NBC Direct Will Never Replace My TiVo
September 20th, 2007 Davis
NBC has announced that they are introducing a program that will let you automatically download some of their shows to your PC. With the announcement came the latest round of TiVo doom and gloom articles, that assert that this technology will some how be able to replace a DVR. While I like that NBC is being innovative and are offering more choices to consumers, I am also skeptical about the long term prospects for this one.
I suspect that NBC is hoping to build a strong subscription base for the shows, so that they can then try and pitch companies on paying for ads by the download. There may be some advertisers that will be foolish enough to accept these arrangements, but over the long run, the advertisers will figure out why it’s doomed for failure.
Right now I would estimate that I record 80 GBs of content each week. I watch a lot of it, but most of it is junk and ends up deleted. This digital waste doesn’t matter though, because there is no variable cost tied to my recording the content. The cable company is broadcasting the signal no matter what. I could delete all of it and it won’t cost them a penny more.
When it comes to downloads though, it’s a different story. Now there is no way for me to know how much NBC really pays for their downloads, but if we assume that they pay .19 cents per GB, it would cost them $15 a week, just to offer the choices and convenience that my TiVo provides. Even if you assume my estimates are high, start multiplying this out by millions and things will start to get expensive.
This wouldn’t be a problem is you were watching 80GB’s worth of commercials, but it creates huge waste, if you end up deleting most of it. As is, advertisers are upset that DVR users are skipping through 50% of their commercials, but if you assume that consumers are deleting 50% of your paid download to begin with, how will they be any better off?
In the near term, these types of developments make for great headlines, but if this gets any kind of real traction, I have no doubt that NBC will cancel the downloads or restrict demand by offering limited content. I’m expecting a long beta on this one. It’s a neat little Jedi mind trick, but I think marketers will be more savvy and will demand greater accountability.
Posted in Marketing, Technology, Media, TV, Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, VOD, TiVo | 1 Comment »
Which New Pilots Do You Think Will Face A Crash Landing?
September 20th, 2007 Davis
It’s not very politically correct, but I’ve always been fascinated by dead pools. I’ve never actually participated in one, but there is something about wagering on life and death that appeals to the degenerate gambler in me.
Since I’m pretty sure that participating in a dead pool is illegal in San Francisco, I suppose that I will have to live with the next best thing, dead TV pools. Marketing Shift is putting on a contest where they are asking readers to try and pick ten of the new shows, that you think will be off the air by the end of the fall season.
The winner of the contest will be the first person to have all ten of their picks canceled. The winner will receive a little bit of link love from MarketingShift.com, but the loser ends up with an internship at Cat World the CW 
If you want to see a list of all the candidates for the pool, you’ll find it on Marketing Shift’s website, but here are my picks for their first annual TV dead pool contest.
1.) K-Ville - I already have a season pass for this, but even though I think I’ll like it, I don’t see it taking off. Hurricane Katrina may be something that people feel connected to, but I don’t think that it will be enough to keep this show on the air, two years later.
2.) Chuck - I caught the pilot on this one and it seems like too much of a niche program to catch on in the mainstream. I’ll be tuning in until they kill this one, but I think this will be one of the first victims of poor ratings and too little patience by the studios.
3.) Pushing Daises - Admittedly, this one looks intriguing to me, but I think that Disney’s family angle will keep this show from being popular. If it was on HBO, I’m sure that this dark comedy would be very successful, but on the Disney Channel ABC it will end up too watered down to survive.
4.) Kitchen Nightmares - I can’t understand why any of the food shows are popular, but this wannna be Wolfgang Puck will go no where with his temper tantrums and scripted outbursts.
5.) Life - This one is just a little too quirky for me to believe that it will survive. If this was on the USA Network or FX, I could see them carving out a niche cable audience, but even NBC won’t be desperate enough to keep this around for too long.
