The joys of online simulcast

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I've been at work during the speeches at the Democratic Convention the last week, but I've been able to watch bits and pieces via the Democratic Convention website. Not only was the video live, but with a fast enough connection the video came down in HD. The quality is fantastic.


This is just another example of a evolution in online video. Many people are getting used to the idea of catching missed episodes of TV shows online. But those are typically tape-delayed. More and more, events are being broadcast on TV and online live, simultaneously.


When you compare the two, in most cases online matches or even surpasses cable or broadcast TV. The one place TV still beats online is in raw video quality, usually. With the exception of a thin slice of people on blazing fast corporate networks or services like Verizon's FIOS, there's just not enough bandwidth to match that through a satellite dish or over-the-air antenna bringing down high-def video.


But in other aspects, watching online is superior. Start with portability. I don't have a TV, let alone a cable box, at work. But I have a laptop and a fast internet connection, so I can watch the Democratic convention at the office. When wireless broadband infrastructure in our country catches up to that in countries like Korea, internet TV will travel with you almost everywhere, and certainly to more places than your TV.


Consider selection. March Madness? Ever game was available via March Madness on Demand on the web, but on TV, in earlier rounds, you were often at the mercy of which game CBS chose to cover, cutting back and forth from one game to another.


In baseball, it's the combination of selection and mobility that gives MLB.tv the edge over MLB Extra Innings on cable or satellite. I've tried MLB Extra Innings via DirecTV, but that only gives me access to baseball games when I'm home in front of the TV. MLB.tv gives me access to those baseball games anywhere I have a web connection, and it provides quick access to box scores and other in-game stats.


How about the Olympics? In terms of selection, online wasn't fantastic, but that was a measured choice on the part of NBC. For obscure sports, however, NBCOlympics.com was often the only option. And if you wanted to see replays of key events? The web was the best choice. Instead of trying to record some five or six hours a night of Olympics TV coverage and then scanning through it with your remote to find the exact event you wanted to watch, you could just look up the event on the web and pull up the video clip instantly.


The infrastructure of the Internet is better suited to offer users the type of control over video that they've grown accustomed to having over other aspects of their life, from communications to news to music.


Every time I watch an event that's broadcast both offline and online simultaneously, I realize how ready I am for that time when every event broadcast through cable or TV is simultaneously available online. Can the infrastructure of the Internet handle that? Perhaps not in the volumes that would satisfy a sudden mass migration, but in time, most definitely.


When notable events are only on TV, I already find them antiquated. U.S. Open tennis? All that's available on the web are low-res video highlights. Why not broadcast day matches during week one via the web, where office workers might be able to keep up with a browser window off to the side?


Take any golf major. The first two days play out on Thursday and Friday, when most golf fans are at the office. I think some of the Masters was online, but why not the other three golf majors, and Ryder Cup?How about the first round of MLB playoffs, when because of TV schedule limitations and time zone differences, some games have to be played during the early afternoon of weekdays.


We wonder now how we used to live without mobile phones, when we had to get to a physical location to use a landline to call anyone. Someday, we'll feel the same in wondering how we ever lived with an Internet that didn't pipe live TV.


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Palin in comparison

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[Apologies for the headline. I've heard so many bad puns using Biden, I thought I had to even out the universe.]


John McCain's pick of Palin to be VP helps me to understand what kind of guy he is. He's that owner in your fantasy football league who reads a few good reports out of some team's training camp and drafts some unknown rookie wide receiver 7 rounds too early.


McCain barely knows her. Compared to McCain's vetting of Palin, Obama's research into Biden is like the type of security checks Middle Eastern people get at American airports. Obama is that guy in your fantasy football league who comes with a 12 tab spreadsheet model with built-in VBA macros and projections customized for your leagues scoring rules. Our President could potentially be the crazy guy from your fantasy football draft who picks from his gut--it's a terrifying thought--or that super-prepared guy.


By the way, I couldn't help but think that McCain chose Palin as she's the opposite of him: young, female, with a head full of dark hair and glasses. I wondered what would happen if we fused them into one single Presidential candidate. Using an advanced Photoshop action, I ran the scenario.


Here is the result.


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What is Latin for month?

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From a BP chat with Steven Goldman (who's fighting cancer):



Trieu (Cambridge, MA): I think everyone should always make decisions on a mortality basis. If only we had the strength to do so.


Steven Goldman: Nah... It's a sad way to live. What makes life tolerable is our ability to forget where it's all heading and just lose ourselves in the moment(s).



Interesting answer. The stock answer is to live each day as if it's your last, but I suspect Goldman is right in that it would be exhausting and impractical. Instead of carpe diem, perhaps carpe annum is the more practical time period.


