When you live in a foreign country, sometimes it’s the little things:

Upon moving to Berlin last year I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was thedailyshow.com not geo-blocked over here, but entire episodes would stream with no commercial interruption whatsoever!  I know, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, does it – still, I’d get a little kick out of that commercial-free skip from one segment to the next each and every time – it felt like I was getting away with something.

Like I said, it’s the little things.

Until recently, that is – watching an episode at home a few weeks ago, I was surprised to find a low-budget German commercial for a shooter video game inserted into my previously commercial-free Daily Show stream at each segment break!  Interestingly, the commercial’s audio was missing and the video resolution was awful.  More interestingly still, after the spot, I was returned not back to the start of the next segment, but was instead deposited at some arbitrary point three quarters of the way through the episode.

It’s been that way for a week now: the same soundless, grainy German shooter video game commercial during each commercial break, followed by a return to some random spot later in the episode.

It all felt like such a hack that I got curious – so as a quick experiment, from my office one day I fast-forwarded to a few of the segment breaks I had seen carrying the soundless, grainy German shooter video game commercial when streamed from home  …and lo and behold, no soundless, grainy German shooter video game commercial!

This meant the source of the commercial is relatively local.  Still, it could be there’s nothing shady going on at all: my home ISP could be streaming from a content delivery network with Comedy Central-sanctioned advertising support, and my office could be streaming from a CDN without.  However, given how thoroughly hacked the insertion of the commercial (and the commercial itself) feels, I wonder if something more ‘informal’ is  happening – could it be that my residential ISP is recognizing this particular traffic as a particularly popular video, and so is buffering the stream themselves while they (somewhat unsuccessfully) attempt to insert a commercial they (rather than Comedy Central) sold?

It’s not such a far-fetched premise: I’m continually amazed at the expensive original recording music drops being used on German TV- there’s simply no way some of these low-profile German TV programs are paying Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith and Nirvana for the use of 3 of their most recognizable hits, all within the space of a minute or two – maybe things are just looser over here

On the other hand, detecting the presence of the stream would require some level of packet inspection – something I’d be surprised could happen in privacy-minded (and Google Street View-unfriendly) Germany.

The soundless, grainy German shooter video game commercial – it remains a mystery.

Back from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, strangely, of all things, it was micro-blogging that got rejected.

Yup! No Twitter, no Facebook status updates, no quick text shout-outs. Nope! Nada! Nothing!

To be sure, any and all mobile communication on all carrier networks was out. Voice and data. You name it.

While I initially suspected complete event-caused subscriber overload (my Blackberry screen message said as much), I soon discovered this “no mobile” diet is a perfectly normal scenario on D.C.’s National Mall.

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Ah, the intractable problem of getting internet-delivered video onto your television: with the advent of the Boxee Box, Google TV, and Apple TV, I think we can safely say it’s not primarily a technical issue any longer.  I’ve recently had the opportunity to try out the new Apple TV device, and in my opinion, this little thing gets an awful lot right – except the content, that is.  ABC, CBS, NBC, and any number of basic cable networks have been unable to come to an agreement regarding the licensing of full episodes to Apple.  What they have made available are short promo clips of their shows – essentially, commercials for content only accessible via traditional cable or (in the case of the broadcast networks) over-the-air DTV.

In other words, it’s the networks’ intention to use Apple TV to encourage users to turn off their Apple TV.

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I didn’t know. The United States Postal Service sports its very own Netflix drop box.

Almost dedicated – Netflix does share the box with postcards – I discovered the drop-off at San Francisco’s Union Square, downstairs, inside Macy’s Post Office.

Without further checks elsewhere, I’d like to assume a string of other USPS locations have followed suit.

Hey, had Netflix competitor Blockbuster been hipper to trends, it might have long been the popular brick-and-mortar video chain and not a young and disruptive DVD mail-order service to get that accomplished.

Of course, Blockbuster is on the auctioning block while Netflix is anything but.

Based on Netflix’s consumer cloud, here’s an early 21st century innovator that convinced someone inside what just might be the country’s largest 20th century bureaucracy to carve out room inside its legacy facilities. Not bad!

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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)

When we moved here to Berlin about a month ago, I was expecting – and looking forward to – experiencing all the differences, large and small, between life in the US (if the New York City area qualifies) and life here in Germany.  A lot of what I’ve come across here was entirely expected: the healthy work-to-live attitude, the not-so-healthy attitude towards smoking (the otherwise cautious and sensible Germans seem not have gotten that memo yet), the smaller personal environmental footprint, the thoroughness and competency, that inscrutable Northern European reserve – the list goes on and on…

I’ve come across some unexpected differences, too  – for one thing, I now consider New York a relatively polite place (there is a German term for “excuse me” – but I can assure you that you won’t hear it on the sidewalks or subways of Berlin – ever).

