How much is a camcorder body worth?

I've been thinking about how much a camcorder body is worth vs. a DSLR ever since Sony released details about its NEX-VG10 camcorder last week. The NEX-VG10 is essentially a NEX-5 with a camcorder body and updated firmware, for $1,200 more ($1,999 for the NEX-VG10 vs. $800 for the NEX-5 with the same lens.) Leaving the firmware aside for now, is there really a $1,200 difference between the two cameras?

DSLRs don't have the proper ergonomics for video. Still cameras are designed to be held only when a photographer is framing and shooting an image or a series of images, while camcorders are designed to be held at the eye for a long time. To compensate for DSLR ergonomics, companies like Zacuto and Redrock Micro have come up with eyepieces that fit over the cameras' LCD displays and a variety of mounting hardware that makes its easier to hold a DSLR at the eye for a long period of time.

Taking Zacuto as an example, a Zacuto Z-Finder Jr. lists for $265, and a Target Shooter, which is the company's least-expensive DSLR mounting solution, is $475. You're also going to need some kind of audio recording solution; at the bottom of the price range, you could probably get away with Zoom's $99 H1, although most people will go with something like the H4n for $299 to get its dual XLR inputs. So, to bring the NEX-5 up to the NEX-VG10 in handling and audio capability will cost from $839 to $1039. And, you still wouldn't have the updated firmware that supports manual controls and a higher AVCHD bit rate.

Once you put it into perspective, the $1,200 premium that Sony is charging for the NEX-VG10 really isn't that much of a premium. The bigger question is whether you'd want to use the NEX-VG10 at all, when you can get DSLRs from Canon that are much more flexible and have a much wider range of lens options, or from Panasonic with third-party firmware that blow away the image quality of the NEX-VG10.

I believe that the NEX-VG10 is going to find a market, and it's probably going to be quite successful, but more serious videographers and filmmakers will stick with the Canon and Panasonic DSLRs, even if they need third-party hardware and firmware to work well as camcorders. However, I also believe that the NEX-VG10 and Panasonic's forthcoming AG-AF100 are the first entries in an entirely new class of camcorders that integrate DSLR imagers, electronics and interchangeable lenses into camcorder bodies. There may be new entries as soon as IBC in September, and there's certainly going to be more at CES in January and NAB next April. At that point, you won't have to trade off form factor for capability as you will with the NEX-VG10.

Sony's NEX-VG10 Camcorder Ships in September

According to Camcorderinfo.com, Sony has announced specifications and pricing for the NEX-VG10, its new camcorder based on the same platform as the NEX-3 and NEX-5, Sony's answer to Panasonic and Olympus' Micro Four Thirds system. The NEX-VG10 uses the same E-mount interchangeable lenses as the NEX-3 and NEX-5, and has the same sensor and resolution as the NEX-5. However, it's packaged into a prosumer-style camcorder body, with both an electronic viewfinder and a 3" LCD display, and a new "Quad Capsule Spatial Array" microphone that's designed to address some of the complaints that DSLR users have had with poor audio recording performance.

Sony has also added some features to the NEX-VG10 to distinguish it from the NEX-5. For example, the new camcorder does away with the NEX-5's recording time limitations, has a higher maximum AVCHD bitrate (24 Mbps,) and has manual control over shutter speed, aperture, gain and white balance (all of which are automatic with no manual overrides when the NEX-5 is in video mode.)

The list price of the NEX-VG10 with a 18-200mm zoom lens with optical stabilization will be $1,999 in the US when it ships in September. This compares with approximately $800 for the NEX-5 with the same lens (which is not yet available.) On the other hand, Panasonic's AG-AF100, a camcorder based on the company's GH2 Micro Four Thirds DSLR, is rumored to be priced at $6,000 in the US when it ships later this year. The AG-AF100 will have more professional features, including dual XLR audio inputs and a wider range of frame rates and resolutions, and it's likely to be able to take advantage of some of the new third-party firmware that is available for the GH1 and GH2, but $2,000 looks like quite a bargain compared to $6,000.

The iPhone 4 antenna problem: An overreaction?

Earlier today, Consumer Reports Magazine reported that it gave the iPhone 4 its "Not Recommended" rating because of the problems with signal drop-off and lost calls when holding the phone so that both antennas are bridged together. Consumer Reports tested the iPhone 4 in its own facilities using its own cell tower simulator and other testing equipment. The problem has been duplicated by many other testers, so let's get a few points out of the way:

1. The problem is real and affects anyone using an iPhone 4 in an area that doesn't have a strong AT&T signal.
2. Even though the FCC doesn't require that cell phones be held during testing, Apple should have done its own tests well before the iPhone 4 shipped.
3. The software fix proposed by Apple to "correct" the number of bars of signal strength that are displayed has nothing to do with the antenna problem. It won't fix the signal attenuation caused by holding the phone "the wrong way."

Apple screwed up badly and hasn't helped itself with its proposed fix. However, Consumer Reports also said that it fixed the problem with a strip of duct tape, and that leaving the antenna issue aside, the iPhone 4 is perhaps the best smart phone it's ever tested. So, if you can fix the problem with $0.01 worth of adhesive tape, it it really all that much of a problem?

In my opinion, there's been a massive overreaction to an overall minor problem. Consumer Reports wants Apple to give every iPhone 4 owner a free bumper, and Apple could surely come up with something a lot less expensive than the $29 bumpers that it's selling. (Recently-published testing showed that the $29 bumpers eliminate the antenna problem but provide no real protection for the phone, so something lighter and much cheaper should work as well.) The best thing that Apple can do is to announce a real fix, a timetable for implementation, and the process for requesting or distributing the fix.

Monthly time spent on site: Good for Google and Facebook, Bad for Yahoo and Aol

According to Silicon Alley Insider, comScore's monthly report for total time spent on popular U.S. Internet sites as a percentage of time spent on all Internet sites is a mixed bag: Good news for Google and Facebook, bad news for Yahoo and Aol, and more disappointment for Microsoft. Here's the chart:

Google is now the leader in terms of total time spent on its sites; in June, its share passed that of Yahoo for the first time. Facebook is an even more impressive story; its share is close to that of Google, and if the two companies stay on their trend lines, Facebook is likely to pass Google within a year.

Yahoo's share has been trending down for six quarters, and in June, the company had its lowest time spent on site since comScore started keeping records. Aol is on an almost three-year-long downtrend, and now has the smallest share of any of the leaders. It's hard to argue that, unless something radical happens, Aol could drop to a 2% share by the middle of 2011.