6.) Caveman - This is one of the shows that I’m really looking forward to. The Geico ads were creative to begin with, but I’m also a fan of product placement over the 30 second ads. There seemed to be a lot of initial interest in the show, but I’m worry that it will get pulled after reading some sub-par reviews. I hope I’m wrong about this one, but only think the Caveman joke will go so far with primetime audiences.
7.) Life Is Wild - Between The Office and the upcoming US adaption of Coupling, we’ve seen strong interest in US based versions of UK programmes. Even though this will be an adaption of the hit UK drama Wild at Heart, I’m still not convinced that it will translate well for US based audiences. Since this one will be on the CW, it could always stick around even if no one watches, but I think that the CW can get better ratings with King of the Hill reruns and we’ll see them drop it.
8.) Viva Laughlin - This is another UK based show that is being produced for a US audience. It does have the very popular Hugh Jackman in the show, but somehow I don’t think the US is quite ready for a musical dramedy. I understood when Comedy Central picked Reno to make fun of Cops, but does anyone really believe that people want to watch a show based out of Laughlin?
9.) Samantha Who? - I’ll admit to having tuned into Married with Children episodes just to see Christina Applegate (Heck, I’ll even admit to watching her movie Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead), but now that she is starting to get older, I don’t see this one having the sex appeal to keep bringing audiences back.
10.) Moonlight - I’m a HUGE horror movie buff, but even this one looks cheesy to me. To make matters worse, CBS has put the show on their Friday night spot. This isn’t a bad time slot if you’re Numbers and are appealing to a baby boomer audience, but horror fans tend to go out on the weekends and aren’t going to stick around for something that looks this flimsy.
As a special bonus pick, I’m going to name Carpoolers as the season’s surprise hit. There may be other shows that end up getting better ratings, but I think that this one is going to do much better than the expectations. In about two to three years, it will be just as popular as the Office.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Hold On Kenny
September 17th, 2007 Davis
Update - Unfortunately Hold On Kenny was pulled and is no longer available. I looked for other copies, but this may have been a one of a kind video. I thought it was awesome and would be disappointed if it was pulled because someone at Viacom couldn’t see the promotional value in a user generated mashup. Since Hold On Kenny was pulled so quickly, I present C’mon C’mon by the Von Bondies. It’s very cool, even if it’s not Guided by Voices.
Posted in Music, VOD | 3 Comments »
Sling Partners With UPC - Introduces Placeshifting To The Netherlands
September 17th, 2007 Davis
Last week, Sling Media announced that they were partnering with UPC, in order to introduce the Slingbox into the Netherlands. UPC is a major cable conglomerate in Europe and could end up being an important resource for Sling. They offer triple play services in ten different countries and are a wholly owned subsidiary of Liberty Global.
For Sling, the deal makes obvious sense. They get an important distribution partner and marketing support from a cable powerhouse. For UPC though, the benefits are less obvious. They haven’t released pricing information yet, so it’s always possible that UPC may end up charging some kind of service fee for the Slingbox, but even if they never make a single dollar Euro from offering the service, I still think that UPC ends up benefiting from the deal.
The name of the game in the cable industry is upselling to digital. With the market for cable TV relatively saturated, cable operators are seeking new revenue streams. In order to continue to grow their businesses, they’ve been forced to think inside, not out. By leveraging their existing customer relationships, MSO’s have seen great success in cross selling new digital services to subscribers. Instead of needing to expand by adding new customers, they’ve been able to expand by maximizing the revenue they bring in from their current customers.
UPC doesn’t list any Dutch stats online, but they do give a breakdown of their current subscribers. According to their website, the company has 9.2 million video customers (or which only 1 million are digital subscribers), 2.4 million broadband subscribers and 1.3 million VOIP customers.
I’m not sure what the average broadband penetration rate is in Europe, but when I see 9.2 million video customers and only 2.4 million broadband subscribers, I see a pretty wide gulf between these services. Almost 75% of UPC’s customers don’t subscribe to their broadband. This not only affects their broadband business, but limits the addressable market for their VOIP services, as well.
