| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c |
| Rachel McAdams | |
| www.thedailyshow.com | |
Rachel McAdams pretty much gives away the plot of the whole film in this interview on the Daily Show.
Category: media-and-expression
Wall of Fame: Napster vs iTunes
The Gadget show's wall of fame again and this time its the battle of music download sites. Thankful this time they picked the right one. Napster.
In the red corner: Napster. A bit of a rebel it shook the music industry to its core and changed the way we thought about music for ever. Devised by an 18-year-old college student, Napster launched in 1999. It combined a music search function with a file-sharing system, which effectively meant you had access to all the music on all the hard drives of computers connected to Napster. It was bit dodgy, infringing on copyright law, and the music industry had it shut down in 2001. But Napster lives on in an online music store, and it’s the legacy of the original site that makes it so great.
In the blue corner: iTunes! Proclaiming to be the daddy of online music, iTunes is like having a massive music and video warehouse in your bedroom. It originally launched in 2001 as a digital music player before it converted to an online store. It makes transferring music to your iPod easy as! And it’s this simplicity that’s led to its dominance of the online music world with over four billion songs sold!
Putting my hate for the itunes store and its locked in ecosystem a side, itunes would never have come about unless Napster had come on the scene. Napster took all the risks and got finally sued so much that it went legit. iTunes has a massive audience but its just a large download store and isn't ground breaking. Even the removal of DRM came late to iTunes. No doubt Napster deserves the position on the wall of fame.
Trailerrific: The Hurt Locker
Looks like a good one….
Forced to play a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse in the chaos of war, an elite Army bomb squad unit must come together in a city where everyone is a potential enemy and every object could be a deadly bomb.
Credit to Miss Geeky for the meme.
Slap Chop remix bought and re-aired
I'm sure everyones seen this remix of Slap Chop done by Dj Steveporter or even the Sham Wow remix. What got me interested was when Steve turned over the media so others could make there own in response to his. But I just heard the slap chop rap remix is coming to a tv screen near you (if your in america of course). Good stuff.
Long form video on the rise
Dave sent me this link a little while ago. Its about monetising long form video. What I found interested was the conclusion at narrowcasting.
We're heading to narrowcasting, even if a few topics – sports, financial reporting, and big news – still will command big audiences.
The future market for the traditional boob tube boils down to this: 1) the technically backward, 2) the institutionalized (in prison, in hospitals, in nursing homes), 3) three year olds and younger who don't yet have the cognitive skills to manage a remote.
As I've been saying to broadcast and cable for years now: Change or die.
There was also a range of interesting quotes collected from the web which I think are worth reposting.
Last year, the top 25 shows on blip.tv averaged under five minutes. This year, the number is up to 14 minutes, roughly THREE TIMES longer – an increase accomplished in just 12 months!
Internet video is mainstream now with about 150 million viewers in the US alone (about half the population) and the average viewer is watching 97 videos per month. Pretty amazing when you consider just five years ago, the typical Internet use was watching zero videos per month.
“People are getting more comfortable, for better or worse, bringing a computer to bed with them.” – Dina Kaplan, co-founder of Blip.TV
Filmriot: Where the adverts are worth watching
I watch a lot of the Revision3 programmes such as Diggnation, Tekzilla, Scam School and of course my old favourite Hak.5. But I've also been getting into some of there newer programmes too. Co-op, Diggreel, ROFL and finally Filmriot.
Filmriot is a strange one, it shows budding film makers how to do some of those film effects you've seen around. Everything from doing decent head gunshots to shooting dusk shots in bright sunshine. A lot of the stuff is done outside the computer using clever camera tricks and I'm sure most of it is learned on a film makers course within the first few months, but its actually very well put together and looks great in HD.
But what gets me is the inline adverts within the show. I think the Co-op guys started the trend of adverts which match in with the style of the show but these guys at Film Riot have taken it to another level. The adverts are actually worth watching just to see what the guys have done this time around. It may have taken them a while to do it and they may recycle them a few times but it certainly beats the standard adverts. I'm not saying this is the future of advertising or anything, just interesting. I posted the another one here.
Does Ridley Scott watch R&D TV?
R&D TV episode 2 is indeed out and we're noting some interesting blog entries. A cpuple of them have had me commenting. FoodieSarah or Sarah Hartley caused a little stir with her blog entry titled “mash this, whispers aunty beeb.” I personally felt she missed a few key points which I highlighted in the comments. The next web had a entry titled “The BBC wants you to remix Jason Calacanis.” and wins for the best screenshot of Jason Calacanis. The post was a little more balanced and sympathised a lot with the problems we had faced putting the whole thing together.
I started to comment on the next web blog post too but thought it might be worth writing this on my own blog. I saw on Creative Commons that Ridley Scott is going to make a Web version of Blade Runner and its going to be licensed CC-BY-SA which is highly creditable in my book. I'm not saying we have any direct influence on Ridley but surely things like R&DTV adds to the overwhelming feeling that content creators should consider licensing there content openly.
R&D TV : Episode 2
We've launched R&D TV episode 2. You can download it directly from the BBC in many different flavours of codecs and formats. We got everything from Flash to Ogg Theora. There's even RSS feeds now which is good. Like the last one, were using a Creative commons non-commercial attribution v2 licence and we have made the assets available for anyone in the world to remix. I want to say thanks to everyone who was involved in the project. R&DTV is a collaboration between BBC Backstage and RAD teams, who are: Producers Rain Ashford and Hemmy Cho, as well as Exec Producers: Ian Forrester, George Wright and Adrian Woolard. This months video is maybe a lot closer to what people were expecting, so enjoy it.
I gave a talk at Social Media Cafe yesterday which included a preview of R&DTV and received a lot of feedback, some of it was quite harsh but only harsh because people could see r&dtv was a good project. The lovely Sarah Hartley live blogged the whole thing using Friendfeed. Chi Chi wrote a little bit and talked about her project, which I missed due to a interesting discussion about the history of emoticons. But if you really want to get a full feeling of what people thought of the project, check out the tweets afterwards and this audioboo which was recorded a few minutes after it ended.
Puting stuff on a IMAX screen doesn’t make it better
So the story is about a guy who books a cinema seat expecting a IMAX experience but finds out that its actually a slightly bigger screen that usual and better a/v. However its not IMAX,
Fine if your expecting IMAX and get something sub-IMAX then you have the right to get your money back. But what equally bugs me is people who said have you seen insert name of big film here on IMAX. I'm sorry but just because its on a huge screen doesn't make it better. If its shot for IMAX like parts of the Dark Knight was, then great IMAX makes sense but when its not, I'd rather be in a decent standard cinema. I talked a while back about my choice to watch the Watchman film on the DLP projector using digital transfer instead of IMAX. I'm not the only one either.
Remix the apprentice
Thanks Tim for this link, I was in tears watching this remix of the apprentice. I've seen remixes but this shows such amazing creativity. Its all parody so I assume it should/might be safe from being taken down. (although I 'm not trained to offer any legal advice)
So some content producers will look at this and either go red with anger or white with fear. Because CassetteBoy has done many remixes which totally take the original subject matter out of its original context. This strikes fear into many, and I can already hear the arguments for even tighter control over content. But the thing to remember is a expression of a artist. Enjoy…