Yesterday a Kickstarter campaign was launched for a new gaming console called OUYA. An hour ago they passed $3.1M pledged, and bet by the time I finish writing this post they’ll hit $3.3M. It’s still got 28 more days to go, and where else are you going to get a $99 gaming console? Seriously.

What’s up with this thing? OUYA is going to be an Android based console. Which means, basically, apps on your TV. Or, really, an App Store on your TV. The idea is fairly solid. Android is a platform that developers are already familiar with and popular games will surely be ported immediately to test the Cash Climate in a new market. The company has said that all the games must have some sort of freeness to them. Whether that’s just totally free, just a trial version, or pay for premium content, or, like, you know, the last boss is absolutely invincible unless you drop a hundo on that dude. I’d want to create the best game ever but make it so the character actually has to eat and you can only get e-food with real $$$. I’d make so much money.

I feel no shame in simply copy/pasting the tech specs:

Specifications:

• Tegra3 quad-core processor
• 1GB RAM
• 8GB of internal flash storage
• HDMI connection to the TV, with support for up to 1080p HD
• WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
• Bluetooth LE 4.0
• USB 2.0 (one)
• Wireless controller with standard controls (two analog sticks, d-pad, eight action buttons, a system button), a touchpad
• Android 4.0

It needs to be noted that the coolest thing here is how open these OUYA guys are to hackers. The box, designed by Yves Behar of fuseproject, will have standard screws so that anybody can jump in there, and rooting the thing doesn’t void the warranty. It’s an open invitation for developers and hardware hobbyists alike to open up on this thing. As of this moment (3:55pm on Day 2 of this Kickstarter drive) there will be 23,859 OUYA consoles shipping out in March 2013. That’s pretty impressive.

It sort of came out of nowhere but with the recent success of Double Fine, Wastland 2, and Shadowrun (so stoked!!) Returns, and now OUYA, Kickstarter and Gaming are like these soulmates and who the heck knew? This should be the model for everything. Instead of pitching to producers, who get all their info on the consumer from focus groups and failed marketing campaigns, developers can pitch directly to us. We know what consumer want because that’s eff-king us.

Of course, now we have to wait to see if these guys can back it up and deliver products that we actually want as much as we imagined we wanted them. That’s going to be a high high hurdle, dudes. But if this works out it could really do good things for the future of creator/consumer dialogue.

Are you going to grab an OUYA while they’re just $99? What do you think?

Follow Carib Guerra on Twitter @44carib

Photo courtesy of Samsung.

The Samsung Galaxy S III is just the thing to make Apple loyalists question the sanity in their devotion. Apple should do the same.

In 2007, when everyone was running around with RAZR flip phones in one hand and an iPod nano in the other, Apple gave us a sea change. Nobody who has ever bought movie tickets with Fandango, decided on dinner with Yelp, or wasted actual precious chunks of their lives playing brain-hole games like Angry Birds or Temple Run (e.g. me, sadly) can deny that the iPhone changed the way we interact with the world and with each other—by changing our understanding of how we could.

But, yo, people. That was five years ago. That thing caught everybody of guard. We were silly with it; remember? People paid $999.99 for I Am Rich, the arrow-pointing-up-I’m-With-Stupid-shirt for the new millennium. An app called iFart Mobile famously inhaled $10,000 dollars per day in 2008. iFart. iFART! Yes. We were silly, turns out it was all worth it, but we were super silly, y’all.

But now all that stuff that ooh’d and genuinely awed us is standard issue. So many people have smartphones that the New York Times actually thought it was news that a handful of contrarians choose not to join the fun. I wonder if they ran a similar article when that wacky Internet was all the rage. Remember that? I could Google it, but why bother?

What I’m trying to say is that unless the next iPhone is a G.D. spaceship, or transmogrifies the raw materials of the cosmos into Popeye’s famous popcorn shrimp, anything it brings to the table will likely be nothing new.

Will it have maps? Not Google Maps, which now runs offline on the SGS3, and all Android phones (lightning fast!). Will it have crazy good resolution? Likely. Retina? It would behoove them to do us the favor, but the SGS3 has an HD Super AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) screen which, at 4.8” feels a little bulky, but dang if that thing doesn’t look cleaner than Starbucks bathrooms in TriBeCa. Will it have Facebook? Instagram? Will it have…what? A camera? Will it have a phone?

