Dish Network plans to offer a satellite broadband service that will allow people in rural areas to access the Internet. The company hopes to launch the service by September or October.
Dish will use an EchoStar satellite for the service. The satellite can deliver 15 megabits per second, but Dish’s service will offer 5 megabits per second in order to serve more customers, sources tell Bloomberg.
The slower data rates will allow Dish to serve up to two million customers with the service.
Dish and ViaSat currently partner to offer satellite broadband, but cover only limited parts of the United States. The new satellite service will cover every region.
The company will likely need to add more satellites if it wishes to maintain at least 5 megabit per second speeds while expanding beyond two million customers.
Dish CEO Joseph Clayton explains that Dish’s service is meant to serve the “nearly 8 to 10 million rural American households” without Internet coverage. Dish will not compete with traditional broadband, as services like Verizon FiOS can deliver 300 megabits per second.
Millions of American citizens still do not have adequate access to broadband Internet, according to a report from the Federal Communications Commission that points at service providers for taking their time in offering high-speed services in rural areas.
“The FCC’s annual broadband report, released Tuesday, says that 19 million Americans are still without broadband,” reports CNET. “And even though things are improving, the agency says, the pace of deployment is still too slow.”
This is an improvement over last year’s 26 million without broadband, but marks the third year in a row that the FCC says the high-speed service is not being rolled out in a “reasonable and timely fashion.”
“The U.S. has now regained global leadership in key areas of the broadband economy, including mobile, where we lead in mobile apps and 4G deployment,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement. “But in this flat, competitive global economy, we need to keep driving toward faster broadband and universal access.”
However, John Bergmayer, senior staff attorney for Public Knowledge, argues that much needed competition is lacking when it comes to broadband.
“Unfortunately, the FCC is about to approve a deal between Verizon and several large cable companies that would allow Verizon to start selling cable broadband instead of its own DSL broadband in many markets,” said Bergmayer in a statement. “This is the clearest sign yet that broadband competition in the U.S. is far from what it should be. The FCC should work to improve broadband competition, which will in turn help its goals of broadband deployment and adoption.”
There are numerous ways to bypass commercials today. With radio, listeners can change the station or opt for commercial-free satellite subscriptions. With TV, DVRs allow viewers to fast-forward through content they don’t want to watch.
A new patent granted to Apple this week is taking a different approach and could be applied to all broadcasts.
The patent protects a new technology for “seamless switching between radio and local media,” according to the filing. It enables a mobile device to “automatically switch between broadcast content and stored media to offer the user a type of customized content consumption experience,” Apple Insider reports.
The device would allow users to bypass any media they were uninterested in — advertisements, segments of a talk show, news programming, etc. — and substitute it with their own content.
“By using metadata from assets like Radio Data System (RDS) data, broadcast listings or published third-party schedules, a device can ‘determine when an upcoming broadcast segment or media item is not of interest to the user,'” the article explains.
“When such an event is detected, the device will seamlessly switch to stored media until the unwanted content is completed. Also included as methods of discerning what a user may or may not want to consume are analysis of audio or video from the source, akin to current iOS apps Shazam or IntoNow.”
The technology would allow users to “like” or “dislike” certain content in order to develop a preference profile. It would also look for appropriate stored content to replaced the undesired sections, using a “relevance algorithm” to keep the media consistent with the broadcast stream.
The post suggests the device could work well with Apple’s rumored set-top box, blurring “the line between live and on-demand television.”
In his Scientific American column this month, David Pogue suggests five ways Hollywood can fight piracy and promote its products successfully by more effectively embracing the digital age of content distribution.
1) “Include DVD extras.” Things like deleted scenes, commentary, behind-the-scenes features and more can be found nowhere else but with the DVD itself, encouraging purchase or hard-copy rentals. “Not to mention subtitles and captions — important options for millions of viewers,” adds Pogue.
