Webcasting
General | Webcasting
Submitted by johnh on May 27, 2007 - 19:04.
Nobody seems to be talking about it, but Webjay will close next month, according to a well-concealed announcement on Wednesday.
Yahoo bought it only sixteen months ago.
Presumably it'll join Blo.gs, which Yahoo bought some time back from Jim Winstead, assuring him throughout that they'd be taking good care of his baby. Last December 11th, someone at Yahoo broke it, and it remains buggered to this day. Nobody's built anything to replicate what it did yet, either.
Two examples, off the top of my head, of Yahoo rushing in, buying something which worked for thousands of people every day, and promptly smashing them to pieces.
So, if you need to make a couple of years' salary as quickly as possible and you don't mind having someone erect a permanent monument to your wasted effort and the kicking of your users in the face... why not give Yahoo a ring?
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
General | Webcasting
Submitted by johnh on August 10, 2006 - 14:16.
It's that time of year again where I leave home for three weeks and spend every waking moment in the pursuit of all the stress and long hours I need.
Evidence of this can be heard at Festival FM on 87.7FM in the City of Edinburgh, and elsewhere since I finally got the streaming server going. So you can listen to me every day (except this weekend) on the World Wide Inter-Information Super Web Nets at the rather civilised hour of 6pm.
Next week, when my Station Manager's Cellphone isn't ringing every 45 seconds, we'll be putting my money where my mouth was in Dublin in March, where I pissed off the entire Irish podcasting community after being asked a question I wasn't there to answer.
Specifically, I was saying that I find most podcasts unlistenable or pointless, because so many of them try to do things which radio is better at, and so few treat the process as an opportunity to produce (in the studio sense of the word), which for my money is the only potential benefit of not being live.
That said, Festival FM is incredibly podcast-friendly, what with the hundreds of comics, actors, artists and producers coming through the place, thirty or forty times per day, and doing interview/plugs for their shows which last about 15-20 minutes. So you might like some of these as podcasts next week.
Me, I much prefer to listen to it as it happens. Give it a try.
Oh, and feel free to annoy me during the programme as it's happening (another thing you can only do live) by mailing studio@festivalfm.net. Those playing along in the UK can also text 'festival ' and a message to 60300.
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
Webcasting
Submitted by johnh on May 30, 2006 - 13:11.
Dixons is now selling a Slingbox which will work here. Buy it in Dixons or Currys or PC World.
Here's a description of what it does and why you might care either way.
They're calling it a UK version, but since it does PAL transcoding and has an aerial socket pass-through (like the one on your VCR), it ought to work just fine for Ireland as well. I especially like the fact that its software remote can emulate a Tivo remote; since we have a Tivo that's a nice thing to have.
The only downside: the client software is Windows-only.
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
General | Webcasting | Webcasting: EU | Webcasting: US
Submitted by johnh on February 4, 2006 - 20:09.
Attention: speculation alert!
What if all this 'darknet' stuff and the wanton hiring in London and the blah blah blah was far, far more interesting than some pissant spat about Baby Bells in the US?
For a very wild theory indeed, click 'Read More' to continue.
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
Webcasting | Webcasting: EU
Submitted by johnh on November 28, 2005 - 18:09.
IMRO, the Irish Music Rights Organisation, would seem to be the Irish equivalent of Britain's PRS and PPL merged into one. Edit: That should be PRS and MCPS. PPI handles phonographic performance, and (double-woo!) also licenses fairly.
The stunning part is that it licenses internet radio in a fair and sensible manner. As of now, you'll pay between 4% and 9% of net revenue (which is between 44% and 100% of what regular terrestrial radio pays in Britain), with a minimum of €1393 per annum.
Now that's something for Ireland to shout about, and a very good reason for anyone operating in Britain to pack up shop and move.
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
3G | Webcasting | Webcasting: EU | Webcasting: US
Submitted by johnh on November 16, 2005 - 11:33.
Well, the ROKR "iPod phone" from Motorola was a disaster for them in the US. So it's a rare thing when a major company (and a telco, at that) steps back and looks at what it did wrong. Rarer still when they hit the correct answer spot on.
Cingular is to add broadcast radio to its phone network.
Sadly, it's Music Choice. Fumbled three feet from the touchline, as I believe local parlance would have it. But hey, pretty close for a first attempt.
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
Webcasting | Webcasting: EU | Webcasting: US
Submitted by johnh on January 3, 2005 - 08:29.
Cybersky-TV [more info] represents, if it turns out to work, the holy grail of webcasting. Like Bittorrent, but for live TV. Expect it to be chock-full of relays of live sports, movie channels, cable pr0n and all other kinds of infringements when (if) it launches on schedule in about a month's time. Shortly after that, there'll be homebrew versions of the above as people figure out how to make a 'channel' by making a looping playlist from from their TiVo recordings and downloaded torrent files.
Shortly after *that*, it gets interesting as the required 'substantial non-infringing uses' get underway with community and college radio and TV channels, some of them brand new. Home appliances which can view these new channels. Auto-downloading plugins for Windows Media Player and RealPlayer/QT. If it works.
For broadcasting, probably the beginning of a fatal earthquake. *Totally* the end of cable TV and the ever-crappy DAB Digital Radio. If it works, if it works, if it works...
... Peercast, for example, just falls short of the mark - extremely skippy for the most part even over DSL - and is too tricky for end-users even though the Winamp plugin is very painless. The thing is, something which does work is definitely coming down the pipe any moment now. Get ready. Meantime, I've signed up for the CTV testing runs and I'll let you know how it's going.
Happy new year...
