When I started this site back in Dec. 2004, it was my intention to explore the options facing consumer creators and to create videos and Podcasts to experiment with platforms, technologies, and so on. To a large degree, I think I have been successful. Hundreds of thousands of folks have looked my videos and/or listened to Mike and my Podcasts (MADCasts). I am looking forward to continuing that journey. Maybe I will be not be a cheap you-know-what and replace my JVC Everio that was stolen in Amsterdam.
My next project takes me in a different direction and will also be chronicled on this blog. I am among those who hate watching long-form video on my PC in my office. Two-three minute clips in my office on my Media Center PC are fine, but watching the hour CSI Miami episode I downloaded from Amazon was a painful experience. I watched it four minutes at a time, so do the math. Also, I just found out about a great New York TV Festival that takes place this week. The event features 30 minute home grown TV shows that may make it to air or might live on the Internet for distribution. AOL will air NBC’s new shows the week before they air on TV. CBS will air its shows after they air, etc…
So, I am wondering, how do I get the TV-PC experience outside my office? I have a Media Center PC with extender box, but that has some network limitations and only allows me to watch programs that live inside Microsoft’s Media Center Platform. I want to have a TV-like experience and want to watch anything I want anytime I want. I am lucky enough to have a larger enough home to create a “living room media center” to become a lab or sorts for this experiment.
My options under consideration:
Those TV’s that take streamed content from the PC. I think Sharp makes one. My hunch is it’s costly.
A new media center PC with Wi-Fi with a big sucker monitor. Sounds OK, but I cannot find a good monitor larger than 20-inches. This requires further investigation.
A dual-core Apple machine with Front Row. My problem is I don’t know that much about Front Row. Still, these seems like it could provide me the best of all worlds. This requires further investigation.
So, I will examine these and other choices and keep you posted. I believe this experiment represents the future of TV consumption, so I am willing to try several approaches. Stay tuned.
In today's installment, we go over Allen's run-ins with YouTube regarding his postings to the site. Before listening, note that ALL OF ALLEN'S FOOTAGE USED IN THE VIDEOS WAS PERSONALLY SHOT BY ALLEN WITH A STANDARD VIDEO CAMERA AVAILABLE IN VIRTUALLY ANY CONSUMER ELECTRONICS STORE. This was not video captured via TV-tuner card or stream ripper. The video was edited using standard editing tools available in many general-purpose consumer software packages.
After listening to Mike and Allen's drivel, consider the following: Will media companies and major "entertainment" brands e.g. Major League Baseball ever fully leverage the explosion in consumer-generated content and commentary if they continue to rely on extending copyright laws created for an analog era?
While I am not generally a fan of reality TV, every once in a while a few sneak in that I enjoy--”The Next Food Network Star,” “Top Chef” and even “The Restaurant” (hmm.. A pattern here). I especially loved to see Rocco, that obnoxious NYC celebrity chef, go down in flames when his restaurant tanked on TV.
Anyway, there’s a new show on TLC called “Shalom in the Home” that is buried on Monday nights, but worth catching. Rabbi Shmuley travels the US in his Airstream in search of families in emotional peril. He’s sort of a Kosher Dr. Phil, but far less overbearing with a sweet gentle compassion. The show is totally non sectarian, and in the first two episodes, the rabbi helped non Jewish families with their issues.
To make matters more interesting, Rabbi Shmuley has video Podcasts on the TLC site that allow him to deal with issues that don’t make it on the show or answer viewers’ questions.
After speaking to a number of folks who haven‘t sat glued to their sets, I am beginning to believe that traditional TV coverage of the Olympics just does not work anymore. With TV ratings down and Web visits to Olympics sites up, the answer could be in utilizing new technology as a broadcast medium for such sports spectacles.
In today's installment, Allen and Mike 'cast about the evolving online video market -- a subject we'll be returning to regularly. For today, we'll focus on Apple's iTunes vs. Google's online video offering. Will consumer-created content be a deciding factor in who owns the online video market?
Even though I have only seen one episode of “Ham on the Street,” a clever new show on Food TV, I proclaim it a hit. George Duran, the star, does clever “man on the street” bits that showcase his talent as a chef who’s up for a laugh or good gag. As I learned later on, Duran is a former radio personality who (five years ago) went to Paris to become a trained chef. In the show I saw, he hollowed out some hot dogs using some hardware paraphernalia and filled them with cheese, peppers and other assorted goodies. He then had some hardware store employees sample the handwork, and the humor ensured. It was funnier than it sounds.
The highlight was when Duran (who is a native of Venezuela) made some Venezuelan hot dogs (topped with potato ships) and offered them to some Brooklyn Cyclone players who also were from his South American home. One guy ate six; wonder if he ran out of gas late in the game?
