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.