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52 Reasons Why I Don’t Go To The Movies Anymore

By Brian Filed in Life, Links, Media Tagged with , February 18th, 2011 @ 11:23 am

Forever Geek.com has this calendar of movie releases for the rest of 2011.

While there are three or four on the list that I will end up seeing because I will be dragged along by my child, there is not a single movie on this list that I would willingly pay money to see except perhaps for the new Muppet movie (link contains spoilers, if you care about that sort of thing).

I realize that I aged out of the primary demographic for movies about a decade ago, but I don’t think it’s my imagination that the mainstream of Hollywood films has gone completely in the shitter. Back when Charlotte was little, I used to feel badly that we had stopped going to see anything other than kid movies, but when you see a giant steaming pile of crap like this, it’s really hard to feel anything but glad that I’m not wasting my time and money. In another year or two, Charlotte will be old enough to go to movies without us, and so I won’t even have to sit through the kiddie movies anymore. I have to say I’m looking forward to that immensely.

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Tech and Media News Linkapalooza

By Brian Filed in Links, Media, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , September 26th, 2008 @ 12:11 pm
  • Now You Can Get A Latte AND An Espresso at Your Bookstore — The Espresso books-on-demand printing system was first unveiled at the beginning of 2007 and made it’s American debut last summer with an exhibition at one of the New York Public Library’s special collections. Now this revolutionary device is making its first big commercial appearance in the Australian bookstore chain Angus & Robertson (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch). The initial intended use of the machines is to allow customers to obtain copies of out-of-print and hard-to-find books, but the chain plans to use them to offer up to 10,000 titles by the end of next year. A typical “big-box” bookstore like Angus & Roberts, or American retailers like Borders or Barnes & Noble, generally stocks about 20,000 unique titles, so this will allow them to increase their offerings by 50% without having to spend money on store expansions or increased inventory. Borders, which bought itself (along with Waldenbook) back from Kmart about ten years ago, is struggling pretty seriously these days. Their talks about merging with B&N failed, and now the chain is trying to sell itself once again. So the arrival of these “ATMs for books” could be either a saving throw for them by adding titles, or it could be the final nail in their coffin as it could quite possibly make big-box bookstores irrelevant. Stay tuned.
  • Coming Soon, The Complete MGM Film Library On A Grain Of Rice — Last week I mentioned a re-imagining of selling movies on USB sticks instead of DVDs. This week, I ran across this news item about a plan from SD-card maker SanDisk and four of the major record labels to sell record albums on SD cards instead of CDs. Those teeny-weeny fingernail sized micro-SD cards now range in capacity from 64MB to 16GB, and a typical music CD only holds up to 700MB in the first place. It’s no problem whatsoever to put the original uncompressed WAV files on the tiny micro-SD cards, which could then be directly inserted into even the smallest audio players as well as your full-sized home stereo system. The micro-SD cards are so small that you could carry dozens of them with you, if you were so inclined, and the ability to use them in the entire range of audio electronics would make them extremely flexible. Plus, if the group behind this idea could get portable music players to support the media format, it would let those manufacturers stop chasing onboard storage and make all the companies that want tougher DRM very happy. Keep your eye on this, as it has the potential to be a big, big deal for the record labels AND the electronics makers.
  • Pay As You Go Everywhere — Last week, Time Warner Cable CEO Glen Britt told investors at a Goldman Sachs technology conference (oh, the humanity) that he thinks metered broadband service is the likely service model of the future. The cable companies are all in the midst of testing the waters of various schemes for changing the nature of broadband service, and TWC is piloting a pay-as-you-go plan in Texas. Comcast, of course, has just rolled out a bandwidth capping policy that provides the average user with so much bandwidth that it might as well be unlimited but will slow down the heavy users. A metered use system would let the cable companies offer price reductions to low-use users, place the burden of paying for extreme bandwidth usage on the actual high-end consumers, and potentially reduce the likelihood that the cable companies would feel compelled to abandon net neutrality and cram tiered Internet service down everyone’s throat. They should be just as enthusiastic about a-la-carte cable TV service, except that the cable companies OWN 90% of the cable networks themselves and don’t want to lose their sweet sweet revenue, but one can always hope that they’ll see the light. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless has announced that they’re rolling out a month-to-month plan that would also let you use any cell phone you want. This announcement goes along with their “any device anywhere on our network” plan that they introduced last year. It’s another step in the right direction of returning the network providers to their rightful roles as providers of the pipes and not the means of access or the content.
  • Slavery Is Freedom — Last week I posted about the upcoming “enhanced” driver’s licenses in the State of New York that will come embedded with RFID chips that can be used for border crossings (among other things). While the United States is on the slippery slope to a police state, the U.K. has already descended into nothing short of Orwellian nightmare with its ubiquitous (and mostly useless) CCTV systems, ASBO classifications, and so on. Now they’re going one step further by introducing RFID-embedded identity cards for resident aliens that are chock-full of biometric identification (i.e. fingerprints, etc.). The cards will be issued to foreign students and to foreign nationals living in the UK on spousal visas. Cory Doctorow, the editor of BoingBoing and well-known privacy advocate, happens to be one of those “married aliens” who will be affected by the new system and has quite a long post about it today. The British government’s plan has been widely decried as a test balloon for forcing ALL British citizens to carry “enhanced” identification cards and be incorporated into a national database system which could be abused any way the government fancied. The Tories have also made the valid complaint that the cards will do little toward the stated goal of “fighting terrorism” because they won’t apply to short-term visitors from the EU, who can move freely in and out of the U.K. and who can stay for up to three months without any additional visas or papers.

