Pervasive.TV

OLED Rapture

Slate's Justin Peter's went to check out Sony's XEL-1 OLED television at a Manhattan store and "ended up sitting in front of the tiny TV for five straight hours." He calls it "a little piece on heaven."

Digital Signage Expo 2008: Business Models plus IT, IP and TV

At the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas last week, the business models were far more interesting than most of the technologies on display. Everybody uses commodity information technologies, Internet Protocol networks and LCD or plasma flat panel displays. But the businesses they build around these common tools are in turn interesting, exciting, confusing or just a bit nutty. This week, I'll be reporting on the digital signage companies I visited, the conference sessions I attended and the smart people I talked to at the show. (Subscribe at the top of the next column to get the updates.) To a number of us, it seems a bit like the Internet in 1996: a few seasoned pioneers, a lot of sketchy upstarts, and a handful of big companies like Cisco staking out early acreage before the rush. Stay tuned.

Skinny TVs

You can't be too thin or too rich, they say, and the latest developments in flat panel displays for home TVs illustrate how far things have gotten. At 35mm, Hitachi's UT Series (top) is billed as the world's thinnest LCD. Even thinner is Sony's XEL-1, the new OLED (organic light emitting diode) display.

Glorious Color: The Aesthetic Impact of CES 2008

I'm mesmerized by the kaleidoscope of spectacular moving images on the big, intense, expensive plasma and LCD screens at CES, the Consumer Electronic Show running this week in Las Vegas. Flat panel display vendors are showcasing higher resolutions, faster refresh rates, thinner form factors and better interfaces.

But the milestone this year is image quality. Sony and Samsung are showing OLED screens, organic light emitting diode products that are spectacularly thin but -- much more important -- that deliver spectacularly glorious color. (We've been talking about OLED for years.)

An LCD screen uses a light source, generally a sickly fluorescent, behind the liquid crystal louvers that let out the pixels. A plasma screen uses tiny cells of gas to excite phosphor dots per pixel. On an OLED screen, each pixel is a diode that lights up as needed; the black is truly black, the color gamut is richer, and there's no flicker.

I'm an HDTV skeptic; I'm a bit too cheap, and I really can't really appreciate the difference between 480 lines and 720 lines of resolution, but this is different, a big step up in the fidelity of the video experience. It's more like viewing a transparency through a light box  versus the old days of tweaking the rabbit ears to pull in channel 2.

Engadget has produced a terrific gallery of SONY OLED screens on the web, but you really have to see it to believe it. I'm glad I did.

Theatrical TV: 30 Foot Sex Goddesses Backup Elton John

The Mitsubishi Diamond Vision video wall at Las Vegas' Caesar's Palace Coliseum is a stunning use of out-of-home video. The $6 million LED screen measures 34 feet by 110 feet, the back wall of the 4,000 seat theater installed for Celine Dion in 2003. I'm sure Celine is wonderful, but I saw Elton John's Red Piano Tour with theatrical videos by director/photographer David LaChapelle.

House-sized images of Marilyn Monroe (portrayed by Susan Griffiths), Pam Anderson (poledancing x 5), Justin Timberlake and an army of buff, scantily clad dancers augment the songs in many different video styles spread across the 110 foot digital canvas. (The Red Piano Tour returns to Caesar's in March 2008.)

• View my YouTube playlist of clips from Elton John's Red Piano Tour.

With tickets starting at $250, filling 4,000 seats in Vegas means delivering a lot more spectacle than a singer/songwriter -- even a superstar -- with a six piece band. The wall-sized TV meets our expectations by illustrating the familiar songbook with edgy, sexy, sometimes surreal moving images full of visual references and emotional appeal. It's breathtaking performance art.

Retail Floor TV Examples

At the Total Retail Experience (TREX) show in New York last month, I shot some clips of "floor TV", interactive video projected onto the floor that interacts with the people walking over it. About half the exhibits at the retail show employed some sort of shelf TV, digital signage or point-of-purchase television. The other half were mannequins, vinyl signs, hanging systems and corrugated displays.

