NBCU Madness

Whoa. Ego will cause some really wacky results. As has been widely written about, NBCU is pulling its shows off iTunes at the end of the contract. Apple, since it wasn’t going to be able to offer “seasons passes” anyway, and probably to stick it to NBCU a little decided to just go ahead and pull the shows from NBCU (all the NBC content plus other shows like Battlestar Gallactica) at the start of the new season.

Today it was announced that NBCU has done a deal with Amazon to make the shows available via Amazon Unbox. The price? $1.99 — NOT the $4.99 NBCU was allegedly trying to stick to Apple iTunes customers. Additionally, there’s a 30% discount for the season passes. For a brief moment in time, the shows live in both places and it’s easy to do the comparitive pricing. Individual episodes are $1.99 on both services, but the season pass on iTunes for Heroes Season 1 is $42.99, and via Amazon Unbox it’s only $31.99. It looks like a really good deal on price.

But there are downsides. First, the Unbox content only works with Windows and with Tivo. Mac video fanboys, you’re outta luck. Second, if you’re without a Tivo, you’re locked into using the “Unbox Player”. Translation, good luck getting that on your Apple TV, iPod or iPhone.

I always thought the season pass pricing on iTunes was ridiculous. It’s definitely better on Amazon, but the downside is the media isn’t really yours to do whatever you want with. You’re locked into certain ways of watching it. In fairness, due to DRM protection this was also mostly true with iTunes but at least I could buy content and get it right on my iPhone, and at least Steve J. is striving to end all DRM.

The $31.99 on unbox is at least cheaper than the $38.99 I can buy the actual boxed set of DVDs with actor and director commentary, fancy booklets, etc. from Amazon for. Apple’s season pass is more than the DVDs!

NBCU won’t sell as many shows on Amazon. Period. And when it comes crawling back to the gang in Cupertino and is back on iTunes, it will be with the same pricing as Amazon.

But here’s the thing, NBC probably generates more revenue from the broadcast advertising on its worst rated show than it makes with a years worth of sales on iTunes. Bottom line is right now this is just fun stuff to write about. The real world does not yet care.

(originally posted on TVbytheNumbers.com)

Marc Cuban vs. Steve Jobs: Who ya Got?

The problem with my love of sports and shows like ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn is love of creating “the contest”. Your team vs. my team, with the ensuing smack talk (your team sucks, my team rules!). I’m 45, and it never gets old for me. And I’m OK with this because sports is one of the few places this should happen. I don’t think it’s good that this same emotional nature, including all the smack-talk seems to drive the political arena as well.

When it comes to Mark Cuban and Steve Jobs, my answer is: BOTH. I pick both. If I could only pick one, sorry Cubes, I gotta go with Jobs but, dude, he invented the iPhone, maybe you’ve heard of it!? (indeed, I am lamenting the outing of Fake Steve Jobs!) I use my iPod/iPhone much more than I watch any HDTV, HDNet or otherwise. But I don’t have to pick just one here, so I pick both. They both announced some new products this week.

Apple announced its new line of computers including a sweet 24” iMac. I am not historically a user of Apple computers, but I have been leaning towards buying one when the new Apple Store opens up on Chestnut Street about 5 blocks from where I live in San Francisco. It’s just an elegant machine and all the issues I had with the Mac vs. PC debate years ago are no longer issues for me.

The only ding against the iMac I have at all is that there aren’t more options and it’s not very customizable. It apparently doesn’t come with a high end video card and that’s disappointing. If you want an iMac with a high end video card, too freaking bad: you can’t have one. You have to buy a Mac Pro, and that’s way more computer (for way more money) than I need (or need to spend). I like the elegance of the all-in-one iMac, but I am big into video applications on my computer and am disappointed there aren’t more options.

Mark Cuban recently announced Ultra HD Video on Demand, which, according to a write-up in Variety:

Cuban is offering it to DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, Charter, Verizon and other cable-network distributors as a snob-appeal add-on to Cuban-financed and -distributed films that show up, for free, on his 24/7 HDNet Movies on the same day the pics open in theaters.

A shout out to Variety write John Dempsey because the phrase “a snob appeal add-on” will forever be etched in my vernacular! I have not been in love with the movie theaters and their $10 ticket prices for some time. Ultra HD aims to bring you theatrical releases sometimes even weeks before their theatrical releases at a retail price of $12.95-$19.95 depending on the movie.

I find this pricing extremely reasonable and I wonder years from now if these types of services won’t pummel the movie houses. Sure, for one person it’s more expensive, but add a second person in your living room and it’s either cheaper or competitive. If there are four people in your living room, it’s a fantastic deal, especially when you factor in the “you got to see it first!” aspect. There’s definitely something to be said for snob appeal add-ons. I hope the studios like this model and that it takes off rapidly.

Cuban is ahead of Jobs on this front, but those of you who have read any of my screeds on Apple’s Four Steps to Total World Domination know that I believe getting stuff from iTunes on to your big screen is a part of that plan. If that’s true, ultimately Steve Jobs and Apple will be offering the same type of thing as Ultra HD.

Over the long haul, unless Cuban somehow beats Jobs to the punch with some easy way of getting that UltraHD movie onto my iPhone/iPod, I think Jobs will win this contest. But it’s not clear to me yet whether several years from now when Apple TV is no longer a “hobby” whether Apple will do deals directly with the studios or just cut a deals with offerings like Cubans. If I have to guess, I am guessing Apple will cut the deals directly with the studios itself, but my guessing is often wrong.

Update 10:26 PDT: I just saw this poll on the Motley Fool and was a little sad because I don't need to buy any of them, but things are looking good for Cuban if this sentiment can be extrapolated to the rest of the world:

Which item do you need to buy right now?
Plasma screen, high definition TV
(6296 votes - 40%)
Computer
(3569 votes - 23%)
Washing machine
(1875 votes - 12%)
iPhone
(1875 votes - 12%)
Air conditioning
(1992 votes - 13%)

For the Love of Orb (and Slingbox, Too!)

This is a very long piece on media liberation otherwise known as easy media portability. This is more rough (and mostly completely unedited) thinking on these topics. What's covered: some of the barriers in general, a brief Orb vs. Slingbox comparison, more 'put your TV on your iPod', and some "Fear of Apple".

There are some Slingbox lovers out there. Some Orb lovers too. There aren't enough of us though. In both cases I think the barrier is currently too steep to reach mass adopter status and not just because either of the products are particularly hard to use, or represent unsolvable technological challenges, but instead because of how people think about stuff and the barriers involved with changing behavior.

The barriers are so hard. For instance, at least the last time I checked, most of the HDTVs hadn't wound up actually hooked up to any type of a set top box (STB) that could provide an HD signal. So you're talking about something were even when someone probably paid more than $1000, the people who bought it didn't wind up ordering the thing from their cable or satellite provider that would actually utilize fully what they just paid for. We can be very strange people.

This challenge may make you scratch your head. It might make you think "nah", but look it up. I think the cable and satellite companies have both stepped up in marketing their HD offerings, so this is changing now. But as of last year, MOST HDTVs were not hooked up to any HD content.

