i.TV Application Added to Apple's iTunes Store

Three weeks ago, we showed you images from an early access build of i.TV, a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets you get the latest TV and movie schedules from your area, rate shows, and leave reviews. The application, which is free, was added to the Apple iTunes application store late last night, and is available to the public immediately.

At launch, i.TV bills itself as the "ultimate" movies and TV guide for Apple's portable devices, offering more than 144,000 TV and movie listings, data from 5,000 local theaters, and nearly 6,000 TV previews or movie trailers. It currently works in the United States and Canada, so those outside North America will need to wait.


i.TV Pulled Down My Channel Data in Seconds to the iPhone
As has been said by many, no application is complete without some social element these days, and i.TV, as you recall, is no different. You can engage with other viewers of shows you like by sharing reviews, and you can recommend shows to friends by e-mail. In fact, some of the elements of this app shadow the recommendations I gave TiVo in June. (See: TiVo Is a Zero On the Social Web. It's Time They Fast Forward.)


You Can Get Show Data and Theater Info on i.TV
I downloaded the new application from the iTunes Store tonight, and the speed is remarkably faster than the first alpha I tried last month. It automatically recognized my location, and based on that zip code, I was pulling down channel listings in seconds. Given its price (free), there's really no reason not to have this app if you already have an iPhone or an iPod Touch. You can find it here: Apple iTunes Store: i.TV.

Statistics Are Your Friend, Even When They're Bad

By Robert Seidman of TVbytheNumbers (Twitter / FriendFeed)

It should be no surprise that being part of a site called TVbytheNumbers that I’m obsessed with statistics and this obsession extends to all the web site analytics and statistics that are available to us.

While I hear and read things often about how Feedburner’s stats stink and Google Analytics stats stink and none of them ever sync up well, that really hasn’t been my personal experience. Using either Feedburner or Google Analytics as an intraday tool is certainly problematic, and I have had a day or two here and there where Feedburner did lose data for an hour of five that it never recovered, but mostly both are just slow and do recover. Google Analytics typically tracks visits and visitors correctly intraday within reasonable timeframes, but lags behind in counting total pages for hours. Usually, by 8am Pacific time (but not often before then) all the page views for yesterday show up. And once they do, on a page view basis, Google Analytics, Feedburner and Quantcast all seem like they wind up syncing up within 2%-3%.

Given everything involved, I find the 2% difference very reasonable and it doesn’t bother us any. We wind up triangulating between Feedburner, Google Analytics and Quantcast and it’s less of a hassle than managing our Web logs.

Because of the problem cited above with Google Analytics being slow to capture all the page views, it does make intraday monitoring fairly worthless, aside from tracking visits and visitors. All the other stats – time on page, bounce rate, pages per visit, etc. – are all wrong until all the page views are captured. But there’s little we’re doing that requires great analytics on an intraday basis. There are certainly times when it would come in handy, but even as it is, it works well enough intraday where we can at least figure out if we add something or move something around whether the desired result was achieved.

As a tool used after the fact, I find Google Analytics to be an extremely valuable tool, though I often don’t like what I see!

One thing we’ve thrown in the towel on is that referral traffic is almost always bad, no matter the source. There are some rare exceptions where linking produces good traffic (high time on site, number of pages per visit, etc), but that’s indeed rare. In fact, in almost every instance where a specific post is linked, the traffic is bad, with bounce rates often in excess of 80%. That’s whether Louis is linking to it, whether someone throws a link on Twitter, or even if Matt Drudge links to one of our stories. StumbleUpon and Digg show similar results.

Such traffic is great for jacking up visits and visitors, but bad for bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site. We’ve pretty much thrown our hands up in the air on that score and attributed it to web surfing behavior via links. As an aside, the stable link we have from Drudge to “TV Ratings” produces much better results, but if he links to specific story on our site and gives it any prominence on his site, the traffic has a very high bounce rate.

That seems largely out of our control, however there was still one stat that really bothered me. That was that if someone landed on our site via our home page, the bounce rates were still pretty high, approaching 50%. Better if someone came directly instead of via a referral, but still bothersome either way. Here's the landing page results for our site for August 1-31:

Recently, with that and a couple of other factors in mind – mainly wanting the ability to showcase more content on the home page – we redesigned the site. The bounce rate for traffic landing on our home page was around 47% for August. In the last week, post- redesign, that is now around 25%. The bounce rate for referral traffic to specific posts is still lousy, but again, we don’t feel like we can do much about that. Here are the landing page stats from September 6-12.

All of this has me wishing I’d gotten around to redesigning the site sooner. Who knows how much repeat traffic we may have lost as a result of design? I also feel silly because once upon a time I actually had responsibility for the web design/UI group at Charles Schwab. I recently had lunch with the VP who ran that group in my org and when I told her about the results she shook her head and laughed at me. My mentality had been this: our blog is a blog, pretty much like every other blog and designed pretty much like every other blog so spending a lot of energy on design tweaking didn’t seem like a worthwhile priority.

I definitely should’ve known better. I’m still not very happy about the bounce rates on referral traffic, but am quite happy about the reduction in bounce rates for people landing on our home page and would ascribe that improvement completely to redesigning.

