iPad’s Achilles Heel: Moving Media Companies to the Current Century

It’s something that the computer geeks don’t get. It’s part of why Microsoft’s efforts to promote Tablet PCs for the past ten years has completely failed. It’s not about the hardware or the feature list. It’s about the books, magazines, newspapers, and movies I can connect to and my access to my stuff stored on the cloud. In typical Apple fashion they are at least a good five to ten years ahead of the curve and this is resulting in more than a few disconnects. The geeks are thinking GBs storage, USB ports and processor speeds and old media are thinking pay-walls and DRM. And both of them are so dead wrong, it’s embarrassing.

On the media end I should be able able to click on any book and get an electronic or audio version for less than the price of going to my local Borders for a dead tree version. But the publishers have got their heads so far up their asses that they want to charge me a hard cover price or more for a version that doesn’t cost them one physical cent to produce or ship. They would rather sell 1,000 copies for $25 than 1,000,000 copies for $5. Or worse, there’s no e-version available because they can’t figure out how to make a digital version (though I remember a Harry Potter fan copying a 500 page book in less time than it took for the dead tree version to make it to his country).

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Moving Media Around the House

By definition, this is a “first world” problem. In the news gap between CES and the Apple event next week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I might manage my media collections between all of my computers. The buzz around the Boxee box and anticipating the need to have most of my working data in the cloud so that I can access it regardless of what computer or platform I’m using has inspired me to find a better way to work with my media. Actually this is a “problem” that I didn’t have until I moved from my one-room studio to my one-bedroom apartment and then two-bedroom townhouse. I have four macs floating around the house (and anticipate a fifth Apple in the form of an iPad-netbook-media-thingy), each with their own full copies of my iTunes library, DVDs ripped to a couple macs, and daily podcasts downloaded to all four computers. In the past I manually erased podcasts I’d already listened to on one of the four computer and my iPhone, but given how many podcasts I listen to this method is just too much work. I’d also been hoping to store my DVDs on one computer and be able to view them on any of the other devices. The upcoming release of the Boxee box has me rethinking my media sharing scheme.

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

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TWiT Reflection into the New Decade

I’ve been watching Leo since the early ZD-TV days. It feels like it was early Internet, but it really wasn’t. Here was a guy and a show that was part of this tech world that I was a part of, that no one else understood. So for their last podcast for 2009, TWiT 228, they got a bit nostalgic (and funny). Good times. This was not the case several weeks ago when Leo and John C. Dvorak made fun of the NASA Tweet-up and totally forgot about what Twitter really means. Basically they took the low road and made jokes about what the hell are you going to say in 140 characters except, “I just peed in my diaper.” Twitter isn’t about the 140 characters or what one has for lunch. It’s about the community and connections that happen over time. So, sometime Leo gets it, and other times he goes for the cheap shot. Surprise, he’s human.

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#1 Music Recording of 2009 That You Can’t Buy

I have no business reviewing music. I gave up on keeping up with what’s hip in music when studio tricks took over for musical talent. Yeah, I’m an old fart. That said, a top 5 list written by Nathan Chase caught my attention because Chase’s #1 recording was a collection that you can’t get at Amazon or Wallmart or iTunes: Kutiman’s “ThruYOU” project.

I previously posted a blog entry about the ThruYou project after a friend sent me a link to the project on the same day that the Buzz Out Loud podcast crew commented on Jonathan Coulton’s blog post about the project. Like Coulton, my first impulse is to go on and on about the tour de force that this project represents and how it reveals how ridiculously broke copyright is. One track from the project, Wait For Me, has almost 140,000 views. After listening to the project I bought his commercially available CD, Escape Route, from Amazon (in DRM-free downloadable MP3 form). That’s one sale of a record that wouldn’t have happened had this artist posted his creation for free on YouTube. As Larry Lessig said in his TED presentation, this is not about taking someone else’s work and passing it off as ones own (piracy), but taking what has gone before and making something completely new: remix culture.

An excellent website has been created listing the Thru-YOU videos and all of the contributing videos: http://thru-you.org

Sources:

* My Top 5 Albums of 2009 – Tortoise, Muse, P.O.S., Mute Math, & Kutiman by Nathan Chase, http://nathanchase.com/2009/12/my-top-5-albums-of-2009-tortoise-muse-p-o-s-mute-math-kutiman/ retrieved 12/31/2009.

* YouTube video: Kutiman-Thru-you – 06 – Wait For Me by Kutiman, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i88CKr6Shn4 retrieved 12/31/2009.

* TED Talks: Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity by Larry Lessig, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html retrieved on 12/31/2009

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