Mediaholic

If you have been a TVersity user long enough, chances are that you were looking for a simple way to access your media on the go - after all this is one of the promises of TVersity. Until today, the only way to do it, was open a port in your home router/firewall, find out the IP address assigned to you by your ISP and point a remote web browser to this address. If you were lucky and your ISP was not blocking you, you could access your media wherever you were - a very liberating experience. For most of us however that was just too complicated.

Today, we are starting to change all that, we have come together with SureWest to offer a custom version of TVersity called SureWest Media Connect, that allows dead simple remote access (SureWest subscribers only at this point). This custom version of TVersity is fully integrated with the SureWest network and the MySureWest.net website, so all you need to do is enter your SureWest username and password during the installation of SureWest Media Connect, and then login to the SureWest portal from anywhere. No network configuration of any kind is required, just install the software and when you want to access your personal media remotely, simply login to SureWest.net. A widget on the home page will allow you to play your music and videos and see a slideshow of your photos from just about anywhere (see widget screenshot).

This new service is currently in Beta, so you will need to first join the Beta program by logging in at SureWest.net. If you are not a SureWest subscriber and yet you live in SureWests Northern California service area, there has never been a better time to switch... Other users who are interested in this service can help us bring it to them by contacting their ISP and suggesting TVersity remote access as a possible value-add service.

In case you are wondering how this remote access service relates to our core offering - access of personal and Internet media on TV, the basic idea behind TVersity is to empower users to access their favorite media on their favortie devices - be they TV connected or mobile. This is the first time however that we have been able to make remote access as easy as it needs to be. Needless to say SureWest Media Connect includes all the other features of TVersity and can therefore satisfy all your media serving needs.

"I am thrilled to be launching the SureWest Media Connect Beta! We have worked for some time with TVeristy to bring this service to our customers in a way that would make it easy to access and use. With SureWest Media Connect and the My Surewest website we are able to give our customers a truly unique service, the ability to remotely access and play all of the music, photos and videos stored on their home PC from anywhere on the world!" -Rick Vohs, Product Engineering Manager, SureWest

Ever thought about the fundamental problem with copyright law at the digital age? I mean, can it be that our kids are pirates or maybe we, the old fashioned adults, refuse to change our habits and instead declare their actions illegal?

Microsoft decided to take down the DRM servers of the now defunct MSN music store and with it the ability of end users to authorize computers for playing music purchased legally on that store. If you own such music, you deserve this punishment since you violated the 11th amendment: "Thou shall not buy DRM protected music".
Note that even if you authorize the maximum allowed number of machines, once you stop using the machines (or in the case of Windows, once you need to reinstall the operating system...), you will lose the authorization and so losing your music completely is just a matter of time.

Back in January of 2007 when it was known that the iPhone is coming, many (including myself, see The iPhone Effect) were trying to anticipate the effect it would have on the market. An article in the New York Times titled "BlackBerry’s Quest: Fend Off the iPhone" got me thinking about this issue again and made me re-evaluate my original analysis.

Here are some interesting facts and observations:

• The smartphone market (in units sold) was just 7.5% (125 million) of the overall mobile phone market (2 billion) in 2007, but is expected by analysts to rapidly grow.
• Worldwide, smartphone shipments jumped 60 percent in the last three months of 2007 over the same period the previous year, according to IDC, the tracking firm.
• In that same year the lion share in the smartphone market shifted from enterprises to consumers, suggesting that consumers want smarter phones and are making the shift to these phones while enterprises already have them. I think it is safe to assume that the growth of the smartphone market will come mainly from consumers.
  
• Consumers demand for smartphone increased the importance of features like multimedia, 3D graphics and a desktop like web browser.
• Blackberry US smartphone market share declined from 45% in 2006 to 40% in the 2007, this is despite the fact that their user base doubled in that year.
• The iPhone US market share in the first six months of its launch was 17.4%.
• Nokia is so far a very small player in the smartphone market in the US but had a 52% share of the worldwide market in 2007 (down from 56% in 2006 and expected to slip further).
  
