Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about.
Members of Broadband for America
Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to an astroturf [...]
October 2, 2009
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to [...]
September 27, 2009
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of [...]
September 23, 2009
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be [...]
September 23, 2009
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way.
Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw launched [...]
September 22, 2009
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail.
[FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's] proposal – to codify and enforce some general [...]
September 21, 2009
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario [...]
September 11, 2009
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them.
This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment of [...]
September 7, 2009
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes.
Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by the [...]
September 1, 2009
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta.
After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
The Good
Alberta is like [...]
August 31, 2009
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.”
The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling more [...]
August 27, 2009
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider.
PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community.
The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking their actual [...]
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The problem is once something becomes ingrained as free, people view it as a public good, and people won’t pay for it ever again. Even if you clamp down on the free model, people will just go to something else instead of paying for it again.
This is why the cable companies are scared.
There is a BIG misnomer that if you watch a downloaded video or streamed video from the Internet, you have to watch it on your computer, wrong. I kept hearing that several times during the video. Most video cards nowadays, have dual monitor support. A simple dvi to hdmi adaptor, that you can get at monoprice for a few dollars, and you can watch whatever on your TV with your popcorn like the guys in the video pointed out. The neat thing about it, is the fact that you can watch anything that CAN be played on your PC. That means you can watch movies that are in PAL format instead of NTSC, mkv, avi, mpg, ect.. It is way more versatile than any DVD/Bluray player. I have been watching TV shows this way for a few years now and is so simple to do. It doesn’t take an IT genius to setup.
I finally did it. I cut the cord a little over a month ago, and it’s been quite a change for me. There have definitely been some growing pains and some learning curves to overcome, but in the end it’s been well worth the leap. So where to begin? First let me tell you a little about my hardware setup.
Last December I decided to build my own home theater PC, or HTPC, from scratch. I found a small motherboard based on the NVIDIA ION platform (http://bit.ly/TNwg9). It had everything required to connect to my wireless home network and connect to my living room TV, just add case, hard drive, RAM, blue-ray drive, and OS. Now I’m kind of a techie type, and this wasn’t my first time building a PC, but I have to say this was the easiest build ever. It took 30 min to put all the pieces together, and about another 30 min to install the OS and all the software. This was my first time installing Windows 7 and it was a breeze. It had drivers for all my hardware and that was it….done! Another great thing about Windows 7 is the Media Center software that comes with it. I was able to access my Netflix account, numerous network shows over the Internet, and the cheap USB over-the-air DTV tuner I purchased. Setup was a cinch and after only a couple of hours, I was lounging on the couch streaming last night’s CBS Survivor episode. The USB tuner gave me the same quality picture I could get with my TV’s tuner, and the built-in DVR that Windows Media Center gives you doesn’t degrade the quality one bit.
But I soon discovered one big problem…..the reception. I found out that a tiny indoor TV antenna was not going to be sufficient to consistently tune in all my local stations out here in the burbs, so I ended up installing an unnecessarily huge 10′x11′ directional antenna in my attic. I’ll save that fun story for a later day, but trust me when I say don’t do that unless you absolutely have to
Now I have all the hardware in place, the antenna tuned in, and I’m ready to go, so now what? I need some content. I first started by making a list of all the cable shows and channels I used to like to watch, and set about to find them online. I would like to say that I was able to find them all, and someday hopefully that will be that case, but there are many show and channels that are gone from me. No more BBC America, History Channel, or Discovery Channel. I can view clips online, but not full shows. I was happy that I’m still able to get all the news programming I want (or don’t want), and that I can get full episodes of almost all my network shows and Comedy Central. I did find that the best leader in online streaming is PBS. All of their shows are well organized for browsing on the couch and the quality was the best I’ve seen anywhere.
This leads to my second lesson learned. Not all video streams are created equal, and this gets even more apparent when blown up on the big screen using a low-power computer. Most video out there on the Internet uses Adobe Flash for streaming. Flash is very CPU intensive, and the Intel Atom processor that comprises the NVIDIA ION platform isn’t up to the task. Although it works just fine running Windows and the other programs, it just doesn’t have the horsepower to process Flash video. The ION platform is designed to offload video processing to the NVIDIA graphics chip, but only for certain types of video, namely H.264 which is the standard used in HD Blu-ray video. Over the past months I’ve had do deal with watching Flash-based video in a smaller window instead of full screen or else the picture would be too jerky to be watchable. Then came Flash version 10 and Apple’s QuickTime 7 which both support the H.264 HD video codec. Now the jerky Colbert Report that I used to watch in a tiny window streams in full-screen HD almost as good as you get over cable! Since this is the main codec supported on Apple’s devices such as the iPad, I expect many more streaming video sites to move to H.264. This will be the solid foundation needed to make living room Internet TV a truely viable alternative to cable, and I can’t wait!
To sum all this up, Internet TV in the living room is still very much in the early adopter phase, and it’s mostly going to be geeks like me who are willing to build the systems necessary to get the true couch potato experience out of the Internet. As with the early days of the PC and the Internet, this too will eventually become as trivial and ubiquitous as buying a laptop and surfing the web, especially as purpose-built HTPCs and Internet-connected TVs hit the market. One thing IS inevitable. At some point there will be a critical mass where ease of connectivity to streaming video, increase in picture quality, and Internet savvy consumers all converge to make this the new model for entertainment, and when that tipping point comes the change will be fast and furious.
Have you tried Media Player Classic Home Cinema? I have found it to be the fastest and best player around and it plays about everything you could throw at it.. And, it is free to boot. WMP, VOC, and some others are slow and really use CPU a lot.
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/media-player-features.html
Quoted from site:
“Media Player Classic Home Cinema allows you to enhance, decode and accelerate a broad span of movie formats like x.264 with GPU assisted acceleration and image quality enhancing. The WMP Classic Home Cinema player does not require many system resources than the rest of the video media players to run smoothly. This is a low PC resources windows media player that runs on slower machines with older CPUs.
Modern graphics card offer the possibility to decode partially or completely a video stream using DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA), in order to reduce CPU usage dramatically. MPC-HC includes an embedded video decoder that uses this technology, to decode x.264, H.264 and VC-1 with hardly any CPU time required.”
Here’s a timely article talking about CBS’s move to HTML5 and H.264. It states that if CBS is successful with its move, other broadcasters and premium video providers could follow suit.
http://newteevee.com/2010/03/25/cbs-testing-out-html5-for-ipad-videos/