Fred Wilson continues his thread on Exploding TV - and seems to be one of the few out there who understands that all this technology and choice don't simply mean that we'll have more ways to slice and dice network produced media.
LINK

Having now digested CES, NATPE, and a billion pages of text, blogs, business plans, VC broadband offerings, and Akimbo - the one thing that is clear is that no one on the mainstream media side of the fence is taking the 'citizen media' trend seriously.

There are a few reasons for that. One is that it all sounds too much like CB Radio or Public Access cable TV.

But what Fred gets right - and mainstream media folks get wrong - is that there is a critical connection coming between IPTV and digital production tools. And once the playing field is level, or at least open, some portion of both my time and my money that i spend on media will begin to move from mass-market sources to nich/focused sources.

By way of example - i watched both the 're-cap' show on The Sundance Channel, and read Jason Calacanis' daily blogs from Sundance. Jason's was far more detailed, and more nuanced. So where do both of these media properties fall? The Sundance Channel is 'professional' but biased (it's their film fest after all). Jason isn't a professional film critic, but he's active and honest about both his likes and dislikes and his personal relationships with some of the filmmakers. Jason was shooting video at CES, and i watched that as well. He's the kind of content entrepreneur that the networks should be concerned about - because i'd watch his take on Sundance over Entertainment Tonight any day of the week.

It's not professional vs. amateur that will be the dividing line. It will be content entrepreneurs nibbling away at mass-market media with nich, unique, compelling content. Both for entertainment -and more significantly for information. Because data oriented media has been all but ignored, but it won't be going forward.

Links for software for TV:

Myth TV
POSM
Bittorrent
Videora
Knoppmyth
eXeem

Google Video Search
Yahoo Video Search

KnoppMyth

In today's Sunday New York Times, a two thousand word feature by Lorne Manly and John Markoff takes the gloves off. Link - login requried

EXCERPT: "Not surprisingly, the repercussions - particularly the rapidly growing number of shows available for the plucking online - terrify industry executives, who remember only too well what Napster and other file-sharing programs did to the music industry. They fret that if unchecked, rampant trading of files will threaten the riches of the relatively new and surprisingly lucrative television DVD business. It could endanger sales of television shows to international markets and into syndication. And it could further endanger what for the past 50 years has been television's economic linchpin: the 30-second commercial.

"We have to try as an industry to get ahead of this and give the audience an attractive model before the illegal file-sharer providers meet their needs," said David F. Poltrack, CBS Television's executive vice president for research and planning.

The the phrase 'terrify industry executives' may be true - but you'd never be able to tell it from the way networks interact with both new technology partners and content creators. It seems like TV is going down the same track as Music - ignore, lobby washington (broadcast flag) and then sue. But as the times accuratly points out - people aren't pirating video because they want to break the law, it's because the clear demand for flexible (non-linear) viewing, and new platforms (phones, portable devices, etc) are being put on the back burner.

In many ways TV networks aren't nearly as concerned about the trends as advertisers - the talk about the end of the :30 commerical is a major topic of conversation at both clients and agencies.

Perhaps most interesting in the Times piece is the CBS research that says that viewers would gladly pay $1 to view a show they like - when they want to see it. Let's say it out loud: Networks exist to provide access to audience. They sell that audience to advertisers - who interupt programs with commericals. Now - audiences are abandoning networks and think of programs as distinct and purchasable on demand. But once we're paying for shows - we'll be a whole less likely to be willing to have them interupted. So the whole economy of TV is under attack. And the Tivo numbers (actually DVR numbers) bear that out.

- from the Times article:
"It all started with the digital video recorder. First popularized by TiVo and ReplayTV about five years ago, the DVR gave consumers a new degree of control: instead of being at the mercy of the broadcast schedule or VCR's, they could now be their own television programmers, scheduling shows at their convenience, pausing live television and skipping easily past commercials. Smith Barney estimates that though only a little more than 6 million Americans now use DVR's, by 2010 nearly half of American television households, or 58 million homes, will have them."

Worth noting that post CES, the blinders seem to have come off. The moment to re-invent television has arrived. Now it's time to place some bets on who wins:

1. Cable
2. Phone Companies
3. IPTV (broadband)
4. Tivo
5. Microsoft
6. Apple
7. Real Networks
8. Linux / open sources
9. Some combo of above

Anyone?