It may be time to face the facts: the rest of the world may have caught up to the iPhone.

Now, I’ll say this, Samsung may have been being real smart and all, but they came super cocky with it. Not a good look, y’all. They seem to think that the coolest thing about the SGS3 is how easy it is to share pictures, music, or just any pseudo-tangible item made of up to 3GB worth of binary. Like, that is cool. Certainly. But it’s not easy. Not unless all your homies also have the SGS3, and even then it involves permissions and settings and really, nobody’s sweating that stuff when it’s already very easy to share electronic data without forcing friends to resent each other cause they had to buy the same phone (if you want to twist our skivvies, stick a USB on that doggie, dawg).

No. The coolest thing about the Samsung Galaxy S III isn’t htat it dims to save power when you look away from the screen, or that it’s got wild facial recognition capabilities, or that you can watch video on a pop-out player while multitasking. No. The coolest thing is TecTiles.

This: little squares about 1” x 1” or so that can be programed to activate whatever stuff on your phone. The example I keep seeing is that you can put one nightstand to activate your alarm just by placing your phone on the thing. But there’re tons of potential uses for these TecTile deals:

• Put one: on the door and tap to open your subway app;
• near the table and tap to open your morning news;
• on your amp and set your phone down to open your guitar tuner;
• bands should have one on the merch table so that fans can FB Like them
• businesses might have one on the counter for a quick 4^2 check in;
• put one on your wallet and tap your pocket to open your camera (HOT!)
• etc. etc.

So, whatever, is the Samsung Galaxy S III going to be an ‘iPhone Killer’? Maybe not, but not for lack of guns. This little buddy is about as good as they get. If you’re looking to buy a phone this summer, it’s a good time to go Samsung. The Galaxy S III has everything you need, and a whole lot of stuff you probably won’t even know what to do with.

At least one dude thinks we could. Some total random known only as BTE-Dan has put together a surprisingly large website detailing (really really detailing) what it would take to Build The Enterprise over the course of 20 years.

As BTE-Dan sees it, all the main technologies we’d need to construct a real life starship are pretty much at hand. Of course it would take scaling them up a bit. Like, way up. Like, to space. But, hey, even if we couldn’t figure out how to build huge ion propulsion engines or a 1.5 gigawatt nuclear reactor or a spinning disk with a diameter taller than the Burj Khalifa—ahem. Tallest building in the world—at least we put our minds to figuring out those limitations.

Aside from being the coolest franchise in television history Star Trek helped to inspire generations of engineers, scientists, inventors, and very cool bloggers to create the world we know today. There are a ton of gadgets that we use now that are as cool, if not cooler, than the stuff Kirk was using in the Original Series. Plus the things we have are often a lot more sensical and useful. See? Not to mention that we’re, like, two hundred years ahead of schedule on this stuff. Bam! Take that, ultra-skeptical 1960′s television writers. We win.

In the FAQ on his website, BTE-Dan, had this to say about it:

“If we want to define the greatness of our civilization mostly based on how we make transfer payments to each other through social programs, well, that sure doesn’t seem too inspiring. We need some other things to get jazzed up by as a civilization – something with a much bigger sweep – something to fire our imaginations. And we need something to inspire more young people to want to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics – the STEM subjects. We need a worthy successor to the Apollo space program – and the Enterprise program can be just that.”

The proposed budget for building this #ActualStarship is $1 trillion, but BTE-Dan figures we can stretch that out at some $50 billion per year. If we can spend $50 billion on wacky stuff like Homeland Security why not just throw in another 50 on building an amazingly radical spaceship? I’m down if you’re down. If we all lived like Luniz and just throw five bucks each on it, that’s already $1.5 billion. If we agree to five a week we’re already in (what I think smart money people mean when they say:) a windfall!

What’s up? Do you think we could build it? Is the idea just a huge crazy waste of brain time? Wouldn’t it be super awesome to have a U.S.S. Enterprise flying around out there? Either way. Check out the site. Obviously my thoughts are, in the words of BTE Dan: “This is super cool.”

It felt a little strange the first time I put it on. The battery pack on the headset was light as the single AAA inside, but its square weight ove my ear wasn’t, like, uncomfortable? Just maybe unnatural. Once I got the Neurosky Mindwave Mobile set up, though—and started controlling my computer with my brain—it was sort of very awesome. Actually kind of totally awesome.

