Kill the Cable

True HD Video coming to YouTube

I’m not entirely sure why YouTube chose to illustrate their move to 1080p HD with a series of increasingly zoomed in pictures of a dog’s nasal cavity, but the news is welcome in any case.

You can checkout their 1080p test video of Pennie the Jack Russell Terrier, though they do caution:

“For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience.”

This caution seems warranted as my MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM had significant difficulties in playing back the video. Surprisingly even tempered (this is YouTube) comments would seem to bear out that I’m not the only one.

So, in conclusion: we’re all going to need to buy new faster computers to watch higher def dog nostril videos.

Continue reading...

Boxee to someday, maybe, kinda have a hardware box

Boxee has announced that:

We have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.

We will show mockups of the box and share more details at our upcoming Boxee Beta Unveiling event in Brooklyn, NY on Dec 7th.

Details and to RSVP to the Brooklyn event on Eventbrite

Video of Boxee from CES, courtesy of BBTV

Continue reading...

Clicker Public Beta

Each individual video on demand service (Hulu, Netflix Watch Instantly, etc) has a queue or subscribe feature where you indicate what shows you want to watch in the future. It’s a bad situation: imagine if you had an entirely different interface and options for adding CBS shows vs Fox shows on your cable based DVR or Tivo.

Jumping into this turbulent situation is Clicker, who have now entered their public beta and are busily creating a new system of management and search on top of the other video offerings. It is good to see this new category of services get going.

Continue reading...

Top Web TV Series for October has over 19 million viewers

Mashable has a story up comparing the Top 10 Most Watch Web Series in October and the overall ratings astonished me. The number one show Happy Tree Friends has 19 million viewers.

In comparison a top rated show broadcast TV show like NCIS has around the same number of viewers in a week. Now these are obviously some apple and orange comparisons happening here (the methodology for collecting online views, “impressions” versus “views”, series versus episode), but it’s still astounding to me the heights to which online video has reached.

Continue reading...

Internet Radio – The Forgotten HTPC Benefit

Most digital cable now comes with an absolute stack of digital radio stations, which get used once a year at Christmas when the “Sounds of the Season” is preferable to one more freaking rendition of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer on the Christmas Tape my parents have been using since I was a child, or so I’ve been told.

In any case the TheMissy has been running a (now) 4 Part Series on Internet Radio – all of which will work to varying degrees on particular version of HTPC device.

Part 1: Last.fm & Pandora

Part 2: Slacker

Part 3: Jango

Part 4: Grooveshark (& Rhapsody)

Continue reading...

YouTubeXL – YouTube for the TV

YouTube has increasingly been adding long-format videos to their service (hey, you can’t watch kitten videos all day) and it only makes sense that they should release an interface that works better on a TV than the current web interface with tiny buttons and hundreds of comments written by what I can only assume are brain damaged lizard people (Seriously? Have you read a YouTube comment lately?).

In any case, this great new interface is called YouTubeXL and it promises all the  awesomeness of YouTube but optimized for a 10 foot interface style.

[via AskTheAdmin.com]

Continue reading...

DVR is TV’s New BFF

From the EFF Blog

A mystified NBC President Of Research called the situation “completely counterintuitive.” But the reason behind the revenue isn’t counterintuitive at all — it’s obvious: When consumers are granted the ability to watch television whenever and however they want, they watch more TV — not less. That’s a simple result which could only be “counterintuitive” to an industry that all too frequently treats its own best customers like criminals.

It’s a cycle that by now has become sadly familiar: When the industry meets a new technology, it panics and fights it tooth-and-nail. Eventually, the industry loses this fight, often squashing innovation or arbitrarily singling out a few citizens for punishment along the way. Finally, the same technology ends up benefiting the same short-sighted industry — but rather than learn their lesson, the same corporations are usually busy repeating the same cycle all over again with something else. It happened with the VCR, the audio cassette, and even the turntable.

Continue reading...

The $30 per Month Apple TV Channel

All Things D is reporting that Apple has been approaching TV companies about launching an online subscription service for TV priced at around $30 a month. Delivered via iTunes (and likely using the same technology that they use for renting movies). The iTunes piece is important as that implies more devices than just the AppleTV.

