Category: Media

Audio/Video, Streaming, and More

The Last Nail in the Boxee Coffin

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“In an Internet/on-demand world your primary concern is the quality of your content, since you are held accountable by the consumer.” – Avner Ronen, CEO, Boxee, 2009

Version 1.5, just released, of the popular media software, Boxee, will be its last for the PC.

Image representing Boxee as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

“We believe the future of TV will be driven by devices such as the Boxee Box, Connected TVs / Blu-Rays and 2nd screen devices such as tablets and phones. While there are still many users who have computers connected to their TVs, we believe this use case is likely to decline as users find better alternatives. People will continue to watch a lot of video on their computer, but it is more likely to be a laptop than a home-theater PC and probably through a browser rather than downloaded software.”

Boxee started with community support. We showed up at every Boxee NYC event. Nearly a year ago, we asked if Boxee had ‘sold out‘. They had slowed their PC development to a crawl, and now they are releasing a final version, after which they will focus solely on their embedded hardware. There are complaints about numerous firmware issues on their hardware.

We threw a lot of support behind Boxee early on, because they seemed to understand the HTPC hobbyist. They started with trying to create a seamless and social experience based on top of XMBC, an open-source media center with extensible plugins. We understand the needs of a business to make money, but each decision has been a nail in the coffin. There are many less expensive options for streaming. Roku boxes start at $50. Many of these features are integrated into TVs and Blu-Ray players.

Boxee may have missed its chance, and is floundering for a way to succeed. We can say we are very disappointed. We still remember when Boxee CEO Avner Ronen had a very public debate with Mark Cuban about the future of video, from which the quote at the top of this article appears. Ronen was referring to cable providers, but he should remember his own words:

The concern should be quality, for you are held accountable by your consumers. 


 

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Downstreaming: Amazon Prime Instant Video

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Amazon Prime
Image by zcopley via Flickr

Amazon Instant Video for Prime Subscribers is a great idea. Many think this is Amazon’s move to compete withNetflix and Hulu. Amazon already has a well-reviewed pay-per-view service and a rental service can get access to movies that a subscription service cannot.

Amazon Prime is a service that offers 2-day shipping on any Amazon purchase for $79 a year. Now, for that $6.58 a month, you get 500 TV Shows and 1800 movies. These are generally library titles, as opposed to first-run movies, but the selection will improve. And classics still have entertainment value.

Prime is a way to get $79 from their customers, but more importantly $79 that encourages people to buy Amazon products over other vendors. By adding video subscriptions, they make that more appetizing. We wouldn’t suggest you get the video without the two day shipping, but together, they are a compelling deal.

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Downsteaming: Hulu Plus

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An evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy! (Log...
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It was in December that we took our Roku on the road, visiting relatives, and vowed to spend the entire weekend watching only things on Hulu Plus. Some compare Hulu Plus to Netflix, which is easy. They are both streaming services, both $7.99 a month, and both offer TV shows and movies unlimited for a single price.

Hulu Plus, for one, offers all current season episodes of 45 popular shows. It is, by itself, the closest replacement for popular TV, but it has one annoying limitation. Some of the shows are web only. If you use a HTPC, that isn’t an issue. However, if you want to use a piece of dedicated hardware, such as a blu-ray player, Roku box, etc…you are out of luck.

In trying to pick all of the programs we would watch in a week, a majority of them, despite being available for free on Hulu, were web only, and not available on Hulu Plus enabled devices. So, pay for more, get some nice back episodes, but get less than you get for free. That seems rather unfair, and until they fix that, we can’t in good conscience fully recommend this prouct.

Hulu Plus, aside from that, like Netflix, offers a good back catalog of titles. If you want to be entertained, and are not looking for current TV, you can certainly be so with Hulu Plus. What do you think? Is current content a must? Or just a good selection of decent content, regardless of year of release?

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Downstreaming: Is Amazon Set to add a Subscription Service?

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Free 2 Day Shipping With Amazon Prime
Image by adria.richards via Flickr

Amazon Prime is a service for Amazon users offered for $79 a year that offers free shipping on Amazon purchases, no matter the order size, with a small upcharge to one-day shipping. If you are a habitual Amazon user, it is a great deal.

