I spoke at Streaming Media East this week on the topic: “How to Launch a Profitable Live Internet TV Channel Today”. The presentation is now being hosted by TV WorldWide here. I made the mistake of having my presentation laptop off to my left so I am rarely looking at the camera. I could also use some public speaking training … despite this, you may find the content interesting. Please let me know what you think about it. Again, here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/5ndjyr.
May 23rd, 2008
I am now the Video Services Director for VBrick Systems. I am building a platform for live Internet TV. I see this as an opportunity to continue the work that Chris Dawson and I started with Webcast in a Box to enable simple, reliable, and cost effective Internet broadcasting. Please drop me a line at erikh(at)vbrick.com if you would like more details about this. I will be posting information about the evolution of this platform here. I also will be presenting my vision for this platform at Streaming Media East next week. I am eager to learn more about other live Internet TV platforms. Please tell me if you have found another that you think is interesting. Thanks!
May 14th, 2008
… according to Fortune:
“YouTube sends a staggering 1,000 gigabytes of data every second, or nearly 300 billion GBs each month. Several industry insiders estimate that YouTube spends roughly $1 million a day just to pay for the bandwidth to host the videos. By that number, YouTube downloads would account for roughly 3% of Google’s $11.5 billion operating costs for 2007.”
March 26th, 2008
I just discovered a new Facebook ad service. It is very targeted. You supply a site URL and then constrain your audience with standard Facebook profile data and the target audience number gets dynamically updated so I know how many folks will see the ad. Amazing!
February 14th, 2008
In a recent press release, Comscore announced a record-breaking month for online video with 10 billion video views during the month of December 2007. Ash at HipMojo.com notes that this was more than the number of search queries for the same period.
February 14th, 2008
I always enjoy reading Ash’s blog HipMojo.com. He often collects market share data and makes projections about how big the online video ad market will be. I thought I would gather some of his findings and stats (many of which come from eMarketer.com) and create a concise summary of this data as a way to segment the potential ad market for online video and more specifically online video ads spent around news and current events content. I took most of this information from the following posts which are all worth reading: 1 2 3 4 5.
US online video projections stem from this post that predicts that online video will constitute about 8 then 13 percent of all US online ad spending. I think that this number will be slightly higher but used it anyway. I projected that News and Current Events content will drive 25 percent of all online video spending. This includes content from CNN.com, local TV station web sites, and sites like ForaTV.
I would really appreciate your feedback on these numbers. Please post your opinions and links to relevant data in the comments section. Thank you!
Update: I think that the online video numbers above are a little high. Here is another post that has the 2007 online video number at $685M, 2008 at $1.3B, 2009 at $2.3B, 2010 at $3.7B, and 2011 at $5.6B.
Update: US online ad spending to reach $50B in 2011.
December 30th, 2007
I believe that there is a disconnect between the projected ad spend online and projected traffic needed to fulfill the ad buys. We know that billions of ad dollars will shift from TV to online next year but we do not yet have a way to spend it all given our current assumptions about CPM (cost per thousand) pricing and the limits of online traffic. Using CPM to quantify ad spending as revenue divided by traffic does not capture the potential of “engagement” as a way to sell advertising. Shifting from impressions to engagement is the key to properly valuing online advertising and capturing this shift in ad spending.
Engagement can be broken into measurable units and sold to marketers as CPE (Cost Per Engagement) if we come up with an agreed upon definition of valid “engagement units”. I propose the following CPE units:
1. Amount of time spent on a site. One unit could be a ten minute block of time. A site could be a specific domain or an embedded web application (widget) on any number of domains, blogs, or portals.
2. Amount of time spent watching a specific video. One unit could be a five minute block of time. This could be a single video or a collection of videos, slides, or other linear media. This video could be embedded on a site or syndicated out and hosted by third-parties.
3. Specific actions taken by the person including:
a. Rating a segment of media
b. Posting a comment
c. Tagging media
d. Embedding a widget or media on another site
e. Linking to the media
f. Sharing the media via Google Reader
g. Marking the media as a favorite
h. Bookmarking the media with StumbleUpon
i. Digging the media
j. Blogging about the media
k. Tweeting about the media
l. Mentioning the media in a Facebook Mini-feed
… or any other measurable action a person can take that signifies expressed interest.
I propose a working definition of CPE (Cost Per Engagement) as “The value of one unit of one person’s engagement with specific media that is strongly associated with a specific sponsor of the media.”
