Beet.TV Transcripts

Microsoft Set to Take On Flash in Online Video with New Player Code Name "WPF/E" -- New Player will Be Viral with Embed Code

Eric E. Zocher, Microsoft

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[Start of Audio]

So the new platform we’re talking about is Code Name WPFV, and it’s available now from Microsoft’s website in preview form, and it’s a new player that runs inside of any web browser. It works on Macintosh and Windows. It works with Internet Explorer, with Safari and Firefox.

And it’s a new plug-in. It’s actually not just for video. It also includes support for graphics and animation, and the WPFV Code Name comes from the name WPF, which is our Windows Presentation Foundation, which is the new presentation and media system that’s part of Windows Vista.

This particular example is sort of a video library example. It’s a bunch of streaming video from – it’s using AJAX, and so you have JavaScript, HTML, and then also using ZAML, so that’s a markup language that we have for describing richer elements and interactivity and things like that that goes a lot beyond what you can do in HTML or in AJAX.

The situation today actually is that Windows media is still, by far, the leading format on the web for delivering video, and this is just actually a new, richer way to build user experiences around Windows media video, so all of the tools and all of the production workflows that people have been using to get Windows media onto the web; they’ll still be able to do that.

Here’s a few of the other things that we have, so let’s see. We’ve got a filmstrip thing, a player. These are all just sample applications.

But we see it being used for all sorts of cases, where you need rich interactivity, where you need rich animation.

And here’s our page-turn application. It’s just a sample of using simply geometry and JavaScript and AJAX. You can basically just put this together with WPFV. These images aren’t pre-rendered like this. They’re just being basically transformed at real time.

Here’s an example of the – it’s a script tag here, and it’s put in the WPFV Control Host, and with this sort of video, you could also integrate better with desktop apps and widgets and things like that, like you see Windows Vista and stuff so that people could find out, say, for instance, it’d be very possible to develop something, where you have a widget that basically notifies you when your favorite video authors have uploaded something new, say, and then you can tie into the whole desktop experience as well.

And you could also – somebody could use WPF and create a desktop player that could connect to the backend and different video feeds as well.

The actual server infrastructure is the server infrastructure you have today, so it works with, of course, Windows Server and with IIS that’s part of Windows Server, and it also works with Windows Streaming Media Server. As far as the tools for creating it, the actual format itself of the video is a WMV format, and it’s a constrained subset. It’s our very latest Kodak VC-1, and we support a core set of profiles. All your videos may already be ready for this or we actually sell a server and client encoding tool as part of a new expression media product that’s specifically for putting video into this format.

So again, we’re trying to offer a whole range of solutions for people, so it’s not just one little technology that’s in the silo. This is related to Windows Media Player. It’s related to WPF and Vista and all those technologies; AJAX, all that stuff, and it’s supposed to work together.

[End of Audio]

AlwaysOn, AO Media, Microsoft, Eric E. Zocher, Adobe Flash, WPF/E

Online Video Looms Large in HP's Ascendancy, Satjiv Chahil Tells Beet.TV

Tony Perkins interviews Satjiv Chahill, Hewlett-Packard

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[Start of Audio]

Tony Perkins: Hi, Tony Perkins here of Always On with one of my favorite people in the whole world, Satjiv Chahil, who’s the marketing force behind HP’s newest ascent to the No. 1, or re-ascent, to the No. 1 position in PCs. How’s it going, my friend?

Satjiv Chahil: Tony, wonderful; wonderful to be here, and with supporters like you, it’s all upside.

Tony Perkins: There you go. Well, you rolled out today in front of our audience and about 17,000 web-viewers, but your commercials, your video commercials that you’re now not only showing on TV, but you’re using them, distributing them very creatively over the Internet.

You wanna talk a little bit about that kind of forward-thinking strategy that you all are pursuing?

Satjiv Chahil: Sure. The Internet is not only a reality; broadband is the new reality, and we’ve acknowledged something that everybody in high industry ought to have acknowledged a while back; that the first billboard people see is in cyberspace; the first window-shopping people do is in cyberspace, and now, they want an all video experience.

So we’ve been proactively using all of these channels of communication to get our message out to our customers.

Tony Perkins: Now, you are also a producer of a variety of devices, and are you taking consideration that particularly the young generation wants to be able to view video content and other multi-media content over all these new devices?

