ENNIO THE GREAT

After taping Danny Burns for BalconyTV last night, myself Tom and Pauline did indeed sit in and watch the Oscars over a few tinnys. How romantic is that? Must be said the highlights were a bit of a dud. Certainly the Sky One version was. I was upset they cut Ellens opening monologue. The opening monologues are usually quite entertaining...so I think that was a mistake. Also upset to see they didn't show the Lifetime Achievement Award which went to the legendary Ennio Marricone. If your not familiar with Ennio Marricone...he is responsible for some of the greatest film scores of all time.
Rambling through YouTube I found jamesthepenguin who seems to have a whole live concert from Marricone uploaded. Here is one of my favourite Marricone pieces...from Cinema Paradiso. Check out The Good the Bad and the Ugly too!!!

And the Oscar goes to...

Ok...so who won the BalconyTV Oscar betathon...

In the BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR category eveyone guessed wrong...so no points there. Alan Arkin won for Little Miss Sunshine.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS...both Stephen and Pauline guessed correct with Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls.

BEST ACTRESS...Pauline guessed correct with the shoe in Helen Mirren as The Queen...

BEST ACTOR...Stephen, Pauline and Tom guessed right with Forest Whitaker in the Last King of Scotland.

BEST DIRECTOR...Stephen guessed correct with Marty Scorcese for The Departed...

And BEST FILM...Everyone guessed wrong as the Departed took home the gong.

All which means Stephen and Pauline finished up with an equal 3 correst guesses...and Tom got a meesly one correct. Stephen and Pauline will now have to go through a nail biting penalty shoot out to decipher whos the best. Fair enough.

OSCAR TIPS

Congrats to Ireland...bloomin marvellous...we watched it in the oak...where the atmosphere was triffic...

OK here are Tom/ Pauline and my Oscars tips for tonight.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR -
Pauline - Djimon Hounsou - Blood Diamond
Stephen - Eddie Murphy - Dreamgirls
Tom - Mark Wahlberg - The Departed

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS -
Pauline - Jennifer Hudson - Dreamgirls
Stephen - Jennifer Hudson - Dreamgirls
Tom - Abigail Breslin - Little Miss Sunshine

BEST ACTRESS -
Pauline - Helen Mirren - The Queen
Stephen - Penélope Cruz - Volver
Tom - Judi Dench - Notes on a Scandal

BEST ACTOR -
Pauline - Forest Whitaker - The Last King of Scotland
Stephen - Forest Whitaker - The Last King of Scotland
Tom - Forest Whitaker - The Last King of Scotland

BEST DIRECTOR -
Pauline - Paul Greengrass - United 93
Stephen - Martin Scorsese - The Departed
Tom - Paul Greengrass - United

BEST PICTURE -
Pauline - Little Miss Sunshine
Stephen - Babel
Tom - Babel

We'll see you at the Oscars...

Hmmmm.

DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

I went to see The Fountain last night at the Dublin International Film Festival with Magnus Lally...good friend and few times presenter of BalconyTV. The film was a strange one...but intriguing nevertheless. I'm sure that spelling of intriguing is wrong...but I'm gonna forge ahead without checking.
While we were in the cinema I was moaning alot about the Dublin International Film Festival. Magnus told me to shut up and just write about it in the blog.
Good idea I thought.
First up, from what I can see the Dublin International Film Festival is not a proper film festival. Every other film festival in the world - Sundance, Cannes, Berlin...even the Oscars has a process designed for you to submit your film for festival consideration. Dublins festival does not have such a system...instead a team of people invite films they deem worthy from around the world.
This process gets particularly annoying when it comes to picking short films for screening at the festival. You see all the short films that screen at the festival are Irish Film Board financed shorts. Now as 99.99999 percent of film makers dont get funding from the Film Board to make short films they have to find funding independently. And many make very good films. But alas...their films don't have a shout at screening at the Dublin festival.
I admit I am somewhat bitter as my short film has been screened at festivals around the world...but never screened at the Dublin event.
I need to get over it.
Apart from that, I have another moan. Tickets for the festival cost 9Euro!!! Isn't the point of a film festival to awaken/culivate/nuture peoples passion in the art form? Surely the tickets should be cheaper, not more expensive.
Thats not all...when you buy a ticket, you also have to buy something thats called a Day Membership which is an extra 2EUROS.
When you go to the screen door and hand in your ticket...your asked do you have your membership card...

