The Smorgasbord

Clear Channel idiots think that satellite radio should be held to indency laws. WTF!??

Yesterday it was announced that the United States Department of Justice approved the Sirius and XM Satellite radio merger. While this is good news, the fight is far from over. The deal still has to be approved by the FCC. The Dept of Justice said the merger “won’t hurt consumers”, and that clearly there is competition from traditional radio and even iPods. It took over one year to arrive at this decision, which is one of the longest merger approvals in history. Jim Cramer (host of “Mad Money) is so pissed off he’s holding a crusade against anyone holding up the merger. There have been 4 separate hearings on this merger, and for the last 2 “big oil” mergers there was no hearing for the first and only one hearing for the second.

Why do you think this is? Could it be the fact that the “National Association of Broadcasters” (the NAB) regularly pays millions and millions and millions of dollars in political contributions annually? Could it be the fact that the NAB has an army of lobbyists in Washington? There a terrestrial broadcast radio station in every town in America and this is an election year. Would any politition want to piss off the owners of all these stations in an election year? Here – watch what Cramer has to say first hand:

Are you still a bit skeptical? Maybe this engadget post about Clear Channel wanting the FCC to hold Sirius and XM to indency laws will change your mind. It says they also want “another satellite competitor”, and “zero local programming or advertising”. WTF!!? Big fat Clear Channel has bought up a huge chunk (and maybe the bulk) of America’s traditional broadcast radio stations in the last so many years. Now when “something better comes along” they want to “regulate it” and spank it to death so it doesn’t impact them. What kind of petty whining in the new media world is this? Microsoft beat the hell out of Netscape the better part of a decade ago and you didn’t see them pining to the government. You didn’t see 4 hearings just so Google could buy YouTube. This is about as bad as the big oil companies making “record profits” the year of the Katrina hurricane, or big tobacco saying that cigarettes aren’t addictive. It’s as bad as that!

I’ve been angry about satellite radio from the very beginning because the NAB has had it out for them since the inception of XM and Sirius. Did you know that traditional broadcast radio PAYS NO ROYALTIES at all to artists and musicians? That’s right – nothing, nada, zip! Television pays, movies, pay, cable pays, many documentaries have problems getting made because of the steep royalty fees. If you make a documentary about dying cancer victims and one of them sings on camera “I Can’t Get No – Satisfaction” for 2 seconds – they have to pay a royalty or that film will never see the light of day. But terrestrial radio can play the entire Rolling Stones catalog for free, every bit of it. It’s always been a handshake gentleman’s agreement between the recording industry and the radio stations. You give us free music, and you’ll benefit from us playing it. But even that agreement soured in recent years from the fact that radio stations were caught in a payola scandal.

So when satellite radio was born, the NAB made sure that there would be no way in hell they could play music for free too. Do you know that the initial model for satellite radio was to be a commercial based service? There was going to be no montly fees at all, you would just buy a radio and listen. But the NAB lobbied the government to force them to pay music royalties and XM was forced to pony up 100 million before they even sold their first radio. This forced them to go to the subscription based model, and it would seem that the “no commercials” format (preferred by customers) has now big the NAB in the ass because they made lemons out of their lemonade.

I can only hope that this BS will not last much longer, but it’s hard to say since the FCC is now involved. Clear Channel must be morons to think that satellite radio should be regulated with “indecency laws”. I pay a montly subscription fee for my satellite radio and I’ll be damned if the government can tell me what’s decent or not for my money. Whether you like Howard Stern or not, you can’t seriously think that the government should have the ability to tell you what you can and cannot listen to. This is probably one of the only ways that radio compares to cable. The reason I can watch “Real Sex” or “Dave Chapelle” any time I want on HBO is because I pay a montly fee for that programming. If I don’t like it I can unsubscribe or turn it off, but the government does not have the ability to tell me that I can’t have it.

I’m sure you have an opinion – what do you say about all this?

This is my review of “hulu.com”, the TV network and movie studio attempt to battle YouTube head to head.

