Tag: TV Revolution

Printing Your Own Clothes, Verizon Wants To Pay Cable Companies Only For Channels Their Customers Actually Watch & Book Publishers And The Digital Revolution

Linda Reimer

Printing Your Own Clothes: Can you imagine a future in which clothes washers and dryers are a thing of the past? A future that has us printing our own clothes at home via 3 D clothing printers? Designer Joshua Harris can! He has designed an award winning 3 D clothing printer which takes cartridges of different colored thread instead of cartridges of ink and actually prints clothes. So in the future instead of going out to a brick and mortar store to shop you’ll shop for clothing designs online at home. You’ll be able to browse shirt designs via the Eagle Outfitters or Gap or your other favorite stores online to your hearts’ content and then select your favorite shirt pattern, pay for it of course, and print it off at home. And after you’re finished wearing the shirt you’ll feed it back into the printer where the threads will be cleaned and then returned to their respective color cartridge cases to await your next clothes printing!

I came across an article, titled The Future of Clothing: 3D Printing Your Own Clothes, on Joshua Harris’s 3 D Clothing Printer on the Nanowerk website – here’s the link:

http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/gadget/newsid=29612.php

And the 3-D Clothing Printer designer Joshua Harris, who incidentally is a 2011 Syracuse University graduate, also features information about his printer on his website found at:

http://jhharris.prosite.com/104313/973830/work/design-for-2050-clothing-printer

Verizon Wants To Pay Cable Companies Only For Channels Their Customers Actually Watch: We are truly in the midst of what is starting to be called the TV Revolution – a time during which how consumers watch television shows and movies is evolving from the more traditional way of getting cable TV from a cable service provider and sitting on your couch to watch broadcast television at the time the cable company broadcasts it – to a time where we are able to access television shows and movies on demand via the Internet on smartphones, tablets and via media streaming players or smart TVs via television sets at home.

And in the midst of this revolution some media companies are challenging the traditional way networks have sold them television channels – in bundles of channels. This traditional bundled channel business model the networks favor has media companies that provide cable TV, like Verizon, Time Warner, Cablevision & Comcast, offering their customers bundles of channels that include popular channels like CNN, ESPN, Disney and Nickelodeon but that also features niche channels that few mainstream viewers watch. Currently media companies have no other option than to purchase the bundled channel packages networks provide which they then must offer to their subscribers in the same bundled format.  And this bundled channel business model is the reason that when you subscribe to a cable TV package you must pick a package from your cable provider to get some of your favorite channels and must also take, and pay for as part of the bundle, some channels that you never watch.

 And yesterday Verizon added fuel to the Television Revolution fire by announcing that it is trying to break away from the old outdated bundled channel business model and wants, instead, to pay the networks only for the channels its customers actually watch. Verizon plans to tabulate what channels viewers watch by data they retrieve from their customer’s cable boxes – which will actually show them which channels their customers watch and for how long they watch them (shades of Big Brother is watching us…). This is the second time in a month a large media company has challenged the network cable channel bundle business model. Last month Cablevision actually brought an anti-trust lawsuit against the network Viacom charging that Viacom’s insistence that Cablevision take all the bundled packages of channels Viacom offers, which it then must also sell to its customers as bundled packages, violates anti-competitive anti-trusts laws. Cablevision, like Verizon, would rather be able to sell its customers channels they do want to watch instead of bundles of channels the majority of which their customers don’t want to watch.

And while we aren’t at an al la care channel business model yet; the actions of Verizon and Cablevision on this issue takes us several steps further down the road that will one day allow us to buy access only to television/video content we want to watch. And I do see the unbundling of cable channels as inevitable in the future because as more and more people access video content on demand via the Internet on portable and home bound Internet connecting devices and as more content is produced by non-traditional networks for streaming, i.e. Netflix & their House of Cards series – well, that is where consumer demand is and will continue to go – for video content people can stream when they want and where they want so that will correspondingly be the market where money will be made.

Here are links to three articles on the Television Revolution:

Article 1 is titled Verizon Considers Only Paying Cable Providers for What You Watch:

http://mashable.com/2013/03/19/verizon-payment-options-providers/

Article 2 is titled Cablevision Viacom Suit Aims To Shake Up 170B Industry:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-27/cablevision-viacom-suit-aims-to-shake-up-170b-industry.html

And article 3 is from the New Yorker and is titled House of Cards and the Death of Cable:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/02/house-of-cards-and-the-death-of-cable.html

Book Publishers And The Digital Revolution: I came across another interesting article about the Digital Revolution this morning on the Wired website. The article is titled Book Publishers Scramble to Rewrite Their Future and the author discusses how the publishing industry is changing. Specifically the article focus is on the rise of self-published e-book authors like Amanda Hocking and John Locke (the non-philosopher author!) and the speculation that if traditional publishing companies want to stay in business in the future they’ll have change their entrenched traditional business models or they may go the way of the dinosaurs.

