|
| Monday, July 18, 2005 |
|
Apple videos hint at film ambitions
Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs is famously secretive when it comes to sharing plans for his company's future.
To find clues, however, you need only look as far as the latest versions of the iTunes Music Store. You can't help noticing support for podcasting, or "radio reborn," as Apple puts it.
Look beyond that, and you'll notice that since May, the iTunes software has allowed you to play videos, movie trailers or even home movies. The store itself has begun selling a handful of music videos, with more being added each week.
Record label sources say Apple has been in talks to sell a much wider range of music videos through the store, probably as soon as this fall. The company also has indicated to media executives that an iPod that plays video could be unveiled as early as September. That leads some industry insiders to believe that Apple is working on an online movie store and a video playback device that does for movies what iTunes and the iPod have already done for music.
"Apple was a pioneer in digital music downloads, and Macs are great for audio and video," said Mike Homer, a longtime Silicon Valley executive and well-connected Apple alumnus. "This makes them well-positioned to introduce video on a grand scale."
Homer and others caution, however, that the iTunes phenomenon will be a tough act to follow, and they figure Jobs & Co. will take incremental steps later this year and next rather than diving headfirst into video overnight.
The biggest challenges are on the business side, not in technology.
Apple must strike a deal with Hollywood executives, who worry about copyright protection on the Internet and don't want to jeopardize DVD sales, which outpace sales at the box office. Apple also must compete with cable television giants such as Comcast in the movie download business.
Beyond that, Apple must come up with a plan to make a profit from video, just as it did with music. Apple makes almost all of its music business money selling iPods, not from the iTunes Music Store.
But if anybody can succeed, it will be Jobs, according to many industry executives and analysts. They cite Jobs' leadership in digital music as well as his Hollywood contacts and experience as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios.
"He's the greatest entertainer and showman in the business," said one prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
Some Hollywood filmmakers agreed that, with help from Jobs, legal Internet sales of their movies could transform their business.
"The business is going to go down, down, down before they finally realize what Steve Jobs and a few others have already realized--that there is a way to make a business model out of this and then people won't steal it quite so readily," George Lucas, director of "Star Wars," said last month on CNBC.
Apple executives declined to discuss their plans. When asked at a conference last month whether the company would sell video via an iTunes-like store, Jobs said Apple's "actions of the future" would answer that question, adding that it is working on "great things" in its labs.
Poker-faced Apple already is showing some of its cards, however:
• Besides providing video support on iTunes, Apple's latest version of QuickTime comes with the H.264 codec, which lets consumers view high-definition video with less bandwidth and storage space than its predecessors. H.264 shipped with Apple's latest operating system, called Tiger, and a preview version of the software is available for Microsoft's Windows.
• The computer maker has been rolling out new products such as the Mac Mini and Airport Express, which costs $129 and is designed to wirelessly stream music to a stereo. Future versions could be designed to handle movie and television, as well. Apple's agreement to use Intel chips starting next year also will make it easier to build a low-cost home media player, many experts argue.
• Apple is getting more serious about embracing the entertainment business' biggest concern: protecting the intellectual property rights of movies and music. Jobs' experience as a moviemaker provides added credibility.
Apple is making its biggest strides in software. When iTunes launched in May, four bands provided music videos: Gorillaz, Morcheeba, Dave Matthews Band and Thievery Corporation. The total has since expanded to more than 16.
In most cases, the bonus videos are bundled with albums, often at a $1 premium. Examples include Billy Corgan's "TheFutureEmbrace," Coldplay's "X and Y" and Missy Elliot's "The Cookbook," each priced at $11.99.
"Anything else you can give to a consumer that they don't get on a CD is really cool," said Chris Sims, a music video editor at Timecode Entertainment in Los Angeles. "A bunch of artists see this as an option."
The iTunes store also does a better job of promoting movie trailers, which Apple has shown for years on its QuickTime site. The iTunes movie trailer page shows clips from new films as well as from DVDs. It also lists 17 major studios by name and links to each of their trailers.
