LIVEdigitally

So AppleTV is officially shipping, and as I saw on Engadget, Walt Mossberg has already reviewed it.  Some excerpts:

… we can easily recommend it for people who are yearning for a simple way to show on their big TVs all that stuff trapped on their computers.

Apple is hoping that, just as the iPod trumped earlier, but geekier, rivals, Apple TV can do the same by making a complex task really simple.

The review continues on, and Walt gushes about the device quite a bit.  The only competitor he points out is the Xbox 360, which he dismisses because it’s twice the price.  I think this is a dangerous dismissal, as the price points aren’t really the issue in this category yet.  We are in early early adopter-land, which means the people who really want it, are gonna buy it. $299, $399, $599, whatever.  The bigger question to ask is: is this really a market they can dominate?

In 2 years, over 20 million Xbox 360s have shipped, and as The Online Reporter observes, the biggest Apple TV competitor could already be on the market.  Xbox 360 owners who have the Live service tend to love it, my friend (and fellow blogger and now Sling Media employee) Dave Zatz told me he felt the 360 was the best device he bought last year. Also, the NETGEAR EVA8000, which I reviewed last week boasts a more robust feature set at a similar price point.  I read a lot of conjecture about how “Apple TV is just like iPod year 1″ but folks, I’m saying now it’s not anywhere close.

When Apple launched the iPod, the category already existed (even if you ignore other mp3 players, people already were comfortable with buying portable music devices).  The problem then was: there was no really convenient way to get existing and new music collections on to portable MP3 players.  I had a Rio Karma, it was great (like really great), but you had to be pretty savvy to get music onto it, and there was ZERO services on the Internet with new content.  In the living room, on the other hand, it’s not just a question of simplicity and furthermore, there’s tons of content out there.  It’s not hard to get “mainstream” video to a TV set, especially in comparison with the challenge of getting “mainstream” music to an MP3 player (circa 1999).

Now I’m not dismissing the product, nor am I dismissing Apple’s ability to move their marketing muscle into the living room.  But this certainly isn’t a slam dunk.  Take a time out to read Thomas Hawk’s list of why he isn’t interested in the “dongle”, then go check out Phil Swann’s reasons why he thinks Apple TV will “bomb”.  If you aren’t too saturated, I’d also stop by WIRED’s fair and balanced thoughts on why it “rules and sucks”.

Here are some of my specific problems with the product (note that I haven’t used it hands-on, so I have no comments about it’s user interface, which is probably great):

• No YouTube support.  This is a very questionable move at this stage of Internet/video/PC/TV convergence.  The EVA8000 does it, and after a few days using it, it’s a very fun application. 
• Widescreen-only.  I love the HDTV market, and about one third of all new TVs sold are flat (which implies widescreen), so that’s a lot of screens (I’ve read before the number of households is in the 20 million range, but cannot find that source to quote here).  But this is the kind of product decision that creates returns, something I have a feeling Apple doesn’t have to deal with in other categories.  Also, there’s a distinct lack of HD content offered at launch, which makes this even more… ironic?
• A computer must be on all the time.  One thing I like very much about my Sonos and EVA8000 setups are they work directly with my networked hard drive (aka a “NAS“).  With the Apple TV, I need a PC/Mac on all the time, and while this is clearly a growing trend, it’s a requirement I don’t like in a product this expensive (it’s one thing for a $99 media adapter, it’s another at $299). UPDATE: I was corrected (by Ben at EngadgetHD), I misread the usage with it’s internal hard drive.

Is it a good product?  Probably. After all, Walt is a pretty picky guy, and even though he clearly has an affinity for Apple products, he seemed impressed (although he didn’t really talk about video quality in the review, which is an interesting omission).  Also, Apple does tend to make the product experience great, and I’ve got to assume that heavy iTunes customers are going to think this thing was sent down from the stars above.  As Sonos’ worldwide PR manager Thomas Meyer said to me, “Mr. jobs is definitely going to do this right.” 

My hunch is they’ll do a very good job appealing to that core market, but have a tougher time getting beyond.  I don’t think they’ll be as strong in the HDTV segment as they want to be, as even enthusiasts such as Ben Drawbaugh (contributing editor at Engadget HD) who thinks “it’ll be awesome” (and has blogged about wanting one) doesn’t think it’ll be all that useful for HD content.   If I were Apple, I’d be doing everything I could to get associated to HDTV, as betting on the future is more important than the past.

I’d guess they can out-market a company like NETGEAR in this space (but will probably drive them unit sales for some of the reasons I stated above). I think they’ll probably be the #1 leader in “digital media adapters” by the end of this year, and can probably move over 100K units in 2007 alone.  That said, I don’t think they are positioned to utterly dominate the living room the way they do in the portable space. 

