john bollwitt blog

When we were in Kansas City last week, the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics started. During our time there, every TV we were around seemed to be tuned into the games. Pretty much everyone was talking about the opening ceremonies, and my family nearly dropped everything to find a TV to watch the amazing show they put on to kick off the games.

Photo credit: Kris Krug on Flickr

Quite honestly, I love the Olympics. Winter or summer, I get glued to anything and everything. I think it basically comes down to the competition of the world’s best, and it only happens every four years. I really dig that. Well, maybe not curling just yet (maybe Vancouver 2010 will change that), but the rest of it is pretty cool.

In various hotel rooms and living rooms of my relatives, it was NBC, MSNBC, and USA Network to flip between and feed the need. According to my brother, who is very into digital satellite and HD, he had access to a few more extra channels of continuous Olympics coverage, but that’s extra that you have to pay compared to this standard trio of channels that most cable TV subscribers get.

Being on vacation, I can’t complain about the coverage too much because we were on a trip to see my family and enjoy KCMO. Still, when we could, we caught what we could of the games, whatever events were being shown. Combined with some incredible coverage by our Raincity Studio pals Kris Krug and Robert Scales, renowned new media gurus on the ground in Beijing, we were keeping up just fine and dandy.

Photo credit: Kris Krug on Flickr

Come back to Vancouver, and the scope of coverage changes dramatically on TV. Of course, it’s all CBC back in Canada, but the amount of coverage and the way they do it is significantly better. (Hint: get proxy access and watch their streaming coverage)

On the CBC, you do see more events that you probably wouldn’t see on NBC’s coverage, and a lot of that is due to the precedence that comes from showing as much U.S. athletes as possible. If there is a game of beach volleyball between two countries in an elimination round and one of them isn’t the U.S., you’re probably not going to see it unless it’s for a medal. You’ll get highlights, but you probably didn’t get to watch China take out Austria today like we did on CBC. You might get the highlights though.

Do I care about any of those teams? Not really, but it was a good match, regardless of how bad the Austrians played. Oh man, and it was really bad.

One thing we have access to back in Vancouver is a NBC affiliate in Detroit and Seattle, giving us both east and west coast coverage. Basically, all of the “live” coverage that the east coast gets is mostly prerecorded live and run in prime time. That makes sense because NBC wants to maximize their audience (which mostly means maximize profits so they can jack up the prices to advertisers who run their commercials during those events at the most inconvenient time).

On the other hand, CBC seems to be running as much as they can in real time. East coast runs the desk in Beijing until it’s time for the west coast prime time to kick in. They’re subtle about stuff that is tape delayed, but they hardly call it “live”.

Ron McLean has even been up front about some airing of events being tape delayed. I’m fine with that. There are so many events, there is no way that you can show everything all at once. Even at work I’ve turned on Radio-Canada in the background just so I can see the events. I don’t understand a lick of French, but they run a lot through the day to give me my fix, much of it being repeated over and over until Toronto kicks back in with English.

Duane shared this post with me, and I’m glad that I’m not the only one feeling this. To say that Russell Beattie is somewhat upset with NBC’s coverage is slightly understated, and he goes on to point out numerous reasons that makes a lot of sense to me in hindsight, especially in comparison with the coverage I see on CBC now.

The absolute blind rage I’m experiencing trying to view the Olympics is going to give me a fucking embolism. I was already prepared for the worst from NBC, who have fucked up the last 3 Olympic games coverage, but I honestly couldn’t have imagined how evil and extortionary they have become. [russellbeattie]

I’m not going to say that what NBC has done so far with these games is wrong, right, better, or worse, but once you are able to get away from it, you have to wonder about how much better it could be done.

Since everything is shown in the evening prime time, there is no stopping everything in the middle of your work day to watch some amazing, breath stopping event. There is no cohesion with the world in being in that one, true moment of greatness. This does not represent the “one world” notion that the Olympics is meant to be.

We watched Michael Phelps win his 8th gold medal when it happened. It wasn’t shown on the west coast feed on NBC until four hours later. We saw highlights from the end of the womens marathon on CBC just a few hours after it was over, but we were able to watch the end of it “live” nearly five hours later on NBC.

