Several bloggers have posted about their experiences tearing into Apple TV hardware:

• Make Magazine shows you how to open your Apple TV and warranty, but not how to upgrade it.
• Engadget has an article on upgrading the hard drive to 80GB
• Gizmodo has teaser info on a 120GB hard drive upgrade

The hard drive size is our biggest complaint with Apple TV. Rather than viewing Apple TV as something completely new, we see it as a new category of iPods. With this in mind, Apple’s decision to only offer a 40GB drive is disappointing, since it won’t hold as much content as Apple’s top of the line iPod.

We’ve had discussions with several digital media fans that are skipping Apple TV and using Mac minis, paired with terabytes of storage, as an alternative. Interest in upgrading the Apple TV, and other options, suggests that Apple is missing an opportunity by not offering Apple TV with a larger hard drive option.

March 21: We’ve looked at many types of music podcasts this month as part of our 31 Days of Free Music, ranging from free classical music shows to barrages of noise.

You can’t look at free music without thinking about the Grateful Dead – one of the early supporters of DIY concert taping.

Luckily for Dead fans, KOPN offers the Dead Show, aka DeadPod, a free podcast that looks at the music of the Grateful Dead.

You can preview the Dead Show below, or subscribe by adding this feed URL to your podcast client:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/INhS

macProVideo.com has released GarageBand 103: Podcasting In GarageBand, a new Garageband training tutorial.

This tutorial teaches valuable podcasting skills including recording and editing podcasts, using GarageBand’s built-in DSP effects to compress and EQ your voice to give it that big podcast sound, making enhanced podcasts with images and URL links listeners can click, and publishing your podcast on iTunes or through iWeb.

The tutorial provides a detailed section on recording remote interviews with people over the web via Skype.

According to new research from advertising service provider DoubleClick, viewers click the “Play” button on video ads more than they click on image ads. They also found that video ads are typically played two-thirds of the way through and video ad click rates are far higher than those of image format ads.

“Online video ads are quickly becoming the medium of choice to drive both brand awareness and sales,” said Rick Bruner, research director at DoubleClick. “The results show that there are clear ROI advantages to placing video ads.”

Key Findings

• Users click the “Play” button more than they click on image ads.
• On average, video ads play two thirds of the way throughVideo click rates are far higher than image format ads.
• Users are about 4 times as likely to click-through on video ads. Online video ads get click-through rates ranging from 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent. GIF and JPG image ad click-throughs range between 0.1 and 0.2 percent.

Online Video Offers Advertisers More Than Televison

“What’s particularly exciting about these types of campaign performance benchmarks is that they provide marketers with an important leap forward in measuring audience engagement and results that simply does not exist in traditional TV advertising,” said DoubleClick’s Marianne Caponnetto. “The best standard data you get on audience measurement of TV commercials is limited to reach and frequency or specialized brand studies. However, online video metrics available today, like interaction rate, play rate, video completion rate and so on, give advertisers much greater insight into how consumers are actually engaging with the ads and their brands.”

The audience for podcasts has grown 18% in the last year, according to an upcoming report from Edison Media Research. Awareness of podcasting has grown even more, jumping from 22% in 2006 to 37% in 2007.

At the Corporate Podcasting Summit, held March 19-20 in London, Edison Media Research VP Tom Webster gave a preview of their latest research on podcasting. Webster’s statistics suggest that podcasting, like other Internet media, is growing rapidly, drawing attention away from other media. In addition, podcasts are getting a very attractive group for advertisers – well-educated people with money that like to buy things online.

Here are some of the highlights of Webster’s presentation:

• The audience for podcasts is up by 18% from a year ago. In 2006, 11% of those surveyed listened to audio podcasts; in 2007, the number was 13%, about 18% growth. This figure looks like it may be the most controversial info in the report. At Marketwatch, for example, Frank Barnako is calling this anemic growth. While faster growth would be great for podcasters, a lot of industries would kill for 18% growth.
• Podcast awareness has exploded in the last year, growing from 22% to 37%.
• Video podcast use is up by 10%, going from 10% to 11%. The relatively small growth indicated by this stat doesn’t jive with obvious trends in Internet video. Internet video is exploding, and by many accounts, it has leapfrogged audio podcasting. It looks like their survey isn’t capturing much growth in interest in video blogs and video podcasts, maybe because of fuzziness about the definition of what a podcast is or isn’t. Is Ask a Ninja a video podcast? If you use Edison’s criteria, probably not.

