Here in the U.S., we’re getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving, which for many folks means a long weekend — my favorite time to tinker, particularly with software. So I’ve gathered together seven free app tinkering ideas from around the GigaOM Network that you may get a kick out of.

Handbrake Speaks Video. Handbrake has long been a favorite open source video transcoding and DVD ripping application. Over on OStatic, Lisa discusses the latest release, which has a slew of new features, including better picture quality and ways to make ripping DVDs easier. You can also use preview features to see how a video will look before you go through a lengthy transcoding process.

Create Your Own Game. If you don’t think you have what it takes to create your own multiplayer online game, check out this post on Arianne, a free software framework for creating slick ones. Create your own game environment and Arianne does the work to deliver your game to users online.

Music Muscle. The world of applications you can use to enjoy, organize and share music is hardly limited to iTunes. There are lots of free applications that are fun to dig into.  Do you want to play Doom on your own customized OS for iPods or most other music players? Do you need customized music library management for multiple software platforms? Check this post for 8 free, open source tools that let you do those things and more.  Also check out this post on the popular Amarok music app, organizer, and media player, which is out in a new version.

Blender University. Blender has long been one of the most popular free, open source 3D animation and graphics applications. You can access almost 70 hours of free online instruction from Tufts University on how to use the app; you can learn how to create a great-looking logo, how to execute special effects and more. Blender has been used to produce striking full-length animated films and is worth getting to know if you haven’t tried it.

A Free Book on GIMP. In “6 Ways to Get Much More Out of GIMP” the OStatic editors collected a number of excellent resources for the powerful, free, open source GIMP graphics application, available for Windows, the Mac and Linux. You’ll find a complete, free online book on GIMP, tips on getting plug-ins and more.

Weekend Zen. Do you write a lot? I sure do, and if you do, too, you may enjoy WebWorkerDaily’s take on free, Zen word processors. They strip away the interface annoyances found in most word processors and leave you with a tabula rasa experience that some writers really like.Try a little tinkering.

Free Media Centers. Have you tried out any of the free media center software platforms that are available? Boxee is a very popular one, but there are other good ones for Windows, the Mac and Linux. Read about four here .

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Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: Arianne, Blender University, Boxee, GIMP, Handbrake, Zen word processors

Cisco said today it would up its offer to buy Tandberg to $3.4 billion — a boost of $400 million over its original bid, made last month — and said 40 percent of Tandberg’s shareholders have so far accepted the deal (Cisco needs 90 percent). About two weeks after the networking giant offered to buy the Norwegian video conferencing equipment maker, a group of shareholders protested, saying the offer was too low. This new offer should placate those shareholders, one of which was a brokerage firm that at the time of the original announcement had a target value on the shares that was slightly lower than the per-share price Cisco is now offering.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: Cisco, CSCO, tandberg

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap!

“Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did 10 years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them,” Schmidt zinged back today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft. I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM.

He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession, and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually, this clip is worth watching, and Cavuto is rational in his questions. So if you have time, check it out.

Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  18 Comments
Tags: Eric Schmidt, google, Microsoft

If you’re as interested in the inner workings of the mobile phone business as I am, then there’s a good chance that you are familiar with Christian Lindholm, partner and director at Fjord, a convergence design agency — or if you are a mobile phone user who has bought a Nokia device over the past decade or so, then you at least have been exposed to his work. He invented the Nokia Navi-key user interface, and he’s viewed as the father of the Series 60 user interface.

