You can buy a three foot HDMI cable for $10 or $100. But it’s all digital, right? So does it really make a difference? I did a quick interview with a booth staffer from Ethereal at CES, and while not everything he says is 100% right, it’s still pretty useful.
psst – in case you don’t feel like watching the video, the answer is pretty much “yes”.
Continuing from part 1…
DirecTV
From walking in it appeared that the DirecTV conference was going to be a bit of a rehash of Echostar, but once the lights dimmed, the difference was substantial. First of all, the presentation included… video. Yup, video – from a media company – what a surprise! I was also impressed that the company brought a team of execs, and a couple of guest stars!
The presentation from Chase Carey (President/CEO) began with a recap of 2006, then went on to discuss the year ahead. The focus will be on Sports, HD, and VOD, and will include new content and services to support the vision. Chase then professed the company’s HDTV leadership position.
Steven Roberts (VP of Games and Strategic Initiatives) came on to present DirecTV’s new Championship Gaming Series, which he described as a “sports league” for gaming. The league will debut later this year, and includes a draft, commissioner, and salaried players. They showed a promo video which I felt was a really exciting vision for gaming. This is definitely something I’d have applied for as a teenager, and I hope “the kids today” take advantage of the opportunity. Fatal1ty also appeared, as he’s under an exclusive contract with DirecTV. I also got a brief interview with him which I’ll post later.
Next up, Eric Shanks (EVP for Entertainment) took the stage to discuss a few new technologies and services. The theme of “being connected” is key, with their Viiv-enabled DVR as their first foray into a connected, digital home. Eric also showcased the upcoming DirecTV-on-demand (launching in Q1), which allows subscribers to view a whole new lineup of on-demand programming. Broadcasters will have the ability to create their own styles and themed “pages” for users.
Eric mentioned consumers’ frustrations with receiving announcements (for new channels, programming, features, etc) from DirecTV and how they are addressing it with a new feature called GMessages (the G is for Guide). In the demo, the program guide has new lines with ads announcements from DTV or broadcasters. These ads announcements can also include interactive features (e.g. “record this” or, more appropriately “buy now”). I don’t know about how many customers are complaining on this topic, but I’d recommend this article at PVRWire on some quite major complaints.
Next, Eric introduced TV veteran Rick Rosner as the pioneer/inventor of a new product coming soon from DirecTV called Sat+Go. Now I have the pleasure of having met Rick while I was working at Sling Media, as he was a big Slingbox owner and helped spread the word to Hollywood. Rick’s a great guy and a visionary, and while he loves his Slingbox, he really wanted to come up with a way to watch DirecTV without any connection, whether he’s in the middle of the desert or out camping somewhere. Thus, Sat+Go was born (read more from the NY Times). Congrats to Rick, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!
Next up from Eric was a preview of the Nascar Hot Pass, a DirecTV exclusive debuting next month. For each race, the DTV/Nascar team will pick 5 racers and give them dedicated channels during the race. It adds 30 new cameras and 10 announcers per race! I’m not much of a Nascar fan myself, but it sounds like a great service to Nascar fans.
During Q&A, I decided to pop in a question myself, wanting to find out where DTV sees Internet/user-generated content (read: YouTube) fits in. DirecTV believes the trend is toward HDTV, and most UGC doesn’t look good (read: it looks very bad) on HD displays. That said, they acknowledge the growth and are looking into something down the road with “Web players.” My hunch is they’ve gone into it pretty far, as they even mentioned a possible implementation where Web videos could have a “send to my DVR” button added to the screen. This was actually my first time hearing a company like this one admit there is a benefit to working with Web services (as opposed to the PR rep at Moxi/Digeo who felt that its not the right target market and a bit too niche). I’m impressed!
The final interesting comment came as a reporter from a HD publication asked about 1080p support. DirecTV has not committed to 1080p, and their CTO rose to state that they weren’t making any commitments yet. As the reporter pushed on the question, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they weren’t budging yet, and weren’t convinced on the benefits of the format. This is a sentiment I completely agree with, and will discuss in the future – don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-1080p, I just think there’s a lot of FUD on the topic.
Powerpoint slides, screenshots, and pictures from the event are below:
In Conclusion
I have decided to create an arbitrary scoring system to pronounce one of the two companies the First Ever Winner of the CES 2007 Battle of the Satellite Company Press Conferences…
Initial score: Echostar 3, DirecTV 3. Holy cow, a tie. Hmm.. I need a tiebreaker. OK, how about:
While Sunday was the official Press Day at CES, Monday (and beyond) still offered a few press conferences. I decided to go to both the EchoStar (DISH Network) and DirecTV ones, which were conveniently back-to-back and in neighboring rooms. It was quite interesting to see the complete contrast in styles between both presentations.
