Lost Remote, among many others, reports that PBS will be making one its shows available solely on the internet under a Creative Commons license (PBS Launches 'a Whole New Kind of Television'). The show, to be hosted by Robert X. Cringely, will be called Nerd TV (Pioneering Another Technology First, PBS Launches NerdTV, the First Downloadable Web-Exclusive Series From a Major Broadcaster).

This is very good news. If PBS doesn't make an RSS broadcatch available, it is likely that someone else will, hopefully, breaking the show down into individual segments.

This is still niche content for an undeveloped market, however, so I doubt the audience will be particularly large. When will we see the hardware that will make subscribing to these sorts of shows easy for the average consumer?

IndieWIRE reports that Netflix has made another deal to distribute an independent film (Hal Hartley Takes Latest Film to Netflix for DVD Release). Hal Hartley's The Girl from Monday is the film being distributed this time. This is a very cool way to slide on down the Long Tail. via Cinema Minima.

You know, the funny thing is, Netflix is sort of like internet distribution, only through the post office. When will we get the equivalent of Netflix for the 'net? Seriously. Just port the damn thing. Customers could just buy a "Netflix Box" and attach it to a broadband connection and their TV. How hard could it be? When you want a new film, you tell it to erase one of your current selections first and it immediately goes to fetch the next film on your list. It'd download faster than the post office can deliver. You'd never have to wait for low availability films.

And, once you have this, the possibilities for other sorts of distribution are ridiculous.

So, the next generation XBox360 is going to have all sorts of cool multimedia abilities and its connectivity through XBox Live is being heavily touted (XBox360 Fact Sheet).

So, will Microsoft dare permit podcasting to the XBox? If they do, which artists will they allow to try to reach this market? How might podcasting be integrated with games? I think of the faux-radio stations in Grand Theft Auto, as a very basic example.

Dare we imagine the possibities for broadcatching video content, say for example, machinima? Doesn't it make sense to deliver machinima film festivals to gamers who would subscribe?

How forward thinking is Microsoft?

UPDATE 1530PT

What better way to deliver short video reviews of upcoming XBox titles? Of course, Microsoft could simply use it as some sort of advertising channel, but why not let known, responsible outlets have access to provide podcasts/broadcatch for their independent reviews?

Imagine a Penny Arcade feed - why not?

The Shifted Librarian brings news of the Spoken Alexandria Project (Introducing the Spoken Alexandria Project + Podcast). The Spoken Alexandria Project

is creating a free library of spoken word recordings, consisting of classics in the public domain and modern works (with permission). AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 audiobooks available for free download and redistribution.

Sounds like a great podcast subscription. I also think that more drama schools/classes should produce audio books as class projects.

Via FurdLog, I note that the New York Times has an article on $1 Public Domain DVDs (Attack of the $1 DVD's).

While overall DVD sales are robust - last year retailers sold $15.5 billion in discs - the low-end market is positively booming. Recently, 19 of the 50 top sellers on the Nielsen VideoScan national sales charts were budget DVD's. "The prices are irresistible," said Gary Delfiner, whose Global Multimedia Corporation offers 60 film, cartoon and television titles with prices ranging from 99 cents to $1.99.

Hmmm ... this sounds familiar. Oh, yeah, there were stories about this last year: Who'd Buy the Public Domain for a Dollar?). And, while physical media is great, why not put these movies online for delivery straight to your television screen? When will people realize that they can broadcatch this stuff?

Galleon is "is a free open source media server for TiVo which allows you to enjoy many kinds of content and interactive applications right on your TV. The server runs on your home computer and organizes your media collection so that they can be viewed on your home network. Galleon also brings Internet content and applications to your TV." Now this is what I'm talking about. Be sure to check the screenshots. Of course, this is also only the beginning. The system does seem to lack one of the most important capabilities: playing video downloaded from the net. Shouldn't be too difficult to add, should it? I can easily imagine people creating RSS feeds specifically designed for viewing via television. Including, of course, vlogs. Lots and lots to do. via PVR Wire

I'm a bit late in blogging this, but this is really significant. Doug Kaye of IT Conversations has a new project to document all the audio presentations from conventions and other places that he can (The New Project).