By the way, for anyone interested, we went with the Live Wire theme from Woo Themes that we modified a little. So far I’d consider it the best $70 we ever spent. It’s not a perfect world, so the theme isn’t perfect, but setting the navigation structure (which we’ll certainly still need to tweak) and other modifications didn’t take much time. For $70 and time spent, cutting the bounce rate to our home page just about in half seems like time and money well spent.

Read more by Robert Seidman at TVByTheNumbers.com.

i.TV Launching iPhone App for Local Movie, TV Listings

Apple Computer's Steve Jobs famously said, in 2004, that he felt "you watch television to turn your brain off" and use the computer "to turn your brain on". In the ensuing years, however, Apple has marched directly into your living room, with the Apple TV, and the company's digital devices are making the partnership between your computing side and your television-watching side better and stronger. A new iPhone application from i.TV debuts today, letting iPhone and iPod Touch users tap into the Web, and pull down local movie and TV listings, search by name, and see user-submitted reviews.

And interestingly, the application, though in its infancy, teases with options about scheduling shows for recording on your DVR, or even renting and buying selected media.


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Once you have downloaded the i.TV application to your iPhone or iPod Touch, its first query is to ask you your zipcode. Entering your zipcode references available TV service options for your area. When you've selected a TV service, such as Comcast, i.TV will take a few minutes to pull down your full channel listings and TV schedule.

From this point, you can browse channels by time, starting with the current time, and go forward and backward in time. Using Apple's touchscreen technology, you can select any TV show to see more detail, rate it from one to five stars, give a thumbs up, or see user reviews.


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You can also use i.TV's database to search TV listings. As you can see in the screenshots, I did quick searches for "Conan", looking for Conan O'Brien, and the term "Law &", to see how many Law & Order derivatives I could find. Obviously, quite a few.


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i.TV, which has offices in both Palo Alto and Park City, Utah, also offers the same level of detail for theater listings. Using the same zip code information I previously entered, I could browse local movie theaters, see which films were playing, and get a quick synopsis of the movie.


Click Images for Larger Size

But gathering data from i.TV is not a one-way passive operation. i.TV's developers promise the ability to send alerts to friends, write reviews and respond to reviews by other i.TV users, making a microcommunity around television and theater entertainment consumers who own iPhones or the iPod Touch. The i.TV application, added to the Apple iTunes Store today, can be found on their App Store, here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/appstore. The company's Web site is here: www.i.tv.

Google Has Leveled the Internet Playing Field

By Robert Seidman of TVbytheNumbers (Twitter / FriendFeed)

There are many motivations to write something and publish it on the Internet. Some write in hopes of making money, others like Louis, write because they want to be a part of something they enjoy, others like Hutch Carpenter find their next job. But I believe whether it's Duncan Riley, Louis or Hutch the common denominator is this: they want their voices to be heard.

It's a Very Different Landscape Than 1994…
A very low barrier to entry brings with it some blessings and some curses. The more people who participate, the better things are for everyone in the aggregate. But the more people participating, the harder it is to compete and have your voice rise up above the cacophony of all the other voices.

During my first foray into Internet publishing in the fall of 1994, the landscape was dramatically different. I launched a newsletter essentially summarizing the big events of the week in the online/Internet space. At the time of launch, my only competition was for-fee subscription content. There was no freely-available competition and as a result, I gained access to readers and industry insiders very quickly. Fortunately, Robert Scoble was writing about visual basic or something at the time, so I didn't have to compete with his bullhorn either.

I first met Bill Gorman, who I now run TVbytheNumbers with, within two months of launching my 1990s Internet publication. Bill was an executive at AOL, who helped launch America Online's international division. Around the same time, Bill started reading what I was writing, so did the person who was running AOL – Steve Case. Basically within two months of launching I was reaching high-ranking industry insiders.

…But It's Still Possible to Get Your Voice Out There
Today, if you were to launch a blog on social network services and hoping to get Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to read it, I believe that task would be about 10,000 times more difficult. The likes of Louis, however, are proving that it's not impossible to write about companies you're interested in and gain 'inside' access. It may not be on the scale of Facebook executives for Louis (yet), but gaining insider access is certainly something he's accomplished to the point where he's now taken an advisory role with ReadBurner.

Louis might seem like an 'overnight success' story to many in the blogging circles, but not to me. What I see is a kid who has been plugging away since January 2006 and really started to get some traction by late 2007, which has accelerated greatly during 2008. Thirty-two months of plugging away to get where he is today isn't an overnight success story. It is a success story, but it is a success story that involved a lot of hard work, persistence and determination.

All Good Things…
The other day I brought up my FriendFeed and saw the link "Robert Seidman Quoted in NY Post On Phelps/Olympics" posted by none other than Louis. It was the first I'd heard of it. Although we have talked to reporters from the NY Post (and other publications) I hadn't talked to them about this. They'd just lifted the quote right out of a blog post and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Although getting quoted is nice, especially when quotes are just lifted off blog posts, the thing I was most proud of for the week was seeing this story comparing the minutes of online streaming to the minutes of viewing via traditional television pop-up in my Google Reader. An analyst working at Fox television crunched some numbers on top of some numbers I'd crunched in a blog post and Fox's PR team circulated it, citing our blog as the original source.

It's not lost on me that mostly happened because the song I was singing, "TV is still king", was a tune the people at the television networks really love to hear. But in a world where we're in some ways competing with Variety, Advertising Age, The Hollywood Reporter, Media Week, TV Week, The New York Times and the USA Today, to wind up having my thoughts on the subject heard was extremely gratifying. In some ways I'm in awe that the playing field is still level enough for that to happen.

