Fearless Jackson Goes to the Fair
A fun little video shot by JFP senior intern Jackson Breland on a basic Flip and editing by me using iMovie HD.
Roku Rocks
Something I’ve wanted since the holidays is what I’ve wistfully referred to as “the Box” — the Roku Netflix Player, which is designed, essentially, to connect your TV to your broadband cable connection so that you can view Netflix’s Watch Instantly movies and TV shows without cabling your computer to your TV. 
For a few years now, I’ve been connecting my MacBook to the TV probably at least a few times per week, first to stream iTunes content, then, later, to watch a fair bit of Hulu, then to watch Amazon On Demand. The service changed frequently, particularly when we wanted to watch a particular show — Battlestar Galactica — because the rights situation with BSG kept changing…first you could buy it on iTunes, then it was gone; then it was free on Hulu, then the number of back episodes was cut down serverly; finally, it was easiest to just buy Season 4 on Amazon and stream it over the MacBook wired up to the TV.
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With Apple TV, Video Podcasts Now Make Sense
OK, so I haven’t been the most vocal supporter of the Apple TV given that (a.) it won’t download movies and TV shows directly from the iTunes Store, which remains a massive oversight IMHO and (b.) it doesn’t serve as a wifi base station on its own, instead requiring that you buy an AirPort base station.
Also, (c.) I don’t have a hi-def TV yet and it seems doubtful that Ms. D is going to let me get one anytime soon. So I’m being a bit snarky, perhaps.
Having said all that, just a few days ago I actually found myself doing something that I may *never* have done before; I watched an entire video podcast. It was an episode of MacBreak starring none other than Leo Laporte. I watched it probably because (a.) I’m utterly in awe of the amazing volume of content Leo Laporte manages to put on the Internet and (b.) because they were talking about the Apple TV, and like a sheep to the sheer, I’m an Apple-anything addict, in spite of myself.
Wal-Mart Offers More Digital Movies Than Apple
According to iPodnn.com, Wal-Mart has launched its “beta” video download store with agreements from the six major movie distributors. Their catalog starts with 3,000 titles compared to the 600 in the iTunes Store. And those titles, distributed as SD (480p) for television and half that for portable devices (not iPod, Zune of PSP), are available only in Windows Media 10 format, supported on Windows XP and Windows Vista. Not that I was buying anything from Wal-Mart, anyway.
Oh, one more snarky comment…what’s with the crappy title images on the Wal-Mart Store site? Check that out:
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