Media Servers, Streaming - where are we going

This year I walked the floor for the 1st two days with Jessica, my wife.  Media servers that were announced last year are finally shipping, Kaleidescapes lawsuit is almost finished, Vudu is launched, Escient shipped their box, and boy is the world confusing. I think there is a pathway out.  Here is our position and some strategies for media purchase and organization in the near-term.

Amblesides Positon on Digital Content Acquisition and Management

• Buy content on Disc whenever possible. Rent, don't buy (unless cheap), on-demand video content.  
  
• Kaleidescape remains the best DVD playback device, Tivo the best broadcast playback.  Best of breed is primary strategy for clients with 100% legal content strategies.
  
• For clients willing to violate Digital Millenium Copyright act (or use sw from companies that do), aggregating all content but broadcast onto a real storage server (either a PC or extender like XBOX 360 or AppleTV) allows for a lot of convenience. For a major library, the storage costs are non-trivial and disc changes might still be cost effective.
  
• For many uses, DVD storage added to the existing picture + music functionality of existing servers might make them viable and more interesting.
  

Personal Music, Video + Picture Sharing is getting mature - use your PC

AppleTV, Microsoft Media Center do this well, Tivo and DirecTV DVR's do this also but badly.  AppleTV does not play well with external storage while the other platforms do.  This shouldn't guide whether you become a PC or Apple household but somewhere there should be a large, backed-up, disk to hold your stuff.

Personal DVD copies on your PC are imminent

RealDVD and Drive-in both are riding the legal precedent set by Kaleidescape to rip full,encrypted copies of movies to a hard drive allowing for a DVD playback experience on the PC.  This is probably no more than 15% the value of a Kaleidescape system but for playback of kids discs in a convenient manner, it will be a boon to many.

Easy, high-quality on-demand movies are not imminent

There is extremely little on-demand HD content.  Netflix has positioned that they will have HD but none yet.  Amazon On Demand has zero.  Vudu has 200 movies, AppleTV the same.  The best source of casual HD content is a big DVR with lots of HD content.

 Movies + TV content are not following the same model as music

Online services for content rental - iTunes, Vudu, etc - or free services like Hulu - should be supported but not central to a video media strategy.  The devices, DRM strategies and quality will continue to be in flux for quite a while. This is very different from iTunes music purchases, music leasing via Rhapsody, etc - they are relatively mature and can be the center of a music strategy. Management and consumption of Disc + Online content needs to be managed by an aggregation platform - most likely PC based because of Apple's role as a content distributor and hw. Apple can be used with 3rd party tools that are have questionable legality but have a great user experience if that doesn't bother you.

Broadcast + Standard Discs are still primary

Amazon has 180K titles in standard def, Netflix over 100K. Between the broadcast and premium networks, one has a solid 4000 HD titles a week to choose from.  There are 1600 blu-ray discs total and maybe 300 HD downloadable titles across all services.  Because of the higher price of blu-ray discs vs. DVD's, especially catalog titles, the 20-1 current sales ratio probably reflects at least a 35-1 title sell-through ratio - lots and lots of $5.99 and $9.99 DVD's are bought.

Discs will remain primary for purchase

Amazon's update is focused on rental - purchase might go away.  iTunes offers no HD purchase at all for movies.  The HD sale market is extremely limited. While the library size of Movielink, Vudu and Amazon Unbox are fairly large, focus is on quick access.  Focusing on rental or instant viewing bypasses the channel conflict, storage and many other issues.  I think it must be much easier to deal with piracy when online viewing is the only possibility.

But the future is streaming

Streaming is the future.There is some general acknowledgement that streaming, not Blu-ray, is the video consumption end-game. Whether its streaming for live viewing or local storage and playback, streaming serves almost everyones purposes (maybe not the consumer but they are sort of the bottom of the barrel here.)  

