a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
“Selling 1 million videos in less than 20 days strongly suggests that there is a market for legal video downloads,” Jobs said. “Our next challenge is to broaden our content offerings so that customers can enjoy watching more videos on their computers and new iPods.”
Not quite the 4 days it took for music sales to reach 1 Million, but still quite impressive. I’d say there is a legitimate desire for video and that people are definitely comfortable on the small screen.
So I have no idea what’s going on today, but we’ve been officially invaded by Ladybugs. There are tons of them all over…
The morning was frosty, but it got up near 70 during the day and literally hundreds (perhaps more) ladybugs appeared all over the house, baking in the sun and climbing all around.
Technorati Tags: ladybugs, Westchester, Katonah
Thomas Hawk pointed me to an interesting piece written by Alex Raiano at the TiVo Blog comparing MCE to TiVo.
First, thanks for blogging on TiVo (Alex specifically), but what the hell are you thinking with this? MCE certainly has a DVR (at least in systems that ship with TV tuners), but it’s about much more. You only do one thing! While it can be argued you do it very well, the MCE value proposition is clearly about more than just the recording of TV.
Perhaps the MS marketing department needs to be reminded that while TV is easy to grok, there are also Photos, Music, Videos (your own) and the Online Spotlight which can deliver quite a bit of additional content. Only the MS bloggers seem to actively promote this. I think actually even with 2 tuners inside MCE loses the battle on a purely DVR front since it really just comes down to money.
A $1,200 DVR is out of the question for most people. I completely agree. In fact while I could probably swing a $1000 DVR, I find it’s ridiculous to even consider when I can get a dual-tuner HDTV capable recorder for 10 bucks a month from my cable company. MCE does not even record HDTV. OTA HDTV is not good enough… I need to record premium stations like HBO, not just NBC.
Thomas immediately brings up many of the advanced features power users enjoy from a richer platform like MCE which Tivo does not even try to deal with from a feature perspective. Sure you can network your Tivo, and add additional features to it, but this is beyond the main base purpose and I believe well beyond the capabilities of most owners.
MCE gets weaker as you expand out since while it is a jack of all trades, it really (and unfortunately) is a master of none. While a fully functioning PC underneath the MCE interface is attractive
to some people, this hurts you. A PC has issues like malware, viruses
and of course device drivers and conflicts.
Tivo is probably best as an ingredient within another platform at this point – Apple Front Row perhaps?
In the end other than the DVR, which is the purpose of TiVo and a single feature of MCE, is the only comparable detail. If you look purely at that TiVo clearly wins on price and picture quality, but MCE has two tuners or more in some addvanced systems.
MCE actually makes the market more complex since while a DVR is in there, it’s about selling PCs. Speaking of which, when you get to the bunddling issue as Alex addresses … many people are starting to buy MCE devices because the software is in there, though I also wonder how much use they get from the full set of capabilities.
I started this with a point, which I think I’ve lost… Comparing the two things is a slippery slope for both sides. If I worked for MS on MCE, I would work pretty damn hard to simplify the experience so that there was a more mass appeal. Telegraph the benefits on a higher level and let the advanced users (your existing market) take care of sharing the benefits with each other – which happens today through community sites and enthusiastic bloggers. Tivo – get cracking on some bundling and adding multiple HD tuners… next year is getting closer, but how much will that cable-card capable box really cost? If around 1000 bucks, MCE creeps into mind pretty significantly.
Technorati Tags: MediaCenter, FrontRow, Tivo, DVR, marketing
Do you often find yourself reading Bloglines on your mobile phone with too many feeds and too little time? Well, we’ve got great news. No, we’re not selling you gecko lizard insurance. But we have made it easy for you to create an abbreviated mobile version of your feed list so you don’t have to scroll past dozens of feeds to get to those you have time to read.
To create your mobile feed list, click the Edit link while in the web version, check which subscriptions you want or don’t want displayed in your mobile view and then select your option in the dropdown menu. You can also change this setting by clicking on the Edit Subscription link while viewing any of your feeds.
Another useful option for dealing with a lot of subscriptions is to have Bloglines only display subscriptions that have unread articles. Click on your Account link and look under Feed Options for the setting to show only updated feeds. This applies to both web and mobile versions.
All good stuff… works great on the blackberry in transit.
Right from my backyard dinner time tonight…
Congrats to Kevin Rose and team! I really like the Diggnation pod / vid cast and enjoy using the site as well. I’d describe it as Slashdot 2.0 (ala Web 2.0), and you’ll find a good mix of stories – though mainly tech.
Digg, a new San Francisco Internet start-up, seeks to rank news items by letting people choose which stories they like anywhere on the Web.And it just received $2.8 million in venture capital from some big-name investors, including Omidyar Network, the outfit led by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners.
MercuryNews.com | 10/28/2005 | Tagging the news you want to use
Technorati Tags: Digg, Venture Finance, Marketing, Social Bookmarking, Kevin Rose
My Nano returned today from Apple which is most excellent as I was seriously missing my commuting partner. Apple replaced my previous model with a brand new replacement — certainly the right move in my book. I was actually suprised by the DHL delivery which just arrived as I was not expecting things until Monday at the earliest. I guess Apple allowed for Saturday delivery, which also is great in my book!