Thanks Google!

I know a lot in the tech blogging circles will opine on whether Google is good or evil. For now in my mind, Google is still good. It leveled the playing field for us. We have little in the way of expense overhead (almost $0, really) and sure, it may work out that I've made about eight cents per hour, but that's the subject for another blog post. From my perspective, we are allowed to compete, and compete fairly without spending anything on marketing. It's hard for me to find fault with a system that provides that sort of level playing field.

Organic Google search (including Google News) is our number one traffic source. This leads to a lot of referral traffic from other sites and a good bit of the direct traffic.

A level playing field does not mean it's easy to get your voice heard, in fact, one of the best ways to compete in a very level playing field is with a lot of hard work. This may not equate directly to riches or fame, but if those were your goals the odds were already stacked against you before you started and you knew it.

Ultimately though, having your voice heard can lead to other very cool opportunities. Ask Louis, or Hutch, or even me. The best job I ever had, as a Senior Vice President at Charles Schwab running various portions of its online brokerage (from 1998-2003) came at least indirectly, and mostly directly, in my opinion, as a result of having my voice heard on the Internet. That was a lot easier to achieve in those heady pre-Google days, but even in this vastly more competitive era, Google does a great job leveling the playing field.

P.S. because I didn't think many FriendFeeders are interested in TV Metrics, I stopped feeding our blog into my FriendFeed stream and created a separate one here.

TiVo Is a Zero On the Social Web. It's Time They Fast Forward.

Despite continued issues around the company's business model, TiVo fans are among the most loyal. As with Apple, I, and many others like me, believe that TiVo offers a superior user experience that has changed my life for the good. I can't imagine being forced to watch TV without a TiVo, finding myself tied down to the scheduling whims of network executives, and seeing commercial after commercial on products I'll never buy. But while some offline products have found a voice on the Web, TiVo is conspicuously absent.

With the right amount of focus, TiVo could leverage their fan base and deliver a TV-centric social network and social networking features, where you could compare season passes, engage with fellow TV watchers, display when you had added a show to your season pass, or one-time recording, and even show if you hadn't yet watched an episode, warning your friends not to spill the beans on a season finale, if you hadn't caught up.

Today, TiVo's Web site lets you manage your TiVo(s) online, letting you remotely add shows, should the need hit you. TiVo Central online also shows aggregate statistics, including Most-Recorded Shows, and WishList rankings for Directors and Actors. It's nice, but it's not nearly enough.

What I would like is:

1. To create a TiVo-centric social network that lets me synchronize my profile with my TiVo units and find similar users.

My profile would, by default, import all season passes and wishlists on my claimed TiVo units, but allow me to "hide" specific items from public view. (Not necessarily for content, mind you, but because my wife doesn't 100% share my interests)

Using technology TiVo already has, I would gain recommendations for new TV shows and actors, based on my selections. Not only would I be able to see previews of the TV shows from within the social network, but I would also be able to find a compatibility rating between my preferences and other TiVo social network users.

Given TiVo's popularity, I would be able to search the social network not just for TV show compatibility, but also by distance from me, or other characteristics, as broad or as narrow as the other profiles would be willing to share. Does this sound a little too much like a dating service? I'm sure there's a little less harm in getting together with a person of the opposite gender to catch a So You Think You Can Dance marathon than most things, so sure, have at it. But more usefully, the social network would also have:

Central bulletin boards for each network television show and the most popular cable channels, as well as, by default, the top 100 most popular actors or directors, with social network users having the option to create new topics.

During the "live" showings of each show, the bulletin boards would have a "live" chat room features as well, so if you were daring enough to watch the show live, you could communicate with other viewers in real time, from anywhere.

2. To create customizable Tivo-centric RSS feeds to populate other social media sites.

Today, I have the ability to show you when I add items to my Amazon.com Wish List. I even have the option to show you when I purchase items from Apple's iTunes Music Store (See: Webomatica). But I can't use RSS to tell you when I add a new show to my Season Pass, or find a new actor or director interesting. Today, that data is siloed.


How My Tivo RSS Feed Would Add to My Lifestream
For many people, what you watch on television is just as definitive for who you are as the Web sites you visit, the sports teams you root for, and the restaurants you like. If I like CSI and Law and Order: SVU, as do you, but I also happen to watch Bones, but you hadn't heard of it, maybe thanks to my watching it, you would check it out.

I want to add TiVo updates I make on the unit or via the Web available as an option to my FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, on Plaxo Pulse or other services. I want the ability to make the details as narrow or as broad as possible, showing either that I've added a show, or, for some, that I've watched a show.

3. To have the option to access and export all my statistics.

Some people may be up in arms about TiVo aggregating user data, but not me. I want to know if I'm watching more TV this year than I did last year. I want to know the percentage of shows I watch live or those I watch on the DVR. I want to know if I wait longer to watch some shows than others, or if I watch more TiVo recordings in aggregate on Thursday than I did on Tuesday. I want to see, in total, how much time I've saved by fast-forwarding through commercials. (I first wrote about this last February: Dear Tivo, Please Track and Report My Data)

What if you could show how many hours you spend per year watching shows that start with "Law and Order"? What if you could then use all these statistics to compare with friends within your social network (See: #1)? TiVo could, with the viewers' permission, make a "couch potato" leaderboard for those who watched the most TV, the most from a single network, the most comedies or the most episodes of a specific show. I could find out if I'm the most reliable viewer of ER in Sunnyvale, California, or within 50 miles from my house.

