Television

My Joost invite came through via the ol’ Twitter network (thanks, Leanda!) and I’ve been playing with it some. A full report will be posted to Uncabled pretty soon, but I just had to get one comment out: There are channels that you are completely unable to remove from your “My Channels” quicklist. Utterly stupid channels like “World’s Strongest Man” and “Lazy TV”: the “Remove” button is disabled on these channels’ settings. I seriously hope this is just a bug, because if this is what Joost expects people to live with — especially when several of these channels are freely web-streamable from network homepages or available as unrestricted video podcasts — then this application is not going to outlive its initial PR.

A rule of thumb about breaking news: ask “so what’s next?” The more the answer leads into the unknown, the better the story is. Obvious, right? Last night on CNN they were obsessing over Castro’s health. I ask “what next?” and it’s not that unknown. At some point, Castro will die, it’s a given. But they spent a few minutes on content — how Cuba will react — and then it was all filler.

Video news is such a powerful medium, but it’s wasted on a 24 hour cycle. News comes in, you find out about it, and then you get on with your day. The killer app for news, IMHO, is an organization that groks the internet VOD, podcasting and IPTV. Sell subscriptions, get high-quality segments beamed directly into your cellphones and iPods, and be all about the information. Removing the requirement of being on-air all the time, and adding new layers of random access means you’ve removed the need for all the repetition and “entertainment” affectations that turn people off when it comes to television news.

I just caught up to the ending of Who Wants to Be a Superhero? the other night and I was marvelling at how a show can take 20 minutes of actual content and stretch it out to an hour-long format. Now that’s a superpower!

I was remarking at how insanely similar the winner, Feedback, was to Cyclops, one of Stan Lee’s famous creations… or at least, the Chris Claremont-era Cyke — the overly intense, gotta-prove-himself, loyal to his mentor hero. Instead of finding a father figure in Professor X, Feedback has Stan Lee himself.

But let’s be serious here, which would make a better comic book and movie: “Feedback”, or “Fat Momma”? We all liked Fat Momma, and would be proud of her as the winner, but she’s just not as sell-able of a superhero as someone who at least designed in some cool powers to go with the persona. We’d like her fictional character like we liked Snakes on a Plane — a ton at first until we had to live with it for a while and realize it really wasn’t all that good to being with.

If I went on WWTBAS?, it would be my generation-x duty to go on with as satirical and cynical a character as possible. I would modify up a suit made with camoflague into a post-modern marksman’s outfit, but instead go as “The Marxman” — that is, I would use the teachings of Karl Marx to help people in crisis. My superpower would be the Aquaman-like ability to command proletariats into action. My battle cry as I swing on a cable high above the streets: “Workers of the world unite!” — even if that is a bit Wonder Twins-esque. I would show all those that need rescue that, in fact, only they can rescue themselves from the tyrannys of fire, runaway trains and rabid dogs.

But of course, shaving off the beard would remove my powers.

Someone get the Sci-Fi channel on the phone!

…I really miss the old pseudo.com peeps.

Whatever happened to Shannon and Melissa (of Minx TV) and the rest of the unaccounted-for Pseudo crew? Are any of them podcasting? Is DJ Dara still doing something like Velocity?

Seriously — who’s going to be the 1996 Pseudo of the 2006 podcasting world?

I’ve been trying to get Galleon to work on Mac OS X for sometime now. Thanks to the app bundles and some bearable instructions—the Windows guys get an installer, we have to line-by-line it, but at least there aren’t that many lines—I can get it running and it’s pretty nice on the TiVo side of the equation, but there’s always the one thing that just won’t work.

See, the Mac users are the hungriest of all of this kind of application, because we’ve been shafted for a year now with TiVo’s inability to create the Desktop 2.0 software for our machines. That means no TiVoToGo or pretty much any cool new feature you’ve read about in a press release lately. Not coincidentally, that’s also the length of time I stopped evangelizing TiVo — in fact, I can’t remember the last time I actually did recommend TiVo to someone, because I’m waiting for them to stop announcing and start delivering.

And even with Galleon, which is open-sourced, it’s still mostly focused on the UNIX and Windows folks. I’ve spent three weekends trying to debug GoBack because the transcoding won’t work with Mac VLC or the ffmpegx binaries, and I’m just about ready to give up.

Frankly, if Apple really does have this “Mac mini DVR” that the rumor mill keeps jabbering about for MacWorld. I’m snapping this up immediately. Mac users like people who treat us as first-class citizens, and sadly Apple is the only big name that has done so consistently, without using us as a springboard and then pulling away entirely (for the obvious reasons).

Yet another article—this one in USATODAY—talking about [the evolution of the TV ad][1].

I guess I have a hard time understanding why it’s so hard a concept to grasp, since to me it’s very obvious: real communication has shifted to interactive mediums and it happens when I’m interested in it happening. I am one of those guys the author writes about, who skips stuff in TiVo at home and reads AvantGo on the way to the office.