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?
More about 'HD' quality
So, Google are shutting down their DRM-backed video sales and rental service. Instead of giving customers the video they 'bought' or a proper refund Google are giving them a "bonus" voucher to spend through Google Checkout, which rusts in 60 days.
Back in the day, we understood the simple cases of:
- you have bought this
- you have borrowed this
- and, you have rented this
DRM intends to make the middle case go away, and skew the first to be a wierd and different thing. If we choose to build technology that breaks these norms, we're going to need much clearer language than 'download-to-own' and 'buy' to cover all of the new possibilities for worse-than-before media.
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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:
- when you download something you are sent a bag of bits in any old order
- 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.
More on Streaming and downloading are the same thing…
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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