For two reasons, Brian’s recent TV Everywhere post caught my renewed attention.

For one, earlier today, Comcast announced expansion of its online TV video efforts to an impressive 23 networks. From full-length movie channels - think Cinemax, HBO, IFC, an Starz -  to cable TV favorites such as A&E, E!, Food Network, and WE,  Comcast’s 5,000 trial homes are now among the very first to enjoy online video akin to legacy TV.

Read the rest of this entry »

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!  

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most daunting technological challenges we face today is scaling up this old internet of ours to meet the burgeoning consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive real-time applications such as telecommuting, cloud computing, and streaming media.

And as internet video continues to trend from short-form/long-tail/low quality content towards long-form/short-tail/high quality (premium) content (i.e. from YouTube to hulu to TV/films on embedded hardware), exploding consumer demand could bring things to a head even more quickly than currently anticipated.
Read the rest of this entry »

When you find back-to-back Hulu and Verizon Hub commercials rolling across your TV screen, (as I recently did in New York), you know for traditional media delivery, the times, they are a-changin’.

Turns out, the TV spot for Hulu and Verizon Hub each mark a first for their respective parent company; pitching products previously not marketed on live television.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve already written a few times (here and here) about DNS.

Why?

A concerted effort to drive readers away with dry technical information about internet plumbing, possibly?

No,  it’s because I don’t think DNS gets the love and respect it deserves - either for its sheer technical coolness as a massively replicated global peer-to-peer data structure, or for its vital importance to The Internet As We Know It.
Read the rest of this entry »

A quick update on my recent ever got pinged by your CEO? post, and some related commentary on online social media in the enterprise world.

Presumably by way of a forward-thinking PR department close to Deutsche Telekom management (indeed my employer), I recently received a LinkedIn invite to connect to DT CEO Rene Obermann.
Read the rest of this entry »

By most measures, the White House’s first online town hall meeting was a smashing success.

A whooping 104,081 email submissions and 3.6 million votes later, today, the US irreversibly gained a whole new level of citizen participation.

To that point, the White House actually created a namesake post exactly for that purpose.

What should come next, in my mind, would be to ensure that this new-found form of political dialog marketing will continue to be exactly that - an ongoing, productive dialog to and fro the electorate and the elected.

To that point, anyone in digital media building and growing a brand online knows, focused quality discussion across the social graph is not as easy as it sounds.

After all, the Web’s bull horn capabilities are very much a two-way street. And media outlets everywhere are likely eager to pick up on any disgruntled citizen that felt s/he didn’t get a proper response.

So beware White House, from now on be prepared to handle your incoming emails with great care.

It’s all about keeping the conversation going.

I know I promised to keep politics off this blog. Do indulge me, though. 

Besides. It’s much more about the (digital) economy than politics.

The White House web site folks replaced YouTube with Akamai as the preferred video delivery platform for the President’s weekly online video address.

What sparked the decision was privacy concerns over how YouTube-embedded video dealt with cookies placed on the devices people used to access the popular White House Web domain.

OK. I get it! But what about the other, much less discussed issue in this context? Money!

Behind the decision to ditch YouTube for Akamai also were complaints that a tax-payer funded government site should not generate free advertising for YouTube and thus Google, the online video giant’s parent company. (The rational being that someone clicking from the White House domain back to YouTube becomes a potentially valuable set of eyeballs against which YouTube can charge advertisers). 

Well, how about this? (All completely hypothetical of course, and somewhat simplified):

YouTube - which for all intents and purposes has solved its cookies issue. Gone is the privacy concern - continues to deliver the President’s video address to the White House site. The nation’s most prominent government Web destination thus drives traffic back to YouTube as it has in the past. 

But this time, this time we go out and actually buy shares in Google stock. (Believe me, it’s cheap right now).

Yes, rather than complaining about taxpayer money being misappropriated by letting www.whitehouse.gov drive free traffic back to YouTube, how about sharing in the financial upside (and risk, I admit) in YouTube’s incremental revenue benefit from my tax-funded arrangement?

Net, net? The White House site would regain an exceedingly capable video partner; one with unparalleled online brand recognition and viral video marketing ability unlike any other video site today. 

And taxpayers? They would have opportunity to realize a potential return on their stock investment transferring right back into their own pockets. (Capital gains tax not withstanding, that is).

