November 24th, 2008

Going back to Windows Media Center

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:15 am

Categories: Digital Media, Media Center, Television

Tags: Channel, Windows Media, Media Center PC, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Media Center, Digital Video Recorder, CableCard, Media Center PCs, DVR, Digital Video

I’d been using Media Center as my primary DVR since shortly after the release of Windows Vista several years ago. At the time, my intention was to learn more about the other TV-oriented technology at Microsoft, which was of particular interest to me as I worked, at the time, in Microsoft’s IPTV division. I also lacked a DVR at home, so Media Center added new capabilities to my television viewing experience that I previously had lacked.

The main drawback, however, is that the computer I was using did not have a “CableCARD” slot. This meant that I could only receive the signals I would receive if I had my cable wire plugged directly into the back of my TV set.

A CableCARD insert would have allowed me to receive more digital cable channels, such as HBO and Showtime. Unfortunately, it is not possible to buy CableCARD add-on hardware for my computer. Systems that have CableCARD slots have to be certified by CableLabs, the standard certification body for Set-Top Boxes used in the cable industry. In other words, if your machine does not have the required interface slots, there is no way to provide them after the fact.

That’s the reason Read the rest of this entry »

November 21st, 2008

SAG follows the path blazed by the UAW

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:16 am

Categories: Digital Media, Television

Tags: Union, UAW, Media, Internet, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, John Carroll

According to a recent article on Betanews, the Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG) is angling for a fight over union rules as they apply to Internet-only productions. Media created exclusively for distribution over the Internet would have to follow the same union rules as applies to bigger productions, regardless of revenue streams expected from them.

SAG proponents would likely argue that they are trying to bring union protections to a fast-growing segment of media production that currently lacks them. If you accept the premise that SAG protections are important for actors working in the industry (and I question that, to be sure, noting that the overwhelming majority of SAG members aren’t full-time actors), then union-won rights must be defended at all costs.

Union life, for some, IS good…assuming you can get into one in the first place. But, by raising costs on Internet productions, SAG makes major studios (the group most often bound by union rules) less likely to bother with Internet-only productions. This benefits the unions, as the Internet, in my opinion, poses the same kind of threat to traditional film production that it poses to traditional newspapers. By lowering the barrier to entry, it brings in new competitors who, by their very nature, offer content at lower cost than the incumbents.

Unfortunately, this is Read the rest of this entry »

October 17th, 2008

The tangled web of broadcasting regulations

Posted by John Carroll @ 7:53 am

Categories: Economic Policy, Television

Tags: Web, Regulation, Broadcasting, John Carroll, FCC, Spectrum, Switchover, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Personal Technology

I’ve been writing this blog for over three years now, and for the most part, have managed to write at least two posts a week. This month, however, has proven harder than most. Granted, I’ve never blogged through an election season (nor through the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, but then again, as the Internet didn’t exist back then, its safe to say no blogger has), and I’m finding the idea generating part of my brain pumps out more politically-related stuff than technology-related posts. That is good for iReport, and it got me interviewed by CNN yesterday (shameless self promotion here), but it means I’m suffering from technology writers’ block from hell.

Interesting things are happening in the technology world, however, even if this blogger is as distracted as a two year old in a toy store.

It’s starting to look like the FCC may approve “white space” devices which use the unlicensed spectrum that exists between TV and other licensed channels. Personally, I think that is spectacular news, though I can see why broadcasters and mobile phone networks aren’t big fans of the idea. Those groups paid big bucks for owernship of spectrum, a price that not only reduces the potential number of competitors, but gives them a justification for charging higher prices.

“Public access” spectrum (which, in some ways, is what “white space” spectrum usage is all about) would challenge that model. It could make spectrum licensing a less valuable revenue spinner for governments, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Europe hobbled the prospects of 3G (the high-speed successor to traditional GSM) by auctioning spectrum at such high prices during the boom-90s that it almost killed the market for such service (3G providers have a real trouble making a profit given the costs associated with spectrum ownership).

The loss in up-front licensing fees, however, is more than offset by the public benefit to be derived by lowering the barrier to entry for use of spectrum that can cover large areas. To be frank, maximizing licensing revenue and protecting a small pool of well-funded incumbents shouldn’t be an FCC goal. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), among others, may have vested interests which motivate them to continue the fight against such technology, but if the FCC truly has the public interest at heart, they should, in the end, fail in their challenge.

Of separate note, legislation will be introduced in Congress that aims to delay yet again the switchover to DTV. As things stand, analog broadcasting must end February 17th of next year. The NAB claims that 21.5 million are unprepared for the transition, though they are playing with numbers a bit. Only nine million US homes would be completely unable to receive any kind of television signal, while the rest just have a few TVs lying around the house that can’t accept over-the-air DTV signals.