I’ve been working online for 13 years. In that time we’ve seen the rise and fall of Napster, the birth of IM, online chat, and “social networking”. I’ve read that 70% of the country (or more) has a broadband connection. I was appreciating that fact today uploading 200K pictures to one of my web sites. Zing, zing, zing, all 100 of them were uploaded in just a few minutes. What does all this mean? The web is growing up. It’s maturing. It’s also changing how we live our lives, and what we watch and see and do. I was just telling my son the other day that I remember when I was a kid we had one tv in the family room and an antenna rotor. There were 6 channels to watch, the three major networks, one PBS, and two independant channels. In my house today we have a flat screen tv, DVD, VCR, a Wii, and a laptop in the family room. Every bedroom but one has a PC. Every bedroom has a tv and a DVD player. My son’s room has an Xbox 360 and 7 or 8 older classic game consoles. He also has a wireless mp3 player. We have a 3 base telephone set with a Vonage line, and 2 adults and 2 teens in the house have cell phones. The house has wired and wireless broadband throughout. Both of our cars have satellite radio.

In other words – there is no shortage of multimedia distractions in our home. I can’t imagine that we’re much different more or less than millions of other families. What this means is traditional media should be worried…VERY worried. Traditional broadcast media, or what we call “terrestrial tv and radio” – they should be the most worried of all. If cable and satellite tv haven’t already nearly killed them compared to their decades and decades of near total dominance – the web has usurped the rest of. But the web has also hurt traditional print media like newspaper and magazine sales, and it’s also hurt the recording and movie industries. Rather than try and embrace the “information superhighway” nearly all of these forms of “traditional media” have dragged their feet. Since the advent of the Internet has also meant the ease of “digital distrubution” some media have resorted to frivolous lawsuits against private citizens in a vain attempt to scare the public and keep themselves fat and happy. While YouTube is still a big of a mess (as far as copyright infringement and video quality are concerned), the model that has made it so successful is flourishing better than flowers in a manure pile.

I wasn’t surprised when NBC first announced it’s deal with YouTube. It seems like they were the first major network to make a deal with YouTube. Maybe it was that experiment that taugh them it could be done better. It wasn’t long ago I heard NBC was going to create their own online video network. As soon as I heard it I just said “whatever”, figuring that it would about as successful as all the other “video clones” currently sprouting up. And then last week I heard it was live on hulu.com.

Naturally – I had to check it out, and I have to admit I figured in less than 5 minutes I’d chalk it up to be a complete and utter failure.

When I went to hulu.com for the first time the first thing I noticed when browsing around was that multiple networks were participating. Bravo, Sci-Fi, FX, G4, Sony, Sundance, E!, Fox, Universal, NBC, the NBA, USA, WB, 20th Century Fox, the NHL and more had signed on.

In addition major movie studios such as Lionsgate, Metro Golwyn Mayer, and 20th Century Fox had signed on.

Even though it would appear that there are less than 1,000 full pieces of content within the site currently (based on the fact that you can browse them from one or two web pages), I think that the quality of the content indicates there is much, much more to come. Within just a few minutes I found that I could be instantly watching Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Family Guy, The Office, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ice Age, Point Break, Sideways, or Weekend at Bernies. These are major titles, and many current broadcast shows.

For the purposes of this review I chose to watch a movie – “The Big Lebowski”. I should mention that prior to this I had already signed up for a free “account” which you have to do to view content. It was nothing extravagant, just a simple form and then email verification. Which surprised me, because the movie I had chosen to watch was “rated R”.

I mean honestly – I was glad it was so easy to just “start watching”, but who’s to say I really was the appropriate age? They asked my age when I signed up, but both my teens are savvy enough just lie about that – as are the bulk of the web aware youth today. So after the obligatory “intended for mature audiences” screen, the next thing I’m faced with is of course an advertisement.

