Hungry Filmmaker

@jaclynlee I totally love my lightbulb notebook. It's somehow so much more inspiring than my real moleskine.

2010-05-25T14:54:00.001-07:00

via tweetie

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

When lawyers fail english

2010-05-21T21:53:00.001-07:00

Larry Horn on creating a patent pool around Google's allegedly patent-free video codec VP8:

Larry Horn: Yes, in view of the marketplace uncertainties regarding patent licensing needs for such technologies, there have been expressions of interest from the market urging us to facilitate formation of licenses that would address the market’s need for a convenient one-stop marketplace alternative to negotiating separate licenses with individual patent holders in accessing essential patent rights for VP8 as well as other codecs, and we are looking into the prospects of doing so.

via digitaldaily.allthingsd.com

Couldn't this guy just stop at "yes"?

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

Why open standards won't stop bad behavior (via @michaelindustries, @gruber)

2010-05-05T11:10:00.001-07:00

The OBJECT tag which spawns Flash movies is an open standard. The javascript that popped open that window with the screaming Flash ad is an open standard. And the HTML/CSS that slowly sashayed that 300×250 div right the fuck over that paragraph you were trying to read is an open standard too.

When Flash is gone, this overly aggressive marketing will simply be foisted upon you using more “open” technologies like HTML5. And guess what? It’ll be harder to block because it looks more like content than Flash does

via mikeindustries.com

This is a point most people (including me) miss when they talk about "open" versus "closed" on the iPhone. Open standards don't necessarily predicate good behavior. And while I continue to argue that open standards are important to have so no one is locked out, you run into the same problem as every open system in the world from a liberal democracy to a city sidewalk: you can't stop the crazies from coming out.

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

My response to David Hitchings article knocking Apple for excluding flash from iPhone OS

2010-04-15T13:41:00.001-07:00

Jobs will never allow Flash on any iPhone OS product, and we’re going to be better off because of it.

It seems counter-intuitive that banning Flash from iPhone OS would give the world more freedom, but that’s exactly what will happen and has happened already. I’m no longer locked into Flash to watch YouTube or Hulu. I don’t have to wait for Adobe to update its software for those content providers to implement more interesting features on their sites that would have used Flash. It’s ultimately a much more liquid market when open standards control interactivity than when one company controls it.

But one thing is certain: Jobs’ does not care about openness. He cares about controlling the user experience. He knows that in a world of open standards, Apple controls its own destiny by controlling its own implementation of those standards. And ultimately, we’ll be able to control our own destinies as well. I can choose a browser that implements those standards best instead of being forced to install Flash. Flash will never go away, of course, but it’s my choice if I want to use it. Jobs’ push to keep Flash off of iPhone OS will force content companies to offer more options to their consumers, and I can’t see anything wrong with that.

via hartfordinformer.com

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

Steve Jobs on design in 2003 (via @gruber)

2010-04-13T00:31:00.001-07:00

''People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''

via nytimes.com

This article is chock full of history. Do you remember when an iPod cost $500? Do you remember when earbuds were black?

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Geeky @ScrivenerApp review on MacBreak Weekly by @ihnatko and @hotdogsladies

2010-03-28T16:50:00.001-07:00

Download now or listen on posterous

MacBreak Weekly 182 Scrivener Review.mp3 (2515 KB)

I'm a huge Scrivener fan, and my religious fervor grows every time I can add someone else's enthusiasm to my own. Here, Andy Ihnatko talks a little bit about how he uses Scrivener, and once he gets going, he doesn't stop. I think this is one of his best and most informative endorsements of it, so I wanted to pass it on. The review gets a little geeky when Merlin Mann, a productivity blogger and huge tweak, jumps in and starts talking about "round-tripping" with between Scrivener and an outliner program. However, even if you're not into things like MultiMarkdown and LaTeX conversion (omg are they fun), Andy presents some very good use cases for Scrivener and how it's made his life that much more awesome.

This is just snippet of the Scrivener review, but you can find the original episode on MacBreak Weekly Episode 182 (iTunes).

Enjoy!

Posted via email from Matt Agnello's Posterous

A tale of two media: radio plays and videogames

2010-03-19T17:52:00.001-07:00

Radio plays and videogames. I never would have thought these two media would have so much in common, but they are surprisingly similar.

