Counterfeit negotiations

You may not have heard of ACTA. I don't believe I had until I heard a radio piece on it a few days ago. Certainly it hasn't been on my radar screen and I get the distinct impression that as far as the parties involved are concerned, the fewer radar screens it's on, the better.

ACTA stands for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. While "counterfeiting" might suggest coins and bills, ACTA appears to be aimed at counterfeiting of goods (for example, generic drugs) and of content such as music and movies. I say "appears" because since its inception in 2008, ACTA has been negotiated in secret, albeit with occasional substantive leaks.

While I can see the common thread here, it seems a bit of a stretch to treat piracy, where no one is really pretending that an unauthorized copy is anything other than that, with counterfeiting, which tries to pass off something illegitimate as legitimate. Add to that the overall lack of transparency as to what's being negotiated or even exactly who is doing it on whose behalf, and it's very easy to see why the EFF and others have been strongly opposed to the whole business from the outset.

Whatever one's opinions on intellectual property and the role of the internet in distributing it, and no matter whether ACTA is in fact an attempt to make major changes to IP policy or just an alignment of practices among the entities involved, I can see no good reason to hold such a negotiation in secret. At the very least, doing so gives the net.world one more reason to believe the RIAA and company are either acting in bad faith or stunningly clueless. That helps no one.

[ACTA was signed by several countries in 2011, but only ratified by Japan, meaning that no one else is actually legally committed to following it, and leaving it a bit moot whether Japan is following it in its relations with itself. -- D.H. May 2015]

TWC and Fox in the new year

As of this writing it appears that the game of chicken that Time Warner Cable and News Corp have been playing is likely to end up with the two splatting into each other at high speed. News Corp wants more cash for carrying its popular TV programming, including US college football bowls and sitcoms such as It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Time Warner Cable (now independent of parent Time Warner) claims it would have to pass along $1 per subscriber and is leery of setting a precedent that the other major TV networks could then use to their advantage.

So far there has been no agreement and there's every possibility that Fox channels such as FX, Speed, Fuel and Fox Soccer Channel -- but not Fox News or Fox Business, which have separate contracts -- could simply go dark to TWC subscribers at midnight tonight.

So what does this have to do with the web? For one thing, TWC is also a major ISP (full disclosure: they're mine, in particular). For another thing, Hulu (part-owned by Fox) will be happy to show you Sunny and other FX shows (not sure about the sports), whether over TWC's pipe or someone else's. That's particularly interesting since Hulu is supported by ads, and declining ad revenue is one of the reasons Fox wants to charge cable companies like TWC more. Another might possibly be that Fox wouldn't mind cable subscribers dumping cable in favor of an online service Fox has a piece of.

Nah.

60 Minutes and the MPAA: Part IV - Error bars

In the 60 Minutes piece I've been referencing, A-list director Steven Soderbergh drops the oft-quoted figure of $6.1 billion per year in industry losses. This figure comes from a 2006 study by consulting firm L.E.K. It's easy to find a summary of this report. Just google "video piracy costs" and up it comes. Depending on your browser settings, you may not even see the rest of the hits, but most of the top ones are repeats or otherwise derived from the L.E.K study. And you didn't need to see anything else anyway, did you?

So ... $6.1 billion. Let's assume for the moment that the figure is relevant -- more on that in the next post. How accurate is it?

One of the handful of concepts I retained from high school physics, beyond Newton's laws, was that of significant digits, or "sig digs" as the teacher liked to call them. By convention, if I say "6.1 billion", I mean that I'm confident that it's more than 6.05 billion and less than 6.15 billion. If I'm not sure, I could say 6 billion (meaning more than 5.5 billion and less than 6.5 billion).

Significant digits are just a rough-and-ready convention. If you're serious about measurement you state the uncertainty explicitly, as "6.1 billion, +/- 300 million". My personal opinion is that even if you're not being that rigorous, it's a bad habit to claim more digits than you really know, and a good habit to question anything presented like it's known to an unlikely number of digits.

The point of all this is that precise results are rare in the real world. Much more often, the result is a range of values that we're more or less sure the real value lies in. For extra bonus points, you can say how sure, as "6.1 billion, plus or minus 300 million, with 95% confidence".

From what I can make out, L.E.K. is a reputable outfit and made a legitimate effort to produce meaningful results and explain them. In particular, they didn't just try to count up the number of illegal DVDs sold. If I buy an illegal DVD but go and see the movie anyway, or I never would have seen the movie at all if not for the DVD, it's hard to claim much harm. So L.E.K. tried to establish "how many of their pirated movies [viewers] would have purchased in stores or seen in theaters if they didn't have an unauthorized copy". They did this by surveying 17,000 consumers in 22 countries, doing focus groups and applying a regression model to estimate figures for countries they didn't survey. (This is from a Wall Street Journal article on L.E.K. web site and from the "methodology" section of the summary mentioned above).