Here’s the link:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/publishing-industry-next-chapter/all/

Have a great day!

Linda R.

References

Design for 2050 Clothing Printer. Joshua Harris Industrial Interaction Design. Online. Accessed March 20, 2013.

Future of Clothing: 3D Printing Your Own Clothes. Nanowerk. Online. Accessed March 20, 2013.

Hughes, Evan. (2013, March 19). Book Publishers Scramble To Re-Write Their Future. Wired. Online. 

Sherman, Alex., Lee, Edmund. (2013, February 27). Cablevision-Viacom Suit Aims to Shake Up $170B Industry. Bloomberg. Online.

Smith, Andrea. (2013, March 20). Verizon Considers Only Paying Cable Providers for What You Watch. Mashable. Online.

Television Revolution Overview & Steps To Take To Be Healthier If You Sit In Front Of A Computer All Day

Linda Reimer

Television Revolution Overview: I came across a cool article yesterday that offers an easily accessible overview of the Television Revolution currently underway. The article is both easy to read and very informative offering information regarding streaming video subscription services, streaming video on demand and much more. If you’re interested in the ways television viewing is changing – and how, in the near future, it might change the way you view television shows too– you may want to check out the article. The article is aptly titled Crash Course Understanding The TV Revolution – here’s the link:

http://www.studiosystemnews.com/crash-course-understanding-the-tv-revolution/

Steps To Take To Be Healthier If You Sit In Front Of A Computer All Day: I’ve come across a number of news articles recently that discuss the sedentary life-style that for most people comes with our modern high tech way of life. The basics gist of all the articles is that we tend to do less physical activity today than people did in times past and that although everyone should exercise for at least 30 minutes a day that all by itself isn’t enough to promote optimum health. It seems that just being sedentary during the work day– as those of us who do a great deal of computer work during the work day tend to be – is also bad for your health. And if you do work that has you sit for hours in front of a computer screen you should get up and move around at regular intervals – like those micro stretch breaks Wegmans is always prompting staff and shoppers to do! So you don’t have to do a work-out in the middle of the day; instead you can do little things like walk up stairs instead of taking elevators, park farther away from the grocery store entrance than you need to or even just buy a pedometer or electronic device (like the Jawbone Up) that tracks how many steps you take each day – and shoot for taking 10,000 steps a day instead of the average 5,000 steps a day most of us take.

And I think the writers of the articles are right to place an emphasis on increasing what the Wall Street Journal article author Sumathi Reddy describes as our “non-scheduled physical activities;” because, really, how many of go out and chop wood on a regular basis, walk to work or spend our days on our feet running around? Granted some people still do some type of physically demanding work or just work that requires one to be on one’s feet all day. However, many, many people also spend their days sitting in front of a computer doing work and thus they aren’t up and on their feet as much as is best to promote optimal health. So tech fans that we are – we should pay attention to how much non-scheduled physical activity we do each day and try and do more of it – or just buy a Jawbone Up for $129 as it will send information to your iPhone or iPod Touch regarding how many steps you take each day, how many calories you burn and if you wear it 24 hours a day – it will even let you know how well you are sleeping! And I digress. The Jawbone Up is a cool health gadget and you can check out the product review on Amazon if you’d like although a pedometer, which is can be purchased for about $20, would work too. Having said that here are links to two articles that discuss the importance of increasing our non-scheduled physical activity during the day:

Article 1 is from the Lifehacker site and is titled Why Walking Throughout the Day Is Just as Important as Vigorous Exercise – here’s the link

http://lifehacker.com/5990300/why-walking-throughout-the-day-is-just-as-important-as-exercise

And article 2 is from the Wall Street Journal and is titled Hard Math: Adding Up Just How Little We Actually Move – here’s the link

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324096404578354590581579014.html

 Have a great day!

Linda R.

References

Klosowski, Thorin. (2013, March 13). Why Walking Throughout the Day Is Just as Important as Exercise. Lifehacker. Online.

Manis, Aimee. (2013, March 11). Crash Course: Understanding the TV Revolution. Studio System News. Online.

Reddy, Sumathi. (2013, March 11). Hard Math: Adding Up Just How Little We Actually Move. Wall Street Journal. Online.