EPiX's Rensing: Bandwidth Not A Concern

Emil Rensing, Chief Digital Officer of EPiX, keynoted at this week's Streaming Media West 2009 event.

While the full coverage of his keynote can be found here, one question asked in the Q&A session stood out:

"How is the bandwidth problem going to be solved," an audience member asked, "since there are threats of throttles and caps by the cable and telecom ISPs?"

"This inflection point we're in means alot of experimentation and change," said Rensing, who dubs EPiX as TV Everywhere, available today. "My baseline belief is that it's a short-term problem, because within the next decade we'll see all content available at all fidelities on all devices."

While this projection has been made by numerous players in the space, it's worth noting due to EPiX lineage (Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM are joint owners of the company) and the fact that it serves Verizon's FiOS and may be doing the same with AT&T's U-Verse in the near term.

Hacking the Xbox

When Mark Whitten, General Manager of Microsoft's Xbox LIVE, spoke at today's Streaming Media West 2009, he was asked about the ability to Xbox community to legally hack an Xbox.

"I am going to agree with you but in a slightly different way," Whitten said to the questioner who identified himself as a Linux user that wanted to get 'under the hood' and change things. "The community should be able to change the experience, but it may not be people writing lines of source code. The ability to share experiences and change things such as vehicles or levels is already in place on various gaming platforms."

"I believe that consistency and simplicity are very important," Whitten continued, "which doesn't mean heavy-handed dev control, but does mean we need to start with the 'mom' button instead of the 'hacker' button."

Perspective: Blame it on video

"Internet traffic is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 46 percent. Video is the driver. Make no question about that."

Robert Pepper, Cisco
Internet Governance Forum conference

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.11b0df967c4c85298aa30205bd42846a.01&show_article=1



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Adobe announces Flash Player 10.1, AIR 2.0 beta

At Adobe MAX 2009, held in Los Angeles back in October, Adobe's CTO announced the features for an upcoming point upgrade to Flash Player 10.

"We've begun working with 19 of the 20 top handset manufacturers, "said Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO, "to bring Flash Player 10.1 support to these mobile platforms."

Lynch meant that all the top handset manufacturers (except Apple, of course, with its non-Flash iPhone) will be able to run full Flash content on their smartphones.

"This provides a consistent runtime across desktops and mobile devices," said Lynch, "and is supported by close to 50 participants in the Open Screen Project, including support Google Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile."

Within the Open Screen Media Framework (OSMF), Flash Player 10.1 is the first fully-compliant player, and is available as of today as a beta on Adobe Labs.

Adobe is looking to introduce HTTP streaming, coupled with content protection from its forthcoming Flash Access 2.0.


Jen Taylor, who spoke to Bit O' Tech just prior to the IBC show in September, also spoke at MAX about the impending solution.

"To date, you can choose RTMP streaming or progressive download," said Taylor, Adobe's Director of Flash Content Creation and Distribution. "We're also rolling out HTTP streaming, starting in 2010, due to feedback from customers who wanted to leverage their existing HTTP infrastructure."

Taylor said it made sense for customers to consider the Open Screen implementations.

"It's more complicated than it looks to overlay text, images or even Flash (SWF) files over Flash video," said Taylor. "In the end, everyone was re-inventing the wheel, and we saw this as an opportunity to solve an issue for everyone."

The framework allows for parallel playback of content (two videos side by side), text overlays, image overlays and other options.

"We found that many also were spending too much time on analytics," said Taylor, shortly after Adobe's acquisition of Omniture was announced. "What they really wanted to do, instead, was to spend the time focusing on customer experience."

"We worked with the community to identify partners to integrate in to the OSMF," said Taylor. "One of those was Omniture, but there are 40 others we are working to integrate."

Adobe also announced the release of Adobe AIR 2.0 beta, which uses the Flash Player engine to drive video content for offline or desktop delivery.

Facebook on Xbox: what about the videos?

At this week's NewTeeVee Live, Mark Whitten, General Manager of Microsoft's Xbox LIVE, was asked about the impending rollout of Facebook integration into Xbox LIVE.

The questioner said: "I understand about integrating Facebook images, but what about Facebook videos since they would be a natural fit with other on-demand content on the Xbox?"

"I have nothing to announce today in that area," said Whitten, "but I truly believe that photos in the living room is an under-served feature that many people would use to share their photos with others in the room."

"We're looking at ways to do in the living room what people had done before, crowding around the laptop,"added Whitten.

Netflix Plugs In to Consumer Devices

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix is addressing a topic at today's NewTeeVee Live 2009, we talked about a few weeks ago: integrating Netflix streaming into consumer devices.