On average, they surveyed about 800 people per country, presumably more in larger countries and fewer in smaller. That's enough to do decent polling, but even an ideal poll typically has a statistical error of a few percent. This theoretical limit is closely approached in political polls in countries with frequent elections, because it's done over and over and the pollsters have detailed knowledge of the demographics and how that might effect results. They apply this knowledge to weight the raw results of their polling in order to compensate for their sample not being completely representative (for example it's weighted towards people who will answer the phone when they call and are willing to answer intrusive questions).

For international market research in a little-covered subject, none of this is available. So even if you have a reasonably large sample, you still have to estimate how well that sample represents the public at large. There are known techniques for this sort of thing, so it's not a total shot in the dark, but I don't see anyway you can assume anything near the familiar "+/- 3%" margin. At a wild guess, maybe more like 10-20%, by which I mean you're measuring how the population at large would answer the question, and not what they would actually do, with an error of -- who knows but let's say -- 10-20%. More than the error you'd assume by just running the sample size and the population size through the textbook formula, anyway.

All of this is assuming that people won't lie to surveyors about illicit activity, and that they are able to accurately report what they might have done in some hypothetical situation. Add to that uncertainties in the model for estimating countries not surveyed and the nice, authoritative statement that "Piracy costs the studios $6.1 billion a year" comes out as "Based on surveys and other estimates done in 2006, we think that people who bought illegal DVDs might have spent -- I'm totally making this up here -- somewhere between $4 billion and $8 billion on legitimate fare that year instead, but who really knows?"

Now $4 billion, or whatever it might really be, is still serious cash. The L.E.K. study at the least makes a good case that people are spending significant amounts on pirated goods they might otherwise have bought from studios. I'm not disputing that at the moment. Rather, I'm objecting to a spurious air of precision and authority where very little such exists. More than that, I'm objecting to an investigative news program taking any such key figure at face value without examining the assumptions behind it or noting, for that matter, that it was commissioned by the same association claiming harm.

And again, this is still leaving aside the crucial question of relevance.

60 Minutes and the MPAA: Part III - Interlude

While trying to track down just how video piracy actually works, I followed a Wikipedia external link to a fascinating and well-written article in Legal Affairs about a real live pirate who is also in the employ of a major media conglomerate. I offer it here on its own merit and for comparison purposes against the 60 Minutes piece. Judge for yourself which is a better piece of investigative reporting.

60 Minutes and the MPAA: Part II - Pirates and pirates

OK, I'll say it again: Copyright violation is illegal. Don't do it.

However, if you're doing an investigative piece on video piracy, it would seem useful to distinguish various kinds of piracy. Otherwise there's a risk of throwing out a figure like $6 billion, showing pictures of convicted gang members and later an animation sort of depicting BitTorrent, and having people think that online file sharing sends $6 billion a year into the pockets of gangsters. Not that anyone would ever want to suggest such a thing.

In fact, there are pirates, and then there are pirates.

• Gangs make money by selling counterfeit DVDs of movies. The practice is particularly rife (and as I understand it, more in a legal gray area) in Asia.
• People trade movies on the internet. No money changes hands.

Lumping all of this under the label "video piracy" captures some common features, particularly that both are illegal and there's a case to be made that both cost studios money, but it ignores the obvious difference in motivation. Busting people on the street is not going to stop file sharing, and somehow shutting down file sharing would not stop people from selling DVDs on the street.

Two different problems, two (largely) different sets of people, and most likely two different solutions.

A brief history of paying for movies (Part II). Well, not so much history, really.

Carrying on the theme of not really reaching any conclusions, I suppose I should wind up my ruminations on how one pays for movies (or videos, or other entertainment). The hypothesis emerging is that there are four main ways:

• Per view (like, by going to a theater, or by ordering PPV)
• By subscription (as with a premium cable channel, Netflix DVD service)
• By short-term rental (for example, at the video store, cable on-demand)
• By purchase (say, buying a DVD)

Do these exist on the web as well? Indeed they do. I haven't directly used PPV over the web, but I'm familiar with Netflix's "watch instantly" service and Amazon's rent/buy^* scheme.

Can we compare the adoption of these models on the web with their adoption online? Not really. Technically, various forms of the various models have been around for a while, but until recently, relatively few people had enough bandwidth to care (as a US citizen/resident I'm well aware that it's been particularly recently here). At which point all four models turned up pretty quickly.

So while the historical comparison doesn't seem particularly instructive, it's interesting that the four existing models seem to have carried over fairly seamlessly.


^*Amazon sells you the right to watch the material for as long as they provide it. Since it's tied to their DRM scheme, there are also restrictions on where you can watch it. Unlike a DVD, you can't pop it into a portable player or watch it in your car (while someone else drives, one would hope), and unlike a DVD, it's not up to you how long you keep it. I'm pretty sure the right is non-transferable, again unlike a DVD. But other than that it's just like buying a DVD.

This seems somehow not completely satisfying, but I've also seen mention of services that would sell you the right to download and (legally) burn a DVD of a movie for your own use. [What's a DVD? --D.H. May 2015]

In which I reach no particular conclusion about open source

I'd originally expected to file this under "not really about the web but I'm posting it anyway," but all roads lead back to the web. Perhaps it's more germane than I'd originally thought. Nonetheless, you may wish to skip the geekly details (which I've indented) and go straight to the lack of conclusion at the bottom.

