Digital Diversion

I ran across the article below by Chris Pirillo on CNN.com and thought that it was so good that I would post it in its entirety.  Chris does a great job of demonstrating a point that I made in one of my previous posts about being careful not to lock yourself into a technology that may limit your flexibility somewhere down the road.  You can draw your own conclusions from the article, but let me offer up a few additional insights:

• For those that are not fans of subscription services and would prefer to purchase your music, there are DRM-free music downloads available.  My favorite is Amazon’s download service which, in addition to being DRM-free, offers songs at a lower price than iTunes ($.89/song) and provides songs at a higher bit rate (better audio quality). 
• While Chris likes subscription music services, he fails to point out that those services do include a DRM; those songs are yours to use only as long as you pay your monthly bill.
• To my second point, I do believe that there is a role for DRM in establishing new business models for music.  In addition to the subscription model, DRM enables free ad-supported offerings such as Spiralfrog. For that reason alone, DRM will not go away in it’s entirety.  
• With or without DRM, consumer choice is always a good thing. 

Enjoy the article … 

Back in my day (a day not long ago, as it turns out), you could go down to the local record shop and plunk down your paper-route money for little disks of plastic that were embedded with the latest sounds of your favorite musical performers.

Whether your tastes ran from Al Jarreau to “Weird Al” Yankovic, you could be assured that those purchased disks were yours — for keeps.

You could play ‘em over and over until they were scratched beyond repair, you could lend ‘em to friends, you could amplify ‘em at illicit Charleston dancing parties, you could sell ‘em to used record stores or you could store ‘em away in a safe deposit box in hopes they’d gain value as collector’s items.

You could even make precious mix tapes for your soda-sharing sweetheart with songs copied from ‘em, though this made recording industry executives more than a little nervous. And it wasn’t long before their weaselly whimpers of protest began. (continue reading…)

A few weeks ago Roku announced that their video player would now support streaming of HD content.  The announcement didn’t come as a surprise to me since that HDMI output was destined to be put to good use at some point in time.  My inner-geek really loves how Roku designs their products (including the Soundbridge) for seamless upgradability.  In terms of implementation, the user is met with a “what’s new” announcement and presented with an option to update their display type for HD, a 10 second process requiring a reboot.  So how does it look?  Obviously the movies themselves will only look better if they are encoded in HD and if you have sufficient internet bandwidth in order to deliver them in their full HD glory.  For their part, Netflix added an HD category within their Watch Instantly library although the quantity of HD titles is presently light.  In terms of video quality, I found it to be noticeably better than their standard definition movies but I wasn’t able to find on either the Netflix nor the Roku sites what their HD video specs are.  The video player itself supports up to 720p but to my untrained eye, I don’t think that the video was at that quality level.  Nevertheless it is a great improvement and will only get better with time. 

If HD support isn’t enough for you, Roku also announced support for Amazon Video on Demand in “early 2009″ bringing Amazon’s catalog of over 40,000 movies and TV shows to the Roku video player.  I’ve tried the Amazon video on demand with my TiVo Series 2 DVR and had a poor enough experience that I would not try it again on that box.  I assume that the Series 2 box just didn’t have the horsepower to handle streamed video well but I am certain that the Roku video player (as well as the TiVo HD Series 3) is better optimized for video streaming.  While it remains to be seen how usability of the Amazon service will work on the Roku player, this update will provide Roku owners with more choices by providing single title rental and purchase options.  This is also a great move for Roku because it extends their customer base beyond only Netflix subscribers.  I can’t wait to see it in action.

If you read about my experience with my dead LCD TV, you may be wondering about the result of my DIY repair job.  Let me sum it up by saying that there was good news and there was bad news.

First the bad news.  The repairman who I paid to diagnose the problem was wrong!  I installed the replacement board only to have the same problem.  So here I was back to square one.  As I tried to research my problem online, I found that the online community for TV repairs is surprisingly weak.  Even though the insides of TVs are looking more and more PC-like (boards, chips, cables), TV manufacturers (at least Sharp) provide absolutely zero support for the end-user.  Unlike the PC industry where OEMs and component providers maintain knowledge bases for troubleshooting and repairs, TV manufacturers seem to perpetuate the antiquated need for a TV repair person.   Sure, there are lots of online TV repair forums; unfortunately they contain a lot more questions than answers.  You can imagine how frustrating it is to know that other people are having the same problem but no one can tell you how to fix it.  

