The Outer Limits - Original O.B.I.T.

Vaguely reminiscent  of E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops of 1909, but with an alien-NSA angle, here's "Original O.B.I.T.", a 50-year old episode of The Outer Limits. Conrad Hall was the DP.



"...A crucial turning point comes when one is able to acknowledge that modern technics, much more than politics as conventionally understood, now legislates the conditions of human existence. New technologies are institutionalized structures within an existing constitution that gives shape to a new polity, the technopolis in which we do increasingly live. 

For the most part, this constitution still evolves with little public scrutiny or debate. Shielded by the conviction that technology is neutral and tool-like, a whole new order is built — piecemeal, step by step, with the parts and pieces linked together in novel ways, without the slightest public awareness or opportunity to dispute the character of the changes underway. It is somnambulism (rather than determinism) that characterizes technological politics — on the left, right, and center equally."

from Autonomous Technology by Langdon Winner

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Update: Check out also "The Special One," from the original Outer Limits series. That story reminds The Secret Sun of a famous story from the childhood of Jack Sarfatti (a physicist whose wild ideas now seem mainstream).

Felina of El Paso: the Breaking Bad finale

Update: more can be found in the BB insider podcasts.

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I guess there's something in cowboy songs after all, though perhaps not so much in this blog post, as I noticed later.

The Breaking Bad finale had several songs that emphasize themes, including Marty Robbins’ song El Paso, which some claim reveals secrets behind the 'Felina' title (both recombinant wordplay with the title and lyric meanings). It probably wasn't a disguised plea for fans to now watch FX’s ‘The Bridge’, which takes on immigration reform, violence in Juarez, and El Paso politics.

Coincidentally, the Grateful Dead recently released a famous concert video, Sunshine Daydream (Amazon), which has an odd segue of the ambience of Dark Star to El Paso (after 1:12:00):

Guess the show got what it deserved, a stronger exit than Dexter and a Baby Blue more uplifting than Dylan's. Here's Badfinger, and the Marx Brothers with "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" (a ringtone in the finale):

Jacob’s Ladder, Brazil, Donnie Darko: same idea?

Several popular films seem to share a common influence, in a certain way at least. Cineleet uses plot *spoilers* to explain how Carnival of Souls, Jacob’s Ladder, Brazil, Donnie Darko, Stay, and other Films were Inspired by 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge', a short story by Ambrose Bierce originally printed in William Randolph Hearst's The San Francisco Examiner in 1890.

The Wikipedia entry for the story lists other more direct and indirect adaptations, including one from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The adaptation below by director Robert Enrico won the 1963 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, and appeared as one of the last episodes of The Twilight Zone in 1964.

Cord Cutters: turn Mac or PC into media center

NewTeeVee has a web video series Cord Cutters, on turning your Mac or PC into a media center. Cutting the cord of cable TV providers is probably why there's a fight over a tiered Internet leading to Snow Crash or Blade Runner style ghettos. The show is introductory at the moment but they're gaining steam with 9 episodes; here's the holiday buying guide:

Behind the scenes of food TV

There's undoubtedly more behind the scenes, but here's a few appetizers for the Julia Child black & white segment on editing (with kitchen utensils) & Dan Ackroyd's SNL homage (or Daily Motion or bad Youtube) below:

• Essential Pepin: Behind the Scenes at KQED

• Food Network spices up production facilities by Michael Grotticelli and Scripps Networks: DIY By Design by Dustin Driver

• [update] see the bumper and bits of info in Cooking Channel’s Celebrates First Christmas at The Art & Business of Motion.

The French Chef
Uploaded by y10566. - Watch more comedy videos and sitcoms.

Mad Men: saturation, psych, and beyond

@StudioDaily noted an insightful BBC blog post by filmmaker Adam Curtis, director of documentaries on desire and fear Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, on the real-life advertisers who inspired the TV series Mad Men. See also Meme tracking and the News Cycle; here's an excerpt from Madison Avenue: Experiments in the laboratory of consumerism:

"The widespread fascination with the Mad Men series is far more than just simple nostalgia. It is about how we feel about ourselves and our society today.

In Mad Men we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.

I think we are fascinated because we have a lurking feeling that we are living in a very similar time. A time that, despite all the great forces of history whirling around in the world outside, somehow feels stuck. And above all has no real vision of the future.

