Of course, referring to “Hollywood” movies as “Culture” is often a stretch.
I was going to link to this yesterday but never got around to it. Ken Fisher at Ars explains the consequences of AACS adoption. From Alan Wexelblat at Copyfight:
It’s not clear to me is where we go from here. In under a year we’ll have Macs and Vistas playing next-gen DVDs. All new movies will come out on those disks… Consumers will be forced to upgrade their players if they want to play the new disks and maybe have to re-buy their first-generation DVDs
This will do nothing but place another roadblock in the path of Independent/DIY Culture (not to mention independent computing). On the other hand, it might just fail/be rendered moot in the face of DRM-less Internet downloads and IPTV. Important year or so ahead.
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
—John Gilmore
The highly-anticipated hack/patch to the AppleTV “diagnostic” USB port has been released. AppleTV Hacks has all the info, caveats and instructions. This patch enables the use of external storage—no word yet as to other uses.
Lost Remote points to Zat’s Not Funny’s pre/review of version 2 of Verizon’s FiOS interactive media guide/set-top box. Features include widgets (weather, etc…), streaming DVR content to remote boxes (an AppleTV-like setup, thought no HD, yet), an add-on option for PC media management software that allows photo and music streaming, and additional web content, all wrapped in a neatly-executed interface. Zat’s also mentions future pans for cellphone-DVR integration. Screenshots at Zat’s.
In related Verizon/video news, the company announced that they would be adding Veoh it it’s V-Cast mobile video service.
Combining podcatching, bittorrent, a Youtube downloader, and a multi-format video player, Miro is the just-released evolution of the Participatory Culture Foundation’s Democracy software project.
Also checkout PCFs Make Internet TV, a wiki for video tools/tips, covering editing, shooting, publishing and licensing.
Art+Technology incubator/curator Eyebeam is now accepting applications for it’s 2007-8 Fellows, in the Eyebeam R&D OpenLab, Production Lab and Education Lab. The Deadline is August 6, 2007.
Research themes for 2007/08 include (though will not be limited to):
* Energy, Technology and Sustainability
* Urban research, urban interventions and media in public space
Artists and creative technologists interested in these research areas are particularly encouraged to apply for 2007/08 Fellowships.
In addition to adding a video remix/editor, YouTube has also launched a mobile site, available to anyone with an Internet-enabled device supporting 3gp video. They also seem to be testing some new layouts/features.
Scott Kirsner of CinemaTech has posted his slides from his presentation at the San Francisco Apple store. The “meat” of the presentation begins around slide10.
The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc., will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner’s permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
The so-called video fingerprinting tools, which identify unique attributes in the video clips, will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said.
A few notable improvements in the GUIs/features of video player embeds. Youtube, in addition to advertising, has included a new “related videos” feature, as well as some interface tweaks. Break.com launches a slew of new features, including some AJAX-y looking player scaling. BlipTV has also launched some new web features and improvements.
Unhappy with the quality/quantity of the extras for The Fountain DVD, Darren Aronofsky has decided to release a downloadable commentary track in the near future. From Cinematical and Aronofsky’s Myspace blog:
“As many of you can tell it [the DVD] is light on extras as compared to my previous DVD releases. Everything at the studio was a struggle. For instance, they didn’t want to do a commentary track cause they felt it wouldn’t help sales. I didn’t have it in me to fight anymore. Whatever.”
Seems to be the nucleus of an excellent social-networking idea here—fans, critics and directors/artists themselves upload “extras” for download via a site based on the film. The “extras” could be in a freely-exchangeable/interchangeable (XML?) format, mashable via other applications/sites.
FREE IDEA How about producing an online application (or even disc-based, given the capabilities of Blu-Ray/HD DVD) that would 1. Load the movie 2. allow the viewer to select/load alt. commentary tracks (or other extras) from the aforementioned web site. Netflix has taken some steps in that direction, and alt. commentary tracks have been done before, but nobody has embraced a truly interactive, user/fan friendly model.
Related: Check out Flak Magazine’s downloadable commentary for David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
Notable:
_YouTube on your Apple TV—software update coming soon.
_3rd-Party iPhone apps probably in the future.
we’ll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can’t compromise the security of the phone.
I’ve used 3rd party apps… the more you add, the more your phone crashes. No one’s perfect, and we’d sure like our phone not to crash once a day. If you can just be a little more patient with us I think everyone can get what they want.
_32-bit graphics w/ 8-bit transparency.
_”search” functionality for VOD and guide data, including seemless DVR integration
_predictive type input
_widgets! (currently only weather and such)
Feature request(s) that could make this a “must have” (at least for me). 1. RSS feed widget (DUH. Really. What are you guys thinking?) 2. Google Maps (or substitute)… and how about hooking that “community info” board up to the aforementioned mapping application. kthxbi.
