So if I see something online I want to watch, it gets saved somewhere so I can load it up on my TV. Or possibly my portable device.

That would be nice.

I use Plex, so a plugin for that would be great. But I’m flexible. The important part is, I’d mostly rather not sit at my computer to watch things – it’s best to watch things in the best place for watching things, my couch & TV. As instapaper is to reading…

This post is brought to you by the alternate reality where the internet is standing by to take my stupid ideas and make them happen.

When I was small I hid books under the covers. I read them furtively from the light that reached into my bedroom from the hallway. So I’ve always been a voracious reader.

The past decade has seen me self-inflict great guilt for not reading like I used to. By which I mean I stopped reading as many books. Gradually I realized that I wasn’t actually reading less, I was simply reading differently. Instead of books, I had developed a bottomless hunger for the web, and later, news feeds. I was better informed about current events than I ever had been when I only read one newspaper, and also familiar with a decent stable of niche interests.

A few years later, the inevitable feed purge occurred. You can oversubscribe to news feeds quite easily, and the mail-inbox metaphor that almost all feed readers use transmits a sense that you have to read everything. Consequently you gradually build up an impractical amount of feeds, and an unnecessary feeling of obligation . One day I found myself spending an hour after work trying to get through everything, and realized the mental trap I had fallen into.

I also had come to realize that the weighting of web / news content to long form (books) had to be corrected.

Now, my reading ecosystem seems balanced, efficient and pleasant. It would seem so exotic to my younger self: the magic book that contains all books. The books transmuting into different forms. The instant access to so many sources. But it’s really just a series of tools.

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Excellent post here at The Legion of Decency with analysis of and commentary on the latest round of CRTC rulings. The key points:

1. Private Broadcasters have the right to charge fees for formerly free-to-air broadcasts on cable and satellite.

2. Private broadcasters have the right to Blackout signals for which they own Canadian rights.

3. “Programs of National Interest” replaces Priority programming and is redefined to comprise only drama and comedy, feature documentaries and Award shows.

4. 30% of network gross income must be spent on Canadian programming (5% on Programs of National Interest).

5. Total Canadian Content on Canadian networks reduced from 60% to 55%.

7. Reduced restrictions on where a network’s Canadian Production spend is exhibited. With as much as 25% movable anywhere within the conglomerate holdings.

8. CMF investment no longer counted as part of broadcaster programming spend.

The rest gets a bit inside baseball unless you’re in the industry or follow it closely, but there’s plenty good there too. Point number two is the one that may cause waves, as Dennis points out, since it favours the broadcasters but requires action by the cable companies:

Canada’s top two cablers aren’t going to make it that easy. They’re set to announce by end of business that they’re pulling all U.S. network feeds from the cable packages in sixty days. This will predictably cause outrage and hate from customers, which the companies will blame entirely on the networks…

This is happening at a time when it is arguably easier for me to bootleg TV shows than watch them in the sanctioned ways. It is laughable. Ha! Well, except for the enormous wasted opportunities and the dire condition of our national culture industry. That is more like cryable. Cry!

The problem with the Canadian TV industry in a nutshell is that all these guys, broadcast networks and cable & satellite companies alike, make their money showing American TV to Canadians. That’s not exactly a valuable service these days. Years ago, the US channels that were reliant on non-exclusive content like movies or syndicated shows realized they had to have some actual exclusive shows to attract viewers and to gain leverage in the New World of post-internet entertainment, where content is suddenly available through a million different avenues. That’s why we got The Sopranos (HBO), Mad Men (AMC), Breaking Bad, etc. etc. The Canadian industry could have learned this lesson long ago and actually started investing in Canadian shows. It would have hurt them financially for a few years, but eventually paid off as they could sell the shows to the US and elsewhere (did you know The Listener is a big hit in Italy?). But no, they do the bare minimum required by their pal CRTC and then defend their relic of a business model by imposing false scarcity in an age of information abundance.

Twilight of the American Newspaper

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

I don’t know if that’s true – I personally don’t feel less connected to Toronto now – it’s one of many neighbourhoods I live in. Then again, I read the newspaper every day in some form or another.

I am now the proud owner of a Kindle. It was an extremely generous birthday present from my sisters. I’ve been researching and discussing ebook readers a lot with my pal Ari – it’s a fascinating emerging market. I probably wouldn’t have shelled out the bread for one at the moment, but I’m certainly happy to have one, to learn about its capabilities, and to learn more about the entire field.

The screen is a wonder. It really has to be seen to be believed. When I first looked at it I thought the “plug in the power cable” message and diagram were a sticker on the screen, but no, that’s how things look. Virtuality has never looked so physical. It literally uses no power unless you’re turning the page.

