Medialoper

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The Weekly ‘Loper – March 5, 2006

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While you were getting your gowns and tuxes ready for the Oscar parties tonight, here is what was happening at the ‘Loper.

Hi Def DVD Roundup: March 05, 2006

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Because we love nothing more than to watch major corporations kill a good idea with a bunch of petty squabbling, here is some of the recent news on the HD DVD front . . .

Philips to Introduce Blu-ray Disc Products and Media – Philips is, of course, one of the big Blu-ray heavyweights, and they are going to announce a player, a PC drive and new writable media. None of which, of course, will be inexpensive.
Subpar wars: high-resolution-disc formats fight each other, consumers push back – Here’s a hardcore techhie look at both formats, the issues surrounding the formats, and why the copy protection schemes could sink both.

Toshiba Plans HD DVD Marketing Blitz: Because nothing says “please choose our next generation HD DVD format over Sony’s” like a tour of the United States. Tickets are available at Tickmaster, I guess. This major corporation’s tour is sponsored, strangely enough, by The Rolling Stones.

LG Kills Blu-ray model, considers combo player – Just two months after showing it off at CES, LG has decided to kill its Blu-ray only HD DVD player, considering a dual-format player, instead. This might be the type of thinking that will actually save HD DVD: keeping the fallout of the format wars away from the consumer. Y’all remember the consumer, right? Right?

    Don’t Call It Public Radio

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    WFMU is not a normal radio station.

    A normal radio station would have pulled the plug on its transmitter after the college it was affiliated with went bankrupt. Instead, WFMU’s staff and listeners banded together to buy the station’s broadcast license from Upsala College back in 1995. Not only did the station survive the transition, it eventually raised enough money from its listeners to buy its own broadcast facility in Jersey City.

    A normal radio station would have given in, or given up, when the RIAA began demanding that web broadcasters pay hefty royalties far exceeding what terrestrial broadcast stations pay. Instead, WFMU fought back and used the opportunity to lobby record labels for exemptions from the new fees.

    A normal non-commercial radio station drives listeners away with frequent pledge drives that are designed to elicit as much guilt as possible. Instead, WFMU has only one pledge drive a year, and it actually draws listeners in with entertaining and unique programming (like the annual Yo La Tengo all request show scheduled for Tuesday March 7th, at 8pm EST – make a donation and Yo La Tengo will play your request live).

    Normal public radio stations receive funding from corporate sponsors and go as far as they can to bend the financing rules imposed on public radio. WFMU accepts no corporate sponsorship or underwriting of any kind. The station is totally listener sponsored. As a result, there’s absolutely no conflict between what listeners might want to hear and what sponsors might find inappropriate.

    In a world of right wing talk and satellite hype, WFMU is one of the few broadcast stations keeping traditional radio relevant. Ironically, they’re doing it with the help of the Internets.

    WFMU began streaming its signal online in 1997. It was a costly and risky move for a station that had just gained it’s independence, and all of the financial obligations that went along with that independence. The bet paid off, however, and Internet listeners now make up a substantial portion of the station’s listening audience, contributing enough during the annual marathon to keep the station afloat.

    More recently, WFMU has expanded it’s programming to include podcasts and web-only programs that bypass the arbitrary content limitations imposed by the FCC.

    I’m frequently astounded that a small, listener supported station from Jersey seems to have a better grasp on new technology and its implications than any of the major media corporations. All of this innovation comes at a price, of course. Bandwidth and servers aren’t cheap — hence the annual Marathon.

    If you’ve never listened to WFMU before, consider this your invitation to tune-in. You might also think about making a small donation to a very worth cause (tax deductible, of course). Consider how much of your hard earned cash you’ve given to the mega-media corporations in the past year. And what have they done for you lately (besides canceling “Arrested Development”)?

