Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Back five or six years ago, my then roommates and I got our first satellite antenna and one of the networks that we spent lots of time watching was a computer/tech/gadget-oriented “ZDNet.” “ZD” was from Ziff Davis, a publisher of computer magazines. There were lots of cool shows and some not-so-cool ones, but a good mixture of subjects was covered to suit various interests. They had kind of general news and tips shows called The Screen Savers, a show for novices, Call for Help, a McLaughlin-esque round-table of pundits arguing about the latest industry trends with the curmudgeonly John C. Dvorak as host, a gaming show, and others that don’t come immediately to mind. I enjoyed them immensely. Perhaps I enjoyed them a bit too much as I remember having to stop for months at a time due to oversaturating myself with the stuff.

In 2002 I moved in with my then girl friend and got cable, but alas the cable in DC did not include ZDNet, which by then had been rebranded as “TechTV.” I was bummed! When we eventually moved back out of DC earlier this year and got satellite again, I searched for TechTV but found nothing. Then I discovered that TechTV had been bought out by some video game network. While a show about the latest hottest games out there is fun to watch once in a while, I don’t consider myself a gamer. I actually try to stay away from the things because I know from past experience how addictive they can be. While some may say to this – “so what’s the problem with that?” now that I’m a real adult with a wife and a house and a career, spending 6pm to 7am online all night gaming is not exactly conducive to this kind of life! Or perhaps I should say that the other way around?

So, I wrote off my past affection to TechTV and went on my way. Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw that Leo LaPorte, who was the host of a couple of shows on TechTV, had his own radio show that had the same themes as his TV shows. Not only that, but he was podcasting his shows, as well as hosting an online community around the show. I started listening to some of his podcasts and got greatly nostalgic for the old TechTV. Leo, for those who never saw his shows or have never heard him on the radio, is just the perfect host for a computer show. He’s honest, friendly, goofy, caring, smart, and genuinely interested in helping people at all levels, never arguing, correcting, or putting people down. He also shows interest in peoples’ lives outside of technology, which is always nice. It’s great to geek out and all, but when that consumes everything and there’s no room for anything outside of geekdom, it can get pretty bland and isolating.

Anyway, I was listening to Saturday’s show and Leo began talking about G4TechTV. Apparently Comcast (the Cable company) owned a channel on video gaming that was struggling. Earlier this year they bought TechTV and merged the two in order to increase viewership. Unfortunately they did away with most of the TechTV shows, favoring their G4 Gaming shows instead. The one that remained was The Screen Savers, but Leo among others, were let go and the remaining staff were forced to move from San Francisco to LA or lose their jobs as well.

After listening to Leo’s earlier podcasts last week, I started TiVo’ing Screen Savers. What I learned today listening to Leo’s podcast from Saturday, was that G4TechTV had actually let go a bunch of staff, including some of the on-camera folks from Screen Savers. Apparently this actually happened over a week ago and since then they have just been showing repeats! So the repeats that I was watching over the last several days had a staff that will be gone when the new shows finally start coming again (supposedly next Monday). While not comparable to Leo’s earlier shows, the episodes I watched were not as bad as I first expected. My only complaint would be that it seemed like they intentionally sped things up to keep what they probably think is their target audience’s (teen gamers’) attention. Also the last show that I TiVo’d on Sunday night had a split screen where they showed the new Nintendo DS footage at the bottom half and the Screen Savers at the top. This made the Screen Savers video so small that it was unwatchable and while I could have just listened to it, I decided not too on principle! I mean, come on, if I’m watching a show because that’s what interests me, why are you killing half of it to show me something else? It’s like if NBC decided to do a split screen to show The Biggest Loser on the bottom of the screen while they showed West Wing on the top. While the shows may share some of the same audience, in the end, both of these audiences lose out when the distraction level and minimized screen sizes make the shows much harder to watch.

So there is still no real scoop on what is going on at G4TechTV regarding The Screen Savers other than it is reorganizing. There is no clue as to who will be hosting the show, or really anything. Some of the current and former staff of the show have commented on their blogs, but mostly pretty briefly and very professionally. The only real commentary is on a thread on Yoshi’s (one of the show’s hosts who was let go) forums from watchers, in the comments of some of the current or former staff’s blogs, in other blogs of watchers like myself, even in G4TechTV’s own forums, and in Leo’s Saturday show. The general reaction from these third parties are generally justified digust. Leo said that in his view the network was basically imploding and would probably be gone sooner or later. Some rumor on Yoshi’s forum proposed what sounds like a conspiracy theory (but perhaps not as unbelievable as it might initially sound) that Comcast bought TechTV, G4’s biggest competitor, in order to slowly kill off all of its shows and then eventually (by the beginning of next year) go back to being 100% about games and even ditching the TechTV part of their name.

