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.

First X-ray vision, now X-ray tape

According to R&D Magazine, researchers at UCLA have discovered that peeling Scotch Tape generates X-rays. Apparently, quite a lot of X-rays, if you're doing the peeling in a vacuum. The scientists built a device that peels Scotch tape from a roll in a vacuum chamber at the rate of 1.2 inches per second, which generates short bursts of X-rays (about a billionth of a second long each) from where the tape is being peeled. Electrons jump from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape that's been peeled away; when they hit the sticky side they slow down and generate X-rays. UCLA has filed for a patent on this technique, which could be used by paramedics to generate X-rays in the field.

Using your office tape dispenser is safe, according to these researchers, but I wouldn't stand too close if I were you.

Camera Category Confusion Continued

A few posts ago, I wrote about how digital SLRs are taking over from prosumer camcorders, camera phones are replacing point-and-shoot cameras, and under-$200 video cameras are crushing the competition. Now Casio brings us extreme slo-mo video capabilities that cost thousands of dollars just a few months ago, in a--get this--still camera, the EX-FH20. According to Engadget, the EX-FH20 is an awfully good digital still camera that just happens to do slow motion video up to 1000 frames per second, all for $600. It's just one more example of category confusion--still cameras that do video, video cameras that are cheaper than still cameras, and phones that are good replacements for still cameras. It's getting harder for consumers to decide what to buy, but the choices, and the price/performance, are getting better all the time.

Red flags in the distance for Apple?

Apple beat analysts' estimates for revenues and profits in the company's fourth quarter, but there are some red flags on the horizon. Sales of Macs fell below analysts' expectations, only by 100 to 150 thousand units, but enough to question whether the recent MacBook and MacBook Pro refreshes will be enough to get the company's momentum back. Of more concern is good news that could turn out to be bad news. Sales of 3G iPhones smashed analysts' expectations, with 6.89 million sold vs. 5 million forecast by analysts. The potential problem is that Apple records the sales when the phones are shipped to its service provider customers, not when those operators sell them to subscribers. The original iPhone was rolled out slowly to service providers worldwide, but the 3G iPhone went out to mobile phone operators in almost 50 countries at the same time. Operators could have "stuffed" their warehouses with iPhones in anticipation of heavy demand that may not have materialized.

The proof will be in the next quarter, where Apple is already projecting sales considerably lower than analysts' estimates. It may be that Apple's simply managing expectations, or it may be a sign of real problems ahead.

Oh Lord, we're in trouble

Fresh from Gizmodo, here's what we have to look forward to at digital conversion time next February. Multiply by a million.

Blu-Ray can't get a break

First it was the Blu-Ray/HD DVD war, then it was overpriced players and software that didn't support all of Blu-Ray's interactive feature. Now, the economy is tanking. Blu-Ray player Christmas sales probably won't hit even the conservative estimates from a few months back, and the Playstation 3, which has been the primary driver of Blu-Ray adoption, remains locked in third place. Last month, despite still having constrained supplies, the Nintendo Wii sold almost three times as many units as the Playstation 3 in the U.S.

More than ever, I believe that Blu-Ray will be a transitional technology, the last physical consumer medium before VOD and downloads take over. Blu-Ray won't knock out DVDs, even with dropping player and software prices. The party is just about over. If you want a Playstation 3 or need to replace your DVD player and can get a good Blu-Ray deal, then by all means buy one, but otherwise, save your money.

Update, October 20, 2008: According to Punchjump, over the weekend, Best Buy cut the price of its least-expensive store-brand Blu-Ray player to $199.99. Target's cheapest Blu-Ray player is $229.99. Neither of these players are Profile 2.0, which means that they don't have all the interactive and Internet features of more recent models, but I'm coming to believe that those features don't really matter. If you want an Internet connection, buy a Playstation 3. However, Blu-Ray player prices have further to drop, especially given the recession. It's not out of the question to see a Blu-Ray player priced at under $100 before the end of the Christmas season; that's the time to buy.

Nvidia accelerates Adobe CS4 applications

There's been a lot of talk about using the GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) on graphics cards to accelerate applications, not just display, and Nvidia has finally done it. According to InformationWeek, the new Quadro CX not only supports dual displays up to 2560 x 1600 resolution, it can dramatically accelerate Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects CS4 rendering. It can also cut H.264 video encoding time in Premiere Pro by half. Nvidia supplies plug-ins for the applications that execute the processor-intensive code on the GPU rather than the host CPU.

