It looks as if Kevin Smith will release a directors commentary for his upcoming Clerks II movie on iTunes. The story floats around on the internet. People point ot a Times interview with him. Of course this is a great idea. It makes allot of sense. Specially for an audience like his. I did watch most of video podcasts that he had running along the production of the sequel. They vary, some are nice, others are not. He ran through his crew and asked people like the loader, script supervisor etc. what exactly they would do on a movie set. I am surprised that these posts never got any big traction on the internet. I only watched the Singer/King Kong episode from similar King Kong and Superman projects. I wonder is “Snakes on a Plane” needs one. Probably not. That movie got made by those four words. Four words can get a movie into your head. No podcasts needed.
Category: media
Peter Krogh comments
iView Media Pro has a stupid name but works fine otherwise.
I understand that they sold themselves to the people out of Redmond. I just don’t see how the product would benefit from it.
google gives away free videos!
well, actually it scheds some intense light on the actual problem of Google video:
Why would you want to spend between one and five US dollars for this?
Essentially there are two broad uses for the internet:
You look for something specific for whatever reason.
You click around for entertainment.
The later mode could be compared to ‘channel flipping’ on a TV. The first one is search. And there there is everything in between. Google video satisfies neither. Video is mostly of the second kind, and youTube caters to this market way better as Google ever did or will do. They went into the video market from the corporate aspect, and they lost. They can afford to loose. But they certainly don’t have the web-midas touch. Actually most things they tried are kind of lame. If you consider that they get heaps of free PR for anything that they start, then it is kind of lame that gmail and google news are the only ones that are in wider use.
Today GOOG trades around 400 US$ which makes it worth 122 Billion US$.
Which would mean that the company is worth as much as the nominal Gross Domestic Product of either Israel, Colombia or the Tchech Republic. if I understand this Wikipedia list right.
That’s right: countries with millions of people, all they make in a year worth as much as company in Mountain View employing a couple thousand people.
I think we should rename the stock symbol to GOOF.
Aparently there are people that spend 20 US$ a day on TV.
As with any good ‘Meme’ the videos from the 80s site triggered a couple of follow ups. Like this top 100 list. Even though the content comes from youTube is the horrible flash format they actually reference the sources for most of the videos.
Now if I were a postproduction house I would try to get all those DVDs and put the decent content on a server for the clients to enjoy. A collection of 500 amazing Music videos from all times in great quality might be a great way for the agency to spend some time with while they are waiting on those renders and lay offs.
1400 music videos from the 80s.
Haven’t counted them. Flash encoded. Which -of course- sucks. Ripped from various source it seems. Hardly legit. Nenne Cherries “Man child” I missed back then. Interesting how motion-control + green screen was enough back then to be concept. It is a shame that it is not MTV that does make this work acessible. I hope they kept copies of things they did broadcast. Probably on “D2” tape. Over the last 30 years society has accumulated a huge amount of so called ‘pop’ culture. That video wasn’t cheap. It is not entirely rubbish either. There is just no way to really access it. I am sure as I write this somebody is deleting unknowingly a rare copy of something that will be missed.
After writing about the Playstation-3 so often I had to go to the E3 to have a look at it. The huge Sony booth featured lots of playable dev kits. Each of the games had a little scale with a sticker at the percentage how much it was finished below it. These were mostly between 30 and 50%.
To cut to the chase: 1080p can look awesome. Some Gran Canyon background textures were simply stunning. Of course Sony showed it’s protege device only on a couple thousand dollars worth of pixels. Who wouldn’t.
I am not a gamer, but even I was able to see that the PS3 does have more grpahics and CPU power than the XBox 360. It’s output looks nicer, but not by leaps and bounds.
And there is even more good news for Sony: They also showed BluRay Playback. That, if I am not mistaken, already out of the PS3 shaped boxes. I had no closer look at this. Both HD-DVD and BluRay have the bandwidth and the Codec to create some nice looking images on their HDMI outputs.
600 US$ dollars or 600 Euros (which is 773 US$ today) is the asking price for the console that will start selling in November. If Sony gets decent yields from their chip factories by then. Having playable dev boxes @ E3 is more than I expected at this point.
However:
The Playstation-2 dominated it’s market. Micosoft’s first XBox was an ‘also ran’ in terms of numbers and attention. That’s how Microsoft enters into new markets: Version 1 is horrible and they get slaughtered. The first Internet Explorer attempts were ridiculous compared to Netscape at the time. But they keep coming back, getting better every time, while the competition clings to the impressions that the first MS Version left them with.
