The Big Gotcha of Apple TV: It Might Not Work on Your TV

Apple says it's going to be a little late turning its homework on AppleTV (see AppleInsider for the deets).

That give them a little breathing room before the flood of buyers returning the product in droves because they can't make it work with their televisions.

Apple says it clearly, if not prominently:

"Apple TV works with widescreen, enhanced-definition or high-definition TVs capable of 1080i, 720p, 576p, or 480p resolutions..."

But I wonder how many people won't notice that until they open the box?

While TVs that meet Apple's requirements dominate current retail sales, they're far from dominating the installed base of TVs. (See also Scoble's lament that his Dad isn't in the digital TV generation.) If you have an older TV, you're just not going to be able to make the connection.

Mickeleh's Take: There are more than enough modern TVs to make Apple's numbers, but there are also many more older TVs that will make headaches for the returns counter at the Apple store. Apple's delay on shipping the product gives them another few weeks to stock up on aspirin.

Other Mickeleh's Takes on Apple TV:

Pixel-Punchy Scobel's Rant about Apple TV

Apple, Pioneer of Accessible Solutions,
Neglects Closed Captions in Apple TV

Newest Mad Scientist Threat: A Machine that Remembers Everything

[This article spans technology and politics, I've cross posted it in Mickeleh's Soapbox.]

The Scooter Libby case goes to the jury today. It hinges on this question: did he lie to the FBI about how and when he learned about Mrs. Wilson, or was he innocently mis-remembering?

Apparently, we will soon have the technology to expedite trials like this. Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, in Scientific American, describe research they are doing at Microsoft on harnessing the technology to record everything.

Scientific American: A Digital Life [ INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ]
New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear--and even things they cannot sense--and to store all these data in a personal digital archive

Storage is getting cheap. Processors continue to obey Moore's law. Network access is getting ubiquitous. Sensors of various types being embedded everywhere. (Carry a cell phone? Then you're carrying a microphone and a camera that know where you are. hmmm.)

Mickeleh's Take: Feds Using Cell Phones to Eavesdrop
...feds can download software to many kinds of cell phone and then have the ability to turn on the microphone and listen in. Even when the cell phone is turned "off."

Bell has amassed 150 gigabytes of data in six years, and his descriptions of what he can do with it make it sound really cool. Without a good overlay of intelligence and analysis, an archive of everything in our lives might turn all of us into clones of the Borges character Funes, the Memorious, who remembered everything but understood nothing.

Bell and Gemmell acknowledge that "the prospect that identity thieves, gossipmongers or authoritarian states could gain access to such records is frightening." And, with the optimism of every scientist in a fifties sci-fi movie seem assured that technologies can be tamed so as to minimize potential dangers. I wonder if Admiral (Total Information Awareness) Poindexter would agree.

(See also my recent posts in the Soapbox: To Engineer a Totalitarian Takeover, First Appoint a Clown to Be President)

Mickeleh's Take: Is it time to join the Luddites yet?

Mind of an Impressario, Soul of a Venture Capitalist, Heart of an Agent

Mickeleh's Take: That Tail gets longer by the minute.

What's Web 2.0, Anyway? The Video

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us


Video by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University. The director has placed a higher quality version on MediaFire and made it available for download. For more info, click through to YouTube and then click "more" to the right of the video window.

Mickeleh's Take: I love this video. There's much to learn here, both about Web 2.0 and using motion graphics to tell a story.

Lawrence Lessig Has a Modest Suggestion for iTunes DRM

Lawrence Lessig points out that there are independent artists on iTunes who would be happy if the DRM on their music were turned off today. Why doesn't Steve start there?

Amazon Video Downloads; Now with the Great Taste of TiVo

The battle for movies online just got a lot hotter. Amazon's Unbox is coming to a TiVo near you. This makes things a lot simpler. Steve Poland on Techcrunch says "Amazon steals Walmart's thunder." But there wasn't that much thunder to steal.