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
Webcasting | Webcasting: US
Submitted by johnh on December 21, 2004 - 12:20.
MP3newswire is kicking off quite the rumour wave with a suggesiton that Apple's going to produce an iPod with a Sirius satellite radio receiver. Notes:
- Sirius is spending a lot of cash right now, having just picked up Howard Stern for half a billion dollars. It's theoretically possible that they're also spending a buttload of cash to persuade Apple to carry their stuff: clearly their current goal is to kill XM out back with an axe.
- I think the resulting product would be too damned big for this to be true.
- Typically, none of the USian commenters are bothering to pay attention to the fact that this thing would be nothing more than a doorstop outside continental North America. Apple doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, currently have any other products which simply don't operate abroad.
Initial take: nah.
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
Webcasting | Webcasting: EU | Webcasting: US | Wireless
Submitted by johnh on October 17, 2004 - 22:05.
SoniqCast Aireo 2: 20GB MP3 player with built-in WiFi
I'm a radio person, so I don't really give a stuff about the 20Gb hard disk and the ability to spend money on ephemeral stuff that goes down the flusher at the first sign of a disk error - all that's in the realm of the rich kids as far as I'm concerned.
No, this is interesting because it has a Wifi adapter and can therefore stream internet radio. Sure, the number of places where you can wander around listening to your home town's breakfast show while abroad is limited *now*, but there's a clear trend developing.
Keep that spare eye on Wi-Max, and fer Chrissakes, if you've got money tied up in any company involved in DAB digital radio, get it the hell out.
For seven years now I've been boring people to death about this one, but here I go again because I'm right: eventually digital radio distribution will become a straight fight between
- DAB, where 'old' radio continues to make a long-term business plan out of spectrum scarcity. Where you'll never get more than 35 stations at a time, none of which you want to hear anyway. Where Capital FM and Heart own the airwaves.
- Portable internet radio delivered by 3G or WiMax or Satellite or whatever, where you can choose any radio station the hell you like from anywhere on earth. Where Des O'Connor FM - All Des, All The Time makes serious money because it owns all the Des fans in the world - while Capital FM is relegated to just one more of the 4500 available CHR stations on the dial. Where all the remaining financial impetus to waste spectrum on catering to common denominators is removed.
And in that straight fight to the death, digital radio is fucked in the first round.
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
General | Webcasting | Webcasting: EU | Webcasting: US | Wireless
Submitted by johnh on October 6, 2004 - 13:41.
What the hell is this podcasting crap?
I was quietly ignoring it for weeks, secure in the knowledge that it was just Dave Winer plugging the enclosures feature of RSS 2 by other means (conveniently ignoring the fact that you can send encoded binary data in any XML format you like already by wrapping it in [CDATA] tags).
But today I see that the bullshit wagon is starting to get some traction - admittedly almost entirely at the hands of Winer and Adam-Curry-who-isn't-famous-unless-you're-over-35-and-American - with a couple of truly outrageous pieces of nonsense.
Exhibit A: A suspiciously-anonymous, wilful, pollution of Wikipedia. "They are published in an RSS 2.0 enclosure feed", no doubt because just downloading an MP3 won't work with an audio file. But the first line is just puke-inducing: "Podcasting is based on asynchronous bundles of passion". Wankers, wankers, wankers.
Exhibit B: Why Podcasting Will Save Radio. Get a fucking grip.
Let's set this straight for a minute.
-
If it's not live, it's not radio.
If you have to download 30Mb of data before you hear anything it's - at best - audio-on-demand.
-
If it's not instant, it's not radio.
Download it overnight to your iPod? "...and here's the news from yesterday. Get it while it's cold."
-
If only five people in the entire world are doing it and insisting all the while that you need a £400 piece of kit to play, it's not interesting.
(This, of course, being something it shares with Digital Radio, but I digress.) "iPod, iPod, iPod, we have large disposable incomes and we're big fish in our vanishingly-small micro-famous pond." Yawn. Welcome to BRN - the Bourgeois Radio Network. Call me back when someone's listening. But they won't be.
We've heard it all before:
"DTP enables anybody in the world to put out their own magazine." Or in other words, DTP enables anyone in the world to put out a butt-ugly photocopied pile of crap using every single font that came free with Microsoft Publisher. Having the tool does not mean you can design something and it does not mean you can write your way out of a paper bag.
"Self-publishing enables anybody in the world to publish their book." Self publishing enables anybody whose vanity matches the size of their wallet to print a book which nobody wants to read. There's a better-than-average chance that the publisher didn't want to print your book because your book sucks. Get over it.
And now we have "Podcasting [spit] enables anyone to produce their own radio programme." Whoopee-do. You mean I can spend 2 hours downloading an MP3 of someone with a nasally whine mumbling incoherently into a low-quality microphone while driving around in his car? Really? Can I?
Speech radio is NOT just about talking into a microphone. It's about communicating a message to people. It's about good writing far, far more than it's about having a 'good radio voice'. This stuff has neither.
It's not radio, people. It's like downloading a talking book. Except without the writing talent.
[sigh] On the plus side this thing *might* have something going for it in the ongoing battle to 'save radio'. While the ego-ridden rich kids are concentrating on this little successor to Pointcast and its provenly-failed ilk, it means that they're opting out of the real future of broadcasting, where a million stations bloom without the restriction on frequencies inherent in the old model, and the best programming gets the biggest audiences. And if that means they won't be getting their goo all over our thing, so much the better.
More on the real story tomorrow. I've got a piece in the works due in by then.
read more | 1 comment | delicious | digg | reddit
