Jim Connelly

Are the Browser Wars Back? Nah.

May 2, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Hey kids, remember the Browser Wars? They took place wayyyyyy back in the mid-1990s when Microsoft realized that the Web as experienced via Netscape could steal the desktop right out from under their thumb. So they figured, “we gotta get us a piece of that action,” and launched Internet Explorer.

Which totally sucked for a couple of iterations, until IE 4, which was good enough to combine with their natural monopoly on the business user and eventually lead to Netscape’s downfall.

This all took a few years, and anybody working on the Web at that period had to do QA testing for about a dozen different Browser/Operating System combinations. My guess is that many were somewhat happy for MS to win the browser wars, even as they mourned a technology that essentially changed the world.

The Perpetual Campaign Ad

April 30, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Is there anything on TV more infuriating than the political ad? If you agree with the candidate or issue, then you really don’t need to see it, and if you disagree, then you end up tallying all of the distortions of your reality that you see in the spot.

Each time an election draws near, I often wish that the fast-forward could go a little bit faster, or that I didn’t watch things like the World Series in real time, as I get pounded over and over with shoddily-produced, unhumorous ads that all look and sound alike.

However, as is often the case, what pisses off the consumers is seen as good news for the executives, so it is that Cable ad executives are looking forward to the plethora of spots that will plague the rest of us.

The Weekly ‘Loper – April 30, 2006

April 30, 2006 by Jim Connelly

While you were busy emptying your savings account to buy another tank of gas, here are some of things that we were discussing:

Is The Future Of Magazines Glossy? – Turns out that the future of magazines might just be email, baby.
Television As A Hunter-Gatherer Experience – Why we’d all be better off if the networks decided not put their shows on their own websites, and stuck to using portals.
Dancing About TV – A look at TV critics who blog about TV on the side.
‘Loper Challenge! Test Drive Pandora – Check out Pandora and let us know what you think — you could win a Medialoper T-Shirt: suitable for wearing!
That’s What I Like: eMusic – Kirk discusses what just might be the only online music download service that looks at things from the perspective of the music lover who wants to listen to anything, anywhere, anytime: eMusic.
This Lawsuit Isn’t Just A Cheap Trick – Why The Cheap Trick / Allman Brothers lawsuit against Sony Music could be a heckuva lot bigger than say, Cheap Trick and the Allman Brothers.
Google’s Puzzling Move – Are those “Crack the DaVinci Code” ads at the bottom of every search results page the precursor to the decontextualization of advertising on Google?

How To Figure Out Who Will Win The HD DVD Format Wars

April 27, 2006 by Jim Connelly

We’ve made a lot of fun of the HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray format wars, and rightly so. After all, it’s very entertaining to point out the parallels to VHS vs. Beta, and — more ominiously — SACD vs. HDCD (everybody say “huh?”); the troubles getting product to consumers and the possibility of no backwards compatibility with older HD TVs.

Obviously, watching high-definition films in the privacy of your own home is such a perfect 21st century idea I guess it’s no wonder that more than one consortium of evil multinational technology and entertainment companies had it at roughly the same time.

TiVo’s Dual Tuner: Only Halfway There

April 26, 2006 by Jim Connelly

My heart jumped when I saw the headline: TiVo Introduces Dual Tuner DVR. While I’ve always been a ReplayTV person, I recently jumped ship to a cable-company provided Scientific Atlanta DVR where the total lack of an usuable user interface has nearly obliterated the fact that it has a dual tuner and can record HD programs.

In retrospect, it was a dumb-ass move, but I’m addicted to those beautiful HD broadcasts of The Sopranos and 24. So, if TiVo was introducing a dual-tuner standalone product (they already make one bundled with DirecTV), I was on board: maybe someone else won’t make the same mistake that I did. Then I read a few more stories about it. And: sigh.

Dancing About TV

April 25, 2006 by Jim Connelly

The infamous quote goes like this: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” What makes it so infamous, of course, is that it’s attributed to so many people, and nobody seems to know who actually made it up.

Fine. It was me. Can we move on now? In any event, the point of the quote — my quote — is that it’s nearly impossible to use one art form to describe another art form. Either that, or it was “piss off, you fracking critics!!”

Maybe. While it might apply to writing about music — there are only so many times you can use the phrase “jangly guitar” — in no way does it apply to writing about that other great art form: TV. And nowhere can you find so much great writing about television than on the internet, especially now that several TV critics have their own blogs.

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“Number Slevin:” #12

April 24, 2006 by Jim Connelly

A couple of days ago, I noted that The Weinstein Company put the opening sequence of Lucky Number Slevin up on YouTube. My guess was that they were hoping that it would go viral and kickstart the film’s box office for this weekend.

It didn’t happen: Number Slevin dropped to #12. And the per-screen was only $1387.89 — down by $1000 from the previous weekend and $2000 from its April 7th opening weekend. By contrast, the #1 film this week – Silent Hill, made over $6900 per screen.

So was this experiment a failure?

[Read more…] about “Number Slevin:” #12

The Weekly ‘Loper – April 23, 2006

April 23, 2006 by Jim Connelly

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.

“Number Slevin” Making Its Own Luck?

April 22, 2006 by Jim Connelly

So I just finished watching the opening sequence of the new thriller Lucky Number Slevin on my TV. I wasn’t watching a bootleg or an illegal download. Rather, I was watching the teaser that the Weinstein Company has made available on YouTube in the hopes that it will go viral and goose the box office.

According to the Weinstein Co and YouTube, this is yet another first in terms of using the Web for film cross-promotion, and it’s a pretty interesting experiment, at the very least.

The DRM of Baseball Stats

April 21, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Who owns Baseball statistics? If you’re a fan of the sport, it’s probably a question you’ve never thought about. After all, you’ve always had access to them in the newspaper, over the radio, on your TV or over the Net. You’ve probably always assumed that they are part of the public record, and that nobody owns them.

And you just might be wrong. And if so, that answer could make a huge difference for the millions of us who spend six months every year playing Fantasy Baseball.