I've been experimenting a bit with video capture on Ubuntu as a means of smashing old analog tapes to bits. To that end, I bought an inexpensive video capture device that takes video in one end and puts USB out the other. It worked out of the box, sort of, on an aging Windows box, but seemed to drop frames, probably because the aging Windows box lacked the horsepower. So I tried plugging the thing into my Ubuntu box.

At first, nothing at all happened. The kernel wouldn't recognize the device as anything but a random USB device. A little googling (see, I told you the web was involved) and a look at dmesg showed that the device wasn't being recognized at all. This turned out to be because it wasn't in the driver's list of devices. But at least I could hack the driver that comes with the distro to put it on the list. As it happens, all I really needed to do was change one byte of the driver (better fixes were possible, but that's enough to make the driver recognize the device).

Ah, but while modern distros are still hackable -- and have to be, to qualify as open/free -- they're not shipped that way. A modern distro is a bunch of binaries along with the artifacts needed for their care and feeding. Source is separate. So ... download the source and requisite tools, and find out the preferred build command, Ubuntu conveniently provides this on a page heavily larded with "are you really sure you need to do this?"

The preferred build command rebuilds everything, as it's aimed more at someone trying to create a package for a distro, not a casual developer. In my case all I needed to do was change one byte of one driver. Further, I couldn't figure out where the giant build had put the results of my one-byte change. Somewhere, probably. After a while, using different instructions on the Ubuntu page, which look much more like what I'm used to, I'm able to build a driver that recognizes the device.

Unfortunately, that version doesn't quite work, for reasons I no longer recall. More googling determines that the latest version of the driver supports the card directly without the problem. Like many major distros, Ubuntu doesn't ship with the latest and greatest version of many components, so it's not a surprise that there would be a newer one. In this particular case, Ubuntu lags a bit farther behind the the latest because the main developer, who has ready access to the actual chipsets and so is pretty well technically qualified, has had some sort of dispute with -- I forget who, but some segment of the community.

However, the source is readily available, and even better, the driver is nice and self-contained (they generally are), so I can rebuild it quickly and modprobe it in. Sure enough, I do that and it "just works". The device is recognized. The other problem I'd been having is gone.

But the picture looks funny. It looks like NTSC is being interpreted as PAL, or something similar. Sure enough (after stumbling down several blind alleys), I check the source code and notice the driver expects the card to be speaking PAL. Not a surprise since the main developer lives in Europe. One three-line copy/paste later, the grabber is working fine. I post the patch to what looks like a relevant forum (look ma, I'm an open source developer!) and feel pretty good about myself.

But, while I can watch the incoming video on screen just fine, I can't figure out how to record it to disk. Which is what I came here for. There are approximately 5,923 different video programs to choose from. OK, more like a half dozen. On the one hand, there is Kino, which works just fine for devices with a FireWire connection, but doesn't seem to know anything about the USB family. Likewise with dvgrab. There appears to be some combination of kernel modules that will get you around this, but I haven't chased that down yet.

On the other hand are the approximately 5,922 programs for watching TV on your computer, which assume you have a USB device hooked up to a TV tuner. Each of them has its own quirks and requires its own special bit of hand-holding to get something showing on the screen, but the ones that can display seem to have trouble saving the video and the ones that might be able to do that can't seem to talk to the device.

That's where I am at the moment. I'm sure I'll chase down the last bit pretty quickly, but an out-of-the-box experience it wasn't.

So ... are closed systems inherently better? You don't see problems like this on Windows, partly because the manufacturer always ships a Windows driver along with the device and often ships a compatible application for good measure. It's even less of a problem on the Mac. Simply place the device in the same room as the Mac and the Mac will install the appropriate drivers, figure out what you want to watch, draw a nice facsimile of brushed chrome around the video window and fix you a latte.

In comparison to that, the Linux experience is pure chaos. In particular, even if I'd just grabbed the driver source and installed to begin with, delving through C code seems a poor way to say simple things like "the device ID is actually 1234:abcd and not 1234:5678" and "no really, this card also understand NTSC."

Except ...

My experience is that modern distros, for the most part, "just work." I've been running Ubuntu for years, now, and this is the first time I've found any need to recompile anything. Conversely, it's certainly possible to have driver problems of the same sort under Windows. Given that the driver ships with the device, detecting the device and figuring out what it supports are much easier. The problem is how the device driver interacts with the rest of the system, and that can vary depending on which of the zilions of different setups you actually have.

The Mac gets around this by tightly controlling the hardware and the software around it. This works, but the flip side is that some aspects of the system are fundamentally closed. For this and other reasons, Macs are considerably more expensive.

Yes, this particular corner of Linux seems fairly messy, particularly with the USB/FireWire split -- why should I care what kind of wire the video's coming over? -- and the apparent disconnect between the driver developer and the rest of the kernel community.