Microsoft aims to have 10 Million XBox 360s sold by the time the Playstation-3 becomes available.
Sony hopes to repeat the disc synergy for a 3rd time: ps1 -> CD, ps2 -> DVD and now ps3 -> BluRay. While it might be, that the PS3 is an inexpensive BluRay player 600 US$ is still 600US$.
There are a couple of the top end consumers that afre affluent enough to buy any high tech device that comes out. (Those would be proably the only Origami clients right now) The first 10,000 HD DVD players were sold within a day to exactly this crowd. But the next 100,000 will harder push, and we will see about the first million. Of course Sony will sell a million PS3s quickly. After that things get ‘interesting’ though. HD TV set penetration is around 15%. 1080p native of those? None. Even normal 1080 resolution is very hard to find and super expensive. Leaves lot’s of flat screens out there. Biggest problem is, that they probably are not connected and configured in the way they should be. Not that people are stupid, it’s just that things got very complex in a short time. Your dad might have explained a carburetor to you, but would you call him if you have troubles with your HDMI connector and it’s DRM ‘features’ ?
Little known fact that nobody likes to talk about: 90% of all TVs (tube or plasma) look like crap. Nothing like the original image. Be it NTSC, PAL or HD. They all have their fair share of issues. Once analog crawl and ghosting were gone, there came compression artifacts, odd frame rate conversions and cheap image scaling issues to replace them.
This is not only the rambling of an old man, it also is a very real problem for Sony: As I said the PS3 looks pretty in 1080p @ E3. It will hardly look different in the average consumers household. And when you sell 200 Million units, then you have to sell pretty much to exactly those people. These people started buying HD since it became synonym with flat panels. They like flat panel TVs. Despite the fact that for TV content a tube for a third of the price can look much better. Right now. Of course that will change in a couple of years. So on the average consumer the PS3 looks as nice as the XBox 360. But the later one is 400US$ instead of 600US$ and it has a great online dimension that works and that all your friends are already on.
People buy consoles to play games. Microsoft probably can afford to drop the price for the Xbox by 50 US$ and offer some interesting deals when Halo3 comes out. They have the muscle to maintain momentum around the time of the PS3 launch.
The world that that PS3 enters in is a much more crowded one than the one that the PS2 came to see when you got it out of its box: Not only is the there the ubiquitous iPod, there is the cell phone (we had those back then, but they were not as cheap to use as now) and the internet. Broadband takes up time in peoples life. Specially in the gamer demographics. The music industry is looking at bad numbers and thinks that their problem is piracy. It actually is much simpler: There is just more competition for peoples time. The Beatles could be huge in the 60s, since there was simply not much more culture for young people. Rumor has it that people even played the B Sides of records in their desperation for content. (I wonder if some crazy record industry executive ever contemplated to bring back the B side by piggy backing one mp3 file on to another one)
Back to the PS3: It’s a Media Hub. Says Sony. The chips are there. That’s true. And the thing /could/ do it. But it wont, since Sony does not get it. The PSP is an amazing device. The hardware would be the greatest video iPod even. It even looks ok I think. It has wifi, a decent screen for it’s size. Still, it sucks. By now there is a web browser maybe some other devices and features. But Sony did not get any momentum for their little hardware wonder. They simply can not deliver the experience. People don’t find the magic. A comparison: I never use a Microsoft Media Center, I can imagine how it is. Apple’s front row is nothing on the technical scale compared to it. It’s ‘just’ a UI. A simple navigation that segways into a couple of components that Apple had anyway. Yet, everybody is looking at Apple to merge the computer and the TV. Sony is like Microsoft here: They are unable to achieve the status of being innovative, cool or to put it bluntly worth bothering with. Their crossbar UI is very nice looking and it works well. But you navigate into things with it that then frustrate. As deadly sin in this day and age.
The amount of accessible content that might be of interest to the a specific person has exploded within the last years.Mostly due to the internet, but not only. Netflix allows you to have access to a gigantic web collection, in two days I can have any book that I might care about. Music? Yeah, we got music, alright. And, again, this not just ‘stuff’, these are the things that I care about.
