For those looking for more intelligent and thoughtful coverage of what is really going on in Egypt, Al Jazeera English is the place to go. Unfortunately, there isn’t a major cable company in the United States with the guts to carry the Qatar-based channel.
However, thanks to modern streaming technology viewers can bypass the gate keepers at KableTown. If you have a Rokuhooked up to your TV, add the Newscaster channel and you will now find Al Jazeera English listed as one of the available programs.
Roku rocks!
For years now those of that are tired of paying exorbitant monthly fees to their cable providers to receive 100s of different channels have been clamoring for a la carte television service. The problem is that most of us typically only watch a tiny fraction of the available channels. In my household we never ever watch the Golf channel or eternal world TV network or ESPN and have no desire to pay for them. The cable companies of course want none of this because they bundle all of these niche channels into packages with more popular channels to pump up their revenues. Allowing customers to pick and choose the channels they want would likely lead to substantially reduced revenues for the likes of Comcast and Time Warner.
When Roku introduced its original Netflix streaming box a couple of years ago it was just the beginning of routing around the cable companies. At first, the Roku could only stream Netflix and the quality and content was limited. However, Roku and Netflix have steadily improved the interface and the streaming quality to the point where the service can now deliver at 720p HD movies and TV shows on demand with quality similar to what we get directly through the cable box.
More importantly Roku made a brilliant move and created a software development kit that allowed programmers to create additional channels that run on the box to provide more content. These “channels” are apps similar to those you can run on most smartphones now. There are now dozens of channels available now for the Roku. Many of these channels are from independent content creators like the TWiT and Revision3 networks, but also include the likes of Pandora, Archive.org and others.
The Roku is now available in several versions that support standard definition and high def output with the top-end XD-S model also including a USB port so that a hard drive can be plugged in to playback local content including photos, music and video. Setup is very easy, just plug in the Roku to power and your TV and then connect to your local network. The Roku has both a wired ethernet port and WiFi. The box has HDMI, optical audio and composite audio/video outputs to support whatever your TV and stereo can handle. If you have an available HDMI port on your TV, the Roku requires a single cable connection. Whatever you do just make sure you order your HDMI cables from Amazon or Monoprice instead of paying the ridiculous prices charged by places like Best Buy.
Netflix is set up by default and the channel store allows you to browse for additional channels to add. If like me, you have an old computer set up with content for the family, you can also add the Roksbox channel that allows you stream content from other machines on your network. Last year I went through all of our old home videos and digitized them and they can now be played back on the TV through the Roku. The only problem with the Roku is limited video format support. Currently it only supports MP4 and H264 so I’ve had to convert a bunch of video content, but once that’s done it works great. Roku offers regular software updates and at some point it will hopefully add more codec support.
Whatever you choose to watch or listen to, the Roku has a clean simple interface that allows you browse through your available content. Netflix now offers a streaming only package for $7.99 and they are constantly adding more content including a lot of TV series. Now if networks like BBC, Discovery and HBO would just create Roku channels, I would happily subscribe and cut Comcast loose from everything but internet access.
Last fall Long Island newspaper Newsday decided it had enough of giving away its product online for free and put up a $5/week paywall. Given the plethora of free news sources, readers decided that Newsday didn’t need their money and went elsewhere. Three months after the paywall went up a grand total of 35 people had subscribed.
Now Newsday is apparently hoping that Apple’s iPad will help it gain some more digital subscribers. It remains to be seen if the iPad will be enough to get people to subscribe, but the ad above is definitely amusing.
The whole trend of using dead celebrities in ads is a bad one. I believe it is fundementally wrong for anyone to endorse a product they don’t believe in. Someone who is no longer alive may well believe in a product, but if they are not around to tell us first hand, who the hell are we to presume?
The latest example of this is an ad for the one laptop per child program. I think the program is a worthy one where people can donate money to send small, robust laptop computers to kids in developing countries. It’s entirely possible that if John Lennon were alive today that he might be a supporter of the program.
The problem is that Lennon has been dead for 28 years. To take the image and words of someone that has been dead for nearly three decades and digitally manipulate them to create a message that person never conveyed is simply wrong. For the OLPC foundation and Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono to assume that Lennon would do such an ad if he were alive today is ethically and morally wrong. The fact that the OLPC foundation is a non-profit is utterly irrelevant. Other companies have done similar digitally manipulated ads for commercial products which I consider even more disturbing and abhorrent. It’s time for this to stop.
Yesterday the House of Representatives rightly defeated a bailout package that would have largely let the Wall Street financial speculators off the hook for their idiotic and greedy behavior of the past decade. This morning on the Today show, the so-called “financial reporters were trying to incite a panic amongst their viewers to try and get them to call their representatives to pass the bill. Among the items included in a “report” on why this bailout is so important was a mention that interest rates on 30 year fixed rate mortgages had climbed by 0.25 percent over the last six months. This little tidbit in and of itself is absolutely meaningless. Fluctuations of a quarter point meant nothing earlier this decade and they don’t mean any more now. What might have provided some context to this argument would have been a mention on what the actual rates are right now for a 30 mortgage, but none was forthcoming. Based on this you might expect that we were back in the 18 percent days of the early Reagan years.
