Archive for the ‘Broadband Video’ Category

Is BD Live a shot in the arm, or a shot in the foot?

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

This post is actually a question for TK and it focuses on my personal experience with BD Live and his contention that there is still a market for purchasing movies.

Purchase vs Rent vs On Demand

As I understand TK’s position, the studios plan to make money by getting you to buy all the movies you bought on VHS and then bought again on DVD by getting you to buy them again on Blu-ray. I am not the ideal consumer for this, I laugh every time I open the drawer of my wife’s mostly unwatched Disney VHS tapes.  I have recently taken a business from delivering training videos via DVD-ROM to delivering them over the Internet, so my opinion is that physical media is doomed and revenue from movie sales will trend towards zero, just as it has for newspapers and music. Certainly the embargoes against rental kiosks and other steps the studios are taking are an effort to promote sales over rentals and possibly rentals over downloads to stave off the inevitable price declines inherent with electronic delivery.

BD Live

BD Live is supposed to make Blu-ray Discs more valuable by linking the movies to online content. A main feature BD Live provides is the ability to get information about specific scenes while watching the movie. Consumers with Internet connected players can get up to date information about the actors, directors and possibly locations. This is a familiar function to TiVo users, it has existed for years as TiVo Swivel Search. Another feature of  BD Live is chat. I just can’t see wanting to chat during a movie and if I did I wouldn’t want to do it through the TV with a remote.

BD Live Inoperable Out of the Box

But all of that is irrelevant, here’s the rub. In the race to the lowest price, the manufacturer of my player decided not to include a memory card. Available for retail for less than $10, an SD card has been required to access BD Live content for every Blu-ray movie we’ve rented. I really should buy one, but I know I have a few spares lying around somewhere and it seems silly to buy another. Obviously I haven’t gotten curious enough to spend the cost of two lattes or to search the junk drawers. Maybe BD Live is great, but someone forgot to tell me.

What’s really funny is that the same player offered me a five dollar credit for connecting it to Amazon’s Video On Demand service. So the player is actually encouraging me to watch downloaded movies. Furthermore when I purchased the player I also was given a choice of Blu-ray movie for free. It seems incredibly short sighted that the movie studios aren’t chipping in another $5 to ensure you are walking out of the store with a memory card to make BD Live useful. The user experience for BD Live for those who don’t know what an SD Card is or how much one costs is horrible. I think this alone would sour the average consumer towards BD Live especially when all of the other online features including video on demand work.

Honestly that is a pretty easy problem to fix. Even after the fact it would be fairly simple to offer a promotion for consumers with Internet connected players for a free memory card. The real issue here is whether the BD Live content is more of an encouragement to purchase or to rent. The fundamental problem is that the content is delivered over the Internet. There is no guarantee that the content will be available in five years and there is no bonus offered for buying the content. Therefore it probably encourages renting more than purchasing. At some point the studios will want to recover the money they invested in producing any BD Live content and will make it available to consumers who watch movies via video on demand. Some of the features of BD Live, including chat, have already been demonstrated in video on demand prototypes from NetFlix.

A Better Option to Promote Purchase

I better option for the studios would have been something that made the movie sticky. This system would involve features from services like TiVo, IMDb, Amazon and Flixster. Fundamentally the system would provide a way to register the first sale of a Blu-ray Disc in an online catalog. That catalog could be connected and shared in social sites like Flixster does with movies in theaters and Facebook. By connecting it to IMDb it would be easy to create TiVo like recommendations of what movie from already in your library you might enjoy. Amazon like wish lists and allow the studios to offer loyal purchasers promotions and earlier release dates completely bypassing the current retail channels and certainly have more ability to forecast end user sales.

This catalog system could also solve a problem faced my most people who have collected large numbers of movies, specifically it could provide a nice cover-flow type interface, the ability to search for movies by keywords, actors, directors or quotes. It could provide a way for the user to specify the location of the movie to make it easier to find in large collections.

If the studios were really gutsy they would build in a lend/like system. Using the social network features you would borrow a copy of the movie from a friend, perhaps even via a studio authorized digital copy. Upon viewing and returning the movie to the friend you would be asked to rate the movie. If you liked the movie the studio could offer it to you directly.

Conclusion

As content becomes available digitally the price gets forced down. The way to preserve prices is to ensure there remains continued additional value in physical copies. BD Live does not provide this increased value, it actually encourages rental and opens the door to more video on demand. Movie studios should look at the consumer’s entire catalog and their overall viewing experience versus the individual movie and thereby drive features based on encouraging purchases.

