A Day at OpenTech

I spent my Saturday at the OpenTech conference in London and it was a day well spent. I do have to learn to go and listen to new things though, although talks from Tom Morris (who I later met for the first time), Simon Willison and Gavin Bell were interesting, those were subjects I already knew about or were aware about to a fair degree. What did strike me however were some of the last sessions by Tom Loosemore and Chris Jackson.

Between them they told stories which included building a peer-to-peer TV network for persisted content, and a project to become 'the DNS for media'. I've always had an interest in home entertainment, and these talks made my eyes light up. I'm really pleased to see that Tom has posted his presentation.

Tom's 'impossibox' was capable of storing 1TBs worth of media data, roughly a months worth. If that were to be networked in a P2P fashion, you could have months of recorded TV, redundantly stored in every house on your street. I think this plays into the networks hands here as well. This isn't real time data and can be sync'd, or you can download a program or series at the networks leisure without breaking net neutrality. Throw in, if there were 100 such networked boxes with a mile's radius, chances are you could take care of the P2P sharing at the local exchange so you wouldn't even need to push large amounts of data all over the place.

Although this future is a 'slightly bonkers' version, it sparks the imagination. Just think of the social networking benefits of being able to capture this data, see friends recommendations, read comments, video mashups, trailers, directors (or other users) commentaries. So much potential.

Great talk.

It's a Mac Mini Adventure

It certainly has been a mini adventure, but one that spans several years in a quest for home entertainment. I think I may even be finally happy with that. With my new home I've been able to do some things I've always wanted to do. Since I left school I started to build my collection of stereos, TVs and other goodies. Recently I added two pairs of Mordaunt Short Genies with a matching centre to add to my 32" Samsung LCD TV.

I had a dilemma where I'd moved my PC away from close proximity to the TV which I was using to view videos with the VGA port on my TV and amp for my MP3s from the PC.

I had tried streaming to my xBox 360 using the Media Centre Extender, and although this works quite nicely for audio it can't cope with DivX movies even though the xBox has been given DivX support. There were a few products on the market which might have done the job, but then I thought "what is the most configurable, most likely to work how I want it work solution?" - the answer. A computer.

It needed to be small, be able to handle videos and music which all computers can. Be able to support DivX and other formats and ideally have a Media Centre like application with remote. The Mac Mini was my answer to that question.

Having a computer as a media centre is both a great thing and a bad thing. It's great as it's flexible but it's bad because it needs input through keyboard and mouse. There may be a way to disable this from the Mac I'm unaware of, but I added a wireless keyboard and mouse that works really nicely. The mouse even works on the material of my sofa.

See, for the smallness of the remote, the small keyboard and mouse are more powerful and easily stashed under the sofa.

All in all, I'm very happy with the purchase, a small media centre hooked up to my TV and amp for £500 that can also be used as a full on computer from the sofa. Throw in a 750GB external hard disc and I'm laughing.

More Thoughts on Future of TV and Movies

I've read another great article on 'Hollywood vs the internet' thanks to the excellent newspapper, The Economist.

The article discusses how the Hollywood companies have missed out on using the web to leverage distribution of their media. It cites some companies which have spouted up offering films at reasonable prices is a range of formats, awesome! Thing is, these sites are illegal. Bummer. It's not for want of trying to get some stuff out there, there are some companies offering limited titles, but no one company seems fully driven to use the web yet.

I wanted to write something about this, but it wasn't until I read San1t1's excellent post on ownership and 20th century mass media that my thoughts stirred once again.

If we ignore worrying stories about ISP bloodbaths about broadband providers not being able to handle the web as a platform for one moment... I really don't want to buy another CD or DVD disc again. What I would like is purchase rights (paid or free - free is the best price) to view/listen content where ever and when-ever the hell I want!

Would I pay £10 for an 'on-demand' movie that I could watch as many times as I wanted, and could watch on my cable box, laptop or iPod? Probably yes. Would I pay that for being able to listen to my music through my cable box, through a web site or my ipod? Probably yes.

As an interesting aside, San1t1 also published another post along similar lines.

Where does this leave us all? While both Hollywood and the music industry innovate on what they think their customers need, I for one certainly continue to push for zero touch, high-definition, highly accessible content, music, films and TV.

