For the unaware, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a legitimately great show. And when it was announced that a new series called Avatar: The Legend of Korra would be a direct sequel to the original, there was (quite understandably) a lot of excitement. Though for fans, anything to get the sour taste of the live action adaptation out of their mouths would have been welcome. Now, the first 80 seconds of the first episode have been leaked online.

Earlier this year, BitTorrent Inc. released an all-in-one ecosystem for BitTorrent products called Chrysalis, which allows users to — by way of using a certified application — find files using BitTorrent, then play them on a media-playing device of their choice, such as TVs, computers or mobile devices. What really makes the product convenient is that users don’t have to pay attention to the Big Three of things that prevent media from running on devices — codecs, file formats, and conversion — which anyone from the early days of modern media devices will tell you make getting that episode of Pushing Daises to properly display on your flip phone a big pain.

BitTorrent Inc. and partner and TV manufacturer Vestel are going to make using media downloaded from BitTorrent a little bit easier. Today, the duo announced the launch of a digital TV that will come with the aforementioned BitTorrent support built right in, a first of its kind.

You know how everyone in the room gets annoyed when you walk in front of the television? Well, Dave Forbes kind of, sort of has a solution to the issue, assuming you are wearing his 60-inch LED TV coat when you get up and walk in front of good Sawyer scene during your weekly Lost on Netflix viewing party. The resolution isn’t so great — only 160 x 120 — but the thing is powered by a 12V battery and can receive video input from an iPod or media player, so when you’re wearing it on the elliptical at the gym, everyone on the row of machines behind you can watch your coat instead of listen to their dubstep cardio remix playlist. The coat is made of flex boards with LEDs attached and is connected by ribbon cables and hot glued to the coat itself, while a digitizing board converts the video signals into RGB data streams in order to display the Doctor’s bow tie. In what is not even slightly a surprise, Forbes built the coat to wear at Burning Man. Head on past the break to see a few more pictures of the coat, as well as a video of the thing in action.

Lionsgate Films has signed a multi-year deal with Netflix to bring the hit ’60s ad industry drama Mad Men to the streaming service. Beginning on June 27, the first four seasons of the hit show will be available on the service with new seasons to be added after their run on AMC.

Though Mad Men has been available on Netflix in Canada under a separate deal, this is the first time the program will be available on the U.S. version of the service. Netflix has been keen to add new television programming, and last February announced a similar deal with CBS that made Cheers, Frasier, and Medium available for streaming.

The addition of hit television programming is certainly part of Netflix’s efforts to expand its streaming library, but also likely to help offset the loss of films the service has recently suffered and competition on the horizon from studio-backed streaming services. Netflix may be trying to outmaneuver these attacks by increasing demand for their service with hot media commodities like Mad Men.

Regardless of the motivation, having the delighfully inebriated trials and tribulations of constantly smoking, ultra sexy ad executives from a bygone age at my finger tips is enough to have my butt parked firmly on my couch. Provided someone can refresh my Old Fashioned.

(via Mashable)

Artist Stephan Tillmans’ Luminant Point Arrays is a series of photographs of tube TVs at the moment they are switched off.

The television picture breaks down and creates a structure of light. The pictures refuse external reference and broach the issue of the difference between abstraction and concretion in photography. The breakdown of the television picture discribes the breakdown of the reference. The product is self-referential photography.

Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson have produced a brilliant satirical essay that re-imagines the acclaimed television series The Wire as a 19th-Century serialized novel. It’s wonderful, and will give you a reason to use the word “Dickensian” today.

There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century. Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia. We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.

You can read the whole essay, “When It’s Not Your Turn,” over at the Hooded Utilitarian.

(via BoingBoing)

I feel like someone is probably thinking up this channel right now, except without the sense of humor. And more ads than humanly possible. (Also: the Craigslist show would be worth its own channel, and I’m torn on the use of a Bob Ross-type character for 4chan.)

(CollegeHumor via Geeks Are Sexy)

Auteur of the weird J. J. Abrams has an established penchant for the music in his projects. Simply uttering the words, “you all everybody” to a LOST fan will lead to untold minutes of Drive Shaft impersonations. And in 2009, he arranged for the release of a song on iTunes by the ultimate LOST MacGuffin, Geronimo Jackson.

However, TVLine is reporting that Abrams has upped the ante with Fringe, going so far as to produce an entire album by faux 70′s rock icons Violet Sedan Chair, having it pressed to vinyl, and secreting into indie record shops across America. Even more teasing is the fact that the albums have allegedly been sitting there for “months.” (more…)

Like a big reveal on LOST, Conan O’Brien announced his new show, starting November 8th on TBS, will be called Conaw Conan. Check out the humorous announcement video below.

Putting new technologies in familiar old backdrops is nothing new, but Jonas Damon has beautifully executed it with his ’70s/’80s-style TV iPad dock.

For Damon, it’s a little more aesthetically and philosophically involved than simply mashing together retro and modern for shock effect.