Tag: iptv

The new LennyHenry.TV show

Lenny Henry.tv show

Ok this came out of the blue – LennyHenry.TV . Started at 22.35 (GMT) for Mins: 30

Lenny Henry takes us through the best comedy shorts available on the internet, from the most outrageous CCTV to exclusive online TV

I can't seem to find anything about it on the BBC site except for the bit above. And for some crazy reason no one at the BBC has even registered the domain LennyHenry.TV! There was some more information on the Tiger Aspect productions site

So about the show. Well its Lenny Henry commenting and playing some of the funniest and most shared videos across the web. Yep its like the a cross between America's most funniest home videos crossed with Diggnation. Graham Norton use to do a section on his show where he talked about something internet related but it lasted all of 4mins while Lenny Henry's show is 30mins. In the first showed classics like the treadmill
dance and dancing cop.

Although I'm in two minds about this being on BBC One, It was good to finally share this stuff with my parents. Lenny Henry's funny commentary does add to the show and his general natter with the guest nicely takes it out of the America's funniest home videos category. I look forward to hearing what others thought soon.


I'll certainly upload a part somewhere for review. I've uploaded it to Blip.tv for now

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If the mainstream media do not get it, we’ll do our own media

Mobuzz TV

Watching a load of Iptv stuff from my geek download folder today, I've come to the conclusion that there is more than enough content out there to easily watch just this and nothing else. I mean between Rocketboom, MobuzzTV, Geek Entertainment, Diggnation, Twit, NerdTV, DigitallifeTV, The Scene, Hak.5, etc. There's hardly anytime to watch much else, and honestly who would want to when you look at what was on TV last night.

8pm – Just came in from work quite late for one reason or another. Whats on? Well Football (not interested), The Bill (no thanks), 10 years younger special (what the heck?), What not to wear special (no thanks), Natrual world (not quite me). Ok to be fair I've just picked on the 5 standard analogue channels on English TV but none of those are of any interest to myself.
9pm – Cooked and eaten. Would like to watch something while I do a little online socialising. Whats on? Rome, more football, life in the undergrowth, british comedy awards and space cadets. Its actually not till 10pm when Lost and the BBC news is on till I'm tempted to even bother turning on the Digital TV box. And even then, Lost I've already seen because I'm watching series 2 like most people I know and I can consume the news a lot better by visiting my mainstream media folder on my rss aggregator. If I go as far as visiting the BBC website I can even watch AV content from my laptop or even on my Xbox using a nice little BBC news Python script on Xbox media centre.

Not only is podcasts changing what I'm hearing day in day out. I'm also changing my habits in regards to what I watch and download. At the moment I would say by pure megabyes, I'm downloading more legal geek TV stuff than shady American and UK TV. Thats quite a large shift from a year ago when I was only downloading bits of the broken and from the shadows now and then. Niche and genuine content is the name of the game now (insert Longtail business model here if you like). I mean even Sarah likes Diggnation and Rocketboom. Some of the mainstream media will catch on and start going straight to the consumer like ABC and NBC with there Apple store content. Some will use it as a lost leader like in the case of NBA.com, but at the moment its all about the genuine voices and cleverly niche topics and if you feel your under served? Go out and do something about it. The equipment is affordable and barrer to entry much lower than its ever been. The revolution my friends started a long time ago, go get some. I wont go into details, but I'm certainlly looking into doing something myself.

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Tape it off the Internet, no really do!

Thanks to a comment by Duncan in my kill TV post a while ago, I've now checked out Tape it off the internet.com. Although its not actually a web 2.0 application or social tool yet. Its got a lot of potential as idea at least.

They seem to have a lot of the simple things right, for example there is a post about why recommendations could be important when you drop off the schedule. There right, when you drop off, you end up relying much more on friends recommendations and what people and things around you say. So for example me and sarah have become big fans of Firefly and Serenity, browncoats some would say. The reason I engaged with Firefly and the movie serenity was a couple of things. My friend doug, a lot of blogs about the treatment Firefly got from Fox and what tipped the balance a Wired article. I was recommended Lost by my buddy Waheed and Prision Break from Tom but another way I gage interesting shows is by torrents which have lots of downloaders times by the time it was published. Some Torrent sites make this easy to sort by, others dont. It would be nice to have a webapi for these things sometimes.

But back to tape it off the internet, another thing which made me shake my head in agreement is the friends x episode tracker. Its best explained in the post.

Let us take the problem outlined below, that of different friends of yours not all being on the same episode of a show, making conversation about said show… delicate to say the least, lest you drop a clanger of a spoiler.

Seriously this happens all the time, i usually have to ask what episode someone is on before talking about it. Lost is a nightmare right now because a ton of people are on the UK series which I believe is coming to the end of series 1 soon. A couple of friends have seen the whole series 1 but not started on 2, and then about 3 people I know are fully up with ep5 of series 2.

