Webcasting: EU
General | Ireland | Vocal Voter | Webcasting: EU
Submitted by johnh on February 20, 2006 - 09:25.
...but then again I can only parse about 10-15% of it, not speaking the language as I don't. Still, this expat got a kewlness buzz from it when it showed up in my referer log.
An tImeall immortalises yours truly in the Irish language. I can read the bit about me having done something around Xmas, and having recently moved from England (Shasana) to Cork (Corcaigh).
Not sure I like the look of that John Bull clause though :)
(Incidentally, I've been here since August, and I'd really rather people didn't refer to me as English, what with my Scots family and my Irish passport and my sincerely-held belief that multicultural London and overwhelmingly-right-wing-and-backward England are best mentally seperated. I'm obviously in no position to tell whether that's being said, being Gaelige-ly challenged, but just in case...)
I've left a comment/appeal there which I'm happy to repeat here: IMHO VocalVoter must be bilingual and I'll need more volunteer help to make that happen.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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General | Webcasting | Webcasting: EU
Submitted by johnh on August 18, 2004 - 16:26.
...until August 28th. Working on a short-term radio station covering the Edinburgh Festivals.
Unsurprisingly, it's called Festival FM and if you're in the area we're on 106.9FM. If you're nowhere near the bloody area and you fancy hearing some of my entirely un-slick presentation sometime after 5pm, you can also listen live from FestivalFM.net in glorious 24kbps MP3 stereo.
That am all for now.
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Webcasting | Webcasting: EU | Webcasting: US
Submitted by johnh on June 10, 2004 - 12:07.
Yesterday a sudden flurry of postings about how TiVo could possibly be planning to deliver TV online. One of the odd things about living in the UK is that you forget that people in other countries don't necessarily know the things you know.
So:
- We already have this service
- It's called HomeChoice. It's DSL-based.
- It's been going for about 4 years
- Neither TiVo nor Netflix can afford to replicate it without either stock dilution, large investment or a big-ass partnership deal. Cost of subscriber acquisition here runs to about £400 per home before marketing. [eek]
You may now return to your US-centric worldview...
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Webcasting: EU
Submitted by johnh on April 5, 2003 - 19:49.
Broadband is for stuff you just can\'t do with a modem. Like watching Iraqi TV live off the satellite, or China\'s English-language service, or for those of you who don\'t get it at home, BBC News.
The provider is DSLTV of the Netherlands. They block access to the metafiles by geographic IP. Boooo. But thanks to this tip on Slate, I can tell you that the process goes like so:
* Change your browser\'s proxy settings to use the HTTP proxy at 212.203.5.93 on port 3128
* Visit the DSLTV website
* Pick a channel on the right
* Make clicky.
Webcasting is dead? My arse. Webcasting is the point.
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