Archive for October, 2007
HD Radio. Anybody?
Apparently not. I know that the guy with the totally anti-HD Radio blog posted a link to the compete.com charts but I much prefer using Google Trends. Google being the largest search engine their Trends site is a pretty accurate view of what is hot and what is not in terms of what people are actually searching for.
Here is the Google Trends chart for Sirius, XM, HD Radio and Slacker:
Yep, nobody gives a good fat damn about (NBC Universal, Hulu.com or) HD Radio.
Slacker is a "slacker" as well.
That is a bit of a shock given the hype and excitement that existed not so long ago. I guess missing their target for releasing their portable by 4 months and counting had a bigger impact than they thought it would.
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What happened with NBC/iTunes?
Mr. Zucker has sounded off.
You just knew it was about money. You know, NBC wanting to raise prices and
Jobs telling them to go screw. It is a very well known fact that most of the time these relationships between the content provider and Apple always come to blows over what Steve won’t let them charge.
The content provider wanting to raise prices and Jobs holding the line. You can argue the point that it is the right of the content provider to set the price for their product, but I agree with Jobs when he says that .99 is the limit.
Well, according to Jeff Zucker, chief asshat of NBC Universal in an interview with Variety he pulled the NBC U content over money;
“We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99,” he said. “We made that offer for months and they said no.”
How much is one episode of a TV show from the 3rd rated broadcast network worth? Jobs hit the nail on the head when he stated that TV shows on iTunes were over priced. If .99 will get me a song on iTunes then .99 should get me a low resolution TV show as well. At $3 a pop over the course of an entire TV season you could buy the DVD box set of Heroes and get a lot more content.
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Pay fixed price for unlimited music?
Got this via Google Alerts this morning. Seems the Dutch version of RIAA is going to propose a plan where ALL Dutch Internet subscribers will pay what amounts to $30 US each month for unlimited P2P music downloads. This fee would apply to EVERYONE. Even those who don’t download music.
Think that dog would hunt in the United States?
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Terror Planning with Google Earth
Who knew someone would use Google Earth for something like this:
Palestinian militants are using Google Earth to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets, the Guardian has learned
Here is the story from Guardian Online. These words from a terrorist sums it up quite nicely:
"We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city centre and sensitive areas," Khaled Jaabari, the group’s commander in Gaza who is known as Abu Walid, told the Guardian.
This is the city of Sderot Israel which is the city under target in the article. Check out the Wiki entry about Sderot below that.
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DirecTV HDTV
Being a DirecTV subscriber I love the service. I get a lot more choice
than cable in my area and the price is about half of what my local cable company wants to charge me. I haven’t bought an HDTV because I didn’t want to drop that kind of money for 7 or 8 HD channels. I have a 50" TV in my family room and frankly that met my needs quite nicely given the very limited availability of HD content.
Then DirecTV goes and launches that new satellite and brings the total channels to 70. The added price? $5 per month. Over 70 channels (100 by the end of the year) and only a $5 price increase for a grand total of $15 a month. Dish Network has 10 or 12 HD channels and the price is $20. My local cable company has 9 and the cost per month is $20. 70 channels of HD goodness and the price is still less than my other options. I am thrilled. Right after Christmas I will replace my 3 CRT TV’s with equivalent sized HDTV’s and I will happily pay the $15 increase in my DirecTV bill.
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New Napster Version 4
Friday I set up a new computer to handle my music and my Inno. I needed to download the Napster software today so that I could manage recordings on the Inno. I was more than a little surprised by what I saw when the software started.
The middle screen is the XM Radio online service, but the rest of that window is very iTunes like don’t you think? More correctly, the way that the sections are setup, the location bar at the top and the color scheme are very iTunes Music Store like. The section links in the lower left of the screen are very Outlook 2003.
And it still sucks.
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Slacker Desktop Radio
Being the huge music fan that I am I jumped on the new Slacker Music Service the very minute that they released their online music player. It’s free (and ad free until the paid service is ready) and I like bright, shinny new objects. I am a heavy user of both Sirius and XM Satellite Radio and listen all day every day while at work and this seemed like a great fit for my rotation.
I didn’t love their online music player. It really shot the browsers RAM usage through the roof and I was more frustrated with it than I thought I would be. Then a few days ago Slacker released their desktop radio player. This thing is cool.
