As a result I haven’t been using the Apple TV as much as I might like until recently.  What’s changed is the ability to stream YouTube and other video content to the device from my iPhone with the latest iOS releases.  If I want to listen to music, I can use the Apple Remote application on my iPhone to access my music library shared over forked-daapd and then set the output from the Linux server to be the Apple TV AirPlay speakers.  I also recently realized that the Apple TV Internet section includes a list of podcasts including most of the ones I watch (provided by TWiT and ThisWeekIn).  That’s good on two fronts because I can stop subscribing to them in iTunes and avoid wasting disk space by streaming them and also because I don’t have to turn my computer on to be able to watch them.

I was having a problem with the device where it would not wake up when sleeping and I would have to pull the power plug and reboot it most of the time when I wanted to use it.  The latest iOS release for Apple TV seems to have fixed this.

The Netflix streaming interface on the Apple TV is faster and better than the one on my TiVo box however most of the time I keep my receiver set to TiVo so I tend to watch Netflix more through the TiVo box simply because of the friction of getting the receiver remote and changing the input.  It would be nice if the Apple TV would support Amazon’s Prime streaming service but I’m not holding my breath on that since Apple has a competing service with the iTunes store.  But then again, they do support Netflix so who knows what the future holds.

I don’t really purchase music or movies from iTunes so streaming purchased content to my Apple TV is not a feature I’ve used.

In summary, the Apple TV is a fairly simple device but it serves a great purpose bringing shows like This Week in Startups, This Week in Venture Capital and TWiT to my living room in a way that’s a lot more elegant than hooking an HDMI cable up to my computer.  I would like to see the TV iOS platform support apps as I can think of a million that would be great to have on my TV.  It doesn’t seem like a hard technical challenge to enable that since the underlying operating system supports it on the iPhone and iPad.  Hopefully Apple will allow iOS TV development this year.  And in a perfect world Skype will create an app that allows me to video conference from my television without having to buy a new Blu Ray player.

So I was dismayed last night when reading that it’s unlikely to return for a third season. Which got me curious about the show’s ratings.

I used to be fairly informed about the entertainment business. Well television, movies, and music at any rate. I’ve never known much about the theater. A long time ago I had this idea I wanted to buy a television network (a story for another day). So I set about educating myself on the business.

I subscribed to Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard. I read Broadcasting and Cable regularly as well, although I never had a subscription. I remember being frustrated with Variety’s film database because while it provided gross sales it did not include production budgets which made the grosses somewhat less useful. When IMDB Pro launched I was thrilled that they had that data and subscribed. And yes I know that you still need to account for marketing budgets, backend participation, etc. but it gives you a starting point. Anyway, the point is that I was fairly knowledgable about how the industry worked.

But when I left California and moved back to the east coast in 2003 I stopped paying attention to all that. I let my trade subscriptions lapse and focused my energies on other things. Which brings me back to last night and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I found a bunch of forum posts speculating that the show is likely to be canceled and encouraging fans to participate in online polls, email campaigns, and the like. But I don’t know of many shows to be renewed based on that kind of thing. And by not many I mean Party of Five. That’s the only case I can think of where that kind of thing worked.

Broadcast television is a business and the revenue model is advertising. There’s money to be made in syndication and DVD sales which is nice for the production company but the network needs to make the advertising money. I’m a bit out of the loop so I don’t know if online sales through channels such as Amazon and Apple or DVD sales are split with the network but I’d imagine most or all of that is going to the production company.

So I went to look at the Terminator ratings. Because I no longer have any trade subscriptions I searched for a free ratings site which lead me to TV by the Numbers which is my new favorite web site. It’s an awesome free resource. How they are allowed to republish so much of Nielsen’s data I have no idea but it’s great!

But in looking at the ratings and commentary I was a bit lost. When I used to look at the overnights in Variety it was pretty straightforward – rating and share. But now there’s Live+7, Live+3, Live+SD, and talk of C+3. What is all this stuff? Where did it come from? We didn’t have any of that back in the old days of…6 years ago.

I don’t like feeling so out of the loop so I did some digging. It turns out that DVR viewing is now measured by Nielsen. The Live+7 numbers reflect everyone who watched the show in its broadcast time slot as well as everyone who watched it on their DVR within a week of its air date. Live+3 is within 3 days. And Live+SD is for live plus same day viewing, which is apparently most common for reality TV.

Nielsen also now offers something called C+3 where they measure the ratings (viewing) of individual commercials for the live broadcast plus 3-day DVR viewing. Most importantly the upfront ad sales are based on this C+3 data. Again, this is not how things worked in the fairly recent past.