I've been spending several mornings reading William Ash's How to Write Radio Drama. A friend of mine got me excited about radio plays after letting me borrow ("borrow") his copy of the BBC Sherlock Holmes series with Clive Merrison and Michael Williams. These two men brought Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to life in a way I'd never really known existed, and it was primarily the result of the "blindness" of the aural medium. I was at once both free to imagine and forced to pay attention in ways I was not used to, using muscles of the mind in combinations I hadn't thought possible.

Ash likes to point to the solitary nature of the radio medium as its great strength. It isn't meant to induce large halls of people to standing ovation like a film or a stage play. Radio is intended to be experienced privately or in small groups like TV, but unlike TV no two people are sharing the same experience. The performances and the action guide the listener's mind to produce its own play, with its own actors, for the benefit of itself only.

Sherlock Holmes presented me with extremely rich performances to draw characters from, like TV, but I had to construct their interaction -- their mannerisms, blocking, wardrobe -- entirely in my head, like a book. Sherlock might go into an elaborate monologue on the unimaginative nature of the London criminal, but I decide whether he waves his arms when he speaks, or if he paces back and forth with his pipe, or shoves the pipe into Watson's face, as if accusing Watson of bringing down the whole society with his romanticism. The play guides me, but its construction is entirely my own, and I have a much closer relationship with it as a result. Listening to the Holmes radio plays, I was both listener and creator.

But how is this like a video game?

Video games work for the same reasons radio plays work. With some exceptions, playing a narrative game is solitary. It isn't intended to be watched by large groups of people in a communal experience. This solitude is a game's greatest strength. Horror games like Silent Hill succeed because they force the player to become the only person in a dark, abandoned place, an experience wholly different from watching a horror film in a theater with 20 or 30 people. The solitude in a game is real. And like radio plays, the game player creates the story as they go. They're limited by the environment and the characters, but individual choices are left up to the player, making it a far more personal experience. No two players will play through a game in exactly the same way, just as they wouldn't have the same play in their head listening to a radio play.

We'll see how far this connection goes. I can't wait to finish the book.

In addition to the Sherlock Holmes plays, I highly recommend the sci-fi series Planet B, "where you can be whatever you want to be."

Posted via email from Matt Agnello's Posterous

I just got Buzzed

2010-02-10T09:33:00.001-08:00

Google Buzz

Posted via email from Matt Agnello's Posterous

"Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer."

2010-02-09T16:36:00.001-08:00

Mark Pilgrim on The Setup

I’m a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn’t fucking matter!

[…]

Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening – really listening – to what people say about your writing.

via 43folders.com

That said, I'm playing around with this Notational Velocity program Merlin recommended on Macbreak Weekly, especially syncing via Dropbox and SimpleNote.

I have not learned this lesson.

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

keep life minimal

2010-02-09T14:38:00.001-08:00

mnmlist in 50 words

In case you feel I've been wordy:

less

via mnmlist.com

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

Apt consumer quote about iPad

2010-02-09T10:28:00.001-08:00

I'm 100% about convenience when it comes to work related stuff. If I'm going to buy a tablet for work--it has to fit what I want it to do 100% or I'm not shelling out the cash.

via mobileread.com

This comment by dmaul1114 on the MobileRead forums sums up almost perfectly what I think everyone's problem with the iPad is: it doesn't do 100% of what they want it to do.

I'm still up in the air about if this is a reasonable expectation. A form factor larger than a cell phone sounds like it should be able to do a lot of things, at least proportionally more things than its smaller cousin. The iPad's initial features fall far short of that. However, I don't think people are giving enough thought to the power 3rd party apps and 3rd party hardware will add to this device.

Imagine: you plug your Canon 5D into the dock connector on the bottom and pop open Canon's CameraTouch application. (For the record, I'm completely making this up.) On the screen, you see what your Canon 5D sees, and you can tap the screen anywhere to have the camera automatically focus and white balance for whatever part of the image you've just tapped, just like the iPhone 3GS's camera. Maybe you can bring up more information about the photo, a spectrograph, an oscilloscope, whatever you want. But instead of Apple being the ones to define and design that experience, you're getting it from people who know your work habits as a photographer and can craft it better than Apple can.

In my opinion, we shouldn't blame Apple for not putting everything we could possibly want in the device right away. We should ask other companies, like Canon or Nikon or Panasonic or Sony (imagine this on a film set!), to make this device useful in their particular field.

The power of the iPad is the same as the iPhone: it's a different computing experience completely separate from what you'd do on a traditional computer. But we can't expect Apple to provide 100% of the things we really want to do with it. We're all too varied and creative. Let Apple provide a compelling device, and let 3rd parties add all of that extra functionality that we as individuals in our homes and jobs need.

