Archive for the ‘TiVo’ 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

Computers haven’t changed our life significantly

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Arthur Salm, columnist for SDNN, argues that after a period of rapid growth from the early 1800s until 1955 we haven’t made any forward progress. Computers he says, “hadn’t altered the way we live all that much”. Arthur unfortunately appears to have missed that we transitioned from the industrial age to the information age.

He does add a postscript to the story recognizing the societal change that has occurred in that time. I would like to make an argument that computers have had a massive effect on our everyday lives in many different ways. And in fact provided some of the very underpinnings that fomented the changes he does recognize.

Healthcare: Computer modeling is used discover causes and cures of many diseases. We now have access to computer based diagnostic tools such as CAT scans, MRIs, ultrasound. We have reporting systems that allow us to create flu vaccines that get it mostly right months in advance of the flu season. We have sequenced the human genome and should start reaping the rewards of both genetic and stem cell research very soon. Two of the biggest problems we face currently are directly related. Our population is living longer and our healthcare costs are skyrocketing.

Finance: Black Tuesday in 1987 has been blamed on computerized trading. And indeed it probably played a partial role. Computers allowed a massive expansion of our stock markets allowing individuals to become a greater part of the stakeholders in the ownership of business than ever before. Arthur pooh-poohs the move from paper to electronic currency, but that change allowed a wide array of financial products to be created that vastly change the way we work and play.

Media: My sons, born in 2002 and 2003, have never known life without TiVo. Arthur dismisses the progress in television from several channels of black and white to color, three digit channel numbered, high definition TV. But DVRs, and TiVo in particular, offer something different. They supply access to media from multiple sources, on demand, filtered for appropriate content. When we stay in a hotel my son, who was able to work a TiVo at two and a half, can not grasp the concept of traditional television. He has only recently accepted that I have no ability to replay a song when I am listening to it on the radio. The choice and selection of media affects us greatly. From a young age the programming shapes our views and values and when we are grown we can limit our exposure to just the views and opinions we want to hear.

Communication: The near free, instantaneous video communication offered by the Internet has released a generation of knowledge workers from the bonds of family and freed them to travel the world, most often to arrive here, to make their fortune. Those that stayed behind or who are returning are shaping the most significant change of our generation, globalization. Business began to be able to send faxes in the mid-1970s. Now just in time delivery systems make construction of the 777 a worldwide team effort.

Turning the world into a single close knit community is perhaps the single biggest advance, and the single largest challenge that still awaits us. Today’s newspapers are failing and are starting to rally around cries of hyperlocalism and geographic community. Unfortunately they continue to show how, even at a supposedly technologically forward outlet like SDNN, they just don’t get it. Yes, I am interested in local stories, but my geographic community is just one definition of local. Things that happen in my workplace, even if it is global, are local to me. The same goes for my family and my friends from high school and college all now spread across a continent, they are a local community to me. There are past coworkers and people who I meet at professional meetings who form yet another local community.

All of these local communities are served by today’s social media technology. Whether it is video conferencing, social networks, blogging or micro-blogging. There is a place for the local geographic media in all of this too, however don’t try to define for me what community is. Just offer me the tools and content and allow me to assemble my community as I see fit.

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Posted in Internet, Opinion, TiVo | Comments

A DM from @Pogue, Rubbing Elbows with the Rich and Famous on Twitter

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Have I told you about the time I stood in line behind George Takei at LAX? I was flying first class on upgrades and he was right in front of me at check in. Until that point I figured LAX had a secret tunnel to Beverly Hills or somewhere else exclusive so that the rich and famous didn’t have to mingle except when explicitly directed by their press agents. Perhaps that’s evidence to the contrary, but I don’t consider myself to be a starstruck person. I don’t have a favorite entertainer, sports hero or even technologist. I am the kind of person who, upon seeing Mel Gibson walk into a restaurant, would hope that he didn’t take my table. So why then would I be so excited to get a DM from David Pogue.

I met David Pogue via downloads to my TiVo. To be brutally honest I don’t value his technical advice all that much. The format does not permit the type of information I use to make buying decisions. What he does do, and does very well, is introduce technology in interesting and approachable ways. He is often clever or witty, he seems to have a gift for making fun of himself while remaining genuine. This is a skill and style that many of us more technically savvy attempt to emulate with our own family and friends.

