- The merger between satellite radio services XM and Sirius finalized a couple of months ago, and initially there were no programming changes, but apparently this week that all changed…and without any advance notice. It seems that most of the programming that was eliminated or moved around came from the XM side of the street, which has left quite a few subscribers who came along from XM pretty steamed. This poster at the Motley Fool website says he gets the need to eliminate the overlap of programming, but all they’ve done with this unannounced change is piss people off, including him, at a time when they can scarcely afford to start dropping subscribers. Technoblogger Dave Zatz is similarly unhappy and is quitting the service for the SECOND time, having ditched XM last year because of programming changes. I’m sure some people will get over it, but alienating your already-miniscule audience isn’t how I’d go about “synergizing” anything.
- This is an awesome idea for the iPhone/iTouch: American Airlines is making it possible for fliers to use their iPhones, Blackberries, etc. as their boarding passes, using those 2-D graphic image barcodes. (via Engadget) For the moment, the service is only being tested at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Los Angeles International, and at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA. When you order your ticket, you can opt to have American e-mail you the boarding pass, then all you do is save the attachment on your mobile device and bring it with you to the security checkpoint. Show the image to the Gestapo goon BEFORE you try to go through the shampoo detector, and you’re IN!
- While I’m on the subject of iPhone/iTouch stuff, I have a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down to share. First, on the thumbs-up side, there’s the Pandora app. Pandora has been around for eight years, so you may very well have encountered it long before this. Like a couple of other music sites from the dot-com era, the idea was to be able to offer tailored musical selections to suit a user’s identified tastes. The so-called “Music Genome Project” uses a set of 400 different musical characteristics to identify songs a listener might like based upon the choice of a single artist or song. The listener then gets a “radio station” programmed around that choice and can fine tune the offerings by giving a thumbs-up-down vote. You don’t NEED a mobile device for this service, but it’s PERFECT for a device like the iPhone/iTouch. I already have a traditional iPod I keep in my car with my whole music collection on it, so I don’t bother putting music on my iTouch, but there are times when it’s kind of nice to be able to listen to music anyway and having a tailored music stream available is pretty great.
Meanwhile, my thumbs-down goes to the appalling amount of difficulty I have had trying to get non-YouTube, non-iTunes video to play on my device. I spent most of my day Wednesday frigging around with two or three different Cydia apps, trying to find one that would let me copy some videos to the iTouch and then play them back. So far I have tried vlc4iphone and mplayer and pwnplayer and could not get a video that I had in both .avi AND H.264 formats to play. What makes it more frustrating is that I have no problem getting the H.264 video to play on my regular iPod or my wife’s Nano. As with the music I just mentioned, I would love the ability to occasionally watch something I’ve downloaded without having to be Apple’s bitch. I’ll also throw in some snarls and grimaces at the nearly infinite number of total shite websites that purportedly tell you how to do this sort of thing — they’re either written in incomprehensible English by non-English speakers, or they’re SEO honeypots trying to get you to view more page ads. Ooh, I hate that.
- One of the big news stories in the technology/media world in the last month has been the recent decision by the FCC to free up what is called “whitespace” — the unused spectrum between analog television channels — for broadband, mobile data services, and other wireless technologies. FCC testing of whitespace technologies began last year, but the final decision to allow development of the spectrum was held off for a while. Now, with the final cutover of analog television broadcasting set for February, 2009, the FCC has lit the green light. This MIT Technology Review article explains a bit about the huge potential for whitespace services to revolutionize wireless data services. Imagine, for example, using a whitespace wireless device to beam content from any source in your home to any viewing device — not unlike the Slingbox concept, but done wirelessly at very high throughput speeds that would accomodate high-definition video. Commercial devices like that are probably at least five years out, but you’ll see other devices (like iPhones, GPS devices, etc.) taking advantage of the spectrum space much faster.
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