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

Hilarious post-apocalyptic web series pilot by John August: The Remnants

2010-01-27T16:24:00.001-08:00

via vimeo.com

Written and produced during the last writer's strike. Who said unemployment was such a bad thing?

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

Live Apple “Come see our latest creation” / tablet event coverage – gdgt live

2010-01-27T11:02:00.001-08:00

10:54AM - Somewhere Jeff Bezos just did a spit take. Well, probably not.

via live.gdgt.com

Another ePub supporter born. Looks like we've found the mp3 of books. Now, what to publish...

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

My tablet coverage setup

2010-01-27T10:07:00.001-08:00

Posted via email from Matt Agnello's Posterous

Movies so far

2010-01-21T09:29:00.001-08:00

Avatar (2009) More at IMDbPro »

Photos (see all 175 | slideshow) Videos (see all 28)

via imdb.com

Caddyshack (1980) More at IMDbPro »

Photos (see all 36 | slideshow) Videos (see all 5)

via imdb.com

District 9 (2009) More at IMDbPro »

Photos (see all 33 | slideshow) Videos (see all 48)

via imdb.com

9 (2009/I) More at IMDbPro »

Photos (see all 57 | slideshow) Videos (see all 35)

via imdb.com

Holy Rollers (2010) More at IMDbPro »

Photos (see all 5 | slideshow)

via imdb.com

The Big Sleep (1946) More at IMDbPro »

Photos (see all 55 | slideshow) Videos (see all 5)

via imdb.com

Up in the Air (2009/I) More at IMDbPro »

Photos (see all 80 | slideshow) Videos (see all 32)

via imdb.com

Triumph des Willens (1935) More at IMDbPro »

Photos (see all 12 | slideshow)

via imdb.com

Full list at http://bit.ly/hungrymovieyear

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

Neill Blomkamp (District 9) gives a new take on filmmaking business: eschew the high budget

2010-01-20T12:09:00.001-08:00

NB: I’ve been offered films – a lot of films, in fact – with seriously high budgets, and I’ve turned them all down. The reason is exactly what you said earlier: Once the budgets get bigger, you can’t do what you want as a director, unless you’re Peter Jackson or James Cameron. And even then, the pressure is still on the filmmaker. Even if the studio isn’t clamping down on you, all the pressure is on the director. And if you screw that up, the jeopardy situation is even worse. The way you don’t get yourself in that jeopardy situation is by making films that aren’t as risky financially. I just want to make films that have enough of a budget to pull off high-level imagery but also have a budget that is low enough that I can do what I want.

via latimesblogs.latimes.com

This is very, very good advice. The best films are ones where the director has as much creative control as possible. If you want to keep creative control, you have to sacrifice budget. And those sacrifices will make you stronger creatively, because you can't slap the magic CG band-aid on something that doesn't work. You have to a CG effect that helps the film as a whole -- not just the shot.

Posted via web from Matt Agnello's Posterous

1 year, 150 films

2010-01-16T10:52:00.001-08:00

I hang around a lot of people who like movies, and naturally that leads to "have you seen this" conversations. Over the past couple years, I've noticed more and more my answer was "no." For a while I was okay with that; I'm a pretty non-traditional guy. I thought to myself, screw Hollywood movies! I don't need to see the crap they put out these days to make something good myself!

I realized that's wrong. First of all, for all the Transformers and Leap Years in the world, there are lots of other mass release films that are good, and all of them have something to teach. Like grammar, you have to know the rules before you can break them. So I decided 2010 will be the year of new movies for me. I decided to watch 150 new (to me) films before January 1st, 2011. At least two of those will be new releases every month, so I'll have seen 24 new releases and 126 old films I've never seen before by the end of the year, and it's gonna be awesome.

This idea is completely unoriginal, and over at the Honky's Movie Year blog (via @ihnatko) you can see someone vastly outdoing me at one movie per day plus a full review -- for a second year in a row!

My intention is a little different. I'm watching these movies as educational experiences. I don't care if they're good or bad -- in fact, I'm intentionally picking some movies people say haven't been that good, like Avatar, which I actually liked (in 2D more than 3D). I'm looking to understand why they're good or bad. Not in the snarky way a film reviewer might understand it. I'm into geeky details: the writing, the lighting, the cinematography, the sound design, the music, the editing, the acting, the directing as a whole. What happens, and what kind of effect does it produce, and does it work out? I want to ask, does the movie do what it ultimately sets out to do, not just did I personally connect with it. I want to really understand what makes a feature film move, from the sweeping CG shot to the sound the foley artist chose for footsteps on pavement.