More on Techmeme

Mickeleh's Take: Yesterday's Take is now slightly obsolete. Call this Take Two: The video download game is decidedly less geeky this morning. Now there are two top tier players with attractive end-to-end solutions: Apple, and Amazon-TiVo. Except that the potential TiVo audience is tiny (1.5 million with broadband connections). Apple TV has a zero audience today, but rumors on AppleInsider suggest they could easily outpace TiVo within a year.

(Tags: Walmart, Netflix, Apple TV, TiVo, Movies)

Can I Be the Only Blogger with Nothing to Say About Steve Jobs Open Letter on DRM?

I can't recall ever seeing so much commentary on anything at Techmeme. Steve Jobs writes an open letter to the music industry inviting them to allow him to cut the locks off the music he sells at the iTunes store. And the crowd goes wild. His strongest argument is this: the horse is already out of the barn; why bother keeping the door shut?

Mickeleh's Take: Bravo Steve. Very cool move. Steve Jobs is a master of timing. He bravely asks the industry to drop DRM two weeks after the NY Times says they're already thinking about doing it. That's leadership. Find a parade. Grab a flag. And run to the front, yelling, "follow me, boys and girls!" Works every time. Mr. Gates, you've made a fortune by copying Steve. Please continue.

Another reason for the timing; Europe is giving Apple grief around the DRM lock-in that ties iTunes music sales to the iPod and only the iPod as a portable player. (Steve's letter has a pretty explanation for why Apple can't share it's DRM mojo with anyone else. It's the Ben Franklin defense: "three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." In other words, if Apple shared the secret sauce, then the secret would get out and if the secret gets out, then, according to its deals with the music industry, Apple has to stop selling music.)

You'll notice, by the way, that movie-mogul Jobs isn't thinking about dropping DRM for any of the Pixar and Disney flicks. (Those horses are still in the barn, and we're keeping the door shut tight, thank you very much.) But if Steve won't make the case for dropping DRM universally, Cory Doctorow will. In fact, he already has at Microsoft and at HP.

(Tags: Steve Jobs, DRM, iTunes, iPod, Music)

New Anti-Vista Mac Spot: Hilarious, Vicious

Ouch.

Walmart Jumps Into The TV and Movie Downloads With Deals with Six Studios

Walmart leaps into the video download battle this week. The first service to offer titles from all six major film studios, Walmart faces off against iTunes, Amazon Unbox, CinemaNow, MovieLink, Vongo, Netflix, BitTorrent, Akimbo, Xbox Live, and others too numerous to mention. And the ones I mentioned are too numerous to remember, which is part of the marketing problem.

But Walmart is memorable. They account for 40% of all DVDs sold. And they used that leverage to nail agreements with all six of the major studios. The online service is Windows-only. 3000-titles-only (for starters). No DVD-extras. Not quite DVD quality. And Walmart has already lost to Netflix in the DVD-by-mail game.

Stories by Michael Barbaro in NYT and David Lieberman in USA Today.

[Update: My take on the Amazon-TiVo deal. Feb 7. 11:31 AM]

Mickeleh's Take: Movies over the Net is still a not-ready for prime-time early adopter geek's game. For our viewers at home, it's all tradeoffs and gotchas. Small libraries, high prices, less than DVD resolution (at a time when HDTV sales are taking off), rights restrictions, etc. And most of all, too many choices. Expect Unbox and Xbox to hang in there (Amazon and Microsoft can keep them on life support forever). Expect AppleTV and Netflix to make the most headway. Apple, has the closest to a simple end-to-end system from distribution through handhelds to the big TV in the living room. Netflix has the best and most innovative deal—free to DVD-by-mail subscribers; you have a time alotment, not a title alotment, which encourages you to sample and abandon titles until you find one you like (remember channel surfing?) Pogue has the details on why Netflix is so cool.

(Tags: Walmart, Netflix, Apple TV, Xbox, iTunes, Xbox Live, Streaming, Movies)

Boston vs. Mooninites: Gearing Up For New Witch Trials

I loved Boston when I lived there, which was long after the witch hanging and the neighboring Salem trials and long before the upcoming trial of the Mooninites. (Actually, the trial is for the guys who put up the light-up Mooninite pictures that twenty-first century Boston couldn't deal with.

