If the user interface is good, this could be the step Connected TV needs - at $35, it's a great price and by being so simple, it's far more flexible than an Apple TV. Google’s Solution to Bringing Online Video to TV | MIT Technology Review. Related articles* Why Google Chromecast isn't quite Apple TV... yet (macworld.com) * The World Isn't Ready For The Chromecast Yet (buzzfeed.com) * Apple TV vs. Google TV (cabletv.com) * Google's TV (buzzmachine.com) * How Chromecast Fits

Reflecting on the link I posted about Thom Yorke quitting Spotify, I kept thinking about the statement in the article that, "The industry average offers slightly less than 0.4p a stream – meaning that 1m streams of a song would generate about £3,800. Most songs receive far fewer streams." The problem with this statement is that it equates streaming with sales, instead of viewing it as the modern equivalent of spins on radio, which is far more apt an analogy. People stream th

When even MIT warns about the dangers of over-reliance on big data, you know somethings up. Robert McNamara and the Dangers of Big Data at Ford and in the Vietnam War | MIT Technology Review.

Whitney Saves Douglas Davis’s ‘First Collaborative Sentence’ - NYTimes.com. Electronic art has always had a short lifespan and digital work even more so. My own piece, "Web Phases," from the mid-90s no longer functions in modern browsers.  

As I've been moving virtual house over to the new hosting service, I've dug up some articles I wrote for MIT and others at the end of the last century. I think they make some interesting reading, and I think I got a lot right. Towards Hypermusic - MIT Press 1998 Sound On The Internet - Developer.com 1997 Turning Cybercasts From Music Promotion to Art Form -  @New York 1998 By the way, to my great shame, I now make claim to one of the earliest uses of the term "cloud" in

After 15 years of running two websites of my own, I've consolidated and simplified. All of my URLs (http://www.cinemavolta.comhttp://www.odenkonsult.com  and http://www.johnmaxwellhobbs.com) all point to the same place - this WordPress site. It's simpler, faster, more flexible and cheaper - exactly as most internet applications have become. Of course, all my old links are now broken - but with good search functionality, that doesn't really matter all that much these days.  

Yesterday the internet was alight with celebrations of the World Wide Web's 20 year jubilee. I marked it with a moment of silence in memoriam for the internet that might have been (and possibly could still be). Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of the web and the irony of the fact that I'm using it to publish this essay is not lost on me.  As a matter of fact, I'm going to be making liberal use of a lot of the techniques I'm going to be complaining about, so this is not an

Things have been very quiet on this site since the autumn.  The end of November starts a long season of celebration that begins with Thanksgiving and includes Christmas/Jul, Hogmanay, my birthday and my wife's birthday.  Finally concluding around Valborgsmässoafton. I now need to lose around 8 kilos, but it's a good way to keep the spirits up through the long winter. I've also slowed down because, like a lot of other folk who were there at the beginning, I've been doing a lo

So, I began to play around with my new found global connectivity. I quickly mastered using Pine for email (and became a dedicated Pico user as well. Never could get my head around EMACS). Fortunately, Panix offered hints as to useful things. I played around with Gopher and became a fan, checked out this new thing called the World Wide Web and quickly dismissed it as going nowhere because it was not as easy to use nor as full of information as Gopherspace or Archie. And then

I'll be speaking at the International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers annual conference in November.

I open the VT100 emulation program, type, "ATDT," followed by a string of seven digits and hit, "return." I hear the sound of a dial tone, followed by DTMF tones, followed by a shrieking and hissing noises - then silence. I'm connected at a screaming 2400 bits per second. The screen prompts for my username and password. I enter them, and I'm in. Sitting in front of me in glorious 7 bit ASCII is a couple of paragraphs of Panix's MotD (Message of the Day) welcoming me and rem

I've reblogged a great article with a poor title from GigaOm, "The one big thing that newspaper visionaries didn't foresee." That article brought back so many memories, particularly the memo from 1992 by Robert Kaiser, a former editor at the Washington Post. I won't rehash any of it here, I strongly recommend you go read the whole thing to get the full context. My story is the other, non-commercial side of media and the development of the internet. In 1991, two momentous t

This really brings back a lot of memories. Robert Kaiser's memo was prescient - it's hard to believe how many things came to pass in almost exactly the form described.

A long but worthwhile read full of a lot of food for thought. Some of it is progressive and illuminating, some of it is infuriatingly regressive and a bit like East Germans pining for the good old days, but in the main, a far more resoned and researched view of where we are at the moment. The most glaring omission is any view of how to solve things other than with a time machine.

One of the greatest challenges in any event broadcast is coverage. Apart from the standard budgetary and staffing constraints, productions have to deal with available camera positions that are often less than ideal, as well as having to second guess coverage needed for more dynamic events such as festivals, non-traditional sports, and wide-ranging events such as motor racing. There has been a great deal of research into free-viewpoint video. In essence, this allows the place

The House of Lords have proposed that Britain should move all TV services to the internet and free the airwaves for mobile services. On the surface, this looks like a bold statement, and in many ways it is, but it's also a safe bet. The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Take a look at my entries on "Cutting the Cords," and "Beyond HD" for a bit of context on the delivery of media over the internet. A couple of key statement from the article: "The committee says

On Friday, I had the privilege of watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics in the BBC's Pacific Quay Studio B over the first ever live transmission of an event using Super Hi Vision, the high resolution broadcast technology created by NHK, the national broadcaster of Japan. Super Hi Vision is the first entry in a class called Ultra High Definition Television, which has a resolution of 7680 × 4320, which is 16 times the resolution of HDTV. Along with that is a 22.2 chann

Ofcom have announced their plans for a 4G spectrum auction. Will we see repeat the outcome of the 3G auctions where £22 billion was raised, which came close to sinking several of the operators? The consensus is, "no." Ofcom has predicted £1.4 billion, and there are estimates of up to £4 billion being possible. This is far more rational. I was working for Ericsson during the early days of 3G and it's interesting to see the similarities. The sorts of things predicted to happe

Good article in Broadcast Engineering: Cloud PVR spreads over Europe. The "Cloud PVR" (Or DVR, if you're in the US) is a bizarre sort of thing, designed to solve a legal problem, not a technological one. It boils down to this - if a distribution company such as a cable of satellite operator, as opposed to a channel, allows you to replay a programme on demand that has been carried over their service, they then have to pay additional fees to the license owner(s) of that mater