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Posted in Broadband Video, Internet, Opinion, TiVo, social networks | Comments

The State of Rich Internet Application Platforms

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

The following was an internal response to an email about: Times abandons WPF & Silverlight and how it affects Total Training’s plans for delivering video content over the web. It should be noted that Total Training partners with both Adobe and Microsoft and produces training products for the products being discussed. We do not currently offer any Oracle, Java or JavaFX training. I welcome your comments. – Steve

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The Times is abandoning the WPF & Silverlight because they have to maintain two different code bases, one native application and one browser based. As AIR applications aren’t really native apps in any sense of the concept (security, performance, functionality) they aren’t really getting a better product out of the mix except in the one mentioned area, font rendering.

The Times because it is primarily a text rendering application is less relevant than two other examples, Netflix and MLB. Both Netflix and MLB provide applications that are primarily video and require continuous connection to the Internet.

MLB abandoned Silverlight because it failed to deliver technically. The primary reason that they moved to Flash is because Flash can be installed on the typical workplace desktop without administrative privilege, not so for Silverlight. MLB also got a black eye with their launch that was plagued with problems. However that launch occurred prior to the Olympics. Both MLB and the Olympics really helped MS wring the bugs out of high performance video streaming.

Netflix’s experience has been nearly the opposite of MLB’s. Netflix is, of course, forced into Silverlight because of the DRM capability. Yet they laid off 50 people in their customer support department specifically crediting Silverlight for a reduction in support calls. Netflix had some recent quality issues (now fixed) that the community blamed on Silverlight. Netflix never admitted what was causing those problems.

As I look at the scoreboard now I see the following:

- The promise of WPF/Silverlight combined applications was not realized. Nor has Silverlight brought the power of .NET to web applications.
- The lacks of a Mac native WPF application capability or a supported wrapper for Silverlight leave MS at a disadvantage to Adobe AIR.
- Silverlight’s installation issues are temporary until MS forces Silverlight in through Windows Update, but until then Flash has an advantage for workplace desktop penetration.
- Silverlight is still the only viable DRM platform, this means it should be the de-facto first choice for any video subscription service. MLB is already having piracy issues even with live games, but since these games are broadcast in the clear the need to protect their Internet streams is not critical.
- Flash has a maturity edge over Silverlight on the application components and has closed the gap in terms of media presentation.
- Microsoft will signal full support of Silverlight as it begins to cut all of its applications and services over to it to compete head to head against Google Apps. Once this is done Silverlight will gain significant credibility for use inside the enterprise and will then gain acceptance for outside facing applications, especially at MS primary development shops.

I should also mention that it appears that the Oracle purchase of Sun is likely to kill JavaFX. Even if Oracle doesn’t actually kill it the months of uncertainty during the acquisition will likely prevent any adoption of the platform.

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Posted in Broadband Video, Internet, Opinion | Comments

Interactive Video

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

What is interactive video? Veeple has a demo marketing video that shows how you can use clickable regions to allow the user to interact with your video. While I think they have a solid product and strategy I think their term clickable video is more appropriate than interactive video.

A truly interactive video would be one that itself changed based on your choices. There have been rich internet applications that have done this previously, specifically I recall a FIOS or U-Verse campaign that linked out to video from different props on a Flash stage. The fault here is that it is not a continuous story and the actors on the Flash stage typically repeat a very lame loop waiting for the next selection.

True interactive video, in my opinion, would be more like the adventure books I read as a child that had a choice at the bottom of each page. The story would continue in a different direction based upon the choice made. This would be an incredibly useful tool for a product selection wizard for example, the video would allow a comprehensive explanation of feature choices and the customer selections would tailor the video presentation to the consumer’s needs. I am excited to think about the possibilities for how that interaction could be implemented. The videos could easily respond to eye tracking or other mechanisms to transparently make decisions.

In the end I wonder if interactive video isn’t an evolutionary dead end. The basic problem with video is that it needs to be recorded and once it has been recorded it is difficult to change. As we move towards realistic digital actors on virtual digital stages, true interactive video will be the ugly stepchild to the video-like rich application.

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Metered Internet Billing

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

In a past life, when I computed Internet costs for hosted customers based on their usage, I wrote a paper explaining how 95th percentile billing worked. This type of billing is used for commercial customers and bills for near peak volumes. It is unique in that it allows for a certain amount of unbilled usage spiking. At the time, and I expect even now, few customers truly understand it or know how to tailor their business processes to reduce their Internet bills.

Internet billing is a funny thing. Very few people have an intuitive feel for the units of measurement used, but this in itself is not that unusual. Do you really know how much water your washing machine takes to run a load of laundry or how much electricity your DVR uses when you aren’t watching TV? But the idea that everyone should pay the same amount for electricity and water is clearly not accepted. So why should Internet billing be different?