Let’s just say Lindholm knows mobile user interfaces really well. In this video interview, he chats with me about the iPhone, Android, and the current problems Nokia faces. He discusses the Maemo platform, Nokia tablets, and how difficult it is to build a mobile operating system. Lindholm talks about why a typical mobile OS has a shelf life of nearly 10 years, and from that perspective, both Android and the iPhone have a good future. If you have time, watch this video interview with him.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: Android, christian lindholm, iPhone, mobile user interfaces, Nokia, smartphone

“Comcast Plans to Bring TV Shows to Your Phone,” a Reuters story trumpeted yesterday, which had many of us here at GigaOM really excited — me especially, since this is exactly the sort of thing that I’ve said the cable guys should be doing if they want to launch wireless products. However, a quick look at the transcript of the executive comments that prompted the Reuters story shows that Comcast isn’t bringing TV to wireless phones anytime soon. Nor is voice of interest when it comes to the cable provider’s wireless efforts, as the Reuters story also stated. So far Comcast’s wireless plans are centered around delivering data, mostly to mobile computers.

According to a transcript of Comcast Chief Financial Officer Michael Angelakis speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia conference, he said:

As you know, we are launching — we are testing today a service called On Demand Online. I can envision some point in the future that having a wireless component. And there has been lots of discussion about voice clients at some point and I don’t want to say much more than that, but I think that data is really an important product for us to lead in the wireless side.

The Reuters’ article turned that answer into:

Leading U.S. cable operator Comcast Corp. said on Wednesday it plans to offer subscribers the option to watch their favorite TV shows on mobile devices through its new wireless Internet service. The company is also exploring adding a voice option to the wireless package that would put it in more direct competition with mobile phone providers like AT&T Inc  and Verizon Communications Inc.

Angelakis talked a lot about the cable operator’s investment with Clearwire and its wireless product, which is based on the WiMAX network Clearwire is launching in the U.S., but his comments focused primarily on providing mobile broadband to laptops and notebooks for folks on the go. That offering is proving to be a popular one, as 30-35 percent of people signing up in the two markets that Comcast has launched in are new customers.

As for voice and the obvious vehicle for it — phones — Angelakis said:

We are a holder of some AWS spectrum, so we could actually build a network. The conclusion was we have 20 megahertz of spectrum, clearly not enough to do what we really want to do. We don’t want to be the seventh competitor in a market that we think is mature from the voice side and it’s a huge economic investment which we are uncomfortable there is a real return for…The other option is do you want to purchase a company? And I didn’t think we have any desire to purchase a wireless company.

So clearly phones and voice aren’t in the cards, which means delivering TV to phones as part of a Comcast-specific wireless effort isn’t happening anytime soon. Delivering TV to computers connected to the Clearwire network seems like a possibility, but there are licensing, authentication and other issues to work out — not that Comcast isn’t tackling those.  As for the latter part of Angelakis’ comments, the unwillingness of Comcast to buy a wireless company is a real shame given that we think it should buy Sprint.

Bonus Link: The transcript of the Angelakis talk.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  2 Comments
Tags: #ef09_newteevee, CLearwire, CLWR, CMSCA, Comcast, News, S, Sprint

Two weeks ago, an appeals court shot down an FCC rule that had prevented any single cable company from controlling more than 30 percent of U.S. TV subscriptions. While a few reports noted then that the decision could spur consolidation in the cable industry, the discussion didn’t gain much traction until this week, when a Citigroup analyst argued in favor of a merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. But there was also this comment from Steve Burke, Comcast’s chief operating officer, who after noting that while the company might make a modest acquisition at the right price, said, “We don’t wake up every day saying, how do we get bigger in cable?”

Right. And drug addicts don’t wake up every morning saying, “How do I get a fix?” After all, what company wouldn’t want more revenue, or a bigger market share? It was in Comcast’s interest to fight this case to an appeals court, just as it’s in its interest to dampen speculation of any pending deal, which could spark a rally in the companies’ shares and as such, make a tie-up that much more expensive. But in the end, Comcast, as well as other pay-TV companies that might see the ruling as a green light for acquisitions, may not be helped by being bigger. Broadband cable and satellite companies are already facing competition from the web as more video content, and more eyeballs, migrate there.