All I can say is “how sad.” I realize business is business, but it really seems unfortunate for all involved: for the staff that had worked and built a great lineup of shows who were unceremoniously dumped earlier in the year; for those who actually made the move to LA only to be let go less than a year later; and for all of the faithful watchers of TechTV who had their shows ripped away. But maybe, as Leo was commenting in his podcast, this is just a sign of things to come. As we see over and over and over again, “Big Media” just doesn’t get it. They are obsessed with marketing to the hottest market in town – that of teenagers and early 20-something’s – and could care less about anyone else. They are driven by stockholders who want to see constant growth of profits in a skittish market. They are obsessed with ownership rights and feel threatened by even the slightest ability for people to fairly and reasonably use technology to view content the way they want rather than the way the content company wants. The audience is seen as a bunch of deadbeats who, given the opportunity, will steal their product and give it to all their friends, thus bankrupting them. Perhaps part of this is due to what they see as their target audience and how that young audience isn’t mature enough to understand the consequences of their actions. It’s a catch 22, unless of course these companies start looking outside of their current narrow tunnel vision and start looking at the big picture and where things are headed, whether they come along for the ride or not.

Leo, I think correctly, envisions a time when media is distributed like podcasts to audiences of all sizes. Sure a lot of it will be crappy home-grown stuff, and I’m not sure where the revenue stream will be to help support the people who want to make these, unless they actually embed commercials in their content too. Maybe IPTV and podcasting and PVR technology will merge in the not too-distant future and instead of having a choice of two or three hundred channels of content delivered by a handful of companies, we will have thousands of choices, perhaps tens of thousands or more, from almost as many different sources. I’m not sure how this will change the dynamic (except that it will probably change it profoundly), but it seems like the current system has so many problems when networks can be destroyed by competitors (whether intentionally or not), and great shows with cult followings (Sports Night or Freaks and Geeks anyone?) get ditched because they were aired on Friday or Saturday nights where they never had a real chance to thrive.

I wish all the folks at TechTV luck – this stuff reminds me way too much of the internet bubble and crash from a few years ago that I narrowly missed participating in. It must be terribly stressful working in an environment like this where your job is constantly on the line. Then again, I suppose this has always been the case for most of media, or show business. When the numbers are down, your show isn’t worth as much to advertisers and so your neck gets closer and closer to the chopping block. Maybe one solution for the future would be a kind of open-source movement for media and entertainment. If you like a piece of audio or video content, a piece of fiction or even a blog entry, you could commit to a one time (or repeating) donation of a few cents or a bit more. This of course relies on people actually wanting to voluntarily sacrifice hard earned money in order to keep stuff on the “air” which cynics would say is pretty doubtful, and even optimists would admit is a big challenge. Yet National Public Radio and Public TV have been doing this pretty successfully for years! They also get government funding, and block out all programming for days a few times per year to plead for money. I don’t know how things will go down in the scheme of things, but it’s a very interesting period for media right now and things may get a lot worse and more confusing before they get better.

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There’s an interesting post by Eric McErlain over at Off Wing Opinion about TiVo and broadcasting networks intentionally trying to defeat TiVo’s recording technology. Like so many companies (especially content producers) faced with obsolescence due to technological changes, the networks seemingly have only defensive answers – restrict progress.

Networks have had to share more and more of their audience with cable/satellite channels, and are deathly afraid that their primary source of income from commercials will dry up due to decreased viewership and companies not wanting to pay them for shows that people are just TiVo’ing and skipping over the commercials. In some ways it’s a lose-lose situation for these Networks because this is how the whole structure of broadcast networks was built. Unlike in the U.K. where all TV is pay, broadcast networks must provide their signal free of charge. The only way to get funding is through advertising. Unlike public television (PBS), there are no public funds nor are there donation drives. While most cable channels have commercials as well, they are also subsidized to some extent by the cable and satellite companies, so they have at least some net to fall into.

Eric mentions product placements as one solution – instead of actual commercials, one would see products put into the shows themselves. While this might help, it seems like it’s an intrusion on the show’s content and the writer’s creativity to force it to include specific products. What I fear we may see in the long run are a type of “banner ad” included in the program’s signal that would pop something up by TiVo itself, which when clicked on would bring the user to a screen of more info. We’ve already seen something like this in a less interactive form by all the preview graphics that pop up on the bottom of the screen on many prime-time network shows, advertising an upcoming episode of another show.