Although the movie clips are free, the trailer page also sells film soundtracks and audio books. That's the holy grail of entertainment marketing: the cross-promotion of movies, soundtracks and books.
In one deal offered exclusively on the iTunes store, you can watch the movie trailer of Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds," buy the soundtrack for $9.99 and get an audio book of H.G. Wells' classic, starring the cast of "Star Trek," for $12.95. The next logical step--assuming the business hurdles can be crossed--would be to include the movies themselves.
The hardware side of Apple's video plans is more vexing. Many analysts have speculated that Apple will release a video iPod. That may support the new music videos finding their way into iTunes, but is unlikely to form the backbone of a full movie distribution service, according to those interviewed.
In the past, Jobs has downplayed the video iPod. "A lot of these other things that people are talking about building in, such as video and things like that, are foreground activities," he said last year. "You can't drive a car when you're watching a movie, you know? It's really hard."
But the popularity and picture quality of Sony's PlayStation Portable device could force Apple's hand. Sources said Apple has looked at prototypes of portable video players in its labs, and future versions of iPods could play music videos, if not full-length movies.
As a first step, Apple could turn the Mac into more of a home media player, industry executives said.
"A home media player would be the best thing," said Steve Perlman, co-founder of WebTV and a former Apple scientist who helped launch QuickTime. "People watch videos when they sit down for two hours. Technology won't change that."
Apple's release of the Mac Mini earlier this year only reaffirmed their thinking. The pint-sized $499 computer looks and works more like a media PC than a laptop or desktop. It's small enough to sit near a television, so a person could plug it into the TV and play music videos or movies.
A Mac Mini with a faster processor, linked to a high-definition TV, could play high-definition video, now that Tiger supports HD video. A bigger hard drive would hold more videos, too.
A unit that wirelessly streams video, in the way AirportExpress streams music, could also be built.
A similar unit could be built to handle video signals. LG makes a digital video adapter, and other manufactures are on the verge of releasing similar products, said Kevin Corbett, vice president and chief technology officer of the digital home group at Intel. Corbett declined to comment on Apple's plans.
The agreement struck earlier this month for Apple to use Intel chips in its computers could pave the way for a Mac home media center. Besides its fast processors, Intel has been building companion chipsets, such as Grantsdale, that are tailored to the digital home.
Jobs hinted at the benefits of going with Intel earlier this month. "We can envision some awesome products we want to build for our customers in the next few years. And as we look out a year or two in the future, Intel's processor road map really aligns with where we want to go much more than any other," he said after the announcement.
Intel also is making inroads in Hollywood. Earlier this month, Intel and actor Morgan Freeman's movie production company, Revelations Entertainment, said they have formed a new venture aimed at distributing first-run movies over the Internet.
The chipmaker also has built a digital home in Santa Monica, Calif., that showcases the latest in home entertainment technology.
"We want to show studio heads the state of the digital home and how digital-rights management works," Corbett said. "If somebody had shown this to the music industry six years ago, they might have been more proactive against piracy."
In addition, Intel has been a leading member of consortiums such as the Digital Home Working Group, which creates digital-rights management systems and other technologies that will clear the way for movie downloads.
Hurdles remain, however. Apple created a digital-rights management technology called FairPlay when it launched iTunes three years ago. But FairPlay hasn't withstood attacks by computer hackers. "It took them roughly a day to crack it," one studio executive said of FairPlay.
While movie studios remain skeptical about copy protection, making enough money from movie downloads is the bigger concern, Corbett said. Profits from movie downloads, a business dominated by small companies such as CinemaNow and Movielink, are scant.
In addition, subscription-based movie downloads are limited because existing agreements between the studios and HBO, Showtime and Starz have locked up most of the Internet rights.
But don't underestimate Jobs, whose iPod took people by surprise and now accounts for one-third of Apple's sales. Years from now, a video service could make Apple more like Sony--a consumer-electronics giant that pipes digital music, music videos and movies into the living room or iPod-like devices.
