Category: Streaming and Multi-Media

Mobile video might take off in Britain

BBC NEWS | Technology | Brits show appetite for mobile TV

As mentioned in the article, the service they are exploring is DVB-H (a standard for mobile digital video). This is somewhat analogous to putting a digital TV tuner in a handheld device and is significantly different than the on-demand streaming services that the US carriers are pushing.

What difference does it make? I am not sure I have a goodr response yet. I do believe that it means this is only good for live content though it can be interactive. I would love someone to point me to some interactive DVB-H content demos.

Fox not jumping on mobile video bandwagon

Free Press : For Fox, the TV Set is Just Fine
Garth Ancier, chairman of the WB, is quoted in the article in a good summation:
“You have to look at each of these things and how many people are participating, what they’re paying, what their pain tolerance for paying is, do they want it with commercials, without commercials, do they want to own it, do they want to lease it,” he said. “I think everything right now is basically in sort of a test stage.”

The end of broadcast as we know it…

The Doc Searls Weblog : Friday, January 6, 2006
Doc writes:
The meta-story behind Intel’s Viiv and Clickstream announcments yesterday is not just the death of TV as we know it, but the gang-stabbing of it by Intel, Apple and their new partners in the broadcasting and entertainment industries. Or, if you prefer, by the reconstituted entertainment industry, which will still be about production and distribution, but without the current channel-based TV system (which will come to an FCC-mandated end in 2009 — it was originally scheduled for 2006 — when every TV station will be required to move off its branded VHF channel and up to some unbranded UHF digital channel, by which time nearly everybody will stop watching over-the-air TV anyway, getting everything we used to call TV over cable, satellite or Internet).

Epeus’ epigone – Kevin Marks weblog
Kevin Marks Follows Up with:
In 1998, I went to work at Apple on QuickTime, and started work on live streaming. This was hard work, but interesting – making a personal TV Transmitter for anyone with a Mac, so they could use the internet for lots of people to watch them at once. Having built this technology, I started looking for uses for it, and was rather bemused to find there weren’t any.

The problem was storage again. It was always better to have a locally stored copy of the video than to try to get it over the net in real time. It just didn’t use the net efficiently, and the ‘buffering’ experience really sucked. In fact, what I realised was that live TV was a waste of time too. But now we had enough storage.

People spend lots of money on iPods and TiVo’s, whose whole purpose is to turn live streams into files so you can pause and skip them, moving the storage into their houses, and pockets. This personal storage is why Podcasting makes sense.

Downloading is always better than streaming, and Edited better than Live, except in one instance.

That difference is when you have 2-way interaction. When you can speak back to the person at the other end, either via iChat AV or Skype, or just by having a textual back channel to a conference.

That’s where Live is needed.

EXACTLY!

Sample Chapters from “Developing Scalable Series 40 Applications: A Guide for Java Developers”

The Basics of the MMAPI for Java Developers
Looks pretty good and thorough. Chapters relating to the J2ME MMAPI, including an introduction, audio playback, other media playback, capture and a summary.

Yahoo! Go – TV

Yahoo! Go – How It Works – TV
I had mentioned Yahoo and their TV initatives earlier so I figured I should give a pointer. While this exactly what I found the most interesting, it has a similar concept. (The Yahoo! Go TV Concepts were more interesting)

Yahoo is integrating TV with internet based video search and Flickr along with Music and Movies, complete with reviews (and sooner or later all of the other things you can find on Yahoo’s site).

How Apple lost it’s Web Video mojo, and how it could get it back

Epeus’ epigone – Kevin Marks weblog
Kevin Marks, a former Apple QuickTime engineer details what happened at Apple to allow QuickTime to become a second class media player/format and how they now have a chance (thanks to podcasting and video ipods) to try again.

Let’s hope the QuickTime team is listening.

Reinventing TV

Release 1.0 / Publication / Reinventing TV: Network TV Signs Off. Networked TV Logs On.
Scott Kirsner write in an older Release 1.0 about Networked TV. It is a good article, too bad it costs so much.

From the abstract:
Television, because of its high production and distribution costs and FCC regulation, has always been the most massive of all the mass media. It seeks the middle ground, and usually finds it. The ads that accompany today’s shows are made with a similar shotgun mentality: There’s no such thing as one-to-one marketing on the tube. Any niche-oriented programming that does exist tends to be available only to small audiences, on obscure satellite channels or community cable access stations.
That will change over the next decade, as a growing number of television sets, PCs and mobile devices are connected to what Jeremy Allaire, the founder of Brightcove, has dubbed “the Internet of video.” Plugging TV into IP rather than into a terrestrial cable system or a fleet of geosynchronous satellites, could redeem – or at least reinvigorate – the medium. The hermetically sealed world of television is about to be cracked open and rewired, transformed into an open publishing platform as a variety of new devices and services emerge to make independent video content easier – and perhaps even profitable – to produce and distribute to smaller subsets of the population.

The Future of Independent Media

GBN: The Future of Independent Media
I thought I linked to this a while ago but I couldn’t find it recently when recommending it to a student.

Andrew Blau writes a great essay contemplating Independent Media in the face of the quickly changing technological landscape. A very good read:

From the text:
The technologies that enable us to make and consume motion media are becoming better, cheaper, and more widely available—and with blistering speed. As a consequence, patterns of media production and consumption are changing just as rapidly. The Internet continues to create new opportunities to connect with audiences. Video games are becoming a platform for critique and education. A new generation of media makers and viewers is emerging, which only increases the likelihood of profound change. Images, ideas, news, and points of view are traveling along countless new routes to an ever-growing number of places where they can be seen and absorbed. It is no understatement to say that the way we make and experience motion media will be transformed as thoroughly in the next decade as the world of print was reshaped in the last.

Digital Living Room – Stalls

The New York Times: David Pogue’s Columns (Forum/Message Board)

Well, I can’t find the original article (not unusual for the NYTimes site) but the reader feedback on one of David Pogue’s columns regarding the digital living room is very interesting. A nice glimpse into what people are using and what they might be using in the future (along with what they are definitely not going to use).

Keep clicking Next after the jump. It goes on and on.