That’s stretching things a bit, and so I think nine million is the real number that people should focus on. I understand the financial interest NAB members have in pushing for this legislation. Nine million fewer viewers after February 17th can reduce the value of advertising by some incremental amount.

On the other hand, there’s no better way to make people aware of the switchover than to have their televisions stop working. To quickly resolve the problem, I think the NAB should ensure that stores have information about vouchers for converter boxes so that they are ready when cave-dwellers come in wondering why their rabbit-eared TVs don’t work. Such a situation could be resolved in a few days, if handled correctly.

We’ve delayed the switchover too many times. Get it over with, already.

August 27th, 2008

The role of media in the Internet age

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:24 am

Categories: Digital Media, Television

Tags: Newspaper, Internet, Media, News, Jon Stewart, Advertising & Promotion, TVs, Marketing, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment

Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, a fake news show that has acquired a huge following (a group among whom I include myself), is attending the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week. As a result, he had the chance to meet with members of the traditional press, a group of people who, according to the account of Dennis DiClaudio on Comedy Central’s campaign-related web site, are huge fans.

The setting was a breakfast thrown by Comedy Central to which the network invited a set of prominent, mostly printed media journalists. At some point, one of those journalists asked Mr. Stewart how newspapers could “restore print journalism to its former place as the apex of political discourse.”

Stewart’s responded with the following:

The antidote is to push back. The antidote is to create filters” to remove the muck from the information fish tank, so we can clearly see what’s truth and what’s political spin. Take the ball away from the cable news networks and do what they’re being paid to do. You’re not on anyone’s team. You’re on our team, clearing our tanks.

It’s an interesting Read the rest of this entry »

August 20th, 2008

HD and region-specific encodings

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:39 am

Categories: BluRay, Television

Tags: HDTV, Broadcasting, PAL, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, John Carroll

Work has yet again been devouring me whole for the past few days, as I have been working almost continuously for several weeks (with a long-ish break on Saturdays so as not to go insane). That doesn’t mean I didn’t have blog ideas Monday morning. It just means that I didn’t have time to write them into proper posts.

Well, the clouds have lifted and the XMPP gods are letting me step away from my computer for long enough to talk about…Peep Show.

“Peep Show” is a TV series produced by “Channel 4″ in the United Kingdom that I discovered by accident in the final hour before landing in Los Angeles on a Virgin Atlantic flight from London. Virgin Atlantic’s competitive differentiator, as it were - besides a color scheme that I like to call “hangover red,” is that every seat has a Video on Demand console embedded into the facing seat back (it has games, too, though I use that less frequently). It makes a long international flight a heck of a lot more entertaining.

There is no shortage Read the rest of this entry »

August 8th, 2008

DVB-H and government overreach

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:09 am

Categories: Television, Wired & Wireless

Tags: dvb-h, government, business model, langheinrich, strategy, management, john carroll

I wrote a few months ago of the problems likely to be experienced by the European Commission as it tries to head the market off at the pass by mandating use of DVB-H protocols for video broadcasting over mobile networks before any viable companies who use the technology have gotten off the ground. As noted then, the market process is critical to working out the meeting point between profitability, customer needs and technology requirements. Quoting myself:

The lesson, in other words, is that picking the wrong winner can be extremely costly in the long term. Governments aren’t usually that good at picking winners, not because they are stupid, but because it is all but impossible to gather sufficient information to represent all the interests of buyers and sellers in a market.

My fears seem born out in the possible collapse of a joint venture designed to find a viable business model for the provision of DVB-H technology in Germany. The very notion of a government-sponsored joint venture in search of a business model really puts the horse before the cart. More commonly, companies find working business models in the process of trying to offer a new service, and that model gets popularized naturally, as success is its own best advertisement.

This statement on Read the rest of this entry »

July 23rd, 2008

Free the XBOX 360!!!

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:29 am

Categories: Microsoft, Television, Wii, XBOX, XBOX 360

Tags: Microsoft Corp., TV, Microsoft Xbox, Game Console, Games, Game Players, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics, John Carroll

Finalizing moves they began with the creation of the XNA managed game development system and the XNA Creator’s Club that goes along with it, Microsoft has announced that game developers can sell their creations in the XBOX Live marketplace. Microsoft will keep a cut of the sales - around 30%, according to the article on MSNBC, more if the game is “prominently featured”. Even so, most of the money does accrue to the developer, thus democratizing the range of games available on the XBOX. This is unique in the gaming space.