Most "Microsoft Media Center PCs" don't even likely wind up ever getting used as a Media Center PC. Many people buy laptops and desktops without even knowing (or knowing and not caring) that it's a Media Center PC. The first Media Center machine I bought was accidental. I had no idea it was a media center PC until I'd unboxed it and saw it had a TV tuner card built in. Since I had cable already in that room for Internet access, I split the cable and checked it out. I liked it. Then I started experimenting with ORB, and I liked it even more. But I do still have some geeky instincts (I thought I'd lost it for a while), and I like playing around with media portability and figuring out how to get it to work. Most people don't operate like that and never will.

This is even more complex than the traditional challenge of marketing something. Traditional models would be more like AOL and Quicken coming bundled on the Computer. Usually most people ignore most of this stuff too, however, AOL and Quicken can do something that doesn't make any sense for Microsoft to do with the Media Center PCs. AOL and Quicken can send you a post card (or a new shiny CD in the case of AOL) and this marketing makes sense, because if you act on it, these guys know what happens: they get paid.

Microsoft would have gotten more attention if they charged $9.95 a month to actually make the media center usable as a DVR. If it would have charged for the program Guide like TIVO does, way more people would've heard about it because if that would have happened, MSFT would have spent some money on sending people who bought Media Center PCs a postcard. On the other hand, I'm glad they didn't, because having a couple of lifetime program guides with Tivo, I would have probably not tried the Media Center's DVR out.. Similarly, I'm glad that ORB didn't ever charge me a fee.

On the other hand these are the exact same reasons that nobody has really heard of ORB or the Microsoft Media Center. I don't know how important it is for Microsoft to be perceived at the forefront of this or whether it should be important to Microsoft. I conclude that for ORB, its decision is it would rather wait for the right time than burn tens of millions of dollars in marketing as Slingbox must do.

ORB vs. Slingbox

Media Liberation is the concept that if I somehow paid for media already and can store it for my own personal use legally, I ought to be able to have access to it wherever I am.

I have gotten questions from more than one person on why I love ORB so much more than Slingbox. If you already have a TIVO and your goal is to be able to watch live or recorded tv from some remote location, I love Slingbox as much as I love ORB. You want to watch on a laptop, even some phones (sadly, not the iPhone) or any computer connected to the Internet (again, sadly no iPhones), I don't have a problem with Slingbox, though if you want it to work on your Sony PSP, you're better off going with Sony's Location Free Player or whatever they have decided to call this product these days (it's basically a Slingbox made by Sony).

There are two reasons I personally prefer ORB to Slingbox. One, it allows me to fully conceptualize in every way the notion of a media server. Secondly, while Slingbox and its ilk will give me easy remote access to live or recorded tv, I have much more than that in my digital media library. All my songs, pretty much any picture I've ever taken and decided to keep since 1997, live and recorded television, and movies and other DVD-style compliations.

Slingbox only lets me get at a piece of that, but I'd say on an application specific basis, especially if you are already set up with a DVR and all that you want to do is get remote access to live and recorded TV. Slingbox is the not only the path of least resistance, unless you already have a TV tuner card and a version of Microsoft Windows that supports Media Center, Slingbox is cheaper.

As it happened, I did already have a Media Center PC, so I played around with it. While I don't love (or hate) the Media Center interface, I do find the version in Vista an improvement, but in terms of remote access, I do love ORB, because unlike Slingbox, it puts the concept in my head of "put all the stuff I paid for here" and get it whenever/wherever I want. I am very enamored with this concept, and in the end whether content is all physically in one place or whether it's virtually distributed, as long as I can ultimately get to it all easily through one interface, I'll be satisfied. For me, ORB is the thing that most enables the "future vision". But there are yet more barriers than "what's ORB's business model going to be exactly?" I honestly don't know currently and "hope Yahoo lightening strikes twice and Orb.Com becomes the Broadcast.Com of the 2000s!" But there are bigger barriers with the consumers than Orb's business model.

Nobody Really Cares Yet, Including Apple

But for now, while WiFi isn't really free and ubiquitous...how much should Apple care yet?

In theory, the widescreen iPhone (and ultimately stand alone iPod) will be the most popular portable media device ever. But it doesn't easily support streaming presently, I will not be shocked if Apple's implementation of Macromedia's FLASH player for the iPhone still blocks me from streaming live TV. Fortunately for Apple, I was already braced because of Sony. Sony, whose PSP did ultimately get around to supporting FLASH, still managed to block streaming protocols. I can stream to my PSP, but only via additional hardware: Sony's location Free Player, or by a convoluted process where I use the PSP to connect with my Playstation 3 at home, and then use the Playstation 3's web browser to access ORB.

While I realize there is some interest in this, especially among enthusiasts and early adopters, for most people the last paragraph just causes their eyes to roll into the back of their heads. We're clearly still in the early adopter stage with some of this stuff and as a result, interoperability is a big issue that causes too much complexity and costs too much. This is a big barrier.

Ubiquitous access to more or less fast Internet. With the iPhone as it is, if Wifi isn't an option, neither is streaming. While ORB can detect your network speed and size the file appropriately, even if the iPhone currently supported streaming seamlessly, I believe because the Edge network is so slow, the results would be poor. However, I'll be shocked if the next generation of iPhone doesn't come with access to AT&T's faster network and on that network, you could get watchable video on a regular basis.

One barrier aside from interoperability and cost is that none of the installed base of the most popular portable media player currently available (iPhone/iPod) can stream anything. So my vision of all this is still at least a couple of generations more of iPods. And you can be sure the very next generation will include a widescreen/touch screen model. Whether that generation has WiFi is the $64,000 question.

The sooner it does, the sooner my vision will start to take root, and that vision is:

Put Your TV on your iPhone/iPod

Or portable media player of your choice. The one big mistake I think Apple made with the video iPod was not loading the iPods with some video content so that people could get accustomed to the notion of portable video. I did some experiments with loading up iPods and loaning them to people. Anyone I could get to use it, seemed to like it quite a bit. But not everyone was interested in trying it out. But the people who did like it and there were several, wished it was easy to get stuff off their DVRs and onto their iPods and iPhones.

For most people, it's way too hard. I have to be honest, it's often way too hard from me, and I confess on occasion I have downloaded files off the internet. I rationalize the ethics like this: the process of getting it from my DVR to my portable device is lousy. So lousy that it's easier and faster to download it. I can't buy a service to do this. I can't get it from Comcast, Apple*, Tivo, Microsoft or anybody. Maybe Facebook will offer it for $8.95 a month and then I can stand in the "I love Facebook" line like everyone else around here.

*You can subscribe to certain TV shows via iTunes and download them already in iPod format. However, these files are optimized for your TV and will playback in DVD quality should you happen to have an AppleTV, they are not optimized for the small screen and small hard drive and they aren't optimized for cramming as much video content that looks great as you possibly can. Ultimately, this will be resolved either via bigger and bigger flash drives to the point where it wouldn't matter to most people, or Apple and others will figure out how to let the software automatically optimize the content

some stuff you can do with the Zune (though I think it might be through a 3^rd party and not Microsoft) is set up to easily transfer shows you have recorded to the Zune. But the Zune as it exists presently is dead, totally killed off by the iPhone and future generations of iPods. If Microsoft doesn't get it yet, they will soon. Form factor matters and an iPhone fits in any pocket you have way better than a Zune. While Sony is taking its sweet time with the Playstation Portable 2, it's at least making the PSP 1 thinner.

