Pandora and many other digital music radio businesses have a somewhat analog-style problem: music royalties scale up proportionally, the more people use the service. That makes internet radio services that rely on the standard, government-set rates different from just about any other kind of digital business. If 10 million people pay for your blog, say,…
Hackers, coders, and clever people gathered on a beautiful weekend at Hill Holiday‘s well-appointed, high-rise headquarters in downtown Boston for TVnext Hack, a weekend-long competition to build the neatest television stuff out of a APIs from ESPN, Gracenote, GetGlue, The Echo Nest (which publishes Evolver.fm), Ramp, WatchWith, and Viggle. This being a television hack day, not every app…
Although it was designed to help the people who put music into television shows find more tunes to match the mood of their show, Curation Station, one of the hacks to emerge from TVnext Hack 2013 this weekend, also works just fine as a method for extending your taste from television to music. Simply enter the…
Welcome to part two of our condensed, super-digestible interview with RJ Bentler, vice president of video programming for the influential music tastemaker Pitchfork. The first part of this interview covers the interactive promise of internet-on-the-television. This second (and final) segment concerns Pitchfork’s plans for putting its original video programming directly on the television — an area…
Say what you will about iOS vs. Android or Mac vs. Windows — nobody can deny that Apple’s tight-lipped approach to its widely-anticipated product announcements is a success. Apple creates a vacuum. The rumors fill it. And just like that, everybody’s talking about Apple again. This time, it’s the Apple iWatch — a smart doohickey…
Pitchfork started as site called Turntable when founder Ryan Schreiber was barely out of high school. Now it’s a Spotify app, a “TV” channel, and many other things. We asked Pitchfork vice president of video programming RJ Bentler about the evolution of Pitchfork TV and had a pretty interesting conversation by phone about how video on the internet still…
Someday, I will stop talking about my iPod prediction of 2001 – the one Gizmodo called “the best iPod prediction ever made.” Today is not that day. In that column, I predicted that not only would the iPod be a hit (despite criticism that it was way too expensive among other things), but that the iPod’s…
It’s easy to make fun of CES, as we found out when we announced our excitement at not attending it in 2012. Now, even stalwart, general technology reporters like the New York Times’ David Pogue are getting in on the act, questioning whether we really need to watch a bunch of shiny new hardware unveiled for…
Remember television advertisements — those paid-for messages that whiz past as you fast-forward your DVR, the way you can’t do with online ads? They’re about to get a little less unpleasant. President Barack Obama signed a bill last year barring television advertisers from blasting you with television advertisements that sound significantly louder than whatever show…
One day, we’ll tell our grandkids about the weird old days when we could watch television, but television didn’t watch us. This reality television / televised contest trend does not appear to be the fad some thought it was, back in the early days of ”Real World,” “Survivor,” and “American Idol.” It could get more interesting,…
Television has great potential as the next great music app platform. Today, it took another baby step in that direction, as Rhapsody announced that its $10/month subscribers will be able to extend their unlimited music subscriptions to so-called “smart TVs” made by LG, Panasonic, and Samsung. “Smart” typically means “WiFi-connected.” But as almost every appliance…
Music apps are starting to put up some McDonalds-style numbers. Today brings news that Shazam, the most popular song identification app on a number of platforms, just identified its five billionth song: Pink’s “Blow Me One Last Kiss” (embeddable player courtesy of Tomahawk): This marks a big milestone on a long road for Shazam, which…
Not to toot my own horn, but I’m going to do it anyway, a little bit. If you don’t like it, go listen to 50 years of summer jams or sign up for our Twitters: @evolverfm, @evolverfm_apps, and @evolverfm_news. I have appeared all over the media talking about music apps and other digital music issues, for over a decade,…
The late Steve Jobs told the handpicked scribe of his biography Walter Isaacson that he had figured out “one more thing” — how to unite the world of Apple devices and services with the ubiquitous television. Jobs is no longer with us, but at the AllThingsD conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that television remains…
This is a guest post from midemblog via MIPBlog, which makes us glad — from an “interesting technology” perspective if not a boating perspective — that we cover music apps instead of television apps. While the programmers at this TV Hack Day enjoyed programming on a yacht called the Mojito, their tools were limited by the fact…
