In case you live under a rock:

The new iPod is has 16x9 screen, 320x340 pixels and 260,000 colors and does realtime decoding of MPEG4 and H.264 at 30fps. It has video out. The 30GB for $299 and 60GB for $399 will be out next week. The 60GB model is thinner than the current 20GB. The 30GB holds 75 hours of video. They come in white and black. They go on sale late next week—the new tagline is “watch your music.” The new ad has Eminem in silhouette campaign.

Very cute. About the same size and resolution as the new Sony PSPs, good choice. Now let’s hope the screen is as bright and clear. But really, the video iPod isn’t the biggest story here:

iTunes 6. Hey, didn’t they just do 5 like, last month? Video podcasting is here, now. The iTunes store will have 2,000 music video. $1.99 each. Six Pixar short films will be available as well, for $1.99. Each video is the size of six songs.

You can buy TV shows through the iTunes store. Desperate housewives and Lost from ABC—which is owned by Disney. “I know those guys,” says Jobs. Going to offer 5 shows on itunes—Lost, Desperate Housewives, Night Stalker and two Disney Channel shows. You can buy current episodes the day after they are broadcast on the air. Shows are downloaded commercial free, no ads! About a 10-to 20-minute download for one episode. $1.99 per episode of for current and previous season tv shows. Watch them on your computer or iPod.

That’s right. Apple has just brought friggin’ Vodcasting into the mainstream. Hollywood, Apple just invaded your turf. The ball is in your court.

It started back in late July when George Gilder anounced that TV would die at the Always On conference:

“TV is dying fast and it will be followed by Hollywood. These industries fed on scarcity. There are only a few channels available. TV was technology of tyrants. It fed this advertising model that has collapsed,” Gilder told an audience at the conference. “The thirty-second spot is just going to die. Nobody is going to watch any ads they don’t want to see.

“Book culture and blog culture can redeem a civilization,” he said.

But skeptics pointed out that Blogs do not equal TV:

BUT TV & movies will not die because Economies of Scale and Scope. The entertainment industry business model relies heavily on economies of scale and scope. To create a truly profitable content requries huge capital investments in order to create contents that are “scalable” and with mass appeal. Those investments in technology, marketing, distribution, brand (of actor/actress), and production are so large that no “blogger” or individual content producer can hope to ever match.

Even Mark Cuban jumped into the fray announcing that ”Broadcast TV will never die.”

The internet can’t support the equivalent of broadcast TV because the internet can’t broadcast. It can deliever individual (unicast streams) streams, but that’s it. This is why AOL streaming 350k simultaneous Live8 users was a big deal.  Instead of a single 300k video stream that every one tuned into, every viewer had to have their own 300k stream. That’s a boatload of bandwidth and is expensive.

What happens when 80mm people want to watch the SuperBowl? What happens when a measly 4mm want to watch a show? What happens when they want to see the show in 1080i HD?

As long as there are TV shows or events that can capture audiences in the millions, the only place to deliver those shows live will be on good old fashioned cable, satellite or broadcast or some other broadcast spectrum delivered TV. It ain’t gonna be the net anytime soon. That’s why broacast TV ain’t going away.

And Paul Kagan at Access Intelligence’s Cable Group heaped on relevant counter-arguments:

Not everyone listening, even in the newly productive blogosphere, agreed. A blogger--from the U.K., judging by his spelling--quickly typed across the big webcast screen: “Gilder is wrong about TV. Distribution can be a huge competitive advantage. Technologists often underestimate consumer habits. Modifying people’s behaviour is a huge cost burden.” Later, during the panel entitled “Dislocation of Media,” it may have been the same viewer who wrote that “ownership is important. The subscription model still works.” Indeed it does. A decade after Gilder’s dark prediction, the force is still with the movie, TV, cable and satellite industries ("big media” in Stanford terms). They’re doing nearly $150 billion in annual revenues. That’s one reason it’s called mass media.

The most salient criticism of Gilder comes from Canada’s Mark Evans:

Let’s be honest, this is an old mantra being recycled for 21st century if you recall Gilder pounded the table in the 1990s on how the power of fiber-optic technology was going to dramatically change how information was delivered. While Gilder was on the mark, he was far too bullish about the rate and impact of change. This didn’t prevent people from enthusiastically following his advice, which made Gilder quite wealthy - at least on paper - from selling newsletters and giving speeches.