"Eh no...I booked these tickets online"

"Well you need a membership card'

"What do you mean I need a membership card? I have a ticket"

"Yes but you need a membership card too?"

Its quite confusing and pointless. Why don't they just build the 'whatever it means' membership fee into the ticket price.
When I went to a film earlier in the week I witnessed a Dublin International Film Festival usher get very ratty with an Italian women for not having the membership card. The Italian women just didn't have a clue what she was being ranted on about. She had her ticket after all.

And where is all this money going? Jemesons sponsoring of the event seems collosus. And I know most of the people working for the event are volunteers.

I dunno...I'm just bitter.

Hope you enjoyed that.

NO FEATURE

Not much to write today. If you, like us made a mad dash to the nearest newsagent to pick up this weeks HotPress to read all about BalconyTV...you may have noticed we didn't feature. We can only presume they are working on a special BalconyTV Pull Out Special...or the likes. Hmmmmm...or maybe they just ditched us...
Our egos are dented in that case.
I attended the UCD National Student Film Festival last night in UCD...sure it was great crack...and the films were ace...proper indie fare.
BLAHBLE BLO BLO...

PUBLICITY HOTPRESS AND ROBERT EVENS

So with the archive back up and running I guess that wraps up everything in a nice little package. I think searching a band name with balconytv on youtube is still messed up...so if you are looking up an act you may have to litterally flick through our archive pages. Pain in the ass we know. Hopefully YouTube will sort this out.
Its has undoubtedly been a strange couple of weeks. Its been totally bizarre how the publicity worked. First of all we learned that we do in fact have a few fans...their blog postings led to a very surprising bout of media coverage about the debacle. And for a website the size of ours...all publicity is good publicity. That sounds cynical without meaning to be. But we must be careful now...Whats the famous line?. 'If you live by the sword, you die by the sword'. I remember that from The Kid Stays In The Picture.
I think we are in HotPress today actually!!! Must run out and grab a copy. The did a photo shoot on the balcony at the weekend. Luckily we got a sunny day for it. Tom made no effort in appearance...and Pauline made a bit more...I just stayed out of it.
Sirens blazing in the background as per usual.

THE DEBACLE COMING TO AN END

So it seems BalconyTV is back in operation on YouTube. Yes folks...our archives are back working and we should have the link reestablished from our main page soon.
We hope to upload the past days MySpace shows onto YouTube soon.
There seems to be some glitches in the YouTube systems still though. For instance on our YouTube page it says we have only one video...but displays over 200. And we are not sure the search facility is working on them which would be a real pain in the ass. Hopefully this situation will improve over the days to come.
Nevertheless, we have to commend YouTube with the speed this situation has been seen to. YouTube is afterall one of the worlds biggest websites...and I think to be able to sort out the problems that came up in a week is quite good considering how much trouble the site currently has to deal with.
We think we are going to go ahead and establish our own archives. We will have to wait and see how that works out.
Sorry for the trouble over the past week or so. We hope the various bands can find their videos.

UPDATE AND MUMBA

A couple of days ago I promised good news...(I think)...

Well basically after using Neil from Greystones template (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter.html), which I faxed YouTube last Thursday...we received an email on Sunday morning from YouTube informing us that their copyright claim against The Dirty 9s video has been retracted!!! It went onto say that the videos have been reactivated and should work again within 2 days.

So apparent success for BalconyTV...WE WIN so to speak.

Well not so...ironically the only video that appears to be working is The Dirty 9s video. So does this mean that when they said the videos would be reactivated...did they mean the ones that we had copyright claims against...and sod the rest?