Satjiv Chahil: Absolutely. As they say, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, and we want to offer choice to all our customers. We’ve got handheld devices, on which I can see a Tony Perkins interview. We also have announced state-of-the-art television sets that wirelessly bring your full, rich media content from your PCs to your television sets. These are called “Media-Smart” TVs.

So we’re in every conceivable access route of digital content and rich-media digital media content.

Tony Perkins: Well, it’s no wonder that Satjiv is the man. When you look forward, what do you think is gonna be your most competitive situation, going forward? What keeps you up at night?

Satjiv Chahil: Two main things, both anchored on the customer, the potential customer. One is to provide the absolute best user experience in a rich-media world. The other is to provide the best service and support structure, so you can be always on 24/7.

Tony Perkins: Well, you heard it from the man, the reigning king of technology marketing in the new era; somebody to watch and somebody we’re gonna be watching at Beat TV. Thanks again.

Satjiv Chahil: Tony, I still have a lot to learn, and you always bring to your forums the greatest innovators, so we have lots to learn and a lot better to do at HP, and I’m glad to have that opportunity.

Tony Perkins: Thank you. I appreciate that.

[End of Audio]

AlwaysOn, AO Media, Tony Perkins, Satjiv Chahil, Online Video Advertising

Huffington Post is a Hot Media with the Right Formula, VC Investor Eric Hippeau Explains

Tony Perkins interviews Eric Hippeau, Softbank Capital

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[Start of Audio]

Tony Perkins: Hi. Tony Perkins; very good friend with Andy Plesser; also journalist at – always on; I’m sitting in for Andy here today, and sitting next to me is a very good friend, Eric Hippeau, who’s a managing partner for SoftBank Capital. Welcome to the Always On media event.

Eric Hippeau: Hey, Tony. Thanks for having me here. It’s a great event.

Tony Perkins: It’s pretty crazy. You’re one of the only venture capitalists that is bold enough to really look at content place, and you’ve made a bold investment in the Huffington Post, which is just going like gangbusters, so I wanted to get a little insight from you on what that investment is all about and what the vision is behind your investment.

Eric Hippeau: We just feel that the Huffington Post’s formula of doing news, which is a lot of personality, breaking news, immediate feedback from the blogging community, as well as the people who are on the sides.

It’s exactly what people are looking for in terms of a new site, so we – our vision at the Huffington Post is gonna be the web’s newspaper.

Tony Perkins: Okay, so what happens – obviously, the one thing that’s fixed in the world is the amount of time people have to consume content, so if Huffington Post continues to go like gangbusters like it is, it’s stealing mindshare from something else. Where’s it stealing mindshare from, do you think?

Eric Hippeau: Well, I haven’t really thought about that too much. I would imagine that it might steal share from the traditional newspapers on their own websites. It might steal some mindshare from kind of generic, new sites that’s called them, where all you get is just the breaking news, but you don’t get the commentary; you don’t get the background; you don’t get the personality.

Tony Perkins: So are people sticking around because they get to interact in boosting those kinds of numbers like the average visit time, which obviously advertisers like because that’s part of the formula?

Eric Hippeau: The average visit time on the Huffington Post – and you can verify this through Alexa or ComScore – is one of the highest, certainly one of the highest in the news category, and it’s actually very, very high compared to all other content.

Tony Perkins: One other thing I’ve noticed is that many times, the headline story will be summarized by the Huffington editors, but it’ll take you to like Time Magazine. Are they just looking at news stories, picking the best source, and then throwing it up for debate in their community? Is that the strategy there?

Eric Hippeau: Yes, this allows us to put a lot of news up. We direct traffic to the people who originated the news, which is only fair, but when we feel that there is enough depth or importance, then we can add a lot of context, and, of course, add the whole discussion part.

Tony Perkins: So last question: Five years out from now, do you think that all media sites will have to be like the Huffington Post and open up their brands for interactivity in community or be left behind or is there gonna be room for printed newspapers and one-way new sites?

Eric Hippeau: Look, the statistics for printed newspapers aren’t very good. The readership is aging rapidly and is not being replaced by young people. The answer to your first part of the question is absolutely. You cannot have content that doesn’t have interactivity; otherwise, it will be of no interest to people.