The appeals court said that, because of new offerings from the likes of DirectTV Verizon and AT&T, cable operators “no longer have the bottleneck power over programming that concerned the Congress in 1992.” That concern, of course, helped pass the the Telecom Act of 1996, which aimed to deregulate the industry and foster competition, but in the end drew charges that it just created a bottleneck power over programming that’s still in place today.

Some analysts believe a big merger of pay-TV companies would still be unlikely, because the FCC may appeal to the Supreme Court or because regulators could still block a deal on antitrust concerns. But Citigroup’s Jason Bazinet said the regulatory barriers would be low even for Comcast and Time Warner since the two companies control only 37 percent of the market — big enough to provide $12 billion in cost benefits, but small enough to avoid a monopoly.

Still, a big merger could spur others in the industry. The Journal pointed out:

The ruling not only said cableco’s could buy other cableco’s. But that any TV subscription company could buy another. ATT could buy Time Warner Cable. DirectTV could merge with Comcast, and the two could buy Charter or Cox.

What would a wave of mergers in the pay-TV industry look like? If past is prologue, less competition in the industry would lead to higher rates. That in turn could spur even more subscribers to seek out video entertainment on the web. Many onetime cable subscribers, including me, have canceled their accounts after finding access to beloved content like baseball games and movies on MLB.com, Netflix Watch Now and iTunes.

There will always be subscribers to good TV content. But in time, fewer will be subscribing through the cable/satellite companies of today. As tempting as mega-mergers may be to those companies right now, they may only speed up their irrelevance.

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Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: #ef09_newteevee, feature

With venture capitalists still leery about telecommunications investments after the fallout from the dot-com crash, telcos should beef up their R&D if they want to stay competitive, Dave Burstein, a longtime telecommunications reporter, wrote yesterday. Two percent of sales would be a good start, he suggests, which would mean $2.48 billion and $1.94 billion for AT&T and Verizon, respectively. AT&T spent $892 million in 2008, down from $985 million in 2007. Verizon doesn’t disclose its R&D spending, but analyst Chris King at Stifel Nicolaus estimates it’s very little, as most of its vendors do the work.

In a time when technology moves faster than ever and so much innovation is built upon the very service the telcos provide, you’d think they’d step up their efforts at developing new ways to deliver better broadband through wires or wirelessly. Think about the history of Bell Labs, which pioneered inventions such as the transistor and the laser. Yet, the innovation is coming from startups and the equipment vendors, or even from companies such as Google and Microsoft, which are trying to build a device to deliver broadband in part of the digital television spectrum.

Telecommunications equipment makers and the cable industry are pushing technologies that are enabling them to take advantage of the telcos’ reluctance to spend, Burstein points out, and several news items back that up.  Yesterday it emerged that AT&T and Verizon  are fighting a patent lawsuit filed by TiVo which is trying to defend and license its digital video recorder time-shifting technologies. Do AT&T or Verizon have patents that will help them craft a cross-license with TiVo, or beat this suit? I doubt it, but they do have lots of lawyers.

But those lawyers can only help the telecommunications providers fend off competition and innovation for so long. The carriers’ empires are showing cracks. The most influential and game-changing wireless handset came from outside the carrier industry. Cable providers have been stealing voice and broadband customers for years (although telco TV seems to have helped carriers fight back in the last quarter). But even AT&T’s IPTV service, U-Verse, was delayed with some promised features never materializing.  This need for telcos to invest in R&D isn’t a new complaint, by the way.

Without a desire to spend on new products and services, even if they may disrupt the core lines of business, the telecommunications providers deserve their commodity status. When optics breakthroughs are coming from companies like Infinera or at universities and useful wireless technologies are built by startups or the equipment vendors, carriers are basically stuck putting a set of pre-selected ingredients together rather than making their own signature dish.

