Las Vegas -- While the mood is a bit subdued at this year's CES, the industry's gadgeteers managed to hype a hot new tech: 3-D television.
Sony's Howard Stringer featured 3-D in his keynote yesterday, and Panasonic's Yoshi Yamada earlier this week called the advent of the technology as big as the move from standard-def to HDTV.
Both companies have demos of 3-D TV prototypes on the show floor, and I checked them out today. (Both, incidentally, featured clips from Disney's Bolt.)
Las Vegas -- Tom Hanks gave his sometime-employer Sony a not-so-gentle ribbing in his appearance during chairman and CEO Howard Stringer’s CES keynote address on Thursday.
Hanks -- star of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Angels & Demons, the Da Vinci Code sequel set for May release -- delivered a warm-up routine during which he mocked the script he’d been asked to deliver.
He began by jokingly expressing regret that he had picked VHS instead of Sony’s Betamax years ago: “What a different world this would be if I had chosen differently!”
Things went downhill from there.
Before delivering the canned intro, Hanks said: “I will now read the lines some low-leve...Read More
Las Vegas -- Dish Network has finally done what everyone expected it would do when Charlie Ergen bought the Slingbox guys in September 2007: It's rolled out a DVR that includes the Sling place-shifting features, the first such offering on the market.
The ViP 922, developed by EchoStar Technologies, will be available to customers in spring 2009. The "SlingLoaded" DVR, just like a Slingbox, lets you watch any programming or recording over the Internet, even on an iPhone (but you'd probably want to be on a Wi-Fi connection).
Las Vegas -- Personalized TV is a sometimes-flaky technology, as any hapless cable subscriber wrestling with a VOD menu can attest.
Certain VOD technologies aren't even able to scale to handle a fully packed Boeing 757.
On my Continental flight to Las Vegas today, the airline's in-flight video-on-demand system -- which provided access to 18 movies, 16 TV shows and short features, 50 music CDs and games -- went kablooie.
Continental just last month completed rolling out the audio/video on-demand system, supplied by Panasonic, on all 39 of its 757-200 planes, according to a Dec. 5 press release from the air...Read More
Worshippers in the Cult of the iPhone soon will have another toy to play with -- a TV-mobility experience from EchoStar's Sling Media that no cable or telco TV provider matches today.
Sling this week will demo a version of SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone at Macworld (an event the Mac faithful's high priest, the ailing Steve Jobs, is sitting out).
So it was to be expected that once Tina Fey's Sarah Palin winked into the sunset that Hulu's numbers would fall off. And they did: Hulu, the joint venture of NBCU and News Corp., served 226.5 million videos in November, down 3.7% from 235.1 million the month prior, according to comScore.
However, that's amid an overall decline of 6% for video clips viewed...Read More
There's a renewed buzz around interactive TV technologies. But like all previous attempts, they'll be bumping into 50-plus years of glassy passivity.
Two recent ITV developments:
ESPN is pitching three ITV apps to affiliates, to launch in summer 2009, that will provide voting/polling, on-screen stats and (with a tru2way-enabled device) a customized "bottom line" scroll.
Then, at CES next week, Intel and Yahoo will demo TVs developed by Samsung and Toshiba that run the companies' "Widget Channel" framework for Internet-fed applications, like delivering local weather, news and sports info. (...Read More
Ho ho ho! Verizon's active legal department got a Christmas Eve stocking stuffer, in the form of a $33.15 million judgment against a "cybersquatter" that had registered domain names that were identical or similar to the telco's trademarks.
The default ruling -- which Verizon claimed is the biggest award ever in a cybersquatting case -- was entered against San Francisco-based domain-name registrar OnlineNIC by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The telco alleged OnlineNIC had registered at least 663 Verizon-related domain names "designed to attract Web users who were seeking to a...Read More
TV manufacturers shouldn't be hoping to get an assist from procrastinators (or the clueless).
The Feb. 17, 2009, digital TV transition has already compelled most consumers who were going to upgrade their TV sets to do so, according to Paul Gagnon, DisplaySearch's director of North America TV market research.
DisplaySearch's 2009 forecast factors in no more than a 2% lift in sales because of the DTV transition, when full-power TV stations must cease analog broadcasts.
"The digital TV transition in the U.S. has helped fuel the growth we’ve seen in the last few years," Gagnon s...Read More
French TV viewers appear to prize individualité, not fraternité, when they’re in front of the tube.
Genevieve Bell, an Intel fellow who directs the chip maker’s “user experience” research group, has spent the last few years surveying the way people watch and interact with their TVs and other digital devices. The Australian-born anthropologist and her team at Intel have visited some 700 households in 25 countries.
Some of Intel’s findings, which the company has used as part of developing its ...Read More
The annual Vegas confab usually involves foot-numbingly long lines and traversing 5 billion square feet of exhibits, but given the global economic doldrums it will (silver lining) probably be less heavily attended.
The flow of pre-CES announcements for 2009 includes the stuff you would expect.
Digeo, the hardest-working DVR company in the business, is kicking off its retail play there. The MoCA folks say there will be Ethernet-to-MoCA bridges coming out. [UPDATE: Netgear today has announced just such an Ethernet-to-coax...Read More
TiVo users who watched time-shifted cable shows skipped 51% of the commercials in October 2008, while broadcast commercial skipping hit 64% for the month in 2008.
That's according to the latest report from the DVR company's StopWatch ratings service, which aggregates data from 100,000 subscribers for 66 cable and broadcast networks.
Still -- the glass is half empty, if viewers are zapping half the ads.
At BBC America, for one, the situation may be even worse than the broadcast average. Network chief Garth Ancier, at an industry conference last month, said just 30% of his network's ads are viewed on a time-shi...Read More
Some of Intel’s findings, which the company has used as part of developing its ...Read More