Power of Information #65

Posted on January 20, 2008 by Michael Koby

This week on the Power of Information, Derek, Suzy, and I discuss Apple’s latest announcements (and there’s a lot of them this week), Universal starting Blu-Ray support, and Melinda Gates gives a rare interview.  All this and more on this week’s Power of Information.

You can download this week’s episode here (mp3).

You can hear Power of Information Sundays on KCAA 1050AM in Loma Linda, California at 5pm Pacific Time. You can also download Power of Information in podcast form from our website at http://www.powerofinformation.net. The Power of Information is part of the America First Radio Network.

Special thanks to AngelsEye Inc. for donating the bandwidth to Power of Information. AngelsEye Inc. specializes in corporate branding and promotional marketing, created to help companies of all sizes promote their own business and events. Be sure to visit AngelsEye Inc’s website today. Also, thanks to the band Anberlin for supplying music for our program. You can find out more about Anberlin and their music at http://www.myspace.com/anberlin.

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links for 2008-01-20

Posted on January 19, 2008 by Michael Koby
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links for 2008-01-19

Posted on January 18, 2008 by Michael Koby
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Why I’m Glad the Houston Market is now Comcast

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Michael Koby

It seems that the internets are abuzz with Time Warner’s plan to have bandwidth limits on their high speed cable modem accounts. They have yet to release the price/bandwidth numbers but I have to say that this makes me glad that the market I’m in (Houston) was one that was switched over to Comcast. Though if this trial run turns out to do good things for Time Warner, Comcast will probably not be far behind in doing something similar.

Time Warner says that this switch is to stop the 5% of people using BitTorrent heavily and thus using up 50% of the bandwidth that is available. The downside is while this might be the case now, by the end of this year (or next) it won’t be the case at all. With Apple releasing movie rental downloads and Netflix looking at set top box (Tivo is already doing movie/television downloads through Amazon’s Unbox), the average consumer is going to start performing what Time Warner considers “large downloads” and they need to accomodate for that rather than placing needless bandwidth caps on usage. Instead of placing caps, why not expand the network? It was wasy to see with consumer high speed lines where data usage was going to go. This should have been expected. And if this was not planned for, well that is poor planning on Time Warner’s (or any other company’s) implementation planners.

I’m hoping that these “tests” are complete failures. We got away from “usage” tiers when AOL went unlimited. Lets not step backwards but rather start looking forward.

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Why I'm Glad the Houston Market is now Comcast

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Michael Koby

It seems that the internets are abuzz with Time Warner’s plan to have bandwidth limits on their high speed cable modem accounts. They have yet to release the price/bandwidth numbers but I have to say that this makes me glad that the market I’m in (Houston) was one that was switched over to Comcast. Though if this trial run turns out to do good things for Time Warner, Comcast will probably not be far behind in doing something similar.

Time Warner says that this switch is to stop the 5% of people using BitTorrent heavily and thus using up 50% of the bandwidth that is available. The downside is while this might be the case now, by the end of this year (or next) it won’t be the case at all. With Apple releasing movie rental downloads and Netflix looking at set top box (Tivo is already doing movie/television downloads through Amazon’s Unbox), the average consumer is going to start performing what Time Warner considers “large downloads” and they need to accomodate for that rather than placing needless bandwidth caps on usage. Instead of placing caps, why not expand the network? It was wasy to see with consumer high speed lines where data usage was going to go. This should have been expected. And if this was not planned for, well that is poor planning on Time Warner’s (or any other company’s) implementation planners.

I’m hoping that these “tests” are complete failures. We got away from “usage” tiers when AOL went unlimited. Lets not step backwards but rather start looking forward.

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Format Wars

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Michael Koby

If there was a space back drop and the Star Wars theme music, you could literally roll something like the following:

The Format Wars Begin: There was DVD, then came High Definition. In an attempt to overthrow the aging format, two formats were created. Giving birth to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Each format had its specifications and companies to back them. But who will the studios pick? Who will the consumers pick? Thus began the format wars…

I realize it’s not that clever, but you see where I’m going. Then last week, Warner Bros. Studios announced that they will be going to Blu-Ray exclusively and Universal announced that they would no longer be HD-DVD exclusive. Many on the internet saying this was a major blow to HD-DVD. Well, Scoble posted last week that at CES many people in the “Blog Room” were moving to downloading their movie content (legally of course) through Netflix or even their Xbox 360s. Scoble even goes on to say that this could be how Microsoft (a huge backer of HD-DVD) gets the last laugh in the format war. Someone on another blog (can’t remember where) even said that they had heard that Microsoft wants both formats to fail so that people move towards online movie downloads.

The way I see it, downloadable movies (especially in HD quality) is going to be a commodity item for a nice little while. Reason being is file size. a DVD quality movie is 4-8GB minimum and HD quality is 1.5 times that at around 720p (2.25 times at 1080). Also, with the exception of the Xbox 360 and the PS3, there is not an easy consumer friendly way to watch downloaded movies on your television. I will say that Tivo has something that is quite nice with its Amazon Unbox integration and Apple TV has a lot of things done right but it’s still not perfect. But we are still not quite there with consumer friendly methods to watch a downloaded movie on your television.

If Microsoft wants to move to video downloads, they need to come out with a non-gaming device that is consumer friendly and will allow you to play movies in any format (WMV, Divx, Mpeg2, H.264, and even MKV). It should also have a way for me to subscribe to video podcasts. Until my parents can understand it without a lot of explanation, we just aren’t there yet.

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