Monthly Archives: May 2012

Comcast Partners with Skype

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In a joint announcement last week, Comcast and Skype unveiled plans to provide video chat service to Xfinity customers. By adding an adapter box to their set-top box and a “high-quality” video camera, subscribers will be able to send or receive instant messages or video calls to any Skype user worldwide, including smart phones, tablets, and personal computers, as well as other Comcast subscribers who are equipped for Skype calls. The press release describes it as “HD video calling” though it does not provide specific details on resolution.

The service will support picture-in-picture, so you can have your video call in a small window on your television screen, or press a button to swap it so the Skype window is full screen and the program that you’re watching is in the small window. (I can see how investment types might find this useful as an inexpensive way to videoconference while keeping a financial news station open in the window.)

The service will roll out in Seattle and Boston first, with Detroit, Indianapolis, Miami, Atlanta, Augusta, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, PA following almost immediately after. Existing Xfinity triple-play customers can get a free three-month trial. According to the Comcast website, the service will cost $9.99 a month after the initial promotional period.

I’ve said all along that Skype in the living room has been a missed opportunity for the television makers. I believe that should have been advertising the pants off this feature ever since they started incorporating support for it in their HDTVs. Making it easy for grandparents to see and interact with young grandchildren is a hands-down winner, and Skype is a staple for people of all ages who want to stay in touch with distant family and friends. I think the $10 a month seems a bit steep, even when you figure in the rental of an adapter box, camera, and the new remote control. Still, given the high penetration rate of broadband connections in the home, I expect that there’s a large market for the service even at this rate. Who knows? Maybe this feature could be a competitive advantage that even might drive new customers to sign up with Comcast.

Alone Together: Is Split Screen TV a Good Idea?

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Conventional wisdom has it that television remains a group activity. We are rapidly being assimilated by our personal mobile devices, and I often see two people together who are both busy texting or Facebooking or whatever on their smartphones. Then I read a blog entry by some DisplaySearch analysts that describe a new “smart dual view” technology from Samsung.

All this does is take a standard stereoscopic 3DTV, and set the shutter glasses so that both eyes see one frame at a time. This lets you have two people in the same room watching two different programs at the same time. The article doesn’t mention that each person would also need to be wearing headphones so that they only hear the soundtrack for their program.

This isn’t all that new. It’s really just a variation of the scheme that let video gamers see their player’s view in a full screen, without being able to “peek” at what their opponent is seeing. But I’m concerned about the idea of using it to “duplex” video content in the living room. Why bother with the big screen at all? For less money, you can each buy your own screen and then retire to your own personal corner or cave to watch whatever you want. No more fighting over the remote. No more negotiating about how we’ll watch one of “your” shows and then watch one of “my” shows. And no more having to talk to each other while you skip over the commercials.

I get it. Samsung is grasping at straws to find new ways to market the 3DTV technology until we get enough 3D content to make consumers want it for its original purpose. But I really don’t think that isolating people even more is the right solution.

What do you think? Send me an email at alfred@hdtvprofessor.com or a tweet to @AlfredPoor, and let me know if this is a good idea.

Turn a Projector into 3D with SmartCrystal Pro

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My good friend, colleague, and sometimes co-author M. David Stone alerted me to a product that he recently reviewed for PC Magazine: the SmartCrystal Pro from Volfoni. This is a device that can turn any 3D-capable front projector into one that uses passive glasses for $1,500 (street price). Inexpensive 3D projectors require you to use bulky shutter glasses, but the SmartCrystal Pro lets you wear the same inexpensive passive glasses that you wear at your local cinema.

So how does it perform this magic? It is actually a “polarizing modulator.” That’s fancy talk for a device that can change the polarization of the light coming out of the projector. You place the SmartCrystal Pro about one to two inches from the projector lens, so that the light fills the window in the device. To get the 3D sync signal, you can connect it either to a VESA port on the projector, or if it is a DLP model, you can use a separate power block to access the DLP-Link signal.

One drawback is that you’ll also have to upgrade to a silver screen, which preserves the polarization of the light from the projector better than a standard screen can. Figure on another $1,000 or so for a 92″ diagonal screen. However, if you want to avoid paying for the expensive active glasses (and eliminate the hassle of keeping them charged), then the SmartCrystal Pro could be just what you need.

Cable Loses; Telco Wins; SatTV Draws

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The Leichtman Research Group, Inc. (LRG) recently reported on the pay television service subscriber counts for 2011. The numbers have not really changed much compared with 2010. The big losers continue to be the cable companies; the top 10 U.S. cable services lost more than 1.6 million subscribers in 2011. The telco services (Verizon’s FiOS and AT&T’s U-verse) picked up the lion’s share of the gains, splitting 1.5 million new video customers. The results were mixed for satellite TV services; according to LRG, DirecTV added more than 660,000 subscribers, but DISH Network dropped more than 160,000 from its rolls.