The font is actually really nice – a serif that’s flirting with sans. You can adjust the text size, but not the font, which struck me as odd, if the sort of thing Apple would do, and you sense that this product is very much the result of an emulation of Apple’s attention to design detail.

The interface leaves a lot to be desired. Your instinct is to touch the screen, but no, you’re stuck with a nipply little joystick, a keyboard(!) and a handful of other buttons. The low refresh rate of e-ink displays make it feel klunky no matter what, but that’s one of those tradeoffs that goes with the territory. Luckily, most of the time you’re just going to be pressing ‘next page’, and that works fine.

You can buy books from the Amazon store on the Kindle itself, and as I’m sure you’ve heard, they get zapped near-instantly to the device, thanks to its always-on cell radio or whatever they call it. You can also plug in to your PC via USB and transfer things that way. There’s also a free app called Calibre that can work like iTunes to your Kindle’s iPod, and will also convert files (including Epub, PDF, RTF, HTML) into Kindle-optimized formats.

You can store thousands of books on this thing, so I loaded it up with some public domain Dead White Guy Classics via Feedbooks. Also, my current book is James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, an enormous hardcover that gets tiring to lug around. I had previously downloaded a pirate .rtf ebook of it (which I feel was within my moral rights, doncha think) to try and get it on my iPhone on those days I wanted to carry my camera instead of a half ton of paper, but the document converted poorly. Calibre did a great job and now I can consume hard-boiled political conspiracy fiction in a much lighter package.

Back to that cell network connection. Here’s where things get shady, probably because the towering death lords we call the Canadian telecommunications oligopoly have entered the room. In the US, you can do the following with your Kindle:

• email documents to it
• sync with an iPhone app
• surf the entire web for free

In Canada, you can do none of these things. Also, every transaction has a $2 surcharge added to it, so a $10 new release becomes $12 and a free public domain book becomes $2. I think what is happening is that Kindle doesn’t yet have a deal with Rogers, Telus or Bell, so the prices reflect the ludicrous roaming charges that those companies bill to AT&T. No one even knows what network this thing is connecting to – none of the parties involved will talk about it. That suggests negotiations are still ongoing. Be that as it may, the last thing we Canadian nerds needed was another sign of what a technological backwater we have become.

If you were going to hold out for a future, more awesome ebook reader, I can’t say I blame you. It seems like a new one is announced every day (Nook, motherfucker!), and undoubtedly future models will feature touch screens, colour, will fire lasers & brew killer espresso. And in Canada, you may want to wait unil Sauron, Hitler and Emperor Palpatine (or whomever manages the affairs of our telecom providers) allow the device to reach its true potential.

Regardless, right now, the experience of reading on this thing is quite pleasant, as is the slim size, and the generous storage. It’s the Tardis for book nerds, and I’m definitely happy with it so far.

There’s an HMV near where I work. In the 90s, this chain sold CDs. (You may remember it from the rip n’ return days, when a liberal exchange policy meant you could buy, rip and return CDs at the original price). Over the course of this decade, it gradually transformed into a DVD outlet, with CDs now relegated to a hits strip at the front and some meager racks at the back.

In the past few years, video games have made an incursion, taking a great deal of the front area. Blu-Ray has of course made an appearance, and even iPod accessories.

In short, the store is a microcosm of the modern entertainment media landscape.

I went in there last week. A whole boatload of DVDs are selling at $6, including many good ones. Racks of old games for $20. A security guard yawns by the door. The place is a ghost town.

Again, microcosm.

I was just doing some camera research and stumbled upon some interesting stuff.

I’m what you call prosumer when it comes to cameras, both video and still. I’ve set up my own darkroom and processed my own film, and used a film SLR for many years. On the motion side I’ve worked in film and TV for many years. However, in a still camera, I tend to prefer small and portable to an SLR, as I can’t take pictures if I don’t bring it with me. And on the video side, until extremely recently, it was impossible for an individual to own something close to pro quality, as pro film and HD cameras tend to cost half a million dollars. That has obviously changed, and now with the Red camera, HD camcorders, and video-enabled SLRs, it’s a different world.

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I find it endlessly fascinating to think about how one medium is going to influence another. Right now, there are so many media spilling into the same pot that it’s hard to imagine how the stew will taste. But in this AV Club year-in-movies retrospective, Tasha Robinson makes an apt observation:

To me, the trend there seems to be less about people filtering the world through their pop-culture experiences—apart from the occasional extreme iconoclast, who in this industry doesn’t?—and more about people filtering the world through camera lenses, seeing every experience as something to be caught on video and shared with a hungry voyeuristic world. I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s 2008 Rolling Stones concert doc Shine A Light, and I laughed at the way Scorsese’s cameras capture people in the process of capturing Mick Jagger’s cavorting on their phones. He’s making his movie—a big, shiny, energetic, polished production—and they’re making their low-fi versions in the middle of it. Or looked at another way, they’re in the front row at a Stones concert… and they’re watching the experience on tiny little screens held up in front of their faces, because capturing it for later is more important than living it.

