I just spent the last hour looking thru the online NPB schedule archive and text messages to friends to identify this July 16 game as the Eagles game I found most distinctly memorable in 2011.
This appears to be the subscription site for the Pacific League. According to this post at Yakyubaka.com, the approximate cost for an all pass in 2010 was $80 for the season.
While the TOS noted the service was restricted to residents of Japan, commenters noted that the streams were not region-restricted.
No info on online DVR-like functionality.
I would really like an app similar to the MLB.tv and MiLB.tv apps, moreso than watching the content on a computer. I mean, I have a Mac Mini connected to our TV so it’s not that big a deal to play content to the tube via the computer, but generally last year I watched more games on my phone via justin.tv, both NBP and MLB, than I did via my actual paid subscription to MLB.tv.
So my actual use case for baseball programming is live Mariners ball and time-delayed Japanese ball to my handheld devices and my computer, but not to my TV, unless by paying for it on my TV I can get it on my devices, without going as far as getting a cable or satellite service provider.
I am obviously aware that this specific use case with regard to MLB is exactly what the blackout rules are designed to prevent, that is, MLB is treating the cable provider as the primary customer rather than the viewer. I kinda suspect the in-Japan restriction in the NPB TOS, which did not have teeth at rollout in 2010, is a reflection of NPB respecting MLB’s desire to maintain a pro ball media monopoly in the US.
Which, whatever, I would pay MLB for the NPB content, just as I did for the minor league content last year. I turned out to never really watch the minor league stuff though. Well, who knows. I would assume that the media team at MLB have a number of other overseas leagues to consider for app-based deployment and although the Japanese games would probably be the easiest to get content for they might not have the largest potential audience.
A couple years old, but here is a rundown on computer-oriented Japanese TV remote access options.
Update from October 2011 regarding iOS viability. Looks like a subset of Japanese broadcasters publish rtsp:// streams.
The site is emphatically not about baseball though, so I am somewhat dubious if the various yakyu providers expose their programming in such a manner. It would be really cool if they did, though. One thing I noticed last year was that sometimes there were multiple competing broadcasts of the same game, and the relay originator would switch between them occasionally, like if an ad came on.
One of these channels appeared to specialize in non-commented broadcasts, so that the game would play without any narration or commentary, just with the sound of the park and the game itself. I really liked that.
It seems like someone this year mentioned that that may be an option on HD sports broadcasts in general, a setting that the viewer can select.
I hear it may be the calm between the storms, but the weather today was great.
I have come to the conclusion that in addition to the Find my iPhone apps (for the phones, Macs, and iPads) a bolt-on which enables similar functionality, but for a much smaller area, would be great.
Something like Find the Coat I Left My iPhone In, or Find the Room I Left My iPad In, or Locate My iPhone in This Car.
A couple links to critical material on Norrell & Strange:
Cynn Corvus, a series of personal essays on the book, essentially an enthusiastic and literate reader’s reflections, basically an internal monologue, on the book. Includes an essay on Clarke’s short stories as well, which I skipped in order to permit me to read them fresh when I pick up the book.
Corvus fails to tease out the intended etymology of d’Uskglass but effectively disembowels the stated heritage of the name.
Crooked Timber’s online “seminar,” conducted with the participation of Ms. Clarke in late November 2005.
Update to my posts of a week or two ago.
In the interim of buying a new set of the original Epic run on eBay and the new copies arriving, I, of course, found the missing box of comics that contained the original copies. It turns out I had not picked up one of the original issues when I was a kid, and it was one of the issues that was expanded for the new collection.
I think it’s a good idea for me to review the original incarnations soon.
Bill, Lindsey, adamdelved: just now had the presence of mind to check the comments queue. Sorry for the tardy followup. Lovely to hear from you. With luck, MT will let you post comments directly now.
Crazy genius. Via esinclai.
Despite this, I’ll keep hoping for a BBEdit analog or spinoff. I could never work on code on the iPad; the cut and paste and type UI implementation (especially the automangle) drive me nuts every single day and underlie much of my current frustration with walled gardens in general. Apple may have done much, much better than everyone else but there is so much so, so wrong with the UI in iOS that I spend every minute I use it to create textual content in a state of mild ragey perplexity.
Well, not every minute.