This trend is not good for cable. In a flat housing market, they continue to lose subscribers to the other services. Based on LRG’s numbers, Comcast lost about 2% of its total subscribers, Time Warner lost 4%, and Charter lost a significant 5% of its customers. It would appear that these companies will have to find a way to offer a better bargain. Maybe it will be to focus on delivering broadband services, or maybe they will be forced to offer subscription options that let viewers stop paying for all the channels that they never watch.

If there is any good news in all this, it is that the total number of pay TV subscribers increased by a modest 380,000 in 2011, in spite of the growth of streaming video over the Internet and the “cord cutting” movement.

Mobile DTV Stuck in the Mud?

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I’ve gone on the record with my pessimism about Mobile DTV, and recent events have done nothing to change my view of the situation. TV Technology recently published an article about a discussion of Mobile TV at the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) in Washington that confirms my suspicions. Jay Adrick is Vice President for Broadcast Technology at Harris Broadcast, and he was involved in the development of the standard. According to the article, he warned the others at the meeting that “if we drag this out another two or three years, it will definitely be too late.” He went on to point out that details such as a viable business model need to be resolved.

I still believe that Mobile DTV is a solution in search of a problem. Consumers no longer want to access linear programming on their mobile devices. They are already streaming content on demand on their smartphones and tablets and computers, using both WiFi and wireless broadband connections. None of their devices have the tuners required to access Mobile DTV, and I don’t think they see any compelling reason to get a device that does.

The best explanation is that television broadcasters see Mobile DTV as a way to hold onto precious radio spectrum that they are not using. They may also see it as a way to try to keep linear broadcast television relevant, though that would appear to be an uphill battle. With as little as 10% of the U.S. population dependent on over-the-air broadcasts as their sole television source, it hardly seems that adding a little mobile content to the mix is going to make any difference. We’re way past the days when a transistor radio could transform the listening habits of consumers. Today, our phones and tablets and computers deliver far more content with far more focus than radio possibly can, and television content is really no different.

At this point, Mobile DTV looks all dressed up with no place to go.

Olympic Online Coverage Will Include Every Event

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NBC will cover all 302 of the Summer Olympic medal events this summer and you can watch them all online. Well, you probably can. The coverage is only available to those viewers who already have a subscription to a cable, satellite, or telco service that includes CNBC and MSNBC. But if you have a subscription, you’ll be able to watch on your computer as well as many smartphones and tablets. With an estimated 3,500 hours of coverage in all, even the most die-hard sports fan is likely to get enough of the Olympics.

This is an interesting development. There have been rumors about Hulu requiring “validation” from television subscribers, and if that works out for its owners (which own traditional broadcast networks themselves), we can expect to see more restrictions of this sort from sites that provide “free” access to major network and movie studio content.

DVD and Blu-Ray: Exit Slowly, Stage Left

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There was a time when DVDs enjoyed the fastest new technology adoption of all time. The transition from the clumsy, snowy VHS tapes to the sleek little polycarbonate discs was driven by the fact that the digital image looked terrific even on standard definition picture tube televisions. And they look even better on flat panel HDTVs; many people still think that they’re watching high-definition content when they watch a DVD on an HDTV.

But the cycles of rise and fall continue, and it looks as though the days of getting movies on plastic DVD and Blu-ray discs are numbered. My friend and colleague Peter Putman wrote a recent column that cites some sobering statistics. Physical disc rentals dropped 25% in the first half of 2012 compared with the first half of 2011. Kiosk rentals were up by 30%, but brick and mortar rentals fell 40% and subscription rentals fell 48%. (Now do you see why Netflix has been trying to get out of the business?) By comparison, streaming video subscriptions rose 545%. (I repeat; do you see why Netflix wants to get out of renting discs?)

Now, I know that there are few options that give you a way to stream high-quality HD content at this point, so all you afficianados do not need to write and tell me about how Blu-ray is way better than streamed video. We’re talking here about the mass market, and many consumers are perfectly happy with DVD quality on their televisions, so most streamed content falls into the “good enough” category. And I also believe that there will be more and more true HD content available to stream over the Internet as the subscriber base increases. (We’re also going to see new compression standards that should help keep the bandwidth requirements down for the higher resolutions.)

The take-away here is that DVD and Blu-ray discs are on the down side of the curve, and I don’t see anything on the horizon that might change that trend.

What Is a “Direct LED” TV?

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If you haven’t noticed, there’s a new term creeping into the television industry lexicon: Direct LED TVs. And as is so often the case, the new term has created all sorts of new confusion. Here’s a quick overview of what this means.