It’s the difference between baking a box mix cake and making your own. And if the equipment vendors offer the same mix to everyone, then the services aren’t all that different. Maybe carriers can change the icing with small service tweaks, but it’s hardly enough to disrupt the industry. If the only innovation carriers can bring is to pricing plans and the vision to lay fiber to the home, they’re going to be stuck as mere utility providers. Because in this world, controlling the pipe is nice, but controlling innovation is where the real power lies.

This article also appeared in BusinessWeek.com.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: AT&T, T, Verizon, VZ

Much of the increased uptake on the wireless web is being credited to Apple’s iPhone, but Opera continues to make impressive gains with its Mini browser. In particular, users are increasingly tuning in to YouTube via Opera Mini.

The Norwegian developer said today that 29.1 million people used Opera Mini in July, marking an almost 10 percent rise over June figures and a 145 percent increase over July 2008. Page views increased more than 15 percent from the previous month, topping the 12 billion-mark, and more than doubling the number from July 2008. Predictably, data consumption through Mini in the most recent month increased at similar rates — to 187 million MB dowloaded.

Interestingly, Opera Mini — which has gained strong traction in emerging markets — is increasingly finding an audience in the U.S. The browser’s number of unique users has grown more than 60 percent in the last year, making the U.S. Opera’s seventh-best market for Mini. (While Mini is pre-installed on some handsets, the figure represents only people who have actively downloaded the browser.)

But I was surprised to see how little change there was in the top 10 destinations for U.S. mobile web surfers through Opera Mini over the past year. Google, MySpace and Facebook were the top three mobile sites both last year and this year (Facebook replaced MySpace at the second spot in the most recent findings); other holdovers include Yahoo, Wikipedia and the New York Times.

The site I’m keeping an eye on is YouTube. Google’s mobile video channel is slowly accruing consumers in the U.S., inching up from Opera Mini’s ninth most-popular site last summer to No. 6 in Opera’s latest report; the site finished in the top 10 of about a dozen other markets as well. YouTube also fared well last fall in a Nielsen survey of mobile web usage, nearly tripling its audience in a year. And while Opera Mini users are increasingly watching YouTube, the release of the iPhone 3G S has helped to “exponentially” expand the site’s offerings by enabling users of the device to upload directly from their handsets.

I’ve long been skeptical of mobile video broadcasts that try to replicate traditional TV programming on a mobile phone — especially when those services are offered at a premium — but there’s strong evidence that a vast amount of demand exists for mobile Internet video. Stay tuned to Opera’s monthly reports to see how YouTube fares in coming months.

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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: Mobile Browsers, Mobile Video, Opera Mini

When it comes to buying content, consumers prefer to pick a bundle rather than buy à la carte, Daniel Taylor, a GigaOM Pro analyst, argues over at NewTeeVee. To bolster his argument, he used the example of paying for cable, rather than individual channels (even though folks are still agitating for à la carte pricing) and he discounts Apple’s impact on album sales as consumers buy only singles through iTunes. Instead, he focuses on the fact that most of a consumer’s household income goes toward buying bundled services rather than individual media products:

But if we look at the $553 billion U.S. digital home marketplace, consumers don’t spend that much money outside of bundles, as described in a new GigaOM Pro report (subscription required). Sales of individual media products — such as songs, albums, video games, software, DVDs, etc. — occupy less than 15 percent of consumer spending. Each month, the average U.S. household spends close to $250 on the quadruple play services that include: fixed-line telephony, wireless telephony, pay TV and Internet access. By comparison, that same household spends $13.75 buying music, $16 buying DVDs, and $70 on pay TV services. Herein lies the paradox. When we have the choice to spend for exactly what we want, we spend less. But given the choice between assembling our own bundle and buying one that someone else has built, we choose the latter. I can’t count the number of times I’ve given up on the dollar menu and selected a “combo” meal just to get through the line at the local drive-through. When the music industry was selling us albums, we’d buy an entire CD to get one or two songs. In a world of Internet downloads, we spend a couple of dollars on the one or two songs we know and give up on the rest of the album.

