Jennlog

I lied in my previous post. I said that I would be sharing some thoughts about my Whole Media Show and Conference concept, but I need to provide some background first.

During my GWH&A/Hallmark Interactive days, I came up with a diagram that went into a white paper I wrote about our Associative Media Platform architecture. This diagram eventually made it into our AMP patent application (USPTO 2005/0060640) — and with a few tweaks for the purposes of generalization, the diagram remains a useful aid in sharing my media relationship philosophy.

Anatomy of a Media Relationship

First and foremost, media is a relationship between a producer and a consumer (or subscriber). From a story shared around a fire 2000 years ago to a video shared over the Internet today — media is about a creator and a consumer — everything and everyone else facilitates this relationship.

Secondly, devices and infrastructure are commodities that are used in the formation and extension of media relationships. People do not purchase devices or subscribe to infrastructure services for the sake of owning a device or pleasure of viewing blinking LEDs. Devices enable consumers to retrieve, receive and enjoy media (and yes, also create media as producers) — computers, ipods, televisions, stereos and movie theaters are all devices. Infrastructure also enables consumers to retrieve, receive and enjoy media by providing a transport for media from the producer to the consumer’s device — CDs, DVDs, motion picture film, the Internet, FedEx trucks, and mobile data networks are all infrastructure.

From the Producer’s vantage, a deliberate conformation of media towards exclusive devices or a restricted availability upon infrastructure platforms can destroy the possibility of maintaining a consumer’s connection to media product across devices and/or infrastructure.

In an ideal media world, decisions and accommodations concerning the device and the infrastructure would not exist. Media would truly exist within a direct relationship with subscribers. Relationship constraints that affect the delivery and enjoyment of media products would be dynamically assessed and media products prepared for the subscriber’s environment.

- A consumer could begin watching a film at a theater with friends, leave early — continue to watch on a bus ride home on a mobile phone, and finish watching it on her television and yet use the media product within linear (or even non-linear) license boundaries set by the producer.

- A consumer could select whether he would pay “in-full” for their media products, pay “in-part” for his media products and either participate in promotions or agree to receive an advertising-based subsidy — or some dynamic mixture of the two within a-la carte purchases/opportunities and/or package subscriptions independent of delivery.

A consumer would have the ultimate control over her device preferences and pay her infrastructure providers of choice for the utility of packet/cell/frame distribution.

Subscriber identity would be liberated from the infrastructure operators and devices (IMEI/ESN, MAC, IP) and instead be released to subscribers at the application layer. Identity would be utilized within media use, rather than connectivity status or device ownership.

The media marketplace (and industry as a whole) is broken. The media producers’ adherence (or possibly obligation) to the kings of outmoded infrastructure has precluded their monetized (modeled) inclusion within and upon new infrastructure as they evolve.

Media producers should be leading the evolution of availability, sustainability and accountability. Media should be exciting for consumers not an invitation to litigation.

Jenn’s Transpatial Office

I was looking for a photo to update my Twitvatar and found this photo in my photos directory. To the left is a Mackie mixer, audio and video processing and recording decks, the monitors on the desk are (from left to right) a Xing MPEG-1 StreamServer, SGI Indy (w/Indycam) and Windows 95 (w/Quikcam).

I formed Transpatial Media Corporation with Warp 10 Technologies to develop a distributed streaming management system that unified acquisition and distribution of media created for Multicast (MBone), the various “V”s (Vstream, VXtreme, Vivoactive, Vosaic, VDO), Progressive/Real Networks, CU-See Me and Microsoft NetShow platforms into a common interface.

Stream Studio

Due to the state of A/V, computing and Internet technology, we were forced to use a ton of equipment including CSU/DSUs, Routers, a Rackmount PC for each format and a rackmount UNIX server to interface to the Transpatial management system. The photo to the right was my first modular design for a Transportable Streaming Studio for distributing events via IP networks.

I was hoping to eventually connect the system to a fly-away satellite uplink kit, but the satellite operators weren’t going to understand IP until much later in the future.

I haven’t flown much this last year and a half, but the thing that always annoyed me about the Denver airport was the lack of free Internet access — Inside the Red Carpet Club, or outside in the main terminal areas.

I was a United 1K and Red Carpet Club member until the beginning of this year — I travelled domestically and internationally a ton, so I spent a bunch of time in the DEN Red Carpet Club and in the terminals.

Nothing annoyed me more than being in a lounge I was paying for already, and being asked for my credit card so I could check my email and do other assorted things — especially while the other Star Alliance partners and other large international Airlines rarely charge for Wi-Fi access in their lounges.

Denver International Airport officially announced that they were no longer charging for their Internet access, and have experienced a 10x increase in users since it went free. Travel is now just a little less painful for all of us in Colorado who fly with a computer, iPhone or LocationFree TV.

