The Energizer bunny thing is a bad analogy. Duracell and Everready advertise their batteries constantly, and try to ensure they are prominently displayed at counters, kiosks, etc, but everyone knows that they deplete quickly. In the case of modern high-drain electronics like cameras, incredibly quickly. If the rovers used their chemistry, they'd have been dead within days. And would just have been more toxic landfill, like all the useless short-lifespan cells the batery companies sucker people into buying instead of investing in a few dozen NiMH cells and a quick charger that will last them a decade or so....
Tivo is extremely touchy with the networks and studios
I saw a corporate presentation by the Tivo CEO to a bunch of industry types. It was all about how much Tivo can do for them (the industry), and how it could capture and hold audiences and then deliver content packaged according to whatever DRM the industry specified. It was eye opening. Tivo is not about users, as witnessed by its rather mediocre featureset and closed system. It is customer focussed, but its customers are the studios, not the consumers.
Google may not be aiming to become Big Brother, but they're certainly aiming to provide every single service they possibly can.
And so the transformation of Google into Yahoo is almost complete... I actually had the pleasure of predicting this to a couple of Google managers a few years ago when I was car pooling with them back up 101. I was the only non-Googler in the car. The conversation eventually got around to how to add more services while maintaining the "simplicity". I predicted that eventually, all services would end up doing the same kind of portal crap as Yahoo/AOL/MSN/Excite, etc. remember, those services became portals before the word "portal" was ever invented. I also predicted that the real rot would set in after the IPO, when Google attracted a lot of people from other companies who wanted to add that sort of stuff, because that was how they had done it in their previous jobs. And that was what the market expected. And once you're a public fad stock, shareholders demand "growth" stories to keep the high valuation and want you to add functionality, no matter how orthogonal that growth might be to your core business. It's feature creep, writ large.
It's so hard to tell "legitimate" high-ranked blogs from algorithmically generated blogs because the two are so damn similar. Many of the high-rank blogs are just incestuous clusterfucks with groupthinkers promiscuously and reflexively linking to each other in a slutty daisychain link. Run the same stories, gangbang the same audience, pimp out the same adverts. Especially good for iPods, porn, and robot women. Why get peeved when the machines can do it better?
They dominate one market, mp3 players, and with that leverage they have dominated the online music market
Apple is on target to have made $850m in revenues from iTMS by the end of the year. Yahoo is on target to make $875m by year's end from its music subscription service, and it has only been in this business for a third of that time.
I really want to put the biggest IDE hard drive than I can find into my TIVO
While I do know someone who just finished putting 2 400GB Seagates into their Replay box, I take a looser approach. DVArchive is a Java client that uses uPNP to impersonate a Replay over the network. So any attached disk storage with a CPU that can run Java appears as a virtual ReplayTV and can be used to store and stream shows. I have a 1TB media server that does double duty for audio and ReplayTV, and a HTPC with 500GB that serves up basically nothing but RTV content and its own video captures. Because RTVs are so network friendly, and can be controlled easily from any web browser, I find I tend to treat them more as loosely coupled capture cards that happen to be in a fancy box more than anything else. The drives within the ReplayTVs themselves? Kind of like a local temporary storage cache. MediaMVPs or modded XBoxes make good front-ends if you want to avoid the HTPC route. With VideoLAN you can stream right from the Replays, through DVArchive, and over the net. Of course, you're going to need a really fat pipe, so I usually convert into XVid and serve up using Media Center - it can do some intelligent bandwidth throttling based on the client's pipe.
In this sense, the iTMS/iPod video download model is superior to a PVR model.
No, it's superior to *some* PVRs (Tivo), but not to others (ReplayTV). My point remains that with a good PVR I can record what I want, or share what I want, and move it to whichever device I want. With Apple's model m I rely on its downloads, or on the kindness of strangers, or I shell out to pay for Quicktime.
If I want to get an episode of Lost on my Archos device, I have to get ABC, and I have to have the forethought to set up recording before it airs.
Most DVRs will record entire runs of shows (including repeats, if you want) and only delete them when you run out of space or on pre-designated schedules. At least, that's how my ReplayTV works and I assume the Dish boxes have something similar.
And as for downloading shows, maybe I've been spoiled for years, but with the ReplayTV's Poopli, I get to snarf thousands of available shows straight from the hard disks of other ReplayTV owners. It's pretty sweet. I still prefer BitTorrent though, for one major reason: HDTV quality downloads, and my 10MBps RCN download pipe.
You need to research the TIVO Hacks that are out there.
I have ReplayTV. I don't need to engage in remote control shenanigans and time-consuming hacking to network share or stream my shows or auto skip adverts. ReplayTV just works, out of the box, no fiddling required. No DRM. Wife-approved.
