Reviews: Entertainment for Daddy and Baby

Baby Einstein: Meh

Experts don't like Baby Einstein.  I know parents who swear by it, but the reason child development experts don't is because you're not supposed to be plugging your kid into the TV, no matter how sophisticated it is.  During his formative years, your kid needs to be doing things interactively.  No matter how awesome the Baby Einstein video is, it's not interactive and therefore takes time away from something better.  For these reasons, I never allowed Baby Einstein into the house.

Until now.

My change was precipitated by two things.  First, one of the Belkins' family friends gave us a Baby Einstein video on sign laBaby Einsteinnguage starring Marly Matlin.  I'm a huge fan of hers and the sign language is something we've been trying to do anyway.

Second, we saw a friend's child be completely pacified by a Baby Einstein when he was cranky.  I was familiar with the concept, but seeing it demonstrated made the whole thing a lot more real.  I could silence my fussy kid, instantly and effortlessly.  And all I had to do was show him some intelligent, well-made videos meant just for him.

To Baby Einstein's credit, the videos are fantastic.  This morning while I clipped Nathan's nails, he watched a video on Monet.  It started with Monet's famous hay bale paintings - done at different times of year, to study how the light would change with the season.  The first season was spring, so Baby Einstein launched into a tangent on spring.  In spring, there are pretty flowers, children play outside, and the rain falls.  The rain looks pretty but if you are outside in the rain you will get wet.  But if you carry an umbrella or wear a rain jacket, then you can play in the rain.

Of course, Nathan has no frame of reference.  He doesn't know what flowers or fields or rain are (although after a winter in San Francisco I think he'll learn).  I found it was helpful to explain to him in English what he was seeing on the screen.  Thus, Baby Einstein becomes a parent-and-child experience not unlike reading a book - it's mostly passive for the child but involves interaction with a parent.  I don't think there's anyone alive who would argue that reading to your child isn't valuable.

So where does that leave us?  I have to give a begrudging acceptance to Baby Einstein, although I will laden it heavy caveats.  Yelena & I would never use it more than sparingly, and only if there was no other option.  I don't like what it is, but I like what it does.

Miro: Meh

Internet video is a new thing.  There are sites like Pirate Bay which do it illegally, and choose to stand up to the RIAA rather than roll over.  There are sites like Hulu which do it legally, and work well on any computer.  There are sites like ABC which also do it legally, but make you install software on your computer and no, it's not available for every operating system yet.  There are services like Netflix that require a monthly fee.

Then there's Miro.  You have to run it on your computer, but it's free and open source.  It combines excellent online sources like Hulu along with legal and illegal files found through the Bit Torrent protocol.  The result: a solution that lets you watch pretty much anything, whether you're online or offline, and lets you do it all from one program.

Beautiful concept, but flawed execution.

I've been excited by a cool new show called Defying Gravity, which bills itself as "Grey's Anatomy in space."  In the US it got picked up by ABC and was available on Hulu.  But then ABC decided to pull the show while it decided on a new time slot.  Two weeks later and they still haven't figured it out.  Must be tricky.  In the mean time the show has kept playing in Canada, but Canadian online video is not available legally in the US (just like Hulu is mostly unavailable in Canada).

Until Miro kindly stepped in.

The show is, of course, available on Bit Torrent.  Miro kindly allowed me to search Bit Torrent and even set up an RSS feed so I could see when a new episode came out.  I was able to download and watch the episodes I missed.  So what's the problem?

Shady legality aside, the problem is that it's essentially a wrapper for Bit Torrent.  I already have a perfectly good Bit Torrent solution, and an RSS feed that makes me wade through a bunch of useless false positives every day doesn't really help.  Bottom line, Miro, doesn't do anything that I wasn't already able to do.

The promise of Miro is still huge.  If they can find a way to streamline their content offerings, they could turn into a truly powerful challenger to traditional television.  But they're a long way off, and I've seen enough flash-in-the-pan software companies to know that Miro may not survive, and even if it does it may flounder and never live up to its promise.

Just like Defying Gravity, online television is a journey with a very uncertain ending.

J<