This is Tech

Broadcast television is at a crossroads. Today’s viewers have no patience for commercials and expect to watch what they want when they want it. Cable companies practically give away DVRs, to the point that even our parents and grandparents know how to skip commercials. At the same time, Internet advertising becomes more refined every year. Internet ads are less expensive than television ads, meaning you don’t need as large a budget to participate. Internet ads can be more precisely targeted than television ads, and the interactive nature of the Internet leads to better feedback on whether an ad campaign is producing results. It is surprising that television ad prices haven’t plummeted, but I guess advertisers are as slow to see what is happening as the networks.

So what can television producers and networks do to stop the downward spiral? (more…)

Find Your TV Show of Choice Online at Prime Time Rewind [Television]:

Catch your favorite TV show online, regardless of the network, with web site Prime Time Rewind. The site, which aggregates online TV from all the major networks, provides a love-it-or-lump-it cube interface that displays shows by genre or network. If you find a show you want to watch, just click click the Play Show option and Prime Time Rewind embeds the same video in your browser that you’d watch directly on the network web site. It’s not the friendliest or most intuitive of interfaces, but the site does offer a lot of content, and if all else fails with the cube, there’s always the search box.

Prime Time Rewind [via ReadWriteWeb]

(Via Lifehacker.)

In tonight’s episode of Lost, the story takes a turn that seems like a reference to Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse Five. In Vonnegut’s book, Billy Pilgrim, like Desmond becomes “unstuck in time,” traveling between differing parts of his life. Anyone else see the connection? If so, let us know in the comments below.

Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends on Google Video: “
Weird Weekends was a BBC2 show (1998-2000) about weird people and weird movements in America: UFO hunters, survivalists, white supremacists, habitual Vegas gamblers, porn actors, swingers, and so on.

It was hosted by Louis Theroux, son of writer Paul Theroux. A few days ago I downloaded a bunch of episodes of Weird Weekends from Google Video, and I have been enjoying them as much as any television I’ve ever seen. Even the ones I didn’t think I’d be interested in (infomercial inventors) were fascinating.

Theroux is funny without being obnoxious, and his sense of curiosity is strong enough to make him ask potentially embarrassing but profoundly revealing questions of his subjects. The people Theroux interviews immediately feel comfortable around him because he is so friendly and non-threatening, which makes them open right up to him. (The only time I’ve seen anyone get mad at him was when he was interviewing a white racist skinhead family and he refused to tell them if he was Jewish or not.)

He also wrote a book in 2005 called The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, where he goes back and visits the people he interviewed on his program. I just bought it but I’m going to hold off reading it until I’ve finished watching all the episodes.

Here are the videos I found (some are from later shows called When Louis Met… and another show called Louis and…). Each one is about an hour long, and you can download them to your iPhone or computer if you want to watch them offline: Survivalists, Neo-Nazis, Westboro Baptist Church, Porn Industry, Black Supremacists, Swingers, Body Builders, UFO Hunters, Apertheid Diehards in South Africa, Legal Nevada Brothels, Thai Brides, Gangsta’ Rap, Hypnosis, Televangelists, Demolition Derby, Off-Off Broadway, Wrestling, Vegas, Enlightenment, San Quentin State Prison

UPDATE: Jesse Thorne of Maximum Fun interviewed Louis for The Sound of Young America last year. Here’s the interview.

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(Via Boing Boing.)