Every day there are scores or even hundreds of fascinating and important conference sessions, lectures or other presentations that are lost. They simply evaporate because no one captures or records them. Some of these presentations are by the greatest and most inspiring minds of our time, and many could be important to people in the far reaches of the planet, if only they could hear them.

My new project is to capture (record) all of these presentations, post-produce them, and make them available worldwide for free.

This is another project that is going to change things. (Disclosure: I have my own show on IT Conversations - The Importance Of ... Law and IT).

There has been a lot of talk about the sluggish box office for recently released movies, but now BusinessWeek is reporting sluggish DVD sales as well (End of the DVD Party?). This is not good news for Hollywood, as many of the problems with box office were mitigated by the rise of DVD. If DVDs are faltering too, well, that is a real problem for Hollywood. What is behind this is unknown, so far. Speculation abounds.

Result: Retailers increasingly are shipping back unsold DVDs -- even those as hotly anticipated as Shrek 2 or The Incredibles -- because they don't have enough shelf space to keep all those titles, figure several analysts.

The article also mentions all the additional competition for viewers, such as videogames and TiVo, which makes broadcast more attractive. Perhaps this is just a blip, if not, as the article says, it could be "seismic."via ReBang

Ironically, the day after the Grokster decision, Apple releases iTunes 4.9, "Now With Podcasting". Interestingly, the Grokster concurrence by Justice Breyer actually mentions podcasts as something that can be legitimately swapped on P2P networks. As far as I know it is the first court opinion mention of podcasting.

Rex Hammock has completed his excellent series, How Apple Will Change Everything About Podcasting, with a post about Five Potential Unintended Consequences of iTunes Embracing Podcasting. The post punctures the podcast bubble just a bit, pointing out some of the negative possibilities of major corporations jumping in so quickly. Read the whole thing. But the best part of the post is the postscript.

In an earlier post, I listed several types of podcasts formats/programming/content I thought could catch on. That post led to lots of e-mail and trackbacks with some great ideas. Alot of them were related to classroom recordings and educational/training audio. Several people e-mailed me suggesting that sermons would be great podcasts -- as the son of a minister, I agree. Some folks e-mailed me to say there are already tour-oriented podcasts and I even received an e-mail from my friend Ellen Pryor at Nashville's Frist Center for the Visual Arts saying the museum was jumping into podcasting.

The point is, with the new tools to create audio files, Odeo, for example and a plug in for my favorite software, NoteTaker or popping a Griffin iTalk onto your iPod, or using tools like Garage Band, it's just a matter of time, folks. Get ready. [italics in original]

Ed Bott points to a study that finds that despite tremendous growth, PVRs (aka TiVos) won't be in 50% of US homes until 2009 (PVRs Won't Hit the Mainstream for Years).

If you own a TiVo, or a Media Center PC, or a PVR from your cable company, you're part of an elite. A new research report from Accenture says that the percentage of U.S. homes with personal video recorders will increase by 500% in the next four years, but even in 2009 more than half of U.S. homes still won't have the equipment to record, pause, or time-shift TV.

Read the whole thing. Of course, that means there are quite a few more years before we're all watching broadcatches.

DesignTechnica reports that Clear Channel Communications is launching 20 podcasts with 10 more to follow shortly (Clear Channel Radio Goes Podcast Happy). They're primarily comedy/interview/morning zoo shows, but it'll be interesting to see how good they are. Clear Channel clearly gets that this will be an important distribution medium. However, do they understand how to take advantage of it? Is repurposed morning zoo chatter going to be successful? We shall see.

BusinessWeek has an an interesting article about radio for your cellphone (Dial R for Radio on Your Cell).

