Blog articles from 04/2009

Parks Associates finds consumer use of tech support tripled since 2006, creating opportunities for service providers, retailers, and third-party providers -- The number of U.S. broadband households seeking professional services for computer and networking problems has tripled since 2006, as more users lack the time and expertise to deal with the complications of today’s technology, according to Customer Support in the Digital Home. This 2009 consumer survey from international...

So, I have fiber optic telco services to my home. So, why do I not have it all the way to my PC or set top box? I know, I know. The installation is expensive, a hassle, and requires adding new wires to my home - not a fun prospect. Wireless could be an option, but what if I am one of those homes where RF is, shall we say, problematic. This past week I had a chance to look over a new technology that looks to address many of these challenges. Firecomms provided us with a demo of Plastic...

For the past couple of years, there has been much emphasis placed on the "connected CE" market, where TVs, Blu-ray players, video game consoles, media adapters, media servers, and alternative set-top boxes like VUDU and Apple TV receive content from online sources. Having followed this space for some time, I've been particularly interested in how the technology requirements for connected devices have changed rapidly. In the white paper From Boob Tube to YouTube, I talked about...

The RealDVD case gets its day in a San Francisco federal court today. This willl certainly be one to watch for at least two reasons. First, will a court apply the "fair use" doctrine - as ordained in the 1984 Betamax decision - to digital technologies? If so, the court would agree with the RealNetworks folks, who argue that RealDVD is nothing more than a way to allow consumers to make a back-up copy of their disc. Second, will the court look to a precedent set in the 2007...

My wife's company had received some 8 GB iPod touch devices several weeks ago. While the young'uns got their iPods up and running in about two seconds, we struggled with ours. The home computer kept locking up during several stages of the registration process, and the device apparently didn't like the Christmas music that we had ripped. It kept locking up at either "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer" or "Once in Royal David's City." Dayna got on the phone with an Apple...

The folks at Atheros caught me up on the new Bluetooth Core Specification Version 3.0 + High Speed announcement (see their press release here ). This is pretty cool stuff, and it's applications that I had seen coming six years ago during all of the buzz about ultra-wideband (UWB). Basically, it's the question of how mobile and portable devices can do data transfers (digital camera to a PC or iPhone to a stereo system) at higher speeds while consuming less power? Given the rough time...

Western Digital announced today that its My DVR Expander™ is now available with 1 TB capacity. TiVo Verified™ compatible with TiVo Series3™ and TiVo HD DVRs, the new My DVR Expander is capable of storing up to 140 hours of high-definition (HD) television programming based on 1 TB of hard drive storage. The ability to expand DVR storage with an attached external drive was something that we explored in both domestic and international consumer studies last year - TV 2.0: The...

After seeing virtually no activity in the cable space regarding multi-room DVR deployments, there were a number of announcements at the Cable Show a few weeks ago that indicate that things will heat up soon. Bright House, Cox, and Time Warner Cable are all expecting to deploy this year. This is good news for Entropic , which will supply the chipsets to enable the networked set-top boxes.