What his post doesn’t address, which I think is important, is that consumers still have to jump through a lot of hoops to assemble their best bundle today. That’s why it’s easier to subscribe to cable TV from a service provider to get the video content you want, rather than buy DVDs, subscribe to a variety of sports packages online, or hunt down last night’s episode of “30 Rock” on Hulu or YouTube. Or to bring it home to service providers that get $250 a month, it’s why most people choose to get a triple play rather than just broadband, because assembling the TV content and making sure the voice over IP phone service works is still too hard. People want what’s cheap and what’s easy, but mostly they just want what’s easy.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  10 Comments
Tags: Apple, Hulu, iTunes

Comcast may take on more than its network can handle by offering its cable TV via the web under its TV Everywhere program, which has me wondering if cable providers will weather the influx of TV content delivered over their data network as opposed to their video network. Unsurprisingly, Comcast and industry equipment vendors say the network will be just fine for TV Everywhere delivered as so-called over-the-top video.

But streaming potentially popular cable TV content over cable companies’ limited pipes could cause problems for the providers. Cable companies share the last-mile network among a certain number of homes, which is why one person uploading P2P files can seriously degrade the connection for other users. Plus, the companies usually allocate only one 6 MHz channel of their spectrum for data services, which translates to about 31Mbps throughput.

If you use a rough estimate of 2Mbps to 3Mbps as the amount of throughput needed for a single SD video stream and assume that 20 households in a 500-home node are trying to watch the stream, that would take up to 60Mbps of capacity. But that 60Mbps is now more than what is available in one DOCSIS channel, which means cable providers will have to allocate more spectrum resources for data. Cable providers maintain that this is all hypothetical and that anyone hoping to break the cable network would have to radically change their viewing habits. Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesman, says that the company isn’t concerned about the effect TV Everywhere will have on the network, and pointed me to a Nielsen report that showed that people watch only 3 hours of online video a month vs. 153 hours on their TVs.

On the technical side, a Motorola executive said that cable companies have several tools to make sure they spool out enough bandwidth resources to support a program like TV Everywhere. Cable companies can split the node, which essentially halves the number of homes that the equipment nearest the homes will serve, they can switch analog channels to digital ones, which are more efficient users of spectrum, and they can bond channels together if the provider introduces DOCSIS 3.0 to make faster pipes.

Floyd Wagoner, a director of marketing and communications for Motorola Access Networks Solutions, said these tools will allow the cable guys to meet demand for broadband at least for the next decade before they have to move to all-fiber networks. Most cable companies already have fiber in the ground to the head-end equipment, which helps them support efforts to deliver services that use more bandwidth. Motorola sells equipment to help cable companies implement these bandwidth-boosting steps.

Wagoner also notes that cable providers are vigilant watchers of their networks, and react swiftly as demand for broadband rises. Comcast’s Douglas declined to share the company’s forecast on how much bandwidth TV Everywhere would consume, but it’s safe to say it has predictions about how it will affect the network. As to how it will affect your bandwidth cap, well that’s a different story.

Bonus Link: An awesome bandwidth calculator on the Motorola web site lets you plug in estimates about the number of homes served, cable penetration (average is about 30 percent), and what type of speeds and concurrent use models are supported for data or streaming. In general, high-speed data averages a 2 percent concurrency and video on demand (which is closer to a streaming model) estimates a 10 percent concurrency.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: #ef09_newteevee, cmcsa, Comcast, feature, MOT, Motorola

LG's Bluetooth-enabled TV

Broadcom today said its Bluetooth radios are inside a new line of televisions from LG Electronics. Earlier this year, its Bluetooth radios made it into televisions from Sharp, while Samsung also has a Bluetooth-enabled TV. The movement to put Bluetooth — a radio technology popular in cell phones, cars and PCs — into television is gaining momentum, and for Bluetooth radio makers like Broadcom and CSR, it opens up a potentially valuable, new market. DisplaySearch, an analyst firm, expects 205.3 million TVs will sell worldwide in 2009.