The Quadro CX lists for $1,999, so it's not something that casual users are likely to be interested in, but for serious CS4 users, the productivity gains could pay for the card in a fairly short amount of time. Given that AMD/ATI is now back in the thick of the graphics performance battle, Nvidia's rendering and encoding acceleration could tip the balance in its favor.

Sirius XM: Load gun, shoot self in foot

Word got out over the last few days that Sirius XM has begun layoffs in XM's Washington, D.C. facilities, covering both off-air and on-air staff. Sirius has long had better talk channels than XM, and XM has had the better music channels. The thinking, when the merger between Sirius and XM was first announced, was that Sirius' talk and XM's music channels would be combined, by and large, into the new service. That's not what appears to be happening. It now looks like the plan is to shut down XM's Washington facility and keep most of Sirius's program structure in place.

That's fine if you're already a Sirius subscriber, but not so great if you prefer XM's music. That in itself should cause a significant drop-off in subscribers once the carnage at XM is complete. Add in the dramatic fall-off in new car sales, combined with hesitancy on the part of informed buyers to install any new satellite radio receiver until models that can support the combined services are available, and you've set the stage for significant net subscriber losses.

Everyone knew that the merged companies had to eliminate duplication and decrease operating costs, but it's beginning to look like the merger of Sirius and XM is going to result in Sirius. There were a lot of reasons why people chose to subscribe to XM rather than Sirius; it was much more than which satellite receiver came with their new cars. Many of those subscribers are going to have to look elsewhere for audio entertainment.

Ballmer still has Yahoo! envy

At today's Gartner ITExpo in Orlando, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer said "I still think it [an acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft] would make sense economically for their shareholders and ours." He also stated that Microsoft wasn't pursuing a deal, and that he thought that Yahoo's shareholders probably still believed that the company was worth $33 a share. Nevertheless, Yahoo's share price spiked on the non-news, closing up 10.55% and another 3.7% in after-hours trading, to $13.47 as of when I'm writing this entry.

It's clear that Ballmer still wants Yahoo!, and could probably get it for $20 a share. The question is whether he'll actually do something, or as Bill Griffith put it on CNBC today, "keep pining for it like an old high school sweetheart." Steve, please put up or shut up, once and for all. Otherwise, people will keep believing that you've got a crush on Yahoo! that just won't give up.

Wanna buy TV Guide for $1?

Wanna buy TV Guide for $1? Not a copy of the magazine at the newsstand, the ENTIRE MAGAZINE? According to Multichannel News, that's what OpenGate Capital just did, and Macrovision, the company that owned the magazine, gave OpenGate a $9.5 million loan at 3% interest to take it off its hands. Macrovision got the magazine when it purchased Gemstar-TV Guide International earlier this year for around $2.8 billion, and it's no secret that they've been shopping the magazine to buyers ever since. Circulation has dropped from around 20 million in the 1970s to 3.2 million today, and the magazine is bleeding cash--it's expected to lose from $20 to $23 million this year, and lost at least than much for the last two years.

Even with the losses, I find it hard to believe that another publisher couldn't have integrated TV Guide with its operations and saved a lot of money. The problem could have been TV Guide's publishing model, where they do a unique edition for every television market, combined with national editorial content. Unfortunately, this is probably the beginning of the end of the magazine.

Apple: Good news, bad news and no news

Apple announced its updated MacBooks and MacBook Pros yesterday. Here's my take on the announcements:

• No news: With very few exceptions, everything that Apple announced yesterday had already been leaked in detail. There was a time when Apple could keep secrets. No more.
  
  
• Bad news: Even with the LED backlit displays, multitouch-enabled touchpads without mouse buttons and cases carved out of a single block of aluminum, there was little in yesterday's announcement to generate excitement. Despite switching to Nvidia chip sets and graphics controllers, the performance of the MacBooks and MacBook Pros still lags behind that of comparably priced notebooks from other manufacturers.
   
• Good news: Steve Jobs shared the stage with COO Tim Cook and head of design Jonathan Ive. As I wrote about earlier this month, one way for Apple to avoid manipulation of its stock price through rumors about Steve Jobs's health is to demonstrate that it has a strong management team. The company is starting to do that.