If this week will be remembered as VIDEO SEARCH WEEK - with seemingly everyone announcing some sort of video search - Rebecca Lieb has a remarkably calm, cool, and collected summary of just what's going on:

"Video search offerings from major portals and search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (America Online counts in this group as well, with Singingfish) will light a fire under the already rapid growth of online multimedia, convergence, Web TV, broadband, Wi-Fi (define), consumer hardware, and any number of other things associated with digital media -- not the least of which are advertising and marketing....LINK for more

It's 8am - and i'm up way too early, but it's to go to hear what Lloyd Braun has to say about Yahoo's future in the entertainment biz.

Braun says he's opening an office in Santa Monica zdnet

With Terry Semel running the place, and now former ABC program head Braun running Media and Entertainment - seems like Yahoo has set it's sights on owning the entertainment/hollywood franchise.

In terms of how he's going to do that - it's clear he's still getting his feet wet and learning about the internet. The one thing he said that I thought should have turned some heads was "If i knew then what I know now, I would have take 50% of my media budget from ABC and moved it to the internet." Yowch.

After a spin to the floor and an over-priced sandwich - it was back to ballroom "K" for "The Reality of Reality." No huge revelations here - other than the last question when an audience member asked one of those questions that most of the time get laughed off. the wanted to know of anyone on the panel ever considered putting Christians and Muslims in a reality show face off. Ben Silverman actually took the question -and said that he hoped all of his shows had some value - and then let it out that he'd tried to convince former President Bill Clinton to host a reality show based 'peace talk' for Network TV. If anyone could pull that off - it would be Ben.

And finally - Thursday AM - Mark Cuban had the line of the day from the "Next Big Thing" panel when he announced that his film division would release "The Smartest Guys in the Room" would be released on the same day and date on HDnet Movies and in his Landmark theatres.

Said Cuban - the industry is Pyra-phobic (fear of pirates) and the only reason that people pirate movies because the get sold the buzz from big marketing and then can't get the movie (since it's not out on VOD or DVD).

Interesting to see how he does - as he pointed out, since he owns the film, the theatres, and the TV network, he can afford to promote the TV net at the expense of box office if it helps him grow the company overall.

AM panel on Branded Entertainment - Scott Donaton from Ad Age moderates. Interesting that everyone on the panel - all leaders in the branded 'space' - say that there is no real way to set pricing for the value of advertiser involvement in programs. Seems like the wild west of advertising and programming. Everything up for grabs.

In a lot of ways the Branded movement is part of the evolution from interruption advertising to new relationships between advertising and content. Shows like the Apprentice and The Restaurant work because audience are engaged by both the shows and the product integration. When it stops working - people will vote with their channel changers.

Then to the show floor. If anyone doubts there there has been media consolidation - just one look at the CBS/Paramount/Viacom/King World booth and you know we're living in a new very narrow universe.

Biggest celeb siting on the floor - Kato Kalin.

Biggest news event of the day. Ted Turner's comments about Bush and Hitler. I'm buying an angus burger today.

It's 6:30 - and i'm 45 min away from a jet blueish flight to Vegas. Yes - once again - Vegas (for those of you who may wonder, i don't gamble - and i don't have a second family there as my son suggested last night).

But it won't be the same Vegas as the CES vegas.

This is NATPE (the National Asssociation of Television Program Executives) confab.

At one point in my career it was THE show of the year. It was a big dot com show in 98,99,2000 - then poof... no dot com. So i skipped the past 4 years (as the show struggled to figure out what it wanted to be.)

But now it's back - and i'm going back. To see friends, talk about program ideas, and see where the whole convergence thing is going.

Broadcasting And Cable magazine had a nice piece in this weeks issues about my NATPE plans - LINK and that's a bunch of what i'm up to.

But it's also a great place to get a vibe about where the content business is heading... so i'm heading out.

It's an exciting time for user-content. Blogging is an explosive new form of expression, video-blogging is coming on strong, the buzz of citizen journalism and user-submitted content has finally come on to the main stage.

All of this is fueled by the ultimate nexus of low-cost desktop editing, DV (and soon HDV) shooting, and broadband that takes content into the home. Once the home media server becomes essential rather than optional - we'll see video from pro-sumers and an emerging class of content makers arrive.

But back when UNfiltered went on the air, it was before there was any of this stuff. People wanted to express themselves with video. My point is that this isn't a trend fueled by technology as much as it is a basic human need that is filling the broadband pipe just as fast as we can lay it to the living room.