This example of video as an architectural element transcends the advertising messages. The software called GroundFX is designed by Sunnyvale, CA-based Gesturetek. (Forgive the focus; I shot these with a Panasonic D-SNAP.)

HDTV Aggravation: More Pixels vs More Channels

Satellite broadcaster DirecTV announced yesterday at CES 2007 that it will offer 100 channels of high definition television in 2007, eclipsing its satellite rival Dish TV as well as most cable TV systems and  the new IPTV systems now launching. The company's CES 2007 press release identifies 70 national channels pending and promises many more regional sports sources in HD. DirecTV also carries the HD version of local broadcast channels, although the release says that local HD programming is only available in 49 out of the service's 142 markets. With two new satellite in space, DirecTV will have HD capacity for more than 1,500 local and 150 national channels, according to the company.

As HDTV industry watcher Phillip Swann in TVPredictions points out, local cable companies currently offer only about a dozen HDTV channels. Under pressure from the satellite competition, they may be forced to eliminate some existing standard definition offerings to make room for must-have HD fare. (A high definition channel eats up the bandwidth of four to six standard definition channels.)

I'll bet the most sought-after media-rich homes will have satellite TV for HDTV, cable TV for the broad range of standard channels (and for cable modem Internet service), plus maybe a digital antenna to pull in local high def channels that aren't carried on the multichannel service. Home TV used to be a lot simpler.

CES Showcases PC Video on Standard TV Sets

The International CES Show opened this week in Las Vegas with over 2,700 exhibitors selling all the digital gear that makes up the entertainment economy. This year's show -- the 40th annual CES -- doesn't seem to have a lot of really new products, There are dozens of me-too plasma and LCD HDTVs, lots of mobile phones, video games, laptops and digital cameras, and the latest installment in the ludicrous high definition DVD war between Blu-Ray and HD DVD. We're getting used to watching TV on our PC screens, but one new category of products transfers video from your desktop PC to the conventional HDTV set in the living room. Three new products take three different approaches.

Sandisk has introduced a sneakernet approach to porting web video to a TV set. Carry the files from your PC on a Sandisk USB stick (at left) that plugs into a TV cradle on the set-top. Using a new standard called USB TV, the cradle runs software that converts web files formats to a standard television signal and even supports a remote control clicker.

Sony debuted an add-on link  called the Bravia Internet Video Link that connects  some of its television sets directly to the Internet, The new module takes an Cat5 Ethernet plug and streams video directly to the TV screen, controlled by the set's remote control and program guide software, No separate PC is needed to prepare the video. (View the short CNET video report from the show.)

NetGear takes a third-party approach, offering its Digital Entertainer HD (left) as a $349 add-on to any home TV. The Netgear device discovers all the video files available on the home net -- including HD files, if any -- and converts them on the fly to conventional TV format from most multimedia formats:  MP3, WAV, WMA, FLAC, M4A, AAC, AC3, MPEG1/2/4, WMV, XviD and H.264. The unit supports multiple TVs in the same home; a  "follow me" feature will stop a video on one TV, shut off the set and pickup watching on another TV.

Finally, I wrote about the excellent SlingBox placeshifting system last week, pointing out however  the bad idea of live mobile video. At CES, Sling has introduced a "reverse Slingbox" that uses a different approach; its software SlingProjector puts any PCs display onto your TV. You can watch YouTube videos but you can also display web pages, play MP3s even run Powerpoint presentations, if you're so inclined. It's not as seamless an Internet-to-TV approach as the Sony, but it gives users the most control over the moving images they zap to the living room.

The Sony bult-in Internet appliance seems the most integrated option: every high end TV should have built-in Web video by decade's end. But there's also a place for sneakernet and for projecting a PC's display tot he living room. It's reasonable to imagine that each of these alternatives will co-exist in the home of the future.