I was concerned about this at first, but in the scheme of things it’s really not that bad. If you look at this images check out the timeline at the bottom of the pic. The white dots in the timeline are commercials. For this two hour movie there are 11 dots, and added to the one at the beginning that’s 12 commercials for a two hour movie. These are 30 second commercials, and that amounts to 6 minutes of ads for the entire movie. Compare that to 24 minutes of commercials for two hours of television or 15 minutes of previews in the movie theater. All traditional media has always been based solely on this type of advertising model – it makes complete sense to just carry it to to the web. Oh – in addition in this image notice that wherever you move your mouse, the exact timestamp appears, which is handy for moving to any point in the timeline you would like (no you can’t forward past the commercials).

In this next image I show you the menus that appear when you mouse near the edges. At the bottom you’ve got the standard play/pause, timeline, and volume – but there are 4 options on the left and 4 options on the right.

The second from the top right is “Pop Out”, which allows you to watch the movie in it’s own browser window like this (the menu only stays when you mouse near the edge):

The “share” option leads you to a social media sharing menu with options for myspace, facebook, digg, windows live, del.icio.us, reddit, StumbleUpon, or Google Bookmarks. Look at this, major networks and movie studios brazenly asking us to “digg” them!?

Another option they give us is to email it to a friend:

And in an incredible YouTube ripoff moment they give us the ability to “embed” anything. Wow, you can embed a 2 hour movie in your blog? Why yes you can…

There are also options for “full screen” and even one to change the video quality from 360p to 480p. I applaud them for actually stating the quality without the usual “broadband” and “dialup” type options. I tried viewing the movie full screen in 480p, and it wasn’t choppy at all, it instantly buffered, and the quality was pretty good. There wasn’t much I didn’t like about the entire experience. I found that there were sections on the site for just “clips” and another for full length series and feature films. Searching was easy and brought expected results. Play was pretty instant and the entire site seems to be on a pretty good backbone with some pretty good servers and bandwidth. I know wonder that if the free vintage TV series at NBC.com I wrote about a few weeks back also run on this network (or not). I would have to presume “yes” since a search for the A-team on hulu.com brings immediate results.

In synopsis, I have to say that I am very impressed with Hulu and I’m very surprised that the major networks not “get the web” and aren’t yet again trying to screw us. One of the modern “conveniences” that has long since bothered me is the fact that modern media thinks that we (as consumers) are stupid. They blatantly believe they have the ability to charge us over and over and over again for the exact same content. Case and point – I paid full price for the Rolling Stones “Tattoo You” album when it came out when it was released in 1981. Then in about 1985 I bought in on cassette, and again probably about 1995 on CD. If I want to listen to it on my phone, Sprint wants me to buy it again – and even if I do (buy the full song) I have to pay $3.99 just to use “Start Me Up” as a ringtone. To play it on my iPod I have but the album again on iTunes, and for the privilege of listening to those Stones songs on my satellite radio – I have to pay a monthly subscription fee. Sometime in the near future I’ll probably be forced to buy it yet again in an “HD Audio” version. This same example could also have been the movie “The Blues Brothers” which I have now on both VCR and DVD. I’ve yet to try and view it on my iPod or one of our computers. “F” you guys! Don’t you get how sick of this I am? I don’t want to continue to buy “licenses” for the same content on different devices.

While Hulu doesn’t completely address this issue, it’s a start, and I hope that the other major players follow suit. As an online markete the thing I really find hilarious is the fact that major media are just figuring out the web, but the sex industry has been raking in over 300 billion online for many years now with the exact same model (give tons of free content away and sell loads of advertisement). If you want to see if hulu is for you or not – I give to you John Belush in one of my favorite SNL sketches “Samurai Delicatessen”:

Watch this BBC video of this car called the “Atom” that is one of the fastest cars on 4 wheels because of it’s design. It’s funny because it only has a supercharged Honda civic engine in it, but because of it’s light weight it can beat a supercharged motorcycle in a track race (as demonstrated in the video). Watch as the driver testing the car has g-forces rippling his face as this car accelerates from 0 to 60 in 2.9 seconds! This car company is going to be really busy with orders, they’d better expand since they currently only have 7 employees!

