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Downstreaming: A Month of Netflix Streaming

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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Published on January 30, 2011
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15 Years Ago, the New York Times Online Began – Now You Will Have to Pay

Logo of The New York Times.
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Last week, we were complaining that traditional print media is missing the opportunities of putting a good quality version of their content online. If the electronic version of the New York Times is better than the Kindle version, and the electronic version is free, than the paper is missing its opportunity to get our money.

It was 15 years ago this week that the New York Times unveiled its website. Perhaps the Publisher described the mission statement best at the time. “We see our role on the Web as being similar to our traditional print role — to act as a thoughtful, unbiased filter and to provide our customers with information they need and can trust.” The media is about the name. They have built trust. A website can build trust over time just in the same way as a newspaper. And if we want or demand a certain level of quality, it is not unreasonable for it to be paid for, either through direct subscription or through advertising.

That said, after fifteen years, Bloomberg reports that the New York Times has decided its paid service will be less than the $19.95 charge for its Kindle Edition, although this may be a promotion during the stage of early adoption. Confirmed details are not yet out. The Times, like other newspapers, has yet to establish how much of their content will stay free, and how much will be paid for.

The Times seems set to move to a consumption based model, with a set number of articles free each month, and heavy users paying a subscription fee. Print subscribers will get full online access with no extra charge. So far, the paywall model has not been entirely successful at any of the newspapers which have implemented it. So the Times may be setting itself up for failure.

The Teleread article on the story had an interesting model suggestion in its comments. ‘Howard’ suggested that as paywalls have been less than successful, a micropayment system might be more effective, where people put money into an account and each time they access an article, money is deducted from that prepaid account.

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Published on January 23, 2011
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Downstreaming: Case Studies in Cord Cutting

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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Published on January 21, 2011
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Organize your Workflow with Pinboard and Instapaper

Image representing Pinboard as depicted in Cru...
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One of the hardest things to do in writing a blog is keeping up on all the developing news and keeping track of reference materials that might be needed for a story. Research is very important, and for the longest time, we neglected keeping our materials organized to the point we ended up with thousands of bookmarks inside our browser and we could never find anything.

Then, Xmarks, our bookmark syncing service announced it was going to shut down(It didn’t), and caused us to rethink how we were doing things. We started with Instapaper. Instapaper is a holding queue for things we have yet to read. It isn’t designed for long-term storage.

Which is why we added Pinboard. The price for joining Pinboard is, at time of post, $9.20 and increases a fraction of a cent with each user. Pinboard is a low-noise bookmarking site, billed as social bookmarking for introverts. It offers the opportunity to store all of your bookmarks and tag them with descriptive terms. It can import links from a Twitter feed, Instapaper, Google Reader, etc. automatically.

Due to a recent boost in popularity caused by news of the imminent shutdown of Delicious, Pinboard is bursting with new users, and new features are planned. Support for multiple Twitter accounts is coming, as well as a Firefox plugin, downloadable archives for backup, tag recommendations, etc.

So, in our current workflow, an item we read quickly and want to keep for the future goes directly to Pinboard. A more timely item or something we want to read in more detail goes to Instapaper rather than sitting in the browser in a tab and eating up active memory. While Instapaper has a Pinboard feature to send Starred Items to Pinboard, and Pinboard has a feature to import from your Instapaper feed, we are hoping for a feature in Instapaper to send archived items directly to Pinboard, as opposed to Starred ones. Other people want a way to integrate Pinboard’s built-in Read Later tag with Instapaper.

So, when we need something, we can search our Pinboard archive for the information. We’re not the only one who uses the combination of the two to keep organized. One blogger called it “Organizational Bliss(Almost)” The benefits of Instapaper for organizing information you want to read and Pinboard for information you want to archive are great. Why not give them a shot? The developers are committed to continuing to improve these services for us.

We even have access to them on Android devices. There are multiple Instapaper clients for Android, all unofficial, but we recommend Instafetch. Instafetch is free, but there is a paid service component to it. There is only one full fledged Pinboard client, Pindroid, which is a port of a Delicious client that is slowly coming into its own.

Of course, our next organization project is finding more hours in the day to actually write things. Anyone have a website for that?

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Published on January 20, 2011
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Traditional Print Media is Missing Online Opportunities

Front page of The New York Times on Armistice ...
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We’ve been in the midst of a free trial of the New York Times on the Amazon Kindle platform. We’ve looked at it both on the Amazon Kindle App for Android and on the Kindle itself. And it falls flat. But don’t take our word for it. The New York Times is the number 1 selling newspaper on the platform, and is offered at $19.99 a month. After the introductory offer of $5.70 a week, delivery of the actual Times is $11.70 a week in our neighborhood here in New York City.

If you explain the reduction in cost as being due to no printing or distribution costs, then this should be a phenomenal deal. But it is severely lacking. Many sections and features are missing from the Kindle edition. But you don’t have to take our word for it. Kevin C. Tofel, who is the mobile site editor for GigaOm, when we were complaining about this on Twitter, commented, “yup, after reading today’s NYT for Kindle on the plane home, I agree. More like a local web version than an ebook newspaper.”