"Hollywood likes us when we bring big checks," said Hastings, in a 'fireside chat' with Om Malik. "They take a high risk, calculating the payback of creativity, so they are always looking for effective new forms of distribution."

"From a studio perspective, they'd like to sell DVDs before they go to rental houses," said Hastings, noting this is possible already in Europe, "so our integration into consumer devices might create an earlier window for studios to capitalize on different sales models."

When Malik asked about streaming, Hastings said Netflix wants to continue to play both sides.

"We have to help keep the DVD ecosystem as big as possible, but we also want to grow our streaming business," said Hasting. "41% of subscribers - up from 22% a year ago - had streamed content in the last quarter, but DVD is still continuing to grow for several years."

"We also expect to start streaming internationally next year, although we've not announced where we'll begin streaming."

Hastings also said Netflix benefits the cable companies, despite protests to the contrary.

"When a customer talks about cutting the cord, in reality they're cutting the video cord but upping their internet connectivity," said Hastings, "so the cable companies benefit since they have markets in television, telephony and data."

This is part of the Third Wave discussion started over at workflowed.com.

. . . Or maybe not

Remember yesterday's comment about Microsoft using Mac OS X Leopard as its inspiration for the new Windows 7 operating system?

Apparently Microsoft now denies any, any, any influence from Cupertino, as noted in today's retraction: How We Really Designed The Look and Feel of Windows 7.

An inaccurate quote has been floating around the Internet today about the design origins of Windows 7 and whether its look and feel was “borrowed” from Mac OS X.  Unfortunately this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7. I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed. 

Sometimes, it's just impossible to make these things up, but Brandon LeBlanc, a Windows Communications Manager at Microsoft who runs the official The Windows Blog, is certainly trying.

Public flogging of Microsoft's partner group manager, Simon Aldous, at 11.

Making Windows Look More Mac-Like, Microsoft Style

This just in from Microsoft's UK partner event: "One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics."

PCR has the quote from Simon Aldous, partner group manager with Microsoft in the UK.

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Adobe: Second Annual Layoff Exercise?

Last December, Adobe cut 8% of its workforce, or 600 jobs. The company has obviously grown since then since today's announcement that it is cutting 9% of its workforce, or 680 jobs.

Last year's were as a result of the recession, this year's are "to appropriately align our costs in connection with our 2010 operating plan." Expect approximately $70 million in restructuring charges, including about $19 million in leased facility consolidation and the remainder in severance packages (for approximately $74,000 per severed employee).

Parallels Launches Parallels 5, Wins Me Too! Award

In the beginning, there was Parallels: the first virtual machine emulation software for Macintosh OS X.

It did some things well, enough so that I and others wrote about it in industry trade rags. Yet, over the years, it has turned into one of those pieces of software that puts out a new full numeral release for functions that other virtual machines (including the grandaddy of virtual, VMWare) released as point updates.

Consider, then, Parallels 5, which in its fifth reincarnation has now finally matched features that VMWare's Fusion has incorporated since its second version.

For instance, Parallels touts its "Crystal View" feature "which makes Windows completely disappear." If you think you've heard this before, you have: it's what VMWare Fusion calls the Unity mode.

In fact, of the top nine features noted on the website's main page, none of them are unique to Parallels. In other words, all of them have been part of shipping copies of Fusion for some time now.

Don't get me wrong: Parallels is not a bad program. I use both it and Fusion, and recommend each frequently to clients.

Parallels marketing has been suspect for quote some time, starting back in early 2007, when Ben Rudolph, Parallels' marketing director, revealed in an oddly worded email and his blog wasn't the startup he'd wanted us to believe, but actually part of a much larger organization.

The secretive approach wasn't lost on those out in the world of virtualization, as one poster to his blog noted, "I saw this announcement a few days ago both here and on various other Web sites and I thought it was presented strangely overall, as though some secret being revealed was the most compelling part of the story." 

Perhaps that strangeness was the sound of thousands of users wondering what was up, especially when the CEO of sister company SWSoft, Serguei Beloussov, presented another person as the Parallels CEO immediately after a Fortune blog post said Beloussov called the shots.

That at least has been corrected in the recent press release, which now identifies Beloussov as the Parallels CEO, and Ben Rudolph went off to the really fun challenge of marketing Vista in mid-2008.

But there continue to be unsubstantiated marketing claims, such as speed benefits with no backing data (and no URLs in the online press release), as well as the odd decision to call out features that are not unique to the company.

Maybe they need Ben back, so that the company can work to get ahead of the curve, as it once was, rather than putting out press releases and charging significantly for updates that only bring the Parallels product to status quo.