Tag Archives: media

The Dude abides

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Check out this trailer for last week’s terrific episode of American Masters on PBS, profiling the life and work of Jeff Bridges.  A link to the full episode is below.

You can watch the full episode online here.

Using my subscription to Netflix streaming on my Apple TV/iPad/iMac, and after seeing “True Grit” a couple of weeks ago, I am in the process putting together my own Jeff Bridges movie festival, with my two most recently viewed being “Starman” and “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

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Scalia smacks down Ginsburg

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Justice Scalia (right) at the Harvard Law Scho...
Justice Scalia on right

Justices Ginsberg and Scalia during the recent Supreme Court hearing on state regulation of video game violence:

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Is there — you’ve been asked questions about the vagueness of this and the problem for the seller to know what’s good and what’s bad. California — does California have any kind of an advisory opinion, an office that will view these videos and say, yes, this belongs in this, what did you call it, deviant violence, and this one is just violent but not deviant? Is there — is there any kind of opinion that the — that the seller can get to know which games can be sold to minors and which ones can’t?

MR. MORAZZINI: Not that I’m aware of, Justice Ginsburg.

JUSTICE SCALIA: You should consider creating such a one. You might call it the California office of censorship. It would judge each of these videos one by one. That would be very nice.

(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

When he is right, he is right. And, needless to say, when he is wrong, he is very, very wrong.

Stewart v. Beck

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According to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News, more that twice as many people attended Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity (plus or minus 10%) than attended Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally (87,000 plus or minus 10%) at the same location earlier this year.

I’ll take that as a small bit of good news regarding the general intelligence of the country.

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Networks block Google TV (updated)

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Image representing hulu as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

The major networks have blocked Google TV from showing their TV shows. What is happening is that Google TV contains a web-browser. Using that browser, viewers could, say, navigate to Hulu and watch the TV shows available there on their big screen TV driven by Google TV. But now the networks have blocked that.

So how is this done? Well, Google TV’s browser, like most browsers, identifies itself to websites it connects to. So, when Hulu gets a request from a Google TV browser, it can treat it differently than, say, the Safari browser.

So a question naturally arises: what if Google TV changes its identification to be Internet Explorer or Chrome or Safari? Problem solved. And there is no law or regulation against this. Of course, it would be a declaration of war by Google to the networks.

I would love to see that.

Update: Do read this post from Lauren Weinstein. I agree fully with this statement:

… in my view, the purposely blocking of particular viewing platforms for other than legitimate technical reasons (e.g. genuine, serious display incompatibilities) is unacceptable — and should be illegal.

I know virtually nothing about antitrust law, but if this is not illegal, it should be. Think about it. This could be a VERY BIG DEAL.

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Glenn Beck and A Face in the Crowd

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Today I watched the 1957 classic film, A Face in the Crowd. The story is of a character called “Lonesome” Rhodes, who becomes popular on radio and TV and becomes a tool of extreme conservative forces in the United States. It stars Patricia Neal, and Andy Griffin, and was written by Budd Schulberg. Lonesome Rhodes goes power crazy and his insincerity is ultimately exposed and his ratings disappear. It truly reminded me of Glenn Beck.

Here is a clip:

And here is a blurry clip more to the point.

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Blu-ray is dead

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Blu-ray disc logo

Image via Wikipedia

How do I know Blu-ray is dead as a format? Because the idea of securing a physical manifestation of media, in the year 2010, is close to silly. Between Neflix streaming, Hulu Plus, YouTube, and other Internet streaming capability, video and audio podcasts, and on-demand cable, there is almost nothing that I want to watch or listen to that isn’t available in a non-tangible form. How many hours a day can one reasonably view media anyway? Make of list of what you want to view (in HD or not) and then look around a bit and cross off what is available now online.  And what little remaining “content” is unavailable over the Internet will be available within a year or two.

But the clincher supporting the passing of Blu-ray is that even Microsoft thinks Blu-ray is over.

We all should shed a (virtual) tear or two for the end of media crammed into a physical object that one could collect, organize and even take a certain pride in owning. Having shed that tear, we can then rejoice that the media conglomerates will not again be able to charge us a second (or third or fourth) time for the same items we already own but which are merely transferred into a different, and rarely better, tangible container.

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