Over the next few weeks - i'm going to share some of the User-Video's from the past work i've don on MTV UNfiltered, CBS Class of 2000, and Free Speech (syndicated by Studio's USA in 1999).

I'll tell the story of the maker, and the tools we used to get their story on TV. Some of these stories are funny, some are heartbreaking, and some are shocking.

This first story is made by John Barber, who transfer to the Univeristy of Florida at Tampa. As you'll see, john is a soft-spoken rather shy guy who's developed an alternative personality to break out. When John called, he was ready to let his private personality and his public life colide.

This was one of those stories that could have gone either way. After all, Drag Queen on campus may or may not be that unusual or revealing. But as you'll see from how the story ends - something pretty amazing happens for John, and everyone who went to graduation that year. Not to mention the phrase "Construction Boys" that became a code word around the office. You'll see.

WARNING -> this next user piece is very intimate, and not something to be taken lightly. It was in fact a huge debate at MTV about how we handle this subject at all.

But the girl who called it in was so passionate about telling Sean's story - in fact she was so angry at him - that we sent her a camera. Internally the debate was... "how can you do a story that has no pictures" which was a concern, but Sean's friends set up interviews, and most amazingly found home movies. There was some pressure to answer the "Why" question, but Sean's friends didn't want to go there. They just wanted other people who might be considering suicide to know that it's a terribly hurtful thing to do to your friends.

CREDITS: This was an amazing team effort, a huge risk for MTV - and an amazing fun time making something no one had ever tried before. Linda Corradina was the Head of News and greenlit the show. Doug Herzog was running MTV at the time and signed off. Rob Barnett was the producer of the pilot, and Rob Fox was the series producer. Dave Goldberg quit his job to come work on UNfiltered. Both Robin Turner and then Mona Eldiaf were supervising producers (Mona went on to run the series after i left in '98). And Bruce McDonald produced the Tweeka piece as well as a bunch of other amazing pieces. I've got to get the credits for the Sean piece, might have been bruce as well.

But Robin was really the person who nurtured the thing along, from it's roots with Hi8 Camcorderes and an 800 number in Saratoga Springs. But that's a story for another day.

from CyberJournalists.net:

"Mark Glazer says the Media Blogger's Association's Tsunami Video Hosting Initiative, which has already served more than 2 million videos, is "a tantalizing prospect for distributing future citizen video."

Beyond the generous donations from hosting companies, the Tsunami Video Hosting Initiative also broke new ground by brokering a deal between washingtonpost.com and bloggers who needed bandwidth. Tom Kennedy, managing editor of multimedia at washingtonpost.com, told me the alliance makes sense for all involved.

"I think it's important for mainstream media companies to figure out a way to work cooperatively with bloggers, and I think it's in our interests to do that," Kennedy said.

... "The ideal scenario would be to do some collaborative development that would make the submission of the videos easier and would begin to get the amateurs used to the idea of supplying enough basic metadata and contact information as a part of what they're uploading," washingtonpost.com's Kennedy said. "That all becomes easier for us to source. It's not foolproof, but it would be a good place to start."

From Mike at HDforindies.com - thank's mike -

Apple's Plans for FCP 5 at NAB (including HDV) 

OK, there is a tiny bit of conjecture in this one, but I'm 99% sure here's how it's going to go:

1.) Apple will roll out Final Cut Pro HD 5 at NAB in April. At least announce if not ship.

2.) The scoop on HDV & the Apple Intermediate Codec: HDV will be supported the same way it is in Final Cut Express HD, which I finally confirmed IS a 4:2:0 codec specifically made for working with HDV. There are 720p and 1080i setups for HDV, and you can "roll your own" other sizes. The codec is 4:2:0 only. There are other output options. But when you choose the 1080i or 720p options in the QT export panel, you're actually preconfiguring a whole bunch of things that get written into the quicktime movie header - the field order, pixel aspect ratio, clean aperture, as well as media and playback dimensions. If you choose "other" then you are free to go the "size" box and enter custom dimensions - say 720x480. But the other meta-information is not setup, so the intermediate codec *could* be repurposed for other media types, but it is really focused on supporting HDV, which is 4:2:0, and comes in 1080i and 720p flavors, and making the import and export of those HDV formats as simple as possible. The audio is transcoded as well, from Mpeg-1, layer 2 audio to straight-up, uncompressed 48KHz PCM.