As for Microsoft, despite the billions of dollars that the company has invested in its online businesses over the past few years, the company's share of time spent was almost identical in Q2 2010 to what it was in Q3 2006. In other words, all that money just kept Microsoft even.

The traffic contest has turned into a three-horse race, and one of the horses (Yahoo) is starting to pull up lame.

Barnes & Noble gets into the higher ed eBook business with NOOKstudy

According to Engadget, Barnes & Noble announced NOOKstudy, a software eBook reader and content manager for the higher education market, earlier today. NOOKStudy is a free eBook application for Windows and OSX PCs targeted at the higher education market that enables students to manage all their digital content (eTextbooks, class materials and notes) on their computers: From the press release:

"NOOKstudy lets students view multiple books and sources at once and offers access to complementary content (e.g. toolsets, reference materials, etc.), as well as the unprecedented ability to highlight and take notes that are searchable and customizable. This comprehensive software solution also provides students access to all of their materials – eTextbooks, lecture notes, syllabi, slides, images, trade books and other course-related documents – all in one place, so their digital library goes wherever they go."

"NOOKstudy will be compatible with the company's entire catalog of eBooks and digital content, including relevant study aids, test prep guides, periodicals, and hundreds of thousands of trade and professional titles. NOOKstudy will also enable students to save money, as eTextbooks offer up to 40% savings off new textbooks."

NOOKstudy is in beta test at a number of universities including Penn State and UNLV, and will go into general distribution for the 2010 fall semester. It's a direct response to Follett's CafeScribe/MyScribe eBook service, which Follett has bungled since it acquired Fourteen40, the company that developed it. It's also a preemptive strike against the Kno eBook reader and service. Kno will make students purchase its proprietary eBook reader (for "under $1,000",) while NOOKstudy will work on the PCs that students already have. While B&N will undoubtedly focus on the schools where it has bookstore contracts, B&N will use NOOKstudy to go after students across the country.

Cool-er: Another one bites the dust

According to TheBookseller.com, Interead, the company behind the Cool-er eBook reader, has gone into liquidation in the U.K. The company's websites are still live, but products can't be purchased. According to the article:

Interead was founded in 2009 by former banker Neil Jones. Jones told the Guardian in September 2009 that he had big ambitions for the company. "I'm pretty confident we'll be number two in America by this time next year in terms of sales, and number one in the UK."

Interead joins iRex Technologies as a failed vendor of eBook readers. iRex declared bankruptcy last month, so there's still a slim chance that the company or its readers could be revived, but Interead's liquidation means that the best that could happen is that the Cool-er readers could be sold to another company to help pay off Interead's debts.

More eBook reader companies are likely to fail or withdraw their products from the market over the next year. There are simply too many eBook reader vendors for the available market, and the best-positioned companies are Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

Everything you know about motivation is wrong

Employees are motivated by money--the more money, the more they're motivated. Bonuses are a great way to get employees to work harder and do a better job. If you can't motivate people with carrots (money), you've got to do it with sticks (the threat of dismissal), because they're inherently lazy. Do you believe any of this? All of this? If you do, you're not alone. This is the way that workers in the U.S. have been motivated for more than 100 years. Carrots and sticks. They work when employees are doing low-value, repetitive work. However, if your business requires creative, high-value work, the carrot and stick model not only doesn't work, it's counterproductive.

Three recent books, Dan Ariely's "The Upside of Irrationality," Daniel K. Pink's "Drive", and Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus", cover some of the most recent research in behavioral economics. In particular, Ariely and his associates have done a lot of research, verified independently, that turns much of what we thought we knew about motivation on its head.

Consider the relationship between money and performance. Paying someone more will result in better performance, right? Ariely and his associates conducted studies in multiple countries where they asked volunteers to complete a series of tasks, ranging from very simple to very complex. Participants were ramdomly assigned to one of three groups. The first group was offered a nominal payment--perhaps the equivalent of a day's pay--for fully completing all the tasks. The second group was offered the equivalent of a week's pay, and the third group was offered the equivalent of a month's pay. For each task, the volunteer had to successfully complete a series of tests or actions. If they completed a at least a minimum number, they would receive 50% of the money for that task. If they completed a higher number, they would receive 100% of the money for that task. If they didn't complete the minimum number, they would receive nothing for that task.

The first two groups--the day's pay and week's pay groups--had almost exactly the same performance. However, the month's pay group was so fixated on the money that it did far worse than the other two groups. The pressure to perform interfered with the month's pay group's ability to concentrate on the tasks. The bottom line is that putting more money at stake can actually decrease, rather than increase, performance.

Next, let's look at the value of money vs. personal accomplishment. In one study, the researchers asked participants to assemble Lego Bionicle toys. For each toy built, each participant would be paid on a sliding scale: $2.00 for the first one, $1.89 for the second one, and $0.11 less for each following completed toy. They could build as many toys as they wanted, and stop whenever they wanted to. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups: Those in the first group were told that at the end of the experiment, their toys would be disassembled so that they could be used by another participant. In the second group, after the participant completed building the first toy and started building the second, the experiment's supervisor disassembled the first one in front of the participant, telling the participant that they were doing it in for them to have another toy to assemble.

If money was the motivating factor, it shouldn't have mattered whether or not the toys were disassembled by the supervisor, but those in the first group that didn't see the toys disassembled before their eyes built substantially more toys and made substantially more money than those in the second group. The participants in the first group also enjoyed the project much more and were more satisfied by their work. 

How about bonuses? Aren't they a great way to motivate employees to work harder? Experiments show that the first time a bonus is offered, it does have some benefit, subject to the situation discussed above--if the bonus is too big, employees fixate on the money and can't concentrate on the work. However, workers subsequently associate the bonus with the effort and expect to get it again. If they don't get it, they're demotivated and their work suffers. This is why companies find themselves locked into offering bigger and bigger bonuses in order to get the same amount of performance improvement.

Multiple studies have shown that money is a strong motivator when people are struggling to make ends meet--when they're at the lower rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. However, in the U.S., once a person's annual income passes $60,000 (on average), the motivating power of money diminishes rapidly. It's at this point that, in Daniel Pink's terms, primary motivation shifts from extrinsic (carrots and sticks) to intrinsic (finding challenges, satisfaction and worth.)