I made an offhand comment to a friend that I thought the iPhone form factor wins, even ultimately for gaming, but I'm not so sure. While I don't get much increased value watching video on the PSP's bigger screen (it's at least a 3^rd bigger than the iPhone's), I haven't played Tiger Woods Golf on the smaller screen. Whether they can get the PSP more iPhone-esque in stature, I don't know but Sony is definitely on to slimming the device, and Microsoft will get there with Zune.

Fear of Apple: Who Will be its Main Competition?

I'm fearful that Apple is locking me in to an all Apple world. It's not a conspiracy, and I don't think I am being paranoid. Apple figured out how to design and manufacture really good portable media players. Now they baked in the phone and the Web browser and the integration is very cool. And because I have to have a phone anyway, and loved and heavily used an iPod already, and love reading stuff on the Web, the integration works out very cool, but that it winds up being such a great "portable DVD" replacement for me personally is more than just icing on the cake.

Apple isn't exactly notorious for being an open platform, and with the iPhone I am already forced into using iTunes for syncing, they probably will ultimately lock me in because as my library is increasingly in iTunes, if Apple can give me a DVR that can then iTunes can figure out how to optimize it for the iPhone and transfer it and charge me for it, that would currently be my path of least resistance.

I conceptually hate the notion of being locked into Apple's products, but as long as its products are actually better my hatred will remain merely conceptual.

Because of "Facebook lovin'", I saw the story where Facebook had acquired a company called Parakey which is run by the people who created the Firefox web browser software and is something called a Web Operating System (WebOS, I think is the correct Jargon). I am too far out of the technology loop to fully grasp what this means, but I think what it means is that someone could manufacture a device with a small video screen (say 3.5") and some flash storage and wifi and have it boot up to a web browser that can also serve as a file access interface (so you can store and then access files on the device for playback). If you threw in a cool touch screen interface and could sell it for around ~$300-$349 and theoretically make some money, I think there's an opportunity – to become the anti-Apple, and build this device to support anything and everything. All file formats, and whatever streams. Make it so the device doesn't care whether you have an Orb or a Slingbox, then market it like crazy to people with Slingbox, ORB, PSP, etc.

Sure, theoretically Apple could just open up to all of that too, though I can't imagine Apple feels like it needs to worry about it right now one way or the other. I think the next generation of AppleTV will give a pretty good signal of what Apple is in a hurry to deal with. If it doesn't change much over the previous model other than some of the specs and it doesn't add-in DVR capabilities of any kind, Apple isn't in a big hurry. I think it may still actually be too early for Apple to care. But I expect the next generation of widescreen iPods will be a big hit, and hopefully that will spur the movement.

I believe the bigger touch screen is the huge leap for the iPod and for the top of the line model, I do not expect the form factor or overall design will change from that version forward very much. They'll have to suck you into the new models with "more flash storage" and "faster WiFi" and "seamless Apple TV integration".

For the average person, the best answer is probably to just wait until Comcast and Apple, Tivo, Orb and who knows, Facebook and Pownce are offering you easier ways to deal with your portable media. By the time you're seeing more than one offer to take your money in return for making your life simpler, the hardware options will all be very much better than they are today and it should be reasonably easy to put your TV on your iPod.

Whether that's all 5, 10 or more years away, I don't know. Hoping that it's 5…

Apple, iPhone/iPod/Apple TV Thesis backgrounder

this needs to be edited really, and...I'm just not in any space of caring about that right now, but there's some good thinking here if you can sift through it.
--

I’ve had a few experiences where I felt WOW about technology in a big way and they were:

1. My first experiences with getting a 300 Baud modem to work. That was a WOW experience.
2. The first time I saw QLink, then AOL, then AOL for Windows
3. The first time I saw the WWW that was another WOW. -this made total sense to me. I e-mailed everyone I knew. I e-mailed Steve Case a lot but I didn’t have his "real" address then (this was probably from May ’93 thru Sept ’93. I launched my newsletter 2 months before Netscape’s 1st beta in September '94, but I had been using Mosaic a while – on slow ass 14.4 and 28.8! it was still cool to see the future.
4. When I saw the iPhone at MacWorld in January
--

A long time ago I figure out that someday my media library would be truly liberated, and have even been playing with usable tech for 3+ years, but I never saw any application I thought would anywhere near it towards mass adoption not even the current top of the line stand alone iPod..though I LOVE the device. (much more in the 'read more').

I’m going to tie it back to what will perhaps be a new concept for you, and one that involves television in a way. I understand the wow of this as a handheld internet application, but it’s not the only wow in there for me, and not the biggest one. I expected that piece years ago. The windows mobile people just never delivered (I’ve tried a few handhelds running that OS).

Right now, today the whole space is more 300 Baud modem than Netscape in some ways, but in other ways if you’re a little geeky there’s absolutely a lot of stuff you can do . I do not know whether out of the gate the iPhone will allow me to stream in my streaming set-up – I will know by Saturday.

But Walt Mossberg assures me that if my 3GP streaming (which Apple is supporting for youtube) doesn’t work , the Flash upgrade to the iphone will be fairly soon and that will definitely work with the set-up I have for streaming. I will be able to watch my TV via ORB on the iPhone via Wifi.

But I don’t need to wait. I decided to buy now anyway, because like the 300 baud modem, I want to be hands on with all this stuff at the beginning. and I have been messing around with the back end of it for about 3 years now, this is the first front end that I thought: WOW!.

My setup works fine on any laptop with an internet connection already and has for 2 years, but handhelds…no good handheld. Let alone one that is a cellphone, a camera, an ipod, that fits in my pocket comfortably with a freaking microphone built into the earbuds. I miss calls all the time even with my phone on vibrate because I use the ipod a lot.

Ok, here’s the thesis: people will spend more time watching video media. (Nielsen has data stating that average TV watching time is still going up, I will share this data at a later time).

On the subway, in the 12 minute starbucks line in manhattan., at the airport when you have a 2 hour delay. You will someday have full access, in the airport lounge, with a device like your iphone to:

1. -everything on your cable/satellite box (live television) at home
2. whatever’s on your on-demand for those products (the Comcast on-demand offering here is extremely robust, especially if you have pay channels.)
3. whatever’s on your dvr
4. whatever movies/media (all this is music/audio and pictures too, of course) you have in digital format which will eventually be everything you buy. The DVD revenue stream is not long for the world as a cash cow (5-10 years max), and in 20 years, only iconoclasts and purists will buy CD’s and DVD’s (that will be a market, just like there is still a market for vinyl and laser disks, but how interesting are those markets to you?).
--

Apple was the Apple of its space, then AOL was the Apple of its space, and now, somehow someway, I think Apple is going to be the Apple of…both spaces, and new spaces too and my heart is in the new spaces.

