Archive for the ‘TV’ Category
Steve Jobs Stakes Out the TV Den
Posted on: May 5, 2008
- In: Amazon | Blockbuster | Caught in the Act | CinemaNow | Den | Hewlett-Packard | Microsoft | Netflix | Out | Sony | Stakes | steve jobs | TV
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A week ago, the family was stuck on I-95 between Washington and New York for seven hours. The Meatgrinder, as it is affectionately known to us, had a little case of congestion and after five hours of quality time, we were reduced to silently hating the intermittent FM signal and the brake lights that framed our existence.
But after we hooked an Apple iPod to a doohickey that works with the radio, the car suddenly filled with an hour’s worth of storytelling from a podcast of “This American Life,” followed by some quality time with Taylor Swift, an improbably gifted teenage country star. The ability to program our temporary purgatory lifted the pall and before we knew it, we were home.
But once we went inside, we hit the halt button on Apple. There was the second season of “Friday Night Lights” on Netflix, “John Adams” from HBO on the digital video recorder and back copies of “Weeds” from Showtime, there for the plucking from the on-demand service.
While a lot of us carry a little bit of Steve Jobs around in our pocket, Apple is now after the remaining bit of life-share that it doesn’t already own, the home front.
On Thursday, the company announced deals with 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment, among others, to sell movies for download on iTunes on the same day they are released on DVD.
The “day and date” downloaded movies (as they are called in industry jargon) will play only on Apple gadgets, but that characteristic may finally give the company the toehold in the American den that it has been looking for via Apple TV.
The movie business, because it makes its living on big fat video files that are harder to share than audio files, was able to watch and learn as the music industry shrank under the weight of pirated downloads and then reluctantly embraced a 99-cent solution from Mr. Jobs. And now every song, now and forever, is worth 99 cents, a price that attains for both the red-hot duet by Madonna and Justin Timberlake “Four Minutes,” and the forgotten B-sides he made when he was in a boy band.
The music companies still owned the songs, but Apple owned everything else — pricing, format, distribution and the lucrative revenue stream of manufactured devices.
When it comes to video, Apple has competition. Microsoft, Sony and Hewlett-Packard are vying to offer Web-enabled TV, while Amazon, Blockbuster, CinemaNow and Netflix sell movies digitally. So unlike the music companies, the movie studios seemed to be holding most of the cards.
They still might have blown it.
- In: Dazzle | images | Jaded | New York Times | The | To | TV
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Modern tech life teems with longstanding quandaries, questions that never seem to go away. Mac or Windows? Turn off the computer every night or let it sleep? Plasma or L.C.D.?
Fortunately, that last question will soon have an answer. There’s a new TV on the block, and its picture is so amazing, it makes plasma and L.C.D. look like cave drawings.
It’s called organic light emitting diode, or O.L.E.D. This technology has been happily lighting up the screens of certain cellphone and music-player models for a couple of years now, but Sony is the first company to offer it in a TV screen. It’s called the XEL-1, and it’s available only from SonyStyle stores. Its picture is so incredible, Sony should include a jaw cushion.
At a cooperative Best Buy store, I did a little test. I set the XEL-1 up next to state-of-the-art plasmas and L.C.D. sets — all hooked up to the same video signal for easy comparison — and recorded the reactions of shoppers and employees. Their adjectives for this picture included “astonishing,” “astounding,” “incredible” (twice) and “amazing” (five times).
They were right. The XEL-1’s picture is so colorful, vibrant, rich, lifelike and high in contrast, you catch your breath. It’s like looking out a window. With the glass missing.
Name a drawback of plasma or L.C.D. — motion blur, uneven lighting across the panel, blacks that aren’t quite black, whites that aren’t quite white, limited viewing angle, color that isn’t quite true, brightness that washes out in bright rooms, screen-door effect up close — and this TV overcomes it.
Plasma is supposed to offer darker blacks than L.C.D., but O.L.E.D. trumps both of them. Next to this TV, even the blacks on the critically adored Pioneer Kuro plasma screen look very dark gray. Blacks on Sony’s O.L.E.D. TV are jet black. Absolute black. Black-hole black — and kuro even means black in Japanese.
(If you’re a TV-technology geek and you’re getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu, congratulations. All of this does sound exactly like the descriptions of S.E.D. television prototypes demonstrated years ago by Toshiba and Canon. Unfortunately, that equally impressive picture technology never made it out of the lab.)
To make this thing even more drool-worthy, the XEL-1’s screen is only three millimeters thick — shirt-cardboard thick. If they could build a laptop with a screen this thin, it would make the MacBook Air look like a suitcase.
BBC and ISPs clash over iPlayer
Posted on: April 9, 2008
A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) and the BBC.
ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope.
Ashley Highfield, head of future media and technology at the corporation, has said he believes the cost of network upgrades should be carried by ISPs.
Simon Gunter, from ISP Tiscali, said the BBC should contribute to the cost.
He said the BBC did not understand the issues involved.
‘Bit odd’
The popular iPlayer service lets users download or stream programmes to a PC.
In its first three months more than 42m programmes have been accessed via the catch-up TV service.
According to figures from regulator Ofcom it will cost ISPs in the region of £830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer.
Mr Gunter is leading the call for the BBC to help pay for the rising costs.
“The question is about whether we invest in extra capacity or go to the consumer and ask them to pay a BBC tax,” he said.
Bandwidth problems
Mr Highfield told the BBC’s Today programme such “inflammatory” comments were not helpful.
“The success of the iPlayer should be of benefit to the whole UK broadband industry, increasing those who want to take up broadband,” he said.