2) “Offer a reasonable viewing period.” Give online renters the chance to finish the movie in a timely fashion. Pogue suggests viewers should have at least 27 hours, providing the ability to finish the movie the next night if sleepiness or other circumstances cut off their viewing the first night.
3) “Eliminate the starting time. You have to start watching a movie within 30 days of renting it. Okay, this isn’t a big deal — most of the time you rent a movie because you want to start watching right away — but what’s the need for the 30-day restriction? If we paid for it, we should be able to watch it whenever.”
4) “Eliminate the ‘release window’ concept.” When a movie’s theatrical run ends, it is rolled out to other outlets (pay-per-view, DVD, HBO, etc.) in a formulaic way that Hollywood believes holds the best financial yield. But as Pogue aptly notes, “during each window none of the other movie sources are making any money for Hollywood.” He thinks the movie should be available to all outlets at one time.
5) “When it’s buyable, it should be rentable.” A movie will often be put on sale online for more money before it’s available for rent, thus missing revenue from renters excited for a new release.
“Listen up, Hollywood: Nobody ever went out of business offering a good product for sale at a reasonable price with an eye toward pleasing the customer,” concludes Pogue. “You should try it some time.”
Ariel Braunstein and Scott Kabat, formerly of Pure Digital Technologies (creator of the Flip Video line of camcorders), have launched a new venture called Knowmia — “a crowdsourced video platform designed to help teachers find and create online video lessons while improving the learning experience for students,” reports Digital Trends.
Knowmia is a member of Y Combinator’s collection of start-ups. Its software curates video lessons from teachers around the world for a personalized, affordable approach to online tutoring.
“The platform offers more than 7,000 free lessons that cover a variety of subjects, including algebra, chemistry, history and American literature,” notes the post.
The videos are primarily from YouTube and Vimeo. The start-up has recruited teachers who add related content including notes and quizzes. The goal is to create a centralized hub for educational videos.
Digital Trends draws comparisons to Khan Academy and TED’s new education platform.
“The team describes its ‘Knowmia Teach’ app as an ‘iMovie for teachers,’ allowing educators to mark up their lessons and videos in interactive demonstrations for their students,” explains the post. “In this way, Knowmia’s app competes directly with that of Educreations and ShowMe, both of which offer interactive whiteboards for teachers that let them create interactive, multimedia lessons.”
Kickstarter launched four years ago. It began as a clever idea intended to generate crowdfunding for projects proposed by designers, artists, philanthropists, etc. It has since grown into a very successful enterprise.
“The service, which takes a 5 percent cut of the funding that pours in, has exploded. Along with scores of modestly backed projects — from $100 for a puppet-show adaptation of “King Kong” to one woman’s $15,000 quest to develop a bionic eye for herself — piecemeal investment has yielded multi-million-dollar hits,” details the Wall Street Journal.
But as this article notes, while there are plenty of wonderful examples of success on the site, there are just as many examples of “ill-conceived projects.” Many of these, both good and bad, revolve around tech product design. The article lists examples of the best and worst.
One good example is the Pebble watch, which links to your smartphone and receives incoming texts and updates via its e-ink face. A bad example is the now-famous i+ Case, an iPhone case that ended up interfering with cell reception and Wi-Fi connections.
The good and bad examples should remind us that sites like Kickstarter are investment tools for proposed products and services, sometimes yielding quality and other times not.
According to numbers from comScore, e-commerce sales reached a high $43.2 billion in the second quarter. That’s up 15 percent from a year ago.
“The quarter marked America’s seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, as consumers get even more comfortable spending online and having products show up on their front porches,” reports AllThingsD.
Amazon is, of course, growing right along with the rise of e-commerce. “The big-box retailer of the Web said that in the second quarter, it grew 32 percent if you take away the impact of foreign exchange,” notes the article.
Online auction and shopping site eBay also experienced a significant increase, jumping 23 percent, while brick-and-mortar stores continue to struggle.
However, comScore’s numbers do not include mobile sales, which saw a “staggering surge,” according to eBay CEO John Donahoe.