It was an educational experience and a great opportunity for me to bring my TV ratings knowledge up to date. And now yours is as well.

Unfortunately the result of all this research was that the ratings for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles are not great, even counting DVR viewers. Although the full year ratings counting its former Monday time slot aren’t horrible compared to FOX’s network average.

My hope is that the Terminator Salvation movie has a really strong opening weekend. I think that’s probably the best shot for a third season at this point. But I emailed FOX my support email anyway. Can’t hurt.

Second Life is a homogeneously scaled environment.  Every “sim” in the system has essentially the same capacity and capabilities as all the others.  The server software for each environment is identical.  The whole system uses the same scripting engine, the same physics engine, etc.

This seems like a good architecture, but it will never allow for the true potential of a 3D immersive Internet virtual world.  The problem is that different environments have different needs.  Not everyone needs to support all the complicated physics.  Some environments don’t need complete user control of custom objects.  Some environments need to support a lot more people than others.

One of the great use cases for business marketing in Second Life is the virtual car dealership.  Web sites are not a great way to show off a three dimensional real world high performance feat of engineering.  A 3D simulated virtual world is.  Certainly some car manufacturers have experimented in Second Life but the result has never been a truly great promotional experience.

The problem is that the car maker’s virtual cars have the same priority as every other object in the environment.    If I were a car manfucaturer I’d rather sacrifice the individual creativity of my visitors to conserve resources to allow me to showcase a high quality virtual automobile.

And then there’s the question of what to do with the car once it’s created.  I’d think you’d want people to be able to take it out on a street or a race track for a test drive.  Again, this has been done but the system for creating a race track in Second Life is the same system that is used to create a moon bounce or a dance club.  That is not a good architecture.  There are a ton of driving simulation games available for PCs and gaming consoles and I’d wager all of them are superior to what has been created in Second Life.  Why not let the car companies’ simulators run a racing game engine instead of the standard general purpose physics engine of Second Life?

The uniform size of the sims is also too restrictive.  If I’m building a race track, I want a big race track.  Perhaps several miles.  But I don’t want to create that across many differnet sims.  I just want one race track simulator that is several miles long.  This can be achieved by making the parts of the simulator that are not on the track “off limits” or very restricted in what they can do.  No foreign object support, for example.

On the other hand, I may want a convention center or lecture hall that can accomodate hundreds or thousands of participants.  Of course to support that many people it would be necessary to remove support for custom foreign objects that people may bring with them.  That’s a trade off, but I can live with people not being able to race their Aston Martin’s around my convention center auditorium.  In fact, if they can’t do that in the middle of a presentation that probably adds to the quality of the experience.

I do think that a scalable 3D virtual world is still a great business concept for the future innovation of the Internet, but unfortunately the current platforms are not taking an architectural approach that will be successful.

The most successful viritual worlds in existance are MMORPGs.  These engines support thousands of concurrent players but they do so at the expense of curtailing individual freedoms.  You cannot build arbitrary objects in World of Warcraft, but that does not diminish the success and popularity of that platform.

My point is not that participants should not be able to create content.  My point is that the content creation requirements are different for different applications, and a one size fits all approach is doomed to scalability and quality shortfalls.

What is needed is a virtual world system that supports shared accounts accross a variety of interconnected engines.  A system that allows me to login, walk to a car dealership and be emmersed in a racing game, then stand up and walk into a conference hall to listen to a talk with several thousand other people and participate in Q&A, and then walk into an environment where I can play World of Warcraft is the system that will realize the dream of the Metaverse.

The iTunes App Store really takes the phone to a whole other level.  In fact, part of the reason that I decided to get the iPhone was seeing David Pogue’s review (video) of the iPhone and App Store.  While I think that some of the most useful iPhone applications have yet to be written, there are already several killer apps available.  And they’re free which is even better.

Pandora Radio has an iPhone application that lets you listen to Pandora streaming stations on the iPhone.  The sound quality is good and when you are connected via wifi it upgrades to stereo.

There is also a free Shazam application.  The Shazam service has been around for some time, but I can’t say that I’ve ever used it prior to having an iPhone.  Their free application is wonderful and easy to use.  It allows you to “tag” music that is playing.  You press the “tag now” button and it listens for a few seconds, uploads the sample to their service, and then tells you what song you’re listening to as well as linking to the iTunes Music Store to purchase it and a video of the song on YouTube if one exists.  It saves the tag history which is great because there are so many times where I’ll hear a song on the radio while I’m driving and not be able to remember what it was later.  Now I don’t have to worry about that any more.

