Category: Internet

Shoutcast TV would be cool if the content wasn't so lame

I’m being a bit harsh, but when I flip on Shoutcast TV I’m constantly amazed by some of the content. Amazed in the bad sense.

When the first moving pictures came out, the people would just sort of stand there in front of the camera and ‘pose’ much as they would for a still camera. Now that we’re moving into the digital age, with live streams available from anywhere in the world (thanks in large part to Shoutcast & VLC) we have the opportunity to watch and hear music from a bunch of German guys sitting around posing in front of their record collections.

ShoutcastTV can be found under VLC. File–>Services Discovery–>Shoutcats TV. Most of the channels are just radio stations that add a video feed, that or video pirates showing reruns of TV or Japanese anime. Occasionally you find a channel that has some ‘adult content’ but most of it is music related. You can also access Shoutcast TV via Winamp if you have that player installed

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iPhone 2.1 firmware released to developers

So it looks like v. 2.1 of the firmware is coming very very soon. A new developers release was sent out to a select group of folks today who are making sure it jives with their existing apps and whatnot.

Apple has not announced a timeframe for the 2.1 release, but the included “Push Notification Service” was promised by September. Despite early hints of turn-by-turn GPS and Copy/Paste, further investigation indicates that these may not have been new findings in the 2.1 firmware (and had also existed in 2.0). References to a new iPod Touch model, however, suggests an iPod Touch hardware upgrade in the coming months.
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More on the iPhone's radio applications and the threat to radio.

My posting a week or so ago about the threat to XM and Sirius has been picked up, echo’d a bit, and expanded upon in a few articles this week.

First was Doc Searls who wrote about it in his Linux Journal Blog

Then he had another piece that cited a CBS News guru who discovered much of the same things that I did while playing with radio (i.e. it’s really really cool).

The concept of Internet radio replacing terrestrial radio has been around now for nearly a decade. The hold ups have been many, including the difficulty in bringing in hardware at a reasonable price point. But Apple’s massive power in just ‘adding this’ as a function to the iPhone is going to really shake up the radio industry. I don’t care that uber geeks had this power with a Blackberry or a Nokia–no one really cared or used it. But with Apple making it as easy as a few swishes and viola, the landscape is about to change in ways not many can predict (though I’ve been trying now for nearly a decade).

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iPhone Internet Radio applications – Review

Well it’s been a week and I’ve been playing with nearly every iphone radio application I can get my hands on. I thought I’d take a moment and write down a few thoughts on what is out there.

AOL Radio

This is one of the top free downloads for the iPhone nearly every week. It allows access to AOL’s in-house radio network along with access to CBS’s national radio network, with stations pretty much in every state. The display also pulls up album and song tracks from the meta-data of the stream. It, by far, has the best looking user interface.

My only rub is a) it’s not available internationally last I checked and b) some of the stations are not amongst my favorites. I never used the AOL Radio application as my main player (though I liked some of the stations) so it is going to take me a bit to get used to them and start listening regularly.

Tuner

Tuner is probably my top choice for an Internet radio application. It pulls directly from the Shoutcast.com directory of stations, which gives you access to about 15,000+ stations or so I’d imagine. I’ve been able to find some of my Shoutcast favorites utilizing the SEARCH function they have on the site. You can bookmark and browse by genre or popularity (but not by location).

On the down side, the listings that come up are not separated by your bandwidth capabilities. For example, you can be on an EDGE connection and pull up page after page of 128k or above streams, which are probably a bit too much for EDGE. It would be nice if we could start to see a limiting capability, showing us just the stations we could use given the bandwidth we have.

allRadio

Very similar to the Tuner application, with one major and glaring exception–no search. This is something I hope they sort out quickly or they’ll lose market share to Tuner. One nice feature about this application is the ability to see radio stations by location, such as ‘International–UK’. I’d hope this capability gets enhanced as they get better information about the regional locations of the stations.

Pandora

I’ve had a Pandora account since I first heard of them, and never ever used them. That changed dramatically once I got the iPhone. First, the sound quality, even on EDGE is pretty good. Comparable to FM easily. Second the algorithm they have definitely pulls in content I like from the assorted mass of songs (I have about 6 preset stations right now).

Last.fm

Mac v. Windows, Canon vs. Nikon, and Last.fm v. Pandora. There are so many battles like this. To be honest, I haven’t give Last.fm enough use to comment on it at this point. My database there isn’t as built up so I’m not sure what I’d be hearing.

Random Radio

Several individual stations have small applications so you can listen to their stations. Nice feature, especially when we start to see them for the stations we really like. I suspect we’ll see hundreds of these as the app store grows bigger.

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BBC Radio on the iPhone

Yea, I don’t know how to do it yet either…

BBC Radio has about 80 different channels of content, from the big dozen or so national feeds to zillions of local feeds across the UK. Unfortunately, the BBC is tied up heavily with Real Audio and has recently done (a heavily criticized) deal with Windows for their content.

What this means is that iPhone users, who can handle streaming mp3 content, are currently out of luck for BBC streaming radio on their iPhone.

