Author: Philip

Categories
Item of Interest Media Consumption

Nielsen – Small Minority Of Viewers watching True HD

Nielsen – Small Minority Of Viewers Watching True HD http://tinyurl.com/3xghhq6

Nielsen are not saying – as you might think from their headline – that only 13% of those with an HD set are watching HD, but overall the number of views in HD is still only 13%.

Only 13 percent of total day viewing on cable and 19 percent of viewing on broadcast television is “true HD” viewing, the audience measurement company said. That means, despite the billions of dollars that was spent buying HD sets, more than 80 percent of television viewing is still a standard definition experience.

The short article then goes on to explain the reasons why the time viewing HD is so low compared to total viewing.

Categories
Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest The Business of Production

Who Needs TV Networks?

Who Needs TV Networks? Mattel Grabs Whitney Port and Goes Right to Hulu http://tinyurl.com/2ej52pz

In what I think will become the dominant trend, Mattel are creating their own programming and going public with it via Hulu. Traditionally Advertisers/Brands rented the eyeballs that Networks and Cable aggregated (in a neat bait and switch to the viewer).

But why should Brand “rent” an audience when they can buy their own? It’s generally cheaper and more effective.

The real story here is the end-around the brand is playing here, bypassing a large spend on traditional TV with a non-trivial spend sent right to an online network (Hulu) for an original web series. Hulu and other online networks like YouTube have proven they have the scale of audience to deliver on what the brand wants to reach. So why bother with bloated TV budgets? The significance of this isn’t lost on Hudsun Media’s CEO Michael Rourke.

“What we are doing with Mattel and Genuine Ken is a complete game changer, ” said Rourke. We have created a wildly compelling, network-quality reality show that, for the first time, can be distributed directly to the viewer in a non-traditional but very effective way.”

All those charts that get marched out in board meetings about how ad spending for online video is shooting up, have projects like this to thank for such lofty forecasts. With some $70 billion spent by brands on Television, the measly $1.4 billion or so in online video seems marginal, but the shift is on.

Categories
Item of Interest

QuickTime Pro: About the “Conform Aperture to” setting.

QuickTime Pro: About the “Conform aperture to” setting http://tinyurl.com/39xqu5c

QuickTime Player Pro 7 introduced a new conform setting – basically an overscan for video played back on computers, something I’d prefer it didn’t do.

Fortunately it can be changed with the QuickTime 7 player (not the QuickTime X player) as the instructions in the linked Knowledge Base article show.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps

So Final Cut Pro 7 was to be the 64 bit release?

Over dinner last night we were discussing the history of Final Cut Pro, various WWDC announcements and it suddenly struck me that Final Cut Pro 7 was originally going to be a 64 bit release, until Apple pulled the rug from under the Final Cut Pro team (as well as other developers, specifically Adobe).

For a little background you could read John Gruber’s The $64,000 Question but the salient points is that Apple announced 64 bit Carbon support at WWDC 2006 (and withdrew it at WWDC 2007). Like Adobe I presume that the Final Cut Pro team decided that would be the simplest way of moving Final Cut Pro forward and chose to use it.

Except when it was pulled a year later, getting to 64 bit became a major rewrite as most of Final Cut Pro is written in Carbon.

If we consider that Final Cut Pro is on roughly 2 year release cycles up until now (which it has been), a 2009 Final Cut Pro 7 release would have had to start planning well before the Final Cut Pro 6 release. The general way software is developed is that features are allocated to a release and then it’s decided 9-12 months before the release what is actually going to make it or not. This is generally before internal QA testing and external beta testing; usually before the version is finished.

That would suggest that the major features of Final Cut Pro 7 would have been decided sometime in mid 2006: around the time 64 bit Carbon was being announced. Given that would – if 64 bit Carbon had happened – meant that a 64 bit Final Cut Pro was a recompile (and tidy up) away, why wouldn’t you plan that instead of a major rewrite. While significant work, it would be nothing like a complete Cocoa rewrite.

Then came WWDC 2007 and no 64 bit Carbon. Features for the Final Cut Pro 7 release would have been pretty much locked by then when 64 bit Carbon was called off. That’s also why there were no 64 bit Cocoa releases in Adobe CS4 either! (I believe Adobe were able to get to a 64 bit Cocoa release faster is because most of their code is cross platform and the Cocoa-ness of the application is largely in the interface layer. Plus Adobe aren’t dependent on QuickTime at the core.)

Too late for Final Cut Pro 7 but I think that late 2007 was when the Pro Apps group decided that the only way Final Cut Pro would be able to follow the company mandate that all Apple software be 64 bit would be to rewrite the whole application. And if you’re going to do that, why not rethink it as well. Most Apple software has already switched to 64 bit, except where there are significant dependencies on QuickTime!  (See iLife 11 is still 32 bit.)

 

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

So, Edit to Tape in FCP survives?

So, Edit to Tape in FCP <next> survives? http://tinyurl.com/26ojoyp

So it seems my hypothesizing abut the need for Log and Capture might have been way off – as people told me at the time. Apple have filed a patent application for an improved (simpler) method of laying off to tape. At least that’s what the headlines say. LIke most patent applications this one is a little impenetrable!

Categories
3D Item of Interest

Has 3D bubble burst?

Has 3D bubble burst? 3 reports slowing acceptance and ESPN 3D’s failure (so far). http://tinyurl.com/2374ezl http://tinyurl.com/26pb5nt and the third link is http://tinyurl.com/2cljev2

I remain a 3D skeptic. Undoubtedly when designed into an appropriate project and created in 3D it can enhance the experience. When it’s a 2D-to-3D conversion to “cash in” on the craze, the results don’t fool many people who won’t pay the premium for bad 3D, which then leads to a rejection of all 3D because the public aren’t expert enough to understand the difference. In other words, the 2D-3D scammers are ruining it for real 3D.