Without that software we'd be adding song ratings on the ipod itself
Assuming Ratings were not available (they are!), let me tell you how I'd do it in Media Center, my favourite jukebox software.
Define new custom tag: MyRating. Click the radio button so "MyRating" embeds within files and updates during Library changes. Optionally: set it to update Library setting from device files setting, if newer. Create new Smartlist with MyRating >=3, say. Synch. That's about it.
Of course, you would have to create the Smartlists using MC itself and define the playback statically because the iPod is a closed system with very little configurability available to the end user. For myself, I prefer more control over my playback devices, and the option of open source.
does knowing a movie is gonna be out on DVD six months after hitting the movie theater stop people from going to the movies? Not really.
this advantage would be destroyed if someone opened another TV show store that supported Archos devices
/. carried this a few days ago: Echostar, 25% owner of Archos, OEM'g Archos PVRs to use as portable players to synch with its Dish recorders. I imagine they are using their own DRM.
ow well do they interact with a Dish Network receiver?
I don't know. I use software, Media Center (J River, not MS!) to do this. Specifically, it's Media Scheduler daemon, which will record video or radio on order. Then I synch the files to portable devices. MC will also transcode library media on the fly to serve up to clients using variable bandwidth, so it's a treat to log in over the Net and watch a stream a show or a tune. Or I just let ReplayTV grab the shows and copy them across. RTV stores them as MPEG2 but it's a snap to run virtualdub on them to convert to XVID.
I have heard that Echostar, now a 25% owner of Archos, has rebadged the Archos players to use with its DVRs. So I guess the theory is that you set your Dish to grab the shows, then just synch them straight to the Archos. The advantage, I imagine, is that the Dish and the Archos probably use the same codecs so there's no recoding needed, the speed of USB2 and the small hard drive becomes the limiting factor in how quickly you can synch. I'd imagine Dish has wrapped them in some annoying DRM though.
Actually, given that Tivo's main advantage is its ability to *record*, I think that the Archos PVPs, with their simple analog video-in jack, are a closer match. So as well as all the digital options for content, if you want to just grab some damn video, all you need is to plug the Archos into a video feed and hit "record". Low-tech, but acceptable, and I believe still protected by Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios.
And further, given Tivo's reluctance to enable free movement of content off the devices, I think a closer analogy for Archos is not Tivo but ReplayTV, with its DRM-free show sharing and ease of moving content between devices and over networks.
The video ipod is classic Apple: as much as possible a one-way street from Content Owners through Apple to Consumers, with the ipod remaining as tethered as possible to a Mac/iTunes for operation. Making it harder than it should be for ipod owners to create and share their own content.
there are technical issues preventing seamless use of free recorders.
If by "technicial issues" you mean the use of drag and drop to move videos onto the excellent Archos video players, than I guess you may be right.
Archos has been at this a lot longer than Apple. Its version of the "ipod video" (as in, small screen with backward-looking enslaved-to-old-audio-paradigm form factor) was the Jukebox Multimedia, released back in 2002. The newer generations of players released since then are a way better. It's nice to have a single device that will happily play back so *many* formats at once. And the video-in jack to do easy quick'n'dirty analog->digital recordings doesn't hurt for snarfing content either.
Thanks to the Apple Herd Effect, I assume there will now be a critical mass of video-enabled personal media devices. Welcome, it's been a lonely three years or so without you on the bleeding edge.
Anyway, now I assume that video RSS downloads, ala "podcasts", will now gain traction. What to call them? Will they still be "podcasts", or "vidcasts", or "podvids"?
ReplayTV's show sharing is DRM-free. Using a client such as DVArchive, you can stream and move shows to any Java-equipped device. And watching them on Archos/Echostar PVPs is trivial. Has anyone cracked the Tivo2Go DRm yet? That would really put me off buying one.
Slashdot Mirror
just check out the extreme "portal-ness" that they've resorted to recently on their home page
Google Portal - not as good as Yahoo's.
Yahoo Search - about as plain as Google.
The door swings both ways. Give it time.
The Energizer bunny thing is a bad analogy. Duracell and Everready advertise their batteries constantly, and try to ensure they are prominently displayed at counters, kiosks, etc, but everyone knows that they deplete quickly. In the case of modern high-drain electronics like cameras, incredibly quickly. If the rovers used their chemistry, they'd have been dead within days. And would just have been more toxic landfill, like all the useless short-lifespan cells the batery companies sucker people into buying instead of investing in a few dozen NiMH cells and a quick charger that will last them a decade or so....
The current splendid Rovers use Lithium-ion chemistry.