Echostar/DISH Network
Echostar’s conference started with some corporate background and statistics (more than 13 million subscribers!), then moved on to discuss the focus for 2007. The motto was “it’s about time” and some of the key points included: a focus on DVR, no change to consumer pricing, and their HDTV leadership position.
Mark Jackson (president, Echostar technologies corporation – not the NBA player) took the podium to go into some details about new products, services, and technologies. New receivers are coming for 2007, many of which have the 2-room functionality. Mark stressed the importance of this both to consumers as well as to the installation costs.
The flagship new unit is the VIP622 HD receiver, coming to market in Q2, 2007. The unit sports:
Mark also mentioned a few strategic relationships, including AT&T Homezone (which they’d apparently like to replace), Sling Media (they are an investor), and Archos (whom they basically own). Afterwards, Charlie Ergen joined to answer Q&A.
Overall it was a fairly dry conference, without too much novelty or technology. Perfect for the financial community, but a little on the dull side for the rest of us. All their slides are belong to us below:
Opening disclosure: I am working on a consulting project with Netgear, but that work is unrelated to my blogging about them. I was invited to their press conference and chose to attend and got to see three new products that I was previously unaware of. This blog post is because I am genuinely amazed with a product of theirs.
Now, onto the story. Netgear had a press conference this morning and unveiled three new products which I will list and describe in ascending order of excitement and interestingness. Before the demos, Debbie Williams (Netgear’s Chief Marketing Officer) gave a brief “state of the union” for the company. Basically: 10 years old, market cap of $883M, products sold in >16K retailers, and they introduced 50 new products in 2006 (methinks about 42 of them were routers, but I guess it counts anyway, right?). She then went on to discuss how 2006 was the year of building the home network for the digital lifestyle (love that term, but I think I may have heard it before), and 2007 is the year of delivering the experience. She then introduced Vivek Pathela, Netgear’s VP of Product Marketing to do the demos (again, listed here in my order, not theirs):
Storage Central Turbo. This updates 2005’s Storage Central device by adding the capacity to expand to multiple terabytes of data as well as gigabit Ethernet. If you aren’t paying attention to the bits and bytes, it means it can store and stream HD movies around your house. This is a fairly evolutionary/logical enhancement to the product line. The MSRP is $249 (with no included hard drives, which makes sense since it’s so much cheaper for you to buy your own anyway) and the product should ship “early” this year. More pics:
Dual-Mode Cordless Phone with Skype. Now we’re seeing some interesting convergence happen. Quite a few companies introduced Skype or VoIP phones in 2006, some worked well, some didn’t. Netgear seems to have added a clever twist by incorporating a standard telephone in the same handset (aka Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS). This is a very smart combination, as it lets a consumer have just a single home phone that can work with both Skype and POTS systems. Also, you can get multiple handsets all working with the same base station (although an audience member asked a great question: can more than one handset make a simultaneous POTS call? which stumped the Netgear team – I sure hope it’s a yes). The demo went great as Vivek called Patrick Lo, Netgear’s CEO, and had a quick live call with near-excellent audio quality. MSRP $199, available now (on Amazon)!
EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD. Oh my is this one interesting. It’s a, well, “box” that hooks up to your TV and your home network connection. It then streams your music, photos, and videos from any PC or networked storage device (NAS) to your TV. It also streams from YouTube (they demoed a classic Diet Coke/Mentos video, which about 90% of the audience reacted as if they’d never seen it before – wow). It also works in high definition (up to 1080p resolution), including full upscaling/downscaling of video. It supports almost every video codec, including MPEG-4 HD, WMV HD, DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, etc etc. It also streams iTunes (including protected content if from a Windows PC, sorry Mac folks). It also has USB to locally connect a flash drive or an iPod. It also supports multiple units so you can start a video in one room, then finish it in another. It also has full PVR (TiVo-like) capabilities. And from the demo, it looks like it works very well! As a guy who has spent about 8 years designing award-winning devices just like these, I am quite impressed. Quite! MSRP $349, available early 2007.