So guys behind the idea, when's the vaporware going into Permanent BETA with a Open API, tagging and tons of Ajax? hehe…

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Messy haxoring with metasploit caught on iptv

Its not quite as cool as it may sound from the title. I just watched epioside 13 of my lame-ass iptv soap, The scene. yes everyones got there weakness but if you put this against other soaps like Hollyoaks then it comes out quite well. Anyhow, I got a real kick out of main character trying to get root on windows box hosting a FTP server. They used the well established metasploit to find a flaw and exploit it. To be fair its one step up from the hack in the matrix reloaded and they did do a little homework to use the nice opensource framework metasploit. Its certainly a fine line between security tester and exploiter but the best tools always are.

Talking of which if you didnt catch the Security now podcast number 9 about rootkits, please do as it will give you a good old wake up call. I've been personally aware of rootkits for quite a long time but I didnt know spyware, adware applications were starting to use them just so they cant be removed from a computer. Its crazy, but its true. Honestly I wouldnt wish a rootkit on my worst enemy, I just cant imagine anything worst. Anyhow, Steve and Leo do a great job explaining how rootkits work. It is however really good to know Microsoft and Sysinternals are working on the problem. I did try out SysInternal's Rootkit Revealer on all my machines and I'm clean as expected but its good to be sure. I suggest everyone should give it a try, at least till Microsoft add rootkit scanning to there malicious software removal tool. No one likes to be rooted…

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Torrents and the long tail

So today I finally found the pirate bay's RSS feeds. They must have just launched them, because I've looked hard before. There quite plain RSS2 feeds but enabled across all the different genres of the site. You can all access everything via rss.php which delivers all the newest torrents regardless of category. I cant seem to find a way to get the Top 100 yet, but I'm sure its coming. Ben Metcalfe has told me RSS has been enabled for quite some time. So with that information I checkout the news page and he was right. Seems to be enabled since at least June. Oh well at least its been blogged now.

On another branch, I was looking through my Torrent RSS feeds and saw “Pump up the volume.” Some of you will instantly think about that film with the same name and Christian Slater. But no no, i'm talking about a Pump up the volume: A History of House. Its a documentary on Dance and House music by Channel 4. See i've been meaning to show Sarah it for years as shes American and lived in small Citys during her teenage years. So has little concept of what Dance music is and where it came from.
If Channel4 had made this available via DVD to buy, I would have bought it at some point. But its too late now, because its here on UKnova. One word for Channel4, Longtail. Maybe they could have done something simlar to PBS with there NerdTV? I'm hoping the BBC take the PBS NerdTV example as a good way to serve the longtail.

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IPTV stuff I have been watching recently

The TV is certainly a dead medium in my house, but me and Sarah do watch mainstream shows like Extras, Catherine Tate, Daily Show, etc like everyone else. But video content is growing online and with free services like youtube, ourmedia, bittorrent and TVRSS making distribution easy. Its easy to see why more of my TV watching time is used up watching content you dont see in the mainstream.

I kept meaning to write something about all the IPTV/vidcasts I have been watching recently. Then today on Digg I found this entry titled Top 15 Tech Shows

This is a list of the best free downloadable tech shows currently available on the Internet. These shows are also referred to as vidcasts, VODcasts, videozines, and IPTV

The once I watch myself are,
Diggnation, my current fav. Two people from TechTV (krose and alex) talk about the top 10 stories on Digg every week. Simlar to Slashdot review but in video form.
Digital Life TV, downloaded the videos but not actually checked this one out yet.
Systm, very polished and professional mainstream hacking show, perfect for airing on a TV network.
The Broken, the first decent hacking show to appear on the web as a vidcast. Kevin rose again and techtv people but all good fun.
From The Shadows, very good hacking and modding show. Quite professional but full of interesting hacks. Well worth checking out there recent Defcon coverage.
The Scene, a slightly geeky but somewhat lame soap about the movie scene. Entertainment value is not bad, when I was sitting on the crowded train.
Hack Point Five, is pretty funny and doesnt take its self so seriously like from the shadows etc.
Channel 9, as it tends to have previews and quite interesting interviews with people behind Microsoft products. It can be hit and miss however.
Rocketboom, because amanda congdon is a geek goddess and this show is as somewhat like the jon stewart's daily show but for internet culture. Think of it as BoingboingTV crossed with the daily show and your close.

I'm going to check out the others soon, maybe you should give them a try? I only wished they all supported TVRSS, but I'm working on ways to get them all into one feed a bit like how Jon did for Systm and Diggnation.

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Skype opens up

Skype

Just as google talk hits the news, Skype unleashes a response which answers a few of the questions about Skype and its openness.

Skype has a present to give back to the internet for all of the amazing support we have received from the internet community. We are announcing two new initiatives that make Skype and the Web a little more interesting and open up new possibilities for the developer and partner community. After all � sharing is good

The full text is here. Theres also a developers area and a official skype blog. Which is weird because I kinda of assumed Skype Journal was almost it. Skype is also tipping its hat to the community efforts through there extras gallery, which is really a large directory of links.

For those wondering about Google Talk vs Skype, check out this good summary of the difference from a normal user point of view.

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