Executive Summary of My 2¢: HDTV is great, but there are too many gatekeepers and technology hurdles--the hottest distribution platform in the future could be mobile video. (This post ended up being much longer than I thought it would be.)
HDTVSo I bought a high-def TV on Friday. I didn't want a big set that would dominate my studio apartment or cover up windows. So I decided on a 32" set, which is still larger than the 27" set that it is replacing. But once I got to the store and stood back about 8 feet, I was having a hard time distinguishing the advantage of high-def. They have these videos at
Best Buy that do a split screen of high-def and a simulated standard-def. Well at 32" and 8 feet, the advantages weren't that great. (I
wrote recently about some equations for how screen size and viewing distance effect perceived
resolution.) I went with a $900 Sony
KDL-32s3000 because it was the set that I could perceive the most difference in high-def that was under a 1K. I found that basic 32" sets weren't as sharp as the more pricey Sony. I wanted to feel like I wasn't just getting a slightly larger, brighter set.
I've watch a decent amount of video so far, and I'm happy with the set. I watched a couple of
DVD's and they looked good. The
DVD's look much larger because 1/4 of the screen isn't lost to
letterboxing as was the case with my old 4:3 tube TV. Road to Perdition was on ABC last night, and it was nice to see a movie in
HD. Although sitting through commercials to watch a movie is a hassle, and I don't plan on watching movies this way. PBS had a travel show on Italy, and I was totally absorbed by the Italian coastline in
HD.
Old analog TV looks like crap on an HDTV. I used to record a fair amount of TV on a DVD recorder that only had an analog over-the-air tuner. Well when I hooked this recorder up to the HDTV and tried to watch some TV that I recorded, I decided I couldn't watch TV like that. The artifacts from analog TV, like ghosting of the image and noise, look just awful on a high-def display. So I replaced my old DVD recorder with a newer model with digital TV antenna. So far, the clean recordings that I get from the new DVD recorder, a Panasonic
DMR-
EZ27 look good even though they are standard-def recordings only. The difference in recording a digital standard-def signal is significantly better than an analog TV signal.
So I think I have dissed digital
OTA (over the air) TV before. I had an experience a few years ago where I bought a
digital tuner and found that I could not get channels reliably. Well my experience this time around has been very good. The digital reception is much better now than my analog reception was. Even my old rabbit-ears antenna works fine.
Apple TVI have been thinking about getting an Apple TV after plugging it so much. But when it came down to it, I didn't think it was yet worth the $225 price. While it would be great to rent
HD movies, there's not that much selection yet. There are almost 100 movies in
HD, but it looks like Apple is having a harder time
getting movies than they expected. They had promised 1,000 standard-def rental by the end of February. Instead, they had only around
350. It makes me worried that the studios are going to dick around with Apple because they don't want to see Apple TV succeed like the
iPod did and become a dominant media platform. Not good news for the Apple TV when they can't even meet their targets for content.
I did go check out the Apple TV at the Apple Store. I thought the
HD movie clips looked good although everyone says that
Blu-ray leaves it in the dust on a large set. The podcast interface was cool. With the 2.0 software on Apple TV, you don't need to use your computer to download
podcasts before watching. You can browse and search
podcasts right on your TV, and if their server is fast enough, start watching them immediately. I think it's a pretty good model for media distribution. Unfortunately, until these media extender boxes take off, then there's just not that many boxes out there that will play video
podcasts on the TV.
I was able to easily search for our show
Mosaic and play it on the Apple TV. Unfortunately, 320x240 looks just awful on an HDTV. Apple has been
recommending video
podcasts be 640x480 or 640x360 in order to look good on an HDTV. That's about 4 times as many pixels, so much more data to serve/download. But there's something to the idea that you have 1,000's of different
podcasts that you can access instantly on your TV set
and it is not controlled by gatekeepers like
Comcast or AT&T. (Check out this
blog post "7 Ways Apple TV Changes The Game And What Podcasters Need To Know And Do About It" for some interesting thoughts on Apple TV and
podcasting.)
So when it came down to shelling out $225 for the chance to rent
HD movies with Apple TV, it wasn't worth it, even for an Apple fan boy like me. I'm also not ready to spend $400 for a
Blu-ray player/PlayStation 3 to watch
Blu-ray movies. For the time, I think
DVD's look good enough on my set. If the selection takes off on the Apple TV, I'll reconsider.
iPhoneSo after buying an HDTV set, I've decided that the real action is on the small-screen. This week was a big week for the iPhone with the announcement of a software developer kit. That means all kinds of third-party applications are going to start appearing for the iPhone. Apple showed off an instant messaging app for AOL. I was skeptical that they would allow
IM because that seems like competition for the
SMS messaging that AT&T still charges for. I think Apple is really going to open up phones as a great mobile computing platform.
This past week, BBC came out with an
iPlayer site that has BBC videos in h.264
Quicktime for the iPhone. Recently it's come out that there's no real chance for Flash on the iPhone--Apple says that the iPhone doesn't have enough computing power to run Flash. Since most sites are encoding videos in Flash, that leaves a pretty big hole for streaming video to the iPhone. BBC decided to start encoding h.264 video just for the iPhone. (
YouTube has been doing some h.264 encoding too since the iPhone launch.)
BBC's iPlayer is basically a website with a simplified interface that works well on the
iPhone's small screen. It only works over
WiFi now--the Edge data network is too slow to stream video, but maybe when the iPhone gets on 3G networks streaming video will be better. Oh, no BBC for you--it only works in the United Kingdom. But I think it's interesting to think about mobile distribution of video. Our
Mosaic Intelligence Report and
Global Pulse would be great for mobile video.
In short my thoughts at the moment are that HDTV is great, but there are too many gatekeepers and technology hurdles--the hottest distribution platform in the future will be mobile video. I think Apple is still playing a positive role for consumers in opening access to content on both the mobile end and on the TV. Maybe I'm too optimistic about mobile--the telco's also control the mobile network and I can't see them being excited about their mobile networks being filled with free videos.
I seem to have a lot of posts about cameras even though this is supposed to be a blog about post-production. So I've been saving up some interesting links on cameras because I didn't think they warranted a post to themselves on my blog.