Cell phones with build in cameras are replacing cheap pocket size digital cameras and video cameras. Best cell phone cameras can be better in many ways than cheap pocket digital cameras from few years back. And most people do not want to carry separate devices for each function (at least without a very good reason), when a smart phone can handle calls, Internet, photos and video shooting.
CES 2013 fair had more pocket advanced size cameras on display than DSLRs, but the trend on then was that business was going down due cellular phone cameras getting better. So camera manufacturers are integrating more cellular phone like features to their cameras (like Android OS with wireless connectivity to photo sharing sites) and concentrate on building good superzoom and DSLR type cameras. You need to have something clearly different than what cell phone can offer: huge zoom, good performance in low light or works also in harsh environment. Wireless connection is getting more and more common, either built-in or using memory card with WiFi.
As Sales Slip, TV Makers Strain for the Next Sensation because hardware companies want to make their products stand out in a sea of black rectangles that can show the content user want to watch. And one that is particularly acute for television makers. The hardware is becoming kind of boring and exciting things are happening in software. TV manufacturers continue to push the idea of “smart” sets by adding apps and other interactive elements.
Connected TV technologies get more widely used and the content earlier viewable only on TV can be now seen on many other screens. Your smartphone is the screen in your pocket. Your computer is the screen on your desk. Your tablet is a screen for the couch. Almost every major electronic device you own is a black rectangle that is brought to life by software and content.
In the last two years, television makers have tried a push with 3-D sets. But now It’s official: 3D is dead. The tech industry’s annual hot air balloon show is gone. On the one hand, 3D has become ubiquitous enough in televisions that people are unwittingly buying it when opting for a high-end new HDTV to fill their living room.
Post HDTV resolution era seems to be coming to TVs as well in form of 4K / UltraHD. This year, television makers like Samsung, Sony, LG and Panasonic are trying to grab attention by supersizing their television screens and quadrupling the level of detail in their images. They are promoting what they call Ultra High-Definition televisions, which have four times as many pixels as their high-definition predecessors, and can cost as much as a car. It’s a bit of a marketing push. It seems that all LCD makers are looking to move their business models on from cheap mass production to higher-margin, premium offerings. They try to innovate and secure their future viability by selling fewer, but more profitable displays.
4K at CES 2013: the dream gets real article tells that the 4K bandwagon is fully loaded and ready to get rolling. The US TV maker isn’t alone in stepping up to the higher resolution in its new flagship models. Sony, Panasonic and Sharp, Japan’s traditional big-screen TV leaders, are all attending this year’s CES with proper retail products. Manufacturers Need You to Buy an Ultra-High-Def 4K TV. Save Your Money because just as HDTV was slow to take off, the 4K start will be slow. It’s more than the price that’s keeping these things from hitting critical mass. 4K is only for ultra-premium markets this year.
4K resolution TV has one big problem: The entire ecosystem isn’t ready for 4K. The Trouble With 4K TV article tellst that though 4K resolutions represent the next step in high-definition video, standards for the format have yet to emerge and no one’s really figured out how to distribute video, with its massive file footprint, efficiently and cost effectively. Getting 4K content to consumers is hard.
Even though 4K resolution is widely use in digital cinematography, but there is no suitable consumer disk format that supports it and the bandwidth need to stream 4K content would be huge. Given that uncompressed 4K footage has a bit-rate of about 600MB/s. Broadcom chip ushers in H.265 and UltraHD video tells that H.265 video standard, aka HEVC or MPEG-5, squeezes more pixels over a network connection to support new high-resolution 4K TVs.
You should also note that the new higher resolution is pretty pointless for a small TV (where the TV mass market is now). Ultra HD would make a difference only on screens that were at least 80 inches, measured diagonally. For smaller screens, the extra pixels would not be visible to a person with 20/20 vision viewing from a normal viewing distance. Ultra HD TVs can also be a flop. But let’s see what happens in the world where nowadays tiny smart phone screens can have full HDTV resolution.
Keep in mind that 4K is not any absolute highest resolution expected in few years. 8k resolution TVs are coming. Sharp showed a 8K resolution TV with 7680 x 4320 resolution at CES2013. For more details on it read Sharp 8K Super Hi-Vision LCD, 4K TV and Freestyle wireless LCD HDTV hands-on article.
Another development than pushing up the resolution to make high end display products is OLED technology. OLED is another new technology to make expensive products. The much buzzed-about device features next-generation, high-quality OLED screens. OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode, and they offer a bevy of benefits: more energy efficient, cleaner image, wide viewing angle and devices can be made thinner. You can also make TV screen curved in shape. In a race between television titans, LG has beat Samsung in becoming the first manufacturer to introduce a 55-inch OLED television to market: the largest OLED TV panel to date.. OLED products are very expensive (LG TV $10,300 in US dollars). OLED display can also have 4K resolution, so you can combine two expensive technologies to one product. Market analysts say that they believe the technology will not become more affordable until 2015.
The Verge Awards: the best of CES 2013 article lists for example product like Samsung 4K “easel TV”, Sony 4K OLED TV, Teenage Engineering OD-11 Cloud Speaker and Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming.
All your audio, video kit is about to become OBSOLETE article tells that although much of the audio and video technology packed into CES 2013′s 1.9 million square feet of exhibition space is indeed impressive, one panelist at an emerging-technology conference session channeled a little 1974 BTO, essentially telling his audience that “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Deep-geek soothsayer predicts smart audio, Ultra HD eyewear, much more in coming years. Audio is going to become adaptive, changing its wave forms to fit each user’s personal aural perceptions. Active noise reduction is finding its way into cars. HD audio will be coming to mobile phones. MEMS-based microphones and speakers are also on the runway. Consumer-level video will see in the future much higher resolution devices with much higher frame rates.
903 Comments
Tomi says:
Tutkimus: yli puolet suomalaisista tyytymättömiä tv-sisältöihin Suomalaisten netti-tv:n katselu huipussaan
http://uutishuone.sonera.fi/media/2013/06/16/tutkimus-yli-puolet-suomalaisista-tyytymttomi-tv-sisltoihin-suomalaisten-netti-tvn-katselu-huipussaan/d3db38f3-3b0f-4609-b0b2-ed460960dfae
Tomi Engdahl says:
White paper tracks video surveillance ‘megatrends’
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/06/video-surveillance-megatrends.html
A recent white paper authored by Milestone Systems’ corporate chief sales and marketing officer, Eric Fullerton, introduces many of the latest “megatrends” and developments in IP video surveillance, including topics such as image quality, mobile access to live and recorded video, edge and server-based video analytics, the move toward open platform video management software, and new uses of IP video.