3.) Fiber Channel connectivity has been described as "important" in this upcoming release

4.) IMX and 1080i50 DVCPRO HD will also be supported.

5.) DVCPRO HD 1080i50 will have less compression per frame than 1080i60 DVCPRO HD. Same overall bandwidth used, fewer frames per second, more bandwidth per frame, so less compression, better quality. See my previous post about 1080i50==>1080p25==>1080p24 workflows for the new Panasonic camera.

6.) Similarly, 1080i50 HDV codec (and it's Apple Intermediate Codec) will have higher bitrate per frame for same reasons.

7.) I'd expect lots of demonstrations of Xsan integrating with Final Cut Pro HD now that Xsan has shipped. I'll have more to say on Xsan in the near future. I did get this key bit of info: for each workstation that wants to work with uncompressed HD simultaneously, you'll need a fully populated X-Serve RAID. Want one uncompressed, one compressed HD station? One X-RAID fully populated. Want three simultaneous uncompressed HD users? Three X-RAIDs fully populated. Eeyouch.
Posted by: Mike / 7:13 PM

Om Malik sums up the Tivo debate here
My two cents:

Tivo is code for a movement, not a company or a box. Tivo means- media that you control, not that controls your life. When people like Michael Powell call it a "God's Machine", they're not praying to Ramsay. They're saying - out load - that the model of a nation rushing home at 7:50 to be sitting on thier coach when their favorite show comes on is just nuts. And being able to push pause, and live your life on your terms is powerful stuff.

So yes, Comcast would have been a good decision for the stock called Tivo (maybe), but a bad decision for the concept called Tivo (freedom).

What's that wisdom about early adopter product failing during the lul between niche and mass? Apple Newton anyone?

Tahiti is a great name for the next generation of Tivo software. It's a fantasy island where the world is always sunny and the drinks always have little umbrella's in them. It's the right idea - maybe to early - but much like Tivo itself, inevitable.

So you can't fault Ramsay for not being double jointed enough to both thumb his nose at the rules of the game, and then not be willing to suck up to the very model that he was helping to explode.

I'd argue this is a natural part of the revolution/evolution of both distribution and content. And that's good.

Great insiders look at the struggle for Tivo's soul. What's clear is that the choice for a company that had a revolutionary spirit was to 'drink the cool-aid' and become part of the cable walled garden, or run fast at IPTV (Tahiti) and see if the revenues can catch up. It's brave - and scary for Tivo. What's that line about leaders having arrows in their backs?

TiVo Struggles to Find Its Niche After Quitting a Deal with Cable
By SAUL HANSELL

Published: January 17, 2005

After months of hard bargaining, TiVo reached an agreement last summer to offer its pioneering video recording system to customers of the Comcast cable system, according to several people involved in the discussions.

It was potentially a critical deal for TiVo, because Comcast is by far the biggest cable system and also because control of DirecTV, the satellite system that has been the biggest distributor of TiVo, had been bought by the News Corporation, which also owns a TiVo rival.
extended article:

A hugely long piece in The New Atlantis about the move toward personalization of media and a term coined Egocasting.

It takes a sociological look at personal media - and sees a future that narrows our field of vision rather than broadens it. I don't agree - but i think i'll read the piece a few more times before i'm ready to dismiss it, the implications are too important to ignore.

Ok, lots of focus group (family) data to report.

First off, while it feels like TV... It feels different. My wife says it feels like surfing the web. I think she means that you're exploring, but not with a clear sense of where your going. Some of that is just that many of the channels are not brands we're familiar with. But also, there does feel like there is some exploration - which is both exciting and a bit daunting.

The other night, my younger son and my wife were watching... And then I heard a big loud laugh from both of them. It's been a long time since anything on TV made them laugh out loud. It was a short movie posted on Ifilm.

Then my older son came out - ended up watching Green Day and a Blondie video. Said "this is great, now I can watch music videos again" -he complains that MTV doesn't play them.

And then a bunch of folks in the family discovered some old Arthur C. Clarke shows from Channel 4, and some yoga videos.

All in all -felt good to find things that seemed worthwhile and educational.

Operationally - there are some missing features. There is no progress bar, and it isn't clear WHEN the box calls out to get content. Why can't the box go and get me a 1minute short when I ask for it -rather than just putting it in the que to download, with no clear indication of when it's going to come in. It's a bit disconnected.