Battle for your TV - Round 2

*ding ding*

A very interesting development in the battle for your TV, BT and Microsoft jointly announce that BT will provide content through xBox Live, check out the press release. It's a funny old world, only last month I wrote up some thoughts on the battle for your TV, BT are playing an interesting game. There is a bit of a - however - moment though...

Here it comes...

However, a resident has to be a BT Broadband customer, and I assume a BT Total Broadband customer so that the resident is using a BT Home Hub (the snazzy Apple looking router) as it guarantees some quality of the line. I can only assume this means that the payment still appears on the bill you get from BT. There doesn't appear to be the 'roaming' option of being signed into any xBox using your Live account. So you couldn't be round a buddies house who uses broadband X rather then BT and opt in for a movie if they've got an xBox. They could however purchase movies from xBox Lives own pay per view service.

All in all, this only suggests that you don't need to get the BT Vision set top box (or you could use it in another room if you've got a long enough network cable) if you have the xBox. That would still leave you needing to buy a hard disc based DVRif you don't already have one.

It's interesting reading some of the comments about this. It's certainly an interesting move, still a bit restrictive but it could open up to thousands more people using the BT Vision 'platform' or what ever it is at the local exchange. It does feel fairly cosmetic though.

Battle for your TV

So I've been wondering who'll be weighing in for the battle for our TVs. There are certainly some interesting prospects on the market at the minute, but I who will win and does there even need to be a winner? This feels different to a format war reminiscent of VHS vs Betamax or more recently (and on-going) HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray. It's more akin to the cable vs satellite vs freeview vs top-up-TV wars we've seen recently.

Both the cable and satellite offerings have pay-per-view content, while freeview generally doesn't. All of these offerings have recording options, although generally with cable or satellite you would have to use the operators set up box, with freeview you are free to choose from a variety of products, some with hard drives for recording.

Two more recent entries on the market are worth looking at further though. BT and Microsoft. BT have released Vision, which is a freeview recorder with pay-per-view capabilities. It looks as if BT have taken two interesting features from the above and merged them before the others had a chance. Get free digital channels, the ability to record programs and the option to purchase movies, TV shows and sporting events all without a contract and monthly fee.

So far so good, apart from the fact with BT Vision, as the content is delivered over the IP network it means you have to have a minimum broadband speed to cope with the streaming, and the way to do that is to have BT broadband. As a side note, to have BT broadband you need a BT land line, sorry all those who switched to cable.

It seems like a lot of competition, but let's not forget the software companies attempts. Well, I call them software companies, but if you have an Xbox 360 or Apple TV then that's hardware really isn't it?

Now in the UK you can download standard definition or high definition pay per view content. Its movies and TV shows at the minute with no sporting content signed up, but who knows what the future might bring. We've been able to download TV content from iTunes for a while now (well not really in the UK) and let's not forget the muted Amazon Unbox.

We're crossing into interesting territory now. With cable and satellite operators you need a billing relationship (and all that implies, i.e. address etc). With BT, you also need that, but have to buy into their other products. With iTunes, xBox 360 Live and Amazon Unbox you pay for what you use when you use it (or use pre-pay credits) and use them where ever you are signed in to the relevant hardware or software to view your content.

Are we living in a world where we increasingly don't need or want bundles? With mobile broadband from providers like 3, and wireless city meshes potentially driving out needing a cable run into your home for land line phone services and broadband, where digital TV is free and pay-per-view content available through a variety of sources be they games consoles, set top boxes or just over the web do consumers want to be tied into contracts and services they can only use in one place?

Vlogging the anwser to TV reborn? Get out of town!

The panel in this session were rambling on about video blogging with a bunch of web apps which I won't mention here. Don't get me wrong, this is relevant, the fact you can do an interview on a phone and publish it is freaking cool. However, this session titled "TV Reborn" sounded like it should have been a discussion on how media companies can play with the web and they failed to deliver!

I asked a question (heartbeat++++): "you've talked a lot about video blogging, but what about open source film like A Swarm of Angels and content providers giving it up like Star Wars Mashups?"

The answer was summed up by Paul Downey on Twitter.

The panel didn't understand the question, and I was largely ignored. It's not that these guys don't get it, but (a Phillipe Stark saying coming up) they are walking and looking at their feet.

[edit]

thanks to Phil Hawksworth for capturing this photo:


[edit2]

Here's the video, goto 41 minutes to see my question:

http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.394193