Bluetooth on the TV gives consumers the ability to use their cell phones as a remote control, connect wireless headsets to the TV, and stream music from an iPod or other MP3 player to their television or speakers attached to their TV, all without a wire. A representative for the Bluetooth Special Interest Group expects to see more Bluetooth TVs coming to market later this year or early next year.

Bluetooth, which allows for small amounts of data to be transmitted wirelessly, is in 50 percent to 60 percent of cell phones. That could open up opportunities for companies that make both cell phones and televisions, such as LG and Samsung, to link the devices and use mobile phones as remote controls.  Companies like Rovi (formerly Macrovision) and NDS, which develop interactive on-screen guides for televisions, are exploring how to tie mobile phones into the TV-viewing experience.

A mobile phone tied to the TV would allow different users in the house to immediately bring up personalized profiles filled with content, recommendations and perhaps other social features when they watch television. Additionally, as search becomes more essential for wading through the massive video-verse, using a triple-tap keystroke input like that used for sending SMS messages would allow users to search for what they want to watch without requiring a full keyboard.

Consumers with Bluetooth-enabled PC keyboards (or full QWERTY keyboards on mobile phones) might use those to control the TV as well. Steve McIntyre, senior product line manager for wireless personal area networking products at Broadcom, said that Bluetooth radios are in a variety of existing equipment, so adding the radios to TVs allows consumers to add functionality to their television without buying a lot of new gear. Of course, one does have to purchase a new Bluetooth-capable TV.

Research firm In-Stat today released a report revealing that well over half of respondents in a survey owned a mobile phone with Bluetooth technology, with nearly 60 percent of them using it to connect a Bluetooth headset. As televisions get broadband connections, widgets and ever more content, figuring out ways to navigate TV 2.0 (GigaOMPro subscription required), while optimizing the traditional entertainment offered from the TV, makes Bluetooth a compelling technology to add to these 80-plus-year-old devices. It’s a good thing Bluetooth came back from the dead.

Additional reporting by Chris Albrecht.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: BRCM, Broadcom, CSR, Rovi

Verizon reported second-quarter results this morning, and saw revenue rise while profits fell. But those of us who care about the fate of broadband should note that the carrier is ramping up its fiber-to-the-home triple play — and likely stealing customers from cable providers. Verizon added 303,000 net new FiOS fiber-to-the-home Internet customers, to end the quarter with 3.1 million of them. That’s a 56 percent growth in subscribers from the previous year for the super-fast service. Verizon also added 300,000 net new FiOS TV customers, bringing its total to 2.5 million FiOS TV consumers by the end of the quarter — an 82 percent boost from the year prior.

FiOS, which is the driving force behind several cable operators’ planned DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades that will boost broadband speeds to 50Mbps or even 100Mbps, is putting pressure on the cable industry. FiOS Internet sales penetration (sales as a percentage of potential customers) increased to 28.1 percent, compared with 23.5 percent during the same period a year ago, while FiOS TV sales penetration increased to 24.6 percent, compared with 19.7 percent from the year before. FiOS TV service was available for sale to 10.3 million premises by the end of the quarter.

Some of that penetration growth appears to be coming at the expense of cable providers, although it’s hard to be sure because various cable operators don’t have footprints that directly compete with Verizon’s. However, Comcast which competes with Verizon in 12 percent of its footprint, has seen its video subscriber penetration fall to 47.5 percent in the first quarter of the year (it won’t report second-quarter results until Aug. 6) from 49.5 percent in the first quarter of 2008. On the broadband side, it’s faring better — having boosted its penetration to 30.2 percent for the first quarter of this year, up from 28.4 percent for the same period in 2008. That may be in part because of cable’s faster speeds when compared with regular DSL from telcos.

