Analog-Theater 2.0

Found two songs of hers remixed on di.fm and then looked at her actual work.  Not bad.

http://www.halflightandshadows.com/ — New Album

I knew going into my last post that I should be doing a fully researched and professionally bound research paper and not a half hour/forty-five minute post on a website.  But you got what you got, and I did what I did.

The market model 2

You are correct, it is all about income, but the engine that drives that revenue is starting to stutter.  Music sales are higher then ever before, but sales of physical media and entire albums are way down.  In the mean time indepentant artists and labels are pushing into the turf that has been traditionally controlled by the larger media outlets.  The reason for this is that cost to produce a professional quality CD has collapsed.  No longer does an artist need expensive studio time.  Marketing via Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, MetaCafe, and other media outlets is free(is anyone still using Myspace?), and digital distribution combined with ondemand printing serverices for physical media make self pulication a reality.

A professional studio can now be a room with good acoustics and a laptop.  The big boards you see the engineer sitting infront of is now fairly inexpensive and in some cases free (with the purchase of a MAC) software.  So, an artist with a decent computer, a CD burner, and maybe a label maker or disc printer, can start cranking out professional quality media.

The test is taking place at http://testing.analog-theater.com/

So, yes, I’m still on a kick about the future of media, but for good reason.  I think the writing is finally on the wall for some of the older media companies.  Companies that just simply can’t or won’t accept that the world and content delivery have changed, and no amount money thrown at the problem, no matter how many lawyers they have, no matter how many congress critters they rent or purchase outright, nothing will put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  The market won’t allow it.  (I’m also not talking simply talking about stealing music, movies, or software)

Why won’t the market allow us to go back to the old model.  Cost. I’m going to link you out to an article I read a few weeks ago, but I also want you to think about this in terms of packaging, distribution, and materials.

Basically, Amazon, Itunes, Rhapsody, and the rest will sell you the same music you can get on a CD at Wallyworld, but the one you get from the online folk is all digital.  This means in a sense, they get one copy, make millions of identical copies at the cost of running a few computers, and then pay a small bandwidth fee to deliver it to you now.  Not later, not then, not some indefinite time in the future when you make time to go to the store, NOW!  So, did you think about this in terms of cost?  No one paid for a print run of a few hundred thousand of the latest wanna be pop stars CD’s, nobody paid for the plastic, the shrinkwrap, the transportation, the rent for the hundreds of retail outlets, the gas to go buy them.  All they paid for was some webhosting and CD ripping.  You get instant gratification or disgust depending on the album, they save millions and charge you about 30% less.

Want proof?  Go take a look at the state of news papers today.  Everything that they print ends up online along with everything CNN reports, Fox News makes up, and MS NBC lets it’s one viewer know about.   The key here is the tons of ink and paper that are consume everyday.  Then paying that strange albino (maybe they just play a lot of WOW) couple to drop it off at your house at 3am everyday.  Sure CNN, Fox News, and to a lesser extent MS NBC film everything, but it is all digital, pay some guy to point that super expensive camera that doesn’t use film at the folks at the desk and then beam it out to the cable companies and the internet.  Sell some advertising, and be done with it.  When was the last time you actually looked at a news paper for anything that wasn’t related to the Sunday Coupon Section?…ohhh, I downloaded a few of those last week too…give it a few more years and that will be gone too.

Now, this brings me to a really fun part.  Companies that compete with themselves.  Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox, Verizon, Sony, and a few others.   Click the link for Time Warner for a good laugh, or cry if you are a customer.

Ever wonder why download caps are such a big deal for cable companies?  Not that it doesn’t cost money to deliver bandwidth to your house, but why say 40Gigabytes?  Because they don’t want you online looking at the competition.  They want you sitting on your couch watching your super HD, DVR’ed, digitally broadcast cable television. Or better yet, ordering Paper Per View, anything they can upsell you to.

If you go online and discover that a little box about the size a paper back book will let you watch any of a few thousand Netflix movies when and where you want, or that ABC, NBC, CBS, and others have their shows on their websites, or that Hulu, Joost, and that other site have cavernous amounts of content.  Well then you might want to cancel cable tv and just eat up a few hundred gig of bandwidth every month.  And they can’t monetize it. (The Netflix Roku player also plays Amazon Ubox video, this is basically like pay per view, or iTunes videos.  DRM’ed, digital copies, that you can download.  I don’t recommend them until you can actually burn them to something to use when and as you choose. )

So, that explains the cable companies, but Sony?  Sony is the force behind BlueRay.  A high capacity disc that may, or may not replace DVD’s.  I see it almost making it.  I have a Playstation 3, and it plays the four or five BlueRay discs I own.  Problem is, well see CD’s above, but add in the fact that Blue Ray can store massive amounts of Data, but who cares.  I have a 16 gig flash drive and if that isn’t big enough, I have a 250gig external that is USB powered, and I can reuse it.  Ok.  So Sony makes BlueRay, so what.  Well, you know how I own a PS3?, the one I just mentioned, did you know it has a digital store that sells movies and TV shows?.  Yeah, so at Target Sony wants you to buy the latest season of insert lousy reality show title here, on BlueRay, and when you get home and pop it into that PS3, they want you to buy and download that exact same show.

So, why the title?  I just read a book that had everything, telephone, mail, television, radio, and well all content delivered via the web, they didn’t call it that, but close enough.  Well, guess what?  My television delivery is IP Based, my telephone is VOIP, my favorite radio station is di.fm (some of you may prefer Sky.fm), I have how many email addresses, pay my bills online, and have started downloading books.

