Redbox Rising
The physical DVD is dead; long live streaming! That’s the conventional wisdom, but I’ve got a dollar that says rumors of the DVD’s death are premature. Why a dollar? Because that’s what it costs to rent a DVD from one of those big red vending machines that you see everywhere from Walmart to McDonalds (not to [...]

How Much Time-Shifting Do We Really Do?
The good old VHS recorder started something that Tivo took to a higher level, and the result has shaken the video broadcast industry to its very foundations. Or has it? Conventional wisdom says that U.S. television viewing households hate commercials. It says that they use digital video recorders (DVRs) so that they can skip over the advertisements. [...]

A Day Made of Glass: the Sequel
Were you one of the 17 million who have watched Corning’s “A Day Made of Glass” since it was posted last year? I know that I watched it at least a half-dozen times. And I remember thinking that it was so cool that just about all the technology required to make everything in that video [...]

How Low Can They Go?
Sorry, folks, but I cannot resist this one. I really struggle to refrain from the breathless “Wow! Look at how low this price is!” type of story because it gets old and it’s inevitable that someone can come up with a deal that tops whatever you’ve found. But I have to give in to this [...]

A Sound Idea
Futuresource Consulting has just released a free analysis report that highlights their observations about consumer electronics products and trends at CES 2012. One of the points that they made in their announcement press release caught my attention: Ever-thinner TV displays boosted interest in speakers, soundbars and home theatre systems. I confess that I’ve been a bit puzzled [...]

Cable and Satellite Complaints Rise
The FCC tracks the complaints it receives about various services under is oversight, including television, radio, and telephone. In the third quarter of 2011, complaints about cable and satellite services increased more than 15% over the prior quarter, though it is worth noting that the number of complaints about “billing and rates” issues were essentially [...]

Stream the SuperBowl
What are you doing next Sunday evening? (I plead “no contest” to charges of East Coast bias.) Perhaps you plan on joining several tens of millions of your U.S. neighbors in watching the Patriots take on the Giants in the SuperBowl. (Perhaps we’re entitled to a little East Coast bias.) Patriot fans in Boston were [...]

We Call It ?Television?
There’s an interesting discussion going on in one of the LinkedIn Groups that I belong to, and I find that I’ve been thinking a lot about it for the past few days. The topic of the conversation is that the industry has not settled on what to call this new and rapidly developing technology landscape [...]

NetFlix Posts Good News
In a letter to shareholders about 4th Quarter 2011 results, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings reported good news and bad news. As I read the letter, it looks to me that while the company may have made some very public missteps along the way, there is no question in my mind that the corporate change of [...]

Great Gift for Grandparents
Okay, I think that this finally is my last CES 2012 post, at least for now. Today, I want to tell you about a product that won an an International CES Innovations 2012 Design and Engineering Award: TelyHD. This is essentially a dedicated network media player that only has one application: Skype. It runs on Android, [...]