Category: Entertainment

Mark Cuban calls bullshit, bullshit

Emmy Advanced Media – Television Business News: Cuban Likes Obesity
Shelly Palmer tells us about Mark Cuban calling out Disney’s Preston Padden in obvious over exaggeration..

From the post:
There aren’t many of us who could call bulls__t on Preston Padden–at least not in front of a room full of press and politicos. However, Mark Cuban, CEO of HDNet and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, did it twice in 10 minutes at the Consumer Electronics Association’s 2006 Entertainment Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. Preston Padden, executive vice president-government relations, The Walt Disney Company, was trying to tell the audience that there had been over six million illegal downloads of Disney’s animated hit movie, “The Incredibles.” Mark wasn’t buying it. “I call bulls__t!” he said, with no small degree of effervescence in his voice. “Maybe if you said ‘Star Wars,’ but ‘The Incredibles’? No way!!!”

“HBO busted me for using bittorrent”

Gen Kanai weblog: “HBO busted me for using bittorrent”
HBO is going after users for downloading content using BitTorrent. Here are some stories, letters and so on..

HBO could simply start doing things like simultaneous release (or at least shorten the time), offer it through iTunes and the like and maybe, perhaps just embrace the BitTorrent phenomena and offer access to a good high quality seed for 1 or 2 dollars. Would be cheaper than the lawyers..

Mobile Games Tied with Live TV

Startup to Wed Mobile Games, Live TV Shows – Yahoo! News
Very interesting:
AirPlay Network Inc. said it will introduce a lineup of cell phone games tied to live television broadcasts. While watching TV, subscribers could use their cell phones to compete against others in “real time” by predicting plays in sports, choosing winners on reality TV shows or picking answers on game shows.

‘The Fourth Screen’ Mobile Media Festival

The4thScreen.com :: global mobile media festival
This festival looks very interesting. They are pushing people to think about the phone in a different way, not just as a television that is carried in your pocket as it seems the providers are pushing for:
‘The Fourth Screen’ Global Mobile Media Festival will focus on the mobile phone as an emerging social, cultural and technological phenomenon.
We invite artists, technologists, and other creative thinkers to submit creations, inventions and concepts in two categories:
1/ moving images: videos made with mobile phone, movies, animation and games intended for mobile delivery
2/ wise technologies: software art, software and hardware that proposes new uses for mobile multimedia communication, applications that have positive cultural, social and economic impact in diverse cultures

My New (old) STB

This is a completion of a post that I started in March of 2006:

Then:
So.. I bought a shiny new Intel Mac Mini solely for use as a set top box. First of all, I love it! Second, a lot of work is needed for this to compete with TiVo, MyTH or even Windows Media Center.

So here is what I have, 1 Dual Core Mac Mini with SuperDrive and a great EyeTV tuner/PVR device…

Now: What makes this truly extraordinary (at least in disruption of the pattern of my life):
At some point last year, the cable was unhooked and never got hooked up again (except for about 15 minutes during the 2008 election). This isn’t to say that I don’t watch TV anymore, I do, I watch Heroes, Lost, ER and a bunch of movies. The difference is that I watch it on my terms, not the terms of the networks. I get none of this TV from regular cable, instead I watch these shows through their respective websites (NBC, ABC) or through Hulu and now NetFlix’s online on-demand service (which is soooooooo much better than DVDs via mail as I don’t know what I want to watch next week today).

No longer do I come home and zone out to reruns. No longer to I switch on the TV just to have something to do..

A couple of additional thoughts:
I am pretty sure that scheduled TV will always have a place and people will always want programming in that form. I don’t think TV will go away (at least any time soon). I do think that (if the cable industry doesn’t buy our government) that it will eventually subsumed into the internet (despite all of the fear mongering about clogging the tubes).

Television Disrupted

Television Disrupted – The Transition from Network to Networked TV by
Shelly Palmer
Looks to be an interesting read. Guess we will find out in the near future.

From the site:
Television Disrupted The Transition from Network to Networked Television, follows the money and the technology that enables it. The book also looks at the business rules and legal issues that are having a huge impact on the future. File sharing, copyright laws, geographical form factors, temporal windows and much more. During the next few years, everything we know about the business of television is going to change – Television Disrupted The Transition from Network to Networked Television will serve as a guidebook and roadmap for the foreseeable future.

The end of broadcast as we know it…

The Doc Searls Weblog : Friday, January 6, 2006
Doc writes:
The meta-story behind Intel’s Viiv and Clickstream announcments yesterday is not just the death of TV as we know it, but the gang-stabbing of it by Intel, Apple and their new partners in the broadcasting and entertainment industries. Or, if you prefer, by the reconstituted entertainment industry, which will still be about production and distribution, but without the current channel-based TV system (which will come to an FCC-mandated end in 2009 — it was originally scheduled for 2006 — when every TV station will be required to move off its branded VHF channel and up to some unbranded UHF digital channel, by which time nearly everybody will stop watching over-the-air TV anyway, getting everything we used to call TV over cable, satellite or Internet).

Epeus’ epigone – Kevin Marks weblog
Kevin Marks Follows Up with:
In 1998, I went to work at Apple on QuickTime, and started work on live streaming. This was hard work, but interesting – making a personal TV Transmitter for anyone with a Mac, so they could use the internet for lots of people to watch them at once. Having built this technology, I started looking for uses for it, and was rather bemused to find there weren’t any.

The problem was storage again. It was always better to have a locally stored copy of the video than to try to get it over the net in real time. It just didn’t use the net efficiently, and the ‘buffering’ experience really sucked. In fact, what I realised was that live TV was a waste of time too. But now we had enough storage.

People spend lots of money on iPods and TiVo’s, whose whole purpose is to turn live streams into files so you can pause and skip them, moving the storage into their houses, and pockets. This personal storage is why Podcasting makes sense.

Downloading is always better than streaming, and Edited better than Live, except in one instance.

That difference is when you have 2-way interaction. When you can speak back to the person at the other end, either via iChat AV or Skype, or just by having a textual back channel to a conference.

That’s where Live is needed.

EXACTLY!