• Google Android is for now a lab experiment, nothing more.
  
• Windows Mobile market share seems to be declining and no one considers Palm anymore as a serious player in that market. This leaves RIM and Apple as the current rivals to watch in the US with Nokia joining them when considering the worldwide market.
  
• Danger, the maker of the sidekick, was acquired in 2007 by Microsoft, suggesting that Microsoft is aware of the trouble lying ahead and is making desperate moves, that will probably have no impact on the outcome of the smartphone battle.

So what does it all mean? Well... here are my thoughts:

• The battle of the smarphone market is probably the most important battle the tech industry has ever seen. This is because phones are more popular than computers by an order of magnitude and with time it seems like the lion share of the mobile phone market will be held by smartphones.
• Apple is positioned to win this battle in the US and maybe even worldwide and the only one that can prevent that is Apple, meaning unless they make tons of mistakes or some force majeure intervenes (say Steve Jobs cancer makes a comeback) there is no company that stands a chance to beat them.
• RIM will most likely get acquired by Microsoft (once Microsoft is done with Yahoo! that is). However if Apple does make enough mistakes (or you know what happens) RIM will most likely be the winner and in that scenario they might just end up buying Microsoft and not the other way around... :) Now that is a thought worth savoring.
• Worldwide, Nokia and specifically Symbian, will most likely drop to less than 50% share in 2008 and may lose the leadership position within a few years to Apple.
  

One more thing, Google Android is fundamentally different from the others since it emphasizes consumers freedom to use mobile devices like they use computers, over everything else. As such it is my favorite underdog, I dare say that in an ideal world it, or something like it, will win, but as we all know we do not live in such a world.

In case you wonder what is Blackberry stand regarding consumers freedom, the following quote from the New York Times article will make it clear that, just like Apple, they are the bad guys:

R.I.M. makes its alliances clear. “We are sort of polite and amiable and we gently interrelate with the carriers and try to find compatibility,” Mr. Balsillie said. “It may be a better strategy to fight the carrier. We may be wrong. The carrier may get disintermediated, in which case we fade with them.”

UPDATED on April 28th with more accurate Nokia market share figures thanks to a user comment, suggesting that their US market figures are very different from the rest of the world.

By: Alon Cohen & Ronen Mizrahi

Linked-In is one of the earliest business social networks and as such inspired great hopes of simple access to people for the purpose of doing business. The hopes were for direct or friend-assisted access to individuals you want to do business with, which may be in your network up to a certain degree of separation.

Many of those who actually tried using the network as business tool report a complete failure.

Seamus McCauley states in post at Virtual Economics: “Here’s the problem with LinkedIn - it doesn’t do anything. You sign up, you find some colleagues, you link to them and then…nothing.”

So have others, including Jeff Pulver, who completely gave up on Linked-In and moved to Facebook.

Our experience is that even using the paid version of linked-in for direct access does not help a bit. The only people you really gained access to, were the people you already knew beforehand, and all the rest of the millions on the network remained inaccessible.

One can only assume that Linked-in invested vast amounts of development time into the referral mechanisms just to discover that it doesn’t work in the real world. The network’s main value is apparently manifested as a repository of resumes and as an active update mechanism that generates notifications as friends find to new jobs.

The problem, as we identified it, was not the concept of the friendly referrals but rather the lack of incentive for people to propagate introduction requests, specifically in fear that they may not be up to par, and the lack of a method to evaluate the request and determine whether passing it on will undermine their reputation in the eyes of the receiving party or reinforce it. In other words am I doing the receiver a favor or am I wasting their time with junk. Plus what’s in it for me?

The idea is to create a clear incentive path and a tracking mechanism for deals that materialized due to referral actions taken by individuals, with the intention to make business introductions facilitated by a social network significantly more efficient when compared to pre-existing methods.

This is similar to the efficiencies social networks added to other forms of communications between friends such as selective sharing of news, photos and other personal data.