Intro
In 1999 when I cofounded Mediabolic, we had a vision of the “connected home” that we pitched all over the world. In 2000, I first started hearing (and using) the phrase “THIS is the year of the Digital Home” (yes, in all-caps). I’ve heard that phrase every year since, but have yet to see the vision come even close to reality. So when I saw the first demo of NETGEAR’s Digital Entertainer HD at CES 2007, I was fairly impressed, and began pestering them to try it day-in, day-out. With my current role as the company’s current guest blogger, I got exactly that - early access to play with the EVA8000 (which formally launched earlier this week).

Unfortunately, I got my unit with less than 10 hours before I hopped on a flight to the East Coast, but like any good geeky blogger would do, I spent about half the night playing with it. Not only that, I spent most of that time videoing my efforts, and edited it down to about 20 minutes (most of which shows the interaction with the device, it’s GUI, etc). The videos are available on YouTube (in 3 parts, because of their filesize limitation) and you can watch them here (for people in RSS readers, here are direct links to parts 1, 2, and 3):

Product Details
For those of you who don’t want to watch the video, here’s a quick summary of the main EVA8000 features:

• Connects to your TV and your home network
• Streams music, photos, and videos from connected PCs as well as from the Internet
• Support for numerous video formats, and stream quality is up to 1080p HDTV resolution
• Works with YouTube, Flickr, and BitTorrent content, and can display RSS feeds
• Networked DVR (”TiVo-like”) features to stream live TV from PCs with TV tuner cards
• Makes a mean bowl of tomato soup

Pretty simple and straightforward, eh?

The product retails for $399, which is probably high in the long-term, but for now is a decent price point. Since we’re still in such an early adopter timeframe for digital home products, I don’t think there is a real urgency to focus on the mass market. Further, if you consider the pricing on HD/BluRay DVD players, it really fits in pretty well (especially since the amount of content it can play is staggering). Obviously sub-$300 prices would be ideal, but, as someone who comes from the other side of the field, I understand exactly why it’s priced this way. Also, don’t forget that it’s always possible to have a sale, but never possible to raise a price…

Using the Digital Entertainer HD
Onto the EVA8000 itself. I liked the user interface (GUI) in that it’s simple and navigates quickly (much faster than, for example a MovieBeam or Comcast HD-DVR menu). If you’ve ever used a TiVo or Media Center PC, you shouldn’t have any problem getting it up and running. The installation is also quite simple, and the unit has all the important outputs (HDMI, SPDIF, and optical audio) as well as the less-important-but-probably-necessary-ones (component, composite, and stereo audio). For connectivity it has built in wireless 802.11g (with support for all the security formats - excellent), Ethernet and a couple of USB ports as well.

The setup went mostly smoothly (although I think I found a weird bug in the HDMI settings, but that’s a minor thing), and it was able to find my network, get online, download an update, and find my networked hard drive with me just following along with the remote. This is very important people - I didn’t have to install any software, drivers, or anything, and was able to get my music, photos, and videos all streaming in a matter of minutes.

There was one exception to the above: if you want to watch YouTube videos, you do need to have the PC software installed. Furthermore, please remember that I already have a properly configured networked drive (Maxtor Shared Storage Plus) streaming music to my Sonos, so I didn’t have to adjust any settings. If you haven’t ever streamed media on your home network before, this might take you a little longer, and you may need to use the PC software.

Regarding media playback performance for a moment. I looked at quite a few photos, and I didn’t really feel they were being displayed at the maximum resolution possible. This could be a trick of the eyes, but I was expecting the pictures to look “HD-like” since they are all resolutions of 720p (at a minimum), so I’ll have to look into this further to see if it was just user error or if the box can’t display them at full resolution. Music playback was spot-on, with only a minor delay between songs. Again, I need to dive deeper to understand the feature set around queuing music, making playlists, and performance with huge collections, but when I selected “play something” from my 15,000-song MP3 (and WMA) collection, it did exactly that. Last up is video - I didn’t have a chance to really put the HD features to a test, but will do that next week. The videos I played were in a range of formats, and the highest bitrate I used was a 2Mbps WMV clip, which looked perfect (yes, even wirelessly). I am curious to see how it stands up once I get the 6+Mbps videos going, but I don’t have any reasons to doubt its potential there.

One key set of features with the EVA8000 is its ability to act as an extension of a PC with a TV tuner card. This means you can have a PC in one room of the house and stream its live/recorded TV to the living room. As a Slingbox owner, this wasn’t something I needed personally, but if you do have a TV Tuner and use Orb or another service, you should look into the Digital Entertainer HD. Also, the hardware was designed to support multiple Entertainers on the same network, and even have them control each other (there’s actually a whole suite of “Follow Me” features that I missed out on since I only had the single unit). Naturally, I wasn’t able to try any of these features myself, so I’ll hope to come back and revisit in the future.