According to the report, the top-performing online products included: “Digital content and subscriptions, consumer electronics, flowers, greetings and gifts, computer hardware, and apparel and accessories. Each category grew at least 16 percent compared to the year-ago period.”
Cloud computing and big data is changing the game for marketers. CMOs will either “sink or swim depending on their ability to recognize the importance of the consumer information available to them and ability to capture and put it to use,” GigaOM writes.
“Marketing is being redefined in the era of cloud-delivered, self-service applications and services and Web-connected consumers,” explains Barb Darrow in the post. “Several CIOs and CTOs have told me that they agree that CMOs gaining clout in their businesses — but the most successful CMOs are those who ‘get’ that effective marketing is both broader and more focused than it’s been in the past.”
While marketing officers need to acknowledge the new data channels like social media, they also need to develop “narrower, less scattershot messaging” to reach customers, Darrow suggests.
“In order to become customer-centric and deliver a consistent message to each individual regardless of the communication channel, companies must first integrate all their customer- and prospect-related data. Up to now, organizations would silo the various types of customer-related data,” says Evangelos Simoudis, senior managing director of Trident Capital.
“Many firms spend lots of resources pursuing outside influencers who’ve gained following on the Web and through social media. A better approach is to find and cultivate customer influencers and give them something great to talk about,” adds Bill Lee of Lee Consulting Group.
In Q2, Facebook grew its ad revenue 14 percent from the previous quarter, a 28 percent rise from a year ago. While this may seem promising, it’s a far throw from the 87 percent year-over-year growth seen in 2011.
CFO David Ebersman says the lackluster increases are in part caused by the 9 percent increase in ad rates, but the larger issue at hand is the inability for advertisers to measure return on investment.
During the last earnings call, COO Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook is working on quantifying the benefits their ads provide. “Though nearly all top advertisers spent money on Facebook ads in the last quarter, she conceded that the total was only a small percentage of the advertisers’ digital ad budgets. She characterized the shortfall as an ‘imbalance’ and a ‘substantial opportunity,'” reports the Wall Street Journal.
Facebook’s online ad rivals such as Google and Yahoo are able to measure results by clicks. “But for many brands, ads on Facebook don’t consist of an offer to directly buy something. They are more akin to TV ads, which marketers study to see how brand exposure might lead to offline sales,” explains WSJ.
Facebook is working with big brands to create customized ad measurements based on each company. Unfortunately, one big hurdle stands in Facebook’s way: privacy.
“One disadvantage to marketers is the fact that Facebook doesn’t offer them access to the conversations that the social network’s 950 million users are having among friends,” notes the article. “The company hides those discussions for consumer-privacy reasons. In lieu of such data, marketers have had to use other metrics, such as how many people ‘like’ a brand’s Facebook page.”
In May, the site lost $10 million in ads from General Motors and it stands to lose more if it can’t find a way to prove ROI.
Most of Apple’s competitors aren’t necessarily fearful of the company’s large market share or earnings, according to Tim Bajarin writing for TechPinions.
“What really scares them about Apple is the fact that Apple sees the future and then creates products that people want even if people do not know they want them,” he notes, after speaking with a number of competitors.
According to Bajarin, Apple has a knack for doing this. The company finds flaws in products and works to improve upon those or to reinvent products entirely. This was first evidenced by the iPod.
“Apple did not invent MP3 players,” writes Bajarin. “But they looked at the early versions and realized its flaws.”
“The first generations of MP3 player designs were less than interesting and the process of getting music on to them was difficult,” he notes. “So they figured that they could add their industrial design magic to it and build an ecosystem of software and services that made buying and playing music and eventually video simple to do so that today they still own 70 percent of the MP3 player market. After 11 years on the market they still don’t have a serious competitor in this space.”
Similar processes played out with the iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. Apple did not invent smartphones, tablets or ultra-thin laptops, but the company certainly helped set the stage for all three.