That attitude has its benefits—for one thing, it gave us Trouble The Water, which rides entirely on the amazing from-the-ground footage two New Orleans residents shot to document their own lives before, during, and after Katrina. I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of that in 2009, as people continue to turn their cameras on themselves and their neighborhoods. Given that so many of our favorite 2008 movies were little lo-fi films about ordinary people rather than the pricey escapist fare, I’m suspecting this might ultimately be a good thing, and I hope it continues.

One of many interesting ideas here is that with so many cameras out there capturing footage, there’s a potential for a new kind of cinema that is both theatrical and collectivist. Imagine a room full of people at an event; you stage something going on in the room, and count on the people there to record it for you. You then sort through the footage from the event and assemble it. Or, you could post all the collective footage for anyone to assemble their own edit. It’s the sort of production that would have been completely inconceivable 15 – 20 years ago.

It’s also the sort of production perpetrated by none other than The Beastie Boys, with their awesomely titled Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That in 2006, the year Google bought YouTube, and conceived well before YouTube opened for business.

I don’t know the moral of this story – it’s ongoing, as they say. Perhaps it’s that the Beasties are awesome.

The following is a post by my pal Duiker on the topic of the PVR – the personal video recorder – and its relationship to the rise of product placement (aka “brand integration”). As both an avid PVR user and TV professional, he’s in a position to know. Anyway, enjoy, and I’ll weigh in with my thoughts at the bottom.

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Missed this one – The NYT Magazine’s Screens Issue, from last week, with lots of amazing articles about the convergence of film, TV and computers, and also a David Lynch interview.

Oh, shit. This beta NFB site is too much. 400+ films so far, more being added, free to stream.

Would still like the ability to download, but [this is good]. Hit options and choose “extreme” (no “gnarly” option?) to get maximum resolution. (via 3rdparty)

Here’s Cosmic Zoom, one of my faves:

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Here’s an interesting article speculating on the economics of Dr. Horrible, and Joss Whedon himself weighed in to say it is “sensible.” Long and short of it is that the show would need to sell about 100,000 copies on iTunes to see a modest profit, and more like a million to compete with Hollywood paychecks for the creators involved (assuming a budget of $250,000). This is before any DVD revenue is taken into account.

I think we can assume Dr. Horrible will make money for its makers, but is there anything more we can take away from it? Joss Whedon is, after all, a special case within a special case – he has a pro budget and talent pool, and beyond that a rabid extant fan base. But nothing about the success of this show means much for amateur creators, those who couldn’t get Neil Patrick Harris to work for scale, and couldn’t afford to pay him scale anyway. There still doesn’t seem to be a system that can help such talent succeed, other than “get a million viewers on YouTube.” That’s not a system, that’s the problem already solved. A million viewers, whether on the web or on TV, spells success. It’s how to get there that counts. (I know this isn’t Joss’ fault, it’s just you get to thinkin’.)

That’s enough of that particular subject. Soon: Dark Knight!

There’s a bit of press for Whedon’s latest venture. Here’s an article in Variety, tying Dr. Horrible in with other creator-originated web pushes. It mentions that the budget was “low six figures” and financed by Joss’ own cash. There’s also an interview in Wired, but it’s mostly fluff. The show is no longer free, but you can get it in iTunes, where I noticed it sitting atop the list of “top TV shows,” which I think means it may well make its money back. It will see eventual DVD release, but that deal is still being worked out. Me, I just hope they keep making more. There are a lot of villains on the Evil Council of Evil that I’d like to see more of, and will we see Captain Hammer’s Hamjet?

Finally, eh? Movies, in both SD and HD, both for rent and to own, are now up inz the iTunes for the gentle-yet-rugged people of the True North.

As for pricing, Apple is charging $9.99 for catalogue title purchases, $14.99 for recent releases and $19.99 for new releases. iTunes Movie Rentals are $3.99 for library titles and $4.99 for new releases, with high-definition rental versions for an extra dollar. The rentals can be previewed, purchased and watched on iPod classic, iPod nano with video, iPod touch and on a widescreen TV with Apple TV.

Gizmodo claims the viewing period is now 48 hours, a huge improvement over the crippling 24 hours the service was offering in the US, but I’m going to assume that’s an error. Also, prices are from $1 to $5 higher than in the US, despite the dollar being at par… make of that what you will.

The Globe retires its paywall, mostly. They still lock up the archives, but the columnists etc. that cost money before are now free. Good move, Globe!

