Category: Media

Ultra HD the next marketing fad

by Matt Hand


Sony 56″ 4k OLED
As the 2013 consumer electronics show wraps up we heard a lot about the new Ultra HD televisions. They are marketing them as UHDTV, and promising them to be the next great thing. We all will want them is what the savvy marketers are implying.

Even Samsung got into the game with a hideously designed 85 inch S9000.
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Bad design and who has room for that easel?

Why am I so negative on this though has to do with we are years away from commercially available 4K playback. There is nothing available today to play 4k. There is content out there that has been shot and edited in 4K and I imagine it looks amazing. In fact Sony had an announcement,

“Mastered in 4K” Blu-ray releases will feature titles—such as The Amazing Spider-Man™, Total Recall, The Karate Kid, Battle: Los Angeles and The Other Guys—sourced from pristine 4K masters and presented at high-bitrate 1080p resolution, with expanded color showcasing more of the wide range of rich color contained in the original source. When upscaled via the Sony 4K Ultra HD TVs, these discs serve as an ideal way for consumers to experience near-4K picture quality. SPHE also plans to utilize available high quality 4K masters for select upcoming new release Blu-ray titles. “Mastered in 4K” Blu-ray Discs can be played on all existing Blu-ray Disc players.

Yes currently we have to take a Blu-Ray and make it bigger to fit on a 4K television because 4K is about 4 times bigger than the largest HD image which is 1080p.

Don’t get me wrong I would support 4k as the production gear is there, but no one has any sort of playback system. You can forget about live television productions in 4K as we are years away from that as well. In fact 720p (which is smaller that 1080p) is used by some networks including FOX. Hopefully h.265 will help, but I just don’t see much immediate future for 4K.

4K another marketing fad.

When a news organization goes bad.

by Matt Hand

The Dish Hopper with Sling was removed from consideration due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp. We will no longer be reviewing products manufactured by companies with which we are in litigation with respect to such product.

CNet should be about news. This is not correct for a news organization to do this.

Update: BuzzFeed breaks it down here.

Is Facebook Video catching up to YouTube

by Matt Hand
With all of the recent conversations of video and how YouTube is looking to increase quality I thought it would be a good idea to see how Facebook may be doing. According to comScore YouTube is holding it’s own. In fact for the last few months it is the number one site for video. While Facebook is rising in overall viewers it is not at an accelerated curve as some may assume judging by unique viewers.
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Of even more interest is the shear scale of amount of time viewed however:

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Facebook is definitely catching up, but has a long way to go. By the way I threw Hulu in as an interesting other source. You can draw your own conclussions.

The shifting face of what we watch on TV part 2

by Matt Hand
A couple of weeks ago CES wrapped up and with all of the major geek announcements from new 3D TVs to a whole slew of new tablets running Android. There was great fanfare surrounding many of these announcements and many were carried by most of the main stream media. A lot of CES was covered by the podcasters and some would say (me included) did a better job. No podcaster out there could match up to TWiT though.

Leo at 2011 CES – from Flickr Dan_H
For a primer on who TWiT is this is from their Wiki FAQ –
• What does “TWiT” mean? Is it an acronym?
“TWiT” stands for “this WEEK in TECH”, the name of the flagship netcast for TWiT.tv, an operating trademark of TWiT LLC.
• What is TWiT.tv? Is it some sort of network? When did it start?
TWiT.tv is one of the biggest netcast networks around. It started in August 2005 with only 2 netcasts and now it has grown to include over 15 shows. The domain twit.tv gets over 2 million views per week, according to alexa.com.
TWiT is one of the leaders in tech podcasting. They are so big that Leo Laporte their head “Twit” was even written up in the New York Times recently. The amazing stat in this article that shows how new media is changing the distribution model is this:

Advertisers, especially technology companies, appreciate Mr. Laporte’s reach. Mark McCrery, chief executive of Podtrac, which is based in Washington, and measures podcast audiences and sells advertising, said TWIT’s advertising revenue doubled in each of the last two years and was expected to total $4 million to $5 million for 2010.

Now Leo is by no means a new comer to the media scene as his credentials go back to TV including a stint as the host of The Screen Savers on Tech TV from 1998 to 2004 with even further credentials going back to the early 90s. He even recently appeared on Regis and Kelly.
What is exciting about what Leo has done is that the TWiT network was one of the first to be offered on Roku. They believe strongly in delivering their content to the broadest audience possible including the use of live streaming apps on iOS, Android, and now even Windows Phone 7. They netcast, as they call it, an amazing amount of content every week and have a tremendous amount of downloads and live views everyday.
This is why content distribution is dramatically different today and will be changing even more in the next year.

The shifting face of what we watch on TV part 1

by Matt Hand

It’s been a great year for Roku!

Roku announced amazing numbers that came through their boxes. From their press release –

Roku players averaged over 11 hours of playing time per week – a significant amount of TV viewing for Roku customers when compared to the national average of 36 hours per week.
“A billion streams is pretty amazing and shows just how engaged our customers are with their Roku players,” said Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Roku, Inc. “If you think about it, our active user base now matches that of a top 10 US cable company. Our core values of simplicity, great content and affordability clearly resonate with mainstream customers.”

This is pretty impressive.
The future of how we consume content is moving online and the current generation of connected boxes.

Roku Sales Double When Apple TV is Released

by Matt Hand
In an interview with the Business Insider Roku CEO:

Instead of taking a big hit, Roku sales actually doubled when the new Apple TV came out, Roku CEO Anthony Wood tells us, because Apple helped bring a lot of new attention and awareness to the category. And Google TV is not proving itself to be a worthy competitor yet.

Proof that as we continue to migrate away from traditional forms of consumption forward thinking business like Roku are in a great place for the future.