Pink defines intrinsic motivation as having three components:

• Mastery: Performing your task well and being challenged by it. Both Pink and Ariely refer to the groundbreaking work of Mihaly Csikszentmilalyi, who identified "Flow", a state of intense concentration where the participant loses track of time. Flow is a state of optimal performance, and it occurs when you're working on a challenge that's difficult enough to tax you but not so difficult that it's impossible to do. If a task is too simple, it leads to dissatisfaction through boredom; if it's too difficult, frustration leads to dissatisfaction and disengagement.
  
  This is a reason why athletes are kept relatively closely grouped by skill level while they're learning a sport. If an athlete's skills are too advanced for his or her group and they don't get a chance to play with more advanced players, they get bored and lose motivation. On the other hand, if an athlete is grouped together with others who are much better skilled, he or she may get frustrated, lose motivation and quit.
  
  You don't have to be an expert at a subject in order to experience mastery, but you have to be good enough at it to accomplish key tasks, yet still find challenges that push you to become better.
  
• Autonomy: Autonomy is the amount of control that you have over how you do your job. Specifically:
  
• Where you do it: Are you required to do your job in an office or factory, or can you work from home or another location of your choosing?
  
• When you do it: Can you set the hours that you work, or are you required to begin and end your workday at specified times? Can you eat when you want and take time to handle personal matters, or do you have to clock in and out at specific times and get permission from your manager for any personal time?
  
• Who you do it with: Do you have control over who you work with, or are you assigned to work with individuals and teams and have no say in the matter?
  
• What process you use to do it: Do you have a lot of latitude in deciding how to achieve your objectives, or are you required to follow a set of tightly-defined procedures and use a specified set of tools?
  
• Purpose: Can you find a purpose for your work (other than earning a paycheck, of course)? Is your work meaningful to you, or is the reason you're doing it because you were told to do it by your supervisor? Do you believe that you're adding value or doing "make work"? Satisfaction and motivation are strongly driven by a sense of purpose. Workers who find an intrinsic purpose to their efforts have been shown to be more motivated and more efficient. On the other hand, people for whom a paycheck is their only purpose have been shown to have much lower job satisfaction, are more likely to change jobs and typically require more money over time in order to maintain the same level of performance.
  
  In fact, one could argue that the entire system of promotions, pay increases and bonuses that has evolved since the late 19th Century is based on a lack on intrinsic purpose. When pay becomes the purpose, it's inherently demotivating over time, so more pay is needed to "increase" motivation, which in turn creates a dependency on future pay increases.

With all this as background, what are a few of the things that progressive employers can do to improve motivation and job satisfaction?

• Pay above-average salaries at the start in order to attract better employees, instead of relying on bonuses to motivate better performance.
• Keep employees challenged with new projects that help them hone their skills. Projects that are too simple lead to boredom, and those that are too difficult lead to frustration.
• Give employees as much autonomy as possible. Things like flextime and personal days only give the appearance of autonomy. Employees need to have control over how, when, where and with whom they do their jobs.
• Enable employees to find an intrinsic purpose for what they do. If they don't understand why they've been asked to do something, or they know that what they've been asked to do won't make a meaningful contribution to the company's success, their sole motivation will become money, and money loses its effectiveness over time.

Moving from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation goes against most of the management practice and economic theory of the last century or more, as well as against the culture of most companies. It may well be impossible for most existing organizations to make the change. If that's the case, it's up to new, agile organizations to adopt the lessons of behavioral economics for better productivity, greater employee satisfaction and lower costs.

Gutenberg's miscalculation: A lesson for big media?

In Clay Shirky's new book "Cognitive Surplus", he discusses a lesser-known aspect of the achievements of Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press, which changed the way that knowledge was distributed and forever changed education, religion, government and commerce. The Gutenberg Bible is by far his best-known work, but it wasn't his biggest, or even most important work.

Prior to printing Bibles, Gutenberg received permission from the Catholic Church to print and sell indulgences on its behalf. (Gutenberg borrowed the money he needed to build and operate his printing press based on the anticipated revenues from selling indulgences.)  Indulgences were a way for Catholics to "neutralize" their sins and thus move from Purgatory to Heaven much faster, or even skip Purgatory altogether.

Priests and pardoners (authorized agents of the Church) would sell the indulgences and write them down on pieces of paper. Gutenberg saw the opportunity to bring mass production to the process. By pre-printing batches of indulgences, he could sell them much faster and make more money for himself and the Church. The plan backfired, however, when other pardoners got their own printing presses and flooded the market with printed indulgences. The entire practice of selling indulgences (among other things) so angered Martin Luther that he wrote his "Ninety-Five Theses" in 1517 and nailed them to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. The Theses were, in turn, reproduced on printing presses and widely distributed, which helped to bring about the Protestant Reformation, which in turn broke the hold that the Catholic Church had over Europe, and eventually, caused the Church to end the practice of selling indulgences.

The introduction of Gutenberg's printing press was an early, excellent example of the fact that it's impossible to predict the true impact of a discontinuous innovation when it's first introduced. Gutenberg thought that his printing press would make money for himself and the Church, but it instead led to revolutionary changes throughout European society that still resonate today.

When the Internet became a commercial reality in the mid-1990s, established media saw it as a sideline at best, but certainly no threat to their primary businesses, be they newspapers, magazines, music, books, television or movies. What they didn't foresee was the radical impact that the Internet would have on all of their businesses. In the case of newspapers and magazines, the Internet cannibalized their audiences and sources of income, replacing paid content with free services. Record companies nearly collapsed before they came to an uneasy truce with online distributors. Broadcast and cable networks found their shows scattered all over the Internet and worked desperately to get distribution back under their control.

Now, established media companies are grasping at apps as perhaps the last chance to keep their historical business models alive. They can sell apps, as well as subscriptions to the content made available by apps. That strategy works so long as apps are the only way to get to the content that people want to access, but it's a strategy with a limited future.

Earlier this week, Google released a new version of its mobile website for YouTube, written in HTML5 and far superior to the YouTube app supplied by Apple. It takes two clicks to put the YouTube site on the iPhone home screen, and from that point on, it's indistinguishable from an app. Eventually, all the content that's available on the Web will be available via HTML5, at which point the walled garden of apps will no longer provide any protection for established media companies. Apps may postpone the day of reckoning for media companies, but they won't eliminate it.