And as we watch the group of characters from 50 years ago, we get reassurance because we know that they are on the edge of a vast change that will transform their world and lead them out of their stifling technocratic order and back into the giant onrush of history.

The question is whether we might be at a similar point, waiting for something to happen. But we have no idea what it is going to be."

Update: some may enjoy The Mad Men Era at The Museum of Advertising.

How To Report The News

Via the Twitterverse is Charlie Brooker, a British Jon Stewart-type who looks at TV, on How To Report The News

'Satellite truck in a backpack' by Livestream

Lagging a bit here, but mobile live video services from UStream, Qik, and Skype are joined by Livestream. Via NYT Lens then Engadget, Red Ferret explains :

"They’re calling it a satellite truck in a backpack, and at $2500 a month rental ($1500 a month on the annual plan) it could just revolutionise the whole news and local event reporting business in a big way. The monthly fee covers 30 hours of streaming including data fees, so small operators suddenly have a way to compete with the big shot news reporting outfits at a price that’s a game changer. Amazing tech. US only at the moment alas.

Just hook your Firewire DV camera up to the backpack, which contains 6 load balanced 3G/EVDO SIM card modems [over three carriers - AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint], press the record button and you’re live to the world from anywhere there’s a 3G cell phone signal. The box contains the encoder and battery, and you can attach an external battery to give up to 3 hours of continuous recording at a time. The video is HD, 1 Mbps, H.264, so your viewers will not be disappointed with the image quality either."



Update: There are a few other implementations, one by AVIWest, and another release of LivePro by Kyte.

Comments from the latter article note that they'll all have to compete with 4G and the iPhone during the failing of traditional media, and "TWIT did this at CES a month ago using a home-built setup with the same basic configuration (multiple synchronous 3G cards)."

YouTube and the Alternatives

Making the Movie noted a good rundown of video hosting sites by Karel Bata in YouTube And Its Alternatives. The survey submitted a 640x480 movie and shows embedded samples at 640 and in their native sizes.

An HD survey is in the works, but Josh Lowensohn of CNET already has one ready with Which HD video Web service is the best?

Beyond hosting, NewTeeVee has put together The Best Guides to Watching TV Online.

Update: NewTeeVee says check out "sites such as Clicker, Yidio and SetJam, and that’s only the video aggregators that have launched or sent us previews in the last week" in Movie Monitor: Find a Movie to Watch Online. That’s It.

See also a previous AEP post Watching TV Online.

Ask MAKE: surplus TVs from the DTV switch

via Lifehacker is Ask MAKE: surplus TVs from the DTV switch. Make has several suggestions on how to use old analog TVs, including how to transform coat hangers and wood into your own HD antenna (and as a bonus how to make a "steadicam").

Maker Workshop - DTV Antenna & Steadicam on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Watching TV Online

Last month saw 2009 Lists of Video Search & Video Sharing sites, now TV Crunch and Gizmodo have guides for watching TV online in the US, while Sidereel and LocateTV also leverage more worldly resources. According to the blog Watching TV Online:

TV Crunch has posted a comprehensive list of the third party websites (free and pay-for) that stream TV online [in The Ultimate Guide To Watching TV Online].

Not included in the list are the network sites that stream their own shows. You can find that list on a Gizmodo Guide called Internet TV Remote. Both of the above lists are accessible to US viewers only.

European and Asian viewers watch TV online on video sharing sites because the networks and third party websites are still working out international copyright agreements. The best link-site by far is Sidereel.com.

Update: Along with hundreds of others, Hacknmod (backstory link 2021) has yet another list, and also references a video Build Your Own Open-Source DVR. For more on DVRs, see Comparison of PVR software packages at Wikipedia.

Update: All Things Digital has some related info in Web Video Winners: YouTube, Hulu…and MegaVideo?

'Action' - the producer's 'Entourage'

Awhile back friend recommended a TV show Action with Jay Mohr and loaned me his DVDs. I forgot about until it seeing a Spocko's Brain post today on a book on American hucksters. Action, originally slated for HBO but aired on Fox, is really a cartoony version of Entourage but from the point of view of a producer. Both shows have pretty good music, especially Entourage. Perhaps an Ari Goldman (HBO mashup), supposedly modeled on the producer brother of Rahm Emmanuel, was too much hero for both HBO and Fox.

The good news is that Action is currently on Hulu and Spike, which has some DVD extras.

