a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Unless I’m missing something here, this content deal between Rogers and Netflix might as well be delivered on. Region encoded DVD. Restricting access by country for internet
streaming is remarkably traditional.
Perhaps the other deals that have been struck for Orange is the New Black and Arrested Development might also be region blocked as well actually … Are we making progress or just rebuilding the matrix again?
As much as I enjoy open access to my data and content of interest there have actually been a few recent circumstances where the cloud could simply not deliver. For the average person living in a well connected market with limited travel needs, streaming your data works great. What I’ve encountered though has made me consider a more aggressive local plan as well.
I just got back from vacation on the Adirondacks where connectivity is poor at best. During the drive up we lost connectivity briefly and then on arrival to our rental home, found ourselves on edge… And slow edge as well. The rental home has satellite connectivity from a company called Wild Blue so there was WiFi in the house but the inbound speed was mainly slower than the edge connection as well. Having such a slow connection requires you to make decisions about what you might want to do online as everything takes time which we essentially take for granted living the land of high speed broadband and 4G.
Using AppleTV for streaming Netflix … Not an option. Spotify … Not so much. Even downloading or trying to steam podcasts was a tricky or delayed affair. For the most part the lack of connectivity wasn’t horrible … In fact forcing the change can be quite nice. There are definitely times though when the connection posed an issue… Driving in the car lately I’ve been enjoying Waze. The realtime map data is awesome and quite helpful. When your connection drops however the app can not only be unreliable but the lost connection can actually make navigation impossible. Google Maps allows for pre-loading the area you want but without any real speed in your connection that’s also quite a challenge.
If you follow me on any of the social services you know I share a lot. At this point sharing is habitual and just part of my information flow. When your connection barely works though you have to make pretty regular decisions rather than more seamlessly flow things back out. My pictures backup to Facebook and Google+ but on edge the process takes hours (yes hours) to happen and then you need to have a much more restrained view if you want to share a gallery vs one or two pics at a time.
Even in more connected environments… Like Westchester where I live the connection can also pose a challenge. Just this morning, I fired up Waze while driving my kids to school. Because the signal was poor my location never activated and instead of a helpful look around, I got a floating look at the area because the phone could not lock things in. Up in the Adirondacks if the signal dropped long enough Waze would actually crash and even though it would want to restart my navigation without a network lock, it was rendered pretty useless as the map never loaded. The car nav BTW worked without any fuss… As did Sirius radio.
Back at home and commuting back and forth to NYC, I’m regularly in range of LTE and stream content, update my apps on the go and basically use my devices as they were designed.
Future trips are going to require me advanced planning so I can cache things I might need or want …
Amazon just announced a very cool new service that will enable cloud access to any of the CD’s you’ve purchased (some limitations) from them. When I think back through the decade+ purchase history, this is considerable for me. I can’t believe it took this long to even get this going as they’ve been able to validate purchase for a long time and have had a cloud streamer for a while as well. I’ll have to really check this out out to get a feel for how it really works.
Meanwhile back in 2004 …
via The Verge
Gizmodo notes the soft-launch of Aereo, which will bring TV streaming potentially to a more mainstream group given the complete lack of set-up.
I really like this idea. Sure there’s hardware you could get to do this but the service folds it all nicely into an app. Pricing just needs to be more in line with Netflix rather than much more as it currently stands.
Looking forward to giving this a try next month (or earlier!) if I’m able to get into the beta.
The only thingI want to know is how much the panel gets paid to endure 16 MINUTES of ads during a 30 Minute show. Who are these people? I’m sure the groups were considered a great success …
Viewers of 30-minute TBS sitcoms like “Meet the Browns” watched, on average, 40 percent of the episode if there was one minute of ads and 37 percent of the episode if there were 16 minutes of ads. Viewers of hourlong TNT shows like “Memphis Beat” watched 59 percent of the episode if there were one minute 15 seconds of ads, and 49 percent of the episode if there was 20 minutes of ads.
via Online TV Show Viewers Tolerate More Ads, Turner Says – NYTimes.com.
Check out that screenshot … Pandora is actively playing while there is no signal on the iPhone!
I was enjoying some streaming music on my way to work today and though I fully expected the stream to drop as we went underground, it kept on playing! Â my iPhone has been jailbroken and I use backgroundr to enable background streaming … I doubt that has anything to do with this, but thought I should mention it.
Presumably Pandora pre-caches the next track as it’s playing which enabled the “local” track to play. Â It seems as if the album art downloads as the song is active and since there was no connection that was impossible at the time. Â Amazingly my stream kept on playing when the connection kicked back as we pulled into Grand Central.
*You obviously can’t start a stream without a connection.