I’m not sure how you change it, but there is something being lost by the way NBC is conducting their control over how the U.S. gets Olympic coverage. I’m not sure that many Americans even know it.

This is pretty wicked. Found this via Robert Scoble who found it via Jakob Lodwick, and what we have here is an incredible video that was put together by Tom Guilmette who is not only an avid video enthusiast, but his day job is being a camera man in the outfield at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox.

This short video is a small tour of the camera he uses to do his job, and the camera he used to make this video blog of sorts isn’t anything to sneeze at as well.

I would love to be able to do something like this with my day job, but in all honestly, radio is not as pretty and it sounds. No seriously, it sounds way better than what it technically takes to make radio happen.

CityTV in Toronto had a great story. Burglar gets caught in the act by home owner, attempts to get away by leaping off balcony, busts his leg, and someone snaps pictures of the poor sap while he lays on the ground as cops are called and arrive to the scene. What avid Flickr user Joel Charlebois did with the photos afterward is the real story.

When CityTV heard him mention that he was going to post the photos to Flickr, they not only checked them out but used them in a news story. Problem is, there was no mention of the person who took the images. This is also known as a violation of copyright. As any good Flickr user and avid photographer will tell you (like Duane did on his blog post on this same topic), you protect the things you love. Yes, you can protect your photos on Flickr with a copyright, and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council agreed with the complaint brought against CityTV.

Charlebois, displeased, took his case to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC), and today, nine months after the complaint was filed, a majority of the National Specialty Services Panel found that City’s broadcast did indeed violate the Association of Electronic Journalists of Canada’s RTNDA Code of (Journalistic) Ethics, which states that “Plagiarism is unacceptable. Broadcast journalists will strive to honour the intellectual property of others, including video and audio materials.” (The full decision is here.) The panel took particular issue with the lack of credit to Charlebois, stating that “the broadcaster knew full well the identity of the photographer whose still shots were used in the news report,” an omission that they deemed unfair, for news reporting or otherwise. (They note that the American RTNDA states that “professional electronic journalists should…clearly disclose the origin of information and label all material provided by outsiders.”)

As a result, City must issue a rare on-air statement at least twice, during prime time, over the next ten days. That statement will follow a script set by the CBSC, stating that, in part, the news organization breached the aforementioned Code of Ethics and “included three still photographs of the injured burglar without providing any credit to the photographer, whose identity was known to the broadcaster. By failing to provide that accreditation, the broadcaster has failed to honour the intellectual property rights of the photographer.” [torontoist]

What is important to me on this story is that intellectual property was protected as it should be, no matter how it is being utilized. On top of that, it gives comfort to know that mainstream media will be held accountable for violations of copyrighted material. It’s not a full safety net, but that means that even the little guy stands a chance against big media companies when it comes to protecting your content.

Even Charlebois admits in the story that all he was really concerned about was the proper accreditation, not the punishment handed down to CityTV. I think it’s interesting to note that there is very little discussion of fines or compensation.

Rebecca left this morning for a whirlwind weekend in Toronto and an appearance on CBC’s Test The Nation television program. She got the call a few weeks ago to participate on the team of bloggers, going up against other groups like taxi drivers and celebrity lookalikes, to see who knows their trivia better. Viewers can also participate to see how they measure up.

The program airs live on CBC, January 20th at 8PM. Of course, it will actually live for the east coast, and then we’ll get the tape delayed version here in Vancouver. We don’t have access to an east coast feed, so I’ll have to wait for the pacific time airing, unless someone out east puts it up on bittorrent right after it airs, wink wink nudge nudge.

Going to the CBC’s website for the event, the picture that represents the bloggers team is laughable. How much more slarm can you cram into that generic, over-stereotyped photo?

For the love of god, CBC, get someone like Kris Krug to shoot you some real photos and ditch the bubblegum sets for these things. Seriously, it looks like a promo shot for a new CBC television show, Blogger Force 5!

And what the hell are they all looking at?

I have full trust that Rebecca is going to rock this thing. She is always kicking my butt in anything trivia or Scrabble related, plus she’s basically taught me everything I’ve come to know about Vancouver to Canada in general. She puts up with my stupid questions by knowing everything I don’t, but it goes both ways when it comes to various topics pertaining to the U.S.

