a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Cingular is making it tough to choose them as a new carrier if the rumors are true about Bluetooth DUN being disabled on the Treo 650. I’ve actually got an unlocked Treo 650 on order so I don’t have to worry too much, but damn, corporate politics easily effect consumer decisions.
I want EDGE, but why would I choose to support this behavior just so you can sell a few more data cards.
Droxy reports on the rumblings of a possible merger between XM and Sirius. I think this would be a great move by both companies and would make it easy to choose Satellite radio. Today there are two choices that are not compatible which can make a serious difference in how you go with a radio at home and in your car. A single company would be simple to grok and would stimulate greater growth for the new company.
It’s just the start (no clips just yet) but Google delivers video!
Hot Damn! Google has just unveiled Video Search!!! It looks like Blinkx TV has got some competition now. But there’s one catch… there are no viewable video clips available, just screenshots. However, it’s inferred that they will be enabled in the near future. One interesting feature, though, is that once you select the broadcast you’re interested in, Google breaks down the whole broadcast into timed, mini-captioned segments featuring the word, terms, keyword, etc. you were looking for. [eHomeupgrade]
Just in from Reuters… (thanks Andrew!)
SEATTLE, Jan 24 (Reuters) – PalmOne Inc. (PLMO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Monday that chief executive Todd Bradley will step down next month, triggering an 11-percent drop in the handheld computer maker’s shares.
Current PalmOne president Ed Colligan, 43, will become interim CEO until a replacement is found, the Milpitas, California, company said in a statement.
Bradley’s resignation, which will be effective at the end of the company’s current quarter on Feb. 25, triggered a drop in PalmOne shares in after-hours trade to $23.70, down 10.9 percent from their Nasdaq close of $26.59. [Reuters]
According to this piece at The Times Online, you would certainly believe it to be the case…
Julian Hewitt, senior partner at Ovum, a telecoms consultancy, said: “From a telecoms perspective there is a big appeal in the fact that Google is a search operation — and of course the Google brand is a huge draw.”
Mr Hewitt said that a Google telephone service could be made to link with the Google search engine, which already conducts half of all internet inquiries made around the world. A surfer looking for a clothes retailer could simply find the web site and click on the screen to speak to the shop. []
It was only a few days ago that Andy suggested Google buy Level3 and get into the space as a major player.
Om shoots this down stating it’s really about infrastructure…
Google is growing, and it is adding data center capacity pretty much all across the planet. (Because it wants to be the Internet OS!) Europe, Asia and US and it needs to link these together with a dedicated backbone, like most smart companies do. In order to do that, they have to build a global virtual network.
According to the NYT…. Sirius has struck an exclusive pact to sign Jimmy Iovine, chairman of Interscope Records, as a consultant and adviser in the development of programming and marketing arrangements.
In what has to be one of the more idiotic PR moves of current times, palmOne requested that Andrew at Treonauts remove the pictures of the GSM Treo 650 he was able to test out earlier in the week.
We’re very sad that we are no longer able to bring you (huge understatement) the first exclusive pictures… I’m still trying to figure out exactly what happened but palmOne politely requested that we pull the images and I agreed to oblige… Hopefully we’ll resolve this soon and thus continue to pictorially report on what a terrific smartphone the Treo 650 GSM is. [Treonauts]
I absolutely don’t get this one. It’s not like the device is a secret…. the only thing we don’t know is when it’s coming, not if. Why go to the trouble to do this palmOne? Should we not be interested in seeing or purchasing your products?
Good thing it’s free… though waiting 5 hours to copy a 1 hour program on your network hardly justifies the service. I’ll be interested in reading more when more people connect and we get some public feedback with how well wired ethernet works.
