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Monday, 11 January 2010 01:11 |
 "TV/video services powered by Mediaroom 2.0 can be delivered to any broadband consumer, not just to customers on a managed-QoS IPTV network," Microsoft's Scott Rowe writes. The new IIS Smooth Streaming was shown at SUPERCOMM to reporters who liked the HD. It will be a natural tool for British Telecom, Bell Canada, and others who don't offer IPTV but can easily support video-on-demand. Profitabilty of full telco TV packages is rare; I believe both Verizon and AT&T are showing losses on TV after five years.
It shouldn't be news that "Microsoft enables operators to offer a premium, HD-quality video-on-demand service, with minimal buffering and fast startup times, even over IP-based networks of varying bandwidths," but a slew of lawyers, economists and registered lobbyists have been claiming otherwise in D.C. Some people who should know better believe them.
Netflix streaming movies look OK at 720p on our 50" plasma over Verizon 3 megabit DSL andI don't remember a single interruption because of line problems, even if I'm actively using the computer at the same time. When they bring us FiOS I expect streaming to be near perfect at 1080 as well. Bandwidth costs continue to come down rapidly, so streaming at full HD rates (AT&T and many cablecos uses 6.5 megabits or less) will soon be economical. Working with Microsoft and CacheLogic, I did a demo of live 6 megabit HD TV back in 2007. It works fine with a few seconds or less of buffer. Many of today's networks can handle those speeds. Jason Livingood of Comcast has pointed out their network very, very rarely drops below 8.4 megabits for standard service. When it is "traffic-managed" - far less than 1% of customers - the actual results is packets delayed minimally, something the buffer can usually handle invisibly to the consumers. As far as I'm concerned, a network that can live-stream 6 megabit HD video is effectively neutral. |
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Wednesday, 29 July 2009 13:50 |
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Ben Silverman left the NBC cochair job for a new company designed to let advertisers take even more control over media. His money comes from Barry Diller of Home Shopping Network fame. Diller press release makes things very clear about the goals of the new company. They want to involve " distributors and content creators early on in the development process, enabling advertisers to be a partner in campaigns and content creation. ... The new company will aim to go further than the industry has gone before, by bringing marketing and advertising expertise in-house to help advertisers sponsor, support an d be involved with the content creation process from the beginning."
Dylan Stableford had fun with the press release, adding his comments in bold. A few choice excerpts:
This will be the industry's first (most recent) global platform that connects advertisers, distributors and content creators early on in the development process, enabling advertisers to be a partner (place products) in campaigns and (dictate) content creation. This new venture will take full advantage of all areas of Ben Silverman's extensive media expertise -- as an agent, producer and advertising innovator (i.e. things he did not do as co-chair at NBC) ... broad-based (vague), 360-degree, multi-creative company. The new company will aim to go further than the industry has gone before, by bringing marketing and advertising expertise (Silverman’s friends) in-house ... Media is being consumed (stolen) across an increasing number of platforms, including TV, the internet, mobile, and DVR. The next generation of media will be defined by the players who can capitalize (figure out a way to get people to pay for) on those trends." http://bit.ly/HUqOt
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Tuesday, 05 May 2009 22:14 |
 The Webby Awards will throw a fancy party June 8 in New York, where you can dress up, meet entertainment stars, and maybe even collect an award. But few real webheads will be there. The honorees
  
don't include ubergeeks like Vint Cerf, Dave Reed or Dave Farber. Nor are the key policy people - Susan Crawford, Tim Wu, David Isenberg, Larry Lessig - likely invited. Instead, they feature Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, comedians Jimmy Fallon, Sarah Silverman, and Lisa Kudrow, and as many entertainers as they can attract. The result: it should be livelier than any of the geeky events we usually attend.
Popular culture will be the spirit of the future net if the Webbies are predictive. The "broadband" award nominees included MTV, BBC, CNN, and BBC. ABSOLUT Vodka, Adidas, Samsung, Sony, and Victoria's Secret are nominees. So are Disney, The Onion, Gardasil and Lonely Planet. But who can complain when the Beatles Revolution is a Nike commercial soundtrack.
The "International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences" has a large staff that does little more than run the annual awards, financed by entry fees that begin at $150 and go higher, rich sponsorships, and an award event that even the winners have to pay to attend. That may well skew the entries, but ED David-Michel Davies tells us that anyone who wants to enter but cannot afford the fee should write him and they will find a way to help.
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Saturday, 26 December 2009 21:15 |
 When I wrote After Avatar, You Must Move On 3D Channels, I had no idea just how powerful the movie would prove. As I write, it's passing $600M at the box office in two weeks. Sharon Waxman writes "even the most hard-bitten moguls (from David Geffen: “a complete gamechanger”) now -- faster than you can say "man the lifeboats!" -- everyone is on board." Ridley Scott wants to spend $7M to add 3D to Robin Hood, already in the can in 2D and therefore extremely limited in what can be done with 3D. Even the next Jackass movie is adding a dimension. The 3D hype at CES in a few weeks will be overwhelming. Sky in Britain will have a 3D channel in 2010. So will the World cup. HDGuru reports DirecTV will launch a channel in the spring, but that's unconfirmed. The Blu-ray folks agreed to use MPEG4-MVC for 3D and some believe it will work in the Sony Playstation. There's no doubt which way the wind is blowing.