TVB Europe reports:

ESPN’s 3D channel is half way through a one year trial with which to prove a business case or it may be pulled from the air, writes Adrian Pennington. The network, which launched in June carrying 25 FIFA World Cup matches and plans to produce 94 live events in its first year, will have its future reviewed in early 2011.

The first link at Business Insider is really a rehash and pointer to the TVB article (third link) that has the real information.

The CrunchGear weighs in:

Is 3D already in trouble? Quite possibly, and there’s a few data points to back up that claim. As you know, Christopher Nolan has announced a few things pertaining to the next Batman movie, namely its name (the Dark Knight Rises), that The Riddler won’t be in it (much to fans’ chagrin), and that it won’t be filmed in 3D. I’m pretty sure the previous Batman movie, the Dark Knight, was a gigantic success, so to not film it in 3D is quite the snub. Sorry, 3D, but the prettiest girl at the dance wants nothing to do with you. (Stupid metaphors are stupid.)

3D isn’t nothing. It’s another tool in the visual storytelling toolbox, but not every tool should be used on every project.

Categories
HTML5 Item of Interest

Microsoft Has Seen The Light!

Microsoft Has Seen The Light. & It’s Not Silverlight. http://tinyurl.com/32jyufv

My primary reasons for disliking Flash were that it was proprietary (only one vendor/source) and that it has horrendous performance on OS X (definitely improving but still bad). I disliked Silverlight for the first of those reasons: any development only comes from Microsoft.

Well, it seems that Microsoft have had a “shift of strategy” :

During last week’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC),ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley asked Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s SVP of the Server and Tools Business, why the company failed to highlight Silverlight in a meaningful way this year. His answer was rather surprising.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. And while he said that the technology has some “sweet spots” for media applications (presumably like Netflix, which uses Silverlight on the web), its role as a vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime appears to be over. “Our strategy has shifted,” is how Muglia put it.

Instead, as they made clear during PDC, Microsoft is putting their weight behind HTML5 going forward. Hallelujah.

Further convergence on a single standard. Now if we can get everyone on the same page for HTML5 audio and video, it would be a big step forward. (I’m looking at you Mozilla!)

Categories
3D Item of Interest

Wasn’t 3-D supposed to be cooler than this?

Wasn’t 3-D supposed to be cooler than this? http://tinyurl.com/2cv8nyo

While it seems the entire industry is rushing to 3D, perhaps it’s time to step back a little and see if it actually enhances the movie-going experience.

The author’s headings probably tell you all you need to know about the article with my summary of the intent:

Shoddy technical work insults audiences (Most 3D is not well done)

No one asked for a 3-D ‘My Soul To Take’ or ‘The Last Airbender’ (A lot of 3D adds nothing)

That’ll be one $16.50 ticket for ‘Alpha and Omega’ (3D is expensive even if it adds nothing)

Would you like an eye infection with that? (Recycling glasses isn’t always done with meticulous cleanliness.)

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest New Media

Broadcast Networks – On Death and Dying

Broadcast Networks – On Death And Dying http://tinyurl.com/2w3dcfo

For Broadcast Networks, the end is coming and it’s time for them to Accepttheir fate.

Kind of premature because Broadcast Networks(and cable) are still dominant,still making the money and still have the premium content, but it’s also equally obvious that status will not remain static in the future.

According to a model developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying”, there are Five Stages of Grief.  
Over the past 20 years or so,Broadcast Networks have bounced around the First Four Stages in an effort to fight off the inevitable:

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest Media Consumption

The Golden Age of Choice and Cannibalization in TV

The Golden Age of Choice and Cannibalization in TV http://tinyurl.com/29h5dov My third GigOm referal today!

Mike Hudack, CEO of Blip.tv writes as guest blogger at GigOm about how audiences are fragmenting and where the opportunities lie. It’s a little long but it’s worth reading in its entirety.

Other than live event programming like the Super Bowl, however, the days of a single television show pulling in the vast majority of American TV households are over. The broadcast networks are long past their peak. Their audience — in absolute numbers, not relative numbers — has been shrinking since the early 1980s.

and much later

People often say that the web video industry will not come into its own until it creates a hit. This thought is, quite frankly, wrong. The cable TV industry has clearly come into its own. And it’s done this without producing a single hit on the order of a network TV success. Yes, the network television business is meaningful, but it no longer produces the hits it did just a few years ago. This year’s slate of network series premieres was the first to pass without a clearly defined “hit” show. That’s no accident. The networks are lost.

Media naturally trends towards fragmentation. As capacity increases so does choice. As choice increases audiences fragment. When given a choice people generally prefer media that speaks to them as individuals over media that speaks to the “masses.” While American Idol remains strong, the trend is clear. Americans have been abandoning broadcast television in favor of cable’s niche shows for thirty years.

For me the key takeaway is that it took Cable 20-30 years to dominate over broadcast, so it’s unreasonable to think that the distribution (and therefore democratization) revolution of the Internet is going to happen in just a couple of years? It might, but I think it’s safer to assume that long term “Internet TV” will be dominant. Broadcast Networks might still be relevant for sports and other live events, while cable’s best bet is to become an intelligent network provider. (Yes, I am saying that in the world of IP-based distribution why do we need someone else negotiating for “channels” that we may watch, when we can go direct to the source of the programming and watch it there.)

This will be a great opportunity for Producers who understand how to make a direct connection with their audiences and can package up the whole business and distribution package themselves. There’s got to be more profit (or overall lower budgets) if we remove one entire layer of distribution – the channel aggregators (TV networks, Cable networks, etc). Those Channels that focus on original programming will transition just nicely I imagine (restrictive legacy contracts not withstanding).