Now for the good news.  I actually found a forum, or more specifically, a single person in a forum that could help me troubleshoot my problem.  After the fiasco of buying the wrong board, I suspected that I had a power supply issue but didn’t want to spend more money until I could get some confirmation.  It turns out that the online store that I had previously mentioned (www.shopjimmy.com) has its own forum and in that forum is one person that seems to answer all the questions.  I suspect he’s a Shop Jimmy employee but if he’s right, who cares.  He responded to my post within 24 hours and confirmed my suspicion that I needed a new power supply unit.  I ordered the part, installed it in less than 20 minutes with only a screwdriver and … my TV is back up and running!

I am sure that it is just a matter of time before these online communities reach some critical mass and put an end to a good number of old-school repairmen.  I say good riddance to the likes of my repairman who was either wrong or intentionally lied to me about my problem.

Home networking took a great leap forward with the proliferation of Wi-Fi networking products and have improved generation-to-generation in terms of bandwidth, range and quality of service. While it’s hard to argue with the attractiveness of networking without wires, I found Wi-Fi alone to be insufficient for my needs. 

My circumstances may differ from yours, but I have to assume that I am not alone.  I live on a hill so my house is tall (four levels) and wide, making coverage at an adequate bandwidth a challenge.  My 802.11g wireless router is co-located with my broadband modem next to my home theater on the third level.  Unfortunately, this setup doesn’t provide a strong enough signal to either my office computers (second level) or TiVo (fourth level).  Looking forward to the day when I can distribute video within the home (an HD stream can consume >10 Mbps), I wanted as much bandwidth as possible.  While 802.11n promises better range and bandwidth than my current solution, of the 15 or so devices I have networked within my house, only one currently has .11n built-in.  Of the remainder, only two are capable of being upgraded to 802.11n.  So simply upgrading my router wasn’t going to entirely solve my problem.  What I really needed was a way to extend my existing 802.11g network to wired and wireless devices without the cost and hassle of pulling CAT5 cable throughout the house.  The networking companies make range extenders, but I gave up on this option after wrestling with a wireless repeater for a few days; unfortunately after almost 10 years in the market, ease of configuration of wireless networking devices remains a challenge for most consumers.

My solution?  (continue reading…)

A few months ago the first TV I ever bought (~1990) passed away.  First the sound went, then the picture gradually faded to black … a dignified death.  Taking the TV to be recycled, I didn’t feel sad for my loss but rather appreciative of the 18 years of dedicated service without a single problem.  

So when my 3 year old Sharp LCD stopped working last week, I took it to the repair shop, dreading the repair estimate.  Sure enough … $465 to replace a failed “main board!”  How can this be when I can buy a brand new TV with equivalent or better features for that much!?!  (continue reading…)

Uno

Microsoft’s “Major Nelson” shared some Xbox Live statistics post-NXE launch on his blog this week.  Some of the data I have already reported on in my previous post on NXE but there are a few new tidbits (quoted directly from Major Nelson’s blog) that I feel are worthy of discussion:

• Movie downloads increased 49% and TV episode downloads were up 30% the week after launch
• Xbox LIVE Arcade sales almost tripled in the first week after the New Xbox Experience launched
• Avatar-specific titles like A Kingdom for Keflings registered the second-best first week of performance ever
• UNO which was updated to include in-game Avatars, saw a 650% increase in sales in just one day

All-in-all this sounds like a great initial result but (continue reading…)

I was cleaning out my storage closet over the weekend and, as I went through my piles of stuff, I realized how much of a pack rat I really am.  Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not any where near one of those hoarders you hear about on Dr. Phil, but I am the type of person that doesn’t dispose of a gadget if it still works.  The result is that I have many perfectly good electronic and computer devices that are stored away waiting for the right opportunity to be put back into action.  I also have some real duds that will never feel the warmth of an electrical outlet again… (continue reading…)

