The problem with Hulu - which seems pretty cool, with the wide range of content available - is the complete lockdown. I can watch a huge range of stuff (even old stuff) - but I can't take it anywhere. I can sit in front of my Laptop and watch it (hello, HD tv in ther other room) - but I can't transfer it to my iPod, I can't save it to my laptop to watch later (like, say, on a plane). So sure, it looks cool. Bottom line though: utterly, totally, and completely useless.

Looks like NBC is still on the stupid train - they say they want to be back on iTunes, but only if Apple lets them do stupid stuff - like jack up the prices and prevent shows from playing on iPods. Yeah, there's a plan: disable all of the useful functionality and charge more! If Zucker has learned anything, it's not obvious :)

Technorati Tags: nbc, itunes, stupidity

I finally sat down and watched the last episode of season 2 of Jericho; it had more holes in it than the first season, which was hard to do. On the other hand, if you're the kind of conspiracy nut who still thinks FDR planned Pearl Harbor (not to mention the more modern versions of the same thinking), then maybe you'll enjoy it - it definitely falls into the "6 impossible things before breakfast" theory of plot development.

SciFi Wire reports an interesting trend at NBC - fewer repeats during the opening run of a season:

NBC's returning genre shows--Heroes, Chuck and Medium--will each air a full complement of original episodes next season, in contrast to this year's strike-truncated season, with Heroes and Chuck set to air without repeats for 13 episodes.

Part of this is the competition for attention: DVRs, on-demand video, the internet, gaming consoles. It's going to get tighter, too. I spotted this story about a big upgrade to Comcast service out in Minneapolis:

Comcast Corp. will start offering faster Internet services in Minnesota's Twin Cities region on Thursday, with plans to extend that type of next-generation system to its entire service area by 2010.

...

With the faster service, a customer could download a 4 gigabyte high-definition movie in about 10 minutes, compared with about an hour at previous speeds.

As that kind of service rolls out, online behavior is going to change a lot. Never mind BitTorrent; that's a bleeding edge use, and while it impacts things, the mainstream applications (iTunes, for instance) are going to start driving big changes. How will viewing behavior change when we can download an HD movie almost as fast as we can download a single song? It's going to cause a shift.

Technorati Tags: downloads, torrents

If you watch Stargate SG-1, you know about the replicators. Well, in the movie that just came out (which wraps up the ORI thread), we learn why the replicators are so devious - the little buggers are Javascript powered. Clearly, to stop them the team should hav e deployed a SOA solution :)

Andy Plesser thinks that sponsored shows are the wave of the future online - which is an interesting step back to the dawn of TV. Way back when, shows were often sponsored by one company in order to promote a brand (I recall a morning wildlife show sponsored by Mutual of Omaha - and the funny thing is, I remember the company better than I remember the show. Could we be heading back that way? I think it's a model that could work online, so long as the sponsor and the audience match up well.

Technorati Tags: iptv, video

Hmm - via Steve Rubel, I see that some people are trying to believe some pretty strange things about DVR use:

On average, half of all DVR primetime program playback occurs within the same day of recording. By the end of the following day, DVR owners complete approximately three-quarters of all program playback, Palisades said

I'd love to see their sample space of DVR users - it neither matches our use, nor that of anyone else I know with a DVR.

Technorati Tags: dvr, advertising

Apparently, pretty stupid. I'm watching CSI, and it happens to be the night of the Iowa Caucuses. Sure, those are newsworthy, and I expect updates trawling through the bottom area of the TV screen. What does CBS do, though? They push the show into a corner, run a text update - and silence the audio to play "dramatic" music.

WTF is up with that? Silence the audio for the show to play dramatic music? Are they taking "how can I piss off my customers" lessons from the RIAA?

Technorati Tags: stupidity