Business referrals among friends has been taking place in the world long before the Internet came along, yet it has not been made more efficient or monetized by social networks yet, like other social activities have.

The Internet and specifically social networks provide the underlying infrastructure to do just that with the potential to track the referral and its path in the network and to keep all parties updated with respect to the referral progress.

As an example if I knew that by referring a start-up to an NBC executive I will receive 1% of a multimillion dollar in case the deal is closed, I will probably do my best to forward the referral request, and even make an effort to find the correct next link to ensure higher success probability of the referral.

Think about helping an entrepreneur get to a VC for a few millions dollars deal, or any other deal that is not so hard to quantify. I am sure you can think of some as you read those lines.
Obviously the network will monetize its database by taking its own 1% commission from those “few” multimillion dollars deals.

The provisional patent described here was filed and it is depicting a method and mechanics associated with incentivizing and monetizing the referral system in business social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, Xing, Plaxo or Pulse and can fit other social networks used for Dating and Matching, as such it is not limited to the business domain.
Third-parties currently working on social network projects and APIs (Google, Open Social and so on) may also implement it across several social networks such that the referral path may span and can be tracked across seemingly unconnected networks.

The inventors are happy to negotiate licensing terms with interesting parties that want to own the patent and its priority date.

In a year (April 7th 2009), this patent will officially lose its priority date and will be available, royalty free, to all social networks. Take that as our own contribution to the social networking world, and yes, we need this to work. We are already in discussions with few parties, so if you are the CEO of a social network straggling to differentiate and compete, or a Biz-Dev guy for that matter, with those companies, don’t let this slip between your fingers, be among the first to contact us.

For more information please contact Alon alonc@netvision.net.il or Ronen ronenmiz@gmail.com.

In what may be one of the last efforts to maintain a dying industry, the music labels are trying to create a music tax. Read all about it at TechCrunch (the title of this post was taken from that article).

The idea of getting paid with no relation to productivity is preposterous, someone at the labels need to be reminded that communism is not in anymore (maybe they are inspired by the rise of China, who knows). Instead of working hard to re-invent themselves in light of inevitable change the labels are busy trying to devise "clever" schemes that will essentially kill them even faster. It is time for a shareholder mutiny.

In a recent survey by Harris Interactive over 25% say they download TV shows regulary, but only 5% watch videos on a TV or other video-playing device regularly. Ars Technica attributes it to the difficulty associated with watching downloaded shows on TV due to DRM and other technical barriers. They also warn content providers from the inevitable consequences of making it hard for consumers to access their content via networked devices:

"As online video continues to expand, content providers will have to face the consequences of their own restrictions on how viewers use content. Making it easier to transfer files to portable devices and set-top boxes will help drive viewership"

What do I make of all this? Well... During 2007, Internet videos and specifically Internet TV has clearly gone mainstream, however as the survey suggests accessing Internet videos from TV is far from mainstream and is still in an early adopter phase. I am convinced however that in 2008, thanks to game consoles and popular networked set-top-boxes (like the DirecTV HR20/HR21), we will see more and more Internet content accessed in the living room. This content however won't be TV shows or movies, it will be content freely available on the web, such as YouTube, podcasts, live TV from all over the world and more. The reason it won't be movies and TV shows is precisely the one mentioned by Ars Technica.

I can testify from my own experience (a few conversations with a top NBC executive) that content publishers do not want it to be accessed via services that they do not control - they are afraid from losing control over their content to iTunes or it successor. This is why NBC and Fox started Hulu, and this is why Joost is having such a hard time and has finally realized that its future lies in the long tail and not mainstream media.

What content publishers do not understand is that they have been fluctuating between two extremes (illegal file sharing on the one hand and iTunes legally taking over their content on the other) and the conclusion they should draw is not "let's pile up additional restrictions" but rather "let's remove these restrictions" so that content won't be used to lock in users (like Apple does) and will be easy enough to consume legally. Will they do it? I am not optimistic... I said it before and I will say it again, the shareholder of the music labels and the movie studios should have replaced the board and management of their companies long ago for their remarkable incompetence when it comes to the digital age.

