved in surveillance and the potential profits to be had by offering surveillance tools, analytics, computational infrastructure, and a host of other goods and services rooted in watching people. Still, Amazon’s Ring and attempts to normalize it harken an odious development. One peek into this came back in February, when a bizarre TikTok trend went viral where Ring surveillance camera owners made Amazon delivery workers dance for them.
At this point, it is hard to defend ownership of a Ring camera. Using fear-mongering about package theft and suburban crime, a surveillance company has convinced countless homes to affix a surveillance network node that police departments and one of the world’s largest monopolies will use to their benefit. And now they want us to laugh about it all in our (ideally) Ring-surveilled homes.
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Ring-A-Ding Dong > Neighborhood Crime Data Doesn't Match Amazon's Ring's Sales Pitches
Here's we go again! . . . from the any-spin-necessary deptRing Continues To Insist Its Cameras Reduce Crime, But Crime Data Doesn't Back Those Claims Up
Tue, Mar 24th 2020 3:15am — Tim Cushing
" . . . Last month, Cyrus Farivar undid a bit of Ring's PR song-and-dance
by using public records requests and conversations with law enforcement
agencies to show any claim Ring makes about crime reduction probably
(and in some cases definitely) can't be linked to the presence of Ring's doorbell cameras.
CNET has done the same thing and come to the same conclusion:
the deployment of Ring cameras rarely results in any notable change in
property crime rates. That runs contrary to the talking points deployed
by Dave Limp -- Amazon's hardware chief -- who "believes" adding Rings
to neighborhoods makes neighborhoods safer. Limp needs to keep hedging.
. . . Worse for Ring -- which has used its partnerships with law
enforcement agencies to corner the market for doorbell cameras -- law
enforcement agencies are saying the same thing: Ring isn't having any
measurable impact on crime.
. . . But maybe it doesn't really matter to Ring if law enforcement agencies believe the crime reduction sales pitch. What ultimately matters is that end users might.
After all, these cameras are installed on homes, not police
departments. As long as potential customers believe crime in their area
(or at least their front doorstep) will be reduced by the presence of
camera, Ring can continue to increase market share."
HEADS UP + LIKE SO MANY OTHER AREAS:
"Hitting the market when things are good and
keep getting better makes for pretty good PR, especially when company
reps are willing to convert correlation to causation to sell devices."
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Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen
sa Police Department in The Spotlight Again > City Council "Study Session" @ 07:30 am Thu 06.17.2021
This starts off about 10 minutes into this Slide Show Presentation > Watch-and-Listen to what they have to about "a relationship" they have with Ring Door Bells + their Neighborhood Surveillance Networks
Official Meeting Details if you want take a look ahead of time
| On agenda: | 6/21/2021 |
| Attachments: | 1. Council Report |
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