Chances are radio services will be a hit with the 2 billion wireless subscribers worldwide. "Mobile phones are always with you," explains Nancy Beaton, a general manager at telco Sprint (FON), which became the first carrier with a commercial cell-phone radio service in December. "Because customers are familiar with how the phone works, adding radio can be very intuitive," says Beaton.

And many users want that addition. According to surveys conducted by America Online, a unit of Time Warner (TWX), more than half the respondents say they would listen to the radio on their phones. AOL is in talks with wireless service providers to offer its online radio stations on mobile phones within months.

Radio on phones is a good idea. I could see that it would be very useful. However, a couple of questions ... many related to my rant yesterday (Die Cellphone. Die! Die! Die!).

First, why the heck does AOL (or any other cellphone radio service) need to be in talks with wireless service providers? Why couldn't they simply be in talks with, you know, customers? The closed networks of the cellphone providers are really limiting competition and innovation (not to mention increasing the price).

Second, despite Miss Beaton's claim about ease of use, why the heck do we have to get the radio via a cellphone? Why not get the radio via an MP3 player? Why not let the MP3 player have basic connectivity for this purpose? A cellphone is great in some circumstances, but not necessarily all.

Radio service also could spark sales of other wireless content. "Since radio is how people discover new music, I'd look at radio as the trigger that would create follow-through sales of [popular content like] ringtones, ringbacks, and music downloads," says Lewis Ward, an analyst at IDC. If users hear a song they like on their cell-phone radio, they'll be able to immediately buy a related ringtone via their cell. That should accelerate the growth of the $500 million ringtone market, as well as sales of ringbacks and music downloads.

Of course, one reason the cellphone service providers like their closed networks is so that they can make more money via associated services. I still can't believe that people pay as much for ringtones as they do. Open up the network, let people buy ringtones without paying the cellphone service provider tax.

Most cell-phone radiocasters, though, plan to use existing wireless networks, but to varying extents. Motorola's iRadio, expected to cost $5 a month, will let customers download hours of radio programming via a PC. New radio-ready Motorola phones are expected to be unveiled this fall. Motorola plans to insert snippets of breaking news into these broadcasts as they're downloaded over its wireless network.

Downloading hours of radio programming via your PC already has a name. It's called "podcasting". Still, perhaps Motorola will share some of their technology, or help work on an open standard, for mixing breaking news with less time-volatile content. Would be useful.

via Mobile Content News

TV Squad wishes Nick at Night happy 20th birthday (Happy Birthday, Nick at Nite). The grandad of rerun TV turns 20 on July 1st. I hope we won't be celebrating their 30th. It's not that I don't like Nick at Night - I wish I had more time to enjoy its soothing shows - its just that I hope that ten years from now we won't have to wait for a broadcaster to show us a rerun. I hope that reruns will be readily available for download via broadcatching. If this happens, there still be room in my heart for a Nick at Night playlist.

A Typical Joe on the future of television (Goodbye Network TV; Hello We TV).

I spent 12 years working in community media production. The problem wasn't the talent or the creativity. It was the time, money and complexity. Each of those is being addressed. If the media industry keeps it up, they'll force us away from the 6 hours we spend in front of the TV. And we'll use those hours instead, making our own.

Nice, short little piece.

A Blog Doesn't Need a Clever Name has a summary of a Wall Street Journal article about the product placement in a new reality TV show (A New Wave of 'Advertising' Pays Producer, Not Network). Very interesting. Reality television impresario Mark Burnett does the product placement and gets the payment, cutting CBS out of the picture. Very interesting. UPDATE 1005PT - In related news, the New York Times reports about dissatisfaction with the pay and benefits for writers on reality shows (Union Takes Aim at Reality TV). via Adam Curry

In From Mixtape to Playlist, Derek Slater wonders about the potentials for social recommendation tools for music.

My hope is that these burgeoning taste-sharing tools can help restart a conversation about how technology can unleash a richer musical culture. We should be celebrating what technology can do for music. Who could object to consumers enjoying music more, enjoying a greater diversity of music, being more creative, engaging music more deeply, and coming together with each other because of music? That's the positive vision I'd like to explore in relation to these tools.