I don’t know what the solution is really, except for these companies to downsize or figure out a different business model. Unlike other content companies their hands are more tied by the fact that they have to provide a service that’s free to the viewer. Many of these companies have branched into cable/satellite, and hopefully this will help them to diversify, but maybe that is just prolonging the wait before they are truly desperate enough to be forced into trying something that’s much more radical than the current practices which are just going to alienate more viewers. Those left who are forced to watch broadcast because they either choose not to buy into cable or satellite or because they can’t afford to, are not the big-spenders than their opposite demographic is, which just means even less advertising revenues for the networks. So if they want to get out of this death spiral, they will need to do something much more ingenious. What that is, I have no idea.

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Having owned a Sidekick for a while, I’m very familiar with it’s reputation as a celebrity phone. Danger actually does list celebrities as one of it’s target markets! Personally I could care less who uses the phone I do, as long as it works the way I want. In other words, I’m totally not into the whole idea of supposed coolness because you where something or do something similar to a famous person. Many of the celebrities you see with phones visible from any company have actually been given the phone in the hope that they will increase it’s visibility and thus is clout. It’s kind of like a product placement, and while it’s possible that sometimes such deals are formalized in contracts, others I’m sure are just hopeful giveaways. And of course we all know that poor celebrities need all the freebies they can get!

So, with that in mind, I thought I’d try trumping the Sidekick’s cache of associated fame and basically beat it at it’s own game. I’m trying to gather a list of famous people who own and love their Treos. It may not be as flashy as those who own Sidekick’s, but I’m sure it will impress a lot more people to know that Lou Reed uses a Treo 600 than Lindsay Lohan. Maybe not teens or tweens, but guess what, companies, teens aren’t your only market!

So, I found another article about a whole bunch of celebrities who have Treo 600’s, mostly musicians as one would have it. Lou Reed, as I mentioned, as well as Peter Gabriel, Philip Glass, Branford Marsalis, Metallica, Aatronaut Buzz Aldrin and actor Kevin Spacey. Hmmm, no women. Apparently Matthew Broderick carries one as well.

In addition to celebs owning and using Treos in public, there is also Treos placed in TV programs and movies. Actually, seeing a Treo 600 used in a recent episode of The West Wing was what prompted all of this. Josh is seen using the phone in an attempt to reach Leo, the Chief of Staff. None of the Treo’s special abilities are highlighted – it’s just being used as a phone and that’s all. Also, a month or two ago I was flipping channels and saw a Treo on Disney or one of the other kids channels. There was a made-for-tv movie playing about a famous rock star who has dropped his phone with all of its scheduling and address info and this was picked up by a couple of adoring fans who then were trying to find him to return it. While this trumpeted a lot of cool features, they actually overlaid the Treo’s real screen with something that was computer generated to make it look a lot nicer and easier to read.

Well, if you know of other celebs you have the Treo and love it, let us know, even if you are that celebrity. Hey, we could have a celebrity war – Treo celebrities against Sidekick Celebrities. Hmmm, I see a new reality show in the making!

Update: Well, it looks you can add Howard Stern to the list – he talked about it on his radio show recently!

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I thought I’d write a bit about this new NBC “reality show” called “The Biggest Loser.” The show premiered last night and I just had to watch it, due to my interest in health and weight loss as well as a grudging fascination with the reality show format. I’m not exactly a fan of the genre, but more like a rubbernecker. I watched the second season of Survivor, Another Joe Millionaire, the second (current) season of The Apprentice, and last but not least My Big Fat Obnoxious Wedding. I decided to take a look at The Biggest Loser and see how it stacked up on its premeir night.

Let me qualify this by saying that I didn’t catch the entire show. I turned to it a little late and had to switch a way a few times to see what was going on during the ALCS game.

The Biggest Loser is different from most reality shows because it involves as its central theme improving your health. Or at least this is the motivation that people talk about as their reason to stay on the show, although I imagine there must be some monetary rewards as well. It’s also very different in that these folks, on the whole, seemed to be all about supporting each other. They all of this common problem of being overweight and they all seemed extremely nice about wanting everyone to lose as much as possible. That was nice and different, but we’ll see how long it lasts. Also the host of the show is extremely nice even when she’s telling people they must leave.

The show divides the participants into two teams, a red team and a blue team. It seems on both teams there’s a variety of participants at varying degrees of overweight as well as both male and female. The premise is that the team that loses the least amount of weight total every week has to pick a person to vote off. During the show you mainly see participants working out and occasionally eating small plates of food. I can’t imagine this being particularly entertaining week in and week out, and luckily it looks like next week they’ve at least spiced things up a little by creating a “challenge” where the teams each have to bake some large quantities of some really fattening desert so that it can then be served at some event or restaurant.