I’ve seen a bit of other coverage already of the conference. MacUser compares it against iTV and calls the UI “uninspired” which is a fair point, but I think making comparisons against a product that’s not really been “announced” yet isn’t quite appropriate. Also, I disagree that Apple will beat the $349 price point, as I think they’d rather rip into their loyal customer base who are more willing to overpay for the Apple brand. More coverage from Ed Kohler, Eric Savitz at Barron’s, Gadgetell, and SciFi.com, but for very extensive details, here’s the Engadget transcript. I also bumped into Dave Zatz (with Sakshi Goel of Netgear), Netgear’s resident CES blogger.
So there’s my front-runner for most interesting new product of CES: the Netgear Digital Entertainer HD. We’ll see how the rest of the show pans out! More Netgear conference pics below and the whole CES collection is here.
Cinemanow and Movielink made the first huge strides in Internet-delivery of movies with their offerings several years ago, albeit not to much success. In the past 2 years we’ve seen things move in leaps and bounds.
Here is my list of some of the most prevalent/important things going on right now:
Saturday Night Live is debating allowing live viewing of rehearsals online. There’s a near little coincidence, as I personally attribute ALL the success of YouTube as originating with the spread of the “Lazy Sunday” clip from SNL last season (which they, at the time, vehemently protested).Phew, I’m exhausted. Did I miss anything?
The talk of the town today (recommended reading: IP Democracy, PhoneScoop, TechCrunch) is the announcement that Verizon and YouTube are doing a deal. Quick summary: you have to be a VCast subscriber and from the NY Times:
YouTube said its editors would select short videos from its library for the Verizon Wireless service. Verizon Wireless said it would vet the videos to make sure they met the company’s editorial and taste guidelines.
“We’ll select content that has the broadest appeal and the highest entertainment value,” Ms. Liang said.
The funniest read on it so far comes from fellow Canadian Mathew Ingram:
I know that Forrest Gump said “Stupid is as stupid does,” but there’s really no other word for what Verizon is doing with its much-heralded launch of YouTube video on cellphones. I mean, really. How much stupider could this get? The answer, to paraphrase Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap, is none — none stupider. Fred Wilson sums it up in a single word: Lame. In fact, this deal is right off the lame-o-meter. How do I lame-ify thee? Let me count the ways.
Now I agree with this as lame, but not for the same reasons as others. Fred wrote “This deal violates the entire ethos of YouTube, not free, not open, exclusive, no community, limited, censorship, etc, etc.” and over on LostRemote I read “I don’t see this as being an especially tempting offering – it goes against the free spirit attitude of YouTube.” These are fair points, but not what I perceive as the most important flaw in the plan.
People don’t surf to YouTube because it’s free or open, nor because of the site’s free spirit. Actually, people don’t really surf to YouTube much at all. Whoa, slow down – I know they serve a kajillion videos a day (or is that bajillion?). What’s key about all this is how people use YouTube.
They share. They link. They blog. They email. They don’t surf.
When YouTube serves 200,000 streams of a video, it’s not because 200,000 people come over to YouTube.com, and go find videos to watch. It’s because people were sent there by friends, colleagues, and blogs. YouTube is viral, not programmed. And that’s the key flaw in the Verizon/YouTube relationship.
They should scrap the budget on the ‘editors’ and instead invest on building a simple technology that allows people to SMS the clips they watch to each other. Not only will this increase usage of the service, it’ll also increase SMS traffic (something the carriers like a lot) and will also help incent new users to pay for VCast.
I received my first TiVo back in 1999. It was a 14-hour unit, made by Philips. It changed my life. Now I don’t even mean that in that lighthearted way – it really did change my life. Prior to owning a TiVo I watched about 2 hours of TV a week, total. Since then, my hours have climbed to a staggering 10-15 hours per week! This is still significantly lower than the 4 hours per day of the average 2-person US household (unbelievable, ain’t it? it climbs to 8 per day when you include all US homes!), but it’s much higher than I’d really like. I’d blame it on Heroes, but there’s enough other stuff I watch that I have to accept responsibility for my actions.
In the early 2000’s I was still a (very) early adopter of the DVR (digital video recorder, the ‘generic’ category for what a TiVo is), always preaching its virtues to friends, colleagues, and strangers on the bus. I remember many times when someone would start talking about a TV show and I’d have to just walk away, not wanting to hear the details for a show I hadn’t yet watched. Worse yet, during the 2003 playoffs (hockey, of course), not one, but two games’ endings were spoiled by eager relatives calling while I was still an hour or two behind on the game. In each incident, I’d always exclaim “haven’t seen it yet – don’t say anything!!!” and then proceed to explain the DVR.