The promo for the next show included midnight turkey bowling in the aisles of a supermarket. Don’t miss it.
Will “Ham on the Street” challenge “Good Eats” as my favorite Food TV show? Right now, it’s a close second.
The highlight for my first full day of CES was over at the Sands Expo—a look at the IPTV pavilion. Mike and I spoke with the folks at DAVE TV and poked around some other booths as they set up.
Am I in the minority of those people who will not watch TV (of any form) on my mobile phone? That means I have to pay for the phone, the service and the content. With the video iPod, I buy the device and then pay for the content I want and view it on a decent-sized miniscreen and then can play it through my TV when desired. I am missing something here.
CBS has announced that several of its top shows, including CSI and Survivor, will begin producing video clips for the Verizon VCast mobile video package. Besides its top prime time hits, CBS is releasing video snippets from The Late Show with David Letterman, Entertainment Tonight, CBS Evening News, and several other shows to the burgeoning mobile video on demand service starting this month.
This is the first CBS content to appear on VCast, which launched early last year with clips from CNN and ESPN, along with specially produced "mobisodes" of the hit series 24. Like the majority of VCast content, CBS' content will be edited into short form clips, which are generally considered as most appropriate for the mobile environment.
Episodes of Monk on the video iPod? Are you kidding me? I think I could fly from here to Timbuktu watching Monk on the video iPod. A great show that is even better on second viewing (and third, fourth...) Now about that battery life….
Today, Allen and Mike return from the holdiday weekend after extended travels to places like Phoenix Muni and the western suburbs of Chicago (Mike, that is). What do we have to talk about? TV over the Web which is different than IPTV. Yes, yes it is different.
Donald Trump says that the poorly-rated Martha Stewart spinoff of "The Apprentice" has caused his own version of the show, now in its fourth season, to lose viewers. "I think there was confusion between Martha's 'Apprentice' and mine," says Trump. "Mine continues to do well."
Martha Stewart would be back in the slammer. I just love this quote:
"Given her notoriety and all the publicity surrounding her comeback to television, I expected more tune-in," says Laura Caraccioli-Davis of the media-buying firm Starcom. "It just goes to show she's not as big as we all thought."
Hats off to MobiTV: I've watched TV while I was on the phone, but it's difficult to imagine folks would want to watch TV on their mobile phones. Either they all have better phones than I have (in addition to better vision) or they’re watching something so wonderful they just cannot stay away. Did “Sopranos” start a new season and I missed it?
As brilliant as Don Adams was as Agent 86 on “Get Smart,” I got a huge kick out of his role as the voice of Tennessee Tuxedo in the cartoon of the same name. Just thinking of him with his walrus-sidekick Chumley going through Phineas J. Whoopee’s “way back machine” makes me smile.
If you haven’t watched “Everybody Loves Chris,” put it on your PVR speed-dial. I mean set your PVR to record each and everyone episode. If the rest are anywhere nearly as good as the opener, it’s a hit. Think a more relevant and edgier version of “The Wonder Years” with Chris Rock as narrator. ‘Nuff said.
I have been scanning the live feeds of the Houston-area TV stations to watch coverage of the pending arrival of (not so lovely) Rita. So far, I only have been able to get the streams from "ABC-13" and KPRC to work. I really wanted to watch KHOU because it's where Dan Rather began his career (not to mention the late Jessica Savitch), but the media player isn't operating properly. It's eerie to see live covrage of folks fleeing the Gulf Coast, but it's also a media marvel. It made me think of the comment from the passenger on board the Jet Blue flight that made an emergency landing yesterday at LAX. When asked if folks were watching live TV coverage (on the plane's in-flight live TV system) of the airplane's peril, she said, "Yes, it was very post-modern."
I have seen a lot of things on TV, including Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, but CNN airing live play-by-play of an injured plane making an emergency landing at LAX is a chart topper. Of course, Larry King had to interject his own story about an emergency landing. No, Sandy Koufax and Calvin Klein were not with him at the time. And no, they were not eating at Duke Zieberts.
Lucky us, the b**ch is back. Here's hoping she bombs. Sadly, this is a nation of TV viewers who enjoy watching car wrecks (like Bobby and Whitney), so no doubt Martha will soar in the ratings. Ugh!
New on our PVR speed-dial: BBC America's Holiday Showdown. Two British families each pick their favorite vacation hotspot and the other family has to go along and "enjoy." Last week, one family chose Cancun while the other chose to do missionary work in Africa. This week's (which we haven't yet viewed) has the combo of Las Vegas and Yellowstone National Park. The chubby little kid of the Vegas-loving family declares (in the preview) "Anyone who doesn't just love Vegas is...stupid!"
