Via eHomeUpgrade, the CEA just released this press release saying that 38% of online users use one of their computers as a media server for digital content. Here’s the important graf:

In an afternoon panel session on Monday, “Media Servers - Fact or Fiction” Wargo revealed that 38 percent of consumers currently own a media server, either with a desktop or personal computer acting as the server or a dedicated media server. CEA Market Research defines media servers as devices that store of all a consumer’s digital content (music files, home video, digital images) in one location, allowing it to be viewed or listened to from multiple locations in the house.

The survey found that close to 19 percent of consumers indicated they plan to purchase a media server in the next two years. Of those, 49 percent noted they would be somewhat or more likely to purchase a server if a professional could install, set-up and maintain their server.

It looks like digital content in the home is starting to get some traction. The number of users who said they’d prefer a professional to install it means that the industry needs to create products that are a whole lot easier to understand and use.

Via Tivoblog, it looks like the JavaHMO 2.0 is starting to firm up. They just released Beta 3.0 with a lot of bug fixes included.

JavaHMO is a free replacement for Tivo’s Home Media Option, which is part of the OS for Series 2 Tivos. It adds a ton of features to your Tivo including internet info like the local weather, internet radio steaming, and the like.

Via eHomeUpgrade, CinemaNow announced that it will add HDTV downloadable movies to its product offerings.

This is an excellent time for these services to gain traction in the market. With HDTV sales up and no standard developed to put HDTV on next generation DVD players, this is a good time to push the service because people are looking for content and options are few and far between.

Tom’s Hardware reviewed the new personal media player, Archos GMini 400, and they gave it a big thumbs up compared to the iPod. It’s got a 20GB drive and it’s tiny (4.2″ x 2.4″ x .7″). It’s cheap, small, fast, and has a host of features that can’t be found on the iPod.

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After reading this article, there is yet another company to keep Tivo nervous at night is a company called Digeo, that is funded by Paul Allen. It’s currently rolling out a new product called the Moxi Broadband Media Center that acts as an HDTV PVR, HDTV receiver, set top box, and interactive television. In Laurence, they are partnering with cable operator, Sunflower Broadband. At $795 and a $7.95 monthly subscription fee, it’s a pretty good deal for those Kansans that can get it, and it has some really interesting features.

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Jeff Jarvis of the BuzzMachine, Fred Wilson of AVC Blog, and some others had a lunchtime conversation on the future of video access. I like the term “addressable television” to describe the ability to get television content in a similiar fashion as getting web content. The area of disagreement is which technology is going to “win”.

Here are the contenders as the group saw it:

• Video on Demand (VOD)
• TV delivered via phone lines (IPTV)
• Video on the Internet (Streaming)
• Downloadable Internet (BitTorrent)

Many of the crowd there found the BitTorrent model compelling, citing the history of the music industry and napster as likely to be repeated for video. I tend to agree that to a certain extend, this is already happening, with people avoiding copyright law and putting up content on the web, and the roadblocks from moving video streams from a DVR to the internet are quickly eroding.

Here’s the basic point:

I think the advent of the media-centric PC will cause this trend to accelerate. If my family room is driven by a PC with a DVR, set top box, and web browser built into it, connected to cable for both programming and high speed data, and then connected to a nice big flat panel display, the option to watch a show via live TV, VOD, DVR, or Bit Torrent is just a click of the remote. And when its that easy, why will my girl’s choose to watch One Tree Hill via DVR when they can just as easily get it via Bit Torrent?

Then there’s the issue of what you didn’t record. Take the whole Jon Stewart Crossfire thing. I didn’t DVR that show. I don’t Tivo Crossfire. I don’t watch Crossfire. But I love Jon Stewart and when I heard he slammed those guys live, I went to Bit Torrent and downloaded the show and watched it. Apparently a lot of other people watched it that way too.

While I agree that is a compelling, I think there are hurdles to make this vision work in the long term. I think they will be overcome, but for a large percentage of the population, VOD, especially if it expands to becoming a centralized DVR, is likely going to be the easier solution.

First, I think the battle will ultimately be played out on HDTV. The cost of HDTV is getting lower each day, and more and more people are buying HDTV-ready sets. More and more content is being delivered in HDTV format, and it won’t take too much time before people demand HDTV streams as a viewing preference. HDTV content will ultimately have a “broadcast flag” making reproduction more difficult for people, and the size of the files will increase. Granted, most people will accept lower quality video than audio (eg mono vs. stereo), but I still think it is an issue.

Second, I view video’s relationship with people different than the relationship people have with music. People listen to music over and over again, but in general, video is a single use commodity for the most part (I have a 3 year old daughter so I can tell you there are exceptions to that rule). This changes the calculus slightly in that the pain to download a video has to be less than the pain to download a music track, or it doesn’t seem worth it.

Third, there is a shelf life issue. Music is fairly easy to store and since people listen to it over and over again, it has a long shelf life on a networked computer. A lot of video content has an expiration date and while compelling at a certain moment of time, quickly diminishes in utility and will be tossed away in the dumpster of time. The Jon Stewart/Crossfire video may be easy to find, but try and find one from two weeks ago.

All these issues can be overcome, but content providers have an excellent opportunity to create their own services before the suffer a napster-like meltdown. The Comcast article makes it clear they have their own stake in making it successful. At the end of the day, it’s going to take more than litigation and the clear path is an iTunes or Netflix model for charging for content.

