So there’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance.

– Sheryl Sandberg, in an interview for the PBS/AOL digital and broadcast series “Makers: Women Who Make America”

Who in their right mind would lie to Ira Glass?

That was my first reaction to the revelation that the theatrical monologuist Mike Daisey had lied or fabricated — or in his words, “taken dramatic license” with — certain parts of his stage play, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

When I met people at parties in recent weeks and told them that I write about technology and that I had devoted more than a decade to covering Apple, the first question I used to get was: “Did you know Steve Jobs?” Since about January of this year, that first question has become, “What do you think of Mike Daisey?”

I haven’t had a real answer. I hadn’t seen his show, which was favorably reviewed by the New York Times, nor had I heard the episode of the highly respected public radio documentary program “This American Life” titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” that had been adapted from his play.

The show — or shows — hit a cultural nerve at a critical moment. Apple is the biggest company in the world, sporting a market capitalization of $546 billion as of Friday, with $100 billion worth of cash and investments on its balance sheet and the most popular stable of consumer electronics products in the world, especially the iPhone and the iPad. All of them are manufactured by workers in China, who labor for wages that are low by Western standards, put in hours that by Western reckoning are long, under conditions that to Western eyes aren’t ideal, doing jobs that by any standard are incredibly tedious.

Daisey’s stage show, which became a sensation among New York’s chattering classes, sought to draw attention to the plight of allegedly oppressed workers at Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner in China. As New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood put it, the play “is a mind-clouding, eye-opening exploration of the moral choices we unknowingly or unthinkingly make when we purchase nifty little gadgets like the iPhone.”

The stage show had been adapted for radio on public radio’s “This American Life,” which is probably the most-respected radio documentary program in the history of broadcasting. And the Daisey episode was presented as documentary, meaning the radio show’s staff of journalists and producers were vouching for it being true.

The problem: Much of it wasn’t.

In the show, Daisey described a trip to China, as well as a visit to Foxconn’s outer gates and other manufacturing companies in Shenzen, where many are located. He delivers a detailed and emotionally riveting account of meeting girls as young as 12, 13 and 14 years old who claimed to work for Foxconn. This would be in violation both of local laws and of Apple policies.

He also told of meeting workers poisoned by a chemical called n-Hexane, used to polish screens.

And, perhaps most movingly, he related a tear-jerking scene in which he showed a working iPad to a man who said he had crippled a hand while making its parts in a Foxconn metal press, yet had never so much as seen one of the devices powered on. Seeing the iPad’s screen in action, he tells Daisey, “is like a kind of magic.”

The word “magic” fits oddly here, because these meetings didn’t happen as Daisey said. “This American Life” yesterday aired a lengthy episode entitled “Retraction,” documenting Daisey’s many liberties with the facts.

To help do so, a reporter for another public radio show — Rob Schmitz of “Marketplace” — did what no one else in the media seemed to be willing to do, which was subject Daisey’s claims to scrutiny. Most damning of all in Schmitz’s report was the testimony of Daisey’s translator, called Cathy. She was found — after Daisey had told TAL he had lost contact with her — and disputed many of the anecdotes taken from the play and used in the radio segment about Foxconn.

Among the fabrications: Daisey didn’t speak to quite as many people nor visit nearly as many plants as he said he did. She disputed finding underage workers. The n-Hexane poisoning incident occurred not at Foxconn in Shenzen where Daisey visited, but at a Wintek facility in Suzchou, more than 900 miles to the north of Shenzen.

The stage show, and therefore the radio show that was derived from it, turned out to be a mixture of facts and fiction. Which might be fine for a production on the New York theatrical stage, where fiction and fact blend readily. And, while it might be okay in entertainment products, you don’t expect it from a prestigious radio documentary program.

And that is where the problems began.

When Daisey’s monologue was adapted for “This American Life,” outrage began to grow among people who wanted to do something about it. It was, Glass says, the most downloaded episode of “TAL” ever, and public radio listeners did what public radio listeners tend to do. For one thing, they started a petition. More than a quarter of a million people have signed a petition at Change.org, inspired by the TAL production based on Daisey’s work, demanding that Apple make changes.

That includes crafting a “worker protection strategy” for new products released, as well as publishing data from Fair Labor Association audits.

Feeding the frenzy, Daisey stepped up as the leading voice for worker rights in China’s electronics industry. He was seemingly everywhere in the media. Since the TAL segment aired in January, Daisey has been seen on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” in a report that, like the “TAL” episode, is now going to have to be retracted or at the very least walked back.

Another CBS-owned property, CNET, hosted Daisey as part of “Reporters Roundtable,” alongside Charles Duhigg of the New York Times, co-author of a series of front page stories in that newspaper. Duhigg ended his “Roundtable” appearance by urging people who care about the issue to go and see Daisey’s play.

Daisey also appeared on MSNBC repeating the same anecdotes and tarnishing the usually shiny Apple. And on HBO. And PBS. And C-SPAN.

Needless to say, there will have to be many more retractions in the days ahead.

At this point, it’s hard to determine what’s more outrageous, Daisey’s lies to Ira Glass and his team, or the national media’s willingness to give Daisey a platform to repeat the same lies and fabrications without making the slightest effort to vet them.

The circumstances around Apple’s manufacturing arrangements in China aren’t new. As a columnist for Businessweek I wrote about Apple’s first round of “sweatshop” allegations in 2006, well before the age of the iPhone and the iPad, which had at the time first come to light in part because of the reporting by London’s Daily Mail.

I’ve never been to China. Many people know more about the on-the-ground facts concerning Apple’s factories than I do. But there are many reporters who have been there. In 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Fredrik Balfour wrote a powerful cover story for that magazine, which aimed to get to the bottom of the string of suicides that occurred among Foxconn employees that year.

ABC’s “Nightline” visited Foxconn earlier this year. Its report was criticized in some circles, because at the time of his death, Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs happened to be the largest shareholder of that network’s parent company, Disney. Also, ABC had been invited by Apple and Foxconn. Even so, “Nightline” anchor Bill Weir, seeing conditions very different from what Daisey described in the course of his reporting, wondered if Mike Daisey’s work was questionable.

At the very least, Daisey is a dramatist who now admits he chose to lie, but for reasons known only to himself. The chance to raise his profile and sell more tickets to his monologue are obvious potential motivations. Whatever it was, his dramatic product is meant to be consumed as thought-provoking entertainment, not as fact-based journalism, which many people assumed it was.

This is the crux of Daisey’s defense for lying to Ira Glass and his fact-checker: That he’s not a journalist and took dramatic license with the events, and now regrets doing the “This American Life” segment.