More Pixar philosophy

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The two most interesting points from the Harvard Business Review blog post "Pixar's Collective Genius" about keys to the successful leadership of Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull:



Redefining the vision. For decades, Ed's driving ambition was to help create the first full-length computer-animated feature film. After realizing that dream with Toy Story, he set himself a new goal: to build an organization that could continually produce magic long after he and Pixar's other cofounders were gone.


This is the challenge for all entrepreneurs: to make the transition from doing something themselves to creating organizations that can carry on without them. Walt Disney, genius that he was, failed this test.


Delegating power. Ed and his fellow executives give directors tremendous authority. At other studios, corporate executives micromanage by keeping tight control over production budgets and inserting themselves into creative decisions. Not at Pixar. Senior management sets budgetary and timeline boundaries for a production and then leave the director and his team alone.


Executives resist exercising creative authority even when it's thrust upon them. Take reviews of works in progress by "brain trusts" of directors at Pixar and Disney Animation. The rule is that all opinions are only advice that the director of the movie in question can use as he or she sees fit. Catmull, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and executive vice president of production Jim Morris often attend these sessions but insist that their views be treated the same way and refuse to let directors turn them into decision-makers.


Even when a director runs into deep trouble, Ed and the other executives refrain from personally taking control of the creative process. Instead, they might add someone to the team whom they think might help the director out of his bind. If nothing works, they'll change directors rather than fashion solutions themselves.



It's fascinating that Pixar is often spoken of as having such an empowering, delegation-based style while being fused at the hip with Apple, where you-know-who is famed for being a micro-managing tyrant (but one we love since we don't work for him).


Also, HBR hosts a longer interview with Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios titled How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.


I recently finished The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company and am halfway through To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, both of which tell the history of Pixar. It's more of an improbable story than I'd realized. For many years before it became the success story we know today, Pixar struggled to stay in existence with meager to no revenues. The former book is recommended if you just want an inexpensive textual history of the company, while the latter is more expensive but larger, like a coffee table book, with color photos printed on high quality paper.


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Mad Men's one mistake

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From Panopticist: Mad Men gets all the details right--except one:



...everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.


Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica.


Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor

Digital cameras of note

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Trailer for Knowing starring Nicolas Cage. Notable as this movie was shot on the Red One, recently profiled in Wired magazine.


I had a chance to visit Red headquarters last week and play with a couple of Red Ones they had set up with different lenses and configurations. What's amazing about the Red One is that what it allows a filmmaker to do is potentially shoot, edit, and output a 2K resolution movie (the Red One shoots 4K but 2K is close to the resolution of what you see in most movie theaters) all using equipment you can afford and put in your own house. On the price-performance curve, if you plot every camera from your average camcorder you can buy at Best Buy to something like a Panavision 35mm camera or even an IMAX camera, the Red One is an outlier.


The sensor in the Red One can be thought of as similar to the 12 megapixel sensor in your digital SLR, except the Red One can shoot 24 fps (or higher, if you want to overcrank), whereas your SLR shoots maybe 11fps in burst mode and eventually has to stop to clear its buffer.


If you can't afford a Red One, which while cheap is still a $17,500 body, todays specs for the new Nikon D90 should be really intriguing. The D90 follows in the footsteps of other Nikon Digital SLRs, but there's a twist. This 12.3 megapixel SLR can also shoot HD, 720p, 24fps video.


As David Pogue points out, there are some limitations:



  • Shooting HD, the max shot length is 5 minutes.

  • The audio is mono.

  • The camera shoots in .avi file formats that eat up a ton of memory card space.

  • Once you start recording video, autofocus no longer works.


The last one was the biggest disappointment to me as it would have been amazing to shoot a fast-moving subject in high dev without having to have an AC (assistant cameraperson). On a professional film shoot, when making a movie, the 1st AC is responsible for pulling focus, or adjusting the focus on the lens during a shot. So there is no autofocus on a professional film shoot, like you have on a prosumer camcorder. But that's by design. Anyone who's watched a consumer home video and watched the focus drift in and out as the camera's autofocus struggles to figure out where you want focus to lie knows that manually controlling focus is one of the professional cinematographer's tools, not a hindrance.


But for the average consumer, shooting their child at a soccer game with their D90, having the full capabilities of the Nikon's autofocus systems to track their child as they spring towards the camera would be amazing.


Still, all that being said, adding HD video capabilities to an SLR is a nifty trick. I don't need a D90, but I'd sure love one. It won't be too long after these are released until we see the first short film shot entirely on the D90.


By the way, you can buy a Nikon mount for the Red One so that it accepts Nikon lenses to shoot with also. Every day, digital SLRs and digital camcorders converge.