In short, TivoToGo isn’t really usable for me unless I seriously plan ahead or until Tivo adds support for 802.11g adapters. This is disappointing to say the least as I had been waiting for this feature for some time. I’m surprised Tivo didn’t make sure to support at least one faster adapter in anticipation of TivoToGo. [Obvious Diversion]
I’d love to see cable companies offer a way to copy programs. They already have the flagging technology and the DRM enabled, why not extend their reach a bit through the set-top. Quite a few boxes have USB or Firewire which would allow an adapter (for ethernet, wired or wireless) or a direct connection. I realize this is a huge can of worms… but people seem to want this, so why not smack Tivo down another notch with a better ToGo feature.
An interesting addition…though I wonder how many people will want to listen to games after most likely watching them on TV.
The National Football League (NFL) and Audible Inc. on Tuesday announced that audio broadcasts of the AFC and NFC championship games and the Super Bowl will be made available through Audible.com for compatible MP3 players, including the iPod. Audible.com’s content is also made available through the iTunes Music Store. The audio broadcasts of the games will be made available for download the morning after the games, and listeners will also be able to download audio highlights of the games, according to a statement. [MacCentral News]
The WSJ (sub required) has an interesting piece of the pending board meeting of Cablevision and the future status of Voom. While Voom is the clear leader in HD content, it has yet to attract enough customers to make it a viable business risk for the Cablevision parent. It’s actually pretty amazing they still only have 26,000 customers.
Charles Dolan, founder and chairman of Cablevision, wants the company to keep funding Voom, which launched service about a year ago but had only 26,000 subscribers at the end of the third quarter. Other board members, including James Dolan, Cablevision’s chief executive and Charles Dolan’s son, favor shutting it down or selling it at a discount if necessary.
A majority of the 14-member board sides with James Dolan, according to people familiar with the matter. “There is a significant disagreement between Chuck and everybody else over the Voom project,” one person said.
The dispute could lead to a shakeup of board members, according to people familiar with the matter. The Dolan family through its voting stock appoints eight of the directors. Among the eight seats the family controls are several members of the Dolan family, including both Charles and James Dolan. It is unclear whether Charles Dolan controls enough of the family interest to remove directors who oppose him. However, as the founder and family patriarch, Charles Dolan likely has the influence to have his way. His son, James Dolan, likely has less influence than his father over the rest of the family.
Cablevision chief operating officer Thomas Rutledge and Victor Oristano, a member of the board, declined to comment. Charles and James Dolan couldn’t be reached. People familiar with the matter said it was uncertain whether today’s board meeting will lead to any decisions or public announcements. “This is a very fluid situation,” one person added.
The battle represents one of the most dramatic disputes to surface within the Dolan family, which has built Cablevision into the country’s sixth-largest cable operator with about three million subscribers in the New York City region. But public spats aren’t unusual for the Dolans. Currently, James Dolan is engaged in a high profile fight against New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg over whether the city should help build a new stadium on Manhattan’s West Side. James Dolan argues, among other things, that a new stadium would hurt Madison Square Garden, another Cablevision property.
The satellite business has long been a dream of Charles Dolan, one of the pioneers of the cable industry who founded, among other things, Home Box Office. He has long believed that satellite is a more efficient means of delivering television than cable systems. Charles Dolan also believes a satellite business would give Cablevision a way of selling the cable networks it owns, like AMC and Independent Film Channel, directly to households without having to go through the middlemen of other cable or satellite companies. [WSJ]
Yahoo!’s got it going on these days…
Today they announce a deal with Verizon to be another high speed portal option for Verizon DSL customers. An interesting play by Verizon considering they are not canceling their current deal with MSN. The NYT article also mentions Yahoo is working on content for SBC’s pending IP TV service as well as their mobile phone service. Sean Alexander recently pointed out what Yahoo! is doing for Media Center as well…
In the multiyear deal, Verizon’s 3.3 million broadband customers will be able to use the co-branded portal at no additional charge. Yahoo will receive an undisclosed share of Verizon’s broadband subscription fees, and Verizon will get a share of the advertising revenue generated by the portal.