Ok, so the show is different from a lot of reality shows, and that’s nice, but its differences clash a bit with the main structure of the reality show that it upholds – two teams who are competing against each other and participants voting off one of their teammates each week. The biggest problem I saw is that most of these people seem to want to be there because this is a big chance for them, as they see it, to conquer a problem that they’ve had throughout their lives. They aren’t there just for kicks, or to try to kick-start a modeling career, or any career. They are there, as far as we know, to improve their health. You can tell that they are committed and that it is a big deal to them by the emotion that so many of them express on camera during their interviews. In that way it is the most “real” of reality shows and so the voting off seems even more mean. These are people seeking health and you are telling them yet again that they have failed because they haven’t lost enough weight.

Speaking of weight, this is another problem I have with the show. Weight is the factor by which everyone is judged. For a public that has been given little respect for their intelligence for a long time, this makes some sense. The creators of the show, if they even recognized that weight probably was not the best measurement to go by, nonetheless decided to choose it because it is simple and it is what most people use to judge their progress in this area. The ridiculous amounts of weight loss that people had during this first week (many over 15 lbs and a couple over 20 lbs!), just shows what a ridiculous measurement it is. Maybe it doesn’t matter for a show like this, except that you keep hearing the word “health.” Losing large amounts of weight very quickly is generally not seen as the healthiest way to lose. Plus weight in and of itself only says so much. It’s extremely doubtful that anyone lost 20 lbs of fat in that one week. And that should be what these people are trying to lose – their excess fat. The other parts of them – organs, bone, and muscle – are not things you want to lose mass from! But with a 22-lb loss, you are undoubtedly losing something besides just fat. Probably some of that is muscle, despite their doing resistance exercises to theoretically increase muscle mass. But a lot of it is probably water, which is often a big part of anyone’s weight loss at the beginning of any diet.

This brings me to another point, which is how fair is the actual winning or losing? I realize this is a TV show and few of these shows are really fair, but still, I just think it’s really arbitrary that they are judged by the total weight of their team. True, some of this may be in their control – how much they work out and how much they eat, but they have these personal trainers that work them to death. One participant talked about doing five hours per day. Working out that much I doubt having an extra 500 calories in food is going to make that much difference. The other problem with this is that everyone is different. Women lose fat generally at a slower pace than men. People who start out heavier generally lose a lot more at the start, possibly because they have more water weight in them and this gets shed in the first week or so. Metabolisms differ dramatically from person to person and especially if you consider all the different ages of the participants, which seem to range from early 20’s up to maybe early 50’s. How could one evenly divide ANY group of people of varying weights, degree of fitness, etc. I guess maybe that’s not the point, but it will be interesting to see how choosing someone to vote off will be decided. For the premier, the person voted off was the person who lost the least weight. She was seen as not having as much weight to lose as others, thus not being able to “pull her weight” so to speak.

I guess what bugs me most is the issue that they have made a game out of something that is a serious personal stuggle for millions, for whom it’s not a game at all. Maybe that’s being overly serious, but still, the problem remains that they are judging people on one thing and one thing alone at the end of the day – how much they weigh. We already as a culture overemphasize the power of the almighty scale and that somewhat arbitrary number. This number, as millions have found, is incredibly hard to control. Those who’ve been thin all their lives won’t understand this because they haven’t had to struggle with it. They think it’s simply a matter of portion control and personal responsibility. While I’m not denying there is a lot of responsibility involved, it’s not that simple. Experts disagree on what the best way to lose and maintain that loss, and lots of facets of our (Western, in particular U.S.) culture get in the way, including a more automated, car-driven lifestyle, all-you-can-eat and largest portion for your buck thinking, etc. Our society also seems to want a one-size fits all magic pill solution which is odd since we pride ourselves on individualism. The point is, though, that you can’t just decide “I’m going to lose X lbs. this week” Despite the vast majority of experts that still tell people they are perfectly efficient input/output systems like a chemical reaction, it’s not just a matter of calories in vs. calories expended. It’s much more complicated and the huge differences in weight loss during the first episode of the show (3 lbs to 22 lbs) demonstrate this. So you are judging people on something that they really don’t have a huge amount of control over.

