The Weekly ‘Loper – April 23, 2006

While you were busy losing your job at The White House, here’s what we were paying attention to:

• Will Online Programming Kill Local Television Affiliates? – If the networks put all of their content on the Net, will that kill their local affiliates? Perhaps they’ll have to concentrate more on, you know, serving their communities.
• Video iPod Delay Not Such A Bad Thing For Apple – At this point, the only thing that would kill Apple’s market share in this category was if the “true” Video iPod was as bad as the Prism Durosport 6000.
• Vivid Gets It Up For Movie Downloads – The first movie studio to make their movies available for download and easy to burn to DVD? A porn studio. Of course.
• RIAA Attempts To Outlaw Shared Folders – Next up for the RIAA? Outlawing carpooling: after all, multiple people might be listening to the same song at the same time. But since only the owner of that car is licensed for that song, the rest are thieves and scofflaws. The RIAA checkpoints are obviously just around the corner.
• A Bar With No Closing Time – Perhaps the only type of iPod mix that the RIAA won’t try to outlaw . . .
• Death Of A Station – The sad, slow decline of the Bay Area’s KRON, who lost their network affiliation a few years ago, and haven’t yet found their direction. Still, they are trying to serve their community. The next step is serving it well.
• That’s What I Like: Oxford English Dictionary, Online – Kassia waxes poetic on a nearly bottomless pit of words, glorious words.