“IP video surveillance is transforming not just video surveillance and other security operations, but the very business processes on which organizations depend,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google finishes defining its VP9 video codec, adds it to Chromium ahead of Chrome and YouTube rollout
http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/06/17/google-finishes-defining-its-vp9-video-codec-adds-it-to-chromium-ahead-of-chrome-and-youtube-rollout/
Last month, Google revealed that it was planning to finish defining its VP9 video codec on June 17 (today), after which it will start using the next-generation compression technology in Chrome and on YouTube. The company is wasting no time: it has already enabled the free video compression standard by default in the latest Chromium build.
VP9 is the successor to VP8, both of which fall under Google’s WebM project of freeing Web codecs from royalty constraints. Despite the fact that Google unveiled WebM three years ago at its I/O conference, VP8 is still rarely used when compared to H.264, today’s most popular video codec.
As Beaufort explains, the main advantage of VP9 for users is that it’s 50 percent more efficient than H.264, meaning that you’ll use half the bandwidth on average when watching a video on the internet.
Yet that doesn’t take H.265 into account, the successor to H.264 that offers comparable video quality at half the number of bits per second and also requires its implementers to pay patent royalties.
VP9 is meant to become part of WebRTC
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audio Video Bridging
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging
Audio Video Bridging (AVB) is a common name for the set of technical standards developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Audio Video Bridging Task Group of the IEEE 802.1 standards committee. The charter of this organization is to “provide the specifications that will allow time-synchronized low latency streaming services through IEEE 802 networks”.[1] These consist of:
IEEE 802.1AS: Timing and Synchronization for Time-Sensitive Applications (gPTP),
IEEE 802.1Qat: Stream Reservation Protocol (SRP),
IEEE 802.1Qav: Forwarding and Queuing for Time-Sensitive Streams (FQTSS), and
IEEE 802.1BA: Audio Video Bridging Systems
IEEE 802.1Qat and 802.1Qav are amendments to the base IEEE 802.1Q document, which specifies the operation of “Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks”, which are implemented by network devices typically called Ethernet switches.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AVB On the Verge?
http://controlgeek.net/blog/2013/6/15/avb-on-the-verge
Audio Video Bridging (AVB): an open standard way to transport audio and video over a Local Area Network (LAN).
While there was lots of talk about AVB over the years, Meyer Sound was the only major player in our live sound market that I had seen really embrace AVB, and I grew even more pessimistic about AVB’s future when, at Infocomm 2012, Yamaha demonstrated its adoption of Audinate’s proprietary, Ethernet-based Dante sound networking system as its backbone of its CL product line.
Audinate has been involved with AVB and the related trade association AVNU Alliance for some time, and with Dante’s increasingly broad market share, I was starting to wonder if it was really would be in Audinate’s interest to support something like AVB, which could obviate the need for their bread and butter, proprietary product. Well, at Infocomm 2013, there was a very encouraging AVB sign in the AVNU pavillion
Dante Ethernet jack, which the Yamaha rep said was running beta Audinate firmware, sending AVB out to the system. With Audinate’s substantial market penetration,this could be a game changer
Audinate’s role in AVB might be to offer manufacturers AVB on a chip (they already do this with there Dante network) with some layer 3 management tools (AVB operates only at Layer 2).
And the great thing is that AVB, as an open standard, is not limited to Audinate, or any other manufacturer, and Yamaha wasn’t the only company in our market demonstrating working product at Infocomm 2013
Avid had a mixer also putting out AVB
Riedel was there using AVB on their intercom system
And Barco was there showing video over AVB
Is this a tipping point? Will 2014 be the year of AVB, Dante, or AVB/Dante?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Signal distortion from high-K ceramic capacitors
http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4416466/Signal-distortion-from-high-K-ceramic-capacitors
Multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) are used extensively in modern electronics because they offer high volumetric efficiencies and low equivalent series resistances at attractive prices. These advantages make MLCCs nearly ideal for a wide range of applications, including output capacitors for power supplies and local decoupling capacitors for integrated circuits.
The various types of MLCCs are delineated primarily by their temperature coefficient, which is the amount of variation in their capacitance over a specified temperature range.
The temperature coefficient of an MLCC is a direct effect of the materials used in the ceramic that forms the capacitor dielectric. Furthermore, the dielectric material also determines the electrical characteristics of the capacitor.
The benefit of increased relative permittivity of the dielectric material is that high-k MLCCs are available in much larger capacitance values and smaller packages than C0G types.
Unfortunately, these advantages come with a downside: high-K MLCCs exhibit a substantial voltage coefficient, meaning their capacitance varies depending on the applied voltage. In AC applications this phenomenon manifests itself as waveform distortion and can compromise the overall system performance. When printed circuit board (PCB) area and cost are major design constraints, board and system level designers may be tempted to use high-K MLCCs in circuits where they can introduce significant distortion into the signal path.
Active filter circuits, anti-aliasing filters for data converters, and feedback capacitors in amplifiers are examples of circuits where the use of a high-K MLCC may introduce distortion.
Because passive component distortion increases with higher signal levels, it follows that filter circuit distortion should be greatest when the capacitors experience maximum applied voltage
The performance of an analog circuit can be dramatically affected by the type of capacitors used in its construction. An active filter was used to demonstrate this principle. When the circuit was constructed with C0G capacitors, it delivered a high level of performance. However, once the capacitors were changed to those of the X7R dielectric type, the circuit’s performance was degraded considerably. X7R capacitors introduced a large number of harmonics into the signal path, with odd harmonics being the dominate contributors to the THD+N measurement. Specifically, X7R capacitors in 0603 packages exhibited the worst performance, and X7R capacitors in 1206 packages provided only marginally improved performance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Future of 3-D TV Murky as ESPN Ends Channel
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/business/media/future-of-3-d-tv-murky-as-espn-ends-channel.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
A few years ago, 3-D was hailed as the next big thing in television, the logical successor to high definition. But viewers in the United States did not buy the hype, and now the eye-popping format is seen as an expensive flop.
That impression was cemented last week when ESPN, the nation’s largest sports network and an early adopter of 3-D technology, said it was turning off its three-year-old 3-D channel. A spokeswoman said the decision was “due to limited consumer adoption of 3-D services to the home.”