And that’s the real shame here.

Clearly, people care about how workers who make our electronics are treated, or there wouldn’t have been a market for Daisey’s show, or for an hour-long radio documentary adapting it. And the subject is one we need to discuss at length as a society. The net result of Mike Daisey’s efforts to put self-promotion ahead of the facts has badly muddied the waters, and has probably done more harm to the people he sought to help.

So, instead of illumination on a serious topic, we are left with little. Mike Daisey is an opportunistic fabulist and should be ashamed of himself for lying. Ira Glass and his team are ashamed for giving him wider attention, and have said so. But there are many more people who should be even more ashamed for taking Daisey’s lies at face value. There should be many more retractions and apologies in the days ahead.

But now we have to start the conversation about Apple and Foxconn and workers’ rights all over again, this time with real, verifiable facts at our command. Is that so much to ask?

(Image courtesy of Mike Daisey’s Web site.)

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

Though Sandberg speaks often about women and ambition as well as Facebook’s business, and Zuckerberg has introduced all sorts of products this year like the upcoming Timeline redesign and “frictionless” auto-sharing, Rose is known for his wide-ranging interviews, so look out for big-picture questions like Facebook’s competition with Google, its evolving approach to user privacy and its IPO plans.

(The PBS listings I checked varied, but at least for me it looks like the show will air at 11 PT tonight.)

Update from the interview: Zuckerberg Says Amazon and Apple Are Allies, While Google’s Building “Their Own Little Version of Facebook”

Here’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg appearing at D6 in 2008:

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111107/facebooks-zuckerberg-and-sandberg-will-make-rare-joint-appearance-on-charlie-rose-tonight/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111019/amazon-expands-pbs-streaming-agreement/ http://allthingsd.com/20111019/amazon-expands-pbs-streaming-agreement/#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:22:41 +0000 Mia Lamar http://allthingsd.com/?p=134230 Amazon.com Inc. expanded a licensing agreement with the Public Broadcasting Service that allows its paid members to stream additional PBS programming, marking the Internet retailer’s latest advance in the red-hot online video battle.

Amazon, as well as companies like Apple Inc., have been pushing into the sector as demand for online content has soared. Netflix Inc. was a pioneer in the streaming video category, but has stumbled recently due to a big price increase and a now-shelved plan to separate its movie-streaming and DVD-by-mail businesses into two different operations.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111019/amazon-expands-pbs-streaming-agreement/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110610/web-security-start-up-cloudflare-gets-buzz-courtesy-of-lulzsec-hackers/ http://allthingsd.com/20110610/web-security-start-up-cloudflare-gets-buzz-courtesy-of-lulzsec-hackers/#comments Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:39:51 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=84771 The Irish writer Brendan Behan once said, “There is no such thing as bad publicity, except your own obituary.” Minus the second half, the quotation has proven remarkably durable, and over the years has been widely applied to pretty much any circumstance when public people or organizations find themselves caught up in swirls of publicity or infamy not entirely of their own making.

Ask Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, a Web security start-up that offers free protection to practically any Web site. The service has won praise from many quarters for its ease of use, its ability to keep sites running even when their servers have problems, and its tendency to incrementally speed up the performance of Web sites that use it.

What Prince didn’t expect was the praise he’s gotten from the infamous hacker troupe LulzSec. This is the group that has taken credit for, among other things, planting a fake news story about Tupac Shakur on a PBS Web site and harassing Sony by attacking some of its sites, and which recently publicly warned Britain’s National Health Service about its own lax cybersecurity.

LulzSec’s site has been barraged by numerous attacks, many thought to have been launched by rival groups wanting to score some street cred, meant to bring the site down. The thing is, that’s exactly the sort of thing that Cloudflare is built to help a Web site — any Web site — withstand. LulzSec signed itself up for the service as any other customer would and has tweeted its appreciation: “We love Cloudflare,” they messaged on June 2.

That’s put Prince in a peculiar situation. LulzSec has for now supplanted both Anonymous and Wikileaks as the Internet’s public enemy number one, both for the sheer boldness of their attacks and for their comically arrogant manner, having racked up more than 120,000 followers on Twitter in just a few days and offering an interview to a TV host on the condition that she conduct the interview while mud-wrestling. “If I had my choice of a marquee client to show off the abilities of our service, this is certainly not who I would have chosen,” Prince told me in an interview. “We’re very sensitive to the sort of problems that groups like this have caused.”

But there are benefits both for Cloudflare as a business and for others who use it. First off, LulzSec’s praise has generated new buzz for Cloudflare that has led to more people signing up. Just this morning I found numerous examples of people saying they had signed up for Cloudflare based on the LulzSec buzz. Prince says Cloudflare is adding roughly one new site a minute. “There’s definitely been a spike,” he told me.

But there’s a second benefit, one that ultimately helps all Cloudflare customers. For every attack that’s launched against a Cloudflare customer, the system gets stronger and better able to apply what is learned across its network for the benefit of everyone else. And so if you assume that the LulzSec site is a target for repeated attacks, whether sophisticated or not, every other Cloudflare customer enjoys the residual benefit.

That is, of course, how it was designed. Cloudflare had its genesis out of Project Honey Pot, a non-profit attempt to fight spam that created a distributed system for finding spammers and the bots they use to harvest email addresses. Launched in 2004, it was basically a hobby for Prince and the other founders — until the day in 2007 the Department of Homeland Security called and said it saw real value in the data the project had collected on how fraud is conducted online.

After a stint at Harvard Business School, Prince teamed up with fellow student Michelle Zatlyn. They crafted a business plan that essentially applied the Honey Pot model to the Web itself. They launched the company last year, backed by a $2 million Series A investment from Venrock Capital and Pelion Venture Partners. The 90-second video below sums the service up nicely.

Like Project HoneyPot, Cloudflare gets better as more people use it. The service uses distributed computing — it’s hosted in 12 Equinix data centers around the world — to keep its customers’ sites online when their servers crash or are attacked. It helps protect against commonly seen attacks, like denial of service attacks and malware bots. It’s also free to use, and pretty much anyone who operates a Web site can have it up and running in about 10 minutes. While most Web security outfits are aimed at helping large companies secure their stuff online, small operations have fewer options. On top of its free service, Cloudflare offers a Pro account for $20 a month. A more powerful offering aimed at enterprises is coming in the fall, Prince says.

