SFist Tech Roundup: The Media Is the Message
The SFist Tech Labs staff is back from last week's big holiday — the launch of the Xbox 360. Oh yeah, and Thanksgiving, too. Our plan to stand in line at Best Buy for 30 hours to follow some poor woman home and steal an Xbox at gunpoint failed, unfortunately, but there's still hope!
Kaleidoscope
We may not have the Xbox 360's awesome home media center capabilities, but we may not even need them, if Apple rumor site Think Secret's speculation is correct. They're claiming that Apple will announce a new Mac mini-based home media center at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco this January. The new unit will be one of the first Intel-based Macs to be released, they say, and will be in a form factor similar to the existing mini but adding a built-in dock for the iPod. On the software side, it will include Apple's FrontRow software that's currently bundled with the iMac G5, and some as-yet-unseen digital video recording software that their "sources" call a "TiVo-killer."
The release of such a machine would make perfect sense for Apple, as just about everything they've done over the past year has led up to this — new iPod models, the Mac mini itself, positioning the new iMac as a media center, setting up iTunes to deliver video content. And end users have been making homebrew media centers out of the Mac mini ever since it was first released. As far as we can tell, the only reason Apple wouldn't announce a mini-based DVR is because it makes too much sense.
After the Jump: killing TiVo and shooting hookers.
TiVo
If Apple does try to release a TiVo-killer, they're going to have to put up a fight. The company announced plans to upgrade its service to allow recorded shows to be transferred to an iPod or Sony PSP. The TiVoToGo feature was already introduced at the beginning of the year, but was limited and was met with lukewarm response. It's pretty clear that the company's making the announcement now as a reaction to Apple's iTunes Music Store video service, as well as the similar video-on-demand services from cell phone providers and the broadcast networks. CNet News has a FAQ about the changes to TiVoToGo; one interesting point is that it won't support the Mac OS.
TiVo has also set up a partnership with Yahoo! to provide Internet-based content over the box, and blogger Dave Zatz has posted photos of the new interface. The look is the same, but gives access to more media such as podcasts, Internet radio, and movie trailers.
And the last bit of TiVo news is that they've announced a new advertising system to deliver categorized ads more directly targeted at the subscriber's interests. The announcement emphasizes that the ads will be completely opt-in, searchable (and presumably browseable) by the user much like TiVo provides movie trailers and other promotions currently.
Won't Someone Think of the Children?
Even if you do have a wealth of on-demand media at your disposal, sometimes you just want to kick back, relax, and shoot a few hookers. But this week, we and thousands of other shut-ins were angered by the words of film critic Roger Ebert, who claimed that videogames are inherently inferior to film and literature. In other words, playing a game about shooting hookers is mindless destruction, while watching a movie about shooting and hookers is High Art.
The videogame industry was also under attack from longtime mysterious rival Senator Joe Lieberman and the National Institute on Media and the Family, who claimed the industry was "beyond repair". They say that the ESRB, the game industry's self-imposed rating board, is giving age-appropriate ratings to games but completely failing to enforce them. Lieberman was joined by Senator Hilary Clinton this week in a tag-team boss fight showdown against the game industry, with the campaign-friendly Family Entertainment Protection Act.
The way this piece of legislation would protect families would be by giving the Federal Trade Commission regulatory power over the ESRB and retailers, including fines for retailers who didn't enforce the ESRB's age restrictions. Although retailer enforcement sounds draconian but not entirely unreasonable, other aspects of the act are more ominous: in particular, regular audits of the ostensibly self-governing ESRB to make sure that its ratings are in line with the FTC's assessments. Opponents of the act (hereafter referred to as "anyone with a lick of sense") point out that this singles out videogames for more strict regulation than movies or music, and to some extent classify games on the federal level as "product" instead of "art."
This latest big stink over game ratings is largely because the jackasses at Rockstar Games released juvenile sex mini-games in the latest installment of its hooker-shooting series Grand Theft Auto, and were caught doing it by third-party modders and the ESRB. Considering that, we in the labs humbly suggest legislation that would be a lot simpler: just keep anyone with an emotional maturity of less than 17 from being allowed to develop a videogame. If looking at a pixelated image of boobies or hoo-has gets you giggling or aroused, then your copy of Visual Studio is revoked by the FTC. It'd likely cause videogames to stop being a growth industry, but it might also earn a thumbs-up from crusading legislators and connoisseurs of the fine arts alike.