Month: January 2006
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On Friday’s Radio Show: Independent Video Producer and Ex-Nexstar Employee Ken Schreiner; More Nexstar Bullying
I initially invited Ken Schreiner on the program because he’s a local guy who completed a feature documentary on the relationship between people and wild animals that he’s distributing on his website, along with other videos he’s produced. Only after extending the invitation did I realize that Ken used to work for our local Nexstar-owned…
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CD-Rs and DVD-Rs Only Last 5 Years?
Data retention is not an easy issue these days. Infoworld reports that a physicist and storage expert at IBM warns that most burned CDs and DVDs will last only 2 – 5 years under typical conditions. Basically, he says the dyes used in the discs can degrade over time. Rather against popular opinion, he recommends…
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mediageek zines now available for purchase online
I really am not the world’s greatest zinester. Ever since the transition to WordPress there’s been no links to the mediageek zine page, and there’s not been any page or info for mediageek zine #3 which came out last June. Finally I’ve got the new zine page together and added the ability to order the…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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.…
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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…
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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.…
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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…