So what’s Prince going to do about LulzSec? Nothing. However, if served a subpoena by a law enforcement agency, he would comply with it. Yet even then he doesn’t expect that information Cloudflare has on LulzSec would be useful. “When someone signs up with us they provide an email address and an IP address, and we know where their content is hosted,” Prince said. “But my hunch is that we have less information about where and who these people are than their actual hosting provider. But we’re an organization that follows the law. If compelled to do so, we would turn over what we have.”

And since Cloudflare isn’t hosting any LulzSec data, cutting the group off as a customer would not bring its Web site offline. “Their Web site would still be online. It just wouldn’t load as fast.”

@eastdakota We love CloudFlare, Mr. CEO of CloudFlare. Can we have a free premium membership in return for rum?

June 2, 2011 11:55 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@LulzSec

The Lulz Boat

@LulzSec thanks so much for introducing me to #CloudFlare! I’m signing up now and it looks fantastic!

June 6, 2011 8:09 am via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@LukeCutforth

Luke Cutforth ✔

Us in 90 Seconds from CF Vimeo on Vimeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110610/web-security-start-up-cloudflare-gets-buzz-courtesy-of-lulzsec-hackers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101230/comcast-finds-new-use-for-the-iphone-getting-work-done/ http://allthingsd.com/20101230/comcast-finds-new-use-for-the-iphone-getting-work-done/#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:45:08 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=1554 While plenty of people are using their iPhones and iPads to watch video, Comcast also thinks Apple’s mobile devices can play a role in helping professional video get onto the Internet.

ThePlatform, a subsidiary of the cable giant, plans this week to launch a program that will allow workers whose job it is to post video content to use their iPhone to manage certain functions.

Workers will still have to use a PC or Mac to do the main work, but the iPhone app will allow basic tasks such as publishing a previously hidden piece of content (or taking down a piece that got published inadvertently).

“With the iPhone being a fairly ubiquitous device for media consumption, we felt it was also the perfect platform for media management,” said Ian Blaine, the CEO of thePlatform, which Comcast acquired in 2006. “It’s usually along with people wherever they are.”

Though clearly a niche product, it is the kind of application that many expect to see more of as businesses find ways of incorporating mobile devices into their office worfklow.

“I think what we are doing is a harbinger for others if they are not doing it already,” Blaine said.

Mpx, the main program developed by thePlatform, is used by Comcast itself and also sold to other cable providers such as Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and Cox, as well as by individual content producers such as NBC, PBS and Canada’s CBC. Mpx is used to edit and prepare video for sending to various devices, including phones, computers and set-top boxes.

“We’ve always been in the game of publishing to mobile devices, but being able to take advantage of the platform for actually publishing is pretty great and we are excited about it,” Blaine said.

The company has been testing the product with a few of its customers. Among those excited about the new mobile version of mpx are the folks at Time Warner Cable who use thePlatform to publish their content.

“We have been working with thePlatform to create a solution that supports our producers or editors responsible for ensuring that shows or clips are ready for publication, 24 hours a day,” said Eric Manchester, a member of Time Warner Cable’s technical staff. “Having a solution we can carry on us at all times allows us to solve many time sensitive issues without being tied to our desks.”

For now, those using the iPhone app will see only thumbnails of the videos in question, but Blaine said adding full-video previews is tops on the company’s list of features to add. It will also see if there is a way to achieve similar capabilities on the BlackBerry, given that many companies also use those devices.

With Android, Blaine said the company may not even need to do a separate app because the desktop version of mpx runs using Flash, which Android supports.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101230/comcast-finds-new-use-for-the-iphone-getting-work-done/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101201/apple-tv-2010-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20101201/apple-tv-2010-review/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 02:02:15 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1649 Of all the set-top boxes designed to bring online and computer content to your TV, perhaps the best known is Apple TV. But, unlike its maker’s other products, Apple TV hasn’t caught on in a big way. In fact, Apple CEO Steve Jobs calls it a “hobby.”

Still, the company isn’t giving up. This fall it brought out a radically revamped Apple TV at a much lower price—$99, down from $229—and with a different philosophy. While earlier versions contained a hard disk and allowed you to purchase and store movies, music and TV shows, the new Apple TV is all about streaming and renting. It can’t store content, although, like its predecessors, it can transmit to your TV screen content stored on your networked home computers.

Perhaps the coolest feature of the new Apple TV is that it allows you to wirelessly beam video and audio from an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to the TV screen. A new feature called AirPlay in the latest software on these portable devices makes this possible. So, if you have a video or photos on, say, an iPad, you can just tap an icon on its screen to view them on a TV via Apple TV instead of on the device’s smaller screen. (AirPlay also works wirelessly from the free iTunes software on PCs and Macs.)

Apple’s Steve Jobs announcing the new release of Apple TV earlier this fall.

I’ve been testing the new Apple TV, including trying out AirPlay using various devices, and found that it performs as advertised. It has a clean, easy interface, does a great job of streaming content from your own computers, and it allows you to rent TV shows at just 99 cents an episode. It’s even almost invisible next to your TV—a 4-inch-square black box less than an inch tall. And setup is easy.

But it has some significant downsides. The most important of these is a very limited selection of Internet video sources. If you want a set-top box that allows you to watch a wide range of video from the Web, Apple TV isn’t it.

Apple TV is now essentially a modestly priced adapter that streams video, audio and photos to your HDTV from three main sources: your own computers, Apple’s iTunes service plus a few other online sources, and content on your portable Apple devices using AirPlay.

It’s the polar opposite of the new Google TV, which tries to encompass the entire Internet but is too complicated for mainstream users and costs hundreds of dollars. Apple is offering much less variety in content sources, but with a much simpler interface and a tiny remote with just seven buttons, versus the keyboard or minikeyboard used with Google TV.

Apple TV is still tied heavily to the company’s own iTunes service. The new model now also offers Netflix, which is nicely integrated into Apple’s user interface, but is very common on other set-top boxes, including the less expensive Roku models. YouTube is accessible from the new device, though it was present on the older model as well. The device can’t deliver other video services, nor is it designed to bring up Web pages on your TV.

And, even within Apple’s own iTunes service, which is Apple TV’s source for a la carte rental of TV shows and movies, the content is limited. For its 99-cent TV show rentals, the device mainly offers programs from ABC, Disney, Fox, PBS and the BBC. If your favorite show is on NBC, CBS or many other networks, you can’t rent it on Apple TV, nor can you get to the Web to view it. Alas, even within those networks, some of the programs are old and I couldn’t find some popular shows, like “Modern Family” on ABC or “American Idol” on Fox. (Fox, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.)

You can still buy TV shows from the excluded networks, or shows unavailable for rental, on your computers and stream them to the TV via Apple TV, but that is a more complicated process.