My fear is that this will just add to the schizophrenic attitude our culture has with food and weight. But maybe I will be wrong. Maybe making weight just another arbitrary thing to be judged on, like one’s voice, one’s business leadership skills, or survival skills, will actually bring it down in importance and people will just see it as any other aspect or “skill.” Maybe those who are overweight will then perceive less of a stigma and can simply find the best way to lose weight without feeling like it is a all or nothing battle for life. Hopefully this will be the case. And perhaps future episodes will give the participants and the show in general a little more leeway in figuring out what matters most and what aspects are most characteristics of a participant are fair to use as fodder for throwing them “off the island.” In all fairness even in this first episode one of the participants said that she had told people she wasn’t going to simply use the weight lost as the reason to vote against someone. Then again, she did end up using it anyway, probably because at least for this time it was the focus of things. With these upcoming challenges and probably individual losses becoming a lot closer as the initial water weight loss is no longer in effect, participants will find ample other things to cause them to vote someone off, like good old fashion personality clashes!

Update: Perusing their website, I was able to fill in a few gaps as far as what I’ve said above:

First off, they do, as I expected have a monetary reward – $250,000. That’ll by a lot of donuts, har, har.

Caroline Rhea is the host, who I thought looked familiar, but couldn’t place. She was on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, but apparently is also a stand-up comic, which I wasn’t aware of. I don’t know what her stand-up routine is like, but she is not, at least on this show, the picture of Hollywood extreme thinness that is so often the prerequisite among Hollywood, so my guess is that the fact that she’s probably struggled with weight a little herself makes her a good (and compassionate) host for this. Don’t even get me started on hosts. The “host” for Another Joe Millionaire was seemingly mocked and despised by the participants and for good reason. All she would do was to walk into a room and spout off her lines without showing any kind of actual report with anyone. It was like she was there to show herself to the camera and little else.

The two trainers seem very different based on what they show on the website:

Bob Harper, who is working with the “Blue” team, seems to be a trainer to the stars who spends his summers in the Hamptons and teaches aerobics to the masses. Bob seems to be all about aerobic exercise as his preferred type. His preferred diet is called the “Eat More Diet.” Here is what the site says about it: “Members of this team will eat four to six planned meals a day to boost their metabolism. The high volume, lower fat and lower carbs will give them energy for their workouts and help them burn fat.” Hmmm. Well, lower carbs doesn’t really give one energy for aerobic exercise. Of course eventually, after a couple of weeks on a low-carb regime people often find they have more energy in general, but it’s more of an prolonged energy good for endurance, not necessarily for doing lots of highly aerobic stuff. Not that I mind that he is saying “lower carbs” but I just wonder what exactly his view of “lower carbs” is, since this seems to be very subjective for some people. Maybe it just means 150 grams per day, which IS lower than the average American diet filled with starches, but certainly is not even at the maintenance level of most self-labeled low-carb diets. Anyway, the issue of low fat also makes his approach a bit confused. Is it low-fat or low-carb? Of course you can have lower amounts of both of these macronutrients, but that only leaves the third, protein. So is it then mostly lean protein? It doesn’t really say. Let’s hope so, because with his emphasis on lots of cardio, and seemingly not as much on resistance (weight-training) exercise, there’s a lot more of a possibility for muscle loss.