One has to be concerned about the direction that Apple's new product development is taking. There's a real sense of incremental improvement in the iPhone, iPods and now the MacBooks. The last earth-shaking announcement was the original iPhone, which feels like it occurred decades ago. I hope that we'll see something really new, not just improved, soon.

Identifying the survivors

With the recession in full force, and warnings from multiple venture capitalists to their investments to "batten down the hatches," it's probably time to start think about which Internet companies will survive and which won't. The dot-com collapse left us with a few world-class survivors: Amazon.com, eBay, Google and Yahoo! (I'm focusing on U.S. companies, but there obviously are others, such as Baidu in China.) In the worst case, who would emerge as leaders after a Web 2.0 collapse?

Right now, there are only two that I'd be willing to put good money on: Facebook and MySpace (MySpace is of course part of News Corporation, but I'm looking at them as an independent entity in this case.) Some of the specialty social media networks, such as LinkedIn, are likely to survive through acquisition. The online video space is already turning into a boulevard of broken dreams, as it did in the original bubble. Sites that are already affiliated with an "old media" company will probably make it through, because they have strong capital bases for support, but most standalone sites are dead meat. The costs of streaming bandwidth compared to available advertising revenues are simply too high. Some of the independent blog networks will also make it, because they've always made do with limited capital, and their costs are so low. In short, anything not named Google that's dependent on advertising revenues and isn't already profitable or at least cash-flow positive will be hanging on by its fingernails, if it hangs on at all.

There will also be the e-commerce segment leaders, such as Zappos, that will probably make it, but they're going to have to survive in a market with consumers who spend less and have less credit. There are lots and lots of infrastructure services out there--far too many for the market to support, and most of them will go away.

I'll stop at this point--any suggestions on sites that I missed?

I'm looking for work!

You may have noticed an increase in the frequency of my blog posts recently. That's because I'm looking for work. The jobs that I have many years of experience in are:

• Product Management
• Product Marketing
• Market Research/Industry Analysis
• Writing and Editing

Full-time, part-time, permanent or contract are all fine with me.  I'm located in Silicon Valley, so jobs there are preferred (especially if they're part-time and/or contract). I'd relocate for the right full-time permanent position.

If you've got a job, if you know someone who has a job, or if your last name is Job (or Jobs), let me know! Email me at lfeldman@feldmanfile.com. You can see my LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/lenfeldman, and download my full resume at http://tinyurl.com/5wa3pd.

Spam free, as free as the wind blows...

Those of you who visited my other blog "Feldman Off Topic" last week may have noticed a warning from Google: "Danger Will Robinson! Hormel canned meat products ahead! Proceed at your own risk!". Well, an actual human being read the blog and decided that it's spam-free, so it's back in all of its poorly-written glory.

WiMax: A little too late?

Sprint officially launched its WiMax high-speed wireless service on October 8th, and now the notebooks with built-in WiMax are streaming out from Acer and Toshiba. WiMax is significantly faster than 3G networks, but for now, it's only available in Baltimore, and Sprint plans to roll it out in seven more cities in the next six months. The problem is that Sprint is bleeding money, and even though Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks have committed to invest $3.2 billion in the business to be created by the merger of Sprint's XOHM WiMax business with Clearwire, those companies may not go through with their investments given the state of the U.S. economy.

WiMax, with real-world download speeds of 2 to 4Mb/second, is only an appetizer on the way to true 4G service, which will provide speeds upwards of 100Mb/second. Those 4G services will probably not start rolling out until 2012 at the earliest. However, if the current recession delays widespread deployment of WiMax to 2010 or later, WiMax may prove to be only a transitional technology, much as Sprint's earlier wireless broadband service couldn't survive once cable and telephone companies built out their networks.

Eyespot joins the deadpool

I received the following email this afternoon:

We deeply regret to inform you that Eyespot Corporation will no longer be able to continue serving you.

For our users at eyespot.com, we're no longer allowing you to upload new videos. You can retrieve your uploaded video and mixes by going to your mymedia gallery and clicking the download link below the video thumbnail. 

For our business customers in the eyespot video network, your site will continue operate unaffected for a limited period of time. We encourage you to migrate your video solution to one of our competing providers in the video mixing (e.g. http://corp.kaltura.com/) and video publishing space (e.g. http://www.fliqz.com/) immediately. We'll soon be providing you with the means of downloading your community videos from within your dashboard at http://eyespot.com/partnerDashboard].