On the other hand, there are more than a few pleasant surprises to be had  here as well – and one of them is the consistently high quality of German photojournalism.  Granted, when I pick up a copy of Der Spiegel or Stern, I can’t do much other than look at the pictures (yet) – but even so, the quality, honesty, and story-telling impact of the print media photography I’ve seen here is striking.  Photojournalism here in Germany, it seems, is simply operating at a higher level than what we’re used to (or what we’ve become used to) back in the US.

A paean to the lowly magazine photograph on a technology/new media blog?  Why not – because at the end of the day, doesn’t content quality deserve at least as much mention as any technical aspects of the medium and/or the delivery platform(s) carrying that content?

So if a picture is in fact ‘worth a thousand words’, maybe it would be worth 1024 words here on digitalmissive – but even though I’m sorely tempted to grab a few of the compelling photos from the “Fotografie” sections of the Der Spiegel and Stern websites and republish them here in an effort to entice you to visit the websites yourself, you’ll just have to take my word for it: although the best shots seem to be reserved for the print editions, both publications’ sites are still well worth a visit.

Tscheuss von Berlin…

An interesting thing happened at the New York Times over the past 10 years as the paper has shifted an ever-increasing amount of focus and resources from its print edition to its web edition in response to the rise of the internet:  America’s newspaper of record, the flagship of a print journalism industry facing arguably the most direct internet-related challenges of any industry you could name, has instead embraced internet technology – not only as a delivery medium, but as a newsworthy subject in and of itself.

And by doing so, the Times has evolved into one of the more important technology news destinations on the web.

Understandably, some of the Times’ technology and media coverage is geared purely towards the casual general reading public  (a recent Andy Rooney-esque lamentation on the demise of the Filofax comes to mind).  If you haven’t noticed, though, there’s also an impressive amount of reliably high-quality technology journalism coming from 8th Avenue these days: the top-level NY Times technology section contains feature articles by the Times’ able stable of tech writers, more informal and interactive coverage can be found in the Bits Blog, and lastly, for coverage of technology for the consumer there’s the “Personal Tech” section (since non-sales driven coverage of new CE products is pretty tough to come by, I find this section particularly refreshing).

It doesn’t stop there, though – the Times is also a reliably discriminating  aggregator of worthwhile tech coverage from external sources such as redwriteweb.com and venturebeat.com.

In short, I find the NY Times technology coverage well-considered, timely, and (maybe most importantly) comparatively hype-free.  It’s a web destination that’s well worth your time (and of course it’s all also available as RSS feeds and/or email newsletters).   So, props/kudos to the NY Times – for not only meeting the challenge of the  internet head-on, but for seeing an opportunity there.

Here are two recent NY Times articles that touch on subjects we’ve written about here as well:

• The privatization of internet We’ve been noticing an unmistakable trend towards the privatization of certain areas of the internet for a while now.  In fact, it’s been one of our favorite topics (we’ve written about it here and herehere).   For both purely technical and business-driven reasons, we’re looking for the trend to continue – and here’s a good NY Times article on one aspect of it: ‘peering’, the shift from public internet backbone routing to private networks:  Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-shifting Net

• Paying via credit card Back in February we wrote about how donating to the Haitian earthquake relief  fund via text message was so utterly painless that we had completely forgotten about it by the time the next phone bill showed up with those several unexpected $10 charges.   Here’s a Times article from a month or two later about more advanced (non-text based) methods : Cellphone Payments Offer an Alternative to Cash

San Fransisco’s  somafm.com (along with Jersey City’s own WMFU) is one of our favorite internet radio destinations.

Both offer consistently good (although quite different) music – but during Space Shuttle missions, somafm also streams “Mission Control” a mashup of the live NASA communications feed mixed over ambient electronic music.   The effect is  remarkable – minutes of ambient music will go by, and suddenly some mundane communication between the shuttle and Nasa will occur, rendered somehow strangely poignant by the underlying music.

The classic argument against space exploration – that there are more than enough problems down here on Earth to invest in fixing first – has sadly never seemed more compelling.  The topic was brought into focus again this week by the Obama administration’s call to increase NASA funding while switching the focus away from moon trips and towards longer-term technologies that could make a Mars expedition a possibility in our lifetimes.

Not surprisingly, this has since become the political argument/outrage of the week rather than the scientific discussion it probably should be – meanwhile, somafm’s “Mission Control” remains a great example of the kind of innovative niche programming the “long-tail” of the internet makes possible – and an interesting blurring of the lines between art and  science.

For those of you who are interested, tune in Monday morning May 19th, as Discovery is scheduled to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere at 7:43 AM EDT…

Ground control to Major Tom – it’s now official, Planet Earth has found a new religion.

First the iPod. Then the iPod Touch. Next, the iPhone. And now, voila, in comes the iPad! At least throughout the Western hemisphere, the iGospel seems to have taken solid hold.

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