One ding to the product is in the PC software. While it was easy to install and seems to have a pretty low impact to performance, it did create a whole new “sound card” in my computer. This means Windows thinks there is another audio output, and it threw off a couple of programs until I realized it had happened. I didn’t see any way to disable this on installation, so once you’ve completed setup, you might want to double-check your PC’s audio settings.

I really enjoyed the integration with both YouTube and Flickr. I was browsing through my own content in just a few minutes (you can use the remote control’s 10-key for text entry the same way you use your cell phone’s keypad). While I couldn’t quite navigate the collections and all the settings both services offered, the EVA8000 is remote upgradeable (I’ve already gone through one upgrade process - worked fine), so I’m sure the folks at NETGEAR can react and add new options dwn the road. The unit also is compatible with RSS feeds and has a few built-in offerings, including some weather features that were quite nice (even a snow report for the Tahoe crowds). I didn’t try the BitTorrent services, since I am not a user (believe it or not, I’ve never ‘Torrented).

Conclusion
If you skipped the videos and just read the text, you missed half the story, so here are (again) links to parts 1, 2, and 3. Now Apple TV is coming soon (possibly within days or hours), and the Xbox 360 has a lot of personal media services as well. I like the EVA8000 against Apple specifically because it can play so many different file formats and is focused on open services, while Apple’s will have a much narrower set and is a completely closed platform. It seems like everyone’s utterly ceded control of music to them, I sure hope it doesn’t happen again in the living room. With products like the Digital Entertainer HD, it’s good to see they have a pretty strong set of competitors.

Overall, the product impressed me (a lot more than I was expecting - no knock to NETGEAR, but I’ve just seen so many similar products that were just terrible in the past). Perfect? No, but I’ve yet to see a single product in the “connected home” that is. The interface was clean and simple, and the unit performed as it should. A few nice bells and whistles of Internet content services did a great job rounding out the personal media streaming features. $399 is a little high (it’s $349 on Amazon), but it’s also the only game in town with both full 1080p support and the built-in integration with YouTube content, all delivered direct to the boob tube.

I really have to dive in even deeper to understand the full spectrum of features the unit offers, and figure out which ones I like/dislike, but most importantly - the product’s basic value proposition is definitely delivered in a good way. With the feature set I’ve seen so far, it is a very strong contender (quick and simple setup as well as HD streaming is a huge factor there). So if you are looking to find a way to play your digital videos on your TV, stream your MP3s to your stereo, and bring some Web media services straight to the living room, the EVA8000 is a solid option for you.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, I am working on a consulting project with NETGEAR, but this is of no bearing to this review. Furthermore, my Guest Blogger status merely granted me access to a unit, I was given free reign to write the review as I saw fit.

Almost a year ago I wrote a review of MovieBeam, wherein I described it as a good, but pricey product.  Since then, a few promos to get the box for $49-149 were offered.  Endcaps at Best Buys were installed.  A few other influential people tried it out.  But it doesn’t seem like much has helped get their sales going. 

When I was first sent a unit, I was told Ethernet support would come by the Summer (of 2006).  It didn’t.  Furthermore, the movie selection over the past few months has mirrored what I typically see on United flights: a few good movies I missed in the theaters supplemented with a list of things I would never watch (although I did get a full 23 minutes into Snakes on a Plane before shutting it down).  This combined with a fairly non-competitive price point was a bit of a circle of doom, in my eyes.

Zatz reported today that Movie Gallery (an East Coast movie chain) is buying them (for under $10 million - ouch), and I wonder what they will do.  Here are the “big” options I see:

• Keep it running as is, tie in the Movie Gallery brand. 
  This is probably the worst option for them.  The current service just isn’t compelling enough against all the new VOD, IPTV, and HD options from a huge variety of players (including Joost, which I’m now trying out - more on that soon).
• Shut it down, leverage the MovieBeam brand for a new IPTV service.
  Not bad, as the name does have a nice ring to it, and they have already cleared a huge hurdle of IP distribution rights.  $10 million isn’t a bad deal to get all the relationships with Hollywood in the IP arena (which is virtually completely different that running a video store).  Not bad, but also probably doesn’t have enough legs for longevity.
• Switch the model into service-based, compete with Netflix.
  This might be the most obvious and logical model for the company.  By using the box, they can offer a subscription service with no need for mailing anything.  Granted it still uses the same datacasting system, but with their access to content libraries combined with a huge customer base, offering it up as a $9.99/month (free loaner box) package could be compelling.  Also, the HD content is a nice plus here.
• Do the above, but add Ethernet for live streaming and community features.
  If the MovieBeam box was able to stream content live, as well as give me a nice suite of personalization and community/social features, I think we’re in the money.  Especially if I can access huge libraries of content, manage my ‘queue’, select movies to watch with friends, etc.  Also, this opens up the notion of partnerships with Joost or even TV studios for new service opportunities.