The Mindwave Mobile is the first Brain Computer Interface (BCI) controller to work on Android and iOS as well as Mac and PC. Unlike the company’s previous first: The First Affordable BCI Headset, the $99 Mindwave, the Mobile version uses Bluetooth to wirelessly communicate with your computer. The active tech about it is a dry sensor that reads changes in the brain’s electrical activity like what’s up with Electroencephalograms (EEG). Traditional EEGs would need an electrically conducive goop smear where sensor meets scalp. Which, obviously, what a pain, right?

Right. Okay, so it’s easy—enough—to use. Even though sometimes it would slip on my head and whatever I’d been doing would be suddenly not done. And what was I doing, you ask? Well there’re a few games bundled up with the unit. A title called Zombie Pop was surprisingly fun. Basically one of those carnival games where you shoot water in a clown’s mouth till a balloon pops. Except you inexplicably work in some sort of Zombie factory, and they’re coming down a conveyor line, and instead of water you have to focus your brain might towards inflating their ugly green heads. When they get big enough you blink and a needles swings down and pops their heads like…like…like flesh balloons at a Zombie Carnival, I suppose.

No. It wouldn’t be fun save for the fact that—yes—the controls are your damn brain! WTF? The Mindwave Mobile reads two mental states, attentive or meditative, and eye blinks. So. If you can imagine if early Nintendo had first released a console whose controller was a d-pad with only two directions and then a single button, and you’re a game developer and they ask you to make a game and you’re, all, “Well, sure, man. I can make that game, but have y’all consid—” But they say just do it, and so you do, then now you understand the limitations of the games available for the Mindwave. Though it does sort of surprise me that no Pong clone is available yet. Since that’s probably exactly what our hypothetical game designer would have come out with.

Maybe the issue there is that switching your mental state isn’t so easy as thumbing a joystick. See, for me it was super easy to hit the ‘meditative’ state where you’re not quite focused on any one thing (this will come as no surprise to my teachers in elementary school), but, for my roommate who helped me test the headset, he could snap into ‘attentive’ no problem. The brief tutorial advised me to try thinking of song lyrics in my head so that I’d be focused on something. This works. But, of course, when one is thinking of lyrics one is not thinking about playing a game.

Even this petty hardship though has some benefit—and until some more engaging titles are dropped this might be the best justification for paying $130 for the Mindwave Mobile—because, when you actively switch your focus on and off with this sort of direct feedback over and over, it becomes easier to do each time. It really does. After a few sessions of Zombie Pop I no longer had to invoke Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now—the only song I could conjure at the time—and really started laying waste to some zombie domes, as though some stunted mental mage, with my brain forces alone.

Some developers have tried to exploit this direct feedback with educational apps—like Imagercize ($6), Math Trainer ($0), and Focus Pocus($149?!)—designed to help students understand what it feels like to be in their best mental state. The potential for this is great. Like, drop the Ritalin, kids. Learn to tighten your thinking caps instead.

If I were the future billionaire who figured out how to market BCI headsets like the Mindwave Mobile my calendar would be all power brunches with SAT prep centers. That’s what’s up.

An Uber car

Uber. It’s an app for getting a car. But, like, easily. Whether it’s rush hour, or raining, or some jerk just walked a half a block up 5^th Ave and stuck out his hand even though you know he saw you standing there clearly hailing a cab and you’ve been there for, like, five minutes and…whatever. For these scenarios and many more, it’s all about Uber.

Originally a San Francisco company but now in 13 cities internationally, Uber set up shop in New York early 2011. Their business is offering us an easy option for all our livery needs. iPhone or Android set up is quick. Just download the app and register an account at Uber.com and that’s that. When you’re signing up you’ll give them your standard deets, mobile number, and whatever various payment methods you juggle your debt across. Takes about two minutes (not counting time spent fishing through wallet for cards). Whenever you need a car just set a pick up spot on the Uber app Google map (dig that). Done. As soon as you open the app, all the cars then driving for Uber show up where they are in real time and there’s a line at the bottom that tells you how many minutes the nearest car is from your location. Once your spot is set, just chill out. No need to watch the windows, no need to fret, nobody’s gonna come and lay in on the horn till you run outside. You’ll just get a quick text: “Hi [You] your Uber is arriving now!”  When the driver drops you off just smile, say thanks, and get out. Payment is automatically charged.