It seems a natural move for a platform company like Microsoft. I love my XBOX, but it always seemed to be a weird Microsoft product. Microsoft makes both the hardware and software, and the environment is tightly controlled - only Microsoft-approved software need apply. That’s not that unusual for game consoles, but it’s certainly a shift for Microsoft, a company that generally makes software designed to be customized and enhanced by third-party developers.

XNA helps to change things…a bit. It’s not exactly the wide-open world of desktop operating systems, but it is certainly an improvement on what preceded it.

Even so, I still Read the rest of this entry »

July 21st, 2008

Citizen journalism and traditional news

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:43 am

Categories: Television, Web Technology

Tags: Video Camera, Video, Camera, Corporate Communications, Marketing, John Carroll

I’ve been experimenting recently with CNN’s site for “citizen journalism” (named iReport).  I created a few video posts of myself in response to requests for questions targeted at future visitors to Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room” (you can see my iReport site here - http://www.ireport.com/people/JohnCarroll). There are a few kinks in the site to work out, some of which I’ve submitted as feedback to the folks at CNN, but its actually a fun thing to do, and the “prize,” if you will, is that you might see yourself on TV. I managed that on my first try, which is a bit unfortunate, as it was my first attempt at doing something like this, and I sat too close to the damn camera (my, grandma, what a big nose you have).

Video is clearly different than writing, a fact I am learning somewhat slowly. I have started - and abandoned - several comments for iReport simply because the result looked like I was reading an article out of an encyclopaedia. Perhaps, with practice, people grow really skilled at reading something and making it sound extemporaneous. Stand-up comics must deliver the exact same joke hundreds of times while making it seem like some witty observation just popped into their head on the spot. I, clearly, haven’t acquired that skill, though I’m settling on making really pithy bulletpoints as guide to what I’m going to say. The result looks more natural than trying to speak on camera the tortured prose I’m prone to include in ZDNet blog posts.

The fact that Read the rest of this entry »

July 17th, 2008

Microhoo, MicroAOL, and challenging Google

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:31 am

Categories: Microsoft, Television

Tags: Google Inc., Advertisement, America Online Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft Corp., Ad Platform, Ad Market, John Carroll

You have to be careful about the kinds of fish you put in your fish tank. If one is considerably bigger than the other fish, it has an annoying tendency to eat them.

Big companies buy smaller companies all the time (and sometimes, small companies somehow manage to buy much bigger companies due to flukes in market valuation, as was the case when AOL bought Time-Warner, a testament to Steve Case’ instinct for market timing as well as cojones the size of Jupiter). However, I would prefer if companies I favor bought other companies who didn’t seem to me like star athletes in their late-60s.

AOL, like Yahoo, has an ad network mysteriously named “Platform A” (AOL execs have clearly been taking naming tips from Ed Wood). Further, like Yahoo, Google has been running circles around that ad platform. Google might have started as “just” an ad platform for the Internet, but it has used that beachhead to reach into other ad markets. Google’s growth in total ad market share is far ahead of even traditional media companies, increasing in 2007 three times as fast as runner-up News Corp. They may account for only 14.9% of the total ad market (in 2007, probably more today), but if their growth rate continues, that number will balloon quickly. This is all built on a base where they account for over 60% of Internet-related advertising.

This is clearly Read the rest of this entry »

April 1st, 2008

The strange journey of HD disc formats

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:04 am

Categories: BluRay, HD DVD, Television

Tags: HD-DVD, Industry, Disc, Blu-ray, HD, Hd Dvd, DVD, Sales Strategy, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology

THe battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray is firmly in the category of “old news.” With the shift of Warner Brothers to the Blu-ray camp and the domino effect in terms of industry support that caused, Toshiba quickly decided to cease its backing of the format it developed and championed, an event that resulted in some rather expensive charges.

Even so, the outcome is decidedly weird. Normally, the less expensive format wins the day, and HD DVD was clearly less expensive. In fact, during Christmas of 2007, HD DVD had managed to reach the $100 mark, albeit through promotions that probably weren’t near term sustainable. In a way, however, that might have been the thing that sealed HD DVD’s fate, as Warner Brothers worried that the new low price point might have helped them to reduce the sales advantage Blu-ray experienced as a byproduct of PS3’s integration of a Blu-ray player. That could have prolonged the format war endlessly, and Warner Brothers had a strong interest in achieving a single format that would keep the movie disc revenue pipeline flowing strong.

The problem, however, is that the decision has taken the industry back to a more expensive format, one in which the lion’s share of players will become obsolete once profile 2.0 gets finalized — an update necessary to remedy the feature shortfall between HD DVD and Blu-ray (HD DVD had more standard features, making the Blu-ray outcome yet weirder).

Further, it’s still Read the rest of this entry »