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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

James Cameron coming to NAB...Apple links up with your TV


- James Cameron will be one of the big draws at April's NAB conference in Vegas. He'll be giving a keynote address, and also sitting down with NATO president John Fithian for a dialogue, according to this release. It includes these two never-uttered quotes from Cameron and Fithian:

    “Digital cinema and 3D open the door for filmmakers to mine completely new creative territory,” said Cameron. “It’s up to exhibitors, now, to adopt these new technologies on the display side, so that audiences have a reason to seek out the cinema and leave their computer and flat screen TVs.”


    Fithian explained, “After years of hard work on technical specifications, equipment development and business modeling, the cinema industry stands at the dawn of the biggest technological revolution since the advent of sound.
    Digital cinema starts right now, in the year 2006, and it couldn't come at a more important time."


- Apple's latest Mac Mini computer, unveiled today, has a remote control, Apple's FrontRow software, and can be connected to a TV. [Prior sentence was corrected, thanks to a reader's comment.] It can also find other content on your wireless network, so you can watch videos stored on your machine in the den, for example. (Say, "Desperate Housewives" episode you bought from the iTunes Music Store for your video iPod.) The lowest-price Mini is $599. (For Apple, that's practically free.)

2 Comments:

  • The Mac mini has always been able to connect to a TV, whats new is that they've included front row on it so you can use a remote to control it instead of hunkering down on the floor and using the mouse. Also new is an optical audio out for digital audio and surround sound.

    I was kind of glazing over Cameron and Lucas' statements about shooting digital 3D as just more and bigger spectacle from the masters of empty spectacle... but this last Cameron quote really hit me. This is a really positive reaction to the way media is changing. Instead of trying to force people to go to movies or dumping a half an hour of commercials on the few who do, or sending people to jail for sharing easily sharable media, this is the sane reaction. Offer people something novel that they can't get at home. And as gee-whiz as 3D sounds, I bet you could do some really cool stuff with it.

    By Blogger Wiley, at 8:28 PM  

  • Wow, let me revise that... it looks like they changed the DVI out on the Mac Mini so that it will actually work with HDTV's... that's pretty huge.. Whether the built in graphics hardware is capable of handling most HD content other than H.264 is unknown though... regardless, that's pretty cool.

    By Blogger Wiley, at 1:05 PM  

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