Live from Austin!

I’ve worked out how to take a typical AVI file download (generic MPEG-4 with MP3 audio, such as XviD) and convert it to something the Apple TV should be able to play without re-encoding all the video.

There’s also the elgato turbo.264, which approximately quadruples the speed of encoding video for AppleTV.

I tried re-encoding a good quality downloaded show that’s unavailable in the USA, using the QuickTime AppleTV preset. The result was indistinguishable from the original. So I’m really seriously considering AppleTV now.

So, how does AppleTV stack up as a way of replacing cable or satellite?

Mythbusters: $50 (30 episodes)
South Park: $24 (14 episodes)
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: $20 (13 episodes)
Venture Brothers: $20 (13 episodes)
Reno 911: $21 (14 episodes)
The Soup: $6 (per 8 episodes)

If we imagine Dr Who and Torchwood were also available at similar prices, that’d be about a year’s TV for maybe $200, or about 4 months of cable or satellite bills.

This ignores the option of watching shows by renting the DVDs from Netflix. Do that, and it’s an even more cost-effective option.

I’d be inclined to spend some of the freed-up money on “This American Life”, Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit”, and other shows that I currently don’t get to see.

As expected, MacWorld was a big disappointment. The MacBook Air was supposed to be the big “wow” item, but it’s more of a big “meh”. Apple clearly set out to make something comparable to the VAIOs Sony has been selling for years–which is a great idea, as I love small laptops, but in the quest to be thinner than anyone else they introduced a few too many design compromises.No optical drive built in is no big deal; I go weeks between using my Mac’s optical drive. More of a problem is the lack of any Firewire capability, the inability to upgrade the RAM, and the fact that there’s no ethernet unless you carry around a USB ethernet adaptor. And of course, that adaptor will use your only USB port, so better carry a hub too. And cables for your hub.

[Update: It's also no smaller than the regular MacBook; just thinner. So it's not an ultraportable, and no easier to carry around.]

Now, if they had done something like Fujitsu’s P1620 and made it possible to flip the keyboard under and use the device as a tablet, that would have rocked. But as it is, it’s just another laptop, albeit a very thin one; and it’s not really suitable as a primary machine.

So what’s the target market for the MacBook Air? People who want a status symbol, or people who travel an awful lot and need the absolute lightest Mac possible. They also need to be people who can afford a second Mac as a main machine, or people with very light needs. So I really can’t see the Air selling in great quantities. If I were choosing a Mac laptop today, I wouldn’t get one, even if price wasn’t a concern.

I was more interested in what they’re doing with AppleTV. I’ve been thinking for a while that dealing with scratched and scuffed Netflix DVDs is a pain, and I’d rather just rent movies via the Internet. AppleTV is going to offer this as an option. Add in the ability to buy TV shows a la carte, and it’s starting to look pretty tempting.

Of course, there are a couple of problems. The first is that a lot of content isn’t in MPEG-4 format. The iPod would never have been a success if it hadn’t been able to play MP3s and had only worked with MPEG-4 audio; and similarly, if Apple wants the AppleTV to be a success, they need to make it able to play more formats than just MPEG-4.

The second problem is selection. Right now, the movie and TV selection via iTunes doesn’t even come close to Netflix. But give it another year or two, and I think the cable TV and satellite companies are going to be in big trouble.

The economics are simple. I watch 2-3 hours of TV a week, on half a dozen channels. To get those channels, however, I have to buy a bundle of over a hundred channels that I literally never watch. I could buy the shows via iTunes instead, cancel the DirecTV subscription, and save $30 a month. But not this year, not until all the shows I want are available…

The big question will be whether the new AppleTV software can be easily hacked to enable installation of other codecs and playback of non-MPEG-4 content. If so, I may get one. If not, I’ll wait until the content is all available in MPEG-4–which may be a long wait.

Fox TV described There’s Something About Miriam as “6 eligible men, 1 beautiful model named Miriam, and an enormous secret reveal you never saw coming!”