Now nothing they are going to do will help improve the performance of the remote/box, but that doesn’t mean they can’t spin out a new unit in the next year.  I hope they look at this as a chance to innovate and differentiate.  I hope they see the potential of what could be done in a “digital home gone right” scenario. 

Nobody’s done it right yet, but the Xbox 360 is close, and Apple TV could be a good shot.  We’ll see if MovieBeam comes back with a vengeance, or just fades into the obscurity of interesting convergence ideas gone wrong (where it enjoys the wonderful company of the Audrey).

As any of my regular readers have figured out, I love CES, it’s my favorite technology conference (as opposed to CeBIT, which is my least favorite - ugh, Hannover). The next-most enjoyable tech activities to me are the ones where you get to see upcoming stuff that’s either just reaching the market as well as the stuff that may never hit the market (Wired’s NextFest is a great example). So when I heard about O’reilly’s eTel conference here in my own backyard (SF Airport Marriott), I thought it sounded like a good thing to check out.

Here’s the official blurb:

Opportunity Doesn’t Always Knock, Sometimes it Calls. Have you answered the call yet to attend the hottest telephony conference of the year? The Emerging Telephony Conference takes place next week February 27 to March 1, 2007 in Burlingame, California. ETel explores the strategies for taming disruption and exploiting opportunities being created by web telephony innovations.

You can see the list of speakers here and the full schedule is here. I’m not exactly sure if I’ll make it to all the sessions or just 2 of the days, but if anyone wants to geek out at lunch or something, get in touch.

Also, the kind folks at O’Reilly are giving LD readers a special 40% off discount. Not too shabby, eh? Register today with code etel07fnf40.

They’ve tried before, they’re trying again.  Rumors circulate today that XM and Sirius are planning a merger (Updated to include Mark Evans and Ars Technica.  Updated again: it’s official).  The two companies together would represent about 13 million subscribers (6 million from Sirius, 7.6 million from XM), with a ~$8B market cap ($615/subscriber today), about $2B in debt, and roughly $600M in cash on hand (source: financial stats for SIRI and XMSR).  Interesting, as Echostar has roughly the same subscriber base, more profitability (and more room for profitability), yet only twice the market cap.

Another interesting thought is on room for growth. 13 million subscribers represents roughly 6% of the ~240M cars in use around the US, or 10% of households, depending on which model you think is more successful (I vote car).  So I ponder how much of a real growth opportunity lays ahead?

Apparently Howard Stern believes 30-40M households in the next couple of years. Bridge Ratings predicts 50 million subscribers by 2020.  That’s 1 in 5 drivers paying for satellite service.  This sounds high to me, from industry, professional, and personal experience.  I don’t see enough factors driving consumers into “dissatisfaction” with standard radio, especially when compared to the option of consumer more of their own content via iPods and other players.

Some predict podcasting and integrated car-iPod adapters may kill satellite radio.  That doesn’t really sound right either.  Talk to the average XM or Sirius subcriber, they seem quite satisfied with their service.  I think satellite radio has a “TiVo effect” where the product is quite good, and once in, you are hooked, but until you get there, you scratch your head a lot about paying extra money for something you seem to already have in your life. 

Unfortunately, unlike a DVR, which makes the entire TV experience leaps and bounds better, satellite radio doesn’t have as broad an appeal.  If you don’t commute for long hours, you’re hard to hook.  If you work long hours at a desk and want more variety in radio, odds are good that Internet services have even more appeal (not to mention the fact that if you aren’t near a window, you aren’t getting a satellite signal).

We’re about 5 years into the satellite radio business.  I believe there’s still a little growth ahead, but it’s going to be slow, and may cap out very soon.  I believe the companies benefit from a merger, as it leaves less FUD for a prospective consumer.  I believe it’s an industry doomed once pervasive Internet services become available and consumers get anywhere-access to services such as Rhapsody, Pandora, Last.FM, and their own personal media collections.

I’ve worked in the field of digital media and consumer technology for about 8 years now, and for all eight years, I’ve heard people predicting the imminent change and overhaul of the TV industry.  Back in the late nineties, it was the dawn of interactive television.  In the early 2000s, it was the dawn of IPTV, about to be launched by all the telcos everywhere.  For the last couple of years, it’s the end of TV, as it’ll be completely replaced by streaming Internet video and user-generated content (UGC).