In order for UPC to keep moving forward, they need to expand the number of broadband subscribers and this is where Sling comes in. There are a lot of reasons why someone may not want to pay for broadband. If all you do is check your email, maybe you don’t see the value or if you only have a laptop, maybe you can get by fine with free wifi. These are all good reasons not to have broadband, but Sling brings a good reason why someone would want broadband. There are lots of people who don’t care about video blogs or YouTube or even P2P 
but they do care about being able to legally watch the TV that they already pay for, even if they don’t happen to be at home.
By partnering with Sling, UPC is able to approach their 6.8 million TV customers that don’t use them for internet and can give them a compelling reason for why they might want to take advantage of broadband access. If they can convince enough video only customers to upgrade to internet, then the VOIP revenues will shortly follow.
I don’t know whether or not UPC plans on expanding their test outside of the Netherlands, but already there seems to be interest from some of the other divisions. Representatives from UPC Ireland, told reporters that management was considering the technology and left open the possibility that Irish UPC subscribers, might also be able to participate in the distribution agreement.
My guess is that once UPC is able to get some real world data from the Netherlands, it will be a no brainer to move forward with a more broad deployment. If offering Sling to their subscribers can help to increase broadband adoption rates, it gives both companies a powerful incentive to see this relationship expand. I’m too skeptical to believe that their North American counterparts will embrace placeshifting anytime soon, but for now, it’s nice to at least see Europe being progressive, when it comes to digital entertainment.
Posted in Technology, Media, TV, VOD, Slingbox | No Comments »
Did Someone Say Free TV? Networks Offer Previews Of Fall Season
September 17th, 2007 Davis
It was a long and boring summer for television this year, but with the fall TV schedule just around the corner, I’m starting to get excited about some of the new shows that are popping up. At the start of the summer, I thought that I would have lots of exciting new shows to check out, but with the exception of Burn Notice (which is freaking awesome), this summer’s crop of new shows was a major let down for me. Too much reality TV and not enough compelling fresh content.
Normally, the start of the Fall TV schedule is a pretty busy time for me. If I don’t catch a show from the very beginning, there is a good chance that I’ll never tune in, so I try to catch as many of the pilots as possible. I won’t end up subscribing to all the shows, but I like to check all of the new ones out, so that I can figure out which ones deserve a season pass. This year, this task got a little bit easier because a couple of the studios have been making some of their pilots available early.
Last week, NBC released free pilot downloads on Amazon’s Unbox service, for 4 of their upcoming shows. Not to be outdone, CBS decided to release an episode of the Big Bang Theory early. Over the weekend I checked out all five of the early releases and had some mixed reviews on the new shows.
The Bionic Woman - Going into the fall schedule, this was my most anticipated new show. I never saw the original series, but I love super hero storylines and after what NBC had done with Heroes, I had high hopes for this series. Dave Zatz watched the pilot and he said that he was unimpressed. My thoughts were pretty much the same. The final 15 minutes of the show had some great fight scenes, but the first half an hour included a lot of bad acting and weak dialogue. My final verdict was to still set up a season pass, but to give it a lower priority over some of the the other shows.
Chuck - I’ve always been a sucker for spy shows, so when I saw that NBC was producing a spy show for geeks, I knew that I’d want to check it out. Overall, the show held some promise, but I felt like it was trying a little too hard. The show is based around a tech guy who works for the TV equivalent of Best Buy’s Geek Squad. He somehow ends up getting caught between the NSA and the CIA when a friend sends him all of their data. He ends up getting recruited to help out both agencies and must save the day each week, because the US Government apparently doesn’t back up their data. While I liked the action scenes and the comedy/romance chemistry between the actors, at the end of the day, Chuck fell back on too many geek stereotypes for me to believe that this will survive past the first few episodes. There was more then one moment where viewers are asked to suspend reality, just so the show can set up their plot. While I like that NBC wants to appeal to the geek crowd, because most spy shows already have the geeky character providing tech support for all of the cool spy gadgets, I didn’t really think it was necessary for the leading character to be an expert on setting up home theater equipment.
