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.

Well now, I was going to sit down and type up a fantastic post about some really amazing things, but then I decided to sit down and talk about two other issues.

As a lot of you, our reader, know, I tend to read a lot of Science Fiction, some fantasy, a little bit of historical fiction,  some actual history, and just about everything else that takes my fancy.  From all this reading the one thing I have to say is “Welcome to the Future”, we are living in it now.

First off, a lot of novels I have read keep talking about the wonders of Pre-packaged food, self heating packets, and self cooling drinks.  Well, I know I saw a patent a few years back on a self cooling soft drink can, but the can would cost $2.50 to produce and would have had serious disposal issues.  As for the self heating food packets…can anyone say MRE?  Yes, we had those in the Army.  But as for the wonders of Pre-packaged food, well I thought that was going to remain securely in the realms of science fiction until well after my time on this world ended, at least until a few recent trips down the frozen food isle.

If at anytime in the near future you have a few dollars, and about 40 minutes to kill, you have to try these. Bertolli make these oven bake dinners for two that really are outstanding.  Now, in most of my books, the dinners could be made in minutes, and these too can be microwaved, I just haven’t tried it yet.  For any of you interested in actually trying these here is a link to $1.00 off coupon.  Now, the wonders don’t stop with just brand, Wegmans grocery for those you nearby has an amazing self rising pizza for only $3.99, and it is more then enough for just the two of us.

Enough about food, onward to technology.

As a lot of you know, I have finally broken down and gotten this crazy thing called an iPhone.  At first I wasn’t really that happy with it, and I am definitely not happy with at&t or however they capitalize these days.  But replacement is outstanding.  So, now let us get into the nuts and bolts of this little gadget.

First we have the Amazon Kindle for iPhone.   Before anyone says “whoooh, that screen won’t work to read a book from!”, you are wrong.   The screen is very readable, even for long periods, the text size can be adjusted, and if you actually own the Kindle, it will synchronize the last page read between devices.  Best of all there are also countless free books ranging from classics to recent novels with most of the of the rest costing around $7 or $8.00.

Next up are games.  The variety, quality, and price for these are simply put, unbelievable.  I have a few free ones, but also several that would the modern hand held consoles would be hard put to match.  My favorite one right now is called Tradewinds 2.

Email support on this device really is another well thought out feature.  It supports all the major email formats, and currently I’m using imap for both my gmail account and my other one.  This keeps everything happily in sync.

For the practical of you out there, USAA has one hell of an application that lets you see all of your accounts, pay your bill, deposit a check, trade stock, even request an insurance id card.  I tried that last one and open the email seconds later to see my insurance id card.

For the less practical of you, there is even a flash light app, another to annoy anyone under 20 which emits a loud sound that I can’t hear but which gives me an ear ache and annoys the dog and one of my coworkers.

Now to talk about the last two feature which are probably the most important and expected, music/video playback and the phone.  It does all of these except the phone part excellently.  Sound quality and volume on calls are perfect, but the touch screen gets in the way.

What that leaves us with is basically a portable music player, book, telephone, video player, gaming console, web browsing device, email appliance, photo viewer, and far more.

As of 5 days from now, Analog-Theater will be 2 years old!  I know this because I just renewed the site:)

So, I have a lot to cover.

Yes, I’ve gotten married.

Yes, I bought an iPhone (crack phone)

But I’m going to cover more later.

I am not sure how many of you, our reader(s) still watch television using the old fashioned meathod of actually turning on the Tele, then switching to a channel, and  sitting down to watching a show all the way through.  I know that for the most part I don’t, and it now seems that the networks are not too happy about this.  NBC, ABC, CBS, and I guess Fox have a point though.  They try to build strong brands backed up by content and then supported by advertising revenue generated by airing commercials every few minutes.  But now we don’t watch those annoying commercials, and on two different cable televisions systems I have watched new commercials overlay the ones broadcast by the network (Thank you Verizon and Cox).  So now they aren’t getting paid.

On the other end of the spectrum this new world of television viewing has provided us, the consumers of content, with a plethora of new avenues by which to enjoy our favorite shows.  We can watch them when they air, DVR them, watch them on our computer at sites like Hulu or the networks own site, buy the DVD/BlueRay of the entire season after it runs, watch the entire season on Netflix’s Instant watch service, buy or rent the episode or season on iTunes or Amazon and download it, and probably a half dozen other means both legal and illegal (Bit Torrent).

This now brings me to the point of my post.  Kevin Wassong, a former television development executive who worked on Golden Girls has decided that this brave new world of television viewing, specifically Hulu, is a”…massive destruction of media value…”.  His argument is that the real value of a network is not in the shows that they produce, but in their history and I love his words here: “The years that it has taken the network to train consumers to expect a level of quality that can’t be matched”.  I am honestly unable to craft a short rebuttal without resorting to profanity.  Has he not turned on his television in the last decade?  Obviously he has, he talks about it, go read this for yourself if you like.  The link is here.

Over the past several years I have been forced by the networks to have no expectations of anything other then more reality television that I can not stand.  Every time ABC, NBC, CBS, and even Fox have aired a show that I am in the least bit interested in, they have then canceled it within the Season with only a few notable exceptions.  These shows have then been replaced with content that I can only believe is aimed at the Lowest Common Denominator.  Look at our current crop of winning shows like NBC’s The Biggest loser, Great American Road Trip and Celebrity Apprentice, ABC’s upcoming Reality Hit Wipeout and the Bachlorette.  This season she gets to service 30 different guys in her search for fleeting fame, money, and I guess maybe some kind of non-physical Love.