This allows content distributors to capture the value of engagement in a way that can be monetized as part of advertising campaigns. More importantly it provides a new model for valuing online experiences that will shift the discussion away from “traffic” and CPM to metrics that capture the more sophisticated value of IP-based media.
December 29th, 2007
I discovered a cool feature on my new iPod iTouch: video playback of video blogs directly on your TV. I tested it by plugging in my AV out cable from my iTouch to my TV and simply navigating to Rocketboom on Safari and clicking the play button. My iTouch asked me if I wanted to display it on my tv. It works well!
December 28th, 2007
Seventy percent of television watched by Tivo owners is time shifted according Daniel Erasmus as cited in Deep Focus: A Report on the Future of Independent Media by Andrew Blau of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. Andrew continues, “Forrester Research forecasts that when 30 million homes in the US have PVRs, 76 percent of advertisers will cut their TV ad spending, a quarter of them by more than 40 percent. Whether that fundamentally undermines the economics of broadcasting, or whether it frees up billions of dollars for other forms of media support, is unknown.”
So, how many people now have PVR/DVRs and how many billions of ad dollars are at stake here?
Bruce Leichtman stated that more than one in every five US households now has a DVR and he forecasts that the number of US households with DVRs will grow to over 60 million by the end of 2011. My estimate of the number of US households with DVRs is 15-20 million today.
The annual global TV Ad spend nearly $170 billion according to ZenithOptimedia.com. US TV ad spending will be roughly $100 $76 billion this year. If the Forrester predictions are true then more than 10 billion dollars of TV ad spending in the US alone may shift to other ad mediums.
This presents a great opportunity for online video ad sales according to Ash at HipMojo.
December 19th, 2007
I just got my TakeTV. I love it. I downloaded an episode of This American Life and watched it on my livingroom TV. The user experience is simple and the video quality is great.
Now I have been trying to get my podcast content on it. The folks at SanDisk gave me the following simple guidelines to use to transcode. I was able to use this software to get the job done.
Video Codec: MPEG-4
- Advanced Simple Profile (w/B-Frames)
- AVI Container
- 23.98 and 29.97 frame rate (Source Dependent)
- 720×480, 720×404(ws), 640×480, 640×360(ws)
- Bit rate 1500 VBR
Audio: MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer 3)
- 48 kHz
- 192 kbits/sec Bit rate
November 30th, 2007
SanDisk announced the availability of the Sansa TakeTV. Engadget has several good reviews here. I have spent some time with the Apple TV and with Dlink’s Media Player. The Apple TV provides a great user experience for set up, synchronization, video collection navigation, and video playback. Dlink’s set up was reasonable, but the onscreen navigation was clunky. A deal-killer for Dlink is that the video sputters on playback over my home network. The Apple TV buffers the video on a local disk that makes video playback smooth. This is an important feature. I am pessimistic about network delivery of real-time high quality video over the Internet or even over a home network. Video must play perfectly and almost instantly in my living room.
I have been using sneaker net with my video iPod. I synchronize with iTunes, then walk the device over to my tv, then use the “AV out” cable to send the video to my TV’s composite video input. The video plays well but I quickly get annoyed by having to get up off the couch to play the next video. I have tried this with my kids while watching episodes of Wild Chronicles. They love the content and the flexibility. I love that it is commercial-free but I am not going to keep getting off the couch to find the next video to play. I did buy an early version of an ipod dock for my tv but even newer versions do not have an on-screen display of my video collection so I can’t really use it from my couch which is at least ten feet away from my TV. This is a critical requirement.
SanDisk has solved several of these problems with a low priced and portable solution. Consumers can copy any content to the device although there is still some skepticism about whether it will support enough video formats. This will allow me to use Miro, Kontiki, or many other programs for fetching video content from the web. The video will play back smoothly since it will come from a local flash disk rather than the network. The device provides an on screen menu and remote control to navigate through my video collection. At 8GB, this may only be 10 hours of content but this is enough for me as I am constantly updating my video playlist with new content (mostly news). Best of all, I can take the whole thing with me on the road for playback in hotel rooms.
I wonder if this product will be compatible with the Sansa e280 media player? Ideally these two products will be integrated such that I can just use the e280 for storage and be able to dock it to a device that provides TV-out, onscreen navigation, and the remote control. If SanDisk really wanted to knock it out of the park, they would integrate an RSS reader into their FanFare software so I can easily pull from their catalog and from my video podcast feeds. They should use the open source Miro reader for this!
