Blog articles from 05/2008

When you work with bleeding edge technologies, you tend to lose a lot of blood. Who of us hasn't had a frustrating experience with a new device that promised to make our life simpler (albeit via a very complicated path). Well today I wanted to share a good experience. I spent much of the past two weeks on the road which (predictably) included about 15 hours in flight delays. In my ill-prepared haste, I had left without a book, DVD, iPod or other means of mobile entertainment. As I...

File this under "I'll believe it when I see it." Time Warner Cable's President and Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt said yeterday at the Sanford C. Berstein & Co. Strategic Decisions Conference that we can expect to see cable operators offering wireless residential gateways (technically, Britt called them "wireless cable modems") that not only enable in the in-home networking features, but also allow for services like Web video to be streamed to TVs. I suppose...

If you've tried to cover the Internet video space, your head is already swimming with terms like CDN, P2P, publishing, content management, workflow, ad insertion, transcoding, etc., etc. It's hard enough to keep on top of the industry without the players themselves confusing you! So, Netflix ... what are you actually calling your Internet video service today? This is the feature that gives Netflix subscribers access to about 10,000 catalog movies and TV shows from their PCs or from...

Advertised to launch on May 19th, the Wii Fit was released across the nation on May 21st. This left some fans upset since only the Nintendo World store in New York debuted the game on the 19th. Designed to be a way to get people off the couch and moving, the Wii Fit tracks your weight, body mass index (BMI), and activity on a calendar with the goal of encouraging frequent exercise. If you don’t return in daily, it very kindly reminds you in a manner reminiscent of my parents that your...

Users of broadband connected TiVos will be able to download Disney movies directly to their PVRs using the CinemaNow service. This will be available later this year, apparently. Among the major studios, Disney has really led the way with electronic delivery of its movie content. It was the first studio to sign with Apple's iTunes, and CEO Robert Iger reported in March that Disney had sold four million movie movie downloads through iTunes since they started in 2006. By my rough...

The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) has announced that it will be working towards a set of specifications that will outline energy saving solutions for the home gateway. Representatives of the industry body’s worldwide member companies will gather at HGI’s 13th quarterly meeting, in Florence, Italy, where the topic will be high on the agenda. The HGI will be basing its specifications on the EU Code of Conduct on Energy Consumption of Broadband Equipment, which sets out the...

After years of discussion, the consumer electronics industry and the cable industry seem to have reached a meeting of the minds. Sony and six major cable companies (Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications Inc., Charter Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Bright House Networks) have come to terms about how to incorporate cable cards and cable’s technology into televisions, making set top boxes a thing of the past. Previously cable cards provided...

Yesterday, Landis+Gyr announced a four-year advanced metering contract with Texas utility Oncor. Under the agreement, Oncor will deploy a next generation Landis+Gyr advanced meter system (AMS) to three million homes and small businesses in Texas. Landis+Gyr indicates that this will be the largest deployment of smart meters in Texas, and one of the largest in the country. I did some digging and found some other examples of smart meter deployments in the U.S.: PGE looks to be...