The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Pamela Parker

Writing my Thesis

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After months of flirting with the idea, I finally allocated the budget for the Thesis theme for this blog. I suppose I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and do what I most enjoy doing — muck around with Internet publishing/marketing stuff and get my feet wet.

There’s still a lot of work to do on the site design-wise, needless to say, but the current rev is 1000% better looking than the standard “Hello, World!” template I’ve been using recently. Expect to see more content on The River in the days to come.

links for 2009-09-14

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  • Information-rich and attention-poor – The Globe and Mail
    “When the effective shelf-life of a document (or any information product) shrinks, fewer resources will be invested in its creation. This is because the period during which the product is likely to be read or referred to is too short to repay a large allocation of scarce time and skill in its production. As a result, the “market” for depth is narrowing. “
    (tags: internet media information attention)

The Making of a Next Gen Video Consumer

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A few weeks ago, I got my husband to agree to cutting off our cable television service. See ya, Time Warner Cable. See ya, Time Warner Cable bill.

Reading about Fred Wilson’s thoughts on the subject (wow, that link is old and yet still valid), and hearing from @lieblink, it has long been obvious to me that the future of television-watching is digital and on-demand. Watching our household’s video viewing habits — a lot of Amazon On-Demand, some Netflix Instant Queue, a great deal of TiVo-ed kids’ programming, and some live TV here and there — I realized that, with just a few slight modifications, we could ditch the cable boxes and save $71/month.

The person for whom this poses the most difficulty (and he’s already asked me to call TWC a couple of times) is my husband. He’s fond of live sports and live sports news — some of which are actually available online, but he’s not accustomed to using these sources yet. For the kids and me, it hasn’t been a difficult adjustment, as there is still plenty of programming available with our new configuration.

Here’s our set up:


  • Analog TV set (vintage 2004 or so).
  • Digital to analog converter box
  • Amplified indoor antenna (“rabbit ears”)
  • Roku box for Netflix and Amazon On-Demand
  • TiVo for recording broadcast TV and a little on-demand (Series 2)

I’d love to have Apple TV or some other way to watch YouTube, Hulu, etc. on our TV, but we are getting along pretty well just now. The most challenging part, thus far, is when we hear about some kind of news event — a plane and helicopter colliding over the Hudson, for example — and want to turn on CNN or NY1 for the on-the-scene coverage. We’re trying to train ourselves to find something acceptable online. Wish us luck.