I should be able to export my statistics in aggregate, to my blog, or any site.

4. To have widgets to display on my blog.

Like those from Last.fm, I want to have a widget that shows the top shows I watched in the last 7 or 30 days. I want to have a widget that shows my status, including what I might be currently watching, or if my TiVo is idle, like widgets for AOL instant messenger do.

To date, TiVo has not leveraged the power of their brand or their community on the Web. While there are sites out there dedicated to TiVo, like TiVoCommunity.com, they are unofficial, and they don't use the immense amount of data that TiVo has at its remote control to connect viewers and fans. I am more than ready to connect my online activity with my TiVo activity, and it is astounding to me that TiVo hasn't made an attempt to take on the new world of the Web the way they once aggressively took on the old world of stuffy network TV executives.

With social networks being so easy to create, and with RSS and XML being extremely customizable, the talent behind the world's best DVR should be able to unpause and get this started.

My TiVo and My Mac, Finally on Speaking Terms

With two Tivos in the house and a pair of Mac laptops being on almost 24 by 7, you'd think we'd be earlier to the game as far as getting the devices to talk to one another was concerned. But, despite my occasional protestations, we've sometimes taken the slow adopter route, and not forced ourselves to be exactly cutting edge. That's why, more than a year after Roxio first announced Toast Titanium 8, with full Tivo2Go support for Mac OS X, I'm only now enjoying the benefits of taking my TiVo'd shows anywhere I like.

I couldn't ask for the process to be much more simple than Roxio has devised. Their Toast Titanium suite comes with multiple applications, focused on CD burning, and a TiVo Transfer application. After entering in my TiVo's DVR ID, and connecting the TiVo to our wireless network with a simple USB adapter, Roxio scanned the TiVo's disk and showed me the TiVo's contents, including show name, description, duration and how much space it would take up on my hard drive to download it.


The TiVo Transfer Interface (Click to Enlarge)

To grab a show, all I have to do is click it, and hit "Start Transfer". I can even choose "Create Auto Transfer" for a specific show, so that every time my Mac is connected to the network, it'll download it directly to my hard drive. Now, if my wife is monopolizing the TV, or if the house needs to be quiet for whatever reason, I can take the show directly to my Mac, plug in my headphones, and watch on my laptop instead, with quality no worse than on my set.


Downloading from TiVo Transfer (Click to Enlarge)

TiVo changed the game on television networks by shifting when we watched shows, or how we consumed advertising. The option to take the shows with me on my laptop changes the location where I watch my entertainment. While the downloaded TiVo content isn't set up to play on my iPod Touch, or at least without file conversions I haven't tried yet, I appreciate having this new, fun, feature. Now, I intend to slink off and catch up on a few Daily Shows with Jon Stewart.

My Apple TV Still Wants Rentals, But Apple is Holding Out

Remember how pleased we were to learn that Apple finally introduced movie rentals via iTunes? I was stoked. In the midst of the writers' strike, the fact we could potentially gain access to new entertainment via the Apple TV and playing on our big screen was a home run. But weeks after the MacWorld Expo hubbub has died down, we're still left waiting, and the situation isn't getting better any time soon. For as the calendar turns from January to February, we got news today that Apple still needs a few more weeks to get it right. (See Also: TUAW)

Rats.

Since the introduction of movie rentals, we've already enjoyed a few films we hadn't seen in the theaters, including "The Hoax" and "A Guy Thing". Both were in the perfect spot for this - not good enough to see for $10, but of high enough quality where I'd feel bad if I snuck off to some Peer to Peer solution and grabbed it, sans paying. As you would expect, the viewing experience from Apple was simple. After the films downloaded, they were in a special section of iTunes for rented movies, and played just like a DVD would on my laptop. When done, I deleted them, and got that 1 GB or so back of free space on my drive, just as I would expect.

But, despite this wonderful innovation, my Apple TV still doesn't have access to it. I've checked the settings, and each time I look, I'm told I'm "Up to Date". What a shame. Hopefully, Apple's newfound transparency in terms of notifying customers there are delays doesn't turn into a repeat pattern as the weeks turn to months and so on...

RSS As a News Engine Eliminates Surprise

With the NFL playoffs in full swing today, and both games partially overlapping with our church schedule, I asked our TiVo HD to step in for us and capture both the Chargers/Colts contest, and that of the Cowboys/Giants. I avoided the radio, didn't look at any sports scores on television, avoided ESPN.com, and didn't look at My Yahoo! or Ballhype, who would each have given away the results.

But I did make a mistake. I checked my Google Reader feeds, and while I knew better than to check the RSS feeds from ESPN.com, excited bloggers who usually cover technology or media exulted in delight when their favorite teams won today.

(Meandering Passage blew it for me in both contests, so don't click either link if you haven't already seen the results...)

In minutes, as I hit the 'J' key, going through each of my items, the surprises were gone.

Now, while I haven't committed the final scores to memory, I am going through the TiVo recordings, knowing the eventual outcomes, and not enjoying the elements of surprise. I don't know just how each team won, or who the stars and goats were. That's left to be seen. But this time, RSS gave it away.