Engadget offered screenshots yesterday of Prime members who were noticing “Prime Instant Videos”, unlimited streaming on select movies for those who join Prime. It includes the note: “Your Amazon Prime membership now includes unlimited, commercial free instant streaming of 5,000 movies and TV shows at no additional cost. If this is confirmed and the selection is good, we could very well give their our money without hesitation, as Prime by itself as a shipping option is already tempting. Too often have we waited to buy Amazon products till we could fill a $25 super saver requirement.

On a practical level, free shipping aside, $79 a year turns out as $6.58 a month, a full $1.41 less than Netflix. Of course, Netflix is estimated to have four times the amount of movies at 20,000. But with a good quality selection, and Amazon negotiating and increasing the selection over time, launching with this number is promising for the future.

As Business Insider points out, Amazon already sells and rents digital content. It is already on a variety of boxes, and sells many of them on their site, and could engage in a variety of great bundling deals. Just like Amazon getting into the Android app store space, Amazon in the video subscription space could mean a lot of changes to come.

We look forward to an official announcement.

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Downstreaming: The State of Internet Video on Demand

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Diagram of Streaming Multicast
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Last week, TNL.net did some analysis of how the top streaming video services were doing in terms of the most popular video entertainment of 2010. They compared Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Video-on-Demand, and iTunes.

Looking at the top 50 TV shows of 2010, the results were not promising. Current seasons of shows are a strength for Hulu Plus, and a weakness for Netflix. Out of these top fifty shows, Netflix offered partial content from 10 of them, Hulu 18, Amazon 31, and iTunes 41. Bear in mind that Amazon and iTunes are pay-per-episode models, which may allow them to secure more content. For current offerings, that would include the last or current season of shows, those numbers dropped to Netflix 2, Hulu 12, Amazon 28, and iTunes 39.

How did movies measure up? Checking out the top 100 box office hits of 2010, Netflix offered 10 of them, Amazon 48, iTunes 46, Vudu 46, and 74 of them are out on DVD. We haven’t discussed iTunes or Vudu yet, as we do not have devices capable of using them, but we will cover them in the future. This is not very surprising though, that a per-rental model is one that studios would prefer to an unlimited use model.

Beyond that, Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu offer an ownership model, although Amazon specifically allows you to buy something they might subsequently take away, as we mentioned when we discussed the service. Ownership means, theoretically, you can stream the title whenever you want…for the rest of your life, or the life of the service, whichever comes first. Even more titles are available on this basis.

The gap between what is available on disc, and what you can stream is closing, but it is likely the rental or the purchase models will see more adoption by the studios than the unlimited consumption models. What we are lacking are streaming models that resemble the offerings of TV stations. Would you subscribe to a service that offered a limited selection of streaming content that rotated each month, but by doing so, allowed you ultimate access to more content over the year, for example?

Specialty streaming subscriptions may be the future in this regard. It won’t happen this way, but would you subscribe to a month of instant SyFy channel, where it would give you all the movies/TV shows scheduled to air on the SyFy channel for the next month, and change on a month to month basis? Or any other cable channel?

What do you think the future of streaming is? What will companies try?

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Downstreaming: A Month of Netflix Streaming

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In 1998 Reed Hastings founded Netflix, the lar...
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Netflix has been around so long that people might be surprised it took us until now to discuss it, or that we’d never tried it, and we still have yet to try their more traditional DVD by mail product.

Netflix is an obvious choice for someone looking to downsize their monthly entertainment budget. However, they are making the transition from their old business model, movies by mail, to the new one, streaming. For those who are HD purists, there are problems. Back in October, users were complaining that despite the premium for a blu-ray subscription, Netflix wasn’t acquiring catalog titles in blu-ray, and was generally neglecting that aspect of their business.

So, that said, let’s focus on the streaming. They offer an unlimited streaming plan for $7.99 a month. Netflix does offer HD streaming on some titles, but it is a limited subset of their overall catalog, and it is not yet perfect, by any means.  Overall, watching SD content, we found it of acceptable quality. The big issue is selection.

