The Web Not Yet Ready For The Video Format

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Los Angeles Times: Google TV Plan Is Causing Jitters In Hollywood: Many worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries. .... Google revolutionized the way people access information. Now it wants to transform how people get entertainment. .... enabling viewers to watch TV shows and movies unshackled from the broadcast networks or cable channels on which they air ....entertainment industry executives fear Google TV will encourage consumers to ditch their $70 monthly cable and satellite subscriptions in favor of watching video free via the Internet. ... Google doesn't yet know how it will make money on Google TV ....for the movie studios and television networks to use the limitless storage capacity of the Web to make their libraries of programs available whenever someone wants to watch .... Google touted the software as presenting a new opportunity to make more money from TV shows distributed online.... In demonstrations with network executives, Google TV confused one network's shows for a rival's. On another occasion, it listed the several ways a popular prime-time show could be watched online and on TV — except on the network's own website.

It's not just business models that seem to be struggling. The very first bottleneck is speed. Even with broadband it takes several seconds to load a static webpage. That is too slow. We need speeds that are 100X, perhaps 1000X.

There has been immense downward pressure on the prices of hardware and software. Software has become free for the most part. Hardware prices have come down drastically. But the ISP busines is so archaic, there the prices have been sticky. Capitalism is dysfunctional in the ISP business. Speeds don't go up, prices stay where they are. That is some major dysfunction.

I urge my president to please look into this.

Hulu Still Struggling With Business Model
Saavn's Great Business Model For Movies

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A Soft Spot For Mike Arrington

I have a soft spot for Mike Arrington. I think it is because we put down the same first four letters when naming our blogs: tech. Michael seems to think technology is a four letter word.

http://techcrunch.com
http://technbiz.blogspot.com

Kevin Rose once said on TV that Mike Arrington was a "d____." Sometimes he is, but I would not make such a blanket statement. At the end of the day he is a great guy with a great blog.

Location! Location! Location!
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I Share Mark Cuban's Passion On The FCC Broadband Plan

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The FCC Needs to Set Its Sights Higher.. Much Higher (Mark Cuban)

The recent FCC broadband plan has been the talk of the town in the tech blogosphere. (Broader Broadband) There seems to be broad agreement in liking what the FCC has come up with. Some key people have come out saying it is not enough. But nobody seems to be saying what I said in one of Fred Wilson's comments sections: The American people need to revolt like they revolted against the British.

Well, here comes along Mark Cuban saying what the FCC is proposing is not entirely enough. And he is saying it with some passion. Yeah, why stop at 100 megabits per second? That might look a lot now, but not long back 5 megabits per second looked like a lot.

A parallel story is Gmail. Gmail storage looked like a lot when it came out. But soon people started running out of space, at least the power users did.

High speed internet to Cuban is less about video and more about Internet 2. Ride on.

Google has its sights on 1 gigabits per second. And although Mark Cuban is on record wanting to upend the Google search business, here he seems to be in agreement with Google's bandwidth goals.

Mark Cuban is worried about applications that might not show up even when speeds go up. I am not. I think it is inevitable that new applications will show up when super high speed is everywhere.

Cuban, passionate plenty, still does not match my talk. Revolt. Free up the spectrum for the people. There Cuban and I seem to have some disagreements. He is more cautious than I'd like.

Free Is The Future: Picking A Fight With Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban: A Quick Thought on the Viacom/Youtube Lawsuit Disclosures
Don’t Waste the Internet on TV – Protect the Future of the Internet
Should the FCC Reclaim Broadcast Spectrum
 

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Broader Broadband

Fred Wilson: The National Broadband Plan

My comment to Fred's post that I left at his blog: Of all the blog posts I ever read at this blog, and I have read my share, this post really stands out for me. This topic gets me like nothing else in computing.

"....another 500mhz of hiqh quality spectrum to be used for "terrestrial broadband services" over the next decade...."

This is miserly. This is not going to cut it. TV needs to take second place to broadband. This is not some tertiary concern. This is the number one - Numero Uno - thing America needs to do to become a post-industrial, information age economy. The government just needs to get out of the way. The government selling that spectrum space to a handful of old companies is the government getting in the way. The American people need to revolt like they revolted against the British.

