Week One of the Age of iPad was barely weekended when Keith Olbermann was removed from his position at NBC/Comcast. I missed his final show, mostly because I stopped watching it and all the cable news channels once the election was over. But then I remembered we are now in the Age of iPad, and guess what I found when I turned on Apple TV. There it was right in the podcasts section, ready to stream.
Parsing the language I heard the same thing we heard earlier when Steve Ballmer fired Bob Muglia, when Eric Schmidt was kicked “upstairs,” when I was asked to leave along with my wife and a friend from the Crunchies because the room was too full. In the last case, I refused to move, waiting until the venue manager moved on to people more her size. I wonder what would have happened if Muglia just said, no, Steve. I’m not going anywhere.
We’ll get back to Eric and the boys in a minute, but in the Age of iPad, all is not as it seems. Take Olbermann for instance: firing him seems like exactly what NBC doesn’t want. It dredges up the recent Leno fiasco in a visceral way, suggesting that even if Conan’s new show might as well be emanating from Siberia, at least he suffered no bad will for telling NBC where they should get off. By contrast, I wouldn’t touch NBC at 11:30 with someone else’s hard disk. → Read More
Seas0nPass is an Apple TV jailbreak app that allows for a quick, painless jailbreak on most systems, thereby allowing you to install “extra” apps including XBox Media Center, Boxee, and Plex. You can download the application here and instructions for use appear here. It is OS X-only right now although future versions should run on Windows. What does jailbreaking really get you? Sadly, very little right now except a slightly buggy version of media streamer Plex and SSH access to the box. With the hard drive removed, there is precious little space on the Apple TV and, whereas previous jailbreaks allowed you to upload non-iTunes video the the device, the new homebrew apps allow only for the streaming of previously unavailable files. → Read More
God bless 2010 as the year when everybody, including Twitter, caught up to Twitter. Now that we know the importance of streaming realtime, what are we going to do with it? I’ve been doing some thinking as I recover from a pinched nerve that has made it agony to do anything other than feel sorry for myself. Thanks to painkillers, acupuncture, and the iPad, I’m slowly regaining most everything but my sense of humor.
Luckily, the world continues to provide comedy (Rose Parade announcer Bob Eubanks tagging a marching band version of I Want to Hold Your Hand by hoping Stevie Wonder was listening) as we struggle to graft new technologies onto old memories and habits. Twitter provided a running commentary on this effort, from the 3D version of the Yuletime burning logs channel to Yoko suggesting John would have loved Twitter and Facebook. It certainly would have shortened the Lost Weekend. Imagine (cough) his tweet stream: Crawled off to sleep in the bath, isn’t it good @NorwegianWood. → Read More
Say you’re buying a TV – any TV, really – and you’re not quite sure what you’re doing. Say you’re in a store and the sales guy says “Well, you want this to be a Smart TV, right?” and you, not knowing any better, agree. Then he upsells this dumb LG box that simply adds LG’s Smart TV offerings including LG’s apps and some DLNA support. And you go home and realize that it’s just a dumbed-down Roku, Western Digital, or Seagate box. Heck, it’s even worse than Apple TV and the new one, barring the obvious hacked value, is pretty boring and is still better than this. You’ve been played. → Read More
Apple just issued a release announcing that it expects to sell one million units of its newly released Apple TV later this week. Apple also announced that iTunes users are now renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day.
As of mid-October, Apple has sold around 250,000 new Apple TVs, which were released to the public in late September. During Apple’s third quarter earnings call, Apple CEO Steve Jobs commented on the new version of Apple TV, “It’s a great product and its $99 price point is very enticing.” → Read More
I wonder if we might be getting a little causation mixed in with our correlation here. Roku’s CEO has noted that when the Apple TV launched at the beginning of September, Roku sales saw a jump. I mean, not like day-of (though maybe a little, since we gave the little box a big plug at the time), but since that time, sales have actually doubled. → Read More
Editor’s note: Online video is going through many changes as people begin to connect their TVs to the Internet and social sharing over Facebook and Twitter influence what people watch as much as search. In this guest post, Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of online video platform Brightcove, gives his view of where online video is going next year. Allaire’s last guest post for us was on the standards war in mobile video formats.
