Author: Lynne

Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group (formerly Forrester) often has some very interesting stories to tell – not surprising, really, because he’s been watching the industry for quite a while. I used to read his comments on the semi and systems side when he was at Giga (and prior at Dataquest). I’ve always found his comments good food for thought (even if we don’t always agree)…

In chatting about media-ready devices, we got onto the subject of the difficulty of creating content. We both agree that building a set-top device is pretty easy given some of the new hardware coming along, but making an interesting service without having good premade content (like getting a Hollywood deal, and that’s hard to get when the studios already have their content delivery channels) is hard. He thinks education is the first target – I think journalism – but content is the key to all.

Interesting about education content. I did a paper on that topic – video serving educational content per a test run in a local school district. Short creative works by kids on California Missions, etc. Webinars for teachers per school district. All automated, secure, simple, centralized. Content trackable / licensable. Focus on project basis – not process. But education is very conservative – while it was fun, it definitely was not first mover from my perspective.

According to this indepth Cnet article “2004 is the last year when people consider video an exotic application for broadband,” (Peter Barrett, CTO Microsoft TV).

So the Baby Bells are spending billions to become TV providers. “Voice is a dying business” and the bites from cable are costly. “If we are going to build the IP (Internet Protocol) pipe, we want all the revenue streams. The great thing is that several technologies are coming together now. We’re very happy about that” (Ralph Ballart, VP Broadband, SBC Laboratories).

The key is services, since most customers already have cable or satellite and are unlikely to change unless service offerings are more compelling. And bandwidth constipation is a real issue when dealing with poorly compressed poorly produced Internet video. “Digital video technology is in flux as technology providers develop potential replacements for the current standard, known as MPEG-2, which would require substantially less bandwidth to transmit video without loss of picture quality. A new standard, known as MPEG-4, would slash bandwidth requirements by about 75 percent, giving TV providers room for additional channels and high-definition transmissions, but it is still largely a work in progress”.

It’s not a “work in progress” at ExecProducer – we’ve been producing media of the Internet, by the Internet, and for the Internet for years, and continue to innovate on end-to-end quality, bandwidth resource allocation, and TCP/IP infrastructure issues along with production issues. So I suppose it’s just a “catch-up game” for those other guys. All aboard!

Michael Bazeley of the SJ Mercury News today takes folks to task for leaving all those digital photos and vids on their disk drive just waiting for it to die. He says people should be putting their personal stuff on other people’s sites (which does help with backup issues). And if you don’t have many photos, and you’re already organized, and you don’t mind transient views, that’s probably a great idea.

But what if you’ve got loads of photos – a lot more than a simple photo album page – and a lot of clips too. If they’re cluttering up a disk drive, surely they’ll clutter up a site. So you become disorganized in two places at once! Well that doesn’t sound too promising…

There’s one more way people can organize their photos (and vid clips). Make a movie with ExecProducer! Here’s how…