Variety is the spice of life

This past weekend, I went from this pair of eyeglasses:

to this pair of eyeglasses:

(Free) Tickets to GO!

For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a series for GO! on CBC Radio One. In it, I solve problems in my personal life by hiring professionals. Two weeks ago, I realized that no one laughs at my jokes, so I hired a drummer to follow me around for a day and punctuate my humour with stings (MP3 of the segment).

Then, last week, I noticed that people always hang up on my voicemail. So I got some help from a couple of professional voiceover artists (MP3 of the segment).

This week, I plan to solve another problem, and you can hear it on your radio Saturday morning at 10, or online at cbc.ca/listen

Or better yet, if you’re in Toronto, there are still tickets left for the show. And they’re free. So if you like getting up early, come on down and be part of the studio audience. Because it’s fun.

Update: The show went well. Here’s an MP3 of the segment.

A Tuna Kahuna and a Pistons superfan

Congrats to my pal Tom who made a guest-blogging appearance on the Detoit Pistons’ site.

Having season tickets is just about being a more informed fan that stays on top of things and follows the importance of a particular game or matchup and the health of the players. On Wednesday I won my fantasy basketball league, beating 12 guys who probably know more about basketball than me. I feel like I know every detail of every game with these guys because I’m at The Palace so often. You just feel like you’re more of a part of what’s going on there. So that’s the advantage for me, more than having tickets all the time, just having the constant knowledge that a fly-by-night, bandwagon fan might not have.

Nicely done, buddy. Watch out for the shellfish, though.

Less than one week until Reading Series part deux

Well, the second installment of Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids is less than a week away. My pal Tristan was nice enough to create a Facebook event for the night, so if you plan to attend, RSVP, si vous plait.

Also, through an email from Neil at Mortified, I learned that our fledgling reading series was mentioned briefly in the LA Times. Seriously.

And, if all goes well, I’ll be interviewed on CBC Radio One’s new arts/culture/entertainment show Q on Monday, April 30 (the day of the show) about the event.

I’m really looking forward to Monday, and I have my fingers crossed that people will show up and read.

How Democracy changed everything, and what the CBC needs to do to compete with the pirates

Well, perhaps Democracy hasn’t changed everything, but it certainly has changed the way I watch television shows.

Democracy is a free, open-source, Internet television platform. Its guts are made of:

1. An RSS aggregator
2. A Bittorrent client
3. A video player based on VLC

When you put these three things together, magical things start to happen.

Let’s say, for example, that I’m a big fan of the TV show The Office. I can visit a site like tvRSS, and get a list of torrents of The Office episodes, or an RSS feed of torrents of The Office episodes. I can then plug that RSS feed into Democracy, and it’ll monitor the feed for new torrent files. When a new episode becomes available, Democracy grabs the torrent file and starts to download the episode.

So in effect, I’m subscribed to a TV show.

Of course, Democracy also lets you subscribe to regular video podcasts (like Brian Hogg’s excellent dotBoom — which I’m really enjoying these days), but it’s the RSS/Bittorrent stuff that I think is really slick.

If this type of television distribution becomes more popular, I wonder if any major broadcasters will decide to make their shows available in this way. From television consumer’s perspective, RSS/Bittorent distribution is a much nicer option than on-demand website-based streaming. But of course, from the broadcaster’s perspective, the latter’s much more attractive, for advertising reasons.

A while back, MuchMusic offered full episodes of their VJ search as a video podcast. Right now, the CBC offers segments of The Hour as a video podcast. I wonder how much could be saved in bandwidth costs by using RSS/Bittorrent distribution.

And if there was ever a broadcaster that should be distributing its programming this way, it’s the CBC.

Take for example, Little Mosque on the Prairie. I’m not a huge fan, but somebody, somewhere, liked the show so much that they decided to digitize it (or make an off-air HDTV rip, or whatever), and seed it as a torrent. Right now, tvRSS has a listing for all eight episodes of Little Mosque. If I wanted, I could download the entire season illegally, for free, right now.

But let’s imagine, for a moment, if the CBC had forseen that they’d have a show on their hands that s_ome people would enjoy enough to pirate it on the internet_. Let’s imagine they’d worked out the right deals with the right unions. Let’s say there was a way for the CBC Television to actually legally distribute full episodes of the-closest-thing-they’ve-had-to-a-hit -in-years, via some type of RSS/Bittorrent system. Once an episode aired, it’d be released and seeded by a CBC computer. As more people downloaded it, the episode would be seeded by actual viewers of the program.

This would be a monumental step for the CBC.

Light years ahead of making selected CBC clips available on Google Video.

Light years ahead of weekly-updated content on a video site that no one uses.

It would mean that in this age of digital media, Canadians could actually house content they paid for. What a concept.

Canadians are smart. They know what they like. Give them full shows. Entire newscasts. Open up the archives. Let Canadians subscribe to whatever they want. Let them watch it on their computer, or burn it onto a DVD, or put it on their iPod. Wake up and realize what people in the real world want to watch, and how they want to watch it.

I know the legal stuff is a nightmare. I know there are no precedents for how to pay actors, or writers, or producers. So figure it out. Work out the deals. Make it happen.

Because otherwise, people are just going to steal your stuff. And no one will buy the DVD box sets.