I'm keeping my list online so everyone can follow my progress, and so peer pressure forces me to keep up the pace. You can view the list at http://bit.ly/hungrymovieyear

Movie suggestions are welcome and highly encouraged. At around 40 or 50 films, I'm sure I'll need the help. You can post them in the comments, or send them to me on Twitter @hungryfilmmaker and use the hash tag #hmy2010, or email me at matt AT hungryfilmmaker DOT com.

Free-writing

2009-12-03T16:42:00.001-08:00

A fellow blogger and friend of mine recently finished NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, where tons of people commit themselves to write 50,000 words between the first and the last day of November. My friend Jaclyn Paul (check out her blog if you like creative people, she's very much so) crossed the finish line on day 30 at 50,020 words. I was deeply impressed, so I asked her how she managed. She said she would sit down for about 1,000 words on weekdays and catch up on the weekends. But she would also set aside time to do stream of consciousness-style free-writing, about 15 minutes every day. I said I had tried that before, but it just felt icky. She said she stopped using the margins, forced herself to write sloppy, and just let things fall out. And somehow that made it easier to write more. Both of us recalled Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg's book about writing, where she calls on writers to simply "fill notebooks," focus on quantity instead of quality, and trust that a novel will emerge out of the chaos.

Doesn't really seem like the best way to write a novel, does it? But strangely enough, she's right. You don't try to edit as you go, or else you'll undercut the natural flow of the novel. The words might not all be right the first time, but that's for your editor to figure out. Your editor might be you, but you can't be both writer and editor at the same time.

Since I'm between jobs, I've been focusing on improving myself as much as possible. One of the things I've let fallow for too long is my writing, so I decided to start doing regular free-writes. I just finished my first in a very, very long time. If you're wondering what this looks like, here's a short excerpt as an example:

Stretch your mind. Don't just asborb [sic] information and grow fat. Spit it back out again. Regurgitate it. Build smething [sic] with it. You can't see a shape until you walk around it, tear it, turn it, break it, burn it, to really know it. You have to be willing to suffer with it, to go to war with it, be tortured with it, love it, have its babies, and roll over every corner of it before you know it.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's not really the point. In fact, this probably has far too much structure for a free-write. It's not particularly meaningful, either, but that is also not the point. The point is, as my brain latched onto at some point in those fifteen minutes, to stretch your mind. In the same way a runner does several meaningless athletic acts before getting to the real business of running, like touching his toes, or pulling her feet up, or jumping in place, so too does a writer have to write many meaningless things before getting to the real business of writing. It's my hope that doing free-writing exercises regularly will help my unconscious grow nimble and flexible, so when I sit down to write, my writer muscle is already warmed up and loose.

The brain is like any other muscle, and it grows lax without exercise. You can benefit from free-writing even if you're just writing a corporate memo or a Facebook message to an old friend. It's all about training your unconscious so that when the pen is in your hand or your hands are on the keyboard, everything falls into place.

"In transition"

2009-11-24T12:45:00.000-08:00

I think this is one of the best times to lose your job.

Of course, you do have to get the sulking out of the way first. You have to spend a couple days when you over-analyze that final conversation where you found out you were being laid off. You pore over every word, maybe come up with a couple retorts you could've used that really, yes really, could have saved your job if you'd thought of them at the time. It's emotionally exactly like breaking up with someone, and you get over it the same way: shed some tears over buckets of burning photos, take a couple cold showers, and move on.

Coming from a job that sucked up 70-80 hours of my life every week, I now have time -- real, deliciously edible time -- to do the things that are really important to me. I get to spend more time with my fiancee. I get to see the people I haven't talked to since we worked on that thing for those people six months ago. I get to catch up on that sleep thing I've missed for the past year. I get to focus on my health again. I get to give a moment to those side projects that have been rattling around in my head forever. I get to redo my website and my reel. I get to spruce up my resume.

Get to. Not "have to." It's a gigantic opportunity for me to find a better job than I had before. I have the freedom to take a step back, look at the state of the industry, and choose my own place in it rather than struggle from some strategically weak position I'm too invested in to leave.

Plus, I get to apply my creativity to the rabidly interesting problem of actually finding a job. These days, the networking tools I have available are incredibly fun and have so much potential. Yesterday, I dove head first into LinkedIn, connected with as many people as I could find, recommended people I've worked with (and got recommended in turn), and got introduced to friends of friends I had never met before. I applied to four jobs in two days, I've got several more leads, and I haven't even touched a job search site yet.

