May 13, 2014
TV
Today was ABC’s day to share their fall schedule (LW). With TiVo, I have to take a minute to think about what I actually watch on a channel. For ABC I think it’s only Modern Family and The Goldbergs (please watch The Goldbergs). A slight adjustment puts those two shows back-to-back.
But is there anything new?
Selfie jumped to my attention first thanks to Karen Gillan (Amy from Doctor Who) and that it is somewhat based on Pygmalion (the character’s name is Eliza Dooley). I wasn’t blown away by the trailer but those points earn it a chance. Other than Selfie, I’m not seeing much.
Podcasts
I haven’t listened to much Nerdist recently, but it’s one of the many podcasts that I keep around just to see the guests before deleting. When I saw this episode with Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham (LW) pop up, that was a guarantee listen. I mentioned them and their show Playing House a few days ago. The town on the show gave me a Gilmore Girls vibe and has that potential so when Jessica compares it to that during the show, I was very happy to be proven correct.
I’ve only just started on Friday’s No Such Thing As A Fish, but their first fact is shareable. It was about a jockey that died during a race, but didn’t fall off the horse, and finished in first. To add to that, the horse’s name was Sweet Kiss, gaining it the nickname Sweet Kiss of Death. I didn’t find a ton of information, but OMG Facts had a quick post (LW).
Sports
Well, sports tv to be exact. PTI will be around for a while longer with both Tony and Wilbon extending their contracts (LW). I actually haven’t watched in a while. The show comes and goes as it seems I’ll hit a stretch of a few days when I’m looking for something to watch when it is on live or a replay. It was one of the early podcasts I listened to, but many have since replaced its spot in that rotation.Â
May 11, 2014
TV
NBC’s Fall Schedule (LW) is out today. I’m not sure I care about this too much. The Voice and Sunday Night Football appear to make up half the schedule. There is really only one show I’m at all interested in watching, A to Z. It’s a romsitcom starring The Mother from HIMYM and Rashia Jones is one of the producers. Those facts got me to watch the trailer (LW), which hooked me.
The biggest hole in the NBC schedule is the cancellation of Community (LW), which isn’t too surprising except if they weren’t going to cancel it the past three years, there wasn’t much reason to cancel it this year after it got things back together and had a great season.
The only excitement for NBC comes from their not yet scheduled shows, which include Parks & Rec. Plus, there are two or three interesting new shows, based on who is involved:Â Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (created by Tina Fey), Bad Judge (produced by Will Ferrell), and Mr. Robinson (starring Craig Robinson).
Podcasts
The Gist is a new daily podcast on Slate. Hosted by Mike Pesca, who is also on Hang Up & Listen (the best sports podcast). This one isn’t sports-focused, but more news and general interest. For example, on Thursday topics included the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, improv rappers attempted to teach Mike how to rap, and a round up of news items related to urine. So yea, topics will vary, but they will all fall into informative or entertaining.
Penn State
Hard to believe that it’s college graduation time, this was graduation weekend at Penn State. That means that finals were last week. Business Insider covered some students who decided finals were worth ’tailgating’ (LW). My only issue is that it appears they actually ‘GameDay’d’ finals with clever signs. So thumbs up to the students, but Business Insider, get your facts straight.
July 26, 2011
All this talk about the cloud but there isn’t much that seems to work correctly at this point. It’s sad that I’m going to have to use iCloud so I can have something that will let me cleanly edit documents across my Apple products when Dropbox has served me well but is limited by what Apple lets it do.
It seems that music in the cloud is the popular topic recently, especially with Spotify finally launching in the US. I don’t see what the big deal is as it is not much different than a bunch of services that are already out there. I’ll have more on the topic soon as I spent a month with a Slacker trial and currently trying a rdio trial. No Spotify trial means rdio has a good shot at winning out. Again, more on that later.
All these music services have struggled to deal with the labels before than can do any innovating. Hmm, if there was only some sort of audio product where there wasn’t much worry about licenses. How about podcasts?
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who still listens to multiple podcasts across a couple of devices at the same time. I’m tied to iTunes to sort of keep things organized and sync’d. Evey that is tricky. iTunes podcast syncing was broken for months earlier this year and they didn’t seem to really care as it went a few updates without a fix. What I mean by broken: I’d listen to part of a podcast on my computer, then sync my iPhone and it would reset to the beginning of that podcast the next time I played it, instead of starting where I left off. For a while I had to be very careful of when I could sync and started listening to certain podcasts on certain devices. I looked for an alternative, but no luck.
The closest a product has come to being useful in a podcast management system was Odeo. It kept track of everything and would stream the podcast. I don’t think it remembered where you were in a podcast if you stopped listening in the middle and there was no downloading, so it wasn’t good for mobile. If you haven’t heard of Odeo, you might want to read up on your internet history as Twitter was dreamed up by the team while working at Odeo.
So what do I want and how does this so-called cloud work?
That’s it. And the podcast hosts handle almost all the bandwidth because they freely distribute. All this cloud has to handle is all the status information. Podcasts don’t even need to be tied to music, so something could easily be developed outside of iTunes. Really all that’s needed are mobile apps because the desktop could be just a web site with streaming at the start. This even solves a problem I had considered too much to hope for: syncing between desktops. I have my own computer but then another computer at work. When I’m at work, I will just listen to podcats on my iPhone because who knows when something will pop up and leave me in the middle of a podcast.
Audiobooks and paid podcasts could easily follow a similar model. Audiobooks are even more crucial when it comes to remembering the position in the book. I can only assume Audible has not come out with their own app because they make too much off of iTunes.
This really doesn’t seem that hard. If I was solid on iOS development and had a few free days, I feel like this could be quickly dealt with.
Oh, and as for making money. You have a podcast directory like iTunes. Again, the hosts do most of the work setting up their accounts. Then you just have podcasters looking for attention to advertise on the site.