We should all cross our fingers. Things should become apparent very soon. Basically our account has been reactivated...but the videos don't work. Hmmmmmm.

In other news Samantha Mumba requested to be a friend of BalconyTV at our MySpace page. This delighted us. We immediatly wrote to Sam and invited her to come up to ou amazing balcony. She hasn't replied yet, which we think is very rude...so we have decided to deny her so called friend request. Booo Hooo Samantha!!!

PHOTOS

We made the front of the Business Section in the Sunday Tribune today under the headline 'Down the Tube: Spat Leads To Loss Of Video Catalogue.' Its a nice little piece by Una Mullally. There is also a nice iccle picture of our BalconyTV.Com sign.
Speaking of pictures...we had a photographer up yesterday to take photos of Pauline and Tom for a popular Irish music mag. Pauline dressed to impress, and Tom just turned up:-) It was very sunny yesterday so the BalconyTV presenters may look more white than usual.
And watch this space...we have just recieved some very good news. We hope to be able to bring that to you in the next couple of days.

MARDI GRAS

So today is the first of what will hopefully be a monthly show featuring the best gay talent in town. Ever since our famous Mardi Gras Special (it was infact Gay Pride, but Pauline didn't have a clue)...BalconyTV has been very popular with the gay community in Ireland. Now it should be even more popular.
Sorry it took so long to get a new show online yesterday. We simpy couldnt upload the show via the Clearwire Dodge Box...so at four o' clock I had to burn the show to disc...and go to the nearby internet cafe and do it from there. Due to this Hipple Street really only got half a day on BalconyTV...so here they are again...
HIPPLE STREET

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CLEARWIRE IS BAD

I'm trying to upload todays show...and the fustration is building. This is my fifth attempt. I only get so far each time before it stops and I see the note 'CHECK INTERNET CONNECTION'. I have calculated that my internet signal must be dropping every fifteen minutes despite the fact that I have four lights on on my CLEARWIRE BOX.
I have just called Clearwire and I am informed that indeed the interference in the area is at the 30% mark when it should be at the 5% mark.
Ok so...............
Try moving the box around a bit I'm told.
Todays the day I officially search for a new internet provider.
I took Neil from Greystones advice by the way and faxed YouTube yesterday with the template he sent us. Lets see what happens on that one.
In the mean time...there may be a show today...or there may not.

SEAMUS HEANEY AND STUFF

Pauline points to at least seven grammatical and spelling errors in yesterdays blog entry. Thats not good. Will try be better today.

I hope everyone liked our little Valentines motiff of the main page. Our web designer put that together quick smart...and I think it looks very nice. You might want to try take a look if you haven't seen it as it should be taken down at any time.

Thank you again to the ridiculously good support from everyone regarding the YouTube debacle. We officially love Phantom FM!!! What a great radio station...we have been waiting for a radio station like this for so long in Dublin. Their support of BalconyTV is mucho appreciado.

We also have gotten a number of comments on the blog. We never get comments on the blog. Neil in Greystones has pointed out this in case we want to take on YouTube...
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter.html
Very useful. We may just do that.

I was called by some other very well known publications yesterday and did various interviews. It's really bizarre. We have never got attention like this. Maybe the YouTube debacle could be a blessing in disguise for BalconyTV, in our efforts to become The New Music Broadcasting Super Power.

Myself and Tom were filming the launch of the new Instituto Cervantes last night. It was a great evening...and Seamus Heaney made a special appearance. I couldn't muster up the strenght to give him a BalconyTV card...but Tom did. Seamus Heaney has officially been invited to recite a few lines of poetry on BalconyTV. That would be a cooo.

Tom vanished into the night with a Polish stunner. I know as much as anyone else.

WE ARE THE NEWS

Yesterday was a funny day. BalconyTV and the YouTube debacle made the news on PhantomFM. That was very cool. These noticed our plight from Blogorrahs reportage on us...and various other blogs who posted about us.
Needless to say thank you to everyone who is supporting us..either through publicity or through emails of support...It is must appreciated.
It has been a tough couple of weeks. For some reason things have been very faulty of late. For instance...our camera are somewhat unreliable now. Our computer is very pernikery at the moment...our hard drives make strange noises and we need to hold our breath before they start up. And ofcoarse the YouTube debacle.
I went for a couple of scoops with Tom last night...when we bumped into a bunch or barristers. They are ready to take on YouTube for us!!!

