Tuesday, January 20, 2009

UCLA Media Tech Class Winter Quarter 09 Class #2

Sorry for the delayed post.

I watched the inauguration this morning at a the Church in Ocean Park with a couple hundred cheering people. Of note is that it was on CNN projected on to a large wall out of a laptop connected via WiFi to the Internet. A complete end run around CATV and DBS and there were very few hitches.

Also notable was the parnership between CNN and Facebook whereby about a million folks could "share" on screen concurrent with CNN's coverage. CNN cut to Facebook's offices periodically to get the "Facebook" report. Another shift in media tech and an attempt at synergy.

Class #2 was mostly devoted to my brief on CES which I posted last week.
Thanks for your participation and the news contributions:
Tiffany discussed www.youtube.com/senatehub and www.youtube.com/househub .
This is amazing. A mashup map UI allows you to visually drill down to your state and find your Senator or Congressman and then you get a lineup of videos on them. So simple yet so profound. A direct line to these politicos on-demand. Of course they only post what they want, and you could probably watch Cspan all day, but this is still a major end run around traditional TV and a yet another part of the social media wave.

Stephen discussed AOLs reorganization into a variety of verticals with its formation of MEDIAGLO (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10141044-36.html) . We can debate how well their strategy will work. Are these verticals synergistic? The Time Warner, AOL Merger was obviously one of the great failures of M & A history. Maybe AOL will yet find a way to thrive. Its still mystifies many, as well as me, why they paid $850 million for Bebo! As an aside, be sure to listen to an excellent interview with Stephen about the THRs 100 most powerful women list on KCRW’s THE BUSINESS podcast (http://feeds.kcrw.com/~r/kcrw/tb/~3/510272329/tb_2009-01-12-182216.mp3 ).

Tracy brought up a story on Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt attempting to aid the print media business! It was commented that Google needs print because it is a driver for online searching. Even though Google has sapped the guts our of print advertising, they still need print and they need competition. They don’t want antitrust. Interestingly, Google just announced that it is shuttering its 2 year old Print Ad division (
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/technology/internet/21google.html?emc=eta1 ) due to poor revenue!

Reed pointed out the imminent arrival of 2TB SD cards within 5 years. Indeed I saw this as well at CES. Look for 100GB sizes this year. All this to say that there is a quiet revolution in personal cheap storage that will no doubt elicit new applications.

To follow-up on the question about the palm sized D.J. rig it was the Pacemaker from Tonium:
http://www.tonium.com/ out of Stockholm Sweden. Sphere: Related Content

5 comments:

Tiffany said...

For all of the hype and advertising encouraging watching the inauguration on a .com, personal experience proved impossible.

I tried every site I could find and all were blocked up with too much traffic, and wouldn’t run. It also could have been partially on my side as well, but I never could get any of them to work. As a commentary on our (read: my) increased reliance on the web, it took me until the end of Obama’s speech to remember I had a radio on my desk behind me (from before the days of internet radio).

Considering cnn.com served 18.8 million total online viewers (previous record was 5.3 million streams from electron day), and Facebook had 8,500 updates per minute during his speech, I suppose it’s no surprise access was difficult.

Other friends had similar stuttering issues with video and audio at various sites.
I suppose we’re all off to YouTube for a recap!

Vivian Lee Arber-Moore said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Vivian Lee Arber-Moore said...

While I was floating around the internet looking for some interesting class related news, I stumbled on an educational site with audio down loads of classes. Although the site seems not to have taken advantage of all of the market possibilities yet, it also seems geared to do so in the future by obtaining the right to offer CLE and MCLA credit classes on demand. The classes that initially drew me to the site are linked below. I hope this is of interest.

http://westlegaledcenter.com/program_guide/course_detail.jsp?courseId=18091297&title=New_Digital_Media:_Recent_Law_and_Emerging_Trends

http://westlegaledcenter.findlaw.com/program_guide/course_detail.jsp?courseId=18304950&title=The_Digital_Law_Firm:_Bringing_It_All_Together

Mi Vida said...

Hi Clan,

interesting class last night. Two things I wanted to ask, what was the name of the "genesis" science tv program? my other question is regarding a music site I came across, it is called MUSICANE, it seems very interesting and doing well, but I just cant figure out what the benefits of using it are. Maybe we can brng it up on our class regarding online music sites.

Stuart W. Volkow said...

Good point about the wobbly infrastructure of Internet Video. It was never designed to distribute streaming video to the masses. Maybe Obama's digital stimulus will help. Better compression and the content distribution networks are helping. It's a miracle it all worked as well as it did!

Musicane looks like a good example of Social Media.

Check out:
http://www.hulu.com/regenesis. I only found it on HULU. It has a science companion site:
http://www.letstalkscience.ca/main/The_News/Latest_News/Revealing_ReGenesis:_Explore_TV%92s_Experiment_with_Gene_Science_Fact_and_Fiction_A_Scientific_Success/
And even a remix from the show's score!
http://www.last.fm/music/ReGenesis+:+ReMixed