With the application of its signature industrial design and knack for giving consumers what they want in advance of them knowing they want it, Apple continues to deliver very successful products — and continues to scare the competition.
Engadget posted a compelling editorial by Brad Hill this week regarding the cord-cutting trend. Hill is VP for audience development at AOL and former director and GM of Weblogs, Inc.
Some 2.65 million cable subscribers decided to get rid of their service between 2008 and 2011, reports Hill. Since 1.5 million of those decisions were made in 2011 alone, it seems that the cord-cutting trend is accelerating.
There are a few “emergent consumer requirements” according to Hill. One is the ability to watch TV off the traditional scheduling grid. This of course means having recording capabilities. The second is a demand for à la carte programming purchases, or not having favorite cable channel shows lumped into a large package with other unwanted channels.
But cutting the cord isn’t without its problems. “This realm is infested with provider irregularities,” notes the post. “For example, Hulu is available on Roku, but not on Boxee. YouTube is widely distributed to media streaming boxes, but not to Roku. Multiple intermediaries create uneven match-ups between those four programmers and the main box builders (Roku, Boxee, Apple TV, Google TV).”
Hill compares this to what the music industry went through during the MP3 revolution, perhaps predicting the future of cable.
“The music industry’s lack of resilience during the MP3 revolution illustrated stress fracture points,” explains the post. “Record labels tried to enforce the single-path model — CD purchases, in that case. That wasn’t à la carte enough for the playlist generation, so albums were, to an extent, exploded by single track sales. Then music ownership was redefined by subscription plans (a little bit) and social music platforms (a lot).”
Hill suggests that inflated cable bills, resistance to tiered pricing and content bundling, and “coercive herding of users into one content delivery path, reinforced by the rumored cable authentication model” could push toward disruptive alternatives.
“The cable cord-cutting movement is not yet a rampage, but it is a trend, and it is growing,” he concludes.
The stop-motion technique has traditionally created an array of production challenges for Hollywood animators, something that may dramatically change thanks to a new technology.
The notoriously slow process is experiencing an update with the advent of 3D printing, which is helping animators shift from mechanical to computer-based animation. Engadget recently visited LAIKA’s facility in Oregon (formerly Vinton Studios) to learn how the new technique was successfully used to produce “ParaNorman.”
In mechanical animation, animators adjust gears and paddles beneath the skin of the models to create different expressions. But in 3D printing animation, the animators can print interchangeable faces for the models.
The animators for “ParaNorman” used 3D printing to create 1.5 million different expressions for their protagonist. They originally used the technology in the film “Coraline” in which the protagonist could display 200,000 expressions.
The animators in “Coraline” had to hand paint each of the printed expressions. But new technology allowed “ParaNorman” animators to use Photoshop to display color models of the expressions.
The studio believes it has only scratched the surface of what could come from 3D printing in stop-motion animation.
“I think it’s a huge quantum leap on multiple levels between ‘Coraline’ and ‘ParaNorman,'” says Brian McLean, director of rapid prototyping. “At the time, ‘Coraline’ was the pinnacle of stop-motion animated films and I think that ‘ParaNorman’ has just risen the bar that much further.”
South Korean researchers have developed a new method to view 3D movies without glasses. The research was recently published in The Optical Society’s Optics Express.
In traditional 3D theatrical displays, we know that projectors shoot two images onto the same screen at the same time. 3D glasses help separate the images, only allowing one image in the left eye, and the other image in the right eye.
There are some glasses-free 3D displays on the market, such as those used for Nintendo’s 3DS handheld game system and the HTC Evo 3D smartphone. But using a similar technique theatrically would require rear projection — an obstacle for most theaters.
The South Korean research team’s system uses a “special array” to polarize the light as it leaves the projector. The method also uses a filter to partition the screen into different sections.
“The trick then is to have the light visible to your left eye contain the left-eye pixels and vice-versa for the right eye,” explains Wired.
But the blocking of light in different parts of the screen causes low screen resolution. Despite this problem, physicist John Koshel still believes many theaters will eventually adopt the technology since it is less expensive than using multiple projectors, and people will enjoy not having to wear glasses.
