This post comes in the very recent wake of my new iPod touch. It prompted me to pay more attention to my current media consumption methods and it brought light to the question of how to integrate such a unique device into my life.
As I mentioned in a previous post, my life is pretty full and it seems that since we cut out TV from our lives, my consumption of media has become… ’strategic’ for want of a better word. I have to plan for it. Since losing TV, I’m no longer passively just absorbing TV and letting it wash over me like a fog. For better or for worse I now have to seek it out and be very specific about what I watch, how I watch it and when I watch it. For the most part, this post is about visual media (TV shows, movies, video podcasts) and less about music.
So if I take casual TV enjoyment off the table for a second, how, you might ask, do you keep up with water cooler conversations? Well, I don’t. Or rather, I do a very bad job of it and I’m constantly going, “Who yo talking about?”. Quite honestly, the one thing I miss the most is TV commercials. And then that was only 1 in 10.
“But what about the news? How do you know what’s happening with Brittney’s custody case?” Well, to keep up with these hot news stories I usually just read the New York Times website and since setting it to my default home page on my browser, I’m about a hundred times more current with my affairs than I was even before I lost TV.
You see, now that I know that I’m missing out on TV (and all the secondary benefits) I’m now more conscious of getting what I need from it. Maybe there’s something inherent in reading news that’s written with a sense of perspective or had a moment of reflection that I like (NY Times) that’s never appealed to me when I watch reporting of something that’s happening as it happens. I just think the commentary is better.
And one unexpected outcome is the recent realisation that the mobile NY Times is really good. It’s the same content formatted into a single column for viewing on crappy smart phones. While I appreciate the effort it took to make the ‘real internet’ on my iPod touch, the ‘mobile internet’ works pretty well too. I might start to read the mobile Times on my Touch now. It just loads faster.
So, News is taken care of. Done.
What about TV shows? “How do you know what’s happening on Grey’s Anatomy?”
For this, I had an one word answer, Netflix. But after all our best intentions, Sara and I haven’t sat down to watch a DVD in weeks. Our current queue is sitting still and it’s no one’s fault, but getting both of us to sit down and chill out to watch a TV show is harder that it sounds.
I know that once our class is finished we’ll have more than a few minutes free, but it’ll quickly get filled up with things to do for our new house. But you see… this is where my iPod touch comes in handy.
I finally found a great, reliable method* to rip the DVDs from Netflix which makes it now perfectly possible for me to watch a movie/TV show/documentary or podcast in the two 30 mins commutes I make each day. It also means that I can turn around a DVD in a day since I can rip the DVD that night and watch it at my leisure. It’s like taking a laxative for our Netflix queue.
A very new tool that I’ve came across recently was the “Watch Instantly” service from Netflix. It’s amazing. Seriously cool and very addictive. I watched a marathon, back to back, almost full 48hrs of NBC’s Heroes Season 1 using this streaming service and I’m now hooked. Using IE (not Firefox) it streams DVD quality streaming content(using fancy Active X controls) to your laptop within 20 seconds. Not bad just as long as you can find the content you want, since the selection is a fraction of what you can find in their physical DVD library.
So as far as I’m concerned, that takes care of TV and movies. Which leaves me with music.
Well, I’m a self proclaimed music whore and I’m the kind of person where I consume music constantly and voraciously. (Does anyone voraciously do anything other than ‘read’?) I think I listen to about 3-5 new albums a week which for years just meant walking into Reckless records (in Chicago) and walking out with a stack of CDs. Now, I have to admit that my physical consumption of CDs has fallen over the years to a near drizzle when it was a down pour. But I’m listening to as much if not more as I ever did. And with every good or great album I listen to, I’m tell everyone I can to get the word out.
In this age of multiplicity in tastes and channels for the distribution, keeping abreast of your passions is harder than ever. You’d think it’d be easier, for me, the sense of ‘oooh man, I’m missed this gem of a band” is ever present in my mind. Between two friends who are way more on top of the scene than me (shout outs to Craig and Lucas!), Bleep.com, russian mp3 sites, Soulseek, Epitonic.com, myspace, Pitchfork, BBC 1Xtra and the iTunes music store (not for buying just browsing thanks), I can barely keep up.
For instance, I only just heard, “Some loud thunder” by ‘Clap your hands and say yeah’ for the first time today. For some indierockanistas (I just made that up), this is probably unthinkable to have slept on such seminal work… but then maybe ‘they’ think it’s all so derivative anyway…
I’m getting off topic here, um…
The point is that I’m still consuming music and I still love it. My last three iPods plus the new Touch have all supported my addiction and I’m sure that it’s not going to get any easier. Even before I carried an iPod, I used to rock a CD player that played mp3s (a full 650 megs worth!) I don’t expect that I’ll stop buying, recommending, and listening to new music any time soon.
On a side note, when I settle into my new house, I’m going finally plan, strategise, and roll out my long lived dream of a home music server. It’ll involve a fully working PC, with nothing else on it but iTunes, Firefox and a shit load of music. I think that somewhere in there, my Touch will act as a wi-fi remote control too. But more on that in the coming months.
So, in conclusion, while my Touch hasn’t completely changed the game in how I go about my media consumption, it certainly supports and extends what I do with it, how I do it and when I do it. Which I think is that name(s) of the game these days.
Give me control and I will consume it.
*Handbrake is a fantastic piece of open source, multiplatform software that makes this whole process super easy. It takes the DVD and makes Quicktime files where every works, with none of the issue of the usual issues, like, no audio or audio which skips. The best part is that the software has tons of handy presets, like iPod and iPhone. Neato.