It was an odd feeling to have in response to receiving a DM and it led me to do a search on @Pogue. That’s when I saw someone else tweeting that he had received a DM from @Pogue as well. So maybe I was excited he considered something I wrote funny enough to deserve exclamation points. Maybe Twitter’s 140 character limit is truly some type of social equalizer as the hype suggests. Or maybe David Pogue is just a cool guy. The kind of guy you want to hang out with at his house because you know he has all of the best toys.

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Relieving TiVo Guilt

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Today CNN hit us with a story about how our normal guilt about overeating at Thanksgiving is being replaced by a new guilt over not watching everything that we ask our TiVo to record. You can Google “tivo guilt” to find out how serious the problem is. Here are my solutions, both things that you can do today and ways TiVo can enhance their product, to help eliminate TiVo guilt.

First, delete some of those season passes. Yes, the new season of Heroes really does suck so stop wasting your time. You know you have season passes for shows that sounded interesting but you just never got around to them. Come on, delete them. If they’re any good they will show up in reruns.

Second, save some programs for the off season. You know it’s coming, those times of year when your TiVo sits idle because everything is a rerun? You can either take a chance and hope your chosen favorites are reaired, or simply adjust the season pass to save them forever and then ignore them until the current season ends. I wouldn’t recommend doing this with sports, news or reality shows though.

If we want to address this problem with technology then we need to look at the root cause. The media focuses on the sheer volume of recorded programs, but that is misguided. The problem is that all the programs you tell TiVo to record get equal priority on playback importance. This means that you have to make choices on what programs to watch. Making choices is not why people watch TV.

We can easily demonstrate this is the case. Most people with suggestions turned on probably allow hundreds of programs a year to be deleted without even considering them. They feel no guilt for not watching these programs. I certainly didn’t feel any guilt when I accidently deleted hours of “Dora the Explorer” and “The Wiggles”.

TiVo currently allows sorting by date and alphabetically. Alphabetical sorting makes sense, it makes it easier to find a specific program. Recording date is not a good sorting mechanism. It implies an importance to the program that was not intended by the user and may be at the foundation of the TiVo guilt phenomenon.  While I will not argue for the deletion of the date ordered sort, I believe a new sort order needs to become the default, the Priority Sort.

The Priority Sort should include a number of factors combined in user selected ways so that the program the user would choose is always presented first. These are presented in no particular order.

Factor 1. Season pass priority

You already ranked the programs for importance once, this ranking should be preserved for viewing as well. Being a naturally lazy person I feel good about being able to use this data twice while only entering it once. Perhaps maybe instead you are an environmentalist, all of the bits getting used to store season pass priority can now be used for now playing priority making the Priority Sort a green technology.

Factor 2. Live Events

News and sporting events are high proirity items when new, but low priority when old. Of course that doesn’t count the “Miracle on Ice” so maybe an exception should be coded in for that one case.

Factor 3. Program and Episode Popularity

TiVo makes suggestions about programs to record, it should also make suggestions about programs to watch. You don’t want to be the only one at the water cooler to have missed the peanut butter bikinis on Big Brother because you chose to watch a Mythbuster’s clip show instead. Popularity would need to have both a predicted and measured component to account for data age and frequency of update.

Factor 4: Previously Watched

A show that you watched and did not delete is probably not the next show you want to watch. Of course tailoring the presentation of the now playing list is the main reason TiVo’s need cameras and facial recognition. Your significant other may be angry that they were told to watch Chuck ahead of the American Idol finale because you couldn’t wait to watch it, solution: tell them to get their own TiVo.

Factor 5: Previous Viewing Habits

Skipping a program in the priority ordered now playing list should be an implicit thumbs down. If you want to choose your own programs switch to date ordering. If I were the TiVo Czar and you skipped a program I would probably delete the season pass and send a letter to the network. But simply moving it down the list should suffice in most cases.

There may be other factors to consider, I will leave that as an excercize for the reader a la the Netflix Prize.

Edit: There are three sort options according to weakKnees. They are alphabetical, recording date and expiration date.

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