Also - the channel paradigm that they've adopted feels old - and hard to navigate. If Akimbo is selling access to IPTV, which we all believe is gaining to be a huge offering in the next few years, where in their architecture is a plan to help ME manage the content ocean? If they're answer is that they (the brand Akimbo) is a filter for quality, well - they've all already lost that argument in my family. To much old stuff, some good some bad.

So - they've won the battle of convincing me that IPTV can look like real tv. Now the question is - how much of a shift will there be in HOW I get new tv (filter/trusted partners/key words/collaborative filter) and that may be the harder problem to solve in the long run.

'Eyes on the Prize,' off the shelf
By Thom Powers

Due to copyright issues, the landmark civil rights documentary can no longer be shown on television or released on DVD.
January 16, 2005

"EYES ON THE PRIZE,'' the epic 1986 documentary series on the civil rights movement, contains a scene showing Martin Luther King Jr. on his 39th birthday -- his last -- in 1968. King, who was trying to take on poverty and the Vietnam War simultaneously, was under tremendous stress at the time, and his staff sang ''Happy Birthday'' in an attempt to cheer him up.

But the producers of ''Eyes'' almost had to leave the scene out of the finished documentary. ''Happy Birthday,'' as it turns out, was copyrighted in 1935 and, following the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, will remain so until at least 2030. Filmmakers have been known to pay $15,000 to $20,000 for just one verse, according to a recent report on documentary clearances issued by the Center for Social Media.

The song ultimately stayed in the film, but don't plan on celebrating King's birthday tomorrow by going to your local video store to buy a copy of ''Eyes on the Prize.'' Thanks to rights restrictions on archival material used in the documentary, the 14-hour chronicle tracing the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycotts in the 1950s to the rise of black mayors in the 1980s can no longer be released in new editions or shown on television. PBS's right to air the film expired in 1993. Meanwhile, the VHS edition has gone out of print and a DVD release would require relicensing. (Complete sets of used videos are currently going for as much as $1,000 on Amazon.)

Why “The Long Tail” for video is different.

Since Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” article hit the pages of Wired back in November, there’s been a lot of discussion about it, and the impact of the idea that content never goes out of print in a new on-demand environment.

The article is breathtaking in it’s simplicity, clarity, and inevitability. Looking at the numbers from either the Rhapsody back-cataloged usage in The Long Tail or the more recent stats that Chris is blogging from Tivo it’s pretty clear that the era of media as disposable is over.

But it’s important to make a distinction between retail video-media, as it exists today (TV, Films) and motion media content that’s likely to populate the Long Tail model in the years to come.

FLASHBACK. Books have been around a long time. The idea of committing ideas to paper, and then moving that paper around is one that human beings understand in a way that is intuitive rather than intellectual. Written words have knowledge. If we want to know something, knowledge is on paper.

Moving images are on the other hand primarily place in society as entertainment. Yes of course there is news on television, and documentaries, but as a percentage of the amount of content either created or consumed, those non-fiction moving images are a very small portion of what currently is in the marketplace.

So we have both a tradition, and an intuitive understanding that when we’re sitting in front of a video screen it is to ‘relax’.

So in order for video to be part of the Long Tail revolution – two important things need to happen. First, lots of high value content needs to be created and be made available. This is inevitable (tools like Final Cut HDV are central to this). But even once content is created and made available – and validated through some sort of filter/folkomnomics /metadata solution – there’s another piece missing.

Users. Motion media is a very different value proposition. If I go looking for a book on how to tile my bathroom floor on Amazon, and I’m offered a video of the same subject – how will I use it? On DVD? On my laptop, on my portable media player? On my cell phone? New experiences are scary – and as much as I’d rather have someone show me how to lay tile… the combination of a missing device, and more importantly a missing sense that I can trust video to be knowledge rather than entertainment, means that there’s a slow build as the demand for long-tail motion media builds.

None of this is bad. In fact, the opposite I think.

The fact is that a new culture of motion media creators is coming on line at the same time that a delivery system for the material is being born. That means that as young creators build their ‘archive’ of published media, audiences will grow both in size and sophistication.

PAUSE. More on the difference between music and Television – and why viewers are likely to make more video content than music…. IN A BIT.