I seem to remember the Daily Camera article (I am locked out of the Daily Camera website and need an account now?) quoting a DEN spokesperson saying that they went free because it would allow the airport to better serve their customers and they wanted to be a leading-edge airport.

Maybe this statistic expressing a 10x growth in users will assist United and other US carriers find a more helpful approach to providing Internet access to their lounge membership. Maybe this news will assist other airports in freeing the Wi-Fi hostages in airport lounges. Only time will tell.

No, I don’t own an iPhone. But, I did buy a Blackberry Curve in September. This is the third bill I’ve received, and the previous ones were at the most 10 pages.

Thankfully, AT&T has the environment at heart and will be removing pages documenting itemized details in the “coming months”.

I can’t figure out anything that I may have done differently last month, except for keep the Curve in the non-Faraday Cage area of my house. It might also be related to the lack of any recent “Network Errors” requiring a battery-removing hard reboot.

Regardless, I don’t see any logic in documenting single packet-sized (1KB) data transactions. Most lines in this 95 page bill are 1KB requests (marked as “Out”).

Itemizing the origination and receipt of 1KB packets on a bill is a very “Bell-shaped Head” way of thinking about the Internet.

Personally, I will welcome our new wireless data overlords as soon as they invade.

Last week, I cancelled my DirecTV service. The three months of “Vacation” from DirecTV that I arranged over the summer proved to me that I can successfully live without cable and satellite television. The WGA strike’s affect on the more random, transient programming I watch didn’t hurt either.

Don’t get me wrong, I still watch television shows — and, lucky for me my favorite “Must Watch” network shows are programmed and provided by NBC, FOX and ABC and not CBS.

I say lucky for me, because the video quality on CBS’s “Innertube” service has left me feeling that CBS hates the Internet, hates their viewers or both.

Today, I decided to check out that much-hyped CBS reality show where the show producers abandon 40 or so kids in some ghost town with a hope that they go all Lord of the Flies on one another.

I notice a change almost immediately in CBS’s feed. Maybe they dumped the Real Networks-based streaming service and its constant “buffering…” messages that annoyed me the last time I wrote about Internet televsion?

CBS replaced the “buffering… buffering… buffering… ” with — well… — I’ve recorded a 30-second audio sample (yes, the video was just as poor as the audio). Various press releases state that move networks (the service that really impressed me with their ABC and FOX stream delivery) now includes CBS as one of their clients, so this quality problem would appear to be CBS-originated rather than a move networks problem. Which is good, because I really like the other stuff move networks delivers to my house.

Anatomy of an Internet Television Show

NBC (Ignore the downloadable shows, they’re only for Microsoft owners using the Windows-only version of the Internet), FOX and ABC place complete episodes of most of their interesting shows on the web.

Most of the network streaming services make you watch the same commercial five or six times in the place of the twenty minutes of commercials you’d normally see during a one hour show, with ABC being the only network mixing in their own show promotions with the commercials.

I actually prefer this approach to traditional advertiser-supported television. If an advertiser wants to pay a network some money in exchange for me to view an episode’s worth of tv, even if there’s no chance in hell of me ever buying or using that product, then good for them and great for me. I’ll take six 15 second commercials in exchange for twenty minutes of random interruptions any day.

So, what do I watch?

NBC

• Heroes
• 30 Rock
• NBC Nightly News

FOX

• The Simpsons
• Bones
• House
• Kitchen Nightmares
• Hell’s Kitchen (Hell’s Kitchen link currently plays American Dad)

ABC

• Grey’s Anatomy

CBC
(the trick is to click pause and let the show download first)

• The National
• Toronto 6pm News (when it works)

Shows I can live without, but wish were available online:

Bravo

• Project Runway
• Top Chef

FX

• The Riches

Local News

I live next to the foothills in Boulder within an apparent RF deadzone (ask any cab driver trying to bill my credit card at my house). I wish there was one local Denver TV station that streamed or allowed the download of local news rather than splitting their stories into tiny clips as added “multimedia rich media extras” linked from Web pages.

This seems to be a solution to the problem of not being near a computer to post something really important to your blog — right now.

Yahoo, Google and several others have connected IVRS (Interactive Voice Response Services) proxies to Live Journal and other Blogging systems for years. It’s a really neat trick and provides an extra interface into “The Conversation”.

I just can’t get over feeling like I’m listening to someone else’s voice mail.

The above statement was said by Mark Cuban at the CTAM (Cable Television Association for Marketing) Summit. Multichannel News reports he also declared, “The Internet’s dead. It’s over” and states that the only “new application” to emerge is YouTube.

