Any time I get frustrated with how something works in my day-to-day life I start thinking about how some day, years from now, I won’t be afflicted by this incessant inconvenience. Television and online video watching is high on the list of things that can (and will) be done drastically better some day.

There is a lot of noise in this very interesting space right now but only a few devices and services that I think have a real chance of changing how the average American television viewer consumes content.

The Devices

• TiVo makes the best DVR on the market but has priced itself out of orbit with its near-$1,000 hi-def unit. Their box is Internet-connected (sans-PC) and already has limited access to a handful of video podcasts. If they don’t dramatically drop the price, they’ll continue to lose market share. I own a standard-definition box of theirs and its currently unplugged and sitting in the closet. I didn’t pay $2,000 for a hi-definition plasma so I could watch a standard-def, analog cable signal. Another TiVo handicap is that one cannot access VOD services like Comcast’s OnDemand, which let you watch TV shows or movies (hi-def) whenever you like. I am an avid OnDemand user and would not use a device that couldn’t access that service.
• Motorola and Scientific America make severely crippled DVR’s with no Internet connectivity and a soul-crushing user experience. These little boxes of terror are distributed for a nominal monthly “lease” fee (typically $5-$10) via the major US cable operators like Comcast and Time Warner. To add injury to injury they even run ads in the program guide. I pay the $10 monthly fee for one of these boxes from Comcast, though, because it’s the only way I can have my hi-def content record to a DVR (without giving TiVo $800 + $16.95/month) AND access OnDemand VOD.
• Apple TV is a slick little device that syncs music, photos, podcasts, movies and TV shows from a computer (PC or Mac) running iTunes for playback on your hi-definition set. All for $300 (40gb). It can stream or store locally almost any of the content you have in iTunes. I’ve been using the Apple TV (connected to my receiver via HDMI) as my stereo and primary conduit for watching video podcasts. If you buy an episode of a TV show from iTunes, you may also watch it on this device. So, this is (for now) primarily an everything-but-TV device (since you’ll be able to rent movies soon through the Apple TV I’ll assume it will be a decent movie player in the near future, like OnDemand). As long as I’m paying for a hi-def DVR, I will most certainly not be buying episodes of TV shows (or anything else) from iTunes.
• Other/Generic media PC’s. HP, Dell and others make media PC’s that are intended to work with your television. They’re just regular PC’s running Windows XP Media Center Edition (or whatever equivalent Vista now has) with TV tuner cards and fancy remotes. Don’t bother with this if you have a hi-def set - and if you don’t, then just buy a standard-def Series 2 TiVo for $300! These machines won’t do digital signals, won’t do hi-def, won’t do OnDemand VOD - all they do is time-shift (skip commercials). Yes, you can buy hi-def video cards, etc, but at that point you may as well buy the TiVo Series 3 (hi-def).

The Content Services

Content is further behind on its evolutionary path compared to the hardware, which is scary because the hardware is still so archaic. Most of us are still paying through the nose for digital cable from one of the large US operators. Here are the alternatives so far:

• A newly launched start-up, from the makers of Kazaa and Skype, called Joost is the most promising and most likely player to carry content that people actually want to watch over a network that isn’t a major cable operator. They’ve struck deals with many of the large studios and networks in the US to legally play great prime-time TV shows through their player. They boast a lot more interactivity and additional content but that stuff doesn’t really matter in this context - it’s still people watching stuff on their computer screen which we all know Americans aren’t going to adapt to when it comes time to relax after a long day of work and watch your favorite shows.
• YouTube and the countless other video sharing sites command millions of hours of video and many more millions of viewers. Great for when you’re bored at work or want to watch the latest viral short film of an alcoholic toddler threatening Will Ferrel. Not only will people not sit through 30 minute prime-time shows on here, it would be illegal for most of the shows to even exist on YouTube. An interesting twist here is that Apple recently announced that the next update for the Apple TV will allow viewing of YouTube video clips. I imagine this will still be a cumbersome “iTunes-first” process, but an exciting step in the right direction nonetheless.