Wow. Bell just unveiled its video download store, and as Ars notes, the timing could be no worse. Bell is about to go in front of the CRTC about the fact that they’re throttling P2P traffic, legal or not, for Bell customers AND for independent resellers’ customers. With this announcement, the anti-competitive aspects of throttling need no longer be simply inferred, they are writ large by Bell itself. Finally, the issue of network neutrality gets a shot in the arm. Thanks Bell! (more in the Globe here)

With all the talk about Mircosoft’s situation in bowing to Sony regarding the 360’s Blu-ray impotence I was reminded of the below…

At around :50 seconds is how Sony must feel right about now.

Just substitute Skeletor for Sony…

This week there was news that Bell is slowing down P2P traffic, i.e. bitshaping, even for their resellers. And there was information on Rogers’ new fee structure, with the highest plan costing $100 a month and still subject to a bit cap.

Meanwhile, in the US, Comcast is backing down from bitshaping after a public outcry. What the hell is going on?

At issue here is net neutrality, and in the US there is public debate on the issue, whereas here there has been none. In brief, net neutrality is the principle that the network should treat all content and devices equally – that internet access should behave like electricity or your water supply. And generally that’s how it’s gone up until recently, when gradually the internet providers have been introducing bitshaping (slowing down certain types of traffic, most often BitTorrent) and bitcaps (a limit on how much you can download before incurring extra fees).

Don’t be distracted by the current focus on piracy – the idea that ‘a few bad apples’ are slowing down the internet for everyone else. The real issue is internet video in all its forms: bittorrented TV shows, youtube, and pay-per-download services like iTunes and Xbox Live. Video takes a lot of bandwidth and with the explosion in online video, suddenly ISPs are seeing people actually use some of the bandwidth they are paying for. And they’d rather not, you know, make less money. Let’s not forget that both Bell and Rogers sell TV services, and online video threatens their profits in that business as well. The last thing they want is someone canceling their cable to download shows off iTunes – but if that happens, they want to get their cut. Despite the fact that their broadband services are sold on the promise of fast, rich media.

Another issue is competition. We have less of it here, and so our telecoms can beat up the consumer to their hearts’ content without fear of consumers jumping ship, as there’s no ship to jump to. What they’d love to do is sell you access to pieces of the internet like they currently do with TV channels: wanna play games online? $15 a month. Facebook? $15 a month. Yeah, Rogers already does exactly that with its phone service (the facebook part, that is). It sucks for the little guy, yeah. But it sucks for our entire country as we watch Canada become a technological backwater in an age when high-tech competitiveness is more important than ever. We have 60% cellphone ownership here compared to 80% in the US. Typical broadband speeds in Japan are nearly 10 times faster than the Canadian average. There are a lot of amazing things that can be done with ubiquitous high speed access if we’re not paying through the nose for the ‘privilege’.

So what should we do? Amongst other things, join the net neutrality Facebook group. By getting 40,000 members, Michael Geist’s Fair Copyright group was able to forestall brutal DMCA-style legislation up here, so it could very well work. Also check out this site although it hasn’t been updated in some time, the petition has 6000 signatures already. In general, just get the word out and let’s make this an issue that more people know about.

Well, shucks.

I know the “format war” ended and stuff but this quick. Money must be made! I wonder if HD 360 players are going to become collectors items in like fifty years? And why did it have to be called Blu-Ray? HD sounds so much better. Meh, at least I didn’t buy an HD player of any kind. Ha ha!

Technology you move so fast!

You so sexy!

Here’s a good, measured piece from Ars’ Nate Anderson: Is the music industry dying? The answer is: no. CD sales are tanking hard, but digital sales are skyrocketing – not just at iTunes but also eMusic and presumably others.

Convenience isn’t the only thing at work here; price is also a major factor. [eMusic CEO David] Pakman believes that the CD is priced “completely wrong,” and points out that hundreds of major DVDs can be had for $4 or $5. Despite the pressure that music labels have been under the last few years, CD prices have never approached this level (not counting those Beatles Greatest Hits! (as played by the Western Ljubljana State Radio Orchestra) discs you find in value bins).

Goddamned right. If CDs were $3 I’d be buying the hell outta them. But it’s clear that the major labels have had a big hand in their own downfall, and not just the suing-own-customers thing. They could have lowered prices on CDs to $3 and still made money, and they could have realized that albums full of junk filler tracks won’t sell like hotcakes in the era of single track downloads. And they could have ditched the DRM a lot quicker.

So given that, and thinking of the recently-announced iTunes movie rentals full of DRM and time limitations, what’s Hollywood thinking? Isn’t it clear that the DRM has got to go eventually? They should get out in front of that shit right now, and not cock it up like the labels did.