“Many in the industry have said over the last few years that if ESPN ever pulled the plug on 3-D TV, that would be the format’s final chapter,” Phillip Swann, the publisher of the industry Web site TVPredictions.com, wrote after ESPN’s announcement. “Today, it’s hard to deny that statement.”
The only other big 3-D channel, called 3net,
The format is healthier at the box office, but even there, only 36 films were released in 3-D last year
Over all, 3-D box office revenue was flat.
When television manufacturers started to aggressively market the technology in 2010 — helped by the theatrical release of “Avatar” by James Cameron in December 2009
Television owners generally rejected the glasses that were usually required
In stadiums, for instance, 3-D cameras had to be closer to the field than traditional cameras.
ESPN televised 380 sporting events in 3-D,
Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president for Gartner, a technology research company, said the 3-D format suffered from “a chicken-and-egg situation where content wasn’t created because of low penetration of 3-D TVs in the home, and consumers were not buying 3-D TVs due to the lack of compelling content.”
Meanwhile, the television manufacturers that had been pushing 3-D are now promoting a newer format, “ultra HD” or 4K, which promises four times the resolution of the high-definition sets that most Americans own.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix will launch in the Netherlands in late 2013, as its international expansion slows
http://paidcontent.org/2013/06/19/netflix-comes-to-the-netherlands-in-late-2013-as-international-expansion-slows/
Netflix revealed the next target of its ongoing international expansion Tuesday night: The streaming service will launch in the Netherlands in late 2013
Last year, the company doubled down on international markets by expanding to the UK, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Netflix now has a total of seven million subscribers outside of the U.S., but some markets have proven more difficult than others. Latin America, in particular, has been challenging
Tomi Engdahl says:
Movie Trailers Are Getting Insanely Fast. Trust Us, We Counted the Cuts
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/online-trailers-cuts/
Film critics have long lamented the degradation of moviegoers’ attention spans. Movies, they say—and their mini-versions, trailers—have gotten more manic and misdirected in their quest to appease ADD audiences.
The Result: A Clear, Steep Climb in Speed Over the Years
Through the ‘50s, the average rate was 12 cuts per minute. Since the ‘90s? Thirty-eight.
That trajectory is easily explained by the evolution of editing technologies. Linear editing systems were once the standard: Editors painstakingly spliced pieces of film together, or later, copied video from one tape to another. “When I started in 1990, there were still people cutting on film in the trailer business—though most people were on tape-to-tape systems,”
Starting in the early ‘90s, though, editors began switching to computers with the rest of the world. In the course of about three years, digital systems—mostly Avid—became de rigueur for video editing. These are so-called non-linear systems: Editors can grab shots from any point in a film’s progression and drag them into a new timeline. There were some holdouts dedicated to the old linear systems until the late ‘90s, but the new system’s impact was clear: The future was fast.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Wants to Create Appointment TV Online, Not Follow Netflix Binging
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/06/amazon-alpha-house-release-plan/66348/
Though Netflix may have emerged as the frontrunner when it comes to original streaming content, what with the successes of House of Cards and Arrested Development, don’t expect Amazon to be following in its footsteps entirely.
The Netflix system of releasing all episodes of a series at once hasn’t been foolproof. Viewers consume the shows quickly, and buzz dies down fast.
“The current Netflix strategy eliminates watercooler chat, it saps the experience of speculation, of theorizing, of cautious optimism or nervous despair. The all-at-once release does a number on conversation, essentially, and conversation seems to be a large part of why many people watch television these days.”
Amazon has been particularly experimental in the way it has handled its jump into original content, releasing all their pilots online and using viewer feedback to help them decide which to order series. Now, they’ll seek to make appointment television online.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LG to mass-produce flexible displays
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2013/06/133_137769.html
LG Display is expected to solidify its leadership in the display market as it will mass-produce a new flexible smartphone panel for major clients from the fourth quarter of this year.
According to the company, LG is investing in flexible displays for mobile devices and new high-tech panels, called organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels, which support ultra high-definition (UHD).
“We have completed the development of our first flexible displays. We will mass produce flexible displays from the fourth quarter of this year,” the company said in a statement to The Korea Times.
Flexible OLEDs are just one part of LG’s plan to sweep the global OLED market by increasing its investment in various business projects.
The company, which is the first to mass produce OLED screens and curved OLEDs for televisions, is in the process of developing OLED TV screens that support UHD viewing quality.
As OLED TVs go mainstream within the next few years, LG is expanding its panel sizes to 65 inches and 77 inches.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hollywood, Silicon Valley quarrel over digital media
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4416718/Hollywood–Silicon-Valley-argue-over-digital-media
Like an old married couple, Hollywood and Silicon Valley keep fighting the same old arguments. The latest spat erupted at the first meeting of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers held on the Stanford campus here.
Hollywood claims Silicon Valley doesn’t do enough to protect its content. The Valley counters Hollywood doesn’t put out its video in ways attractive enough for the digital age.
Meanwhile the next big format war is brewing.
On the codec front, a Google engineering manager said the search giant locked down the code stream and held an industry summit two weeks ago for its VP9 codec. It showed the royalty-free codec it evolved from VP8 that Google acquired with On2 Technologies delivering streams while using roughly half the CPU horsepower of today’s H.264.
The free, fast codec will be much more attractive than the competing H.265 (aka HEVC), said Google’s Jan Skoglund, claiming H.265 will carry even high royalties than its predecessor. Industry giants are still debating terms for H.265 at the MPEG LA.
Expect more shoes to fall in this debate over the next year as debate heats up and crystallizes over patent terms for both codecs.
TV makers came to CES last January trumpeting UltraHD, The quad-resolution high def picture was their hope to re-ignite interest in giant flat panels after stereo 3-D failed to ignite the market.
Hollywood wants something different. Rushing to more pixels is an easy but unsatisfying answer, said one studio exec who asked to be unnamed.
Instead, content owners are shopping ideas such as expanding the color gamut which is still locked in the olden days of what could be shown on a CRT. Today’s LCDs can show a much wider set of colors and consumers will notice the difference. By contrast they will need huge screens to detect the difference more pixels bring with UltraHD, the exec said.
The old debate over copy protection, started in the late 1990’s Napster era, still grinds on as the most bitter of all the arguments.
Twelve million people have Ultraviolet accounts across about four countries where it is offered.