Well, actually the reveal is pretty obvious from the web site. It’s your basic reality TV dating show, where a bunch of loser guys compete for the attention of a woman–but this time, the object of their affections is, unknown to them, a pre-op male-to-female transsexual.

The show was made in 2003 and shown in the UK in 2004. It’s currently finishing up its US run on the Fox Reality Channel; the final 2 episodes are next weekend. Because of the delay before the show aired here, the offscreen drama has already played out.

As you might have guessed, the male contestants were not very happy about the show, and felt they had been ridiculed. They launched a lawsuit claiming everything from defamation, thru psychological damage, all the way up to “conspiracy to commit sexual assault”. (Don’t flatter yourselves, boys.) Eventually the production company behind the show settled out of court.

Another “lie to the contestants” TV show soon followed. Space Cadets sent a group of ordinary mouth-breathing reality TV show contestants on a 5 day mission in earth orbit. That’s what they were told, anyway; in reality they were stuck in a fake spacecraft built on a disused military base in Suffolk. Apparently they didn’t catch on, and a cash payout at the end prevented legal unpleasantness. Viewing figures were disappointing, though, with many people refusing to believe that anyone could be stupid enough to fall for the hoax, and concluding that the whole thing was in fact a fake reality show made using actors.

The scenario reminds me of an SF short story, 50s I think, about a group of astronauts who are similarly sent on a faked mission–but who go insane after the accidentally get to see the far side of the moon, which is just a painted wooden mockup. (Perhaps someone remembers the author and title? I’m thinking Heinlein.)  Of course, in this case the astronauts were selected because they were borderline insane to start with.

TV as lie is hardly new. The bigger mystery for me is the content of some of the reality TV shows that are totally honest with the participants. Like A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, aka some slutty bisexual woman with a MySpace page. The shock revelation in this case is delivered right at the start: there are contestants of both genders competing to win the chance to take home a Playboy model to meet mom and have her lap dance for grandmother. (No, really.)
Tila is cute, but she’s not that great of a catch. There are any number of good looking Asian women who are a lot less trashy, and won’t ask you to eat raw bulls’ testicles and crawl through mud for the chance to date them. So basically, the whole dating aspect is a farce, and it’s a show where people compete to over-act hysterically and perform degrading stunts in order to appear on TV.

(And in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t sit and watch any of this crap. I just watch the highlights (or lowlights) that are mocked on The Soup.)

It makes me wonder: in another few decades, will people look back on reality TV shows the way we now look back at 1970s variety shows, Vaudeville, and circus freaks? Will people wonder why they were so popular? Or will reality TV continue indefinitely, like game shows, albeit becoming less popular with time?

I’d like to think that eventually, the mystique of TV will disappear, as anyone can put their own video on the Internet for the world to see. You don’t need to eat eyeballs on camera in order to appear on screen. I suspect that what will actually happen is that reality TV will evolve to attract only the most desperate attention whores as participants. But in that case, will anyone else want to watch?

With the latest South Park being a time-travel story about Nintendo Wii, atheism, and sea otters, I must admit I did momentarily consider the possibility that either Trey Parker or Matt Stone had been reading my web site.

However, it’s quite common that people think that TV episodes contain coded messages specifically for them, and 99.9% of the time it just means they stopped taking their medications. So unless there’s an upcoming episode with a squirrel named Frida, I’m going to assume it’s a coincidence.

But that Allied Atheist Alliance logo with the otter head was pretty cool…

When I read about Lost, it sounded like exactly the kind of show I’d love. I didn’t watch it. To understand why, we need to look at The X Files.

At some point during the first few seasons of X Files, the writers decided that it would be good for the show if there was an overall story arc involving the alleged extraterrestrial invaders. Initially, they were right. However, shortly after the movie a problem became apparent: the network was never going to allow them to solve the mystery.

Things quickly became ridiculous. The need to keep adding new bits of plot twist to an already confused backstory quickly turned the UFO thread into an unintelligible mess of black liquid, killer agents, swarms of bees, body implants, and superintelligent children.

