We're Not Who You Think We Are
by Jim Connelly
Last week, I wrote a post about ways that Zune could actually be an iPod killer, if Microsoft did things like
not have DRM’d music, integrated wireless, and supported AM/FM and satellite radio.
However, according to Zune Luv?, this last suggestion means that I have lost the plot . . .
[Read more…] about Why Zune & iPod Should Have the Radio On (Radio On!)
by Jim Connelly
On one level it makes sense that the sixth season of The Sopranos has been announced as the first TV show to make it to HD-DVD. The writing, acting and production values are all motion picture quality, and this most recent season has been no exception. It’s only peers are Deadwood and Battlestar Galactica, and neither of them have been doing for nearly as long — and we already know that Deadwood won’t.
Given the combination of quality and longevity, it may just be the best TV Drama ever, so it’s kind of fitting that it’s the first one to make the hi-def jump.
However, there is one small problem: the price. $129.95. It makes one wonder if HBO has contracted out to Tony and the rest of his New Jersey gang to whack HD-DVD once and for all.
by Jim Connelly
Lotsa talk — maybe too much talk — about Zune, Microsoft’s new “iPod Killer,” and how it really doesn’t have a chance to grab much of Apple’s market share. Or be anything but a boondoggle.
However, we should all just try and remember that the iPod/iTunes juggernaut is anything but perfect, and there are actually several things that Microsoft could do with Zune to take advantage of those imperfections.
I’m not saying, of course, that they will, just that they should.
[Read more…] about How Zune Could Actually Be an iPod Killer
by Jim Connelly
Wanna know the philsophical underpinnings of some of our posts here at Medialoper? (I’ll pretend you said “yes.”) The following books have helped me work out some of the concepts that infuse nearly everything that I write about what we are calling the “new media.”
Here they are, alphabetical by author:
by Jim Connelly
While you were working on your spreadsheet of who started which war when, here’s what we were looking at:
by Jim Connelly
Because in Hollywood, no idea is ever too good not to try over and over and over again until it’s made the transformation from unique to ubiqutious, rejected pilots are now popping up all over YouTube and other sites like break.com.
As if the set of circumstances that made NBC’s picking up of Nobody’s Watching were, you know, easily duplicated.
by Jim Connelly
MTV turns 25 today, and love it or hate it, it’s hard to imagine a pop culture landscape without it. Like the iPod, it took an that took an existing type of musical content — music videos had been around for decades — and turned it into a disruptive force.
And then abandoned it almost immediately. If they first made their name by the novelty of the music video, they kept their name by slowly turning their focus away from those videos. (Variations of the “MTV doesn’t play videos anymore” jokes started almost immediately and have aged worse than the channel itself.) Even though I have pretty much stopped watching MTV, I have always admired how they’ve managed to stay relevant. And I think that the they fact that they made it part of their programming philosophy to continually change in the same way that pop culture continually changes is how they’ve done it.
by Jim Connelly
I am a map geek. And I am a traffic geek. Back when I was doing my 45-mile (one way!) commute in the Bay Area, I would always check the Web obessively prior to leaving, listen to traffic reports while driving, even call the special TravInfo phone number. None of that was really effective, at least partially because there was no way to get an on-the-fly visual overview of what was going on once I actually hit the road. Not on my budget.
Until now, that is.
by Jim Connelly
When faced with the world of 21st Century Television, different networks do different things to bring audiences to their shows. In the past couple of weeks we’ve learned that FOX will continue to ruin the baseball playoffs; ABC wants to disable the fast-forward button on DVRs and CBS is going to advertise on food.
Lame lame lame. (Actually, I recognize that the FOX/MLB partnership is shrewd from the marketing standpoint; it’s just that I’m a lifelong baseball fan who recoils in horror at being faced with Tim McCarver, those dopey “Sounds of the Game” and sitcom stars in box seats every goddamn October until 2053 or whenever it is.)
So just when you’d figure that NBC would also come up with some kind of dumbass stunt or idea of their own, they actually go in the complete opposite direction and do something very very smart.
by Jim Connelly
Last week, I ran across an print ad in Newsweek for Technorati, probably the major blog-tracking service. The ad copy went like this:
Behind every breaking story, there’s a Blog
Behind every emerging trend, there’s a Blog
Beind every big scandal, there’s a Blog
Find it.
Every single day, the blogosphere gets blamed or credited for some world-changing event or another. Hell, this very blog has done it at least twice in the past week. Given of all of the coverage of the “blogosphere,” you might imagine it as one of those amorphous clouds in an old Star Trek episode, lurching this way and that, firing laser shots of truth and opinion at various politicians, athletes, tech companies, and the entertainment industry.
And you would be wrong.