The Apple TV set-top box with TV showing 99-cent TV show rentals from iTunes.

Apple claims the largest selection of high-definition movies online, and says many are available the same day they appear on DVD. Movie rentals start at $2.99 for standard-definition versions and $3.99 for high definition, though many are $4.99. Both movies and TV shows can be kept for 30 days, but, once you start playing them, the clock starts on a short window before they expire. In the case of movies, the window is 24 hours; for TV shows, it’s 48 hours. You can pause and resume, or watch them repeatedly, within those windows.

In my tests, video and audio quality were excellent. Programs started rapidly, and I never saw any stuttering or buffering delays. Like the older Apple TV models, the new one did a very good job of streaming to the TV content from both PCs and Macs running iTunes on my home network. In fact, the process of setting this up has been made simpler. Watching slideshows of family photos was simple and rewarding.

Searching for a TV show or movie was tedious, because it requires you to peck out letters from an onscreen keyboard with the little remote. (This is why Google uses a keyboard, but that isn’t a welcome device in many living rooms.) However, there’s an alternative. Apple offers a free iPhone and iPad app that can control the Apple TV, and it has a built in virtual keyboard for much faster searching.

AirPlay worked well in my tests. I tried it on both an iPad and an iPhone, and was easily able to switch a video or song from the device itself to the Apple TV, and thus, to the TV screen and speakers. This requires merely clicking on an icon that looks like a wide-screen TV with an arrow beneath it, and then selecting “Apple TV” as a destination.

I also tried AirPlay on both a Mac and Windows laptop using the latest version of iTunes, and it worked fine. On all the AirPlay-equipped devices, you can also multitask. Once you’ve started beaming a video to the Apple TV, you can do other things on the originating device without interrupting the video. For instance, as I write this paragraph in Microsoft Word, I am watching a video beamed to my TV via AirPlay from iTunes on my laptop.

But AirPlay has some limitations. On the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch it will only beam video to the Apple TV from Apple’s own Video, iPod and Photos apps, plus the YouTube app. On computers, it only works with iTunes. Some third-party apps on the hand-held devices can use it with audio, though not video.

Also, switching the video stream to the Apple TV can take a few seconds, during which the video keeps playing, so you often have to rewind.

Overall, Apple TV is a reasonably priced, well-designed device. It is especially attractive for viewing videos and photos from your computers, and Apple devices, on your TV. But it doesn’t deliver most Internet video sources, or even all online network programs.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101201/apple-tv-2010-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101117/google-tv-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20101117/google-tv-review/#comments Thu, 18 Nov 2010 02:07:11 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1621 The quest to bring the full range of Internet video to your TV in a simple way continues, but it isn’t going well. The latest team to try—Google, Logitech and Sony—has made an admirably bold effort, but, like others before, it has missed the mark, at least in its first effort.

Google TV—software built into hardware made by Logitech and Sony—is very different from competing products, such as Apple TV and Roku. Unlike the others, it aims to merge Web video and regular TV in one simple interface, via one box, with one easily usable controller. Also, unlike the others, it isn’t limited to just customized channels that bring specific Web-video services to the screen. It lets you browse to almost any website with video, and play it on the TV.

But, for now, I’d relegate Google TV to the category of a geek product, not a mainstream, easy solution ready for average users. It’s too complicated, in my view, and some of its functions fall short.

You can get Google TV in three ways. One is through a small, black $300 set-top box called the Logitech Revue. The second is through a special Sony Blu-ray player that costs $400. The third is through a Sony TV with built-in Internet that starts at $600. All are much costlier than the $99 Apple TV or the $60 Roku, but they offer more of the Internet’s video and make the effort to integrate it with cable or satellite programming.

Logitech Revue for Google TV

Google TV cleverly piggybacks onto your existing cable or satellite box and can control it, at least to some extent. So there is no switching of inputs or remotes required, at least theoretically, to go between Internet video and regular TV—something that has plagued competing systems. But if you try to watch an Internet version of a show from a big network site or from Hulu on your Google TV device, it’s blocked, because the studios want to channel those shows through your cable or satellite box.

I tested Google TV using the Logitech Revue product, though I also met with Sony and had a briefing on their version, which looks and works pretty much the same. Setup took 12 steps and about 40 minutes and went pretty smoothly. It might have been worse if, as Logitech warns, your cable or satellite box requires you to install special cables to allow the Revue’s controller to operate it, or if you use a separate audio system. You need an HDTV with HDMI jacks on your TV and cable or satellite box to use the Logitech Revue.

The controller on the Revue is a wireless keyboard. Yes, that’s right, a keyboard, something you might find unattractive in the living room and no better than what you might use if you just plugged a PC into the TV.

Logitech does offer an optional “mini” controller for $130, but it is essentially a tinier keyboard with minuscule buttons and track pad crammed into a smaller space. It is more complex to operate than the big keyboard and much more complicated than a typical TV remote. Sony’s box comes with a similar, complex-looking mini-controller.

The key to Google TV, however, is the software, not the hardware. There is a home screen with a list of core functions, but, Google being Google, the principle activity is meant to be search. You just start typing what you want to see and Google TV brings up a list of hits from both regular TV and the Internet.

Unfortunately, in my tests, this search-and-viewing process was frustrating. For one thing, you only get a few results, and in my experience, they usually weren’t the right ones. When I was looking for the telecast of the Mark Twain Award ceremony for Tina Fey, all Google pointed me to were short clips on YouTube. I had to do a full Web search (a standard option in the brief list Google gives you) and then navigate through a standard Google results screen, which was unreadable at 10 feet without zooming in, to find the full show on the PBS website.

When I finally got to the PBS page, we watched the show, but it was noticeably pixelated on our large TV screen, even though my Internet connection is very fast.

In another case, I wanted to see the new Beatles-themed ads from Apple, but Google’s first results didn’t include them. The closest they came was an old fictional ad on the topic produced by a fan years ago. I manually navigated to Apple’s website, where the ads were prominent, but found that Google TV doesn’t support QuickTime, Apple’s video format. (The company says it plans to do so in a future release.) I knew the ads were also on YouTube, so I went there and eventually found them, with some effort, but they stuttered on playback.

To use the Logitech Revue for Google TV, you need an HDTV with HDMI jacks on your TV and cable or satellite box.

I was similarly frustrated by finding and using regular TV shows from my cable box. Unless you have a box from Dish network, Google TV can’t search in your recorded shows, or allow you, when it finds a show coming up, to set it to record. You’ll likely switch to your regular remote to do those things, which defeats Google’s aim of integration.