But devices natively supporting UV have yet to hit the market in a big way, and marketing for the effort has been nearly non-existent. Some note UV has failed to go viral, and has been passed by in favor of other Web offerings.
Industry veterans say Ultraviolet has gained broader industry backing than any copyright protection effort to date.
Meanwhile content owners say chip makers need to do more to support hardware root of trust in silicon.
“The idea that you have to change your business model because people are stealing your music rubs me the wrong way,” said Singer. “I’d like the dialog to be about what we can do to help manage online theft,” he said.
Campaigns to sue individuals largely ended around 2008. But von Lohmann noted a few highly publicized judgments for millions of dollars threatened to create “a chilling effect on innovators” and a “nuclear winter” in digital media.
“I’ve heard before the argument that copyright stifles innovation, yet we’re the most innovative country in the world,” countered Singer of Sony.
Student’s downloading free movies “do not think they are doing anything wrong,”
“You can’t create impenetrable technologies, but you try to make it more costly to circumvent them than to get media legitimately,” Balogh said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT will be next silver screen, says media exec
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4416661/IoT-will-be-next-silver-screen–says-media-exec
The Internet of Things could be the silver screen of the future, the platform for immersive entertainment. The far future idea was one of many ideas from a meeting of content creators and technologists on the Stanford campus
All sides agreed entertainment is in rapid transition driven by mobile and Internet technologies.
For example, MIT researchers are working on creating a giant display based on a massive swarm of tiny drones each carrying an LED, hovering over a stadium. Others have created interactive walls and green screens such as one now in Times Square, New York.
“The notion of what’s the platform we can play on interactively is about to bust out,”
“When we think of IoT and a world full of sensors and displays, the materials available for telling stories changes,” he said.
“I’d love to see us incorporate the idea the audience is not just receiving the programming, but participating very deeply, creating content including large video files,” she said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gigabit Speed & Power Over Ethernet
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=264539
Gigabit and Power over Ethernet (PoE) are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
“The overall trends in the marketplace are the move to high speeds and Gigabit operation,”
“Video applications and other network consumers are playing a role in the need for speed and, with the price point of the Gigabit products coming down, it enables users to future-proof their network.”
According to Duffy, the 802.3AT PoE+ standard already in the marketplace delivers about 25W of power to the end devices, but there are devices in development that will provide up to 60W.
With external TV cameras on the top of a pole, many have a wiper element on them to handle harsh conditions, a bottle of water for washing the lens on the camera, and a heater to avoid condensation issues, all of which are drawing more power.
Tomi says:
Ask Slashdot: Does LED Backlight PWM Drive You Crazy?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/06/20/1525236/ask-slashdot-does-led-backlight-pwm-drive-you-crazy
“backlight flicker, from which many LED-backlit monitors suffer. As you might know, the backlight and its dimming is driven by a pulse width modulated square wave, essentially flicking the LEDs on and off rapidly.”
“we should be using frequencies in multiple kHz there”
“the display review site PRAD has already started to include backlight signal captures to help assessing the problem. ”
Comments:
If you’re sensitive to them, don’t buy them.
Please don’t make every LED / LCD on the planet more expensive because of a tiny minority of people who blame things like PWM for their symptoms (correctly or not).
I’m positive it’s placebo here.
LED PWM frequencies are FAR higher than the old CRT refresh rates.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Megastereo – Panoramas With Depth
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/192-photography-a-imaging/6022-megastereo-panoramas-with-depth.html
Disney Research has made a breakthrough in implementing the technique of acquiring depth information from a simple camera scan of a scene. The images can also be stitched together to create hi-res panoramas with or without 3D information.
We all try our hand at a panorama shot – just pan the camera around and then use some autostitch software to put the mosaic together. Computational photography has some algorithms that will do the stitching automatically by automatically identifying the same features in each photo and then applying a transformation to take account of the changed point of view. For a perfect panorama you need to rotate the camera around its optical center, i.e. just rotate the camera.
However, if you just rotate the camera about itself you don’t get any parallax effects – which is why it makes the stitching together easier. If you want to get 3D information from the sequence of shots you need parallax. This means rotating the camera mounted on an offset arm or just moving the camera along an arc in your outstretched hand. The big problem with this method is that the parallax makes it more difficult to fit the mosaic together, and this is the problem that the research team has been working on.
The good news is that the methods generalize to a range of camera positions and so to different types of panorama.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hollywood’s New Screen Test
Big Studios’ Korea Experiment Rents Movies on Demand While Still in Theaters
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323836504578552521772173386-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwMzEyNDMyWj.html
Two Hollywood studios have quietly begun testing a controversial business model in South Korea after years of failed efforts in the U.S.: renting movies via video on demand while they are still playing in theaters.
The experiments, by Walt Disney Co. and Sony Pictures Entertainment, mark the first time major American studios have offered viewers anywhere the option of buying a ticket to see a movie or to rent it at home from a cable, Internet or satellite-television provider.
Executives at the four other major Hollywood studios said they are watching Disney and Sony’s tests in Korea and may follow suit.
In the U.S., top cinema chains including Regal Entertainment Group and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. refuse to play films without at least a 90-day “window”—industry jargon for the time between the theatrical and home-entertainment release—out of concern people will choose to wait for the movie at home rather than go to the theater.
“A short window or simultaneous release muddies the value proposition being offered to consumers,” said Patrick Corcoran, a spokesman for the National Association of Theatre Owners trade group.
In 2011, Disney conducted a VOD test in Portugal with a six-week window on the animated feature “Tangled.” Until South Korea, it hadn’t repeated the experiment.
A number of local productions have already had super-premium VOD releases in South Korea.
Moreover, DVD sales and rentals have all but evaporated in South Korea, totaling just $30.5 million last year, according to IHS Screen Digest. Hollywood studios have shut down DVD sales offices in the country and rely on contractors to handle their small operations. Because they don’t have to worry about undercutting DVD sales or rentals, studios are freer to experiment with VOD timing and pricing. Super premium VOD rentals typically cost around $9, compared with about $3.50 for a normal online or cable rental in the country.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OpenSkan: Open Source Full Body 3D Scanner
http://vlrev.com/?p=162
Tomi Engdahl says:
3D scanning by calculating the focus of each pixel
http://hackaday.com/2013/06/21/3d-scanning-by-calculating-the-focus-of-each-pixel/
this approach uses pictures taken with several different focal lengths.