New WebM/H.264 Comparison

A new comparison of VP8 (the video codec in WebM), H.264 and XviD has been published by the Moscow State University's Graphics & Media Lab. The comparison is an addition to a comprehensive review of codecs. The team that performed the comparison makes it clear that it didn't do as extensive a test of VP8 as it did of the other codecs, since the study was apparently virtually completed by the time that Google announced that it was open-sourcing VP8 and including it in WebM. Nevertheless, the team came to a number of conclusions:

For movie encoding:

Comparing VP8 to XviD, VP8 is 5-25 times slower with 10-30% better quality (lower bitrate for the same quality). When comparing VP8 and x264 VP8 also shows 5-25 lower encoding speed with 20-30% lower quality at average. For example x264 High-Speed preset is faster and has higher quality than any of VP8 presets at average.

For HDTV:

Comparing VP8 to XviD, VP8 is 5-20 times slower with 10-20% better quality (lower bitrate for the same quality). When comapring VP8 and x264 VP8 shows 5-20 lower encoding speed with almost the same quality, excluding x624 High-Quality preset.

The source material that the team used for the Movie testing was clips from the films "Ice Age 3", "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Enemy of the State" and "Up". For the HDTV test, the team used video shot in the Amazon taken from a Microsoft site, the trailer from "Iron Man 2", a close-up video of a calendar and a clip from the movie "Troy."

The WebM team responded to the Moscow State University results, admitting that a lot of work needs to be done to VP8 in order to improve its encoding speed. However, they contend that VP8 would have provided better-quality output had the source material not previously been encoded (only one sample, the calendar, was uncompressed.) Here are their comments:

We've been following the MSU tests since they began and respect the group's work. One issue we noticed in the test is that most input sequences were previously compressed using other codecs. These sequences have an inherent bias against VP8 in recompression tests. As pointed out by other developers, H.264 and MPEG-like encoders have slight advantages in reproducing some of their own typical artifacts, which helps their objective measurement numbers but not necessarily visual quality. This is reflected by relatively better results for VP8 on the only uncompressed input sequence, "mobile calendar.

Even with this limitation, VP8 delivered respectable results against other encoders, especially considering this is the first time VP8 has been included in the test and VP8 has not been specifically optimized for SSIM as some other codecs have.

To date, WebM developers have focused on the VP8 decoder performance and are only starting to optimize the encoder for speed. The WebM project has only been underway for three weeks, and we believe that our encoder speed will improve significantly in the near future.

The WebM team's comments about the source material have some merit, but in the real world, video that's previously been compressed is often included in projects. It may be difficult or impossible to get uncompressed source material--for example, AVCHD camcorders and some DSLRs output video using H.264. Therefore, the performance of VP8 on previously compressed video is important.

The Moscow State University comparison provides useful insight into the performance of VP8, and points out some of the areas that Google and its partners need to work on.

The rats are running for the lifeboats at Blockbuster

Home Media Magazine reports that Mark Wattles has sold more than 1.7 million shares of Blockbuster stock for a grand total of $230,741, or an average price of just a little over $0.13 per share. Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes sold more than 245,000 shares at a price of $0.18 each, for a total of $44,100. According to the article, he still holds more than 1.8 million shares, which if valued at what Wattles got for his sale, would be worth a bit more than $234,000.

Blockbuster's stock has been delisted by the New York Stock Exchange and its biggest holders are dumping their shares while they still have some value. Even though the company claims to have avoided bankruptcy through a one-month reprieve in debt payments from creditors owed $440 million of the company's $920 million in total debt, Wattles's and Keyes's stock sales indicate that they don't believe that the company will be able to stay out of bankruptcy court. Based on first-quarter earnings, the company is on track to have less than $100 million in earnings this year before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization--not enough to cover scheduled interest and principal payments on its outstanding debt.

More evidence that tablets are cooling netbook demand?

According to DigiTimes, both Acer and Asustek (Asus) have cleared out their existing inventory of netbooks, and are monitoring market demand before launching any new models. Intel's pricing for its new dual-core Atom N550 processor, which is $11 to $22 higher than current models, is said to be one of the factors causing the netbook vendors to be cautious.

Another big reason for caution on the part of Acer and Asustek has to be the market success of Apple's iPad and the potential impact of forthcoming tablets. I've had an Acer Aspire One for more than a year, and I've switched to an iPad. There's very little that I can do with the Acer that I can't do with the iPad, plus the iPad doesn't have to be unpacked to go through airport security, it's lighter and it feels faster. (I'm running Windows 7 on the Acer, so that may explain some of its sluggish performance.)

A year ago, the company that I was working at was pushing netbooks as more flexible substitutes for dedicated hardware eBook readers. They had limited success, even though the netbooks were often less expensive than the dedicated readers. Now that the Kindle 2 and nook are priced below $200 and are likely to fall further, netbooks have lost their price advantage. At the other end of the scale, the iPad's user experience is far better than that of netbooks. With Android and WebOS tablets likely to reach the market at lower prices than the iPad before the end of the year, the argument for netbooks is even more tenuous. That's why the leading manufacturers are holding back.

Disney loses in "Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire" case

It's an often-told joke that no matter how much money a movie or TV show grosses, no one ever seems to make any money. According the the LA Times, Celador International, the creator of "Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire," filed suit against Disney in 2004, charging that Disney had struck a series of deals between Disney owned and controlled companies in order to make it appear that the show had made no money. (Disney actually claimed that the show has lost $73 million since it first went on the air.)

Celador asked for as much as $395 million in broadcast licensing fees, based on an expert's opinion of the fair market value of the show, plus another $10 million for Celador's share of royalties from sales of show-related merchandise. The jury returned a verdict awarding $260 million in licensing fees plus $9.2 million for merchandise royalties.

At the trial, Celador introduced evidence that Disney had received $515 million in revenue from license fees plus $70 million from merchandise sales. Kantar Media estimates that the show attracted nearly $1.8 billion dollars in advertising revenue over the life of its run. Yet, somehow, Disney calculates that it lost $73 million on the show.

For those of you who never saw the show, it consisted of two chairs, two computer displays, two people on stage, a bunch of spotlights on swivels and some foreboding music. I'd be amazed if it cost Disney $73 million to produce the show across its entire run.

This is an extreme but by no means unusual example of the problems of doing business with the "big media" companies. It's almost impossible to make money unless you've arranged fixed, unconditional payments.

Open Source Content: The next wave in content creation

Over the last few weeks, I've read Dan Ariely's "The Upside of Irrationality," Daniel K. Pink's "Drive", and I'm finishing Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus." The three books cover much of the same ground and refer to much of the same research in behavioral economics, and I'll be referring to them quite a bit in future posts, as their concepts impact a variety of fields.