Tony Perkins: Well, that’s great. Well, as an online content producer, I appreciate that guys like you are out pumping money into good content producers. I don’t see a lot of that happening in Silicon Valley, so you should be very successful, I would predict, and thanks for being on the show.

Eric Hippeau: Thanks, Tony.

[End of Audio]

AlwaysOn, AO Media, Tony Perkins, Huffington Post, Eric Hippeau, Softbank Capital

Veoh Growing Fast with 4 Million Users -- And Many Videos Will Be Seen in High Quality on TV Screens

Dmitry Shapiro,Veoh

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[Start of Audio]

Dmitry Shapiro: We have a comprehensive broadcasting platform for them to use. And what we mean by that is it’s extremely easy for you to create an account, upload your videos, group your videos into various types of traditional groups.  You’d want to group them into series, some episodic set of videos, channels where you can group series and videos together into your own channel. We expose all of that out for syndication so you can publish once to VO and tell us to automatically publish your videos to YouTube, automatically publish them to MySpace, automatically publish them to Google.

And we’re talking about actually uploading those videos for you, which today, independent producers have to manually, and they do that. We don’t really know many people that are serious about delivering their video that simply publish it on one sight.

Andy Plesser: So you guys have this desktop application; you save video, which is cool. How is does it actually work where you can get that video onto a TV set? Like could I – what’s that last mile or that last ten feet?

Dmitry Shapiro: Believe it or not, it’s actually quite easy today for early adopters. It doesn’t require a lot of technical skill. In fact, if you can hook up your TiVo to your TV, you can hook up your computer to your TV. It’s actually easier, I think, to hook up your computer than your TiVo. I’ve done both.

Today, most people hook up their computer to their TV by VGA out, to VGA in, if your TV has a VGA in. If your computer has a DVI in, which is a high-resolution output, all the new plasmas have DVI, and so you can do that. If not, then your computer typically has, these days, an S-Video out.

You can put it to S Video, and so lots of ways to get a video signal out of your computer into the back of your TV, and in audio, simply a little mini jack to your headphone jack on your PC out to – I put it to my receiver, so I can use my surround sound system, to the input of your receiver, and you’re done. All you need is a remote control, which again, these days, ships with a lot of PCs, or you can go to CompUSA and buy a $20.00 remote control, and with VO, you’re sitting back and you’re watching Internet television.

Andy Plesser: So tell us about the business model. Where do you guys see this and how do you think you’re gonna monetize this business?

Dmitry Shapiro: Well, also, we always say the only thing we know about the business model right now is that it’s wrong because nobody really knows what it is yet. We envision the business model to be a revenue-sharing business model and revenue sharing on kind of a number of fronts.

First of all, we believe that the majority of the revenue will come from advertising because we have a deep belief that content wants to be free, and so we allow publishers to publish their content to us. We do not charge them for hosting that content and delivering it because we have these cost-saving capabilities with our peer to peer network, and for that, we require that they choose a business model.

One business model may be to allow us to go and sell ads, place the ads, very targeted ads, onto their content, and then share with us in that revenue. A second model may be that they want to offer that content on a premium basis. Again, kind of pay per view, pay to rent, pay to own or subscription basis, and then share with us in the revenue that’s generated off of that. But we believe that out of those kinds of two models, the vast majority of revenue will come from advertising.

[End of Audio]

Veoh, Dmitry Shapiro, P2P

Amazon Powers Diversion Media, the New Online Video Content Company Launched by MTV Veteran Nicholas Butterworth

Nicholas Butterworth, Travelistic

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Can you tell us briefly why you decided to go it alone, and walk us through a little bit, you know, how it works.

Nicholas Butterworth: Sure. Well, I used to run this site called Sonicnet, which was an independent music site, and we built our own platform in the ‘90s because that was the best way to get what we needed. And then we merged with MTV.com and all the international MTV sites. Sonicnet ended up providing the platform that powered 18 different websites around the world. So my experience is if you’ve got a good platform, you can share it between a lot of different sites, and that’s what we’re trying to do with diversion.

My co-founder, Tatum Lade, was the head of engineering at a site called iFilm, so one of the biggest viral video sites on the Internet and probably one of the biggest video sites of any kind in its day. And so he’s got a lot of experience in developing kind of scalable video architecture, so we looked at many platforms. We liked Britecove; we liked the Platform.com; we liked a couple others. But, ultimately, we decided that we had the resources and the experience to build our own platform.

