It’s not often we outright endorse a product here at digitalmissive (ok, we’ve never done it).  Well, I’m going to have to make an exception in the case of Logitech’s Squeezebox internet radio.  I’ve been loving this < $200 device for a few months now.  Even if you’re not an expat in a far-off land suffering from the occasional spontaneous craving to listen to radio from places you used to live (say, KCRW in Los Angeles, or Jersey City’s very own WFMU) without having to go turn on your  computer, this little guy is well worth it.  Turn it on, put it on your home wireless network, and you’re good to go: the radio connects to Logitech’s servers and features a pretty well-optimized interface for searching and accessing an surprisingly extensive range of radio stations from around the world.  So extensive, in fact, that you soon might find yourself playing with it, listening to Jamaican news reports or Polish pop music.  Strangely, it’s more satisfying surfing for global internet radio using a device like the Squeezebox than it is using a web browser: the fact that it’s not “a computer” makes it feel somehow more special, like the internet-age incarnation of old-fashioned ham radio.

How does it sound?  Really pretty good for the price.  There’s also an accessory pack available with a remote and an internal battery pack, but although the prospect of being able to pick up my Squeezbox and take it with me to the kitchen or the bedroom is appealing, at $50, I haven’t quite sprung for the battery yet (besides, for remote control, there’s always the obligatory iPad app). Yep, this little thing is pretty cute – and the Logitech folks in charge of aggregating radio stations over on the server side have done a really impressive job (I’m not alone in my admiration – on Amazon US, the Squeezebox averages 4.5 stars across almost 450 reviews). Now if only someone could manage to do such a good job with internet television….

A few weeks ago I wrote about the short fat pipe I now have in my living room.  It’s great: while internet television solutions all continue to suffer from a lack of premium content, much of that programming is currently freely available via any web browser – and my little $99 device does a decent job of getting it all from my PC over to my TV – wirelessly.

Granted, this short fat pipe solution of mine is nothing more than an interim measure.  The technology needed to make  internet video directly accessible from the television is here, but its going to be a while before the business-side folks reach consensus on how to best navigate The End Of  Television As We Know It.  Meanwhile, products are being released in fits and starts: just recently, poor reviews of Google TV (mostly centered around this very same content issue) have forced Google to ask their hardware partners to delay the launch of any devices while they regroup.

Filling the void are the various PC-to-TV ‘short fat pipe’ solutions covered in my previous post, along with more recent arrivals such as the very clever SnapStick.  Although not for sale yet, this device shows promise.  Rather than have to push bandwidth-heavy HDMI from the computer to the television, the SnapStick device will sit next to the television and connect via HDMI over a cable or be embedded within your next TV or Blu-ray player.   Merely another set-top box, you say?  Not really – rather than building an yet another dedicated internet video platform from the ground up only to have it rejected by the still gun-shy content owners (i.e. Google, Apple, and Boxee), SnapStick had the insight to realize that the web browser model is the only game in town for the time being.  The other cool thing about Snapstick is that rather than have a complicated ‘computeresque’ remote (like the Sony and Logitech Google TV products), you install an app on your smart phone and use the phone’s native web browser to navigate to content: once you find a video you’d like to watch, just flick your phone at the SnapStick device, and Snapstick will stream the content and repackage it for your television.  Take that, Flash-unfriendly Apple…

Too good to be true?  Maybe – if the hulus of the world can sniff Boxee HTTP requests and deny them access despite Boxee’s best repeated attempts to ‘sneak in’ by appearing to the outside world like any other Mozilla browser, I’m not sure why the same fate doesn’t await SnapStick.

Yup! It’s that time of the year again. I am headed for Las Vegas, to scan the halls of the #1 annual electronics bonanza – CES – short for Consumer Electronics Show.

Probably the key highlight for this year’s show – more electronics OEMs find religion in portable mobility. As far as exhibitors’ new devices announcements go, the excitement is virtually palpable.

Especially with 4G connectivity helping to better connect them all.

Read the rest of this entry »

Not sure yet what you would want for Christmas?

How about an Apple-designed car?

Yup! A vehicle created by the same company that managed to single-handedly re-invent your PC, your Walkman, your cell phone, laptop and VOD player.

Read the rest of this entry »

The new crop of internet television solutions (Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee Box, et al) are more capable than ever.  However, despite the technological readiness of all this new hardware (or perhaps because of  it), cable/broadcast networks are more reluctant than ever to allow their content onto these devices.

