Medialoper

We're Not Who You Think We Are

Jim Connelly

HD DVR: Hi Definition Disappointment Part 2

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Recently, I wrote about how disappointed I was with my first cable company-supplied Hi-Definition DVR.  My main issues were that, compared to the Replay I had been using for several years, the actual functionality and usability were a huge step downwards.  In addition, the cable guy kept going on about how it just too bad that I wasn’t getting something called the “Moxi,” which he said was much better.

And he was right: after being contacted by a guy from the company that made the Moxi,  I did some research, and, yup, it pretty much has all of the features I want.  Fat lot of good that does me.  After all, it’s not like its easy to find a day to unhook everything, wait for another cable guy; rebuild my entire setup, and learn yet another DVR. 

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered even more issues with the Scientific Atlanta box:

  • Nowhere does the cable guide tell you whether an episode of show is a repeat or a first-run episode.  
  • If a show I’m normally recording is being pre-empted by another show, the cable guide still shows that the timeslot is going to be recorded. 
  • For the NBC HD Channels, the sound doesn’t sync up with the picture.  The Olympics were on when I wrote that first post, so I had no cause to record any NBC shows, but since then, it gets very annoying when sound gags on Scrubs don’t match the visuals.  Or this upcoming weekend when Arctic Monkeys play SNL. It’s only NBC HD — nobody else — so I don’t know if the problem is with the cable box, Charter, our local affiliate, or NBC itself.  All I know is that it’s dammed annoying.
  • Finally, despite all of this, our cable bill has risen $20 (twice as much as they told me it would) and — best of all there is a line item on the bill for DVR Moxi Service.  That’s right: it looks like I’m being charged for the thing that I didn’t even get.

So I’m thinking that rather than upgrading to the Moxi, if we’re going to make that much effort, we might as well switch to the satellite company that has the TiVo HD DVR.

Origami Photos

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A PC World blog has published photos of a pair of Origami devices — including the Samsung Q1 — on display at the CeBIT electronics show in Germany. It’s really hard to tell much from the photographs, which look like they were taken surreptitiously with a cellphone, and kinda have same perspective as pictures from Mars: is that rock 3ft tall or 300ft tall.

In any event, an accompanying article explains the following:

  • It’s a handheld, measuring 6″x8″
  • They are calling it an “ultramobile device”
  • It runs a “special” edition of XP
  • It will support WLAN; bluetooth & 802.11
  • It will have an XP independent multimedia player
  • It will have camera, GPS & gaming functionality

What the article didn’t explain, and I guess is up to Microsoft’s marketing department, is exactly why I might need one. However, that didn’t stop Microsoft’s stock from going up after the announcement.

A History of the Ricky Gervais Show

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As these things go, I’m a relative latecomer to the podcasts of The Ricky Gervais Show: I only got ’round to listening to them a couple of weeks ago. Better still, I came into it totally cold, not knowing what to expect, and I was instantly hooked on the mad ramblings of Karl Pilkington.  So much so, that as a matter of fact, I have no issues with paying for the podcasts of the second season.

It totally passes my Blackjack test:  do I anticipate getting more pleasure out of this than playing a single hand of Blackjack?  And in this case, the answer is a resounding “yes.” To be fair, Ricky was on Letterman last week, and explained that they are charging for this season to recoup the hosting and bandwidth costs for all of the downloads.

However, for those of you who don’t want to pay for your monkeynews, or you want to see to find out what the buzz is all about  prior to  paying — it looks like the Podcast Series  1 archive will also cost $5 to grab in one fell swoop — I’ve discovered a secret online stash of dozens of episodes of The Ricky Gervais Show.

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It’s All About the UI

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Here’s an interesting little tidbit: a recent study showed that nearly half of all products returned to stores for malfunctions worked just fine – the problem was that the users couldn’t figure out how to get them to work.

While we all still laugh at jokes about the “any” key; VCRs flashing 12:00 for eternity; and RTFM; the simple fact is that this is not user error, but poor design. In terms of users, we are talking about people who know that they are living in the middle of a technological revolution, who have installed software, set up home entertainment systems, built their own networks; entered numbers into their cellphones and filled up their iPods. These are the people having the problems:

The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working, before giving up, the study found.

Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how cool your gadget is, how fast it is and how many bells and whistles it has the bottom line for everything is User Interface, because if the user can’t find all of that great stuff, they are just going to give up. As we get deeper into the convergence of communication, services and entertainment into single handheld devices, those who define and design those products would do well to pay attention to studies like this, or the convergence revolution could be stillborn.

Hi Def DVD Roundup: March 05, 2006

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Because we love nothing more than to watch major corporations kill a good idea with a bunch of petty squabbling, here is some of the recent news on the HD DVD front . . .