Life - Before the start of the TV season, I hadn’t really heard about Life, but once NBC made the pilots free, I figured that it was worth checking out. Life is the story about a guy who spent ten years in prison for a murder that he didn’t commit. After being released, he’s reinstated in his former job as a detective and must solve crimes each week. Damien Lewis is the main actor in the show and his character is a cross between the detectives in Law and Order and Monk. He seems to have a knack for finding clues, but doesn’t have a lot of tact when it comes to talking with people. If this one hadn’t been a free preview, there’s a good chance I would have missed it, but after seeing the pilot, there’s an even better chance that I’ll miss it. There wasn’t any good chemistry in the show and Lewis ends up coming across more freaky then brilliant. While this formula has been successful for detective series in the past, it didn’t seem like enough to keep this one from being canceled after a few episodes.
Journeyman - This show was already on my list of things to check out this season, but it wasn’t a priority. The show is about a guy who gets caught into some kind of a time warp and must go back and help people correct mistakes in their past. The show has been compared to Quantum Leap, so I figured I could use it as a good fall back show, in case nothing was on. After seeing the pilot though, it’s clear that I misjudged this one. Journeyman is amazing. This is one that I will be looking forward to every week. At the end of the pilot, I literally had goosebumps. The show is a lot like Quantum Leap, but instead of being cheesy and formulaic, it’s dark and complex. I can tell that there will be a lot of mysteries revealed over the course of the season. One of the things that I really liked about the show, was that it looked at science fiction from a realistic perspective. In Quantum Leap, the audience was expected to think about time travel as normal, but in Journeyman, characters respond in the same way that your friends would respond, if you tried to tell them you were traveling through time. I liked the entire pilot to begin with, but it certainly didn’t hurt to have NBC set the series in San Francisco. This isn’t something that everyone will appreciate, but seeing some of my day to day haunts throughout the show, is a fun experience and adds something unique for Bay Area residents.
The Big Bang Theory - I saw the previews for this one and had pretty much made up my mind to miss this show. In general, CBS’ sitcoms tend to be a little too family friendly to appeal to my tastes, but when CBS offered the pilot for free through Unbox, I decided to try it out. Overall, I wouldn’t put it at the top of my season pass queue, but the show did turn out to be a lot better than I expected. The show is about a couple of ubber geeks who end up having a cute girl move in next door. I figured that the comedy would be pretty formulaic, but was impressed by how intelligent the dialogue really was. I’m not sure what direction they plan on taking the sitcom, but the characters were compelling enough to make it worthwhile to check out future shows.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the studios experiment with early releases for their shows, but this season it seems like they have really stepped up these promotional efforts. As a TV fan, I like this trend because it lets me check out new material before the start of the Fall season bonanza. Not every show is going to be a hit, but after a very slow TV summer, even a sneak peak at the new schedule is a welcome relief from the reruns and the baseball. It may not be as good as starting the entire Fall TV season two weeks earlier, but it is nice to be able to check out a few of the shows, so that I can start to make decisions on which season passes to make a priority. With even more new shows coming out and plenty of my favorites returning, I think viewers are in store for a great fall TV schedule this season.
Posted in Media, TV, VOD, Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, TiVo | No Comments »
Marvell Unveils Redbull For Video HD Microchip
September 5th, 2007 Davis
There are a lot of gadget nuts out there, but when it comes to the microchips, they don’t really get a lot of buzz. I think part of why they don’t get more attention, is because you have to have an advanced Engineering degree, in order to understand most of it. Even after hundreds of millions of dollars in branding, I still don’t think that I could tell you the difference between an Intel and an AMD chip. All I really care about is how fast my computer will run and whether or not I can download movies onto it.