It’s a little hard to know what to make of this, historically Apple has shied away from pursuing a subscription based music service (ala Rhapsody). This is likely because they are making money hand over fist selling tracks for a buck a piece and Rhapsody is struggling to maintain market share and revenue.

I think there are clear parallels to the Movies and TV Business as well. When a “Season Pass” for Family Guy is $49.99, who is benefitting from a flat $30 a month plan? It seems unlikely that it’s Apple and maybe not even the television companies.

Continue reading...

Review: EpixHD – Not Quite There

I’ve been using the EpixHD service on a trial basis over the weekend and while promising, it’s not quite there yet. EpixHD is being sold as a hybrid premium cable channel and online service. It’s a bit like if HBO decided to offer HBO OnDemand directly over the Internet, but only to people who were already paying for HBO through their cable service. As of right now EpixHD is only available to Verizon FIOS customers.

Cable

As a premium cable channel, it’s both a premium cable channel in simultaneously pushed out in both SD and HD(1080i). Shows play on a preset schedule and you can’t randomly access any movie you want. With Verizon, if you have their HD DVR option you also get access to to EpixHD OnDemand which does let you choose from whatever movies they have available that month.

Given this structure (which is the same for all the other premium cable channels), it’s hard not to view the existence of the actual “channel” as anything but some some habitual relic that is still kicking around.

Online

Shortly after the EpixHD service was announced, it acquired the unofficial phrase of “The Hulu of Movies”, in deference to the early look and feel of the site and it’s corporate parentage (Studio 3 Partners owns EpixHD, which is a joint venture between Viacom, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Lionsgate.) in contrast to Hulu which is a joint venture of NBC Universal (GE), Fox Entertainment Group (News Corp) and ABC Inc. (The Walt Disney Company).

Given the early comparisons, it’s interesting that EpixHD didn’t do more to distinguish its online player from Hulu’s early on. The iconography of the controls and general look and feel is extremely similar to that of Hulu (though it still baffles me why anyone would want to “dim the lights” instead of play something full screen.

One notable difference is in the the HD/Bandwidth throttling controls. Epix eschews having an “HD” option which on Hulu’s player bumps up the resolution to 480p (though whether this is true “HD” is open for debate), instead users can play with the amount of downstream bandwidth used: toggling between “Seamless/Variable” and “Maximum/Locked”.

This is all well and good, and the picture on my 1920 x 1200 monitor looks fantastic. However, several times while playing back “Chinatown” the movie froze for no apparent reason. One time I also had a significant weirdness where I had paused the movie, and when I hit play the audio started playing again, but the image reset to the beginning of the movie and started over. Perhaps more troubling than a few playback quirks is the extremely limited sample library of movies.

While anyone (you don’t need an account) can browse through the movies that are listed on their site (in their super flashy Flash Interface) not all of the movies are actually available. A good follow up question would be: “How many different ways are there to say: ‘We don’t actually have this movie’”:

Who Would Want This

While the comparison to Hulu is interesting, the real competitor here is Netflix’s Watch Instantly program. EpixHD puts a great deal of emphasis on their new first run movies; which is hard to see as anything but a jab at NetFlix and their deep listing of movies. Even with EpixHD’s fluffing out of their library they are still behind by at least a factor of 10 if not a 100 times fewer titles than NetFlix offers for approximately the same price ($8.99 / Month). With their current weak number of titles, the competition and the fitful nature of the playback, it’s hard to see how this is a good deal for anyone at the moment.

Continue reading...

Too soon to call Epix an Epic Failure?

Epix, the supposed “Hulu of Movies”, never mind that Hulu has movies already, has started to get itself off the ground with “hundreds of movies”. If you go to the site and enter your email, you have made it into “this weekend’s most exclusive destination”. So, we’ll see how that works for them.

If you do get in this weekend, you’ll get:

• Front row seats to hundreds of big Hollywood movies, anytime, anywhere.

• Tons of studio exclusives, behind the scenes access and movie extras.

• Private screenings: watch movies with friends, from anywhere, while you chat in real time

It’s an interesting combination of DVD features (but no word on commentary tracks) and they seem to be taking a subtle dig at Netflix Watch Instantly with their incessant yammering about “big Hollywood movies” (roughly translated this means: “Screw you Long Tail! You’ll watch ‘The Proposal’ and like it!”).

Continue reading...