Guess what folks, the one hundred and ten million households (that’s 110,000,000) who consume cable and satellite TV are a lot further away from big change than some experts seem to think.  Steve Rubel wrote a piece yesterday which I feel contains exactly the examples of misplaced hype:

The race is on to turn your TV into an open content platform. This will bring more programming to your set and much of it won’t come from the traditional networks. Conspicuously absent from the game are your local cable and satellite providers. Should they fail to act, they all run the risk of turning into commodity services.

…

If you wanted to, you can already ditch your cable or satellite provider. Wired news ran an experiment a few months back showing that it is possible to get a lot of content on your set without them, though there are still lots of caveats. As the big technologies players continue to refine their IPTV strategy, the need for cable TV programming will diminish.

It is most certainly possible to do such a thing, but in an era of increasing HDTV programming (DirecTV is en route to 100 HD channels this year), why on earth would you make such a change?  I watch Heroes pretty religiously.  Now I can stream every episode from NBC.com, which is a great way for people to catch up with the show, but the viewing experience doesn’t even come close to the one I have now. 

Now I suppose I could find an illegal download of the HDTV version, then hook up a PC to my TV set (or buy one of the upcoming “connected home” devices), then watch it that way.  But that’s a major shlep for the masses, and most certainly, in every way, a worse experience than using even a cable-company provided DVR (because $800 for a Series3 is still too much, no matter how great the product is).

We also saw a report circulate recently claiming YouTube users watch less TV.

Frequent YouTube users said they are spending less time visiting other websites (36 percent) less time watching TV (32 percent), less time on email and other online social networking (20 percent), and, well, less time on just about everything else.

I guess I’m just too much of a disbeliever in studies like these, and for one basic reason:  most people tend to say they watch less TV when polled.  It’s as if all of TV watching were merely a guilty pleasure.  Yet, reports show Americans are watching more TV than ever before (whether you like Nielsen or not, it is still considered the de facto standard in TV viewership information).

Now I do believe in an increase of video consumption, and believe that the use of both PC-based TV watching and Internet-enabled TVs are on the rise.  I believe we will see an increased quantity of diverse options as to how we choose to watch TV.  In fact, after all we accomplished at Sling Media, I was surprised to see articles this week with the non-evil-doing Googlers claiming the Internet can’t deliver TV content yet (recommended reading from GigaOm, ZatzNotFunny, and WebTVWire).  Sure it can, it’s just a question of how it should be used.

In my Mac-PC video debate last month, Fred Davis and I diverted to talking about broadcast vs IPTV delivered television, which Josh Catone chimed in on in his blog as well.  I believe the future on this topic is going to be determined primarily from an economic basis.  At present, we have the infrastructure in place where, if desired, every single household in the US can watch the same TV show live in real-time.  Broadcasting of content requires no new infrastructure build-out (unless, of course, we want a lot more HD stuff, which, of course, we do).  Doing the same thing over IP networks wouldn’t work, and wouldn’t even come close.

So why bother trying to make it work?  It simply doesn’t make sense to build out a massive IP infrastructure to do it.  However, let’s say that at any given time, all 110MM households want to watch a “recent episode” of a show (say, last week’s Heroes).  Best method possible?  Give them all DVRs, use the broadcast pipe to get it to the house, let them watch it time-shifted however they’d like. 

But now let’s say that all 110MM households want to watch radically different content, such as the episode of The Facts of Life where Blair learns a very important lesson, or that very special Blossom.  Then, having access to a personalized, on-demand IP network is ideal.  It’s costly to build, costly to maintain, and time-consuming to construct (not to mention dealing with the graphical user interface complexities), but it’s the right model.

Ultimately, I do believe in a future wherein a hybrid of services are available.  But it’s the future, and not the present, and there is a lot less of a rush to make it happen than we in the technology community might like.  Cable companies have increased billing rates higher than inflation for almost 10 consecutive years (since good old, helpful to consumers deregulation - that’s sarcasm people).  The costs to get an IP service off the ground are staggering (ask the people at companies like Akimbo for validation).

So I’ll end by making my conservative prediction:  the majority of US households will continue to consume television the way they do today for no less than 5 years, and even then the changes will be gradual and evolutionary, not drastic and revolutionary.

According to this article, for only $350 you can buy a pair of shoes with GPS built-in.  Sounds like a steal, except there’s also a $19.95 monthly fee. 

For shoes.

With GPS.

Hmmm.

So, part of the reason to do this?  Find someone you think is lost, say an elderly relative or a child.  Only catch is, the only way to activate the “find them” feature is by the wearer pushing a button on the shoe.  That’s just not going to work very well is it?