Now, I realize that Mark was in a room full of cable industry execs and it would seem a likely place for him (or anyone) to announce that the Internet is dead and cable supreme, but what was he thinking?

There are dozens of new services using peer-to-peer technologies — like Joost, Grid Networks and Vuze to name just three. Pre-Internet, these services would not have been allowed to exist in a cable environment unless:

1. the peer points existed on closed cable-owned and operated boxes
2. used software owned and installed by the cable company
3. only transfered media content that the cable company allowed subscribers to see (i.e. was compensated by media owners to deliver to subscribers)

There are dozens of new services that enable interactivity in the television-like world of broadband video distribution, for example:

1. viddler (timeline tags — your own personal MST3K)
2. brightcove (create a “channel”, monetize the channel and analyze statistics)
3. Digg Video (influence the video zeitgeist)
4. podcasting (be the tv)

Cable has done a really poor job of growing beyond their passive media delivery roots (of replicating the original passive over-the-air public broadcast in a private wire-bound spectrum).

It’s not coincidental that the number of “Interactive Television” startups exploded simultaneously to the acceptance and popularization of IP, the Internet and WWW as a communications and interactive media. The cable industry facilitated the creation of ITV Hype 2.0 (in the early 90s, ITV Hype 1.0 didn’t go so well) because if they didn’t they would have lost even more ad dollars and eyeballs to the Internet.

We’ve seen ten years since the mainstreaming of the Internet (and ITV Hype 2.0) and the open Internet is well into “Web 2.0″ while cable is still struggling with delivering the promise of “Interactivity 1.0″ (beyond pointing and clicking a remote to select a PPV on-demand movie — yay interactive tv!).

On the other hand, if Multichannel News misquoted Mark and his statement was restricted to the distribution and use of passive high definition television — he is correct, the Internet doesn’t enable the sustained distribution of 19.2mbps MPEG2 transport streams to the home in 99.99% of the world’s cities.

But the number and quality of pixels displayed on a television set does not equate to the sum total of the visual media experience. At the 1999 National Association of Broadcasters show, my team proved the acceptable visual media experience is flexible and will adapt to low quality if the subject matter is exclusive, informative and/or compelling.

The Internet allows for a much wider variety of exclusive, informative and compelling media. The Internet delivers this media to an ever increasing number of devices and network architectures.

Cable offers… Pay Per View… to your television.

I’ve been watching quite a lot of television on the web since I put my DirecTV service on hiatus for the summer.

Thus far, I think the winning implementation for delivering on-demand television to the web is Move Networks. The shows (sometimes) available from my local Fox station are next to flawless and really enjoyable experience.

In contrast, the worst experience by a wide margin can be found on CBS’s “innertube”. The CBS television experience features hundreds of “Buffering… Buffering… Buffering…” waits between random akamai/doubleclick errors* and dozens of CBS web server-based “slow script”** errors. When did Akamai and Real Networks begin to suck so much?

And what is up with the web television commercials that have the audio cranked to 11? One word for you web television services: “NORMALIZATION”. Seriously, the audio on some of these commercials is at least three times louder than your programming content. Computer users should not have to leap to their volume controls in an attempt to prevent their speakers from being destroyed every time a commercial starts streaming.

I can’t wait until web television/IPTV content aggregators decide to apply some quality control to their products. This industry technology left the experimental stage more than ten years ago.

Peer-to-peer television holds great promise, but the most popular solutions all seem to require Microsoft Windows or Intel CPUs at this time. I wonder if Broadcast TV would have been as popular if NBC programming was limited to General Electric TV sets and shows on ABC were only compatible with RCA sets?

Web Television has a long way to go.

* “RealPlayer: Connection to server has timed out. You may be experiencing network problems. rtsp://a1770.v219276.c21927.g.vr.akamaistream,net/ondemand/7/1770/21827/v7201400/
cmscomstor.download.akamai.com/8605/_!/g2demand/entertainment/primetime/bigbrother8/
rebroadcast/ep05/bigbro805d.rm?auth=daEcObMbEb.dwbkaWb1cLbncHaadMcsddai-bgOq2X-buy-EaEncVlg&aifp=v07201400”

** “A script on the page CBS.com - Innertube http://www.cbs.com/innertube/player.php?cat=140205&vid=&format=&auto=1 is making Safari unresponsive. Do you want to continue running the script, or stop it?“

All the hype about Apple’s iPhone has me thinking about a device so cool and useful that I would do just about anything to own one. These are the features such a device would have:

Form factor

1. The device would be about the size of an iPhone and weigh no more than 4oz.

Interface

1. A high-definition screen, larger than 240×320 pixels — preferably 480×720 at 180dpi or higher. It would work in both portrait and landscape orientations.
2. There would be on-screen virtual keys and also connect to a bluetooth keyboard.
3. It would accept voice commands, including voice dialing.
4. It would be capable of connecting to a bluetooth headset
5. The video could be output into an external monitor (think airlines / desktops / tvs)
6. The OS and Applications windowing API would allow for slick and reactive experience.

