award tour

Boris just sent me this link from arstechnica about how the NHL made an agreement with Slingbox to let users share video clips online. Slingbox is a device you hook up to your tv which lets you watch tv over the internet (It’s for people who are clinically addicted to watching tv). Anyways, the deal is interesting in that MLB and the NFL have basically told slingbox that they have no interest in partnering with them and that they’ll sue them to the stone age if they use their content.

What’s interesting is the difference in the leagues approach to online content. The NFL and MLB have high ratings and can tell Slingbox to piss off. The NHL’s ratings are abysmal and need things like Slingbox to get some sort of distribution. To give you some scope, NBC didn’t even show the first two games of the NHL finals and then for “those final three games averaged a 1.6 rating, according to NBC, putting it on par with Sunday afternoon golf for a minor tournament. Game 3, televised last Saturday night on NBC, produced an abysmal 1.1 rating—the lowest prime-time rating in NBC history”

A little while back I pointed out that CBC Radio now has a weekly podcast featuring the best of As It Happens. I only first heard of the show last year when my friend Juan was actually on the program after sending an email pleading with them to let him on. I’ve been listening to the show for just over a month and have been really impressed.

For example, back in October there was an interview with Pakistani President Musharraf which became quite confrontational but was still incredibly substantive. The interviewer wasn’t playing your standard journalistic “gotcha” game. She was just asking tough questions. It’s so amazing to see or read content that has a fresh take on current events. Mainstream news has just become so homogenous. Another example was from this week’s show which featured an interview with an American who has been living in Kandahar for the last 5 years running a non-profit business. Her observations about how things operate day-to-day in Afghanistan were really thought provoking. She also had some pretty harsh words in response to comments recently made by Canadian Commanders in the region.

The show also features more upbeat stories which are usually really quirky and offbeat. Some of them can be boring but others are quite interesting. I find what makes those interviews even more entertaining is the fact that most of the interviewees seem so excited to tell their story and are always so thankful that anyone is interested in them at all.

Anyways, if you have an ipod or just want some occasional talk radio content, check out the podcast.

There really isn’t an industry as stupid or as greedy as the music business/cartel. The new york times recently reported that the Universal Music managed to extort $1 from the sale of every $250 Zune, Microsoft’s new mp3 player. Luckily for Microsoft, they make about $12 billion a year and have about $30 billion cash-in-hand. Clearly, this is a win for innovation when the only company that can afford to make a digitial music player is the richest company in the world. Maybe Exxon can enter the market too. Over at GigaOm, Om himself has a post entitled Microsoft, Zune & The Music Mafia in which he goes to town on the music cartel. The post is defintely worth reading but I find this is the most interesting take-away:

If Apple had to pay at least $1 per device for every iPod sold over past two fiscal years, its cost would be $62 million at minimum: or about one more song per device. If music industry cannot sell one additional song to consumers (and has to blackmail for more money) then, you as a business, have lost grip over your core competency.

Yahoo is selling a new Jessica Simpson single in mp3 format (with no DRM) and it’s personalized to specific names. I made the list of names but poor Ramanan did not. I know he’ll be crying himself to sleep this evening.

There’s two things about this that strike me as quite interesting. First, it’s a prime example of the massive amount of customization that the music industry could exploit online. I just finished reading The Long Tail by Wired’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson. It details how there is a lot of money to be made in niches, even niches as small as 1 person (or in this case, 1 name). The second interesting part is this post on yahoo’s music blog. They’re bascially begging the music industry to let them create an emusic competitor. They also make a great point about how DRM adds nothing since labels already sell DRM-free music in the form of CDs. Maybe there’s a chance the labels will come to their senses and give this a try. The Carrot: major labels realizing that DRM really just means they’re locked into iTunes. The Stick: companies like Yahoo saying it’s the only way to compete with Apple.