We have spent three years providing over a hundred thousand of you with a unique video experience. We believed that by putting creative tools and rights-cleared media into the hands of influencers and connectors, Eyespot would enable social media and participation culture like no other company. 

After playing over two hundred million of your video creations, we have to stop. After assembling possibly the most potent team in digital media ever, we're now moving on.

Thank you all for being apart of our community over the past three years.

Jim Kaskade 
President & CEO

Eyespot.com followed the tried-and-true path of first targeting consumers, and when that didn't work, shifting focus to businesses. That didn't work either, so now they're going out of business, and I fear that many others will follow. It's overwhelmingly hard to monetize video on the Internet, and only a handful of sites have the traffic necessary to attract advertisers. In Eyespot's case, according to their email, they claimed just over 100,000 unique users over three years--not enough to make the business attractive to either advertisers or investors.

I hate to see any business fail, and I wish the management and employees of Eyespot well. This is a terrible time to be out of work. I'm afraid that many, many others are going to follow them into unemployment.

UPDATE, October 12, 2008: According to an email that I received last night, Eyespot's service will shut down for good at midnight on October 15th. According to the email, users must retrieve any content that they've uploaded to Eyespot's servers before then, or it will be lost.

Where have all the subscribers gone?

Cable operators in the U.S. have been experiencing subscriber losses for the past year or so--nothing terrible, but enough to raise eyebrows. Satellite providers haven't done much better: Dish is losing subscribers, and DirecTV is barely holding even. Verizon and AT&T entered the market about two years ago with FiOS and U-Verse respectively, but their gains don't completely explain the losses from other service providers. And, as I discussed in a previous post, AT&T is literally giving away money to get people to try U-Verse, so its rate of market growth must have tapered down to almost nothing. So, what's really happening?

I've got to admit that I don't know; all I can do is speculate. Television viewing in general is declining, as people find more and more things to do with their time. The increase of video content on the Internet can substitute for programming available on television. DVDs provide an evening of entertainment for as little as a dollar. Video services in the U.S. are relatively expensive relative to many other countries, including most of Europe and Asia. For cash-strapped families, premium packages are simply too expensive for the value they offer.

With all of the other options available, are the video services becoming luxury items rather than necessities? I think that they're becoming just that for many people. The switch to digital broadcasting might actually accelerate the change, if broadcasters aggressively program their subchannels and insure a good signal throughout their coverage areas. I expect to see cable, satellite and IPTV operators all lower their prices significantly, although it might require subscribers to call in order to find out about the better deals. In fact, it could start looking like the long distance telephone market several years ago, when subscribers played one company against the other in order to get the best rates.

Eric Schmidt: The Internet is a "cesspool"

Image by Eric Schmidt / Google
via CrunchBaseAccording to this article from Advertising Age, at a meeting with magazine executives yesterday at the Googleplex, "The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday." Schmidt's solution is to bring more magazines and other old media sources onto the Internet, where their trusted editors can make the decisions on what is right and wrong, and on what information Internet users are entitled to get.

Schmidt's words might have gone down well with the magazine publishers in the audience, but it runs counter to the Internet serving as a forum for the expression of information and ideas, and it trivializes the ability of Internet users to tell fact from fiction. (And, as anyone who followed the false Steve Jobs heart attack story last week knows, it was CNN that gave the story legs and helped it to do so much damage.)

It is, in fact, this "cesspool" that makes so much money for Google. It's the blogs, websites and email that Google places its AdSense text, banner and video ads on. It's the millions of videos uploaded to YouTube that Google sells advertising against. So what, exactly, is Eric Schmidt saying?

If he wants to put his money where his mouth is, here's what he should do:

• Drop all AdSense ads from Blogger (the posts there might be incorrect.)
• Screen all websites getting AdSense or DoubleClick ads on a regular basis for accuracy, and drop those whose content is deemed to be insufficient of Mr. Schmidt's standards.
• Screen all YouTube postings for accuracy, good taste, and whatever Mr. Schmidt seems to feel is wrong, and delete those found wanting. Better yet, why not save money and shut down Blogger and YouTube altogether?
• Stop putting ads in Gmail (the contents of the mail might be inaccurate or offensive.)

Schmidt can't do these things because his advertising revenue would drop by half overnight. Google makes most of its money by selling search ads against, hosting and delivering the contents of that cesspool.