Cablevision, which competes with Verizon in 30 percent of its footprint and has been aggressive about countering FiOS speeds, has seen a 1.5 percent drop in penetration for video subscribers, according to its first-quarter 2009 results. (Cablevision reports second-quarter numbers on July 30.) As those cable providers start reporting their numbers, keep an eye on how penetration rates are faring. They may claim it’s a lousy economy, but FiOS may have something to do with it.

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Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere ";

Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  15 Comments
Tags: Cablevision, cmcsa, Comcast, CVC, Verizon, VZ

Akamai today said it would provide adaptive bit-rate streaming to deliver video content from web sites to the Apple iPhone 3G and devices running the iPhone OS 3.0 operating system. Basically, using adaptive bit-rate streaming means folks can watch streaming video on their iPhones or iPod Touches with fewer stops and starts. Adaptive streaming adjusts the video content to a lower or higher bit rate, depending on how robust the web connection is. Akamai offers a similar service for Microsoft’s Silverlight for video on PCs. Adobe Flash and Move Networks also offer adaptive bit-rate streaming, although Adobe uses a proprietary method that requires special servers.

Apple and Akamai are bringing the service to the mobile world, which will be great for dealing with the many variances in mobile data connections, and will provide for smoother video delivery over dodgy networks. Videos can run in the Safari browser, so they don’t even require a special app that AT&T, the carrier that provides service for the iPhone in the U.S., might try to block. For more details on this, check out the awesome story Liz did about HTTP video on the iPhone or her in-depth look at adaptive bit-rate streaming over at our subscription site, GigaOM Pro. For pretty video streaming, check out Apple and Akamai’s  show-and-tell site.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: AAPL, Adobe, AKAM, Akamai, Apple, iPhone, Microsoft, Move Networks, msft

In the market for a new TV? These days, there are bargains galore, especially when it comes to those with plasma screens. The Wall Street Journal reports that the growing popularity of their LCD cousins has TV makers such as Pioneer and Vizio phasing out their entire plasma TV line-ups. Others may soon follow suit. (Read an alternative take on the future of Plasma TVs.)

One can hardly blame them — there were 30 million LCD TVs sold in the U.S. in 2008 vs. 4 million plasma TVs, according to Display Search, a market research company. That’s quite a comedown for a technology that once represented the cutting edge of the display market.

Plasma is made of cells. Each cell is essentially two plates of glass filled with neon-xenon gas that is electrically charged, which then strikes phosphors on the screen and that in turns displays the image. LCD panels in comparison are made of two layers of transparent material where one of the layers is coated with a special polymer that holds liquid crystals. Electric current is passed through these crystals which either pass the light or stop it, there by creating an image. (From About.com)

I remember when plasmas trumped LCDs by a mile, both in terms of picture quality and viewing angle. There were some problems with them, of course — they generated too much heat and static images burned into the screen, limiting their lifespan. They’ve since improved a lot, but so have LCDs, which by comparison have better contrast, sharper images and higher refresh rates. NewTeeVee back in February saw the demise of Pioneer’s Kuro TV line-up as a sign that plasma TVs would go the way of the buggy whip.

I paid an ungodly amount of money for a 42-inch plasma screen TV in 2002, only to sell it on Craigslist for a third of that price when I moved to San Francisco in March 2003. It taught me a valuable lesson: Televisions (and most consumer electronics) lose value really quickly, so there’s no point in overpaying by buying the latest and greatest. (I leave that for cell phones, computers and headphones.) Today, I have a 50-inch Panasonic LCD TV — not exactly the best on the market, but it does a fine job as a display for my DVD player and my Apple TV.

Now I’m getting ready to move to a bigger apartment. This would give me a chance to buy another television, this time for the bedroom. I’m thinking about buying a cheap plasma TV — just for old times sake. After all, it will be obsolete by the time I’m ready to move again so I won’t feel that bad about losing my investment.