The Shifted Librarian points to an "audio literature trivia game": Who Said? (The Perfect Podcast for Librarians).

Every other day or so, I'll make an audio recording from a novel. It will be short passage, always something a character says. Your task will be to guess the character, book and author.

Lots of good marketing opportunities here, I think.

Techdirt has a nice collection of links regarding the many outdated state requirements that every municipality must approve the provision of television services in their communities (IPTV Saga: Verizon Sticks With Good Ol' Lobbying, Adds Cash Incentive). Can we get some regulation not designed for the 1800s around here? Is that too much to ask? Instead of making life difficult for television providers these cities would be better off figuring out how they're going to replace cable tax revenues when broadcatching takes off.

One of the difficulties that podcasts face is simple lack of attention bandwidth. I can read (or scan) far many more blog postings than I can podcasts. This will always be the case, but there are quite a number of improvements in the technology that can be made to improve access. For example, many of the longer podcasts should be broken up into segments that can be easily skipped, one segment of a show to the next. Another idea: have meta-information about the podcast included in the audio itself at the beginning (topics, time, etc.).

Ed Bott has another suggestion (Tip of the Day: Listen to a Podcast at Warp Speed).

Windows Media Player has a well-hidden advanced playback control that allows you to vary the speed at which a media clip is played back. This feature, it turns out, is ideal for listening to broadcasts that emphasize the spoken word, such as podcasts and vlogs. This feature does much more than simply rewind or fast-forward a media clip; it performs time compression and expansion, speeding up or slowing down the pace of playback but maintaining audio and video fidelity—keeping a narrator or host's voice from sounding like a cartoon character when the audio or video clip is played at faster than normal speed.

Use this feature to “speed read” an instructional video or a podcast, for example, viewing or listening to the full program in a fraction of its normal running time while still being able to understand the audio.

I've actually experienced similar technology in the past (audio tech for the vision impaired) and it works pretty well. With practice and experience you can scan audio pretty darn quickly.

Of course, such technology can't be some hidden trick, but must be readily accessed and adjustable, such as through a scroll wheel or some such.

Are the podcasting gods listening?

As Jason Schultz says, Rush Limbaugh may actually be "a copyfighter at heart" (Rush Limbaugh: Copyfighter?). Turns out RL is not terribly happy with the music licensing situation for podcasts (Rush Limbaugh Podcast All the Rage):

They were righteously indignant and offended and they said, "No, it has nothing to do with that. The cost is prohibitive." I mean there's no system set up for this kind of thing yet. We're away ahead of the curve to do this legally. I can't explain the people that are doing it in a way that we have been told is illegal, and I can't explain why they're doing it, and the fact that they are doing it does not give us the confidence that we could do it ourselves. We have a big legal team that's looked into this. But I just want to tell you we're continually working on it, which at this point simply means monitoring developments in this whole copyright and piracy law. I know the Millennium Copyright Act is what this is all about, and until that's changed, none of this is going to change. In fact I just saw a story in my RSS reader today that Sony is coming out with a new system to copy-protect their CDs. There's software on their CDs that will allow a maximum of three dubs, three copies, and then it shuts down. So if somebody goes and buy a CD, they can copy it three times, but that's it and it's not on all their CDs. It's a new technology that they are embedding in the CDs, and of course the DVD industry has gotten even much tougher than the music industry has, but it's a huge deal and we have looked at it in every which way and that's what we have been told by the legal eagles. Whatever anybody else is doing out there is of no consequence to us. Based on what we have learned anybody else doing this is doing so at risk, and that's as much as I will say about it.

His legal explanation is a bit confused, the licensing issues for podcasts don't have much to do with the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but he seems to want to liberalize it a bit, which would be good. Previous post on Rush Limbaugh and copyright here: Rush Limbaugh to Launch Podcast on June 3rd - No Music Though.

Last Sunday, on Corante's Podcasting Jeff De Cagna asked, what the role of profanity in podcasting was (Profanity in Podcasting: What is its Role?).

