Call it my inability to abandon my breaking news background as a former TV journalist. But I’m enamored with the notion of a “news peg” to galvanize attention around a particular issue.

Our MCDM program did it with Wikileaks in December with “Open Secrets” and the news gods have smiled upon us again, ahead of our conversation tonight “Who Owns the Pipes?” as it relates to content creation and net neutrality. That’s because the federal government just gave its blessing to the Comcast/NBC merger. We delved deeply into what this ruling means for content creators as lines are drawn around control and regulation of the Internet. Indeed, framing the issue this way struck to the heart of net neutrality, as ISP’s might content that it’s online video that strains their infrastructure the most. And if we’re talking about “transmedia” storytelling, access to the internet via cellphones to access this bandwidth-heavy content begs a whole other set of questions. That’s why the FCC created a mobile broadband exception in its December 2010 net neutrality rules.

News pegs make even more sense today as we all battle for each other’s attention. We’re caught in an interesting paradox that as the explosion in digital communication technology facilitates the promulgation of new voices, we’re also losing our ability to listen — because there are so many voices. So what’s going to grab people??

Read more…

I wasn’t too concerned about missing the Opening Ceremonies from the Vancouver Winter Olympics, as I figured I could catch it online afterward.  NBC was keen to showcase its cool new Silverlight plug-in by streaming a considerable amount of the Beijing games in 2008.

But when I tried to watch Part 1 of the Opening Ceremonies, up came this message, along with a sign-in screen:

“You have selected a premium video (e.g. live stream or full-event replay).” Read more…

Love this New York Times article about NBC’s futile attempts to maintain its US broadcast monopoly on the Olympics opening ceremonies.

NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.

In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.

Also love good-friend-of-the-MCDM Tracy Record’s (from the West Seattle Blog) most excellent comment in said article:

“The idea of watching a 14-hour delay is repulsive.”

Read more…

Cascade Locks OR — posted by Hanson Hosein

I took this photo, seven years ago, using the digital image function (640 x 480, very low res) on my Sony TRV-900 camcorder.

It’s under the Bridge of the Gods in Cascade Locks, OR along the Columbia River.

It’s quite fitting that I’ve returned to this region for the first time since then, on a “Faculty Fellows” field tour as a professor with the University of Washington. Because I wouldn’t have gotten here (as Director of the UW’s Master of Communication in Digital Media) without going there (Cascade Locks, OR).

How do the two connect? Read on…

Read more…

Part of the problem in assessing new technology is estimating what is real for the majority of consumers versus what is real for the tech geeks (don’t get your dander up; some of my best friends are geeks).

Recently I had an interesting conversation with an NBC digital distribution manager, who said that companies, including NBC, are continuing to invest in WAP Web sites so that cell phone users can pull digital TV and movie offerings into their mobile phones and watch at their leisure. I asked my favorite IT guru why WAP was important given the usability of iPhones.

Read more…

Interesting study posted by friend of MCDM Cory Bergman on his Lost Remote site:

In its first online video study, Nielsen Online found that women trend to favor network TV shows online, while men are drawn to user-created content. Also, online TV viewers are loyal to a particular network’s website: for example, just Read more…

Well everyone, I just upgraded our WordPress account so that you can all upload video directly from your hard drives to the blog. Just make sure you click on the “Videos” option below your edit box to upload the video to the WordPress viewer. It may take a while to transcode. Then “Send to Editor.”

Read more…