Video quality is still an issue with all of these solutions but I expect that to be fixed once a more mainstream audience demands it. The Internet-to-TV workflow needs to be resolved first. I am optimistic that the TakeTV concept is the best path for now.
October 23rd, 2007
The Dragonfly company, creator of the Movie Maker video publishing platform, has selected VeriSign to accelerate the delivery of video for the Star Trek New Voyages media player. A feature-length, high quality, episode is now available here.
September 18th, 2007
It looks like Adobe will be enabling H264 playback inside of the Flash player. On2 is developing tools to support this. I wonder if this player will support the standard mp4 file format as well as the H264 codec. What is Adobe’s motivation for this?
Update: TechMeme has lots of covereage of this already.
Update: It may actually support the standard MP4 format as well!
This may mean that standard video podcasts (rss via http with h264/aac in mp4 enclosures) may be renderable in the Flash container! This would be great.
Update: More great details here.
Hardware acceleration is an important thing to consider when rendering HD-quality video or when encoding video. Apple may be embedding H264 encode/decode chips into their computers soon.
August 21st, 2007
Sprint’s efforts with Google to roll out WiMax are substantial and significant. This should create some much-needed healthy competition for broadband Internet access. A Sprint spokesman said: “We are pursuing a new business model that is Internet-based, not telecom-based, and therefore will establish a new service brand.” wow.
August 16th, 2007
I finally installed Miro today. I have watched this application evolve from the Democracy player project by the Participatory Culture Foundation. This application is really worth installing. It has a beautiful user interface that makes it easy for both novice and expert users to manage their video podcast feeds as well as to discover new content from sources like YouTube, Revver, Blip.tv, and Veoh. It will place your videos into a directory on your computer that can be used as a source for your digital media gateway/adapter for display on your TV. You can use it to unify all of your digital video by pointing it the to the directories that are used by iTunes, Kontiki, or any other application. It supports a wide range of codecs. This is the end of history for digital media.
August 16th, 2007
This looks like a promising solution for moving videos from your computer to your TV. The industry has not settled on a name for these types of products: “media extender”, “digital media adapter”, “digital media gateway” … all provide functionality that is similar to the AppleTV but provide support for more video formats and codecs as well as support for composite video displays while AppleTV is HD-only.
Update: Many of these are also called “Media Streamers” … MySimon has a list here.
August 16th, 2007
I recall a time when online video publishers were worried about people linking to their videos. They did not have a way to monetize “deep links” and they were worried about high bandwidth costs without a clear return on their investment.
Now folks are using Flash and Silverlight as a way to distribute the video with a protective wrapper that provides enhanced reporting capabilities, allows them to insert ads, exposes their logo, and leads the viewer to new content with embedded post-roll recommendations. It also makes it easy for folks to embed these as “widgets” by simply pasting in a snippet of HTML.
This capability is enough to drive premium content owners to “syndicate” their video with these wrappers to anyone who will embed them on their websites or blogs. The publishers are able to reasonably control and monitor the playback of their content and monetize it as they see fit even when the wrappers are published on third-party sites.
The good news is that we will see more and more premium content online as clip syndication with these wrappers will enable several viable business models including impression advertising, pay-per-click recommendations, and possibly pay-per-view.
The bad news is that the dominant wrapper technologies are controlled by Adobe (Flash) and Microsoft (Silverlight) which means that these vendors can choose to restrict the distribution of this technology to suit their larger business strategies. This could include excessively charging for the authoring tools or disabling the client on competitive platforms like the Mac.
So far Adobe’s Macromedia team has been willing to develop and support a Windows, Mac, and Linux client for Flash. Microsoft has recently released both a Windows and a Mac beta client for Silverlight. We can expect Microsoft to support the Mac client for a while since they have just entered the market and Adobe still has a commanding position in it.
However, I recall a similar situation in 1999 when RealNetworks had a dominant marketshare of streaming media clients and supported a Windows, Mac, and Linux version. Microsoft entered the market and initially supported a Mac version of their client. After about five years, Microsoft had replaced RealNetworks as the dominant vendor and stopped supporting the Mac soon after.