Next week, or sometime in the vague and misty future we will talk about Podcasts, e-books, and end of publishing as you know it.

Seriously though, if you enjoy anything history related, especially Roman I want to direct you to this guy’s podcast.  I’m on episode 60….Nero going off the deep end and committing

suicide and the year of the four emperors…also about the time of the great rebellion in Judea.  It is 100% free, and better then a lot of college courses I took.  The author will be on a four week break doing the wedding thing I won’t talk to Jared about, and then moving so it is a perfect time to catch up.

After a lot of deliberation and my other site getting hacked, it is time to upgrade Analog-Theater again, so get ready, Analog-Theater 3.0 will be out soon for all our reader to enjoy.

So, I hear all of you asking, how did my (I know, you think I know everything about everything, don’t you?) my website get hacked?  Well, the answer is that there are three culprits.  There is myself, I failed to upgrade the site when new security updated versions came out.  Then there is my host, who I think let the shared host get hacked, and then we have the hacker.  But, can I really blame the hacker, I mean, he/she/it was just doing what he/she/it does.  I don’t blame the dog excrement I step in for being dog excrement, and I don’t blame the dog for doing it there, I blame the person for not picking it up and myself for not looking out.

Now, for those of you worried that the site might, well crash, when I upgrade it.  Fear not, I will fully test this on a sub domain or something first.

Oh, and while Glee is not something I plan to watch, it does not suck.

My little sister Hannah seems to think that I need to tell people about things that are going on in my personal life. I occassionally share stuff when I deem it shareworthy. However, my impending doom, I mean nuptials, was not one of those things. I mean, how many thousands of people get married (and then divorced) each day? But Hannah seems to think that it’s important. My dad seems to think it’s important too because after he found it he suddenly wanted to talk to me about it. Since everyone seems so interested in it, I guess I should share. I must give my adoring fan what he or she wants.

About three years ago I proposed to Nancy and she said yes. Then we got into a couple fights and called it off. We’ve stayed in touch the entire time and a while back we decided to give it another try. I figured that since I’ve been getting bored with video games lately and my mother has been telling me that it’s my turn to get married now that Robert did it I might as well give it a try. And so far that’s the entire story.

Now, the other part. Apparently getting married is expensive. So much so, I wonder why people do it. Even more so when the bride to be is in another country. By the way, Nancy lives in Nicaragua. So, I’ve been looking at what all needs to be done. I need to get a new passport since I forgot to renew mine, I need to double check the price but I think it was around $100. I need to fly down there and see her (the application for the K1 visa, ie. fiancee visa, asks about if you’ve seen them in person in the last 2 years, so I’m guessing it’s important to do that), airfare for that is about $400. The application fee for the petition for the visa is $450. Then I need to bring her here. I’m guessing that the proper (and more costly) thing to do would be to fly down there and escort her back. That would be about $800. And then there is the wedding. Well, I created this website in hopes of getting rich, so please help me out.

To the left there is a nice little banner ad. Feel free to click on it. You don’t even have to order anything you don’t want to.

Since I don’t want to just take your money without giving you anything in return, I have found the following books. Each of them is the latest continuation of an awesome series that are coming out in the next couple months. I will get a small commission off of each sale.

And for those of you that are feeling more generous feel free to click on the tip jar. You can then give me money through paypal.

The more I pay attention, the more games I see that I want. Even though it is not coming out anytime soon, Guild Wars 2 is trying to keep people paying attention. I first started paying attention when they were talking about releasing it in early 2009. Now it’s release date is 2010/2011. However, they just released a teaser trailer (though much of it appears to be concept art). Click here to see the trailer.

Another game I’ve been anticipating is Supreme Commander 2. It was announced back in November of 2008 and has a release date of sometime in 2010. From what I saw on their website it appears to be the same as the original game. They have not announced any new factions, but I’m sure there will be some new toys.

A game that is a little closer to release is Aion. The artwork in the game looks fantastic. It is by NCSoft, the same company as Guild Wars. In fact, there is a promotion right now, if you preorder Aion, you will get a special emote in Guild Wars. For information about the promotion click here. Aion is scheduled for release September 22, 2009.

One game that is out now is Overlord 2. I’ve had some time to play around with it. The story is okay, but I don’t think its as good as the original. It does have some nice new features, like the minions riding on pets and resurrecting your favorite dead minions. I don’t like the new forging system, you can’t customize your weapons. But now that I think about it, I believe I talked about this before. However, I do want to show you this:

It’s the piles of gold on either side of my bed. Why can’t real life be more like this?

One of the ideas I had when I started this site was to do reviews of really lame movies and I did a few, but after a while it got hard to watch them.  Some of them; like Attack of the Killer Tomatos, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Vampirella were watchable, but Hot Rod and others were just mindnumbingly bad. 

After talking to a friend of mine, we were talking about movies and thought of watching good movies.  By good, we mean enjoyable, well written, and maybe even mentally stimulating.  Stuff that we think is worth watching.  To keep a regular schedule and maintain content here, I think weekly might be the best.  So, each week we will watch and review one movie.  That makes 52 movies for a year.  Now the question is what movies.

Doing some research online, some of the critically acclaimed movies are:

Citizen Kane
Gone with the Wind
Godfather
Star Wars
Casablanca

 On top of those, some of my top movie choices are:

Wristcutters
Iron Man
The Man from Earth
Equilibrium
The Dark Knight
Cowboy Bebop: the movie
Signs
The Shawshank Redemption
Field of Dreams
Searching for Bobby Fischer

If anyone has any other suggestions, I’d appreciate them.  I think I’ll start the movies with the beginning of the calender year.  That way I have some time to prepare.