TechAgility

I have recently been looking at what is available in the way of Media Streaming devices and other forms of DVR under this post - Everex gPC Mini as a potential Media Streaming device? or mini HTPC? - and this news from Sigma Designs certainly would appear to raise the bar as far as performance goes for the next generation of Set top boxes?

The only annoying part of this is that because I keep an eye on what is potentially coming to market, I keep putting off making a decision because I’m waiting for the next release…  <sigh>

The really annoying part of this <below> is the Microsoft Mediaroom, not because of what it is, but because of what it promises that is not available yet, grrrrrrr. This is exactly the sort of thing we would all like to hook up to the large LCD, but as far as I can see this is essentially a "mock up" of what is possible to deliver using MS’s IPTV *NOT* what is available - and more is the pity?

SoC for STB’s has triple processors

Apr. 15, 2008
Sigma Designs has introduced a pair of set-top box SoC’s (System on Chip) that run Windows CE and Microsoft’s Mediaroom IPTV software stack. Powered by three MIPS cores apiece, the SMP8654 and SMP8655 boast accelerated graphics and compliance with HDMI (high-defintion multimedia interface) 1.3, says Sigma.
The SMP8654 and SMP8655, differing only in the latter’s omission of Macrovision, are designed to replace the company’s "industry leading" SMP8634. And indeed, they appear to be a significant advance on it. Where the older SMP8634 had a 300MHz MIPS CPU and a 200MHz security CPU, the SMP865x chips boast triple MIPS processors, for a claimed fifty percent speed boast, according to Sigma claims:

• A 500MHz processor runs the operating system and applications
• A 333MHz processor manages interrupts and part of the network stack
• A 333MHz security CPU, deliberately inaccessible by external interfaces, manages authentication, key generation, and content access functions

Sigma’s 865x SoC sports three processors
(Click to enlarge)

The SMP865x chips offer high definition video decoding, including H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10), WMV, VC-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 (part 2). They also support China’s home-market AVS (audio video standard). HDMI 1.3 support offers bandwidth to 340MHz, while adding support for the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD formats used by Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
Other touted features for the SMP865x chips include:

• On-chip flash memory (24K for 500MHz processor, 4K for interrupt/stack processor)
• DRM (digital rights management) engines
• 2D graphics processor including scaling, JPEG and OpenType acceleration
• Dual gigabit Ethernet controllers
• Dual USB 2.0 controllers
• DDR2 controller supporting memory up to 666Mbps
• NAND flash controller
• SATA controller
• Audio I/O
• Simultaneous HD and SD video outputs

Sigma did not cite pin compatibility with its previous SoCs, but said the SMP865x chips are software-compatible with them.

SoC for STBs has triple processors

written by dcaddick

Now this may seem a bit hypocritical, but first let me state that I don’t condone this, but in quite a number of ways the TV Stations and the Cable Operators are responsible for setting our (and our Spouses? expectations quite high in the first place and then clearly not delivering.

Why the present system is not working

Example 1:

Here in Australia Foxtel would like you to sign up for their premium service and use the IQ (similar to UK’s Sky+ Service) however here in Australia there is a wealth of content still delivered by the main Free to Air (FTA) Stations and yet this is only available **IF** you have the service delivered by Cable - NOT if it’s delivered by Satellite.

Apparently that would require a retransmission fee that the TV Channels are not prepared to pay for - so although you see the lovely shiny adverts for Foxtel’s IQ Service… come to think of it there haven’t been that many lately, then it won’t work for the majority of Australians who would expect to pause and timeshift TV Shows from the main Stations.

Example 2:

Related to above, my Wife starts getting interested in the TV mini-series Damages on Channel 9 at 9.30, only to find that 5 or 6 episodes in they decide to switch it to a 10.30 slot that is too late for her.

Example 3:

Channel 9 advertises "New Series" of CSI - as soon as it starts I can see it’s essentially a rerun of Series 7. But now that my interest has been piqued I check the details for CSI on www.tvrage.com and find that yes CSI is now in Series 8 and it first started airing back in Sept. 2007….  sheesh!!

Example 4:

My wife is a very big fan of X-Factor in the UK and yet this show never makes it to the Foxtel supplied UK channels, so we step outside this and download them from the Internet and generally watch them a week after they have aired in the UK.

Can anyone else see the similarity with the Music Industry?

