It's Not the Tools, It's the Talent

If you're at all interested in video production, one of the most exciting developments in years has been the introduction of digital SLRs (DSLRs) with first-rate video capabilities, especially the Canon 5D MkII and 7D, and the Panasonic Lumix GH1 (which technically isn't an SLR, but fits into the category in every other way.) For the cost of a mid-range professional camcorder from a few years ago, you can buy any of these cameras, a nice support rig from Redrock Micro or Zacuto, and a case full of Zeiss Prime lenses. The 5D MkII and 7D were used to shoot the new opening title sequence for Saturday Night Live, so keeping the cameras' limitations in mind (primarily their rolling shutter/"Jello" image problems with motion), they're "ready for prime time."

The tools cost less than they ever have, and provide superb image quality, so it therefore means that more people than ever can produce professional videos and motion pictures. Perhaps, but you can't buy talent at B&H. It takes more than a nice camera and great lenses to shoot compelling video. You have to know how to frame a shot, how to light, and how to pull focus. You have to know how to break down a scene into a sequence of shots, and how to get those shots under changing conditions. You have to know how to work with talent and how to communicate what you're looking for.

The point is that the ever-decreasing cost of tools is democratizing video production, just like the Internet is democratizing video distribution and promotion, but it takes talent (and training) to know how to use the tools to their best advantage. Talent can't be bought and isn't getting any easier to acquire. So, as excited as I am about these new tools, I'm also afraid that we're going to get even more schlocky videos, albeit with really great bokeh.

Building a National Local News Service on the Cheap

Clay Shirky gave a talk at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard last week, where he performed a physical "biopsy" on a copy of his hometown newspaper, the Columbia (MO) Daily Tribune. Let's get out of the way the fact that this is one newspaper and an unscientific study, but the analysis that he did was very illuminating. He found out the following facts for the issue that he dissected:

• Less than a third of the paper was locally-created content; the majority came from the Associated Press and other syndicated sources.
• Less than half of the locally-created content (not including sports) was written by the paper's hard news reporters; the rest came from columnists, covering topics such as cooking, travel, etc.
• The paper has only six hard news reporters, out of a staff of 59. Every reporter filed at least one story that day; three of the six filed two stories.
• The paper also has 11 sports reporters, including one dedicated only to high school sports.

Shirky points out that there are also a variety of editors, but hardly enough to fill out the remaining 42 positions (and you don't need 42 editors for 17 reporters.) So, you've got six hard news reporters and 11 sports reporters, handily covering the events of a city of 100,000 people.

The core function of the newspaper for its readers is fulfilled by the 17 reporters and the editors assigned to them. If you want to provide a local, web-based news service, you'll need those 17 reporters and their editors. If you've got several of these local services, you can have a centralized team that adds content from syndicated services, lays out and populates the websites, and manages the IT infrastructure.

If you're someone like Comcast that already has a national local advertising sales team (Spotlight), you can handle local and national advertising sales for the news service through the salesforce you already have. Thus, you can build a local news service on the cheap using experienced, professional journalists, and with national reach.

Are TV Stations Worth More Dead Than Alive?

Tom Wheeler of Core Capital Partners has written an interesting article on how the U.S. broadband bandwidth crunch could be solved. He points out that at current market prices, Sinclair Broadcasting's 30 television stations are worth less than $100 million, or $3.3 million per station, and there are 100 bankrupt stations that, by definition, have no market value.Why not take some of those stations' bandwidth and apply it to either Hulu-like offerings or common carrier-style data services?

The idea is seriously worth considering, especially when mated to the "white space" data service proposals made by Microsoft, Google, HP, Philips and others. Microsoft in particular has had significant technical success experimenting with two-way WiFi-like data services and devices that can work within the "white spaces" between television channels, without interfering with the adjacent channels. However, there's a lot more bandwidth available within a channel than between channels. If a television channel is converted to a data service, the "white spaces" will do what they're supposed to do, which is protect other channels from interference.

The FCC is going to have a lot to say about this, of course. It issues (essentially free) licenses to broadcasters for television, not data. It won't allow the only television station serving a community to become a data service. The U.S. Congress could also get involved, because if free television bandwidth is repurposed into a paid data service, the Government could resell tha licenses and make money from them.

However, converting some television stations to data services would be very appealing. Broadcasters in markets with converted stations would see competition for advertising sales go down and revenues go up. Existing "white space" users such as public safety and wireless microphones wouldn't have as much competition for their frequencies and would have far fewer problems with interference. Even cable and IPTV operators, who would naturally oppose the entry of new competitors, would benefit, because their "must carry" obligations for the stations converted to data usage would end. They could then use those channels to add more cable networks, add more bandwidth to their own data services, or both.

A company like Microsoft or Google could pick up Sinclair for pocket change. They would then have the ability to offer high-speed wireless data services in 30 cities, if the FCC approves. This could turn virtually worthless television stations into very valuable properties indeed.

Criswell Predicts: Apple to Approve Google Voice on Friday

Apple has got to make this Google Voice thing go away, and quickly. As I stated in my previous post, there may be nothing that the U.S. Government can do to force Apple to approve the application, but they've already forced the company to make major changes to both how it runs the App Store and to its penchant for secrecy.

In Apple's response to the FCC, it make its case for why it probably should reject Google Voice (although Michael Arrington reported that Apple did formally reject it, contrary to its statement to the FCC.) It can't just turn around and approve it without making some explanation, but it can't admit that it's approving it due to government pressure, either...too many egos at stake.

So, I'm betting that Apple announces that it has approved Google Voice with a simple press release this coming Friday, after the U.S. stock markets close. Why Friday? The first reason is that late Friday is the best time to get minimal coverage for an announcement--much of the business press has already left for the weekend. However, the second, and far more important reason is that it's the day that Apple ships Snow Leopard. The computer press will be falling all over itself to get out the first reviews of the new operating system, and the Google Voice approval will likely fade into the noise.

