So did I mention that I got a TIVO for Christmas? My, how much I’ve been missing. I know, I know…I could probably just as well have caught all the Daily Shows on YouTube or BitTorrent or somewhere else. And it stinks that TivoToGo won’t work with a MAC. Bummer.
And speaking of which, here’s something I’ll be capturing tonight. ABC News: ‘The YouTube War’ will feature some thoughts from Jeff Jarvis, who has been doing some great blogging about “small TV” of late. Interesting how things are evolving on that front as well. Here’s a snip from the show notes:
From the frontlines of the war in Iraq to the political battleground of the 2006 midterm elections, the surge of online video has changed the dynamic. In both campaigns, a piece of tape can be quickly uploaded, and seen by tens of thousands of viewers in a matter of hours.
Another example of how these tools are pushing social and cultural change…change that our schools aren’t keeping up with…
Technorati Tags: YouTube, Jeff_Jarvis, culture
Will,
Now go to Costco and buy yourself a cheap DVD recorder. I know. I know that your Mac (and mine) burns DVDs, but that’s after connecting it to the source (or two if you don’t have a neat way to convert analog to digital video on the fly). After the connection you need to digitize the video, compress it, etc…
A $100 DVD recorder is a godsend for road warriors (and obsessive packrats). TIVO a show, insert a blank DVD into the recorder, hit record, go to sleep and take the DVD with you on the road.
Best of all, there are a lot of program that will let you rip the content off the DVD so you may remix it.
Modern video is allowed to be raw by the watcher in a way that most reading material still is not. I equate editing and normal structure in film with everything learned in a 7th grade grammar text in English class. An adult today has much higher standards for text than for video. If text material on the web were to have the same level of “polish” that most youtube video has, the typical adult wouldn’t even go the site after the first attempt to comprehend it.
The question for society is, why is there a difference in standards between text and video?
The question for schools, are we discussing this in class in an organized way?
While I might imagine why game playing could be considered a dubious class activity, under what justification and authority was it blocked in your district?
Is there a democratic process involved in your network services or does one person dictate policy at a whim and without oversight or appeal?
It is drag that TiVo to Go doesn’t work with your Mac, but as a Mac user (who has been waiting for 2 years for TiVo to fulfill their promise to develop this feature for Mac users) and TiVo fan I was happy find that the recent application TiVo Decode Manager lets you access all your Now Playing list on your Mac. This is one of a couple of GUI that takes advantage of the recently cracked TiVo DRM. Check out this link for a run down of the options.
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/12/09/tivodecode-manager-fulfills-tuaw-prediction/
If you haven’t already, buy the Tivo wireless adapter and then try streaming your iTunes songs from your computer. For me, this experience was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the moment when I unequivocally embraced the notion that DRM is useless and unfair. I became one of the millions of people who have been stymied in their attempt to make fair use of something they had legitimately purchased.