How I view Apple in the space of fully portable media is the way I viewed AOL in the internet/online space between 1986-2000. “These people get that making the stuff easy to do and visually appealing is really important! Easy to use trumps whatever freaking gazillion databases CompuServe and Prodigy will charge you $2/minute to access”.

Steve Jobs totally gets it. Totally gets it. He gets it more than me (how often do you think I admit anything like that?!) But I think the strategy for the phone is brilliant and will build large demand for a cheaper, stand alone ipod that has all the features of the iPhone except the actual phone. it will be a portable wif internet device with a bigger touch screen. When I can’t say, they can’t be too quick with this because I think they really do want to hit 10 million phones by the end of 2008.

I can’t take you exactly through the timing curve of “very early adopter” (me) to mass adoption. But I believe there will be mass adoption. Whether that’s 10, 15 or more years, I don’t know, but I think this curve is going to be steeper/quicker than the curve with my modem in 1982 to the world starting to care ~1995 (Netscape 1.0 release).

It’s going to change how all the deals are cut too. Ultimately, the NHL will want to just stream all the games itself. And iTunes, which doesn’t do streaming right now..well they plan it with their AppleTV (it is already a media extender that streams from your PC to your TV), but I believe ultimately a vital part of the apple strategy will be to become something of a “Cable/Satellite” alternative, and they will need Live TV to do this (sports is always going to be popular live).

There are technological challenges to overcome, just as there were with the 300 baud modem and the first browsers, but these challenges will be solved and I’ll be able to buy from AppleTV, for $199 or whatever it is, the NHL hockey package, and I’ll be able to:

- Stream it to your big screen in high definition
- Stream it to any video appliance you have (computer, other tvs, handheld devices, laptops, etc) wherever I am.

I already know hockey doesn’t think like the MLB. MLB will HATE this for a while, but it’s just being slow to realize control is important and that it might get more subscribers if people felt like they could maximize paying $200 for it to begin with. I always hated when I was a directTV NFL Sunday ticket subscriber and was out of town on a Sunday. I felt like I was paying for something I couldn’t use, and wished I could use.

Whether compared to the internet curve this is 1985 or 1995…I lean towards 1985 in terms of complexity, but with really good results for some of the work (I can stream high quality video all over my house, and typically reasonable quality video anywhere I can get a wifi connection) but that set-up is WAY, WAY too hard for the average joe.

I predict Steve Jobs will make it easy, maybe even fun. He’ll get some of the “non live” stuff sorted out with the next AppleTV . I’m sure it will probably have DVR functionality and I’m sure it will make getting something from the DVR to the iPod much easier than what I have today.

On the iPhone there are space considerations because its only 8GB right now, but they can get it down where you could have 3 hours of programming from the night before in around a 1GB of space and maintain very high quality video (for a 3.5” display)

these are still very early days, with no focus and nobody really going after the portable media market with ease of use/design in mind. Nobody, except Apple. Different space, different time, but I think the comparison to AOL holds up. I was facetious with Steve Jobs 4 keys to total world domination headline, but I wasn’t kidding around at all about the thinking.

There are lots of implications here, I have only begun to consider:

- Still MORE attrition for primetime ratings/share (though since they count back in DVR viewership w/in 7 days into the weekly #’s they will ultimately be forced to track how many people watched Gray’s Anatomy on their iphones into the ratings.
- Many, many new distribution opportunities
New opportunities for advertising…

My head is spinning, but it’s fun.

Steve Jobs’ and Apple's Four Keys to Total World Domination

Step 1: Launch the best portable music player ever designed that works with the best software ever designed for managing the experience and get millions of iPods into the world and hundreds of millions of copies of iTunes installed World Wide.

Report Card: A+

Step 2: Create a buzz around a revolutionary new phone which actually probably isn’t the best cell phone in the world, but make people want it anyway by being the best iPod ever.

Based on the reviews here, here, here and here the early report card is: A+ (when you consider the phone isn’t available and all these guys tried to find the reasons not to like it, and they had many…and still loved it anyway).

Step 3: Launch more affordable stand alone iPod that has all the features of the iPhone except the phone itself (think bigger touch screen and cool as heck WiFi appliance)

Report Card: TBD

Step 4: Turn AppleTV (Steve’s Little Hobby™) into a full-fledged media server (as opposed to the basic media extender it currently is) with full features (DVR, pay per view/internet download directly from the tv, full streaming capabilities not just at home, but remotely). The goal of this box should be that it’s mostly transparent to the people using it. If they want to watch something on their big screen, it works, if they want to watch in their bedroom, it works, if they want to watch on their office computer, it works and of course if they want to watch on their iPod or iPhone, it works.

Report Card: TBD
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Time is an important dimension here, but total world domination is worth the effort as far as Apple and Steve Jobs are concerned. They’ll have to keep stirring the pot, and I believe that Apple will make the concept of “liberating your media, so it’s really yours to do what you please with” something that everyone wants. But if Marketing is the metric, and past performance is any indicator…A+ Keep doing that for the next 5-15 years and…total world domination. And really, given its history, Apple would be happy to only own 80-90% of the “liberated media market”.

My only ding on Apple at all with regard to any of this is that if they sold iPods with big hard drives preloaded with 100 hours of video content, more people would understand the concept of portable media sooner, but they can wait 1-3 years on this probably without it impacting the quest for dominance.

Why AAPL Will be Higher in 5 Years

Disclosure: I'm almost always wrong 20% of the time. I use the 80-20 rule and strive to have 100 opinions a day. Usually at least 20 are wrong. It's an absolutely fantastic way to learn though. When it comes to the stock market, while my opinions are fewer, I'm probably only right 20% of the time. But I think this is the 1 out of 5.

Why I love Apple Computer

I'm sure my friend Bill G. and my old friend Mark Hurst will get a chuckle out of this. They'll ask me what took me so long. But this isn't about the reasons they love Apple. They actually love the computers Apple makes. Bill G., he couldn't care less about an iPod, bizarre as that may sound. I can go more bizarre. Hurst didn't even own a TV when I met him. I finally talked him into letting me dump an old 20" set on him before I moved to California. I played up the fact that he sometimes liked movies and he could hook a VCR up to it (these were still pre-DVD days). Much has transpired, and I'm pretty sure Hurst has a TV now, but…I wouldn't bet any money on it.

Bill and Mark have their reasons for loving Apple. I have my own.

Steve Jobs. He really does have that vision thing. there is much more in the 'read more..'

Real Steve Jobs. He's the only executive out there on a large scale that I see as really being ahead of the curve. His quest for total world domination is just beginning. The iPhone will have to be a huge flop which is possible, I suppose, but I'll be surprised. What I think will happen is the phone will have some issues, but they'll get addressed in V2 and the juggernaut that is Steve Jobs and Apple will just keep juggernauting.

Here's one way he's ahead of the curve. Nice handheld device that works with WiFi that (allegedly) has a relatively good battery life. This reason alone has me considering V1 very strongly. Because of Steve Jobs I will almost certainly be saying bye-bye to Verizon as my cell phone provider.