It is a great time to be unemployed, because it allows me to get a sense of perspective on myself and the world around me. I can explore and experiment in ways I never could while employed. And I can catch up on the important things, all while actually looking for work. Of all the points in history I've passed through on my way here, I'm glad I get to be unemployed now. After all, what better time to be "in transition" when the entire industry is in transition?

Photo / Original by ingridtaylar CC BY 3.0

Connect with me on LinkedIn!

The Melmarc Zone, a new kind of corporate video

2009-08-11T20:09:00.000-07:00

I occasionally crew for my friend Phil Hover at Soar Productions who does corporate videos in Orange County. More than half of the projects he hires me on end up being slightly zany takes on the traditionally dry corporate video genre that involve the company's actual employees as amatuer actors. It's a really unique experience, and I love it every time. This time, he covered an Orange County textile company called Melmarc in a mashup of styles that combined The Office, reality TV, and the Twilight Zone.

I'm always impressed how excited and involved the employees get. This is the second corporate video of this type that I've done with him, and each time I'm surprised how dedicated the employees are to learning a skillset completely divorced from their own industries to help get the movie made. Watch especially Blaze's crazy designer pad, a set that the employees put together entirely on their own, to see how much these guys really throw themselves into the production. And Blaze himself clearly missed his calling.

I also have to praise Melmarc for being self-confident enough to do something totally off-beat and put it out there with no shame. Most companies do not have the cajones to do something like that, but I really think a video like this sets Melmarc apart from other companies, especially in attracting an edgier crowd.

Thanks to Phil for giving me the amazing opportunity of watching him work again, and I hope you enjoy "The Melmarc Zone."

The great backlight adventure

2009-08-11T19:44:00.000-07:00

About six months ago, the back light on my friend's five-year old Dell Latitude expired. Eschewing traditional repair routes, and despite having many technically-inclined friends more than capable of taking on the task of repairing the laptop for him, my friend Justin — who is anything but technically inclined — purchased a replacement part from eBay and set about replacing the fizzled filament himself.

In a rather spur of the moment decision, we decided to film the event, and it snowballed into a full-blown pick up production. Justin invited everyone over for a party. We threw together an interview station with a curtain and a work light and interviewed all the attendees on their opinions on Justin's prospects for success. Following that, we filmed the entire repair process from the first unhinged screw to the decisive moment when Justin steeled himself and with eyes pressed shut in terror finally pushed the power button.

Another friend of mine is editing the project, but I threw together a little trailer after capturing the footage. I hope you enjoy it, and stay tuned for a full documentary on the event sometime in the future.

Justin's Laptop Teaser from Matt Agnello on Vimeo.

PLoS Conversations: Episode One

2009-08-11T19:27:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some more work with PLoS, the open access science journal, to help grow their community and spread their amazing ideas around. The latest to come out of the amazing idea machine that lives in the depths of PLoS is article-level metrics, a new way of evaluating paper relevance and impact. This was the first of what will hopefully be several episodes in a series we've decided to call PLoS Conversations where PLoS collaborates with people in the community to talk about hot topics in open access generally and PLoS specifically, and I help make a video out of it.

This was my first project where I worked as the editor only and someone else shot the footage. That someone else was Cameron Neylon, a biological scientist and social media blogger, who used ScreenFlow to record himself and his Mac while he presented on article-level metrics and social bookmarking for academics.

Check back at the PLoS Conversations channel for future updates. We'll hopefully be adding more videos there in the future. Enjoy!

Article-level Metrics from PLoS on Vimeo.

Speak early and often

2009-08-11T18:46:00.001-07:00

This is my hundredth post! The irony is that it comes over 100 days since I did my 99th.

I have to apologize for not posting for so long. I can't offer being busy as a reason, or having nothing to post about. Neither is true. It was more a confidence issue.

Reading more and more about the history of blogging and watching social media develop as a medium, I found it hard to believe that I could really add much that hadn't been touched on already by better minds. But this view, I later discovered (or re-discovered), is completely wrong. I reaffirmed for myself something I had known intuitively for a long time but faded when I never asserted it: everyone's perspective matters.

One might not be a master wordsmith or know the perfect metaphor for the moment, but the Web invites even the dustiest prose, and the most amateur author, to speak. The act alone is important, because you can't evaluate beforehand the impact of your words. You have to form them and put them firmly into the world first to really know their worth. And even if your work is not deemed worthy, it's a step toward getting your 10,000 hours in and learning the craft.