In a rather unusual open letter, Brightcove's Jeremy Allaire and Adam Berrey addressed the consumer electronic industry asking them to open Television sets to Internet content.

The letter, which comes after the 2008 CES show in which the absence of an open industry standard for accessing Internet content on TVs was made obvious, identified a few key elements of such a standard:

1. Direct Network Connectivity – TVs should be connected directly to the Internet through home networks, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and Ethernet.
2. Internet Media Browser – Every TV should have an Internet Media Browser (IMB) designed for finding, browsing and viewing video from the Internet. Unlike a web browser, the IMB as a standard should be designed around a narrower goal of browsing and viewing streaming video and music. The IMB would be like the traditional cable electronic programming guide (EPG) for Internet content. With the IMB, consumers should be able to browse through any media catalog published on the Internet and stream the videos and audio directly to their TV. The IMB should handle playback with standard codecs including MP3, Flash Video (VP6), H.264, and VC-1. Finally the IMB should support a simple, standardized programming model that would enable ad insertion and analytics integration through web protocols.
3. Catalog Publishing – To get listings and content into the Internet Media Browsers, we will need a standard for any Internet publisher to publish catalogs of media content. Most likely using XML, this standard would provide a simple way for any website with media content to list that content along with the metadata, such as title and description, and pointers to the physical files. This standard would mean that regardless of the device, an IMB would be able to easily display the listings and access the streaming content. The relationship between the publishing standard and IMBs would be like the relationship between RSS and RSS readers.
4. Registration Services – The final component is one that would create a natural bridge between web browsing on a PC and Internet Media Browsing from a TV. The core of this is a standard for registering devices with an online service where consumers can save links to the media catalogs they'd like to access from their TV. With this mechanism in place, it would be easy for someone to click a link from a web page to say, "I want to watch this on my TV," and have the video or collection of videos registered online and automatically made available on their TV the next time they turn it on. By making this an open standard, companies providing cloud services could compete in an open market place and consumers could choose the service they want whether it's from a manufacturer, social network, portal or someone else.

While I agree with the above suggestions and in fact TVersity today addresses most of them, I think the letter is misguided. The consumer electronics industry will not be able to respond on time to the obvious consumer need to access their favorite Internet content in the living room and will therefore lose this opportunity to game consoles and set-top-boxes.

My thinking is simple, they will need a substantial amount of time to get their act together, (believe me I know, TVersity has been discussing ways to bring the Internet to the living room with consumer electronic companies for a long time) and then it takes another 7 years or so for these new TVs to be deployed in a large enough number of households (A typical household keeps their TV set at least that amount of time and since many just got a new HD TV they won't make a new investment for a while). Until that time content publishers won't have a critical mass of viewers so they won't bother addressing this market.

In the same time, the latest generation game consoles have been deployed in more than 20 million homes already, it has impressive Internet capabilities and at least two of the three consoles (the PS3 and the Xbox 360) were designed as multimedia gateways. Microsoft and Sony are very well aware of the Internet opportunity and are looking to capitalize on it and usurp the market long before the CE guys can make their move.

While this is all taking place, the existing rulers of the living room, the cable and satellite TV operators are not going to give up their control without a battle. Comcast's announcement of project Infinity and tru2way are two indications of it. Add to that the fact that TV operators are able to deploy new set-top-boxes faster than TVs are sold and that their latest generation HD-DVRs have updatable firmware and an Ethernet connection, and once again it is obvious that they can make a market changing move long before the CE guys.

Of-course the open letter would not have been any more effective if it were addressed at TV operators or game console companies. It is the nature of every emerging market to go through all the "unnecessary" stages of extreme fragmentation and eventual consolidation both in terms of products and standard and in terms of companies that deliver them. This market is no exception, if anything it is going to be much worse, since a lot is at stake and the players come from many different tradiitonally isolated industries (Software, TV service providers, CE companies, networking companies, Set-Top-Box companies and more).