But these aren't open source problems. They're software problems. Any sufficiently large software organization is going to have occasional arbitrary distinctions and political friction. The threshold for "sufficiently large" here is probably a handful of people. The more relevant question is to what extent is open source more or less liable to have such problems. Dunno.

Against that, you have the fundamental advantage of being able to fix it yourself if you need to. It's annoying that things don't just work out of the box, and annoying that the most effective way of fixing the problem involved digging around in the driver source, but at least I could do that. In the proprietary world, you're generally stuck waiting for the next release [which, to be sure, has always worked before and nearly worked this time].

Is hackability worth the trouble? For an everyday user, having to fire up obscure tools, or even a command line, is not really acceptable. The real benefit is that any everyday user might also be a qualified developer who could help with a problem. Hackability maks it much easier for that person to get involved. The benefit to the everyday user is indirect: the larger pool of developers means a better system down the line.

So. Conclusions, or lack thereof? Not much, but maybe this: open source and the web together are powerful, but not all-powerful. But then, neither is anything else.

"Buying" internet movies

Maybe I'm missing something but ...

For a price near what you'd pay for a DVD, Amazon will give you the right to watch a given movie over the internet, subject to some fine print. Or you could just get the DVD for a similar price.

If I have a DVD, I can watch it pretty much anywhere -- on any TV with a DVD player attached, with a portable player, in a car with a player, on a laptop, at a hotel ... wherever. If I have the internet equivalent, I'm restricted to internet enabled devices, and within that, to whatever devices Amazon chooses to allow.

Frankly, I wouldn't know what devices those would be without looking. I know it'll work with my Roku box, and I've never really had cause to try anywhere else. I know Netflix will let me watch their movies on a laptop (at least if it's using IE/Windows), but I haven't been traveling much lately, so that's not really on my radar either.

The point being that, if I'm just watching a particular movie through a subscription service, or renting it short-term to watch it once, I don't care that watching the movie is tied to the box I ordered it on. I'm going to sit down, order the movie, pop some popcorn and watch it. On the other hand, if I'm "buying" it, that is, buying the right to watch it whenever I want, I'd also like the right to watch it wherever I want.

Internet video delivery is not there yet. I'm sure it will get there, and I'm sure it's good enough for some people right now. It's not there for me yet, late adopter that I am.

[What's a "DVD"?  Recently a friend wanted to watch a short clip on a DVD, and had a choice of ... a set-top box in the living room that happened to have a DVD attached.  When your main devices are a phone and a tablet, and there's an app on those for the major providers, it's not so hard to watch internet video everywhere, and a pain to watch a DVD anywhere.  Pretty much the opposite of what I describe above, only six or seven years ago.

I personally prefer not to buy internet movies.  The price tends to be three or four times the rental price, and I generally don't watch movies three or four times.  Maybe the movie won't be available three years from now when I feel like re-watching an old favorite, but maybe it'll be available cheaper on the original site or elsewhere.  I find this surprising, honestly, since I often tend toward a "get ALL the bits and keep them" mentality, but evidently not in this case.  --D.H. Jan 2016]

Paying for movies

Continuing the theme of "What does it mean to own content?" ... let's compare some ways of legally paying for a movie, short of actually going to a theater and, um, watching a movie.

If you have an ordinary TV setup you can pay for a movie by:

• Watching it for "free" over the air or on basic cable/satellite service, but dealing with commercial interruptions
• Watching it on a "premium" movie channel and paying for it and whatever else you watch on that channel through a subscription fee
• Watching it on pay per view which, despite the name, generally means paying for the right to view it during a 24-hour period (at least on cable)
  
• Buying a DVD and watching it as much as you want
  

With a DVR and the movie channels' on-demand services, time is not really a factor, except in that different channels offer different movies at different times and pay-per-view is generally more up to date.

If you have an internet connection and suitable equipment, you can pay for a movie by

• Watching it for "free" via a service like Hulu, but dealing with commercial interruptions
• Watching it through a service like Netflix and paying for it and whatever else you watch that way through a subscription fee
• "renting" it from Amazon (or anyone else who does this) for a 24-hour period
• "buying" it from Amazon (or anyone else who does this) and watching it as much as you want (subject to a little fine print)
  

Suspiciously similar, no?

March Madness, baby!

Every spring here in the US, the NCAA hosts its college basketball tournaments, and every year some many-digit number of dollars of productivity is lost as employees (and bosses) try to keep track of how their brackets are doing. The effect is particularly pronounced in the first round, a glorious orgy of 32 games, roughly in batches of four, spanning a Thursday and Friday in late March. The games go from about noon to midnight on the East Coast, and thus pretty much through the workday on the Pacific side.

What does this have to do with the web? Every year there's a bit more Madness online. This year, CBS is streaming every game for "free" on ncaa.com, using Silverlight. The quality is good (not that anyone at my place of work would have checked, of course), but "free" means you get a commercial at the beginning, an obnoxious animated ad off to the side, and the usual further commercials during what used to be the "TV time outs" and are now the "media time outs."