"For the first time since the Mac," Homer said, "Apple has created an opportunity to reinvent their business well beyond PCs." |
| posted by Perimbean @ 9:30 AM |
|
|
|
| Friday, July 08, 2005 |
|
IBM to Apple: eat these chips
As a parting shot to Apple, a piqued IBM today announced two new lines of its PowerPC 970 processor, better known as the G5. And they're impressive beasts.
A new, low-power 970FX consumes between 13W and 16W at frequencies of 1.2GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz. That's more than the 10W that the Freescale MPC7448 found in today's 1.5Ghz PowerBooks consumes, but around half the maximum power consumption of Intel's Pentium M, which powers today's Centrino laptops. IBM is also unveiled the dual-core 970MP codenamed 'Antares', at clock frequencies of 1.4GHz to 2.5GHz. Each core has 1MB of L cache, and one core can be turned off to save power.
Contractual commitments and supporting remarks from IBM since the WWDC announcement suggest that these processors will form the final PPC-based Macs that Apple produces, despite the ill-tempers raised by Apple's switch to Intel.
Clearly responding to the belief that only Intel can afford to invest and manufacture in volume, IBM showed a slide that the pointed to the investment in its semiconductor platform. Between them, IBM, AMD, Sony, Samsung, Infineon and Toshiba have invested $17bn worth of capital expenditure on silicon, compared to $12.6bn by Intel. The PPC and Cell will form the heart of games consoles from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony over the next 12 months.
Exactly ten years ago, Apple's board agreed to sell the company to IBM, which was trying to create a volume business for its PowerPC chips. The deal was done and dusted, and only fell apart at the signing ceremony. Now IBM looks like it will finally have a volume business - but Apple won't be part of it. |
| posted by Perimbean @ 7:30 PM |
|
|
|
| Thursday, July 07, 2005 |
|
What is Podcasting?
Looking for a next generation radio which can create self-published, syndicated radio shows and broadcast it too?
Podcasting is what are probably looking for. If you are a music enthusiast you probably know about it. Or if you a regular on the www news you probably heard about it somewhere. According to Sharon Housley author of an article "How Podcasting Works" in October of 2004 a Google search returned less than 6,000 results for the term "podcasting". Today, a similar search yields more than 857,000 results. That article was probably written a few months ago as today the term fetches 7,510,000 results on Google. So much for its popularity. So what exactly is podcasting?
What is Podcasting?
Wikipedia describes Podcasting as a method of publishing files to the internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically. It became popular in late 2004, used largely for audio files. The Podcast is the RSS version of the content that can be downloadable on the portable music player. Unlike the popular music, users can now hear text-based information on the move. It can be a school lecture and it can be a recorded telecasted show, it just brings forward limitless possibilities of providing free content to masses.
Listeners may subscribe to feeds using "podcatching" software (a type of "aggregator"), which periodically checks for and downloads new content. It can then sync the content to a portable music player. Any digital audio player or computer with audio-playing software can play podcasts. The same technique can deliver video files, and by 2005 some aggregators could play video as well as audio.
According to Sharon "Podcasting is RSS that is used to syndicate and distribute audio files. Podcasting contains an audio file in the RSS feed's enclosure tag. An enclosure tag is used in RSS feeds to include certain types of files. The file contained in an enclosure tag can be: an image, a data file, a video file, or an audio file. Podcasting specifically refers to RSS feeds that contain audio files in their enclosure tag. The RSS version that currently supports enclosure tags is RSS version 2.0. All podcasts are currently created using this specification." I would recommend Sharon's article titled "How Podcasting Works?"
Apple and Podcasting
Apple seems very optimistic about Podcasting. It calls Podcasting the "new generation radio". Apple's recent launch of iTunes 4.9 includes a podcast directory listing over 3000 free audio programs and has the ability to automatically send new episodes of podcasts to your PC/laptop.
The move is expected to propel podcasting into the digital media mainstream. Infact convergence of syndication technologies and new file formats with the iPod has been nothing less than historical. In fact it seems like a visionary move made by Steve Jobs. In the words of Jobs himself "Podcasting been an emerging phenomenon that has been growing very rapidly. But we're hoping to take it mainstream with the latest version of iTunes, which has everything you need to podcast built right in it."
