Medialoper

We're Not Who You Think We Are

The Darknet Panel: Meet The Consumer

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I admit it – when I heard that the MPAA was sending someone to SXSW to sit on the “The Future of Darknets: Can Hollywood See The Light?”, my first thought was, “That’s gonna be fun.” You know, fun in the way that root canals happening to someone else are fun. Fun, fun, fun.

And it was. I have a sick sense of humor that way. As Kevin Smokler said the next day, “There’s a street fight a-brewin'”.

Let me set the scene: the panel was hosted by J.D. Lasica, author of Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against The Digital Generation. Panelists included Kori Bernards of the MPAA, Mark Ishikawa from BayTSP, Ian Clarke, creator of Freenet, Heather Champs from Flickr (who was mad as hell about the DMCA, a perfect mood for the panel), and Dave Toole of Outthink. Oh, and a room packed with tech geeks, media consumers, and filmmakers. These groups were not mutually exclusive.

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The Daily Loper – March 15, 2006

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Todays links of interest:

AOL Launches In2TV

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AOL launched their In2TV service today, featuring an eclectic mix of 30 Warner Bros. TV shows from the past half-century. Some good, some bad, some on DVD, some not — and all available for high-quality streaming in their entirety with “minimal commercial interruption.” 1 to 2 minutes, for now. Though if it’s successful, that will no doubt sneak up a bit: the whole point, of course, is another revenue stream.

We haven’t yet had a chance for a test-drive of the service through the Medialoper Review Labs — the pilot ep of Welcome Back Kotter, prior to Travolta becoming a superstar, will be just the ticket — but here are a couple of random initial impressions:

  • The home page is clean and well-organized: less clutter than iTunes, and easier to find stuff than Google video or YouTube.
  • Don’t come here looking for full seasons. Looks like they’ve launched with about 10 eps of each show.
  • They’ve also launched with features and interactive games.
  • There is more than one way to find an individual show: they’ve categorized them, have a search feature, broken out clips; and have a “show all feature” that actually lists more than a few at a time.
  • One of the best ideas: “Pilot Theatre,” which is exactly what you would think.

All in all, a nice auspicious start for IN2TV: one can only hope that they add more shows, and more episodes for each show.

HD DVD: Stumbling out of the Gate

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Warner Home Video, the only studio which had a firm release date for any HD DVD titles — March 28 — has now told retailers that the date isn’t so firm after all. Worse yet, they really aren’t sure when they’re gonna release those titles.

“To be honest, the outlook is tenuous — we’re still coming out with an initial slate, but we may be a week or two later; we just don’t know,” division president Ron Sanders said.

Translation: don’t look for any HD-DVD movies before Easter, or maybe even Memorial Day. Fourth of July? Meanwhile, the big mass market retailers are reportedly canceling pre-orders and changing ad campaigns to compensate for the lack of product. And no other studios had even announced actual release dates. Even without the format wars, this would be a less than auspicious beginning.
Meanwhile, Toshiba, the only manufacturer to even make the players right now (though LG just announced their dual player), is going to be all dressed up with nowhere to go.

And nowhere seems to be where the format is headed right now.

The Daily Loper – March 14, 2006

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Todays links of interest:

Fast, Cheap, and Redefining News: Rocketboom

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When we started Medialoper, one comment I heard really resonated, but probably not in the way the speaker intended. In a discussion about creating content for Internet-distribution only, a well-meaning but ill-informed pundit opined that regular, quality content required major infrastructure behind it. There was no way (no way!) that people working out their living rooms could produce programming on a regular basis.

Mr. Pundit, meet Rocketboom.

Rocketboom is a daily video log (vlog, if you will). Think of it as a hipper, cooler, smarter nightly news. With correspondents around the world and regular production schedule, Rocketboom pulls in over 250,000 daily viewers — people who catch the current show and people who access the programs extensive archives. The daily program is largely created by two people: director/producer Andrew Baron and co-writer/host Amanda Congdon. Others work on the show in various capacities. And, as revealed during their SXSWi session “Democratization of the Moving Image”, almost no expense has been made to produce this show.

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Nick Denton Is The Most Generous Man On The Internet

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Battling Roomba RobotsI know, the title of this post might surprise some of his employees. And it’s true that after arriving early to the Side Bar we were a bit skeptical that there was really going to be much of a Lifehacker party. The fact that there was no cold wine and exactly one half pint of Guinness Stout didn’t bode well for the evening’s festivities. Really, when has anyone ever ordered a half pint of Guinness? It sort of seemed like someone might have forgotten to add ‘party planning’ to their next actions list.

The unannounced live performance by Diamanda Galas on the outside patio only added to the confusion. Nothing against our old friend Diamanda, but we were forced to stuff quarters in the jukebox to offset her sonic attack with the sounds of Tom Waits, Jonathan Richman, and Sly and the Family Stone.

Eventually the Lifehacker crowd showed up and Nick Denton started paying for our drinks. All was well. Better yet, we were treated to battling bluetooth enabled Roombas that also played pool. What more could a Medialoper possibly ask for?

Factlet learned from the Side Bar mens room wall: 2,500 left handed people every year are killed using products designed for right handed people. Don’t let this happen to you. If you’re a lefty, get a left handed mouse immediately.

Thank you Lifehacker.

The Daily Loper – March 13, 2006

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Todays links of interest:

My Sony Settlement, Part 1

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I was one of the unlucky people who happened to purchase a copy-protected CD from SonyBMG last year.  It was the Foo Fighters album On Your Honor, and I remember at the time cursing the fact that I couldn’t rip it to put it on my hard drive to listen to at my leisure.  Turns out that was the least of my worries, as they also left my hard drive vulnerable because they decided that the simple act of purchasing a CD from a band I’ve always liked meant that they could do anything that they wanted to do with my system. 

Gee, thanks SonyBMG!! Thank you ever so much for that!! And by the way,this whole fiasco actually kept me from buying another SonyBMG album that I had borrowed and actually quite liked: My Morning Jacket’s Z. Sheesh. No wonder people like Kirk have given up purchasing physical CDs, even while the record companies try desperate measures to force people to do just that. 

In any event, thanks to the EFF call to get the settlement, I am now going to get whatever restitution that I am offered, and I thought that it might be fun to track the process.

 

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Museums Meet Web 2.0

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This year’s SXSWi festival is filled with several micro-themes, one, of course, being the idea of remixability. Today’s tech people don’t see entertainment as a static concept. They’re moving ahead as if this is a generally accepted principle — as always, it’s up for to the rest of the world to leap on the bandwagon (and they always do).

Leaping boldly into the void is Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. In creating an online design museum, the institution is embracing Web 2.0 and making art accessible to the public in a new and exciting way. The relaunched website will allow visitors to create virtual collections, act as their own curators, even help museum staff by adding to the institution’s knowledge-base. In other words, the museum realizes that the dialogue doesn’t have to go just one way.

Among the models that [Kevin] Farnham and Maeda point to are Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 and the site http://del.icio.us. Users on those sites already are creating communities through “tagging” — Web-speak for linking personal reactions to items on a site. Tags allow spontaneous communities of strangers to share interests in seemingly random ways.

The Washington Post rightly wonders if museum culture can survive radical upheaval — museum websites are traditionally staid and as likely to entice browsing as a brochure for teeth whitening. And if a museum’s website can’t engage people, what hope does the museum have?

It’s not wrong to wonder how a Smithsonian museum can survive as the Wikipedia of design culture. Or whether a museum site modeled after the populist photo-sharing http://Flickr.com — with favorite artifacts and amateur points of view — would diminish an institution’s reputation. The bigger question for all museums is how to flourish if they don’t.