An In-Depth Look at the Google TV Interface http://bit.ly/chYF7B
I still think it ‘s a mistake to try and put interface on the same screen as the display. Â Put the controls on a second touch device! Works great with an iPhone.
UPDATE: Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, agrees with me. Check out his last point.
Monsoon Multimedia – Vulkano for Macs, iPhones, iPads http://bit.ly/93kGwD
Does anyone know more about this than is in the Macsimum News item and on the company website? It looks awesome:
Consumers can now watch and control any home TV channel through a wired or Wi-Fi (and soon on 3G) connection from anywhere by installing a Vulkano and downloading a free software application on to their device of choice or from the respective app store. They can watch and control live TV and schedule a recording through an included EPG (electronic program guide), transfer, watch and control these recordings at any time on their TV, computers, smartphones or iPad type devices.
Vulkano lets users watch YouTube on their big screen TV and by leveraging UPnP (Universal Plug n Play) they can stream video and photos from their smartphones, computers and cameras wirelessly on to their living room TV without having to use cables. In the near future, Vulkano will offer free service upgrades such as Google TV, Yahoo! Widgets, Netflix, Hulu and others.
The link from the article doesn’t seem to work, but follow http://www.monsoonmultimedia.com/products.html and it does.
BBC: HTML5 Is Not Ready For Video And Sailing Off-Course http://bit.ly/ckjcQS
The corporation’s future media and technology director Erik Huggers writes:
“The fact is that there’s still a lot of work to be done on HTML5 before we can integrate it fully into our products. As things stand, I have concerns about HTML5’s ability to deliver on the vision of a single open browser standard which goes beyond the whole debate around video playback.â€
I think it’s widely agreed that HTML5 is not a complete replacement for every use of Flash at this time of the technology’s development, but this attack is hard to separate from the fact that there is a long-standing agreement between the BBC and Adobe to transition the BBC’s video to Flash.
The BBC is invested in a long-standing strategic relationshipsigned with Adobe late in 2007, allowing it to move its media delivery away from RealMedia to Flash. So it’s Flash on which one of the world’s most popular VOD services is now built – BBC iPlayer served 100.2 million online requests in June.
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Five Rules For How To Make Things Go Viral (TCTV) http://tcrn.ch/dp2AVz
There is no guarantee of virality, but there are some approaches that help improve the likelihood that something will go viral and be spread across a wide variety of audiences.
I particularly like number 1 – “Create media for the bored at work”!
The advice is “as expected” but worth remembering.
Why asking how much a movie cost to make is the wrong question. http://bit.ly/9xchrE Article also talks of $800 movie shot on Pentax DSLR.
There’s no positive benefit to spending more on a film than is going to be seen on the screen and yet the majors all talk about “$200 million movies”.
A few years back at a Cato Institute conference on copyright, a guy from NBC Universal challenged me with the question of “how will we make $200 million movies?” if content is freely shared. As I noted at the time, that’s really the wrong question. No one watching a movie cares about how much the moviecosts. They just want to see a good movie. The question for a good filmmaker or producer or a studio should be “how do I make the best movie I can that will still be profitable?” Starting out with a “cost” means that you don’t focus on ways to save money or contain costs. You focus on ways to spend up to those costs. That’s backwards, and it’s how you fail as a business.
The article goes on to talk about a new short film from Futuristic Films, which notes in the opening that the whole damn thing was shot with a Pentax K-7 DSLR, which you can find these days for around $800 or so!
Big difference from the $200 million movie, but trying to compare them is probably ridiculous.
5 Questions With…Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone http://bit.ly/bk79Db
Jim Lanzone, who, prior to starting “internet television guideâ€Â Clicker.com, was CEO of Ask.com and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Redpoint Ventures. Below, he submits the phrase “nanocasting†for approval, sings the praises of the Double Rainbow and explains why using Clicker.com is better than having a brain hemorrhage.
Web video company My Damn Channel zeroes in on branded entertainment  and celebrity content http://bit.ly/aNKCLK This is the third company in the “mini-web-studio” category to get funding recently.
There’s a lot out there beyond that original article – someone has a good publicist or is good at getting out to the media. The New York Times has After Drought, Hope for Shows Made for Web; there’s the Venture Beat article mentioned above and New TeeVee focus on the fund raising and expanding staff to “10 people”.
All three articles are worth the read. While there’s some duplication in content they give varying amounts of context and mentions of other similar mini-web-studios like Revision3, BlipTV and more, and how their shows “pay the bills”.
Tesco goes to Trolleywood http://bit.ly/c068cD
One step beyond branded media – custom movies! Content for one store only – harkens back to the early days of cinema where the studios also owned the cinemas. Kraft and P&G have jumped into the music business, so it’s only logical that Tesco will jump into the movie business. (Really, that’s logical?)
The supermarket giant that inhabits virtually every corner of our existence has this year moved into film-making with a straight-to-DVD movie or, as its makers prefer, a “DVD Premiere”. This autumn, Paris Connections will go on sale exclusively in Tesco stores. If successful, it could revolutionise the movie business, removing distributors and agents in one swipe and transforming how many films are made and funded.
Paris Connections is the first in a series of Collins adaptations, loosely based on her novel LA Connections, but transposed to Paris Fashion week. Today, in the Hotel Lutetia, the director Harley Cokeliss is shooting a catwalk scene. Many of the extras are authentic fashionistas: a man with wet-look leather trousers, plenty of big glasses and vertiginous heels. The effect is tarnished somewhat when I am hurriedly shepherded among them to make up the numbers.
Right now it’s just one movie, but it does indicate that there is a way around the stranglehold on production by the MPAA studios. Unlike those studios, Tesco didn’t intervene to micromanage the movie asking just “that it not be porn” and be PG15.
No matter how bad the movie, actors, directors, producers and the whole product crew got paid!
Anyone But Me Crowdsources $17K For Season 3 http://bit.ly/a54rQr
One way to fund production – particularly web production – is to ask the fans to fund it. Anyone but Me (a show I haven’t seen but has completed two seasons) had the first two seasons funded by a “private investor”.
And like good filmmakers these days, there are graduated responses:
Ward and Miller have set a series of milestones for fundraising: When they reach the $30,000 mark, a special video of series stars Rachael Hip-Flores and Alexis Slade singing will be released. And at $55,000, Miller and Ward have committed to doing at least five new episodes of the show. “We wouldn’t just leave things where we left them [in the season two finale],†Miller said.
Hurt Locker Still Shared Widely Online; Wonder Why Producers Aren’t Issuing Takedowns? http://bit.ly/aKUIzZ
In what is clearly a new business model for filmmakers, the producers of Hurt Locker look set to make more money from “settlements” than it did from the box office.
If the above scenario becomes reality, The Hurt Locker would make $25 million in settlements alone in the coming months. This number could of course go much higher, as thousands of people are still downloading the movie every day.
With this $25 million the film makers would have collected more money from BitTorrent users than they did from U.S. movie theater visitors. Despite the recognition from Academy members and the huge success among downloaders, the U.S box office revenue has been relatively low at $16.4 million.
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-will-earn-hurt-locker-more-than-the-box-office-100530/
No wonder they haven’t filed DMCA take-down notices. It’s not in their best interested to prevent unauthorized copying (something that has never been show to harm a film’s revenue) because they stand to make more money from suing (on flimsy evidence that probably wont’ stand up in court if any of these get there, unlike Tennenbaum et al, which were Kaza or eDonkey based) than from distributing the film in a traditional manner.
Congratulations for finding a way to make unauthorized distribution pay. And turn fans against you.