Reading the Amazon reviews of the product, you see many people complaining about being unwilling to pay this price for partial news, and missing sections. Why would anyone pay $20 a month to get less than they can get on the New York Times website for free? Where is the value-added product? It is why, like many, we have no plans to continue our subscription past the free trial. Why is the New York Times putting out an inferior version of their product? There were similar complaints in other of the top papers and magazines. Missing content was the biggest complaint.

Most customers want a e-version of their newspaper to be a reproduction of the paper experience and to be formatted the same across multiple platforms(to the best extent possible). We can use the website, but the point of downloading a complete file is that we get everything without the need for constant connection. These issues are not limited to one platform.

Electronic subscriptions are up, but overall, subscriptions are down. If print media cannot put out its A game, then is it any surprise if it fails to succeed in paid digital subscriptions, and ultimately at preserving its relevance in a connected world.

Someone give us a top-quality electronic newspaper or magazine, or even just top quality online content packaged for our use. Give us something worth paying for, and people will pay for it. Not everyone, but those people unwilling to pay for content are not the target audience for newspapers or magazines.

What do you think?

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Published on January 17, 2011
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H264 vs WebM comes to a Head

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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Published on January 16, 2011
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Downstreaming: The Future of Bypassing the Cable Box

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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Published on January 13, 2011
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New Video Capture Devices for your HTPC this Season

Hauppauge HD-PVR
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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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Published on January 11, 2011
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Has Boxee Sold Out?

Image representing Boxee as depicted in CrunchBase
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We’re big fans of Boxee here. We don’t use it on a daily basis(partly because of the issues with using it under Fedora Linux). We’ve been at every Boxee New York City event, we’ve annoyed their CEO.

Boxee is a media center application with a 10-foot interface designed for full sized televisions. As it began, there was an emphasis on socialization. Boxee has a lot of advantages. It has wonderful codec support for playback. But as Boxee moved toward a commercial model, playing local content was moved to the side, along withsocialization. People seem to speak less of those aspects nowadays.

Boxee turned to focus on streaming content, becoming popular for individuals looking for a new Hulu interface. Boxee played a game of cat and mouse with Hulu. Until the D-Link Boxee Box came along, and they announced that they would be putting Hulu Plus on. This logically means that the game is up. Even though Hulu offers content for free, Boxee, like many boxes, will likely support only the paid version.

Vudu and Netflix, showstoppers, are delayed and will hopefully arrive on the Boxee Box soon enough. That hasn’t stopped Boxee from expanding. At CES this week, Iomega announced a Boxee device that includes a hard drive. Viewsonic announced a TV set including Boxee.

CBS Interactive announced it will make full episodes available for purchase through Boxee. It is certainly a big move for Boxee. But they have gone from challenging the status quo to working with them. Working with CBS is certainly better in the long run. Working with content providers to get them to willingly put their content on TV is a better long term solution than creating apps that may stop working at the whim of said providers.

On the other hand, they may lose some of their devoted fanbase in the process. If every service costs money, then the value of purchasing a a dedicated device for several hundred dollars is lessened. One thing though…it’s still cheaper than cable.

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Published on January 9, 2011
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Downstreaming: The Roku Box

Netflix Roku Box - III
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Last week, Roku announced they served their one billionth stream of content after announcing they’d sold one million units. We first started talking about the Roku box two years ago when it was for Netflix only. Since then, Roku has unveiled countless channels…some good, some useless…well, to us at least.

Also, the base price for a Roku box has gone down to $59.99, and now offers Hulu Plus, Amazon Video on Demand, Pandora, MLB.Tv, NFL Gamecenter, NBA Gametime, Radiotime, etc.

Roku’s current offering is three boxes: The Roku HD, XD, and XDS. The latter two offer the options of 1080p and Wireless-N. The XDS offers a USB port and component video and optical outputs(which were built in on the original Roku). We did read of multiple complaints with Roku customer service, but never had a problem with the device worth calling about, nor has anyone else we know personally, so we cannot confirm this. We read through a lot of reviews about overseas technical support and TV connection quality, but have been unable to reproduce it.

It has a thriving community of enthusiasts and many private extra channels beyond what Roku provides…and they grow their list regularly. Even without paying for some of the subscription channels, there are hours of content to entertain, organized in a simple interface The issue with the internet is that content is everywhere…organizing it is the hard thing.

The truth is this…a HTPC will do a lot more. But it is an HTPC. The Roku is a tiny box that is basically plug and play. Even if you have an HTPC, you may not have it in every room. For us, using Linux for our DVR, services like Netflix are unavailable to us. This fills in those gaps. It also lacks a large amount of HD content, but this is more a provider issue. Full HD content online is in its infancy.

Basically, if you want a simple device that puts a lot of content in on place with very little setup required, that is not much larger than two decks of playing cards, this is the device for you. If you want something more complex…we’ll get to that in future editions.

Update: Roku has refreshed its offerings . We’ve updated the below links accordingly.

[asa_collection]Roku Collection[/asa_collection]

 

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Published on January 9, 2011
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