You spend enough time thinking about internet television, and you start assuming that the interactive possibilities of the new medium would be obvious to anyone - especially someone in the business.  Every now and then, though, you get a reminder that the traditional linear model is so deeply ingrained in everyone’s way of thinking about what television is supposed to be that sometimes even the industry doesn’t quite see the forest for the trees.
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The other day I read about the very first box out of the gate running Intel’s very promising (and much anticipated) CE 3100 ‘System on a Chip (SoC) processor (aka ‘Canmore’).   This was news worthy of further investigation, and so within a few clicks I found similar mention on Slashgear, and soon ended up at the personal blog of the OEM Product Manager from the Netherlands who worked on the project.
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Last week, I attended the first HD Communication Summit, here, in New York. 

I have to confess, the concept of high definition voice transmission was new to me. 

Yet, by the time I left the auditorium, Jeff Pulver and team certainly made sure I was up to speed. (For the purpose of full disclosure, although I am a “telco guy”, I am primarily focused on market analysis and vendor scouting in the fixed broadband consumer data space. That keeps core voice service topics outside my purview).

So why HD-quality voice transmission, if for decades standard-definition 300 to 3000 Hz service quality has done just fine for most of us?

Among the arguments, once people have gotten a taste of what wideband voice communications is like, they wouldn’t want to turn back - ever!  

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A Wall St. analyst’s report on Apple today has touched off a new round of buzz on the rumored Apple netbook - essentially, a 9-inch iTouch.

Although we wrote about this over two months age here,  it’s well worth a bump: given that hulu has just decided to stop waiting for Apple to let Flash onto the iPhone OS and will instead release a workaround app of their own using MP4/Quicktime (à la youtube), this device promises to be one seriously cool “lean-back” (lean way back, if you want to take it to bed) internet video device for the home.

This is going to be a huge success.

Huge.

Measuring internet video, like math, is hard.

Witness the wildly divergent numbers for hulu coming from competing measurement services Nielsen Online and Comscore: as reported a few days ago in the New York Times, Nielsen counted 8.9 million unique visitors while Comscore counted well over four times that number: 42 million.

Understandably, hulu takes issue with the lower Neilsen numbers.
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This one’s a somewhat lighter post, mainly a few observations about how, of all things, New York City weather, social networking and mobile technology all seem to gel quite effectively these days.

Last week, just back from the ITP Spring Show at Manhattan’s Tisch School of The Arts, I took a quick break strolling across Union Square, on my way to Yaron Samid’s latest NY Video 2.0 meetup event.
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Question: Name a market in which Microsoft does 57 times better than Google…

Answer: Web browsers: according to recent numbers from Net Applications, Internet Explorer has 66.1% of the market, while Google’s Chrome browser sits at a meager 1.4% (in between are Firefox at 22% and Safari at 8.2%).

While 29% of North American households connected to the internet via broadband connections in 2008, Forrester expects that to more than double to 62% by 2010.  We’re also expecting consumer buy-in of cloud computing and netbooks to increase dramatically over the next few years.  As these trends play out, the web browser will assume an ever more important role: the operating system for the cloud.
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• the internet - to the rescue of the newspaper industry?

• full-page television-style video commercials coming to your web browser? (pitchfork and torch futures soar)

• Sony’s Howard Stringer on the decline of AOL, the success of Apple, the importance of the “user” in user interface design, and other startling developments

• The US Centers For Desease Control and Prevention is really interested in how many of us (>20%) now live in cellphone-only households…

• The latest must-have for your overclocked computer: Liquid Nitrogen!

Which would happen first - would Apple and Adobe get together to bring Flash (and therefore hulu) to the iPhone, or would hulu (like the similarly Flash-based YouTube service) write a workaround iPhone App?

Historically, Apple has been uninterested in letting Adobe get its Flash Player technology onto the iPhone.  Technical power consumption issues have been often cited,  but given that Google’s Android devices have had Flash support from almost square one, perhaps a more reasonable explanation for Apple’s resistance has had to do with a desire to promote their competing Quicktime technology.   Meanwhile, Flash has become the clear defacto standard for web-based video streaming (according to Adobe, the Flash Player is installed on  98% of US browsers) - and in terms of the still nascent embedded CE hardware market, Adobe alone seems to ‘get it’,  recently making decisive moves to become just as ubiquitous there as they are on the browser (more on that here).
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Before getting involved in technology/new media research and analysis, I made a living as a  musician and composer.  Frankly, at times it was more of a living than at others - but suffice it to say, I was active enough to leave a fair amount of online evidence of a musical career still laying around up there in the cloud.

Although my days of releasing CDs (back when they still released CDs, that is) and writing for TV commercials are largely behind me, every now and then I still google myself (who doesn’t occasionally self-google?) - and a few weeks ago, I started noticing videos with my music showing up in search results on YouTube.  The recordings being used (demos from various older projects) were all otherwise unencumbered and were still being licensed occasionally for other uses, so in an effort to protect myself, I decided to contact YouTube and see if I could draw their attention to the issue.
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