According to Gartner, Apple's move will strengthen its competitive position by allowing consumers to better manage podcasts as well as making the on-demand technology more attractive to internet content providers.
Podcasting in the news
Techwack.com says Podcasts are hot. Apple vice president Greg Joswiak calls it "the next generation of radio". Some analysts are predicting that by 2010 there would be as many as 12 million households subscribing to podcasting services. According to Randal Stross of New York Times News Service "In pre-Web times, marketers counted noses. With the advent of the Web, eyeballs. Mark my words: Eardrums are next."
Thanks Randal, podcasting sounds like music to my ears, already! |
| posted by Perimbean @ 10:30 AM |
|
|
|
| Wednesday, July 06, 2005 |
|
Expert: Apple Switch to Intel Will Lure Developers
Apple Computer's (Nasdaq: AAPL) total switch to the Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) processor by the end of 2007 will be a major enticement to Windows software developers, writes an IT expert.
Arnold Reinhold, a partner at the research and consulting firm Hurwitz & Associates, wrote in an article for IT Director that "standardizing in Intel will lure developers" to the Mac.
Renhold wrote that developers did not support the Mac previously because of an "arcane architectural difference" between the PowerPC and the Pentium called the endian problem.
Endian Obstacle
"Endian issues were a big obstacle to supporting both platforms," Renhold said. "It should also be possible to port Wine-like software to the Mactel. The open source Wine is a package designed to allow Windows applications to run as-is on x86 Linux boxes. Whether Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) raises legal objections remains to be seen."
"The computer industry never standardized on how to number bytes within larger blocks of information called Words," he wrote. "There are two ways to do it and Intel's approach differs from the approach Apple has used in the past."
New Possibilities
Renhold believes the Intel product line, with its economy of scale, low power consumption and integrated digital rights management, will open up a range of possibilities for consumer products that offer what Apple does best.
"New capabilities that you never knew you wanted but can't wait to get once you see them in action," he said. "With its iPod success, Apple now knows what it's like to have a dominant position in a market. They must have noticed it feels a lot better than 'me too'." |
| posted by Perimbean @ 10:00 AM |
|
|
|
| Tuesday, July 05, 2005 |
|
Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
Compared to Panther, the Mac OS X 10.3 system software, Tiger exhibits broad performance improvements. It's noticeably faster at booting the system and loading applications (especially the second application load, which is aided by cache). PDF rendering and all text and graphics rendering is faster with Tiger on late-model Macs.
Users usually don't expect much from an OS. They're the foundation for prefabricated or build-it-yourself solutions, but none is a rich solution, a self-contained platform out of the box. If you want a complete productivity platform, you can nickel and dime your way there with Windows, hammer and saw your way there with Linux -- or hit the ground running with OS X.
Unlike any OS X before it or any competing desktop OS, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) sends users' productivity skyrocketing before one manual is opened or one application is purchased, thanks to stellar new search and workflow tools.
OS X Server 10.4 has made an impressive trek, putting in one place every service you could need or want, with the exception of a commercial database. It boasts turnkey ease of operation but no restrictions on customizability or configurability.
Letting Tiger Loose
Both the Tiger client and OS X 10.4 server are built on Darwin 8, the open source Unix project actively maintained by Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) . Indeed, Darwin is OS X -- minus those properties Apple keeps to itself. And Apple always keeps Darwin up to date with the latest release of its commercial system software.
Compared to Panther, the OS X 10.3 system software, Tiger exhibits broad performance improvements. It's noticeably faster at booting the system and loading applications (especially the second application load, which is aided by cache). PDF rendering and all text and graphics rendering is faster with Tiger on late-model Macs. That's most obvious in Preview, Apple's PDF viewer, but it's also apparent throughout the GUI.
The big boost in rendering speed shows up in unexpected places. For example, Finder (Tiger's file manager) scrolls through detailed file lists in real time, something that Panther couldn't manage on my burdened 1.5 GHz 17-inch PowerBook.