Bringing up the rear, Om Malik summarizes the conflict in his beautiful succinct tone ”Why TV Won’t Die:”

Consumers, not the early adopters, have a certain expectation from television. The quality of image is one such expectation. The networking infrastructure challenge of video-over-the-Internet cannot be understated. I think it will be many years before we will be able to get the same QoS on what Anderson describes as “Internet TV.” A proof of consumer expectation is VoIP services and the 911 brouhaha. Back to Gilder - before we take him seriously again, folks remember the past… just saying!

Seeing this debate slowly make its rounds across the blogosphere made us realize that there is a fundamental problem no one is addressing: When anyone says “TV will die” they all have a different meaning. There is a SEMANTIC problem here. Here are just a few of the different definitions that people are bandying about:

1. The death of the 30-second spot (TV advertising).

2. The death of TV distribution (IP vs. broadcast, optical fiber vs. copper cable).

3. The death of the livingroom TV as we know it (convergence, PVR, Tivo).

4. The death of TV content/networks (reality tv, quality of programming).

5. The death of studio control of channels (the long tail, million channel universe).

6. The death of programming exec’s control over scheduling (Video-on-Demand, Tivo, BitTorrent).

And there are probably a few more that I’ve neglected to mention. Each individual in this debate takes one or more of these definitions and uses it to debate someone who is using a different definition. For example, Gilder seems to be promoting a combination of #5 and #6 but Mark Cuban is using definition #2 and #3. Since everyone is comparing apple’s and oranges its impossible for anyone to make heads or tails of the arguments because everyone is simultaneously right AND wrong at the same time.

This cute little Reuters piece is one of the latest journalistic commentary on the death of journalism.

The Wikipedia, which has surged this year to become the most popular reference site on the Web, is fast overtaking several major news sites as the place where people swarm for context on breaking events.

Traffic to the multilingual network of sites has grown 154 percent over the past year, according to research firm Hitwise. At current growth rates, it is set to overtake The New York Times on the Web, the Drudge Report and other news sites.

Journalists seem to be exhorting their own demise with praise such as:

The business model of Wikipedia is a constant work in progress. Wikipedia Foundation, its Saint Petersburg, Florida-based parent organization, is a nonprofit that depends on donations and has no plans to accept advertising.

But by relying on the power of community, Wikipedia poses a stark contrast to the top-down editorial approach at Yahoo News or the computer-driven story selection of Google News, not to mention traditional media.

Despite all the praise that is heaped onto Wikipedia by the mainstream press, they leave out an important weakness. While it is awfully nice that everyone is a volunteer for a non-profit entity, they will never be able to achieve the investigative reporting that traditional outlets have. The New York Times may seem old and stodgy but they can pay journalists salaries that allow them to fly off to distant lands and do full-time research on a complicated topic. Without the resources to allow “wikipedians” to dedicate more time to the quality of their info, they are doomed to remaining a “light” reference.

A frightening glimpse into the future:

Meanwhile, computers will continue to be used more and more to watch digital streaming video, eventually turning them into televisions. With no computers available to solve complex math problems, people will have no choice but to return to the abacus. Within a few months, this ancient device will be abandoned when it’s realized that there is no good way to make “abacus porn.”

However, these minor setbacks will soon be overshadowed by a stunning scientific achievement: Mars is finally explored and colonized simply because it’s an even cheaper place to produce television shows than Canada. Producers cheer this cost-saving move but, typically, some New Yorkers complain when the latest “Law & Order” series depicts Manhattan as having a jagged red landscape and two small moons.

Another week, another celebrity sex-tape scandal.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP)—Actor Colin Farrell is suing a woman for allegedly trying to distribute and profit from a sex tape he says the two recorded with the agreement it would never be made public.

Don’t bother reading the CNN article. Why? Because they say nothing about the woman. No picture, no description. Why should we bother wasting our time downloading this off the internet if we don’t even know how hot she is?