The Yahoo venture comes on top of a similar arrangement Verizon has with MSN, the Microsoft portal.
When the Yahoo portal is introduced this summer, Verizon customers will be offered a choice of Verizon, Yahoo or MSN portal as their home page.
The arrangement is a less ambitious version of the venture Yahoo has had with SBC Communications since September 2002. In that deal, SBC invested $300 million in Yahoo.
SBC and Yahoo are also expanding their partnership. Yahoo is now designing portals for SBC’s IP television service and mobile phone service. This will let customers use one ID and password on a variety of electronic devices [NYT]
Hey – it’s a worth a few minutes of our collective time for the chance at a free device. Freeminimacs.com is from the same people who ran the free iPod promotion. You do have to agree to one offer, but they are all free – minus of course a touch of your marketing info.
Go ahead let’s help each other out… freeminimacs.com
The New York Times is running a story with some key insight into why Tivo is only where it is today… Ignorance. Tivo’s CEO and Chairman, Michael Ramsey just simply could not let go and this is clearly pushed them down the road to failure.
Tivo is still a niche player even though their brand outweighs the number of units sold, an estimated 2.3 Million. By ignoring the inevitable future, that DVR functionality was more commodity than secret sauce, they allowed anyone interested in entering the market to cruise past them with ease. It can certainly be argued that the Tivo system is more sophisticated with greater flexibility and features, but the failure to market that early on, made it difficult to choose Tivo when you could get a box for free from your cable company.
2 Tuners and HDTV are two significant advances that cable carriers were able to deliver at virtually no cost (set-tops are usually free) to subscribers. The boxes from carriers also come with an installer in many cases and are easy to swap out should you run into an issue – something you’d have to send out for with Tivo and if you a re out of warranty, you might find yourself having to pay for repairs if there was a hardware failure.
The amazing thing is that apparently Tivo was pretty close to doing a deal with Comcast last year, but Ramsey backed out in the final hours thinking they should be getting more money.
After months of hard bargaining, TiVo reached an agreement last summer to offer its pioneering video recording system to customers of the Comcast cable system, according to several people involved in the discussions.
It was potentially a critical deal for TiVo, because Comcast is by far the biggest cable system and also because control of DirecTV, the satellite system that has been the biggest distributor of TiVo, had been bought by the News Corporation, which also owns a TiVo rival.
Yet, at the last minute, Michael Ramsay, TiVo’s chief executive, decided to pull out of the deal. Comcast was not going to pay TiVo enough money or give it enough control over its service, Mr. Ramsay told the company’s board, according to people involved in those discussions.
TiVo’s board backed Mr. Ramsay, a brilliant and headstrong Scottish engineer, who wanted to focus on new technologies to attract customers directly – without distribution of the service by cable or satellite TV companies. But a debate about whether the company made the right choice raged in its executive suite and boardroom.
Here’s a tip… less profit per box but installations in the homes of the largest cable company in the country is better than remaining a niche also ran. As long as the deal was not exclusive, it would most likely lead to deals with other carriers looking to keep up. Comcast is testing all kinds of new DVR and HD systems and probably wants to go with leading edge stuff… the kind of tech Tivo has, well had. Now it simply does not matter. When their HD Cable Card box comes out next year, it will have to fight an even steeper uphill battle for the attention of many already installed HD and SD DVRs courtesy of cable companies across the country.
Om Malik notes an enhanced Blinkx video search and I immediately thought that with the addition of RSS feeds linking to content you could have your very own clipping service. I’d guess people would be willing to pay for this as well. Think of all the marketing directors and PR firms who pay other people now for access to clips about themselves (their companies really) or competitors. Could be very cool.
Just add the feed to Azureus via the RSS plugin and you’ve got a custom video channel pulling relevant material as it happens.
