Wednesday, October 08, 2003

BBC Vision for download video apps It's great to see/hear this kind of thinking coming from a major broadcast media company.  This is precisely the kind of approach that Maven Networks has taken in building a broadband media system, focused on the broadband-connected PC rather than the PVR/TV (for now, though as convergence devices come about and the bridge between PC hard-disk and PVR/TV disappears, that will change).  Early Maven customers are exploring all of these options -- download free content; download DRM content; download, DRM-enabled paid and subscription content, and soon will leverage P2P technology in the Maven client and server software for viral and cost-effective distribution. BBCi director's stunning speech on file-sharing and TV Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, gave a speech on Monday at the Royal Television Society about the nature of the BBC's ambitious and grand Internet plans. It's a stunner of a talk, filled with extreme sensibleness: Downloading and sharing this video is the final piece of the jigsaw and will create a killer combination that I believe could undermine the existing models of pay-TV. The killer combination is broadband together with digital TV and PVRs, plus the ability to share this video in the same peer-to-peer model with which music files are exchanged on the net... We are exploring legitimate peer-to-peer models to get our users to share our content, on our behalf, amongst themselves, transparently. And as an industry, we should be more active in creating legitimate content download products, whether that's as a pay-model, or rights-cleared for free. We need to help consumers leap-frog the illegal downloading issues that have wrecked havoc on the music industry. Here's what we believe is the shape of things to come, a way for people to search for whatever they are interested in -- perhaps in the case of a natural history for a school project -- searching from Buffalos to Bears -- and then download it for their use.  [ BoingBoing ] Marc's Voice[Comments] 9:54:14 PM    comment []

N-Gage: See the Forest... Carlos Longino at TheFeature.com has a good editorial on the industry significance of the launch of the Nokia N-Gage mobile gaming device.  I think he's right -- while the N-Gage suffers many significant design flaws, it is a category buster, and a great indicator of convergence between wireless, gaming and entertainment.  At a minimum, N-Gage will prompt developers to broaden their thinking and designs on multi-player, community-connected gaming, and that's a good thing for the industry no matter who provides the platform. 11:56:21 AM    comment []

Load Acrobat Faster...use Flash Paper Russell Beattie has a post today about his quest for getting PDFs to load more quickly, noting as other's have that the footprint of Acrobat 6 is getting larger and larger, with stuff that mostly no one neads for simple digital paper. A number of people have noted that Flash Paper, Macromedia's new electronic document technology based on SWF and the Flash Player, loads extremely fast, because the Flash Player is so small and nimble.  Here's a good sample of how Flash Paper can be inline in a page, and a full page example with a PDF comparison. While Flash Paper doesn't offer all the bells and whistles found in Acrobat, such as signed documents, full text search, document workflow, it does offer two simple and important benefits:  universal viewing with 95% of users on all platforms, and the ability to easily include electronic documents inline to a web page, rather than inspite of a webpage.  Others have noted that Flash Paper has a bright future, once the document object is exposed/documented for ActionScript developers, and once the Flash Paper template format is provided so people can custom decorate and integrate these documents into rich Internet applications, taking advantage of the XML, web services, forms/components, and real-time communications APIs that could bring such documents to life. 9:29:12 AM    comment []