I remember a lecture back in an Intro to Advertising class that discussed this issue. The story told was about a man who went to a monster truck rally. The trucks ran over a row of cars and the only car whose frame wasn’t crushed was that of a Volvo. The man wrote Volvo about his experience and said he would now seriously consider purchasing on of their vehicles because of this.

Volvo decided to turn this story into a commercial. During filming an extra witnessed some men reinforcing the Volvo’s frame by welding some heavy duty pieces of metal to the interior of the car, not to be seen by the camera’s. The man called the local news station to report what was going on and naturally the news station showed up and interrogated everyone involved with the commercial. Volvo shut production down and the commercial or any variant was ever aired.

This is a fantastic story of keeping advertisers in check. Unfortunately, we are now bombarded with ads that are totally unrealistic. Dodge Nitro’s can blow up cars, Toyota Tacoma’s are Meteor-Proof, and this stuff can make a 60 year old look like a 20 year old. When did advertising agencies lose their credibility of educating us about a product? Instead, our heads are bashed against the concrete until we give in or simply decide to skip over the commercials with our DVR’s.

I was thinking about Steve Rubel’s post about TV being “The great new platform” to develop on. He was of course referring to Television programming (shows), but what about just normal everyday things we already do? I want to be able to interface with my music via my TV instead of my computer. Let’s say I want to have a party and allow people to add to the playlist (everyone loves to play 30 second DJ). How can I do this? Well, I have an MP3 tunes Oboe locker and a Wii. Why not make a Wii friendly web service that taps into the MP3 Tunes API to do that? People could find songs and drag them to the playlist via the wiimote.

Why stop there? SXSW had Flat panels displaying Twitter messages that flew by live, you could do the same by just browsing to Twittermaps on your Wii. Someone could create a Facebook service that did the same. A screensaver of sorts that pulls data from Facebook and showed you your friends new picts, status updates, wall posts, etc. What I’m getting at is that we all know the Wii is capable of cool interaction like this (wiitube.com), so why hasn’t anyone started to make services like this yet?

I was reading the blogosphere today and stumbled upon a great article from NewTeeVee. Their article discussed how Apple may change the TV industry as the iPod did for the Music industry. It got me thinking about the numbers behind TV shows which I’ve decided to share here.

Disclaimer: These numbers are all that I could scrounge off the net, if anyone has more accurate numbers contact me and I’ll update the post.

I watch a lot of TV. Enough TV that my Cable bill minus High Speed Internet comes out to about $110 a month. Which means I’m spending $1320 a year on television…WOW. To break it down for you, the shows I keep up with regularly include:

Lost, Rome, Family Guy, The Riches, Heroes, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (cancelled), Entourage, Nip/Tuck, The Office, The OC (cancelled), Curb your Enthusiasm, The L Word, Carnivale (cancelled), Weeds and Dexter. This comes to 15 shows a year that I watch. This doesn’t include random flipping through the channels watching the Discovery Channel or the History Channel when they have interesting stuff on. This also doesn’t include any sports of any kind (I try to keep up with my Longhorns).

Assuming I buy an AppleTV, cut my cable subscription, and can get all of these 15 shows via iTunes, what will I save? A season pass on iTunes costs $35, I watch 15 shows which brings us to $525. That’s a savings of $795 a year. I wouldn’t be able to watch my Longhorns on ESPN, but I can go to a bar and spend some of my savings on that. I also wouldn’t have mindless entertainment like infomercials and those occasional cool shows like “Battleground: The Art of War” on the Discovery Channel. But I can buy these types of shows one by one if I choose once iTunes broadens its reach. I can also surf the limitless Video Podcasts that spring up day after day.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a great deal to me. Even better, I get to keep these shows once I’ve seen them and bypass purchasing a season I like on DVD for an extra $60.

What about the cash flow for the industry? From the shows I could find, Rome’s first episode pulled in 3.8 million viewers. Let’s pretend they kept all their viewers and sold all of them $35 subscriptions to the show instead. That’s $133 million on a show that cost roughly $100 million to make. Not a bad profit on a high budget series. Heroes brought in 14.7 million viewers last week. Cut those viewers in half and sell them each a $35 subscription…$257 million.