On the other hand, if Google Voice isn't approved on Friday, don't look at me...it was Criswell's prediction.

Apple to the FCC: "You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!"

Well, okay, that's actually a line from "Plan 9 from Outer Space", but someone at Apple was thinking along those lines when they responded to the FCC's questions last Friday concerning Google Voice. (You can find Apple's entire response here.) After indulging in seven paragraphs of marketingspeak, Apple claims that it hasn't actually rejected Google Voice, which TechCrunch's Michael Arrington disputes; his sources inside Google assert that Apple did, in fact, reject the application. (We don't yet know Google's side of the story, because it redacted the section of its response to the FCC dealing with its discussions with Apple.) However, Apple states its case for why it would likely reject the application, a case that doesn't stand up to even the most cursory examination.

Apple claims that the Google Voice application replaces the functionality of Apple's carefully-crafted Visual Voicemail and text messaging features. In fact, it does no such thing. Google Voice sets up an additional phone number for the user. If the user chooses to give out their Google Voice number, and if they've configured Google Voice to forward calls to their iPhone, then and only then does Google Voice replace the iPhone's voicemail functionality for calls placed to their Google Voice number. If someone sends a SMS to the user's Google Voice number, the user would access the message through the iPhone Google Voice application instead of the iPhone's own SMS feature. But, if someone calls the user's iPhone directly, then the iPhone's voicemail system is used, and if they send a SMS directly to the iPhone, the iPhone's own capabilities are used. Google Voice doesn't usurp any functionality of the iPhone--it adds additional capabilities.

Apple also charges that the Google Voice application copies the user's entire contacts list to Google's own servers, which Michael Arrington again claims is untrue. Even if the charge is true, Apple itself enables the user's contact list to be copied to Google's servers via iTunes. Why is it okay when Apple does it but not when Google does the same thing?

Apple seemed to believe that the FCC wouldn't or couldn't figure out how Google Voice actually works. Making the assumption that you can baffle the U.S. Government with B.S. is dangerous. It reminds me of Jim Allchin's infamous testimony during Microsoft's antitrust trial, when he presented a bogus video purporting to demonstrate that Internet Explorer couldn't be removed from Windows without causing the operating system to slow down or malfunction. The Government shot holes in the video and Microsoft was forced to withdraw it. Microsoft subsequently admitted that it also falsified a second video that purported to show how easy it was to install Netscape Navigator on Windows.

Microsoft did a lot to destroy its own credibility in the course of its antitrust trials, and even though it managed to avoid serious damage through a "sweetheart" settlement with the Bush Administration, the company is still paying the price.

The FCC has a great deal of power over AT&T, but if Apple independently made the decision to ban Google Voice, as both it and AT&T claim, there's very little that the FCC can do. Apple's market share in mobile phone and smartphones is too small to claim that the company is a monopolist, so there's also very little that the U.S. Department of Justice can do. (DOJ could charge Apple with perjury in its response to the FCC; good luck trying to get that to stick.) The Federal Trade Commission might be able to take action, but I'm not sure what its grounds would be. So, Apple is probably not at risk for prosecution, but its reputation is every bit as much at risk as Microsoft's.

Apple's public behavior concerning the App Store has already changed substantially since the FCC issued its inquiry letter: Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior VP of Marketing, has personally written a developer and a blogger to explain the App Store approval process and state that improvements are underway. The response to the FCC made public a number of key details about the approval process, such as the average number of weekly filings and the number of reviewers. A formal appeal process for rejected applications also seems to be in the works.

With all that, however, Apple needs to approve Google Voice as an application, to try to put the immediate crisis behind it. In the long run, it should allow iPhone users to install applications from any developer, whether or not they've been approved by Apple, as Google's Android operating system does. Not only would this lessen government scrutiny, it would eliminate a huge reason for jailbreaking the iPhone.

Why I Bought an iPhone 3G S Instead of a Palm Pre

The day after the iPhone 3G S was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference, I ordered one from AT&T. The Palm Pre was released a few days earlier, and it has a number of features that I frankly prefer to the iPhone, including true multitasking, a very simple way of intelligently integrating (not just merging) contacts and managing email accounts. Most importantly, the Palm Pre has a hardware keyboard, while the iPhone's keyboard is on-screen.

The new iPhone 3G S does video, which the Palm Pre doesn't yet do, but what really clinched the deal for me was the 50,000 applications available for the iPhone, compared to the 20 or so that were available for the Pre at launch. I certainly didn't expect the Pre to have anywhere near the iPhone's application count at launch, but by severely limiting developer access to the Pre's WebOS SDK, Palm virtually guaranteed that its opening-day assortment of applications would be paltry.

The Palm Pre and WebOS are a very impressive platform, and I'm not going to speculate about how successful Palm will be long-term. However, Apple is well on its way to building the same kind of overwhelming network effects lead in the smartphone business that Microsoft has built in personal computers. No matter how good the Pre and subsequent models are, they probably won't be able to overcome Apple's lead in applications and installed base.

Palm needed to put a full-court press on developers from the day that the Pre was originally announced. Instead, it assumed that the functional superiority of the Pre/WebOS combination would overcome a lack of applications at launch. That was true for some customers, but as in the PC business, it looks like applications are driving purchase decisions.

There's no such thing as "best companies"

The current issue of Fortune Magazine has a list of the "world's most admired" companies. They're also keeping track of the "100 best companies." There's no such thing as a "good company," there are only good people. If a company is good, it's because the people who founded it were smart, they made good decisions and established good policies, and they hired good people. A "good company" can be run into the ground by a handful of bad executives. Decades of progress and achievement can be lost in a matter of a few years, or in extreme cases, a few months. Ask the investors in Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America. At the end of the day, a company is nothing more than the quality of its people. Nothing else really matters.

