According to this Wall Street Journal article, popular cable networks, including HBO, ESPN and MTV are streamed over the Internet in China, much to the consternation of the network owners. A basketball game featuring Yao Ming was streamed over a Chinese P2P network called Coolstreaming, and garnered 50,000 viewers.
While most of the networks are in Chinese, some, including the popular U.S. channels, are in English with Chinese subtitles. Moreover, some of the streamed channels are gaining a European audience.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:47 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
An amazing development reported by Wired’s Joel Johnson: the employees of a web hosting and co-location center called Zipa are still in their offices in downtown New Orleans and are blogging away and streaming live video of the city center over the web. Zipa’s data center still operates, powered by a 750-kilowatt diesel generator.
Employees of Zipa are still in their offices and an employee of Zipa’s sister company, DirectNIC, is blogging from the office building and transmitting webcam video of the city. The employee, Michael Barnett, checks the building’s perimeter every morning for security threats and then gets on the computer to blog. Another employee, named Sigmund Solares, has taken dozens of photographs, and the video camera goes everywhere. Two other employees, one named Crystal and the other Donnie, have duties as well.
One recent entry by Michael Barnett:
We won’t quit, I promise you. We’re expecting today (Friday) to be our most physically demanding day so far. Sig and I will be pushing 18 fity-five gallon drums of diesel up a steep parking garage incline to the 9th floor generator.
Here’s part of an interoffice memo sent by Sigmund Solares yesterday:
Intercosmos Media Group, Inc., (dba directNIC.com) is going to pay all employees hourly and salaried this pay period the same exact amount as last pay period. Unfortunately, we have been unable reach anyone in accounting who has handled payroll in the past and we have not heard anything about them.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:02 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
CNET’s Blogma has a nice item today that underscores the rise of citizen journalism in times of disaster. Hurricane Katrina and the unbelievable catastrophe in New Orleans makes it clear that citizen journalism plays a vital role in times of trouble.
Years from now, if not months, we may look back at this as a defining moment for the rise of citizen journalism. It is just unfortunate that catastrophic events would be the reason behind its mainstream acceptance.
Over at Boing Boing, there’s a plea from the KatrinaHelp wiki for more bandwidth given that the shoestring operations has been flooded by more traffic than it can handle. KatrinaHelp is a central forum for organizing help and for posting requests for information on missing loved ones.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:40 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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