There’s every indication, in fact, that the process of developing viable and sustainable business models built around getting premium internet video content directly to to the television is going to take the various stakeholders (including cable/satellite operators and advertisers) much longer than the more optimistic of us had hoped.

It’s a little frustrating.

What’s an out-of-patience viewer to do?

Fortunately, while networks continue to shy away from the television, they seem more comfortable than ever allowing access to their content from the safe confines of your computer’s web browser:

• For many, hulu has become virtually a browser-based ‘DVR in the cloud’ for catching up on recently missed programming from 3 out of the 4 major US broadcast networks (only Disney/ABC, with its close ties to Apple/iTunes, continues to shun hulu).
• Program-specific websites such as those of The Daily Show and Fox News Sunday (my two favorite news-related entertainment programs) often now routinely make extended interviews and other additional content available online.

There’s a reason why content owners are increasingly friendly to the web browser yet continue to view the internet-connected television with such fear and loathing: the computer offers a sufficiently lousy user experience (single-viewer, non-aggregated content, desktop-based) so as to not threaten incumbent television revenue streams.

Waiting indefinitely for ‘the internet television device of the future’ or buying an interim device such as Apple TV that lacks content already available a few feet away on my web browser are both unattractive options.  But what if I could get my desktop computer’s audio and video output over to the HDMI input on my television wirelessly?  Technically, it’s a non-trivial technical challenge: the typical home TCP/IP wifi network can barely handle a buffered and highly compressed video stream’s packets.  HDMI, on the other hand, is a much more bandwidth-intensive protocol – designed to run on a wire with zero compromise on quality, HDMI couldn’t care less about accommodating or recovering from the vagaries and dynamic fluctuations of wireless network performance.

But hey, I only needed to cover the 30 feet from one side of my living room to the other - what I needed was a short, fat pipe.

So I started looking into it – and here’s what I found…

Read the rest of this entry »

“Engineers remain the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry” – Sony CEO Howard Stringer

Although the quote’s a year or two old now, the bloated remote for Sony’s new Google TV would suggest that the culture of engineer-knows-best is still firmly in place over at Sony.  And that’s a shame, because even a cursory comparison of Sony’s and, say, Apple’s performance over the past few years would suggest that engineers may in fact not be the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry.

Engineers, it turns out, are the engineers of the electronics industry – and while crucial to the technology involved, should be kept out of the room when it comes time to do consumer electronics user interface design…

…or you end up with TV remotes that look like this.

Read the rest of this entry »

After a whole (vacation) week worth of back-issue reading through stacks of geek magazines and industry reports, here’s a couple of consumer digital connectivity statistics I thought worth sharing.

Each item individually may not be much news. But in aggregate, these developments provide pretty impressive guidance we are well on our way to moving from an already not-too-shabby megabit society to one a thousand fold faster.

Read the rest of this entry »




Astronaut, restaurant critic, world-class rock guitarist, independent technology/new media blogger – there are a lot of fun jobs out there. Add to that list engineer/developer at Ar Drone, the french company behind the “Parrot”, the first iOS-controlled “quadricoptor”.  Although a prototype was shown at this year’s CES, the device has just hit the US market this month.

We’re not much for gadgets-for-gadgets’-sake here at digitalmissive – but this thing, if it works as well as it seems to, looks like a pretty OK way to waste $300.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been written before about the smart move the New York Times made a  few years ago: instead of dreading internet technology as a potentially fatal threat to their business model, they instead ‘made lemonade’ and decided to embrace change by increasing their coverage of all things internet.  The New York Times has since become known as one of the leading technology business and consumer technology news sources out there.

As part of that increased coverage, last week the ‘paper’ launched a series entitled “The Sofa Wars”, about  something else we’ve written about before: the stubborn problem of getting internet video over to the television where it belongs.

The first two pieces are here and here, and they’re really worth a read.

Since moving to Germany I’ve been relying on the Good Reader iPhone app more than ever, frequently referring to a PDF map of the Berlin subway system I have stored locally on the phone.  That got me to thinking…

Question: It appears the security issues involving both Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash are somewhat similar (just last month came word of the latest zero-day threat affecting both).  Why then is Apple allowing PDF files onto the iPhone by bestowing the App Store blessing on apps like Good Reader, while maintaining its very firm (and very public) anti-Flash stance?