One by one, old media industries have been reshaped by technological changes: When music could be copied perfectly and shared at no cost with anyone around the world, the ability of record companies to control the pricing and distribution of their products collapsed. The music industry is still trying to find viable new business models.

The business of printing words on paper and distributing them daily or weekly to consumers is also collapsing. Note that I didn't say that the newspaper or magazine businesses are collapsing, only the business of distributing ephemeral content on paper. There's tremendous demand for news, analysis and opinion, but it's being fulfilled by websites, blogs and Twitter, all of which can respond instantly to events. Newspapers and magazines will survive if they can develop business models that will enable them to get out of the "words on paper" business and make money online.

The movie and television businesses see the digital steamroller coming and want to defend against it with their own technology: 3D. The cost of producing videos, and now movies, has probably dropped by two orders of magnitude in a decade. 3D, on the other hand, is still (comparatively) expensive and difficult to produce, so only "professionals" need apply. Also, the only commercially viable outlets for 3D are movie theaters; only a relative handful of 3D HDTVs have shipped, and very little programming is available for in-home viewing.

However, 3D won't stop the penetration of online digital media into the home, and it won't prevent the marginalization of "big media." People have made their own independent films for years, but they were limited by two constraints:

1. Filmmaking was expensive, especially if you wanted to make a film that looked good enough to come from a major studio.
2. Distribution was controlled by a handful of distributors owned by the major studios. If you couldn't get one of them to distribute your film, you'd never reach a big audience.

Today, filmmaking isn't free, but it's much less expensive than it used to be. DSLRs and their lenses have dramatically decreased the cost and size of cameras. Desktop editing, special effects, color correction and audio mixing systems can handle all the post-production work. Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and countless other vendors can distribute the production to viewers around the world.

One component can't be eliminated, however, and that's people. The best equipment and software can't produce a movie or television show by itself. That requires talented people. People like (and expect) to get paid, so no matter how much you can reduce the other costs and bypass the big media gatekeepers, you still have human costs. Or do you?

The computer software business has been turned on its head by the open source movement. With open source software, a group of developers comes together to write software, and the resulting software is made available to be used (under specified rules) at no cost. The developers aren't paid, but they get satisfaction from solving a problem for users, recognition from the developer community for their efforts, and experience that they can use to increase their income from their "day job."

Blog writers like myself do this all the time, but it's less common in audio, video and motion pictures. Call it "open source content". The key is that a like-minded group of people come together to produce a musical recording, podcast, video or movie. They don't get paid for it, and their creation will be distributed (under specified rules, such as a Creative Commons license) at no cost.

Open source content can be distributed for revenue, of course. For example, Sony Pictures could agree to distribute a particularly compelling movie made using the open source method. For that reason, before work even begins, the team needs to agree on how any revenues earned from the content will be distributed: Will the funds be distributed equally to every team member? Will the team put a percentage of the funds into a reserve for future productions? Will they contribute all or a portion of the funds to a cause or charity? I can easily see pre-made disbursement agreements along the lines of the Apache License or GNU GPL that become widely accepted, and that everyone on the team can agree to before work begins.

One important distinction here is that these open source content projects aren't intended to replace "day jobs." They provide participants with satisfaction, challenges, experience and recognition, but (in most cases) no financial compensation. If and when the project makes some money, it comes after the project is complete and is a nice bonus for the participants.

People want to make their own videos and movies, but the "old media" environment shuts them out. The DIY (do it yourself) content movement is alive and well--just look at YouTube, which gets 24 hours of video posted every minute of the day, if you have any doubts. By formally applying the concepts of open source software to content, the rules and expectations for participants can be standardized. The big software companies have been unable to stop the open source movement; the big media companies are unlikely to have any more success with open source content.

"Do-or-Die" time for Sony's eBook business

According to Engadget, Sony has dropped the prices of all of the eBook readers that it sells in the U.S. The entry-level Pocket Edition dropped from $169 to $149, the mid-range Touch Edition went from $199 to $169, and the high-end Daily Edition with 3G went from $349 to $299. The problem is that none of the models are competitive with comparable models from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The Sony Pocket Edition has a smaller screen and lacks the WiFi of the comparably priced nook. The Daily Edition has essentially the same features of the Kindle 2 and nook 3G, but it costs $100 to $110 more. The Touch Edition is priced $20 less than the Kindle 3G but offers much less value for the money.

Sony has a very difficult decision to make, at least in the U.S. eBook market: Dramatically decrease costs and/or improve specifications to be competitive with the Kindle and nook, or get out of the business. Borders, which was one of Sony's primary sales channels, now has its own hardware reader, the Kobo, which is comparable to the Pocket Reader. It's in Borders' interest to promote the Kobo over Sony's products. Also, the deal that Sony had to make the Wall Street Journal available on the Daily Edition is non-exclusive, and readers can get a much better experience with the iPad.

Sony's eBook business has always been opportunistic; the eBook business unit is headquartered in San Diego, while most of Sony's businesses are headquartered in Tokyo. It's inconceivable that Sony's Vaio PC business unit isn't working on a tablet to compete with the iPad, and the eBook team may well find itself competing with its sister PC business unit.

I suspect that Sony will get out of the dedicated eBook reader business and shift its focus to Vaio-branded tablets and convertible PCs. The eBook group in San Diego may be maintained in order to write eBook reader software and to operate Sony's own eBookstore. However, the "sweet spot" for dedicated eBook readers is rapidly falling below $100, and it's not likely to be an attractive business for Sony.

Kin's dead, Sidekick's dead, and what does Microsoft have to show for them?

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it killed its Kin mobile phone line, just two months after it was launched. The Kin won't be rolled out to Europe, and production has been halted on the two models sold in the U.S. Verizon will continue to sell existing inventory until it runs out. Today, T-Mobile announced that it's discontinuing sales of the Sidekick LX and Sidekick 2008, both of which were designed by Microsoft's Danger subsidiary and were precursors to the Kin. T-Mobile is apparently reserving the Sidekick trademark to use for future models, but they won't be compatible with the older models and won't use Microsoft's technology.

Microsoft's decision to kill the Kin was a smart one--the phones were out of sync with the current market. The two Kin models looked like smartphones but weren't--users couldn't add applications. Their original prices were close to smartphones, but without the functionality. To make matters worse, Verizon made buyers sign up for two years of a $30/month data service, the same price that they would have paid for a smartphone. The result was that sales were far below expectations.