From unmediated.org

A little birdie told me that the coolest thing at MacWorld was the LaCie - silverscreen - Multimedia Hard Drive. It's a USB powered hard drive, with a video out snake cable with RCAs, and other standard connectors for playing back video files (MPEG 1, 2, 4) on a TV. It has a remote control that you use to open, play, and browse the videos/files on your drive via the TV. I haven't seen it yet. But it's listing for $329 and is supposed to be available next month. The only negative I see is that it's USB powered- which means you still need a computer nearby when you're playing off the TV. Maybe the USB on the set-top will work. Hmmmm. LaCie! Send unmediated some demo units! We'll add video aggregation to it! Anyone know how they're doing this? Is it one of those multimedia playback browsers?

Since I'm firmly in the camp of changing distribution paradigms, things that balance our unbridled optimism with some skepticism are always a good read.

Om Malik (Business 2.0 /www.gigaom.com ) takes a thoughtful look at some of the obstacles in this post: LINK

"Here are some actual numbers which show that exploding TV is one with a really long and I mean long fuse. An average American watches four hours of television and assuming that he gets to pick and choose at a rate of 99 cents an hour, well his/her average spend is going to be about $1465 a year or about $120 a month. Add the download costs - say a good 6 megabits connection, which is about $50 a month, you are looking at $170 a month. Average cable bill is about $52 a month. Not including the cost of specialized gear like darling of the moment, Akimbo or TiVo, the delta is just too wide."

He's not wrong. There are a number of obstacles, and a number of groundbreaking events that could shift things more quickly. Perhaps the most important, and least written about is the current Cable Card debate.

ENGADGET Link

The Federal Communications Commission announced a unanimous decision to adopt rules that make digital cable reception on new televisions as easy as plugging a card into a set.

"The agency said Wednesday that with the new rules, digital TVs can receive cable signals without the need for a set-top box. The rules allow manufacturers to make sets with so-called plug-and-play capabilities, so consumers can just "plug in" their equipment to receive digital services. Customers insert a security card, or a cable card they would get from their cable operator, to decrypt scrambled cable signals on the sets.

CABLE CARD Link

Why does this matter? Because we're facing a battle over who owns the living room. And if cable co's are allowed to insist on a box... then they control our living room universe.

But - if the hardware in our homes is something we can buy at Circuit City - or that other manufacturers like Tivo can build into their boxes - then things really heat up...

In all the hot sweaty blogging about Mac Mini and IPOD Shuffle - there's a interesting new set of features in Imovie that matters to folks in the documentary community.

First - has anyone talked about the fact that Steve Job's waved a Sony HDV camcorder around and embraced both HDV and Blue-Ray? I think that might mean that Final Cut will add HDV support to pro sooner rather than later.

HDV is now supported in Imovie, but final cut folks just shrugged because it isn't yet out for FCP.

but little mentioned is Magic

thanks to AppleMatters for catching this big clue.

MAGIC is a cool feature that digitizes your entire HDV tape, breaks it up into scenes, puts in automatic scene-breaks, titles, credits, and music.

Ok - the pro's are sniffing in disgust. But hold on. Why have we spent the last 10 years keeping folks from digitizing everything on a tape? Because storage cost a ton of money. But the apple folks know that it's much easier to let the software do the in and out points (based on camera start/stop i assume) and then sit down and trim, remove, and polish. And as we know - storage prices are falling every day - making it cheaper to store more and prune than to nit pick what goes in up front.

From the apple website:

"Unassisted, iMovie HD automatically rewinds the tape in your camcorder and imports all your video. After placing each clip on the Timeline, it assembles your movie from start to finish."

the site goes on:

"Imagine. For your next movie project, iMovie HD can step in and perform all of the preliminary work for you. Like a trusted assistant, it preps the stage. Then it’s your turn to step in and take your project to the next level. Use your iMovie expertise to trim or reposition clips, introduce effects, modify transitions, add or delete chapter markers, include sounds or additional musical elements."

Is this feature going to be included in FCP along with HDV support? I sure hope so. Not because a piece of software replaces an editor. Far from it. But the job of keying in 'in' and 'out' points is horrible, and anything that means i can sit down and start touching material without having to grind through the 'digitizing' process is a great thing.

Hope Apple is listening.

News

The company will seek a successor to Mike Ramsay, as predicted last year by
TVPredictions.com's Phillip Swann. Ramsay, however, will stay on as chairman.
By Mary Downs
Special to TVPredictions.com

Washington, D.C. (January 12 )-- TiVo, the Digital Video Recorder service, announced today that it will seek a new CEO to replace Mike Ramsay, who has been chief executive since the company's launch. Ramsay, however, will retain his role as Chairman of the Board and will continue as CEO until a successor is identified.