Amazon Gets $11.97 of My Apple Money

With the new TiVo HD installed, we have access to the Amazon unbox service, letting us rent popular movie titles directly through the TiVo box. For only $3.99, we can download everything from "The Simpsons Movie" to Jim Carrey's "The Number 23" or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and keep each show at home for a full 30 days.

So now, from one box, I can record multiple TV channels simultaneously, get recommendations for new shows I would like, stream my iTunes and iPhoto library via TiVo Desktop, and download movies from Amazon.

Meanwhile, my Apple TV just sits there. If Apple offered movie rentals through iTunes, I'd likely have bought them through iTunes, out of loyalty, and the company's typical leading interface and ease of use. But they don't... still. So tonight, I purchased three films for $3.99 apiece, totaling $11.97, sending my money to Seattle, Washington instead of nearby Cupertino.

The more I can do with my TiVo HD or my Wii, the less I see myself using the Apple TV. The Apple TV still offers the best way to get my full iTunes Library and access YouTube through the television, but that's it. And if I keep using the Amazon unbox service and find myself happy with it, then I just might become a fairly loyal customer for them instead, even if Apple eventually follows on with movie rentals.

Apple, your time for leadership with the Apple TV has passed. Now, just get your act together and stop forcing me to give my money to your competition.

Doubling Down On Our TiVo Obsession

Not too long ago, I mentioned I had taken TiVo up on the company's offer to add a TiVo HD unit to our house and maintain our lifetime subscription, all while keeping our old unit up and running for 12 months. And while I got the new Tivo HD shipped some time ago, it didn't get set up until yesterday, thanks to my needing to install new cable cards, and having to wait around for Comcast to offer me the privilege of utilizing their services.

While relying on the cable company to show up in the all too familiar "8 to 12" window isn't fun, their serviceman came by yesterday and did a quick, efficient job.

After I configured the TiVo HD unit in our bedroom, attached to our 42-inch plasma TV, I took our old unit back to the living room, to our long-neglected 27-inch CRT, and got that one set up. Now, instead of my wife and I having to share the one functioning TiVo in the house, we can both be watching our recorded shows, pausing and rewinding live TV, and avoiding commercials. It's yet another excuse for us to be spending time apart while we're both at home!

While this is a tremendous advance, graduating from our current setup to home entertainment nirvana will still take quite a bit of work, however. We still need to:

1) Sell or give away our oak entertainment center (almost completed!)
2) Purchase a flat-screen plasma or LCD for the living room, getting rid of the older TV
3) Put the plasma TV on the wall in the bedroom (not the dresser)
4) Put the new, not yet purchased, TV on the wall in the living room
5) Move the Wii and Apple TV to the living room
6) Consider getting real home theater audio

As you can see, this project could take a while, especially at my typical glacial pace. We love our TiVos, and are excited to have the power of TiVo throughout the house now, but it's always good to have a plan to take things to the next level.

And yes, I haven't lost the irony that now we've gotten our second TiVo, there's absolutely no new TV to watch, thanks to the writer's strike. I guess that's why I'm watching ESPN Classic's rebroadcast of the 2004 league championship series between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. Please don't tell me who wins.

It Could Be a Boring... Slow... Cold... TV Winter

Thinking ahead to the weekend, it dawned on me that I won't be watching college football this Saturday. With the exception of upcoming bowl games, most of which I can ignore, that season is over. And when it comes to college basketball, I simply don't care. Couple those harsh realities with the fact the Hollywood writers' strike has no end in sight and I foresee a serious lack of entertainment on the boob tube over the next few months.

Despite our having hundreds of channels on cable, our TiVo has already almost been squeezed dry of its content. The dramas we watch on a weekly basis are in reruns and hiatus. Late Night with Conan O'Brien and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart are dark. Meanwhile, baseball is but a memory and a hope, and even the BBC America shows have seen their seasons come to an end.

That leaves us with a few options:

1. Find new shows to watch, either new or in syndication, via USA, Bravo, etc.
2. Proactively seek out movies playing on Encore and other networks and record them.
3. Look at Apple's embarrassing lack of video on iTunes and pay for it.
4. Go to movies this winter in the theater.
5. Wrestle away the Netflix account from my wife and get it going again.
6. Leverage BitTorrent to fill our video gap.

Of these, #1 and #6 are the most likely. Maybe I can find an edgy drama we've never had time for to date. Maybe the combination of "free" movies and a wider selection than Apple will make BitTorrent a viable alternative. But I have zero faith that the writers and all of Hollywood will come together and start producing new shows again to keep us busy.

How many more days is it again until Spring Training starts?

Eight Reasons the Apple TV is Failing, and How It Can be Saved

I enthusiastically bought the Apple TV early this year, and was among the first to receive it when Apple started fulfilling orders. But what could have been the best conduit between the Internet and my Television has turned out to instead be a reminder of what even good technology companies can do when they don't make a product line a priority. Should Apple continue to neglect the Apple TV, it just might disappear altogether, and I'd be stuck using mine as an expensive conduit for playing iTunes, as I do now.

(See also: Jeremy Toeman: Why isn’t AppleTV an actual TV?)

