This article is essential reading.
Broadcasting is facing a threat that’s not economic – it’s attention-based. Those giant networks are providing a media experience which is personal and immediate, something a broadcaster can never offer. They’ll change the face of television as well.
This would have come in handy in the movie “Footloose”.
Browsing the Internet Archive I chanced upon this, a 9 minute anti-piracy short from the mid 80s called Don’t Copy That Floppy. Its has a certain ‘old world charm’.
It contrasts nicely with the 3l33t speak of YT Cracker.
Plays . . . . AND records !
The new Samsung YM-PD1
The new video iPod is looking less and less exciting. Especially when compared to the PSP.
From the ilounge review
Is there any video bummer? Well, the big one on the hardware front is playback time. The 30GB iPod runs for only 2 hours, says Apple, when playing back video. And the 60GB iPod runs for 3. That’s considerably short of both the PSP and Zen Vision, which run for 4-6 hours – and both include replaceable batteries. Yet again, Apple dropped the ball on including that – apparently the most frequently requested iPod feature – and because of its video functionality, that’s now a considerably more relevant omission. Given that the prior iPod drains additional battery life when outputting to a TV screen, it remains to be seen whether a 30GB iPod can even last long enough without a wall charger to show a complete movie on a TV – and pity, now there’s no charger in the box.
And on those pay-for video files from iTunes (of course, NOT yet in Australia)
The other big issue is Fairplay, Apple’s digital rights management software. Fairplay permits you to transfer the videos to five devices, but not to burn them on CDs or DVDs. In two words, that sucks. Given a choice between a $38.99 box set of DVDs from Amazon or a $34.99 download of low-resolution, unburnable video clips, we’d take the DVDs any day of the week. Getting them on to the iPod might not be easy, but frankly, if we’re going to cough up that sort of cash for TV shows, we want better quality and better usage rights than that.
Still, they point out
Regardless of any review the new iPod receives, we’re convinced that Apple has a no-brainer solution for its customers: in every way except battery life and the absent wall charger, you get more this year than you did last year, and even if you didn’t think you wanted one, you’ll now have a hard disk-equipped video player for the cost of last year’s music player – or the cost of a Sony PSP with only 1GB of flash memory. The 30GB iPod is $100 cheaper than the 30GB Zen Vision, too. Unless a competitor can come up with a radically improved device, there’s no question that Apple will have the most popular – not most powerful – video player around by this time next year.
This is very cool . . . . and rather silly. Print your own Scrabble set.
Check this.
4gb harddrive for the PSP that is powered off its own battery source
Straight from EFF . . . the word on the new push to lock down consumers rights on digital TV.
EFF aims this at Europeans but as you will read it will apply to Australia.
This system requires tight controls over analogue outputs. These outputs are very useful in current digital devices — they ensure compatibility with existing consumer equipment and enable innovative products. Without unrestricted analogue outputs, sophisticated personal video recorders could not exist without special arrangement or permission from copyright holders or broadcasters.
CPCM allows rightsholders to specify restriction of playback to a single “household,” granting copyright holders a veto over which households are “legitimate” and which ones are “illegitimate.”
No account of the exceptions to copyright that safeguard education, criticism, free speech, and fair dealing is taken in CPCM. An educator who may have a legal right to show a clip to her class has no means of taking restricted content out of a CPCM system and into a classroom. A volunteer adding assistive information for disabled people to a programme has no means of extracting the programme into an environment where this activity can take place.
The proponents of CPCM promise an as-yet-unspecified “compliance body” that would require manufacturers to adhere to a set of rules for designing DTV equipment, that would ban Free and Open Source Software-based tuners, players, recorders, and so forth (on the grounds that these technologies could be modified to remove the restrictions set by the rightsholders or broadcasters).
I’m not sure how long this decision in the High Court will stand given the reassessment by the Federal Govt on the anti-circumvention and DMCA as part of the FTA. But fingers crossed. Most people wouldn’t have taken it as far as the High Court.
Kim Weatherall has a lot of good things to say on this (as usual).