There's also the "boss button" that throws up an imitation spreadsheet. This must be just for laughs. If it actually fools your boss, you obviously need hoops to liven up what must otherwise be a stunningly dull workday.

All of this has been in place for a while, but each year's version is a little slicker and a little smoother as the media players get better and the net becomes better able to handle large loads of streaming video.

Can't watch the video? Well, you could always stream audio, or just check an automatically updating scoreboard. Playing the office pool? You can do that online, too. The site will do the busywork of keeping score. Some will even show updated scores of games in progress. Nice.

Frivolity? Sure (unless the Jayhawks are playing). But it's also a nice test case and driver for the technology. You have everything from streaming media down to nice UIs for showing scores and tracking brackets, all aimed at a mass market that, collectively, is very picky about usability. If your site is clunky, millions of sports fans that should rightfully have been your customers will find one that isn't.

Just the sort of testbed for improving the infrastructure to pave the way for ... um, well, March 2010 comes to mind ...

A gigabit behind your eyes

OK, I thought this was going to be an easy one. At a lecture the other day I heard Edward Tufte (author, among other things, of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and quite a bit of scathing invective aimed in the general direction of Power Point) claim that the human optic nerve has a capacity of around 20 megapixels per second. "And we have two of them!" he continued, pushing one of his major themes: people can easily and naturally process much more information visually than most graphics contain.

Leaving aside the questionable implication that two optic nerves allow us to process much more information than one -- unlikely both because the two eyes generally see almost the same image and because if they don't the result is generally less informative than the normal case -- I was happy to hear some hard numbers, apparently based on a careful, peer-reviewed study, regarding human visual bandwidth.

So all I needed to do was track down Tufte's assertion on the web, follow that to the original study and write it up: Our optic nerves can handle approximately X, so a display purporting to handle more than X may not be that useful (and maybe that's why Blu-Ray doesn't seem to be taking the world by storm). Granted, this is just a crude measure of bandwidth and leaves aside many, many details of human visual perception, but it's still a useful number for sanity checking and ballpark estimates.

Alas, I'm stuck at step 1. I'm only mostly sure the number was 20 and the units were megapixels per second, and I'm assuming that a pixel is more or less three bytes, based on fairly well-known results in color perception. So instead, here are some facts and factoids that turned up:

• The human eye has about 100 million receptors. This is sometimes quoted as "the eye has 100 megapixels," but trying to compare rods and cones to camera pixels is really apples and oranges.
  
• Unlike the uniform grid of digital cameras and video displays, the eye instead has about 100 million light/dark-sensitive rods and 5 million color-sensitive cones. The cones are clustered around the focus point of the lens. Peripheral vision is much less color-sensitive.
• Most people can't really tell the difference between a 6"x4" photograph printed at 150 dpi and one printed at 300 dpi when both are viewed at normal distance. 6"x4"x(150dpi)² is about half a megapixel. Half a megapixel times 20 frames per second is about 10 megapixels per second; that's low of Tufte's figure, but then a 6"x4" photo at normal distance doesn't completely fill the field of vision -- just the most acute portion.
  
• The optic nerve contains about 1.2 million fibers. That's a bit more than one for every hundred receptors, so either some aggregation is done on the retina, or the neurons are able to multiplex information from multiple receptors, or both.
• 1.2 million fibers times 20 frames per second is close to Tufte's 20 million per second.

All this suggests that, to a rough approximation, we can process still images of about a megapixel and moving images with around 20 megapixels per second of useful information. 20 megapixels per second at three bytes per pixel is 60MB/s or about 500Mb/s, so we have something close to a gigabit network right behind our eyes. This sort of thing is one reason I tend to put "broadband" in quotes.

If we can only process a megapixel or so, why have a bigger display than that? Good typographic resolution is more like 1200dpi. On an 8 1/2" x 11" page that's over 100 megapixels. Isn't that overkill?

Not really. You don't look at the entire page at once. You scan it, focusing on on piece, then the next. Each of those pieces needs to be sharp. A large, finely-printed page will give you about a hundred high-resolution patches to focus on. Similarly, you can't take in all of an IMAX image at once. Rather, you have a huge image that looks sharp no matter where you look at it.

A sharp display with only a megapixel of resolution would have to cover the entire field of view, and it would have to track eye movements so that which megapixel you got depended on where you were looking. Maybe some sort of really high-tech contact lens?

Another data point on immersion

A while ago I estimated the bandwidth required for 3-D Imax at 13GB/s, uncompressed. Today I got the latest newsletter from the California Academy of Sciences bragging about the new and improved Morrison Planetarium. They say this bad boy can blast 300 million pixels per second onto its hemispherical screen. At 32 bits per pixel, that's about 1.2GB/s, or about a tenth of my IMAX estimate (I think I used 32 bits per pixel to ensure a conservative estimate of the bandwidth required. 24 ought to be good enough).