Why the Apple TV is Failing

1. No Compelling Exclusive Content

Sometimes a killer application, game or content can drive a product from one of the crowd to a must-have. Witness how the X-Box, largely ignored in light of the Nintendo Wii's success, spiked in demand with the launch of Halo 3. The Apple TV, and its content provider, iTunes, don't offer any compelling television or film content that can't be found elsewhere. Bringing YouTube to the big screen isn't exactly innovative either.

2. No Flexibility In Displaying Content

Locking customers into iTunes and the iTunes Music store sold tens of millions of iPods. But the fact that I can't take downloaded .avi files, DiVx files, RealPlayer, Windows Media or anything else from my computer to the Apple TV, with the exception of QuickTime videos or iTunes downloads reduces my options to use it. Just like Apple once embraced the "Rip. Mix. Burn." slogan to attract downloaders, there's a mountain of people using BitTorrent and other services to get movies free. The Apple TV could become a must have box for those guys if they had an outlet. A simple tagline of "Don't Steal Movies" would give Apple enough cover, as the line "Don't Steal Music" once did.

3. TV is Free, Stupid

Let's see. I can either watch a show live for free with commercials, I could record it to my TiVo for free and skip commercials, or I could pay $1.99 to get commercial-free 22 minute episodes of my shows. I think I'll take the TiVo method. The iTunes package worked great for music because consumers were accustomed to paying for music, but we're not accustomed to paying for TV.

4. Purchasing Movies Makes Little Sense

How often do you watch movies more than once, even the classics? Not too often. There are many outlets to rent movies and return them, from NetFlix to BlockBuster and beyond. Why would I pay anywhere from $10 to $15 to wipe out a gigabyte of hard drive space and not enjoy it more than once? I haven't purchased a single movie from iTunes still, and can't think of why I would. (Also: See above for BitTorrent allowing for free downloads today or my post from April)

5. Apple Is Distracted

Apple only mentioned the Apple TV once during the last quarter's financial earnings call. They don't care, so why should we care? They don't even want to tell you how many they sold, and it's no secret that if a company won't break out one product line, but does for all the others, they're hiding something. With the iPhone, Leopard and Mac sales taking the headlines, the Apple TV is getting the short shrift. The recent ugly spat between NBC and Apple made it clear that nobody is winning the revenue game there when it comes to film and TV downloads through iTunes.

6. Apple Isn't Supporting Eager Developers

The Apple TV is a cleverly disguised cheap Macintosh, and the developer community was once excited enough to hack into the box to run native applications and get the Apple TV to act more like a Mac. With the right support, the Apple TV could be extended to be an excellent game machine, to add more video sources, and grab the eye of the geek community.

7. iTunes is Losing the Video Streaming War

One of today's biggest pieces of news was Hulu, NBC's attempt to take TV shows online, supported by commercials. ABC has long done the same thing. Joost has some extremely compelling software that lets me select shows on demand, run streaming from other computers, with minimal advertising. To even watch a single episode from iTunes, I have to download the whole thing and then sync it to the Apple TV.

8. iTunes and the Apple TV Have No Answer for Rentals

In my mind, it would be incredibly easy for Apple to offer movie rentals, with DRM, that would get me to download movies from iTunes. I would dump my NetFlix account if I could get films from iTunes to the Apple TV in an hour, rather than the days it takes to turn my NetFlix account around. But while there have been rumors about the service's debut now and again, we've got absolutely nothing to show for it.

How the Apple TV Can Be Saved

1. A Solution for Movie Rentals is Needed Now

Suck it up, Steve. Admit that people don't want to own their movies the way they own their music. Precedent has been set that movies are to be watched once or a few times, not many times (See my note from January). And as fast as networks are getting and as big as hard drives are getting, the concept of downloading movies of any quality is still a big deal. Let me download, watch, and delete. That's all I want. You work out the business model.

2. Cut Exclusive Deals With Movie Studios

Can you imagine if movies debuted in the theater at the same time as they did on iTunes? If I could see those films playing in the box office on my home screen instead of having to go to a theater, with its crowds, sticky floors and crying babies, I would do it. But if I have to wait 6-9 months to get it on iTunes, by that point I've either seen it already or stopped caring.

3. Make the Box Something New: A Game Device?

If it's really a Mac under that hood, Steve, then it's a lot more powerful than you're letting it be. See how the Nintendo Wii has captured the imagination of so many? What if you could make your one box the answer not only for music and videos and YouTube, but for video games? I don't care if you get Halo 3 on there tomorrow, as quite honestly I'd be content with Cribbage or Scrabble on the big screen, so long as you promised Tetris and sports games would eventually show up.

4. Open the Box Up to Developers and Support Them

Developers are not the enemy. In fact, they can be the best allies you have, doing the work your team isn't doing, and expanding your customer base, without much cost to you. You supply them the hardware and the network connections, and let them do the rest. Hold seminars on how to program for the Apple TV.

5. Act Like You Care About Apple TV

Don't call this box I purchased a hobby. I took it seriously, can't you? While I understand the iPhone is pretty cool, as is the iPod, and Leopard and Mac... don't you think this box, with so much potential, should get a little love? Don't tell me you shipped it to just give up on it.

