New Domain Names — and free!

MediaJerk now has a new domain name: www.mediajerk.tk.

We’ll see how disruptive any advertising might be, but for now, from a media perspective, this is a practice I highly recommend.  Just by going to www.dot.tk, you can register your current website for a completely free domain name.  As far as I’m concerned, why should you have to pay 13 bucks a year for a domain that looks better on a t-shirt?

There’s my quick ‘n’ dirty review.  I’ll have more if I start to get pissed off by any advertising they may add to my blog.

More content forthcoming.  It turns out that having two more kids makes one’s life tremendously difficult, and it becomes much harder to pay attention to the media.  Which is pretty vital to this particular blog, no?

My poor wife is subjecting herself to “Your Mama Don’t Dance.”  Maybe I’ll do a write up of that cesspool of inbreeding.

I guess I really can’t take credit for getting this one right

It’s official: Toshiba has tapped out, BluRay has won the format battle and Sony’s stock has taken the appropriate upturn.  Don’t I feel like a dumbass for not buying Sony stock before Tuesday?

 Some of you may recall that I did recently make this call here at MediaJerk.  Not that it was a tough call to make.  I don’t recall reading anyone — media insider, blogger, reviewer, whatever — who actually disagreed with my assessment.  I think I’ll have to find something harder to predict if I’m going to toot my own horn here.  Regardless, there you have it.  Sort of a no-brainer, really.

However, the article I cited up-top, courtesy CNBC, does make a semi-interesting point.  Because of the price war between BluRay and HDDVD, suggests writer Boorsten, “this business may be less profitable than [Sony] originally thought.”  I’m not really sure how true that is, though. 

Whenever you deal with new media, the first couple generations of product are priced to cover R&D costs.  With BluRay, the PS3 had an entire generation to deflect these costs.  It’s a granted, I think, that the battle forced Sony to drop the price of BluRay decks before they would have perhaps preferred to do so.  However, to some large extent, Sony had to know that Toshiba and their partners weren’t simply going to bend over for BluRay.  Further, Sony’s experience with Betamax would have prepared them for the eventuality of price warfare.  All of which is to say, I seriously doubt Sony’s going to be hurting financially after this battle. 

It helps to be the only game in town.

I’m declaring a winner!

Hey, political pundits can do it; why not me?  Though I’m loathe to do so for reasons I’ll state momentarily, and though all the information isn’t in (and the industry itself has yet to officially declare a winner) I’m calling the HD format battle in favor of BluRay over HDDVD. 

This is a tough call for me, because I’ve been cautiously suggesting HDDVD would become the format of choice — and I hate being wrong. 

But it’s not as though I was making an uninformed prediction — I had valid reasons for the opinion.  First of all, HDDVD had history on its side.  Sony (BluRay’s creators, for those just catching up) has a tendency to get all proprietary when it comes to tech formats — even to the detriment of sales figures.  Beta was a great example of this attitude, and the consequences that go with it.  Though it was a superior format, Beta failed to outsell VHS industry-wide because Sony charged enormous amounts of money for licensing — when they agreed to license at all.  Secondly, HDDVD was backward-compatible with the current DVD library, where BluRay players were capable of playing only BluRay.  Plus, when I made the prediction, everything else was equal: though some large video rental corps were going with BluRay, others were choosing HDDVD.  BluRay had Disney and (obviously) Sony Pictures; HDDVD had FOX, and some others.  Though when the formats started, only BluRay was capable of true 1080p output (1080 lines of resolution, progressive scan), HDDVD caught up.  All things thus being equal, HDDVD simply had less baggage to overcome.

 Then Sony (wisely) started licensing the BluRay technology under reasonable terms.  You started seeing Samsung, LG and Sharp brining out BluRay players.  The new generation of BluRay developed backward-compatability with Standard Def DVD. 

Then the bombshell dropped:  Warner Bros signed exclusively with Sony.  Now you’re starting to see other groups going to BluRay.  You’re starting to see groups like DreamWorks asking HDDVD producers to create or modify “out” clauses in their contracts, “just in case.”  Rumors are already flying about Paramount and Universal ending their exclusivity with HDDVD.

Toshiba, the main purveyor of HDDVD, is not ready to give up the ghost just yet — but with the superiour end-user functionality of BluRay (in the form of easy in-movie menu access, better features — and you can’t forget the PS3 tie-in), Toshiba had better start doing more than simply cutting prices.

Things aren’t looking good for HDDVD.  But then, it is Sony’s turn.

I’m getting all angsty about the FCC. As usual.

I don’t know how many radio people are hanging out in the blogosphere — much less how many are actually reading this blog.  I personally know of two besides myself — but considering that’s about the number of actual readers on this little blog, I suppose I’m talking to you.  In any event, I’ve got this crazy notion that nearly every working DJ whose formative years were spent in the early ’90s got into this gig, in large part, because of ”Pump up the Volume.” 

Not that this is based on a scientific study of any kind.  Mostly, I just talked to other announcers about my age, and they generally agreed that yes, this movie had such an enormous impact on their young and tiny brains that they couldn’t help but grow up and become disc jockeys.  Well…. I guess that’s probably about as scientific as most political polls.

Now, if I’m right, here’s what’s truly frightening.  Part of the whole appeal of that movie was the shaking of fists to the establishment.  Sort of a flipping of the bird at government commissions and regulators of free speech(!!!!) like the FCC.  This should frighten some people, particulary those for whom the belief in the power of government to solve every problem known to man is nearly religeous.  Because that means that, deep down, most of my generation’s DJs are at least 80% anarchist.

The other 20% in my case is Republican, so I call myself a “Liberterian.”  Neither here nor there.

Now, lately, I’ve been okay with the FCC.  Not that I figured their actions suddenly became Constitutional, or that i think they’re a bunch of swell guys.  It’s just, I spend my job behind a microphone.  The day to day stuff, the legal stuff, simply never crosses my radar.  For the most part, they leave me alone, so I don’t do a lot of thinking about them.

 But now they’re getting their fingers into something else about which I care deeply:  television.  This whole DTV thing (digital television… if you don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up here) is just sticking in my craw.  For one thing, it bothers me that, with everything else going on in the world, the Federal Government has decided that time and resources should be used in forcing the digital revolution (a feat, for those just catching up, that they’ve been trying to accomplish since just before this century — really). 

My problem with this?  The FCC, traditionally, is stacked with morons.  Like most government agencies, these idiots don’t know which way is up unless a congressman tells them — and very often, the congressmen don’t know, either.  They can’t get it done right — and they want to use taxes to do so incorrectly. 

The biggest issue here, by the way, is the issue of tuners.  Now, most new televisions (all, actually, starting last year) have built in digital tuners.  Recording devices, however, do not.  And if they do, you add a hundred bucks to the unit.  Which means, in short, that you now have to purchase particular cabling to be able to record in to these units.  In itself not so bad. 

Except that Americans, in particular, had trouble dealing with the VCR back when it was easy.

This means that those of us in the ‘know’ are going to get countless phonecalls from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends (not to mention the parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles of said friends) to explain what they need to do in order to record “House.”

All because some mutt in congress went to some other mutt in the FCC about some jackass lobbyist who (undoubtedly) poured out all kinds of money to get the government to force this “revolution” upon us all.

And what do they want to do with the analogue “air” that is now going to be empty of programming?  Sell it. 

I smell pirate television coming on.  Perhaps Hard Harry needs a TV show.  The anarchist in me can only hope.  And start looking for cheap transmitters.