Jillian Michaels is a fitness trainer who seems to have a different set of qualifications as Bob. She’s certified by various entities and has some recognition in “Advanced Exercise Nutrition.” She was a martial arts expert for many years and she has specialized in many areas of fitness including lots of weight-training related areas. And in fact I did see her participants doing lots of exercise with weights, plus push-ups, sit-ups, etc. Her diet is termed the “Eat Less Diet” and this is what the site says about it: “Diet Philosophy: Burn more calories than you take in. Members of this team will calculate their basal metabolic rate (BMR) to see how many calories they burn without exercise. Then we will factor in the calories burned with the exercise on top of their BMR and deduct the appropriate amount of calories for desired weight loss. Team members will eat a high fiber, high protein, low carb diet with emphasis on portion control. Consuming less calories than they are burning will lead to… WEIGHT LOSS!!” Well… maybe. I do like the fact that she emphasized bother lower carb and higher protein and doesn’t get hung up on fat. Lowering your carb intake can have beneficial effects on insulin levels which in turn has lots and lots of positive physiological effects. Read Protein Power and you will learn a lot about the science behind this, not just as a weight-loss tool, but as something that improves health. Protein is frawned upon by many of the extreme low-fat (because protein usually comes with a good deal of fat in the bargain) and also veg*n (because there are few non-animal sources that are particularly high in protein – soy being the only notable exception) advocates. But protein is what makes up much of our body – muscle is pure protein, but so are much of our organs. Maintaining good muscle mass can help increase metabolism and strengthen bones, despite the constant unfounded myths that increased protein consumption actually depletes bone mass and causes cancer. While I don’t think fiber is as big of health boon as some make it out, foods that are high in fiber are often low in carbs as well – lots of greens and other veggies. Portion control is important for everyone and even though most low-carb plan don’t put specific limits on protein and fat, neither do they encourage people to pig out, at least not explicitly. Indeed often those on low-carb plans find themselves less hungry. The increased amount of fat tends to make them fuller. This is used somehow by critics to “prove” that low carb diets are low-calorie diets in disguise. Why this is a bad thing, I’m not really sure, but then again, much of the criticism low carb has received turns out to be idiotic and unfounded. Now, I do remember hearing a part of Jillian’s speil about her diet and kind of deemphasizing carbs, and what I think she was doing there could be construed either way. I think on the one hand it could be construed as being a bit defensive, and not wanting to be criticized as many are for their support of a low carb regime, but on the positive side I think it might be a good thing that she is suggesting that it isn’t all about the carbs, but as much about getting adequate protein and not pigging out on, say, processed foods that just have a label saying they are “low carb”. The one problem I have with Jillian’s overall approach is that it gives too much credence to the aforementioned calories in vs. calories out, incredibly dumbed-down way of looking at how the human body works. In the end, though, I think she still has more sense backing up her approach than does Bob, and so I guess if I’m going to have to root for one team over another, it’ll have to be red. As it turns out, red did win the first week, albeit from an admittedly pretty insignificant less than 1lb per participant.

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Sony has decided to come out with a competitor of sorts to Tivo, but at least for now it will just be available in Japan. Called “Vaio X,” Sony is calling the device “Tivo on Steroids” and that it is! It contains six TV tuners (only analog, but hey, can you really complain that much?) so that six shows can be recorded simultaneously. To provide storage for so much recording capability, the device includes a terabyte of storage, or optionally a higher 1.3TB. I think this equates to something like 1,300 hours worth of content, or about 81 days of straight watching – minus 8 hours per day for sleeping, eating, cleaning, brief walks to get circulation going again, and potty breaks. I suppose you could always cut the number down by using catheters and treadmills, but in any case, it’s enough to where you you’re not going to run out of space any time soon! This also doesn’t take into consideration the fact that 99% of people wouldn’t be able to get through half the number of hours of marathon TV watching without going insane.

The unit will go on sale next month for over $4K, so it’s not exactly in the same marketplace as Tivo or ReplayTV, but rather for avid, obsessive-compulsive, slightly insane, and/or fairly well-off TV enthusiast. My main question would be when are there ever six things on at the same time that I just really need to watch? I guess if you were a sports fan and wanted to watch most of the football games on in their entirety, this would be one way of doing it. Or if you were a writer wanting to cover an event and wanted to watch all the major cable and broadcast news networks for their individual takes on the event… I guess the other main thing would be for people sharing this one unit in a household and everyone in that household being able to program their own set of recordings and not worrying about what others are watching or recording at the time. The problem with this is that while it’s great to allow multiple people to record so much stuff for later viewing, if everyone’s sharing this one unit, how do you ever get time for everyone to then view all that they’ve recorded. I suppose one answer would be to pass that content off to computers as MPEG-4 files so that people could then watch on their individual computers or even Portable Media Players. This may actually work in Japan, but I can see why Sony isn’t talking about a U.S. version anytime soon, although I’m sure some gadget heads with money to burn will be trying to acquire one or even construct their own.

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Just a quick note to update folks on the impending partnership between Tivo and Netflix, since I wrote about it earlier. According to this article, the companies have always had close ties. I know Tivo already teams up with cable companies and satellite companies to provide units that have both the DVR and receiver in one unit, but it will be interesting to see how these various forms of content delivery and storage systems meld and overlap with one another to create a method that is optimally convenient. Then again, maybe what would be most useful would be to have different forms of content delivery and storage, giving people more choices. There are obvious pros and cons to one over another, so why not have them all available?

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Most of the “convergence” devices out there involve the telephone and the computer, but not the TV, or at least not the broadcast part of TV – more just the element of TV as a monitor for playing pre-recorded video. But Sanyo, anyway, looks like they may introduce a phone with an honest-to-goodness TV tuner, and a digital one at that. The fact that it’s digital means that it could theoretically display high-definition content, although for a screen the size of matchbook, I hardly think you would be able to tell the difference.