So we have a great developer team. We’re writing it in Ruby on Rails, which I think the _____ is Ruby also, which we found to be an excellent programming environment and has allowed us to do a lot of things pretty fast. And so we’ve taken, for example, the same platform that we built to publish Travelistic and we’ve reused almost all that to publish Snowvision. Now, we add some custom components in Travelistic. We integrated Google Maps everywhere because it’s travels, so maps were really important. For Snowvision, we have weather data, so we have some feeds that were ingesting of snow conditions at 350 mountain resorts.

But as we go on and do other channels, we’ll keep adding to that shared platform. Hopefully, that lets us make a more customized user experience for each vertical.

Andy Plesser: So tell us a little bit from the technical standpoint about the encoding and the uploading and the side of distribution. Talk us through it a little bit.

Nicholas Butterworth: So there’s one piece, which is what we call ingesting the video, so there, we’re using a Kodak from Onto. We looked at a bunch of different Kodaks. We liked that the best. That’s for flash, so whether we upload video ourselves or a user uploads it, it gets processed by the Onto Kodak and turned into flash. Then we have our own sort of servers to do content management, so it’s effectively a video publishing system that we input meta data that goes on with the videos.

In the case of Travelistic, we associate a latitude and longitude pair with each video, for example, so that we can locate them all on a map, through a map or any other mapping system that we chose to plug in; other stuff, typical media stuff, like author and publisher and length and duration and format, and we use a tagging system, an internally generated tagging system.

So then we take the actual video files and we store them on Amazon’s S3 Service, so this is a little bit of like a trade secret, but I’m so excited about it, I don’t mind telling you. Basically, Amazon is like our CDN, so instead of using a VitalStream, or a Line Light or an Akama, we use Amazon to actually store the bits.

So when a users comes to our site, it’s our own severs that figure out what kind of content to deliver them, to do the personalization, the community features, present all the meta data around the video and also decide which ads to insert, so we go out and do calls to different ad networks, and then the actual files, the flash files, get sent from Amazon.

Andy Plesser: It’s amazing. What is the arrangement with Amazon? How does that work?

Nicholas Butterworth: I think that the S3 acronym stands for “Simple Storage Solution,” and I don’t’ deal with it directly, but my understanding is it’s insanely simple and that they really made it super easy to use, and I think a lot of startups are starting to use it. I will say that I think we probably could get a little higher quality of service if we did use like a Line Light, so we have a little bit of a tradeoff and that sometimes it’ll take a little time to initiate, but the actual quality of the file we’re delivering is very high.

We benchmarked ourselves against YouTube. We coded a little higher bit rate. The frame size a little bigger, and we actually have gotten lots of compliments on the quality of our video on Travelistic, which is great. For Snowvision, we’re actually going up again in file quality because this is a very broadband-centric world, very technically savvy, so we have an even bigger frame size and even more bits that we’re pushing up.

Andy Plesser: With the higher quality videos that are part of travel and snowboarding, are you considering distributing downloadable videos?

Nicholas Butterworth: Yeah.

Andy Plesser: And what are your thoughts about that?

Nicholas Butterworth: So the map, which is kind of our flagship original series that I talked about on Travelistic, is available as a podcast so that you can subscribe to it and get it through iTunes just like any other podcast. And I think, over time, we will probably offer a lot more content on Travelistic for download. I personally like to download queue, so I like to have a play list and set it to download in the background. I think that is going to be a powerful application for travel. You could be downloading – if you’re flying to Jamaica, you could download 50, 60 minutes worth of video, and then watch them on your iPod or your laptop on the flight itself and really get a feel for the place that you’re going to.

With Snowvision, we’re going to have almost all of the videos available for download right off the bat. So, yeah, we’re definitely are moving towards kind of multi-format delivery, and we envision that, in the future, we may have another tier of service where we have like super high quality, HD quality on most downloads. That might take a little longer, but there’s probably a segment of the market that’s going to want them.

Andy Plesser: Well, how do you see this other smaller crop or this smaller niche of video distribution companies, such as yourself – is there this opportunity now to kinda create your own?