As a consumer, it’s easy for me to tune these details out, but as a Technology Enthusiast, I know that these chips represent the forefront of the consumer electronics industry. Before the product launches at CES, before the beta testing, even before the prototype, you need that microchip. It may take years for the buzz to catch up, but the advances that we see today will be the hot products of the future. I can’t admit to understanding it all, but it’s exciting to see the foreshadows of what’s to come.
Marvell Technologies unveiled their own vision of the CE future today and I was lucky enough to sit in on a conference call for the unveiling. During the call, Nikhil Balram, one of the inventors behind the chip, fielded questions from reporters and described how this tiny little device is going to bring HDTV to standard definition downloads.
Marvell has named the new chip Qdeo (quiet video) and hopes to develop the brand into something consumers will recognize. At a very basic level, Qdeo allows you to up-convert standard definition video into an HDTV signal. There are of course DVD players on the market that already do this, but Marvell is trying to take this to another level by providing up-conversion features on all video content, not just DVDs.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen a lot of interest in portable video. While there are many different ways to get video on the go, most of them end up involving smaller/downgraded video files than what’s necessary for HDTV. This isn’t a problem if all you want to do is take high res content you’ve purchased on your TV and minimize it for a cell phone, but if you want to take content you’ve downloaded for your cell phone and put it on your big screen TV, then get ready for quality that looks worse than the camcorder movies that float around on bit torrent.
Because of bandwidth considerations, most portable content isn’t ready for prime time. While there are ways to buy HDTV content for an Xbox360, most downloadable video solutions tend to be compressed for speed instead of quality.
What Marvell’s technology is trying to solve, is the quality problem that consumers face, from having so many different video choices. In order to address this issue, they built an algorithm that can support up-conversion features regardless of the resolution of the original file.
During the presentation, I didn’t have an opportunity to see a video of the chip at work, but Marvell did have several photo examples of the technology in action and I could see a difference. Marvell has more examples on their website, if you are interested in seeing some visual demonstrations of the product at work.
The technology makes three major improvements to the video signal.
First, the chip helps to eliminate the rough edges that you’ll find in a lot of videos. If you’ve ever seen a low res clip on a big screen TV, you’ll know that when you increase the size of the screen, it makes it really easy to see the individual pixels in your content. These show up as uneven lines and make your video look like it’s composed of a bunch of blocks. With the Qdeo technology, they’ve figured out a way to automatically blend these pixels, so that it appears more natural.
Secondly, the chip helps to remove noise from the file. This helps to add more contrast to a video and makes it easier to focus on the subjects in the video. From a consumer standpoint, this is probably the most noticeable improvement. By removing a lot of the white noise, it helps to make the video more vivid and alive.
Finally, the chip includes an automatic adjusting feature for color remapping and contrast enhancing. This was probably my favorite feature during the demonstration. Normally, I have a tough time distinguishing between colors because I am color blind, but even I was able to see how dramatic of a difference there was between an untreated photo and the end product. I don’t know their secret sauce behind this feature, but the end result appears to take areas that are over exposed and shift that light to areas where there are lots of shadows. It also makes the colors more vibrant, but doesn’t adjust the color of flesh, so it prevents people from looking like Oompa Loompas.
For the launch of the chip, Marvell has partnered with Meridian iRIS, in order to create an iPod high definition converter that plugs directly into an HDTV. Once it’s hooked up to your TV, all you need to do is dock your video iPod and you should be able to see high resolution copies of whatever movies you happen to have on the device.
As the market for this new technology develops, Marvell is hoping to expand the functionality into HDTV DVD players, set top boxes, flat panel TVs and media bridge products.
It’s hard to really get a sense of how powerful the technology is without seeing real life examples, but I think that the chip would have the biggest impact for the television market. Because the end result will only be as good as the display technology, even great video signals can be comprised by the wrong television. When I asked Balram as to whether there was a difference in the quality of a Qdeo TV vs. a portable device that connects to a different set, he seemed to feel that it wouldn’t be that significant.
