random rants - banjax blog

Steve Garfield's Video Blog: Holmes Wilson Interview

Link: Steve Garfield's Video Blog: Holmes Wilson Interview.

Holmes Wilson Interview

Wired News: Wright Hopes to Spore Another Hit

Link: Wired News: Wright Hopes to Spore Another Hit.

Next year, Electronic Arts will release Wright's next attempted masterpiece, Spore, a game some are calling "Sim Everything." Spore will give players the chance to control life -- from the ground up.

Starting with single-cell organisms, players work on designing life with ever more complexity. As the game progresses, players must figure out how to take creatures from individual animals to small tribes and then to cities, whole planets, solar systems and galaxies.

New wrinkle in movie swapping | CNET News.com

Link: New wrinkle in movie swapping | CNET News.com.

A group of anonymous programmers has released a new software tool online that threatens to raise the stakes for Hollywood studios fighting Internet movie-swapping.

Dubbed ratDVD, the new software crunches video from movies into small packages, while creating a single file that keeps intact DVD "extras"--alternate endings, outtakes, director's commentary and the like.

Because it retains all these extra features, allowing them to be burned back onto a DVD or browsed on a computer, the software is already being discussed in video-focused Net circles as a potential successor to the most popular formats used for trading movies online today.

ratDVD FAQ
afterdawn's how to guide

Light Reading - Networking the Telecom Industry

Link: Light Reading - Networking the Telecom Industry.

The law of WAN access, which predicts a halving of network costs every two to three years, may face an R&D challenge and VC funding gap. But, like clockwork, the cost of storage drops by half every 12 to 15 months. By the end of the decade, we may see homes connected at only 10 Mbit/s, but we'll be able to store 10 terabytes of information on a device the size of a handheld tape recorder and it will cost just $250!

Light Reading - Networking the Telecom Industry

Link: Light Reading - Networking the Telecom Industry.

What else do the service providers need? They need new content and applications. Video needs to offer more than what the cable companies have. Think of all the specialized vertical content that cable networks made possible. MTV. ESPN. CourtTV (well, there's something for everybody). Now take to the Internet, and multiply it by the thousands. Imagine accessing Internet video databases that can be ordered and cached on your PVR or transferred to a sort of video iPod, or ViPod (surely Apple is working on this?). When video is married to the Internet, that's what you'll get. The Scuba Diving Channel becomes a possibility. Or, better yet, Light Reading TV, which is launching on this site next month.

Light Reading - Networking the Telecom Industry

Link: Light Reading - Networking the Telecom Industry.

Interesting article about the 3th annual Symposium, “Next Generation Media Networks" (a rather grand title!). I was particularly interested in Reed Hastings observation:

Reed Hasting, founder and CEO of Netflix, said the industry had reached a crucial juncture, where it would be choosing between "freedom and control." He said that closed, proprietary TV systems such as those present on cable systems represent control, while open, IP-based networks represent freedom.

MSNBC - The Future of Television

Link: MSNBC - The Future of Television .

I have been on television for almost 12 years, and in that relatively short time I've seen the medium change exponentially. Naturally, this seismic upheaval has bred fear and uncertainty in our industry, but throughout it all I have remained calm. Like an old fisherman I have weathered countless storms and kept my tiny skiff afloat. And now, my face cracked and my nut-brown hands rubbed raw by the salt air, I know the mysteries of the inky deep. I've stared into the unblinking eye of modern television and I alone know her startling future.

MSNBC - New Ways to Drive Home the Message

Link: MSNBC - New Ways to Drive Home the Message .

One of the most talked-about commercials this year never appeared on regular television. It was available for voluntary viewing on, of all places, hotel pay-per-view networks. The 10-minute video promoted Virgin Atlantic's new first-class flat-bed seats and salaciously (though cleanly) parodied an adult film with "Austin Powers"-like humor. In six months, more than 1.2 million hotel guests clicked on their remote controls and sat through an average of seven minutes. Did we mention the commercial was about an airline seat? Virgin Atlantic was thrilled, of course, but not just with the response to the ad. "We actually thought the brilliance of the idea was the placement," says Virgin Atlantic VP Chris Rossi. "We want to put our message where business travelers are spending their tim

MSNBC - Television Reloaded

Link: MSNBC - Television Reloaded .

Forty-four years ago, when Newton Minow famously described television as a vast wasteland, he might have hit the bull's-eye on the wasteland part. But he didn't know from vast. TV back then%u2014a few black-and-white channels with a test pattern after midnight%u2014was a sleepy three-light town where everybody hung out at the same dull places because there wasn't much else going on. As monochrome moved to color, and we got pay TV, more channels, remote controls, VCRs and cussin' on HBO, television sprawled much wider. But compared with what's coming, our 2005 experience is only half vast.

The Future of Television - Next Frontiers - MSNBC.com

Link: The Future of Television - Next Frontiers - MSNBC.com.

To begin, the trend toward larger and larger televisions will continue as screens double in size every 18 months. Televisions will eventually grow so large that families will be forced to watch TV from outside their homes, peering in through the window. Random wolf attacks will make viewing more dangerous. And, just as televisions grow larger and more complicated, so will remote controls. In fact, changing channels will soon require people to literally jump from button to button. Trying to change the channel while simultaneously lowering the volume will require two people and will frequently lead to kinky sex.