In his BBC blog last week Mr Highfield laid out a 19-point plan of action for ISPs, and warned they should not try to charge content providers.
“Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content works best on (and which to avoid).”
In response Mr Gunter said it was a “bit rich that a publicly-funded organisation is telling a commercial body how to run its business”.
“Inflammatory comments about blacklisting ISPs do not help. There seems to be a lack of understanding about how networks are built. Either we are not explaining it properly or it is falling on deaf ears,” he added.
So-called traffic throttling has long been controversial and has been used by ISPs to control those users who eat up bandwidth by downloading huge amounts of material from often illegal file-sharing sites.
But the BBC’s iPlayer service has changed the nature of the problem.
“The iPlayer has come along and made downloading a legal and mass market activity,” said Michael Phillips, from broadband comparison service broadbandchoices.co.uk.
He said he believed ISPs were partly to blame for the bandwidth problems they now face.
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 Inflammatory comments about blacklisting ISPs do not help  Simon Gunter, Tiscali
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“They have priced themselves as cheaply as possible on the assumption that people were just going to use e-mail and do a bit of web surfing,” he said.
ISPs needed to stop using the term ‘unlimited’ to describe their services and make it clear that if people wanted to watch hours of downloaded video content they would have to pay a higher tariff, he added.
He said he believed the BBC needed to compromise.
“There has been talk, for instance, of the BBC bringing their servers into the loop as a way of lowering the backhaul costs,” he said.
But Mr Gunter said he was not convinced this would help.
“I have heard that the BBC is working on building a caching infrastructure so that storage devices can go on an ISP’s network but even if it goes ahead it doesn’t save costs on the backhaul network,” he said.
Gridlock warning
Geoff Bennett, director of product marketing at optical equipment maker Infinera, said he believed the government should broker a deal between the BBC and ISPs.
While allowing BBC content to be ‘cached’ by ISPs might be an instant fix to the problem it may not be the answer as more on-demand, bandwidth heavy applications come online, he said.
“There is a broader issue about the downloading of content and this requires an increase in the pipe where the bottleneck is occurring,” he said.
This would mean upgrades in the so-called backhaul or second mile network, he said.
“The industry has talked a lot about upgrading the last mile network with fibre to the home but the question needs to be asked about whether we should upgrade the second mile. The price of this would be ten times less,” he said.
Some reports, including one from US analyst firm Nemertes Research, have warned of net gridlock as early as 2010 as networks struggle to cope with the amount of data being carried on them.
But the BBC believes that the growth is “manageable”, said Mr Highfield.
“We estimate that currently the iPlayer is having between 3-5% impact on the network,” he said.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Blinkx, the video search engine, is getting into video distribution. Today it will launch BBTV, a downloadable player that streams video from content partners using peer-to-peer technology.
The initial content lineup is rather spare: forty-odd independent movies from Dogwoof Productions and other videos from existing partners such as Young Holywood (celebrity videos), Kiplinger (financial videos), Shiny Media (fashion videos), ExpertVillage (how-to videos), TurnHere (travel videos), and Mavericks (surfing videos).
There are plenty of other P2P video players out there, including Joost, Veoh TV, Vuze, and Babelgum. None have exactly taken the world by storm when compared to video available through the browser. But you can do more inside these custom players, as you can with BBTV, and the viewing experience is much better.
Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake gave me a demo last week. He positions BBTV as completely different than Joost:
What Joost tried to do from Day One is present itself as a true alternative to regular television. Can you actually do that? It is hard because TV is actually pretty good. If this will be of interest to the average person it has to offer something new and different.
Where he tries to be different is with the technology and the experience. With BBTV, you can stream full-length movies to your PC in decent quality. Using Blinkx’s speech-to-text technology, you can see a full transcript of any video and go to that exact part of the video by clicking on any word. “Speech becomes navigation,” says Suranga. You can also jump off to the regular Web by hitting different key strokes to, say, search for a person’s name on Wikipedia or look up something on IMDB.
But why not offer the service through a regular Web browser? He is actually agnostic:
If you can do it on the browser, you sacrifice certain levels of control and quality, but you get a platform that everybody uses. I don’t think we are wedded only to this experience. To make it fit seamlessly you need to package it. I would not be surprised if we implement this eventually in a browser.
That would make BBTV much better. Barring that, a Mac version would be nice.
| Website: | www.blinkx.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founded: | December 16, 2004 |
| IPO: | May 22, 2007 |
blinkx describes itself as the largest video search engine with 18 million hours of indexed online video and audio content. They use advanced speech-recognition technology to analyze videos and deliver search results that are more accurate than… Learn More
| Website: | joost.com |
| Location: | New York, New York, United States |
| Founded: | October 1, 2006 |
| Funding: | $45M |
As their third major undertaking, Skype and Kazaa founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are attempting to perfect IPTV with Joost. Joost is a p2p on demand video player that offers professional (legal)… Learn More
| Website: | www.veoh.com |
| Location: | San Diego, California, United States |
| Funding: | $39.7M |
“Veoh is a Web site that’s headed for your TV. It’s also the name for a suite of applications for collecting, publishing, and watching a vast selection of HD-quality video programming. Veoh is a diverse, virtual community of indie publishers coming… Learn More
| Website: | babelgum.com |
| Location: | Dublin, Ireland |
| Founded: | March 1, 2007 |
| Funding: | $13.2M |
Babelgum is a P2P IPTV company which offers on demand video programming from a downloadable client. Going live after competitor joost, Babelgum lost much of its public momentum. At its launch it included far… Learn More
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