How We’ll Likely Be Watching TV … Soon

The Register is reporting some interesting news that Joost is in talks with DVR manufacturers to get its software embedded on their Internet-connect set-top boxes. Joost, armed with their network and studio distribution deals, would be the first to provide widely-desired television programming to set-top boxes strictly via the Internet. Apple and TiVo are in position to compete here as well and I hope, for the sake of us consumers, they do. Apple seems to be good at striking deals with content owners and TiVo has the leading hardware platform and decent in-home market share already.

In the hopefully not-so-distant future, The Ultimate Box will let the viewer watch hi-def, prime-time TV shows, rent movies in hi-def, time-shift programs (DVR functionality), watch any video clip on the Internet that has a discernible URL, view photos, videos and music from the user’s own collection, and share this content with friends via the Internet from the set-top box itself.

Economics, from the Networks’ and Advertisers’ Perspective

All of these delicious features are going to have to mix well with the economics of the television industry in order to get the content owners to play ball. NYT has a good numbers article this week that also highlights how the networks are evolving their pricing models. The highlights:

• Networks now including online exposure in their upfront pricing because advertisers are reluctant to try it on their own.
• DVR playback data now taken into account as well as audience size for the ads as opposed to the program.
  • The networks want credit for when shows are played more times after the original airing, thus amplifying the number of times the advertisers’ commercials may have been viewed.
  • The advertisers wanted their audience numbers based on how many viewers are watching theor commercials not the program.
  • DVR’s can and do now provide that data to Nielson.
• Some networks have fully sold their online inventory and some advertisers have unspent broadcast ad dollars for 2007-08 season.
• Total upfront ad sales (about 75% of all prime-time commercial spots for the season) for all 5 major broadcasters (ABC, CBS, CW, Fox, NBC) was estimated in 2006-07 to be $9.1 billion.
• The cable networks combine to command about $6.4 billion in advertising spend, making the entire television advertising market about $18.5 billion with the new medium elements worked into the pricing.

It’s smart for the content owners to work the ads into the online versions and then charge advertisers for that exposure and I’m pleased that the commercial-skipping DVR users haven’t soured the advertising business for the networks so much that they’re suing hardware manufacturers to get the feature disabled. It could happen - but it looks like it won’t have to.

BusinessWeek reporter Roben Farzad recently traveled to Columbia to determine whether or not the “third tier” (globally speaking) economy there was ready for mainstream foreign direct investment and an “equity culture”. From an investment perspective, Columbia is the next frontier after the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Its stock market has increased 14-fold since 2001 with a still modest total capitalization of $59 billion.

The one-time murder capital of the world and former home to infamous drug cartel Pablo Escobar, Medellín (pop 2.4mm) is reemerging as the commercial hub of the nation. The president, Alvaro Uribe, unlike most South American leftist leaders, sits right of center and has an approval rating above 60% in his now second term in office. His government is very much interested in attracting growth through foreign investment and understands that this can only be achieved by driving the paramilitary drug lords out of the urban commercial centers, which he’s made good progress at so far.

The U.S. has incentive to stay on good terms with and help Colombia grow as relations with Venezuela and Equador continue to deteriorate. The U.S. has sent $5 billion in aid since 2000 - the 4th largest financial aid recipient of the U.S.

The Colombian stock exchange, called Bolsa de Valores, is merely 12 people sitting in front of trading screen in an office building in Bogotá’s financial district. The exchange closes at 1PM because all business that needs to be transacted for the day is typically done by then. With such a limited number of buyers and sellers in their emerging market, volatility is the norm. In 2005 the Bolsa was up 128% (second best in the world that year). It took a 45% dip last year when many emerging markets were hit - second worst loss in the world. It is down 5% in 2007. Bolsa-listed stocks can only be bought with pesos and there are no Colombian mutual funds available to foreign investors.

Some upcoming public offerings on the Bolsa include Procafecol, a local coffee producer (Juan Valdez), and $4 billion state oil company Ecopetrol, which will likely get listed on the NYX. The only Colombian stock currently listed on the NYX is Bancolombia, whose shares are up 20-fold in the last 5 years.