The nastiest part of that phrase is "over a decade. This has to happen in 2010, not in 2020. The jobs are needed now, "look around."

Broad Broadband
Silicon Valley Vs. New York City
Fred Wilson's Insight

John Chambers: Why America Needs A National Broadband Plan
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Jay Leno Should Go On YouTube

Jay Leno: It's Not the Tonight Show. It's, Um, the Ten-ight Show Time 9/15 Everyone's asking how well Jay will compete against CSI. I wonder if his biggest rival, in the long run, isn't YouTube.

Jay Gets Bigger, NBC Gets Smaller
Leno to America: Goodbye! I’m Not Going Anywhere!
Jay Leno Is the Future of TV. Seriously Time The show could be a footnote, or it could make its host bigger than ever. But either way, the small screen is only getting smaller.

Comedy is not going anywhere. And Jay is funny as hell. What is being challenged is the business of television, the business of comedy on television. Jay could adapt to the business.

I say go on YouTube, produce one, and two and five minute clips. Embed ads in them. And produce a ton of the embeddable material: a Jay Leno joke on every conceivable topic that you can embed into your blog or website.

There would be a basic fee for the ads, and then a recurring fee based on how many times that particular clip got viewed.

I bet he would make more this way than doing his hourly thing on NBC.

I am suggesting ultimate fragmentation to a guy who many consider a holdover from the era of mass media. He might not like it.

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http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/3771376873

Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?

Wyclef Jean via last.fm

Imagine a newspaper or a TV station that has a bureau in every town on earth, in every capital city. Can you imagine one step further? Imagine a newspaper or network that has someone covering every human being. That is what Twitter is. And Twitter is not a newspaper or a network. Evan Williams is not my Editor In Chief. I don't report to the dude, cool as he is. I don't even report to the world. I don't report to me. It is not important to say out loud who if anyone I report to. But my thought fragments matter. They are fundamental to the social fabric of the world. I matter if or not I want to participate in the jamboree. To twitter is to say you don't need to get on TV, you don't need a microphone, you don't need a gathered audience, you don't

Image by richard.pyrker via Flickr

need a special day, or a special moment. Every moment is special if you think it is. That is Twitter.

The 140 Characters Conference: twitter as a News Gathering Tool
Chris Sacca and Wyclef Jean at 140 Characters Conference
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Twitter, Twitter, Twitter Everywhere…

What Twitter captures is the basic building block of our social reality. A tweet is an atom. The social reality already existed. Even with old media and with mainstream media, the reality still existed, and the building block was still the atom, the tweet. But now, with Twitter, we get to map that social reality, one tweet at a time.

Twitter is about power to the people where power should have been all along. I wondered o

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

ut loud once in the late 1990s as to why people talk of term limits for politicians but not for the talking heads on TV. Some of them stick around for decades. And they have power over opinions.

Democracy means the political power rests with the people. Social media - it should really be one word like democracy - means the media power rests with the people.

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David Gelernter: Manifesto

"Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us."

How is that not like saying the internet is a new country? (Where is the Internet headed?) A Web 3.0 Manifesto, The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream

