American Airlines & Hilton Entertain Road Warriors

Both Hilton Hotels and American Airlines announced this week they are ramping up programs to entertain their traveling clientele. First up, American Airlines revealed they will be running a four month pilot (pun!) program in which business/first class customers will be loaned Archos 704 PMPs and Bose QuietComfort headsets. Don’t worry, though — us working … Read more

Back To The Future: 21st Century Movies

As a digital TV blogger, I spend a lot of time writing about where I think television is heading. Given the impact that technology is having on the television experience, it hard enough to know what is going to happen next week, let alone 25 years from now.

This is why I was surprised at how eerily familiar things seemed, when I was reading Paleo-Future’s review of the The Omni Future Almanac. The book was written in 1982 by Robert Weil and offers his vision into what the television industry would be like, in the 21st century.

We’re only a few years into the 21st century of course, but considering that it’s been 25 years since the book was published, I couldn’t help, but be impressed with how many of the predictions he got right (except for the whole people loving westerns thing, he was way off base on that one.) In looking over the list of predictions, here are a few, that I think we’ll continue to see throughout the rest of this century.

*Instant classics will be created by increased Hollywood hype and intensive advertising. Aggressive marketing techniques will also be used in the promotion of pay television and home video media.

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Au Revoir, Pandora

In a move that I can only suspect is designed to show Pandora’s willingness to abide by copyright law, the Internet radio company has said that as of today, May 3rd, it will start blocking access to its service for listeners outside the US. While Pandora is currently fighting a ruling by the CRB that … Read more

Comcast and Yahoo Deal

Somehow amidst watching his Mavericks squeak out a respectable series against Golden State, Mark Cuban has had the time to write insightful commentary about the revolution in advertising brought on by the recent Comcast/Yahoo deal. The specific point Cuban makes is that Comcast can entirely bypass the Internet with this set-up, which also means bypassing … Read more

Netgear to Acquire Infrant

No sooner am I reminded of Infrant’s NAS solutions, do I discover that my friends at Netgear just announced that they will be acquiring them. This should be a win/win in providing Netgear more robust storage solutions while pushing Infrant’s technology into mainstream retail locations… and maybe at lower price points.

TiVo’s Marketing Blitz: $$$

Wondering how much the new My TiVo Gets Me television, print, and web advertising “blitz” costs? According to the NY Times: more than $15 million. Yowza! The Times also reports the ad agency behind this campaign (in which everyone gets TiVo antennae) as Kaplan Thaler, who we probably know from the Aflac duck and women … Read more

Ready, Set… Joost

Joost has gotten more hype pre-launch than any start-up company I can remember, and here I am contributing to it. Officially Joost may have made its commercial launch announcement earlier this week, but isn’t actually be available to everyone yet. If you’re still looking for an invite, I too now have 999 available in my … Read more

Backing Up Digital Media

Like most folks I’ve talked to, my digital media backup situation is less than ideal. I’ve got pictures, video, and music scattered all over the place — across operating systems, CD, DVD, internal hard drives, external hard drives, etc. (At least I got the Zip disks out of the mix a couple years ago.) Most … Read more