In fact a quick check online of mortgage interest rates shows a 30 year fixed loan running about 5.8-5.9 percent. That’s less than half a point more than the rate we got when we refinanced in 2002 (5.5 percent). Yes it’s higher but not ridiculously higher.
The report then goes on to ask why we should pay to bail out banks because our neighbors lied on their loan applications. First of all this is not only irresponsible, it’s also a lie! The reality is that most people didn’t lie on their loan applications, the banks lied to themselves in ignoring the financial resources of borrowers in making the loans. Banks loaned people way more money than they could afford to repay based on the false premise that prices would continue to climb and they could dump off the risk on unwitting investors in mortgage backed securities.
Why is NBC so desperate to create a financial panic? Could it have anything to do with the fact that NBC is owned by General Electric? And the fact that a large unit of that company is GE Capital which is heavily into the leasing and finance business? What is the likelihood that GE Capital is up to their eyeballs in this fiasco and they are looking for a handout? I’m guessing its pretty high. I would say that after you call your Representative and Senator and encourage them not to bail out Wall Street, your next call should be to NBC to tell them to stop yelling fire in the crowded theater.
Along with the Daily Show and Colbert Report, the Onion is perhaps the best source of political news in America today. The unfortunate irony is that none of the three are actual news sources. While all three are brilliantly funny, the truths that they tell wrapped in satire reveal the true decay of the mainstream media. With the media asking ridiculous questions about Obama’s choices regarding lapel decorations instead of discussing the travesty that is the FISA bill (giving retroactive immunity to phone companies for warrantless wiretaps), we must count on the Onion to reveal the truth about the disaster that has been the shrub presidency. It’s still not to late to impeach!
One of the greatest truth-tellers of the 20th century died last night when George Carlin succumbed to heart failure. Carlin was perhaps of the funniest humorist of our time but he was much more than a comic. He held up a mirror to the world to expose the hypocracy and absurdity of modern life. While some criticised Carlin for the coarse language he often used, it was in fact a tool in his verbal arsenal. One of the long standing topics of his monologues was the euphamism. Carlin was an advocate of calling a spade a spade, not softening shell-shock to battle fatigue and then PTSD. He used language to describe everything from the horror of war, to silliness of the hippy-dippy weatherman, to consumerism, to germs. Carlin has inspired the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The world needs more people willing to stand up speak truth to power in such an eloquent manner.
What do you suppose the chances are that the media will celebrate this truth teller in the way they fawned over Tim Russert last week. Unfortunately that won’t happen even though it should. Carlin provided us with far more reality than Russert ever did. We’ll miss you George.
On Sixty Minutes tonight Scott Pelley conducted one of the most disgraceful “interviews” I’ve ever seen with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pelley came off as such utterly arrogant jackass reading his questions directly from the list of White House talking points. His “questions” were nothing more than accusations of Iran’s supposed “crimes”. While Iran is definitely no angel, having supported Islamist groups in Lebanon, Palestine and elsewhere, the US government has been trying to whip up war fever against Iran. CBS should be ashamed of themselves allowing Pelley to conduct this inquisition and they should never have aired this propaganda piece. This is just another example of the utter corruption of the American mainstream media.
I’ve been saying for a long time that traditional mass media will soon be relegated to history. Now it looks like the next stage is coming. Over the last decade Clear Channel Communications has been snapping up radio stations and concert venues all over the country. They now have over 1200 radio stations including 4 of the 5 commercial radio stations in Ann Arbor (they tried to buy the other one a few years but were thwarted). After homogenizing American radio to the point that it became unlistenable and helping to drive people to other sources like mp3 players, they have now decided to put themselves up for sale. The company is heavily in debt and bleeding listeners. They’re apparently negotiating a leveraged buyout, possibly with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the company that years ago bought RJR Nabisco and then proceeded to break up the company and sell off the pieces. With any luck they’ll close the deal quickly and sell it all off. The sooner all the big media companies either split up or die the better. Media is being democratized through blogs and podcasts and companies like Clear Channel are needed or desirable.
For those looking for more intelligent and thoughtful coverage of what is really going on in Egypt, Al Jazeera English is the place to go. Unfortunately, there isn’t a major cable company in the United States with the guts to carry the Qatar-based channel.
The whole trend of using dead celebrities in ads is a bad one. I believe it is fundementally wrong for anyone to endorse a product they don’t believe in. Someone who is no longer alive may well believe in a product, but if they are not around to tell us first hand, who the hell are we to presume?