TechLore - Zatz Not Funny

Why Dave Gave Up On Hulu

ZatzNotFunny — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:11:48 GMT

I received the same Hulu email as Mari earlier this week. And it didn’t move me. I don’t want to stream full length feature films on my laptop. Hulu ’s real strength has been in shorter form television entertainment. (Given their NBC and FOX DNA , this comes as no surprise.) During Hulu’s beta I was pretty tolerant of their “random episode” policy, figuring it’d take awhile to encode the content library. However, after many months I still see no rhyme nor reason to what shows are available and when. For example there’s not much on TV these days, so when I heard about USA’s Pysch I dropped by Hulu to check it out. As you can see above (click to enlarge) - only a few episodes are offered, they’re not in any sensible or sequential order, and at least one will expire (before I’d get to it). As someone who’s never seen Psych, at the very least Hulu needs to provide the first episode of each season so I can see what it’s all about without joining mid-stream. Ideally, they’d present the entire season - but even if they offered a few episodes, perhaps they’d hook me and I’d...

Redlasso and the Comcast Coincidence

ZatzNotFunny — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:53:34 GMT

Earlier this week I sat down with Redlasso CEO Kenyon Hayward for an update on the Redlasso business and the company’s ongoing negotiating process with big media networks. There’s much to write about on that front, but since I won’t get to that today, I thought in the meantime I’d share a bizarre coincidence I encountered while testing out the Redlasso service. Redlasso uses several tools for video search on its site, including meta data search, closed caption service and phonetic word recognition. I tried searching for WiMAX clips first, but didn’t get anywhere except some phonetic results that didn’t actually have anything to do with WiMAX. So then I searched on Comcast. Several hits came back, and I clicked on a clip from ESPN. Interestingly, a DTV transition ad came up. It hadn’t occurred to me that commercials would be in the mix, but of course that makes sense. However, the exceedingly weird moment came when I realized who was starring in the Comcast ad. Standing in front of me on the computer screen was a guy I went to college with. Actually, it was the guy I performed with in our school’s production of Carousel . That performance...

Hulu Days of Summer

ZatzNotFunny — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:32:06 GMT

Whether or not you believe Hulu can “kick YouTube’s ass,” the folks behind the Web video venture are certainly doing more than a few things right. I got hooked on Hulu when it was still in beta , checking out a few 30 Rock episodes and some of the Scrubs shows I’d missed. But I admit my usage of the site has fallen off. (Largely because when I’m on my computer I get too distracted by all things work.) Now Hulu has a new campaign going that may just suck me back in. The Hulu Days of Summer push launches a premiere program every weekday through mid-August. So far, Hulu’s put out Lost in Translation (great movie), a Three Stooges collection, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , and today’s debut, a long line-up of NOVA shows. I know the gimmick sounds pretty standard, but Hulu’s adding a twist: a Hulu Days of Summer Widget along with an RSS feed. Brilliant move for the all the Web entertainment sites that track this kind of thing. I also found myself receptive to Hulu’s news because in came in an email update that apparently I opted in for. This may be the...

Meta-Blogging: The Browser Wars

ZatzNotFunny — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:59:11 GMT

Following Kevin Tofel’s lead , I’ve taken a look at ZNF browser stats in honor of the ( world-record breaking ) Firefox 3 launch. The snapshot above represents the last 30 days and isn’t that different from the same period of time a year ago - the percent of Firefox readers is actually down a bit, while Safari and IE are up. However, that Safari line item encompasses OS X, iPhone, and PC clients. Nearly 20% of Firefox visitors are already running 3.0. Firefox is my (multi-platform) web browser of choice - I’ve been on v3 nearly full-time since March . Which is no surprise considering I’ve been a FF user since the pre-v1 days. And I still remember surfing the early, barren incarnation of the web via Mosaic and Lynx back in the old days when WWW ? Internet.

Sports, myp2p.eu and the VideoLAN Media Player

ZatzNotFunny — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:43:25 GMT

This post?s author, The Media Patriot , is a fellow consumer who enjoys music and television but condemns DRM . The pseudonym pays homage to the original participants of the Boston Tea Party . Are you getting all the sports coverage you want from your cable or satellite provider? Ever wonder if that UEFA Euro 2008 soccer match you have been waiting four years for will even be televised? Last weekend was the annual 24 hours of Le Mans sports car race in France. This year?s broadcast was quite poor since Fox?s Speed TV inexplicably decided to televise only a few hours worth of racing, compared to years past when the coverage was nearly end-to-end. Seeking a way to watch the race in its entirety, we turned to MyP2P EU and their people powered network of SopCast relays and excellent support for the Video LAN client (VLC) media player . The event was being broadcast in Europe on EuroSport 1 and just like Speed TV, they broke away several times for other sports coverage (soccer, cycling and rugby) ? but then a quick visit to http://myp2p.eu saved the day. MyP2P provides a way for intrepid motor sport fans to share...

Why Care about WiMAX?

ZatzNotFunny — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:33:53 GMT

There’s been a lot of WiMAX chatter the last couple of months. For example, the major announcement in May of new financial backers for a US network (Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Google, Intel and Bright House). And yesterday came the much lower-profile, but still highly-important news of the first successful round of WiMAX certifications by the WiMAX Forum. Certification means interoperability, which is critical for any large-scale deployment. Amid the flurry of recent WiMAX coverage, it’s been difficult to pin down the important facts for Joe Q. Public. After all, what normal person really is interested in spectrum frequencies? 700 MHz or 2.5 GHz - who cares as long as it means high-speed wireless Internet access? Here are some of the important conclusions I’ve arrived at, several with the help of Paul Kapustka’s “Game On, WiMAX!” report . This is what consumers in the US should be interested in and what WiMAX has going for it. What should matter to consumers: Per-use payment options - No requirement to pay a WiMAX monthly service fee if you’re only going to connect once or twice a month Handsets don’t have to be subsidized, meaning you’ll be able to buy anything WiMAX-certified at...