For Pandora, as with local television stations, this year’s spike in political ads is a welcome source of cash for a media company reliant on advertising revenue. During the first three months of 2012, Pandora brought in $70 million in advertising revenue, nearly double its total over the same three months in 2011, a non-election year, according to SEC filings.
via The Politics of Your Pandora Station – US News and World Report.
And while Facebook is struggling to make money on small mobile screens, Facebook TV could be a more natural place for display ads. Advertisers have been demanding a bigger, flashier ad formats that Facebook TV could host. We’re so used to watching commercials on TV that a glossy still ad every 10 minutes or 10 photos, or the occasional fifteen-second pre-roll might not seem out of place.
Apple would gain a good showcase for how existing mobile and web apps could be reformatted for the television. The special Facebook app could also be a selling point for Apple’s new TV hardware. Facebook needs to be on televisions and Apple needs Facebook on its televisions, so this collaboration seems inevitable if not imminent.
via The Future Fruits Of Apple + Facebook | TechCrunch.
What goes around comes around. The first computer to use the TV as a monitor was the VIC-20 or Commodore 64. Then there was WebTV. Now Apple wants to pipe Facebook to TV? Not having a TV or a Facebook account I have no basis for an opinion on this.
GeeXboX is a free and Open Source Media-Center purposed Linux distribution for embedded devices and desktop computers. GeeXboX is not an application, it’s a full-featured OS, that one can boot as a LiveCD, from a USB key, an SD/MMC card or install on its regular HDD. The GeeXboX distribution is lightweight and designed for one single goal: embed all major multimedia applications as to turn your computer into an HTPC. GeeXboX runs on x86, PowerPC and ARM devices.
via GeeXboX.
Download videos from various Flash-based video hosting sites, without having to use the Flash player. Handy for saving videos for watching offline, and means you don’t have to keep upgrading Flash for sites that insist on a newer version of the player.
via get-flash-videos – A command line program to download flash videos – Google Project Hosting.
Update 10/14/2012: Try this site. The relatively newer github site here. I think I had problems with the code.google.com version which didn’t seem up to date.
Aereo is another in a succession of internet companies that have sought to disrupt traditional TV-watching. Many of the others have been sued out of existence; and Aereo has said it is anticipating a legal challenge and has a theory to get around the copyright issue.
via Broadcasters Sue To Stop $12 Streaming Service Aereo | paidContent.
A MythTV box with an HDTV card can do this too without the monthly charge.
Release Notes: VLC 2.0.0 “Twoflower” is a major new release of VLC. It has faster decoding using multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware, and the ability to open more formats, notably professional,..
via VLC media player – Freecode.
Download it at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Welcome to Darwin Streaming Server, the open source version of Apple’s QuickTime Streaming Server technology that allows you to send streaming media to clients across the Internet using the industry standard RTP and RTSP protocols. Based on the same code base as QuickTime Streaming Server, Darwin Streaming Server provides a high level of customizability and runs on a variety of platforms allowing you to manipulate the code to fit your needs.
Sockso is a free, open-source, personal music server for everyone! It’s designed to be as simple as possible so that anyone with a mouse and some mp3’s can get their friends listening to their music across the internet in seconds!
MediaTomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices.
MediaTomb implements the UPnP MediaServer V 1.0 specification that can be found on http://www.upnp.org/. The current implementation focuses on parts that are required by the specification, however we look into extending the functionality to cover the optional parts of the spec as well.