Also confusing is Google TV’s home screen, which has overlapping categories. For instance, there is a Queue, for some of your favorite podcasts and sites, and a Bookmarks for others. There is an Applications menu that takes you to specially designed apps that spare you from navigating the regular Web, such as the Netflix video service or Pandora Radio. But there is also a Spotlight category that has customized, simplified websites that, to an average user, amount to the same thing. And, so far, you can only search for the names of most applications, not any content they contain.

Google plans to add the Android Market of third-party apps to Google TV. That could be good, adding more functionality. But it also risks adding more complexity, unless Google redesigns the interface.

Google TV has its strong points. The integration of Web video and regular TV, while flawed, is a smart move. There is even a picture-in-picture feature that lets you keep watching TV while, say, using Twitter or any other Web function. And the Logitech box has an optional $150 camera that allows you to make free video calls. It worked well in my one test. Logitech also allows you to control the Revue from an iPhone or Android app.

But this is a 1.0 product. For now, I’d suggest average users dying to watch Internet video on a TV, either plug in a PC or use one of the wireless systems, like Intel’s Wi-Di, that wirelessly beam video from a PC to a TV. Or, you could wait for Google TV to improve.

Find all his columns and videos at walt.allthingsd.com Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101117/google-tv-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100706/app-watch-pbs-sees-potential-in-iphone-as-childrens-toy/ http://allthingsd.com/20100706/app-watch-pbs-sees-potential-in-iphone-as-childrens-toy/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:58:05 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=26858 For many kids growing up in a world of gadgets, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone is little more than a cool toy.

Never mind the price tag or the fact that the phone helped revolutionize mobile devices. Kids like to poke around on the screen and watch animation. And many parents have found that the gadget can be a great diversion, if they can get over their fear of their children breaking the device.

A whole category of applications has sprung up for very young children who play on mobile gadgets. And PBS Kids, the children’s division of the Public Broadcasting System, is aiming to do for this medium what it did with educational programming on television.

“Our specialty has always been in informal education,” said Lesli Rotenberg, the senior vice president of children’s media at PBS. “We can make a really big difference even when kids aren’t in school.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100706/app-watch-pbs-sees-potential-in-iphone-as-childrens-toy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100204/pbs-frontline-considers-the-digital-nation-a-lot-of-handwringing-over-the-inevitable-but-watch-it-anyway/ http://allthingsd.com/20100204/pbs-frontline-considers-the-digital-nation-a-lot-of-handwringing-over-the-inevitable-but-watch-it-anyway/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:26:36 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24055

Earlier this week, the reliably erudite PBS public affairs program, “Frontline,” aired a documentary called “Digital Nation,” which I caught on television in one of the rare moments I find myself actually in front of one.

Produced by Rachel Dretzin, in collaboration with tech author and pundit Douglas Rushkoff, it’s the second in a series–the first, which aired in 2008, was titled “Growing Up Online”–about how the inevitable digital onslaught is affecting everyone.

As the site for the show describes itself, in part:

Over a single generation, the Web and digital media have remade nearly every aspect of modern culture, transforming the way we work, learn and connect in ways that we’re only beginning to understand…Dretzin and her team report from the front lines of digital culture–from love affairs blossoming in virtual worlds, to the thoroughly wired classrooms of the future, to military bases where the Air Force is fighting a new form of digital warfare. Along the way, they begin to map the critical ways that technology is transforming us–and what we may be learning about ourselves in the process.

And, indeed, Dretzin and her team race hither and yon interviewing a pile of smart folks–most of whom, thankfully, are not from Silicon Valley–to uncover what’s up with this Internet thing, which the kids seem to love.

There are ruminations on the out-of-focus students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the evils of multitasking, fretting over how this digital submersion is affecting the brains of schoolchildren and more jaw-dropping over the creepily compelling oddness of virtual worlds and online relationships.

Dretzin even features and–natch!–clucks over her own computer-savvy children and what it all means to them. She plays the role of the less-plugged-in mother, complete with a furrowed brow about it all, although the kids are obviously sharp as tacks, digital French flashcards or not.

This egads-no-one-know-where-this-geekery-is-taking-us worrywartness is probably appropriate, and though nothing new, is well told.

Perhaps the best part is a visit to the spanking new gaming-heavy center the Army has built that sucks in teen boys like nobody’s business.

While the piece has aired, you still can watch the whole thing on the well done Digital Nation Web site, the best part of which is the contributions of regular people who added their own voices to the digital conversation.

Which is remarkably robust, as far as I can tell, so perhaps we have not gone to hell in a cloud-computing handbasket quite yet.

Here are two of the more adorkable of those videos:

Here is the whole “Digital Nation” doc, in nine chapters:

Distracted by Everything

What’s It Doing to Their Brains

South Korea’s Gaming Craze

Teaching With Technology

The Dumbest Generation?

Relationships

Virtual Worlds

Can Virtual Experiences Change Us?

Where Are We Headed?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100204/pbs-frontline-considers-the-digital-nation-a-lot-of-handwringing-over-the-inevitable-but-watch-it-anyway/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20091124/a-clicker-to-watch-tv-online/ http://allthingsd.com/20091124/a-clicker-to-watch-tv-online/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:43:07 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=934 Finding TV shows online can be a major hassle. If you can remember which network hosts the show, you then must hunt through a maze of listings of several other television shows on that network’s Web site to find it. The show you want to watch might not even be available since many networks rotate only a handful of recent episodes online at a time. And if you do finally find the correct episode, you may be required to download a special media player to watch it.

Some services make this process a little easier. Hulu holds episodes from 1,200 television shows, but is still missing many. Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes Store offers over 50,000 episodes, but unlike network sites or Hulu, it requires viewers to pay to download and watch them (though they are commercial-free). Video search engines like Truveo browse the entire Web, returning an often-overwhelming number of results. And while YouTube is the king of Web video, it can too easily return a search result that isn’t a complete and genuine episode of the show you’re seeking.

This week, I’ve been testing Clicker, a free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site—like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

I like Clicker and found it to be a quick resource for finding all sorts of shows online. In many cases, it directed me to find the episodes I wanted to watch and saved me the hassle of less efficient searching. It also suggested shows I might like and offered a playlist where I could subscribe to receive episodes as they became available or save available videos to watch later.

Clicker makes descriptive pages about each show

Though it has a search box, Clicker feels more like a directory than purely a robotic search engine that relies mainly on algorithms. In fact, Clicker created a descriptive page for almost every show, and these pages can be edited or created via user submissions, which Clicker will review before posting them to the site. And because it’s focused on TV shows or Web originals, it won’t clutter your results with kids’ birthday parties or cats on skateboards.