Photo credit: gusgreeper on Flickr

While hanging out at Muffin’s house last Tuesday, I finally broke down and tried my hand at Guitar Hero[wiki]. Yes, it was the first edition of the game, but the bigger point is that I’ve tried my hand at this thing that has seemed to grip the gaming nation. I’ve been suckered into the Mario Kart[wiki] realms in the past and watched the disturbing rise of Dance Dance Revolution[wiki].

The Adam and Corinna are big GH fans, and I’ve never mustered up the extreme interest in picking up an axe and trying my hand at the game. The game looks and sounds like fun, but it never stuck me as something I really wanted to try. Stick me in front of a gaming console with a hockey game of some sort and you might have me asking for a try, even though I’ll have no clue how to play.

So, I’ve finally tried it. I had already thought that by knowing how to play bass and a little guitar would cause some conflict, and that was slightly the case. There is something to be said about having rhythm, and then it’s another story when you have to hit the right buttons when the game calls for it. To me, that’s more timing than the groove you kinda get when you are jamming on your guitar or bass. It kinda threw me at first, but I adjusted.

However, did you catch the recent episode of South Park about Guitar Hero? The part where they say something to the effect that it would be amazing what these kids could do if they spent all that time and energy learning how to actually play guitar versus playing a video game where they pretend. Made me laugh pretty hard.

And then Randy where he plays the game in his underwear. That was hilarious, but happened to me on the second time I tried my hand at the game, even on easy level. Of course, I wasn’t nearly naked when I did it, but maybe I should try that and see if I improve. Maybe it will make me man enough to tackle GH two or three now.

The beautiful thing about BitTorrent[wiki] is that it allows us to pretend that we have a DVR. Well, in Vancouver, they are known as PVR, but it’s that digital video box that is so much sweeter than what a VCR ever was or can be.

Anyhow, on one of the many sites that I watch for the latest torrents that I want to grab, something popped up that caught my eye. It said “Finland” and “hockey” somewhere in the title, and there was also a “vs” in it as well. I’ve heard a lot about the Swedish, Finnish, and Swiss leagues that NHL players jump ship to play in, so I thought I would download it to see what it was.

Sure enough, it was a Finnish league hockey game, and the broadcast was entirely in the native language. HD, widescreen format with sound that had some killer, stereo quality sound. Who ever did this rip, did it with passion, and the broadcast wasn’t half that bad either.

I didn’t get a chance to watch the whole game because I was going through the collection of stuff that has been accumulating for us to watch prior to recording the latest episode of The Crazy Canucks last night. I actually needed to help free up space on my hard drive, so I parsed through it rather quick. That’s not to say that I wasn’t able to make a few observations, if not get a feel for how the game went.

First and foremost, the amount of logos on the jerseys of the players should make any NHL fan rejoice that we don’t have to endure such blatant advertising. The arena wasn’t the biggest, but the home team made quite the noise when the home team scored. I think they were the ones in the blue and orange uniforms, but I don’t really know if they were SaiPa[wiki] or Tappara[wiki].

Checking into those Wikis, there are a couple of players on these respective teams from B.C. and Minnesota. Some good ol’ North American hockey kids, dontcha’ know, eh?

Both of these teams, finding this information out while writing this post, are in the SM-liiga[wiki] in Finland. Interestingly enough, this league is regarded in Europe the same way that the NHL is thought of in North America. Playing at this level is nothing to scoff at, and watching some of the action is evidence of that. International rules or not, these guys can play.

So Tappara won, and I think I’m pretty confident that they are the guys in those blue and orange uniforms, but now I’m second guessing myself and saying that the home rink was that of the guys in yellow and black. Or was it yellow and blue?

I don’t understand a lick of Finnish, so there is no way I can say for certain as to who was who, but 4-2 was the final score, Tappara was the winner. The guys in orange and blue. At least our numerics cross language boundaries.

Thank you, mysterious Finnish league hockey fan, for taking the time to put this out there for me to discover. Like I said, I’ve only heard about these leagues but never have had the chance to really get any exposure to it. On top of that, the announcers are fun to listen to, even if you can’t understand the language. Granted that it’s no Mexican league futbol match in terms of the quality and entertaining play-by-play, but these folks get just as excited.