MSNBC is running a poll: "Should Boston officials prosecute the men responsible for putting up the signs that disrupted the city by stirring fears of terrorism?"

Mickeleh's Take: I think Boston hasn't gotten over Paul Revere's alarming ride. Hint: The British ain't comin' and neither are the Mooninites. The Aqua Teen movie just better be funny after all this publicity.

News of the Death of the Googlebomb is Greatly Exaggerated

Nick Carr has a good piece on Google's attempt to excorcise the Googlebomb

Matt Cutts has Google's take.

Mickeleh's Take: News of the death of the Googlebomb is greatly exaggerated. Go search on "miserable failure" today and you'll get a gazillion items that explain how "miserable failure" was linked to George W. Bush through Googlebombing. Reminds me of the scene in Fantasia where Mickey chops up the enchanted broom into a gazillion splinters and then all of the splinters re-animate into a gazillion enchanted brooms. Was Google's mission accomplished? No more than the Miserable Failure's.

(Tags: Google, Google Bomb, Googlebomb, Miserable Failure)

So, Now we Know WTF Technorati's WTF is all About

It turns out Steve Rubell and his echo-chamber got it wrong yesterday. The new Technorati feature, WTF isn't a Digg clone or a meme-tracker after all.

It's more akin to the "previously..." clip-fest that opens a lot of TV shows. For viewers who are jumping into a show midstream, it gives you a warm bowl of condensed cream of plot-and-character soup.

According to Liz Dunn of Technorati, WTF is a way for readers to get some context on the hot Technorati searches. It's a maketplace between people who like to explain things and people looking for explanations. Technorati has long featured top searches on their home page. If you're the second hippest person in the room, you may be wondering "why this?" and "why now?" With WTF, there's a good chance that the hippest person got there ahead of you and left an explanation. ("OMG, so that's why people are searching on Britney!)

Mickeleh's Take: I don't believe for a New York nonsecond that WTF stands for what Technorati says it does. ("Where's the Fire?") And neither do they. (nudge-nudge, wink wink.) I think this feature is helpful. There's a lot of smart people out there who like to explain things. And other people who like to vote on how smart the explainers are. And folks like me who just need to buy a clue. Could get interesting. (Disclosure: some folks at Technorati gave me a heads up on WTF last week.)

Niall Kennedy has the backstory.

More on Techmeme.

(Tags: Technorati, Search, WTF)

Technorati's Found Headlines and Lost WTF

If you're looking for the new Technorati feature that Steve Rubel spilled the beans on this morning, you won't find it. But you will find this treat:

I looked at the top tags on the Technorati home page this morning and they actually made sense as a series of headlines. Well, maybe not actual sense, but they're pretty much on par with the headlines in the news today.

Bush celebrates China
Comedy Democrats
Flickr gaming Iran
Mac money
Open-source opinion
SEO shopping Vista war
Windows, Windows, Vista
Women fashion foto

Mickeleh's Take: We may have a new doorway into the wisdom of crowds here.

More on Techmeme.

(Tags: Technorati, Poetry, Tags)

Chris Pirillo: Vista Ads and Webisodes "Horrible Waste"

Chris Pirillo says Vista ads on Comedy Central and the websites they link to are confusing and a waste of time.

Mickeleh's Take: Chris is right. Good ads embody the virtues of the product. Does Microsoft really want to tell us that Vista is a confusing, pointless distraction? Of course not. They want us to think that they're as hip as the guy with the jeans and the mock turtleneck.Hey, Redmond, stop with the Apple Envy. Play to your strengths.

(Tags: Vista, Advertising, Microsoft, TV)

Vista's "Wow!" Echoes 1950s Jingle for Color TV

Microsoft is spewing half a billion dollars to ensure that we all have a Pavlovian response linking the word "Wow!" to the new Vista operating system.

It's too late for geezers like me. I'm hard-wired. When I hear "Wow!" I spit-back, "I saw color TV!" Here's the jingle (mp3) that did me in. (It's from Dave Pruiksma's collection.)

