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Comcast's 'HD' quality

PVRblog points to an interesting and quite thorough comparison of Comcast's recent drop in HD quality, including some pretty damning screen captures.

There's a real problem with defining 'HD' as at least a certain number of dots and damn the compression. Quality is a richer game than that. I think we may also need a THX-style, "does this look crap, call this number", and a meaningful, policed brand that means High-Quality, High-Def. Do content owners care when their programme is beaten up so badly it appears on the consumer's television as a bruised and battered mess?

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DRM stops leaks

Oh no, hang on, it doesn't.

iTunes slipped up and put the wrong episode of Stargate Atlantis on their store. It was the first filmed, but the fourth episode of the season. It is wrapped in the usual tasty DRM wrapper and it hasn't aired anywhere yet. Strangely, though, the video has made it onto the usual torrent sites.

So much for the notion that DRM keeps content off the ad-hoc networks.

(Sorry for the long gap in posts here – things have been pretty busy since August. I've either been away, working hard or both for quite a while. Things are settling down now, and I've lots of nearly finished articles coming soon.)

Streaming and downloading are the same thing

Chris pointed at a piece in the NYT where they say:

Streaming video, unlike downloads, never resides on a viewer's computer. It usually cannot be replayed as a downloaded file can be, which is another reason that content creators like it.

Pay attention, especially any lawyers hanging around at the back.

Here's the important difference between streaming and downloading:

1. when you download something you are sent a bag of bits in any old order
2. when you stream something you are sent a bag of bits and can start watching them before they've all arrived

That makes streaming harder to do, as a server, and theoretically nicer for the end user. The down-side is that once you have that harder performance problem of sending enough bits quickly enough it gets tricky. You can buy yourself better performance by distributing some (or all) of the information from a central server, but that gets expensive.

The next thing you can do is just to use fewer bits, that makes it both cheaper, and the technical problem gets easier. The consequence is to make the quality suck, to the point of being unwatchable for me. Content owners are well placed to compete on quality, right now they're losing to the ad-hoc torrent people.

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Joost advertising

So Joost have signed up some more advertisers.

While having some more big names advertising is good for Joost, I'm a little troubled. All the ads I've seen so far on Joost have been short logo & tagline affairs, placed between programmes. A return to 30 second ads, even in very short breaks, in the middle of programming is going to feel much more annoying.

[Via digg]

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