There should be a new rule instituted: If you are a celebrity and you decide to record yourself having sex you are absolutely going to see it end up on the Internet. BBB staff would like to point out that this is not necessarily a bad career move (but you have to pretend that you are trying to stop the distribution of the tape as if that were possible).

Stop whatever you are doing and watch this clip now:

Video - WMV

Video - QT

Through the magic of the Internet this will be seen by millions more than were watching CSPAN at the time. Imagine if this were available on a service like google video…

Read more about it with a transcript here.

As usual, Wonkette has the best truth-in-humor judgement:

Yup, that video of the WH press corps pelting Scott McClellan with repeated questions about the Plame investigation sure is funny. Funny if you like watching puppies get beaten.

The St. Petersburg Times has a hilariously written article that equates someone using your open access point to being a hacker. In short some guy saw a man “furtively” using his WiFi connection and called police.

Police say Benjamin Smith III, 41, used his Acer brand laptop to hack into Dinon’s wireless Internet network. The April 20 arrest is considered the first of its kind in Tampa Bay and among only a few so far nationwide.

“It’s so new statistics are not kept,” said Special Agent Bob Breeden, head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s computer crime division.

But experts believe there are scores of incidents occurring undetected, sometimes to frightening effect. People have used the cloak of wireless to traffic in child pornography, steal credit card information and send death threats, according to authorities.

For as worrisome as it seems, wireless mooching is easily preventable by turning on encryption or requiring passwords. The problem, security experts say, is many people do not take the time or are unsure how to secure their wireless access from intruders. Dinon knew what to do. “But I never did it because my neighbors are older.”

In any large city you can turn on your laptop and find half a dozen freely available hotspots at any given time and I can also reasonably assume that you are not instantly trading in kiddie porn, stolen credit cards or plotting the destruction of Western civilization. Wireless is everywhere and we constantly use it.

This man knowingly left his access point open and calls police when someone is using it? Between all of us here at BBB, we’d have gotten the death sentence by now for all that “free” wireless we’ve “hacked” into by just turning on our laptop.

“Honestly your honor, my powerbook connects to the first wireless network it sees automatically.”

“Likely story young man,” the judge said just before he threw away the key.

Today is Public Service Announcement* day at BBB. We’d like to explain to those of you who make tech gadgets that there are people out there who will - *gasp* - modify your product after they purchase it. Yes, putting little software locks and disabling features isn’t going to stop them. There are millions of people out there that are smarter than those cut-rate engineers you hired in some godforsaken south-east Asian country.

Sony Computer Entertainment America said in an e-mailed statement that hacking or the operation of “homebrew” software programs may damage the PSP, and void the warranty.

The PSP boasts a high-resolution viewing screen and has been in the sights of technology enthusiasts and software programmers, who want to use it to run copies of everything from games and music to e-books to movies.

No one is convinced that running software on their PSP is going to make it catch on fire. Sony, people are going to hack your pretty little toy and you should just get used to it. You don’t want to get into an arms race with these people. We all know where this inevitably leads. It gets really ugly: they hack past your protection, you issue another update patch and pretty soon you’ll find yourself stumbling out of some crackwhore’s bed at 4am wondering what that strange rash on your software department is.

Please Sony, THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

*<small>This is not actually a PSA but we’re hoping no one reads the fine print.</small>

Remember DVD Jon? He’s the scandinavian wunderkind who cracked the infamous content scrambling system that was the thin nighty that protected a voluptuous naked DVD from the prying eyes of the, arrr, internet pirates. After tearing that sheer garment from the bosom of the movie biz cash cow he proceeded to rape all other sorts of media as well (including at one point Apple’s iTunes Music Store).

Apparently less that 24 hours after Google introduced their video browser so that you could watch some nerd’s dog barking at a toy robot, DVD Jon has cracked the tool so that you can use it to watch any movie and not just google’s precious movies:

Google Video Viewer included code to prevent it from being used to play non-Google hosted videos. Jon’s patch disables that, allowing the player to be used with any videos. Given that VideoLAN is open source, all I can say is, what was Google thinking? When you take an open source tool and try to make it proprietary, you’re inviting a fight, and it’s fitting that Jon was the one to take the fight to Google.