The idea is to process the photos using luminance. It looks at a pixel and it’s neighbors, subtracting the luminance and summing the absolute values to estimate how well that pixel is in focus. Apparently if you do this with the entire image, and a set of other images taken from the same vantage point with different focal lengths, you end up with a depth map of pixels.
Tomi says:
Sony to kick off Wimbledon with 4K TV trial
Tennis star to sport ads on fingernails to showcase detail of Ultra HD
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2277026/sony-to-kick-off-wimbledon-with-4k-tv-trial
JAPANESE TECHNOLOGY GIANT Sony will trial 4K television in the UK with the start of the Wimbledon tennis championships today.
As the first time that action from the tennis tournament has been captured in the high resolution ultra high definition (Ultra HD) format, tiny adverts will be hidden on tennis star Anne Keothavong to showcase the level of detail consumers can see on 4K televisions at home.
“With more footage being generated in 4K people are going to see every single detail and get much closer to the action,” said Sony. “We thought we’d push it to the limit by running a microtising campaign, proving that Sony televisions can pick up on the smallest details.”
So far there isn’t much other 4K content to watch, although Sony has announced 4K Blu-ray discs of classic movies including Ghostbusters, Spider Man, and Taxi Driver. And 4K television is expected to start in Japan in 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Swedish court backs TV license fees for computers, mobile devices
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/24/net-us-sweden-tv-idUSBRE95N0PZ20130624
A Swedish court on Monday ruled that the state broadcaster could charge a fee for accessing television via the Internet on laptops, tablets, smartphones and other devices.
“Even if a computer is primarily used for other purposes, one of its uses these days is to receive TV programs,” the court said on its website.
“Since it is the ownership of the equipment that is subject to a fee, it is of no significance to that liability whether the person maybe does not use the computer to watch TV programs.”
Britain charges a license fee to watch or record television live on any Internet-connected devices
Tomi Engdahl says:
Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/digital-diary-instagram-video-and-death-of-fantasy/?_r=0
Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, and Kevin Systrom, the chief executive of Instagram, introduced the new video-sharing feature, they described it as the future of memory, a way to capture the moments and experiences that you wanted to remember and share them with your friends. But while that shaky video that I took on the roof was definitely steeped in reality and definitely true to the moment, it wasn’t the version of the night that I wanted to remember or share with my Instagram friends.
That’s because Instagram isn’t about reality – it’s about a well-crafted fantasy, a highlights reel of your life that shows off versions of yourself that you want to remember and put on display in a glass case for other people to admire and browse through. It’s why most of the photographs uploaded to Instagram are beautiful and entertaining slices of life
Instagram is a yearbook of our most memorable moments
Video, at least the amateurish footage I shot, is the antithesis of that fantasy. And as much as I think we’re getting more comfortable being ourselves online, there’s still a difference between the self you’re willing to share publicly and the self you’re willing to share when only a handful of people are watching.
This is a distinction that Facebook — and now, by association, Instagram — has never seemed to understand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pink Floyd: Pandora’s Internet radio royalty ripoff
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/06/23/pink-floyd-royalties-pandora-column/2447445/
Internet radio companies are trying to trick artists into supporting their own pay cut.
It’s a matter of principle for us. We hope that many online and mobile music services can give fans and artists the music they want, when they want it, at price points that work.
Nearly 90% of the artists who get a check for digital play receive less than $5,000 a year. They cannot afford the 85% pay cut Pandora asked Congress to impose on the music community.
Musicians around the country are getting emails from Pandora
Of course, this letter doesn’t say anything about an 85% artist pay cut. That would probably turn off most musicians who might consider signing on.
Fine print is one thing. But a musician could read this “letter of support” a dozen times and hold it up to a funhouse mirror for good measure without realizing she was signing a call to cut her own royalties to pad Pandora’s bottom line.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The future of cinema and TV: It’s game over for the hi-res hype
All you’ve ever been told sold about moving pictures is wrong
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/25/the_future_of_moving_images_the_eyes_have_it/
Feature Digital video guru and author of The MPEG Handbook, John Watkinson, examines the next generation of TV and film and reveals it shouldn’t be anything like what we’re being sold today.
The next time you watch TV or go to the movies, bear in mind that you are not actually going to see any moving pictures at all. The movement is an illusion and it’s entirely in your own mind.
What is actually on the screen doesn’t move. It is a series of still pictures that are each held there for a short while before being replaced.
Currently, the obsession is for ever higher pixel counts, an approach that disregards how we actually see moving images. If broadcasters have their way, we could be on course for some ridiculous format decisions.
Intuitively, you would think that the frame rate – the number of pictures per second – would have quite a large bearing on the quality of the illusion, and you would be right. Equally, you might think that the film and TV companies had done a lot of research into human vision in order to choose those rates that have been in use unchanged for decades. Unfortunately, you would be wrong.
frame rate of movie film: 24fps. Silent movies ran even slower, at 18fps
American television runs at 60 fields per second, whereas in the old world we get along with 50.
The TV industry must have taken note that the movies were short-changing their audiences by showing every frame twice, so they thought up a similar cost-saving mechanism, called interlacing.
The proponents of frame repeat in cinema and interlace in television had made the classic mistake of assuming all that matters is the time axis. Along the time axis, frame repeat doubles the effective frame rate, cutting flicker, and two interlaced fields correctly mesh together again.
There’s a whopping and tragic flaw in these assumptions, and it’s due to the simple fact that the human eye can move.
Self-evidently, the eye can only track one object at a time and everything else will be in relative motion.
In the case of cinema, the static resolution of the film is quite good in 35mm and startling in 70mm, but the audience can’t enjoy it. One reason is the frame repeat. The two versions of the same frame are identical, but to an eye tracking across the screen they appear in two different places. Thus the moving object of interest that is being tracked is blurred at low eye-tracking speeds, and at higher speeds a second image is seen displaced from the first.
A more useful metric for a moving picture is dynamic resolution: the apparent resolution presented to a tracking eye. The present fixation with static resolution leads to completely incorrect decisions being made. It’s the reason why today’s HDTV couldn’t be dramatically better than SDTV. How could it be when the frame rates remained the same?
Most of the grammar of cinematography is about avoiding strobing. One approach is to use long shutter times so that motion is smeared and the strobing is harder to see
By throwing the background out of focus the strobing is diminished. In cinema everything is controlled
In television, there is often little control and no budget for a focus-puller. That is why they have to use higher picture rates. That will probably remain true in the future. Rates will have to go up in both cinema and television, but the disparity will remain.