P.S.: In case you’re still wrestling with which TV — LCD or plasma — to buy, CNet has a handy comparison guide.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  18 Comments
Tags: LCD TVs, Pioneer Kuro, plasma tv

NBC Universal General Counsel Rick Cotton, speaking at the Digital Media Conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, brushed off concerns that the deal between Comcast and Time Warner to test the feasibility of TV Everywhere was a first step toward bringing TV on the Internet under the control of Big Media.

“I know there’s been some static in the system that says this will somehow limit access to content online, but this is about increasing access,” Cotton said. “These are subscription networks now so it’s not really a big surprise that they would be subscription networks online as well.” He also shrugged off fears that the collaboration between programmers like Time Warner and ISPs like Comcast represented some sort of unholy cabal worthy of antitrust scrutiny from the government.

“They shouldn’t have called it TV Everywhere because what we’re really talking about is cable TV everywhere,” Cotton told me after his panel. “The idea is you would go to Fancast, or to Hulu, and there would be free content, just as there is now, and there would be subscription content, which you could access if you’re a subscriber.” It’s just like cable TV, he said. “There’s free, over-the-air content, but there’s also subscription content you can get by subscribing to cable.” The deals between subscription network owners and web video portals, he suggested, would be no different from the perfectly legal deals that currently exist between the networks and cable MSOs.

Maybe, but that’s only the simplest use case being discussed. What happens when we get to Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes’ nirvana where any multichannel video subscriber — whether to cable, satellite or telco TV — can access any of the content they subscribe to from anywhere on the web, whether directly through an ISP, through a web portal like Hulu or on mobile platforms? Apart from the sheer complexity of such a system, making it work will require a degree of information-sharing among nominal competitors that practically begs for antitrust scrutiny.

Let’s say I want to catch up with a missed episode of “In Treatment” by watching it online. I go to a web portal — we’ll call it YooHoo — and find the episode. Since I pay for HBO through my Comcast cable subscription I ought to be able to access the episode, presumably by typing in a password or some other authentication method. For that to work, however, YooHoo has to know something about my relationship with Comcast. Maybe Comcast owns YooHoo, in which case, no problem. But what if some other media company owns it? It now has access to information about my Comcast subscription.

Now let’s say I leave the house and want to access the same episode on my handheld device using Verizon Wireless’ V-Cast service. Now Verizon has to know something about my relationship, either with Comcast or with YooHoo — or both. Apart from whether that’s something Comcast would want to do — Verizon has recently begun soliciting me with offers for FiOS, after all — what we’re really talking about is multiple competing service providers sharing information with each other (or with the same third party) about prices, payments, customer service and behavior and all sorts of other data.

Such a system would just be ripe for abuse, even if intentions were pure going in. And it would only get worse as the number of ways to access the content increased. Of course, you could always break up the vertical monopolies among programmers, distributors and service providers and the problem would be solved, but somehow I don’t think that’s what Bewkes and Cotton are talking about.

Paul Sweeting is the author of The Media Wonk blog. He’s covered digital media and policy issues for over a decade.

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Posted by Paul Sweeting on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  18 Comments
Tags: #ef09_newteevee, Comcast, Digital Media Conference, feature, NBC Universal, Rick Cotton, Time Warner, tv everywhere

YouTube is much closer to breaking even than widely thought, says a firm with intimate knowledge of global infrastructure costs. A widely publicized Credit Suisse report that said Google would lose $470 million on the site this year neglected to account for factors such as peering traffic, wholesale bandwidth deals and cheap data center locations. Where the bank said YouTube’s costs will amount to $711 million in 2009, RampRate, a San Francisco-based company that advises large companies on IT infrastructure, says the actual cost is $415 million.

Given Credit Suisse’s revenue estimate for YouTube, that would give the site an operating loss of $174 million this year. If you use other people’s revenue numbers — for instance, Jefferies said $500 million — the site would actually turn a profit.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  9 Comments