I expect the same thing to happen again. Microsoft will aggressively seek to dominate this market with massive industry subsidies, like their previous “broadband jumpstart” initiative, free tools, free server software, and perhaps even free video hosting bandwidth. Then, once they have a dominant position in the market, they will align their efforts with their larger business strategies which could include shutting out the Mac or locking in their own advertisements or requiring a license for premium capabilities like DRM.
What are the alternatives? Open source is one. Another is standardization and licensing through a consortium of vendors and organizations that will commit to keeping the technology accessible to all platforms and devices. This is what the MPEG has consistently done for digital video technologies, including H264.
August 10th, 2007
This is a great analysis by Matt Rosoff of Microsoft’s strategy regarding Windows Media.
August 7th, 2007
The Digital Living Network Alliance promotes digital interoperability amongst devices that move downloaded video to the TV.
August 7th, 2007
Engadget has had good coverage of the explosion of Digital Media Adapters (or Digital Media Receivers). These devices provide functionality that is similar to the AppleTV but with support for alternative codecs and file formats.
August 7th, 2007
Om Mailk got a sneak peak of a cool trick that allows the Jaman movie download service to have a top-level menu on the AppleTV.
June 28th, 2007
Marc Vanlerberghe reports in his blog that the US Q1 2007 revenue from premium SMS services was $273 million on 74 million transactions.
June 28th, 2007
Bloggers can develop value-added premium SMS services while still keeping their blogs open and free. For example a system could be developed that would allow readers to receive SMS alerts each time a new comment has been added to a particularly compelling blog post. They would text a post’s ID to the blogger’s SMS short code as a way to subscribe to comments via SMS. The SMS message could provide the title, author, some of the text, and a link to view the entire post on a WAP page. The blogger could charge $1.99 for this service per post or $4.99 per month for access to comments alerts on all of their posts as well as WAP page versions of the posts themselves.
June 28th, 2007
Betsy Flanagan of Startup Studio interviewed Jonathan Cobb of Kiptronic. She says that last year, ad spending totaled $80 million for podcasts and $1.5 billion for online video. By 2011, those numbers are expected to grow to $400 million and $6.2 billion respectively.
June 27th, 2007
The Apple YouTube relationship for mobile and AppleTV distribution of YouTube video has lead YouTube to start encoding their video into interoperable standard video formats. Here is Apple’s press release. You can now find YouTube video with any web browser at http://m.youtube.com and playback streaming video on a number of standards-based video clients including the Kinoma player for the Treo 700p or the VLC client for linux.
Here is a page with a video stream of Rob Paravanian called “Pachelbel Rant” that has the following encoding standards: RTSP streaming protocol, 3GP file format, H263 video, and AMR audio.
June 22nd, 2007
People want a simple way to move high quality content from the web to their TV. Publishers need a way to monetize video podcast content that does not require DRM, advertising, sponsorships, or subscriptions. The solution: mobile micro-payment of video podcast episodes via SMS with delivery via a personalized RSS feed to the AppleTV or other compatible devices.
This is how it can work:
Publishers register with a service that lets them submit their content to a directory, which will generate a unique content identifier, and set their price for the individual content item.
Consumers register with a service that lets them create personalized RSS feeds (think of these as channels) that are tied to a system that adds episodes to their feeds via a SMS message.
As consumers browse the web searching for video content or see offline promotions for the content in the form of magazine ads, TV commercials, billboards, and even T-shirts, they can simply send a SMS message with the content identifier to a short code. The SMS response would be a confirmation message with the content title, the publisher, the price, and which of your personalized channels the content will be added to. This will add the episode to the RSS feed and the AppleTV device (via iTunes) will pull the content from the web and display it on the TV.
How does this sound? I have a lot of the pieces for this already; we just need to put it all together. If you are interested in being a part of this (as a consumer, business partner, or content publisher) please let me know!
June 14th, 2007
Apple has released a specification for video podcasts and has sent emails to content creators to help them make their content look good on AppleTV. They advise people to use Quicktime’s “export to iPod” to insure that the content will work on an iPod. They say that this “results in an M4V file” that will lead some to assume that this is a requirement for playback on AppleTV.
This is not the case at this time. The Scobleshow feed uses .mp4 files instead and it plays well on AppleTV. My point is that people should use the industry standard .mp4 file format rather than the Apple-specific .m4v format.