Jeff Jarvis makes some excellent points as well, but I’m not ready to embrace his vision of Citizen’s TV:

New tools and citizen producers will reduce the cost of producing TV to a comparative nil and there goes the barrier to entry to video.

: What excites me most is that reduced cost of production. That’s really what drove weblogs: history’s cheapest publishing tool reduced the barrier to entry to media and allowed anyone to produce and distribute text content. Now this will come to video. I’ve said it before (warning: I’ll say it again) … A half-hour of how-to TV that now costs X hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce can be done quite respectably — and probably with more life and immediacy — for a few thousand dollars. New content producers will pop up all over (just as they did in blogs) and now they can distribute their content freely (thanks to BitTorrent). That is where I want to play.

While I agree the production costs of video will drop, I still think it be a while before people outside the artistic fringes start creating their own video content worth watching. I think video production will still in general be more difficult than audio production, and that hasn’t exactly taken off.

I do think video convergence is the “next big thing” and is undoubtedly going to be re-shape a lot of the industry in the next few years. There’s a compelling need to have “addressable television”, and PVRs are just the tip of the iceberg.

Via the TVPredictions.com newsletter, I found one jewel of an article describing the fiture of cable. Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, had some candid comments on the company’s strategy for the future when he spoke to students at Wharton. The future as he described it boils down to three letters: VOD (Video on Demand).

Earlier this year, Comcast unsuccessfully tried to acquire Disney in what some analysts thought was a move for Comcast to diversify out from the cable business. Roberts, on the other hand, says it’s the wealth of content that he can add to his Video on Demand services that made them such an attractive acquisition candidate.

The article states:

In his talk at Wharton, Roberts made it clear that he believes his company’s future hinges on video-on-demand. That, he argues, is why the Disney bid made sense. On-demand allows customers to choose not only what they want to watch but also when. It also lets them control their viewing via functions such as pause and replay. Satellite TV, cable’s biggest competitor, offers abundant programming but not two-way communication.

Roberts stated further:

“Television today is a one-way experience. It seems totally clear to me that the personalization of television is the future. Everybody wants to do what they want, when they want. And we happen to have a platform for that, where our competitor, satellite, doesn’t. So all of our energy is to give our customers, on demand, the ability to get as much content as possible.”

Does the “what they want, when they want” sound familiar? It should if you’ve been watching the new Tivo advertising blitz that uses a similiar refrain as its mantra. It’s clearer than ever that cable operators have their own centralized vision of the future, and that Tivo is more a competitor than a partner.

There is also a glimpse on the difficulties facing the Netflix/Tivo deal in acquiring a large library of content. I think the success of this deal largely rests on the ability of Netflix and Tivo to get enough titles online to make it worth getting the service.

Comcast, which will have five times more subscribers for its VOD service even if Tivo makes it’s forecast, has had difficulties licensing content. Roberts says:

“We go to movie companies and say, ‘We’ve got this great on-demand in five million homes, and it will be ten million by the end of this year.’ And you know what they say? ‘The problem is DVD sales are so good right now that we can’t tick off Wal-Mart.’ The single largest revenue source for Hollywood is Wal-Mart. How did they get themselves in that situation? And they say, ‘I know, I know. We have got to stop giving it to Wal-Mart. They squeezed us on the price last quarter, but we have got to make budget.’ That’s what’s happened with the music business. They were making all of this money on CDs, and one day Napster just took it away.”

There is a lot more to the article, so put it on your reading list if your are interested in the mechanics of the industry.

Engadget had a good interview with Tivo CEO, Mike Ramsay. He mentioned the corporate focus on receiving more content from broadband sources (via the internet instead of the cable) and mentioned the Netflix/Tivo deal. I agree that there is a lot of content on the Internet that would be handy to have in my living room, beyond the obvious downloading of movies, including movie times, maps and directions, weather, and the yellow pages. JavaHMO is ahead of the curve on this one, particularly when you look at his todo list.

Related Links: Tivo and the Mustard Lesson

(Hat Tip: TivoBlog)

A man in Oregon got an odd knock at the door at his apartment, only to find himself standing next to men in Air Force uniforms and police officers. Apparently, his Toshiba television, with built in DVD and VCR, was emitting the same frequency that satellites monitor for distress signals, and a day that innocently began watching Arthur on PBS started a worldwide manhunt into motion.

The result was a stern warning:

Now, he has been instructed to keep his TV turned off or face fines of up to $10,000 per day for emitting a false distress signal.

I’d take it as a spirtual sign that it’s time to upgrade to HDTV.

It looks like the Hauppauge PVR350 might be lowering it’s price from $199 to $149, at least on the Hauppauge online webstore. The store webpage currently has this comment next to the PVR350:

New! Lower price: $149.-

Unfortunately, if you select the “Add to Shopping Cart” button, it still has the price at $199, so you might want to wait until the dust settles if that deal floats your boat. Alternatively, you can buy a PVR350 and receive a free MediaMVP, which is a good deal as well.

The interesting aspect of the PVR350 is that it not only encodes MPEG2 streams as they are captured, but it also has a TV-out which will decode it on the fly as the well, greatly reducing the CPU needs and letting you use an older, less powerful computer.

Thanks for the tip, reader CT!

Additional Info:

TVHarmony Product Tracker: Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350

(Hat Tip: Reader CT)