First and foremost, this does not refer to a TV where the image is made directly by LEDs (unlike the Sony CrystalLED technology demonstration at CES 2012). It is still an LCD TV. The difference lies in how the backlight is oriented.

LCDs don’t make an image on their own; you need to shine a light through them to be able to see the picture. Originally, LCD panels had compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) behind them to create this light. Then the cost of LEDs came down some, and manufacturers put LEDs behind the panels instead. This saved energy, eliminated the environmentally-hazardous mercury used in CFLs, and improved the color performance. It also let the backlight be dimmed in different areas, which had the effect of increasing the dynamic contrast of the screen. On the other hand, the sets cost more.

Over time, the LEDs got brighter and engineers were able to create highly efficient light guides that could distribute the light from LEDs arranged along the edge of the screen, so that it would shine evenly across the back of the LCD panel. This made it possible to create the impossibly-thin flat panel TVs that you can buy today.

The high brightness LEDs remain expensive, however, and prices continue to fall for the run-of-the-mill LEDs that are used in millions of other devices. So now manufacturers have discovered that they can use more of these cheaper LEDs arranged behind the panel, and eliminate the expensive high brightness LEDs and their sophisticated light guides. The result is a television set that is a bit thicker, but that costs less than an edge-lit LCD TV. I have not seen one yet, but I would not be surprised to learn that the “direct LED” sets are not as bright as the edge-lit models, even though they use more LEDs in the backlight.

NPD DisplaySearch sees a bright future for this design. They expect direct LED models to take more than 10% of the worldwide TV market this year, driven mostly by their cost advantage. Edge-lit models will still dominate, however, with almost 60% of the worldwide market. So if you’re price sensitive, you may want to see what sort of savings you can get — and what compromises you’ll have to accept — when the direct LED models start to appear.

(By the way, while I’m quoting NPD Displaysearch numbers, let me point out that they expect the worldwide TV market to be about 250 million units this year. Of that, they expect fewer than 50,000 units to be OLED televisions. So if you’re planning on being one of the first to get an OLED TV, be prepared to spend a lot for it, because they will be rare indeed. That’s 0.02% of the worldwide total.)

Media Center, We Hardly Knew Ye!

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Microsoft initially added the Media Center feature to Windows XP. It let you watch broadcast television on your computer, as well as play DVDs, your digitized music collection, and a lot more. It was there in versions of Windows Vista and 7, but according to news reports, it will be MIA in Windows 8. Apparently, you’ll be able to get it as an extra-cost option for some versions of the new operating system.

Microsoft explained the decision by saying that only about 6% of Windows 7 users ever launched the feature. Given the wide usage of Windows in business settings, I guess that makes sense. Microsoft says that it wants to avoid paying royalties for a feature that users don’t appear to want or need. Some people are upset about this decision.

Frankly, I’m glad to see Media Center put out to pasture. I tried it on Vista when I first started using a computer in the living room. After the digital broadcast transition, my hard-disk DVR no longer worked because it only had analog tuners. I dropped a tuner card in a PC and connected it to my big screen, and gave up on Media Center after a couple of days. The interface was a pain to use, the DVR features were limited, and it couldn’t even find the sub-channels in the digital broadcasts.

The fact that Microsoft has done little to improve on that experience is one of the reasons that I believe that Microsoft’s heart really isn’t in delivering television. It’s happy that so many people are using the Xbox to connect their TVs to the Internet, but I don’t see any evidence that they want to get into the business of helping people find the content to watch using that connection. And as a result, I expect Microsoft to get left behind as the home entertainment environment continues to evolve. It’s possible that Kinect may find a niche as a gesture control device for this new world of television, but I think that broad gestures to control a TV across the room is not going to be a popular solution (nor will a speech-recognition device, either).

So don’t count me among those mourning the departure of Media Center from Windows. It was behind the curve when it arrived, and it has not kept up. We’ll likely have to look elsewhere for help in navigation our new media choices.

The Return of Google TV!

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According to a Reuters report, LG is going to start shipping televisions based on the Google TV platform before the end of May. Manufacturing of the sets is slated to begin May 17 in Mexico.

This is Round 2 for Google TV which drew a lot of interest before it put on the brakes and asked partners not to show products with it at CES 2011. This next version has a solid set of partners, including Samsung, Sony, and VIZIO in addition to LG. It remains to be seen whether the new interface is enough to make the feature a selling point. The platform should make it easier to search for and discover content across a number of sources, and it will also offer special features for DISH Network subscribers.

Clearly, Smart TVs are appealing to U.S. consumers as the attach rate of television sets to the Internet is climbing steadily. Whether or not Google TV offers enough “special sauce” to make it stand out from all the other connected options remains a question that probably won’t be answered until Google TV sets become available from the other manufacturers.