There’s a lot of attention toward GPS these days.  I love the technology, and I love my GPS unit, but I totally believe it’s a dying device category.  A lot of next-generation mobile phones have GPS chips embedded, and that’s really the most logical place for it to exist, especially when you consider the incredibly poor in-dash receivers built-into the higher end cars.  Funny how you can pay an extra $3000 for a badly built ‘option’ or save a lot of your money and buy a standalone unit.

If you really want some GPS in your life (and I don’t blame you), for about $450, you can buy my favorite GPS unit, the Nuvi 350 (amazon link), and give it to your kids.  Probably more useful this way anyway. 

I love my Nuvi.

I don’t want a Nuvi Shoe, but I definitely want a Nuvi phone (long before I want my Zune phone).

I just read this Reuters article about the “desk of the future” in which the designer (Herman Miller) is incorporating wireless power technology from eCoupled (a competitor to WildTangent, who I saw at CES last week - more on eCoupled at Engadget).  I love the concept of wireless chargers, and I love the concept of building them into existing products such as furniture and cars (the Reuters article discusses both). 

What I don’t like is this part…

But no mobile devices will have eCoupled built in by that time, so Visteon customers will have to purchase an adapter from Mobility Electronics Inc., said Walter Thornton of Mobility Electronics.

Available this summer, the adapter will be able to work with Motorola phones, Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod Shuffle and other gadgets, Thornton said.

This is actually the same flaw I have with the WildTangent system - it puts too much burden on the consumer and requires too much of a behavioral change.  This whole system is designed to make charging devices more convenient, not less.  Here’s a quick analysis on the process after and before (intentionally in that order).

After (in other words, you bought the desk)
1. Remove cell phone from pocket (it’s not on your belt, is it?  c’mon)
2. Look around cluttered desk for special charging adapter
3. Insert phone into adapter
4. Leave phone on desk until charged
5. Remove phone from adapter
6. Place adapter somewhere “you’ll remember later” (causing at least 10 minutes of searching next time you want to find it, since you inevitably place it in that one drawer you never open)

Before (in other words, today, without the desk)
1. Remove cell phone from pocket
2. Connect to charger which you have at your desk already
3. Leave phone on desk until charged
4. Remove phone from charger

In my opinion, this is a clear case of technology being released to consumers way too soon.  This fits none of the bill of: faster, better, cheaper.  Maybe next year this’ll actually get easy, but only once the following has come true…

Phonemakers will embed eCoupled soon after Visteon releases its product, Hazlett said.

However, Motorola would not comment and Lynch refuses to get really excited until Motorola is on board.

“I’m hoping that they do get the (device) manufacturers to buy into this so that it doesn’t fizzle out,” Lynch added.

Update: thoughts from Engadget and CrunchGear.

Long long ago (last year), in an office far, far away (San Mateo), Blake Krikorian (Sling Media CEO) had a vision wherein Slingbox owners could easily share clips from favorite TV shows with each other. We knew it was a good idea, but didn’t want to push to far forward due to industry relations, copyright issues, bandwidth issues, etc. Looks like they’ve come a long way in the few months since I left, and a lot of these issues got worked out, which is very exciting. They announced two major new things at CES 2007: SlingCatcher and Clip+Sling.

SlingCatcher coverage is fairly pervasive, and I’ll hold off on adding any commentary of my own until we get closer to product launch. Watch this video or read about it at Zatz Not Funny, Engadget, Crave UK, MobilitySite, or ShinyShiny.

For Clip+Sling I was able to attend Les Moonves’ keynote during CES, and recorded a video of the whole demonstration:

It was great to watch Blake up there, especially as Chad Hurley had been on stage as well. YouTube is definitely great for user-generated content, like the videos we all make with our cameras these days. It’s a real pain for most users, however, when it comes to TV content. Most consumers have no idea how to record video to their PC, or even worse how to edit down to the clips they want. I think Clip+Sling with a centrally hosted server launched in conjunction with CBS and other networks could be extremely disruptive in the online video space. I’m looking forward to the launch later this year.

More Clip+Sling coverage: Engadget, Laptop magazine, PVRWire, SlingCommunity, and Zatz Not Funny.

Disclosure: I am a former Sling Media employee and have some stock. In fact, I just found a couple of videos of me doing Slingbox demos with the nice people at BuyTV (and the Slingbox Pro too)

Also, I video’d the CBS “media” presentation during the keynote.

Opening disclosure: I am working on a consulting project with Netgear, but that work is unrelated to my blogging about them.  I was invited to their press conference and chose to attend and got to see three new products that I was previously unaware of.  This blog post is because I am genuinely amazed with a product of theirs.