Microsoft had originally planned to base the Kin phones on the Danger operating system, then spent 18 months moving them to a Windows CE-based platform. During the 18 months that it took for Microsoft to move from Danger to Windows CE, the smartphone market exploded, thanks to the iPhone and Android. Customer expectations were completely reshaped, and what was acceptable in late 2008 was no longer acceptable in 2010.

Similarly, T-Mobile's decision to kill the Danger-based Sidekick phones makes sense. It was clear that Microsoft was discontinuing any further effort to develop the Danger platform, and the current Sidekicks were getting very old, so it was time for them to abandon Danger and move to another platform.

The question is: Why did Microsoft take the Kin phones to market at all? The company had already announced its Windows Phone 7 platform, and when the Kin phones were launched, Microsoft made it clear that they couldn't be upgraded to Windows Phone 7. I'm sure that Microsoft had to make major financial commitments to Sharp, the manufacturer of the phones, both in NRE costs and in committing to volumes of product for inventory. Microsoft undoubtedly knew what Verizon's service pricing plan was, and should have known how unattractive it would be. It knew the market trends favoring smartphones. As good a decision as killing Kin was, it would have been a far better decision not to launch it in the first place.

And what about Danger? Microsoft spent $500 million purchasing the company in 2008, and now has abandoned both its software and hardware platforms. Microsoft says that some of the social networking concepts from the Kin will be implemented in Windows Phone 7, but it seems like very little return on a big investment.

Microsoft is gearing up for its launch of Windows Phone 7 this Fall, but its mobile operation appears to be in disarray. With Apple and Google piling success on top of success and RIM holding its own, there's virtually no room for Microsoft to make a mistake. They have to do everything right with Windows Phone 7 that they did wrong with Kin to have any chance of success.

Monogram BCC: Impressive new video production system

I missed this one at NAB, but a company called Monogram Multimedia has developed a very impressive live video production system called BCC that competes with NewTek's TriCaster TCXD300, the recently-released HD version of the TriCaster. There are a couple of things that make the BCC unique: First, it fits all of its components, including a touch-screen display, into a single Pelican case weighing 35 to 53 lb., depending on configuration. Second, it doesn't require any external monitors, keyboards, T-bars or switches in order to work. The touch-screen display doubles as a control surface and multi-source monitor. I'm always a little bit suspicious of packing too much into a single device, since a failure in a single component can render the entire system inoperable. However, it makes sense in a portable production system where it's essential to get a lot of power into a small package.

The BCC can be configured with up to eight HD-SDI inputs, as well as a 3D model with four dual HD-SDI channels. It also has a built in encoder and audio mixer. As you might expect, the BCC doesn't come cheap--prices range from $14,995 for a four-channel SD version to $34,995 for the four-channel 3DHD version. The four-channel HD version that's most comparable to the TCXD300 lists for $19,995 and the eight-channel version for $23,995.

According to the ProVideo Coalition's Allen Tepper, the touch-screen interface takes some time to adapt to vs. the conventional T-bar interface, but once you do, it's a very powerful interface. (In my opinion, any innovation in switcher user interfaces is a good thing.) Portable, all-in-one video production systems are taking off, and the BCC is impressive.

Hulu Plus begins testing, and it's an OMG experience

You may remember when the company that became Hulu was first announced by NBC Universal and News Corporation. Critics derided the company and said that two non-tech media firms could never build a compelling online video service. Google called it "ClownCo." But when Hulu actually began beta testing, virtually all of the critics changed their tune overnight. It was head and shoulders above any online video service available at the time.

Rumors have been flying for months that Hulu would introduce a paid subscription service, and yesterday, they did just that, announcing Hulu Plus. The new service will be priced at $9.99 per month, and it provides full access to all the current year's episodes of shows from ABC, Fox and NBC, as well as complete libraries of episodes of some series. One of the biggest complaints that users have had about Hulu has been spotty availability of episodes--some series would only have three or four episodes from the current season available, others would only have a single episode available for a limited time, and so on. By and large, Hulu Plus appears to eliminate these problems.

I've had a chance to try out the free preview of Hulu Plus on both an iPad and iPhone 4 (it's available from the iTunes App Store,) and like the original Hulu, it's an OMG experience. I tested it on a WiFi network, so I can't speak to its quality when viewed using AT&T's 3G network, but the video quality is superb and the user interface is well-designed.

Some reviewers are already calling it a cable or TV Everywhere killer, but Jason Killar, Hulu's CEO, is trying to nip those ideas in the bud. TV Everywhere has a big advantage in that it carries content not only from the broadcast networks but from the major cable networks as well. Hulu may well extend its array of content providers, but the company has to be careful not to over-expand and dilute the revenue shares that it has promised to its investors and primary content providers. Similarly, Hulu Plus is strictly an on-demand service; if you want to watch a live sports event, or see a series episode on the day and date that it's originally broadcast, you'll need a cable, satellite or IPTV service provider.

In any event, I wasn't particularly excited about Hulu Plus until I had a chance to try it out. I'm very likely to be parting with $9.99/month once the service becomes available.

Rolling Stone and the true nature of the U.S. Press

Every once in a while, something happens that gives "ordinary people" insight into the thinking and decision-making of the powerful. That happened last week, when Rolling Stone magazine published a profile of General Stanley McChrystal and his senior staff in Afghanistan and France. The article, written by Michael Hastings, was a first-rate piece of journalism that showed that McChrystal and his staff didn't have much respect for the President or any member of his foreign relations team except for Hillary Clinton. It also delved into McChrystal's implementation of strategy and the resentment that many enlisted soldiers felt against him. In short, it was a devastating but well-reported article that served (at least in part) to bring McChrystal's career in the military to an end.

As illuminating as Hastings's article was, the reaction of the press was at least as illuminating. In short, it could be summarized as "How dare they?" How dare Rolling Stone scoop The New York Times, Washington Post, Time and all the other bastions of American media? There were two lines of thought. The first was that Rolling Stone isn't a "legitimate" news source, so they had no "right" to own the story. When the story first started to leak out, Time Magazine and Politico got advance copies of the article in PDF form. Without Rolling Stone's knowledge or approval, they posted the entire article on their websites before Rolling Stone posted it.