U.S. investment banks have been buying up companies in Colombia and Colombian companies are slowly starting to export their products to the U.S. to grow faster. The two countries are on the verge of a free-trade agreement, something president Uribe is pushing hard for.

Although murders and other violence is dropping, infrastructure in Colombia continues to degrade and is in need of billions in investment. Many investors are waiting for that to happen to open the floodgates for other markets inside the country. The government is hesitant to break from its old-world traditions of owning all infrastructure, though. They are having trouble raising bond money because they can only deliver 6% returns instead of the 20% they yielded 10 years ago. Critics say there is plenty of private money waiting to fund the infrastructure projects if the government could just adopt an equity frame of mind instead.

The lengthy article has some great descriptions of his personal interactions in Colombia and some more detail on its violent history and how much better it is now. Extreme Investing: Inside Colombia

By Adam Jackon

Many services here in the US that were once expensive are now progressively becoming less so. Broadband Internet access seems to be in a race to the bottom, largely thanks for fierce competition between providers. Local and long distance phone service is much more affordable now thanks to competition from VOIP.

Conversely, some services that were once free or cheap are lately becoming more expensive. Television, for instance, used to be either free or very inexpensive for the average American household. Now its probably the largest monthly bill in the household behind the mortgage or rent payment. Admittedly, television has gotten a lot better over the years: more channels, better picture, DVR capabilities. I think the price increase is justified. Celular service, if not increasing in price, seems to be maintaining its premium pricing as time goes by. Sure we can TXT and PIX each other now, but does the service really need to be as expensive as it is?

Before we get into what this cellular provider of the future might look like, let’s establish what sort of technology we’re dealing with in the average American’s cell phone here in 2007.

Phones these days are location-aware. Even if you’re not using or paying for the service, the phone always knows approximately where on the planet it is, provided there is cellular coverage. The accuracy is even good enough to build a driving directions (GPS-like) service into the offering. Blackberry’s and other devices offer this - for an additional usage fee, of course. Cellular location technology is much better than GPS, though, because you don’t have the line-of-sight issue. GPS units must be able to “see” the satellites that give it geographic positioning information. If you try to use one indoors they’re useless. Modern cell phones use the cell towers for this information and thus will work anywhere that the phone work gets a signal.

They may not be doing it now, but cellular service providers are able to easily track where their users are, geographically. We know this because some of them even offer a “track your kid” feature as an add-on service. The location sensors in the phone beam the location of the kid to the cellular provider’s servers, which host a map that the parent can watch to track the location of the child. As long as the child’s phone is on, the location is known. I’m not going to get into the (very real) privacy implications here. Instead I’d like to think about some potential service offerings that could defray cellular operational costs.

1. Tracking the rate at which individual cell phones are traveling on surface streets and freeways is the most accurate possible way to monitor traffic congestion in real-time. In California CalTrans uses our FastPasses and assorted highway sensors to give a general view of freeway traffic speeds, but cell phones would be a much larger and more accurate sample and would transcend past the freeways onto congested surface streets. This data stream could be sold as a subscription service to be integrated with the very phones providing the data or with in-car navigation systems.
2. The social network possibilities here are endless. Have you ever decided where to eat a meal based on how crowded you thought the restaurant would be? What if you could jump online and see for yourself? “Restaurant X has a dining capacity of 120 and there are currently 145 cell phones in the building.” Sounds like there’s a wait - even after you count the staffs’ phones. The best part is that the restaurants and bars wouldn’t have any way of cheating and making their place look more full or empty than it really is.
3. Imagine a new social networking site thats let users create profile pages similar to MySpace and associate them with their cell phone. Users can choose whether or not they want their location to be known and who should be able to see it on a map, live. Maybe you only want your friends and not your coworkers to see it on the weekend. Better idea - maybe you never want your coworkers to see it. It’s similar to twitter or dodgeball but with far less effort and better accuracy. This social network would be much more compelling than existing ones because it dives more deeply into our offline lives. Collecting basic demographic data on cellular subscribers, combined with this rich stream of location data would yield such unique information as:
   • Which bars and restaurants are most popular and which days/times of the week/month. Consumers and competing bars would love to know.
   • What demographic frequents different bars and restaurants. I know some guys that would probably pay to see where all the girls were hanging out each night of the week.
   • Where do the different age groups tend to live? That would help make outdoor advertising more targeted and relevant.
4. I saved the most obvious and most irritating for last: targeted marketing. It doesn’t get much more targeted than this. You walk into a Target and you start receiving coupons for Walmart. You walk into Starbux and a $2.00 off coupon for Peets along with walking directions to the Peets down the block pops up on your phone. Annoying? Maybe. Profitable? Definitely. Maybe customers who don’t want the ads offers pay a slightly higher monthly subscription fee. Perhaps the cellular provider can ask the customer on the web, during signup, which offers he or she wouldn’t mind seeing. The service could, if done right, actually be a feature to some users who value saving money on purchases they’re just about to make.