But there is an even more fundamental inquiry I'd like to pose here: what is the role of profanity in podcasting? Do we need to curse to demonstrate our fidelity to free speech? What is the point at which our defiant acts against the FCC will cease to be purposeful, and we will just become garbage mouths in the eyes (and ears) of our listeners? I know I'm probably messing with the bull here, so I'll be prepared! [emphasis in original]

The answer is simple, really. It plays whatever role the speaker desires. If that role doesn't mesh with the role the audience cares for, the audience will stop listening.

Use profanity, don't use profanity. It's a judgement call.

The real question is whether some censorship regime is necessary.

Last week on the Yahoo podcasters group, there was an extremely passionate discussion (complete with name calling) of profanity in podcasting and how it can be screened by listeners who prefer to avoid it themselves or want to keep it away from their kids. At the moment, of course, there isn't a way to screen for profanity short of listening to the podcasts. Some group members advocated a voluntary ratings system, while others recoiled at the suggestion. A key question is who gets to decide what is or isn't profane and by what cultural standard, an extremely relevant matter given podcasting's global reach. [link in original]

But really, is this necessary? The internet has a number of rating schemes, they're mostly useless. I've never noticed any blogs that are rated, why should podcasts? Depending on the audience, most blogs simply exercise a judgement call. Some refuse to publish vulgarities, others do. Sometimes the sites warn their readers, sometimes they don't. Seems to work just fine.

Of course, I'm sure the topic will come up again and again and again ...

Change and progress is wonderful, but sometimes we need to assimilate it, as Firefox developer Blake Ross reminds us (The Next Big Thing is Not My Concern).

Here’s what I mean: put a digital picture and an instant message window side by side and ask Mom to share the picture. Even though the windows are approximately five pixels apart, sharing them is about as intuitive as a W2 form. It’s actually easier to share a picture sitting on a server in China than it is to share your own stuff. And you want me to gush about podcasting?

via Ant's Eye View

PVR Wire reports on an anti-commercial-skipping experiment during the Indy Car series, playing the commercials in a split screen while the race continues (ABC Split-Screen Experiment a Success). Read the announcement ( ESPN, ABC Sports to Provide Continuous Race Coverage). I suggest that advertisers will find clever ways to take advantage of new technologies such as TiVo.

Last week I wrote a story about the death of the channel (Die Channel. Die! Die! Die!). Of course, if the channel dies, the whole concept of the network begins to make a lot less sense. They'll certainly have to change.

Well, it turns out that back in April, Deloitte published a report predicting the death of the broadcast network (Television Networks in the 21st Century).

Read the press release: Television Networks Threatened with Extinction: Change or Die, Says Deloitte Report
Read the 16-page report: Television Networks in the 21st Century [PDF]

As markets fragment, control shifts from suppliers to buyers - or in this case, from broadcast networks to viewers or consumers. That shift raises serious questions about the continued viability of the broadcast network business model.

Today, major television networks (public and private) and their affiliates still cling to a premium as the only media outlets with true mass-market reach. But as fragmentation continues, even the most optimistic advertisers have come to realize that no single channel can truly reach the masses. The mass-market is being re-defined.

Good read, though I don't think their recommendations are quite radical enough.

More recently, like yesterday, Broadcasting and Cable reported on a recent panel discussion about the future of television in which several senior executives participated and predicted the death of one or more networks in the next five years (NBC, Touchstone Chiefs: Some Broadcast Nets Won't Survive). On the other hand, "'Frankly, network television is here to stay,' said Magna Global Worldwide Chairman and CEO Bill Cella." TV Squad responded (Networks Better Get Ready for a Change):

If it’s true, as Bill Cella says in this article, that network television as a business model is here to stay, it’s only because those with vested interests in it’s survival will call in as many favors as they have to in order to guarantee it. I think that yes, in five years the network landscape will look much as it does now minus perhaps one major player. But after that it’s anyone’s guess.

That's about right, I think.

via Smart Mobs