Although I am not as active in the social networking scene as I once was, Facebook has a great application for the iPhone.  It presents the information feed from the service in a format that is perfect for consumption on the iPhone.  It also includes a wonderful interface to viewing photos from the site that is very similar to the photo viewer that’s built into the device for viewing local photos.  Overall the application has a great interface design.

Tags: TiVo, NBC, Amazon, Unbox, Bionic Woman

I won’t be checking this out, as I don’t have a Verizon wireless cell phone; I’m part of the Cingular/AT&T camp. I don’t understand why something like mobile TiVo scheduling needs to be a proprietary application. Why not make a slimmed down mobile HTML site so that all wireless users could schedule their programs remotely.

I’ve not tried the TiVo Central site from my Blackberry 8700c, but I suspect that if it works at all the experience will be difficult. My bank recently launched a mobile banking web site that works great. I don’t understand why my bank can provide me financial services without a special application but my TiVo can’t let me schedule recordings the same way.

Tags: TiVo

Unfortunately the available content for Unbox on TiVo is still pretty limited, but hopefully that will change down the road.

Tags: TiVo, Amazon, Unbox

I watched The Departed last night. Interestingly I purchased the movie via Amazon’s Unbox and watched it on my TiVo, but this post is about The Departed, not the Unbox on TiVo service.

The Departed is a classic undercover cop infiltrates organized crime story, with several twists. Instead of taking the usual plot approach of structuring the story around the undercover officer’s attempts at creating a case against the organized crime bosses, The Departed instead focuses on the cat and mouse game between the undercover officer who has infiltrated the crime syndicate and the crime syndicate’s mole inside the police department. They are constantly struggling to learn the other’s identity and provide useful information to their respective organizations without betraying their true identities.

The acting and cast was stellar. Martin Sheen, Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio – what’s not to like?

If you enjoy movies along the lines of Donnie Brasco or L.A. Confidential then you’re likely to enjoy The Departed.

Tags: The Departed, Movie, Donnie Brasco, LA Confidential

I accidently forgot to pay attention to the EULA as I clicked through it, so I’m not sure if there is some NDA stuff in there. I doubt it. I don’t have much to report in any case, as I have only played with it a little bit.

The idea for Joost is peer-to-peer legal television-quality programs on demand. Unfortunately right now the service is extremely content-starved and it’s clearly much more of a technical beta than anything else. There are some interesting documentaries and music video content, but if you’re looking for prime time US television, it’s not there. Yet.

As far as the technical features and interface goes, it’s not a traditional Windows UI app and that may cause some learning curve. It looks and feels more like a Flash web application. This isn’t necessarily a negative and it does make the interface feel fresh and trendy, but it may create usability issues for some.

The video codec they are using is fairly resource intensive. My computer isn’t the newest on the block (in fact, it’s becoming a bit out dated as evidenced in my recent experimentation with Second Life), but I have found that I need to close other applications and give Joost everything my system has.

As I play with it more, I plan to send them some feedback. So far it seems promising, but this platform will live and die by its content so it’s too early to say what the real prospects are for Joost.

Tags: Joost

What interests me more is the music streaming capability. I keep all of my music on my computer (in iTunes) and sometimes I’d like to listen to it in my bedroom using my TiVo. I could get an Airport Extreme, but why invest the money in that when I already have a device hooked up to my television which should accomplish the same task?

The mp3 streaming feature of TiVo has been around for a few years now, and it works fine from a technical perspective. While emerging formats like AAC are not supported, that’s a limitation I can live with. What I cannot live with is the horrible UI. Generally TiVo wins against all other DVRs on the market not for superior technology or price, but for incredibly good UI. Unfortunately this has never been the case with their computer integration components and I don’t understand why they haven’t remedied this.

I have a substantial amount of music on my desktop computer, and with TiVo I must create new playlists (why it does not support iTunes playlists I don’t know) and import them. This is a minor hassle, but acceptable. What’s unacceptable is the interface for browsing music that’s not in a playlist. It’s just a many-pages-long alphabetical list. Finding something requires tedious scrolling with no random access search at all. There’s also no filtering based on metadata other than the artist name.

TiVo has already has solved the random access search UI with their Search by Title television recording interface. Why do they not apply this to video and music that’s available on home networked computers? It seems obvious to me that this is the right solution, but when will they ever implement it? It’s very frustrating, and I hereby volunteer to beta test that version of TiVo code when it’s released.

Tags: TiVo