Under these circumstances anything that fails to deliver on it’s promises will just be ignored. The PSP is cool, but it seemed awfully complicated to put content on it. So I ended up not investing any time in it. On the other hand there is my iPod shuffle: 50US$ refurb from Apple.com. Took 5 minutes to figure out what I needed to know about it. Probably not that long. (Why don’t they sell those things with a 30 second message from Steve Jobs prerecorded on it? “Hi, my name is Steve, and I owned this iPod before you. But don’t worry, I did not use the earphones.”. ). The shuffle served me well: It was a good deal. Money wise, but most importantly time and attention wise. The PSP having all the right hardware yet still being a lame device makes believe that the PS3 will repeat the same problem on a different scale. Sony is betting the company on the repetition of a old pattern (ps1 670MB CD, ps2 4.7GB DVD and now ps3 25GB Blue Ray). But the world of 2006 is different of that in 2000.
The world is changing so fast that the arrogance of the incumbent can be lethal. Microsoft experiences that from both sides simultaneously. Being the gaming console underdog they had to innovate and come up with concepts like Xbox LIVE. On the OS market they are actually the one ruling the world and therefor loosing their firm grip on it.
nice idea
Ignore the title cards, and don’t expect anything from the end.
Philps patents a technology that would not allow a TV to switch a channel during a commercial break.
Interesting how consumer electronic companies have a very skewed perspective how to serve the people that actually buy their products.
“stone age”, “bronze age”
these terms align the history of mankind along the materials being used. While these segments are still valid it is also worth noticing that they have been establlished during the ‘steel age’. It was when technology had reached yet another pinnacle in the industrial use of metals.
Hundred fifty years later information technology shares the same fate: It’s frenetic paced development seems to change the world in unprecedented ways. It is only natural to ‘re-segment’ history along the current dominating paradigm of progress. A very broad separation could be:
1. Language
2. Reading/Writing
3. Printing press
4. Internet
It is certainly provocative to put the WWW in one line with those other three steps of human progress. The importance of each step compared to its predecessors is without a doubt declining. Language separates people from animals. Reading/Writing invented societies that are bigger than a couple of hundred people. The printing press established the domination of the european culture over the entire world. And the internet? Nobody knows. Still, I think it’s importance justifies to put it in one list with the three earlier ones. Human history can indeed be interpreted as the acceleration of the means of communication.
1. Language
Language allowed for a completely new and improved social interaction. Complex schemes could be planned and executed. Ask the average sable tooth tiger: he knows all to well how a couple of monkeys can make your life not only hell, but bring it to a sudden end. In parallel to language tools came into existence. Nobody would attempt to kill said tiger with bare hands. The argument can be made that only language allowed for the making of the tools. If you would try to make a weapon out of a couple of stones you would quickly realize that even though you are much stronger than the average ice age joe you will fail. No matter how many stones you have at your disposal, you are not more than lunch that happens to make funny noises. What you are missing is somebody to tell you how to make a weapon out of a stone. Since mankind seemed not to have hit the branches of the stupid tree over the last couple of thousand years, it seems that language is what brought tools into our world and kept them there.
2. Reading/Writing
Being able to ‘unrealtime language’ allowed for the next jump in human development. Without accounting nobody could have build a pyramid. All non tribal mass societies that I can think of have established a system of writing. Written language can travel in room and unidirectional in time. The commands of a ruler far away can be read thousands of miles away. And thoughts can be inherited. They can even outlast their thinkers. As a kid you see some magic in a treasure map or a message in a bottle. This magic is simply the power of reading and writing.
3. Printing press
What one person writes could be read by many, but only the printing press invented real mass communication. It allowed the word to spread. With this infinite multiplication concept ideas became ultimately powerful. The moment a printing press was churning out the first book all oppressive societies were doomed. Burning books became a sign of the desperation of the powerful people to maintain the un-maintable status quo of their rule. China and Europe were more or less on the same level of development in the midst of the last millennium. If there was a difference then China probably had the edge in many areas. Still, three hundred years later the entire world was ruled by a few european nations. The printing press allowed Europe to leap ahead in the global competition.
4. Internet
Since the internet is so new and evolving so quickly I am on the grounds of pure speculation now. Looking at the first three steps of culture technology advances each one spured a gigantic leap in human abilities. The Wright brothers could read about physics and metal technologies in books. Augustus could write laws for his far reaching empire that many people could read and copy. Many people that names we will never know lived a couple of years longer because of a story they have heard.
The internet allows knowledge to be shared in an entirely new ways. Knowledge wants to be shared. Even this text will be read by somebody.
The hype around google and very certainly it’s stock price have reached ridiculous dimensions. However, in the core this almost religious feeling towards an ugly website has a sound core: “Organizing the worlds information and making it accessible” is a pretty good glimpse on the real potential of the internet. We are only at the beginning here. The possibilities can only be guessed.