Archive for June, 2009

Game On! - Boxee on Windows

While I’m not a huge fan of MLB, I think it’s fantastic that Boxee now has LIVE content from MLB.com streaming to their front end.  More importantly, you can now use Boxee on your Windows PC.  I’ll be using this shortly.

Along with Hulu Desktop (which incidentally brings my ancient Pentium M 1.73 to a crawl) and a bunch of kiddie front ends using Adobe Air.

It’s almost time to upgrade to support for my next killer app… Flash!!?!?!??!

Great post and thread about broadcast TV

As of today, broadcast TV in the USA is offically digital.  In an effort to close the “analog hole“, we now get all of our broadcasts coming in lucious 1’s and 0’s.  There’s a really good read (with suprisingly civil comments).

Summary: with digital broadcast TV being seen as one of the ultimate forms of DRM to preserve the broadcast TV business model, TV as a business is now officially in denial.  Much like the newspapers have been for the last 10 years.

What I find interesting is that I would basically agree that TV advertising revenues are basically out of whack, but what happens when they “normalize”.   The biggest victims will be the professional sports leagues and athletes.  Now, I love sports, but I don’t have much love lost for the outrageous salaries of pro athletes.  Wall Street got their come-uppance, and in a couple of years it will be sports’ turn.  The NBA has already started taking steps, they actually DROPPED their salary cap by 10% next year.

So now that the finance guys are no longer paid ungodly sums, and pro athletes are soon to follow, maybe being a professional geek (engineer) is not a bad thing.

Weirdly bummed

I just came back from Europe (and actually got to travel in First Class).  This week I feel oddly bummed.  It will be the first year in 8 years (although last year doesn’t count) that I won’t be at E3 in LA.  Not that standing in line with all of my other sweating, booth trolling brethren is a ton of fun mind you… it just feels weird.