Month: May 2010

Good article on H.264 patent licensing costs that should put to rest any lingering concerns: http://bit.ly/bdpzDk

Essentially: stop worrying about it and continue being creative.

The biggest fear I’ve heard expressed from opponents of the H.264 standard and advocates of competing standards is cost. But are those fears justified? I’ve taken a closer look at the legal and technical documents involved, and I’m convinced that those fears are vastly overblown. As I explain below, the cost per user is literally pennies, and there’s already a cap in place that guarantees the rates won’t rise more than 10% in the future. (As a side note, I completely understand and sympathize with the objections that some people have to software patents in general. But here in the real world, those patents exist and are routinely enforced in courts, at great cost to the participants.)

Unbundling channels to programs or apps. http://bit.ly/9mLUxV Inveitable consequnce of unbundling trend of the Internet. Louderbeck is always a good read.

The internet is all about unbundling. Newspapers and magazines have been unbundled – why pay for the whole thing, when you can just read the articles you want online for free? Music has been unbundled – why buy a CD with 11 crappy songs for 15 bucks when you can just buy the good one for 99 cents?  Even TV shows are unbundling.  Why suffer through the whole show when you can just catch Letterman’s top 10 list at CBS.com, or the funny bits ofSaturday Night Live on Hulu or YouTube?

Cable TV is next. Why should I pay $75 or more for 500 live channels when I only watch around 15 regularly? That works out to around $5 a channel, a month, by the way, a princely sum that only ESPN, HBO and Showtime meet or exceed from cable ops – and ultimately customers.  But I pay for those 500 channels via affiliate fees, meaning I support ESPN, Comedy, Disney and Nickelodeon – which I’m happy to pay for – along with Hallmark, FoxNews, Animal Planet, and 482 others I couldn’t care less about.

Songwriters Guild Claims The Internet Makes It Impossible To Create Content http://bit.ly/b3fBlq From the too-stupid-to-breath department! Seriously.

Quoting discredited reports – discredited by none other than the US Govt. General Accounting Office – and flying in the face of a booming music industry, fueled by the ability to build audiences over the Internet, these guys basically want welfare for songwriters and no business model to ever change, or cause an income drop.

Sheesh!

Of course, the SGA, and its boss, Rick Carnes, are sort of famous for their over-the-top ridiculous claims that were debunked ages ago, but Carnes never seems to let up. In Carnes’ world, the gov’t owes songwriters a living, and the fact that the market has changed is of no concern to him, because he doesn’t want to change, and the government should do everything possible to stop such market changes. Carnes/SGA also have also said that “network neutrality” means more piracy, that songwriters cannot write without copyright and, my favorite, that no technological change should ever be allowed to decrease royalties for songwriters.

New addition to the HTML5 Spec – Captions http://bit.ly/cUlAvt And a “new track’ element as well.

subtitles: Translation of the dialogue, suitable for when the sound is available but not understood (e.g. because the user does not understand the language of the media resource’s soundtrack).

captions: Transcription of the dialogue, suitable for when the soundtrack is unavailable (e.g. because it is muted or because the user is deaf).

descriptions: Textual descriptions of the video component of the media resource, intended for audio synthesis when the visual component is unavailable (e.g. because the user is interacting with the application without a screen while driving, or because the user is blind).

chapters: Chapter titles, intended to be used for navigating the media resource.

metadata: Tracks intended for use from script.

More flexibility without resorting to a proprietary player.

FCC to Overhaul Regulation of Internet Lines to protect Net Neutrality. http://bit.ly/cF3s0V (Sorry the WSJ doesn’t have open access. One workaround is to copy the headline into the Google News search and link from there.)

Net Neutrality – the principle that all packets on an ISP’s network will be treated the same, no matter where they’re from – is important to the future of the Internet. Without it, an Internet provider could decide to delay VOIP packets from say, Vonage, but favor VOIP packets from their own service; or the ISP could try and force Google to pay a premium so Google’s traffic isn’t slowed on the Internet.

However, the real problem is not Net Neutrality, it’s a lack of real competition in most markets. If there was robust competition in supplying high speed internet connections, there would be no question about one ISP selectively slowing traffic. If any ISP tried it, they would lose customers to the competition. Right now the lack of real competition in most markets makes Net Neutrality legislation important.

But I’d rather it was achieved by competition rather than legislation, as most legislators don’t really understand the issues and “collatoral” damage ensues.

On Wednesday, Mr. Genachowski’s staff began briefing the FCC’s commissioners on how they will propose to regulate Internet lines under rules that were written for traditional phone networks. Some of those rules won’t be applied to Internet networks, FCC officials say, but others will be used to enforce net neutrality, or regulations that require Internet providers to treat traffic equally and not slow or block websites.

Scribd goes HTML5 for online document and presentation delivery. http://tcrn.ch/aJBWqG

Adobe’s much-beleaguered Flash is about to take another hit and online documents are finally going to join the Web on a more equal footing. Today, most documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides) can mostly be viewed only as boxed off curiosities in a Flash player, not as full Web pages. Tomorrow, online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages. Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser (see screenshots), but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages

Another brick in the wall!

When Ads become content… http://bit.ly/bfJD86 …we don’t hate them as much! If they’re entertaining and relevant, they’re content.

I enjoyed listening to Carol Bartz, the CEO of Yahoo!, who was in London last week to address the European press and analysts. She’s smart, focused and entertaining – a rarer combination than it should be. But one thing in particular struck me. When she was asked about the future of online advertising, she commented that in the future, “ads should be as interesting as the content.”

People watching more long form on smartphones than expected. http://nyti.ms/coFcGD

The stations would transmit to phones over the airwaves, much like Flo TV, a unit of Qualcomm, which has invested about $1 billion in mobile video distribution. The service sends channels like ESPN, Fox News and MTV to phones.

“Putting the concepts of mobility and watching video together is a natural, and we’re seeing it really grow right now,” said Flo TV’s president, Bill Stone.

Mr. Stone says the average Flo user watches 30 minutes of video a day. So far, though, few people are ponying up $10 a month or more for the service.

But that is not stopping other media companies from trying to charge for walled gardens of content. Beginning later this year, Bitbop, a product of the News Corporation’s Fox Mobile Group, will stream TV episodes to smartphones for $9.99 a month.

Flash is a platform, H.264 is a codec. One cannot kill the other. http://bit.ly/98Y588 Dan Raburn explains the difference.

As I tried to do with my “What’s the difference between a codec, and a container or wrapper” article from mid 2009, it’s not a question of H.264 vs Flash because since November 2007 Flash has played H.264 MP4 files – the same files used in Apple’s mobile devices (although Flash can play more variations on H.264 than Apple’s devices, btw).

Dan explains that Flash brings a lot more to the table – DRM, interactivity, etc – that is not available with a plain HTML5 video tag playback. This is provided at the CSS/Javascript level outside of Flash.

So the real debate with H.264 has nothing to do with Flash, but rather with the browsers that support and play back video. Microsoft has said they will only support H.264 in IE9, but we have to remember that IE6 still has close to 10% market share and the browser is nine years old. Looking at my own traffic stats for my blog, nearly 15% of my traffic each month comes from viewers using IE6. Like it or not, that’s reality. So the idea that H.264 video playback in a browser that supports HTML5 is somehow going to work for all viewers overnight is simply not the case. How many Internet viewers will have an HTML5 compatible browser in the next two years? Not as many as some seem to think.

The article is definitely worth a detailed read.