Take out a factor of two since 3-D requires two images and assume that the frame rate is 24 frames/s in both cases. The remaining difference is down to spatial resolution. IMAX is about 10K by 7k, or 70 megapixels, so the Morrison is more like 14 megapixels. In the earlier article I guessed that the 13GB/s could probably be compressed down to 1GB/s, partly because the two 3-D images would be largely redundant. Planetarium-level 2-D video would also compress, but not quite as much. Bottom line, you're still looking at gigabits per second to be able to handle this stuff.

The Academy also claims that the panetarium would hold 2,402,494,700 M&Ms, but I'm skeptical about either the volume of an M&M or the planetarium, much less both, being known to a part in 10 million.

More undead technology

For whatever reason, I found myself browsing through the upcoming generation tall buildings the other day. The Burj Dubai [Now the Burj Khalifa --D.H. June 2015] still has pride of place, but the one that caught my eye was the Tokyo Sky Tree. With a shape suggesting a huge Katana, the Sky Tree was considered necessary because the existing Tokyo Tower isn't tall enough to broadcast over Tokyo's latest skyscrapers.

So Japan, one of the more wired nations on earth, is spending hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to build a new structure to broadcast radio and TV over the air. Another case where the surprise is that it's not surprising. Evidently the transition from broadcast to internet audio and video has a ways to go yet. Assuming it ever happens completely at all.

Is Netflix/Roku a web application?

Already sounds like one of those tail-chasing exercises where it all depends on your definitions, doesn't it? Or, put more kindly, a case where exploring the question is more valuable than any particular answer that might pop out. Let's try that angle [if you just want a review of the box, see here] ...

On the one hand, how could a set-top box be a web application? All you do is pick movies and watch them. There's no browser. You could say that picking a movie from the queue is like chasing a link but it seems more like a plain old menu. In particular, it feels a lot like picking a movie on demand with cable, except a little smoother and nicer. If the Netflix box is a web application you might as well say digital cable is, too.

On the other, the web is an essential part of the experience. You can't set up your queue without it. You can't even activate a box without going to the Netflix web site. The web interface isn't necessarily the most visible part of the picture, but it's definitely there.

In one of the earliest posts here, I tentatively defined the web as "all resources accessible on the net." I still like that definition -- it seems a little broad, but I'm not sure how to narrow it without cutting out too much -- and by that definition the box is definitely part of the web, and would (arguably) be even if the movies themselves didn't come in over a net connection.

If anything, the split between setting up the queue (webby) and watching (not so webby) bolsters the idea that the web is mostly about metadata -- relatively small bits of information about things, like in this case which movies are on your queue -- and not so much about large chunks of raw data like songs and movies.

Does this matter? From one point of view it's all pretty arbitrary, but questions like "is it the internet or not?" or "is it the web or not?" may matter quite a bit if you're down in the trenches fighting business and legal battles about who gets to charge whom how much for what. It will probably all shake out in the long term, but I can imagine it mattering at least for a while whether something is a "data service" or a "video service" or whatever.

I'm completely guessing here. I'm not a lawyer, and even less a businessperson.

Three times the commercials! That's progress for you ...

There seems to be a buzz developing over phone providers' "three-screen strategy." The idea is that you'll be able to get video -- TV shows, "user generated" videos, whatever -- delivered anywhere you like, whether your TV, your PC or your cell phone. Underpinning this is a new kind of distribution deal. Previously, carriers and providers had negotiated separate deals for the three kinds of device, but the latest deals cover all three.

This is a perfect example of convergence from the vendors' point of view, and a small but necessary step from the consumer's point of view. Again, there's a tension between competing interests. On the one hand, the carriers would like to be able to provide a broad selection of programming, since that will attract customers. But if everyone is providing the same broad selection then the service becomes a commodity, consumers can easily switch providers and the providers' margins shrink.

Right now, we seem to be at the "baby steps" stage, with deals covering content like five-minute excerpts from popular shows. Perhaps it's a bit early to make too many predictions.

Myself, I don't feel a great need to watch TV on my tiny cell phone screen, particularly since advertising seems to be a major part of the current plans, but advertising isn't necessarily bad, and I'm sure a lot of people won't mind greatly. As always, it will be interesting to see how things shake out.

Media convergence and divergence

Technically, it's game over.

There's no reason why a box like Roku's Netflix box [reviewed here] couldn't be used to deliver current TV shows, live events, premium cable content, whatever. And in fact, it looks like you can get just that kind of service from DSL providers (well, maybe you can -- it's not available where I am yet). Boxes like Apple TV are also in the mix; the streaming aspect is there, albeit downplayed.

There are some concerns about bandwidth on the backbone, but Cisco says it's manageable, and they're allowing for a sizable chunk of peer-to-peer traffic, which may (or may not) become less of an issue if people are happy with what they can get directly from the providers. If I can see a given movie anytime I want as part of a $10/month subscription, why would I hassle with copying it peer-to-peer? But maybe that's just me.