Hulu Part 2: At war with everybody

Paul Yanez, a talented developer who had previously written a clone of Joost as a Flash application, recently released a program called MyMediaPlayer to provide a desktop interface for Hulu. This app uses Hulu's published, public specifications for accessing and displaying videos. It uses the Hulu player, doesn't strip out any advertising, doesn't introduce any advertising of its own and is free. Nevertheless, Hulu has repeatedly come up with ways to block MyMediaPlayer, and it appears that after five rounds of reworking the application in order to get it working again, Mr. Yanez has given up.

In the same vein, Boxee was able to reestablish support for Hulu by connecting to that company's RSS feeds, the same feeds used by Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Nevertheless, in just a few hours, Hulu blocked Boxee's access to its RSS feeds. As I write this, Boxee claims that it has worked around Hulu's changes and can again access the RSS feeds. Perhaps the best thing that Boxee could do is to change its browser user agent to look like Internet Explorer, so that Hulu would have to effectively shut down the RSS feed to block Boxee.

I don't know why Hulu is doing this, but it's only making itself look idiotic. All of its blocks will eventually be worked around, and its content isn't so precious that it's only available in one place. As I've written before, its actions are encouraging, rather than discouraging, piracy. Every time I see one of its commercials, I see a company that doesn't get it trying to act cool. Perhaps the people who called the company "ClownCo" weren't wrong, just premature.

Sony's latest piece of s#!t

From the Onion News Network, here's news about Sony's latest product:

Hulu--get successful, shoot self in foot

It's a common story--start-up that initially isn't taken seriously by either its competitors or the industry in general, delivers a great product and turns the industry's perception around. In order to get distribution, the start-up cuts deals with some competitors, and makes it easy for others to redistribute its products. Once the start-up gets successful, however, those partners start to look more like competitors, and it starts pulling back on deals.

That's exactly what's happening with Hulu, the web video start-up that was derisively labeled "ClownCo" by executives at Google, only to become, in some ways at least, a more profitable and popular destination than Google's YouTube. Last week, however, Hulu started pulling the plug on distribution. The first was to take Hulu's content off of TV.com, a site that CBS purchased when it acquired CNET last year. The second was to take Hulu off of Boxee, an increasingly popular web video browser for Linux, OS X, AppleTV and Windows that turns PCs into set-top boxes. Hulu's distribution deal with TV.com was contractual, while there was no formal business arrangement between Hulu and Boxee.

In the TV.com case, Hulu merely stated that it had the contractual right to remove its videos, and was doing so. In Boxee's case, Hulu seemed to be more apologetic, stating that it withdrew its content at the request of its content partners. It's important to note that Hulu's largest owners, with equal control, are NBC Universal and News Corporation (Fox), and to my understanding, it would only take one partner to get Hulu to yank its content. I'm not going to speculate on which partner I think pulled the plug (NBC Universal), because they're both extremely well-run companies with top-notch management teams (and pigs can fly.)

What is happening is that Hulu's actions are getting people to reconsider The Pirate Bay and other sources for the content that's distributed by Hulu. These are unlicensed sources, and not a penny of revenue goes back to Hulu, its parent companies or other affiliated content providers. At precisely the time that Hulu is engaging in a promotional program involving commercials on NBC, Fox and both companies' cable outlets, it's taking actions that curtail Hulu's distribution and encourage piracy.

In Boxee's case. it's entirely possible that it was cable operators that forced Hulu's partners to take the action they did. To these operators, I say that taking Hulu off of Boxee and any other service will not in any way slow down the trend for consumers to drop their cable services. The only thing that will do that is an industry-wide switch to a reasonable a la carte pricing scheme, which will happen fairly close to the heat death of the universe.

In short, Hulu's actions are only going to hurt Hulu. They won't accomplish what either the content providers or the cable operators want--in fact, they'll accomplish the reverse. Joint ventures almost always suck massively--they're impossible to manage, because the participating partners almost always have divergent strategic goals and objectives. I chalk Hulu's behavior up to that.

The Kindle 2? Meh.

Last week, Amazon.com introduced the Kindle 2, the latest version of its eBook reader. I won't bore you with product details--you can get them by Googling "Kindle 2." Suffice it to say that the Kindle 2 is great for reading simple books with text, but not a lot more. Graphics? They're okay if they work with 16 shades of gray. Color? Forget about it. Animation? Double forget about it. Video? What is this strange thing called "video," Mr. Sarnoff?

If the Kindle 2 cost $199 or less, I could argue that it's a decent bargain for a dedicated eBook reader, but it's $359. For less than that, I can buy a netbook from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and others that can display eBooks, plus browse the Internet, get and send email, play videos and run applications such as Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, in a package under 3 pounds in weight. In other words, it can do the job of an eBook reader plus an entry-level notebook. So, why would I buy a Kindle 2?

If that doesn't convince you, consider the iPhone. You can buy it for $199, it has multiple eBook readers available for free or at a very low price, plus it allows to you make phone calls, get and send email, browse the Internet, and run thousands of other applications. It displays color, handles video and animation just fine, and fits in your pocket. So, why would I buy a Kindle 2?

Amazon and its defenders argue that the performance of the Kindle 2's display in bright sunlight and its battery life are both critical factors. They are, but they don't outweigh all of the other deficits of the Kindle 2 and similar eBook readers. If I'm not sitting on the beach, a backlit display will work better than the Kindle 2's reflective electrophoretic display. If I can charge the device at least once a day, the Kindle 2's multi-day battery life isn't necessary.

