| So long Time Warner Cable, hello DIRECTV
Now sure, I've read George Ou's recent posts about the poor image quality of their "HD-lite" service, but I still wanted to see what they were offering. [Until now, I had avoided satellite because I liked the idea of video-on-demand, and because I couldn't imagine life without NY1, a local all-news station that's exclusively on Time Warner Cable only available through Time Warner Cable and Cablevision. In reality, we hardly ever use VOD, and as for NY1 — well, life always has trade-offs, and I can always stream the audio from their website if I get really desperate.] The bottom line: For our first 12 months, we could pay $49.99 a month for virtually every station we receive today (it would go up to $69.99 a month after the first 12 months). On top of that, we would need to buy a $99 HD-DVR ($199, plus a $100 rebate), which at least on the surface, appears to blow away our current Scientific Atlanta box from Time Warner.
Adobe gives web, desktop development a breath of fresh AIR
There's something in the air, and this time, it's not from Apple. Adobe announced today the official 1.0 release of Adobe AIR, its technology for merging web and desktop application development, along with Flex 3, its open-source application development framework. With AIR and Flex, the company says that it is staying on top of the development of rich Internet applications (RIA) while enabling developers to create apps for both the Web and the desktop without having to create entirely new code for each. And, of course, the company is using AIR to help port its own applications over to the Web—such as Premiere and Photoshop—while maintaining a desktop userbase. Once the a migration is finished, it will be easier for Adobe to maintain its software both online and off while using the same codebase.
Peter Carey an Australian in New York
You can crash and burn after a year's work. I'm writing a book now, and it's scary still because even though I've been through stages of being immensely pleased with it, I also, at times, don't know what I'm doing." Despite the limited time the narrative spends there, His Illegal Self offers us the most substantial view yet of Carey's adopted city. The book opens in New York and, for the first time, Carey has written a novel that includes American main characters. Most surprisingly, his narrator has a finite knowledge of Australia. Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, His Illegal Self explores life in privileged Manhattan and in subversive, underground America. It also takes in Australia at a time, Carey writes, when "Queensland was a police state run by men who never finished high school".
Sundance documentaries focus on trauma, tragedy
PARK CITY, Utah If the documentaries at this year's Sundance Film Festival reflect the current state of the world, then the world is in trouble. Irena Salina's "FLOW: For Love of Water" explores a global water shortage that could imperil Third World countries. Patrick Creadon's "I.O.U.S.A." warns that the United States is on the brink of a financial meltdown, while "Trouble the Water," directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, shows how Hurricane Katrina's impact lingers among its survivors as a sobering example of government neglect. "Secrecy," directed by Peter Galison and Robb Moss, argues that the United States' post-9/11 obsession with classified documents has created a government secrecy crisis. Josh Tickell's "Fields of Fuel" probes the world's uneasy addiction to oil, and Lisa F.
Univision Battle With Televisa Places Programs in Jeopardy
A long-running feud between Univision Communications and the Mexican broadcaster that provides most of its programming is headed for a showdown in a federal court in Los Angeles. If Univision loses, it could see many of its prime-time shows yanked. While a dispute over royalty payments is the source of the current dispute, tensions between the two companies date back to bad blood between Univisions former chief, A. Jerrold Perenchio, and the late Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, who felt he got a bad deal in 1992 when the two men negotiated the original contract. If the Mexican company, Grupo Televisa, wins and pulls its programming, Univisions enterprise value could be chopped by more than $1 billion. The lawsuit centers on a program license agreement, or PLA, between Televisa, the dominant broadcaster in Mexico, and L.A.s Univision, the dominant Spanish-language TV network in the U.S.
Brightcove closes consumer doors. What happens to Aftermix?
Brightcove announced that they're dropping the consumer side of their video platform to focus on the larger parters and their content. They've been extremely successful getting new partners and as Josh Catone notes, they weren't fully into the consumer side of things to begin with. But it's a shame to see. Steve Borsch makes a great point about the difficulty that smaller fish have when looking at a video platform. My question was what will happen to Aftermix, a psuedo-consumer play that allowed people to mix up videos, photos and music then distribute them. It was associated with the .tv property. So what does the future hold for Aftermix especially as the video-editing/mashup space heats up with things like Adobe Premiere Express? It sounds like it will be back in some form.
Wake-up call
If you're into gadgets, you could load books on to your BlackBerry. A blogger at www. ecogeek.org shares: "Whenever I have to wait, I just pull out my PDA and start reading, and I can read many books simultaneously. One downside comes when I'm really into the story and I start running out of battery - that never happens with real books."Posts at www.greenprinteronline.com/blog suggest an easier way: "Pick up an 'old school book thing' at your library – that's pretty green – and unplug yourself for the day."If you don't mind used books, there are plenty of them on www.amazon. co.uk, while http://ecostreet.com/ blog .
Britney Spears
Sam Lutfi was finally served the restraining order yesterday that effectively requires him to stay 250 feet from Britney Spears and have no contact with her whatsoever. The restraining order was set to expire today, but the judge in the case extended it to March 17, according to the AP: In court papers, Jeffrey Wexler, an attorney for her father, James Spears, wrote that "after three weeks of apparently evading service," Lutfi was served at 11 a.m. outside his Los Angeles apartment.
The order, which requires Lutfi to stay 250 yards away from Spears and her home, was set to expire Friday. Wexler had asked for the order to be extended. Poor Sam Lutfi. He must miss Britney Spears. I bet he walks in on random pap smears just to remember the good times. Surprisingly none of the women really cared until Sam started throwing Cheetos at them and screaming "Where's the checkbook?! I'll feed you to Satan!" Then it got a little weird.
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