You spend your life dealing with information. A lot of it is academic, a lot more is personal, it all matters, and you can probably use better tools for handling it effectively. On this page, we’d like to introduce you to a few of them.
College life, powered by Google
This is just a smart thing to do. Not that college kids don’t know about Google, but this page does a nice concise job positioning some solid tools.
At work, I use Flock like I do at home and before Flock I was using Firefox since I have a basic disdain for IE. This is fine for my basic needs, but frequently – and I mean frequently I am forced to switch over the IE in order to use our world-wide extranet which is based on SharePoint.
It’s not worth reading a rant on SharePoint (I can assure you it would be long) but what I don’t get – is why (for legitimate reasons) I need to use IE. If this is the era of Web 2.0 the browser of your choise (assuming it supports standards) should be more than acceptable for any mission you choose. Instead, what I find is that browsers do not work, or don’t work well with quite a few sites.
CNet recently ran a story talking about job seekers running into company job application sites which won’t work on the Mac, again based on only working on Windows IE. This would not only frustrate me (I ran into this myself in my last round of job seeking), but I just find it ignorant more than anything.
To me, and I’m not a developer, this is just laziness. If I choose to login to my company webmail from home on one on my Macs, I have to enter my credentials at least 3 times sometimes 4 to have them accepted by Exchange. If I use IE for Mac, it works on the first time. Our time entry system is the same thing… if you use anything but IE, you don’t even see some of the menus – assuming you can successfully login.
I’m certainly not switching to IE for my main use, but find that I run it as if it’s Word or Excel in order to access certain things… instead of just opening another tab in my existing browser. Gotta love how this forces addditional system resources to be deployed for a rather limited purpose. I’d yet to run the task manager to compare, my dell crap-top certainly feels the pain when I start opening a second browser adding to it’s burden of trying to keep up with me.
I’d love to boycott systems and companies that force this type of usage, but instead it’s the developing community that needs the wake up. This type of limiting work is a dead end in what should be the new, new world of Web 2.0. The browser is a conduit and with simple standards, it would be accessible to anyone. Let’s not mess that up more than we already have now.
Technorati Tags: Flock, IE, Firefox, Browsers, Standards, windows, Dell, Web 2.0, Sharepoint, Mac, Exchange
The idea of a movie being available on DVD or VOD the same day it’s released in a theater is very attractive to me. There have been plenty of times in the past few years when I was not able to get to a movie for whatever reason and have simply waited for Netflix or my cable VOD service to get access…
With a simultaneous release (even at a higher price for non-theater viewing) I’d be able to enjoy the same film, on my terms. This is a great addition to the Home Theater experience, or the HTPC experience if delivered over IP.
Clearly the plans being developed by Mark Cuban, Morgan Freeman’s Clickstar and now the Independent Film Channel are cause for some controversy:
In an interview before his speech, Shyamalan said he planned to ask theater owners at ShowEast’s Final Night Banquet and Award Ceremony “for zero tolerance on this — to say, ‘If you’re gonna release a movie in another medium, then you’re not going to get into our theaters’ — because at the end of the day, they hold all the cards.”
Shyamalan: Day-and-date ‘life or death to me’
I really hope it does not come to this and that perhaps as a consession, the DVD release is pushed. On-Demand though would really make things considerably more available. Please charge more money…I’d definitely pay for the convenience.
Technorati Tags: movies, marketing, Mark Cuban, Clickstar, DVD, VOD
I mostly run it on my 15-inch PowerBook. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the refreshing wind-blowing-through-my-hair feeling when I sit down in front of a G5 running Aperture. But a PowerBook is fine for what a lot of photographers do in the field with their laptops: browse images quickly and step through the thumbnails. Maybe tag the images they like, maybe zoom in closely on one. The photo edit stage. For that, a PowerBook does take a speed hit, but it’s totally usable.This is where our scheme of loading a proxy image comes in — the 1024 proxy is often all I need to see at this stage. Depending on how many megabytes each image is, Aperture on a G5 can load the full Raw image in less than a second. On my PowerBook, that same image may take three to four seconds to load fully.
creativepro.com – Stripping Raw Naked
I am so pumped to give this application a try and now that it should run reasonably well on my powerbook I am even more excited. From what I can tell, Aperture will be my ideal application for photo management and editing. I don’t have too many needs on the compositing side of life and Aperture seems to leave that work for Photoshop.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Aperture, RAW, Nikon, Photography, Software
Matt Goyer reports on a adult VOD service available for MCE users … It worked for VHS and DVD.
Technorati Tags: Porn, Marketing, technology, DVD, VHS
Riya looks like it will be a killer, killer application for digital image management. What is it? A facial recognition system for your pictures that lets you tag things (people, place etc) and it seems to learn based on what you input so you can get a very serious read on who and what is in your pics.