For these reasons, I think that the Kindle 2 will, like other hardware eBook readers, be bracketed between smartphones and netbooks--not functional enough to compete with either of them, and without sufficient unique features to justify carrying both a smartphone and Kindle 2, or both a Kindle 2 and a netbook.

The Search for Value Creates New Leaders

Earlier today, I was sitting in a local Dunkin' Donuts, drinking coffee and watching CNN on a Samsung television. It wasn't that long ago that Samsung was all but unknown in the U.S.; now they're one of the market leaders in flat-panel TVs, DVD players, cellphones and other products. Samsung got where they are by offering high-quality products that could rival Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Nokia, Motorola and others, at highly competitive prices.

Earlier this week, U.S. auto sales for January were reported, and only three companies reported improved year-to-year sales: Subaru, Kia and Hyundai. Hyundai grew more than 14%, not by offering ever-larger cash-back deals and financing discounts, but by simply agreeing to take back cars in the first year after purchase from buyers who lose their jobs.

Through a combination of good value and innovative marketing, these Korean companies are coming out ahead...as is Dunkin' Donuts, which is kicking Starbucks' butt with good coffee at a lower price. It seems that people are willing to trade off comfy chairs and cachet to save some money. And, Wal-Mart is just about the only retailer that's continuing to grow; it's taking even more market share away from competitors with its low-price strategy.

It's impossible to say whether these trends will hold once the economy recovers, but it seems unlikely that we'll go back to "business as usual". Consumers will continue to demand more value for their money, and the companies that can't, or won't, provide it won't be around much longer.

Taking stock

This is the end of what has been the worst year of my life. I was out of work for six months, and had to file for bankruptcy last October. I had to euthanize my older cat on Christmas Eve, less than two weeks after we got to Chicago for me to take my new job, and just a week after his 17th birthday. (We had been together since he was four months old.) The good news is that my other cat seems to be healthy, if still a little disoriented by the move from California. I've got a good job with a great company, and I'm working with a wonderful team of people. I'm living in a beautiful condo.

In many ways, this is the start of a new phase in my life. I've come full circle, from going to graduate school in Chicago from 1978 to 1980, to returning 28 years later. I've got a fairly young cat to raise in a new city, with new friends, neighbors and co-workers, and a new area to learn. I'm not sure how relevant this blog is to my new life, since what I'm doing is only tangentally related to what I used to do. Therefore, as we wrap up the holiday season, I'm rethinking what this blog should cover, and whether I should even continue it.

For now, I'm putting the blog on pause, at least until after the first of the year.

I've got a new job!

As some of you know, I've been looking for a new job for almost six months. Last week, I accepted an offer with a large, privately-held company outside Chicago, IL, USA. I'll be starting in mid-December, so I have to find a place to live, move and get settled in over the next two weeks. As a result, I'll be posting on this blog intermittently (if at all) for a while. Thank you for your patience!

Is there really a market for IPTV?

Late last week, Tilgin sold off its IPTV set-top box business to Amino in order to concentrate on the IP Residential Gateway business. The initial sale price was 30 million SEK, plus a potential bonus based on sales performance. Tilgin is just one of many second- and third-tier IPTV suppliers that have sold out to bigger competitors, and the list is only going to get longer as the worldwide recession drags on. The residential gateway business isn't exactly a bonanza, either; Pace is struggling to establish a business there, and the business argument for gateways isn't clear for a lot of operators.

The overarching question is whether or not there's really a market for IPTV services. IPTV is doing well in France, Spain and some other European markets, but in France in particular, consumers can get a complete triple-play bundle including IPTV for not much more than what U.S. customers pay for a single service. In Hong Kong, PCCW was the world leader in terms of subscriber count for a number of years, but now PCCW and China Netcom are merging, and the question is whether or not PCCW has finally saturated the market. In Japan, IPTV services have been all but stillborn, even with the country's largest telecommnuications companies (NTT, KDDI and Softbank) behind it.

In most of the first world, IPTV entered the market as the third or fourth choice for video services, after broadcast, cable and satellite. Where IPTV has been really successful, one or more of the following is true:

1) The IPTV services are offered at a dramatically lower price than competitive video services (that's certainly true in France.)
2) Local competitors let the IPTV services take hold with high prices, bad customer service, etc.
3) The IPTV provider offers non-video services that the local competitors couldn't match (in the U.S., Verizon's FiOS data service offered far faster speeds than cable operators, and Verizon used that advantage to sell FiOS TV into those same customers.)
4) The existing local video choices are rudimentary or nonexistent.

Where advanced cable services are available, it remains all but impossible to differentiate IPTV services from cable. The interactive features of IPTV are nice, but there's nothing that the cable industry can't match. Even satellite providers are getting into the interactivity game with Internet connections on their set-top boxes.

I do believe that there is, and will continue to be, a market for IPTV, but it's smaller than most of the analysts have been forecasting, and even smaller than I forecast when I was in that business. We'll continue to see tremendous pressure on second- and third-tier IPTV hardware and software suppliers to merge, discontinue their IPTV product lines or go out of business. We'll also see tremendous pressure on IPTV service providers to differentiate their offerings by price rather than functionality. Ultimately, IPTV will be just one of several video options for consumers.

TiVo tanks, Apple breaks third-party apps

Earlier this week, TV By the Numbers reported that TiVo lost 163,000 subscribers in October, and the company has lost subscribers almost every month this year. In its most recent quarter, TiVo only sold an average of less than 500 DVRs a day. The company would have lost money in the quarter had it not received a one-time payment of $105 million from Echostar for patent violations. It's pretty clear that TiVo's situation is getting dire, and the company is not going to survive in the standalone PVR business for much longer.