Action: The Complete Series - Getting Into the Action: Worst Human Being on the Planet | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com

Spam & Free To Air

Awhile back Smith-Micro introduced DTV4PC, and it still has a heavy e-mail spam strategy that promises to turn PCs into complete entertainment centers. As Vodyo (a blog about online TV) explained last year, the DTV4PC is $30 software that aggregates Free To Air (FTA) channels and packages access with a custom user interface and search function.

What's interesting is that FTA channels are already free to anyone with an internet connection or satellite dish. There's even a website that aggregates the online versions of these channels: World Wide Internet TV, wwiTV.com. It's a great way to check out marginal television from all over the world -- here's something from Europe for weathercasters who are bored with props like rubber duckies and umbrellas:



Something similar to wwiTV programming but just from the USA is AmericaFree.tv, which uses QuickTime streaming. And though everyone knows the best ones already, more options for both free and pay models are listed at the dateless and aged Daily IPTV articles A TV Guide For IPTV: 100 of the Best Internet TV Channels and IPTV Startups to Watch.

Free the Airwaves

PrepShootPost explains "White Space" spectrum win in "WHITE SPACES" COULD BE OUR SPACES:

"We all know about the DTV transition, here in the US, in Feb. 2009. That's when our analog TV's will go black and all terrestrial video signals will be digitally broadcast. The thing is, those digital signals take up less space of the broadcast spectrum, about 70 percent less. These sections of the broadcast spectrum, previously crowded by terrestrial analog signals, will sit empty.

Since these "White Spaces" share the same spectrum as DTV, they aren't really "clean" enough for the FCC to sell for broadcasting licenses. They are kinda like the spaces between DTV signals, not really useful for broadcasters, just empty space. There was once another part of the spectrum that engineers called useless, they even nicknamed it "The Junk Band". It was the space filled with powerline and microwave oven emissions.

No one ever thought that anyone could do anything useful with it. This was the 2.4ghz to 5ghz range, and in 1985 the FCC said, "OK, you engineers, industrial tech folks and medical people, do whatever you want to with that useless junk band."* And then boom, a decade later the "junk band" became "WiFi", and you know that story. This is why this idea of a free and open, and otherwise marginally useful slice of the spectrum is so exciting. Imagine WiFi but instead of covering a 50 foot radius, it covers hundreds of miles.

Where ever you can get a TV signal you can get seriously high-speed wireless internet."

Read the rest at PrepShootPost.

Bruce Johnson at PVC also writes about this in Any News on November 4th?, as does TechCrunch and, most importantly, Larry Page of Google.

'The Wire' creator on journalism

PrepShootPost posted a YouTube interview with The Wire creator David Simon from last Spring, "Journalists & the Public Square." It took awhile for me to get to The Wire (and Oz); The Wire DVD boxes don't lie long around in the used bins at stores like Amoeba but you can rent them from a library too.

Watch the interview and check out his comments at PrepShootPost.

The Daily Show and their TiVos

Discrete Cosine noted a a nice post on The Daily Show and their TiVos on the the PVRBlog. In short, a creaky stack of TiVos and sneakernet to editing.

TV tech in primary coverage

Not long after Technology Review published a long essay critical of NBC and new media, The Daily Show looks at the cable news networks uses of TV technology during the New Hampshire primary coverage. (via)

WGA explains strike with YouTube video

The WGA explains the writers strike in a YouTube presentation and a video blog, United Hollywood. Apparently they want downloads to count and an extra 4 cents on every $20 DVD, as understood from the strike 20 years ago. (via)



Update: Splice Here has more in AMPAS and Intellectual Property and Putting Residuals in Perspective with the co-creator and head writer of “Lost.”

Prepping TV spots & PBS guidelines

Prepping spots for delivery to a TV station was the topic of a recent thread on the AE-List. Paraphrasing, it was noted that while BetaSP is disappearing from post houses, many TV stations and cable operators still require BetaSP, or DVCpro. Many are also using services like DG FastChannel, and the networks and major cable channels are also taking Digibeta. Few are taking digital files, but in any case it's best to check early for specific delivery requirements.

Capria.TV notes that "though most video pros don’t deliver PBS programs to the network on a regular basis, the PBS spec is commonly used as a benchmark throughout the industry." Frank adds links to PBS Red Book guidelines and definitions in his post New PBS Tech Specs.

World ends in 2012 (for analog TV)

Not exactly, since there's still a Valentine's Day for 2009, but Ars Technica explains in FCC to cable: You must support analog TVs until 2012.