Of Tiger's surface-level enhancements, Spotlight is the marquee player responsible for elevating the Mac to a new class of productivity-enhancing solutions.
Spotlight Rapid Searches
Spotlight looks like a pretty desktop text search engine, but it shares some salient features with large-scale document- and records management systems I've worked with -- albeit at a considerably smaller scale and lower specificity.
Spotlight isn't an application, but a service MIy integrated into Tiger, exposed to developers, and shared by all Tiger applications. It does rapid searches based on content and metadata. Spotlight drills into 14 different document types, including Apple's e-mail and address book databases, and it understands not only their encoded content, but also the invisible key/value metadata that applications attach to files.
In practice, Spotlight is incredibly powerful. Entering the search term "PowerPC Apple" on a PowerBook with nearly 40 GB of searchable documents populated a results list as I typed, sorted by document type and relevance. Further qualifying the search by adding the metadata string "kind:PDF author:apple" narrowed the list to PDF-formatted documents created by Apple. Spotlight has a lengthy vocabulary of document-specific, shared, and system-supplied metadata types.
As with any search engine, you'll get some false hits and missing matches until you get the hang of it. But once I was familiar with Spotlight, I spent little time scrolling around in Finder, and I uncovered documents I thought were long lost -- including, to my embarrassment, one large document I had completely retyped after a fruitless manual search.
One Clever Kitty
Tiger's new Smart Folders allow you to save the results of a Spotlight search in a continuously updated list. This is a great tool for managing projects: If new files, e-mail messages, or Address Book contacts that match your criteria are added to your system, they show up immediately in a Smart Folder. The folder is virtual - no files are moved or copied -- and you can change a Smart Folder's criteria at any time.
Spotlight has a few small flaws. When you kick off a Spotlight search from the Finder toolbar, it doesn't match on Spotlight's full set of file types by default. Finder searches still suffered awful intercharacter lag (unacceptable on slower Macs) as I entered search terms.
Also, Spotlight cannot index volumes on a server, so every user must build and search against a private index that points at server content. When I mentioned this to the company, Apple's response was that I should "expect great things from Spotlight in the future."
As for the other new features, they certainly have their place in the updated client.
Second-Class Mail Client
Automator reduces common, repetitive operations to a workflow (pipeline) of predefined actions. To create each stage in a workflow, you drag icons for actions into the workflow window. The actions run in sequence and pass their data to the next stage.
My first efforts with Automator were ambitious: Create a blank CD image on disc, do a Spotlight search, create a compressed archive from the Spotlight results, and burn the archive to a CD. It worked on the first try and I was able to save that workflow as an executable.
Tiger's Dashboard interface pops up a layer of pretty desktop widgets, some hooked to services such as weather and Yellow Pages. What I like most about Dashboard is the programming layer underneath. Apple really jazzed up JavaScript, and Dashboard shows off the under-appreciated WebKit HTML rendering engine Apple built around portions of the KDE project.
Unfortunately, Apple's Mail.app remains a second-class mail client. In Tiger it gains Smart Folders that appear in the mail folder hierarchy, but the mail folders can't be freely rearranged or hidden to save space. Mail.app also lacks Outlook's ability to present multiple views. The e-mail API, most easily accessed through Automator or AppleScript, is in many ways more useful than Mail.app itself. I prefer Spotlight for mailbox content searches.
Full Tilt Server
Everything in Tiger is in OS X Server 10.4, giving administrators access to Spotlight, Automator, Dashboard, and all of Tiger's desktop advantages.
Below ground level, new development tools, OS changes, and a pair of updated frameworks allow OS X Server 10.4 to run native 64-bit daemons and command-line applications. You cannot link 32-bit code into 64-bit apps, so going beyond basic system services and accelerated math will require the use of interprocessor communications between 32-bit and 64-bit executables.
With OS X Server 10.4, Apple has eliminated performance-choking resource contention between processors in multiprocessor Macs. Users will see this as a substantial boost in file sharing performance, but it will also improve all Mac servers with heavy nonstreaming network and/or disk operations loads.