Mickeleh's Take: RCA's challenge in the 50s was to advertise color TV to people watching black and white TVs. If you can't demo the picture, hire someone to scream, "Wow!" Better "Wow" than "Bow Wow."

More on Techmeme

(Tags: Vista, Advertising, Microsoft, TV)

USA Today: Verizon Passed on iPhone—Jobs' Terms Too Stringent

Leslie Cauley, in USA Today, reports that before Jobs placed the iPhone with Cingular AT&T, he offered it first to Verizon. According to Cauley, Jobs insisted on too much control over distribution, replacements, etc. to satisfy Verizon.

Mickeleh's Take: USA reports on the terms that Verizon rejected, but I'm not sure we know what terms Cingular accepted. Apple's insistence on determining when a customer deserves a replacement phone raises a flag. Mobile Carriers have been very liberal about offering instant replacements when a phone is in warranty. Apple's policies have been more stringent. (see Scoble's rant on his son's experiences with a rebooting MacBook Pro.)

Steve Jobs famously said that Apple isn't good at reaching their own customers by going through the orifices of the carriers. Could it be that Cingular has a wider orifice than Verizon?

More on Techmeme

See also Brian Dear's Notes on Steve's session at the Wall Street Journal D Conference (2005)
See also Peter Hirshberg and me speaking later at same conference. I heard Steve's "orifices" remark and it resonated deeply. At the time I was working at Digeo and we were struggling to get Moxi through the orifices of the cable carriers. At CES, Digeo announced an orifice by-pass: they plan to offer Moxi directly to consumers through retail.

(Tags: iPhone, Verizon, Cingular, Steve Jobs, Tech, Gadgets, Moxi, Digeo,)

Preview: Linda Stone Hips HBR Readers to Continuous Partial Attention

Linda Stone, who is wise and savvy enough to have managed successful careers at both Apple and Microsoft, examines how our many channels of communication and our fear of missing out on something important messes with our minds. People who attend meetings while surfing and blogging on their laptops and answering email on their Blackberry's may be beyond parody, but they're all around us. Linda says too many of us live in a state of Continuous Partial Attention, that it's driving us to distraction. Literally. And that there are important opportunities in offering relief to a population drowning in it's own split focus. Linda offers a concise overview of Continuous Partial Attention in the upcoming Harvard Business Review. HBR ranks CPA as #7 in its breakthrough ideas of 2007.

Mickeleh's Take: The article is short enough to take in even if you're drowning in CPA yourself, but it's worth some focused time to digest and ponder. Linda suggests folks seek immersion in iPod as a refuge from CPA. Hmmm. If email, cell phones, and IMs are enticements to CPA, and the iPod is a relief, where does that put the iPhone? It's got 'em all. It may be an entire ecosystem of disease and cure. No wonder we're going crazy for it.

(Tags: Linda Stone, CPA, Continuous Partial Attention, Trends, Business, Living, iPhone)

Gil Amelio: from Turnaround King to Rightwing Swiftboater

Guess who scored a mention in Bob Novak's latest column? You already know because I put it in the headline. Yes, Gil Amelio, the turnaround king who rescued National Semiconductor (as chronicled in his Profit from Experience, available at Amazon, starting at $0.01) and Apple Computer (as chronicled in his On the Firing Line, also available at Amazon, starting at $0.01).

Why is Amelio featured in Novak's column? According to Novak, Gil is one of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs behind TheVanguard.org, a right-wing answer to moveon.org. TheVanguard is bulking up for '08, bringing on Jerome Corsi (co-author of Unfit for Command, the anti-Kerry screed that led to the coinage of the verb "to swiftboat.") and Richard Poe, a Freeper who is revving his engines to swiftboat Hillary, and already fired numerous salvos in print and online.

TheVanguard's chairman, Rod Martin, describes himself as a "prescient futurist," which, I guess, is the second best kind of futurist to be. The best, of course, is to be a funny and successful futurist like Matt Groening, creator of Futurama. To end this dismal report on a high note: there are are four direct-to-DVD Futurama movies in production and Comedy Central gets the rights to the series in 2008.