The company's decision to replace Ramsay was predicted last November by TVPredictions.com's Phillip Swann. Noting TiVo's continuing difficulty to persuade cable and satellite operators to license its technology, Swann wrote:

"Over the last four years, the company has been unable to persuade a single cable operator to license its technology. Now, cable operators are rolling out their own DVR services. TiVo is also heavily dependent on a company (DIRECTV) which is likely to reduce its marketing commitment in the near future. Plus, TiVo is now focusing more on non-DVR services, such as home
networking, which might be several years away from reaching a mass audience. This at a time when studies show that millions of consumers are considering getting a DVR. And the company has launched a succession of advertising campaigns that have failed to clearly communicate why someone would swap his VCR for a DVR.

Ramsay, a soft-spoken engineer, has made the wrong move at almost every turn. Consequently, I predict that TiVo's shareholders and board of directors will encourage Ramsay to let someone else run the company in 2005. The DVR service desperately needs bold, powerful and experienced leadership. Despite his brilliance in bringing TiVo to market, Mike Ramsay is not that person."

Failure
Ramsay, who co-founded the company in 1997, has successfully led TiVo to a premiere brand position, acquiring more than 2.3 million customers. However, many analysts, including important Wall Street officials, have said recently that the company's growth could be dramatically reduced in the next year because marketing partner DIRECTV will launch its own DVR. In addition, Ramsay has been criticized for his failure to land a cable licensing deal.

"Founding TiVo with Jim Barton and growing the company into a major consumer brand has been the thrill of a lifetime," Ramsay said in a statement released today. "We have achieved a tremendous amount since we started the company. We have had a fundamental impact on television viewing and believe strongly that the company has huge upside potential, in a massive market, going forward. I believe it is a natural evolution of any company to have a transition of leadership as the company grows and matures. The time is right for me, personally and professionally, to bring in an outstanding Chief Executive Officer to lead the company so that I can focus on future strategy. I feel this is a great opportunity for the right person to run one of the industry's most exciting companies, and I look
forward to recruiting a new CEO who will help the company realize its full potential."

Speaking on behalf of TiVo's Board of Directors, Geoff Yang, a founding investor in TiVo, said: "Mike Ramsay has led TiVo to an exceptional level of technology innovation, business performance and consumer satisfaction. As co-founder of TiVo, he has helped create a truly big idea and executed on its delivery into the marketplace with great skill. We plan to hire another exceptional leader in the months ahead."

TiVo has selected Howard Fischer Associates of Philadelphia, Silicon Valley and Boston to conduct the search process.

There's a great conversation taking place in the blogosphere about TV - and it's future. It's fueled at least a bit by the sense that TV is simply bad, or ill-used. It could be so much a). Better b). More Valuable c). More useful d). More important.

Think of it this way. You have to lose all but one of the following devices:

a. Your Computer
b. Your Cell Phone
c. Your I Pod
d. Your Broadband Connection
e. Your Cable Connection

Is there ANY chance the one thing you'd keep is Cable? For entertainment? For Information? for anything. Check out "Exploding TV" Fred Wilson's take on TV's future -->LINK <--

And then what Jeff Jarvis has to say about the same lunch: -->LINK <--

It is pretty clear that IPTV changes everything - now we just need to imagin the future we want to build and not get too freaked out by the exploding number of choices.

I was at a panel at CES where someone suggested that consumers really didn't want choice... they in fact wished there were less channels and less choice. True enough, I want less junk, and more stuff that's meaningful to me.

That's why my blog reader beats my TV channel changer any day. More stuff I want, less stuff I don't. Not so complicated, really. And there's also the matter of authenticity. As Fred also speaks about on his blog, voices from the Tsunami that are human and real seem to be more engaging and effective than the so-called 'objective' voices of MSM news. But watch CNN and you'll see some of that changing a bit - in surprising ways.

"We believe the true revolution that is taking place today is a revolution in the way that entertainment is created, distributed, managed and consumed…In other words, the entire entertainment process, whether it's music, or movies, or TV or images, is becoming digital, mobile, and virtual."

Check out Carly Fiorina's speech at CES--> HP Speech <--

Also, check out what the executive producers of Project Greenlight: Chris Moore and Ben Affleck have to say about Project Greenlight and it's deal with with HP.

I was about to write a detailed entry about my NATAS Advanced Media floor tour, when this came in ---> SHELLYSBLOG <---- Well, he's gone and done it, so why duplicate efforst.