The site is still rather new, so it has some kinks to work out—like links to videos that didn’t actually play if, for example, they were pulled by the network. But these were rare, and for the most part, if a video wasn’t available, a clear, brief explanation was displayed at the top of the page. Also, if Clicker sends you back out to a network’s site and that network uses a special player for videos, you’ll still have to download that player.

Filtering Results

Clicker’s program pages contain a description of the show, and a way to filter results by season, airdate or popularity. And the site shows the actual airdate of each video—something that not many other sites do. A column on the right side of each page displays several related shows, like the suggestion of “Modern Family” for fans of “How I Met Your Mother”; and “Roswell” and “Dead Like Me” suggested for people who like “Heroes.” In December, these recommendations will become even more personalized.

Some of Clicker’s sources include NBC, Fox, ABC, PBS, the Food Network and Web original content (i.e. “The Onion”). It also can search movies and music videos; the movies can be watched free in some cases, or paid for via Amazon’s (AMZN) Video on Demand or Netflix (NFLX) Instant Streaming. In January, Clicker plans to incorporate shows and movies from iTunes, using Apple’s pay-and-download method.

Clicker is especially handy when you’re looking for a show that isn’t where you think it should be. “Seinfeld,” for example, is on TBS rather than NBC, where it originally aired, and only nine episodes are available at once before they rotate out and are replaced by nine more. “Friends” is found on theWB.com, rather than on NBC’s site. “Damages” isn’t available on its network site, FX; instead, it can be found at Crackle.com, another video-hosting site. It’s easy to understand why people settle for missing an episode rather than trying to find a show online.

Clicker finds over 400,000 television and Web-original episodes so you can search less and watch more.

Clicker also comes in handy when you’re querying something or someone you need to learn about. By typing in a term like “Thanksgiving travel,” I get news results from NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” the “CBS Evening News” and the Associated Press. I also get tips for traveling during this busy time of year from an AOL Travel online video, as well as a 1968 episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” called “The Thanksgiving Spirit.”

Clicker isn’t the site to use if you want to find the hot video clip that everyone is watching. When I searched for “Whitney Houston” the morning after the American Music Awards, the most recent video I found was the singer performing on “Good Morning America” in September—not the one showing her singing during the awards show the night before.

But the fact that Clicker can find Whitney Houston on “Good Morning America” is useful in itself. A search for Warren Buffett’s most recent appearance on the “Charlie Rose” show can be conducted in a similar manner—either by typing his name into the box at the top of the page or by opening the show’s page and searching within that show for anyone who has appeared as a guest. Performing a search within a show like this anywhere else is nowhere near as easy as on Clicker.

Playlist of Your Shows

Clicker can be used as a TiVo (TIVO) of sorts if you create a username on the site or simply sign in using Facebook Connect, which I did.

Users can make playlists where they can add just one episode, all episodes, or new episodes to this list—subscribing to receive all new episodes in the playlist as they become available. I added episodes of “The Amazing Race” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” to my playlist. This list can be accessed anytime, and it’s helpful for people who don’t have enough time to watch a show that they found. In December, email and Facebook notifications will be added to tell users that new episodes are in their playlists.

If you spend a lot of time in front of your computer and find yourself searching all over the Web for the TV shows you’d like to watch, Clicker will be a huge help. And even if your show isn’t available, you might find something similar—or better—in Clicker’s recommendations.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091124/a-clicker-to-watch-tv-online/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090904/boomtown-talks-about-the-iphone-apps-economy-on-the-news-hour-plus-future-stuff/ http://allthingsd.com/20090904/boomtown-talks-about-the-iphone-apps-economy-on-the-news-hour-plus-future-stuff/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:52:40 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=18100

Last night, the News Hour With Jim Lehrer aired a piece on PBS on “how technology companies are innovating amid the recession by designing popular new smart phone applications.”

BoomTown was asked to reprise my recurring role as a naysayer to tech hyperbole that always comes with the latest trend.

This time it was about how perhaps not all of the 65,000 apps being created by legions of third-party developers for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone–as well as for other smart phone platforms such as Google (GOOG) Android and Palm (PALM) Pre–will result in gold, diamonds and unicorns raining down on innovative entrepreneurs.

Well, except for the iBeer folks!

Oddly enough, I somehow went all Jules Verne at the end and started talking about ubiquitous screens on coffee tables, referencing the movie, “Minority Report” (which I love, despite the ever-annoying Tom Cruise).

So, I am obviously just as bad.

Here’s the video from the News Hour and, if you prefer, here is a link to the transcript:

In addition, here is a lovely clip from “Minority Report,” just because I like to embed stuff and it features that cool interactive mall scene and the USA Today e-newspaper (plus Portuguese subtitles!):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090904/boomtown-talks-about-the-iphone-apps-economy-on-the-news-hour-plus-future-stuff/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090813/twitter-you-are-not-a-target-until-you-become-popular/ http://allthingsd.com/20090813/twitter-you-are-not-a-target-until-you-become-popular/#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:01:07 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=14356 Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, called the service’s recent attacks a sign of its significance in a PBS interview that airs Thursday.

“You are not a target until you become popular,” he said, after PBS’s Tavis Smiley commented that the denial-of-service attacks were a “backhanded compliment.”

Mr. Stone said that the outages, which occurred Thursday and again Tuesday, taught the startup that it needed to be ready for online assaults.

“We spent a lot of 2008 sort of catching up with a lot of the popularity of Twitter — unexpected popularity — getting there technically so that we’re stable. And along comes this massive attack,” he said. “We learned a lot from it.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090813/twitter-you-are-not-a-target-until-you-become-popular/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090812/get-out-of-our-biz-stone-talks-twitter-attacks-on-tavis-smiley/ http://allthingsd.com/20090812/get-out-of-our-biz-stone-talks-twitter-attacks-on-tavis-smiley/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:33:40 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17488

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone can be seen tomorrow night in an interview with Tavis Smiley on his PBS show, talking about the denial-of-service attacks on the hot microblogging service recently.

In the interview, noting that Twitter had spent 2008 scaling up its platform to deal with its popularity, Stone said the San Francisco-based start-up was now trying to get up to speed on malicious attackers, who have managed to shut down Twitter for short periods of time.

“You’ve got to tune your systems to be able to handle this level of assault, this scale of assault,” said Stone, who added that the company was working behind the scenes with other Web companies like Google (GOOG) to deal with the attacks.