What do you think about this letter?

Readers of this blog know that I am no big fan of DRM and so it is with great pleasure that I can now declare that DRM protected music is a thing of the past. Warner Music Group is the most recent label to drop DRM and Sony BMG, the last one out of the four major label that still sells DRM protected music only, is expected to do so in 2008.

The music industry adopted DRM as a mean to create new business models, and most importantly allow them, even in the age of digital media, to re-sell the same music to consumers over and over again in different formats or for different devices. Yet, the only business model that DRM enabled is the Apple monopolistic model. And so the labels killed DRM in an effort to battle this new monopoly that DRM created. Isn't it funny, they turned to DRM to enable new business models, yet it enabled a new business model for Apple and in the process the labels lost control over both legal and illegal digital music downloads. So now they turn to DRM again (by killing it) hoping to re-gain control over their own business. If only they focused their energy in adding value instead of fighting their customers in court and outside of it...

I am telling you all this because, movies are still mostly DRM protected and one can't help but wonder if the lessons from the music industry can be applied to the movie industry. Unfortunately for us, Apple is not yet a monopoly in movie downloads and so the studios do not feel any pressure to do what the labels are doing. Furthermore, since Apple TV is not taking off, they are not likely to become such a monopoly any time soon. Rest assured however, that some form of delivery of Internet content to the living room will emerge and go to the mainstream eventually and when that happen s it will most likely be DRM protected. If that ends up creating a new monopoly then maybe we will be lucky again and the DRM will be killed by the studios for the same reasons as the labels. If however this DRM scheme will be open, chances are that no single entity will monopolize the legal movie download business and hence the studios will have no incentive to kill DRM.

Of-course I am an optimist and a capitalist, so I believe that DRM for movies will eventually be eliminated as well. The reason is simple, something that does not add value to the customer but rather makes for a bad user experience and in the same time has costs associated with it is a great inefficiency and free markets won't tolerate it for long. What I do not know however, is how exactly this story will unfold, just like I did not know a few years ago how DRM protected music would go away, yet it did happen and it happened for the very same root cause, an intolerable market inefficiency.

While I am a big believer in open mobile networks as a concept that will eventually replace the existing closed ones, I am also realistic enough to know that the path to this future is going to be full of pain and obstacles. So, when Verizon announced that they would open their network to any device and application, I was certain that there was nothing more than marketing buzz here. I then came across this article by TIM O’REILLY, titled Static on the Dream Phone, and I knew I was not the only one feeling that way.

To be fair to Verizaon, I need to explain why I think there is no substance to this announcement. According to Verizon, “devices will be tested and approved in a $20 million state-of-the-art testing lab.” Now let me ask you how long do you think it will take and how much it will cost to get your application or device tested? Surely more than one such test will be needed, and in fact with the rapid releases we see these days for software and device firmware, any single application or device will require dozens of tests every year, assuming Verizon was able to do them fast enough (which I doubt). Therefore it follows that the gatekeeper approach Verizon is currently playing will continue just the same, the only thing that will be more open maybe is the gatekeeping process and of-course your checkbook.

I have been saying over and over again that carriers are behaving like dictators and it is time for them to open their networks for any phone or phone software. You can imagine how happy I was to see this recent write up by Walt Mossberg. Here are a few interesting quotes:

"A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer."

"That’s why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them."

Looks like Walt is at least as angry as I am about the current state of affairs. Now we only need to find the Mihail Gorbachov that can free the wireless world and end the cold war between Skype (or other software / phone vendors) and the carriers.

We have just made a new TVersity release with newly added support for Windows Media Center as well as Media Center compatible technologies such as Active-TV. This is just a few days after we have been given spot number 44 in the top 50 free tools on the web, put together by PC Pro.

They have dedicated to us a paragraph of text and almost half a page for screenshots. Here are some scans sent to us by one of our first users and our biggest evangelist in Europe, Mike Leeson:

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