The level of consistency and integration supplied by Apple s management GUIs -- Server Admin and Workgroup Manager -- is remarkable. OS X Server 10.4 creates a genuine zero-effort server, replete with every Internet, intranet, and security service imaginable.
In the new server, starting configurations are more robust and additional configurability has been added. Support for new services -- including IM, Weblog, the Xgrid distributed workload manager and agents, and much stronger e-mail spam and virus guards -- are all wired into one interface, accessible both remotely and locally.
Server Version Improvements
For administrators who prefer or require it, OS X Server 10.4 enhances command-line administration tools, which were introduced late in the 10.3 lifecycle, with additional commands and documentation.
File system security gets a boost from ACLs (access control lists), which attach an arbitrary list of users, groups, and associated permissions to folders. OS X Server 10.4 implements ACLs in a Windows-compatible manner. Unfortunately, the structure of the OS X file system precludes full compatibility with Unix ACLs; however, enough of the functionality is present to satisfy requirements and run most ACL-enabled Unix apps.
Apple's directory services are based on LDAP, making them inherently compatible with all systems that browse and update directories through LDAP network interfaces. Apple added to OS X Server 10.4 the ability to masquerade as a Windows Server 2000 PDC (Primary Domain Controller) or BDC (Backup Domain Controller), making it a Windows server peer. It's easier to enable than is a domain controller in Windows: In System Admin, I selected PDC as a role, typed in a Windows domain name , and after several seconds the domain appeared on my Windows XP and Windows 2003 machines, indistinguishable from native Windows.
The new Software Update Server asynchronously downloads fixes and point releases from Apple's site and rehosts locally an administrator-determined collection of updates that clients receive automatically. OS X Server 10.4 simplifies the process of pushing updates, applications, and even new OS versions from the server to one or more clients without going near the client machine.
Roaring Success
Tiger and OS X Server 10.4 have real value, not just in price but also in a shared principle: Professionals shouldn't have to build, either from purchased or downloaded code, application platforms brick by brick. Users should start with a complete structure, ready to do real work, which they can enhance and take apart at will.
Trepidation about single-sourcing notwithstanding, BSD's incomparable pedigree, Apple's openness with its OS code, and its recognition that users, developers, and administrators get paid to work not to prepare to work will prove alluring to many. Seeing Tiger and OS X Server 10.4 as productivity platforms puts them in the proper, brilliant light. |
| posted by Perimbean @ 3:30 AM |
|
|
|
| Monday, July 04, 2005 |
|
Apple Releases iTunes 4.9 with Podcasting Support
Apple last week released iTunes 4.9, adding extensive support for finding, subscribing to, and managing podcasts, which are audio files that are made available for anyone on the Internet download and listen to (see "Podcasting: The People's Radio" in TidBITS-766). The new podcast support adds to iTunes functionality that previously required the use of separate programs such as iPodder, iPodderX, NetNewsWire, and others. With iTunes 4.9, Apple has made the process of finding, subscribing to, and listening to podcasts simpler than ever before, but notable confusions and oversights remain to be corrected in future versions of iTunes.
Discovering/Subscribing/Managing Podcasts -- Launch iTunes 4.9, and you'll see a new Podcasts item in the left-hand column (the Source pane). This is the management interface for podcasts to which you've subscribed. Syndicated podcasts that you can choose to receive appear in the iTunes Music Store as a new genre when browsing.
To view Apple's directory of podcasts, click the Podcast Directory link at the bottom of the screen. Or, you can click the Music Store link in the Source pane, and choose the Podcasts link to browse. As with music in the store, a glitzy page showcases podcasts. Select a podcast or a podcast category to see the same familiar views used to navigate and buy music. The podcast directory is haphazard, containing some moribund podcasts and lacking others that are current, active, and quite popular. Luckily, Apple provides a way on the main Podcasts page in the store to suggest new podcasts and also a way to request the removal of a podcast. Apple hasn't clarified how they will opt to follow suggestions for addition or removal.
Once you find podcasts that interest you, subscribe to them by clicking a simple Subscribe button (which replaces the "Buy" button found on songs). The podcast is listed on your Podcasts page, and the most recent episode is automatically downloaded (more on this later).