So somewhere around now, give or take a couple of years, is the point where in major markets it's technically reasonably easy to get all the media you want via the net, media meaning audio, video, phone (i.e., two-way point-to-point audio) and the web. At some point not too much later than that point -- again whether it's already happened or about to happen depends on your definitions -- it's all available in a mobile environment. Just take a more-or-less broadband mobile connection and use it instead of your wired connection. QED.

Technically, media convergence is here, and if technology were all that mattered we'd be about done. For better or worse, however, technology is only part of the show, and often not the part in charge. In this case, the real drivers are two divergent views of convergence: the consumer's view and the providers' view.

As a consumer, I want a complete mix-and-match free-for-all with the flexibility of the "pocket-thing" scenario. I can get my bits delivered any way I like and don't care which particular means is in effect at any given time. I can get whatever bits I like delivered without caring too much who's providing them, and in all cases I can easily pick how they're actually rendered useful to me.

If that's a bit too abstract (it seems a bit too abstract to me and I wrote it), here are some concrete examples of what that means:

• I could switch from, say, cable to DSL or WiMax or whatever tomorrow and, apart from performance, not notice the difference -- I could watch the same shows, keep the same phone number, listen to the same music, etc., etc.
• I get the same services when traveling as when at home, though again I may be dealing with a better or worse internet connection on the road. My services are tied to me, not to a particular location or device.
• If I want a particular bit of content -- a movie or a TV show, for example -- it doesn't matter whether I've got cable, DSL or something else, or where I am.
  

Providers, on the other hand, tend to take a different view. Convergence means you get all your media through them. They'd just as soon not have it be too easy to switch to a different provider tomorrow, and if you have to pay them again to access something on the road, so much the better. Hey, they're in business to make money and their interests are only partially aligned with yours.

My particular view is that the consumer will tend to win in the long run, but it will take a while and proceed in fits and starts. If what's provided gets too far out of line with what people want and what the technology can do, new players will step in and steal business from the existing ones. This tends to bring things back in line. The new players start to lose their competitive advantage, commoditization sets in, competition becomes harsher, weaker players are shaken out and competition wanes.

This lets the remaining players cash in and service once again get out of line with what people want and the technology will do. Which is where we came in ...

Interestingly, in the bullet points I gave above, video is the odd one out. Switching both land-line and mobile phone providers is fairly transparent. If you switch ISPs, your email accounts still work, and the web is the same, well, world-wide.

My guess is that this is at least partly because the technology for reasonable video over the net is only starting to become widely available, and that the Netflix/Roku box is an early participant in this particular cycle of innovation and shakeout. It's going to be an interesting time to be a studio or TV network, not to mention a cable or satellite TV company.

Netflix/Roku review

The Netflix set-top box I ordered came in this weekend. It's about the size of a small CD box set, all clean straight lines, black with a single white LED on the front. Ordering it, I'd had two concerns: technology and selection. Would the box be able to deliver a clear, steady picture, or would there be dropouts as it dealt with our local broadband connection? Can you have 10,000 titles to choose from but nothing to watch?

First, the technology works. Nicely. The hardest part of setting up the box was moving my honking big old-school TV so I could hook up the cable (and then negotiating the TV's menu to get it to show the right input). The second hardest part was putting in my WEP key in its full hexadecimal glory. This is really a problem with the router -- I've had to do that with everything I've hooked up. Roku makes even this about as easy as can be, especially considering that all you have to work with at that point is a screen and a remote with nine buttons.

Once it's connected, watching movies is easy. Netflix gives you an "Instant" queue, parallel to the regular one. You can flip through the contents of that queue on the screen. The titles show up as DVD cover images with a text caption. When you select a title, you see the description. If you pick something with multiple parts, like a TV series, you can easily select the episode you want, or the next episode if you've just finished one. Once you make a selection, the box spends a few seconds filling its buffers and you're off and running.

I'm not a "show every last sub-pixel" videophile, so your mileage may vary, but for my money the picture was just great: sharp and steady and at least as good as the regular cable feed. I kept waiting for some sort of glitch but so far it hasn't happened.

You can pause just like a DVD. Fast-forward/rewind is a bit different. You see a series of stills taken every so often either side of where you left off. You can scan through these just like you can scan through your queue. It would be nice to be able to scan through the contents of the buffer, so you could go back a second or two to replay that line you just missed, but for finding your place it seems to work well.

What about the selection? That's largely a matter of taste, of course. The current catalog tends heavily toward older releases and direct-to-DVD fare, lots of Night of the Obscurities II: The Relapse and such. Even so, with 10,000 titles to choose from, a high chaff/wheat ratio isn't necessarily a problem. That latest release you want almost certainly won't be there, but many older hits will be, along with back episodes of popular TV series and a smattering of interesting-but-not-blockbuster offerings.

Netflix makes no bones about the "Instant" selection being more limited. From their point of view it's a supplement to their DVD service, and that's still the main attraction. If you want that latest release, you'll have to put it in your regular queue and wait for the DVD to show up.