I was checking my email today and I get my weekly email from NBC. I’m probably stuck getting emails from NBC in the first place because my wife used my email address voting for “Deal or No Deal” last year sometime. Usually just throw the email away without reading it, but the title was “The A-Team is back on NBC.com”. I mis-read that and thought they were “back on NBC” which kind of freaked me out. The first words out of my mouth were “Who’s playing Mr. T? It can’t be….like…Mr. T?” Right there – they got me! They sucked me in, I just had to know. I viewed the email and saw this:

Turns out the are putting old episodes of shows from 25 odd years ago on the NBC.com web site. They must have been targeting people from my demographic this week, because I grew up with most of those shows, like the A-Team, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Miami Vice, and Emergency! They sucked me in even further, I click to see just how good the quality was on these – because let’s face it, who could resist watching an episode of the A-team online?

I was really surprised, when I clicked a got a web page, chose the “A-Team” and when the interface came up I chose an episode and was watching within seconds. I had the ability to choose from any season, any episode. The quality was good the movie was clear, and right away a commercial came up. I thought then that maybe I would be bombarded with commercials the entire time but the message said “very rew interruptions due to Sponsorshp from sprint…”. In fact, in the timeline under the movie I noticed that the “notches” in the line represented when the commercials played. You can’t forward past them, but they are only 30 seconds.

The flash interface that plays the movies works well, and there are “large” and “full screen” options to watch all the TV shows. The full screen option was a little lesser quality, but still completely watchable. Thank you NBC for doing something right. I only wish that the movie studios and record labels would wise up and do the same.

I’ve read a lot of articles lately about the Firefox 3 Beta released last month, and most point out the 2 or 3 obvious features that will be coming – like Malware Protection, Web Forgery Protection, and Resumeable Downloading. The first thing that came to my mind was – “that’s it?!”. Going from a major revision like 2 to 3, I knew that there just had to be more exciting features than that! So I give to you –

“The Smorgasbord list of Top 10 New Firefox 3 Features“!!

1. One Click Site Info: Just click the little favicon pic next to the URL in the address bar and see who owns the site — cool!
2. Easier Password Management: Thank god! It’s time to have more than the basic options we’ve had for years. The “dialog” box will be replaced by an info bar.
3. New Download Manager: I’ve been using Firefox for years and I’m really used to it saving everything to the desktop. But I always wondered when they would be making this a bit better. Looks like I’ll get my wish!
4. Tab Scrolling and Quickmenu: I always thought that if I had 3 dozen tabs open the layout could be managed better than a “forever” scroll to the right. A ‘quickmenu’ allowing me to ‘go to end’ or jump quickly would be great. Depending on what will be on this menu – I’m thinking that this will be good for me!
5. Full Page Zoom: I have always lauded the ability to zoom way in and out in a PDF – and now we will finally have that ability in a browser!
6. Improved bookmarks: Some great things here, like one-click bookmarking, you can “tag” your bookmarks to categorize them (vastly improved from “folders”), and a ‘smart places folder’ with your recent bookmarks and tagged pages
7. Location bar auto-complete: I will frequently type in the first few letters of a domain in the address bar to let it complete and quickly go to a site. But NOW, you can type either the first few letters of the web page name, or even the ‘tags’ you used when bookmarking the page. I think that this will prompt people to bookmark a lot more pages just to use this feature. Bookmark your online banking and tag it so you can just type “bank” in the address bar when you want to go to it, very handy!
8. Reliability: This is a behind the scenes one, but if your system of browser crashes, your bookmarks, cookies, preferences, and history is stored in a transactionally secure database format preventing data loss. What does this mean? No more corrupted config files!
9. Web Forgery Protection: Yes, this was already mentioned in other places, but I need to state why it’s cool. Email programs started long ago not displaying images until you click to “load” them because of spammers and phishers using them to entice you to click. Now, forged web pages will do the same and not display content to you – keeping people from being fooled. An awesome feature, you can test it here.
10. Malware Protection: Also already mentioned, but I think this feature will be good because it will keep many people from adding third party plugins and what-not for malware into their browser. I know, it’s not perfect keeping a “blacklist” constantly updated with “bad” web sites, but at least it’s a start – and we can build from there. You can also test this one here

After looking at this list – I think that what is coming in the new Firefox 3 is really something to look forward to!! Now I just have to install it on one of my PC’s to personally test the beta. Have you been testing it? What do you think? Comment now below!