All podcasts currently in the iTunes Music Store are free, but there is no reason to assume that this will always be the case. Apple appears to be preparing for that day by featuring podcasts offered by larger media outlets, including public radio, while relegating the early initiators of the distribution format to an Indie category that appears at the bottom of the Podcasts splash page. (Of course, some podcasters will welcome a mechanism by which they can offer for-fee podcasts for premium content just the way that certain radio shows are sold via Audible, Apple, and others now.)
You're not limited to Apple's list, of course. To subscribe to a podcast that's not in Apple's directory, you must first find the syndication link that includes podcasts on the site that's offering the audio downloads. Copy the link, which often ends in .rss or .xml. Then choose Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu in iTunes 4.9 and paste the link. Click OK, and if the link is correct, the podcast appears in the Podcasts list via the Source menu.
Unsubscribing to a podcast is a two-step process. First, you select the podcast in the list and click the Unsubscribe button in the bottom right of the iTunes window. This leaves the podcast listed among your subscribed podcasts with a Subscribe button next to it and retains all episodes you have already downloaded. To remove it (and all episodes) from the list you must Control-click on it and choose Clear from the contextual menu. If you perform this second step first, you can unsubscribe and delete all podcast files at once.
Setting Podcast Preferences -- In the iTunes 4.9 preferences, you can set the frequency that iTunes checks for new episodes, how many to download if there are more than one at the time checked, and how many to retain.
Unfortunately, these preferences are global for all podcasts, lacking the granular control provided by other programs that specialize or include podcasts. For instance, NetNewsWire Pro 2.0 allows you to set automatic downloads (but not the number of downloads or items retained) for each feed, as well as a global preference.
A new setting in the iTunes preferences lets you choose which podcasts are synchronized to your iPod (all models except the iPod shuffle, to which you must copy podcasts manually, since Autofill ignores podcasts, much as it ignores audio books) and, of those subscriptions, whether so synchronize all, new, unplayed, or checked episodes. On the iPod, podcasts are also grouped into a single Podcasts playlist and do not appear in other playlists unless you manually put them there in iTunes. Click Wheel iPods display a top-level Podcasts menu item; podcasts on older iPods appear as a Podcasts playlist.
Managing Podcasts -- In iTunes, podcasts are grouped together into the Podcasts entry in the Source list on the left. In fact, they are listed only there; they do not show up in the main library, nor do they appear in any playlists. You can add them to normal playlists manually, but you cannot use smart playlists to manage your podcast listening, a major oversight on Apple's part.
A blue dot next to a podcast name indicates an unheard episode. As with other songs in iTunes, a small speaker icon next to the name indicates that you are listening to, or were in the middle of listening to, a show.
By opening the disclosure triangle next to each podcast in your subscription list, you can view all episodes currently listed in the podcast's syndication feed, which is usually the last five episodes. Download shows that have not been retrieved already by clicking the Get Show button.
To find older episodes, you must visit the podcast's Web site, which takes some doing. First, you must click the right-facing arrow after the podcast's name (assuming you haven't turned these arrows off in your iTunes preferences.) If the podcast is not in the iTunes Music Store (that is, you subscribed to it manually), you will go directly to that podcast's Web site. If, however, the podcast is in the store, you will go to its page in the store where you will find a link to take you to its Web site.
A welcome addition is the information button (an i in a circle) to the far right of each episode which displays the show notes for that episode. Show notes are information - metadata, more technically - about each episode provided by the show's creator. Now you can see what a given show is about before you download it. (This metadata is indexed by Spotlight, making it easier to find archived podcasts on a system running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.)
As noted earlier, the TiVo-like options in iTunes preferences for choosing whether to keep All, All Unplayed, Most Recent, or 2, 3, 4, or 10 episodes can't be set on a podcast-by-podcast basis. Some people may want to keep only the latest versions of podcasts rather than letting them pile up and filling their hard drive while others may be devotees of certain shows and want to hear every single one, no matter how far behind they may fall. I like to keep all the episodes of serials such as The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd regardless of whether they have been heard or not (my five-year-old loves them), whereas I'd prefer to keep only the most recent episode of news-based shows. The only workaround is to keep everything and manually delete older episodes, a tedious process at best.