At about the same time, Blockbuster got into the set-top box business, as I've written about earlier. Also, Apple released a new version of software for its AppleTV STB, which broke third-party software running on those devices, including Boxee, media center software for Linux and OSX that supports Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, CNN and many other Internet media sites. Boxee was back up and running on the AppleTV a day later.

Is there really a market for third-party set-top boxes? By and large, the answer is "no," although the Roku Netflix player seems to be selling well. What I'd really like to see is a set-top box that's open and that supports multiple services. That rules out Apple and Vudu. You shouldn't have to pay a monthly subscriber fee to use the box, so that rules out TiVo, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and, at least for now, Roku. Blockbuster's new box is still a question mark--there's no monthly fee, and the box, built by 2Wire, runs Linux, but it's unclear if Blockbuster will allow Boxee and similar applications to run on it.

In my opinion, it would be a brilliant move if Blockbuster let Boxee, as well as others, run their software on its box without a long approval process or the fear that the third-party applications would be deliberately broken by Blockbuster. In one step, Blockbuster's offering would move from a me-too product to a market leader.

Experience has proven that consumers simply don't want multiple set-top boxes. Given the choice between a cable operator-provided PVR and a TiVo, they've chosen the cable operators' offerings in droves. This market is dead unless the players start seriously rethinking their strategies to adapt to consumer needs.

Blockbuster jumps into the set-top box business

According to CNET's Crave website, Blockbuster Video has struck a deal to resell 2Wire's new MediaPoint set-top box, to compete with the Roku Netflix Player and other Netflix-enabled devices, as well as Apple TV, Vudu, etc. The MediaPoint player will sell for $99, but comes with 25 free movies. Additional movies will be priced starting at $1.99, and no monthly subscription is required.

The MediaPoint comes with all the standard inputs and outputs: 802.11g or wired Ethernet interfaces, composite, component and HDMI video interfaces, and both analog stereo and Toslink digital optical audio interfaces. The MediaPoint user interface, as seen on the Crave website, borrows a good deal of its look from TiVo.

On paper at least, Blockbuster's offering could be very competitive with the Roku Netflix player, with a lower net cost and no subscription required. It's not known if Blockbuster is trying to get its service integrated with many different companies' video players, as Netflix has succeeded in doing. What IS clear, however is that Blockbuster is once again playing catch-up to Netflix. Keeping in mind what happened to Blockbuster's Total Access program, which made big progress against Netflix only to lose its momentum when the company chose to pare its financial losses, I wonder whether the company has the stomach to stick with its online service.

Silverlight: In at Netflix, out at Major League Baseball

Not long ago, I noted that Netflix has adopted Microsoft's Silverlight as its streaming media platform for Apple's Macintosh, but today, Major League Baseball announced that it has switched from Silverlight to Adobe Flash for its live and on-demand video streams, starting in 2009 and for at least the next two years. This comes after the National Football League chose Flash earlier this year to stream its games, including the interactive multi-camera player used by both NFL.com and NBC. Neither MLB nor the NFL pointed to technical deficiencies in Silverlight as the reason that they adopted Flash, and Major League Baseball's statement that it was adopting Flash "for the next two years" indicates that the reason for the switch may have been based on business, not technical, reasons, and could be revisited down the road.

Pure Digital jumps in with its own HD Flip Video camcorder

File this in the "You knew this was going to happen" department: According to Cnet, Pure Digital has just announced the Flip Mino HD camcorder, with a $229 list price. Pure Digital claims that it's the world's smallest HD camcorder at 3.3 ounces. It records at 720p (1280 x 720) resolution, 30fps. The company also claims that it has improved the camcorder's built-in FlipShare software. The built-in 4GB of flash memory allows one hour of recording. Other than those features, the camera appears to be physically and operationally identical to the existing Flip Mino.

Via Engadget, I learned that the Wall Street Journal has already gotten its hands on one for a test. Here's a video with some test footage, which, for a camcorder that's probably going to be street priced under $200, isn't bad at all. However, before you buy one, you might want to wait for Camcorderinfo.com to do its own testing; they found that the Kodak Zi6, a similar HD camcorder that beat the Flip Mino HD to market, had serious image quality problems in the same kind of lighting that most people use in their homes. For now, here's the Wall Street Journal's footage:

LCD prices were fixed...did you notice?

According to CNBC, the U.S. Justice Department just announced a $585 million dollar settlement of a price-fixing case against LG Electronics, Sharp and Chunghwa Picture Tubes. By far the biggest portion of the fine, $400 million, will be paid by LG. Price-fixing is illegal, of course, but the price of LCD displays has been on a downward spiral for years. I haven't heard anyone complain that LCDs are too expensive recently; if anything, the problem has been whether the prices would stay high enough to keep some of the manufacturers in business.

I can't imagine that resolving this collusion is going to make LCD prices drop any faster than they've already been going down, but it will put a half-billion dollars into the U.S. Treasury. More bailouts, perhaps?

Dish Network's TiVo Killer? (Well, maybe a TiVo wounder...)

From Cnet's Crave comes news of Dish Network's new DTVPal DVR, a $250 (after $50 instant rebate) standalone HD PVR with 30 hours of HD or 150 hours of SD storage. The DTVPal works with over-the-air, cable or satellite sources, has a 7-day program guide, and perhaps most importantly, requires no monthly or lifetime subscription fee. The key is the user interface, but Dish has made great progress with its satellite-based PVRs over the years. (The DTVPal DVR also acts as a digital-to-analog converter, but it doesn't qualify for the $40 Federal coupon, which is why Dish is offering a $50 instant rebate.)

The question is whether or not consumers will be willing to pay for a HD PVR if they can get similar functionality from their cable or satellite providers. Probably not, since they'll still have to pay for a set-top box, but the real target for this device is consumers who want to record over-the-air video. For those users, TiVo is the primary option, and an alternative with no subsciption fees will be very tempting.