Live broadcasts are something that’s so far been somewhat missing in such devices. Sure you can go up online and look at news on a website, or you can even have SMS messages sent to you with news headlines and brief stories. But the immediacy of live TV or even Radio just hasn’t made it. Since we’ve had portable TV’s for at least a couple of decades and portable radios for a lot longer, it’s a bit surprising to me. I mean portable radios have gotten so miniscule that adding them to a phone would mean little if any additional real estate.

What’s really needed for all of these devices is a screen that will make viewing a pleasure rather than a chore of squinting. The screen would have to use technology we currently don’t see in consumer devices but which has been developed and probably will be coming out some time in the next 5 or 10 years. The technology is called “liquid polymers” and it allows displays that are thin, flexible, and cheap. Theoretically these screens could be folded or rolled so that you could carry them inside of a small device or phone that could fit in your pocket or belt, but when you wanted to watch something for a longer period (not just a quick check to see who’s calling, etc.), then you’d just open the compartment, and unfold the screen and all of a sudden you have a monitor-sized screen but with the dimensions and weight of a piece of paper. Pretty damn cool!

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By way of Vastly Important News, here’s a piece by Newsfactor about a rumor of two popular consumer media technologies teaming up together – Tivo and Netflix.

Media content companies have been dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age. Part of this was a concern that people would illegally copy content and share it with friends, thus killing the huge profit margins that these companies use to stay big and keep getting bigger. Napster and others arose mainly because these companies could not get it through their head that the vast majority of people who buy music want to buy it in a legitimate way, but if you make it not only a lot cheaper, but a easier to obtain, many of those people will simply opt for that way, whatever the legal implications. Apple’s iTunes finally started to erase this wrong thinking by offering individual songs legally for download via a copy-protected file format, and surprise, surprise, they’ve had some great success!

Movies are a slightly different animal because one can’t separate a movie into scenes and sell these separately. DVD’s changed the way movie companies distributed movies perhaps because these companies were nervous that the new technology would flop with consumers like Laserdisc unless they were given other advantages. Instead of charging $80 for the first three months so that only video stores or true aficionados would invest in a movie initially, the prices were set at a much more reasonable level. While some single DVD’s still are released for $30 or $40 or even more, the majority now seem to be going for well under $20, and if you walk into any electronics chain, or even grocery store at this point, one can easily find a sizable collection of DVD’s for under $10.

Despite massive decreases in profits, the music industry still is having a hard time learning a lesson from video. While iTunes and now similar services from Wal-Mart, Sony (no longer available), and soon Microsoft are starting to make some headway, it still will cost you $10 or more to buy an album. You would think the music folks would cut the consumer a break and take a bit more off for the saved expense of creating the CD itself, plus all the packaging and shipping.

So, if this rumor pans out, it could allow video to eclipse music yet again. Netflix and Tivo have already developed huge fan bases around them, and have changed the way Americans consume their video content – both movies and TV. Tivo has made filtering all the junk on TV to a person’s preferences making watching TV actually LESS time-consuming. You don’t have to wait for something to come on or even study a schedule anymore, because if your TIVO knows your preferences, whether by guessing or by you programming it, a backlog of programs of interest to you will simply be on your TIVO when you next check. Similarly Netflix satisfies the urge in many of us to watch movies that we’ve always wanted to see, but missed for whatever reason. It’s use of lists to do this is great because any time one hears of a movie one wants to see, it goes on the list and you don’t have to think about it after that – it will come to you as part of your subscription. Whether it happens in two days or two months depends on where you rank it on your list. The subscription model has worked well for both Netflix and Tivo, although with Tivo you never have to give your content “back” if you don’t want to, you simply need to get it off of your Tivo (either by deleting or by saving to some external source) in order to make room for more if you fill up your Tivo’s entire hard drive. With hard drive’s getting bigger and cheaper, though, this becomes less and less an issue as time goes by.

Combining these two technologies may be a very successful consumer product, but it does have some drawbacks with the current state of technology. The main issue is that the vast majority of Tivos out there record in standard definition 4:3 non-widescreen. There are Tivo’s just starting to come out this year that allow for high-definition recording that would be necessary to due true justice to DVD, but these devices are still priced upwards of $1000. Maybe this, as with the case of most new technologies, will come down significantly over the next year or two and no longer be an issue, but what about all the older Tivo boxes? Will they be upgradeable? Probably not. Then there are all the special features of a DVD. Tivo can simply record a video stream; it can’t translate a DVD menu system as far as I know, so these features, if included, would have to be just tacked onto the end of the stream. What about commentary tracks? Does Tivo have the ability to record multiple audio tracks with one video stream?