Eye tracking causes interlace to fail in television.
For example, if we reduced the static resolution of digital cinema to 70 per cent of what it presently is, nobody would notice because the loss is drowned in the blur due to poor motion portrayal and other losses. However, digital images are two dimensional, so the pixel count per frame would be 70 per cent of 70 per cent, which is near enough 50 per cent. Thus doubling the frame rate can be achieved with no higher data rate. All we are doing is using the data rate more intelligently. Half as many pixels per frame, twice as often, will give an obvious improvement.
There are some signs that the film and TV industries are waking up to this modern understanding of moving pictures. Some movies are being shot at raised frame rates, generally to audience approval.
Early work on a replacement for HDTV, called UHDTV, is considering 100 or 120 fps. But the static resolution fixation is still there. There is talk of broadcasting 4000 pixels across the screen at only 50/60Hz, which has to be the dumbest format ever
Tomi Engdahl says:
The computer gets the senses
In the coming years the computer learn to interpret the user’s facial expressions and track the movements of his hands. This is called perceptual computing.
Through the senses, the computer learns to talk, listen, and watch. New modes of interaction affect the user interface design and enable new kinds of applications. Initially, techniques are PC-to-use, later also for mobile devices.
Intel has set up a $ 100 million fund to support the development of sensory techniques. Intel’s own perceptual SDK development environment has been downloaded nearly 15 000 times.
Intel demos were shown games that are able to control the movements of the hand using 3D-capable camera.
Infrared and color comparison utilizing the camera can detect up to heart rate.
“The technology enables the game to adapt to the player’s experiences,” Nanduri envisioned.
3d camera also adds face detection reliability, because the camera can not cheat on a person’s photo. The first will go on sale accessory is Creative SENZ3D camera. The second half of next year, Intel will introduce the module, the hardware manufacturers to embed the top of the screen the existing 2D cameras instead.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/tietokone_saa_aistit
Tomi Engdahl says:
New wireless technology brings several displays to one big
Intel has introduced a technology that allows a single image or a video showing a number of different on-screen without any cables.
Intel’s technology to build an image so that the pixels are divided into different screens, and each screen will only be sent the necessary pixels WLAN access.
Intel invites you to display your technology as a service, or abbreviated daas. The chip giant has already developed techniques to image can be divided into screens. The newly developed daas differs from previous techniques in that, in theory, the screens can be any number.
Daas also works in reverse. Image may be collected from a number of display on a single screen.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/uusi+langaton+tekniikka+kokoaa+useasta+naytosta+yhden+ison/a911592?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-27062013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Video platform tests ultra-HD consumer electronics
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4417409/Video-platform-tests-ultra-HD-consumer-electronics
With the VT-B360 HDMI TX 300-MHz module, manufacturers can use the VTC and VTE video testers from Rohde & Schwarz to test next-generation HDMI sink devices with ultra-high-definition or 4k screen resolution with 4:2:0 pixel encoding. The module furnishes four parallel HDMI channels with ultra-HD resolution for performing tests on TVs, monitors, projectors, and A/V receivers.
The VTC and VTE video testers use the module to generate HDMI A/V test signals and play them out via one or more outputs
Tomi Engdahl says:
Understanding in-loop filtering in the HEVC video standard
http://www.edn.com/design/consumer/4417218/Understanding-in-loop-filtering-in-the-HEVC-video-standard
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a video compression standard, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), jointly developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) as ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2 and ITU-T H.265. HEVC promises half bit-rate compared to current de-facto standard H.264 at a similar video quality and is expected to be deployed in a wide variety of video applications ranging from cell phones, broadcast, set-top box, video conferencing, video surveillance, automotive, etc.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple’s ads failing, says firm that called Surface ads effective
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57591257-71/apples-ads-failing-says-firm-that-called-surface-ads-effective/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title
Ace Metrix, a company that likes to think it knows how to measure TV ad effectiveness, says Apple’s new ads are not a success with consumers.
Tomi says:
Intel’s new CEO focused on mobile chips, cautious on TV
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/28/us-intel-ceo-idUSBRE95R0XK20130628
a cautious tone about the top chipmaker’s planned foray into television and said Intel continues to look at the business model.
“We believe we have a great user interface and the compression-decompression technology is fantastic,” Krzanich said. “But in the end, if we want to provide that service it comes down to content. We are not big content players.”
Tomi says:
New Intel CEO Says Intel TV Sounds Great in Theory. But …
http://allthingsd.com/20130628/new-intel-ceo-says-intel-tv-sounds-great-in-theory-but/
Since February, Intel executives have been promising to launch a Web TV subscription service sometime this year. And they’re still making those promises.
But Intel also has a new CEO. And while Brian Krzanich is still supporting the TV project, led by BBC veteran Erik Huggers, he doesn’t sound convinced about Intel TV’s prospects.
This messaging comes from a Reuters piece, which says Krzanich took a “cautious tone” about Intel TV in a recent interview (presumably today), and “said Intel continues to look at the business model.”
all it really means is that Krzanich has the same question everyone outside of Intel has about Intel TV — can the company really get their hands on enough programming, at the right price, to make a product that would compete with traditional pay TV?
We won’t know that until Intel actually launches — or at least until they’ve announced distribution deals with the major TV networks. So far they haven’t.
Tomi says:
Windows 8.1: So it’s, er, half-speed ahead for Microsoft’s Plan A
A desktop failure gambling on slablet success
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/28/windows_8_point_one_review/
Delivered as part of Windows 8.1, Internet Explorer 11 supports WebGL, a standard previously opposed by Microsoft on security grounds, enabling hardware accelerated graphics in the browser without a plug-in. DRM support for web video means that sites like Netflix can also deliver content without a plug-in.
Tomi says:
The smartphone changed festival into a game
Summer festivals and sporting events to participate in new ways smartphones. Digital games provide opportunities for sponsors.
Smartphone Apps to the summer festival guests find the right places and provide advice on these schedules. In the future, smart phone applications are still with little more into the public events.
“The viewer’s terminal can act as if the sound as the light source,” the researcher Kai Kuikkaniemi Aalto University School of Information Technology HIIT to believe.
Concert crowd smartphones can be, for example, a joint wavy sound barrier, or light sea.
The stage sound equipment in addition to the performers call can be routed directly to the public smartphones.
Cameras is growing. The world public has been able to send messages or video for a concert or sporting event on the screen, which can be displayed in either a single or a camera to capture the myriad of images constructed mosaic.
