The Case of the Missing FireWire
Friday, October 17, 2008 - Permalink
The recently announced new MacBook Pros are of course good news for all prospective BoinxTV users. Due to the vastly improved graphics system, they will be great machines to record live events on the road. Add a FireWire ExpressCard to the built-in FireWire 800 and you can have at least 2 cameras. (It is currently not 100% certain that more than one camera on one FireWire bus will work reliably).
Unfortunately, Apple has limited your choice of mobile system quite drastically to one of the 15" MacBook Pro models even though both the new MacBook Air and the new MacBooks feature the new graphics system which would make using BoinxTV on those machines possible. The problem is that both lack a FireWire port. There is also no expansion slot which would allow you to add a FireWire port.
Steve Jobs himself apparently deems the FireWire port unnecessary, citing the fact that the most popular consumer HD camcorders now ship with USB 2.0 instead of FireWire.
We can only hope that this means that Apple will finally get started on supporting those cameras properly. Right now all you can do is download the movies recorded on the camera to your Mac for post-production. And while most of those cameras have a "webcam" mode that allows you to use them for live input, this feature is not supported on the Mac and it usually is a very low resolution on top of that.
Even better, though, would be the addition of an HDMI input which would really take recording video podcasts and the like to another level.
Oliver.
They won't know what hit them
Friday, September 19, 2008 - Permalink
As I head to IBC waiting at the airport, I read in ibce-daily about ITV's Michael Grade giving a keynote at IBC where he stated that "Google and YouTube are just parasites. The day they start spending one billion pounds a year on content is the day I'll start worrying."
I think it may be that Google is already spending a billion a year on content - they are spending it on technology enabling them to collect it. Sooner or later they will start sharing the advertising revenue with people who provide high quality content. Once this model is there, someone with a brilliant idea won't have to go to ITV any more trying to get it sold to them, he or she could try to sell it directly to the consumers, bypassing traditional broadcasters.
BoinxTV will help people who want to do narrowcast studio shows or record live events.
Oliver.
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