Archive | January, 2005

NYT > Technology has a troubling article “By LORNE MANLY and JOHN MARKOFF” titled Steal This Show. “Homemade cable boxes. Episodes swiped off the Web. TV is becoming a do-it-yourself affair, and the industry is terrified.”

I was really disturbed by the tone that recording is the same as stealing. Time-shifting is a right. I don’t want to plan my life around a TV schedule. If I’m busy at 10 PM on Thursday (okay, more likely asleep), I want to record it and watch it at my convenience.

Broadcasters are losing out if people don’t record the commercials along with the show. Okay, I’ll concede that. So, keep the commercials in. Laura and I taped 12 hours of “Crossing Jordan” when A&E did a a marathon over the Thanksgiving weekend. It was kind of quaint watching (and yes, fast-forwarding through) the Christmas specials advertisments in January.

Laura pointed out that all the sharing hurts broadcasters because they don’t show up in the Neilson ratings. I hadn’t considered that, and that’s a really good point. If I understand correctly, it’s the ratings that let them price their advertising. Well, the NYT article might accidentally point the way there, too: The top of the article lists the top videos downloaded last week: this is not “lost” broadcasting, it’s just not counted.

Here’s a solution: the networks themselves need to host the video downloads, using something like BitTorrent that lets every downloader contribute to the uploading bandwidth. The network can offer some sort of an enticing premium like a higher-quality feed, with the commercials left in, and count the number of eyeballs that are watching using mechanisms like the BitTorrent tracking features. They get a bigger audience, viewers get to watch at their leisure. Is that a win – win?

Laura and I enjoy listening to WERS, the user-supported radio station of Emerson College, on Saturdays: 10 AM – 2 PM Standing Room Only plays Broadway tunes, and 2 PM to 5 PM All A Cappella. Since we live just outside their broadcast area, we listen to the streaming audio. Thanks to Live365.com, we can listen to the streaming music either on the iMac via iTunes or through the ThinkPads and WinAmp or Live365’s player. However, that means that we are stuck in the computer room with the good computer speakers or listening over the weak laptop speakers, right? Nah.

Downstairs, we moved my ThinkPad into the living room, and use the living room stereo via iRock. Okay, follow this: WERS broadcasts their radio signal, and also routes the audio somehow to Live365.com, who turn it into TCP/IP packets. The internet packets route their way through the Internet, and end up on my Comcast cable, decoded by my local cable modem. Routed from there to my LinkSys WRT-54G. Wrapping around the room, an ethernet cable goes to a LinkSys 5-port switch, and back out again to a LinkSys WAP-11 802-11b transmitter. Back into radio waves, the transmission somehow finds its way to the living room, where the ThinkPad A31p‘s built-in wireless adapters turns it back into TCP/IP packets, again, and then into an MP3 stream, which WinAMP turns into audio output, again. Wait, we’re almost there! The iRock then turns the audio stream back into FM radio waves, which are picked up by tuning the living room stereo to the same frequency. Once again, back to audio, the sound, finally, comes out the speakers.

What’s remarkable is how good this sounds. And that it works at all.

How hard could it be?

If this works out, we may consider using an Airport Express, and cut out a lot of the complexity.

SlashDot notes: “National Geographic has an article stating that… “Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras – a hybrid creature that’s part human, part animal.”

Great! And are these creatures – HAnimals or Animans? – entitled to protection by the SPCA or by the UN Human Rights Commission? There are incredible ethical issues in this.