Common Paradox Tech Blog

The year is 1963. It’s November. At 1:40 PM ET, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite comes on the air. “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.” Rapidly, everyone in America descends upon the closest television set to tune in.

Thankfully, we have not yet had a tragedy of that magnitude in the age of the realtime web. But we will. It’s just a matter of time.

If it were to happen today, most people would still turn to their TV sets to get the most up-to-date information on such an event. We saw that on September 11, 2001. But a large number of people would also now turn to the web. And there they would likely find the information they were looking for faster than those watching on television. We’ve seen it time and time again recently.

America’s most trusted satire newspaper and website, The Onion, has been steadily moving into online video in the past few years (with many hilarious pokes at the Web, the iPhone, and social media along the way).

Now, the outfit has landed a very real deal with Comedy Central to develop a pilot for a show based on its Onion Sports Network (OSN) videos.

According to a statement put out by the companies, “the as-yet untitled series will take on the whole universe of modern sports – teams, players, leagues, sycophantic fans, ridiculous products and over-hyped sports coverage – with an eye towards appealing to sports fanatics and more casual fans.”

It’s not hard to see an OSN-based show fitting in nicely alongside The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The completely over-the-top parodies of ESPN and FOX Sports Net talking heads and cliché stories and soundbites is very analogous to what the network has done with its take on cable news.

You do have to wonder, however, if the humor of stories like today’s “Tom Coughlin Retires From Family to Spend More Time With Team” might be lost on those that don’t quite get the whole satire genre.

If you haven’t seen OSN before (or even if you have), here’s the hilarious Coughlin story:

Tags: Comedy Central, the onion, tv, video

newVideoPlayer(“/WindowsSlam.flv”, 500, 375,”"); This exchange, as seen during a segment on Windows 7 on CNBC’s Street Signs this afternoon, doesn’t feature CNBC’s resident Apple knob-polisher Jim Goldman, surprisingly. But it might as well. Cable news, everybody! Consistently worthless.

I tend to reflexively dismiss single-source news apps, since they’re usually not much more than a repackaged mobile site. CNN’s Mobile, with push, VOD and live newscasts, is much, much more—but don’t expect to get it for free.

Once you’ve gotten over the fact that no, CNN somehow didn’t already have an iPhone app, consider the feature list: CNN.com’s text content is formatted into swipeable panels, organized by category. You can save stories for offline reading, and select subjects to create personalized news feeds from CNN’s stories. (In blogland, we call these “tags,” but hey!) If you’re particularly reportorial, there’s also a panel for iReport submissions—3GS users can upload video, and everyone can upload stories and photos.

The newsreading and reporting functions look fine, but he app doesn’t really start to shine until it starts to stream: Video is available in both VOD and live flavors, the first of which is organized in a catalog, and the second of which jumps in and out of service at the whim of CNN. Here’s the theory: Users sit tight with their text content and old clips of Anderson Cooper interviewing panda cubs, or whatever he does, until NEWS BREAKS: Anderson has been mauled by mother panda. This is huge. You get a push notification that says, “Hey, CNN’s live right now,” which means that the station’s content is streamed over Wi-Fi, 3G or EDGE. And, you watch.

CNN says this’ll kick in fairly frequently, mostly to correspond with big news events— you know, the kind of things you might rush to a TV to find out more about. It might not sound like much, but conceptually, cable news streaming over the air to the iPhone is, well, a pretty big deal. Sadly, CNN seems to have realized this, so they aren’t giving this one out for free: the app will run two dollars when it goes live later this morning. [CNN]