Category Archives: Media & Culture

Apple TV. Take Two.

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Appletv2I think they got it right this time. My Apple TV brings the net to my living room. I can rent movies, buy TV shows and music, watch podcasts and YouTube videos and view photos from Flickr (mine or anyone else’s).

I can Tivo all my favorite shows and watch them when I want but the new Apple TV feels like a very different viewing experience. Give me a week or two to get familiar with it. I’m looking forward to watching more video podcasts. This might be the future of TV. Smarter folk than I seem to agree.

The Onion: Room: Editorial meeting

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In last week’s This American Life, host Ira Glass lived one of my fantasies. He sat in on an editorial meeting of The Onion, “where there’s one laugh for every 100 jokes.”

“They start with over 600 potential headlines for their fake-news newspaper each week, and over the course of two days, in the very tough room that is their editorial conference room, they select 16 to go in the paper.”

Public radio and podcasting

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Mark Ramsey points us to an interesting piece by “The Long Tail’s” Chris Anderson on how his listening behavior to public radio has been transformed by podcasting.

“I realized that I don’t really support my local affiliate. I love some of the shows it broadcasts and hate others. My attachments are to individual shows, not to a broadcast station. My engagement with public radio is at a more granular level than the affiliate.

Now that I get my radio via podcast, I don’t have to take the bad shows with the good. I’ve got an a la carte menu, and I assemble my own schedule with what I want and when I want it.

But look at the arc of history here. The podcast model is getting cheaper and more ubiquitously available (who doesn’t have a cellphone?), and it serves individual needs and taste better. Meanwhile the broadcast model, which is all about one-size-fits-all taste, is based on human labor costs and costly transmission equipment and is only getting more expensive. You can see how this story ends.”

I’ve had the same guilty thoughts about my own listening habits. I like a lot of NPR programs but listen to them as podcasts. And I would be willing to pay for the best shows (This American Life, for example).

IpodspeakerAnd my morning listening routine has improved with the purchase of a small speaker/doc for my iPod nano. Each evening iTunes downloads any new podcasts to which I’m subscribed, and syncs to the nano. In the morning I pop the nano into the speaker dock and listen to a perfectly customized line-up of progams.

Brits tuning in to personalized Internet “radio”

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Mark Ramsey shares some thoughts on a story in the Sunday Times of London about the growing number of Brits tuning in to personalized Internet “radio” every week (and tuning out traditional radio).

Sunday Times: “Personalised broadcasts of the future will probably have either advertising or a price tag attached, just as they do today. But once your radio knows exactly what you want to hear, the idea of a human DJ – however cheeky his banter – might start to sound a little dated.”

Ramsey: “Over the long haul I fully expect the influence of music-oriented radio to diminish. Because music, my friends, is a commodity. Not only can anyone string together a playlist, but nobody can string together my favorite playlist better than I can.”

“What it all adds up to is the gradual near-obsolescence of music radio, not in a blink, but by a slow and persistent siphoning of audience and attention and interest and advertisers. This process will take years to happen.”

I read a lot of stories like this but very few on the impact of Internet “stations” on non-music formats. Are news-talk formats feeling any effect from the web? My radio pals can feel free to post an anonymous comment.

Yes We Can – Obama Music Video

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Blogger (and Hillary supporter) Jeff Jarvis dismisses this little ditty –and Obama’s campaign– as "the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time."

What was the title of the "song" (early 70s?) that incorporated bits of speeches by MLK, JFK and Bobby Kennedy? Was it Abraham, Martin and John? Seems like there was another one but I can’t come up with it.

UPDATE: But smays.com reader Dale could. In 1971, DJ Tom Clay combined Jackie DeShannon’s What the World Needs Now with Dion’s Abraham, Marltin and John, and the speeches referenced above. Clay died in 1995 at the age of 66.

Download What the World Needs Now.mp3

Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete

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Doc Searls says the Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete the moment high-enough-bandwidth wireless connectivity becomes ubiquitous.

“We’re one good UI away from the cell phone becoming a radio. (Thanks to the iPhone, it already serves as a TV.) And we’re one smart cell company away from radio- and TV-as-we-know-it from being replaced entirely — or from moving up the next step of the evolutionary ladder. Public broadcasters know that. That’s one reason they now call themselves “public media”, a move that separates the category from its transport methods.

Will this someday be an issue for our networks? Radio Iowa. Wisconsin Radio Network. Nebraska Radio Network. Time will tell.