Now, onto the story.  Netgear had a press conference this morning and unveiled three new products which I will list and describe in ascending order of excitement and interestingness.  Before the demos, Debbie Williams (Netgear’s Chief Marketing Officer) gave a brief “state of the union” for the company.  Basically: 10 years old, market cap of $883M, products sold in >16K retailers, and they introduced 50 new products in 2006 (methinks about 42 of them were routers, but I guess it counts anyway, right?).  She then went on to discuss how 2006 was the year of building the home network for the digital lifestyle (love that term, but I think I may have heard it before), and 2007 is the year of delivering the experience. She then introduced Vivek Pathela, Netgear’s VP of Product Marketing to do the demos (again, listed here in my order, not theirs):

1. Storage Central Turbo.  This updates 2005’s Storage Central device by adding the capacity to expand to multiple terabytes of data as well as gigabit Ethernet.  If you aren’t paying attention to the bits and bytes, it means it can store and stream HD movies around your house.  This is a fairly evolutionary/logical enhancement to the product line.  The MSRP is $249 (with no included hard drives, which makes sense since it’s so much cheaper for you to buy your own anyway) and the product should ship “early” this year.  More pics:
   
2. Dual-Mode Cordless Phone with Skype. Now we’re seeing some interesting convergence happen.  Quite a few companies introduced Skype or VoIP phones in 2006, some worked well, some didn’t.  Netgear seems to have added a clever twist by incorporating a standard telephone in the same handset (aka Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS).  This is a very smart combination, as it lets a consumer have just a single home phone that can work with both Skype and POTS systems.  Also, you can get multiple handsets all working with the same base station (although an audience member asked a great question: can more than one handset make a simultaneous POTS call? which stumped the Netgear team - I sure hope it’s a yes).  The demo went great as Vivek called Patrick Lo, Netgear’s CEO, and had a quick live call with near-excellent audio quality.  MSRP $199, available now (on Amazon)!
   
3. EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD.  Oh my is this one interesting.  It’s a, well, “box” that hooks up to your TV and your home network connection.  It then streams your music, photos, and videos from any PC or networked storage device (NAS) to your TV.  It also streams from YouTube (they demoed a classic Diet Coke/Mentos video, which about 90% of the audience reacted as if they’d never seen it before - wow).  It also works in high definition (up to 1080p resolution), including full upscaling/downscaling of video.  It supports almost every video codec, including MPEG-4 HD, WMV HD, DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, etc etc.  It also streams iTunes (including protected content if from a Windows PC, sorry Mac folks).  It also has USB to locally connect a flash drive or an iPod.  It also supports multiple units so you can start a video in one room, then finish it in another.  It also has full PVR (TiVo-like) capabilities.  And from the demo, it looks like it works very well!  As a guy who has spent about 8 years designing award-winning devices just like these, I am quite impressed.  Quite!  MSRP $349, available early 2007.
   

I’ve seen a bit of other coverage already of the conference.  MacUser compares it against iTV and calls the UI “uninspired” which is a fair point, but I think making comparisons against a product that’s not really been “announced” yet isn’t quite appropriate.  Also, I disagree that Apple will beat the $349 price point, as I think they’d rather rip into their loyal customer base who are more willing to overpay for the Apple brand.  More coverage from Ed Kohler, Eric Savitz at Barron’s, Gadgetell, and SciFi.com, but for very extensive details, here’s the Engadget transcript.  I also bumped into Dave Zatz (with Sakshi Goel of Netgear), Netgear’s resident CES blogger.

So there’s my front-runner for most interesting new product of CES: the Netgear Digital Entertainer HD.  We’ll see how the rest of the show pans out!  More Netgear conference pics below and the whole CES collection is here.

While this certainly doesn’t capture all the company memories, it reflects many of mine (or at least the ones I took pictures of, with my old Kodak DC210 single-megapixel digital camera)…

2000-2001: the early years
Sure the company was founded in 1999, but it was in a different office and we were really beyond tiny back then (and were called even channelDOT for a few weeks).  We established worldwide HQ at 1525 Union Street, a convenient block from my apartment at the time. 

Back in these days, while we were pitching the vision of the “connected home” we were really up against a lot of negativity.  We had to explain why consumers would likely network their homes in the next few years (we were right) and why they would, in turn, have networked media devices in the same timeframe (not so right).  I remember listening to a major consumer electronics manufacturer share their vision of the future: embed SD cards into every device instead of a network port.  Wow.

Also at the time we developed on a “ready to go” embedded Linux platform using chips from National Semiconductor (ah, the trusty Geode). At the time, virtually every company seeking to bring new products, features, or services to the TV were using the exact same box.  I have a hunch more were used by developers and demos than were ever brought to market (although Pioneer sure came close!).