Web video is just getting started, and 2011 promises to be yet another year of transformation in the online video landscape. The stage is set for mainstream connected TVs, Over-the-top adoption, and even more videos watched directly streamed from website. Here are the five biggest trends in online video that will play out in significant ways for end-users and publishers alike.
1. Connected TV Platform Wars
The past year saw the definitive emergence of platform wars in the handheld computing landscape. This year will see those wars expand into new territory, the Connected TV platform market. Input 1 on the TV is the new homepage or start screen. We should expect that the battles will look incredibly similar to the market that emerged for smartphones over the past several years, but with some other entrenched players. Google vs. Apple vs. the dominant TV brands. In fact, these platforms will largely be based on a similar architecture, offering app and content publishers a common model for creating device-oriented applications and Web experiences.
Apple will ship an iOS-based Apple TV display and will open up Apple TV to third-party apps beyond Netflix. Developers will have a common model for building apps across the phone, tablet and TV, as well as a suite of new APIs for phone and tablet apps to interact with TV apps (think remote control type activities, gestures for games, etc.). Its platform will also support HTML5 with a set of design standards for TV Web 10-foot experiences. → Read More
Comcast doesn’t care about the iPad but that’s because they are acquiring NBC which is paid by Microsoft to not care. They released an iPad app that lets me control my DVRs but doesn’t let me watch them. I can get NBC shows on my iPad by renting them from iTunes, so I don’t blame NBC, just Comcast. The FCC is toothless, Barnes & Noble gives me no reason whatsoever to leave them even a pity tip as I go to the Kindle and iBooks stores to download iPad product, and Adobe…. Ooyala will fix the problem, but Adobe is the problem.
As the guy said in the old movie, what we have here is a failure to communicate. What part of yes fails to penetrate the minds of those who see video as the next bubble? Yes, we want video, we want it streamed, we want access to it even if we never stream it because then we can delete it off of our iTunes server to free up enough OS space to upgrade to the next version of the infrastructure. The Chicken Littles announcing that this streaming thing is gonna use up all the Cloud’s free space have always and continue to be wrong. → Read More
Apple TV users are reporting massive slow downs in video rentals and streaming over HDMI, resulting in “3,000 minute” waits for some media. In related news, the new Apple TV is currently jailbroken and you can basically knock out the Apple TV iOS software and run Plex, instead. → Read More
Navigating Apple TV and its various peeks into the presumed future has been a valuable waste of time. For $100 plus an HDMI cable I get to sample various media dead ends including NetFlix, iTunes rental, buy, and streaming options, YouTube, and other stuff I can’t remember right now. In the past, I would have spent more time testing the work arounds for adding podcasts and ripped music to broaden the choices, but something about the device suggests we’re in such a rapid shakeout it might be easier to wait.
But for what? Google TV seems caught in little brother mode behind the next loser tablet wave. What ultimate value is there in trading Apple’s dead ends for another set of second rate dead ends? The idea that we can replace the aggregate value of the Hollywood studio system with some loose coalition of rag tag revolutionary product ignores the tendency for the avant-garde to go mainstream. At some point, having everything work from one device is the best way of killing any possible interest in what’s available. → Read More
Google TV is a mess. Apple TV is a joke. Using a Roku is about as exciting as cleaning my gutters. I like the Boxee Box, but my wife doesn’t understand why; she doesn’t get it and that says something. Downloading torrents or NZBs is time consuming and only a small portion of the population actually has the know-how and hardware to do it. Sorry. Cord cutting is a lost cause.
Listen, I’m all for canceling Comcast and joining the ranks of the cord cutters. I hate Comcast so much. If Comcast had a large, fluffy mascot, I would punch it in the face. That’s saying something if you know me. But the fact remains that there is simply no way to replicate Comcast’s or any other cable provider’s service right now. If you want to watch TV, you have to pay for it — but you can still complain along the way.