DVDS AND THE FUTURE

So we'd like to thank all the fans and people who have supported us since the YouTube debacle. We have had some amazing support. We are now hatching plans for the future...a world where Balconys stand side by side with huge coporations...a world where no Balcony has to fear...blah blah blah...you get the idea.

I still don't know what to think about YouTube. I had another account where I posted all manner of other things that I filmed...short films and stuff...I see that has been taken down too. Which is another pain in the £@%.

Maybe YouTube lost one of their servers and lost a load of accounts...or maybe they are just out for me.

Anyway...until we figure out how the new archive we work...what it will look like...we hope you continue to enjoy the new shows.

If anyone wants a copy of their past shows on DVD...we are charging 10EURO for this service. We're sorry for the expense...but a Balcony has gotta live!!! So just give us an email and pop the tenner in an envelope...

BalconyTV
2 Crane Lane
Apartment 4
Off Dame Street
Dublin 2

We hope thats ok for you...

THE FULL STORY

So yesterday the worst happened. At about 1pm we logged into our YouTube account to see how ratings were going for the day...when we saw this message -

[ Your account has now been permanently disabled. ]


In total we had uploaded 223 shows onto YouTube.

We suspected a problem in the last couple of weeks when we start receiving emails from YouTube informing us that various shows were violating copyright rules and were thus removed. The alleged copyrighted shows were featured the bands SUPER JIMENEZ and THE DIRTY 9S. Mysteriously BARRY MCCABES legendary performance went missing from our archives too, however we received no notification why that was.

Here is a copy of YouTube email.

[Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Viacom International Inc. claiming that this material is infringing:

THE DIRTY 9s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RudQLj13BxQ

Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.

If you elect to send us a counter notice, to be effective it must be a written communication provided to our designated agent that includes substantially the following (please consult your legal counsel or see 17 U.S.C. Section 512(g)(3) to confirm these requirements):

A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber.
Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled.
A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
The subscriber's name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriberis address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
Such written notice should be sent to our designated agent as follows:

DMCA Complaints
YouTube, Inc.
1000 Cherry Ave.
Second Floor
San Bruno, CA 94066
Email: copyright@youtube.com

Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability.

Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 YouTube, Inc.]


So there you have it. When we got these emails we feared the worst...and thus set about contacting YouTube and Google. If you try and contact YouTube, you'll see it can only be done via a form on the website. Imagining the hundreds of thousands of emails they get a day...we felt we needed to get to someone quickly before the worst happened. We tryed to find contact details for Google...Google Ireland would be a good stop we felt. Alas numbers for that particular company are hard to come by too.

We did contact DMCA via email...claiming they made a mistake in removing our videos. They responded with an automated reply a couple of days ago. We will indeed have to go down the official lines.

Regardless of everything...I personally felt our archive was our best feature. And now it is gone...I imagine alot of videos will have to be removed from Blogs and MySpaces everywhere.

BalconyTV would like to apologise to all the bands this has caused hastle too. We also know that alot of acts had come to cherish their balcony moments...its unfortunate that the removal has caused such gut wrenching heartache.

So what to do...well we haven't quite given up on retrieving our archive. We are hoping to speak to someone in Google Ireland today. But after that who knows.

We may create our own online storage for videos...or we may find another video host.