Verizon doesn't offer WiFi, though they do have a fairly fast network for accessing the Internet from your phone. The phone I have will absolutely stream windows media. Except that Verizon blocked that from regular Internet Web access. Verizon wants you to pay $14.95 a month for its VCast service with a very limited offering. Verizon will try to tell you that the offering is not limited, but quite robust. But it's not.

My basis of comparison is that if they would have just let me stream via the Windows Media Center, I could've had access to every channel of my cable box, everything stored on my DVR and everything in my media library (music and video). VCast is not robust compared to a scaled down cable or satellite offering, it's certainly not robust compared to what I have access to. It's really not robust compared to anything other than itself.

Verizon would have been better off selling freaks like me who are way, way ahead of this curve unlimited access to its network for $14.95 a month. I would've paid for it and probably wouldn't have wound up using it much at all. I can tell what a hit success VCast has been by looking at Verizon's last quarterly report (for the period ending 3/31/07). There is exactly ZERO mention of VCast in the earnings report. My guess is when the numbers come out for Q2, again, there will be ZERO mention of VCast. And that I would be willing to bet on. $100 anyway.

Now the iPhone comes along. I don't care about how fast AT&T's network is for data. I don't care that there's no 3G – because it has WiFi. In San Francisco WiFi isn't quite ubiquitous, just nearly so much so that usually I wouldn't notice the difference. The iPhone solves 2 problems: one it's a handheld multimedia device AND a hand held Internet appliance that will work pretty much wherever I am. If it works anywhere near as well as advertised (which is by no means a given), it will be a huge success.

There is the small problem where I switched from what was AT&T (Cingular) to Verizon because although I live in an urban area, when I had Cingular I rarely got any bars in my home. Hopefully they have corrected that by now.

The launch of the iPhone kills VCast off as far as I'm concerned and it was dead on arrival to begin with. This is no big deal. Verizon doesn't do "that vision thing", but what telco does? Verizon had a chance at the iPhone and initially I thought they were smart for passing. Jobs wants Apple calling all the shots. I wonder if Jobs talked AT&T into including the Apple logo on the monthly statement. That would make the transition more seamless when they get around to taking the AT&T logo off. Ok, I jest. Kind of.

Killing a deader than dead VCast is no big deal, but this is: Apple's iTunes Store is now the 3^rd largest retailer of music, passing Amazon. That's right, someone selling DIGITAL music, is the 3^rd largest retailer of music. Apple has about 10% of the market (9.8%) trailing only Wal-Mart (15.8%) and Best Buy (13.8%). All this really means right now is a few things:

1. Digital music sales represent at least 10% of the whole pie
2. Distribution is so fragmented that you can have 10% of the overall market and be in 3^rd place.
3. If you make it easy and make buying music a good experience, a lot of people will buy it digitally instead of steal it digitally.
   

The CD isn't dead , Amazon and Target (#'s 4 & 5) still combine for more sales than Apple, but that's the trend. And it's way, way early days for that trend as far as video, but that's going to be the trend with that as well. Everyone who likes more flexibility and control over their media and is not change resistant will want their media in digital format to begin with. There are always those resistant to change. But you wait them out and they either change or die. The world moves on either way.

It's going to be at least 5 years before Apple rips me off and launches the "Put your TV on your iPod/iPhone" campaign, but I still believe that's what Steve's Little Hobby™ is all about.

Microsoft didn't design for this kind of stuff, not even when it set out to compete with the iPod with the Zune. The Zune does have WiFi built into it, but it's old school 802.11b. Not only that, they didn't turn on real live Internet access (you can talk to another Zune apparently, if you could find…another Zune, but you can't browse the web).

The Zune would've made sense to me as a portable media device if it had enabled WiFi. It's got a nice screen and it works fairly seamless in terms of "synching" with a media center. But I am near a half terabyte in media storage, and growing. The Zune can't hold all that or do "live tv". But the iPhone can.

There are other portable media players that are missing the boat too. I saw a very nice one from Archos, but they want you to use their software. It does have WifI, and it's got a nice screen, but a few things. One thing the good old pre iPhone iPod has taught me. I don't need a bigger screen to enjoy video remotely. The Archos is slick, but it's not going to fit into my pocket any more comfortably than a PSP (and perhaps less comfortably) and that's not all that comfortable really. But the Archos doesn't want to hook into my media center, it wants to hook right up to my cable box and use its own DVR docking station to record programs. If I were starting from scratch today with portable media, I might give it a look.

With Apple, I won't have to. Apple is making the first handheld device I can use to stream video. I know, there are handhelds that do this now. I have one. It's an iPaq and it does a nice job but the battery life wasn't very good at all with WiFi enabled.

The battery life is key to me. But if I can get an hour of WiFi access to browse or stream and still have a couple of hours of talk time, I don't think the battery life is an issue. If I stream video for an hour and won't be able to use my phone afterwards, that's a problem. For those who have continuous access to chargers that might not be a big deal. The iPhone still beats the other handhelds though because of the form factor. From the looks of it, it has a much better form factor for my pocket than even the 80GB Video iPod, and that has a way better form factor than any other portable device I have (besides the Nano, of course).

I don't see 40 million people running out and buying an iPhone for $600. But if you ask me in 5 years if I think there will be 20 million iPods/iPhones out there that do WiFi in a nice form factor, the answer is yes. That assumes some non-phone version that has similar features (the bigger touch screen, internet access via wifi, etc).

And in 10 years? In 10 years you'll be reading about how iTunes is the #3 distributor of music and video (and of course #1 in digital distribution). And by then, Apple TV isn't going to be a hobby. It'll just be some box in your house that you hook up and never think about again. It will be the box that seamlessly gets all your media wherever you want it and wherever you are. And it won't be for gearheads like me. It'll all be as easy to use as the iPod.

My Media Center runs on Microsoft Vista. The portable streaming is powered by Orb Network's software. The first handheld device to truly unleash the power of all that when I'm outside the home...is an Apple product.

Right now, I'm one of a relative handful of people who even cares. For that alone I love that Apple built this so I could take full advantage RIGHT NOW without having to wait 10 years. In ten years it will be so much better.

I'm sure there will be challengers, but like Google ten years ago, nobody knows who those challengers are. We've seen Microsoft's vision and if it's the Zune, well it's a vision, and for many people it's a very functional product.

It just doesn't liberate all my media and fit comfortably in my pocket. the iPhone looks like it will. I don't underestimate "liberating my media" and "fitting nicely and comfortably in my pocket". For now, I am sure I overestimate it, but I'm always ahead of the curve on this stuff.