Nicholas Butterworth: I will say it’s not easy. We have a terrific team of developers. They worked for months to develop even the first version of the platform. As I say, Tatum is a very experienced leader of this team. I have a lot of experience with video infrastructure. So it’s not for everyone, but we fundamentally can set ourselves to be a media company. Now, out of our ten people at Diversion Media, five of them are developers, so we are a very technologically focused media company, but having gone from Sonicnet, which was ten people in a loft in Tribecca, to MTV iGroup, where I managed 500 people around the world, and now going back to ten.

Technology is really being rapid adopters and understanding the technology and what it can do quickly is the only thing that lets a little guy compete against the big guys, you know. So it doesn’t matter, fundamentally, whether you’re using someone else’s platform. I mean, if you’re a blogger using WordPress, just fine. You don’t need to go create your own blogging platform.

And there are increasingly going to be more people that are going to give even small independent publishers a platform to use, but if you can create your own, especially if you’re doing multiple brands, then we kind of feel like that’s definitely the best way to go, and I would think that any sort of aggressive media company would want to be very technology focused.

Now, my experience in big media is that it isn’t always the case. Sometimes, there’s a lot of lip service paid to it, but when push comes to shove, people feel like; hey, we’re not really software guys. Why should we have all these engineers around here? Let’s let someone else do that. For us, the technology is kind of the key that unlocks everything else.

[End of Audio]

On2 Technologies, Nicholas Butterworth, Content Distribution Networks, Amazon.com

The Online Video Revolution will be Our Legacy -- Watch Twyla Tharp Dance with Me!!!!

Twyla Tharp

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[End of Audio]

Twyla Tharp: I started working with cameras for a couple of reasons. One is I grew up in a drive-in theater, so I always saw everything in two dimensions coming out of a camera, so I didn’t know what I was doing until I could be a Hollywood movie star. So I needed to get a video camera.

The other reason is because I’ve spent a career doing sessions, where I invent material. I don’t necessarily remember the material from those sessions, but because I have recorded a lot of it, I have access to that material.

And I’ve been doing this since the late ‘60s, so I have a documentation of myself as a dancer from the time when I was very young until I’m not so very young.

Andy Plesser: Dance, unlike music, that can be properly annotated, exactly annotated through sheet music, let’s say, does not have that same – it’s not the same medium. How can video help to both archive, but also create a sort of a medium that can be passed along to other generations?

Twyla Tharp: Video is becoming the text of choice for dance. There are two systems at least that have been utilized in the past, the Beneche and Lav annotation. They are both very labor-intensive, and they can’t contain all of the detail that’s involved in very, very complicated movement.

So if one has access to video cameras and can shoot multi-angled, you have a document that preserves what is that work, and I have every piece I’ve made, which is 130-some-odd, since ’65 on tape since after the first five years. I don’t have the first five years.

Andy Plesser: And what do you hope – what are your hopes for the archives and sort of beyond just chronicling your work and being in Archives for Scholars; how would video work for you or for other choreographers?

Twyla Tharp: Well, having the pieces contained with an archive base means that when the pieces are taught to other companies, to other generations of dancers, they can be taught responsibly and accurately and that there is a standard control.

As I’m sure you’re aware, every live performance is different, and every live performer has their own version of the material, and what this affords is what I think of as a re-adaptation. I mean, it would be as though, to use a grandiose example; we only knew Shakespeare from one player’s documentation as opposed to the text that Shakespeare put down, and the archival documentation can give detail that a performer will lose and can give intension that a performer may not even be aware of, coming from the choreographer that will help guide future generations of people who wanna learn from this material and who wanna present it.

[End of Audio]

Twyla Tharp, Choreography, Dance

Magnify.net Brings User Generated Videos and Revenue to Blogs and Web Sites

Steve Rosenbaum, Magnify.net

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[Start of Audio]

When you go to Magnify.net it basically says do you have an existing page or do you want to start from scratch. So in this case you say I have an existing page and the set up is three quick pages. You give it the current URL and then you can create a header and footer to match yours. So we’ll mirror your CSS style page; so we’ll match colors, header, footer. The idea is that from your home page you should be able to click on videos and go to a basically identical environment that looks and feels like nobody’s left Beat TV or whatever the site it. Our goal is to be the daughter pages behind your home page that’s your video experience.