Verizon's Mobile Live TV Launch

A day after I posted a piece arguing against live mobile phone TV, Todd Spangler in Multichannel News reports that Verizon will announce a new service offering "fewer than one-dozen channels" of live TV at the International CES show opening this weekend in Las Vegas. The new service will compete with the upcoming Modeo beta and the Sprint-and-Cingular-centric first-mover MobiTV promising better video quality. It will require an extra monthly charge and a new higher-powered mobile phone.

A much-quoted InStat survey of mobile video subscribers last year was skeptical of the entire market, and a more recent BBC Online Video Survey of users in Britain, where advanced mobile phone technology is more standardized, gave disappointing results for mobile video promoters.

We'll see.

Mobile Phone Video Placeshifting: A Poor Way to Watch Live TV

The often-corrupt market research buzz around mobile video foresees astonishing numbers of mobile phone users tuning in to handheld TV by the end of the decade. (Although as John du Pre Gauntt points out in eMarketer, the disagreements among the number-crunchers reach tens of billions of dollars.)

Forecasters count manufacturers and investment deals and ad spends, but market researchers are sometimes obtuse about the texture of the tech they tout -- they misjudge user delight, user frustration, user acceptance, and our ever rising media expectations..

Pictured at top left is my T-Mobile Pocket PC phone running the Slingbox Mobile Player that I connect over WiFi at my local Starbucks. The excellent and very user-friendly Slingbox links my DirectTV satellite tuner in New York to the Pocket PC or any laptop or desktop computer on the broadband Internet. I can browse all 200+ channels of television from my phone or  PC as long as I'm near wired or wireless Ethernet.

An even more mobile handheld TV product is the over-the-air Modeo service based on DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) that gets a lot of telecom industry hype. (Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOM reported yesterday that Modeo is launching a beta test in New York this week. I got a demo of Modeo some weeks back from Sam Leinhardt, co-founder of Penthera Technologies, Modeo's systems provider. Sam showed me the custom-made Modeo phone plus an SD-format plug-in card that receives Modeo DVB-H service on standard high-end phones, Pocket PCs and laptops. (Click on the inset at right to enlarge.)

The Modeo offering provides five or six regular cable services like FOX News (details in flux) to your phone anywhere in your mobile coverage area. But mobile TV with either the Modeo or my much more capacious Slingbox-connected Pocket PC phone misses the mark for five reasons:

1. It's old fashioned appointment TV. Unlike a DVR, DVD, iPod or YouTube, I can only watch what's on the air at the time I tune in.
2. It doesn't travel well. I can't watch a 30 minute sitcom let alone a two-hour movie while I'm on line at the ATM or waiting for a bus. And I can't pause, bookmark or email the live video stream.
3. It doesn't fit on a phone. I can either take calls and ignore the TV, or watch the TV and ignore the calls. Even an MP3-playing phone stops the music when I answer a call.
4. It needs a broadband radio signal. It'll work in a Starbucks or on a bus but not in a tunnel or on the subway.
5. I don't get enough battery life out of today's hot multipurpose phones between talking, texting, taking pictures, playing color games and playing tunes. Adding even a half hour of video could wipe me out, powerwise.

By contrast, these days I want ...

1. to watch what I want when I want it, and
2. I prefer three or six minute videos in general,
3. that I can pause, post or email to my friends,
4. and that can play anywhere
5. without cutting me off from the world with a dead battery.

I can imagine watching an important ball game or news coverage on my Slingbox PPC. I can see a Modeo player in the car on long trips -- even on an hour-long commute. But other approaches to mobile video that rely on short form programs, downloaded content, and custom-made, tightly-targeted branded entertainment seem more likely to attract the big audiences that researchers predict. Merely replicating a 20th Century media model with a 21st Century technology seems like a waste of time.