Then in a three-part episode, in what was originally intended to be the final season (Season 7), Mulder and Scully located wreckage of an alien spaceship, washed ashore on a beach in West Africa. You might have thought that they’d take photographs, get teams of scientists in, and get some answers; but the network’s desire for a neverending plot meant that the following week everything went back to normal—or rather, to a guy with a mysterious hunger for human brains—and the proof of alien existence was casually left on the beach.

At that point, I knew the shark was most definitely jumped. I watched for a while longer, but when Season 8 ended with Scully having her child, that was enough closure for me, and with a sense of relief I stopped watching.

Something very similar happened with Earth: Final Conflict. Season 3 had a multi-part story that turned out to have absolutely zero to do with the ongoing plot; when they followed that with a clip show, I realized the series was being shamelessly padded out to fill time, and I stopped watching.

So when I read the scenario for Lost, I immediately suspected that it would go the same way—that it would start promisingly, but that the network’s demands for a show that never ends would quickly mean that the writers would be forced to jerk the audience around. I figured if I turned out to be wrong, and there was a satisfactory resolution after 2 or 3 seasons, I’d hear about it and could rent the DVDs.

An added disincentive to watching Lost was that it was on one of the major networks. That meant if it was any good, it would almost certainly be killed part-way through a season. It amazes me that ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX will kill a show that doesn’t get mass-market audiences, even if there are complete, paid-for episodes sitting on the shelf. After seeing it happen to Stressed Eric and The New Fantasy Island (much underrated), I had vowed never to watch anything on a major network until it had made it to the end of season 1. If they didn’t kill it, then I’d watch the reruns.

So I’m not surprised to read that Lost is now hemorrhaging viewers as the writers overload it with red herrings. If you’re addicted to the show then I feel sorry for you, because I doubt you’ll ever get a satisfactory ending. Probably once the audience figures drop below a certain level, ABC will kill it mid-season; but in the mean time, they won’t allow any key questions to be answered, because they want to keep their options open. End result: lousy stories.

It’s clearly not impossible to have a series with a long story arc on US television. Babylon 5 managed it (though not without problems), and Star Trek: Deep Space 9 did too. But Lost is more typical: shows either die before everything (or anything) can be resolved satisfactorily (Firefly, Harsh Realm, American Gothic), or they are padded out with endless sub-plots that go nowhere until everyone turns off in disgust (X-Files).

So, is there a way to save future TV mysteries? Yes, but it might hurt: It’s vitally important that you all stop watching Lost, right now. Show ‘em they can’t just jerk you around endlessly.

We like to think that we are immune to propaganda. Yes, other feeble-minded individuals may allow their attitudes to be shaped by the media and their surroundings, but we’re sure that we are far too smart for that.

In 1975, John Cleese savagely satirized British attitudes to Germany, in the classic Fawlty Towers episode The Germans. After a blow to the head, hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty loses his ability to self-censor. While taking a dinner order from some German guests, he proceeds to blurt out the names of Nazis; eventually he descends into xenophobic ranting.

The sad thing is that after 30 more years, nothing much has changed.

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Digital TV means crystal clear reception from an $8 wire loop antenna. It means beautiful sharp images a meter across with no visible scan lines.

It also means occasionally having to reboot your television.

It’s just the way things are. I have to reboot my cellphone every day or so, or a memory leak eventually causes it to crash. I have to reboot the printer once a month or so. Our answering machine has needed rebooting a few times, too, and the other day I rebooted the car. I haven’t had to reboot my watch, but it does have to sit and calculate for a while when I change physical time zone. I’m sure in a few more years, I’ll be rebooting the toaster whenever it starts burning toast.

Like a Mac, our TV is entirely software controlled, even powering itself on and off when ordered to by the software. There’s no physical on/off switch, just a button that requests that the software turn the set on or off.