“This technology is still in its infancy, but it’s a new step that was hidden for a long time,” explains Koshel.
“High frame rate (HFR) cinema isn’t here yet, but it’s one of the most talked-about topics in the media and entertainment space,” notes Debra Kaufman for Creative COW. “But how many frames per second is ideal? How does HFR cinema change the workflow and the bottom line?”
A group of experts met for a panel during the recent SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles to discuss “why we should be excited by the opportunities of HFR cinema and what we can expect in day-to-day production and post workflows.”
“The higher the frame rate, the more realistic the image, and even more so with 3D,” said pioneer Douglas Trumbull. “My interest is in hyper-cinema. By combining 3D with extremely high frame rate on an extremely large screen at extreme brightness, the result is more like live performance. This offers a new interesting unanticipated opportunity to make movies that are like live events. The viewer is in the movie, on the adventure.”
HFR advocate James Cameron screened test footage of identical content comparing 24 fps, 48 fps and 60 fps versions. His producing partner Jon Landau explained that HFR technology can raise the impact of both 2D and 3D experiences.
“We want to find technologies that disappear and transport the audience more into the narrative story,” said Landau. “We thought 3D was one step in that direction. We have a responsibility as filmmakers to continue to push technology to tell stories in better ways, to tell stories that couldn’t be told before and to drive people out of their homes into theaters.”
ILM visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren experimented at home by playing Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animated film “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” at higher rates and noted how motion looked more natural and characters looked less artificial. He also experimented with TV commercials at 120 fps.
“I think HFR is a great tool,” Muren said. “It’s closer to reality. You can always filter the camera or cut it back, all the things that cameramen have done to take the curse off video. But the audiences can connect more. Add 3D on top of that and you’re there. I’m a big proponent of it.”
The panel discussed the history of frame rate experimentation and the cost and production considerations that led to 24 fps as a standard for film. The group also addressed current experimentation and how dramatically new the possibilities are in a digital process. Additionally, obstacles were addressed, specifically the potential massive amount of data involved with HFR production.
“The enthusiasm over the possibilities of HFR cinema was tempered by some of the impact on VFX and post production toolsets and workflows,” reports Kaufman. “But if the past — including the recent past with the adoption of 3D — is any indication, this won’t hold anything back.”
Reaction to the upcoming 48 fps screenings of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” will be influential, suggests Kaufman: “If audiences are enthusiastic, everything will fall into place: studios will greenlight HFR projects, some directors will enthusiastically embrace it, hardware and software vendors will come out with the technology to handle it, and the VFX and post houses will deal with the consequences, as they always have.”
We should expect a decline in network television coverage of this year’s national political conventions, but a dramatic “gavel-to-gavel” increase in Web streaming.
Online video will move to the forefront as the top four broadcast networks compete with new rival start-ups such as Politico and The Huffington Post to cover speeches and events live via the Web.
The Internet will take center stage when Republicans convene in Tampa, Florida next week and Democrats the week after in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“NBC, in fact, is likely to forgo prime-time TV coverage entirely of the Democratic convention the night of Wednesday, September 5, when it is contractually bound to air the kickoff game of the NFL season between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“This year, more than any other cycle, we are going to reach millions more viewers in ways other than just television,” said Marc Burstein, senior executive producer for special events at ABC News.
There will also be some interesting social tie-ins as more audiences are expected to access coverage via smartphones and tablets than TVs.
“Time magazine, for example, has formed a partnership with Foursquare, a location-based mobile check-in service, for the conventions, in which Time has provided content that users can unlock when they get to certain locations in Tampa and Charlotte,” notes the article.
“CNN has joined with Facebook Inc. to gather political sentiment from its users. Bloomberg has teamed up with Event Farm on apps to simplify ticketing to events at the conventions. Other organizations, including National Journal, have launched their own apps to help visitors navigate the conventions.”