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Friday, 19 June 2009 23:29 |
 Gordon Brown told the Guardian “"You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.” Dan Rather suggests “The revolution may not be televised but it will be twittered” and echoes Tiananmen + Twitter = Tehran from Read Write Web. The hype is off the wall. Twitter has passed Facebook in some places, and is an enormously important tool that you must learn if you haven't, but politics ain't that simple.
Reza Shah said years ago “If Khomeini came with tapes, Khomeini then will disappear with the Internet.”
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Wednesday, 04 March 2009 22:09 |
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 Anthony Dod Mantle won the Academy Award, although he shot more than half the "film" on a Silicon Imaging camera. The answer to "film or digital" is now yes, whichever is better for wat you're shooting that day. I'm a geek who knows that Moore's Law will constantly improve the digital gear, and bring the price down.
Hit TV series 24 used a $3,000 Sony FX-1 five years ago for scenes in tight places, I found out from an uncle working the show. Nobody noticed. That's the same HDV camera Jennie shoots with, and it certainly isn't as good as a $100,000 camera with a $20,000 lens. But Moore's Law will constantly bring down the price and improve the quality of digital. The 4K Red camera at about $30,000 for the kit including a lense draws rave reviews.
Slumdog was shot in conditions no one would envy. It was "an orgy of bad light," Mantle tells Marcelo Lewin of EXPOZed. "The film versus digital debate as been like a war zone," he adds.
Time for a truce, I say.
http://www.promax.com/Answers/InsiderAccess/ |
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Thursday, 11 September 2008 15:37 |
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TV folk: Brian Roberts of Comcast changed the Internet in June, 2008. He's going to offer 50 megabit service to his 50M customers by 2010. That's fast enough for 4 HD channels and much more. 60% of the U.S. will be able to get that speed in 2010-2011, and 80% soon after. Quickly, far more people will be able to watch quality TV, especially if the cablecos price reasonably.
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Saturday, 05 December 2009 12:00 |
 Jim Cameron's Avatar premieres December 18 and it will open eyes about what 3D can be. The film inevitably won't live up to the hype, but today's 3D technology amazes everyone the first time they see it. Cameron made a believer out of me almost three years ago with a remarkable demonstration at NAB. He said then that all his friends the A-List directors will insist on shooting with 3D and that most of the big movies will be in 3D from now on.
The televisions soon will be much cheaper than the $10,000 units that will be at CES. 3D is created in the original program and post, not at the TV set, so it requires little modifications of the TV. Sony at NAB showed decent 3D on a current top of the line TV unmodified.hr id="system-readmore" /> The main requirement is a rock solid high frame rate, which now is achievable.
BSkyB is already promising 3D channels soon because they are a valuable way to stand out from the competition. Verizon hasn't said anything, but 3D is a natural way to take advantage of FiOS' massive bandwidth. Severe difficulties with standards, etc. are putting people off. But if you can make it work, probably right to be in the vanguard. Your most affluent and technically sophisticated customers will want it, and they tend to have a strong influence on others.
For a taste on your computer today of what 3D can be, do see a remarkable video of Picasso's Guernica in three dimensions. http://bit.ly/7oPfky
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Tuesday, 16 June 2009 16:50 |
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 Microsoft, Cachelogic and I demo'ed full 6 megabit HD video over the net at Web Video Summit, and the stars are now aligned for HD to become first practical and then common – unless the carriers succeed in taxing the net outrageously. That's cheap enough that even HD TV over the net can be supported by ads, and it becomes a no-brainer for any movie service that charges to offer true HD.
Dan Rayburn, the guru of the streaming media world, reports “The lowest price I saw in Q1 was two and a half cents per GB delivered for over 500TB of traffic a month. When I questioned many of the major CDNs about this price, nearly all of them told me they don't price delivery that low, but the contracts say otherwise. That price is not the norm as 500TB a month in delivery is a very large customer.”
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Monday, 16 February 2009 20:14 |
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Obama's inauguration reached a peak of 7-8M simultaneous viewers, Dan Rayburn calculates, including 3.8M at Akamai alone. Adding a few assumptions to Dan's figure, I'd estimate CDNs can currently deliver 20M streams at low bandwidth and perhaps 2M at digital cable quality.  Akamai had to ration their customers' bandwidth and turn away some; the North American content networks were close to saturation, with heavy traffic in Europe and Asia as well.
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Thursday, 11 September 2008 15:00 |
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AT&T traffic is growing 25%-30%/year/customer, with a dramatic shift from p2p to YouTube and Hulu like video. Easily a third of AT&T's downstream traffic is now “web audio-video,” far more than p2p and the gap is widening rapidly. |
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