A good open letter from the guys at Plex to the media companies. Obviously I share most of their sentiments.

Dear Media Companies,

I’m really beginning to think that things between us won’t work.

I have to admit that I’ve been cheating on you for a while now. I’ve been spending time with USENET. She’s old, she’s unattractive, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with her, but she does offer me one simple thing that you don’t: unencumbered access to ad-free media.

Plex is a free media center application for OS X, based on the Xbox Media Center code. A similar project is Boxee, which seems to get a lot more attention and press. Having tried both, I can say I prefer Plex. But really, having a choice between two awesome media center applications that are under active development, who can complain?

Labels: internet, Links, Video

As part of our latest round of work for Sun Microsystems, the Brightcove professional services team put together an iPhone-specific interface for their video portal. This takes advantage of Brightcove's support for MPEG-4 video and multiple renditions, allowing Sun to add a video file specifically for iPhone viewing to each of their published videos.



Sun has deployed iPhones to a large number of their employees, so this should be of use to them. Accessing channelsun.sun.com from an iPhone or iPod Touch will take you directly to this project.



We are also ramping up an initiative at Brightcove to share more knowledge and information about the world of video with our customers, using a new site and forum combination for publishing articles and answering questions. I have planned two articles around designing for video. One will be about simple iPhone-specific websites using the above project as an example, and another will be a longer article about the difference between short- and long-form content, and how the experiences for both should be designed. Fun stuff!

Labels: brightcove, design, internet, Video

Internet TV got exciting this week. Adobe announced support for the h.264 codec in Flash, an ubiquitous and highly useful format for providing video. There is a lot that is very cool about this development, and there are people who know a lot more about it than I do who have written comprehensive and interesting blog posts about it. For me, I believe this development will help realize the 'Internet TV' concept, moving us from streaming clips to long format, near-HD content.

But the shocking part is that while the technology behind internet video took a huge step forward this week, cable television dropped another rung down into the cesspool of over-priced mediocrity it has been stagnating in for a decade now.

I received a letter this month informing me that my cable service, already around the $150 mark, would be going up another $5. No specific feature or upgrade justified this, just a vague marketing hand wave at a 'continued investment' into the future. Considering how little we actually watch television in this household, and how much better that experience is facilitated by downloading the shows online, we decided to kick Comcast out of our house.

1. What do they even provide?
Any sort of non-linear television programming is available online via Usenet, Torrents or whatever particular flavor of file sharing you prefer. Generally speaking, an hour long tv program (well, 40m once the commercials have been cut out) can be downloaded in under ten minutes. This is less than we usually wait for the DVR to buffer enough that we can skip the commercials. Despite all the money we pay for cable, more often than not we end up just downloading the show because its easier and a better experience.

So with that, there is very little content left on cable television that we can't obtain easily online. What's left is essentially news and sports. The internet and Katie Couric have rendered news television useless (and who's home at 6:30pm for the national news anyway), and the talking heads on the cable channels are about as useful as talk radio. This leaves Comcast providing exactly one thing that can't be obtained online: sports programming. Specifically, NFL games. We are paying over $1500 a year to watch the New England Patriots. If I had realized this earlier I would have just bought tickets to the games.

2. Can we get this content elsewhere?
So all that's keeping cable in the house is the NFL. The NFL is shown on the major networks, which are by law required to provide free over the air broadcasts. Not only that, they are required to provide digital, HD broadcasts of their content. Coming from Maine, and of parents who never got cable TV (I can thank them now), I had a bias towards broadcast. Its just not a great delivery technology in a more rural environment. The city is different. According to antennaeweb.org, a useful site that tells you what broadcasts you can receive based on your street address, I was within range of every major network's HD broadcast.

3. Make it happen!
I picked up a simple indoor antennae that had some good reviews from Radio Shack. They offer a 30 day cash return policy, so if the technology wasn't what it claimed to be I could just take it back the next morning. I plugged this into my bedroom LCD which has a built in HDTV tuner.



