Creamer

TV Deprivation Day 5: Joost Gets It

There's More Than Meets the Eye on Cable-Like Service

Posted by Matthew Creamer on 05.25.07 @ 01:07 PM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Since Wednesday's big finales, there hasn't been much for me chase down from TV's prime-time schedule. So I've been spending the waning hours of this experiment camped out at Joost, the new video offering from the guys who founded Skype and one that's often described, misleadingly, as a YouTube killer.

It would be tempting to call Joost the future of online video. Or maybe just the future of video, full stop. But the concept of future has gotten so darned provisional that I'm going to pull up short and just say it's really cool and the closest the internet has come to replicating the cable-TV experience.

TV Deprivation Day 4: All Was Not 'Lost'

ABC Saved Matthew Creamer From Watercooler Scorn, but Visa's :30 Was Another Matter

Posted by Matthew Creamer on 05.24.07 @ 04:18 PM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- While millions of Americans watched the "American Idol" finale in bars, at parties or perhaps alone in a darkened room wearing nothing but thigh-high boots, a chiffon dress and a dream, I had it narrated to me by someone known only as Angie.

Angie, you see, was charged with live-blogging the finale on Slimtainment, a website maintained by DJSlim, aka Brent Natzle. And since the Fox website shut me out and nothing was popping on YouTube, Angie was all I had. She was my Virgil, my only link to one of the few mass-media events left in American culture, her 50- to 100-word entries posted as close to real time as possible serving as a crucial guide to this pop-culture vomitorium.

TV Deprivation Day 3: The Couch Calls

New Media Is a Bit Too Labor Intensive for Erstwhile Layabout Matthew Creamer

Posted by Matthew Creamer on 05.23.07 @ 05:53 PM

New York (AdAge.com) -- Boredom setting in. Irritability growing. On day three, the cracks are beginning to show. I miss being able to laze about on my couch nibbling around the buffet of programming provided by my new favorite people, the folks at Time Warner Cable. Sure, many of the dishes seem at least three-days old, but at least they're there, waiting for you. And you know what to expect, even if it includes some gastrointestinal distress. You realize that the always-there quality of TV is nothing less than a gift only when you've spent hours hunched over a laptop looking in vain for various scraps of prime-time TV.

Deprivation Day 2: No TV? No Problem

Matthew Creamer Finds Jack Bauer on MySpace

Posted by Matthew Creamer on 05.22.07 @ 04:58 PM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- A national nightmare is over, and I'm not talking about Jack Bauer's latest bad day. Just minutes after filing yesterday's post, the recent episode of "The Sopranos" popped up on YouTube, divided into five 10-minute segments. For reasons that are unclear, the fourth segment, wherein A.J. tries to off himself, was missing. Happily, another user posted a five-minute clip of the suicide bid, meaning that I only ended up missing about four minutes of the episode.

Interestingly, the episode was distributed courtesy of Million Movies Download.Com. Posting sliced-up episodes of "Saturday Night Live" and other shows seems to pretty much be the extent of this site's promotional strategy and it seems like a sound one, even if there are a few cease-and-desist letters in there. I e-mailed an HBO spokesman to see what they thought of this, but hadn't heard back at press time. Anyway, thanks a million, Million Movies Download.com, wherever you are.

Matthew Creamer Is ... TV Deprived!

Day One of Our Reporter's Experiment to Get His Fix Via New Media

Posted by Matthew Creamer on 05.21.07 @ 05:52 PM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- I'm experiencing the white, educated, cubicle-dwelling, American-male equivalent of waterboarding: It's Monday afternoon, and I still don't know what the hell happened on "The Sopranos" last night.

No, my cable didn't go out, my cat didn't die and I didn't suffer from hysterical blindness. The pain is entirely voluntarily. I've sworn off TV for a week. Don't worry, this won't be part of some lecture on how the TV set is ruining you and your kids. And it's not an effort to see how informed I'll be at the end, despite some time away from Anderson Cooper. This isn't a vacation from all media.