The main point here is that the RIAA have spent the best part of the 5 years or so trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle with regard to MP3 downloads and they are clearly fighting a loosing battle. It would be far better for them to approach this from the point of view that it is extremely hard to stop and or eradicate, so how can we make this experience much simpler, easier for the Customers/Public to the point that they will all flock to RIAA approved web sites for their content? Or even take on board some of the suggestions that they organise a royalty payment mechanism with the ISP’s?

At the moment the Video content is still quite questionable in a number of cases and you never really know what it will be like until you view the file after it’s downloaded - so there is still a lot of potential for the TV Stations/TV Studios/Film Studios to learn from the RIAA’s experience and start building a consensus and/or business case of how the future might look? There will be plenty of people who will argue that it can’t be done because of the myriad number of vested interests - but my point is - look at where the RIAA is now, technology will advance, ADSL is getting faster and more ubiquitous….

And don’t forget from my example above, even though it might be a complex and time consuming exercise, every time I get stiffed by one of the "vested interests" above when they change scheduled times, or do reruns as "new series" etc. I revert to form 

It would be great to think what it might be like in another 3 - 5 years from now when you sign up on a TV Channel’s web site and get updates via email that your new show/episode is ready for download? And would you possibly interested in these other similar shows in the Archive? And don’t forget we will be debuting a new show that you might be interested in next month…  Would you like to schedule these downloads automatically?

If you make it simple and easy people will flock to it - then just add advertising to make it pay?

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents for what it’s worth, and below I have outlined how it is possible to make it reasonably simple enough that my wife is now able to get things without involving me

Downloading TV Shows and Movies from the Internet

Great places to search for these downloads are:
Pirate Bay - www.piratebay.org
Mininova – www.mininova.org
Newzbin – www.newzbin.com

Both of these are structured somewhat differently:

Mininova uses bittorrents that requires a bittorrent client like utorrent to facilitate the download, where as Newzbin simply searches parts of Usenet to locate the groups of smaller files that have been posted that make up the larger TV show or movie.

Mininova:

For example search mininova for “CSI series 8” and you will get a result like this

This brings the result like…..

Click on the link at the top of the seeds column, and this will rearrange the list so that those torrents with the most seeds is at the top (more seeds means that more people have the complete file being offered up to others)

Now look for the particular episode that you are looking for – these are typically named in the format like s08e04, s802 or 808 – what this is referring to series 8, episode x.

BTW (By the way) it’s worth mentioning now that a typical 1 hour TV show is actually only 40 mins in length once you have removed the ads – this is then typically compressed down to an *.AVI file of only 400Mb – so be aware of this when checking the size of the download, too little or to large could be a cause of concern. If it is a DVD then it would be appropriate to be of 4.5Gb in size

If you are in any doubt it’s always worth checking www.TVRage.com for the actual title of the episode – Films can be checked at www.IMDB.com (The Internet Movie Database) – these are both very good resources to check any details regarding TV shows or Movies

Click on the link you need – here I am looking for s08e01

So here is the link details

So in the above example you can see the mouse is just hovering above the link to download the utorrent client – if you haven’t installed a bittorrent client yet then I’d suggest you download and install this now

So just run this, no need to save it anywhere as it’s quite small, and we’ll install it straight away

So here Windows is asking you to confirm that you actually want to install this – just click on “Run”

Just accept the defaults and click on Yes

Change the “Connection Type” to whatever is appropriate

So at this stage just click on OK

In progress….

Newzbin:

Newzbin is a service that you have to pay for – more information can be found at:

· 1 Site Questions

o 1.1 What is the purpose of Newzbin?

o 1.2 What exactly can I do on Newzbin?

o 1.3 How do I download from Newzbin?

· 2 Email Questions

· 3 Premium Membership Questions

· 4 Legal Questions

· 5 IRC Questions

How much does it cost? 50 US Cents a week – what do you get for your money?

http://docs.newzbin.com/index.php/Newzbin:Premium_Membership

So once you have paid, here’s how it works

Search for “CSI 8x” gets you the following:

It’s worth noting that the date matches closely the first screening date as described in tvrage.com as well as the title, although that there are a number of different file sizes – this will probably come back to the compression routines, alogrithims or config details used when compressing the original recording down to the *.AVI file

I would always tend to go for the 400Mb or so as this will typically = 1 hour of TV? (i.e. 40 mins of program minus the 20 mins of Ads) and treat anything else as potentially suspect – but that is only my personal opinion

So when you attempt to download something from Newzbin you will be asked to open or save an *.NZB file

This needs to be opened or downloaded by the Newzbin Client (the best is probably NewzbinPro)

This will then download the components on your behalf in to folders.

Typically this will be a load of small files that will need to be re-combined using WinRar, and if there are any missing files they will need to be recreated by using QuickPar.

Happy Watching

written by dcaddick

Chris Anderson from Wired first postulated the “Long Tail” phenomenon back in October 2004 and it was updated again in Wired on 2006 Tiny slice, Big Market (the concept of a MegaNiche?)

Wiki on Long Tail:

The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article ^[1] to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of those business allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.

Given a large enough availability of choice and a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution, instead of the expected normal distribution curve. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail"). ^[2]

My take on a Long Tail
In essence one of the easiest analogies is the difference between a Music Store and an iTunes. A physical store has a finite limit on the amount of stock it can display on it’s shelves, so as a consequence of this limit it needs to stock and display the most popular music to ensure a decent turnover and revenue - whereas with an on-line store with little restriction on it’s stock (add more HDD’s?) and a very cheap and scalable distribution system (the internet) that the customer actually pays for can not only stock a huge amount of titles but it also needs to only hold one of each.

His latest missive was about the way everything on the Web is free…  or getting there?

Everything get’s cheaper in digital format?
Essentially this distills down to the trend that once anything gravitates from physical to silicon/software it appears that there is an almost unstoppable force that will place the price of that commodity under a constant downward pressure due to what might be described as the “Economics of IT” and the way the cost accelerates downward under the sheer weight of scalability, it almost seems to be the nature of Technology?

Appendix at the bottom for example of how cheap hardware is getting

This can also be demonstrated very clearly with the news of Google’s new App Engine being released today? Google Jumps Head First Into Web Services With Google App Engine  - It’s free for the first 10,000 developers who get in the door, and even though there are restrictions on its capabilities (at the moment) I think it’s all quite reasonable to expect that this will build from here and still be listed as Beta in a couple of years when it’s still free and got millions of users?

In an aside as to how Google manages to provide it’s service for free, I was recently chatting to a colleague, and he told me that Google don’t buy Servers or even Desktops – they just buy the motherboards and hang them in the racks – the maintenance cycle simply consists of a tech going around the Data Centre and replacing the failed systems once a week. Apparently they are looking at moving to newer DC supplied M/B’s so that it’s safer, but other than that it just keeps ticking. (Please let me know if this is correct? I’d consider this info to be anecdotal and not confirmed)

So from my perspective the one shining ray of light that shouts about being free is Music via MP3.

On the one hand, now that it has been absorbed in to Silicon (i.e. Digitized) the price is in an ever downwards spiral, and yet on the other hand it perfectly validates Chris’s Long Tail theory that people can still make money in fulfilling a niche demand?

This is also demonstrated somewhat by the more popular artists who have branched out beyond just providing the musical content and now diversified into clothes, designer accessories, perfumes, etc.

Video
The main issue looming on the horizon here is what is going to happen to the Motion Picture Industry (isn’t that a quaint way of phrasing it?) if they don’t pull their collective finger out? Just in case they haven’t been paying attention during the last decade we have moved from traditional TV (I’m not counting VCR’s) to Tivo for the US (1999) and Sky+ for the UK (2001) so that for most people who do enjoy TV they have had it on demand for some time now.

In some ways TV and Video have stagnated in development since the launch of these devices, I’m sure there will be folks carrying on about BluRay etc. but once the commodity has been digitized it’s game over – from that point on the ONLY medium that we all want to use is whatever we have to hand – iPod, PSP, Portable HDD, SD Card, iPhone, Laptop, etc. Who cares if you can or can’t burn it on to a plastic disk? What I’m trying to point out here is that once the product or service has been turned in to a string or stream of bits then the Studio has effectively given up control, and the sooner that they can understand this from the recent history of the Music Business the better off they will be.

There are other ways to make money from content, and clearly the biggest one going at the moment is advertising where we would appear to be in the midst of a titanic fundamental shift where advertising that was normally placed with traditional media is now moving steadfastly in the direction of the Wired World, be it YouTube, whatever. I seriously think the Studios have had a coffee or two and are up to speed on this, but at the moment they don’t see a way out and so they are watching the dwindling revenues and hoping for a miracle?