Right now I think AAPL will be higher in 5 years. I could be wrong, and even if I'm right, it could go back down to $60 before shooting to $600. If your time horizon is 3 days, or 3 weeks or 3 months I don't have an opinion. But if it's 5 years, right now I would say buy APPL even with the huge run up of the last year.

all of this assumes only these three things:

1. the iPhone works pretty much as advertised
2. there will be iPods that have a lot of the functionality of the iPhone at much better prices
3. AppleTV becomes a full fledged media center/server instead of merely a media extender for iTunes
   

It’s the Mirror Neurons: Put your TV on your Ipod Part II

The mirror neurons are basically what happens in your brain where anything you've seen/experienced in real life -- let's say a 50" plasma screen TV -- where even if you see the commercial of a 50" plasma screen TV on a 20" television, your brain more or less processes it in your mind as if it is actually a 50" plasma screen. Mirror Neurons are also the thing where if you see someone eating chocolate your brain automatically (without you even thinking about it) begins processing the same chemicals as if you were actually eating it. And of course, porn. Porn works because of the mirror neurons. And for that matter, TV. TV fires the mirror neurons. Advertisers and programmers alike capitalize on this.

And this is the beauty of science and observation. People capitalized on mirror neurons for years without ever even knowing what they are. It was already a science. But increasingly, armed with more and more data about how the brain works, they will probably get it to an exact science. A lot of benefit will come from that, and not just on the advertising and entertaining fronts.

But right now – already, the mirror neurons are why even on your ipod's small screen it doesn't matter, and when the new generation of ipods with the bigger screen like the iPhone (I am thinking helplessly of some way to put a Pacific Catch reference in here, but I can't make it work) it will matter even less.

Today I walked over to Houstons on the Embarcadero to meet another out of work slacker for lunch (she's a married out of work slacker with 2 kids though, so she's nowhere near the slacker I am) and when I use my feet as a mode of transportation, I try to be early if I can so I will have10 minutes to cool off. So I sat at the bar guzzling diet Coke and tried out my new "kick-stand" case, a little accessory that makes it easy for you to stand the iPod upright.

I decided that for Season 5 of 24, I would watch it exclusively on the iPod. Let me rant on this one more time. I bought it off iTunes. The quality is really great. If it's not DVD quality running on the bigscreen, my eyes can't tell the difference. On a 2" screen it looks really good as well. But, I paid more for that on iTunes than I would have buying the DVDs at Best Buy. And those come with commentary.

Steve Jobs needs iTunes to be competitive with BestBuy, Target, Walmart, Amazon, etc. And not just on price. They need to figure out subtitles, cut scenes, commentary, all of the extras. A good first step would just be selling it for less than the superior, vastly more expensive to make and distribute physical product. If Apple wants iTunes/iStore/"Steve's Little Hobby™" Apple TV to be a player, the digital media must compete fully with the physical media or be noticeably less expensive than the physical media. Right now, neither is the case, I get less at a higher price. I imagine if I had Steve Jobs' real e-mail address and whined about it, he'd come back with something like, "Hey man, I already told you, it's just a hobby."

But it so isn't. Trust me on this one people.The iPod and the iPhone are the only reason he's even still at Apple. They ARE cool and fun and new. Mac and the software tools – they're the hobby, not to the company, but to Steve, ok since Steve is the company…. At least that is sure the look of things.

I'm fine with Steve focusing on Apple TV, that's where I think the focus should be. Huge growth market or slow growth market. Which hobby would you pick?

Sooooo…I'm waiting for my friend to show up and guzzling Diet Coke and watching 24. Because I am watching season 5 exclusively on the iPod, it's going slower than normal because I only watch when I'm out. I haven't made a huge habit of watching the 2" screen at home and have only ever watched the iPod and bed once. I decided I did not want to get into that habit (I haven't had a tv in my bedroom for going on 10 years).

I know this is all a long build up and sadly right now I'm in phase one of my "writing", which is just writing down what I think. I am practicing my thinking. Phase 2 will commence in the middle of July when I begin practicing my editing.

I'm watching 24 on the iPod on a 2" screen looking at the "command center" of the Counter Terrorist Unit where they have some huge 100" jumbotron screen – and on the 2" iPod, my brain still spatially processes the information as if I was looking at a huge 100" jumbotron. That is why I believe portable video will be a fairly well adopted technology in the long run . I consider right now to be the "very early adopter" phase I say that because theoretically I live in one of the top-ten gadget conscious zip codes, and I'm the only one I've ever seen watching portable video in public on a portable device (note, I have seen several people watching video on laptops – I'm talking about stuff you put in your pocket).

I'm sure that will all change the night of June 29, when the fools who just stood in line to buy the iPhone cross the street to stand in line at Pacific Catch. I hope Apple will just give the fools that can't wait a phone with Pirates of the Caribbean already on it so they'll have something to do while they wait in line for their calamari.

More iPhone and Pacific Catch

if you're looking for the iPhone commercials go here. But, the synergy between the iPhone and Pacific Catch takes a turn towards future synergy. They're breaking ground on the future home of the Apple Store on Chestnut Street which will be about a block away from Pacific Catch.

I'm excited about the Apple Store. I anticipate its layout will be about 10% dedicated to Apple Computers and Software products and about 90% dedicated to iPods, iPhones and Apple TV.

Put Your TV on Your Ipod (My e-mail to Steve Jobs)

From: Robert Seidman
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2007 4:28 PM
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Put Your TV on Your iPod!

Dear Mr. Jobs,

I have watched with great interest just how smooth you’re being with your little “hobby”. I’m on to you though!

I think it’s prudent to say exactly what you’re saying for a lot of reasons. Primarily, this time around Apple showed up to the party much earlier than it did with MP3. In the space of “home media servers” or “get your media wherever you want it”, these are very early days. Things with “get your media wherever you want it” are effectively where MP3 was back in 1998 or 1999 (in the dark days before iPods). People are screwing around with home media and streaming, and putting video on their iPods and other devices. There are many products you can buy, but it isn’t sweeping the nation yet. For similar reasons as why MP3 was such a pain in the butt in the late ‘90s– it’s still too complex. There’s much more broadband these days, but on the other hand the file size of an episode of 24 downloaded from iTunes is more than ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY TIMES LARGER than the file size of your typical 4 minute song(mp3).

I’m the only person I know – and this in the San Francisco Marina district – home of Pacific Catch calamari on Chestnut St (and really, you need to try the chili encrusted calamari at Betelnut on Union St. – way, way better!) and future home of most iPhones/capita – with all that, I am the only guy I know who turned my iPod into an incredible video on demand product with more than a week’s worth of continuous programming. I’m also interested in getting my media wherever I want it and to this end have played with Orb, Slingbox, Location Free player, Tivo, Media Centers, media extenders, etc.

I get that all AppleTV, your little hobby, is today is just another media extender albeit one that was designed to work with iTunes. But I’m pretty sure you’re not being forthcoming at all about your true plans for AppleTV. I think it’s smart, and I don’t see the upside in you fully disclosing. But I’m on to you.

It’s smart for you to say it’s a hobby right now. It lowers expectations, puts the content producers and the Comcasts of the world at ease and allows you to fly under the radar. By the time version 2.0 comes out, the language from you will probably change to “It’s still a hobby, but one we’re very passionate about. Will we replace Comcast? Of course not! We just hope to be able to offer Comcast customers something that will make their Comcast experience even a little bit better! We’ll work with Comcast as much as possible.”

