Future of Media #81: Get Out Your Crystal Ball

Of the media and developments listed, I think the fact that Wal-Mart is buying Vudu will probably have a great influence on the field in the next few years. The technology is changing so fast these days that it's a real guessing game, but anything that Wal-Mart gets involved in seems to make a big effect on the consumers.

I'm not a early adopter of technology. I once had a new VCR in a box for weeks before setting it up. I admit, if I find something that I like and it's easy to use, I stay with it. I don't jump on the bandwagon at the first appearance of a gadget. I generally wait a bit to let the developers work some of the kinks out of it first.

In the last 1980's I got a video player that produced the best picture quality of anything available. It was called the laser disc player. What the "new" format known as CD was to music, the LD (laser disc) was for movies, etc. At the time I was at WTLS in west Texas and one of he county libraries I worked with was the Midland County Public Library. The film librarian there was Anne Trout and she had a big collection of LD's. One of the titles she sent me to try was a Sear's catalog. It was interesting to watch. In-between the various catalog pages of clothes were style shows of the outfits. There was a machine that would play the threes sizes available: CD, 8 inch music videos and the 12 inch movies. I thought about getting one but at $1000.00 it was a little beyond my budget. The movies/documentaries were recorded on only one side and were 1/4 inch thick. I still have some of mine and yes, the player works just fine.

Future of Media #80: Movies

The website Hulu was a bust for me. Neither my staff computer or a branch laptop could run any of the programs, movies or trailers because it need an Adobe Flash Player 10 update which I don't have and can't install. Hopefully Network Services will be able to update when they have the time. UPDATE: The Adobe Player was updated and I was able to watch part of a couple of movies and trailer. THANK YOU NETWORK SERVICES. I watched part of Star Trek VII: Generations and Ghostbusters. Over all I liked it but the one thing I wasn't fond of was that while watching the movies and trailers they would stop or slow down every few seconds to load more of the movie or trailer. One thirty second trailer took over three minutes to load.

I watched trailers on IMDB, Hulu and Youtube. They all did the same slow load but at Youtube it would replay at regular speed. I had mixed success on Apple Trailers, I was able to watch Diary of a Wimpy Kid but not anything else. The other trailers would stall at 2 items remaining. I might visit the sites to see what is going but I would probably go to Google and search by title and see what the search found and then choose a site.

As of now, I'm not really interested in joining a fee-based service. I have a friend who is home bound and her really like the Nexflix service.

Future of Media #79: Television

I searched both Hulu and tv.com for West Wing and Highlander. West Wing wasn't listed at all on Hulu, whereas Highlander had all six seasons avalable to watch. Tv.com listed both but only had episode guides and forums.

My cell phone doesn't have the ability to view programs or movies. I've never watched a program on a cell phone and I don't think I would want to, the screen's too small.

I'm not really interested in watching a streaming program. The ones I looked at were too slow and didn't hold my interest.