Circuit City files for Chaper 11 Bankruptcy

According to Dealerscope, Circuit City filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy this morning. In a written statement, the company said that it plans to reorganize and remain in business. That may be the company's intent, but the odds of successfully emerging from Chapter 11 are increasingly slim for retailers. For example, Sharper Image initially filed for Chapter 11, but within a few weeks the company modified its filing to Chapter 7 and liquidated. Mervyns, a chain of department stores, filed for Chapter 11 last July, and then a few weeks ago, it filed for Chapter 7 liquidation and is now going out of business.

Circuit City may beat the odds, but I think it more likely that we'll see many more than the 155 stores already running "going out of business" sales close their doors before the end of the holiday season.

T-Mobile customer service goes kablooey?

Last year, I bought a Samsung mobile phone and prepaid service from T-Mobile exclusively for travel. I haven't left town for several months, but I have to take a trip next week, so I decided to add some money to my account. I did that part online, and it worked fine...but the phone didn't. It said "No Service", even though I was getting a strong signal. So, I called T-Mobile, and got transferred...and transferred...and transferred. I was transferred to seven different people, finally ending up with someone in India on a connection so bad that I could barely hear her.

Ultimately, I found out that the account had expired, the phone number had been given to someone else (possibly not even a T-Mobile customer), and the company keeps no record of which numbers have been given to which customers once an account expires. I ended up having to visit a local T-Mobile store, which sold me a new SIM card and assigned me a new phone number. This number is only good for three months, unless I use up the current balance and add more time, which will buy me three more months. The customer service experience in the store was great; the experience on the phone was horrible.

Do you need more than a netbook?

I finally got to play with a netbook today, an Acer Aspire One running Windows XP with 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive, and I was impressed. As a travel computer, it would do just about everything I, or most business or personal users, need. There wasn't a live WiFi connection in the store where I was trying the Acer out, so I couldn't test the computer's performance with streaming video, and there's no DVD drive, so I'd have to rip a DVD onto a USB flash drive if I wanted to watch a movie on an airplane. To me, those are relatively minor limitations.

The Aspire One that I was looking at was priced at $399. There were bigger notebooks with much larger screens and keyboards for a couple of hundred dollars more, but for my money, a computer like the Aspire One would be an ideal travel computer, far more cost-effective than either the Mac Book Air or Lenovo X300. The Aspire One and similar computers are so cheap that they're "sacrificial"; so long as you have a good backup solution, if they break, it's often cheaper to buy a new one than to get the existing one repaired.

All that said, I probably wouldn't want to edit a webpage or run Photoshop on a netbook, but that's not what they're designed for. For the kinds of things that you're likely to do when traveling, a netbook is fine.

CNN's "Holograms": A waste of perfectly good bandwidth

If you watched CNN's Election coverage Tuesday night, you may have seen CNN's "holograms", technology designed to make it look like a person being interviewed is in the same studio with the interviewer, except that it does no such thing. Both reporter Jessica Yellin and musician will.i.am were turned into "holograms". In fact, they were shot with multiple cameras simultaneously, which allowed them to be viewed from multiple angles, but it still used chroma key compositing technology, which caused fringing around the edges of the images. It looked nothing like a true hologram. More to the point, it added absolutely nothing to the interviews.

Wolf Blitzer could have been talking to faces on a monitor, and none of the content of the interviews would have been lost. In fact, I'd argue that the coolness/creepiness factor of the "holograms" interfered with the content; much of the audience was paying more attention to Blitzer talking to a blob than to what was actually being said.

For most of the night, CNN played it fairly straight, using technology in appropriate ways for the benefit of the audience. The "holograms," however, were nothing more than gimmicks.

New Canon 5D Mark II HD video sample

I've written about how Canon's new 5D Mark II DSLR has superb HD video capabilities, but this is the first time that I can actually show you video without having to link out to another site. While you're watching, keep an eye out for the camera's superb handling of depth of field, and the flexibility it gets from its interchangeable lenses. This particular video was shot by a single cameraperson (cinematographer?) in Japan over three days, and edited in France on a Mac Book Pro in two days. Akihabara News has more details. And now, the video:

Tokyo Reality (Canon 5D Mark II) Final
by lejapon

Circuit City to close 155 stores

Yesterday, Circuit City announced that it will close 155 stores in 28 states, and in the process get rid of 17 percent of its workforce. The company will also halt its plans to open new stores in 2009, and will attempt to renegotiate leases on existing stores. The stores that are scheduled for closing will be closed today, November 4th, to put up signs and reprice merchandise, will reopen on Wednesday, and will close permanently no later than December 31st. A complete list of stores to be closed is available here.

I would not be surprised to see Circuit City add stores to the list as the holiday season goes on, especially if the retail season is as bad as many observers fear it will be. 

Well, the one on the right was on the left, and the one in the middle was on the right, and the one on the left was in the middle, and the guy in the rear used to work for IBM

Lots of job changes yesterday:

• Tony Fadell left Apple. Fadell was the first member of the iPod engineering team and most recently ran the iPod product line.
• According to CNET, Fadell is to be replaced by Mark Papermaster from IBM, but IBM is enforcing a non-competition clause in its employment contract with Papermaster, and is suing Apple to keep it from getting trade secrets related to IBM's Power chips and server products. What Power chips and servers have to do with portable media players is anyone's guess.
• George Kliavkoff, who's been NBC Universal's Chief Digital Officer for the last two years and oversaw NBC's participation in Hulu, the company's online Olympics activities and the growth of NBC.com and the company's other digital properties, is leaving the company to go do something else.
  