Wait! Does this sound too much like a mini version of the current US stimulus plan, bailing out an already lackluster Internet stock with public money?

Is this a (mini) step towards socializing the digital economy - akin to the previous administration’s proposal to let taxpayers (partially) invest their tax-funded social security, with all the inherent risk attached?

Listen, I am just a telco guy. What do I know?

But quite frankly, to me the bigger picture is that the digital economy has grown and prospered best every time we rewarded value (here YouTube’s unique video delivery expertise) and risk (my trust that buying Google stock) will pay off.

Artificially disconnecting any Web site from a quality vendor makes little sense to me.

Besides, wouldn’t we want to see our tax dollars placed where they are likely to generate the highest return?

What’s wrong with that? Especially in this economy.

PS: Yes, I own a handful of Google stock. And no, this post is not a vote against Akamai.

As an IT consultant/network administrator a few years ago, one of my clients was a small but fast-growing retailer with several remote locations spread across the country.  Having no trusted technicians available in some of these cities, it was a clear win when I chose to go with WYSE thin client terminals on many of these remote seats (I wrote a bit about that here).   While the idea of such simple and lightweight “web appliances” dates back to the late 90’s, despite a few short stints as The Next Big Thing, the devices never proved quite as popular as promised - but conditions now are more favorable than ever:

• Increasing functionality in the cloud mitigates much of the need for heavy client-side application installations (and the RAM/processor power/data storage they require)
• The current global economic climate certainly favors less expensive (and often computationally redundant) devices

There’s a third (and crucial) factor, though: now that wireless internet access has become nearly ubiquitous, we all place an increasing premium on portability (consider that by most accounts, laptop sales actually surpassed desktop sales for the first time during 2008).  What do you get, then, when you take all the innate advantages of thin computing and add today’s need for mobile computing?

The “netbook” - a small (8″ or 10″ screen) laptop with a lightweight operating system, long battery life, (and often) solid state disk (SSD) storage.  As with good bread, the Beatles, and text messaging, it’s Europe that’s been out in front on this, but that’s expected to change as US acceptance of the netbook grows.  In fact, while industry analysts at Gartner expect overall 2009 PC sales to decline by almost 12% (a historic high), they see netbook sales doubling.

To date, the low-power Intel Atom has been the netbook CPU of choice, but AMD and Motorola have each recently released new processors of their own aimed at this growing market.   As for what operating system runs on those chips, for now it’s come down to a battle between Microsoft and the Linux community (Apple having not yet demonstrated much interest in this lower-end market).  Google’s Android cell phone operating system has even been ported over to a netbook - an interesting possible future platform for the open source OS.

Many of the first netbooks ran a specialized Linux kernel, a trend that only looked to gain more momentum once Microsoft stopped stopped selling XP last June.  However, with the netbook trend starting to pick up, Vista proving too resource-hungry for many desktops (let alone netbooks), and with Windows 7 still months away, Microsoft had a change of heart - and recently decided to bring back XP Home, giving the OS a second life as their unofficial interim netbook operating system (until Windows 7 arrives, that is).  It’s an easy decision to justify: while netbooks are by definition leaner and meaner than traditional PCs, users still expect them to be more than mere terminals: in other words, people like their applications (and chances are pretty good the ones they’re used to are not going to be available for Linux).   Furthermore, despite (or maybe because of) the fate Vista met in the marketplace, many users still like XP - and in any event, to a less technical user, that oh-so familiar Microsoft desktop would have to look more reassuring (and less toy-like) than a Linux desktop - even if only on a purely emotional level.  Lastly, even if Vista was able to run on a netbook, licensing costs for the new OS would tend to put the machine well beyond the price point of the average netbook.

So, not surprisingly, the decision paid off for Microsoft: XP Home lives on and has beaten Linux out to ship on the majority of netbooks now sold (in a telling sign, HP recently stopped even offering Linux netbooks in otherwise penguin-friendly Europe).

Either way, in addition to all the other advantages, at only $200 to $400 each, these devices (much like smart phones) are inexpensive enough to be subsidized by long-term internet service agreements - so going forward it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which netbooks do not figure in heavily.   Microsoft, for one, agrees, and is committed  to releasing a lightweight version of Windows 7 optimized for netbooks (despite the economics of the netbook market dictating substantially lower license fees than Redmond is used to charging).

I think there might be one in your future too.

I know I want one - so it’s got to be cool, right?