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."

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.

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.

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.

Persuasive TV: Anti-Suicide Bomber PSA

Public service announcements to stay off drugs or go back to school have been with us forever, but here's a striking PSA against suicide bombing created by LA production house 900 Frames.

A story by Lorraine Ali in Newsweek last June reported that the spot will be aired on Iraqi television and maybe some other Middle Eastern networks. The million dollar price tag is backed by an unnamed group of donors both in Iraq and abroad.

(Off topic: Is it me, or are there way too many ads on the Newsweek/MSNBC page? I count twelve banners or text placements, more if you include house ads and logos.)

The Future of Creative TV Ads: A Still Photograph

The Online Media, Marketing and Advertising (OMMA) show next week is heavily promoting its Creativity Awards showcasing interesting and engaging interactive media categories like "Flash or Rich Media Interstitial or Over-Page Units." But in the increasing competition for home TV viewers' attention, it looks like less is more. Fox Television is running house ads for new programs that consist of a static 30 second image backed up with audio-only dialog from the show. With so many time-shifters fast-forwarding through the commercials, the hope is that at least a few seconds of the show logo and accompanying graphic may stick in their heads.

Apple iTV: Better, Cheaper, Easier Media Center

I show this picture of the back of a typical MediaCenter TV whenever I talk about Home TV and home networks. It's scary: two dozen connectors for audio, video, USB, Ethernet, FireWire and God knows what else. The Digital Home of the Future can't be just for engineers and twelve-year-old hacker nerds.

Yesterday in San Francisco, Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's version of the media center, a $299 interface code-named iTV links a PC or Mac running iTunes to a regular home TV via wired or wireless Ethernet. Due out next year, the new set-top box streams 640x480 video from your computer disk to the screen, browses iTunes video and audio catalogs on-line, and  (I infer) lets you buy first run movies from your couch, not just your PC. Jobs also announced that iTunes would now be selling movies: $14.99 for hot titles, $9.99 for backlist items.) The iTV box has just two kinds of jacks: the new digital HDMI and the traditional four-wire component video links. (Elise Ackerman of SiliconValley.com reported on the Apple announcements which included a higher res iPod and a smaller new iPod Shuffle.)

The YouTube video below of Steve Job's description of iTV is a little long, but it underscores the convergence theme of Home TV, Internet TV and Personal TV -- First, Second and Third screens.