Magnify is not a destination so must of our sites you’re gonna reach by going first to a page and then looking at our video. So let’s go to Sailnet because Sailnet is actually a good way to see how Magnify works. Sailnet.com. Okay. So now we’re on Sailnet and you see that the URL is Sailnet.com. Not our site. Over here you see in their right hand column there’s a bunch of videos and it’s rotating and it says Magnify Video and there’s a whole series of videos. This is feeding off our server so we’re basically providing them with a video service on their home page, above the fold. If you go and you click on any one of these videos, we’ll click on this one here, it’s a pretty one, in you go and you’re now in the same domain, same space, same colors, same look, same feel but the only difference is you’re now being served off the Magnify server and you’re seeing a video that we’re feeding. It makes you wonder; the thing about this is you look at this and think how could there have not been video on Sailnet for us? And why did this person make this video and put it on UTube and what did they expect would happen? Well the answer is that other sailors would see it. It’s gorgeous.

Now there’s a whole series of tools that we offer you. So search, play list, ranking and voting, email a friend, all the things you’d expect in a video community to organize, share and promote videos. And it’s pretty seamless. I’d have to say is the nicest thing we get – we have a very big, open community of developers and so we have a discussion board and we get all these – “You guys are amazing. This is so cool.” “How come you’re doing this for free?” And the answer is we don’t think that we’re doing anything for free. We think we’re part of the emerging video ecosystem on the web.

Let’s go ahead and look at a New York favorite. Let’s – we’ll go back to the home page and then we’ll search on NYHH.magnify.net. NYHH is the New York Hamster House. This is – can’t make this stuff up – this is a woman in New York who specifically works to rescue abandoned hamsters from families that don’t want to care for them anymore and then it helps them be adopted. And she told us that video helps people decide they want to adopt a hamster. Here’s her videos on our blog. If you click on that you’re now on her video site. And this is the ever popular dwarf hamster.

So what Magnify basically says is we live between the destination sites and your site. We help you organize and gather, we’ll help you make revenue and we’ll share the revenue with the publisher. And we’ll also share the revenue with the destination site that’s providing the video.

[End of Audio]

Magnify.net, Video Aggregates, Online Video

Too Many Marketers are Jumping into Viral Video, AdvertisingAge EIC Scott Donaton Declares

Scott Donaton, AdvertisingAge

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[Start of Audio]

Marketers have really jumped into this viral video thing, and that’s good and that’s bad, and it’s good because I think that it’s very important right now with all of these new options, new ways that people can go to market; that companies experiment.

So on the one hand, I’m very much in favor of get out there; try something new. Don’t sit around waiting for the metrics to catch up or the standards to be set. You have to just sort of – if you sit still here, somebody else is gonna basically take it away from you.

On the other hand, this is like any form of marketing communication; if you’re gonna get involved and if you’re an advertiser and you wanna do viral video, have an idea, have a strategy, have a sense of where this actually sits and why you’re doing it.

I think, too often, advertisers fall into this mindset – I call it “get me one of those,” where the boss basically says – the CEO says to the CMO; the CMO says to the agency, “Get me a viral video,” and you go, “Okay, why?” “I don’t know; because everybody else has one; because my competitor has one; because other people are doing it; because I read about it,” and that’s just not good enough.

And it’s amazing. It sounds like such an over-simplification. I’m sure there are people who will hear that and say, “C’mon, that doesn’t really happen in the business world.” But I’ve had enough people say to me, “It’s absolutely how it happens.” Somebody hears a buzzword. Somebody said to me, “I don’t like my client to go to conferences because they always come back and they want whatever they’ve just heard about.”

And there’s a danger. There have been some really cool things done with viral video and with social networking by some advertisers, things like the Philips Bodygroomer was a really cool idea, the video of the guy sort of talking metaphorically about how this shaves parts of your body that you wouldn’t otherwise think to shave as a man and the Ax Game Killer series has had a lot of traction.

But there are too many marketers right now who are jumping into these spaces without knowing what it is they wanna do, and that is potentially gonna turn away people from the concept of advertiser-supported viral video. I’m not saying don’t experiment. I’m not saying that you might not make mistakes, but I’m saying you need to have an idea behind what you do, even if it turns out to be the wrong idea. You can’t just do these things for the sake of doing them.