Philips to Introduce Blu-ray Disc Products and Media – Philips is, of course, one of the big Blu-ray heavyweights, and they are going to announce a player, a PC drive and new writable media. None of which, of course, will be inexpensive.
Subpar wars: high-resolution-disc formats fight each other, consumers push back – Here’s a hardcore techhie look at both formats, the issues surrounding the formats, and why the copy protection schemes could sink both.

Toshiba Plans HD DVD Marketing Blitz: Because nothing says “please choose our next generation HD DVD format over Sony’s” like a tour of the United States. Tickets are available at Tickmaster, I guess. This major corporation’s tour is sponsored, strangely enough, by The Rolling Stones.

LG Kills Blu-ray model, considers combo player – Just two months after showing it off at CES, LG has decided to kill its Blu-ray only HD DVD player, considering a dual-format player, instead. This might be the type of thinking that will actually save HD DVD: keeping the fallout of the format wars away from the consumer. Y’all remember the consumer, right? Right?

    Major Labels Colluding? Same As it Ever Was

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    Have you ever wondered why it costs roughly the same for you to purchase a CD of, say, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde — an universally acknolwedged classic of 75 minutes of sublime music, and Bob Dylan’s Down in the Groove — a universally acknowedged piece of crap that barely breaks a half-hour?  As a music fan, of course, you’ve probably come to expect that all albums, then CDs, then downloads all cost pretty much the same. It’s just that some enrich your life forever and others get you maybe a buck and for sure a snide look from the guy at the used CD counter. 

    In a lot of ways, this pricing is kind of like paying the same amount of money for a McDonald’s hamburger and a Prime porterhouse at Morton’s.  Only in entertainment do we risk essentially the same money for such wildly varying degrees of pleasure.  Part of that is wrapped up in our understanding of art:  not even the greatest are great every time out — and of course, to be fair, even Down in the Groove no doubt has its defenders — but part of that is wrapped up in the methods of those who control the distribution.  

    In this case, that would be the major labels — these days they are configured as such:  SonyBMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner — in the past, configured differently, but it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is, no matter how they are configured, from the consumer standpoint they’ve artificially set the prices to be the same, regardless of quality, regardless of manufacture cost, regardless of length (except that a 80-minute double-CD could be sold for twice as much as a 78-minute single CD), regardless of just about anything.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end amen.

     

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    “I heard that we’ve sold over a million downloads”

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    That, my friends, is a million downloads of a television show — the U.S. version of The Office, which in its second season, has come into its own, both critically and commercially.

    It’s always great when quality and popularity intersect, especially when they intersect in a show that nobody really gave a chance to succeed. So how did the U.S. version of The Office get to be so great? In a long interview with Television Without Pity’s co-founder Wing Chun, writer and actor B.J. Novak (he plays Ryan, the temp) holds forth on such topics as:

    • Living in the shadow of the Ricky Gervais version
    • All of those downloads.
    • Improvisation on the set.
    • Michael’s man-crush on Ryan.
    • Why their move to Thursday nights makes sense.

    Nothing, alas, on the Prism Durosport. Nevertheless, from my standpoint, it’s beginning to look like The Office is going to end up being the greatest cover version of a stone-cold classic since Husker Du’s “Eight Miles High.”

    YouTube: Rattle and Hum

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    Lots of recent sabre-rattling directed at YouTube, who have come out of nowhere to be the one of the most-trafficked video web sites. In the past couple of weeks, they’ve been hit with a pair of high-profile “get that thing off of your site” letters from uptight copyright holders, making people wonder if they can avoid being tagged the “Video Napster.”

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    Does TV Want to be Free?

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    The L.A Times has an article today pointing out that TV execs are having a devil of a time convincing people that when they download a television show from, say, BitTorrent, that they are stealing that show.  In a weird way, it’s a problem that the TV industry created itself: for over a half-century, we’ve been told that, unlike a song, or a film, or a book, or a videogame — that show you are watching is free. 

    You the consumer aren’t paying for it, but rather the advertiser(s) who sponsoring that show, hoping to get you to purchase their product(s).  My guess is that this is a model that is rapidly becoming outdated, and we are lurching toward a totally new era, where how we consume TV will be more like how we consume other media products. 

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    Following “Bubble” through the Window

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    Just a few scant weeks after Steven Soderbergh’s “Bubble” was available simultaneously to theatres, cable and video, here comes another major test for what they are calling the “day and date” strategy of multi-platform releasing.   IFC and Comcast have announced a deal to release several indie films this year to both their theatres and cable on-demand services on the same day.

    “Bubble” could have been written-off as an anomaly, a confluence of a maverick director and a maverick eccentric billionaire (Mark Cuban), but this, my friend, this is a trend.

    And it will work because indie film people who live in areas who that don’t have a lot of theatres that show indie film, but happen to have Comcast cable (like, say, in Fresno, California) can watch the first-run movies that they’ve been reading about on various film sites and not have to wait months for the DVD to show up.

    This could be the same boon to indie film that iTunes and eMusic are to indie rock.