Sorry Hollywood, box office receipts are gonna be in a slump for a while because there’s an awful lot of dancing baby movies out there…

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that some students at U. of Texas-Austin have developed software allowing people to stream shows off of their computers:

The software, called Alluvium, uses peer-to-peer technology to let people stream video to multiple users nonstop—even without high-speed Internet connections. It’s not just for tech enthusiasts and struggling artists, says Joseph T. Lopez, a graduate student who co-founded the software project.

The program specializes in “swarmcasting,” says Mr. Lopez. Much like BitTorrent, the file-swapping program popular with movie downloaders, the swarmcasting program breaks video files into small pieces, so that a computer user can download component parts simultaneously from any other machines that are storing or streaming the files.

But unlike BitTorrent, Alluvium—which was designed by Brandon Wiley, also a graduate student at Austin—orders those component parts before downloading them. Users of the software can simulate the experience of watching live TV, by streaming video as they finish downloading it.

The idea here is that because the focus is on streaming video rather than downloading it, they will be able to avoid the copyright infringement pitfalls that have befallen other p2p networks. Unfortunately for them, this very technical argument will be lost on the copyright regime enforcers.

We found this amazing little piece of software through our friends over at BoingBoing:

HOWTO Stream from iTunes to your mobile phone (without Apple’s permission)

DittyBot is a script for OS X that uses a clever combination of mobile email and VoIP to stream music from your iTunes collection to your cellphone. Using your phone, email the title/artist info for a song in your iTunes library to DittyBot, which is running on your Mac, pulling down mail every minute. DittyBot receives the request, calls you with Skype, and plays the song back to you over voice-over-IP using iTunes. Wow.

This a good example of the law of unintended consequences. As all of our daily interactions become digital it becomes very easy to turn anything into a dumb pipe. Using your cellphone to stream music from your home computer may not be very practical for the average joe today but this is just a sign of what is yet to come.

Today is Public Service Announcement Day here at BBB. We bring you this breaking news from the international authority on modern sexuality, the New York Daily News:

“A nerd is an excellent provider and a guy who puts you first,” says E. Jean Carroll, Elle magazine’s love and sex advice columnist. “He’ll turn out to be a great father and a great husband.”

And, she insists that a woman who is willing to stick it out with a nerd and get past his quirks will be handsomely rewarded. “Don’t give up on him too fast,” she said. “If you stick with him, he’s going to turn out to be really great.”

To all you lucky ladies out there, feel free to email .

Speaking of wireless…

Did you know that most new cars are equipped with built-in Bluetooth. Since you were probably to busy to pay attention all the other times we’ve mentioned this, having wireless data tech built into your car makes your car just as hackable as your phone. The good geeks over at F-Secure went about trying to hack a Toyota Prius in an underground bunker.

However a mobile worm infecting a car is a thought that one cannot let go easily, and even as we knew that the car cannot be infected, this was something that just has to be tested in real life.
If for nothing else than for the reason of getting to test out one very cool car.

Even you’ve gotta admit that’s pretty fucking cool.

Boing Boing has a great piece on Mark Cuban’s new release and distribution strategy for his feature films. Instead of doing theatrical releases followed by DVD and TV releases he is going to do it all at once and “let the audience decide”:

When I interviewed Mark Cuban earlier this year for a Wired Magazine feature on digital cinema (link), one of the things he mentioned about his movie biz plans involved changing the way films are released. Here’s how it works in Hollywood now: new theatrical releases are made available on DVD and pay-TV some time after they’ve left theaters. That “window\” of time has been shrinking in recent decades. Cuban said that his distribution company 2929 Entertainment, which he runs with business partner Todd Wagner, saw no point in this delay. “Let’s release everything all at once, and let the consumer decide,” their argument goes.

Several months later, they’re making good on those plans. Earlier this week, news broke that 2929 is doing just that, with Steven Soderbergh. The director will release six films through 2929 so that theater release, DVD and pay-TV all occur on the same day.

This article sounds like the plot to a really bad Sci-Fi screenplay:

Qatar plans to start using robots as riders in popular camel races after international criticism of the use of child jockeys, the Gulf Arab state’s official QNA news agency reported on Wednesday.