By version 3 of Apple TV (~ 5 years from now) though – it’s no hobby. it will have a DVR, you’ll be able to do pay-per-view on it, you’ll be able to order content directly via the AppleTV (instead of needing to go to iTunes first) and, you will be able to receive, over the internet some kind of television programming package that DIRECTLY competes with the Comcasts and DirectTVs). For LESS money than you pay Comcast or DirectTV. Adding massive bandwidth to support that is much cheaper than launching satellites or laying your own cable. Apple has no legacy infrastructure – a great position to be in.

Even by version 3, Comcast isn’t exactly going to be crapping its pants, but it will be out of the realm of hobby and it will be a real business.

Separately I believe something else will happen. The iPod that is in the forthcoming iPhone will ultimately be released as some sort of stand alone iPod that doesn’t have a phone. It will have the wider screen and wifi though. Probably a bigger hard drive will replace the phone components. I believe this product, to the degree there is a standard for “portable video”, will be the standard.

5 years from now there may well be 10 million of those yet-to-be-released iPods in the world. And one of the selling points of AppleTV by then will be: “Put your TV on your iPod…easily!”

Connecting all the dots, Apple is going to be a major player in the “home media” space and in the space that’s of particular interest to me “all your media, wherever you want it”. I don’t think there are that many people like me today, but in 5 years from now there will be at least a million people like me. A million people who are spending ~$2000 a year for video media between Cable, DVD, movies, etc . -- this does not include the ~$600/year for high speed internet or any of the hardware gadgets..

In 5 years, I imagine I’ll get some kind of e-mail from you saying, “Look, just give ME that $2000 and I’ll give you EVERYTHING you already have, plus – it will automatically be on your iPod either by synching or streaming over Wifi. I’m going to make it all very easy for you!

Where do I sign? That’s what I’ll be asking along with the 999,999 other people like me. And so what, even if I am wrong by one order of magnitude and 5 years…who cares? Not you, I imagine.

And unbelievably, hovering near $125, I want to go LONG AAPL. Word to your mom, that’s bad news at least in the short term for AAPL. If you want to trade, do exactly OPPOSITE of what I say. I shorted AAPL @ $52 last July and covered at $60. With my special brand of Seidman Math, seeing AAPL at $125 I still think I’m a genius for having he sense to cut my losses fast. Should’ve road it up though – duh. But I see the future – my version of it anyway, which can’t be that far off from yours really – and in that future I’d be long AAPL. Since YOU are the one with the special skills for “that vision thing”, I’m sure I’ll ultimately like YOUR version much, much better than my own.**

Hardware products like the iPhone, the iPod and personal computers are great. But monthly subscription revenue streams are very tantalizing. As is getting whatever media I want wherever I want it. Right now I’m the only one who cares. In the late 80s, I was one of the only people who cared that something like “email” existed. Ten years later the world caught up with me. It will catch up with me here too. It’s just a question of when.

I can’t wait.

Sincerely,

Robert Seidman
rseidman.blogspot.com
**anyone reading this who is not Steve Jobs: please don't make any investment or financial decisions on the basis of my commentary!! (remember I shorted AAPL @ $52 and it's @ $125!

Forget the Calamari at Pacific Catch!

i'm glad hardly anyone is reading this blog yet because if it ever generates any traffic I could get totally sucked into my love of analyzing data. The amount of data available for free to find out who is looking at your stuff and why is fascinating to me. That someone wound up on my blog by searching on “iphone calamari” or “iphone pacific catch” doesn’t surprise me much because it was probably my friend Bill G.

But “Lindsay lohan excess” landing on something I wrote, no way that was Bill G. and I’m almost aroused at the thought of someone finding my writing as a result of THAT search. In my own way I have been trying to understand the pop culture and I had a 20 month or so project with a B-Team Lindsay Lohan from my own neighborhood (she’s actually probably degenerated to the point of C-team at this point, but really hasn’t Lindsay too?). I do in fact consider myself one of the world’s leading experts on “Lindsay Lohan excess”.

I’d rather write much more about getting the Simpsons pre-loaded on iPods and Apple TVs, but I do have some bandwidth (and expertise) for the excess that is Lindsay and Paris.

But the fact of the matter is this: if you are already IN the neighborhood where Pacific Catch is, you don’t want THAT calamari. It’s a fine calamari, it is. But it just isn’t special. If you want special calamari and are already in the neighborhood go for the chili encrusted calamari at Betelnut, you won’t be sorry.

Bill Gates vs. Paris Hilton? I'll take the iPod!

at least if it's a popularity contest. Paris Hilton, 8 updates in 0 (zero!) minutes. Bill Gates, 8 updates in 5 hours.

I like looking at the data, but I have no idea what it means. Apple TV returned 46 hits in the last 5 hours.

In fact, Apple is the Paris killer with it's iPod receiving 21 updates in the last ZERO minutes.

George Bush? 2 hits in the last 0 minutes, 7 updates in the last 5 hours.

Let's do Mark Cuban vs. Donald Trump.

Cubes, 4 in the last 24 hours, the Donald? 5 in the last 24 hours.

But Paris and the iPod are way more popular than Harry Potter from the bloglines search view of the world. I'm not sure if any of these comparisons are fair because I can't get a good read on how Bloglines (or Google for its blogsearch) indexes.

The ONE Mistake Apple Made with the Video iPod and AppleTV

First, for the engineers: there is nothing wrong with the video iPod from a design premise at all. In fact, it is the most fabulously designed application specific gadget I have ever owned. I can’t really think of anything about it that doesn’t work exactly as it should. To me, this product is the gold standard for good design.

The mistake is one of marketing and I believe they will fix this over time, both with the iPod and with Apple TV.

Here’s how it goes:

Them: “Hey Robert, what have you been up to?”

Me: “I’ve been binging on 24 Season 5 on my iPod.”

Them: “Really? What the hell is wrong with you, why don’t you watch it on your big screen? You have a 60” TV and your watching 24 on a 2” screen?”

(hands video iPod playing 24 and earbuds over)

Them: “Ohhh. I could see where you could get really addicted to this!”

Me: “Exactly.”

Here’s the mistake Apple made, and they will fix it with the iPod and AppleTV, they didn’t sell the devices with video already loaded on it. And really, because of the file sizes of things on itunes, even WITH broadband that process is still more cumbersome than it ought to be. So there are barriers in place to make it hard to make people realize they could get addicted to watching video on the ipod itself. Too cumbersome.

Too cumbersome for me to have done it for myself in fact. The only reason I got around to doing it at all was I had a friend who had a particular issues with Monday nights being bad for her. Considering what I knew about what she loved and what calmed her down, I gave her a video iPod crammed with every episode of Family Guy, Heroes and a season of Boston Legal. My motivation was to help my friend and had I not had that motivation, I would have never known how addictive watching video on the iPod is. Doing all that was very cumbersome, but once it was done…WOW. When I finally got to the point where the device was actually a mini “on demand” product I thought, “You know, I really need one of these for ME!”

In the process of trying to be nice to a friend, I found something *I* really loved. I’ll take that kind of Karma. But what I’m saying is for all my motivations with gadgetry, had it not been for my friend I would have been fine with streaming video to my PSP and notebook over wifi for my portable entertainment. But “Seidman on Demand” with over 200 hours of continuous video programming on a device that fits in my pocket is…better.

