Disney chief talks up Apple's iTV media hub - Page 6

[QUOTE=mugwump
The rest is talent and audience choice, which will keep most of it in total obscurity. [/QUOTE]

And we're better off for it.

Video garbage in, video garbage out.

That's one thing that really interests me. Essentially, this is a way to create an infinite number of "channels." Doing for video media what the internet did for print.

I fully expect this aspect of it to be sidelined and underutilized, lest Apple offend the big studios.

[tangent] Wouldn't it be killer if the studios distributed their shows as free video podcasts? I'm sure a heck of a lot of shows would benefit from being able to be watched at the viewer's convenience. Increased viewership would mean increased revenues for ads, which would more than offset any bandwidth costs and lead to greater profits. One can envision a revenue model which attaches quick ads--like simple logos and catch phrases--before during (between acts) and after, as on NPR, so that people don't mind them. Sure some could go through all the trouble to edit and erase them, but if they're short (like 5 seconds), most people wouldn't bother. A company could even set up a distribution model where ads are placed on certain shows when just released, and replaced with others after a certain time. No more paying extraordinary sums of money to Madison Ave morons to create mind-numbing stupidities that everyone hates (commercials), no more paying actors, directors, etc... Again, more efficient.

But will the studios do this? Hell no. Why? Because they'd endanger online sales, DVD sales, and syndication revenue, even though these are inefficient revenue sources because of bureacratic overhead in syndication (nearly double the corporate bureaucracy for the priviledge of rerunning shows), disk manufacturing production and transportation costs, not to mention pollution from disk maufacturing and transportation. (Hell, they could even maintain the revenue from disk sales by releasing video podcasts in SD and selling the disks in HD.) [/tangent]

But even though studios won't jump on this business model, I'm hoping alternative media folks do. I'd love to see Democracy Now produce a genuine TV news program (rather than just a video recording of their radio show) in addition to what it already does brialliantly. Instant movies. Instant documentaries (a la "Loose Change" except with facts instead of breathless, wild-eyed inuendo). I'd love to see film schools jump on this, having their students produce for both traditional theater and for internet/home distribution.

Hmm...Do most video podcasters distribute in the old 320x240 res? Or have most upgraded with Apple to 640x480? (I guess I could check tonight, but does anyone know off the top of their head?)

The studios better play their cards right. There's very high prestige value for making content available on iTunes -- anyone notice which shows did surprisingly well at the Emmy Awards? Even that "High School Musical" which was the first available movie download was nominated. Not to mention "The Office" which had small TV ratings but topped the iTunes lists.

The biggest problem is that advertisers wouldn't be willing to pay as much for tiny 5 second ads as they are for full ads, with their full content. It's a cool idea, and sites like ABC are trying it, but with chunks of ads that are less than normal TV but usually devoted to one sponsor per show (and using a custom player that doesn't allow skipping commercials). You're getting free in exchange for ads along with more restrictive DRM that doesn't allow watching the show without them. ABC is also doing pretty heavy user surveys specifically about what users remember from ads. I'm sure the future implementations will be strongly effected by these surveys.

That and the original showing of the episode should be covered by the ad spots from TV.

Still...its good that they are exploring something as the age of the 30 sec ad spot being paramount is likely to be passing sooner rather than later. With it the "free" TV model...which hardly matters anymore. In the top markets subscription TV is in the 85-95% range.

http://www.tvb.org/selling/Competiti...lite_Cable.asp
http://www.tvb.org/rcentral/markettr...ion_by_DMA.asp

MSOs are doing somewhat worse than I expected and satellite better which surprises the heck out of me. I would have thought the triple play opportunitues of cable would cause a movement away from satellite.

http://www.ncta.com/ContentView.aspx?contentId=54

28.5M cable broadband subscribers. 6.6M cable telephone customers. Drop in the bucket for phone service but the RBOCs can't be too thrilled. 10% conversion rate even at current pricing and hassle.

Vinea

I'm thinking about putting a pay phone in my house too. And a vending machine, and a juke box. Although I don't a key to any of them.

http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyehome#

Elgato's EyeHome seems to have disappeared from the Apple Store (and other places?), and isn't linked to from Elgato's web site.

Looking at the product demonstration, it seems to be pretty much the exact same product, with a couple of new interfaces (HDMI, WiFi), and nicer packaging...

I wonder what happened to EyeHome?

Cheers,

Martin.

While Elgato's eyeTV products are tremendous, the general consensus is that the eyeHome was not a great product. Its UI was subpar. The feature set on the hardware was not good. While it had component video output and could even output 1080i, internally, the hardware would down-convert your pictures or video and then upconvert it again (useless).

Elgato said that they will never upgrade eyeHome to be Highdef capable. They could have made a great product but I think may be Apple refused to license them the Bonjour capablility for iTunes and iPhoto. Without those, all other hardware vendors are out of luck. This is precisely the reason why Roku and several other media box people have embraced windows media stuff because Microsoft has licensed the uPnP protocols for various inferior windows media. Unfortunately, since Apple wants to keep Bonjour protocols private, Apple will be the only media settop box manufacturers for mac users. That is unfortunate because it reinforces proprietary technology.

I use Squeezebox for my network music player and its quality is tremendous. Nothing Apple makes will be that good for sound quality. However, it will not interface directly with iTunes. It does not matter much for me since they have their own Slimserver (open source) that does run on OS X and also imports the iTunes library in the background. The only thing I cannot play are iTunes Store purchases. It plays Apple Lossless, AAC, FLAC, MP3, etc.

I'm fairly sure that Bonjour is the same as the opensource Zeroconf as by installing zeroconf on our linux systems we can full cross-compatibility - so I don't think this was limiting the eyeHome. I have one and the main problem I have is that it is very picky about codecs. With newer versions of mencoder and ffmpeg it has tons of artifacts so I keep older, compatible versions around.

Bonjour is open on MacOS Forge: http://bonjour.macosforge.org/.

Yep, EyeHome's UI is weak.


It uses an older Sigma Designs chip that really isn't intended to support HDTV.


What does Bonjour capability have to do with iTunes and iPhoto? And isn't Bonjour based on open standards? (edit: see previous responses)

Even with its flaws, $99 (refurb) for EyeHome can be a pretty good value if you're still using SDTV. Unfortunately mine died recently (a post-earthquake power outage victim, I suspect) and I'm missing it. I got outbid a couple times on eBay (last buyer paying more than a refurb, the fool) for a replacement but will likely end up waiting for "iTV".