There’s been a lot of talk about Louis CK directly marketing his recent concert online and how he made a million bucks at it in little over a week, and I think it’s well deserved. I paid 5 bucks for a video that at times is fantastically funny and other times (much fewer and further between) is just “pretty funny” and I have zero regrets whatsoever for the purchase. And I get to keep it forever – no rental approach here.

It’s funny, though: if I’d paid ten bucks perhaps I’d be a little ticked, I don’t know. What I do know is when Radiohead let their customers choose the price I bought In Rainbows off their site, and then I turned around and bought it the full definition bits from Amazon in CD form when they were released. In other words, Radiohead got paid twice by guys like me for being incredibly flexible in their approach to selling and distributing their works.

And I think that’s the point to take away from all this. I hope more performers remove the middleman and simply sell their performances at a price that empowers their audience to be truly empowered and connected. Fifteen or twenty bucks from Best Buy isn’t that solution, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say Apple’s fairly high and inflexible pricing might not be the complete long term solution either. For most of us competitiveness and elasticity drive secondary purchases like these, and frankly we’re the “gravy” that makes the entertainment market lucrative.

At least this time she’s calling it quits there isn’t a marriage involved.

But, even worse, there is a child.

…and I do, too.

Here are his well-founded reasons.

For anyone preferring DVDs over Netflix’s much smaller ‘Watch Instantly’ collection, you’ve just been given two more reasons to choose Blockbuster.

Meanwhile the rest of the world continues using Handbrake and other products to do exactly the same thing.  More.

Get ready.  Here’s a selection from a survey Netflix is sending around to customers:

• “Imagine that Netflix offers its subscribers the ability to instantly watch movies & TV episodes on their iPhone. The selection availability to instantly watch includes some new releases, lots of classics and TV episodes. There are no advertisements or trailers, and movies start in as little as 30 seconds. You can fast-forward, rewind, and pause or watch again. The movies & TV episodes you instantly watch are included in your Netflix membership for no additional fee.  Whenever you want to instantly watch content on your iPhone, your iPhone must be connected to a Wi-Fi network (such as one you might have at home or at work, or in public places like coffee shops, book stores, hotels, airports, etc.).  If this functionality were available, how likely would you or someone in your household be to instantly watch movies & TV episodes on your iPhone via a Wi-Fi network?”

TechCrunch chimes in here.

Golden Globes joke of the night from Ricky Gervais.  Here’s the video:

Twenty bucks says Steve Jobs is a big part of this one.  We’ll know when Apple shares their plans for the future of media either later this month or later this year.

via Disney renegotiating Starz deal, might pull movies from Netflix streaming — Engadget.

Patently Apple picked up a very recent patent application for DVR technology likely to be employed by Apple any day now.  This promises to (if we’re lucky) finally blur the lines of distinction between local content sources.  In other words, perhaps when combined with the Home Sharing feature recently added to iTunes, we’ll no longer have to figure out whether the latest episode of Big Bang Theory is on the Mac, the AppleTV, the iPod, the iPhone, or still somewhere out in the cloud (perhaps at the giant MobileMe datacenter being built in the Carolinas?).

Expect to either see the role or layout of iTunes to completely change.  This is probably why Apple’s invested so little in Front Row of late, instead choosing to allow it to continue looking like AppleTV 1.0.

More here: Apple’s Media Players will One Day be Both Portable TV & DVR – Patently Apple.

It’s hard to pull on over and customers and partners alike without one or both losing trust.  Now that Rob Glaser’s finally been fired from his CEO job at Real, many of us are getting an opportunity to reminisce over the many reasons we stopped caring about Real, Real Audio, Real Networks, Rhapsody, or any of the other brands we should still be using yet abandoned ten years ago.

Side note: you know you really screwed up when you can’t even keep people using the proprietary file format you locked them into in the first place.  Think about it: PDF, MP3, WMV, DOC, XLS, PPT, and RA.  Which of these is gonzo?

Five Really Dumb RealNetworks Moves.

BTW, hiring Rob Glaser in first place would have been number on on my list.