Here’s the video clip from the interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090812/get-out-of-our-biz-stone-talks-twitter-attacks-on-tavis-smiley/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090805/vital-video-the-national-parks-americas-best-idea/ http://allthingsd.com/20090805/vital-video-the-national-parks-americas-best-idea/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:00:36 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17006

How much should you ponder this amazing video from an upcoming new documentary series by Ken Burns–titled “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”–on America’s national parks system?

Muchly much, as the national parks have indeed been one of this country’s most amazing gifts to itself.

Set to air on PBS on September 27, the creators stuck a video clip that is almost 27 minutes long on YouTube and on the series’ own really nice Web site, which is a pretty terrific thing to do.

The real series is 12 hours long and in six parts, directed by the still-elfish Burns and co-produced with Dayton Duncan, who also wrote the script.

As they describe it, the series “is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone.”

After having recently just visited the wonder that is Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is much featured in the series, you can say that again.

Here’s the video clip (it’s August, so take the time to watch it):

[Photo above: Tourists at an erupting Old Faithful. Yellowstone National Park, 1884. Source: Haynes Foundation Collection, Montana Historical Society]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090805/vital-video-the-national-parks-americas-best-idea/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090424/project-playlist-names-former-mtv-exec-sykes-as-ceo-replacing-van-natta/ http://allthingsd.com/20090424/project-playlist-names-former-mtv-exec-sykes-as-ceo-replacing-van-natta/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:09:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12842

Legendary MTV Networks exec and co-founder John Sykes (pictured here in an interview on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” show) will replace Owen Van Natta as CEO of the controversial music-sharing site, Project Playlist.

He is a high-profile choice to take over for Van Natta, who was officially named CEO of MySpace this morning by News Corp. (NWS).

Van Natta, who also worked at Facebook, will remain an adviser to Playlist, which is based in Silicon Valley. It is not clear where Sykes will be located.

Sykes–who is on the Playlist board–was one of the original executives who launched the iconic music-focused cable channel 25 years ago, before leaving last year. He was also a key exec at both VH1 and Infinity Broadcasting.

He is well regarded in the music industry, an important criterion since Playlist has been dealing with legal attacks from some music labels. Settling with them will be key to the start-up’s survival.

Former AOL and MTV exec Bob Pittman, who is an investor in Playlist, worked closely with Sykes at the Viacom (VIA) unit.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Playlist Names Board Member and Veteran Media Executive
John Sykes as CEO

MTV Co-founder and Former VH-1 President Replaces Owen Van Natta

Palo Alto, Calif., April 24, 2009–Playlist, the leading social media network where over 43 million music fans discover, create and share playlists, announced today that Board Member and industry veteran John Sykes has joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. As a Co-founder of MTV, President of VH1, and CEO of Infinity Broadcasting, Sykes brings extensive operating experience and industry relationships to the company as it partners with the music industry to provide advertising, subscription and e-commerce services to music consumers.

Owen Van Natta will serve as an Advisor to Playlist.

“John was a pioneer of the MTV revolution that forever changed the music industry landscape by giving fans a whole new way to discover and enjoy music,” said Bob Zangrillo, Chairman of Playlist. “Playlist looks forward to leveraging John’s tremendous track record operating media businesses and deep relationships in the music industry as it builds out the world’s premier social media service.”

“Creating and sharing playlists has become a phenomenon in our culture. With over 43 million registered users, Playlist is the number one site where fans go to discover, share and enjoy their favorite music,” said John Sykes, CEO of Playlist. “Leveraging our newly forged partnerships with the music community, we can now offer consumers deep access to their music and provide the industry with powerful new revenue streams.”

Playlist, one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet, continues to establish partnerships with the entertainment industry in an effort to offer a comprehensive collection of content that can be discovered, shared and monetized at www.playlist.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090424/project-playlist-names-former-mtv-exec-sykes-as-ceo-replacing-van-natta/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090422/pbs-expands-online-video-offerings/ http://allthingsd.com/20090422/pbs-expands-online-video-offerings/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:04:46 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=11106 PBS revamped its online video offering Wednesday, adding full-length episodes from shows such as “Antiques Roadshow” and “Nova,” as it attempts to broaden its audience and sponsorship opportunities.

The public broadcaster is aiming for younger viewers who don’t tune in to “Masterpiece Theater” on television, but–it hopes–will be interested in its programming if it’s more accessible on the Web. It is adding archived TV, such as the late Julia Child’s cooking series, as well as a show, “Time Team America,” that will debut online in advance of a July air date.

“We know that there’s a certain age group that may not be watching us on television, but it’s not because they don’t have an affinity for the brand,” said Jason Seiken, who heads PBS’s interactive unit. “They love PBS, they grew up with PBS, they have an attachment to programs like ‘Frontline’ and ‘Nova.’ It’s just that they consume their media in different ways than an older generation did. So we feel that this is a way to capture them, to meet that need.”

Read the rest of this post on the original Web site, WSJ.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090422/pbs-expands-online-video-offerings/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090218/kara-visits-with-pbs-mediashift-blogger-mark-glaser/ http://allthingsd.com/20090218/kara-visits-with-pbs-mediashift-blogger-mark-glaser/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:01:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=9921

Recently, BoomTown had a lovely lunch with PBS new media blogger Mark Glaser (pictured here).

Glaser is a longtime free-lance journalist whom I first noticed when he wrote a weekly column for the USC Annenberg School of Communication’s Online Journalism Review, post-Web 1.0 bubble, as well as for the most excellent “Media Grok” daily email newsletter for the now-defunct Industry Standard back in the midst of the froth.

Glaser was always able to cut through that with a clear-headed tone–while maintaining a respect for what was good about traditional journalism, as well as an excitement about the possibilities of new media.

His MediaShift site for PBS has recently gotten much beefed up, with interesting pieces about a range of digital media topics, from a cool map-timeline combo from the Washington Post to a new business venture called the Printed Blog to, of course, the impact of social media on journalism.

(There is also an interesting closely linked site called “Idea Lab,” which is a group blog about reinventing community news in the digital age.)

Glaser writes on the MediaShift blog about once a week and has about a dozen contributors.

A recent post–and thank goodness for some counter-programming in the blogosphere–was titled: “Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business.”

Here’s my video interview with him, on a range of issues facing the media in the interactive world (apparently, journalists don’t know everything!):

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090218/kara-visits-with-pbs-mediashift-blogger-mark-glaser/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20080716/snagfilms-finds-virtual-theaters-for-documentaries/ http://allthingsd.com/20080716/snagfilms-finds-virtual-theaters-for-documentaries/#comments Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:02:02 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20080716/snagfilms-finds-virtual-theaters-for-documentaries/ Thousands of feature-length documentary films are produced every year, but almost nobody gets a chance to see them. A few dozen are shown to small audiences at major film festivals, and a handful make it into theaters. For every blockbuster like “An Inconvenient Truth,” there are hundreds of documentaries that never find an audience.

