- Now You Can Get A Latte AND An Espresso at Your Bookstore — The Espresso books-on-demand printing system was first unveiled at the beginning of 2007 and made it’s American debut last summer with an exhibition at one of the New York Public Library’s special collections. Now this revolutionary device is making its first big commercial appearance in the Australian bookstore chain Angus & Robertson (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch). The initial intended use of the machines is to allow customers to obtain copies of out-of-print and hard-to-find books, but the chain plans to use them to offer up to 10,000 titles by the end of next year. A typical “big-box” bookstore like Angus & Roberts, or American retailers like Borders or Barnes & Noble, generally stocks about 20,000 unique titles, so this will allow them to increase their offerings by 50% without having to spend money on store expansions or increased inventory. Borders, which bought itself (along with Waldenbook) back from Kmart about ten years ago, is struggling pretty seriously these days. Their talks about merging with B&N failed, and now the chain is trying to sell itself once again. So the arrival of these “ATMs for books” could be either a saving throw for them by adding titles, or it could be the final nail in their coffin as it could quite possibly make big-box bookstores irrelevant. Stay tuned.
- Coming Soon, The Complete MGM Film Library On A Grain Of Rice — Last week I mentioned a re-imagining of selling movies on USB sticks instead of DVDs. This week, I ran across this news item about a plan from SD-card maker SanDisk and four of the major record labels to sell record albums on SD cards instead of CDs. Those teeny-weeny fingernail sized micro-SD cards now range in capacity from 64MB to 16GB, and a typical music CD only holds up to 700MB in the first place. It’s no problem whatsoever to put the original uncompressed WAV files on the tiny micro-SD cards, which could then be directly inserted into even the smallest audio players as well as your full-sized home stereo system. The micro-SD cards are so small that you could carry dozens of them with you, if you were so inclined, and the ability to use them in the entire range of audio electronics would make them extremely flexible. Plus, if the group behind this idea could get portable music players to support the media format, it would let those manufacturers stop chasing onboard storage and make all the companies that want tougher DRM very happy. Keep your eye on this, as it has the potential to be a big, big deal for the record labels AND the electronics makers.
- Pay As You Go Everywhere — Last week, Time Warner Cable CEO Glen Britt told investors at a Goldman Sachs technology conference (oh, the humanity) that he thinks metered broadband service is the likely service model of the future. The cable companies are all in the midst of testing the waters of various schemes for changing the nature of broadband service, and TWC is piloting a pay-as-you-go plan in Texas. Comcast, of course, has just rolled out a bandwidth capping policy that provides the average user with so much bandwidth that it might as well be unlimited but will slow down the heavy users. A metered use system would let the cable companies offer price reductions to low-use users, place the burden of paying for extreme bandwidth usage on the actual high-end consumers, and potentially reduce the likelihood that the cable companies would feel compelled to abandon net neutrality and cram tiered Internet service down everyone’s throat. They should be just as enthusiastic about a-la-carte cable TV service, except that the cable companies OWN 90% of the cable networks themselves and don’t want to lose their sweet sweet revenue, but one can always hope that they’ll see the light. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless has announced that they’re rolling out a month-to-month plan that would also let you use any cell phone you want. This announcement goes along with their “any device anywhere on our network” plan that they introduced last year. It’s another step in the right direction of returning the network providers to their rightful roles as providers of the pipes and not the means of access or the content.
- Slavery Is Freedom — Last week I posted about the upcoming “enhanced” driver’s licenses in the State of New York that will come embedded with RFID chips that can be used for border crossings (among other things). While the United States is on the slippery slope to a police state, the U.K. has already descended into nothing short of Orwellian nightmare with its ubiquitous (and mostly useless) CCTV systems, ASBO classifications, and so on. Now they’re going one step further by introducing RFID-embedded identity cards for resident aliens that are chock-full of biometric identification (i.e. fingerprints, etc.). The cards will be issued to foreign students and to foreign nationals living in the UK on spousal visas. Cory Doctorow, the editor of BoingBoing and well-known privacy advocate, happens to be one of those “married aliens” who will be affected by the new system and has quite a long post about it today. The British government’s plan has been widely decried as a test balloon for forcing ALL British citizens to carry “enhanced” identification cards and be incorporated into a national database system which could be abused any way the government fancied. The Tories have also made the valid complaint that the cards will do little toward the stated goal of “fighting terrorism” because they won’t apply to short-term visitors from the EU, who can move freely in and out of the U.K. and who can stay for up to three months without any additional visas or papers.