We are using MySpace Video at the moment to show videos. Watch this space...

if you missed yesterdays show...here is Tom breaking the news of the BalconyTV crisis mere moments after we learned about it.
YOUTUBE TAKES DOWN BALCONYTV

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INTERVIEWS ON RADIO STATIONS

Why does the snow never really stick here. Any scientists out there want to come up to the balcony and explain? You can be our resident meteorologist. Although we can't pay you. Remember it's just for fun.
I enjoyed the interview on Phantom yesterday morning. They have a very good set up over there. Myself and Pauline actually studied Radio Broadcasting in college together...but we obviously never got to the limelight of a real radio station.
I was interviewed by Edel Coffey...while having a nice cup of coffee...(tee hee hee). I think the interview went ok. It was funny that while we were talking they were recieving texts with the likes of 'BALCONYTV ROCKS'. That was good. I always thought radio stations made up peoples texts to seem more popular that they were. After the interview they played Lauren Guillerys Rude, which I think was a good choice by Edel. If you've never seen Laurens performance of Rude on BalconyTV...its down the bottom.
Another interview is tonight somewhere between 10PM and 1AM on Roddie Cleeres award winning WLRFM. You can hear that at www.wlrfm.com. WLRFM took the award for the "Commercial Radio Podcasting" at the Digital Media Awards last week.
We should be featuring that interview on BalconyTV interview tomorrow. Touch wood.

Floating Plug

I'm looking out at the Balcony and I see the BalconyTV Lights Plug is floating in the rain. That can't be good.

Have a bit of a headache today. Tom from BalconyTV organised a big party last night in the Sugar Club for a company called Captive Advertising. You might know them...they are responsible for alot of adverts you see in the back of toilet doors in bars.

It was a great night though...Tom organised burlesque dancers, magicians, belly dancers, The Revolts and The Republic of Loose to play. Very very good fun. Tom was wearing my flashy white jacket!!!

Hope you like the changes to the homepage. We do.

Listen in to Edel Coffey after 10.30 this morning. I'm on it.

Blah blah blah.

Broken Cameras!!!

Tom brought back the Digital Media Award yesterday after kidnapping it for the weekend. Pauline was very sad about it. Tom wanted it in HIS mantel piece...to show it off. We now...we have it back...we're gonna keep it, feed it well and look after it.
In case your not up to speed...BalconyTV.Com is the Best Music Website!!!
Sorry about the poor quality sound on todays show...since we won the award we've been slightly jinxed. Two of our cameras have stopped working. We had to act fast in order to do the show at all. It was a royal pain in the ass.
Basically I had to use another camera that I wasn't 100 percent confident of. My apologies to the Scenarios who are welcome back to BalconyTV whenever they want.
I think the problem with the camera is dirty reels...which can lead to complications...which it has.
Anyways...thats whats happening at BalconyTV.
Oh...by the way...I think I'm gona be on Phantom tomorrow morning from about 10.30...so listen in.

PAUL MOST EVER VIEWS BRADY

Just looking over BalconyTV.Com ratings...we see the legend that is Paul Brady has risen to the mountain top of ´most ever views´. We see he has over 7´100 views!!!! And his video has been favourited over 100 times. Big congrats to Paul.

There is alot of good Paul Brady on YouTube now...check out this pearl...

Happy Sunday!!!

Bad News

So a day after the glory of winning Best Music Website at the Digital Media Awards...we have just recieved another dodgy email from YouTube stating the video of THE DIRTY 9s has been removed due to copyright infringment!!! Viacom is the company who has got us this time!!!
Thats our second video in a week to be removed. The email comes with a warning that if further videos breach copyright rules, they will cancil our YouTube account, removing all our videos!!!!! Thats everything we´ve done basically.
Unfortunatly there is no phone number for Google or YouTube!!! So what to do!!!!
Watch this space!!!
Gulp!!!!

Celebrations

We all have headaches this morning! Too much wine and champers!

So BalconyTV won Best Music Website. Hurrah.

To tired to type.

No Luck

So both myself and Tom failed to get through the Big Brother auditions yesterday...although Tom got through to the next stage...when he was promptly knocked out.

Digital Media Awards are tonight. 3 nominations!!! I need to go sort the tux now.

A few movie reviews...

Hollywoodland is a dissappointment...Babel is over-rated but entertaining. Not the intelligent important film it disguises itself as. It's a bit farcical actually.

And last night I watched Carlitos Way. Muy buen.