Unfortunately, there’s a bug. Every now and again, the software will think there’s no incoming signal, and ask the hardware to turn off the screen to save power. After a second or two it’ll realize it made a mistake, and ask the screen to power up again. It happens very intermittently, I’d guess once every dozen hours or so, but that doesn’t stop it from being annoying. At one point there was a TV episode on the TiVo that would reliably make it happen at a certain point.

So, I wrote to Sharp asking if this was a known glitch with Aquos TVs. They called me back, and had me put the TV into a special hidden maintenance mode. It turned out my TV needed a software update, something to do with a power glitch in Aquos models that support CableCard. I was refered to a local Sharp service engineer, who brought over a couple of flash cards and apparently did the update. So far, so good.

Something about this disturbs me, though. More and more outwardly simple objects that we interact with are controlled by complex software, and we’re apprently still no closer to solving the problem of delivering reliable software. I didn’t feel too bad when the car needed a firmware upgrade, because a car is a really complicated system—especially a hybrid car that needs to control 2 engines at once and trade off energy between them. But TV is conceptually so simple, and it used to involve no software at all. Digital is nice, and all, but because of the need to decode MPEG-2 we’ve quietly lost simplicity of design. And that’s before you even consider the fact that ATSC is a horrible, horrible piece of design-by-committee with 18 different formats.

I’ve been watching Life on Mars. The setup is: Manchester police inspector is in the middle of a very tense investigation and turbulent personal situation, when he’s hit by a car. He wakes up, apparently in the same spot, but in 1973. As far as he can tell, he’s really in the past—but from time to time, he also hears sounds that suggest that it’s all his imagination, and he’s really in a coma in a hospital bed in 2006.

He discovers he’s a police officer in 1973 also, and tries to make the best of the situation. The series reconstructs the Britain of 1973 in pretty exacting detail, and plays off the modern sensibility and policing techniques of the protagonist against the Sweeney-style approach. Manchester in the 70s was notorious for police corruption, and so bribery and fit-ups are standard operating procedure for some of his colleagues. The plots are twisty enough that I can’t predict the outcome, there’s a dose of humor now and again, and the series provokes thought about how much has changed in just 30-odd years. It’s the best TV show I’ve seen in years; I’d put it on a par with the new Dr Who. Thank goodness for the BBC.

BBC America will apparently be showing it later this year, so US readers should look out for it. Or, you could watch the inevitable shitty US network TV remake.

Apparently the FCC have taken a closer look at the figures they were offered to prove that à la carte programming would increase prices. Turns out the figures were flawed, and prices would actually drop according to the FCC’s own analysis.

Predictably, the media giants are howling with dire warnings of even bigger price hikes, mass censorship, outbreaks of bird flu, and anything else they can think of.

I’m getting tired of seeing the same old crappy arguments wheeled out time and time again, so I’ve put together a page on à la carte TV myths, based on thoughts I originally wrote up in a letter to the FCC. (Hey, they asked for comments.)

The prize for worst response has to go to Comcast, who announced yet another 4-7% price hike a few days after the FCC turnaround.

The controversy over à la carte cable and satellite programming keeps resurfacing. The basic problem is that cable prices keep rising, to the point where the basic level of digital cable is over $50 a month in many places. Prices have risen 40% in the last decade.

(As an aside, I’m amazed at the whiners in the UK who complain about paying £126.50 a year for a TV license that gets them the best premium programming from the US, as well as UK TV. I pay $588 a year to get a similar selection.)

Viewers find it galling to pay for a hundred channels when there are only a handful they watch on a regular basis. Hence there has been a campaign to get the FCC to rule that cable and satellite providers must offer the option of à la carte programming, where you can choose to subscribe to only the channels you actually want.

The cable and satellite companies don’t want to see that happen, as it would eat into their fat profits. Since the same companies own a lot of the mainstream media outlets, I’m constantly seeing astroturf coverage explaining why à la carte programming is impossible, would make your cable bills skyrocket, is tantamount to Communism, and so on.

This is my attempt to cut through a lot of the common bullshit spouted on the subject.

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