I’m here for meetings this week, training Cartoon Network staff for a project launching later this summer. It is summer as of today (hoo-ah for the solstice), and the weather is lovely. Supposed to become rainy into the weekend, but I’m sure Sam and Amy (who are joining me tomorrow) will have a great time anwyway. Took advantage of the nice evening to walk off dinner (from China Grill) and visit the brand-spanking new Apple store near Central Park. That cube is darn impressive. Coolest thing – 30″ Cinema Display. Lamest thing – no machines running Boot Camp. ‘Still beta” said the hipster store attendant. Come on guys!
Can’t make it to the hinterlands of Tennessee? The good folks from AT&T are showing off their ability to show stuttering video via their high speed networks with a live video webcast of many of the acts from this year’s alt music festival and arts extravaganza happening about 200 miles north of Atlanta. Two of my faves – Ben Folds is on the air at 3pm ET today and Elvis Costello will be up at 6:30pm Saturday – will be featured. Unfortunately, neither Death Cab for Cutie or Radiohead will be streamed from the AT&T site. Link to AT&T’s ‘BlueRoom’ live streaming is here.
This spiffy web app maps the contents of web pages into a tree with different nodes representing various types of page elements – blue for links, red for tables, green for divs, violet for images, yellow for forms, orange for blockquotes or br or p tags, etc. Rather a beautiful construct, don’t ya think. The image at right is of our very own Trotz.com. The creator of this applet also has a rather more estoeric project – onethousandpaintings.com. Yes – pick a number (not previously taken) between one and one-thousand and the artist will paint the number for you on canvas. Unfortunately, the number 42 is already taken, darnit!
Since the February launch of the CNN Enhanced interactive television product, there has been very little trade coverage of what I think is one of the most interesting and widely distributed domestic ITV projects around – it reaches over 11 million Echostar Dish Network households with constantly updated, 24/7 news content. Interactive TV Today,aka [itvt]has just published a lengthy interview with myself and Kevin Cohen, SVP at Turner Broadcasting who was the main sponsor of the project. I worked on this project for over a year before it launched, and I’m quite proud of what it achieves. Here’s my favorite quote from yours truly:
Trotz: At CNN, we try to make practical and logical reuse of things that we create for one medium in others. There are probably several dozen syndicated products that use the feeds from CNN.com–whether those products are on mobile or on other Web sites or are RSS feeds or what-have-you.
We’ve essentially taken that same approach with this new interactive TV application–this approach of repackaging the content that we produce for CNN.com. The site has nearly 25 million unique users per month, and it’s updated every minute of the day. So we want to make that broad array of constantly updated content available to viewers on EchoStar, and–later, hopefully–on various cable platforms. And we want to do this in such a way that it’s accessible while they’re watching our bread-and-butter core product, the CNN US linear network.
![[itvt] on CNN Enhanced](https://trotz.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/cnn_enhanced_tv_echostar.jpg)