Time and Politico would have been within Fair Use limits if they had quoted from the article, but they instead reprinted the entire article. Both publications took the article down when Rolling Stone sent them complaints, but one wonders if they would have been as callous about copyrights and ownership had the source of the article been The New York Times or Washington Post. Thus, the first line of thought was "You're not a legitimate news source, so you're not entitled to the same treatment as legitimate news sources."

The second line of thought came from CBS's chief foreign correspondent, Lara Logan. On Sunday, June 27th, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post interviewed Michael Hastings and Logan on his CNN program, "Reliable Sources". CNN has put a complete transcript of the interviews online. First, Kurtz interviewed Hastings, and then he turned to Logan for her reaction.

Let's look at some of the things that Logan said to Kurtz, and then deconstuct them:

KURTZ: If you had been traveling with General McChrystal and heard these comments about Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jim Jones, Richard Holbrooke, would you have reported them?

LARA LOGAN, CBS CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: Well, it really depends on the circumstances. It's hard to know -- Michael Hastings, if you believe him, says that there were no ground rules laid out. And, I mean, that just doesn't really make a lot of sense to me, because if you look at the people around General McChrystal, if you look at his history, he was the Joint Special Operations commander. He has a history of not interacting with the media at all.

And his chief of intelligence, Mike Flynn, is the same. I mean, I know these people. They never let their guard down like that.

To me, something doesn't add up here. I just -- I don't believe it.

KURTZ: When you are out with the troops and you're living together and sleeping together, is there an unspoken agreement --

LOGAN: Absolutely.

KURTZ: -- that you're not going to embarrass them by reporting insults and banter?

LOGAN: Yes.

KURTZ: Tell me about that.

LOGAN: Yes, absolutely. There is an element of trust. 

Logan suggests that Hastings somehow lied to or misled General McChrystal and his staff to talk off the record and then printed their comments, but other than a vague feeling, she provides no evidence whatsoever that he did that. Then, she goes further and implies that it's a reporter's obligation to protect their subject's reputation, as if Hastings should have warned everyone to be extra careful when they spoke because he's a reporter. The last time I checked, General McChrystal and his staff are all adults and should know that when you say something around a reporter, it's likely to end up in print. That's what reporters do, or are supposed to do. Report the truth.

KURTZ: He (Hastings) says that all of the things that have been written about Stanley McChrystal have been these glowing profiles. He's suggesting that he did a job that the regular beat journalists have not done.

LOGAN: I think that's insulting and arrogant, myself. I really do, because there are very good beat reporters who have been covering these wars for years, year after year.

Michael Hastings appeared in Baghdad fairly late on the scene, and he was there for a significant period of time. He has his credentials, but he's not the only one.

There are a lot of very good reporters out there. And to be fair to the military, if they believe that a piece is balanced, they will let you back. They may not have loved it. They didn't love the piece I did about hand grenades being thrown in Iraq that were killing troops. They didn't love that piece, it made a lot of people very angry. They didn't block me from coming back.

The operative phrase here is "...if they (the military) believe that a piece is balanced, they will let you back." In Logan's view, a reporter has an obligation to report stories that the military will judge to be "balanced," so that they can continue to get access.

KURTZ: "The Washington Post" quoted an unnamed senior military official as saying that Michael Hastings broke the off-the-record ground rules. But the person who said this was on background and wouldn't allow his name to be used.

Is that fair?

LOGAN: Well, it's Kryptonite right now. I mean, do you blame him?

The commanding general in Afghanistan just lost his job. Who else is going to lose his job?

Believe me, all the senior leadership in Afghanistan are waiting for the ax to fall. I've been speaking to some of them. They don't know who is going to stay and who is going to go.

I mean, the question is, really, is what General McChrystal and his aides are doing so egregious, that they deserved to end a career like McChrystal's? I mean, Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has. 

I'd argue that, in fact, Hastings served his country extremely well, because he reported the truth. Logan has warped the journalist's role from reporting actual events to becoming a censor and arbiter of what the public has a right to know.

Lara Logan has fallen into exactly the trap that the Pentagon hoped to create when it began embedding press with military units and controlling access. She's more loyal to the people who are giving her access to the field of battle than to the audience that's depending on her to learn the truth. Who knows what stories she's suppressed or ignored over the years in order to maintain her standing with the military?

Even if Logan were to eventually apologize for or "clarify" her comments, she can't undo the view into her thinking that she's given to the American public. She will never again be seen as an effective reporter. She's damaged the reputations of CBS News and her colleagues. The question now is whether CBS will keep Logan on, and in what capacity. Those decisions rest with Sean McManus and Les Moonves. In Logan, CBS News has its very own Judith Miller. What they do with her will in large part determine the future credibility of the network's news operation.

Freehold InJersey experiments with a coffeehouse newsroom

From PoynterOnline's Jim Romenesko comes a story about Freehold InJersey, a blog run by the Asbury Park Press and Gannett, launching a public newsroom in a coffee house in Freehold, NJ. According to the press release announcing the newsroom, "At a computer workstation surrounded by diners and patrons, the staff of Freehold InJersey will conduct interviews, work on stories, and produce multimedia content for this groundbreaking website. Passers-by can stop to ask the latest news, share a tip, or learn how to post their own stories to the open-source news site. 
 Patrons can step into the newsroom and become reporters of their own community, using the provided desktop computer to post their own scoops."

It's a great idea for increasing community engagement and participation, but why stop with text? Put a camcorder or two, a reporter and a live streaming system into a coffee shop, and you've got an instant studio for interviews. It's been done before, from KRON in San Francisco doing morning interviews in coffee shops to Fox Business doing interviews in Wall Street bars at the end of the business day. The cost would be much lower than building out a studio and much faster to set up. News networks and local television stations spend millions of dollars building on-street studios; the "coffee shop studio" would get the same level of community exposure and engagement.

Speed is an important benefit, not just cost. Consider the following scenario: The local school district announces that it's going to close a neighborhood school. The typical approach for television stations is to send a reporter out to local rallies or to get "man on the street" interviews. With a coffee house studio, they could invite members of the community and the school district to come in and talk about the issues. The likely result would be a more informed, more in-depth discussion of the issues. When the issue is resolved, they could move on to another coffee house in another neighborhood. It's a great idea for blogs, newspapers and television stations.

TechCrunch hits the mark on Bezos's interview with Fortune

TechCrunch's Robin Wauters has deconstructed an interview that Amazon's Jeff Bezos gave to Fortune Magazine. In the interview, Bezos claims that the iPad had no influence on the company's recent Kindle price drop, and he says that tablets like the iPad are "really a different product category. The Kindle is for readers."

