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How Apple Just Disrupted the Cable Guys September 2nd, 2010
Interesting observations from Wired’s Evan Hansen about how the new AppleTV poses a threat to the cable stack…
You need a whole new ecosystem if you’re going to dislodge cable. Cable controls the whole stack, as people in IT like to say. From the content owners, which are addicted to the huge licensing fees only cable can afford to pay; to the distribution networks; to the consumer devices; to the eyeballs; to the advertisers: Cable owns the stack.
If you want to beat cable, you need to create a whole new ecosystem for reaching consumers and changing their habits. Has Apple done that? I think so.
In the Apple TV ecosystem, the phone is not just an iOS controller, it is the hub of a new personal mobile media center. Don’t get distracted by Apple’s video rental service. It sucks, for now, and won’t get people to cut the cable. But they will buy the Apple TV box, because it is cheap and they have iPhones and iPods and iPads, and they see the inexorable logic of closing the loop between their Macs and their phones and their mobile media devices and their TVs.
…Apple TV is a paradigm shift, because you always have your phone but no one lets you integrate your phone into the media center.
Guess what? Apple just did that.
How Boxee Sees the Apple TV September 1st, 2010
Some good comments from Boxee about the new AppleTV… (and mad props to them for embedding The Clash’s video for Rudy Can’t Fail):
Now there is a new version of Apple TV coming out and the Boxee Box is launching in November.
We think people want to be able to watch anything that they can watch on their computer, only on their bigscreen TV. There is an overwhelming consumer expectation that the content we can consume in our cubicles, our dorm rooms, and in our laps should be available in our living rooms, in full 1080p with a gorgeous interface. It’s a simple premise, but the challenge is to do it in a way that makes sense in that space, so you can put your feet up, grab a remote and start watching. No keyboards, mice, windows or labyrinthine menus. It should be calm and it should be beautiful. And it *must* be open.
Amazon Working on New TV, Movie Service August 31st, 2010
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is building out a subscription web TV service.
Amazon.com Inc. is working on a new subscription service that would deliver TV shows and movies over the Internet, ramping up the battle among Web companies to control the living room.
The Internet retailer has in recent weeks pitched a Web-based subscription service to several major media companies, including General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, Time Warner Inc., News Corp. and Viacom Inc., among others, according to people with knowledge of the proposal.
Amazon appears to be targeting a similar model to Netflix, focusing on older, “catalogue” content, according to people briefed on the meetings. Executives at media companies often view the availability of older content on the Web as less of a threat to their existing business.
…Amazon’s new subscription service would be viewable on a Web browser, or through devices such as Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray players and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 videogame console. Amazon currently sells individual episodes of TV shows on those devices, often for $1.99 apiece. It also sells and rents digital movie downloads.
Media companies have been reluctant to put too much of their best content on the Internet for too little money. None want to be left behind as the Web merges with television. But they are also wary of encouraging a shift to Web-based viewing, which could lead consumers to cut off cable and satellite subscriptions.
Of note:
Netflix has found a growing niche with online streaming. About 61% of its 15 million subscribers watched for at least 15 minutes in the second quarter, up from 37% a year earlier, the company said in July.
Transmedia Artists Guild August 31st, 2010
I’d like to talk a little bit about the Transmedia Artists Guild. Aside from our first public statement at ARGfest and the somewhat spartan website, there’s not a lot of information out there, but a lot of people are very curious about what we’re planning.
Let’s start by talking about where the idea came from. During SXSW, a group of us got to talking over ice cream about some of the problems affecting professionals in our field. Isolation, for one; also difficulty in establishing credibility, missing industry standards for getting credit for our work, and the lack of a really good fit in other, existing professional associations.
I’d be all over the transmedia producer credit at the PGA, but… I’m really not a producer. The SFWA wouldn’t have me, as things stand now. And while the IGDA has long tried to foster a professional ARG community, there are difficulties with that home for the broad sweep of transmedia. A lot of great transmedia works aren’t fundamentally games in any sense. READ MORE
As E-Book Wars Heat Up, Borders Drops Prices Of Kobo And Aluratek Devices August 31st, 2010
As competition in the e-books device market heats up, Borders is cutting the prices of its leading eReading devices, the Kobo
and Aluratek to $129 and $99.99 respectively. The Kobo was previously priced at $149.99 and the Aluratek was priced at $119.99.
Borders is also announcing that Velocity Micro’s Android-based Cruz Reader R101 and Cruz Tablet T103 are now available for preorder on Borders.com for $199 and $299 respectively. Borders is currently offering 1.5 million titles through its e-book readers. READ MORE
Hukilau Slate 1.5 Released! August 30th, 2010
What’s New In Version 1.5
- New Timer that starts and stops with your clapper.
- Double tap the timer to restart.
- Redone entry fields
- Larger text for easier use during projects.
Can Hollywood redesign humanity? August 30th, 2010
Parag and Ayesha Khanna have some interesting thoughts about the possible impacts of transmedia. From Big Think’s Hybrid Reality blog:
What is happening in Los Angeles today goes well beyond movies, and well beyond story-telling. As Henry Jenkins of USC explains, the rise of transmedia means that fiction has dispersed across multiple delivery channels, from comic books to film to the web; the entertainment experience has become unified and coordinated. What underpins this phenomenon is one of Hybrid Reality’s fundamental principles: the increasing cross-pollination of disciplines. In this case, production designers, game-makers, architects, sociologists, and other experts are designing virtual worlds and filling them with archetypes that inspire and train at the same time. The “Re Evolution” festival will do this in June 2011, focusing on the convergence of technology, culture, science and art, and the upcoming 5D conference promises to do the same by linking immersive design with narrative media.
The evidence is mounting that immersion in virtual life is impacting our real-life behavior.
NSFW: A Modest Proposal For Authors Who Abandon Their Publishers — Give Me A Break August 30th, 2010
“Publishers are all cohorts of the devil.
There must be a special hell for them somewhere.”
- Goethe
If I were a commissioning editor in a major publishing house, I’d be feeling a little unloved right now. Like the wife of a guy who runs over his neighbour’s cat: why does everyone hate me? What did I do?
Maybe hate is too strong a word: hate is when you hope that someone will burst into flames and die. The current feeling towards publishers isn’t quite that: no one wants them to combust – it’s just that, well, they wouldn’t urinate on them if it happened. READ MORE
‘Anti-Facebook’ project nears launch August 29th, 2010
The open-source social networking project Diaspora reported on its blog this week that the code for its much-hyped “anti-Facebook” software will be released September 15.
Hatched by a team of New York University programming students, Diaspora raised $200,000 through a microfinancing strategy–nabbing small chunks of money from a lot of individuals.
The project has received a huge amount of press despite being little more than a vaporware reaction to Facebook’s privacy snafus. That said, if the team is half as good at building software as it is at building hype, there might be something interesting in the upcoming release, and maybe even a viable business.
But it’s a long shot. READ MORE
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