Blu-Ray's BD+ security has been broken

According to Slashdot, BD+, one of the security schemes protecting Blu-Ray content, has been broken and can be removed to make Blu-Ray content freely copyable. Longtime observers of the HD DVD/Blu-Ray battle may recall that BD+ was an additional protection mechanism championed by 20th Century Fox in the event that the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the baseline security system for both HD DVD and Blu-Ray, was ever cracked. The whole issue probably added a year to the HD DVD/Blu-Ray battle. AACS was broken last year, and now, BD+ is gone.

The consumer electronics companies and movie studios anticipated that both AACS and BD+ would eventually be broken, but they expected it to occur in years, rather than months. Now, the industry has to decide if and when to push out firmware updates for the Blu-Ray players already installed (as well as to slipstream new firmware into production). They also have to agree to the changes that have to be made to AACS and BD+ in order to make them secure again, yet keep them compatible with existing discs that have already been shipped. And, they have to face the fact that they'll probably both be broken again within a year.

My belief is that the industry knew that both methods would be broken, but hoped that they'd stay viable for at least five years, long enough for an orderly transition to downloaded and streamed video. The fact that they've now both been broken, and that the means of both breaks are publicly known and understood, makes them little more than window dressing, no matter how many times the industry updates firmware.

Don't cry for me, innovation

Today's New York Times website has an article on the importance of maintaining investments in innovation, even with an economic downturn. My question is, what innovation? I track a variety of technology-related industries, and I've been hard-pressed to find anything recently that qualifies as a real innovation. One of Google's most exciting recent innovations is the ability to read and index text in images of pages, such as in PDF documents. I worked for Palantir, the company that invented most of that technology, 23 years ago. Or how about Google Chrome, which was all the rage a few weeks ago? It's largely based on open-source Webkit technology and a JavaScript compiler that Google acquired, rather than developed in-house. And, it's a browser. I was in the browser business near the beginning as well, at Netscape, 13 years ago.

The problem isn't encouraging innovation in an economic downturn, it's producing true innovation, period. Economic downturns often help, rather than hurt, innovation. Just as forest fires burn away the underbrush that stifles forest growth, so companies are forced to focus on products and services that really matter. The survivors in each product segment become clear, and the people who work for the losers either take their ideas to the winners or go start their own companies. A new wave of start-ups is born, and some of them do really interesting things, rather than merely cloning what someone else is doing with a minor twist.

I say let the big companies batten down the hatches, and let the start-ups without business models die off. The big guys will do what they've been doing for a long time, which is buying their best ideas from others. So long as there's venture capital and engineers & scientists driven to build the next big thing, innovation will take care of itself.

Goodbye, Moto?

IDC's numbers for the largest mobile phone global suppliers by volume for the third quarter of 2008 are out, and Motorola has slipped to fourth place, down almost 32% from the same quarter last year. Nokia remains #1, Samsung is #2, and Sony Ericsson, which was once all but given up for dead, has passed Motorola to be #3. LG Electronics is #5 and could pass Motorola soon, and Apple is #6 in shipments and #3 in revenues.

At the same time, Motorola announced that it lost $397 million on $7.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter, and has postponed its plans to spin off its mobile phone business until some time after 2009. They're undoubtedly facing the reality that they won't be able to get any reasonable price for their mobile phone division until the current recession lifts. The only question is whether or not they'll have a viable business to spin off by that time.

Brightcove positioning itself as a survivor?

Not too long ago, I wrote about which Web 2.0 startups would survive this recession, and one of the danger areas I pointed out was video services. The fallout is already happening, but one of the companies that's likely to survive is Brightcove. In the last few days, both The New York Times and AOL have shifted their video services to Brightcove. Like most video ventures, Brightcove started with a consumer focus, but it shut down its consumer services fairly quickly to focus on being a supplier of services to larger media companies, including Discovery Communications, 20th Century Fox, Showtime and The Wall Street Journal. It recently launched its third-generation platform. While YouTube dominates consumer video, Brightcove has become the arms dealer of choice for video infrastructure. There are other major players out there that are also doing fine, such as Comcast's thePlatform, but the outlook is bleak for consumer-oriented video sites that hope to switch to a business focus in order to ride out the recession.

Netflix "Watch Anytime" to be available on TiVo

According to the New York Times, Netflix's "Watch Anywhere" service will be available on TiVo's HD-capable PVRs starting in December. To use the service, consumers will have to have a TiVo HD ($299.99) and subscribe both to TiVo's service ($12.99/month, less per month with an annual or lifetime plan) and one of Netflix's unlimited subscription plans, which start at $8.99/month. The cost of the two services together, almost $22/month, is as much or more than basic cable in many parts of the country, so this isn't the solution for cost-sensitive consumers. However, it helps TiVo to improve its value proposition against cable set-top boxes that include PVRs.

It's a shame that TiVo couldn't offer Netflix on its Series 2 SD PVRs as well; there are millions more Series 2 boxes in the fields than HD models. It's unlikely that this announcement will spur sales of many TiVo HDs, but it will certainly add utility for people who already have a TiVo HD or are considering purchasing one for other reasons.

Wal-Mart to discount T-Mobile G1--is the target Apple?

Thomson Reuters reported today that Wal-Mart is going to discount the T-Mobile G1, the first commercially-available Android phone, for $148.88 on a two-year plan, a $30 discount from the $179 price in T-Mobile stores. The top-line news is simple: If you want a G1, go buy it at Wal-Mart, but the real target of this price cut may be Apple. Apple and Wal-Mart are direct competitors in music and video sales, and the iPhone has become Apple's revenue growth engine. If Wal-Mart can impact iPhone sales, it can put Apple in a world of hurt. Also, Apple's and Wal-Mart's stores address very different markets, so the G1 in Wal-Mart could become the iPhone for the rest of us. I'd certainly expect to see the Wal-Mart music store on the G1, and possibly a Wal-Mart shopping application.