On average the cost is about 50 percent higher than yellow cabs. With base rate at eight bucks plus $3.90 per mile, or $0.95 a minute at speeds under 11mph. With an average pick up time of six minutes after ordering the car, the idea though is that you’re paying that premium for the convenience of a car service that’s truly on-demand. Though, word is, a “Lower End car type” that would be around 25 percent off the current prices is “coming soon”. When I took Uber from my home in Bushwick up to their headquarters around Nassau and Metropolitan, the fare was 24 bucks. More than if I’d called my usual black cars, but I could see the boon for Brooklyn riders being the pleasure of avoiding yellow cabs whose drivers need directions at every turn, or just the guarantee of a nice ride. Seriously though, we all know that special feeling when you call for a car and that glossy Suburban rolls up instead of your standard cop auction Crown Vic, and inside it smells like NuCar instead of farts and cologne. It makes you feel like you deserve it. Which you may.

Even so, Josh Mohrer, General Manager of Uber NYC and authentic lifelong New Yorker, says that for him “it’s not really about what kind of car I get. It’s about how I have to get the car and how I’ll have to pay. With [Uber] you don’t have to compete with all these people trying to get cabs up Broadway. You just press a button and you’ve got the ride. Mostly the transportation service industry is, you know, uncivilized. If there were restaurants that said ‘Yeah, we’ll serve you food, but only if there’s enough’ and you had people pushing and shoving and competing for their meals? That would be insane. That’s silly. For decades we’ve just allowed this industry to be uncivilized, and I don’t know why that is.”

For Uber the goal is efficiency, and now, thanks to what tubular dudes in the 1980’s would have called “Radical Future Stuff, bro,” efficiency is their reality. Thanks to Uber, it’s our’s too. See since the whole deal is automated the company is able to get direct feedback that just wasn’t possible before. You liked your driver? Give them five stars. More, though. Next time you open the app you’ll be asked to provide a little write up. Not that you have to but, like, say what happened was that y’all were just trying to get from Bedford ave down to that party at Myrtle/Wyckoff but your driver gets on the damn BQE and now you’re gonna get charged way too much and you’ll only have enough money left for the cover and maybe a couple of Coors Banquet 24’s, right? Don’t freak out, people. Tell Uber what happened—that the driver took the wrong route—and they’ll look at the trip log (all tracked on the GPS) and be, all, ‘Dang. Yeah. No problem, buddy. We’ll take care of that for you’ [Not an actual quote. Author’s rendition of company response based on assumption alone]. We can leave 311 out of it.

For drivers it’s just as sweet. Uber hooks them up with a free iPhone and data plan and when they want to work they just open their app. There’s no crackling beep boop dispatch radio, the job will always go to the nearest driver, they’re immediately set up with the GPS stuff, and payment is handled automatically. “The driver shouldn’t be the cashier,” here’s Josh Mohrer again, saying how drivers “shouldn’t have to worry about handling the money. They shouldn’t have to worry if somebody’s going to jump out of their car and not pay them at all, or if a passenger’s going to puke in their backseat and leave them responsible for the clean up. With Uber the app takes care of it all. The rider pushes a button and gets a ride. The driver chooses when they want to work, and we cut them a check that’s exactly what they earned.”

No hassle. An easy ride, reliably provided, and in a nice car to boot. That’s what’s up.

Have you tried Uber? Is it worth? Are y’all willing to pay the premium for a streamlined system and a little peace of mind? Let us know in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Groundreporter and Flickr Commons.

Following the sleepy-faced 7:30am curtain call David-Michel Davies, founder of the Webby Awards and cofounder of Internet Week itself, gave a quick hello and passed the mic to New York City’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne. The work that Sterne has been doing in partnerships with the local tech community is a large part of the growth we’ve recently seen here in the city. She mentioned the recent New Tech City Report, put out by the Center for an Urban Future, stating that “New York City is the only region in the country that over the last five years has experienced an increase in venture capital funding.” People! Not only were we the only ones, all the other popular cities like Boston and Silicon Valley actually saw investment fall. Good job us. Speaking of jobs, Mayor Bloomberg and Rachel Sterne’s unveiled a little dealy called Made in New York, a Google map for job seekers that pinpoints tech companies that are hiring. Very cool.

