Saturday, January 7, 2006

Welcome to Giza

If you want video on your computer from the entertainment pyramids — or from anybody who wants to charge you to watch it — you're going to have to watch inside the new pyramids of one or more of their partners. For example, Google and CBS announced a deal yesterday. You can watch CBS stuff on your Windows box using Google's player (nothing yet on other platforms). Two days earlier, NBC and DirectTV, among many others, were announced as partners of Intel for its OEMs using the Viiv platform. Those are also Windows-only. We'll find out about Apple in three days.

Tristan Louis has been sorting this all out. You can see his first installment here.

Of course, there's plenty of DRM-free stuff in the world. And plenty of ways to watch it. Which means the fight in the long run will be between the pyramids and the former slaves that have grown tired of helping build them.

As Neo said to the Architect, it's about choice. If you don't like what they give you, make some of your own.

Wonder

Saw Stevie Wonder last night, where he and and a modest band (trumpet, sax, guitar, bass, two drum sets, keyboards, four singers) entertained 5000 or so Monster guests at the Paris. Great show. Almost informal, with lots of starts and stops and people wandering around the stage. It's easy to forget how many great songs Stevie has treated us to over the years.

By the end, nobody was sitting.

Not much news, but a lot of fun

I didn't report live on the Google Keynote at CES, for two reasons. One is that I knew Engadget would cover it like paint, which they did. (Nice job by Paul Boutin.) The other is that when I did it at the Intel keynote two days earlier, where there was huge news, my scoop got all of two links (thanks, guys) and almost no traction. (Later correction: eight.)

I blame myself for that, since the post was, well, pre-draft in quality. Public note-taking has never been one of my skills.

So, while a bunch of our colleagues here vigorously discussed whether or not links subvert hierarchy, Intel rolled out a hierarchy on the scale of Khufu that drew major yawns from a sum that rounds to everybody.

I have a feeling that when Apple does the same next week (possibly with this, among other things), we'll pay a bit more attention to what our pharoahs are up to.

As it turned out, Larry Page's keynote had no major news (and hardly anything for my Linux Journal readers), but lots of fun, mostly courtesy of Robin Williams, in his usual hilarious improvisational form. I also liked the way Larry gave the consumer electronics industry some well-deserved shit for continuing to waste everybody's money and time on incompatible connectors and power supplies — and generally ignoring the need for standards. He was the un-keynoter, stylistically, and that was a huge relief after all the scripted and stagey stuff we've been subjected to here.

Afterwards in a downstairs meeting with a bunch of A-list press folks (Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, et. al.), reporters took turns trying to get some kind of Google vs. Microsoft or Google Laptop story. None of the Google folk (CEO Eric Schmidt included) wanted to play the game.

The only bummer was Google's offering of new products (including a DRMful video product) that run only on Windows. When I asked him about that, he said it was a concern (or something like that) and that they were working on it.

Meanwhile, Euan points us to YouTube.

Welcome back, JPB

The best thing about the future is that it doesn't arrive all at once.

And in the case of John Perry Barlow's blog, that line carried its own demonstration, arriving at the end of his first post after an absence of nine months.