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opting out w/ virtual suicide: seppukoo
I've heard "AVC" doesn't mean "AVC main profile". Insert sad face. CABAC and B-frames are awesome.
Forget Your "Junk"—The TSA Wants to Feel Up Your Mind
Cory Doctorow griping about Canadian ISPs
...with some justification, it appears. A glimpse of our comcast-y future?
Comcast's platform blocks access to content not bought through their storefront. Oh, wait.
tweetpsych
Taking closed to new levels ... pentalobe screwed
Wow. Google is dropping H.264 support in Chrome.
Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.Not sure how this is going to work in terms of Android, since as far as I know there are no mobile chipsets with hardware accelerated VP8 support. I guess maybe this move will force the creation of such chipsets? Or it's just not necessary any more since chips like Arm Cortex A9 are plenty powerful? (I don't really believe that last sentence.) I can truthfully say I did not see this one coming.
Looks like the Verizon iPhone will finally be announced on January 11th. Good bet to go on sale February 3rd. Ken, your long wait is over (although now Android handsets are so good that Verizon/Apple isn't the world beating dream team it once would have been.) Still, I expect them to sell the heck out of it. I'll be curious if Apple was able to keep 100% of the power like they did with AT&T, or whether Verizon will be able to screw things up with their own software add-ons.
To evaluate streaming video, I've got a few devices. A first gen ipod touch, an ipad, a moto droid, etc. I'm going to get a Ubuntu/Intel Atom netbook for the low end of the "computer" space. At the other end, I want a no-holds-barred mobile platform that will let me see the limitations of the encoder & server (not the client). Edging out the HP Envy and 15" Sony, I got a Dell XPS 15 ... i5, 8 GB dual channel memory, 1 GB graphics memory, advanced N wifi, slightly more than 720p display, HDMI output, wireless display driver, bluray disc, speakers that are rated very highly. All for under $1.5 k. It will be bigger and badder in every performance dimension (except hard disk capacity) than any machine I've got. It will probably run circles around the Mac Pro that I got in 2008 (except disk capacity and pro video outputs). But I don't get it for a month. (Insert sad face.)
Microsoft is releasing Windows Media Player plug in for FireFox which will play H.264 video. Works on Windows 7. For modern browsers, this leaves only FireFox on Mac and Opera without H.264 support and neither of those browsers have a ton of users.
Futurology
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.
"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899.
"With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market." -- Business Week, August 2, 1968.
ESPN Says Study Shows Little Effort to Cut Cable
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: December 5, 2010 nyt
Seeking to understand the cutting of cable cords, ESPN has waded into the Nielsen Company’s audience sample and concluded that the cancellations are currently a “very minor” phenomenon.
The sports network’s study provides a new answer, or at least a new set of data, for a question that looms over the television industry: how many Americans are dropping their costly cable subscriptions and watching TV on the Internet instead?
This action, often called cord-cutting, has happened in 0.28 percent of households in the United States in the last three months, ESPN found in a study that it plans to release on Monday. Offsetting those losses, though, 0.17 percent of households that had been broadcast-only signed up for pay TV and broadband.
“So the net amount of cord-cutting for one quarter was just one-tenth of 1 percent,” said Glenn Enoch, the vice president for integrated media research for ESPN.
The study is significant because the prospect of cord-cutting has deeply worried television executives. Established players like ESPN that depend on subscriber revenue have been eager to figure out how much cord-cutting is going on — and to dispel myths about the behavior.
“We got a little worn out reading headline after headline saying, ‘Cord-cutting, it’s a disaster; young people are abandoning TV.’ For our strategic purposes, we needed to know what was really going on,” Mr. Enoch said.
The research comes from the same sample that Nielsen uses to project TV ratings. Nielsen verified ESPN’s findings.
Similarly, data from the research firm SNL Kagan found that 119,000 customers dropped their cable or satellite subscriptions in the third quarter of this year. There are about 100 million subscriptions nationwide.
Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for planning, policy and analysis at Nielsen, said the ESPN study confirmed that while there are some cord-cutters, “it’s a really small number of people.”
More people, she added, are “swapping cable cords, rather than cutting them.” Cable providers have lost some customers to satellite or telecommunications providers in recent years.
Mr. Enoch said ESPN would monitor cord-cutting behavior every three months using the Nielsen sample. The amount of cord-cutting could pick up over time, but networks like ESPN are limiting the amount of video they make available on the Internet without a subscription partly to prevent that.
Sporting events are particularly hard to watch free online, so it comes as little surprise that the Nielsen sample found that among heavy and medium viewers of sports, the research showed what Mr. Enoch called “zero cord-cutting.”
A version of this article appeared in print on December 6, 2010, on page B7 of the New York edition.
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Only 0.1% Have Cut The Cord: ESPN Analysis
Analysis Of Nielsen Data Indicates 0.3% Of Broadcast-Only Subs Became Multichannel, Broadband Subs Over Past Three Months
Mike Reynolds -- Multichannel News, 12/6/2010 9:40:26 AM
Cord-cutting, at this point, is barely a blip on the multichannel horizon.
According to an ESPN analysis of Nielsen's national people meter sample over the past three months, just 0.28% of homes dropped their multichannel video service, but maintained their broadband connections.
That percentage was mitigated by a group of broadcast-only households that became subscribers to multichannel TV and broadband over the same period, as these "un-cutters" represented 0.17% of homes in the Nielsen sample.
As such, the net loss between the groups was just 0.11% of all households.
Additionally, people who were heavy or medium sports viewers showed zero cord-cutting. Heavy and medium sports viewers account for 83% of sports viewing and 90% of viewing to ESPN, according to the programmer.
"This project adds critical intelligence to our understanding of the multichannel marketplace," said Glenn Enoch, vice president of Integrated Media Research, ESPN, in a statement. "We knew from other sources that cord cutting was a very minor behavior, but we now have the ability to quantify this group and monitor it in the future."
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For ye have the interlace always with you ...