So word. Then what? Billy Beane, the dude who was portrayed by Brad Pitt in Moneyball, gave a keynote speech on how he harnessed data for the power of good (i.e. money…and ball). As for things that can be seen on everybody’s lips, #BigData is the new hipster mustache. I suppose it makes sense to have Mr. Beane get up and talk about it in a sort of Old Guard passing the torch way, but really we all just wanted to see if he was as handsome as Pitt. On that point, “they pretty much nailed it,” said Billy Beane while on a stage. Fair, though. In a completely objective sense, I’ll say, dude was pretty Silver Foxy.

Beyond Beane, we had a treat of a speech on Tuesday morning with David Carr and Brian Stelter of the New York Times. First, I should just say that these guys really don’t seem to like each other very much. Until they hit the groove it was a fairly uncomfortable back and forth about who would win in a fight between the Past and the Future, played by Carr and Stelter, respectively. Now I’m no Nostradamus but—based on the way that he is dead and I am alive—my money’s on the Future. Sorry, Carr. Moving forward the gist of their banter was that the New York Times won’t fail…no matter what. So don’t worry, y’all: The Times is here to stay; stay here, indeed.

Today we saw Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, give an awesome talk about the trajectory of her organization and, in effect, well, us. When Mozilla dropped Firefox it really changed the way we understand our interactions with Internet technology. Think about the difference between the world of proprietary software that we had before and the push of Open Source that they sort of ushered in. It’s all very cool. Where we’re headed, though, with all the data out there and concerns over privacy and fair use and $$$, is for a bunch of people a pretty worrisome landscape. Mozilla’s Do Not Track initiative, which started with the browser add-on and has recently gone mobile, is one response to the issue of uncontrollable consumer transparency. It’s one response, and it’s a good one. Regardless of what your stance is on whether or not companies should have hold of all our infos, just having the option to not be tracked—to opt-out—is what Baker is all about. Her whole deal is that if there’s this “ball of information about me out there, that can be very personal, and that can be very scary. But it can be used to get a degree of personalization that you just can’t beat.” That’s real, right? But in order to make this Personal Web really a human thing we need to find a way to “maintain a workable balance that allows companies to use that valuable information, but that also ensures individual control.” I couldn’t agree more.

So that’s what’s up for the first two days of #IWNY! I’ll be back shortly to fill you in on the rest.

Follow me for updates and just because, @44carib

Why should you care about #IWNY? Well it seems that New York City is on the verge of becoming the new capital of Tech Startups in the USA. That means more jobs, more money, and a whole lot of awesome young companies bragging about how many pinball machines they’ve got in their sweet open loft offices! Also we’re talking about the Future of Stuff here, people. Today, tomorrow comes today.

A bunch of panels, events, and classes are open to the public as well. Check out the schedule to see if any catch your eye, and if they require RSVP.

Follow my coverage of the fun on Twitter @44carib and here on NYPRESS.com

*FREE: Full Relinquishment of Electronic Entitlement

With all these devices and more of our lives being defined in code every day, we will inevitably find ourselves at the mercy of the electronic equivalent of bag snatchers. E-Bags, if you will. These aren’t master hackers, or whatever. These aren’t your c0mrades (RIP), your Zero Cools, or even your Dexter Douglases. These are just random jerks with a computer and just enough reason to figure it out. Even so, cyber crimes like identity theft cost United States households, like, $13.3 billion in 2010.

But what can you do? Seems like, truth be told, not much. If these criminals are able to fell The Department of Justice website, and snake files out of places like Stratfor, then what chance do we have? Somini Sengupta over at that other New York paper, Yesterday’s News…I mean, The Times, mused recently on how the bright side of this #HackAttack super-trend sounds “the alarm about the unguarded state of corporate computer systems.” Fair enough, but I hear another alarm. It’s coming from our bedside tables, it’s telling us that we need to get up, shoot a 5-Hour Energy, and get to work. Big companies and government agencies aren’t the only ones who need to learn a little about The System.

