Brother, can you spare a card?

About six months ago, when Netflix was back on its heels after jettisoning some 800,000 angry customers, StreamingMedia.com received lots of traction around the whole story including a number of radio and television interviews on the story. One piece that got little attention, though, was our conjecture that Redbox and other kiosk-based DVD delivery systems might prove problematic for Netflix as the DVD-by-mail company morphed into a streaming media delivery giant.

Turns out the hunch about Redbox was right, and it's affecting not just Netflix but also Verizon and Blockbuster. 

Yesterday's announcement that Coinstar, the "coin-operated" company that runs the Redbox kiosks—among other types of entertainment stations—had tripled revenue for the year and was using some of that cash on hand to buy Blockbuster Express kiosks from another point-of-sale company, NCR of cash register fame.

The news sets the streaming world on edge a bit. The Blockbuster Express name was licensed out to cash-register maker NCR for the kiosk-based system NCR had cobbled together to compete against Redbox. The interesting irony here, of course, is that the Redbox name is now being licensed out to Verizon Communications for the streaming service (in much the same way that the Blockbuster name was licensed to NCR for Blockbuster Express).

As I mentioned in the KOMO interview around the Netflix debacle of late 2011, the problem with Blockbuster and Netflix is that neither offer—to steal a marketing phrase from Blockbuster—Total Access to their disparate DVD and streaming libraries.

Coinstar might just be on to something, though, with its simple-to-use kiosks popping up all over the USA (34,000 and counting, before the Blockbuster Express units are accounted for). If it can pull off an equally simple approach to streaming in its newfound partnership with Verizon Communications—especially a non-subscription model akin to the kiosk approach—there just might be hope yet for a "total access" option.

Out of all this comes one truth: the days of brick-and-mortar DVD rentals are well past being numbered, but the pax romana of physical DVD rentals is still ahead. Still, the other major difference between Netflix and Redbox is the one-off impulse rental nature of a kiosk delivery—available to anyone passing a Walgreens, 7-11 or Wal-Mart in any corner of the USA—versus the subscription-only nature of Netflix's DVD or streaming models.

Read the StreamingMedia.com article for more details.

What will the New Era of HP entail?

About this time of year, every other year, HP's workstation division unveils something new. A few years ago it was the z800 workstation, unveiled at a presentation at BMW Designworks, the agency that helped shape the unique design of the z-series cases.

This year, though, HP is moving the event to Las Vegas, and is teasing—complete with 2001:Space Odyssey "monolith" imagery— that a New Era is just over the horizon. We'll keep you informed as soon as we peek over the rainbow, or around the next planet...

Super streaming Bowl fail?

The fine folks at StreamingMedia.com have an article I wrote late last night, after the Super Bowl ended, about the failure of large-scale streaming for those trying to watch the big game on their desktop or laptop computers.

It's touched a nerve, apparently, and the article has rocketed to the top of the most popular list on this  Monday morning after the game. Some commenters are expressing embarrassment over having tried to show their friends the alternate angles offered by the online stream—that is, if you didn't mind waiting a full minute after the game play to actually view the "live" stream.

Something's gotta get better in this whole live streaming scenario...

[Update: The New York Times' Media Decoder blog from Brian Stetler quotes a bit from—and links to— the StreamingMedia.com article.

Stetler notes that NBC is blaming low-quality streams on last-mile issues or "connection issues" as Kevin Monaghan, managing director of digital media for the NBC Sports Group, calls them.  It's disingenuous for NBC to blame last mile issues when a) much higher-quality live content was also delivered across the same networks during our testing and b) there are many consistencies in the overall problems that viewers have commented on—from variable lag times to consistent poor quality at the height of the game's key moment, one of which Monaghan mentions.

It's as if, in the early days of TV, the broadcast engineer says "hey, the signal looked good when it left our building" and it's a reminder that we're in the early days of large, live events—enough so that we can all "blame it on the blockbuster" if the event has problems.

We look forward to eventually seeing the numbers from NBC Sports, which we suspect will show that the adaptive bitrate worked but only if measured by the fact that the number of viewers seeing sub-standard, low-bandwidth streams are considered an acceptable viewing experience.]