    The Daily Loper – March 4, 2006

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    Todays links of interest:

    The Daily Loper – March 3, 2006

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    Todays links of interest:

    Major Labels Colluding? Same As it Ever Was

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    Have you ever wondered why it costs roughly the same for you to purchase a CD of, say, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde — an universally acknolwedged classic of 75 minutes of sublime music, and Bob Dylan’s Down in the Groove — a universally acknowedged piece of crap that barely breaks a half-hour?  As a music fan, of course, you’ve probably come to expect that all albums, then CDs, then downloads all cost pretty much the same. It’s just that some enrich your life forever and others get you maybe a buck and for sure a snide look from the guy at the used CD counter. 

    In a lot of ways, this pricing is kind of like paying the same amount of money for a McDonald’s hamburger and a Prime porterhouse at Morton’s.  Only in entertainment do we risk essentially the same money for such wildly varying degrees of pleasure.  Part of that is wrapped up in our understanding of art:  not even the greatest are great every time out — and of course, to be fair, even Down in the Groove no doubt has its defenders — but part of that is wrapped up in the methods of those who control the distribution.  

    In this case, that would be the major labels — these days they are configured as such:  SonyBMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner — in the past, configured differently, but it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is, no matter how they are configured, from the consumer standpoint they’ve artificially set the prices to be the same, regardless of quality, regardless of manufacture cost, regardless of length (except that a 80-minute double-CD could be sold for twice as much as a 78-minute single CD), regardless of just about anything.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end amen.

     

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    The Return of the Mix Tape

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    Whether you like it or not, you’re going to be hearing a lot about social networking this year. For a supposedly lonely place, the Web has a lot of ways to bring humans together. With very little effort, you can find a like-minded soul. . .or at least someone who shares your feelings and took the time to create a playlist to reflect them.

    As noted in the Washington Post, song-sharing (not to be confused with file sharing) is poised to change the music industry:

    IMixes — as well as playlists on other services such as Rhapsody, Musicstrands and Soundflavor — are the online cousins of amateur cassette-tape and CD mixes created over the years by countless music collectors as soundtracks for parties and road trips. Many of the playlists focus on a theme — and many of those on a personal one, whether the subject is a lost love, a class reunion, a nasty breakup, duty in Iraq or a new romance.

    Consumers don’t trust radio programmers. Not enough variety, not enough information. Station playlists are too limited and decisions about what gets played and what doesn’t get played is subjected to a pseudo-science that seems almost random (for a great example of this, check out Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink for a story about an artist named Kenna).

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    Blogs to Books: Still Not Busted

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    For those who thought the blogger-to-book phenomenon had passed, we bring you this from Publisher’s Lunch:

    “Gawker Media’s The Gawker Guide to Conquering Media, a humorous, inside look that pulls back the curtains on the horror stories, unspoken rules and power players in big media, to Peter Borland at Atria, in a pre-empt, by Daniel Greenberg of Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.”

    As soon as the ‘loper team can hire a ghostwriter, we will be shopping “The Medialoper Guide to Ruling the World”.

    The Daily Loper – March 2, 2006

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    Todays links of interest:

    “I heard that we’ve sold over a million downloads”

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    That, my friends, is a million downloads of a television show — the U.S. version of The Office, which in its second season, has come into its own, both critically and commercially.

    It’s always great when quality and popularity intersect, especially when they intersect in a show that nobody really gave a chance to succeed. So how did the U.S. version of The Office get to be so great? In a long interview with Television Without Pity’s co-founder Wing Chun, writer and actor B.J. Novak (he plays Ryan, the temp) holds forth on such topics as:

    • Living in the shadow of the Ricky Gervais version
    • All of those downloads.
    • Improvisation on the set.
    • Michael’s man-crush on Ryan.
    • Why their move to Thursday nights makes sense.

    Nothing, alas, on the Prism Durosport. Nevertheless, from my standpoint, it’s beginning to look like The Office is going to end up being the greatest cover version of a stone-cold classic since Husker Du’s “Eight Miles High.”