So far technology has come against major public events telephone operators, data transfer capacity is not enough.
Use of mobile devices in connection with public events in Finland has been the most informed choice in advance or on site.
Source: http://www.3t.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/teknologia/alypuhelin_muuttaa_festarit_peliksi
Tomi says:
Smartphones, cameras are already available to print-ready images in daylight. Now, manufacturers seeking competitive advantage twilight description and zoom. Samsung already announced a novelty, the Nokia reveals his own in July.
Optical zoom is a rare treat for smart phones. Samsung Brings 10-times optical zoom, the new Galaxy S4 zoom model,
The lens extends from the upper end of the wide-angle 24 mm and telephoto 240 mm
Lens f / 3.1 to 6.3 in the focal length of the current small pocket-sized digital cameras levels.
Camera Phones aperture size increases, which means larger pixels and less noise.
“Finally, a smartphone with a compact zoom camera features,” enthuses Samsung camera products, the company’s sales manager Kari Pälli novelty.
Nokia has introduced the optical zoom handsets in 2007, presented N93i model after. According to Nokia, the optical zoom is unnecessarily increasing the camera’s size and is sensitive to impairment due to the moving parts.
“We believe that PureView 808-style true zoom technology is a good choice for the mobile environment,” says Samuli Hänninen.
Nokia Lumia 925 point in 920, and its predecessor, comes with a large f/2.0 the aperture size.
This means that the camera sensor can be, at least in theory, to get more light than a smaller hole size on the Samsung
Shooting in the dark is adapt to for new smartphones in the weakest part of the area, estimated fiction writer and Master of Science Petteri Järvinen. He describes both the Nokia Lumi below the long tube SLR cameras.
Lack of light is difficult to replace by raising the ISO sensitivity
“This small cells where the noise is too much,”
“Xenon-flash the advantage of LED lights compared to the speed. Moving Image may not really frozen, ”
Source: http://www.3t.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/teknologia/kisa_kovenee_kannykalla_saa_kohta_parhaat_kuvat
Tomi Engdahl says:
Camera manufacturer Nikon is trying to develop a counter bet for smartphones. The company is rightly concerned about the popularity of camera phones, threatening, especially digital compact camera sales.
Nikon expects pocket cameras waning sales this year by 12 per cent, but at the same interchangeable lens cameras sold in the types of sales may grow by 9 per cent.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/nikon+pelkaa+alypuhelimen+tappavan+pokkarikameran/a913450
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nikon President Eyes Smartphone Users as Compact Sales Fall
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-07/nikon-president-eyes-smartphone-users-as-compact-sales-fall.html
Nikon Corp. (7731) (7731) is looking at ways to tap smartphone growth as a slump in compact camera sales may lead to weaker-than-forecast earnings.
Point-and-shoot camera sales across the industry dropped about a quarter in April and May from a year earlier, President Makoto Kimura said in a July 4 interview at Nikon’s Tokyo headquarters, citing third-party research. Smartphone shipments jumped 46 percent last year to 722 million units, according to Framingham, Massachusetts-based IDC Corp.
“The number of people taking snapshots is exploding by use of smartphones that sold 750 million or so last year and are still growing,” Kimura said. “We’ve centralized our ideas around cameras but can change our approach to offer products to that bigger market.”
Secret Products
Demand for Nikon’s high-end cameras, like the D4-SLR that retails for about $6,000, can help compensate for slower sales of point-and-shoot models at least for several more years, Kimura said, even as the company looks for new ways to generate growth.
Nikon’s imaging division and a new business team are working on products that are expected to be available in less than five years, according to the president.
“We want to create a product that will change the concept of cameras,” said Kimura. “It could be a non-camera consumer product.” The president declined to say if the company was developing a mobile phone.
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The future of cinema and TV « Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog says:
[...] Handbook) examines the next generation of TV and film and reveals it shouldn’t be anything like what we’re being sold today. The movement of film and video is an illusion and it’s entirely in your own mind. What you see [...]
Tomi says:
A New Way for Musicians to Make Money on YouTube
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/a-new-way-for-musicians-to-make-money-on-youtube
Love Doctor and Schreer’s library of about 1,700 other tunes now bring his company about $30,000 per month from their use in YouTube videos. He’s the test case for a New York startup called Audiam that says it can help artists profit when others use their music. Jeff Price, Audiam’s founder and a friend of Schreer’s, pitches musicians like this: “Let’s go find you money that already exists.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Exclusive: Apple Pitches Ad-Skipping for New TV Service
http://jessicalessin.com/2013/07/15/exclusive-apple-pitches-ad-skipping-for-new-tv-service/
Apple has a new trick up its sleeve as it tries to launch a long-awaited television service: technology that allows viewers to skip commercials and that pays media companies for the skipped views.
Talks have been slow and proceeding in fits and starts, but things seem to be heating up.
In recent discussions, Apple told media executives it wants to offer a “premium” version of the service that would allow users to skip ads and would compensate television networks for the lost revenue, according to people briefed on the conversations.
Consumers, of course, are already accustomed to fast-forwarding through commercials on their DVRs, and how Apple’s technology differs is unclear.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HBO Asks Google To Take Down “Infringing” VLC Media Player
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/07/16/1434232/hbo-asks-google-to-take-down-infringing-vlc-media-player
In an attempt to remove pirated copies of Game of Thrones from the Internet, HBO sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular media player VLC as a copyright infringement. An honest mistake, perhaps, but a worrying one. … Usually these notices ask Google to get rid of links to pirate sites, but for some reason the cable network also wants Google to remove a link to the highly popular open source video player VLC. …
Oliver Giving says:
All this new technology definitely won’t come into mass use until there is a substantial price reduction.
tomi says:
I can agree on this. It always takes time until new technology becomes cheap enough to become widely used.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Next-Gen Video Encoding: x265 Tackles HEVC/H.265
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/23/164228/next-gen-video-encoding-x265-tackles-hevch265
MulticoreWare released an early alpha build of the x265 library. x265 is intended to be the open source counterpart to the recently released HEVC/H.265 standard which was approved back in January, much in the same way that x264 is used for H.264 today.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google has launched a TV connected media player Chromecast, which allows you to play videos and music wirelessly from your smartphone, tablet PC, or from PC.
In practice, it is the Apple TV competitor, but at a much cheaper and smaller. For sale in the United States become the device costs $ 35 (26 euros).