I’m  not saying that we should all go out and become computer scientists, or even DIY robot hobbyists, though if you did manage to scrape together something excellent, @Kickstarter might just make you a mint. Either way, if you’re going to live in the Age of the Nerds, you may want to don a pocket protector just so they know whose side you’re on. “When in ROM…” as they say, “…read-only.”

There are a number of resources out on the Internet to get you up to snuff. Startups like Treehouse and Codecademy look to make your learning fun. If you’ve got a touch of the artist in you, Processing is a language aimed at satisfying the need for instant gratification by serving as a sort of code sketchpad. Moving through the many tutorials, users harness the power of the Processing language to create arts. Actually cool!

While Treehouse costs a good scrap, 25 monthly bucks for the intro package, they do boast a huge number of instructional videos, and helpful texts. I can’t think of anywhere else you’d get such a great deal from obviously knowledgeable people…oh, wait…I did once hear that some two-bit school was offering full introductory courses to Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics online and totally for free. What school was that? That’s right: damn Stanford University. Through the Stanford Engineering Everywhere program, you can get a world class education from the comfort of your own tax deductible home/office (that’s what web developers call their studio apartments, btw), all it’ll cost you is time.

Speaking of—and, trust me, I know the market value on seconds these days—the good folks at Lifehacker recently mentioned how just thirty minutes a day can make all the difference when you’re learning something new. I’m not talking about those 30 minute pay courses, either. Really. Just sit down for 30 minutes a day and practice.

Remember, fellow Netizens: ask not what your computer can do to you, ask your computer to do anything you want it to.

Follow @44carib on @Twitter just because!

Right there, whenever you like, on your browser, iPhone or iPad. Yes.
Let’s be real: Nobody but Nielsen families watches TV on a television set anymore. I bet so few people watch “TV” TV that only a few of you understood my killer Nielsen family joke!

To be honest, who has time to sit around and watch the tube? Most of it’s not must-see; if it is—trust me—some bar in Williamsburg has a theme night for it. Not to mention how totally unhip it is to actually watch TV these days. We all know kids these days are watching the Internet just like the rest of us. If you are watching TV, it’s likely you’re using a DVR to do it, which is sort of what Aereo is about.

All the way back in 2009, Vishesh Kumar and Sam Schechner reported in the Wall
Street Journal, “The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a new type of digital video recorder from Cablevision Systems Corp., [which set] the stage for wider use of the technology.” That, of course, was the good ol’ Cablevision DVR Plus; much lauded for not requiring a small object in a room but derided for being unfathomably
slow in the beginning. When Cablevision launched their bright idea, a slew of networks sued them too. Cablevision hired a lawyer and won their case—no spoilers, but Aereo just hired the same one.

The original defense rested on the fact that DVR Plus members were basically doing the same thing TiVo lets you do: recording content that anybody with an antenna and a TV has free access to. Every recording was saved to an individual’s own private virtual DVR storage. It’s very much like when Universal and Disney sued Sony
because the Betamax was considered an evil piracy device. Aereo is is likely to use the Cablevision defense because their whole system works by allotting members their own private pair of micro-antennae located on the company’s Brooklyn rooftop— in effect, you’re paying Aereo to hold on to your antenna for you.

Like millions and millions of my contemporaries, to me, the Internet equals an Absolutely Everything Machine. If it’s not on the Internet, I don’t know about it. Even if it is on the Internet, if it’s not in the cheap-to-free price range, I actually do not want it. Aereo’s $12/month price is not bad at all. If you add in the price of monthly Netflix and Hulu Plus accounts, the price tag for your TV diet is still way less than my grandfather pays for cable. After an extended Beta, Aereo launched for New York residents on March 14th. New users get a 90-day free trial. Their website looks nice and the video quality is just fine when you’re watching it live—that’s right: live streaming video.

All this actually-on-the-air-right-now content reminded me of what a huge letdown it was back in the day when there was “nothing on!” But with Aereo, I flipped ahead in the guide a bit, set it to record 30 Rock, did things, came back at 9 p.m. and was actually giddy! To think, my very own, brand-new episode of 30 Rock saved snug in my 40 hours of DVR storage space on the Aereo cloud and—What?! Under the Recordings tab, I found
a friendly, devil-red line of text that read: “Not recorded: System error.”