In another oversight, iTunes could better refine how it manages podcast files. If I listen to an episode and want to remove the file from my hard drive, the only option within iTunes is to select the episode and hit the Delete key, or Control-click it and choose Clear. That action removes the entry from the list of episodes and, optionally, the file from my hard drive. But what if I later want to download it again for some reason? It no longer even appears in the list of episodes with a Get button. It's completely gone. The only way I can find to remove a file but leave the entry in the list is to Control-click on the entry, choose Show Song File from the contextual menu, and then manually move it to the Trash. Even then, the show is still listed as if it were still there and there is no Get button even after iTunes figures out that the file is missing.
Listening to Podcasts -- Listening to podcasts in iTunes is the same as listening to any music: double-click and listen (or select the podcast and click the play button). iTunes remembers at which point you left off if you stop listening to an episode, so you can easily go back to that point - regardless of file format, which is convenient and a welcome addition to iTunes.
But iTunes 4.9 also suffers from a major bug in that a podcast is marked as played the instant you begin listening to it, as opposed to when you finish listening to it, as with songs. So, if you have iTunes set to keep only unplayed podcasts and you listen to the first 10 seconds of a podcast and then stop to save it for later, it will vanish the next time iTunes updates (according to the schedule you have set in iTunes Preferences). This bug also affects synchronization to an iPod if you base the sync on unplayed episodes. Apple should either create a new category called "In Progress" so you know which podcasts you are in the middle of, or they should treat podcasts like all other music: consider a file as played only within a few seconds of the end. Personally, I'd like to see both: consider a podcast unheard until the last few seconds (not the actual last second as the iPod does) and provide a way to see which podcasts I have started but not finished.
Apple introduced its own podcast, the New Music Tuesday Podcast, which demonstrates a new, exciting feature: bookmarks within a single podcast. Apple's podcast showcases a number of different artists, and as the podcast plays, the album art display on the lower left changes to reflect the current artist. In addition, a new bookmarks menu appears to left of the main track display to provide immediate access to each artist/segment in the list. Apple also released a beta command line tool called the Podcast Chapter Tool which helps power users build their own such menus for their shows. To download it, click Publish a Podcast in the Podcasts page of the iTunes Music Store, click Learn More about Podcasting on iTunes, and scroll all the way to the bottom of that page.
Podcasts work on all iPods, but an updater released last week for fourth generation iPods - those with the click wheel - provides additional podcast support, such as bookmarkability for all podcasts regardless of format, the capability to display show notes by clicking the center button twice, and scrolling long podcast names in the main display. It's possible that older iPods may pick up these new features as well in the future, much as most of the new features of the Click Wheel iPods were rolled out to earlier generation iPods some months after the Click Wheel models were released.
A Good Start, but More Work Needed -- Apple's entry into podcasting is the first for a major company and quite well done for an initial effort. That said, there are a number of significant problems that need to be addressed. I suspect many power users will prefer to stick to their current methods of podcast management so they can continue to take advantage of smart playlists, better file management, and the like. But for the majority of users, iTunes 4.9 does the job and will help take podcasts further into the mainstream.
Support for the popularity of the feature comes from early reports that major media sites, like KCRW, have had enormous boosts in their podcast listenership since iTunes 4.9's release. The L.A. Times reported that KCRW saw an increase from 3,500 to 100,000 daily - yes, daily - downloads of its programs. Other reports noted that iTunes users signed up for a total of one million subscriptions in the first two days.
That popularity is also revealing a few kinks in the system: at least some subscriptions are redirected through Apple's servers rather than downloaded directly, and some of the more popular shows have appeared as inaccessible for some people. Hopefully, these are just short-term glitches.
iTunes 4.9 is free, and you can get it from Software Update or from Apple's Web site as an 11.1 MB download.
|
| posted by Perimbean @ 7:00 PM |
|
|
|
|
|
