mediageek

Author: Paul

  • The Big Steve Jobs Macworld Keynote, Boiled Down for Media Producers

    I pay attention to the big Macworld keynote with half-interest. I’m not primarily a mac user, though I have a work-supplied PowerBook and we do have a G5 in our production suite. Work is getting more Mac-centered, so I guess I’m wading in. So I’m glad that DV Guru has distilled the Macworld announcements to…

  • How Good Is Your DVD-/+R media?

    I’ve been burning DVDs since the first DVD-R burners came out six or seven years ago. And, generally, DVD burning has been a dicier, more error-prone proposition than CD burning, whether it’s just data DVD-Rs or video DVDs. The type and brand of media has always been a question and a variable. At work I’ve…

  • News Headlines from the Jan. 6 Radioshow: New FCC Commissioners Sworn In; No Indecency Fines for 2005; CBS Splits from Viacom; Texas Is IPTV Frontier, but Problems Ahead for Public Interest

    These are the media news headlines as read on the Jan. 6, 2006 edition of the mediageek radioshow: FCC Commissioners Sworn In On Jan. 3 Michael Copps and Deborah Taylor Tate were sworn in as FCC Comissioners. This will be a second term for Copps, a Democrat who has been on the FCC since 2001,…

  • When Will Hard Drive Camcorders Become Viable for Independent Producers?

    This year JVC released a line of consumer camcorders that record to hard drives instead of tape. There’s even a higher-end prosumer version that has 3 CCDs. It’s a great idea, since in theory it should eliminate the need to import video in real time to an editing PC by playing it out via firewire.…

  • Washington Post To Give Radio a Shot

    Following right up on my post arguing that podcasting is revitalizing radio — today the Washington Post announces that it will be programming a DC-area station with Post-derived content: Post publisher Jones said in his memo to staff that “this is an innovative way of presenting Washington Post journalism to Washington area radio listeners. The…

  • Podcasting and the Revitalization of Radio

    Radio has been declared dead many times, especially with the rise of the internet. When streaming audio became practical in the late 90s it was often declared that every person with a ‘net connection would have her own station. The birth of satellite radio, with hundreds of channels of narrowcasted nationwide channels, brought more exclamations.…

  • The Copyright Cartel’s A-Hole Is Nothing New

    The “analog hole,” that is. In all the pre-holiday, end-of-semester rush I missed the introduction of new copyright legislation to address the so-called analog hole. That hole refers to the fact that most current copy-protection technologies only get in the way of digital copies, limiting CD copying and ripping to MP3, or copying DVDs, for…

  • HD Stealth Cam for Indy Videographers?

    Camcorderinfo notes the announcement of a Hi-Definition pocket camcorder from Sanyo that records to SD flash memory cards instead of tape. The HD1 is not quite full HD like you can get with HDV camcorders — it records 720 progressive at 30 frames a second, which is mathematically superior to the 720×480 interlaced 30 fps…

  • Pirate Shortwave DXing Can Be Fun, too

    In the spirit of last week’s post about broadcast radio DXing, Ragnar’s Pirates Week podcast from Dec. 27 features 45 minutes of his loggings of pirate shortwave broadcasts he received over the Christmas weekend at his cabin in the woods. Some of it is pretty rough listening, in that pirate’s use low power levels and…

  • Radio News for Sale

    As discussed on the last two radioshows, Clear Channel’s Madison, WI news/talk station WIBA has sold the naming rights of its newsroom to AMCORE bank. Kristian Knutsen has been hot on this story, writing three stories for the Daily Page blog of Madison’s alt weekly Isthmus.