Alex Hopmann’s Blog

If you miss any of the key Olympics events it looks like you can catch most of the 2008 Olympics on Amazon Unbox.

About a week ago I switched the Media Center from the old machine running the XP version to a new Vista machine. As I’ve mentioned before this is a new machine I built in a nice Zalman HTPC case, a quad-core 2.4ghz process (Q6600), the Gigabyte Silentpipe 8600GTS video card and an AverMedia dual-tuner card. The parts all follow my usual theory when building my own PCs- stick with the top quality name brand stuff.

I’ve been running the machine for a couple of months now as a workstation and its been running great. So I reinstalled Vista, installed the minimum of stuff I needed for its new role as a TV, unplugged the old media PC and plugged it in. The old Media PC is not getting touched until its clear that the new one is really working 100%. Part of what is so tough about penetrating this market is that you really rely on your TV. It sucks to reboot a PC ever, but rebooting your TV in the middle of a program sucks even more. And having your TV fail recording the football game right before the big ending is even worse.

So far the results are so-so. Overall the new user interface is nice, with two big flaws. The new 3-row UI for finding programs is a disappointment. I remember seeing this a long time ago when it was in development and thinking about how cool it looked. In particular it should be a much better use of the screen on wide-screen displays (like I have). It does look cool, but I find it fairly clumsy for finding things. Its even worse when for my video collections it shows the thumbnails for everything so finding an item with a given name is really hard. I think we figured out how to switch to a “list” interface, but its only somewhat better.

The other big issue is the video libraries. It now integrates with the Windows Media Player notion of libraries and scans directories for videos, pictures and music. The old one just let you browse directories to find the videos you wanted. Now, the new approach should be better but so far its not working very well so I go to my video directories and see nothing.

As for reliability, so far no general system crashes. But it has mysteriously failed to record a few programs in the middle of the night. Since I’ve got the cable plugged directly into the tuner there are now cable boxes to screw things up now, so something is clearly failing in the box. So far its been old Star Trek episodes so no big deal, but it would be really annoying if we started missing the new episode of something (once there are new episodes of something back on TV at all).

But I’ve had three incidents now that were even worse. In the middle of recording a program it has screwed something up in the file that causes playback to freak out skipping in a crazy way playing sounds like nails on chalkboard. It actually can corrupt it so badly that it caused the whole machine to lockup at 100% CPU for like an hour. It is not just the Media Center playback, playing the recorded file on another machine in Media Player does the same thing. I’ve never seen something so screwed up.

I do wonder if the bug is in the drivers for the video tuner card (since in theory lots of the encoding happens in hardware) or in Vista itself. I am tempted to try my older Hauppauge tuner to see if it makes a difference, although of course I don’t have a consistent repro case.

More and more I’ve been watching TV much later than its official release. I wonder if using DVR starts you down that slope? First you are just time-shifting shows to later that night, then you watch them a different day of the week when you have more time. Pretty soon you are catching up on weeks of episodes. 24 season 5 and the first season of Prison Break were the first big cases where we saved up the whole season- it can be fun to watch them all in a row in just a few weeks.

Amazon Unbox has made this much easier since I don’t have to record and save up from the TV broadcasts. I just caught up on the new Battlestar Galactic series and I’ve got to say I’m impressed by both how good the show was as well as how good the experience can be watching this stuff in high quality on Amazon. I’ve been hoping to catch up on Lost also but unfortunately Unbox does not have it (despite having many other CBS programs). I really don’t get why some of the networks are being so tight with this stuff- they just passed up around $20 dollars of easy, no cost to them revenue…

I was chatting with some friends recently about buying TV on the Internet. It was on the way towards almost making sense not getting cable or messing with DVR and just getting the individual TV shows you want a-la-carte. With Unbox, iTunes, and the XBox video service you just download the shows you want, pay for each show, and enjoy.

Done right this should be a huge win for the TV networks. It seems like the only downside for them is that they lose the advantage of their wide distribution, but that is going to happen whether they play or not. The only stumbling block to make it more widespread is cost. At $2 for most TV shows whether they are 20 min (cut out the ads) or 40 minutes, high definition or not, its just not quite a no-brainer to watch everything online. If the Daily Show and Colbert Report were more like $1 per show and even better you could get a cheaper subscription I’d be there. But at $2 per show, that is 20nights/month X $4/night = $80/month. Sounds like the studios are being greedy. Here they have this opportunity to make some really solid revenue streams from their shows and get off the falling interruption advertising market.

And then the news today is that NBC is pulling out of iTunes because they want to charge $5 per show. Wacky and clueless. NBC was slow to put many of their shows on Amazon Unbox, but I see that Law and Order is up there now.

Hopefully they won’t jack it up to $5. Like I said, and $2 per HD episode, they have a great thing going and probably have ~$40/season extra revenue from me, especially if they do a better job posting the episodes right around when they go live. If they get greedy I’ll just continue to DVR it…

I’m looking forward to the premier of the new This American Life TV show on Showtime. While its almost the stereotype of public radio, I really enjoy the radio version and Kat and I went to the live taping in Seattle two weeks ago. It was great getting to see the preview of the TV show and watching a radio show be taped can be a surprisingly fun event.

There was one interesting bit though- Ira Glass was chatting about the TV show with his director Chris Wilcha. They were talking about what a puzzle it was to figure out how to visually put Ira into the show and Chris said that he came up with a completely original, never done before concept. They would stick him at a desk in the middle of some landscape, by a road, on a beach etc.

I just hope they aren’t so clueless to think this is an actually original concept vs. one of the most brilliant but well known device in the history of television. I just hope they give a little shout-out to the origin of this device by having Ira say “And now for something completely different” at his desk some time.

It is pretty amazing to me the sorry state of the TV networks taking advantage of the Internet as a distribution
medium. The only real excuse is that most people don’t have a computer hooked up to a TV yet so they can’t really
watch TV programming sent via their computer. Still, with a set of early adopters all over it, you would think someone
would get in front of this trend.

So far the best solution I’ve found is Amazon Unbox. Unbox is cool enough that I’m planning on cancelling
some of the premium channels on cable and just getting individual programs via Unbox. While I felt that $2 per
program was too much for TV (its still too much for 30min programs, they need to price differentiate more),
when I look at how many programs I can buy a month and still save over the Comcast
subscription, it becomes easier to justify. Plus I get real DVD quality content, better than most broadcast HD
and I get to replay anytime at that quality.

The other night we went to watch the latest CSI episode and discovered that the recorded version was trash. Somewhere
between the Media Center and the HD broadcast antenna the results were jumpy and cut out. Since CSI is one of the programs
available on Unbox I went there to get the program. This was a day after the broadcast but the new episode wasn’t online
yet. This I really don’t get- hey, if I’m paying $2 to watch it, they should pretty much have it available online
before the normal broadcast time if anything.

However a quick visit to the CBS web-site saved me. They have this new video player they call the InnerTube
that has full episodes of most of the shows available a couple of hours after the west-coast air time. They
force you to watch a couple of ads, but thankfully they are fairly brief (although they crank up the volume even
worse than normal broadcast ads do).

The quality isn’t as good as Amazon but its almost as good as broadcast/cable after you PVR it.
Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come. Now if someone had a $20/month
subscription service that would give me all the HD quality video of TV shows I want…