Memory and Storage

1. There would be at least 2GB of RAM
2. There would be at least 20GB of stateful storage (disk or solid state).
3. There should also be a USB2.0 or Firewire port for external storage
4. There should also be an API available to connect to WebFS or some other remote IP-based storage service.

Power

1. The battery should be removable, with spares sold as accessories.
2. Battery life should average 8-10 hours, regardless of voice or video use.
3. There should be modular mains connectivity for worldwide AC options.
4. There should be an option for Car, Boat and Plane DC power connectivity.

Multimedia

1. There would be a camera with a resolution of at least 2MP. This would be used for taking photos or capturing video.
2. It should be able to receive streaming video from files or broadcast
3. It should be able to address my home media server(s) through a tethered sync or from any IP network
4. there would be a stereo microphone.
5. There would be sound input (line and mic) and output jacks (line and headphone).
6. There would be a hardware OpenGL 3D render engine.
7. There would be hardware H.264/MPEG 4 encoding and decoding. A FPGA/Media ASIC for future codec compatibility

Applications

   Productivity

1. Email should be compatible with IMAP(S), POP3(S) and Exchange over IP
2. Calendar should sync over IP with Exchange, .Mac, Yahoo or Google calendars and also have the option to sync via tether to my local Outlook/iCal
3. My address/phone book, notes and lists should also sync over IP and/or tether.
4. I should be able to plug in a GPS USB key and tie location into meetings/events in my calendar
5. There should be an option to perform the above securely (OpenSSL, MSFT VPN and Cisco VPN compatible)
6. The geek in me also wishes an SSH client — because my productivity often relies upon a command line.

   Internet

1. There should be a full featured web browser with Javascript, Flash and a full Java Runtime Environment
2. There should be freedom for developers to develop for the device platform, release open source applications or commercial applications as they desire
3. There should be freedom for consumers to use open source or commercial applications upon the device as they desire
4. There should be an open API that Internet software can utilize to plug into the camera, microphones, USB and A/V ports.

   Voice Calling

1. 100% Voice over IP.
2. Roaming and Long Distance constraints and rules would not be tied to the device.
3. The phone number or network address should be temporarily or permanently assignable to other IP-based devices

   Video Calling/Conferencing/Receiving

1. 100% Video over IP.
2. Compatible with other IP-based video calling and conferencing standards as they are adopted
3. Compatible (and addressable at no extra cost) with my IP Video Television services and subscriptions

Network Plan

1. Membership/Subscription/Identification/Access Control should be performed and verified at the personal level rather than the device level. I should be able to replace my IP Communications device freely without pre-notifying the network operator and having to negotiate new device credentials.
2. The communications device will never ever register itself on a cell/mobile operator’s voice network. Ideally, there will be no “Home Network” registration required and therefore no need to roam.
3. The network service will actually be a network access aggregator who, through relationships with WiMax and WiFi network operators, will ensure that I have a near-seemless worldwide access experience at a flat rate price.
4. There is no mandatory application or service feature bundling requirement from the network operator or aggregator. I am free to form application delivery relationships with anyone I wish, worldwide (including VOIP and Television).
5. I am free to use any network-delivered applications or device-based features I wish without network owner/operator/aggregator interference.

Price

1. The base device MSRP should be US$700.00 or less.
2. The network subscription fee should be US$100.00/mo. or less.
3. Alternately, network subscription fees could be subsidized by ads or traceable in-network affiliate-like purchase agreements or gifting by other services
4. Application subscriptions should be US$20.00/mo. or less — or ad supported, or free.

Last iPhone post of the day.

It dawned on me, while I was reading another blog, that 1. AT&T owns and/or operates a rather large 10,000 hotspot WiFi network in the US (and possibly provides access to more through roaming partnerships); and 2. they aren’t bundling access into it for iPhone users.

This is incredibly dumb. AT&T had a killer opportunity to market their first “Wireless Double Play” device and access package and they blew it. AT&T already allows their DSL customers to access the AT&T WiFi network for an additional charge of $1.99 every month.

Someone at AT&T must have championed the “ancillary revenue” angle over delivering a practical solution and enabling customer convenience. Or, it could just be another example of one half of a large company not wanting to play nice with the other half. Or something.

The best WiFi deal for world travelers is the worldwide Wi-Fi service from Boingo Wireless for a flat rate subscription cost of US$39/mo. It includes unlimited roaming at over 100,000 hotspots around the world.