Boxee iPad App: Integrating Social Media and On-The-Fly Transcodess

Boxee is one of the more innovative set-top box companies out there for watching streaming media on your TV.  This is a brief on-floor demo of their iPad app at CES.  Facebook and Twitter integration, ability to save videos for prioritized viewing later and, holy crap, on-the-fly transcoding when watching media from your computer hard drive on your TV. This is awesome, but, you can't help but wonder how long it will be before this is all integrated into TV's? Samsung seems to be heading in that direction.

(Si Si) Christmas Dance Party

Voulez vous partir with me?

Ari Emanuel Speaking about the Future Media Landscape

This is a very interesting conversation with Ari Emanuel, Hollywood super agent at the recent Web 2.0 Summit (whatever that's supposed to mean).  Some of the things that he says about the future of media are similar to points that I have been making.  Of course, the difference is that he actually knows about what he is speaking.   The future is coming quickly and for small players, the window of opportunity is getting smaller as the big players start to actually figure out what is happening.  Agility and the ability to pull together sophisticated media production and marketing quickly by leveraging technology and the incredible wealth of knowledge available to everyone with an internet connection will be as important for indies as it is for Lady Gaga.

Hope everyone is having a great holiday.  Much exciting news coming in the next couple of months.

Personal Brand Schizophrenia

I am just back from Brazil.  It was an amazing experience, I will write about it further when I have a little time to digest it and write about it intelligently.  I realize now that I have not even spoken about the substance of the project.  Let's just leave it at now that I am very fortunate to be able to participate in documenting a sustainable development project in the Amazon facilitated by this organization.  It was energizing (and a real privilege) to meet people who are doing so much right to improve a piece of the world through hard work, brains, humility, stamina and more hard work.

Beautiful, but not always easy

There is so much happening right now in my world, I will try to touch on a few important other thoughts today (against the advice of the experts who warn about keeping a focused personal brand--rather than corporations becoming more human, it seems as though we are increasingly assuming their attributes).

I wanted to post a link to this: Flipboard, a subtle, but important step forward in how I see us all consuming media in the future.  Media created by people you know and curated/repackaged for your consumption.

I will leave today's post with a few questions:

1.  Is there any reason to think that in the future visual media will be any more highly valued than music has become?  In China, it seems as though literally no one pays for music now.  People there are scrambling to try and create anything that people will pay for surrounding the consumption experience, especially using social media.  Indie filmmakers, is this sounding familiar? Once the bandwidth logjam is broken, and it will be broken, unless we are willing to become completely uncompetitive as a nation in the global marketplace, how will media producers stop visual media from becoming as valueless as an mp3 in China?   It seems like a survival strategy that madia producing companies like NBC/Universal are being consolidated into pipeline providers like Comcast.  As someone who creates visual media, and knows the dedication, skill and hard work that goes into its creation, this is not an easy question to ask.

2. Will the future of paid media production involve largely only a few high-end producers of technological wonders (like Batman, Ironman, etc.) which can only be produced with a lot of capital and organizational/technical expertise?  Will most of the rest of the media consumed be produced by, well, everyone and curated through Facebook, YouTube and other online social repositories?  It seems as though we are well down the path to ever-increasing media consumption, however, rather than being consumed as a separate viewing experience it will be consumed nearly constantly, in small bits, and much of it created by people we "know" (at least online).

I'm not leaving until I get my $.99 for that download

Brazil- Arrival

Travel by bus is also difficult

Finally, I am safe in Brazil 6 airports and 40 hours later.  Fighting travels sickness off, (nothing to do with hygienic conditions in developing areas)  and everything to do with  municipal/airport authority institutional capitalism (thank you Panda Express at George Bush International Airport).   I had forgotten what it’s like to fly on non-U.S. airlines:  lots of fresh air in the cabin, food service, multiple beverage services on short flights….. Meanwhile, at George Bush I saw my first “self-service” boarding gate, for an international flight no less.  Apparently our future in the U.S. is even more jobless (and chaotic—no one to control people at the boarding gate??) than I’ve even imagined.  And on the San Francisco-Houston leg of my trip I felt like a fish in an oxygen starved aquarium 

I am now in Santarem, Para State, Brazil.  I will be staying for the next night or two in a hotel best described as 1970’s military dictatorship Internationalist architecture relic.  Think Internationalist more as in 1970’s coup-conspiring ITT, not Le Corbusier.  But, as in all things Brazilian, it is the wonderful people that make it a living place.  And there are definitely worse places to land at 1 a.m after all your plans have been disrupted.

I recommend highly the book,  Amazon Journal: Dispatches from a Vanishing Frontier  by Geoffrey O'Connor  if you have any interest at all in the reality of the not-that-distant Amazonian past and how it ended up portrayed in the media.  One thing I have realized in my preparation for this trip, and already from the very short time I have spent traveling across Brazil, is just how much more complicated the situation is here in the Amazon than I had taken the time before to understand.  As opposed to (what O'Connor refers to as) the eco-kitsch, Indian-kitsch, and political-kitsch, etc. that we have all been fed.   No matter how much we realize that this information is not reality, it is so pervasive that it does end up shaping our perceptions. 

Ceci n'est pas un indien

This is opposed to the good kitsch of which there seems to a fair share here in Brazil and which I hope to share with you as well, like a huge fake Christmas tree constructed out of burlap standing mutely in the 93 degree heat with the tropical birds squawking up a riot.  More later on how similar the internal “dream life” image the media creates in Brazil is to the U.S. version.

Not Christmas in Connecticut

My producing partner arrives hopefully tomorrow, after an unscheduled delay in Lima and being separated from his equipment.  Then, it will be time to get hard at work.  More on that later.  Roughly we will be working in this region till next week, when we head out on the Arapiuns River (Amazon tributary) and later the Tapajos (also an Amazon tributary) River.  My posts will be fragmentary and sporadic, but I hope to share some of the interesting moments I find with you.

Interesting fact that I learned while preparing for this trip:  the Amazon area was a large lake and the river flowed from the lake to the Pacific, not Atlantic.  The geological events that created the Andes mountains reversed the river’s flow.

Tchau.

Qwiki

I have to make this short, as I leave for a month of filming in Brazil tomorrow.  This is definitely a step in the direction to which I see media consumption moving.  Forget watching movies or shows in segregated time blocks, we will be experiencing bits of media constantly and not just from "professional" media producers.  Nightmare or dream?

For sure, the future of media consumption will be imperfect.  Funny that they coded this crazy product but couldn't get all of the video to load at the correct aspect ratio on Vimeo.  They may need to add a couple of teenagers to their marketing team.


Qwiki at TechCrunch Disrupt from Qwiki on Vimeo.

Update

I am now tweeting, mostly about technology and the future of media consumption: @cmieritz.

Also, here is an interesting article that clearly explains how Facebook and Google have become direct competitors (include Apple on the list as well).  Essentially, it is a battle to see which company will become your everything.  I am guessing that Facebook has replaced the Trilateral Commission in the paranoids' minds-eye by now.

O.K., back to my Amazon trip preparations.