Tivo is extremely touchy with the networks and studios
I saw a corporate presentation by the Tivo CEO to a bunch of industry types. It was all about how much Tivo can do for them (the industry), and how it could capture and hold audiences and then deliver content packaged according to whatever DRM the industry specified. It was eye opening. Tivo is not about users, as witnessed by its rather mediocre featureset and closed system. It is customer focussed, but its customers are the studios, not the consumers.
Tivo is to media devices what Apple is to computers
No, Tivo is the Microsoft of DVRs. ReplayTV is Apple.
Google may not be aiming to become Big Brother, but they're certainly aiming to provide every single service they possibly can.
And so the transformation of Google into Yahoo is almost complete... I actually had the pleasure of predicting this to a couple of Google managers a few years ago when I was car pooling with them back up 101. I was the only non-Googler in the car. The conversation eventually got around to how to add more services while maintaining the "simplicity". I predicted that eventually, all services would end up doing the same kind of portal crap as Yahoo/AOL/MSN/Excite, etc. remember, those services became portals before the word "portal" was ever invented. I also predicted that the real rot would set in after the IPO, when Google attracted a lot of people from other companies who wanted to add that sort of stuff, because that was how they had done it in their previous jobs. And that was what the market expected. And once you're a public fad stock, shareholders demand "growth" stories to keep the high valuation and want you to add functionality, no matter how orthogonal that growth might be to your core business. It's feature creep, writ large.
The rest of the trip was a bit frosty.
It's so hard to tell "legitimate" high-ranked blogs from algorithmically generated blogs because the two are so damn similar. Many of the high-rank blogs are just incestuous clusterfucks with groupthinkers promiscuously and reflexively linking to each other in a slutty daisychain link. Run the same stories, gangbang the same audience, pimp out the same adverts. Especially good for iPods, porn, and robot women. Why get peeved when the machines can do it better?
You reap what you sow.
Your comment is a dupe of one posted 3 minutes earlier.
Thanks, but I can't really take the credit...
"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money".
I hereby claim longest dupe period yet! I reserve the right to submit this article 5 years hence.
/. search function really is a stinker. I should just use Google for this sort of thing. Blame APOD, it was their photo today!
I guess the
A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you're talking real masses.
I'd think that perhaps, just perhaps, that episode was one they might not screen in its entirery in Quebec, n'est pas?
They tried for years to make the text more "local"
I'd love to hear what the French translation of "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys" in a thick faux-Scottish accent sounds like.
War throughout history has been one of the most effective disseminators of culture.
I respectfully disagree. Trade is the most effective cultural hybridisation driver. Followed by whoring. War is an epiphenomena of trade.
They dominate one market, mp3 players, and with that leverage they have dominated the online music market
Apple is on target to have made $850m in revenues from iTMS by the end of the year. Yahoo is on target to make $875m by year's end from its music subscription service, and it has only been in this business for a third of that time.
Tell me again who is dominating what?
I really want to put the biggest IDE hard drive than I can find into my TIVO
While I do know someone who just finished putting 2 400GB Seagates into their Replay box, I take a looser approach. DVArchive is a Java client that uses uPNP to impersonate a Replay over the network. So any attached disk storage with a CPU that can run Java appears as a virtual ReplayTV and can be used to store and stream shows. I have a 1TB media server that does double duty for audio and ReplayTV, and a HTPC with 500GB that serves up basically nothing but RTV content and its own video captures. Because RTVs are so network friendly, and can be controlled easily from any web browser, I find I tend to treat them more as loosely coupled capture cards that happen to be in a fancy box more than anything else. The drives within the ReplayTVs themselves? Kind of like a local temporary storage cache. MediaMVPs or modded XBoxes make good front-ends if you want to avoid the HTPC route. With VideoLAN you can stream right from the Replays, through DVArchive, and over the net. Of course, you're going to need a really fat pipe, so I usually convert into XVid and serve up using Media Center - it can do some intelligent bandwidth throttling based on the client's pipe.
In this sense, the iTMS/iPod video download model is superior to a PVR model.
No, it's superior to *some* PVRs (Tivo), but not to others (ReplayTV). My point remains that with a good PVR I can record what I want, or share what I want, and move it to whichever device I want. With Apple's model m I rely on its downloads, or on the kindness of strangers, or I shell out to pay for Quicktime.
If I want to get an episode of Lost on my Archos device, I have to get ABC, and I have to have the forethought to set up recording before it airs.
Most DVRs will record entire runs of shows (including repeats, if you want) and only delete them when you run out of space or on pre-designated schedules. At least, that's how my ReplayTV works and I assume the Dish boxes have something similar.
And as for downloading shows, maybe I've been spoiled for years, but with the ReplayTV's Poopli, I get to snarf thousands of available shows straight from the hard disks of other ReplayTV owners. It's pretty sweet. I still prefer BitTorrent though, for one major reason: HDTV quality downloads, and my 10MBps RCN download pipe.