Here are the video podcast specifications that I recommend:
H.264 video, 1.5 Mbps, 640 x 480 (640×360 if you can do 16:9 aspect instead), 30 frames per sec., Baseline Low-Complexity Profile with AAC-LC audio at 160 kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .mp4 file format
Please let me know if you have a podcast with this specification. I would love to test it.
April 12th, 2007
I was noticing the following menu items on Apple TV:
iTunes Top TV Episodes
iTunes Top Music
iTunes Top Music Videos
… could Apple be tracking the downloads of iTunes content? Will they be providing media measurement services like Nielson? This seems obvious. I just wanted to take note of it.
April 2nd, 2007
Apple today announced the sale of DRM-free songs and music videos from EMI. Many people will gladly pay more for higher-quality, DRM-free, content. How many people will buy content that they are currently getting for free illegally? I predict that we will be pleasantly surprised. Removing the burden of DRM will open up the market for those who are willing to pay for content as long as it is as easy to manage, store, and play as their current DRM-free files.
April 2nd, 2007
I played with an Apple TV yesterday … It is truly delightful as you would expect. It makes the consumer experience of navigating downloaded content as easy and enjoyable as live TV content. This is a breakthrough innovation which will shift the behavior of TV viewers and the spending of advertisers. This promises to have a significant positive impact on our society.
Folks who are now used to time shifting and DVR pausing will quickly realize that they can easily program their Apple TV to have so much compelling content in subscription delivery form (podcasts) that their TV consumption behavior will shift from channel surfing and occasional ‘must see’ scheduled viewing to a model where they no longer have enough time to consume all of their stored and immediately available content. This content from their podcast subscriptions will be constantly trickling down to them. They will be making tough choices between many high-quality sources rather than passively surfing the garbage that is the stuff of most live TV today.
I have this problem with my audio podcast subscriptions today and I spend more and more time with this content as a result. I squeeze shows in when ever I can. I have so much great content waiting for me that I no longer think about when it is published. I just consume it as soon as I can. I never seem to run out of it.
The same thing will happen with video podcast content and soon most folks won’t have a reason for live TV or cable services in general. What about live news content? Will downloading make me feel out of touch with live events and breaking news? Well, what if you had more current news content than you can possibly watch from sources like CBS, CNN, NBC, or PBS? Folks will find lots of mainstream news content that is updated daily or even hourly now ready for Apple TV as well as several daily news video sources that offer more investigative and independent reporting, like Democracy Now!
This will create a new digital divide between the old live TV folks and the new “downloaders” … with lots of painful industry writhing as a result. We see it now with all of the networks adding shock entertainment and vile news content to appeal to base emotions as a way to desperately hold on to their audiences. This trend will simply accelerate the adoption of video downloading as viewers seek higher quality niche content. Advertisers will shift their spending to these higher income early adopters and will appreciate the ability to target their messages to niche audiences.
As more people adopt this new model for selecting and viewing downloadable TV content, they will be more discerning in their choices of entertainment and news sources. They will add more diverse sources and will prune away content that resembles today’s shocking sound bites. Our society will evolve.
March 28th, 2007
Steve Ragan from Monsters and Critics tipped me about an open letter from the Coral Consortium to Steve Jobs regarding DRM. This is the fourth way. I will track this and have a longer post on this as soon as I can.
February 14th, 2007
Steve Jobs seems to not be aware of a fourth way for DRM which is the use of systems like OpenIPMP from Mutable that are open source and open standards based.
“There is no theory of protecting content other than keeping secrets.”, he states, as if systems like Public-key cryptography and SSL are not viable methods of protecting content. There are also several alternative DRM systems like OpenIPMP, OMA, and ISMAcypt. I am surprised to see such a smart person so pessimistic.
What EU folks and others want is a way to prevent Apple and Microsoft from monopolizing the sale and distribution of sold content. This is reasonable.
Jobs could enable a flourishing economy of digital content sales and multi-vendor product innovation by implementing a system like OpenIPMP for his hardware and software that would allow other vendors to leverage his platform.
This would force Microsoft to do the same for both audio and video content.
This is something that I would embrace this wholeheartedly.
February 7th, 2007
I’m enjoying a little debate on Scobleizer about DRM … here and here .
DRM is just an extension of our existing practice of trying to bring scarce goods to market … but if an open and pervasive DRM solution existed then artists could engage on a whole new set of ways to package and monetize their works … I would go even further to posit that the lack of a good and open DRM system is why labels and studios are able to keep content locked up into silos of scarcity.