The TV flipped through all the channels and programmed in presets for everything that showed signs of reception. I sat there kicking myself for not knowing about this technology earlier as I watched over 20 channels blip by. Every major network (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX and CB or whatever it is) were being received in either 720p or 1080i. Most of them looked better than they do on Comcast HD. PBS has two offerings, and the visual quality is absolutely stunning. I had a few minor reception hick-ups with FOX, but a few adjustments to the antennae (which is done via remote control!) solved that. Victory over the cable monopoly was being pulled out of the air.

4. Further integration, making it cool.
Broadcast HD was obtained on the bedroom TV. Very cool, but we tend to watch sporting events in the living room on our projector. The projector doesn't have a built in tuner, so plugging an antennae into it isn't an option. Fortunately I had previously come across a device that not only solves that problem, it brings an additional pile of awesome to the broadcast HD world: The HD Homerun from Elgato.



Elgato has for a long time made interesting devices for the Macintosh that let you tune in cable or antennae programming and use your Mac as both the digital tuner for browsing show schedules and also as a DVR. You can record, pause and schedule programming like a Comcast DVR box. The HD Homerun takes this a step further. Instead of being a USB device, it plugs into an ethernet network, and allows you to share an antennae and cable cable connection (it supports two inputs at once!) across your LAN. Instead of having two large weird-looking antennas, I can plug the one into this box, and access HD programming from both bedroom and living room.

To function, this device requires a Mac. Fortunately I have a Mac mini in the bedroom and an iMac in the living room, already integrated with both the TV and projector. I installed an ethernet network between these machines earlier in the year for streaming HD movies over the network, and integrating with the Homerun box should be a piece of cake.

Conclusion
I do enjoy the convenience of cable. Its there, its always on and it generally works. Its very easy to flip it on when you're bored and find a Seinfeld re-run to fall asleep in front of. But paying over $100 every month for a service that I use infrequently at best is absurd. There is a lot of slack here and, circling back to the top of this post, the foundation has been laid this week for Internet TV to start pulling in a lot of it. I think there are strong parallels between the lazy, screw-the-customer attitude of the cable providers and that of the music industry pre- Napster. I look forward to sinking the money I used to pay for cable each month into a low-energy file server for holding all my new television programming.

Labels: brightcove, cable, insanity, internet, television, Video

I just found this blog post complementing the design of the current Brightcove video players. Its nice to see someone notice and praise the more subtle interaction and design decisions.

Labels: brightcove, design, internet, Links, Video

Everyone is wild for widgets, or so they tell me. Here is one we just finished up at work:



This ties into a new page we call Brightcove Takeout. Its basically a whole bunch of RSS feeds from different areas of the site. In addition to getting the RSS feed, you can grab a widget powered by the feed (Takeout boxes). The one I posted here is powered by a feed of my most recent video uploads. Pretty neat.

Labels: brightcove, internet, Video, widget

The BBQ Blog returns! For those unfamiliar with its virtual meaty goodness, The BBQ Blog is a project I had during the final years of art school. My good buddy Matt and I would blog about grilling, post recipes, etc. Apparently some people actually found it semi-useful, unlike most of the stuff I contribute to the internet.

bbq.nattarbox.com

Eventually it came to a halt when the Brookline fire department got sick of seeing clouds of mesquite smoke wafting off the roof of my apartment building. The grill disappeared one day and a notice regarding the illegality and general lack of common sense relating to open fires on rooftops was slipped under my door. We continued grilling occasionally, but the blog began to languish.

Today we're bringing it back, primarily as an excuse for me to learn XHTML (transitional, I'm not that crazy yet) and CSS. I've been putting off this step far longer than anyone who works as an interactive designer should, relying on the hacked up HTML I learned in the roaring '90s. Armed with the written support of Zeldman I'm slowly taking the blog back online. So far I haven't spent much time on the design, intending to keep it fairly similar to the previous. Right now its pretty ugly as I'm mostly just getting the Blogger tags in place, but once the framework is in place and working I'll put a pretty face on the 'ol girl.

Also a lot of the content needs updating, especially in the photo deparment since the demise of my previous host. I've started transitioning photos over to Flickr, where hopefully they will enjoy a permenant home.

Labels: bbq, Blogging, internet

The seven or eight people who occasionally read this blog should all vote for The Closet as Boston's best consignment store! Just click the vote button below the photo.

Labels: boston, fashion, internet