The movie and TV production culture for many, many years has been one of leasing and periodic viewing.  One movie ticket, one season of re-runs, 16 weeks of HBO viewing, one pay-per-view.  VHS tapes and DVD's became a very important revenue source but one that often was selling through to the rental market. DVD sales are extremely important but they are shrinking while all other forms of consumption are growing.  Single viewing over the internet holds the promise of watermarking or dynamic encryption - something the industry needs to avoid the same fate as music industry.  Also, the TV industry has the history of ad supported content.  And it seems like it might be working in the video world - Hulu and YouTube don't seem to have any potential of going away while Pandora (a streaming music service) is pretty iffy.

Just don't buy streaming content right now - rent it

Purchase of low-cost content - iTunes TV Shows - seems very low risk.  It's really akin to the cost of rental and should be regarded as a short term purchase not long term.  Vudu, Amazon Unbox and others do not offer physical back-up of media to non-DRM media.  I advise clients to look at "purchased" content from Amazon or Vudu as a long-term rental.  $600 worth of movies will likely be gone if the company goes away and the hard drive crashes.  There is no way to back-up or restore.  Apple offers this with iTunes music and that feature - in addition to the ubiquity of the platform - makes it the only low-risk online content to purchase.  Vudu, Amazon Unbox, iTunes Videos, CinemaNow, MovieLink and all the rest offer no way to back-up your media to a standard (DVD/Blu-ray) for that can be played without their software.   No one has placed their software in escrow or demonstrated clearly how the content will not be orphaned.  All of the media comes with a restricted use license on top of the digit-millenium-act protected DRM.  

A Platform must have multiple uses, hold content, access + search content and allow for playback.

Tivo, Windows/Xbox and AppleTV/iTunes.  All three can store music, playback purchased music, rent movies, and playback stored movies.  And all three seem to have a footprint that allows survival.

A Personal/Family policy of ethics is necessary to properly decide on a strategy

Some of my customers own cars that go over 65 mph and I'm pretty sure they actually use that feature.  Somehow Porsche and Ferrari don't seem too worried about selling a tool that blatently breaks the law.  OTOH, most common sense understanding of fair-use has been contravened by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.   Some families presume violation is fine, others want to respect the DMCA.  Since everyone wants, if it's easy and free, upiquotous access to content, this position must be clear - it is the largest constraint to a personal media strategy. I see households that seem to hold sw piracy and content piracy as lesser evils to breaking encryption on content they own.  As far as I know there have been far more prosecutions for content piracy than DMCA violations.  I'm not sure an end-user has ever been prosecuted for removing DRM from content while plenty have been prosecuted for content piracy.

Crestron Digital Media - Take 2

 Last year I wrote about the forthcoming Crestron Digital Media System.  Two days ago I saw the whole product released and I'm just floored.  I knew that Crestron understood the problem...But understanding it and executing on a complete product set aren't the same thing.  I think Gefen and others probably understand the problem too but we still haven't seen an HDMI matrix switch product that works from Gefen or anyone else.

There are several key features that just blew me away when I saw it live:

Instant HDMI switching.  Not only does it handle the one to many HDMI/HDCP problem, but the delays in source to source switching - delays that everyone encounters using a reciever or any single display switch - are gone.  Switching is almost instantaneous.  The display doesn't go through another handshake.

Mixed Fiber + Copper. Less than 100' or okay to use a repeater? Use copper.  Over 100', use fiber.  Mix and match in the same switch.  Fiber switches are uncommon enough - I've only seen them in the commercial field.  I've never seen a switch box that had a card system that allowed both and handled hdmi/hdcp.

Integrated USB extension.  I saw this before but it really got my mind going now when I saw the HDMI input wall plate.  With the combination of USB + HDMI in/out we get remote placement of computers + gaming stations without losing flexibility of use or control.  A game station can live inside a family room but be used in the playroom too.  Or the console can live in a rack and all the controllers plug into a plate inside a family room end table cabinet.  Or your laptop plugs into the office but a small keyboard lives in the kitchen and the bedroom allowing you to pick up the display there.  And so on.....