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The moment you become a New Yorker

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Article in the NYTimes about that moment, some period into your first year living in New York, when you become a New Yorker.


Though I can't recall a specific moment things changed for me in NYC, I did reach, sometime about four or five months into living in NYC, a state of harmony with the city, when I understood its rhythms and its personality, when I felt all the privileges of living in the country's greatest city open to me.


The city, like its people, can seem prickly, antagonistic, or even dangerous. But NYC has more layers than any city I've lived in, and the longer you're there, the more it surprises you.



The world's most powerful copying machine

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Transcript of a great lecture by Cory Doctorow on the Internet and copyright law. Besides covering DRM and copyright law, Doctorow touches on some of the same points Clay Shirky raises in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, about the implications of the lowered costs of collaboration using the Internet.


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A fresh take on reality programming

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From one of the sites in my blogroll, This Blog Sits At The, a fresh look at the qualities of reality TV.



Reality programming is instructive. Pam and I watch Project Runway. I see a new design come down the runway, I take my money and I place my bet. Out loud, so that Pam can hear, I say what I think. And eventually I discover whether my judgment bore any resemblance to the experts who eventually hold forth.


It's clear that some education is taking place. My judgments diverge less and less. This means that this kind of reality programming is actually making me a more discerning observer of the world of fashion. It is helping me internalize my own modest mastery of the code.


...


Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely, one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into the studio and prime time. Reality programming is contemporary culture on tap. It is by no means a "raw feed." That is YouTube's job. But it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by their own efforts. In effect, reality programming is "stealing signals" from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit. (Mixed metaphor alert. Darn it, too late.)


This is an era in which we are inclined to issue lots of brave talk about cocreation, open source, and dynamic institutions. We speak of breaking down the citadel that separate the corporation from the real world. Well, this is actually what it looks like (for certain purposes). And funny old TV may in fact be one of the first meaning makers to figure out how we solve this particularly thorny problem. This, in turn, would make reality programming not the end of civilization as we know it, but a test case in what comes next.



What I find fascinating about reality programming are people who are addicted to the shows yet love to watch them just to tear down the participants. There is something bizarre in that ironic, conflicted behavior. Not that schadenfreude doesn't exist, but there is no greater charity you can contribute to a reality program participant than your eyeballs to their ratings.


Speaking of reality programming, Hulu now has the first episode of Architecture School.






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Obama's economics worldview

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A preview of a feature by David Leonhardt in this Sunday's NYTimes Magazine on Obama's economic policies. A really worthwhile read. You can choose who to vote for based on political ads or party affiliations, but this day and age makes it easier to research candidates than in years past, and it's worth the effort.


The press and the public have had a hard time coming up with an easy narrative for Obama's economics, perhaps because he doesn't fit neatly into pre-conceived economic stereotypes for liberal or conservative politicians.


He should have much appeal to voters who classify themselves as socially liberal, economically conservative.



The partial embrace of Reaganomics is a typical bit of Obama’s postpartisan veneer. In a single artful sentence, he dismissed the old liberals, aligned himself with the Bill Clinton centrists and did so by reaching back to a conservative icon who remains widely popular. But the words have significance at face value too. Compared with many other Democrats, Obama simply is more comfortable with the apparent successes of laissez-faire economics. Sunstein, now on the faculty at Harvard, has a name for this approach: “I like to think of him as a ‘University of Chicago’ Democrat.

Tomb of the Unknown Designer

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One of the stars of these Summer Olympics, in addition to Michael Phelps, has been Beijing National Stadium, forever to be known as the Bird's Nest.


But whereas you can't help but know Phelps' mom and coach by now thanks to NBC's extensive coverage, you probably have not heard of Herzog & de Meuron. That's the Swiss architecture firm that designed the Bird's Nest, in addition to the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Tate Modern in London. In 2001, Herzog and de Meuron won the Pritzker Prize.


The article notes that architects, outside of celebs like Gehry or Koolhaas, don't get the level of respect they deserve here in the U.S. That's a shame. If you read a book you like, you'll probably remember the author. If you like a movie, you may know or find out who the director is. It shouldn't be any different for design or architecture.


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The woman who should sing the next Bond song

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Last night at the Viper Room (famous as the venue outside which River Phoenix died), I heard the woman who should sing the next Bond theme song, and her name is Janelle Monáe.


Janelle Monae


Her set was short, just 5 songs, but it was one of the most energy-packed, blow-your-mind 5 song sets I've heard since, well, ever. I've heard her songs online via MySpace, and I was impressed, but seeing her live is an experience unto itself and not to be missed. She's like a live bolt of electricity on stage, and frankly I'm not sure she could keep maintain it for a 15 song set without just passing out and getting carried off in an ambulance.


