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.

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.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.

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

Kobo

Aluratek

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

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.

GET IT NOW

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.

“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

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

For as long as I can remember, Blockbuster Video has been the nation-wide go-to spot to rent movies. Some of my earliest movie experiences as a child involved movies my family rented from Blockbuster. When the popularity of online music downloads began shuttering music stores, the world realized that Blockbuster’s days were similarly numbered. Now it seems that number is quickly approaching zero as the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that an impending bankruptcy could be as close as a few weeks away for the video and game rental giant.

According to “several people familiar with the situation,” Blockbuster executives met with the six major Hollywood studios to warn them of a “pre-planned” bankruptcy the company plans to enter sometime in September. The company intends to file Chapter 11 in order to escape leases on underperforming stores and hopes to soldier on in 2011 with some of it’s nearly $1 billion in debt recouped. READ MORE

After dominating the home video rental business for more than a decade and struggling to survive in recent years against upstarts Netflix and Redbox, Blockbuster Inc. is preparing to file for bankruptcy next month, according to people who have been briefed on the matter.

Executives from Blockbuster and its senior debt holders last week held meetings with the six major movie studios to discuss their intention to enter a “pre-planned” bankruptcy in mid-September, said several people familiar with the situation who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of ongoing talks.

READ MORE

FORTUNE — Mike McCue has spent a lifetime — he skipped college and went to work for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) straight out of high school — making technology do things the world might not be ready to embrace. In 1989, years before the web took off, he founded Paper Software, which evolved into a browser company. It was acquired by Netscape. In 1999 he launched TellMe, a seemingly futuristic voice-recognition service that lets consumers verbally ask a question (instead of say, typing in a search query) of their smartphone. The service then searches a huge database and delivers the answers in the form of a text message or audio reply. McCue’s system, a pioneering combination of supercomputing and the telephone, became the standard for “voice browsers.” He sold that company to Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) in 2007 for an estimated $800 million. READ MORE

Still, for the record: “More new generation Kindles were ordered in the first four weeks of availability than in the same timeframe following any other Kindle launch.” And Amazon (AMZN) customers are now ordering more Kindles than anything else in the store, says Amazon.

Meanwhile, Kindle readers like the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, too. Amazon reports that “the most popular” Kindle titles  “are the books in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, “Star Island” by Carl Hiaasen and “The Rembrandt Affair” by Daniel Silva. “ (VIA)

Behold SUBVERSIA, the new nonfiction collection by D.R. Haney. This is the first official look at the first official copy of the first official book ever published on the new TNB Books imprint.

SUBVERSIA will be available for purchase very soon. We’ll keep you posted here on The Feed, as well as on our Twitter and Facebook feeds. Please stay tuned…

And congrats to Duke!

-BL

While in Vancouver last week, BoomTown got some time to chat with Aydin Senkut about his recent announcement of a new $40 million investment fund, which is part of a “super angel” trend in Silicon Valley.

In many ways, the concept of a super angel was pioneered by well-known tech investor Ron Conway, whom Senkut mentions in the video interview I did with him, below.

But now the market is getting very crowded, with a $30 million fund being raised by Dave McClure just one of many similar efforts by others, from Chris Sacca to Michael Dearing to Conway himself, again.

Apparently, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, these super angels have some kind of mysterioso “magnetic” effort–which means entrepreneurs like them and other investors pay mind. READ MORE

In 2006, the typical window between DVD and VOD release was 30 days, with some titles lasting up to 45 days before they became available. As recently as 2009, the average wait between DVDs hitting shelves and films being available on VOD was still 21 days. So why has the DVD-to-VOD window suddenly collapsed? READ MORE

Personal digitization of books is catching on in Japan as people look to move their book collections to portable devices.

Referred to in Japan’s Internet community as “jisui,” (literally “cooking one’s own meals”), the process involves feeding pages of a book through a scanner one by one to turn a work into digital form. Boosting the popularity of personal digitization is the emergence of portable devices such as Apple’s iPad.

“I used to get rid of the books I had read periodically, but I bought four copies of one book because I needed it later on. The accuracy of scanners is good, and reading books on the iPad is sufficient,” said a 31-year-old Tokyo woman who has recently been digitizing her books. READ MORE