Starting Thursday, however, there will be a new online service that aims to change all that. The service, called SnagFilms, allows anyone with a blog, a Web site, or even a page on a social-networking site, to open a virtual movie theater and show these documentaries, free. The virtual theater is a small widget that contains the film, and that can be embedded easily and quickly in a wide variety of popular social-networking services and blog platforms. No technical knowledge is needed.

Once a site or page owner “snags” a film in this way, visitors to the site can view it in a larger window that pops out from the widget. This window plays the film, displays some ads and provides links to charities or organizations related to the topic of the movie. The films can even be played in full-screen mode. Many also include links for buying a DVD of the film. All that’s missing is the popcorn.

These aren’t homemade, three-minute YouTube (GOOG) clips. Nearly all are feature-length, professionally produced documentaries, from both small independent filmmakers and well-known sources such as PBS and National Geographic.

The owner of the site or blog gets no direct revenue from posting the films. He or she is, in effect, donating space to support the film or the cause it highlights, a decision SnagFilms calls “filmanthropy.” But the filmmaker and SnagFilms do make money — splitting advertising revenue equally. And the charity or organization can make money, too, if viewers opt to donate. The filmmaker also can make money from DVD sales, paying SnagFilms an 8.5% commission.

I have been testing a prerelease version of the SnagFilms service and have posted SnagFilms widgets with no problems to Facebook, MySpace (News Corp), iGoogle, Netvibes, Blogger, Windows Live Spaces (MSFT) and Vox. Many more Web sites can house these widgets, including the vast number of blogs built on the popular WordPress and TypePad platforms.

Here’s how it works. You just go to the SnagFilms Web site at www.snagfilms.com, select one or more of the 250 or so films available at launch and click the snag button. A menu pops up that lists numerous popular networking services and platforms. Clicking one will automatically post the SnagFilms widget of your choice on your page or site at one of these services. You can also simply view the films at the SnagFilms site.

Each widget includes an “info” button that takes you to a page on the SnagFilms site giving the details and background on the film. You can also leave comments here, rate the film, order the DVD and see recommendations for related films.

The system is viral, so you don’t have to start at the SnagFilms site. A Web surfer who sees a SnagFilms movie anywhere on the Web can spread it around just by clicking the snag button on every widget. The snag button allows the viewer to either host the film or to email a link to the film that will bring friends to the SnagFilms site to view or snag it.

SnagFilms is the brainchild of Ted Leonsis, a former top executive at America Online (TWS), who in recent years has become a documentary-film producer. He became frustrated with the distribution bottleneck for such films and arranged to take over AOL’s documentary site, TrueStories, and turn it into SnagFilms. He also is chairman of the board of a company, Clearspring, which created the film widgets.

At launch, the SnagFilms catalog includes well-known documentaries like “Super Size Me,” but also lesser-known films on a wide variety of topics, including college football, AIDS in Africa, politics, profiles of average people and tales of the New York Fire Department. One of my favorites was “Paper Clips,” the story of how a school in Tennessee learned about the Holocaust.

Filmmakers can submit movies to the site by sending an email to: submissions@snagfilms.com. SnagFilms says it doesn’t censor or edit the films, but won’t accept pornography or films deemed to encourage hate. It does have a selection process, so not all films submitted will make it onto the site. The company hopes to add more films soon.

I had only two gripes about SnagFilms. First, the films should be able to play inside the widget itself, with an option inside to play at larger sizes. Having to open a separate browser window is a pain. The company says it’s working on this.

Second, the initial catalog is light on documentaries from a conservative or probusiness perspective. But the company says it is “actively seeking to offer differing viewpoints” and will soon add “a number of films that are quite conservative in philosophy.”

SnagFilms is a great idea for getting documentary films in front of more people. It’s another example of how the Web is changing media distribution for the better.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080716/snagfilms-finds-virtual-theaters-for-documentaries/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070827/monday-morning-quarterback-the-cant-we-all-get-along-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20070827/monday-morning-quarterback-the-cant-we-all-get-along-edition/#comments Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:34:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070827/monday-morning-quarterback-the-cant-we-all-get-along-edition/ Interoperate’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Here is that video from MarketWatch about the joint interview PBS’s Charlie Rose did with John Chambers of Cisco and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, where they trotted out that old saw about coopetition.

In other words, how the tech giants might compete, but also interoperate for customers’ sake. Let’s say we keep this one near the top of the pile, just in case it turns out differently.

“The Newspaper Is Dead. Long Live the Newspaper.”

That’s a nice kicker at the end of an excellent essay on the shift in newspaper reading from Slate’s Jack Shafer (full disclosure–I once worked for him when I was but a wee lass).

Shafer’s not saying much new here: Guess what? People are increasingly getting their news on the Web and they like it that way!

But, as usual, he says it well:

Horrible as it may sound, on many days the newsprint front page tastes of already chewed gum.

“I’m not the average reader, but anecdotes convince me that the average reader is becoming more like me every day—reading tomorrow’s news today.”

And he has some good suggestions for the troublesome trend, too: more succinct stories; better use of graphics on heftier inside pages; and, of course, acceptance of inevitable change.

I would add: Pray fervently that the trend is not moving quite as fast as it actually is.

Go Ahead and Use That SUV and Feel Better–Not

OK, I will admit I have been somewhat dubious about these carbon-offset credits you can buy to balance out your energy consumption.

Now, I am even more disturbed after seeing this video about the topic, given that Michel Gelobter of the think tank Redefining Progress and founder of Climatecooler.com says some companies that can cause increased global warming are being planned, so we can pay them not to be created.

In the meantime, also read Valleywag Owen Thomas’s entirely on-point screed about the global warmingness of the techie-heavy Burning Man event, now taking place in the Nevada desert.

Confused?

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20070827/monday-morning-quarterback-the-cant-we-all-get-along-edition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070701/iphone-charlie-rose/ http://allthingsd.com/20070701/iphone-charlie-rose/#comments Sun, 01 Jul 2007 19:01:27 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/20070701/iphone-charlie-rose/ On Friday, the day Apple’s iPhone debuted, I appeared on “Charlie Rose” on PBS to discuss how the handheld device works and what it means for the future of cellphones. The interview appears below. You can read the review of the iPhone by me and Katherine Boehret here.

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