The fact is that Amazon's own advertising belies Bezos's remarks. Last night, I saw a TV ad for the Kindle that was based on one, and only one, feature: The ability of the Kindle to be read in sunlight. That doesn't differentiate the Kindle from the nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, etc. The only device that Amazon's ad was targeted against was the iPad. Amazon isn't spending money on national television advertising to position itself against a product that it doesn't compete with.

My opinion is that Amazon shouldn't be in the hardware business. The industry is moving too fast, and the prices are dropping too quickly, for Amazon to maintain the margins that it's looking for. At the time that Amazon got into the hardware eBook reader market, good hardware was essential to get consumers to adopt eBooks. Now, however, there are good hardware solutions available from many companies, and the pace of technology is getting away from Amazon. The company's not going to be successful in making the Kindle an application delivery platform to compete with the iPad or with Android-based products. On the other hand, Amazon has good eBook reader software for every major platform, so it no longer needs its own hardware.

$9.99/Month Hulu Plus service being promoted on Samsung TVs

A Bloomberg reporter who purchased a Samsung Internet-enabled HDTV last Friday got a special bonus: A promotion for Hulu Plus, a new HD subscription service for $9.99/month that will have “More episodes, more seasons, more shows,” according to an on-screen offer. A trial offer of 21 free video clips couldn't be accessed, and the offer was erased when firmware in the HDTV was updated on June 26th. Hulu refused to comment. Whoops!

Could Project Canvas become the template for "TV Everywhere" outside the U.S.?

According to Wired UK, The BBC Trust has approved plans for "Project Canvas," an Internet-based on-demand video service co-sponsored by Britain's terrestrial broadcasters (the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five), plus communications companies Arqiva, TalkTalk and BT. The partners are targeting launch for April 2011. There are two fundamental differences between Project Canvas and TV Everywhere, the video initiative sponsored by cable operators in the U.S.: First, access to Project Canvas will be free and will not require a subscription to a cable or satellite system (although value-added content and services can be charged for,) and second, Project Canvas will be open to the entire industry.

The specifications for Project Canvas must be published within 20 days, so there will be a short wait until a point-by-point comparison can be made between it and TV Everywhere. However, it looks like Project Canvas will be a very promising alternative to TV Everywhere outside the U.S, especially if it's truly open to any content provider who wants to participate.

Is Plastic Logic the next eReader vendor to "circle the drain"?

According to Engadget, Plastic Logic has sent an email to customers who pre-ordered its QUE proReader to expect additional delays. Plastic Logic contacted customers in April to tell them that the device wouldn't ship until June 24th. Now, they've sent out a new email announcing a further slip in the ship date (without disclosing a new ship date), and more disturbingly, they've canceled all pre-orders.

Plastic Logic may be completely redesigning its reader to be price-competitive in the new regime of under-$200 eBook readers, or it may be reconsidering whether to be in the eBook reader business at all. If the company expected to ship a new model in a reasonable amount of time, there would have been no reason to cancel all the pre-orders. This doesn't look good for Plastic Logic.

Adobe: Who's in charge here?

Sorry for making this "dump on Adobe" day, but the news that the company is porting its "zombie" audio editing application Audition, which was long ago given up for dead by most users, to Mac OSX has got me scratching my head. On Wednesday, Adobe announced much stronger revenues--up 34% from the year before, primarily from the launch of Creative Suite 5--but earnings were flat, leading investors to be concerned about future prospects for the company.

Microsoft probably has twice as many products as Adobe, but it has almost 20 times the revenues. Microsoft's profit margin is more than twice as high as Adobe's, 29.03% vs. 11.84%. (Statistics courtesy of finance.yahoo.com.) And yet, Microsoft and Steve Ballmer are coming under almost constant attack for poor management. It's true that Microsoft is milking Windows and Office, and that accounts for a good deal of its superior profit margins, but one has to look at Adobe's management as part of the problem.

There are over 90 products listed on Adobe's Product web page, and only six of them are suites (five of which are variations of Creative Suite 5.) The rest are individual software products, components, development tools, servers, and "toy apps" like Adobe Kuler. Adobe's Labs website lists 30 technologies under development, some of which are new versions or features for existing products, and some of which are entirely new products or experiments. That's a lot of products for a company with $3 billion in revenues.

Adobe could probably prune and consolidate its products, lowering the number of products offered by at least a third, while having little or no impact on revenues. The company would likely increase its profitability and dramatically improve management's ability to focus. It could start by creating two piles--one for the products in Creative Suite 5 and one for everything else, and do a bottom-up review of every product in the "everything else" pile. Then, it could look at the CS5 components themselves and determine which products can be consolidated and which add little or no value to CS5 and can be sold off or discontinued.

Right now, Adobe is like the cowboy who gets on his horse and rides off in all directions. Its inability to release a viable mobile version of Flash after years of trying, its bungling of Acrobat tools that cost the company some of its biggest eBook customers including Amazon, and now, the decision to port Audition, an all-but-dead audio editing product, to OSX, all demonstrate that there are serious problems with Adobe's management that one good quarter of CS5 sales aren't going to fix.

Adobe plans to release Audition for Mac. Why?

According to DV Magazine, Adobe plans to start beta testing a version of Audition for Mac OSX in Winter 2010. Audition is a multichannel audio editing application that has only been available for Microsoft Windows since Adobe acquired Syntrillium and Cool Edit Pro (the previous name of Audition) in 2003. The last major version of Audition, 3.0, was released in 2007.

I've used Cool Edit Pro and Audition since the late 1990s, primarily for radio production, and it's a very good package, but most Audition users have long since given up on Adobe and have moved to other software, such as Avid's Pro Tools. Audition was never part of Creative Suite (Soundbooth, sound editing software optimized for video post-production, was derived from Audition and is part of Creative Suite) and has been seen as an "orphan" product for years. At one time, Audition was priced at around $250 when the cheapest version of Pro Tools was close to $1,000 and required Digidesign hardware. Now, you can buy the M-Powered version of Pro Tools that works with any audio hardware for $250, while Audition 3 sells for $329 at Amazon.

So, why is Adobe bothering to port Audition to the Mac? It makes no sense. Perhaps they want to remain a thorn in Apple's side--Apple sells Logic Studio, a far more powerful audio editing application, for $499. Perhaps they've got some developers sitting around with time on their hands. But, the smartest thing they could do is kill Audition once and for all.