Mickeleh's Take: Does anybody else see some irony in Gil Amelio associating with the guy who wrote Unfit for Command? Yes, Apple lost a billion dollars in his last year there, but Gil actually did save Apple—by bringing back Steve Jobs.

More on Mickeleh's Soapbox.

Wisefool has more on this on Daily Kos. In a comment, Near Vanna recalls the fabled Gilometer.

(Tags: Gil Amelio, swiftboat, politics, Hillary, Hillary Clinton, Steve Jobs, moveon.org)

Cable DVRs in Short Supply; Bad Forecasting or the CableCARD Rule?

Looking for an HD DVR from your cable company? Depending on where you live, you may just have to take a number or get in line.

On Wednesday, Channel 9 in Syracuse, NY reported that the local Time Warner Cable was out of stock. What's behind the shortage? According to Channel 9, "The company that makes these DVR's has been overwhelmed by requests for them, and cable companies all across the US are telling customers they'll have to wait for the DVR's." (Yesterday Channel 9 announced that TWC had just received a shipment of 1500 HD DVRs to distribute to customers.)

Forecasting demand is always something of a black art, but this season it's especially difficult because of an FCC rule that forbids cable companies to distribute the current generation of set top boxes after June 30th. (By the way, this rule was issued in 1999, so it's not as though this sneaked up on anybody. The cable industry has managed to get the deadline pushed back until this year--and they're still pushing.)

A little background on the rule: To ensure that customers only watch the channels they pay for, and to guard against copying and piracy, most digital channels are encrypted. The set top box has security features that the cable company controls to be sure that you only have access to the channels you pay for. These security features have given two companies (Scientific-Atlanta and Motorola) a virtual lock on the set top box market in the U.S. The FCC rule that's causing the rucus is called the Integration Ban and says that the security features can no longer be integrated into the box hardware, but have to be made available as a separate module (Currently embodied in CableCARD technology).

Separating security from the navigation, tuning (and now DVR) functions was meant to encourage more open competition, innovation, and customer choice. But in the face of rising demand for HD DVRs, it makes forecasting and inventory management a high-risk gamble.

Michael Powell, who was Chairman of the FCC when the rule was first issued in 1998, dissented from the ruling. One of his reasons is proving prophetic:

"... the ban is likely to skew present business decisions of operators about when they should buy new set-top boxes, how many they should buy and what plans they should make for deploying digital technology. MVPDs (Multichannel Video Program Distributors), particularly smaller systems and other non-exempt operators such as wireless cable operators, will be forced to make these decisions so as to avoid the potential for stranded investment, not on the basis of what might be best for their customers. I see no reason to put these operators in such an untenable position."

If you want to get a flavor of this battle over the FCC Integration Ban, here's the latest consumer electronics industry letter to the FCC (pdf) and the cable industry response (pdf).

Mickeleh's Take: The transition will be ugly, frustrating, expensive, and (maybe) worth it. What do you think?

More at Techmeme

(Tags: Cable TV, DVR, HDTV, HD DVR, FCC, Gadgets, TWC)

Dreamgirls Didn't Merit Top Oscar Nominations

I don't know why anybody is scandalized that Dreamgirls missed out on nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, or Best Actress. Those nominations weren't merited. Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy earned their nominations in the "Best Supporting..." categories. Dreamgirls still leads the field with a total of eight nominations.

Mickeleh's Take: [Spoiler Alert] Here's the trap they dug for themselves. The story is how an electrifying and overweight singer gets pushed out of a girl group while a bland, pretty backup singer with more TV and cross-over appeal is promoted to lead. Guess what that means? The story forces the most exciting character (singer and actor) off the screen. Once Jennifer Hudson goes away, most of the energy goes out of the picture. The bland pretty girl just can't carry the weight. At least when Hitchcock bumped off Janet Leigh early on, he left us with Tony Perkins to take us the rest of the way home.

[Edited to remove a spoiler. Thanks to the commenter who pointed this out. I'm going to delete the comment now, because it quotes the spoiler. Apologies to all those for whom I spoiled the movie.]

(Tags: Oscars, Dreamgirls, Jennifer Hudson)