“at that stage, once you are doing the processing at the source device, you’re really bypassing the processing in the TV. So whether at one stage, it actually did the processing or didn’t, at other stages you are simply using it as a raw panel. So then you get into things like which companies make better panels compared to which ones.”
With a longer design time for televisions, don’t expect to see Qdeo in any HDTVs right away. For those who can’t wait, Meridian does expect to have their HD iPod dock available sometime in October. Once we start to see the early reviews come in, we’ll know how good this technology really is, but if Marvell delivers on their promises, it should be beautiful technology to see in action.
Posted in Technology, Microchips, Media, TV, HDTV DVDs, VOD | 2 Comments »
Poker Bots Still Can’t Beat The Pros
September 4th, 2007 Davis
A few months back, scientists at the University of Alberta built a piece of software that could not lose at the game of checkers. Even if you played the game perfectly, at best you’d end up with a tie. Somehow I doubt that most online gamers are looking for games that they can’t beat, but it was still a pretty amazing technological feat to see accomplished.
After proving that checkers could be perfected, the team behind the software set their eyes on the high stakes world of Poker and in late July they entered their Polaris poker software into the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Computer Poker Competition in Alberta, Canada.
The highlight of the event turned out to be a Polaris rematch against celebrity poker player Phil “the Unabomber” Laak. Laak previously had beaten the Polaris software, but not without quite a bit of difficulty.
For the rematch, the AAAI paired up Laak with fellow poker pro Ali Eslami and the two did battle against a number of different poker programs. The end result of the event proved that the pros can still beat the best software out there, although even the pros admit that the poker bots are getting better.
“And so it seemed a solid victory for team humanity. Was this more proof that the complexity of poker was still currently too much, even for a program that had been in the works for 16 years?
Not according to Eslami and Laak.
As the applause died down Eslami spoke to the crowd, “This was not a win for us. First of all there are a few things you need to know. One of the bots completely clobbered us. Another one had kind of a glitch in the second match that we won.”
Both players also agreed that they had played their absolute best poker and if there had been a time limit on the hands, they would not have been able to beat Polaris.”
As it turns out, the Polaris software wasn’t even the best bot to play in the tournaments. A piece of software called Bluffbot 2.0 couldn’t beat the pros, but was able to edge out the other robots in a tournament that pitted a number of different bots against each other.
The Bluffbot was built by a couple of software developers Teppo Salonen in Claremont CA. The duo that created the software hasn’t released the Bluffbot 2.0 on their website, but they do have an earlier limit version, that is available for download. They also promise that they’ll have an online version of 2.0 up soon, so that internet surfers can test their own skills against the machine.
A lot of people find the idea of poker robots somewhat distasteful, but I’m fascinated by the technology. Trying to create the perfect chess or checker games is tough, but because there are only so many mathematical possibilities, it’s something that is at least possible.
When it comes to poker though, there are so many variables involved that I’m still not convinced it can be done. You can certainly analyze other players patterns for tells, but sometimes, it’s the little things that give away someone’s hand. I used to play online poker quite a bit, but after finding that I couldn’t win online, I stopped playing in the real money tournaments.
I’m not sure if people are gaming the system online or if I just can’t do well at poker in an online environment, but when I play live, it’s a very different game for me. Just being able to look for subtle tells like which card someone is eyeballing, can give you a real advantage in real life, but when you play online, there isn’t nearly as much info to go on.
Eventually, someone will come up with a piece of software that will be able to consistently beat real life players and when they do, it will make online gambling even less attractive. There have already been attempts to deploy this technology on real money sites, but there isn’t any good data on how effective these programs really are.
At the end of the day, I enjoy online games as much as the next person, but part of what makes internet gaming so appealing is that people actually make mistakes while playing it. It’s fun to be challenged, but it’s even more fun to win and when your opponent is a cold calculating machine, it takes random mistakes out of the equation.
Posted in Robots, Technology, Video Games | 4 Comments »