Most people will never know because it’s too much of a pain in the ass. Plus, you know what? The world is still a stupid place – I can buy the physical media (the DVDs for 24 season 5) for less money than I can buy the digital version on iTunes. Further, the digital version on itunes has no directors commentary, no subtitles, none of that. Just “the show”. The # of instances where the digital media that is inferior (because it doesn’t come with as much) costs more money. That too is a barrier.

But Apple CAN make addicts out of their video iPod users just by packaging up some video. They can go old school for cheap and pay hardly anything to license the content. I’m thinking “Johnny Quest”, “The Jetsons” and the “Flintstones” (animated video works tremendously on the iPod). With all the baby boomer money out there, the can probably get “The Jeffersons” on the cheap and slap a season of George and Weezy on there as well. The point is, there needs to be at least a little bit of content on there to get people acclimated to the notion that “wow, watching video on the iPod is cool!”.

When they start shipping Apple TV with the 160GB hard drives, they have to start thinking about selling with content. I agree the present market (despite all the blogger enthusiasm) for the AppleTV is small, but they can revolutionize the way content is sold.

AppleTV with bigger hard drive: $399

AppleTV w/every episode of the Simpsons $599.

I don’t know if that works for the Simpsons, but if it doesn’t work right now, it will work someday when they’re trying to squeeze every last dollar of value out of the brand. What I do know is when they market the product (both the iPod and AppleTV) this way they will change the way people think about things.

The market of people who want an AppleTV may be small, but the market of people who’d like every episode of the Simpson’s for an extra $200 is big enough to increase product interest substantially and of course once it’s on your AppleTV, it will seamlessly transfer to your iPod.

Watching video on the iPod is addictive, but right now Apple makes it too hard for you to find that out. It’s a mistake, but one Apple can and will correct. It’s only a question of when.

The Internet is My DVR

I first coined this phrase around a month or two ago. I was having a conversation with someone who had bought an AppleTV and while it struck me that he ascribed a lot of things to the AppleTV that were not actually because of the AppleTV, we had similar thinking.

What the AppleTV is, is a media extender. It’s a media extender specifically designed to work with ITunes and that’s what it is. Period. Through a lot of back and forth discussion on this finally I thought despite the discussion, we were really in the exact same place. The thing we wanted was for the Internet itself to be our DVR.

But either people, including billionaires are stealing the phrase I coined or, you know, it just makes so much sense that of course that’s what everyone wants and anyone who thinks about it for even a second will conclude, “Yeah, I do want the Internet to be my DVR.”

For all practical purposes, the Internet is already my DVR, oh I have Tivos and Media Centers and all that recording stuff constantly, but the Internet is mostly my DVR already. It works in a couple of ways:


1. If my goal is to get recorded content into my iPod, it’s faster for me to download a torrent of the program from the internet in MP4 format than it is to take the exact same program off my Tivo or Media Center, convert it to MP4 and then put it on my iPod. Plus, the Internet version is already stripped of commercials
2. Through these sites I do see programs of interest sorting based on # of downloads. For example, I saw that the Larry King episode with the cast of Heroes on it was a top download…and that was something I wanted to watch.

Larry King is against my religion not because he throws softballs to celebrities, but because he’s a fraud. Going back 25 years when he was on the radio he used to tell all these stories about growing up in Brooklyn. One involved a tale with Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodger Hall-of-Famer, Sandy Koufax. When asked about this story years letter in an article in the Washington Post Magazine (that comes with the Sunday paper) Koufax denied EVER knowing Larry King. I love Sandy Koufax, and I loved the Larry King story about him (it was a bet about Carvel ice cream and how much you could get 2 scoops for in the 50s), but when the story proved to be a fraud, Larry was on the outs with me. I have a rule and the rule is if I know you’re totally on-board with being a fraud, I don’t want to get any of my information disseminated from you.

However, I love Heroes and loved this episode of Larry King on CNN. I was glad to find it, download it AND watch it. I wouldn’t have if the Internet wasn’t already my DVR.

Now I know what some of you are thinking: Aren’t torrents illegal? That is not a question for me to opine on. The question I will opine on is this: do I have a right to use media I have already paid for, for my personal use in any fashion I choose FOR MY PERSONAL use?

Answer: Duh!

Do I worry about the Feds knocking on my door? I hope they knock on my door. I’ll hand them the harddrives and make a name for myself by taking down a completely stupid premise. I mean jailing me for wanting to use media I paid for in any way I choose would be ANTI capitalistic.

Why? Well, for one, I’m already into Comcast to the tune of about $2400 a year for the media, and this doesn’t include ppv, DVD’s purchased or rented, the hundreds of dollars a year I spend on Videogames, the $22/mo. I pay to Blockbuster to be able to rent videogames, the subscription costs for Tivo, etc.

Excluding hardware, my media spend for my personal consumption is probably $5000 a year. I think this makes me an exemplary citizen in the capitalistic system that values people buying media.

If you add in the hardware costs (iPods, media centers, tivos, -- and hey, let’s not forget the plasma screen and the big ass tv and the XBOX 360, and the PS3 and the Wii, etc).

My annual media spend is HUGE. Now, if someone wants to throw me in jail because I found it easier to just download Heroes off the Internet rather than convert the version of it on my Media Center PC…I say let them. I mean if the system wants to put me in jail and take the thousands of dollars a year I spend on media off the table just to make a very self-destructive example, I’m fine with it. It’s exactly the self-destructive kind of behavior (cutting off your nose to spite your face) I love to make an example of and I’d figure out how to use that jail time to make a mockery of these dopes.

Every show is NOT fed into the Internet download population, among them 2 of my favorite shows – the shows I watch the most. ESPN’s “Around the Horn” and “Pardon the Interruption”. Fortunately in the case of PTI, they at least have the audio as a Podcast as is Mr.Tony’s radio show back in Washington, DC. But the video for these shows does not flow into the download library in the way that shows like “The Daily Show” do.

I have a DVR to always have these shows, but there is no easy and quick way to just dump them to my iPod yet – and services that ultimately have the digital equivalent of ON DEMAND for everything, in any format, will be what we pay for. Would I go another $100 a month to Comcast for this service? NO. But another $10-$20? Yep! Believe me when Comcast thinks there are enough people like me to make that interesting, they will.

I’m certainly ahead of the curve and probably by several years on the “I want my media wherever and however I want it” that results in “The Internet is My DVR.”

I basically have already achieved this through media centers, tivos, Sony Location Free Players, the ability to remote broadcast crap of my PS3 to my PSP (location free player does this too) but I have achieved it through great expense and hardware hacks, and it’s still rather clunky as hell Though I do note that recently my ORB server ran uninterrupted with fairly high usage (by me) for over 10 days straight. I know, I know, you can’t believe I didn’t have to reboot my Windows machine for over a week. But it’s true!

The Internet IS my DVR. Someday it will be yours too. And when that happens it will be both CHEAPER (by a LOT) and BETTER (by more than just a little) than what I have today.