Pervasive.TV

Most HDTV Owners Don't Get HDTV

The American consumer seems to be willing to spend thousands of dollars on a new flat panel digital TV set capable of showing high definition television images, but only about half buy the box to see HD and only about 30% subscribe to high def programming via cable or satellite. Interviewed in USA Today by David Lieberman, consultant Maryann Baldwin of Magid Media Futures reported on the results of the company's pricey annual study of HDTV consumers. As HD expert  Phillip Swann wrote in TVPredictions:

...the number of real high-def viewers is far less than the number of real high-def owners; Magid says it's only 50 percent but it could be even less, perhaps as few as 10-12 million total.

HD sevrice often costs more per month, but most HDTV owners could put up an antenna to get local over-the-air programming. Maybe it's not worth the money and the effort for just a few dozen HD channels, for just a few more pixels per inch.

Artificial TV Intelligence: AI Bots Edit Your Video Feed

There's just too much TV to watch. Digital video recorders, video on demand and Netflix can help us time-shift. Personal media players and mobile video can help us place-shift. What we really need is to compress the time it takes to consumer TV so that we get to the point of the video content faster.

Viewers have been fast-forwarding to skip to the interesting bits since the beginning of the adult videotape industry. Microsoft's Windows Media Player lets you play back files at faster speeds, and a useful WMP plug-in from ENounce supports up to 2.5x acceleration without "chipmunking." The innovative "dingalinks" on  the pioneering webcast Bloggingheads.TV map a program's hyperlinked episodes to the proper point in the feed and even let viewers create their own dingalinks while watching a show. And thumbnail views of a video file help the viewer run around a program non-linearly. Often the "interactive" in "interactive video" refers to the users skipping away from the boring parts.

At a CES preview in New York recently, I got a demo of  MagicSports3 (see screen shot at right), a PC-based artificial intelligence system that watches a DVR-recorded sporting event and finds the important moments. With AI techniques like listening to crowd noise, reading the on-screen scorecard, recognizing commercials and talking head fluff, MagicSports3 creates a ranked list of the key moments in a game. Viewers skip through thumbnails rated with one to four stars, pause/stop/fast forward, and can even order up edited programs of any duration. If you've got a half-hour train commute, for example, MagicSport3's algorithms will edit a 30-minute highlight reel of the game that you can port to you video iPod.

MagicSports3 is sold by CyberLink as part of its large line of home video viewing, editing and Media Center products. I met a representative from the Taiwanese developer who deferred questions about how the system worked and whether it was true artificial intelligence but did say that MagicSports3 worked for soccer, baseball and basketball with modules upcoming for American football and sumo.

A review of MagicSports used on an English football game was posted by Hanners on EliteBastards.com who also posted the robot-edited five minute highlight video on YouTube. Soccer always struck me as deadly dull. Any bot that can find five minutes of interesting footage in a 90 minute game has gotta be magical.