Cable is damn expensive and so through various media streamers, game systems, and services, I’ve tried just about everything to replace it, but nothing gives you the same experience and service as *shock* cable — or satellite — TV. → Read More
The original Apple TV was loved by many. It was hackable, fun and functional. But then Apple went and crashed the party with the new model. It lacks a lot of the selling points of the original like local storage, legecy outputs, and 3rd party support. So yeah, you may want to opt for the older model if you’re the type that’s never satisfied with out-of-the box features. CE Pro points out that it just dropped in price from $230 to $150. Good deal? I think so. → Read More
You can now use Plex on your Apple TV. I guess that means it’s useful now, right → Read More
Yes, you heard this before. The Death of Cable TV. Yet, it hasn’t happened. But now, so many disruptions are happening in the video space, cable tv is really stepping towards the cliff. Don’t expect the cable industry to just give up.
We’ll get some new insights next week when the largest U.S. cable operator (23 million cable customers), Comcast, reports its Q3 earnings and subscriber count. Comcast cable customers dropped nearly 3% in Q2 compared to last year. In Q2 for the industry overall, a record 711,000 subscribers abandoned cable tv, and six of eight operators suffered their worst quarterly subscriber losses ever.
Just this month, a lot has happened. → Read More
We had a special guest for this week’s episode of OMG/JK, the show I host alongside fellow writer Jason Kincaid: the new MacBook Air. If you’ve been waiting to see two guys endlessly fawn over something, watch above.
And once we wiped the drool off of our faces, we also discussed Kleiner Perkins’ new sFund, the $250 million fund to back new social applications. And we talk a bit about the Google TV, its awful remotes, and the quickly heating up connected television space. → Read More
The title of this post is both a very old idea and a very new one. With the prevalence of fiber connectivity and pervasive broadband speeds, this year has been a hot one for bringing together the home computer and the living room TV. While companies like Apple and Google battle over share of TV viewers, they have left open and promoted the web for content distributors to control their own experience through HTML (and, especially, HTML5).
To that end, it looks like Apple has one-upped Google by opting to privately pre-arrange distribution deals with traditional studio networks beginning with ABC and FOX, while Google has no deals in place at all, hoping the networks will just “allow” consumers to watch Web videos on their TVs. But Google TV is getting a slap in the face from several networks who pulled the plug, right on the big release day. Just as reviews were rolling out in favor of Google’s new living room effort, ABC, CBS and NBC are exiting stage left.
As for the rest of the world, you can’t stop us. Developers of Web video distribution platforms forge ahead. Apple is offering to lure them in with partnerships, Google is giving them the opportunity to figure it out for free. Neither Apple nor Google, nor anyone else is waiting any longer. The time is now. You can feel it. The rest of the video world marches on, bringing the internet and the TV closer together. → Read More
The Apple TV only came out a month and a half ago, and it’s already busted wide open. Actually, that’s not much of a record. A lot of hardware gets cracked pre-release, or day-of. And in fact, the AppleTV was cracked privately some time ago, but now you too can get in on the fun. → Read More
On every earnings call, someone always asks for specific sales numbers. And companies always duck those questions. But not today. When someone asked how the Apple TV is doing since its relaunch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave a very specific answer. “In a short amount of time, we’ve already sold a quarter million.” He quickly made it a bit more clear: “over 250,000.”
Jobs is clearly happy with how the new Apple TV is doing so far. “It’s a great product and its $99 price point is very enticing,” Jobs says. He notes that the Apple has completely moved the product over to the streaming model. You can either stream from the iTunes store, from a computer in your house, and soon from your iPhone or iPad with AirPlay. → Read More
According to JMP Research analyst Alax Gauna, many Apple Stores are having trouble keeping the $99 Apple TV in stock. We were not particularly surprised when we couldn’t get our hands on the Apple TV over this past introductory weekend in San Francisco, but when the scarcity persisted into this week it got us to checking and we subsequently learned that stores across the nation were selling out of their inventory on the same day as receipt in Boston, Chicago, New York and Washington D.C.,” he writes, “and online representatives corroborated this strength extends beyond our 20+ store checks. Nice. → Read More
The Apple TV isn’t much more than a Samsung-made A4 processor, 8GB of flash memory, and a connectivity chip. iSuppli says those components along with the casing and power supply only costs $63.95. Not too shabby considering the original $300 Apple TV contained $237 worth of parts and was sold at a 20% manufacturing margin. The new one retails for $100, which works out to 35% above the cost of the parts. Of course that’s not pure profit for Apple seeing how the price of the device also covers R&D along with marketing, but at least the parts are cheap and Apple’s margin improved over the previous generation. → Read More