Don't underestimate the impact of getting the world's biggest retailer behind Android. Yes, it could be completely opportunistic on Wal-Mart's part, but I think that there's some serious strategic thought behind this move.

Circuit City and Tweeter nearing the deadpool?

A cover article in this week's TWICE (This Week in Consumer Electronics) Magazine examines the impact of possible store closings or even bankruptcy by Circuit City and Tweeter. Together, the two companies represented around $11 billion of consumer electronics sales in the U.S. in 2007. Circuit City is by far the bigger of the two, and is by far the bigger issue. The TWICE article quotes a Wall Street Journal article that speculated that "Circuit City might be forced to close more than 20 percent of its stores and liquidate $350 million in inventory to keep the company afloat through Christmas...".

For consumers, the two companies' problems could be a holiday bonanza, with competitive retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart forced to match Circuit City's and Tweeter's prices in order to sell their own inventories. For competitors, however, a massive restructuring or bankruptcy of either company could turn what's already likely to be a bad Christmas season into a disastrous one. Consumer Electronics manufacturers and distributors are also suffering, since many retailers are cutting back on inventories and even dropping entire product lines. Seasonal employment will also suffer--Circuit City and Tweeter are unlikely to do much seasonal hiring if they're on the brink of bankruptcy.

So, if you're looking for a big-screen TV, iPod or PC, stand by to stock up on bargains that are likely to continue throughout the entire Christmas buying season. If you're in the Consumer Electronics business, stand by to stock up on Maalox.

The Christian Science Monitor to cease daily publication

In what's likely to be the first of a wave of fundamental restructurings in the newspaper industry, The Christian Science Monitor announced today that it will cease publication of its daily newspaper by April of next year. According to Online Media Daily, the newspaper will shift to a weekly print edition, along with a continuously updated version of its website, CSMonitor.com, and a daily electronic subscription product. There's been an ongoing debate within the Christian Science church over whether or not to keep the newspaper alive, and this strategy appears to be a compromise that will keep the Christian Science Monitor in business by shifting daily coverage to the web and dramatically decreasing costs.

Weekly newspapers are about the only bright spot in the newspaper industry, and moving from a daily to a weekly will help the Christian Science Monitor capitalize on this trend. I think that this is likely the model that many newspapers will follow--daily coverage on the web and a weekly print version. Whether that will save enough money to keep hundreds of newspapers from failing is anyone's guess, however, especially with advertisers pulling back across the board, including online.

It seems likely to me that in many markets, the job of providing daily local coverage will fall to the websites of television stations, not newspapers. The local newspapers in those markets will either have to survive as weekly lifestyle-oriented publications, or not survive at all. The strategy pursued by The Christian Science Monitor will work best for the national or quasi-national newspapers, such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Times or Washington Post.

In any case, we're witnessing the start of the final transition of print newspapers to electronic distribution, or to history.

Update: According to Advertising Age, only two of the top 25 U.S. newspapers gained circulation in statistics from the Audit Bureau of Circulation for a year-to-year six month period ending September 30th. Those two are USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, and the gains were 0.01% in both cases. Some of the other changes were The New York Times down 3.6%, the Los Angeles Times down 5.2%, The New York Post down 6.3%, the New York Daily News down 7.2%, the Chicago Tribune down 7.8% and the Houston Chronicle down 11.7%. Overall, daily circulation declined 4.64%, and Sunday circulation dropped 4.85%. In both cases, the overall rate of decline increased from the year-ago rate, which was 2.6% for dailies and 3.5% for Sunday. Not an encouraging trend.

A big win for Silverlight--from the last place you'd expect

Microsoft's Silverlight has played a poor runner-up to Adobe's Flash in terms of player installation and usage ever since it was introduced, even with Silverlight powering NBC's Olympics video last summer. Today, however, Silverlight got another big win, and it's not something that will last for only two weeks. According to Engadget, Netflix just announced that it will finally bring its "Watch Instantly" streaming video service to the Mac, using Silverlight. One reason that Netflix went for Silverlight over Flash is Microsoft's Digital Rights Management platform, called Play Ready. I suspect that another reason is that Microsoft doesn't charge for players or servers, while Adobe still charges quite a bit of money for servers. Having Microsoft software as the preferred streaming platform for Macs is a bit of a shocker, but it apparently makes both business and technical sense for Netflix.

Vibratory conveying experience required

As I've mentioned previously, I'm looking for a new job. Like many jobseekers, I've created profiles on just about every job search site (Monster, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, HotJobs, etc., etc.,) and those profiles generate daily lists of jobs that might fit what I'm looking for. I found an opening for a Product Marketing Manager that looked great, until I came to the following line: "Vibratory conveying experience required." Statistics show that one out of every three people have some vibratory conveying experience, but I'm not one of them. Then there were the next three lines: "This position is in Walla Walla, Washington. Key Technology will cover all relocation expenses and provide a handsome relocation allowance. Are you willing to relocate to Walla Walla, Washington?" I would be, if they didn't require vibratory conveying experience.

Is Sun finally setting?

According to the New York Times, Southeastern Asset Management, a private equity firm, now owns 21 percent of Sun Microsystems, up from 16.5 percent in August. Southeastern is putting pressure on Sun's management to, as they say, "maximize the value of the company." Sun's been losing revenues and market share for a long time, but it's still profitable. At the time of this writing, the amount of cash that Sun has on hand (nearly $3.5 billion) exceeds its market capitalization ($3.26 billion.) Some of that cash could be used for a stock buyback, which would raise the stock price, or for acquisitions that would have the potential of reigniting Sun's growth. It's clear that Sun, as currently constituted, is a cash cow whose best days are well behind it. Sun's management can't remain in a holding pattern; its investors won't let them.