One one hand, if a head-to-head comparison of Apple’s Preview and Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is any indication, there could well be some truth to Apple’s low opinion of Adobe software: as we’ve said before, it’s hard to come up with another instance in which two applications that do exactly same thing differ so much in quality and usablility.  Preview is lightweight, fast-loading, and features a very nice contextually-based search function – all qualities utterly lacking in Acrobat Reader.  That the inferior product is made by the same folks who design and maintain the platform itself is even more remarkable.

On the other hand, maybe Adobe’s code isn’t so uniformly horrible after all – maybe there’s another reason Apple is perfectly OK with letting their mobile devices not only view PDF files but also to store them locally, while Flash is treated as if it had some type of digital cooties. I find the most-often offered rationale – that the advent of HTML 5 is upon us and will make Flash unneccesary – to be a bit of a red herring.  First of all, HTML 5 in any meaningful form is still years away.  Secondly, significant issues remain to be worked out, while the various competing browser-builder agendas have made reaching agreement on something as basic as the underlying codecs an exercise in cat-herding.  Also consider that HTML 5 has yet to address ad serving, encryption, and digital rights management – which, for all its faults, Flash has.  In short, the Flash platform offers the tremendous advantage of a standardized layer of abstraction across multiple browser implementations, Adobe’s figured a lot of things out about getting a video stream from point A to point B across the internet, and the platform works well enough to have prevailed in the open market – it’s not going anywhere soon (for more on why, here’s a post worth reading – from, of all people, an HTML 5-loving Google/YouTube engineer).

Answer In Cupertino, though, animosity towards Flash runs deep, and it runs strong.  So much so, in fact, that what amounts to an anti-Flash manifesto was recently published on company website – written by the CEO himself, no less.  What could be differentiating factor between Apple’s very different attitudes towards Acrobat and Flash?  We think it could well involve an as-yet unannounced push by the company to attempt to solve the stubborn problem of getting internet video onto your television.

After all, at the intersection of internet technology and consumer electronics (the Apple sweet spot), the getting the internet television experience right (as opposed to the computer-dependent internet video experience) is undeniably the big prize – the ‘elephant in the room’, a market with the potential to dwarf even the smart phone market.  There’s that pesky little problem of Flash, though – any 3rd-party technology simply won’t do if Apple is to go to the trouble of getting into internet video in a big way, given the company’s vertically integrated business model.  That’s why there is not, and will never be, Flash on the iPhone (until the day the App Store model itself is successfully challenged in court).

Prediction With iTunes, Apple’s already shown that they know how to make selling premium digital content over the internet user-friendly enough to work.  They just blew through their Q3 earnings forecasts and they enjoy a level of brand loyalty unmatched within the CE industry.  With all that in mind, it’s almost obvious in what direction the company’s headed in next:  Within the next 1-2 years, look for Apple to launch a new Apple TV box and maybe even a standalone internet-enabled television with Apple TV baked in and an RF cable interface for backward compatibility  -  all to access a new and dramatically enhanced Apple TV service.

A standalone Apple television?  Well that’s just crazy talk, you might say.  However, bear in mind two points: they have the monitor manufacturing supply chain and expertise already in place, and (maybe more importantly) it’s the hardware where Apple makes their money, not the software.

While that’s not exactly a new opinion here at digitalmissive, it bears repeating.  Pure conjecture?  Yep. (But remember, you heard it here first – OK, maybe not first, but early on enough to make it interesting).

Obstacles Flash?  Small pickings – Apple has clearly made the determination the Adobe Systems is a company that can be dissed at will (or, given the current Apple market cap, even acquired).  No, the real challenge for Apple here is that any plan to get into internet video in a big  (i.e. Ipod, iPhone) kind of way would of course require going up against the vested interests of the highly lucrative, heavily regulated  (and even more heavily lobbied) industry that is broadcast/cable television.

If, with all that he has going for him, Jobs still decides not to go for the ‘brass ring’ of consumer electronics that television represents, it can only be that a clear-eyed assessment of the power and entrenchment of the incumbent industry players will have dissuaded him from mounting the challenge.

Adobe is clearly well within the envelope – but doing battle against a unified Comcast/NBC and Viacom?   That’s another st0ry entirely…

And even if you’re Apple, sometimes you have to pick your battles.

(The opinions expressed above are entirely unaffected by whether or not I own Apple stock – there aren’t that many digitalmissive readers out there – but in the interest of full disclosure, I do)