Goodbye Youth - David Letterman Is Off the Air

Head in my hands.  Eyes fixated on the screen.  Bedtime come and gone.  I'm 11 years old and Letterman is on.  No rushing me to bed tonight as my whole family's eyes are glued to the screen.

I wasn't raised in a stern household, but homework and bedtime were staple rules that were rarely broken.  You did your school work and you got to bed at a reasonable hour.  But 11:35pm tended to be a special moment on the clock.  I was raised in a Letterman household.  Parents born of the Johnny Carson era, there wasn't even an option.  Not even an idea that the remote would make it's way over to that Leno character.  My mother the writer admired Dave's self deprecating spirit.  My father the actor squinted with glee when Dave would ask the fateful question, "will it float?"

There's no truely putting into words what the career of David Letterman has meant to my family.  Some families gathered to watch "Homicide," (my best friends family).  Another childhood friend's household stopped when "Wheel of Fortune" was on.  Letterman brought us together, and those childhood nights staying up into the wee hours will not soon be forgotten.

So without further ado, the key moments in David Letterman's final show...
 


The final, star studded Top Ten - "Top Ten Things I've Always Wanted to Say to Dave"
 


We also can't talk about last night without tipping our hat to Conan O'Brien's touching tribute to the late night king.  O'Brien, who's show starts at 11pmPST, urged viewers to tune in to Letterman at 11:35pmPST in order to properly send off the man he said saved his career.

Conan Heading To TBS

Hulu iPhone App Coming Soon

Safe to say this will be the greatest iPhone app in the history of the app store...

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that a dedicated Hulu application is indeed on its way to the iPhone and should be here in just a few months. SAI says the application will work over Wi-Fi and AT&T's 3G network, meaning that users will be able to view programming anywhere with a fast data connection.

Rumors suggesting that an iPhone-friendly version of Hulu swirled around this time last year, however, they predated the launch of the App Store, and Hulu flat-out denied that one was being worked on.

This time around, though, it's far more plausible, with the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 software update, which lets developers bake streaming media into their applications. For Hulu, this means that the advertising could be stuck into the mobile stream and that users would be able to watch videos without leaving the application.

One of the things that keep this rumor from holding water is that Hulu is in direct competition with Apple's iTunes business. Users of Hulu can watch ad-supported, full-length television shows and movies on their personal computers for free, instead of paying Apple to download a copy for offline viewing.

If such an app were available on the iPhone, it would also offer portable TV and movie watching, something not yet offered in Apple's own mobile iTunes app, which is limited to video podcasts. In past instances of this, the company has simply denied applications such as Podcaster from making it through the app approval process, only to launch it as a first party feature later on.

On the other hand, some of Hulu's competitors have already gotten a foot in the door, including Joost and CBS-owned TV.com, which has its own iPhone application that streams in content in chunks. In addition, Google's YouTube, whose application comes preinstalled on the iPhone, has recently reached an agreement with major studios, including Sony Pictures, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS (publisher of CNET News), to offer visitors full-length TV shows and feature films.

If Hulu can't manage to pull off getting advertisements in the stream, using this system, it would be fairly simple to force users to sit through advertisements between clips.

If You Haven't Seen It Yet, Lebron Is NASTY

CBS Creates iPhone App...And Supplies Porn

Who said CBS had lost it's cutting edge?

In a classic case of citizen journalism gone awry, CBS’s iPhone application Eyemobile has created a big stir today in the application market. Eyemobile provides users an easy link to CBS’ user generated news platform CBSEyemobile.com where citizens can upload photos and short pieces as their version of “news.” Straight from the AdAge presses:

Karl Johnson, chief operating officer of BrandContent, a Boston-based agency, uploaded the app last night and saw a picture of a young woman bent over her kitchen stove, her skirt hiked up. Later he saw video of three women performing sexual acts on one another. A visit to CBSeyemobile.com turns up a few photos that walk the line of not-safe-for-work, a jarring juxtaposition with CBS's storied news brand. What's more, Google is advertising on the clips via AdMob.

As a huge supporter of the application movement and the Mac community, I will be jumping on the bandwagon of calling out CBS’s moderating system as faulty. The same way Facebook and other massive user initiated sites are monitored, there is a built in system to track content uploads and safety of said content.

CBS does have a moderator, but it seems the system isn't working, or perhaps not as well as they would like. "We've been posting user-generated content since April, and this is the first known incident along these lines," a CBS spokesman said. "It was removed promptly and we will redouble our efforts in this regard."

While CBS’ debacle will probably only leave a temporary stain on the growing app market (enter T-Mobile and G1 stage left), we should all remember the potential pitfalls of putting the word “news” in front of the UGC acronym.

Sidenote, could you ever turn on the TV for your 6 o’clock news and accidentally get porn? No, which is why everyone loves the Internet; it keeps you on your toes.