Current Dr Who series is excellent

I remember being really scared by the Daleks as a young child, and I've always had a soft spot for Dr Who.

This current series started out looking a bit like the high production value was out of balance with the plots but the last three weeks, here in Australia, with the two part "Silence in the library" and "Forest of the dead", and last week "Midnight" were really great.

7:30 Sunday nights ABC1.

Sleek Geeks in a lift

After a talk on ABC Radio National about the iPhone this morning, I was riding down in the lift at the ABC's Ultimo centre, the doors opened, and in walked the "Sleek Geeks" - Adam Spencer (with his bicycle) and Dr Karl Kruszelnicki.

I'm a huge fan of both these guys, and they were gracious enough to allow me to snap this picture as we descended. Adam rode off and Karl stayed for a chat about some computer troubles.

Thanks guys for being so polite in the face of a stary-eyed fan in close quarters.

Another perspective on piracy

Denis Price, owner of "The Picture Show Man" twin cinema at Merimula gave an insightful talk on ABC Radio National tonight, but I feel he's missing an important point.

Denis has seen a "large chunk" of his market disappearing. I have great sympathy for him and can fully understand his interpretation of what he is experiencing - but I think he's missing the point.

The estimates of lost revenue by the record companies, studios and game makers are based on an assumption that everyone who has taken a copy of their works would have actually paid retail price for that work at current retail prices for physical copies. Clearly that's not the case.

Secondly, if Denis thinks that his cinema would be full except for the piracy of movies on the Interrnet, then how does he explain the fact that DVD/BluRay copies aren't available at the same time as the movie release? Surely if everyone was satisfied with the cinema experience then surely movies would be on DVD on the same day of the cinema release.

A new movie can be enjoyed in a variety of formats: iMAX, Digital Cinema, Standard Cinema (like Denis's), High Definition home cinema, standard definition TV, iPod Touch/iPhone, or iPod Video, and many others.

Sure, the film maker would like us to see their art in the iMAX cinema, but the reality is that not all of us will.

Downloading a movie from the "Internet" isn't free - users pay for the bandwidth, and it take real effort and concentration to locate and organise the download. Users must install special software and jump through all sorts of hoops to view the content.

The fact that Denis sees lots of people doing all this doesn't mean that they are criminals, it means that there is a clear consumer demand to get the content they value in new ways. Content providers have not kept pace with what consumers want and consumers will find a way until the providers come on board.

When a new movie comes out, I want to be able to choose how I will view it. Some movies should be seen in a wonderful cinema. Other movies might be best watched on the bus on my portable digital player. The point is that I want to pay the creators of this content but currently I can't.

If we can't buy the content in the format we want, well, I guess we'll look for other alternatives. That's not a threat, it's a marketplace that is being shunned by retroactive suppliers who refuse to keep up with the age of the internet.

The old model of distribution of content, where physical copies are shipped around the world is just silly.

Denis Price says "Indeed, we've now reached a tipping point." but he's got an axe to grind and he's picked the tipping the wrong way.

The cinema experience, where we go to a place with a great digital projector, great surround sound, great seats, and the vibe of experiencing the movie with other movie lovers I hope will live on - but it's just one of many possible ways to consume content.

Often when I go to the cinema, I get over priced food, out of focus projection, way too many ads, and bad seats plus annoying compatriots.

I respect creative people and I want to pay them their dues. We live in the age of the Internet and instant gratification. There is a huge opportunity here, don't fight it, satisfy it.

I urge you to read what Denis had to say. But I think the other perspective should be expressed.

Newspapers not for breaking news any more

I remember a time when the morning newspaper had a box, outlined in red, with breaking news that was occurring as the paper was put to bed.

This morning, the Sydney Morning Herald arrived on the doorstep missing one of the biggest stories of the year - the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Now, I listen to the radio over night so it felt like the story was quite old by the time the paper came and it was surprising to see no mention of it.

In Wikipedia it is reported on her page that she died at 6:16pm local time, which is 12:16am Sydney time (a bit after midnight). Had the paper's front page been set in stone already?

Was the biggest story in the world the fact that NSW police didn't want a water cannon, or that the PM went to the cricket and didn't seem to enjoy it?

I know it's the silly season, but news doesn't stop and in recent years we've had some really big stories at this time of year, including a tsunami.

For three years I subscribed to Time magazine and there is some value to a publication that shows the news of the past week in a way that lets you get a feeling for what has transpired without any pretense of having the very latest news.

It's hard, (for me), to see the value of a broadsheet daily news paper. Our paper recycling bin is pretty much full of it. Perhaps it's time for a daily journal of opinion and analysis that doesn't pretend to have the news of the day any more.

Video stores dead... again (Quickflix review)

I've long assumed that the days of the local video store are numbered, but the reason I thought was direct rental with download over the internet. It seems there's another competitor that is very compelling - the online DVD rental businesses.

When Ingmar Bergaman died (actually a week before, which is weird) I felt a desire to watch some of those beautifully lit black and white movies. A visit to the two local video stores proved fruitless. The nicer, more disorganised store couldn't even search their database for anything except titles!

I looked for an online DVD rental service and stumbled across Quickflix. They have a 14 day free trial with unlimited rentals during that time (with 3 out at a time). You can keep a DVD as long as you like with no penalty, (except your monthly fee), but of course they don't send you more until you return some. Sound too good to be true!

They have a catalog of 25,000 titles, you create a queue of what you want, in order, and they send them out with a pre-paid return post envelope and a nice stiff DVD holder. As a new member, I've been a very efficient viewer. When a disk arrives, I watch it and post it back the very next day.