Since I was not exactly diligent in tagging my roughly 6000 (and growing) photos since purchasing my first digital camera pre-2000, I’ve got quite a bit of work to do if I want to find anything that’s lurking within. Riya looks like it could be the answer.
What I really like (having yet to test it) is that it looks like you can import photos and info from MANY sources so you can maximize the tag value. I’ve already emailed and gotten a reply (nice!) that iPhoto support is on the list…
Technorati Tags: Riya, Photos, Tags, facial recognition
Installed!
Automattic Kismet (Akismet for
short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a
non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry
about spam again.
Stop Comment Spam and Trackback Spam « Akismet
Technorati Tags: spam, wordpress, automattic, trackback
Finally!!!
Flickr has implemented printing on an official basis — if you are in the US. For now, you can order prints and have them fulfilled through Target. You can either pick them up the store or have them delivered to your home.
The best part is that you can control who can order prints based on your contacts. My family and friends can finally get off my back on why I use Flickr when they can’t order any pics.
Technorati Tags: Flickr, Prints, Sharing, Photography, Family, Target
Very cool – the Washington Post goes video.
This video podcast includes news and documentary video from washingtonpost.com.In the first video Washington Post personal technology columnist Rob Pegorarodiscusses his initial impressions of the latest iPod which can play video and TV shows.
If the Treo is your preferred device for all occassions this certainly seems like a great add. PocketTunes is a killer app for the device and iTunes integration is just solid.
The newly released version 1.3 of Mass Storage Synchronizer, a free iTunes add-on by Tea Vui Huang, lets you sync iTunes to your Treo 600 or 650. Just use either RealPlayer for Palm or Pocket Tunes to play the synced music.
While Thomas thinks it’s all about the picture, that unfortunately is just a detail. There are plenty of other details that need attention as well… music library management is certainly a key piece — but I think it’s really much more about the whole package. MCE is too complicated, period.
Picture quality is so super important. I would agree with the observation that the television picture quality on a Media Center PC has never approached that of even an entry level non HD TiVo. This is the single biggest obstacle in the way of Media Center acceptance. We must get a better picture — preferably CableCARD or Satellite or IPTV HDTV. I’m hoping we see this improve in Vista.
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: Media Center Gets Slashdotted
Don’t get me wrong, I want solid crystal clear images from my DVR and don’t think that’s too much to ask. I believe though, that until the computer part of the system is masked (no virus pop-ups, device drivers etc) this thing is in trouble from a mass adoption perspective. The idea of a 10′ UI is a good thing, it just needs some serious refinement. When I recently attended the Digital Life show in NYC, I stopped by the Microsoft booth and played with an MCE device, presumedly the latest. Switching between screens / modes required far too much wait time, with loading icons… I can’t possibly bring something like that into my living room without expecting a family conflict about how much more complex and annoying I’ve made things.
Technorati Tags: MediaCenter, Microsoft, Digital Life, Thomas Hawk
I just caught this hilarious post on BYOPVR courtesy of Channel9. This piece chronicles the adventure of a seemingly highly techncal geek setting up their own MCE box from scratch. The main way MCE gets sold is through packaged boxes which have addressed (in theory) some technical issues, but it’s still quite amazing to read of the troubles… and of the amount of work to get things configured in the HDTV world in which we live…
What Media Center does really well is show many ways there are to mess with an HDTV monitor that it doesn’t like, and allow you to practice starting in “safe modeâ€.
What is does really poorly is most of everything else. I retired from battle with a strategic retreat: moving the whole shebang to the bedroom, cohabitating with me, spouse, two medium dogs, and a vanilla 27†CRT.
DVR – Sort of
As a DVR, one tuner was just OK, with a second tuner working, it was still OK, provided you weren’t too picky about mouths moving at the same time words came out. Out with the snazzy Realtek integrated sound on the ASUS-A8V motherboard. In with an Audigy 2ZS to lessen the load on the AMD 64 3000+ processor. More gadgets. That cured the synch. The picture still was no where close to a vintage Tivo. [Build Your Own PVR]
I would certainly recommend the read to anyone interested in the category. The final point pretty much sums up what I know I’ve said, experienced and certainly read from others…
The Netopian dream of the refrigerator that orders more milk when you run low remains elusive. But in the 21st century, with Media Center, your VCR can now offer to sell you Viagra. And it has a social disease.
That is the final curse of Media Center. Even if it worked, it would still be Windows .
While the Apple Front Row solution is similar in that it’s an application / UI running on top of an existing OS, the underlying system is easier to manage, and generally speaking free from hassle. It’s quite unlikely that you will see a Virus warning pop-up at any time while running a Mac.
The more transparent the system – from setup to playback – the better the whole HTPC category will do. While TiVO can be a challenge to setup and configure to the average consumer, HTPC devices which seek to do far more than handle “simple” DVR functions will blow the minds of most — if not the just the early adopters who crave the technology, but can’t stand the issues. This stuff is getting close, but is still not where it needs to be for a consumer technology to be accepted on a mass level. Regardless of how many boxes MS says they’ll ship in the next year courtesy of bundling…
Technorati Tags: MediaCenter, BYOPVR, Microsoft, Apple, Front Row
