Amateur Tsunami Video Footage

Posted by Andy Baio

In addition to the extensive first-person coverage of the tsunami disaster on blogs, there have been several amateur recordings of the tsunami from camcorders. Unfortunately, the network websites aren’t making them easy to find and view. The videos are usually only available as poor-quality, streaming video like RealPlayer, and buried in popup windows and poor navigation.

Ben pointed me to downloadable versions of three clips. I’m hosting them here. (Unfortunately, I don’t have much information about the source of these videos.)

  • phuket.wmv (11MB) – shot from inside a restaurant, waves engulf older couple clinging to railing before flooding entire room
  • patong_beach.wmv (10MB) – rooftop view of two huge waves battering buildings along shore, then flooding of city streets
  • sri_lanka.wmv (7MB) – upper balcony view of hotel swimming pool area getting flooded as observers run away; woman asks “how high will it go?” before retreating
  • koh_lanta_thailand.avi (11MB) – shot on beach level; watch as first wave grows and crashes, before cameraman’s frantic retreat away from shore
  • penang_beach.wmv (1MB) – shot from wall above beach, three men are caught in battering waves
  • sri_lanka_resort.wmv (6MB) – upper level hotel balcony; restaurant, pools, and deck flooded as people cling to trees; two men narrate what they see

If you have any more first-hand video footage, or higher-quality versions of any of these videos, please let me know and I’ll add them. Most of these videos are also available as direct downloads from Cheese and Crackers, Asian Tsunami Videos, and Wave of Destruction.

December 29, 2004: Added two more videos. There is also some new footage I haven’t converted yet: BBC footage from a second-story balcony in Aceh, Indonesia.

December 30, 2004: Wow, you people used over 400GB of bandwidth in a single day! I’m now redirecting all video requests to several mirrors, courtesy of Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin, Nathan Perkins, and Ask Bjorn Hansen. Thanks for the help, guys! (Sorry about the temporary downtime while I was sorting out the details.) If you can contribute a mirror and have loads of bandwidth, please e-mail me ASAP.

December 30, 2004: Archive.org is now hosting all the videos. All download links will now redirect to the Archive.org mirror. Thanks to everyone who mirrored the files overnight.

Also, a final note… If these videos touched you in any way, consider donating to the relief efforts.

December 31, 2004: Basically, we broke Archive.org! The largest repository of public-domain audio, video, and text in the world couldn’t handle the demand for these videos.

I’m now hosting all these videos on my BitTorrent tracker instead. Because of the small size of these videos, I was hoping to avoid requiring a BitTorrent client for downloading, but the demand is just too high.

January 4, 2004: Back to Archive.org, at Brewster Kahle’s request. He thinks they can handle the traffic now.

January 12, 2004: If you’re looking for newer videos, the definitive source is the questionably-named Wave of Destruction. The site is updated constantly, with videos available by BitTorrent or direct download from multiple mirrors.

iTunes Producer Patent

Posted by Andy Baio

Last week, Apple Computer filed a patent application covering the iTunes Producer application and backend architecture, used for managing and sending music to the iTunes Music Store. The patent includes screenshots of the application, which Apple only distributes to authorized musicians and record labels.

One screenshot includes some interesting fields, such as Parental Advisory warnings, BPM, and various sales and copyright information. There’s a button for adding Lyrics, which may indicate future support for lyric searching in iTunes Music Store.

Unfortunately, you need a special plugin to view the embedded images at the Patent Office website, so I’ve converted all the drawings to GIF and included them below.

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The U.S. Patent Office Search is consistently interesting. If you search by “Assignee Name,” you can keep track of all the pending and approved patent activity by your favorite companies. For example, here are all approved patents and pending applications for Apple Computer. Some other interesting company searches: Google’s pending and approved, TiVo’s pending and approved, and Yahoo’s pending and approved.

Not surprisingly, there are a few good blogs that focus exclusively on new patents. Patently Obvious and Patent Pending. And I just found Fresh Patents, a fantastic daily index of new patents, with RSS feeds by industry.

The Future of Movie Theaters

Posted by Andy Baio

I’ve been having a big debate with the guys here at work about the future of movie theaters, and I’m wondering what you think. Here’s my hypothesis:

Home video never hurt the theaters because of the movie industry’s staggered distribution schedules, from box office to DVD to cable. If DVDs were available the same day of a movie’s theatrical release, it would have hurt movie theaters badly.

Now here’s how it comes into play in the future:

Like in any other form of media, the Internet screws up traditional controls over distribution. Many people, confronted with the option of downloading a copy of a movie on the week of release (lesser-quality, cheap) or going to a movie theater (high-quality, very expensive), will choose the former. Of course, this assumes that downloading movies will inevitably be as fast and as simple as downloading music. (Which, in turn, leads to better ways of playing downloaded video on your TV with portable video devices or networked media players.)

Not everyone, of course, because seeing a movie in the theater is a different experience. It’s social and it’s great quality, focusing your attention completely. But going to a movie will become a more elite experience, like the $14 tickets at the Arclight.

But enough families and normal folk (the bread and butter of neighborhood megaplexes) will stop going to affect their livelihood.

This Forbes article, written in March 2001, discusses the state of the movie theater industry. Even without taking the Internet into consideration, movie theaters aren’t doing well as it is, and three of the top five chains went out of business in 2001. (I can’t verify it, but I’d wager that the rising ticket costs and increases in in-theater advertising was designed to offset these losses.)

Meanwhile, compare these 2003 statistics for the home video market to box office sales. The gap between home video sales/rentals and the box office has increased dramatically in the last few years.

The only thing saving the movie theaters is their exclusive access to new films for the first few months of their lifecycle. If the Internet loosens that hold, movie companies will be forced to adapt, most likely by radically minimizing the gap from theater-to-video or offering an iTunes Music Store for films. Earlier this year, Robert Occhialini nicely summarized this situation.

Predictions of the movie theater’s demise have been common (and wrong) for the last century, first by the television and then by the VCR. I’d argue that both did, in fact, erode at the popularity of the movies. But they survived because of their distribution rights. Any opinions?

January 5, 2005: IMDB reports that the number of tickets sold in 2004 fell 2.5 percent from the previous year, and is down 7.5 percent since 2002. Despite this, there was a slight increase in dollar totals. I can’t think of another reason besides rising ticket prices.

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