Month: August 2012
There was a great quote by George Clooney that I cut from The Game for space, but it applies here: “When I started to go on auditions, I just wanted them to like me. That wasn’t the right attitude … I started to view auditions as my chance to solve their problem.”
And once he flipped from desire to empathy, his career changed.
It was timely, having written my piece about live TV piracy, to then see this post from Fred Wilson about the HBO Go app on his iPad: “HBO No-Go“. In a nutshell, HBO’s new app does not support video over AirPlay – only audio. In fact, just about everything that is wrong with media companies’ mindsets at the moment can be summarised in these two paragraphs from his post:
Continue reading “HBO Go does a fine job of underlining why TV piracy occurs”
Whilst most are focussing on The Pirate Bay and other piracy sites as the bane of media companies worldwide, I have been reading occasional mention of the growing threat of live TV piracy – that is, being able to access worldwide live television broadcasts, entirely for free. I couldn’t resist looking into this in more detail, and I thought I’d share my findings here.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that with the aid of Google and a little know-how, getting access to global television was incredibly easy. So easy in fact, that you can probably follow these steps right now and be streaming live television from various sources within ten minutes.
Its this simple:
Continue reading “Investigating the world of live TV piracy”
As a terminal geek and gadget nut, it was inevitable that I’d be leaping at the chance to buy a Raspberry Pi. A £30 computer-on-a-board? What’s not to love?
Mine arrived a couple of weeks ago, and since then I’ve had fun testing various builds and services out on it. I’m not a programmer, so whilst others are customising to the Nth degree I am happy just to investigate what people are building and what’s possible with a computer that can run from any USB socket (e.g. the spare one on your TV, Xbox or whatever), uses less power than any other mains device in your home, is 100% silent and doesn’t get hot. Here’s some of the things I’ve installed and played around with:
This article was originally posted as a With Teeth opinion piece over on Music Ally.
I’ve had a couple of very interesting discussions recently regarding advertising in general, but also with specific reference to music websites. The suggestion from some site owners is that the income generated by display ads is in decline, and this raises the question of how exactly they are to survive in years to come if this trend continues.
The problem lies within the display advertising networks and the fact that the banner ad is now on its last legs as a medium to effectively promote your product to people. But what are the alternatives?
Continue reading “With Teeth: the death of display ads – and what we can do about it”
I picked up a Nexus 7 shortly before taking a holiday in Spain, mainly just to mess around with it and see how it fared as the groundbreaker (mainly via price and PR) for a new form of 7″-screened content consumption devices. Judging it on that basis alone, it hits the mark; reading Kindle books on it is great, and the screen lends itself well to landscape viewing of movies.
For me though, where it comes unstuck is not during usage; its during standby. Now, I realise comparing a Nexus 7 to an iPad is a little unfair as the two are occupying very different spaces… but, when I flick the power switch on my iPad, it can then sit there happily for days without the battery power decreasing much. Not so for the Nexus; if you leave WiFi and syncing on, you’ll be lucky to last 24 hours.