I felt feelings then that I hadn’t felt since I once forgot to put a new VHS tape
in for the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale. There’s bound to be issues at first. And an episode of Seinfeld and an airing of the Addams Family movie recorded just fine later on.

Broadcasters need to stop and take stock of their industry. Here is another example, of many, of a business model showing us that the future of television is not allergic to revenue. But still, these clunky old brands are so afraid of reality that they’ve become incapable of taking all this money I’ve got sitting around.

Services like Aereo could be a non-candy lifesaver for these guys. All of the ingredients are there: TV, Internet, willing consumers and money. And think of how much more in touch networks would be with all the data available from a web audience. Instead of spending cash picking on the new kids, legacy media outfits might consider a few smart investments.

Don’t be afraid of working together to make life easier for consumers.
How do you get your sitcoms? Think the plaintiffs are right? Let us know at nypress.com!
Follow @44carib on Twitter, just because.

Let’s be real: nobody but Nielson families watch TV on television set anymore. I bet so few people watch TV-TV that only a few of you understood my killer Nielson family joke! But, to be honest, who has time to sit around and watch the tube? It’s not Must See. If so—trust me—some bar in Williamsburg has a theme night for it. Not to mention how totally unhip it is to actually ‘watch TV’ these days. We all know kids these days are watching the Internet just like the rest of us. If you are watching TV, it’s likely that you’re using a DVR to do it. Which is sort of what Aereo is about.

All the way back in 2009 Vishesh Kumar and Sam Schechner reported in the Wall Street Journal that “the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a new type of digital-video recorder from Cablevision Systems Corp., [which set] the stage for wider use of the technology.” That, of course, was the good ‘ole Cablevision DVR+; much lauded for not requiring a small object in a room but derided for being unfathomable slow in the beginning. When Cablevision launched their bright idea a slew of networks sued them too. Cablevision hired a lawyer and won their case and, no spoilers, Aereo just hired the same one.

The original defense rested on the fact that each DVR+ member was basically doing the same thing TiVo lets you do: recording content that anybody with an antenna and a TV has free access to, and every recording was saved to an individual’s own/private Virtual DVR Storage. Very much like when Universal and Disney sued Sony because the Betamax was considered an evil piracy device. Aereo’s is likely to use ‘The Cablevision Defense’ because their whole system works by allotting members their own/private pair of micro-antennae located on the company’s own Brooklyn rooftop. In effect, you’re paying Aereo to hold on to your antenna for you.

Like millions and millions of my contemporaries, to me, the Internet equals an Absolutely Everything Machine. If it’s not on the Internet, I don’t know about it. Even if it is on the Internet, but is not in the cheap to free price range, I actually do not want it. Aereo’s $12/month price is not bad at all. If you add in the price of monthly Netflix and Hulu+ accounts, the price tag for your TV diet is still way less than my grandfather pays for cable. Right now Aereo is in Beta so you have to sign up for an invite, but new users get a 90-day free trial. Their website looks nice and the video quality is just fine when you’re watching it live—that’s right: live streaming video.

All this actually-on-the-air-right-now content reminded me of what a huge letdown it was back in the day when there was “just nothing on!” But with Aereo I flipped ahead in the guide a bit, set it to record 30 Rock, did things, and came back at 9 p.m. and was actually giddy! To think, my very own brand new episode of 30 Rock saved away snug within 40 hours of DVR storage space on the Aereo Cloud, and, What?! Under the Recordings tab, I found a friendly, devil-red, line of text which read: “Not recorded: System error”

I felt feelings then that I hadn’t felt since I once forgot to put a new VHS in for the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale. There’s bound to be issues at first. And an episode of Seinfeld and an airing of The Addams Family movie recorded just fine later on.

Broadcasters need to stop and take stock of their industry. Here is another example, among many, of a business model showing us that the future of television is not allergic to revenue. But still these clunky old brands are so afraid of reality that they’ve become incapable of taking all this money I’ve got sitting around.

Services like Aereo could be a non-candy lifesaver for these guys. All the ingredients are there: TV, Internet, willing consumers and money. Also, think of how much more in touch networks would be with all the data available from a web audience. Instead of spending cash picking on the new kids, legacy media outfits might consider a few smart investments. Don’t be afraid of working together to make life easier for consumers.

How do you get your sitcoms? Think The Plaintiffs are right? Let us know in the comments!

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