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This Week in Tech—officially stylized as this WEEK in TECH, casually referred to as TWiT, and formerly known as Revenge of the Screen Savers — is a weekly netcast (and occasional videocast) of the TWiT.tv network *. Hosted by Leo Laporte and many of his former TechTV employees, it features roundtable discussions and debates surrounding current technology news and reviews, with a particular focus on consumer electronics. As well as having been ranked
Format Following the show's number, title, sponsors and theme tune, Leo Laporte typically begins an episode of TWiT by introducing the week's panelists one-by-one. Light conversation often takes place about panelists' recent projects or work, before Laporte's reading of the week's major technology headlines. Panelists respond to each headline with "roundtable" comment, discussion and debate, however often drive conversation to different and sometimes unrelated directions. This causes the length of each episode to vary, sometimes considerably, from show to show. Panelists Regular panelists and recurring guests include John C. Dvorak (now famous for his controversial analysis and demeanor on the programme), Roger Chang, Robert Heron, Patrick Norton, David Prager, Doug Kaye, Kevin Rose, Alex Lindsay, Paul Thurrott, and Wil Harris. Occasional contributors include Steve Gibson, Amber MacArthur, Jessica Corbin, Jenn Cutter, Yoshi DeHerrera, Chris DiBona, Cory Doctorow, Dan Huard, Kenji Kato, Mike Lazazzera, Lawrence Lessig, Roger McGuinn, Tom Merritt, Kevin Mitnick, Sarah Norton (wife of Patrick Norton), Chris Pirillo, Arlo Rose, Robert Scoble, Sal Soghoian, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, Andy Walker, Bob Young, Bill Fernandez, Andy Hertzfeld, Daniel Kottke, Randy Wigginton, Bill Machrone, Brett Larson, Molly Wood, and Steve Wozniak. History The show began when Laporte recorded a one-off "roundtable" discussion between himself, Patrick Norton, Sarah Norton, Kevin Rose, David Prager, and Roger Chang at the 2005 Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Having published the show on his blog to an incredible public reception, Laporte decided to rename his original recording "episode 0" and turned the roundtable concept into a weekly downloadable audio file, or 'podcast', featuring more cast members from his former TechTV programme The Screen Savers. The first episode was posted on Monday, April 18, 2005 as "Revenge of The Screen Savers", but was eventually renamed This Week in Tech in response to a cease and desist letter sent to Laporte by copyright-holder Comcast. In episode 2, Laporte announced a contest in which listeners could suggest a new name for the show. One listener suggested This Week in Geek, which inspired Laporte to create with the eventual name, This Week in Tech, or TWiT. The weekly show was recorded with all of the hosts staying at their respective homes and talking via Voice over IP (mostly using Skype). Episode 9, which was supposed to have been released on June 13th 2005, was released 6 days late due to technical and scheduling issues. The delay caused one subscribing listener to write a complaint, to which Laporte posted both an edited and unedited version of the show as a way of highlighting the amount of editing involved. Starting around episode 10, Norton began physically coming to Leo's office during the taping. Upon Rose's announcement that he was moving to San Francisco, Laporte suggested that all of the hosts should get together to record the show and, starting in episode 15, began recording in front of a live studio audience. Episode 21 was recorded at the San Francisco Apple Store on September, 4, 2005. The Revision3 Studios crew taped the show, and released the first ever video version of TWiT. Episodes 22 through 24 were recorded at Noonan's Bar and Grill in Larkspur Landing, California. Video versions of episodes 23 and 24 were taped by Alex Lindsey]'s Pixel Corps, and were this time distributed by Revision3. Episodes 25 and 26 were recorded at the Gallery Cafe in San Francisco. The use of a live audience began to fade thereafter, and since episode 45 the use of Skype for remotely recording the netcast has been resumed for nearly all episodes. No more video editions have been filmed. Distribution and Licensing All episodes are licensed under the Creative Commons share-alike license, and are distributed via direct download from the ''TWiT.tv website (of which a new version was launched on July 13, 2006), or from Apple's iTunes Store. There is no download charge from either source. The show is available in four formats: 64 kbit/s MP3, 32 kbit/s MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis. Occasionally however these bitrates vary if a stereo version of the netcast is produced. The files are distributed via several means, including direct downloads with bandwidth provided by AOL and via BitTorrent, a preferred method since this puts little strain on the official TWiT server. The original server load went up significantly when iTunes 4.9 was released, since it has built-in support for netcasting but no support for BitTorrent. This causes each listener to download the entire audio files directly from the web server, instead of from other listeners, like they would if using BitTorrent. Because of the issue of server load, Laporte had been in talks with at least two companies about hosting the audio files for TWiT. On July 4, 2005, he announced that America Online would be hosting the highest fidelity MP3 version of the show. AOL membership is not required, and the hosting is provided in return for Laporte's mention during the netcast, with the agreement that profanity would be censored. Funding Laporte stated in episode 3 that the show would always remain free and without advertising. However, due to ongoing costs as a result of TWiT.tv's constant expansion, a roadmap for the introduction of podcast and web-based advertising was announced during episode 45 of This Week in Tech. On 5th September 2006, TWiT.tv officially became one of the first major advertising-supported podcast networks, sponsored initially by both Visa and Dell. Listeners have always been invited to support the network by means of an automatic PayPal subscription or one-time payment, however this granted access to an exclusive TWiT forum from episode 40 onwards. Listener funding has been used to purchase radio-quality microphones and digital audio-recording devices for the hosts, and as a means to finance compensation for podcast contributors. "Scare" On October 22nd 2006, a blog posting surfaced on the TWiT.tv website to announce two weeks of absence for This Week In Tech. Laporte explained that the break was partly due to an upcoming technology cruise, but stressed that it was also the result of the show's panelists deciding to all 'play hookey at the same time.' It became apparent that the latter had raised serious concerns with Laporte when he proceeded to declare the show as being 'on life support with the heart monitor flatlining.' The posting became one of the week's top stories on Digg having attracted almost 500 comments in less than 4 days. On October 26th 2006, Laporte posted a follow-up to his original article, titled "OK OK!", in which he said that he, "had no idea what a storm his little sentence would generate," confirming the fact that he was merely, "tired, dispirited and trying to figure out how to do the show without any contributors." Following e-mail communication with the panelists he also promised the continued recording of This Week in Tech so long as listener demand remained strong. TWiT 74 (Memories) released on October 30th 2006 was a compilation made up of parts of various shows. Most notable was earlier TWiT discussions about Apple using Intel processors in the future. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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