Our good friends on Cable aren’t much better.  MTV which was the channel we all wanted back in the 80’s and early 90’s, the one our parents hated, and which good little rebellious teenagers watched, has turned into nothing more then a playground for scripted reality and mainstream manufactured pop stardom.  Can anyone out there explain to me how Paris Hilton needs a new BFF.

There is no longer any expectation of quality from any network except possibly Discovery, National Geographic, and maybe a few others. (Note: TLC “The Learning Channel” does not make that list.  The only thing that you might, possibly, learn on that channel is that John and Kate now have 8 children and it isn’t easy to be a little person in a big world.)  The only value left to any produce of content is in what they produce, and today they need to wake up and realize this.  Nobody cares if the show runs on ABC, NBC, or PAX so long as they know which channel and what time to set the DVR for.  And after this past season, you need a computer in order to figure that out

Services like Hulu are essential in the modern world.  They drive viewers to shows and garner revenue with each viewer.  Claiming they are destroying a value that no longer exists is asinine.

Stop fighting the consumer.  Stop trying to block our access to content.  If I choose to DVR a show and watch it next week, pause it while it is live to go get a soda, or watch it on Hulu, be thankful I am at least taking the time out of my day to sit down and view it.  If I have paid the $2 per episode fee to purchase it, be even more thanful because that means I didn’t download the torrent.

I guess that is it.

Well now, we do have a lot to cover but I can’t remember half of what I wanted to talk about now.

Lets see.  Betty Crocker!  You buggers.  I bought your Chocolate Chip cookie mix, and wow did that not work out right.  The directions are fairly simplistic, but what came out of the oven wasn’t work the $3.00 for the bag.

Silk Soymilk.  Dear WhiteWave, I have enjoyed your Organic product for years.  This sudden shift to all natural is nonsense.  At least let me know you are going to change the formula and mark up the one I’ve been buying.   I’ve spent hours trying to nail down exactly what is required to call food “All Natual” and have had no luck.  I’ve scoured the FDA website to no end, but it turns out that no one really regulates it.  So, guess what, I am now buying the cheaper Organic store brand.  Thank you.

Lets see, what else is going on.

I went to see Star Trek.  I highly recommend this.  Very good movie, but did they need to kill 6 Billion folks to break the story line?

Amarok 2.0.2

Many of you are likely aware that I don’t always use Windows.  I tend to move around and my desktop of preference is KDE 4.2.2 at the moment.  Recently I went and installed Kubuntu 9.04 and noticed that I was having some serious difficulty in getting the Vocal Trance channel at di.fm to launch.  I’ve never had this problem before, for the last several years it has been simply click the link in Firefox and then point it to the program I want to have open it.  In the past this has always been Amarok.  Amarok has been a wonderful program that played everthing I wanted it to, and has done so with optimal sound quality.  But that was version 1.4 Amarok Fast Forward.  Today  I discovered the bloody aftermath of a bad train wreck on an interstate with a downed international flight that they for some reason call Amarok 2.0.2.

The new process to open steaming audio is to launch Amarok and try to figure out the interface.  This is not easy, to save time I recommend The Right of AshkEnte, but for those of you who aren’t up to summoning death, well your on your own.  Once you have mastered the interface visit your favorite online radio station and download the .pls file.  With Amarok open, click the Amarok drop down menu, open the .pls file, and then double click on the odd looking set of numbers with dots (ip address) now in the playlist field on the right…I think that is the playlist field.  I gave up and simply started using VLC.

Edit:

It appears that you can actually click the play button once you have told it to play the .pls file.  Why you need to download a playlist file, then manually point Amarok to this file, and then after having told it to play this file, click play I have no idea.  1.4 would open the file and play.

I think that each and every single one of us has heard the terms “Dog eat Dog” and “Rat Race”.  Many of us even remember “Greed is Good” and the famous “Me too Generation”.  What I never realized is how true to life they where.  It was a sad day today when I was made aware that I just don’t have what it takes to become a major player on the corporate stage.  I have that one major drawback, that singular failing, a conscience.

As everyone, including my dog, is no doubt aware some banks have been paying bonuses and then taking government money.  No problem, everyone likes money, and now that our friends in Washington, DC are dealing in imaginary number, there is enough for everyone.  Sadly that included the senior executives where I work.  Of course they all took theirs a few days after cutting 10% of the staff.  Now, before anyone chooses to insult them, it’s ok.  The million or so they paid out to themselves was justified, and they made sure they could not take anymore this year.  Oh, and anything they make over the first hundred thousand a year will be cut by 6%.  We found this out following the surprise second layoff.

But, before anyone out there worries, my job is safe and that second layoff was simply to secure our companies profitability.   They would never try to cash out and leave us in the red.  Honestly, since they could not sell the company a few months ago, every single one of them is fully committed to the success of the business and would never jeopardize our position as a market leader in whatever it is we do.  If that includes paying out bonuses more then equal to the full pay of every single person let go so far, that is justified because of all the hard work and big decisions they have to make.

As a human, I could never make some of those decisions simply because I see every person as a person and not a statistic.  I also understand the basic principles of business and balancing an account.  Seeing that we have a business to run, taking money for performance that does not warrant it and then laying off vital support staff (The only developer who understood the half finished system, the one person in IS who actually returned calls…the ops lab should not be providing internal support!) just doesn’t add up.  Not when the money was there to pay for them.  Layoffs are a necessary evil, staff needs to reflect the needs of the business, but it is not a first option for cost savings you idiots!