I’m not in the industry, but that is a lot of dough. If they can figure out how to squeeze a few extra dollars with product placement, we have ourselves a nice little business. Knowing that this kind of money can be made through iTunes in the next five years, will we begin to see companies popping up that create great shows but never release them on any network other than iTunes? I don’t see why not. We as the viewer will get the best of both worlds, more quality programming at a cheaper cost.

AAPL is a major buy in my book…

AppleTV began shipping from Cupertino this morning.  I’ll be purchasing mine from Amazon Prime or the local Apple Store as soon as I can get my hands on one.  The question I have is, what are the limitations of this device?

From reading reviews of AppleTV, it seems I can auto sync one computer and have as many computers as I’d like(Mac and PC) stream to the device.  The problem with all of this is storage.  My current laptop has 60 gigs of storage, 28 gigs of which have music, tv shows or movies downloaded from iTunes.  A major reason for purchasing the AppleTV for me was to clear up a lot of that space on my laptop.  I’m certain if I sync to AppleTV then remove the items from my library, AppleTV and iTunes will be upset with me.

Another solution I had thought about was purchasing a Mac mini solely to store data, but what’s the point of purchasing a machine if all you need is storage?  I should be able to hook an external hard drive up to the Apple TV, which brought me to my next solution.

Now this is a big “is it possible?” that I need help with and hopefully someone out there will be able to test this out.  What if I purchase a new Airport Extreme Base Station and hook up an external hard drive to it (the new airport base stations can provide an external drive with sharing capability over the network).  Can I store all of my media on the external hard drive connected to the Base Station and stream media without a computer?

If this last solution will work, I’ll be able to rip all of my dvd’s through Handbrake, store them on the external hard drive and stream them whenever I want to AppleTV.  If that’s possible, I can’t think of a better set up with today’s current offerings.   Can anyone tell me if this will work?

I keep hearing horror stories about Vista but haven’t actually seen it in action yet until today.  One of my co-workers has just gotten a new machine with it pre-installed.  About thirty minutes after using this brand new machine it began blinking at her.  Yes, blinking.  A video driver went missing in the system and notified her as an OS should do.  The difference in this notification is that the screen was on for two seconds then off for two seconds then on for two seconds then off for two seconds.

Of course a new release is going to have issues, but what kind of user experience is this?  She began panicking like she had done something wrong as we all grouped around the machine laughing at the stupidity of the feature.  After watching the screen for a while it actually made me feel nervous and jittery.  I had to look away because it made me feel so uncomfortable.  We all use visual cues in the web industry to clue the user that something has happened, it is a convenient feature for user and creator.  But whoever decided it was a good idea to notify the user by giving them a seizure needs to be drug out into the street and shot.

I’ve long been a fan of George Orwell. He paints such a fantastic picture of the consequences of being passive over time. How the small things can make such a large impact. I find it interesting that a book which was published almost 60 years ago can be so relevant today. I am not going to discuss how this is relevant to The Patriot Act or today’s government in general. I’d like to instead wrap my thoughts around the huge trend of voluntarily sharing information.

As MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and other services mature, we begin to see that sharing personal information with strangers has not only become mainstream but quite addicting. We have accepted these services as the norm and continue to be progressive in the amount of information we are willing to share.

Twitter for example, is a service that allows a person to broadcast ‘What I am doing’ in realtime. Anyone on Twitter is allowed to follow anyone else on Twitter without any of the friend confirmations we are used to. If someone wants to see my Twitter updates, they simply list me as a friend and that’s it. Every update I make will be forwarded to their email or cell phone via text message. If I send out a message of my location, friends and foes alike have immediate knowledge of my location.

I can’t be very critical of these trends because I am frequently an early adopter of most. I like to see how things work and how I can use them to make my life easier and more fun. The problem is that as others do the same, pieces of our private lives slowly break away. We keep complaining about the government’s policies on monitoring, but anyone with an email address can find intimate details about our lives.

Where do we draw the line and when does the fun wear off?

It’s about time I join in on the fun that is blogging. I’m not really sure yet what this I’m going to write about, it’ll probably be just a collection of thoughts and cool stuff I find around the interweb.