Blinkx is getting really serious about its video search and has signed up the BBC, ITV, Sky and Fox and will basically allow the massive archives from these companies to become searchable. “This is basically turning the computer into a really, really big video recorder with thousands of programmes you can search and watch at any time,” Suranga Chandratillake, the British co-founder of Blinkx told The Evening Standard in UK. “This could do for television what Google did for the web.” [Om Malik on Broadband]
I’ve been thinking about a post Andrew made at Treonauts on the Third Screen (your mobile) and how even though there are most likely going to be 3 Million users of the Treo alone by year end, there are no video services like you see for other handhelds. Andrew cites a fair number of initiatives that have become public lately all dealing with delivering video to your pocket, but none are Treo or are even Palm compatible.
The device can handle this (try loading a Kinoma MP4 file on a server), assuming a quick, 1XRTT or EDGE connection, the minimum required on the other services. I think the real issue comes down to how the Treo itself is marketed. It’s a business tool, not a consumer device regardless of how many of us are buying it with our own money, instead of corporate expense accounts. palmOne has made this clear again and again with the (granted limited) marketing efforts they have put forth. The limited TV and print that has run for Treo has always been focused on connectivity and remote productivity. There’s no time for fun it seems when you are simply getting it done.
If they were able to focus (and run different themed campaigns against different targets), you might find a carrier specific deal that would push this as an advanced service. Instead, we find nothing from either palmOne or PalmSource who might actually be the more likely of the two to push capabilities.
The Wall Street Journal reports on the latest in the battle for listeners in radio… Apparently terrestrial radio is getting more than a bit scared and is about to run a series of commercials targeting satellite, though without mentioning the platform or either brand… The campaign is running with the tagline “Radio — you hear it here first.”
Major radio companies from Clear Channel Communications to Viacom’s Infinity Broadcasting to Entercom Communications have banded together to create 30-second spots featuring such stars as Avril Lavigne and Ludacris talking up local radio. The musicians run through highlights of their careers, and then remind listeners how all the Grammys and accolades happened only after lots of radio airtime. As one performer says in the spots: “Before being a lady of soul made me a diva, you heard me, Ashanti, on the radio.”
Did we mention the payola required to get you to hear those songs the number of times necessary to program your musical tastes?
Radio also is going after the niche audiences that satellite attracts by accelerating longstanding plans to move to digital broadcasting. That technology lets broadcasters transmit as many as five stations per frequency, compared with one today.
Radio executives envision having a rock station on the main channel and secondary stations featuring, say, boy bands, “deep cuts” from albums or traffic reports. They hope such specialized programming will help win back audiences from satellite radio and even from portable music devices such as Apple Computer’s iPod.
“If we end up deploying all the secondary channels and bringing the consumer dozens of niche stations, and we do it for free, what’s the value proposition in satellite radio?” asks Mr. Field. [WSJ]
I’d say the value is diversity of programming, content not available via traditional or HD Radio and of course no commercials.
Time Warner Cable in NYC has just updated their OnDemand system and now includes a pretty serious array of new programming — AOL Music ComedyCentral, A&E, BBC America, CourtTV, GOLF, CNN G4TechTV, Food Network, HGTV, and Kids on Demand.
I checked the Kids and was disappointed to only see cartoons for older kids and no PBS stuff… Comedy Central does have the Chappelle Rick James Episode, so no complaints there.
MIT Advertising Lab reports on a very cool campaign Starbucks recently ran in Boston. Apparently there were large Starbucks cups were mounted on the roofs of cabs as though someone had left it there getting into the cab. People noticed enough to try and flag the drivers down at times… Talk about getting involved with the brand!
Check out the list — Glad to see I’ve been a smart one and using most of this already… Tip to EMERGIC!
Sirius announced a major deal with Ford today which will have Sirius factory installed in the Ford F-150 (the best selling truck), the Ford Explorer (the best selling SUV), the Lincoln Mark LT and the Mercury Mountaineer. New installs will include at least a 6 month complimentary subscription to the service…
Having a major manufacturer like this offer the service in such popular cars is a sure boost to Satellite radio in general.