Here is something I’ll bet you’ve never seen before, AND you will want! It will probably also make you think. It’s a rotary car door that “disappears” and goes under the vehicle! Yes, I said “under”. Visit the Disappearing Car Door web site, and watch the video and you’ll probaby think just what I did – “why didn’t they do that years ago?”. In the beginning of the video they show a car with a traditional door and the narrator (complete with English accent) says “the modern car is still using a ‘door and hinge’ technology from nearly 100 years ago”, and I thought – that’s completely true! With all our technology automakers have stuck with the “cheapest” way for us enter and exit our vehicles when the advent of technology could make those doors open and close dozens of other ways! This is a REAL cool video to watch, and will make you want one of these real fast! Send this post to all your techie friends, they will love it!

Whether you love or hate Madonna, a groundbreaking deal was announced when Madonna signed a $120M deal with “LiveNation” out of L.A. The contract is for 3 CD’s, and they will also promote her concerts, merchandise, and license her name. I don’t know what else they do, but I know Live Nation primarily for it’s concert promotion efforts. It seems like every time I see a new concert announcement (in my area), you see the Live Nation name behind it.

I think this is key, because for years the P2P and torrent rallying cry by many was to “free the music”, because the artists make most of their bank on tour anyway. At least, they seem to get a greater percentage of it. I believe that some of the best artists only make about 20% royalty for their CD sales, and the less ones….well, they probably get much less. Let’s say a “successful” band, artist, or pop star sells 500,000 CD’s. That’s pretty good nowadays. What if the average retail was $16.99, their half million CD sales would equal just about $8.495M (about eight and a half million). Twenty percent of that is about $1.7M. But wait – they probably have to pay their manager, producer, agent, and maybe even a lawyer. We better take 25% off for that, which leaves $1,275,520. Let’s say in this scenario there’s 4 guys in the band, so each one would get $318,812.50.

If that same band went on a 100 date tour with an average of 5,000 people per night (I’m being pretty conservative here), and the tickets were $45, they would gross $22.5M on ticket sales alone. If only 1/2 the people in attendance bought one shirt or memoribilia (again being conservative) that would bring in $6.25 in merchandise revenue, for a total of almost $29M. Let’s say that 50% of the gross has to be paid to promotion, road crew, tour manager, etc. That still leaves $14.375M to be split by the 4 band members = $3.59M each!

Alright – I don’t work in the music industry, and my theoretical numbers may be waaaay off. But if they’re even close, it shows that artists stand to potentially make 10 times more money on tour than from their album sales! So (in my head) I believe that Madonna took the $120M deal because it’s more than she would possibly make from a traditional record company. A couple weeks ago Radiohead gave away their entire album on their web site FOR FREE. This TechCrunch article states Oasis and Jamiroquai and about to do the same. It also makes the bold statement “The deal shows that even for a world famous act, a record company is no longer required in the days of digital downloads and P2P music sharing.“. Is this the new frontier of music – will over major artists and music superstars follow suit?

Has P2P file sharing and Bit Torrent peer to peer networking finally won the battle? Especially now since earlier this year iTunes and other music download services are offering significant music catalogues with no DRM whatsoever?

I would love your comments on this hot topic – share view with everyone now by clicking on the comment link below now!

*UPDATE*

Here’s another article from Wired that describes the current state of the Music industry to a “T”. They’re busy sueing single parents for $222,222.00 in damages (for 12 ‘shared’ songs), while they are screwing the artists out of the lion’s share of the royalties anyway. Unbelievable.

[tags]riaa, music, p2p, download, itunes, drm, madonna[/tags]

According to John Nack’s Blog over at Adobe – Photoshop is going online with a stripped down version called “Photoshop Express”. I think this is a significant branding point for Adobe – if they can tie their service into huge social apps like myspace, facebook, or even a major email service this could be big win for them. At least they understand that this won’t dilute the Photoshop brand – only strengthen it.

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