Netflix is aggressively negotiating deals with content providers to get their content on its service. However, in looking at the most current popular TV shows, Netflix tends to offer older episodes, and not as large a selection, and is significantly behind Hulu on overall popular TV content offerings. If you want classic TV and related offers, Netflix offers a great overall selection. In popular movies of 2010, Netflix is offering only about ten percent. But this is a problem for streaming overall.

To be honest, if it was a matter of content, there is enough on Netflix streaming to give us many many hours of entertainment. In that regard, it is a great service. We can sit around and catch up on older content we missed, as well as dozens of movies. To make this point, let’s look at instantwatcher, a third-party Netflix watching site. At the time of this writing, the most popular movie being watched was Get Shorty, circa 1995, which had just become available to streaming two days earlier. There were a few breakout hits from the last few years in the list, such as Shutter Island, as well, but again, this is where streaming is lacking. The selection is slowly improving as Netflix makes new deals.

So, never having a problem finding something to watch, if not always a currently popular item, means Netflix will keep you entertained. And its recommendation engine is relatively good, after it gets to know you, at making suggestions.

As a positive push, the company has ensured the ubiquity of Netflix streaming on devices. If you have a Windows or Mac machine, you can stream to your computer. Much to many people’s annoyances, it is not offered on Linux. The majority of network-enabled TVs and blu-ray players now embed Netflix streaming, as does the AppleTV, WD TV Live, and of course, the Roku Video Player, which started life as the Roku Netflix Box. A variety of game consoles, such as the Wii, PS3, and XBox also support Netflix.

We used the Roku box, as the least expensive and tiny piece of hardware, to do our testing, but clearly Netflix streaming support is now a core feature everywhere, to the point that Netflix has successfully arranged for a Netflix button to appear on many devices that have the service built in.

Should you get Netflix? We’d say yes, with a caveat. If you are putting in a Netflix plan to your overall budget and, as a result, justify a reduction in your cable service level, then it is certainly worth it. But, by itself, it is not a complete solution. More on that to come.

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Downstreaming: Case Studies in Cord Cutting

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A modern Music Server made with Apple iTunes/M...
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This week, well-known blogger and co-founder of both Gizmodo and Engadget, Peter Rojas, announced he’d finally pulled the plug and cancelled his cable TV service. Rojas will be using a Mac Mini with a Silicondust HDHomerun, plus EyeTV, Boxee, Hulu, Netflix, and Kylo.

The SiliconDust HDHomerun, which we also use, and have mentioned repeatedly, is a networked single or dual tuner device. A new version is set to be released that will include cablecard support for those who want cable without a cable box. Using it with OTA/Broadcast transmissions requires an antenna and decent reception, but it is a great way to get programming for free.

It is hard to say whether or not Rojas will stick to it. Dan Frommer, of Business Insider, gave up his cable-less existence last year, after two years of trying to be a ‘Hulu’ household. But, what can you get from cable that you can’t online?

There are a few shows, of course, that are not available for free online. And HD content online is in its infancy. Most online content is in standard definition. If you are lucky you can get 720p on a handful of items.

Even one Time Warner Cable PR executive, Jeff Simmermon, survived without cable, including eighteen months while on the job. His argument about why he didn’t stick to it is a valid one: It takes work.

Aggregation is the big future of online content, because to find online content now, you often have to go to several different places and find it. This is the argument of Matt Burns, of Crunchgear. Nothing gives you the same experience as cable or satellite. If your requirement for a system is that it give you everything cable does when cable gives it to you, then this sort of idea is not for you.

But, even if you can’t give up cable entirely, perhaps there are parts of it you can give up. It won’t be exactly the same, but it can be, once the system is set up, easy to use on a daily basis and full of content to fill your day. Just remember, that if online content becomes as commonplace as cable TV, the prices for it will surely rise as well.

So, we’re counting on you, Peter Rojas. You are a trendsetter in the industry. If you can stick to your guns and stay off the cable, it will make others feel comfortable.

