Category: Streaming Media

Cinematography of Anh Hung Tran

greenpapaya.jpg Can a camera caress water? Anh Hung Tran is a Vietnamese director whose slow delicate movies seem less stories than excuses to collect drops of leaves. I’ve now seen M?i du du xanh – L’odeur de la papaye verte (1993) (English is “The Scent of Green Papaya”) and Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000). In both the camera dwells on the textures of everyday life. Both take place in the outdoor kitchens where the women cook and wash in the many basins that seem to populate Tran’s movies. At times the camera moves across surfaces just to caress the painted wood as if we aren’t important, but our homes are fine landscapes for the closeup eye.

Could one build a site for moving textures? A Flickr for clips.

iSIC: Sonnification of network traffic

iSIC is a neat research project into the sonnification of network traffic. The system makes music out of live activity on your network (or some other complex system) so that you can attend to the system without staring at a screen. When the music changes you hear the change. This project is led by William Farkas, a friend and neighbor, who teaches at Sheridan. Very neat. Listen to the music it produces.

Satellite Radio

Jack Kapico of The Globe and Mail has an article (“update”) on satellite radio coming to Canada, The radio war (Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005). He asks how traditional radio will survive the two satellite services that have been licensed, XM Canada and Sirius. His conclusion is that local radio that includes local talk shows, local news and, yes, local advertising, will not be affected, but stations that just play lists of tunes with ads will suffer because satellite radio offers the tunes without the ads. So, for example, he sees CBC Radio 1 surviving and Radio 2 suffering.

We’ve lived in a world of local radio for so long we have little idea of what a universe with (inter)national radio might be like ‚Äî even the CBC breaks away frequently for local content. We might in fact be surprised by how many people want local news, local sports and its accompanying boosterism, local weather conditions and on-air personalities’ happy talk (we’re all part of a huge local family). This will be the first real test of how wedded we are as a market to local interests.

A second point he mentions, but does not follow up on, is how people are paying not to listen to advertising. The iPod generation now has affordable alternatives to ad-heavy radio and they are voting 99 cents at a time just as they subscribed to ad-free movie channels. Are we revolting against saturation advertising such as found on commercial radio?

Stanford Podcasting and iTunes

Stanford iTunes is a site that will launch your iTunes so that it sees podcasts from Stanford University organized as a podcast “store”. In effect Apple gave Stanford a section of the iTunes store with its own graphics, “What’s New” section and subsections. Very interesting way to promote academic content (and the university) by being able to manage ones own area. I wonder how it works under the hood, and if Apple will let anyone create an iTunes site? From the FAQ I note that the tunes are not kept on the Apple iTunes site, but on Stanford’s server, and that therefore searching iTunes won’t work. This is thanks Peter Sutherland.

MP3 Player Sales

I was wondering what the sales of MP3 players is – are there enough out there to see a change in audio consumption habits? Or, are MP3 players and iPods a niche phenomenon? Some figures and proedictions were reported in Electronic News – MP3 Market to Nearly Quadruple by 2009. These are based on market analysis from iSuppli Corporation which predicts that MP3 player sales will go from 36.8 million units shipped in 2004 to 132 million units shipping in 2009. At that rate I think it safe to say we have a widespread phenomenon. How then will it change audio listening and consumption? Will radio be replaced by podcasts? Will online music stores replace storefronts?

Face of Text: Streaming Video and Podcast

We have added to the The Face of Text web site a section on Media – from there you can launch a Quicktime application that lets you see streaming video of selected talks at the conference with synchronized slides and text. The application was developed with LiveStage Pro – an interesting authoring environment for Quicktime applications. You can also hear podcasts/MP3 audio of selected talks.
The streaming media was developed by Zack Melnick as a Multimedia senior thesis project. Drew Paulin has been updating the web site.