With more spectrum space (thanks to multicasting), one can only speculate as to what programming CBS will squeeze into its new digital channels. Some thoughts:
CSI: Toledo
48 Minutes (the Canadian version of 60 Minutes.. do the math)
Canadian Football League game of the week (Go Bluebombers!)
As the Internet emerges as a broadcast medium for television, the frightening notion for programming executives is in the fact that the marketplace will quickly and fairly decide what shows live and what shows die. The TV world is used to living in a world of planned obsolesce in which every fall new shows emerge only to be axed within a few weeks. It's absurd how poorly programming execs misread the public's entertainment tatses. In any other business, such a win-loss ratio could never be tolerated; in TV, it’s been a way of live. With democratization of the process (consumers as tastemakers and networks), the TV world will be forced to be efficient and more in touch with the consumer’s tastes. It’s about time.
In this installment, Allen and Mike expound upon the future of sports TV programming with the ESPN-COMCAST hook-up for hockey games as a discussion point. We follow that up with some chatter on Yahoo Music's (mostly) permanent low-low pricing for music subscriptions; and finally we go after the Oakland A's. We use the adjective "short-sighted" a lot in that last entry.
In today's episode, Allen and Mike admit that the past few days worth of news in the media world have left them slack-jawed at the speed with which world of TV is morphing.
To absolutely nobody's surprise, it appears that the MPAA is refusing to drop the cudgel, to give up the ghost as it were, in its efforts to force the broadcast flag on CE manufacturers and consumers.
So I guess we'll continue to get more and more litigation and legislation and less and less innovation.
Well, I guess somebody had to stand up for TV's really old market-release windows. Bless the MPAA.
Perhaps paying attorneys to chase down these nefarious file-traders really is cheaper than figuring out a quick way to get this TV content to foreign markets in less than 8 months after it is originally broadcast.
Perhaps, but I really doubt it.
Then again, maybe this is just a smoke-screen and the networks are really trying to figure out a way to take advantage of P2P technologies to create low-cost, high-velocity distribution networks that can be monetized.
I actually watched the Grammy ® Awards from darned near cover to cover. I liked a lot of the live performances and could even tolerate Queen Latifah (nee Dana Owens). I have no problem with the Queen, but her hop scotching from street cred to parlor room acceptance is something to see. She can go from “Yo, yo yo with da homies” to round tabling at The Café Carlyle piano bar ala Bobby Short in one split second. That’s great marketing. Or at least a great attempt at same.
I liked the U2 performance (I was a lucky person who scored concert tickets) and even marveled at Marc Anthony’s voice as he duet-ed with J-Lo. Difficult to believe he played a thug in one of my favorite action films, “The Substitute.” My two big moments were Kanye West doing “Jesus Walks” and Stevie Wonder belting out three notes from “Isn’t She Lovely.” Damn, Little Stevie still has it.
By and large, the country stuff bored me, except the Southern Rock tribute that brought my wife to her feet, hopping and bopping in the kitchen. She lived in GA in the ‘70s and was lucky to be at the epicenter of the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, etc… BTW, where was Charlie and his fiddle made of gold? It was good to see Loretta Lynn, but in my mind’s eye, I imagine Sissy Spacek, the coal miner’s daughter, as Ms. Lynn. (From the movie of the same name).
The TV commercials weren’t very good, and I mostly left the room to see how many people STILL are coming to this site to see Nikki Capelli news. No, you will not find any nude pictures of her here. Just sarcasm.
*If you go to the Go Daddy Website, the ad that did not run is there plus an explanation from Go Daddy’s CEO, Bob Parsons. I am not prude, but there is something somewhat questionable toward the end. One more thing—am I just a crazy film buff, or did the ad feature Nikki Capelli as homage to a character in the Steve Martin film, “My Blue Heaven?”
*I totally missed the MSN Search ad. I saw it this morning on the iFilm page. It’s a decent ad, but nothing spectacular.
*In my review of the ads, I didn’t mention the car ads. Mostly because no one buys a car based on a TV ad. Or least no one in his or her right mind.
*The Vcast ad for Verizon does not mention the cost of the service, the cost of a new phone or the fact that current Verizon service holders probably must extend their service agreements to get the broadband content. Until the cell companies allow current customers to just buy new phones WITHOUT a penalty, these new services will flounder.
I have been scanning all of the news coming out of CES, and am pleased that the focus of the announcements centers on the research Mike McGuire and I wrote last year around a concept we call "Digital Media Titans." Nearly every product release and vision statement from Yahoo!, Microsoft and HP aligns with our thoughts that suggest a new construct for the media industry.
Our big question for 2005 is how do we top our work from last year? Believe me, we are up to the challenge!