The data the cellular providers have access to provides an unprecedented view into the offline habits of almost every citizen in the country. There are probably many more business models that could leverage this data that someone smarter than I will think of. The point, however, is that if a smart provider decided to build some new service offerings around these under-utilized assets and then use the new revenue streams to lower the cost of the basic cell phone service (maybe even to $0), they would be unstoppable in stealing market share from their competitors in a what has turned into an increasingly commoditized industry.

— Would you sign up with a cell phone provider if you could get free (or say under $20 / month) cell service if the provider was engaged in the businesses outlined above?

I took the bait and tried out MovableType4 Beta, the “other” and “original” blog software that announced a new, open source and feature-rich version (4 beta) today. I’ve been a faithful (but not necessarily happy) WordPress user for several years now. I really thought WordPress would’ve been further along by now (more AJAX, better drag-drop features, better in-line image handling, etc). I downloaded and installed MT4 because of the releases this morning eluding to some of these rich UI features being included.

Summary:

• The system is still written in Perl (CGI) so get ready to spend an hour installing additional Perl modules. I have a fairly recent version of XAMPP’s distro on my server which is usually sufficient for hosting LAMPP web apps … but not MT4.
  • You’ll have to add “Options +ExecCGI” to your Apache config and open up the permissions on all these CGI files before any of this works.
• Perl Modules installed, now I install MT4. The web-based installation was quick and painless.
• The Admin UI definitely has more flash and AJAX but is counter-intuitive.
• I immediately setup a new blog and attempted to import all of this blog’s entries to see how they looked. I figured MT4 would at least be good at that seeing as how they’re biggest challenge now is to steal market share back from WordPress.
• Before importing, MT4 suggested I setup my publishing paths (I’m assuming that means how the URL’s will be generated for my posts). Makes sense. So I clicked the provided link to do so and got this message (click to see the full screen):
  
  So clearly the software still has some serious bugs.
• I also attempted to configure other options for the blog but after about 15 minutes of screwing around, couldn’t find where to set them. Maybe I’m too used to WordPress, but after a few hours with MT4 I decided the software wasn’t worth the time and hassle.

I am hoping some healthy competition in the blog software space will make WordPress an even better product. I don’t think they have to worry too much about MT4 for now, though.

I’ve been using the formerly online-only task manager at www.RememberTheMilk.com. It has a slick AJAX interface and great features that allow you to add tasks quickly, prioritize them, set recurring tasks, maintain multiple lists, integrate with Google apps, and so on.

My biggest problem with them was that the service would go down periodically, leaving me unable to update my list. The recent rollout of Google Gears, Google’s framework that allows web applications to operate in the absence of an Internet connection, and RTM’s integration with it has solved all my problems.

RTM now lets me switch between online and offline mode without disrupting the usefulness of the application.

I’ve been off Microsoft Outlook for about a year now (thanks to Google’s Domain Applications which gives you mail and calendar). Now the task management problem is solved as well. Nice job, RTM!