I mentioned it in the recent episode of The Crazy Canucks, but the NHL should really do more with the technology of bittorrent. I’m not the first one to promote or come up with the idea, but it just might help grow exposure to the league if you make games available like this as soon as they are complete. Posting games to Google Video three days after they happen is… well… hmm, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, they’re easy to forget about.

Finland, you’ve got some good stuff over there. You make me want to come visit the home of Sami Salo[wiki] and stay for the hockey.

Hold on to your hats, the Canucks are coming to a big screen near you.

Forget Hockey Night in Canada, how about Hockey Night on the big screen? Cineplex Entertainment is bringing back Canucks pay-per-view games as a regular feature in select theatres across BC.

The idea was first tried out last year, and Cineplex says it’s been successful enough to warrant a sequel. The next “big screen” game is on Sunday, when the boys take on the Blue Jackets. [news1130]

As incredibly cool and nonintoxicating as that sounds, why would you want to watch a standard definition broadcast of a hockey game on a huge screen? Changes are coming to Canucks Pay-Per-View, but it’s still the same, over priced dribble that we have watched for the past two seasons. It could be longer than that, but I haven’t watched it for that long.

Come on, PPV people! I get that we don’t have to watch commercials, but what else do we get besides that? John Shorthouse and Tom Larschied? Yeah, that’s cool, but there could be a whole lot more.

Dare I say it, but TSN does some cool stuff by having their guys down on ice level, smack dab in between the benches. Or how about cameras on ice level? Give me a Fin cam or something more than just your standard Sportsnet broadcast with static cameras.

It’s not about being flashy or bells and whistles. I’m just saying that you could make a lot more money if people really got primo content from PPV. I don’t mind visiting our friends on the north shore to watch the game on their huge DLP TV, but if we couldn’t make it over, we’d live with listening to the radio.

The green graphics and the in between period set where Dan Murphy hangs out is nice, but that’s it? Should have spent more money on going HD, and that’s a whole other gripe.

A lot of the people that I have been talking to about the new Transformers[imdb] movie have often been very excited about it, but many of them follow up with saying that they were never a fan of the original cartoon series. You know, “back in the day”?

I’m starting to wonder a couple of things. Is it too nerdy or geeky to admit that you watched this as a kid? On the other hand, was I just paying attention at the right age to let it take affect? Somewhere in my parent’s house, I still have a variety of Autobots[wiki] and Decepticons[wiki], some with more missing parts and pieces than others. I’m not afraid of saying that I loved the series growing up.

Ahead of seeing a killer futbol match this past Saturday, Rebecca and I caught the flick with Duane, John, and Travis downtown in a surprisingly half-full theatre. That only strikes me based on the $67.6 million that it took in over the weekend, and I’m ok with helping support that.

Bottom line, good movie. I was highly entertained, and that is always what I asked for in any movie that I watch.

What you want to know is if it does justice to what I remember as a kid, right? Well, it doesn’t, and I didn’t expect it to. There certainly is some homage to my oh so found memories of waking up very early on Saturday mornings to patiently wait through Jem[wiki] in order to hear that sweet theme song come on(this is prior to cable, and there wasn’t anything else to watch on the other three channels). I was once scolded in kindergarten for humming the tune far too loud for my teacher’s liking. If you think that’s bad, I had a fellow classmate in second grade who thought he really was a Transformer. When asked to transform, he always gave the excuse that there wasn’t enough room for him to do it.

Still the effects are outstanding. When you see Optimus Prime[wiki] for the first time, you can’t help but get a slight smile on your face. Then his voice kicks in, and I was instantly transported to those pre-sunrise hours of my childhood. Strange how Peter Cullen[wiki] can do that nearly twenty years later.

I’m still upset that Bumblebee[wiki] isn’t a Volkswagen Beetle, but there is subtle homage to his original identity when he first makes an appearance. Jazz[wiki] was pretty spot on with his character, and there is a lot to the robots’ characters that reflect back to the cartoon series to keep things old school while getting an updated, Hollywood remake done to it.