[End of Audio]

Viral Video, AdvertisingAge, Scott Donaton

Twyla Tharp Teaches Aging, Stiff Videoblogger how Stay Limber and "Squirm!"

Twyla Tharp

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[Start of Audio]

Twyla Tharp: “-- just easy, Rocking. Not too much. Don’t think you have to accomplish anything. All you have to do is get your body so it hates you a little less. Just roll from side to side on the bottom. Roll back and forth, yet now as you’re doing this stuff, trying to get looser rather than tighter, so easy. Everything has to be easy.”

Andy Plesser: What kind of responses do you give to business people who wanna be more creative, who want to solve their problems? What do you tell them?

Twyla Tharp: Body and mind; this is a very important element to acknowledge that the body does have a kind of control over the quality of the mind’s functioning.

Good. Round is a very good thing when you’re stretching. Round gets to all the joints. Okay, I’m working here at the top of the leg, going up into the knees. I’m working here at the shoulders, and I’m working here at the head and the neck all at the same time, and if you don’t tend to the body on a regular basis, your mind is not going to be contributing everything to your efforts that could be, and that just is a reality. You gotta do it.

And good?

Andy Plesser: That’s great.

Twyla Tharp: Now, you know about Anton balls?

Andy Plesser: No.

Twyla Tharp: Okay. Watch this. You can do as well as a flat – flat as you can do on your side, so you’re getting the side, right? Then you do across this area, so you’re getting here, as well as obviously here, so you’re just rotating 360 degrees around this side and flip over, and this one is nasty; bracing back here, and it’s up from here.

Because the abs are many different sections; it’s not just one band, so you need to do all these different placements, and balls is a really good thing because then, you can reward yourself here, and then you can further reward yourself here.

Andy Plesser: Yeah, a stretch, a little bit of stretch.

Twyla Tharp: So if you don’t have a ball, get a ball and just learn to squirm, okay? This is the discipline of being frail, all right? You got that?

[End of Audio]

Twyla Tharp

Internet High Priestess Esther Dyson Declares: Net Neutrality Debate is a "Muddle" and Two-Tier Internet is Not Necessarily a Bad Thing

Esther Dyson

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[Start of Audio]

Esther Dyson: The biggest problem that net neutrality has is nobody knows what they’re talking about when they talk about it. The issue is who pays and whether they’re monopolies or not, so there’s a whole lot of, I think, disingenuous discussion about control without ever really looking at the fundamental issue, which is somebody’s got to pay for more bandwidth if consumers are gonna be uploading and downloading video.

Some people say, “Well, we want to sell advertising and control the channel, and; therefore, we’re gonna be able to tell consumers they can get it cheap or free and become the good guys,” but we do that, basically, by limiting their access.

As long as there’s healthy competition, I have no problem if someone pays extra for additional bandwidth, as long as that doesn’t cut off people’s access to the other stuff. The challenge is when you have – especially when you have local cable companies who are going to limit people’s access, the same way the cell phone companies will give you sort of their platform without letting you get to the rest of the web.

That’s when you have a problem, but net neutrality basically means whatever you want it to mean. For example, AT&T just signed an agreement that they would basically – they said, “We’ll observe these principles of net neutrality for everything except Internet TV,” which, of course, is what the net neutrality battle is all about.

So it was a kind of useless exemption. It’s like saying I’ll be good every day except for days when I wear red, and then you wear red on the days you wanna be bad.

Andy Plesser: It’s streaming and downloading video that’s really the big – and uploading video is the big issue around this whole bandwidth and net neutrality discussion?

Esther Dyson: The issue around bandwidth and net neutrality is simply can you control what users see, pay for it through advertising, and then tell the users you’re giving – they’re getting it for free without allowing them the ability to pay for what they actually want.

And so there’s this disingenuous discussion of if you don’t allow us to pay extra, you’re not gonna get free content. Well, of course not, but let the consumer decide whether they want paid or subsidized.

Andy Plesser: Where do you think the legislation might go and the impact that it could have? Do you think about that?

Esther Dyson: I think we’ll muddle through. Really, what will happen is if anything’s too egregious, we’ll sort of stop it eventually, but yeah, companies will throw their weight around, and it’ll – they have a lot of lobbyists and a lot of money.

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Esther Dyson, Net neutrality