Nowadays, TiVos are fairly well-known in the mainstream (if you are reading this and thinking to yourself “what’s he talking about, everyone has a DVR!” you are very out of touch with the masses. DVRs are in roughly 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 of US households, that’s it.) and you see references in TV shows and movies (and even Sprite commercials). My Mom has a TiVo (she calls it Mister TiVo), my wife uses it, my in-laws have a DVR, my Dad doesn’t have one but knows all about it, etc. In fact, timeshifting (using your DVR) is so prevalent, it’s being tracked by Nielsen – who recently reported that DVRs are actually boosting show ratings.
Recently, however, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot less chatting about the shows themselves. While some are musing that TV viewership is down (the stats simply disprove this theory), others think that watching behaviors are changing. I agree more with the latter than the former. I believe the combination of timeshifting, TV shows on DVD, and online video is causing more of a social impact than a viewership one.
Today, when you watch a show and start talking about it, you hear responses that range from “I’ve got it in my Netflix queue” to “I haven’t watched it yet, it’s on my DVR” to “I’ll download it from iTunes tonight” and more. People seem a lot more prone to saving entire seasons for future viewing, so you can’t talk about Entourage when your friends are waiting for it to arrive from Amazon. Heck, I don’t even read many pop culture blogs or Web sites, for fear they’ll have divulged events from this week’s Heroes, which I just didn’t get around to watching.
I don’t agree at all that people are watching less television. I think they may watch it with less enthusiasm than they once did. I think they watch it with more distractions than they once did. They watch it at different times (and places) than in the past. They watch it on different devices.
My feeling is that social culture is changing to de-emphasize an episode of a show as something worth talking about. I haven’t quite figured out what’s filling that void, just as long as nobody ruins another show for me.
The single best turkey I’ve ever made, eaten, smelled, eaten, and eaten. Wow. The only one I’ve made that looked better was the 25-pounder I cooked with my cousin a few years back, and while that was tasty, this year’s knocked it out of the park.
Now I’ve been posting a lot of recent stuff on non-techie topics, and I’m feeling a little guilty about that, so I’m going to amend for it all here. This post also contains vlogging, a quick intro to Muvee, and my first use of Stage6 from DivX (quick disclaimer: I am doing some consulting work for DivX, although it is wholly unrelated to turkey cooking).
First up: the vlogging. I used my trusty Canon SD700is (recently rendered obsolete with the SD800is) to do all the video work. Sure I could’ve used my DV camera, but I didn’t care that much about the final video quality, and didn’t want to spend all the time downloading the video from the miniDV tape. Also, my wife and I did all camera work, no tripods, microphones, or anything fancy was involved.
Next comes the editing. My first video project, I did all the editing myself. From the notes I took, I spent 13 minutes importing and editing clips, 20 minutes working with transitions, photos, and titles/credits, then 11 minutes to export the video, for a total of 44 minutes. You can see the video here (running time 4:50), I feel it’s the most informative, yet dullest of the batch.
What’s this? Batch? Yes, that’s correct, I have created multiple videos. The next three were all done using Muvee AutoProducer, which is one of the most impressive pieces of software I’ve seen in years. I’ll do a full review shortly, and this is not the best demonstration of its power, but I wanted to do an easy “compare and contrast.” It took 6 minutes to import all content and create titles/credits and pick a style for the video. It took another 4 minutes to analyze the media files (a one-time only requirement), and I had my first video ready. Over the next 10 minutes I experimented with different styles until I had the one I liked, then waited 13 minutes while it exported the video, for a total time investment of 33 minutes.
The really impressive part was I then spent less than 10 minutes to preview a dozen more styles, and generated two additional videos in another 10 minutes. To see the fruits of my labor (and you should watch one of them in contrast to my manual editing work), watch style one, two, or three (I recommend #1). As you’ll see, all three are more entertaining and upbeat than the manually produced version. Muvee is awesome, and I’ll really prove it in the next few weeks with a detailed review.
For my last tech experiment of the day, rather than go with YouTube, I decided to try out Stage6 for my video-sharing needs. Creating a profile was simple and took a few seconds (although I decided to actually flush it out with all the personal details too, but that was not a requirement), but uploading a video wasn’t as straightforward as I’d hoped.
First, I was required to download an uploader (although I think there was a plug-in version as well, but I may have accidentally missed that), then I realized my videos weren’t in DivX format already, a requirement of the site. I proceeded to download Dr. DivX, after which I was prompted to download a DivX codec update. Pain in the rear, however, Dr DivX worked really quickly and flawlessly, and coincidentally included a built-in uploader to Stage6.
