Storage device manufacturer SanDisk last year launched a device that allowed you to download content from a PC and play it on your TV. The trouble was TakeTV involved moving a USB device between the two.

My mobile phone has a 4GB micro disk. It’s smaller than a fingernail. My first PC has 128MB and it was a monster. Even in Fry’s or PC World you go and buy TB disks today for a pittance.
Video is voracious and requires huge amounts of storage. Or, it needs relatively modest amounts of bandwidth.

We’re moving into an era where the concept of physical devices holding bits and bytes is archaic.
So, bit surprisingly, SanDisk has just announced that it is discontinuing its venture into the world of Internet TV.

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Storage Problems

Some six years ago, sitting on the couch in my living room where I write this, I went online, formed a company, registered a URL and created a monster. The following six years with Narrowstep were a rollercoaster ride which was going quite well until I had to resign as CEO due to ill health. The subsequent story is well documented on this blog and in the annals of the SEC filings engine.

As Project V gets into swing I’ve promised myself one thing. This time I’m staying on the couch. So, no plush offices, studios and edit suites; no full time employees and a growing need for a HR department. Project V will remain lean, mean and very virtual.

With the huge amount of experience I’ve had working with offshore colleagues and running outsourcing centres in the US, Croatia and India, I’m pretty confident that most of the work can be undertaken by the vast industry that has developed subsequently.

Something else I won’t be doing is raising any outside financing and the baggage this brings. There are plenty of times where accessing such finance is a very sensible option and I’ve been very lucky in having the faith and considerable financial backing of some very forward looking individual and institutional investors in the past. However, this time I think that Project V can be self-funding due to the way its business model is established.

As a result the company isn’t being established to be sold, as I’ve done with my past four companies, so the focus is totally on the day-to-day operations.

The third thing I’m doing is not trying to replace what’s already out there and working; rather I’m going to bring together the best elements in the market and offer them within a comprehensive package.

So, I’ll keep you posted on progress from the couch…

Continued here:
Project V – Couch Potato

Verizon Wireless’s acquisition of Alltel makes it the biggest player in the US mobile market and poses an ever growing problem for the UK’s Vodafone, which owns 45% of the market. A huge amount of capital is tied up in this business and Verizon has announced that it will not be paying a dividend until 2012.

This situation, reminiscent of that other transatlantic telecom debacle, Concert. Vodafone can’t afford to buy out Verizon (especially given current market conditions) and Verizon has little need to stump up to buy back shares in a majority owned subsidiary. And the figures are so enormous and the pill so poisoned that no one else will touch the situation.

The relevance of this to the growth of TV over IP is huge. The show is moving on and we are now with mobile devices and video where we were with PCs and video some decade ago.

The sector has, to date, been a graveyard for many startups whose business models simply aren’t viable due to the walled gardens and oligopolies run by the mobile operators in almost all markets around the world. There are simply too many mobile orientated companies to mention and the few who have been modestly successful have acted as suppliers to the mobile giants.

I remain bullish about this sector as a whole and expect mobile TV takeup to increase gradually, but more on PDA type devices (or MEDs – mobile entertainment devices) than on traditional cellphones, but it’s going to be a relatively trivial task for current video on PC operators to adapt their services to these devices, especially as the boast more and more powerful processors and better web browsers.

Whilst the giants at the top of the industry maintain their oligopolies there is very little nurture that trickles down to mobile video startups and they face a tough task.

Source:
Mobilopoly

Many people have been speculating about what we’re up to here at TV Everywhere and I can now begin to reveal the first details of an exciting new venture we’re launching later in the year.

We hope it will revolutionise Internet TV. It will certainly make it a lot easier and cheaper to build and run Internet TV services. Some of the industry’s biggest players are involved and we’re actively looking for partners. If you’d like more details email me at ij@tveverywhere.co.uk.

In the meantime it’s back to that drawing board…

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Project V

I’ve been taking another look at video encoding recently, especially the bottom end of the market.

Let me share some conclusions with you:

For desktop encoding SUPER is, well, super. But beware that some versions of this shareware product have been rigged and come with trojans installed. This version seems trustworthy. this product is a bit technical and clunky to use, and does not feature an ftp function so that you can upload your videos, but otherwise it’s flexible and covers an extensive list of formats and codecs.

If you’re looking to set up a server side encoding system, this can get painfully expensive. the best value product I found on the market was Sothink, although the evergreen Autodesk Cleaner now boasts this capability too. Other solutions, such as those from On2 and Anystream, are considerably more expensive.

If you’re looking to get content from DVDs onto iPods and other devices (legally, of course), I can’t recommend the weirdly named Cucusoft highly enough. Their products are simple to use with impressive results.

Happy encoding and transcoding!

Source:
Encoding Overview