I don’t have all the answers, but part of that is because while being a fan of these technologies, I don’t use them myself. What? The gadget guy doesn’t use this stuff? What kind of hypocrite is he? Yes, I admit it. I do intend to eventually adopt these technologies, but since I recently purchased a high-definition TV with HD satellite service, I did not want to pay yet another $1000 for the only Tivo option that would have allowed me to record shows in HD. As far as Netflix, I did try them out about 6 years ago when they were first starting and they didn’t have the lists and monthly subscription they do now. It was all ala carte. But as some of you may know, I also manage a DVD website, and as part of that receive quite a few DVD’s for review on that site. I would say well over half of the upwards of 400 DVD’s I own I haven’t watched! So for me to start renting more DVD’s would be ludicrous.

In a year or two HD DVD’s (or Blue Light depending on which format you think will win the new format war), and cable systems have started showing movies “on demand” and of course there is always pay per view. Eventually everything should be on demand, that is one can download it and watch it as soon as desired. Just like the web works. You want to see a web page, you enter the address and go to it. Such stream-of-consciousness viewing is something people want, even if not all of them quite know that yet. The mindset of the web, especially on a higher-speed connection, will seep into other forms of content. There are some big hurdles to get over before this becomes reality, such as storage and bandwidth issues, but if there’s any guarantee it’s that if people want it, they will build it. Technology marches forward. A lot depends on the innovation, inventions and discoveries that are still unknown to the general public, or haven’t even taken place, but eventually bandwidth and storage will cease to be of any issue – until the next level of content begins arriving in a decade or two that involve the tactile and olfactory senses too!

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There’s certainly enough inane crap on TV these days, and the Olympics has never been a bastion of enlightenment in a see of darkness, with all it’s hyped up stories and blatant US favoritism. But come on!I was watching some of the coverage of the men’s gymnastics last night. They seem to have two experts who do a pretty good job of convincing you that they know what they are talking about. But for some reason NBC has chosen to throw in a third wheel. A general commentator that seems to have little background in the sport. He will say the obvious or worse – things that are completely unsubstantiated, just so that he can say something, since obviously he can’t really add anything useful.

I don’t know why it’s gotten to me so much, but it kind of ruins the whole experience to have some buffoon who has no idea what he’s talking about spout all kinds of nonsense just so there’s no “dead air” or because people need a more “human” angle rather than the actual technical details of the sport at hand. Ugh.

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Just picked up a new Sony TV this weekend. I did some research on the net and decided that this would be a good set for us. It’s gotten great reviews, can do high-definition with an additional receiver, and is not so huge at 34 inches that it’s going to visually take over our entire living room. Oh, it’s widescreen too, so I can now look at DVD’s in their full aspect ratio. So far we don’t have it hooked to anything but a normal antennae and so the reception is pretty horrible, but we’ll be getting DirectTV installed soon. I have watched a couple of DVD’s on it, though, and I must say that it brings a whole new dimension to watching them – especially animated stuff like Monster’s Inc. or Finding Nemo. There is just so much textural detail that I never noticed even on a 27″ Sony with good (but standard) resolution.

Now, although I should know this stuff already, I am learning that I will need to calibrate the thing properly in order to get the best picture. It is hard to understand this when it already looks so amazing, and I suppose being slightly color-blind doesn’t help either! I have ordered the Avia Guide to Home Theater Home theater information and setup DVD which I read was the best for those not already serious home-theater geeks. It helps you calibrate all the stuff you need plus gives you a lot of good information about the concepts. The one thing that has me a little confused is whether I’ll need access to some special “service menu” that I have no idea how to get into. The TV menu has some basic settings like color, brightness, tint, color temp, etc., but I got the impression from a little bit of reading at The Home Theater Forum that there’s a whole lot more.

I’ll try to post follow-ups to this with more information as I get more educated about it. Oh yeah, I got it from Circuit City, but I think you can order it from Amazon.com and pick it up from a local Circuit City. I don’t know why you would do this though. The thing is seriously heavy, and very bulky to boot! It weighs in at 201 lbs, which, even if I were to share that with another person I could manage for maybe ten seconds at best! I thankfully had it delivered for an extra $45. The guys who delivered it were extremely curteous and also hooked the unit up to my dvd player and satellite receiver and actually preconfigured the tv and the dvd player. Not a bad deal for avoiding a hernia! I had them put it on my current Ikea TV hutch, or whatever you call it, but we are getting a new one from Storehouse that will match the bookcases that are right next to it in the living room, so I will have to move the damn thing, if only sliding it a couple of feet. But still something I’m not looking forward to!

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