The revolution will not be red
There’s a lot of buzz being generated by the RED camera. That happens when a young (by billionaire standards) and charismatic entrepreneur enters a new field. This is an industry that more than occasionally needs shaking up, and Jim Jannard’s a lot more interesting than most most of the pocket protector crowd that usually delivers us innovation.
I’ve been publicly skeptical of the RED camera coming to market on time. I think a 4k camera at $35,000 would be pretty damn cool (that’s what a baseline functioning camera will cost), but not very useful.
It turns out that the December date was simply mentioned by the founder as a date he would hope to be in production, nothing more. It’s hard to fault a founder for optimism. It goes with the territory. Pessimists and cynics don’t launch companies with the stated goal of revolutionizing an industry.
So let’s say this work of stunning industrial design arrives for NAB. I still believe it won’t, but really smart people tell me the team is still on track. If it does show up, so what? It’s cool like having a car that can go 150 MPH is cool. What are most independents going to so with it that a Panasonic HVX-200 can’t do? Seriously. How many of your clients have been clamoring for 4k resolutions? The only venues that can show the RED image in all its glory are cinemas. Are cinemas clamoring for more independent fare? How many films do well at Sundance and never get into theatrical distribution?
At the end of the day this camera will have no significant effect on democratizing the industry. It won’t be because it’s not a technological marvel at an incredible price point. It’s that acquisition isn’t the bottleneck for distribution. IPTV is the revolution, and for the next decade at least there ain’t gonna be no one clogging those pipes with 4k independent films.
Buy an HVX-200. You can be shooting with it next week and have material ready for IP distribution shortly after.
Thinking about upgrading to Vista?
Bloomberg reports on yet another Microsoft antitrust case [Comes v. Microsoft Corp., CL 82311, Iowa District Court, Polk County]
It’s rare a court case helps me decide whether to upgrade an OS on a production machine, but some lawyer in Iowa just saved me a couple hundred bucks. Discovery’s a great thing. When Longhorn’s lead developer calls Vista a pig you know you’ve hit pay dirt. It might not win your court case, but it makes a lot of Mac geeks’ day.
Allchin, who started the exchange in an e-mail entitled “sucking on media players,” also suggested he talk to Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs to get the iPod to work with Microsoft’s media software for fear the iPod would “drive people away from Windows Media Player.” Microsoft introduced its Zune music player in November.
“My goodness it’s terrible,” Allchin wrote about one of Creative’s devices. “What I don’t understand though is I was told the new Creative Labs device would be comparable to Apple. That is so not the case.”
Majidimehr replied “Now you feel our pain.”
And then…
The e-mails mark the second set of conversations exhibited in the trial in which Allchin, a 16-year Microsoft veteran, expresses concern about competition with Apple products. In a 2004 e-mail to Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer made public during opening arguments in December, Allchin criticized Windows and said “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.”
Allchin at the time was leading development of Longhorn, the code name for Windows Vista, which reaches stores Jan. 30. Allchin, who is retiring after Vista is released, referred to Longhorn as “a pig” and said “we have lost our way.”
NTFS access from OS X?
Google’s Mac OS X team has released MacFUSE code that allows Mac OS X clients to access Windows NTFS disks. The install isn’t for the faint of heart. While I can’t imagine anyone installing beta versions of file system kernels on a production machine, it looks like NTFS access for Mac users may be around the corner – as much as a Google beta cycle can be called around the corner.
Laugher of a mobile TV prediction
If you believe those stories about people waking up in hotel bathrooms with missing kidneys, you’ll love this. The firm Understanding & Solutions – no I hadn’t heard of it either until Fierce Mobile Content picked it up – predicts the mobile video business to grow by 800% by 2010. Had they stopped there, their prediction would have simply been wildly optimistic. They didn’t. They went on:
…[reaching] global revenues of $18 billion by the beginning of the next decade. Of that amount, mobile TV profits will exceed mobile VOD by a margin of nearly four to one, generating roughly $14.3 billion and $3.7 billion respectively.
That means they believe mobile video is already a $2 billion industry worldwide. Only Italy and South Korea have embraced the technology, and for content of an extremely limited scope. Too bad they never explain their math.
Like a Virgin
From the Guardian (irritating registration required, but European privacy rules apply)
Watching TV on a mobile phone has proved less of a turn-on for British consumers than the telecoms industry had hoped, with Virgin Mobile understood to have sold fewer than 10,000 handsets for its mobile TV service, despite a major advertising campaign.
Considering that the British spend more time on mass transit, and non-voice mobile services thrive on the other side of the pond relative to the States, this doesn’t look good for Moribund TV’s investors. As broadcasters are beginning to deal with the passing of traditional broadcasting and embracing the GoogleTube generation (see Moonves’ CES announcement), it boggles the mind how billions can be spent bring broadcasting to mobile phones.
Of course it’s hard to call “significantly less than 10,000″ broadcasting – at less than 2,000 viewers per channel you’re getting into TV Weasel numbers. What’s really surprising, even to a mobile video skeptic like me, is that ESPN (now out of the MVNO business) and Virgin have had such disastrous goes at mobile video. These are marquee brands among the 18-34 set. MobiTV and it’s insidious marketing references to “TV snacking” doesn’t stand a chance.
Smell that? That’s VC cash exposed to a white hot burn rate.
