Office and NLEs
Office makes the world go ’round. The ubiquitous software suite is a must have… or is it?
Last week I added a Final Cut Pro workstation to my small studio setup and learned I’d exhausted all our Office licenses. Every editing system needs Office to open scripts sent as Word documents, to gather data for graphics stored in Excel spreadsheets, and of course PowerPoint — the all-purpose corporate monster that has destroyed human communication.
I was ready to bite the $400 bullet, but decided to give OpenOffice a try. It’s free. It’s being installed on a virgin system — what’s the harm? And Office 2008 on the Mac is new and relatively untested. I’ve used OpenOffice on Linux machines, and it’s reliably opened and written Word and Excel documents.
Mac OpenOffice users have to run x11 in order to run the GUI. x11 shipped with OS X 10.4 and ships with OS X 10.5, but I wasn’t up for the added complexity. I opted to try NeoOffice. It’s built on the OpenOffice source code, but behaves just like a native Mac application.
While there are certainly going to be incompatibilities between OpenOffice/NeoOffice and Office, I haven’t come across any with basic 2-column scripts and Excel tables in two weeks of regular use. I consider this a $400 discount on every new editing system I purchase. As an added bonus, both OpenOffice and NeoOffice run natively on Intel Macs. You’ll have to upgrade Office 2004 to 2008 in order to get that from Microsoft.
NeoOffice has worked so well for us that in this brief test that we’ve put off upgrading to Office 2008. We may just make a wholesale open source switch.
- OpenOffice Writer for Microsoft Word users documentation
- OpenOffice wiki
- NeoOffice wiki
- Eleven tips for moving to OpenOffice
IPTV delays mean opportunity
ABI research released a report today on IPTV. The overall findings aren’t surprising. IPTV rollout in North America is behind previous projections. The telcos were expected to be the primary drivers, but they have fallen behind schedule, citing excessive regulation among other factors. Even where the telcos have begun rolling out IPTV services, true IPTV services are not available. ABI notes that Verizon’s video service is no more than an RF overlay. If that’s the case, then the telcos have nothing to offer over existing cable services. That leaves them to compete on price. Considering the pounding their voice revenues are taking, one would think they’d rather offer premium services at premium prices.
The telco delay also keeps the pure play IPTV companies in the game a little longer, running the risk that someone will gain traction. Among the gang of three – Brightcove, Akimbo, and Dave – Brightcove has the best chance. First, it’s got good leadership. Second, its initial go to market strategy did not include a proprietary set top box. (Akimbo and Dave are moving away from STBs.) Brightcove has instead hitched its wagon to Microsoft Media Center technology that requires networking the TV and the PC. How many non-geeks are going to try that? Who wants more wires and devices in the living room? This is a recipe for glacial adoption rates.
But what if Brightcove could untether the TV from the home network? Then they might have something. Develop a solution that gives users the option of burning content to DVDs or Video CDs. The digital rights management can be similar to that of online music purchases with the customer is only allowed to burn one or two discs of a downloaded program. Since Brightcove is initially focusing on shorter form, long tail content, this can be a viable alternative. The client application can be designed to download, decompress, and burn in the background. It might add some time to the process, but its service isn’t for the instant gratification crowd anyway.
Back in June, Amazon bought CustomFlix – an on demand DVD distributor. It’s not a leap to imagine a download service evolving from this marriage. The fact is that the longer the telcos delay real IPTV rollouts, the greater the chance they’ll miss the opportunity. What if the likes of Amazon or eBay partner with a Brightcove? The telcos will remain stuck in the dumb pipe business.
