Category: media

hiltoutube

internet media

The internet is a funny place. You can make things that make no sense, and they can exist for a while. YouTube for instance. I love it as a user. By now I have given up to frown about the horrible quality. For most of the youTube content the visual aspect is secondary. Flashvideo has won the format war. For years people were writing about quicktime, windows media and real player. Looking at every move of one of these formats. Predicting this or that. Along came flash video and it was all other. No self respecting internet video site would choose something else. No pundit had seen it coming.
It looks worse than anything, and people don’t care, since it looks good enough. Apple lost this one.
YoutTube is trying to find money now. They turn to Paris Hilton. Maybe Paris’ dad sells a Hotel every Tuesday to come up with youTube’s bandwidth bill? Seriously, it might be a rude awakening for youTube to realize that they are able to recoupe 3% of their operating cost before they start loosing audience since the ads get in the way. iFilm had an alright selection, but they never became a youTube. One of the reasons were rather pesky ads.

The content that youTube will continue to be there. But I still think that youTube is a bit like Napster 1.0: Something that works really really great, but that is built on non existing conditions. Napster 1.0 ignored copyrights, and youTube ignores the fact that bandwidth costs money.

macbook wifi: what gruber said

Apple media

I hope, really hope, that Mr Gruber never catches me when I do anything wrong.

His 6335 words about the story of the Macbook wifi exploit say all that needs to be said. And those words aren’t pretty. Yet needed. After Gruber the record is probably set straight.

meta

media

Animator vs. Animation
it helps if you have done some flash animation.

How about somebody putting a flame UI in a commercial now?

open

communication history linux M$ media technology

Microsoft likes more people to develop games for their consoles. In their press release it sounds like a Windows XP machine is all you will need to develop games for their consoles.

The range of impact goes from ‘flash in the pan’ to ‘Sony is finished’. It all depends on the details of the implementation and capabilities. Nobody has ever opened game consoles to a wider development community. It might or might not take off. Trying it is a bold and innovative move.

Microsoft is a funny companies these days: Some of their divisions do all the right things, while others are as stupid as the Ottoman empire in 1907.

Trolltech makes a phone now. Trolltech got big with a toolkit for graphical user interfaces called “Qt”. I used it years ago, and it is not bad. Now they make a phone that runs embedded linux, and their user interface on top of it. In other words it is an open source phone.

From the pure aspect of technology these developments had to happen. The very interesting question is, what will come out of it. Content is a very tricky thing to predict. Hollywood survived despite constant failures in this area. As long the movie industry existed they tried to mechanize and control creativity and content creation, so that they can churn out products like a nuts and bolts manufacturer. And it never worked.

One the other side of the argument one could see Microsoft and Trolltech shipping typewriters to a million monkeys.

And, of course reality will fall somewhere in between. And once the revolution happened, it will be so clear why it did. Same in the other outcome.

Games could really use some injection of innovation. Roaming the show floor of what was the last E3 of it’s kind I was pretty surprised how alike most games looked. I don’t play. But I care about the technology and business side of this industry. There are racing games and first person shooters. Lot’s of those.
With production costs high new content development is tricky. That’s why I liked Rockstar’s Table Tennis.

Tetris was written by a russian programer when there was still a country called “Soviet Union”.

The situation with phones is similar. They don’t suck, but I never saw a phone that made just sense. Of course all Apple fan boys hope that Steve Jobs will come down Moses like with a phone on his arm. They hope so, since phones are ok, but definetely not as useful as we want them to be. And as they could be. If open software can fix this is to be seen.

melting math

media

the BBC writes about greenland

Reading it, you would think that Greenlands Ice is about to be gone.

Only using numbers from this article (6.5 meters rise of sea level if ice melts completely, 0.5 millimeters rise a year) it will take 13,000 years till Greenlands ice cap is gone.

I am not saying that global warming is not real. I am just surprised how somebody can write an article that contradicts itself in such simple ways.

Apple to rent movies?

Apple history internet media

somebody thinks

Well, since it does not cost that much for Apple to try this, I doubt that it is a failure.

The press however will make a big ‘bruhar’ around this. They just love those simple “take one big thing, and add another big thing” stories. They always look like these sure winners. Like the extension of the cinematic experience by the sense of smell.

Or the combination of cellphone and gaming console

rb v2

internet media technology

Rocketboom ‘sans congdon’. The first show. 24 hours late.
Let’s see what develops. Interesting how the new host looks similarishly like the old one. The proof will be in the pudding of the next episodes. Amanda better gets some episodes on their own going real soon. That way we will be able to tell wether it was Andrew or her that made Rocketboom worth watching in the last 18 months.

Rocketbooms audience has spiked recently. Dirty laundry is great PR. Nothing better than a little scandal.

format shrug

media Sony technology

HD-DVD launched. Bluray launched.
People don’t care. Of course there are reviews in the more tech geek media.
But apart from that there is not much movement.

As expected people don’t care.
There was a format war before this one. Audio CDs with their 44,100 Hz 16 bit sampling rate were not state of the art as far as technical ability around the turn of the century. So Philips and Sony came up with the Super Audio CD that quickly went into a format war with the similarly feature yet incompatible DVD Audio.

That was 1999. There are probably around 631 audio geeks who can get really excited about these formats and their differences. The rest of us is happy with compressed mp3s that indeed can sound horrible.

The current HD DVD format flavors do present a bigger quality jump than the CD / next gen format had to show. Most peoples eyes are better educated than their ears.
In order to watch next gen material there is a very considerable investment needed. You need a HDMI capable screen with enough resolution and the right image processing ingredients. And an expensive player.

Roughly between 3000 and 6000 US$ worth of equipement.
I remember that we paid 450 US$ for our DVD player three months after it came to market. There were 18 titles available, but the quality jump from VHS was stunning. VHS was considerably bad compared to live TV. DVD was noticable better. And there was decent sound too. And the things needed no rewind. And there were multiple audio tracks with commentary and an OK navigation system. And the disks seem to last longer than tape. And they used up less space.
Sure in the beginning many Studios were betting on the other format. Divx, not to be confused with Divx , was an attempt to get people used to the fact that they can not own anything that Hollywood creates. A failed attempt, but not the last one.

HD-DVD vs. Bluray
The score seems to be zero zero.

no more hits

history internet marketing media

Chris Anderson writes about the end of the hit era
His Book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More” that this article is adapted from will be available 7/11.

four and a half hours

confessions of a pixel pusher internet media

Over time I did subscribe to a podcast here and there. A bit of NPR, fxguide of course, Twit, Adam Curry was only worth listening to a year ago. He is long gone from the cut. Even though I try to keep the list edited I can not keep up any more. Todays download would take 4.5 hours to listen to. Easy for the shuffle, hard on me.
There is simply not enough Lawn to mow, commute (replaced by getting breakfirst rolls from the bakery), floor to vacuum in my life. And hour or two, I can squeeze in.

Of course this is just one sign of the times: Content is available in abundant supply. Ten years ago Cinefex was pretty much the only magazine covering visual effects. Quartely. Now there are lots and lots of podcasts, websites, newsletters around the same subject. Weekly.

I looked at the Millimeter Magazine website today. Interesting, yes. Couldn’t find the subscribe button. So, no, they did not make the cut. Clicked on that funny icon just to find out that they try to use flash video. What a joke! Somebody have a the mercy to explain to them that their audience is different from youTube, and that they should use quicktime.

But with all those gigabytes streaming through to my hard drive they are not worth the consideration.

Media darwinism two thousand six. Lots of content producers are in a for a surprise.