Efficiency of install.  We make really clean racks - they are works of art and we've won awards for it.  But there is a future that doesn't require so much rack trim work - when components plug in with only ethernet and HDMI.  In order to do that you have to be able to do control over ethernet, manage stereo feeds over HDMI and be able to have 100% of displays on the system on HDMI.  The benefits are enormous.  Today a DirecTV DVR has 9 cables, some of them going to the switchers.  On the room side, the box has 7 AV cables out.  In the digital media system, the DVR has three - power,ethernet, HDMI, the room box has 1 - HDMI.  To extend that DVR to the 9th through 16th rooms, we need 6 cables, in the digital media world we'll need one or three depending on the system architecture.

How to DIY

Hilarious....until YouTube takes it down....

Will Zigbee solve our problems?

John and I were talking about hybrid control architectures (local and
centralized for same system) and got to talking about Zigbee. John
thought the time is near - maybe 2-3 years - before the Japanese
implement zigbee widely. I'm not so sure - and even if they do, I'm
not sure it'll matter. To implement an open control system, one needs
some transmission interchange between devices, a semanatics to the
messages and a translation layer. As far as I know, there are no
interoperable zigbee products - at an application layer - sold by two
different companies (CardAccess + Control4 doesn't count.)

But John is a smart guy, so I want to give him the benefit of the
doubt...maybe things are developing under my nose. I check out the
zigbee alliance website. Eureka! They have now published "ZIGBEE
HOME AUTOMATION PUBLIC APPLICATION PROFILE". I go off an download it.
Not very interesting - basically a lighting protocol for residential.
Still leaves lots and lots of wiggle room (i.e. I can't imagine
actually making two dimmers from two companies work together using
this protocol.) It's at version 25 - that's a good sign. I don't
know the comittee members so I google them.....a whopping two out of
seventeen are from the control world (Control4 and Vantage.) There is
no one at all from the Japanese manufacturers or any CE manufaturer
(the Phillips folks seem to be from the lighting.)

Meanwhile, there has been lots of action on the thermostat and power
control fronts...lots + lots of licensee's. But none interoperable.

Granted that AV system control isn't rocket science but how hard is
HVAC control? The zigbee world has put forth 6 or 7 different
residential thermostats - none of which appear to be interoperable
(not their Smart Energy Series - they actually have semantic level
standards.)

So, what are we to make about the state of affairs? Doesn't the
existence of the lighting + hvac control efforts presage the extension
to broad-based automation control? I think not. The energy guys
really like standards. Lonworks/BacNet actually have some adoption.
Meanwhile, the AV world is moving towards a meta-data rich, real-time
interface world that Zigbee can't support. What AV manufacturer is
going to go whole-hog into a protocol that doesn't support cover art?
I know that AMX has their Zigbee remote and Crestron will release
theirs soon. And there will be more - I bet we see something from
Universal Remote and Elan at CEDIA next month too. But none of them
will talk to each other - it's just a better, longer range version of
lower frequency RF from a customer point of view.

-Aaron

802.11N Post CES-2008 - why we're still waiting

I've not deployed 802.11N yet - much to the constrenation of my customers.  They want the latest and greatest, 802.11N has seemingly been out for years - and we won't support it....I was hoping we'd see new products at CES 2008 that would let us make the leap but it still looks unlikely.

Here are the basics:

802.11B and 802.11G only operate on 2.4Ghz

802.11A operates on 5 Ghz

802.11N can operate on either.

When 802.11N operates on 2.4Ghz, it uses 40mhz - basically the whole spectrum.  The two protocols basically fight.

The solution is to push 802.11N only the 5Ghz and leave 802.11B/G on 2.4Ghz. To do this requires an access point that not only can do both frequencies but both at the same time.  These still don't exist.

I've talked to Linksys - none of their routers can be configured for dual frequency. The new Netgear units don't even appear to have 5Ghz radios.