    Meanwhile, here’s a bit of good news about less sinister applications of RFID technology: Researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. are developing a tag technology based on RFID that would create very inexpensive tags that could be applied to produce, meat and other food that spoils quickly to detect the relative freshness of a piece of fruit or a cut of meat or a container of milk and update the displayed expiration date of the item on its packaging. Accurate expiration labels are presently non-existant, using “best guess” efforts only, causing tons of food to be wasted everey single day. This is a different system than the highly-touted “self-inventory” sort of RFID tag that lets warehouses track stock or lets your “smart” refirgerator tell you when you need more eggs, but could probably be included in the same sort of systems and would be very beneficial to consumers AND producers alike.

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Linkapalooza – Fun & Games

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , , , , , September 18th, 2008 @ 12:42 pm

Looks like it’s Fun And Games Day here at BKO today.

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first: how long would YOU last chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor? My score is 54 seconds, but I think I would have scored better if I had learned a few choke holds in my younger days.

Here’s a must-have toy: an RC race car that has a wireless camera built into the windshield so that you can experience the first-hand point-of-view of the car via a par of VR goggles. Here’s the demo video to show you what the experience is like:

Even though DVD sales have levelled off, it doesn’t look like the format is in any danger of dying out too soon. Nevertheless, this seemed like a clever niche product that should attract some people: full-length movies on a USB flash drive. The original “Ghostbusters” movie will be the first traditional Hollywood film released on USB flash media, according to this tech news website. Granted, “Ghostbusters” isn’t exactly a hot new release, but it was definitely a huge film in its day and has a lot of residual popularity. There are probably a gazillion similar older titles that could find some new sales by being marketed on USB sticks. The viewer can copy the film to their computer’s hard drive, but there’s DRM built into this (of course) that requires you to have the stick plugged in when you want to watch it. I can see this being very popular with business travelers who like to watch movies on their laptops while flying. And there’s also enough room left on the stick to load up some music, photos or other files, so it’s a bit more versatile than a pre-recorded DVD. The only thing that doesn’t work is the price point: £29.99 in the UK, which is well over $60. It needs to price out around $10, because these days you can buy a blank USB flash drive for about ten bucks and load your own movies and such, and it’s easy to find older movies in DVD bargain bins for $9.99.

Everybody seems to agree that the thing that separates the Wii video game console from the rest of the consoles on the market is the motion-sensitive game controller that makes you feel like you’re part of the game. We have been known to work up a bit of a sweat around here getting a little too intense swinging the remote when playing Wii baseball, and I swear I strained my wrist playing Wii bowling. But the haptic controller is sheer genius — the accelerometer in the iPhone is also turning into a platform for making fun games for that device as well. So why not extend the idea and make motion-controlled TV remotes? Instead of pressing the channel button, you just flick your wrist to flip through the 500 channels on your cable system, raise or lower volume, and so on. Sadly, this isn’t a real product yet, just a concept project from a company that has a whole bunch of cool ideas for digital media interaction.

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Hitch-Spotting

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , March 9th, 2007 @ 12:35 pm
hitch1.jpeg hitch2.jpeg

Most movie buffs know that Alfred Hitchcock was fond of making brief cameo appearances in his films, but even armed with a comprehensive list of the cameos, it’s often difficult to pick him out — he’s usually only in the shot for a fleeting moment, passing by in the background, included in a crowd, and so on.

This Htichcock fansite not only has a list of all the Hitch cameos, it comes with handy stills to show you exactly when and where the scenes are, and they’ve even done you the favor of highlighting Hitch, so you can spot him much more easily the next time you sit down to watch “Suspicion” or “Notorious” or any of his movies.

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We Demand…A Shrubbery!

By Brian Filed in Links, Media Tagged with , , , , , , , January 5th, 2007 @ 12:12 pm

nii.jpg

One that looks nice and is not too expensive…or we shall say “Nii!” again!!!

It’s an on-demand world these days, and the next two businesses to be sacrificed on the altar of J-I-T production are big-box bookstores and anyone still in the video rental business, including NetFlix.

You’ve heard it before, right? Well, yes, you have. I have been hearing it for a dozen years at least, but I think this time the predictions may have more than wishful thinking behind them.

This Fortune article from last month says it’s the “next little thing”, but books-on-demand from a stand-alone kiosk are making their debut in 2007, offering over 2 million public domain titles, and they expect to work out deals with publishers to be able to offer virtually any book in print within the next five years.

Of course, these days big-box bookstores like to sell you a lot more than just books. The also like to sell you DVDs, but, gosh, wouldn’t you know it, Sonic Solutions has just announced a DVD-on-demand system that will let people download movies and burn them to their own DVDs — and they’ve already signed on all of the major studios so that you won’t have to pirate anything in the process (as long as you’re okay with whatever copy protection and DRM they build into the system). The resulting multi-fold increase of the number of titles legitimately available for download (whether limited-use or permanent purchase) should be the final nail in the coffin for small video stores, a serious thorn in the side of big-box bookstores, and will probably cause NetFlix to have to completely overhaul their business just to survive.

Along those lines, do take time to read David Denby’s piece in this week’s New Yorker where he considers the effect of recent technological innovations on the entire film industry. He does have a few decent counter-arguments to the current conventional wisdom, but overall he ends up having to agree with the prognosticators.

Nii! Nii!

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