6. Watch What the Industry Is Doing and Learn

Every few months or so, I read an article about how TiVo is dying. Really? Their box still kicks your ass. What about SlingBox? Couldn't figure out how to get me a way to watch my Apple TV when I was on the road, but some punk startup turned that idea into an acquisition worth hundreds of millions? What about Joost or Comcast OnDemand? How can you take this tremendous Apple TV and iTunes package and come up with an answer for real-time on demand? So far, you've got nothing.

Steve, and the Apple team, we're among your biggest supporters. That's obvious. I'm not the type of user who would complain if you dropped the price or added new features after I bought. I bought version 1 and I know the issues there. But for you to ship away and slip away makes no sense here. If you ever think iTunes will make it in the video world, you're holding on to the very best way to make that happen, the Apple TV. But if you don't do anything about it, it will be too late, and you will have failed.

Now please excuse me so I can go watch some Netflix DVD we rented. When I get back home, I also look forward to catching up on my TiVo shows. Will you have anything new for me?

TiVo HD Lifetime Promo Too Good to Pass Up

In June, I was tempted to upgrade to a Series 2 TiVo and maintain my lifetime membership, for $299. Having been a series 1 holdout for 4-plus years, I almost sprung for it. But I didn't. Then in July, TiVo announced a low-price HD box, bringing the entry price to HD TiVo goodness down to $299 instead of $799. But, still, we held on to our Series 1. It's worked great for years, and I wasn't interested in paying a monthly fee to Alviso, where TiVo is headquartered.

Despite all that, today, I finally gave in to TiVo's marketing ploys.



It seems TiVo is a little tired of us Series 1 lifetime membership holdouts getting their services for free, seemingly forever. After June's promotion, I got an e-mail today offering me the new TiVo HD at the standard $299 price, but offering the option to move my lifetime membership from the old box to the new for only $199 more, and I get to keep the series 1 active for another year. Given it can cost upwards of $179 for just one year's worth of TiVo, it made sense, and we accepted their offer.

Once the new TiVo HD comes, we'll finally have a TiVo on both our TVs. We'll finally be able to record two channels at once. We'll finally be able to download movies directly to TiVo from the Web. And we'll just maybe get to see it in HD, if I ever stop being cheap.

Additional coverage: Engadget: TiVo offers lifetime service transfers to the HD... if you've got $199

Welcome Back, Network Television

Just as the baseball season is coming to a close, a new season is upon us - that of the Fall television season. After months of mundane TiVo near-ignorance, and dabbling in the BBC America network, primetime television roared back to life in our home earlier this week with the 1-2-3 combo of Bones, House, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. After a brief Wednesday's vacation, the TiVo whirred up again tonight, taking in Ugly Betty, CSI and ER.

(I'll let you guess which two of the shows are slugged "wife only")

In the summer months away from the standard idiot box fare, we spent a significant amount of time enjoying our Nintendo Wii, reading 200+ RSS feeds in Google Reader, blogging a bit ourselves, picking winners on Ballhype, catching up on our Netflix queue, and attending a ton of A's games. Now, as we've regained yet another distraction from all the real work we need to do, some of those other items just might go down in the number of hours spent daily - or, in the cases of blogging or reading RSS feeds, they'll have to be done in parallel. There's nothing like sitting cross-legged on the bed with the laptop open while occasionally glancing up at the TV set to make sure you haven't lost track of the plot, after all.

To be honest, there weren't any real cliff-hangers from Spring that had us waiting with anticipation. In fact, we were disappointed, as we are every year, to see some of our favorite shows disappear, as Fox's hilarious War At Home was axed without fanfare and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was similarly canned, though a lot more noisily.

Now, our time with the TV becomes a balancing act. How do we make sure we train the Series One TiVo to get our BBC shows (Coupling and Hotel Babylon) without missing some season premieres? Is it possible to play the Nintendo Wii while watching CSI? (I think not...) And will our Saturdays be spent watching the two, three or four shows we missed during the week?

All I know is regardless of how many shows we take in, and whether we can possibly catch our fill of crime dramas, medical emergencies and jury trials, we'll have our TiVo remote in hand to zap through the commercials and save precious minutes with each episode. Hopefully, we won't find any more new shows to add to our own fall schedule, or I'll have to start calling in sick to the office.

Slingbox Going Corporate Before I Get One!

If you consider we've got our 42-inch plasma TV, a TiVo, a Nintendo Wii and the Apple TV humming along, sucking down our share of electricity, it's clear that only one real TV device is missing - a Slingbox. Though I've considered buying a Slingbox from Sling Media on more than one occasion, so I could catch up on the home TV while away, I've never made the jump - and if the breaking news from PaidContent.org is true, I won't be a customer before they jump from being a scrappy tech startup to part of a big corporate monolith. News from PaidContent.org says Sling Media is being picked up by EchoStar, manufacturers of the Dish Network, for all of $380 million.

This could be good or bad for current or prospective customers of Slingbox. While it's sure EchoStar has plenty of capital to expand distribution and continue manufacturing the next generation of TV streaming gear, I always have a tendency to want to root for the underdog, and have something resembling distrust for the mega-monolith, as it often seems the bigger you are, the less likely you are to pull off something amazing - instead, being beholden to the quarter by quarter financials and supporting an existing customer base on prior revisions of hardware or code.

I've optimistically had the Slingbox on my Amazon wish list for the better part of two years now, stupid commercials aside, and maybe, just maybe, I'll take it off for the short term and see how this purchase shakes out.