The Viper Room's concert hall is tiny, and that was part of the experience. Being able to see her animated expressions, being able to see her dancing like her life depended on it. I'm sure I'll never experience her music that way again. For her last song, she crowd-surfed, and I nearly ruptured my other Achilles trying to help guide her across as she passed over my head.


She has an interesting style (that hair!) and sound, both futuristic yet classical. That's why she'd make a great choice for the next Bond theme song. She can bring some of the Shirley Bassey funk and marry it to a more modern, hip-hop sound. With her interest in science fiction--she references androids in her album cover and some of her songs--she might even be able to write lyrics that incorporate "Quantum of Solace" in an organic way.


Her music is hard to describe. She went from the propulsive drive of "Many Moons" to the hushed emotion of "Smile". My favorite track is "Sincerely Jane". There's funk, hip hop, soul, pop, and bits of other musical goodness in there.


After the concert, we all stared at each other wide-eyed, and then I ran over to the merchandise table to buy her CD, because all I could think was "this girl's going to blow up" and "I need to buy stock in her."


You can buy her CD Metropolis: The Chase Suite or mp3's from Amazon. Here's the rest of her appearance schedule for 2008; those of you in SF, Portland, Seattle, Arlington, NYC, or Chicago should get your tickets now.


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Man on Wire

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Last weekend, I caught Man on Wire, a documentary about wire walker Philippe Petit and his attempt to walk between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974. After watching it, I wondered how it was that such an obsessive personality could have escaped Werner Herzog's eye. Those are his specialty.


It turns out Petit and Herzog are longtime friends, and Esquire has a transcript of a conversation between the two.



WH: What I do is for spectators. Whether Philippe's walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn't matter. Philippe once secretly put a cable across a 2,400-foot ravine and walked across it and danced on the rope. Only a farmer who was driving his cattle at sunrise realized that someone was there. He rushed into the village to wake a policeman. And when they came back on a motorcycle, there was no Philippe, there was no wire left.


PP: But the cows remember.



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Tech product reviews: Kodak Zi6, Microsoft Photosynth

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Positive review of the Kodak Zi6, which is the little handheld video camera that's like the Flip except it shoots HD (720p up to 60fps).


I'm curious about the audio quality, but I have a Flip, and if the Zi6 combines the Flip's simplicity of use and portability with HD quality it seems like a handy little gadget. Not even film school students and camera snobs always want to deal with busting out a full-sized camera and pro-level gear.


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Walt Mossberg reviews the upcoming Microsoft Live Labs release of Photosynth (releases this Thursday to the public for free). The demo seems to have floated around for years, and I'd long since given up hope of seeing it in the wild (when's the last time anything from Microsoft Labs made it into the public?). So to hear it will be released as a website for free for anyone to use is a pleasant surprise.


Mossberg has mostly positive things to say. Sadly, the Mac version is not ready yet, so it's Windows only for now.



I've been testing this service for about a week, and while it has its flaws, I believe that Photosynth offers a dramatic new way to use your photos and to share them with others.


Photosynth works within a Web browser, using a small plug-in you install. Currently, it works only in Windows, using Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser or its rival, Firefox. A Macintosh version is in the works, but for now, you can't even view others' synths in the Mac operating system.


When Photosynth works right, the results are wonderfully satisfying. But it takes some skill to get a set of photos the service can match up well, a quality Microsoft calls being "synthy." Ideally, portions of each slice of a 3-D scene should show up in at least three photos, with 50% overlap between them. After you upload your pictures and Photosynth does its best to make them into a 3-D scene, the service assigns them a percentage number that indicates how synthy they were.



Interestingly, you can only run Photosynth on a Mac if it's running Windows XP or Vista via Boot Camp, not via Parallels or VMWare Fusion. The error message if you try to use Photosynth on a Mac:



Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet.



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A quick trip through Buzzfeed

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Is Obama announcing his running mate tomorrow morning? Drudge thinks yes.


Funny bust, err...bus stop ad.


Speaking of the Wonderbra, they came up with another clever billboard, a photomosaic made up of hundreds of photos of women in their bras.


If I work on the top floor of this building and they announce that they're doing a fire drill test some day, I'm calling in sick.


Backlashes seem to have been accelerated by the Internet, so it's surprising that it took so long for the Radiohead backlash. Me, I'm going to see Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday and I couldn't be more excited.


At this moment, there might not be a bigger way for a woman to summon a world of fame onto herself than by dating Michael Phelps. First contender: fashion model Lily Donaldson.


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