Meanwhile, here’s a bit of good news about less sinister applications of RFID technology: Researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. are developing a tag technology based on RFID that would create very inexpensive tags that could be applied to produce, meat and other food that spoils quickly to detect the relative freshness of a piece of fruit or a cut of meat or a container of milk and update the displayed expiration date of the item on its packaging. Accurate expiration labels are presently non-existant, using “best guess” efforts only, causing tons of food to be wasted everey single day. This is a different system than the highly-touted “self-inventory” sort of RFID tag that lets warehouses track stock or lets your “smart” refirgerator tell you when you need more eggs, but could probably be included in the same sort of systems and would be very beneficial to consumers AND producers alike.
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Tech and Media News Linkapalooza
N-B-SeeYa!
The May ratings sweeps are over, and the undisputed loser is NBC. NBC could only manage one series in the Top 25 for the entire season: one of the many and varied versions of “Law And Order” came in at #16. That puts NBC in fourth place behind FOX, although they were still ahead of CW.
NBC now has all its chips on doing well with the coverage of the Beijing Olympics, which will last for almost the entire month of August, but it’s unclear what they really might expect to gain as a long-term advantage. NBC is only bringing out four new series in the fall, so it’s not like there’s all that much to promote. Moreover, when they broadcast the Winter Olympics from Torino, Italy in 2006, the games were squashed in the ratings by programs like American Idol and Dancing With The Stars. Granted, they won’t have that kind of competition in August, but there’s a concern that viewer interest in the Olympics has dwindled, and there are many who have strong negative feelings about the games taking place in China.
Over at TVNewser there’s a post about open speculation that corporate parent GE might be willing to sell off NBC-Universal and that a potential buyer might be TimeWarner. TimeWarner is in the process of spinning off their cable division, but media industry analysts see a merger as a way to provide TimeWarner with a broadcast television presence…as well as a way to consolidate CNN and CNBC to compete against FOX News and Fox Financial News.
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A Big Fat One-Way Pipe
Some assorted bits and pieces about the cable world to tie together for you:
All the various tech sites are reporting that Time Warner Cable is going to test-drive a “pay-per-bits” pricing scheme for Internet access. Not unlike your cellular service, you would pre-pay for a set amount of bandwidth usage per month and then pay a premium in the form of per-byte overage fees. But, as DSL Reports also informs us, TWC is likely to set the bandwidth cap pretty low during the trial period — perhaps as low as 5GB. On the face of it, that might sound like a lot to you, but to anyone who downloads media content from the Internet, 5 gigs is a pittance. A single movie might be 5GB.
Most reactions to this news are pretty unfavorable, but telco guru David Isenberg says he thinks this isn’t a bad idea at all as a stopgap measure to deal with bandwidth usage outstripping the existing network infrastructure. Making people pay will slow down some bandwidth hogs, and is probably a fairer way of dealing with the issue than abandoning net neutrality and establishing preferred-access tiers for providers.
Meanwhile, at the CES show Cisco announced a 1Gbps “concept” cable modem that would work under DOCSIS 3.0′s channel-bonding process (which otherwise caps out around 150Mbps). Since DOCSIS 3.0 isn’t even implemented yet (and probably won’t be for another year), this is a “sneak-peek” at something that might be four or five years down the road. Of course, if your cable service only lets you download 5GB a month, about the only thing a gigabit cable modem will do is let you use up your allotted bandwidth 25 times faster than you can right now, but maybe by the time this puppy starts shipping they’ll have beefed up the backbone a bit.
They will want to get going on that sooner rather than later, too. In 2006, cable provider Cablevision tested a “network DVR” service that let customers have some DVR features without having to have a set-top box, but the test was pulled due to a court order that said they were crossing over into broadcaster territory by “redistributing content”. Now, our friends at Comcast think they’ve found a way around that by limiting the functionality of the network DVR. Your TiVo, or even your cable company DVR set-top box can fast-forward and rewind through recorded programs as well as provide the time-shifting ability of recording a show and watching it whenever you want. Comcast’s test service will only let you jump back to the beginning of a program already in progress — no fast forwarding whatsoever (which means you can’t skip through the commercials), and, from the description Ars Technica provides I’d say that rewinding and recording aren’t going to be part of the feature set either. There are indeed times where it would be great to be able to jump back to the beginning of a program you just turned into (a feature you can’t do with TiVo or other hardware DVRs unless they’re already on that channel), but personally I can’t see why anyone would pay for that service instead of a full-featured DVR unless it is super-cheap. Unless, of course, the real goal of the cable companies is to defeat the DVR in the long term and make this sort of “crippled” service the only one you can have.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
