Archival TV and Intelligent Television present: Getting Ready for Prime Time: Online Video and the Future of Television Friday, September 30, 2005 9.30 a.m. – 4.30 p.m. The Hillside Club 2286 Cedar Street Berkeley, CA 94709 More than 30 million hours of unique television programming are broadcast every year worldwide, and a growing fraction of [...]
No one expects that if you give a person a typewriter, they will be empowered to become the next Mark Twain. But in the technology industry, there is a hope, more or less in the background, that if you give people the tools, that’s all they need in order to make great cultural productions. Sometimes [...]
The BBC’s Backstage developer network is having a competition for the best new apps built using its TV schedule data. Cool. State owned broadcasters are supposed to be stodgy enemies of progress. Instead, the BBC has set the standard for how broadcasters and program owners can take more innovative approaches intellectual property and Internet technology. [...]
Al Gore profiled in the NYT. Interesting excerpt: “Virtually the only structure is to be provided by three-minute “Google Current” segments at the top and bottom of each hour, in which the most popular Google searches of the day are to be mined for evidence of what is on people’s minds.”
Vara Software released a substantial upgrade to VideoCue, which now comes as either standard ($39) and Pro ($89). They’ve done a lot of work to make life easier for podcasters and vloggers, and they’ve added a chroma key (blue screen) feature that is especially cool.
The NYT reports that WABC-TV, the ABC affiliate in New York is now soliciting video and cell phone pictures from its viewers. Stringers with police scanners have been a part of the media ecology for a long time, but stringers got paid; the contract on this arrangement allows WABC to distribute anything it receives to [...]
The idea is an interesting one: offer cheap ($20 – $170 per half hour) access to free-to-air satellite broadcasting. UonTV reaches an audience of 3 to 6 million people who have a 30 inch dish and downconverter, allows time slots to be reserved up to three months in advance, and asks programmers to provide MPEG-2 [...]
Most of the time, I root for entrepreneurs; starting a company takes an enormous amount of heart. But why so many me-toos? It’s not like there is a shortage of hard, interesting problems related to the Digitization of Everything, and the transitions from tape to disk, RF to IP, unscheduled to on demand, and medium [...]
The always good Unmediated is reporting on two new free video blogging / FlickR 2.0 services, Vobbo and CastPost.
J.D. Lasica, author of Darknet, Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation, has a page up documenting requests to and refusals from studios for the use of clips in a home movie project.
Jon Carroll had a great column last week about how copyright concerns caused the producers of “Bewitched” to edit the Transamerica Pyramid, which is a copyrighted image, out of the movie. Carroll also references the fine work of Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi on the tribulations of documentary film makers. For what it’s worth, a [...]
The London Times reports that the EU may begin regulation of Internet-based television services as part of a rewrite Television Without Frontiers, the 1989 European directive regarding television regulation. The Times notes “Today, television delivered via the internet is unregulated in Britain. There is, therefore, nobody with legal power to force an internet broadcaster to [...]
AOL is stepping into video this week according to CNET. AOL’s placeholder page, the service will launch with more than a million video clips available, as well as a new player. Access to Time-Warner’s holdings, and an audience of a few million people should make this one of the more influential sources of video on [...]
George Coates has been pushing the technical boundaries of theatrical performances for nearly 30 years, and the videoblog he’s backing in concert with a large team of close collaborators, Better Bad News, is arty, highly political, and way ahead of most other video blogs in production quality and content. It’s still casual, but it doesn’t [...]