Here's what I like about this vendor:

• Good web site, quick, good searching, queue management a bit clunky but functional.
• Reviews by David Strattan and Megan Spencer are a good thing, I'd like more lists to prompt me as well
• Email notification of what they've just posted and what they've just received back from me is great and clear.

Here's my pretty minor grumbles:

• The limiting factor is the postal turnaround time. I work in North Sydney and they are in North Sydney, even so it takes three (or mostly four) business days for the posting of one disk back before the next one is sent.
• They don't send items from the top of my queue. Perhaps they only have a few copies, but I generally get things from number four or more from my queue. It might be good to give some idea of the stock and demand.
• After your free trial, you go on to the $40/month plan "unlimited" with three DVDs out at a time. Given the turnaround time, this doesn't seem like the best value - I've dropped back to the $20 plan which is a maximum of 5 DVDs per month.

And why is the local DVD store dead? $4 per DVD with a post paid return envelope and a catalog probably 100 times larger beats $6 per DVD and the waste of time going to the store when they are open - hands down.

How about downloading? I hear that a DVD converted to H.264 video takes up about 700Mb. For most of us on current "unlimited" broadband plans (ha!), five movies would be 3.5Gb which is a fair proportion of "unlimited". For this to be really attractive, it would need to be unchargeable download of some sort. Pretty soon, we'll all be renting HD/DVD or BlueRay and these will be much bigger to download so I predict that delivering data by disk through the post will remain pretty attractive for some time, at least in this country...

Efficient news reading and manipulation by Dvorak

I'm a news junky. Radio, including short wave radio, used to be my primary source of world news. As the internet ramped up in the '90s I used to visit a bunch of sites each morning to get my update on what's important to me.

It took maybe 15 minutes, while eating breakfast, to read the sites. I also appreciated their design, sometimes clicked deeper in to their content and viewed their banner ads.

Now I use RSS readers, it used to be NetNewsWire but now that web apps are getting good, I use GoogleReader. I can skim all the headlines in seconds, view a bit more info a few more seconds and drill right to the site if I want more very quickly.

Content is king and it's a great deal but I do feel bad that the sites I read every day (actually many times a day) don't get the benefit of my ad impressions.

Some sites are smart, or manipulative - if you like. The king of traffic manipulation is John C Dvorak. I like his story sense - he's been around a long time reviewing technology, so he's a skeptic and tends to dismiss the hype around new product announcements which is actually a useful approach.

John has a rather broken RSS feed that gives you just the headline, which is often incomprehensible without the image. If you click through, you get the comments about the story, but not the story. So you are forced to go and visit the home page. He's getting several page views through this strategy.

Dvorak and his (new) team of hhopper, Eideard, Uncle Dave, SN, and Gasparrini don't seem to publish any original content on the blog (presumably that's saved for commercial journalism outlets that pay a bit better). The value they are adding is mostly editorial - they find interesting stories and re-publish a bit, often embedding video segments. They always give attribution and links - so that's good for the original content creators.

The big secret in the news business used to be how much of the news (90%?) was simply copied or slightly edited from the wire services: AP, Reuters, etc. It's no longer a secret to anyone who views GoogleNews and sees how the same story appears, word for word, in all the world's news papers.

The news business is changing, I'm amazed to still see the giant pile of newspaper we recycle every week, full of stuff that was old news before it was printed. I think there are the following distinct points in news production where value is added:

• News gathering - reporters on the ground
• Editing and researching
• Editorial selection - choosing stories of interest to different consumer groups
• Editorial ordering - sorting the stories, choosing the top story
• Linking relevant stories
• Packaging into periodic wrapups - news of the day, news of the week, news of the year
• Opinion - interpreting a bunch of stories to deliver some insight about "what's really going on"
• Presenting - reading aloud, rendering on paper or HTML or whatever
• Delivering - to browsers, TVs, phones 

The scary thing is how much of these are able to be done pretty well by automated computer programs.

I love news, but right now the only people being paid by me is my internet provider. This doesn't seem quite fair.

Fairwell DRM, hello fingerprinting?

I'm as happy as everyone to see that it's going to be possible to buy music without DRM. I've only purchased a few tracks as I regard buying with DRM as being like renting rather than buying.

This move will surely stimulate more content sales, and perhaps better, will open up the market to iPod alternatives that will play your purchased content.

The purpose of DRM is to make it hard to pass on the content, the downside is so bad (honest customers losing the ability to play stuff they paid for because they upgraded or something) that it could be that less intrusive alternatives are being sought.

The obvious one to me is content fingerprinting. Add a unique customer code to the data in the content that doesn't affect the play but can be used to trace where the copy came from. Sure, there'll be ways to strip them out in the end, but for most consumers, if they know their purchased tracks can be traced back to them it will dissuade them from "sharing".

I'm making this up, it might not be on the agenda at all, but it is possible.

Media ratings survey asks wrong questions

My fourteen year old daughter recently completed a two week media survey diary for Roy Morgan Research.

They paid her to the value of about $35, it wasn't worth it. The survey was a combination of a detailed questionnaire about her interests and behavior and a diary of what she watched or listened to on TV or radio.

She's tech savvy and doesn't like watching ads so TV is mostly watched in delay by recording it on our digital video recorder so the ads can be fast forwarded through. The strange thing is that the diary asked only the time and channel, but not the program. As my daughter pointed out they weren't asking the right questions.

Luckily for them she was kind enough to look up the time and date of the recording and try to fill in the diary to reveal the program, which is presumably what they wanted to know. But what about when she watched a program while recording another, there was no way to reveal this.

Incidentally, it appears she listens to no radio at all. All music is on iPod from various sources. That's a depressing thing for a radio lover like me.

Reading their site, Roy Morgan Research, seem to be on the ball, but after seeing how they survey I would have to be highly skeptical about the accuracy of their media survey results.