Chromecast is a five-cent-sized, high-usb-stick-like device that is connected to a TV or video projector hdmi port. The device operates WLAN. The phone can then transfer data such as the YouTube video to watch on a larger screen.
Chromecast stream content such as Netflix, YouTube, Google Play, and Google’s Chrome browser. Google’s aim is to increase the supply in the future.
Chromecast Media Stick works with both Android and iOS.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/google+tyrmaa+apple+tvn+35+dollarin+mediatoistimella/a916483
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Tomi says:
Google Chromecast: Why it’s the most important smart TV tech ever
Netflix, YouTube are just the tip of the iceberg
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/27/why_chromecast_is_important/
Analysis The more details that emerge about Chromecast, Google’s new streaming media dongle, the more it sounds like you get what you pay for – and let’s face it, $35 isn’t a lot. But don’t be fooled. There’s more to Chromecast than meets the eye.
When the hardware hackers at iFixit did their teardown of the device, their conclusion was that it was “essentially a luxury item with limited use.” And in my own review of Chromecast on Thursday, I was able to stream audio and video from Google Play, Netflix, and YouTube, and little else. In short, it couldn’t do much that my existing gear couldn’t do already.
But that’s today. What about tomorrow – or a year from tomorrow?
A closer look at the inner workings of Chromecast reveals that it’s a technology with impressive potential. In fact, if Google succeeds in building an ecosystem around it, it could prove to be one of the most important smart TV technologies to come along so far.
It’s essential to understand that when you buy Chromecast, you’re not just getting a dongle that can “do YouTube.” That’s what sets it apart from most of the other smart TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-Ray players, and other devices that can already stream YouTube content.
Chromecast can’t really stream YouTube at all – not on its lonesome. It’s really just a receiver. To stream content, it relies on a “sender” app running on an Android or iOS device or in the Chrome browser. Both halves together make the whole.
Consider the Google Cast SDK documentation, which explains, “Given the nature of the interaction model, tabs, windows or popups cannot be created, and there should be nothing on the receiver device screen requiring input. All interaction with the application must be done through a sender application.”
With Chromecast streaming, you never see any buttons or input boxes or menus on your TV screen. All of that user interaction takes place on the sender device.
he UI you use to find and display content on your TV is the exact same UI you use to find and display that content on your Android or iOS device or in your browser. The only difference is that when you press the Cast button, the content comes up on your TV.
But the Chromecast dongle isn’t just mirroring what you see on your sender device’s screen.
Tomi says:
Google’s new Chromecast spills its simplistic guts
‘Pure simplicity’ innards fuel Chocolate Factory’s quest for ‘TV domination’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/26/inside_googles_chromecast_media_streamer/
Teardown Google’s li’l Chromecast media-streaming HDMI dongle is certainly getting a lot of attention for a thirty-five-buck, one-trick pony.
“Best hope for this little guy: after a long, fulfilling life of streaming kitten videos,” they write, “the Chromecast is recycled responsibly.”
The truth – especially if the tiny device is embraced by the developer community – is likely somewhere in between domination and responsible recycling. In any case, iFixit’s teardown does give a sense of that “pure simplicity” comment mentioned above.
iFixit notes that Google’s product info says that “Chromecast may get hot to the touch; this is normal.” The hardware sadists weren’t comforted by that assurance.
The Chromecast’s logic board is, well, pure simplicity. On one side reside an AzureWave 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM combo chip (red rectangle), and the brains of the outfit, a Marvell DE3005-A1 SoC (orange). On the flip side are a 16Gb Micron NAND flash chip (yellow) and a low-power 512MB DDR3L SDRAM chip, also from Micron (green).
“We’ve decided not to assign a repairability score to the Chromecast,” they write. “There’s just nothing in it to repair.”
Tomi says:
Chromecast: We get our SWEATY PAWS on Google’s tiny telly pipe
Popping in the Chocolate Factory’s two-incher
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/25/chromecast_review/
oogle just unveiled its Chromecast wireless streaming media dongle on Wednesday, and it’s already being hailed by some media outlets as something close to the Holy Grail of internet TV. So does it live up to the hype?
Clearly, much of the fuss stems from Chromecast’s price tag. At $35 (UK and international pricing to be determined), it looks like an attractive alternative to the $99 you’d pay for the Apple TV or the Roku 2 XS. Throw in three free months of Netflix streaming (a $24 value) and it effectively costs next to nothing.
Setting up Chromecast couldn’t be easier. There isn’t even a user manual in the box – just the dongle, a USB cable, a power adapter, an HDMI extension cable, and a note directing you to a Google website for next steps.
The dongle looks and feels like a chunky USB drive, only with an HDMI prong instead of a USB one. It’s designed to plug directly into your TV’s HDMI port, but the short extension cable is provided in case the fit is awkward or Wi-Fi reception is spotty.
One thing that may not be clear from Google’s marketing materials is that Chromecast needs to be connected to a power source at all times. The USB cable is included for this purpose.
Chromecast isn’t connected to your Wi-Fi network yet, so you can’t set it up with a web browser. You’ll need to download a small app for the purpose.
Once Chromecast is up on your network, it will inform you that it’s ready to go with a start screen that displays the current time against a nature-themed background that changes every minute or so. And that’s that.
Tomi says:
Downloading pirated collapsed – copyright organizations already have a new target
07/27/2013 6:01 Studies have shown that pirated files from a few years suffered tremendously. Copyright by organizations of the reason is the new legal and illegal online services.
These results have come to Norway and Finland studies. Finnish copyright of this is part of a change in the forms of piracy. On the other hand, for example, that a movie file loaded into the computer, movies or TV shows to stream them online without permission performing on-line services.
- For example, Turkey is an online service where you can watch movies like YouTube. Service is funded by ads sold on the site, says the project manager Lauri Kaira creative industries represent a counter-Lantern Organization.
In Norway, the study shows that online piracy has suffered tremendously. Norwegian Norwaco-copyright organization in the annual survey commissioned study (pdf) found that in Norway in 2012, illegally downloaded 210 million music files, while still in 2008 of illegally downloaded files was 1.16 billion shares.
Also, films and TV programs for the illegal downloading of a Norwegian study, at the same time reduced to about half.
Source: http://www.digitoday.fi/viihde/2013/07/27/piraattilataaminen-romahti–tekijanoikeusjarjestoilla-jo-uusi-kohde/201310397/66
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chromecast Teardown
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Chromecast+Teardown/16069/1