I read last week that Atlantic Records (owned by Warner Bros.) announced that it’s sales of MP3’s and ringtones have out-sold physical CD’s for the first time ever and that Warner Bros. as a whole brought in 27% of it’s revenue from digital sales.  While this is certainly a major milestone for this particular label, it comes as no surprise to me as I’ve watched the ongoing transformation of the music business.  I’ve always been a big music fan and, while I take comfort in having a physical copy of CDs, I have embraced digital music for its flexibility and portability.  But to a large extent, carrying a physical CD around has only been replaced with carrying your MP3 player around.  The holy grail for me has always been to replace this “sneakernet” with true music streaming within the home over my home network.  Most solutions that allow music streaming within the home consist of a few common elements:

1. Media server hardware.  This is the device on which your music resides and is most commonly your computer hard drive.
2. Media server software.  This is software that runs on your media server hardware and is responsible for organizing your music library and sending it to other connected devices.  Windows Vista comes with its own media server (Windows Media Connect) as do any number of applications that you may use to manage your music library on your computer including iTunes, Musicmatch and Rhapsody.
3. Digital media adapter (DMA).  This is the device that receives the music from your media server and plays the music on speakers.  The DMA typically comes with a remote control.
4. Connectivity.  The media server needs to be connected to the digital media adapter; typically over a wired or wireless network.

Over the years, I’ve tried many different devices and configurations before landing on my preferred solutions.  I’ve tried devices from the likes of Linksys, Dlink, Netgear, Microsoft, Roku, Sonos and iCube and there are new devices are coming out all the time.  A quick search on Amazon.com turned up additional products from Logitech, Philips, Escient, MediaGate, Sony, Olive, Denon, Apple and Creative Labs.  With all these alternatives out there, how does one choose?  Here were my considerations: (continue reading…)

I heard about Lala.com on the local news a few weeks ago where they were touted as a breakthrough in the business model for online music.  So what’s different about Lala?

1. You can listen to any of their 6 million songs in their entirety - but only once. Compare this to the 30 second clips with no listening restrictions that you get from iTunes
2. You can purchase a song for online listening for $.10
3. MP3 downloads are $.89 (cheaper than iTunes but the same price as Amazon)
4. Lala allows you to upload your entire music collection so that you can listen to it online from anywhere for free
5. They’ve included community features and the ability to ‘follow’ someone like you would on Twitter

From my perspective, the real twist on the business model was the ability to have your entire library online. I figured I’d give it a shot and tried to upload my music.  I have over well over 30,000 songs in my digital music library and unfortunately Lala was ill-equipped to handle the upload so I eventually gave up.  After what amounted to several days of uploading, I was only able to get about half of my library online.   (continue reading…)

I had the opportunity to hear Shane Kim, Corporate VP at Xbox, speak this past weekend at the >play Digital Media conference.  Reporter Dean Takahashi did a nice job of covering the features of the Next Xbox Experience (NXE) to be delivered as an update to users today.  NXE adds a new user interface, community features and, in an obvious nod to Wii’s success, avatars.  You can read Dean’s article here.  I download the NXE update today and, despite some intermittent issues accessing the Xbox server (probably due to the number of upgrades going on), the UI looks nice but will take some getting used to.

What this upgrade really highlights is the power and flexibility of the Xbox 360.  When I was at Intel, I was the lead business development guy trying to win the Xbox 360 business.  It wasn’t a good business for us and we ended up walking from the deal but in the process I did get an appreciation for what Microsoft was trying to accomplish.  After what some have estimated to be a $1B investment in advance of selling their first unit, their goal was to maximize revenue from the platform by:

1. cramming in as much horsepower into the box as possible so the up-front investment lasts as long as possible
2. selling as many Xbox’s as possible by pricing them at or below cost 
3. delivering more and better content over the platform’s life
4. getting a cut of every piece of content that gets delivered through the Xbox

From Intel’s perspective, our worst nightmare was (continue reading…)