MediaFilter

A collection of news stories, announcements and blog entries important to professionals in the media industries.

[theverge]

Microsoft: entertainment overtakes multiplayer gaming usage on Xbox

More time spent watching TV than online gaming

[evangotlib]

This is important.

[mediafilter-blog]

This switch will only become more pronounced as cable companies continue to sign on to Microsoft's big push for more media distribution via the Xbox. All I have to say is congratulations, Microsoft. You earned this one. You may not have knocked it out of the park with the Zune, but you certainly seem to have learned from your mistakes.

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Ever wondered why you couldn't buy the classic Batman TV series on DVD? After all, it's currently airing on The Hub and Me-TV, and Batman - The Movie is available on DVD. Well it turns out the show is trapped in a wicked web of licensing, ranging from disagreements between DC and Warner Brothers; ABC, Fox and Greenway; uncredited cameos and music; and even the iconic Batmobile isn't exempt from its share of licensing issues!

Let this be a lesson to all you aspiring producers out there: get your ducks in a row. Make sure you have everything spelled out in legal documentation with any licensed pieces, and be forward thinking in what rights you retain. It's no guarantee it'll protect you from any eventuality, but if you are unwilling or unable to own everything used in the production, it's certainly is worth trying.

[aljazeera-blog]

Al Jazeera not to air French killings video

Network says video showing shootings that left seven dead in southern France did not meet its code of ethics.

[newsweekscience]

More on that, from the UKPA: 

Merah apparently filmed all of his murders, which began on March 11 with the shooting of a French soldier. Before the rampage ended, two more soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi were killed.

Zied Tarrouche, Al-Jazeera’s Paris bureau chief, said the letter, written in poor French with spelling and grammar errors, claimed the shootings were carried out in the name of al Qaida.

Mr Tarrouche said the images appear to have been taken from the point of view of the killer, perhaps from a camera hung around his neck. He said they were a bit shaky but of a high technical quality.

Unfortunately, due to state of things, these videos will likely see the light of day at some point on the web.

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Personally, I have to agree with Al-Jazeera's decision. There is nothing of further importance that the public needs to learn from these videos, and I feel that disrespecting the wishes of the families of the victims for the sake of sensationalizing coverage of a tragedy is not justifiable.

The BBC World Service's World Have Your Say had a discussion yesterday (MP3 link), inviting people to reach out to them regarding whether or not they would have made the decision to air the video, and if it were leaked to the Internet, would they watch it.

[mediafilter-blog]

Xfinity for Xbox 360 has finally launched! For the time being, all it's really good at is displaying a screen telling me that the servers are "unavailable." However, given how big Comcast's footprint is, is it any surprise that subscribers eager for an alternative to the clunky cable box UI are leaping all over this?

I'll be doing some more in-depth looks at Xfinity for Xbox once I can actually connect to the service, but judging from the changes to the TV tab, it looks like Xfinity can pipe promoted programs directly into one central advertising block, in addition to providing you with access to Video on Demand and a programming guide. Pair this up with an additional movie/TV streaming service (like Netflix, Hulu, Epix, Vudu, or other like service), and premium content like the recently launched MLB.tv and HBO Go apps; pipe it all into the new Bing interface, and you've got the one stop shop for media consumption that Google TV wanted to be. One thing's for certain: with all these high profile media launches on the Xbox, it's a good day to be Microsoft.

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What stood out to me was the huge amount of power we pumped into set-top boxes in 2010:

...A report from advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council... found that cable and satellite set-top boxes consumed approximately 27 billion kilowatts in 2010 -- equivalent to the output of nine coal-fired power plants. The NRDC report concluded that the cost to power DVRs and set-tops will increase $3.5 billion per year by 2020 without more energy-efficient set-top and DVR designs.

However, the cable industry is working on this problem:

Meanwhile, cable operators are deploying set-top boxes with "light sleep" capabilities that reduce energy consumption when they are not in active use, a feature NCTA projects will save 350 million kilowatt hours in the first year alone. In addition, lower-power digital transport adapters (DTAs) are saving 2 billion kWh annually, according to the NCTA.

I've been seeing a lot of these lower powered boxes cropping up, but there are two big problems:

First, cable companies only seem to be distributing these boxes for new installations and replacement of old hardware. They're not encouraging people to upgrade to the newer, significantly smaller boxes that are available.

Second: who "turns off" their cable boxes? I can't think of a single person who routinely hits the power button on their TV and their cable box. This is key to the light and deep sleep modes that the industry is working on, unless they've devised some other method of determining when people are and are not watching TV (perhaps using HDMI-CEC? Though not everything speaks CEC at this stage in the game, and convincing people to upgrade just because of that will be a hard sell).

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Aereo Mobile TV sounds like shades of iviTV: you pay a fee and they stream you television signals available for free over the air (though just the ones in New York City, for now). However, there are key differences between Aereo and iviTV: first being that Aereo isn't technically retransmitting any signals: they give the user access to an antenna and digital DVR, and provide remote access to the hardware you are assigned. Also unlike iviTV, they intend to enforce geographical limitations on reception, essentially limiting you to viewing signals to the city you are currently in (in this case, you can only watch TV in New York City). So in this case, it is very much like a Slingbox, except all the devices are centrally located and rented to users. As the legal fight warms up, Aereo has already started filing lawsuits against broadcasters and networks.

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[parislemon]

Actor/comedian Aziz Ansari shares my Games of Thrones pain. As he tells GQ:

The way people release media is so far behind the way people actually consume it. There’s so much frustration. I mean, I get frustrated. I want to watch Game of Thrones. I’d love to see it before it comes back. Is it on iTunes? Do I watch it on HBO On Demand? What’s going on? What do I do? I bought the DVD, but I can’t watch it on my iPad?

And:

This is $5, and you have a video file that you can watch anywhere. I think people like the simplicity. Many surveys have people who stream TV shows or steal content saying that if it was available at a fair price and in a convenient form, they wouldn’t steal. And I believe that. Let’s say you hear that show Homeland is great, and you don’t have Showtime. You want to buy it. You go to Amazon, it’s not there. You go to Netflix, it’s not there. OK, fuck it, you’re just going to steal it from a torrent. But if you saw that it was $10, you could get all the episodes and watch it on anything, wouldn’t you do that? If you knew that the quality was proper and everything?

A-fucking-men. 

And unlike me, Ansari is in a position to do something about it on his end. He has put his comedy special online Louis C.K.-style.

For $5, you buy it, you own it, you can watch it anywhere. Support sanity.

[thanks Eric]

[wilwheaton]

This is history porn at its finest.

[mediafilter-blog]

Every time I needed some stock footage for a student production, first place I went was the Internet Archive. Now they have a whole category dedicated to stock footage shot on 35mm film? Oh my, I think I've just died and gone to heaven!

[mediafilter-blog]

I find the idea of non-realtime content pushing to be interesting, but the big question is will users want it, especially in these days of ubiquitous, always-on Internet connections in our homes and pockets? Perhaps it could be a hit on featurephones, but other than providing a convenient, universal access to local news, I'm not entirely sure what it could offer that isn't already available. However, similar services have proven somewhat popular in Japan...

[michaellonger]

The King of Cool’s birthday would have been this Saturday [today].

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Rest in peace.

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This follows an earlier report of a list at Premiere Radio Network that includes 98 companies who do not wish to be advertised during Limbaugh's program following the controversy stirred up regarding his comments about the law student Fluke.

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