A good DRM system would lower the cost of music and movies for consumers who want to pay for great content. Open DRM systems would allow artists to cut out middle-men for distribution and the “platform sharks” that subsidize content distribution as long as it sells more of their unrelated goods. Why do you think Walmart loses $2 per DVD for new releases? They want to sell you a whole bunch of other stuff that you probably don’t need. What is Apple and Microsoft selling? Content? No way.
… what do you think?
January 17th, 2007
He said that he downloaded a HD-DVD quality video at the Verisign CES booth and realized that this technology will enable him to get his movies much faster and at a lower cost than traditional movie distribution methods. [source]
I agree and would add that P2P technology will be necessary as downloadable video reaches scale with television distribution. Imagine if 10 million people downloaded a TV episode rather than tuning into the broadcast. This will happen this decade.
My hunch is that Verisign will be able to combine their P2P technology, with their Internet infrastructure, and their brand of security and trust to convince content owners that P2P has legitimate and positive role in their distribution strategies.
January 11th, 2007
Brian Gruber was the Director of Marketing for CSPAN back in the 80s, now he is bringing content from the public sphere of the World Affairs Council, CSPAN, and guest lectures of independent bookstores into a great new online community site called Fora.tv (plural of forum).
I spoke with him at CES this week and got a walk through of the site. He said that he has been visiting universities as well as several US and European public affairs groups. They all want Fora.tv to distribute their content and to build community around their content. Fora.tv has edited video and commentary in regional and topical channels. They have great transcription and chaptering features that make it easy to navigate the video. My favorite feature is the Fora.tv Think Tank. Here they post content around a narrow topic, interview thought leaders, and post videos and comments from all of us. The goal is to provide a rich information experience around narrow and current topics.
Moving forward Brian hopes to create a network of video blogger “stringers” that he intends to give press access to public affairs venues and cash to cover production costs. Folks can just show up with their cameras and plug into the audio press pool.
Brian has received funding from several angels including Will Hearst who loves the idea of bringing public affairs content and online communities together. I see this as important as Doug Kaye’s IT Conversations … Doug gives me access to keynote speeches of the Web 2.0 conference and many of the leading technology thought leaders … Maybe Brian can give me access to Davos!
January 11th, 2007
Does iTunes run on iPhone? This is what many folks are waiting for. We want to be able to get podcasts directly to a mobile client without having to sync from a PC. If not then perhaps I can run my Google Reader on the iPhone … if so then this will be even better than iTunes!
January 9th, 2007
I am so excited about being able to move my Mac Mini from my living room back to my home office. I have been dealing with scan converters, cables, switch boxes, and poor resolution for too long. Sometimes I bring my computer monitor into my living room just to add podcasts to iTunes as the scan converted resolution makes reading small text difficult. I just don’t want to operate a computer in my living room and with a TV display. Once I get my Apple TV, I will simply use my Mac Mini again like a workstation and be able to watch high quality video on my TV that will stream from the Mac Mini on my home network. I think that lots of other folks will be doing the same. This product will make downloadable video mainstream. Independent content publishers like Rocketboom and ZeFrank will soon have the ability to reach a mass audience and consumers will finally have an easy way to choose better content. This is a great day in the history of media.
January 9th, 2007
I am so pleased to have discovered the iRecord booth at CES (it is #69628 at the Sands). I met the CEO, Mohammad Ayub Khan, and his son (pictured below). These guys are great. I just had to spend some time at their booth gushing on about how great their little box is. I asked them to make a live version that can be used as an encoder source to a standard RTSP server. My hunch is that we will see such a product from them later this year. If we do then it can be used as a very low cost way to stream lecture content that can be archived and managed from a centralized publishing system. This will be important for some of the projects that Chris Dawson, Obadiah Greenberg, and Brian Gruber are working on … more on this soon, I hope.
January 9th, 2007
I have been hanging out at CES. I was told to watch out for the long taxi line at the airport but found that it was a good place to meet folks on their way to the show. I ended up meeting a guy who is a key influencer at a major account that I am working on. I invited him to join my cab and was able to pick his brain a bit. After securing my hotel room, I headed over to the PodTech BlogHaus at the Belagio. Lots of PodTech folks where there … I made a point of bringing my iRecord and showing it to Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, and Doc Searls. I call it the “Silo Buster” since it creates video with standard H264/MP3 codecs and the standard mp4 file format that plays back well on any platform. I think that it is important to not tie your content to any one technology vendor.