Last.fm is my usual streaming source when I’m at work and even when I am at home where I have access to my pretty extensive digital music library. I use the desktop application for Mac and Windows which lets you access your library, friends and loved tracks directly for streaming. If you use Last.fm and have not checked it out, I would highly recommend it …
Last.fm released a new beta application called Boffin today which looks at your local collection and then creates a tag cloud of what it finds. It took about 20 minutes to run against my library of about 30K tracks and when i was done I found this:
Some of the tags are inconsistent which I hope gets cleaned up in future releases, but I love that I can create a “stream” of my library with a couple of tags. Depending on how you arrange your music in iTunes, you might be able to do something similar with a smart playlist, but this was dead simple and is definitely re-presenting my own music to me in a new way. Speaking of iTunes, it would be ideal if you could just point to your iTunes library rather than a folder but perhaps that will come soon as well.
There’s no shortage of options when it comes to uploading video, but lately a few sites have upped their game and have changed how I’ve been considering even where to upload.
It has been a while since I captured HD video, but I recently received the Flip MinoHD as a gift
If you have never worked with video, it’s important to understand that sharing is a bit more complex than photos as anything you upload needs to be converted for flash which is how just about all web video is presented. Shooting with the Flip is great as the files come off the camera already digitized as .mp4 files which means they can be uploaded straight away if you like. You can also use a video editor like iMovie or Final Cut to add some polish though that really depends on your need. In previous video work I’ve done, I’ve had to first import my footage from the camera (shot on tape) which is a real-time process. If you shoot 30 minutes, you need 30 minutes to copy it over. Once on your computer even if you choose to dump it right back out, you need at least the same amount of time (if you have a fast computer) to create a digital file which can then be uploaded for sharing. The flip (and other digital storage based cameras) let you just copy the files over and get going right away.
So as I had started to say initially, I’ve been shooting a some new stuff since getting the camera last week and I was looking to share easily with family and friends. Since Facebook offers some excellent control over who sees what, I went there first and uploaded a few clips. Facebook recently updated their video offering and my HD (720p) video uploaded and encoded quickly. I was actually pretty impressed with how quickly the encoding process took as that’s generally another real waiting point for most video sites. The posted video showed up on my profile and in my feed and I was instantly sharing my vacation experiences.
I’ve been seeing a lot of video on Vimeo lately and wanted to test out their HD offer to compare and so I uploaded the same HD video again. I also posted the video on Viddler, Blip (different video) YouTube and Ovi. The differences became apparent immediately. Every other site needed some serious time to encode the posted content and this time took anywhere from over 2 hours (vimeo) to overnight (youtube). When my content appeared on Vimeo it looked awesome, but I was frustrated with the time it took to actually see it. I’m not in a race to share content, but having to wait in line to even get the encoding going is quite frustrating. Only Blip offers the original MP4 (believe at my preference) while the flash is being encoded which is very cool. The negative is that MP4 files do not buffer or stream with the same ease across clients as flash – regardless of what Apple says. Ovi, by the way refused to playback my video …
Vimeo is the only site that offers a premium option and I debated it for a day before going for the upgrade. For about $60/year you get the skip the encoding queue and are offered better quality video playback, HD embeds (with 1000 plays), and a few other bits. Right after I paid, I uploaded another video and I have to say it looks damn good. Compared to the Facebook version there is noticeably less digital artifacting and the playback seems a bit smoother. All is good right? Well …
While Vimeo offers the best playback and a community, the community aspect is minor compared to what Facebook delivers given the real connections and notifications within the FB system. The quality is very good, totally free and if you make your video public able to be embedded on your blog or website which is a very interesting move by Facebook in itself. Facebook’s only real flaw is that there are no statistics available for content you share. There’s no way to see how many people have seen your video or photos which tends to be a currency on most media sharing sites. Facebook is probably going to be the place you also first think to share video content much like people have been doing with Photos. As I see it there’s no reason why not to use it. TOS BS aside of course though that does seem to be behind us for the moment. I will likely continue to use a variety of sites and have signed up for Tubemogul which will let me upload a single (<100MB) file and have it shared across the sites I choose as a bonus I can see an aggregated dashboard for my views as well. Except for Facebook …
I don’t think so but it looks like HBO and Neflix do according to a survey that’s being sent around to some Netflix streaming customers. According to the survey, you’d get access to watch HBO original series and movies streamed to your computer or TV (via netflix set top box).
I’ve yet to see a an interent stream come through at the same quality level as my HD signal which would be the bar for me if the price was the same. Sure there’s a bit of additional flexibility to use many more devices, but you’d also be sacrificing the ability to use your DVR. On demand somewhat offsets that need, but the playback controls you get with a recorded program are considerbly greater than with the typical tv show streamed – using hulu as an example. It’s possible that there would be some different rules to apply here, though given the parallel pricing proposed, I’m betting not.