One of the things that jumps out of Edison’s research is that awareness of podcasts is up by about 70% over last year, but use is only up 18%. What’s unclear is if this gap is a normal stage in the adoption of technologies, if the figures reflect limitations of the research or if podcasting is a stagnating or “broken” technology.

March 20 was the final day of the first European Corporate Podcasting Summit.

Following on the format of the previous day, the second day kept up the same very brisk pace. Presenters and panels were each given a scant thirty minutes in which to give their talks — meaning a lot of ideas and information were packed into the eight-hour day.

Some of the highlights of the day included:

A lighthearted ABC’s of Podcasting was offered by Laurence Lennard and Juian Mayers, the principals at new media consultant company Yada-Yada Productions. I’ll wait to post their whole alphabet for another day (once I’ve gotten their go-ahead), but favorite letters included

• Q: questions (invite feedback and questions from your listeners!)
• X: XML, “the language of podcasting” and “the cool big brother of HTML”
• Z: zzzzzzz (“keep it interesting! don’t be boring!”)

Claire Raikes and Barbara Bradbury of the Podcast Production Co explained “How Blogs and Podcasts Work Together.” While stressing the importance of planning and careful production, they encouraged prospective podcasters to strike a balance between staying “on brand” and straying into sales pitch territory, a huge turn-off for listeners.

March 20: It‚Äôs 31 Days of Free Music month at Podcasting News. Every day in March, we‚Äôre going to do our best to hook you up a great free music podcast. And if we should skip a day because we’ve got jet-lag and we’re suffering from nights of 2 hours of sleep, don’t worry. We’ve still got a lot of great free music shows to talk about.

If you don’t know about WFMU, a non-commercial, freeform radio station broadcasting at 91.1 Mhz FM in Jersey City, NJ, it’s time that you find about them.

WFMU receives absolutely no corporate or government funding – they are 100% funded by listeners. Because it’s funded by listeners, it doesn’t have to play what the record companies want you to hear or what Clear Channel wants you to hear. The station’s management lets DJ’s control their program content. Imagine that!

One of WFMU’s shows is Downtown Soulville with Mr. Fine Wine. Mr. Fine Wine plays obscure soul 45’s. Every show delivers an hour of 20 or more classic soul tracks, and just enough talk to let you know who the artists are that recorded the songs.

You can preview the Downtown Soulville podcast below, check out playlists at the Downtown Soulville site, or subscribe to the podcast by adding this URL to your podcast software:
http://podcast.wfmu.org/SV/SV.xml

A lot of people are talking about the fact that CD sales are down by 20% from a year ago. While the music industry blames it on pirated music, there are more important reasons that CD sales are down:

• The compact disc is 25-year old technology;
• Mainstream music has stagnated;
• People are spending their entertainment dollars on other media, like DVDs and video games;
• You can buy spend $2 on a couple of singles and get the songs that you want from a CD, instead of buying the whole CD;
• The music industry jacked up prices when CDs were introduced, and many people think CD prices are too high;
• Unlike used records, used CDs sound great, which means that the market for releases of older music is getting saturated; and
• The compact disc is 25-year old technology.

The biggest reason that sales are declining, though, is that you can get great free MP3s legally.

All month we’ve been talking about music podcasts, and a lot of the music featured is great stuff that you’re not going to hear on major-label CDs or on mainstream radio. We’ve got an index of the free music podcasts that we’ve looked at this month, and it shows the variety and quality of the music podcasts that are available.

Pirating probably contributes to declining music sales – but there are bigger issues facing the mainstream music industry. The biggest of these is the fact that there is a huge world of free, legally downloadable music on the Internet. Every year, the world of free Internet music gets bigger, and every year, free Internet music will pose a bigger threat to the traditional business model for mainstream music.

March 19: It’s 31 Days of Free Music month at Podcasting News. Every day in March, we’re going to do our best to hook you up a great free music podcast.

OK – it’s not really March 19th – it’s the 21st and we’re a couple days behind on the free music project. It’s not because we don’t have a ton of great free music podcasts that we want to share, though. We’re behind because we’ve been in London for the Corporate Podcast Summit and the combination of jet lag, late nights and prepping for our presentations has done a number on us.

Most of the bands we’ve looked at are probably ones that you haven’t heard from before. We‚Äôve highlighted a classical music podcast, a podcast of free hip-hop music, free Celtic and Irish music and more.

Here’s an example of a mainstream artist using podcasts to promote themselves and their music.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg has been test-driving an Apple TV for the last couple of weeks and calls it “a very well-designed product that easily brings the computer and the TV together.”

“We’ve been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it’s a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it,” notes Mossberg and Katie Boehret in their review. “It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.”

Here’s their video review of the new device: