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Amazon Unbox is Windows and US-only… pah! September 9, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : web, apple, gadgets , 1 comment so far

I had been planning on using a cold and wet Saturday in Sydney to give Amazon’s new movie download service a go. However it appears that it is US only. I was all fired up to watch the Star Trek episode, ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’; I have never seen this episode but understood that the Tribbles were the inspiration for the Trumbles in the Commodore 64 version of Elite. I downloaded the Amazon Unbox player (in my Windows XP virtual machine running under Parallels) and was ready to hand over my $1.99USD when I was confronted with a checkout screen that wanted me to enter my U.S. state of residence. Dang!

Perhaps the international Amazon stores (Canada, Japan and various European countries) will get a locally-branded Unbox soon enough. This is unlikely to help us Down Under however. Apple and iTunes are no better; despite television content being available from the US iTunes store the only video content Aussies can purchase or download are video clips, Pixar shorts and movie previews.

Of course a key barrier preventing the sale of episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives or whatever is the exclusive agreement that the local broadcaster has (in Australia’s case, channel 7 for both shows) to show them first. BitTorrent is an effective way to route around any such agreement for those with the know-how and willingness to break copyright. At the same time though it appears that local broadcasters have been quite unwilling to open their own content up to streaming or download, with the exception of the ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our government-owned television and radio broadcaster) who have been increasingly dipping their toes into internet distribution. Thank goodness for The Chaser’s vodcast!

The key to opening the floodgates of movie and TV downloads might be solving the problem of how people actually watch it. Watching short clips or TV episodes on a laptop or video iPod is fine but does not cut it for feature-length films. The content has to get onto the CRT, LCD or plasma TV in the living room. Microsoft has an offering of sorts with Windows XP Media Center edition and the XBox 360 can act as a media extender (I don’t see any reference in the Amazon Unbox FAQ as to whether the high-resolution version of the downloaded videos can be watched on an XBox 360?). Intel keep threatening to actually come up with a coherent strategy surrounding Viiv that might result in some kind of set-top box. Ultimately Apple have the opportunity to really innovate in this space… will this coming Tuesday’s “It’s Showtime” Apple event reveal the announcement of a video-compatible Airport Express or a media-centre docking station for a Mac mini? If only iTunes movie downloads are unveiled without additional hardware a great number of people will be disappointed.

Maybe when it comes down to looking for true innovation in the distribution of video online, I will have to consider something more Democratic.

Print, press & publishing’s impending seismic shift August 3, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , 1 comment so far

I have yet to see an e-paper/e-ink reader in the flesh. But I am so ready to buy one if its properly executed. And I believe many other people are as well, such that wide-take up of these devices will significantly change the way the print, press & publishing industries work.

The Sony Reader that was demonstrated at CES 2006 last January was originally slated for release in the northern hemisphere spring; before being subsequently delayed to summer and then autumn. Apparently now it will be ready for “the holidays”. Meanwhile the iRex iLiad has been released but is only being made available via specialized channels which are generally pre-loading the device with expensive vertical-specific content, such as aviation maps or medical journals. Sony have taken the bold step of asking Phil Torrone of MAKEzine to canvas his readers for their questions about the delayed product which is a welcome sign of openness after Sony’s DRM root-kit debacle. I can only hope Sony don’t attempt to encumber the device with too much loathsome DRM and is capable of rendering PDF and TXT files. There are tantalising rumours that Apple may also be working on an e-book reader. I have more faith in Apple’s ability to enter this market with a category-defining device than Sony. Maybe we’ll see one at the WWDC next week?

At the same time more technical publishers are embracing DRM-free PDF’s as a distribution format. And thank goodness, technical books are heavy man! At the moment it is mostly indie or smaller outfits like The Pragmatic Programmers and 37signals with Getting Real (from which the revenue of $215,000 is almost ‘pure profit’) that have fully embraced this idea but more ‘traditional’ tech publishers such as Manning and O’Reilly (read Tim O’Reilly’s piece on PDF distribution) are waking up as well. Not to mention many other non-technical publishers which distribute some of their catalogue, mostly in DRM-encumbered and frequently platform-specific formats, through a variety of online ebook vendors.

Savvy newspapers are also waking up. Witness the recent launch of UK newspaper The Guardian’s G24; several automatically generated DRM-free PDF’s of key articles straight from their newspaper, updated every 15 minutes. But why rely on traditional media outlets for a PDF newspaper? Check out Jonas Martinsson’s FeedJournal which generates a PDF ‘newspaper’ from the RSS or ATOM feeds you provide it. Who would like to read Techmeme in newspaper format on the bus/tube/subway to work?

As soon as we have a range of e-paper readers that are relatively affordable, support a wide-range of platforms and formats (albeit with the inevitable but hopefully not egregious DRM), the publishing business will change just as rapidly as the music business has been changed by the iPod.

Where’s the iPod of e-ink? Apple? Sony?

FlyPod June 21, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, gadgets , 2 comments

Apple needs to keep innovating in order to stay a step ahead of Microsoft’s rumoured iPod killer. Since iPod integration with your car is now passe, the next industry Apple should be trying to suck up to, errr, I mean partner with is the airlines. I want my seat to have a universal iPod dock dammit! And the ability to display video (for 5G and unreleased-video-ipod owners) on the seatback display would be fantastic for long-haul flights. So who’s going to provide it first? Groovy, funky Virgin Atlantic? Emirates? C’mon, someone get onto this quick!