CES 2001 was the first year we demonstrated at a trade show.  We had a suite at the Venetian and spent about 48 hours prior to the beginning of the show transforming it into our demo home.  We wired a network (under the carpets mind you), took over the TV sets, and hung our own posterboards instead of the hotel’s artwork.  The bathroom became the storage “cluster” and the whole thing was topped off with a bowl of blue M&M’s.  For the branding, of course.

While CES was the first show for the year, it was Comdex 2001 (you remember Comdex, right?) where we got out into the public eye (a little bit).  As partners with National Semiconductor, we had a kiosk in their booth.  Both Woody Deguchi (the VP of Asian Sales - also the Asian VP of Sales, but that’s a bit of an inside joke for Woody and myself) and myself had TV appearances, and I even demoed to Paul Allen and his gang (no joke, he was surrouded by about 12-15 people at all times). 

2002-2003: real products

It’s one thing to demonstrate a vision of the future.  It’s another thing to showcase products that are en route to the consumer marketplace.  Pioneer worked with us on the Digital Library, a “media server for the living room” along with it’s companion “media client” for other rooms of the house.  At CES 2003 I actually got on stage with Pioneer’s hired talent (yes, I was invited) to help explain the product, as it was so new to both the company and the consumers.

We also had deals with HP, Fujitsu, and Creative Labs (and a few others to boot), all interested in the networked home and networked entertainment products.  In fact, there was such interest in our platform, we ended up hosting an Interoperability Forum in Japan, and had over 15 different manufacturers send senior engineers to come listen and learn from us.  We were concerned that UPnP, the de facto standard for device-to-device interoperability simply wasn’t strong enough to provide a useful value proposition for consumers.  We were right on that one, but the “M1 standard” wasn’t really the right strategy for the company to pursue either, and was eventually shelved.

During this phase we achieved partnerships with other technology and infrastructure companies, including Intel (a relationship that blossomed for several years).  We attended trade shows around the world (I was unfortunately introduced to CeBIT) and it was my first year as a United 1K member.  Again, a blessing and a curse.

2004: best of show
I’ll never forget CES 2004.  We were in development of a series of products with Denon Electronics, including the flagship NS-S100.  This device was a networked DVR with dual tuners and a removable hard drive.  It could do just about anything you’d ever want a DVR to do.  Best of all, you could very easily start watching a show (or live TV) in one room and pick it up in another room.  It did everything.  And it did it all really really well.

A team of judges from TechTV (read: two guys slightly less geeky than me) came by to see the product.  They liked it (heck, most people liked it).  They came back with a film crew, took a bunch of footage and told us when they’d announce finalists, which we were in the “home media device” category. They returned for more footage.  After asking me three times if I was sure we’d have someone there, I had a little bit of a good feeling about things.  It also helped that, at the time, there weren’t any other major new or exciting products in the same space.  Brad Dietrich (cofounder and CTO and coworker of mine since we both went to CMU in Pittsburgh!) and I went to the award ceremonies.  When we won in our category, I was thrilled.  When, less than 10 minutes later, we won the Best Overall for CES award, well, there were no words for the joy I felt.  I was practically in tears and called my then-girlfriend (now wife) then my parents.  I’ll never forget the moment, and once I find which backup drive it’s on, I’ll put up a little video on YouTube.

I left Mediabolic in June of 2004 to join Sling Media as VP of Product Management.  It was a difficult decision at many levels, but was the right one for me.  The experiences learned and connections made at Mediabolic helped prepare me for my next career move, and are really the foundations of much of what I do professionally.  Needless to say, they carried the torch quite well in my absence, hired some great talent, and now, with the Macrovision acquisition have the opportunity to bring excellence in networked entertainment to the masses.

Thanks Dan & co for all the great times and great memories, and congratulations once more.

For the most diligent of my readers, you may recall Mediabolic, the company I cofounded back in 1999 with Dan Putterman and Brad Dietrich (the CEO and CTO, respectively).   It’s a very exciting day as they were just acquired by Macrovision for $43 million US (official press release, SVSJ mention, reuters, SJ Merc, or find more at Google News).  Congratulations to everyone at Mediabolic!

For more details on the acquisition, you can read this letter (PDF format) from the CEOs of both companies.  This is the kind of deal that seems to make a lot of sense for both parties.  Macrovision already has technology inside many consumer electronics devices (for example, all VCRs and DVD players).  Mediabolic has a suite of digital home technologies (more about this topic at WSJ today) that are clearly a part of the future of consumer electronics.  Win-win.

I guess this means today was the day I became a serial entrepreneur!  Just kidding, I actually don’t like that term at all, but it sure does feel great to see a company that I cofounded have a nice exit.  It’s not exactly a “life-changing event” but it is certainly a great event nonetheless!

I’ll put up a little photolog from the 5 years I was there later today to share a few memories.