Blog articles from 05/2008

And news today that Verizon will be offering a subscription Internet video service from Starz. The company plans to offer a video download service from Starz Entertainment that provides on-demand access to first-run movies, independent films and other original programming for a monthly subscription fee of $5.99.The Starz Play service offers a limited catalog of about 1,000 movies -- including "Spider-Man 3," "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" and...

We've written previously about the double-edged sword that the DVR presents to television operators. They are table-stakes offerings to allow customers to time-shift their programming, but they're having a detrimental effect on how consumers choose to (not) watch advertising. One answer to this conundrum is to move more primetime television programming to the cable operators' on-demand systems, and to make the ads non-skippable. Hey, if it's working for the broadcast networks to offer...

The news today wasn't good from Akimbo Systems. The company has laid off all employees save one executive and is looking for a buyer. Akimbo began as an ill-fated effort to marry a stand-alone set-top box with an aggregated Internet video experience. When we last talked to Akimbo in September of last year, they indicated that their new strategy was not to go the stand-alone set-top box route, but to work with multiple hardware partners to provide a rich video experience. It wasn't a bad...

After a trial run with Cleveland Clinic, Google Health is now open for business. Designed as a free full personal health record (PHR), Google Health allows individuals to create their own profile complete with records of conditions, medications, allergies, procedures, test results, and immunizations. Intended to be a one-stop shop for people to store all medical information from the numerous institutes they visit, control is given to the individual. (It is important to note, however,...

You know, those local access channels carried on television systems are not the most stimulating things in the world. City council or school board meetings lack the punch of Emeril on The Food Network or the latest NBA highlights on SportsCenter. But woe to the television operator who doesn't do a good job of monitoring the basic quality of the local access channel! Ironic that suburban Chicago - the location of Wayne's World from Saturday Night Live fame - is front and center again...

The HomePlug Powerline Alliance provided an update today during a phone briefing. Here are some of the highlights: There have been 18 million HomePlug semiconductor shipments (cumulative). More than one-half of sales are outside of the U.S. This is consistent with the calculations that we compiled earlier not to long ago that gives powerline networking solutions about 8% of all home networking nodes in U.S. households. Consistent, with our findings, Europe dominates for...

I was organizing some notes, and ran across this news from mid-April regarding Sony's plans to launch a premium video service through its PlayStation Network service (very much like the Xbox LIVE service for Xbox 360 users). Peter Dille, Senior Vice President for Marketing & PlayStation Network, writes in an April 15 blog entry on the PlayStation Blog where he confirmed that Sony would offer a video service through the Network. While short on specifics, Dille writes that...

A recent report issued as part of the Pew Internet & American Life Project found the Internet was, "just one among a variety of sources people use and usually not the key factor in final purchasing decisions." This conclusion is generally consistent with research conducted by Parks Associates (including our study The Changing Consumer Electronics Purchase Process, conducted in late 2007), but I wanted to point out a few interesting details our own studies have uncovered....