More to come….

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H264 vs WebM comes to a Head

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HTML5 video icon
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Last week, the Chromium blog announced that it was terminating support for the H.264 video standard in the HTML5 video tag in favor of the open WebM and Theora codecs, neither of which have seriously taken off yet.

There has been a lot of criticism of this move by the community. H.264 is used by a variety of different video streaming sites and this will drive people back to using Flash as a delivery system for H.264, which will not help the larger goal of replacing Flash with native browser video playback. On the other hand, Firefox will never support H.264, and Firefox has a large percentage of the overall browser market.  The people behind the Opera browser are defending the move as well.

The truth is that this may go down as a horrible decision by Google, or drawing a line in the sand that led to greater unity on the web. The biggest issue right now is hardware acceleration. A lot of hardware now has built in H.264 hardware acceleration, which is important for widespread adoption. However, the WebM hardware development team is hard at work on this, and the first commercial chips that support hardware acceleration should be out in the first quarter of this year.

Either way, the support for HTML5 video tag needs a lot of work before it is more universally used, much as we wish that day would come soon.

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Downstreaming: The Future of Bypassing the Cable Box

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Central cable box
Image by Lars Plougmann via Flickr

Last month, one of the things that went up on our cable bill was the rental of our cable box. It now costs over $14 a month to rent a cable box. Can it cost more than a year or two’s worth of rental fees to actually buy a box? Yet cable box manufacturers insist there is no market for direct consumer purchase of cable boxes, and thus the cable card system is nearly a failure.

At CES, Time Warner Cable announced that they had made a deal to make live and on demand programming available over IP, eliminating the need for a cable box. The new service will be integrated with Sony and Samsung TVs, as well as the Samsung Galaxy Tab. For now, this will only be available to customers who have their broadband services, but going forward, there is no reason why such a service could not be provided over any network.

Verizon FIOS has similar ambitions. it wants FIOS TV on everything from iPads to BluRay players.

Time Warner Cables CEO insists the demand for online-only viewing is small. We’re not so sure. A full online-only version of the offerings of a cable company has yet to be tried. Most online services have serious limitations in terms of content. Some of the biggest complaints about cord cutting has been the fact that no one service offers what the cable company does. That may become different if it is a cable company providing the service. or it may be that the cable company will do an inadequate job simply because they do not wish to challenge their core business.

What seems inevitable is a transition from conventional cable delivery systems to an IP based delivery system. The design of the HDHomeRun and the Ceton InfiniTV TV tuners are both IP based. Each decode the stream and stream it to the computer(although the Ceton device uses a virtual ethernet connection). Imagine a future where a cable box is installed in a single location in a house and multiple devices can access that box over your house network to stream channels, including your computer and your network-connected television.

The step beyond that is the so-called TV Anywhere, where you can access your content over the internet anywhere. That is what companies are looking at, but the concern is that bandwidth is not at the point at which high-quality streams can be sustained.

Either way, hopefully change is going to come, and this news is very promising.

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New Video Capture Devices for your HTPC this Season

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Hauppauge HD-PVR
Image by Geek Tonic via Flickr

Two interesting new video capture devices came out from Hauppauge over the past week.

The first is an internal version of Hauppauge’s popular HD-PVR. This new PCI-E card will eliminte the need for a large external enclosure and power supply. The new device will cost $159. The HD-PVR is a component-video capture device which takes advantage of the so-called analog loophole.

The second is still in the prototype stage, and is the result of Hauppauge’s partnership with Silicondust. The hope of that partnership is a significantly less expensive cablecard tuner. Hauppauge is investigating different DRM technologies besides Microsoft’s PlayReady to enable the use of the tuner with encrypted CableCARD content in different software packages and operating systems. Silicondust will be responsible for the driver side of the device.

Elsewhere, Silicondust itself is in production of the HDHomerun Prime, although CableLabs certification is still pending. The HDHomeRun Prime will retail for $250 and is a networked cablecard tuner. There is a new version of the non-cable card HDHomerun which will be offered in a sleek black case for $129 and will begin shipping next month.

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