I'll just underline two things that i think are worth noting. The Sony Z1 HDV camera is going to blow the doors of the industry in February. And a little noted 5.1 sound recording in the Sony DCR-DVD403 is likely to find it's way into the HDV line (not sure what the tech issues are since the DVD403 records directly to DVD).

And the Motorola Moxi box is very sweet, but without IPTV support at this time.

CES isn't a convention - it's more like 6 conventions. It's car audio (and now video), it's photography (and digital photography) It's Consumer Electronics, and Electronic Accessories, and it's all the pipe and infrastructure stuff that glues it all together.

I spent the morning at the Digtal Hollywood conference - a series of panels on the relationship between content and technology.

The first thing that is clear is that the revolution that Tivo began is no longer an if, or even when - it's now. ABC, Comcast, TV Guide, Starcom MediaVest and the BBC all had representatives on this panel moderated by Ken rutkowsky. (www.KenRadio.com). And while they through around words like Gatekeeper (each accusing the other of being one) they also talked with great agility about Bittorrent, MP3, and Citizen Media. They all know that VOD, and IPTV are all inevitable.

The Comcast rep talked about the fact that cable feels that it's retransmission fees to broadcast networks should give them the right to offer network TV shows on a demand basis. I'd pay money to see how those negotiations are going.

The Panel seems to agree that the future is going to be driven by navigation and guidance in the new long-tail world of media storage and on demand delivery.

After hearing so much about media servers and IPTV - I ventured out onto the tradeshow floor to kick the tires. My first stop was Microsoft, where they were demo'ing the Home Media Center. Bill Gates had pitched this whole media center option hard when he delivered his Key Note the day before.

I have to say - the software seemed surprisingly elegant (ok, it's a trade show so it's fair to assume that it should work in a totally engineered environment with no outside forces). Bill Gates key note had a few glitches - which made the rounds.

Next stop was Tivo. The CEO Mike Ramsey had said this morning that he was abandoning their cable strategy and going for IPTV.

more in a bit - off to dinner - -

Ok, update at 1am.

It's working. Not sure why. I thought it might have been because I was using Safari - so I logged on with Explorer. It worked, and then... tried again with Safari - and it worked as well.

So - maybe the Akimbo server was down. Hmm....

First impressions. The menu is full of random stuff... some that I know (TCM, Adult Swim from Cartoon Central) and some that I never knew existed (Sailing. TV)

Pricing is all over the place - and surprising. A channel run by Quicksilver charges $3.95 for a download of a surfing film. Most channels have some free samples. In the end, you could get a nasty surprise on your credit card if you don't download with care. There's a good password protection feature to keep the kids from hitting your credit card.

I'm downloading a bunch of stuff tonight. No progress bar, and no view in progress - so it's just sitting there. Not ever a blinking light to tell me it's working. I hope I'm downloading some things. find out in the AM.

Since tv over the internet is going to be important for filmmakers - Akimbo is a step into the great unknown. So i decided to blog the ordering, installing, and content.

First- the ordering. Good news. The process is simple, there's a free trial till april 1st - and the site is easy to navigate. After i ordered Akimbo emailed me a tracking number for UPS - and, i watched the progress as my Akimbo made it's way to me.

It arrived TODAY - on time, as promised. And like all early adopters, i spent the day knowing my new toy was waiting at home.

First thing - it looks good in the rack. I put it next to the Tivo - hoping they would be friends (probably not).

Installation was easy. Ethernet cable, audio and video rca's. Ta Da. Akimbo found the internet, and then things got tricky. The box has a sign on key (three random words) and the box wants you to go on the web to sign on and authorize the box. From here - things get more complicated. The web site kicks back the three words... ocean - moose -tree. So i tried the key a few times, caps, smalls, but no go. Then, i figured- time to go to the Troubleshooting Guide in the manual.

Nope. No troubleshooting guide. Ok, fine, website. No answers to authorization problems. Finally the phone. But there is no 800# and no phone support after 9pm. Now this makes no sense to me. Let's face it - the folks that are buying this box are the die-hard early adopters. We're basically beta testers, willing to own 1.0 boxes to put out the word. Why wouldn't Akimbo be wise to keep atleast one or two CSR's around to answer the phone? Nope. 9pm - closed.

So - what's wrong with my Akimbo - won't know till next week, since i'm off to CES in the meantime...

Stay tuned...