Adding Movie Rentals to iTunes Would Save the Apple TV

Sometimes, being an early adopter really bites. After years of drooling anticipation from fans, myself included, Apple delivered on their set top box strategy, with the debut of the Apple TV, acting as the conduit between video on my iTunes and my wide-screen TV. While I recognized the first box would have issues, I had to get one. I also trusted that the box's feature set could be updated on the fly, putting my faith in Apple to deliver additional functionality as the box gained in maturity.

And in the six months or so that I've had my Apple TV, the only real news is that I gained the ability to browse YouTube in June. I still don't have Apple's blessing to play .avi files from other sources on my widescreen TV. I still don't have anything like games on the Apple TV, and worst of all, iTunes still hasn't debuted movie rentals - what I believe to be the missing link between potential product obsolescence and product success.

Today, my Apple TV largely plays my music on the TV's speakers, acting as an overpowered stereo, with some cool graphics. But the price barrier to download films - at $10 for anything from the iTunes store, is a fallacy in the face of Netflix pricing, and the ability to set up my TiVo to proactively find films for free.

With this background, we now see Forbes lustily calling the Apple TV "The iFlop", saying while the iPhone has soared in the global consciousness, the Apple TV has been dissed as a hobby and hidden in the backs of stores. Apple won't even discuss the product's sales success, or lack thereof, as an individual line.

I have faith Apple can get their act together on the Apple TV, but very little faith in the media owners of today (i.e. the movie studios) to do what's best for consumers instead of what's best for their own pockets. If they do not deliver reasonable download terms for movie rentals via iTunes, it could both spell the death of Apple TV and even worse, send us to BitTorrent and other less-desired means to get our digital entertainment fix.

Let's get this done, Apple. I've been begging since April for you to crush Netflix, have seen rumors you'll pull this off at least since July and I have no interest in seeing Forbes' dire prediction come true.

BBC America Helps Beat Summer TV Doldrums

While the major television networks fill their summers with the latest ridiculous reality shows, my wife and I have been more than happy to indulge in other pursuits, including watching televised A's games, making the most of our Netflix subscription, and battling each other on the Nintendo Wii. This has left our TiVo largely neglected, dutifully taking down each Jon Stewart or Conan O'Brien airing, but not doing much else - until recently, when we asked our TiVo to step up its game by dabbling in the British arts, recording the series "Hotel Babylon" and "Coupling" on BBC America.

As usual, we are quite amused by what the proper English have put together. In the same spirit as the original "The Office" series and "Absolutely Fabulous", both Coupling and Hotel Babylon seem to be ahead of their time, sure to be poorly mimicked by wannabe TV producers here in the states in no time.

Of the two, Hotel Babylon is both newer and most promising, in my opinion. Taking what would otherwise be pure drudgery - managing a hotel, keeping guests pleased, and rooms cleaned, instead presents a foundation for all sorts of mischief, internal politics, and odd characters, with an acceptable level of sex, drugs and alcohol thrown in for good measure.

But Coupling is in itself quite funny - almost like the series Friends could have been if it were to have some semblance of intelligence, and a darker side. The most recent episode we saw showed two sides of a couple's breakup and eventual reconciliation, cutting a clear demarcation between the two genders' interpretations and reactions to the same event. For starters, the girl treated herself to a beauty parlor, while the man headed to a strip club. You get the idea.

Given that much of network television is getting progressively worse, and the summers are the most vapid of them all, I'm glad we've found an escape route, even if it means listening to strong accents from across the Atlantic. If you've got spare space on your TiVo or DVR, pick up a few episodes and give the shows a whirl.

Simpsons Movie: Woohoo! D'oh! Woohoo!

Saturday was a day I'd yearned for in excess of a decade and a half. After years and years of speculation and hope, I finally had the chance to enter a movie theater and see The Simpsons Movie. Nearly 90 minutes of The Simpsons in all their yellow, dysfunctional glory, without commercial breaks and much, much larger than ever before. I also was lucky enough to see the show with some of my closest friends and my wife.

As any good diehard will tell you, The Simpsons Movie wasn't perfect. There's no way that a single film can meet all the built-up hopes and expectations we had. There's no way that 87 minutes can provide the show's fans enough time to see all the minor characters we wanted. And for every laugh we had during the film, and there were many, we could find issues we would have improved were we running the show.

The show itself was divided into three parts. Simplified for spoiler avoidance, you had: Crisis, Escape and Resolution. The escape had the Simpsons headed to Alaska, away from Springfield, where all the fun is. The escapade to the great white north took the Simpson family out of their element, away from the hilarity of people who were greatly neglected in the film, like Apu, Patty and Selma, Groundskeeper Willy, and even usually non-funny folks like Principal Skinner, Gil the salesman, and the acne-ridden teenager whose voice is constantly breaking.

What I loved about the movie was that it started immediately and kept going at a quick pace. Without the usual buildup you see, even in the 30-minute weeklies, with delayed on-screen credits, the movie jumped into its element immediately, and one scene led to another. I loved the fact Bart and Homer continued their efforts to be the worst father-son combo of all time, and that the writers could take liberties with the content that aren't available on network television.

What I didn't like about the movie was the introduction of new characters, as in a series so rich as The Simpsons, there's really no need to add more to the mix and introduce their background. This also squeezed out some of the much-desired peripheral people. I also didn't like the utter non-b