It’s true that there are some plot line issues, and some details kinda skip along like a rock across water. Welcome to the world of summer blockbusters, and this is exactly what I expected going in. I wouldn’t say that my hopes were low, but there was a lot of satisfaction by what I experienced. I say that by taking it for what the movie was, not over thinking about the series I grew up with.

I must admit, Live Earth was pretty cool, at least from what I saw. The basic, overall message seems to be in dispute, but the performances that I did catch were pretty amusing. Metallica got me to stay put, Spinal Tap was cool, the snip of the Beastie Boys left me wanting more, and Wolfmother in Sydney made me wish we had saw them in Vancouver.

We had a busy weekend, so there wasn’t much time to watch a lot of the performances. The awareness ads that ran during the commercial breaks were amusing, but it left me with a sense of people being apart of something to get their “big names” plastered into a world event. That’s not to say that the messages weren’t worthwhile, but Will Farrel or that one dude from those American Pie movies isn’t a name at the top of the list when I think about conserving energy and/or saving the environment.

With hope, Live Earth did what it was intended to do. In this MTV culture, the true test will see how well it sticks, no matter how successful it might have been.

Live Earth events drew more than 10 million online viewers Saturday, the most ever to simultaneously watch a concert broadcast over the Internet, according to Microsoft.

The concerts were beamed live from venues in or near New York, London, Hamburg, and several other major cities around the world over Microsoft’s MSN network. As of 3 p.m. Saturday, MSN had delivered more than 10 million video streams, the company said. [informationweek]

Even I will admit that I watched, and wanted to watch more, because of the musical acts. That’s not to say that I’m already contemplating the issues they were talking about on a near daily basis, but it’s totally the rock and roll that kept me coming back for more. Cameron Diaz talking about being one of the first actors in Hollywood to buy a hybrid car? I could kinda care less.

Going along with the 7-11 and Kwik-E-Mart post from earlier, Rebecca turned us into Simpsons characters.

Everyone’s doing it, and you can go to The Simpsons Movie website to do it, too.

I know that I am completely behind on the hype, but in case you missed it, here is something completely worth noting. Rebecca and John Biehler have both been to and posted pictures of the smartest pieces of marketing that I have seen in a long time, if not the most brilliant.

Photo credit: Miss604 on Flickr

Around the world, 7-11 has turned a selection of their stores into “Kwik-E-Marts” in anticipation of the upcoming Simpsons movie on July 27th.

Over the weekend, 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores of “The Simpsons” fame, in the latest example of marketers making life imitate art.

Those stores and most of the 6,000-plus other 7-Elevens in North America will sell items that until now existed only on television: Buzz Cola, KrustyO’s cereal and Squishees, the slushy drink knockoff of Slurpees. [yahoo]

Dan Lilly has a great series of pictures on Flickr, and I had a chance to talk to him the other day about it. He had a good point. There are numerous cities, around the world, that have one of these. New York, Chicago, Dallas, etc. All these large cities, and the one in Canada ends up in Coquitlam.

Photo credit: zonaboy on Flickr

Buh? I have a hard enough time teaching some of my American friends that I live in Vancouver, not to mention that I live nowhere near Toronto or the frozen north. Perhaps this was a matter of the location meeting the requirements needed to make it look like an Apu-run Kwik-E-Mart, but the trek to get there is something many, hardcore fans are doing.

I’ve heard reports of people sticking to the floor around the “squishee” machine being worse than any movie theatre that they have ever been in, and there are 7-11’s in the downtown area selling plenty of merchandise to buy Matt Groening[wiki] another yacht yet.

Just to help celebrate being two episodes into season four of Rescue Me. Well, at least if you’re in the states. And if you’re a Rescue Me fan, you’ll enjoy the full version of this track, not just the abbreviated-opening-sequence-edit of this awesome Von Bondies track.

I get a ton of hits from people searching for the details of Rescue Me and when it will be on Showcase in Canada. Chances are, you won’t see the first episodes of season four hitting the screen until the end of the season currently running in the states. That means July or August before that happens, but you might be surprised. If anyone has more details, feel free to post the news in the comments.

Update: Thanks to a comment from the folks at the Showcase Blog, which you can find out more on their blog post here, the fourth season of Rescue Me will premiere in Canada on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007.