If we look at common thought at the beginning of the nuclear power age, many experts predicted that electric meters would become extinct. The cost of Nuclear power would be so cheap on a per unit (KWh) basis that measuring it would be pointless. Sadly this vision was not realized. However, it is true for today’s Internet service. The cost of Internet bandwidth is in creating and maintaining a total capacity. The 95th percentile billing used for commercial Internet billing reflects this reality, in its own limited way so does our current residential billing practice. At the lowest tier dial-up providers are still providing low-cost, low-capacity service. As you move up the chain you can find different rate plans from broadband providers for different levels of service. So why has there been a backlash against metered billing plans? Robert Charette offers insight into the issue.

Time Warner’s plan would have charged usage not on their peak consumption, but on their total consumption. This means that Time Warner would not be billing on what it cost to deliver the service, but would be profiting excessively from their most dependent customers. Additionally, at a time when margins are still good on broadband service, their plan was to make more money off the heavy demand customers without passing the savings down to the casual usage customers.

We need to understand that metered billing can be very useful. By aligning metered billing with the true cost of delivering a service we can shape customer behavior through self management instead of using artificial means. Take as an example telephone billing in the past. Usage costs for residential long distance were higher during business hours but cheaper in off peak time. This resulted in users moving their personal calling to off peak times freeing up network capacity for business calls. In this case, the metered billing accurately reflected the age old business principals of supply and demand.

Metered Internet billing should only be applied in the same way. Currently some ISPs use traffic shaping to artificially constrain use during peak demand time. They are forced into this because the user’s have not been induced through the rate structures to either limit their bandwidth usage or to move their activity to off peak time. It is fairly easy to create tools to measure usage and display costs in real-time taking into account peak and non-peak rates. Once presented with that information it would be fairly easy for the users to alter their behavior, moving their file sharing to off peak hours for example. The biggest reason this is not done, in my opinion, is because the 95% of the users who are currently subsidizing the 5% who use 50% of the bandwidth would find out they are being overcharged for their service.

I would ask you to remember the “web hog” commercials of the early 2000’s and the implications that the network didn’t have the capacity for all the activity. With the age of Internet video having arrived it is important that we provide a monetary incentive for ISPs to provide adequate bandwidth yet avoid the pitfalls of the network neutrality mess and ensure that people are paying their fair share. Correctly implemented metered billing accomplishes all of these goals.

In conclusion, a backlash against Time Warner’s plan was a good thing, however metered billing can be a good thing and the correct implementation should be welcomed. However, such billing needs two things to be successful. It needs visible metering so that user’s can conceptualize how their consumption is related to their cost and it needs to be structured to provide an incentive to modify behavior and thus optimize overall network usage.

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Posted in Broadband Video, Internet, Opinion | Comments

Towards broadband video on TV

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

Will Richmond, president of Broadband Directions and publisher of VideoNuze has been on a jag lately opining that broadband video on TV is a mirage. The crux of Will’s argument, as I understand it, is that in order for the true destiny of broadband on the TV to be fulfilled consumers must be able to freely access all broadband content. While I do deal with broadband video production and distribution in my day job, I do consider myself a fairly mainstream video consumer. Will’s vision of a system with complete and open access to all broadband video content does not appeal to me.

Firstly, my TV viewing patterns are quite different from my Internet viewing habits. In front of the computer I am an active participant seeking out content and following links to other relevant content. In front of the TV the vast majority of my time is spent passively consuming content, only a small fraction of my time is spent searching for content.

Secondly, the input devices for my computer and my TV are vastly different, and I like it that way. I have no interest in attaching a keyboard to my set top or trying to incorporate a Wii inspired pointing device. Having more complex input devices would unnecessarily complicate my experience.

I do think it is possible to put together several different news items and see that we continue to make progress towards Will’s vision for broadband, perhaps more rapidly that he gives the industry credit for. The first article referenced above was primarily about Comcast taking a leadership role in bringing more broadband to the TV through their installed set top boxes. But what really interests me was the TiVo announcement that their spring software update will contain a feature allowing users to access any video content syndicated through RSS. Since TiVo software is now becoming available via Comcast set top boxes I wonder if we aren’t closer to achieving the reality Will envisions while preserving the simplistic interface and passive experience I currently enjoy.

I would like to see TiVo working on some solution for actively following references to additional video resources, both from broadband sources and from traditional programming. For example, Mythbusters regularly offers extended content via their web site and briefly references it during the episode. It would be helpful if TiVo was sensitive to this and allow the download of this content with a simple “Thumbs Up”. Perhaps Google’s recent patent application of a process for text recognition in video would be useful here.

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