Art imitating life imitating art, or Internet imitating TV, as TV?

For the past couple of weeks I've been on vacation and pulled myself away from Internet and Video business. Well last week I found myself doing something I hadn't had time for most of this summer...flipping through the TV channels. Now call it Law of Attraction, or serendipity, or coincidence, but whatever it was I'm still smiling. Flipping through the channels I stumbled into a new series, i-CAUGHT on ABC.

I was surprised and captivated by the premise...but then again maybe not really surprised because I knew this was coming (is coming). I'd say the feeling was more like "impressed" the by speed and agility of those who brought the show to fruition. It is exactly the evolution I've been telling so many of you about; warning that times are changing, and if you don't recognize this progression of Video-Internet-Television, it may cost your business.

In it's own description of the program ABC claims "...we all know there's a video revolution swirling around us all - 24/7". Interesting. Powerful. Did you know about this revolution? Check out the link above, there is a video introduction of the program that is very compelling.

Its a great time to get involved, and to rethink the ways we do, what it is we do. This is just the beginning, but hold on tight, it could be a very fast ride.

The Rise of Silverlight

I can't imagine that there's anyone doing media that hasn't seen Microsoft Silverlight (or at least heard of it) by now. Gotta admit, it's pretty slick. Cross-platform (ok, Win and Mac right now, but thet've got Linux on the radar), integrated with Visual Studio, .NET implementation. I went to a MSDN roadshow last week, and the evangelist coded up a very cool vector-based button with gradients and animated hover states using SIlverlight lickety-split. The multiple-videos-streaming-at-once was pretty cool, too.

Don't have to name the specific target ot this MS initiative, and it may not be a killer-app for that space, but it does open up the media "door" to the mainstream development world. Certainly worth keeping an eye (or both) on.

I tried out the Mac version. The installer crapped out on 10.3.9 (the disk image didn't even pass the checksum stage). On the brand new MacBook Pro, 10.4.9, the installer worked, but (and I guess I'm not really shocked here), the Silverlight pages didn't recognize that the plug-in had been installed. Not the ideal customer experience.