It said the robot, developed by an unnamed Swiss company, had been tested successfully and that the energy-rich country was considering setting up a factory to build them.

Sheikh Abdullah bin Saud al-Thani, the official in charge of the project, referred to United Nations concern over child jockeys and said Qatar was determined to save camel racing, which is popular among Arabs of Bedouin origin.

Nearby United Arab Emirates has also announced plans to introduce remote-controlled robots, which can be light enough to use as jockeys in the lucrative sport.

Rights groups say several thousand boys, some as young as four, work as camel jockeys in the oil-rich Gulf, many after being abducted or sold by their families mainly from the Indian subcontinent.

They say the boys are kept in prison-like conditions and underfed to keep them light so the camels run faster.

Of course, in the third act, the robots, child-slave-jockeys and camels will all join forces to overthrow their evil oil-baron masters.

Over at the Long Tail blog, there is some fascinating analysis of the death of mainstream “mass” culture:

* Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
* Television: network TV’s audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
* Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
* Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
* Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
* Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Intrepid readers readily informed us how to hack our brand-new PSPs to surf the web. Our site doesn’t look so bad on the hidden Sony browser.

We don’t know what is more embarassing: the way in which Variety uses the words “logged on” in its writeup or the fact that someone is actually trying to make a movie based on Friendster.

Director Harold Ramis and Topher Grace have logged on to a Universal romantic comedy based on the popular online service Friendster. Grace sparked to the chance to play a character looking for love while navigating technology such as instant messaging, camera phones and Internet porn. Producers made a deal last year with Friendster CEO Jonathan Abrams to use the friendship and networking site as the catalyst for a romantic comedy.

I can see the development exec meeting now: “Maybe if we just throw in as many new technologies into a script we can make a movie out of it! And hey, I like internet porn so let’s throw that in too!”

Careful what you wish for.

In the future when everyone watches high-resolution displays beauty really will be skin-deep. OnHD publishes a hilarious list of which celebrities look terrible once the powerful lens of HDTV is focuse on their hideous blemishes and which ones look better. I know, we also have no idea how anyone could possibly look better in High-Def.

3. Britney Spears
The pop tart is still in her early 20s, but she looks about
10 years older in high-def. Her face is puffy and she’s
starting to show wrinkle marks around her lips,
reportedly from a two pack-a-day cigarette habit.

Our recommendation for all future celebs: carry a super-size bottle of vaseline for liberal application to any lens. Unless you want to suffer the hypercritical eye of the masses.

What is Playlistism you ask? Now that iTunes uses an Apple technology called “Rendezvous” your music collection can shared with those around you. With wireless networks popping up everywhere this leads to some interesting situations. You can now hate/love people based on their terrible taste in music as opposed to the cliche race, religion and other traditional categorizations.

But this technology also gives us a new way to flirt with hot women (or hot men if that’s your fancy):

It had to belong to the girl with dark hair by the counter. I saw her when I got my coffee. Took note, lovely. Her. Her?

There is no music on my PowerBook. I offloaded my library to a drive that is to remain perpetually hooked up to my new Mac mini, serving away at home. Nonetheless, I shared my empty library out under the name “maria i sweat your music collection <3.”

I waited. I listened to selections from her library: Low, Manual. And then the sound skipped. I flipped to iTunes. Her library title had changed: “try_the_new_dalek.”

And he’s not the only one. His entire college campus is now redefining social hierarchy via iTunes libraries:

Aubrey said Wesleyan students are enjoying a new parlor game—going through music libraries trying to guess what their owners are like. At any one time, 30 or 40 iTunes libraries are available on the campus network, which is shared by about 2,000 students.

“This one playlist had a lot of German techno,” Aubrey said. “We predicted this was a kid wearing a mesh shirt who wanted to be a Nazi.” At a party shortly afterward, Aubrey recognized the playlist and asked whose music it was. “They pointed to this kid in a mesh shirt with a swastika on his arm,” Aubrey said.

Now excuse us while we go delete all the German Techno tracks from our iTunes. We wouldn’t want to give any potential mates the wrong idea.