You need to research the TIVO Hacks that are out there.
I have ReplayTV. I don't need to engage in remote control shenanigans and time-consuming hacking to network share or stream my shows or auto skip adverts. ReplayTV just works, out of the box, no fiddling required. No DRM. Wife-approved.
Without that software we'd be adding song ratings on the ipod itself
Assuming Ratings were not available (they are!), let me tell you how I'd do it in Media Center, my favourite jukebox software.
Define new custom tag: MyRating. Click the radio button so "MyRating" embeds within files and updates during Library changes.
Optionally: set it to update Library setting from device files setting, if newer.
Create new Smartlist with MyRating >=3, say.
Synch.
That's about it.
Of course, you would have to create the Smartlists using MC itself and define the playback statically because the iPod is a closed system with very little configurability available to the end user. For myself, I prefer more control over my playback devices, and the option of open source.
does knowing a movie is gonna be out on DVD six months after hitting the movie theater stop people from going to the movies? Not really.
Box Office is a money loser for Hollywood. It breaks even on DVDs and cleans up tidily with TV and syndication. The box office kabuki is just to add a bit of pizzazz to the TV launch. And in fact, the Box is declining rapidly and becoming more and more of a liability. The release window has now shrunk to 3 months or so for Thanksgiving movies. The studios make no money from popcorn sales, which is all the multiplexes care about, and most of them went bankrupt several years ago anyway. It's a death spiral.
this advantage would be destroyed if someone opened another TV show store that supported Archos devices
/. carried this a few days ago: Echostar, 25% owner of Archos, OEM'g Archos PVRs to use as portable players to synch with its Dish recorders. I imagine they are using their own DRM.
ow well do they interact with a Dish Network receiver?
I don't know. I use software, Media Center (J River, not MS!) to do this. Specifically, it's Media Scheduler daemon, which will record video or radio on order. Then I synch the files to portable devices. MC will also transcode library media on the fly to serve up to clients using variable bandwidth, so it's a treat to log in over the Net and watch a stream a show or a tune. Or I just let ReplayTV grab the shows and copy them across. RTV stores them as MPEG2 but it's a snap to run virtualdub on them to convert to XVID.
I have heard that Echostar, now a 25% owner of Archos, has rebadged the Archos players to use with its DVRs. So I guess the theory is that you set your Dish to grab the shows, then just synch them straight to the Archos. The advantage, I imagine, is that the Dish and the Archos probably use the same codecs so there's no recoding needed, the speed of USB2 and the small hard drive becomes the limiting factor in how quickly you can synch. I'd imagine Dish has wrapped them in some annoying DRM though.
It's like having a pocket-sized TiVo
Actually, given that Tivo's main advantage is its ability to *record*, I think that the Archos PVPs, with their simple analog video-in jack, are a closer match. So as well as all the digital options for content, if you want to just grab some damn video, all you need is to plug the Archos into a video feed and hit "record". Low-tech, but acceptable, and I believe still protected by Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios.
And further, given Tivo's reluctance to enable free movement of content off the devices, I think a closer analogy for Archos is not Tivo but ReplayTV, with its DRM-free show sharing and ease of moving content between devices and over networks.
The video ipod is classic Apple: as much as possible a one-way street from Content Owners through Apple to Consumers, with the ipod remaining as tethered as possible to a Mac/iTunes for operation. Making it harder than it should be for ipod owners to create and share their own content.
For myself, I prefer more autonomy.
there are technical issues preventing seamless use of free recorders.
If by "technicial issues" you mean the use of drag and drop to move videos onto the excellent Archos video players, than I guess you may be right.
Archos has been at this a lot longer than Apple. Its version of the "ipod video" (as in, small screen with backward-looking enslaved-to-old-audio-paradigm form factor) was the Jukebox Multimedia, released back in 2002. The newer generations of players released since then are a way better. It's nice to have a single device that will happily play back so *many* formats at once. And the video-in jack to do easy quick'n'dirty analog->digital recordings doesn't hurt for snarfing content either.
Thanks to the Apple Herd Effect, I assume there will now be a critical mass of video-enabled personal media devices. Welcome, it's been a lonely three years or so without you on the bleeding edge.
Anyway, now I assume that video RSS downloads, ala "podcasts", will now gain traction. What to call them? Will they still be "podcasts", or "vidcasts", or "podvids"?
Tivo does have the option for Tivo2Go
ReplayTV's show sharing is DRM-free. Using a client such as DVArchive, you can stream and move shows to any Java-equipped device. And watching them on Archos/Echostar PVPs is trivial. Has anyone cracked the Tivo2Go DRm yet? That would really put me off buying one.