Category: media

The hosts of CBC Toronto’s popular Metro Morning program are back on the air – just not at the CBC. Having paid a $5 volunteer fee, the radio veterans behind Toronto’s most popular morning show have begun broadcasting over the University of Toronto’s student station, CIUT. Some locked-out workers worry that such freelancing will only prove the CBC’s point that programming can be produced on the cheap, but the Metro Morning (now known as “Toronto Unlocked”) crew insists that the CIUT show was only made possible through “hundreds of volunteer hours, a television bought from a weekend yard sale and a clock radio.”

Kazaa may not survive the fallout from an Australian court decision this week, but the impact on peer-to-peer file trading networks as a whole will likely be negligible, say some experts. “Successors such as BitTorrent and eDonkey have already upstaged Kazaa with a number of technical improvements and edged it out in terms of the volume of raw data that’s exchanged on their respective networks, which feature large numbers of bulky video and software application files… Awkwardly for Kazaa, the court’s position on copyrights is now pretty much where a big portion of the P2P developer world sits, at least in public.”

The BBC and ITV are teaming up to launch a free satellite TV service in the UK which will bring digital TV signals to Britons who have thus far not been able to receive them. The service will be a direct rival to paid satellite service BSkyB, which is owned by multinational media company News Corp. As part of the deal, ITV will unencrypt its satellite broadcasts, meaning they will be available free of charge to anyone with a receiver.

Nick Spitzer’s popular public radio program, American Routes, has always been heavily flavored by New Orleans, the city from whence it originates. Now the program, like everyone else in the Big Easy, is in exile, and Spitzer is using the program as an unofficial catalog of the cultural loss of one of America’s great musical centers. According to Spitzer, Katrina “[may be] America’s biggest cultural disaster – in the sense of the loss of New Orleans’s cultural stuff, the loss of the communities there that interact and the lack of will to move as quickly as if these houses being flooded were on the coast of Kennebunkport. And even for those of us who got out, there’s this grinding uncertainty of whether we’ll ever get back and ever live the same again.”

Long before CDs – before cassettes, 8-tracks, and even those old 78 records, for that matter – there was Thomas Edison and his wax cylinders. “From John Philip Sousa’s patriotic band to the Fred Van Epps Banjo Orchestra to obscure Hawaiian hula medleys, Edison’s cylinders brought recorded music to the masses and set the stage for the entire industry to develop. Along with performers, he recorded the important and interesting people of his era talking about their work, including Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist, and Thomas A. Watson, the assistant to Alexander Graham Bell.” Hundreds of these earliest examples of recorded sound are still strewn about Edison’s New Jersey lab, and historians are working to catalog and digitize their contents.

The file-sharing network loses a big one in Australian court. “Kazaa, a programme estimated to be used for four out of five internet file-swaps, will have to include copyright filters in future editions of its software and put pressure on its current users to upgrade to the new version. More than 317 million people have downloaded Kazaa – which allows users to swap music, film and other digital information over the web – and several million are believed to be using it at any one time.”

The paranoid regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe charges “that Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn were part of a CIA plot to oust President Robert Mugabe. The two Hollywood stars feature in The Interpreter, a blockbuster about a failed attempt to assassinate an African president. The fictional despot portrayed in the film, Edmond Zuwane, bears a striking resemblance to Mr Mugabe.”

“In an unprecedented scheduling fluke, six upcoming first-run films have been “on the shelf,” as they say, for anywhere from eight months to almost two years. And these aren’t small, quirky indies. These are films with major stars and directors vying for major bucks.”

One online game has become so popular that some worry it is sucking players from everything else. “With its finely polished, subtly humorous rendition of fantasy gaming – complete with mages, orcs, dragons and demons – World of Warcraft has become such a runaway success that it is now prompting a debate about whether it is helping the overall industry by bringing millions of new players into subscription-based online gaming or hurting the sector by diverting so many dollars and players from other titles.”

No surprise – the Weather Chennel scored its highest viewership in its 23-year history. (Its numbers are always best the day before landfall.) “WC was seen in more than 1.9 million homes – 533 percent above its normal audience – and spiked to 3.1 million at 9:30 p.m. It was the day’s top-rated cable network.”