David Gelernter

The Second Coming: A Manifesto

We tend not to believe in the next big war or economic swing; we certainly don't believe in the next big software revolution. ..... computing transcends computers. Information travels through a sea of anonymous, interchangeable computers like a breeze through tall grass. A dekstop computer is a scooped-out hole in the beach where information from the Cybersphere wells up like seawater. ...... The real topic in astronomy is the cosmos, not telescopes. The real topic in computing is the Cybersphere and the cyberstructures in it, not the computers we use as telescopes and tuners. ...... Browsers fasten users to remote computers, to "servers" on the internet...... Today's operating systems and browsers are obsolete because people no longer want to be connected to computers — near ones OR remote ones. (They probably never did). They want to be connected to information. In the future, people are connected to cyberbodies; cyberbodies drift in the computational cosmos — also known as the Swarm, the Cybersphere. ........ The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush growths like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts. ....... the Net will change radically before it dies .... The Web makes the desktop impotent. .... Desktop power will inevitably drag information out of remote servers onto desktops. ..... The computer mouse ... Like any device that must be moved and placed precisely, it ought to provide tactile feedback; it doesn't. .... The computer screen is the window of your vehicle, the face-shield of your diving-helmet. ...... Under the desktop metaphor, the screen IS the interface — the interface is a square foot or two of glowing colors on a glass panel. In the landscape metaphor, the screen is just a viewing pane. When you look through it, you see the actual interface lying beyond. ...... Computers are fundamentally unlike file cabinets because they can take action. ....... If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous. ........ You shouldn't have to put files in directories. The directories should reach out and take them. If a file belongs in six directories, all six should reach out and grab it automatically, simultaneously. ....... A file should be allowed to have no name, one name or many names. Many files should be allowed to share one name. A file should be allowed to be in no directory, one directory, or many directories. Many files should be allowed to share one directory. Of these eight possibilities, only three are legal and the other five are banned — for no good reason. ....... In the beginning, computers dealt mainly in numbers and words. Today they deal mainly with pictures. In a new period now emerging, they will deal mainly with tangible time — time made visible and concrete. ....... Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized into folders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents. .... A "lifestream" organizes information not as a file cabinet does but roughly as a mind does. ....... to stop building glorified file cabinets and start building (simplified, abstract) artificial minds ...... Many websites will be organized as lifestreams. ..... The lifestream (or some other system with the same properties) will become the most important information-organizing structure in computing ...... Today's operating systems connect users to computers. In the future we will deal directly with information, in the form of cyberbodies. ...... Your computer's operating system will make as much difference to you as the voltage level of a bit in memory. ..... A lifestream is a landscape you can navigate or fly over at any level. Flying towards the start of the stream is "time travel" into the past. ..... You can walk alongside a lifestream (browsing or searching) or you can jump in and be immersed in information. ...... A well-designed store or public building allows you to size up the whole space from outside, or as soon as you walk in — you see immediately how things are laid out and roughly how large and deep the space is. Today's typical web site is a failure because it is opaque. ....... Movies, TV shows, virtual museums and all sorts of other cultural products from symphonies to baseball games will be stored in lifestreams. ...... Your car, your school, your company and yourself are all one-track vehicles moving forward through time, and they will each leave a stream-shaped cyberbody (like an aircraft's contrail) behind them as they go. These vapor-trails of crystallized experience will represent our first concrete answer to a hard question: what is a company, a university, any sort of ongoing organization or institution, if its staff and customers and owners can all change, its buildings be bulldozed, its site relocated — what's left? What is it? The answer: a lifestream in cyberspace. ........ A software or service company equals the employees plus the company lifestream. .... The company's lifestream is an electronic approximation of the company's memories, its communal mind. .... Software can solve hard problems in two ways: by algorithm or by making connections — by delivering the problem to exactly the right human problem-solver. The second technique is just as powerful as the first, but so far we have ignored it. ...... Lifestreams and microcosms are the two most important cyberbody types; they relate to each other as a single musical line relates to a single chord. The stream is a "moment in space," the microcosm a moment in time. ..... We'll know the system is working when a butterfly wanders into the in-box and (a few wingbeats later) flutters out — and in that brief interval the system has transcribed the creature's appearance and analyzed its way of moving, and the real butterfly leaves a shadow-butterfly behind. Some time soon afterward you'll be examining some tedious electronic document and a cyber-butterfly will appear at the bottom left corner of your screen (maybe a Hamearis lucina) and pause there, briefly hiding the text (and showing its neatly-folded rusty-chocolate wings like Victorian paisley, with orange eyespots) — and moments later will have crossed the screen and be gone. ....... If you have plenty of money, the best consequence (so they say) is that you no longer need to think about money. In the future we will have plenty of technology — and the best consequence will be that we will no longer have to think about technology. ..... We will return with gratitude and relief to the topics that actually count.

Web 5.0: Face Time
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter

This manifesto is mind-blowing. Blew my mind.



I came to the David Gelernter name earlier today by way of Outlook: Cloudy: Floating up into the cybersphere.

I Get Twitter

David Gelernter is my kind of guy: he is a big picture person. Weird first time I am hearing of him.

The ClueTrain Manifesto

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