Spent half the day helping Viv look online for a specific pair of boots we’d seen at a local boutique with limited stock - none in her size. The designer’s hq is (or possibly was) in New York and the website is downish - that is to say, the URL resolves but a permissions error protects the content from the rabble of the web.
The specific design feature of the boots was the stitched duck-style rubber sole and welt beneath a very high quality soft midcalf leather upper. It was witty, attractive and well made.
The inadvertent result of spending so much time looking for the boot is the realization of what a terrible mess women’s wearable product marketing is online. I totally expected that there would probably be multiple manufacturers providing duck-sole, leather upper semi-dress boots, but in fact, there are only a very few, and most of them extend the rubber to the entire foot area, joining the non-rubber upper at the ankle, as does the traditional duck shoe.
I also expected that the individual construction features of the shoe - such as sole material or construction style, upper construction material, and so forth - would be in well-defined taxonomies, such that a direct narrowing process would allow me to immediately view the range of products that fit my needs.
I am reasonably confident that the women in my readership are laughing heartily. No retailer, not one, provided a reasonable multilevel features-based taxonomy to narrow selection. At best I could narrow to “boots, women, leather” or “rubber.” The over-narrowing of materials also forced retailers to list inappropriate items, so that a “leather boots” search would include rubber and pleather.
The intentional obfuscation of available choices is a hallmark both of traditional physical retail sales and the earliest efforts to practice online sales. Over the past ten years, thanks primarily to Google and to a lesser extent Amazon (by design) and eBay (despite itself), many areas of online retail now rest firmly on a foundation of immediate and direct consumer transparency and features narrowing.
However, this is changing. Facebook and Apple are at the heart of the problem.
The success of Apple’s restricted-market App store, which nearly entirely eschews feature narrowing and which is carefully content and function vetted to protect Apple-held areas of interest, clearly demonstrates that consumers remain ready to spend large amounts of money despite the lack of these crucial sales tools. The net result, consumer expenditure in an information impoverished environment, guarantees a higher per-unit price point, just as it traditionally has in auto sales.
Facebook emulates this by creating a socially-fulfilling environment which goes to great lengths to prevent the introduction of interesting online content which is best consumed outside of Facebook. The end result is that while
larger and larger numbers of people are engaging in social interaction online, fewer and fewer of them are experiencing a range of online environments. This means that the newer online consumer has a weaker grasp of online tools to determine what the range of choices may be with regard to any given online interaction, including purchasing decisions.
Over the past six months, Google has been acting aggressively to combat the perceived threat that Facebook poses to their advertising revenue. Unfortunately, rather than seeking to disrupt the appealing, information-impoverished environment of Facebook or the App Store, Google has been reactively seeking to emulate these organizations’ user-herding strategies.
I strongly suspect that the partial progress in place in Amazon and eBay to increase transparency to the purchaser will be eroded over time as these organizations seek in turn to emulate Google in its’ disheartening turn toward user captivity. Each site, of course, already has a powerful incentive to keep the casual site visitor within the domain as long as possible. I would guess that the primary vehicle each site will employ is some method of user rewards in exchange for specific partner merchant purchases.
The end result of this will be to diminish, to some extent, the long-term shift toward online shopping, while at the same time increasing margins only for the largest merchants. And it will keep the process of shopping for women’s boots online a fruitless nightmare.
Of course, the resolution to this would appear to be someone taking up the originating mantle of Google’s commitment to radical, disruptive transparency in search. It’s not impossible that Microsoft or Amazon could actually adopt this orientation, in my opinion. It is awfully unlikely that Microsoft would do so, however, simply because their most profitable products rely on obfuscated pricing schemes. Amazon might possibly adopt some of the strategy, though. The company deliberately encourages internal competition and the most prized metric is gross income. Transparency in marketing and pricing benefits grosses but can squeeze profit margins; Amazon has been steadily working toward a business model that shifts the margin problem to third parties while still growing the grosses at a healthy clip. So there is a strong incentive within the company to target this turn toward information poverty in managing the online audience.
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This week’s snow and ice seems to have done for an arbor vitae in our yard. I will have to wait until it dries out a bit to cut it down and chop it up. The only other casualties of the weather on the property seem to be an improbably long-lived wolfsbane and, inexplicably, a porch light, which failed at first freeze, well before any snow, ice, or rain.
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