TV Shows and Movies
So what’s going to happen to Video? If we take it that we are now entering an age where Video is something that by default is now stored, transmitted and received in digital format it becomes pretty simple to hit the "Forward 30 secs" button and pass the Advertising completely - and this is what is scaring the pants of the Studio and TV execs.

After all this is the fundamental difference between Movies/PayTV and Free to air TV (FTA), the advertising segments on FTA broadcasts are what pays for the whole model, now if people are recording the TV series, episodes etc and retransmitting via bittorrent (with or without stripping the ads) to other folks then this is effectively curtailing the Broadcasters revenue stream?

My take on this (please feel free to comment if you disagree?) is that the Movie and TV players have always kept a keen eye on trying to make as much money out of the content as is possible, and rightly so in a free market economy, and this has been possible while the distribution system was tightly controlled by them. So Movies typically play to large cinema complex’s first (that presumably pay a premium to premier?), then a wider number of cinema and distribution houses, then DVD release, then DVD Rentals, TV Premiere’s and then finally TV reruns? And in this way they try to maximize the return on the original investment of making the content in the first place.

Now unfortunately this cosy state of affairs that was all very nice for the content creators but what they didn’t quite anticipate was that they had effectively "let the genie out of the bottle" when they decided to go along with changing over from VHS tapes to DVD’s, once this was agreed to and they had conceded to move from Analogue to Digital then this is the moment they lost control of the content. By 2000 the DeCCS code for the DVD was broken, the AACS for HD content was broken in early 2007, and since then the only real impediments to holding back the masses from going ahead and sharing this wildly across P2P sites has been the size of the files and the corresponding bandwidth as well as the threats of lawsuits from the Studios and TV Stations.

So once we started to get to around 2005/2006 and bandwidth was becoming a bit faster, XViD and DiVX codecs were becoming commonplace in consumer DVD players, DVD Recorders were getting cheaper and before you know it entire TV shows and full episodes were appearing on the internet within hours of them being aired in the US - now the Exec’s were really starting to get worried…

Advertising
So what are they going to do? I would say that the distribution system that we now take for granted for Audio (MP3 files) and Video (AVI files) via the internet is so efficient and personal that it is here to stay unless something better comes along - what they need to do do is stop thinking of how they can stop it, it’s like King Canute trying to stop the tide, it is nigh on impossible. I would think they are better off trying to follow the lead of what most people are turning their hands to on the Web and embrace the concept that once it’s turned digital and it’s in the silicon it’s as cheap as can be - but you get it with advertising!

The old model of advertising in video was to stop what the customer is watching and force them to watch something that you want to advertise but only for a short time and then go back to the original material that the customer wanted. Typically people would tend to ignore this, so advertisers manage to pack more sound effects in to "pump" the volume without the volume changing - we just muted the set. With modern technology it’s getting easier to bypass the advertising all together, and if you are watching recorded shows on a DVR you can just skip 3 minutes in a heart beat.

So it would appear to me that the old method of TV advertising is almost at it’s use by date anyway? I think what we will be seeing soon is ads that appear along the edge of the screen (left, right, top or bottom depending on the action?) during the actual program and these will be akin to the banner ads were are used to seeing on web pages.

One example of what this might look like is here: Overlay.tv Adds Links and Easter Eggs to Music Videos
The key to this will be getting ALL the TV signals being broadcast in digital otherwise it wouldn’t work, so there is still a window of opportunity on a number of fronts, so in the meantime you’ll have to keep trolling the bittorrent sites for the episodes of the show you *were* watching before the local station decided to move that show to a 3am time slot on Monday morning?

Appendix: Examples of Hardware costs from days gone by….

The Macintosh II, introduced in 1987 for US$5,500
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/6

Try this for size, anyone with an iPhone has more power at their disposal than this server from 10 years ago:
The Hewlett-Packard NetServer E50 is a case in point. The unit I tested (street price: $2589) had a 333-MHz Pentium II CPU, 64MB of RAM, and a 4GB Wide Ultra SCSI hard drive; the 4GB SCSI tape backup is a nice enhancement. Like many bargain-basement desktop PCs, the E50 comes without a monitor. More important, it lacks an operating system:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,3992-page,3-c,servers/article.html
And….  that’s without a display or an O/S? now you can get the equivalent from AT&T…. 

written by dcaddick