Several minutes later, I began uploading videos, and am now officially a member of the long tail. And I didn’t even have to use clips from SNL or the Daily Show to participate! Ni-ice. As you noticed from the post, the only way to really share videos from Stage6 is via linking or email.
I’d like to see them step up the features for bloggers by including some HTML sharing code, embedding tools, and thumbnails. Also, while I know the codec is huge in Europe (just like David Hasselhoff), I am curious to hear back from readers if there were any issues playing the videos
Anyhow, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, full of turkey and techie, just like me!
When it comes to mobile technology, it seems that major carriers and phone manufacturers around the world have a common mantra: “they do it in Japan and Korea, therefore …” The statement applies when trying to convince other industry players that a given service/feature will have huge adoption rates in the US or other countries. The phrases sound like this: “The Japanese play 3 hours of video games a day on their handsets, and spend $1023 per month for social networking services and content, so we need to bring this to the US as soon as possible!” For the most part, it’s a lot of malarky (is that really a word?). Why? Well, if let’s say you have one country/culture in which 2-4 hours per day of train-based travel is the norm. And you have another one in which the average commute is done by car and is under an hour. Sounds like you don’t have much of a match, doesn’t it? So a few years back when the discussions of mobile TV first started blossoming in the US, I was personally a bit of a skeptic. And then I helped design and build SlingPlayer Mobile, and I saw the light.
I’ve used SPM (as we were known to call it) to kill time on the tarmac. I’ve programmed my DVR from the long lines at Starbucks. I even watched some of the NHL Playoffs last year on my commutes home (yes, my wife drove, I’m not that bad). Funny thing is, I was once quoted as saying “Nobody’s going to watch the entire Super Bowl on a cell phone.” And while I stand by that statement, for this year’s game I did have my PPC6700 showing the game live in the bathroom so nobody would have to miss a minute’s action (go Stillers!).
As was announced today, Europeans (starting in the UK, spreading outwards in 2006) can soon have the same joy. Instead of Heroes they’ll be watching Eastenders. Instead of the Superbowl, they’ll do the World Cup (in a few years). Instead of The Office, they’ll do.. oh. well… The Office. Hmm.
In an interesting twist, Sling Media launched SlingPlayer Mobile in Europe with a mobile operator, 3. Now 3 is going for some kind of quintuple or octuple-play by bundling a few other options and services with their new X-Series offering (live Webcast tomorrow), and you can read more details about it over at the SlingCommunity site (or Unwired or Gadgetell) . Seems like an interesting play, but I’ve gotten spoiled I guess, since I’m a Windows Mobile user, and the extra services are all available to me on the 6700 I use.
The other interesting element here is this is the first time the Slingbox is viewable from a non-Windows Mobile device. The handsets for the launch are the Nokia N73 and the Sony Ericsson W950i. I think it’ll be interesting to see the performance comparisons as more and more users adopt the service.
Good thing the Internet rumor mill didn’t go too far after Blake mentioned something about a mobile carrier at last week’s Web 2.0 show. Check out speculation at Unwired, MocoNews, and Engadget. It doesn’t take too many hops in the blogosphere to go from “idle comment” to “solid fact” these days. Either way, congrats to Sling and 3 for putting together a great relationship that brings smart value-added services to their customer bases.
Well, time for me to get back to playing 3D interactive multiplayer video games on my mobile phone with built-in GPS, DVR, MP3, and waffle-making capabilities. I’ve got a long way to go to get to Akihabara.
This is a few years old, but makes me laugh out loud every time I see it. Watch and enjoy.
I was sent this link last night, and only got a chance to watch it this morning. I practically did a spit-take (not good at the laptop) while watching. Note to the impatient: it takes about 1:45 to get to the funny.
Thanks to Sam at PodShow for sending it my way!
It’s amazing to read, but the same organization that only last year lauded “Everybody Loves Raymond” with “Outstanding Comedy Series” is now recognizing Sling Media, Visible World, TiVo, Moxi, Revver, and other new digital media companies with technology-related Emmys. This is great to see, as it’s important sign that the whole industry is moving forward to embrace such technologies and services.
Here’s the entire list:
More from the official Emmy site here. Conspicuously absent are YouTube, DivX (codec and/or Stage6), MSN Soapbox, and other online plays. Maybe next year…