This is really quite annoying. Granted mp3 is technically a proprietary format as well, but it’s a standard that works on Real and Windows media players (not to mention Winamp, Shoutcast, VLC and nearly all other audio software programs). That the BBC (and NPR and other public radio stations) continue to utilize these locked up formats is a considerable pain, especially as more and more devices and mobile phones have improved playback for mp3 streams.

The BBC has their podcasts in mp3, and they have built a version of the iPlayer that works with the iPhone (alas US people cannot access the videos though). I think it is only a matter of time before the Beeb comes out with an application to put their content on the iPhone and iPod touch.

But wait! There might be hope. Some folks have found a way to create a BBC 1 relay that converts the stream to an mp3 stream.

http://blog.garryrenshall.co.uk/bbc-radio-1-stream-on-the-iphone

Unfortunately I just tested it and it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment.

We’ll keep monitoring this one.

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Friendfeed and the Hong Kong effect

Friendfeed is the newest new thing out in Silicon Valley that has hockey stick growth in only a few weeks. Seen by many as a refuge from Twitter and the constant ‘fail whale’, Friendfeed’s growth is just going out of control. (Friendfeed, for those not in the know, is a micro-blogging platform that lets you put up quick notes to your ‘core regular’ followers, i.e. friends. Twitter was the original, but simply cannot keep up with the growth, leading to a fail message of a big whale picture).

Anyway, I’m following a few tech luminaries and that shows me what their friends are posting, but I’m starting to notice something that I call the ‘Hong Kong effect’ with postings.

When I was living in Hong Kong, the Internet, quite frankly, was pretty boring. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it until I thought about it for a bit and realized I was accessing all of my normal sites each day (Washington Post, NY Times, Silicon Valley sites, etc) at what turned out to be night time in the USA. Websites don’t really get updated at 1 in the morning, and in fact many go into maintenance mode at say 4 am (i.e. slower, etc). So the page I saw at the Washington Post when I woke up in Hong Kong (8am HK/8pm DC) was pretty much the same page I saw when I was having dinner later that night (6pm HK/6am DC).

The same sort of thing is happening with Friendfeed. With its userbase primarily in Silicon Valley, it seems that I’ll wake up in the morning in DC (7am) and there will be a few stories posted from after I went to bed, but I won’t really see any new content until about 1 or 2 pm this afternoon, when most of the Silicon Valley crowd gets up and starts chatting.

I guess I should start following more folks in Europe (I have a few) but the heavy users (and their friends) still seem to be living and posting on West Coast time.

We’ll see if I can change that in the next few days. It’s an interesting site (though I don’t like visually how the comment section appears) and I suspect it will have a very good future, so long as we don’t see the big whale appear on the homepage.

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Why I upgraded to the new 3g iPhone

Because it was free.

I mean basically, that’s it. My old iPhone is making its way on Ebay right now and the current prices they are fetching are incredibly similar to the price of buying a new iPhone (which I did earlier today).

I’m not one to rush and get the newest of the new simply because it is the newest, but with a chance like this to pay $0 and get a new phone I had to jump.

I was in Annapolis on another matter and called the Apple store, which the apple.com computer said was sold out. I spoke to the woman and she said ‘call back in 30 minutes’. The UPS guy at the Annapolis Apple store usually arrives about 10:30 and sure enough, he had a batch of new iPhones with him. The Apple folks told me it took about ‘10 minutes to ‘check-in’ the delivery’ and then they would be on sale.

I got to the store just as the UPS man walked out, and they made an announcement in the store that any customer looking to buy a phone should leave the store and get in line. I was 4th in line.

Unfortunately the people in front of me took a bit of time or had credit problems or whatever. Since I already had an iPhone and ATT account my upgrade and purchase took all of about 10 minutes. Others who were in line before me were still in the store.

The old iPhone went offline about 15 minutes after I left the store. The new one started working shortly thereafter. I’m now in the process of restoring from backup the contents of my original iPhone to the new one. The original is also being cleaned up for sale (note: if you ever buy Apple products, save the original box for resale purposes. Apple products get premium resale value vs. other electronics, and the original box helps).

So the upgrade is going on now and I’m off to get some lunch.

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Sympathy grows for Yang and Yahoo amongst billionaires, but no one can find Rupert Murdoch's wedding ring

The NYTimes has an interesting story about the Yahoo deal (with a funny aside about Murdoch’s wedding ring).

The deal was so ridiculous — it called for Yahoo to sell its search business to Microsoft and for Mr. Icahn to take over the board of what was left of the company after assets were spun off and dividends paid out — that when the moguls here started to learn the details, it actually began to change the perception of Mr. Yang’s predicament.

Microsoft and Ichan deny this was the deal.

The conference was a collection of billionaires. The Google guys were there photographed with Yang, and Rupert Murdoch was also in attendance. He lost his wedding ring which resulted in all the other billionaires getting on their hands and knees to look for it under the tables and chairs (they didn’t find it).

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