know | Future

Adweek reports that Nielsen will start providing same day ratings for DVR playback starting wih the dataset scheduled out on December 28th to be followed by the addition of seven day playback ratings starting on January 17th.

The catch is that they will only have equipment to track DVR in 60 of it’s 9,000 households. I’ll save you reaching out for your calculator, that represents .6% of Nielsen households though they claim they will be adding households at the rate of 100 a month through July to better represent the current official 7% DVR penetration (many peg that penetration as high as 11%). Though NBC is planning to start using at some point in the future the Live+7 data, it is non-commital about it’s timing. The lines still remain drawn in the sand in the same place they have been. Advertisers feel that they should not continue to pay escalating network costs while viewers are increasingly zapping their ads with DVRs while the networks look at the same data the advertisers are looking at and in a classical glass half-empty/glass half-full fashion and say, it’s not so bad, not everyone fast forwards or skips past ads. I think everybody needs to buck up and realize that they need to either make the ad so compeling, even outside of Superbowl Sunday, that viewers will not be likely to skip it, and/or, diversify their media portfolio and reduce their reliance on Network ads.

You can also read more at Reuters…

Over the past month Sony has shown in the most spectacular way everything that is wrong with the music publishing industry. I suspect that this story did not have in the real world quite the impact that it had in the demi-monde of pop technology that I sometimes inhabit, so in case you have not heard: On October 31st Mark Russinovich broke news on his blog that he had discovered that certain Sony Music CDs he had played on his computer had without due warning, installed what is referred to as a rootkit, a piece of software that is completely hidden from the operating system. Furthermore, if you tried to remove it, your DVD or CD drive would stop working requiring a complete reinstall of Windows. Not only that, the software would also automatically cloak any files starting with a specified string hence becoming a handy method for other bad guys to infect your computer. The software was also found to be sending information back to Sony from the affected machines. And why did Sony do this: to prevent unauthorized duplication of the CD content.

Sony’s initial arrogant reaction was best encapsulated by Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG’s president of global digital business, when he told NPR that “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”. (more…)

TiVo has announced that an upoming version of TiVo ToGo will allow users to transfer recorded content to their brand spanking new video enabled iPods as well as to the PlayStation Portable which more practical mobile video viewer. Details are sketchy though apparently you will need to purchase additional software to make the magic happen.

Now, if it works properly, which considering how difficult TiVo ToGo is to use I don’t expect it will, and you look past the fact that out of the total population of TiVo subscribers that use TiVo ToGo is only about 300,000, this may ultimately put the kibosh on dreams of selling tons of downloadable, drm’ed video content via iTunes. (more…)

E Ink and Phillips have announced a breakthrough in electronic ink technology: a 10.1 inch flexible e-ink tablet with a resolution of 100 dots per inch (comparable to standard newspaper). This is another step towards a prctical electronic newspaper. Electronic ink is an ideal display medium for books, newspapers and magazines as it needs to be powered only to change and is a purely reflective mechanism that needs no backlighting and is as sharp as ink on white paper.
The full text of the release is here…

The importance of the video iPod is more far ranging than the product itself and transcends it, just like the effect of the original iPod on the music industry and even culturally in how we listen and relate to music. In the olden days we used to sit down and listen to albums in our living rooms on systems carefully tuned for sound quality. Now we listen to music in any sequence we want and mostly in shufle over some crappy headphones delivering 128kb limited sound. But the iPod has empowered us by untethering our music and allowing for serendipitous access to our deep libraries and not what we just bought last week. The video iPod also legitimizes in one fell swoop the act of paying for video and not getting a physical copy of it.. Delivery of DRM protected video content from all those myriad of startups is now suddenly legitimate.
(more…)

Now that the suspense is over and we know that it is not THE video iPod that was much awaited, but a video enabled iPod nonetheless, there are sure to be content deal announcements and this is the first one I have seen. AdWeek is reporting that ABC will be offering at least five series, including the popular Desperate Housewives and Lost for download via iTunes. Now this may seem like a good idea at first, BUT,

• They will be charging $1.99 per show.
• The resolution of the video will be a quarter of a standard definition video screen (320×240) to match the resolution of the video-enabled iPod
• You will not be able to burn it to DVD or CD without going through an analog and redigitize cycle

The problem is that they are competing with full NTSC resolution bittorrents that people can download at will from the web, Sure, you have to know what to do to get the torrents and it is illegal but that does not seem to stop eDonkey and the rest of the Napster heirs on the music front. No word on whether they will have advertising on the downloaded video…Read more here..

Slashdot has picked up an article published Monday in the Seattle Times describing how Microsoft has entered into contracts with four major telecomms companies in the US and a smattering overseas to provide next generation TV service over IP. Verizon launched a test deployment in Texas on September 22nd but could easily extend it out to anywhere it is offering their Fios fiber-to-the-home service. A user review of the Fios service can be found here…

The Wall Street Journal writes on Friday that Microsoft and Time Warner are once again engaged in talks. Details are sketchy but it seems that they may be concentrating on consolidating their dial-up operations. If you remember, Microsoft considered buying AOL in the mid nineties but instead took a pass and developed MSN. If the deal deepens this may spell some problems for Google who derives between 12 and 40% of their ad revenue (depending on who you listen to) from AOL.

The BBC has started a trial with several thousand users that will allow them to download favorite TV and radio shows up to seven days after they air. The files are encoded with DRM code that will expire the content after the seven day window. This is, as far as I know, the most ambitious project of its kind and blazes a trail that many will follow I suspect. Imagine the posibilities, a content producer could distrbute the show using P2P maybe driven by bittorrent or a variant thereof, sell their own advertising and cut the networks out of the loop completely. The fracturing continues…

Read more… (via Slashdot)

PC Magazine (via Engadget) has been nice enough to round up three popular XM2go devices and stack them up against each other. As you know XM2go is TiVo for your XM receiver which allows you to store XM audio content so you can listen even if you are in the cellar counting your bottles of Chateau d’Yquem. Their conclusion? They are big and power hungry as befits a first generation product. Me, I am waiting for christmas when I can get a combined XM/MP3 players to be fueled by the XM Napster alliance (more on this here). These new products may send radio stations to reconsider the heavy investment needed to do HD radio and just start an advertising supported podcast.

Read more…