On the other hand, they say that they're working to expand the instant offerings. From the looks of it, they're doing this even as I write. The bottleneck seems mostly to be negotiating with the studios, who largely seem to be playing wait-and-see. My guess is that if the box turns out to be a hit -- which it might very well -- the studios will be more forthcoming, at least with older releases. Realistically, though, the box will continue to be the poor cousin for a while.

I could also imagine a "premium instant" service, where for more than the base $10/month you could get more choices, but that probably will have to wait until the studios are comfortable with the technology.

So should you get one? I'd say take a good look at the selections on Netflix and if it looks like you can find enough there to justify $100 for the box (and $10/month if you don't already belong to Netflix), go for it. Netflix says that this Roku box is "likely to be the lowest cost Netflix ready device for the foreseeable future". I hate that kind of sales pitch, but in this case it's probably true.

Netflix, content and pipes

Previously, I pondered what cable companies would make of Netflix's new set-top box [reviewed here], which would seem to compete with existing on-demand video services, but also drive up demand for broadband internet. Hardly was the virtual ink dry before I ran across this item: Time Warner, under pressure from shareholders, is spinning off its cable business and is now, according to one analyst, "headed toward being a pure content company."

So, at a guess, and keeping in mind that besides not being a lawyer I'm also not a financial analyst, this might make everyone happy. Time-Warner gets to distribute its content however it likes, including via Netflix if that makes sense. Netflix sells boxes and rents movies, and the cable arm should do OK as long as it can sneak any money it loses in on-demand rentals into higher prices for its broadband service -- perhaps by making sure that the "regular" broadband service doesn't carry Netflix's movies quite as well as the "premium" version.

The new black box in town

Netflix has finally announced its long-rumored set-top box [reviewed here]. The box, made by Roku, is $99 and the service is $9 a month (it's included with any Netflix subscription except the $5 entry-level special). There are a couple of catches:

• Obviously, you'll need broadband. The service promises "near DVD-quality", that is, somewhere around a megabit. I don't know if they can send you HD if you've got the bandwidth for it but if you live in the States, you probably don't so the question is moot.
• The selection is limited. In particular, the studios are still leery of putting out their latest releases on the internet, so you won't get those. In all, about 10,000 titles are available, compared to the 100,000 they offer by mail.

Hmm ... anyone remember when movie theaters had one (count it, one) screen and there were three TV networks plus the odd UHF station playing Our Gang, The Munsters and Laurel and Hardy re-runs? Now 10,000 titles is "limited". Progress, I suppose.

"Broadband" in the states won't support live HD, but if the box had enough storage on board you could get HD sort-of-on-demand. Ask for your selection when you leave for work and it'll be there when you get home, probably, assuming no one else wants to do much with the internet connection during the day. Faster than waiting for a DVD in the mail, but interestingly, not a lot faster.

I would be surprised, though, if the box had anywhere enough storage on board for a full HD movie. My guess is it's enough to buffer a few minutes in case of net.hiccups, and Wikipedia's entry on Roku (the manufacturer) seems to support this.

Even at near-DVD resolution and a "limited" selection, I'm expecting the things to sell like hotcakes. For about the price of a premium movie channel package you get orders of magnitude more selection with comparable picture quality (if the quality isn't at least comparable, the whole thing will be dead on arrival). If they do sell, the projected video flood of the internet comes one sizable step closer.

In the case of households with cable, a chunk of video traffic that now goes over the provider's system and then down the cable to the TV will shift to going over the backbone to the cable provider and thence to the TV. In other words, the net shift is from the provider's system onto the backbone. The obvious solution is to put Netflix's servers at the upstream end of the cable (but see this post for a slightly different take).

Whether this happens depends on how the cable companies feel about their newfound "co-opetition". If you're in the bandwidth business, you love Netflix's box. If you're in the content business, maybe not so much.

The video flood

Shockingly, I'm not the only person pondering the impact of video on the internet. Under the provocative headline Does online video threaten the net?, Auntie Beeb, in a somewhat indecisive mood, concludes yes, possibly, well, no probably not.

One interesting point, lurking but not prominent in the piece, is that the projected buildout to video-friendly bandwidth will most likely benefit the larger players and shake out smaller ones who are too busy undercutting each other to accumulate the kind of capital needed to make major upgrades to the backbone and other infrastructure.

All of this assumes that the net will be the way to go for video. It may well be. Cisco is confident that the bandwidth will be there, and Cisco knows a bit about the topic.

On the other hand, I'm not quite ready to say it's a foregone conclusion. Quite possible, sure. Likely, even. But given the inherent efficiency of broadcasting broadcast video, maybe not inevitable. Back on the one hand, though, if internet video works and it doesn't cost too much, why not?

One thing that jumped out at me was the projection that by 2011, 30% of bandwidth would be video and 43% would be peer-to-peer file sharing of video. I'd be interested to know the assumptions behind those figures. To what extent do people use peer-to-peer because the only alternative is to shell out for a DVD or hope the movie you like is available on demand on cable?

I was also intrigued by the BBC's iPlayer service, but I wasn't able to try it since it only works if you can convince their server you're in Britain. An international version is promised. That's got to be about £icensing.