January 9th, 2007
An open source DRM system has been contributed to SourceForge by ObjectLab. This project promises to implement standards created by ISMA and OMA. Use of this technology in a commercial offering will probably require a license. I wonder what the costs will be.
Microsoft, RealNetworks, Adobe, and Apple all have their own closed systems for video protection. At one time, Microsoft was so dominant that many adopted their DRM as a defacto standard. Their DRM efforts has always been a strategy to lock users into their operating system. This is to be expected from a company and explains why Apple wont license FairPlay. We should expect Adobe to do the same with their system.
Supporting open standards and paying royalties to patent holders is our best bet for future proofing our products and insuring that content owners and consumers wont be held hostage by vendor strategies that keep us in codec silos.
I expect to see the open standards for DRM implemented in commercially available solutions from Envivio.
December 14th, 2006
I just voted in Farmington, Connecticut … I am hopeful for some positive change for our country.
November 7th, 2006
I received my iRecord and have successfully recorded some video to my iPod. I love it. It will store about 3 hours of video per Gig in standard H264/MP3 format directly to my video iPod. I could hook up an external USB drive to it and store tons of video or simply plug in a 1GB USB stick and capture a full-length movie.
November 7th, 2006
Yesterday morning I turned on the TV to try to catch some news while I was getting ready to head out from my hotel room. I flipped through a couple of channels until I found Good Morning America. They found a video clip from a security camera inside a school bus full of kids which flips on its side, smashing the whole gaggle of kids against the side of the bus. The picture quality was poor but there was enough detail as well as the screams of the kids to broadcast a real sense of horror. I wonder how many people watched this video … how many parents with their kids who were eating their breakfast and getting ready to hop on their bus themselves soon after. GMA played the video at least two times … I am simply disgusted by most of network TV.
November 7th, 2006
Worth watching
October 24th, 2006
I bought my duckie on October 19th at 2:44 am (late night impulse buy) and it showed up that day on the show here! Can you find which one I bought? Which one will you buy here? Who will be the first to buy the “Bling Duckie”? I bet we will see several Bling Duckies being sold in the near future. Go Ze! This changes the economics and business model behind blogging and online video. Let folks vote with their dollars. Enough of the page view advertising model that is just an echo of the mass audience TV ad model that has degraded content production to the lowest instincts of the audience.
October 24th, 2006
On Digg …
That Zune will support H264/AAC and MP3 is a big deal. This is the first sign that Microsoft realizes that they wont corner the online video and audio market with their proprietary codecs and formats. It means that they will need to make root and branch changes to their DRM technology. Apple has forced Microsoft to use codec and format standards … hopefully Microsoft will be forward thinking and try to force Apple to adopt some sort of open DRM standard.
Am I too optimistic?
UPDATE: Yep, it just transcodes standard H264 into a closed MS codec.
October 20th, 2006
Here are a couple of kids having fun while the TV industry rethinks its distribution channel and content line up. (link) I keep thinking that they look like Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt as kids … imagine that. Did they think that they would be disrupting the TV industry then? They certainly are now.
October 20th, 2006
Reading Mark Cuban’s post on Apple and YouTube this morning made me think: why wouldn’t Google license all music for use for any YouTube member?
So the music industry makes $11B in CD sales per year but the annual TV ad spend is $70B. It makes a lot of sense to me that Google would pay a lot of money (currently $15M per year as predicted by Cuban) to each label to secure rights to this music for YouTube user/publishers.
I bet that the artists and the labels would prefer YouTube users to have better fidelity for their lip synch tracks. Discovering new music will driven by a “watch me listen to music and dance” culture that would gladly see a few Google ads to give them real safe harbor.
October 20th, 2006
I just ordered the iRecord device. I like the idea of separating the video encoder from the video input and the storage. I will want to try video inputs from different cameras and video sources including scan converters and perhaps a document camera. Being able to swap out USB storage is great. I could have a couple of external USB drives and capture a ton of footage in a web and ipod ready format!
October 19th, 2006
Hello “CBS”, glad you could join the million other users who now have their own channel. I watched the “cat fight” video that you posted and I decided to switch to another channel. Please try to post some content that is more interesting. I do like your YouTube profile, however: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=CBS
October 19th, 2006
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