Archive for the ‘media’ Category

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Why Max Headroom WAS the future (which is the present)

by Warren

Max Headroom was one of the best television shows of the Eighties. In fact, it’s fair to say that Edison Carter is one of the reasons I got into television, along with Doctor Who director Graeme Harper.

Well, Wired has a tribute to our pixelated forefather, and the article makes the very good point that with the rise of Youtube, video blogging and web series we have all become Max. Everyone is a digital sound-bite, but the difference is we aren’t in thrall to all powerful television networks as portrayed in the show. Instead the internet has made everyone into a network, for good and ill.

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Friday, July 9th, 2010

playing around with BoinxTV

by Warren

I’ve been working through various ways to create compelling internet content, and I’ve explored various options including scripted material and making elements for FInal Cut Pro so I can film, drag and drop. All off this comes from the idea of minimizing the inputs while maximizing outputs…but it would still involve a lot of work. Putting together the two Fruitygamer pilot episodes required about half a day of work for each segment, in addition to being down at E3 in the first place and filming the interviews.

That’s all well and good, and there’s no reason I can’t use that same methodology for special episodes. But if I want to create a lot of content quickly the way to do it is live and streamed. So I looked at BoinxTV as a viable option. I got Boinx when I bought one of the MacHeist offers for $40 a while back, and as the program is normally $299 I got a pretty decent bargain. But since I had no use for it at the time, Boinx sat on my computer unused, until now.

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Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Announcing Fruitygamer

by Warren


When I started Freyburg Media, I wanted to create videos for clients that brought TV-level quality to web video. I’ve been lucky enough to accomplish that with a couple of different projects including working with The South Granville Business Improvement Association on a number of videos. But while I love doing work for clients, I like creating original programming even more, and I think that’s where the future of online media is headed.

To that end, I spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure out how to create niche websites targeting things I’m interested in and could blog about regularly. But what I found is that while I’m perfectly comfortable zipping around FInal Cut and creating a video, all the attendant Wordpress setup, ad network crafting and other bits and pieces of “making money from a website” drives me mental. It also occurred to me that while many people can and have created websites in order to bring in income, significantly less do so with video and audio (Leo Laporte and a few others spring to mind) because of the much higher barrier to entry.

Fruitygamer is my first effort to create a niche program for an online audience. Mac gaming is finally coming into its own, and the iPhone and iPad are becoming portable gaming platforms rivalling Nintendo’s dominant handhelds. It makes sense to target that audience, I think.

In the next few weeks and months I’ll be rolling out more programming, but for now enjoy the two episodes of Fruitygamer from E3. I’m looking forward to putting out more content soon.

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Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

The changing face of media at E3

by Warren

When I worked at Superchannel in the mid-90’s, I pined for the day when cheap hardware and software would allow anyone to start up their own television station, free from the restrictions of both the CRTC and TV execs who continually aimed straight down the middle at the lowest common denominator. THere weren’t any shows that seemed to address what I was interested in, and no way to use my talents to cover interesting niche topics because there simply wasn’t a venue for that kind of content. Remember, this is before Youtube, when Realplayer was as good as it got for online video (ie. terrible.)

But there was one exception to this rule, a show produced in Vancouver called the Electric Playground, made for gamers by gamers, and at the time the only media in the mainstream that treated gamers with respect instead of derision. At the time I vowed that one day I would work for the show….and against all odds, one day I actually did just that.

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Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Surreal Adidas spot in the Star Wars cantina

by Warren

Snoop Dogg and Daft Punk interacting with Kenobi and Greedo. Brain just exploded.

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Monday, May 31st, 2010

Mobile TV finally coming to North America?

by Warren

The New York Times has an article up about the coming wave of mobile TV headed to North America. Asia and Europe have had mobile TV on their phones for years, and it’s frankly surprising that we haven’t followed suit.

Or maybe it isn’t. Canada’s mobile industry is woefully behind the times, and one more deficiency isn’t in the least bit surprising. Bell offers a Mobile TV app, and Rogers presumably has some weak-assed mobile version of RODO in the works, but frankly I have better luck rolling my own media solution on my iPhone. I have Al Jazeera English, NHK World, Livestation Mobile’s numerous streaming news channels, and the TWIT network, and that’s without even trying.

I think before North American carriers get around to providing mobile TV, appmakers and content providers large and small will work around them and provide their own solutions.

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Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Why the Streamys are stupid

by Warren

Mashable gets it exactly right. The Streamy Awards are an annual event meant to celebrate the best in web video, but this year they did so with a crude, juvenile ceremony, for which they soon apologized. More to the point, the entire exercise heralded web series done by B-list celebrities and wannabe types who haven’t made it into Hollywood’s inner sanctum (but surely desire to, more than anything.)

As Mashable points out, all of this entirely misses the point. Media has become democratized, with the ability to mount a compelling, great looking production within the reach of anyone with a laptop, a DSLR or higher-end camcorder, and talent. But for some reason a lot of the web video world’s supposed luminaries want nothing more than the supposed legitimacy of recognition from old media. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and in the end it’s really a fool’s game. Why jump onto a sinking ship?

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Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Media, the iPad and CD-ROMs

by Warren

Not as random a collection of words as you’d think at first glance. Scott Rosenberg of Salon fame has a post up on Silicon Alley Insider where he relates the excitement of Big Media over the incoming iPad as parallel to their clueless exuberance over CD-ROMs in the early 90’s. The web showed up soon afterward and the CD-ROM became a historical curiosity.

It turns out that nothing can compete with people connecting with each other around common interests. While the iPad will likely have some of those features, the Big Media hope of creating new walled gardens through apps is likely just that, a hope. Personally I would but a New York TImes or Wired app, provided the price was cheap enough and it took advantage of the platform in ways I couldn’t experience with any other medium. BUt I think there wil likely be quite a few misfires as big media outlets try, and fail, to turn back the clock.

Does that mean the end of the Ipad? I don’t think so. The tablet form factor is advantageous not just for reading media but a host of other applications, including ones we haven’t yet come up with.

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Friday, January 29th, 2010

My thoughts on the iPad featured in the Vancouver Sun

by Warren

Vancouver Sun tech reporter Gillian Shaw interviewed myself and several other technology enthusiasts on the day of the Apple iPad announcement, and you can check out my thoughts online on her blog (as well as in yesterday’s dead tree version of the Vancouver Sun.) Techvibes.com also reposted “The iPad cometh“. Neat!

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Monday, January 18th, 2010

New York Times and the Curse of the Paywall

by Warren

For the second time, the NYT is thinking about instituting a paywall. My personal feeling is that it’ll be slow suicide, but maybe the brain trust at the Gray Lady knows something I don’t. Apple’s new tablet might be a revolutionary product that heralds a new media delivery system, and in the process makes the NYT “app” worth both paying for and subscribing to. And if I had to pick a paper I’d pay to read, the Times would definitely be the top contender. But….it all smacks of desperation and futility. Matthew Ingram, who recently left the Globe and Mail to become a senior writer at GigaOm (itself formed by former BusinessWeek reporter Om Malik) has written an interesting post about the NYT paywall. Check it out.

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