Monday, May 26, 2008

More new Oprah & Eckhart on the mysterious Oprah Soul Series!

Why do we say mysterious? Because there seems to be some intentional "sins of omission" about these videos from Oprah's XM radio interviews and we are starting to think it is intentional.

After all, she built a Monday night audience of hundreds of thousands. Now she wants to take that new web-only audience & re-disperse them back into her radio & TV demographic. Makes sense considering the investment she made on her free 10 weeks of webcasts.

The omissions are the nondisclosure of the length of segments from the radio interviews (which will be made available tonight), & the time that they were recorded.

When was tonight's interview with Eckhart recorded?.... Before, during, or after Oprah's webcast series with him? Eckhart did a series of guest appearances on the Oprah TV show late in 2007. And Oprah did mention on one of the webcasts that "this conversation with Eckhart will continue at XM radio", implying that both of them will walk over to the XM recording facility right after the webcast.

But as broadcast professionals, we have been given a clue. The pictures of Eckhart used for the guest line-up preview for Oprah's Soul Series shows Tolle wearing headphones. All radio shows require the use of headphones so that you can hear how you sound on the microphone. Neither Oprah nor her guest Dr. Bolton wore headphones in the video for the last 2 weeks. This leads us to believe that the Eckhart interview was conducted some time before the Harpo team decided to use these videos as part of the Soul Series webcast.

As we talked about last week, the absence of headphones makes folks look more attractive & natural on TV. If they really need to hear themselves, hidden wireless headphones inside the ear have been invented. All this to say that we are certain these Soul Series Eckhart interviews were NOT done after the webinar.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Oprah Eckhart Chapter 2 & the Soul Series Premier

Ditching school means that you have to ask your friends in class for their notes, but what do you do if the teacher does not show up? This is what happened to perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who scoured Oprah.com last Monday night (May 12) looking for the 1st installment of the Soul Series. It simply wasn't there.

There were opportunities to pay money to listen to the interviews on XM online & there were opportunities to sign up for a 30 day free trial of XM radio, but no video of the Soul Series premier, free or otherwise, could be found. Knowing that the audience Eckhart & Oprah had so effectively built over 10 weeks had become quite attached to Monday nights with Oprah, we thought it was a fatal error to offer nothing to those who eagerly tuned to see the Soul Series premier.

It reminded us of the first Oprah-Eckhart webcast, which you remember was jammed because too many people were watching & the Harpo team didn't have enough bandwidth. (So no one saw that premier either). Many people never returned from that 1st week of frustration nor did they bother to deal with the large proprietary Macintosh-platform download files that are not PC friendly. This is how we got in the business of providing these videos for free in YouTube format.

So if you have subscribed to our video newsletter & got the full webcast of Chapter 1 in your e-mail inbox last week, you are able now to see in full the beginning of the Eckhart-Oprah paradigm shift with no interruption. (If you have not subscribed to our video newsletter & would like to be included in the weekly mailing of the entire A New Earth webcast, free, go to the top right of this page to sign up).

So what happened to the new Soul Series? Well, we found it at Oprah.com 2 days after its premier date, Wednesday, and here is our report:

1. The program segments run 23 minutes. On the original XM satellite feed, that allows 7 minutes of commercials between program segments.

2. There is a big XM satellite logo in the lower right corner of the video screen, just in case you share the video with a friend & have forgotten where you got it.

3. Oprah's radio studio is very attractive. It's set-up to have a video shoot of high quality. The only clue that it's radio is the big microphones on giant wands coming up from the floor. Nobody is wearing headphones. It's all very cool, although why not use lapel mikes & eliminate the radio look entirely?

4. We only get the 1st segment. The last 3 come tonight, a full week after the premier date. Why the wait?

Overall the interview with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is interesting. It was obviously recorded while Oprah was in the midst of her webcast with Eckhart, since she makes many references to the webcast & his work. But it is disappointing. Why? Because we don't have Eckhart's presence filling the screen. These 2 women are talking about spiritual experience rather than embodying it.

Monday, May 5, 2008

The Grande Finale - Crossing the Finish Line

After 2 stunning classes in week 8 & week 9 we are on the eve of the last class. We talked last week about how many are asking for ANE II, a second edition of A New Earth. And we reported on how Oprah intends to webcast videos of her radio interviews during the same exact Monday time slot to keep the webcast going.

Those of you have signed up at Tolle Teachings to have the shows e-mailed each week in the YouTube format we are providing will begin receiving A New Earth Reprise -- the entire series of classes starting with the 1st class -- mailed out May 12th. If you haven't signed up, you can do it anytime. (See upper right column of this blog.) It's free and you don't have to join anything.

This blog will also continue with commentary on each class as they are repeated & report on what is happening with the Oprah-Eckhart phenomenon which on the Internet will continue to propagate & affect the world.


From all of us at Tolle Teachings, thank you for joining us on this paradigm-shifting adventure that has really just begun.