I wrote about Ira Glass's comments on storytelling and creativity a while ago, and it came back to me as I thought about this topic. He talks about how people in creative fields start out with great taste but little skill. It takes a while, a long while, for those two things to converge, where you can make something that really matches the image you have in your mind. What he doesn't come out and say is this: perfectionism and fear of failure will make you fail. You have to try and fail over and over again, and rarely will you be rewarded for the act of trying, but it is by far the most important thing you can do to increase your ability to "be the change you wish to see in the world "(Ghandi).

My perfectionism and fear of failure kept me silent since March. I hope not to succumb to that again. To make it up, I have some posts coming up after this one to talk a bit about what I've been doing in the last few months, and I hope you enjoy them.

Update: Here are some direct links to the three new blog posts.

The Mad Crisis: Jim Cramer on The Daily Show

2009-03-14T08:20:00.000-07:00

"This is not a [censored] game."

Few people could have provided more appropriate commentary on the economic crisis than Jon Stewart in his interview with Jim Cramer on The Daily Show. Stewart played clip after clip showing Cramer in 2006 explain how he had manipulated stocks through rumor and insinuation as a hedge-fund manager. "It's really satisfying," the 2006 Cramer said. When the camera turned back to the 2009 Cramer sitting in front of Jon Stewart and a full studio audience, he was speechless and pale and couldn't apologize fast enough.

But it was Stewart's wrap up that delivered the full punch, the most entertainment, and the best point. "You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet."

Stewart's quick-punch criticism is reminiscent of his interview on Crossfire in 2004 where he took on hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson for skewing political debate and making it into "partisan hackery" and "theatre."

Is Cramer the only guy to blame for the current market situation? Absolutely not. Did he deserve the call out for his actions as a hedge-fund manager? Absolutely. Are there other people who should be in that chair? More than one. But I'm concerned less with the financle angle than I am about the news one: why is a Comedy Central satirical news show doing the hardest hitting criticism of Wall Street?

One possibility is that Comedy Central has nothing to lose here. Jon Stewart can easily take a stark position against corruption on Wall Street and hear nothing from his bosses. The story might play out differently if a CNBC reporter took a hedge-fund manager or SEC regulator to town over these same kinds of "shenanigans." That kind of reporting, while wildly effective, could see a drop in Mad Money's ratings. Why invest if CNBC is giving you more reasons not to trust the stock market, and therefore, why watch Jim Cramer on TV?

These kinds of conflicts of interest, where large companies undermine themselves internally, is killing the quality of products everywhere, including news reporting. Competition is supposed to shore this up, but all the news networks have the same sickness. I love The Daily Show, and I love that it isn't afraid to be serious, but I don't want it to be my only good news source.

[via EW.com]

Part 1:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Part 2:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Part 3:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Photo / Matt Agnello CC BY 3.0 / original by woodleywonderworks CC BY 2.0

Hulu cuts the cable to Boxee

2009-02-19T06:08:00.001-08:00

In another shot across the bow in the content wars, Hulu has pulled itself from the budding media interface Boxee. Boxee is a hack for the Apple TV that allows you to watch many shows streamed over the Internet on your TV. Those include Fox, CBS, YouTube, Netflix, Comedy Central, and until recently, Hulu.com. Boxee is also available as a stand-alone program that you can run on your Mac.

TechCrunch reported that Hulu CEO made a post on the subject on the website's blog entitled "Doing hard things."

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.

As most of the coverage points out, this action brings to light the fact that Hulu is deeply dependent on content-owners' wishes and has to bow to their demands over its users'. It also highlights a space where users who want ad-supported around-the-clock on-demand programming on their TVs through their Internet subscription will clash with content owners who want to control the entire experience.

Around the same time, Ars Technica covered the release of a new work-in-progress Front Row plugin called Understudy that allows you to do some limited streaming from Netflix and Hulu. As of this writing, the Hulu functionality does not work and marks any video you attempt to play as unavailable.

At the moment, Hulu's actions only affect more technical individuals who hacked their Apple TVs or who use Boxee on their computers. But it's clear that more and more people want their media wherever they want it -- be it on a computer, on an iPod, in the car, or at the office -- and they want it now. This will naturally bump up against content owners' desire to control the experience, sell ads, and cable companies who wish to sell cable subscriptions. Even now, I get calls from Time Warner asking if I want a cable subscription, and I have to tell them I watch all my TV on Hulu.

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