LAS VEGAS -- Vudu, a darling of specialty A/V channels, is going high volume, the company is announcing at this week’s CES. With a movie library of some 20,000 titles, the streaming content provider is starting its own Internet application platform to take on Yahoo, adding four new CE hardware partners and expanding current agreements with Mitsubishi, LG and Vizio. The end result is that “Vudu will be in millions of devices by the end of 2010, a scale we could never have hoped to achieve by selling our own box,” Executive Vice President Edward Lichty told us.
LAS VEGAS -- Vudu, a darling of specialty A/V channels, is going high volume, the company is announcing at this week’s CES. With a movie library of some 20,000 titles, the streaming content provider is starting its own Internet application platform to take on Yahoo, adding four new CE hardware partners and expanding current agreements with Mitsubishi, LG and Vizio. The end result is that “Vudu will be in millions of devices by the end of 2010, a scale we could never have hoped to achieve by selling our own box,” Executive Vice President Edward Lichty told us.
“It’s not likely” that a one- or two-day pause in holiday shopping from the weekend blizzard that dumped up to two feet of snow on the East Coast “will cause measurable impact on the final holiday sales volume,” Stephen Baker, NPD’s vice president of industry analysis, said Tuesday on the company blog. The regions hardest hit, New England and the Mid-Atlantic, accounted for 18 percent of sales the first 10 months of the year, he said.
The quality of online video still falls far short of TV’s, and users are overwhelmingly likely to stop watching online if they run into problems viewing, said TubeMogul, which analyzes online video. “Viewers click away 81.19 percent of the time rather than wait for the video to re-load” when the video pauses to “rebuffer,” TubeMogul said. “As online video audiences continue to grow, content delivery network imperfections like these will be increasingly relevant to the publishers’ bottom lines."
The quality of online video still falls far short of TV’s, and users are overwhelmingly likely to stop watching online if they run into problems viewing, said TubeMogul, which analyzes online video. “Viewers click away 81.19 percent of the time rather than wait for the video to re- load” when the video pauses to “rebuffer,” TubeMogul said. “As online video audiences continue to grow, content delivery network imperfections like these will be increasingly relevant to the publishers’ bottom lines.”
Regulators should keep in mind that mobile broadband is still in its early stages, as they consider additional regulations on the wireless industry, concludes a study by William Lehr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was ordered by the industry-supported Broadband for America. “Quantifying the economic interactions between fixed and mobile services will be important if one anticipates adopting any regulatory interventions targeted at remedying any perceived deficit in broadband competition in either market,” the report said. “Because the market for mobile broadband is still relatively immature, estimating the requisite own-price and cross-price demand elasticities is difficult today and would be prone to relatively large uncertainty bounds. If we were to anticipate a significant problem for competition arising, then this would be worrisome.” Growing investment by carriers and evidence of innovation “should give us pause before we consider imposing new regulatory obligations on broadband providers,” the report said. It says the wireless industry’s capital spending since 1985 has totaled more than $264 billion, according to CTIA figures. “The expansion of facilities-based networks has intensified competition, resulting in continuously falling prices,” the report said. “Roaming charges have fallen, pre-paid and unlimited calling plans and feature-rich options have expanded, and handset prices have fallen.”
AT&T closed captions public, educational and governmental (PEG) channels in Illinois only when municipalities request it, a group of Chicago-area communities and organizations said Wednesday. “But rather than simply comply with the law by enabling this function on area PEG channels, AT&T is requiring that cities submit a ‘Closed Caption Request,'” Keep Us Connected said. “Apparently, cities that fail to do will not receive the upgrade.” Most PEG providers don’t caption their content, and AT&T seeks municipal approval in the state to enable captioning because turning it on requires a “momentary pause in the programming stream,” a company spokesman said. “Just like any other service change, we wouldn’t just do that unilaterally. We typically notify/contact customers and make changes during a maintenance window.”
The EPA released a final draft Energy Star specification for game consoles that takes effect in three stages. The agency had separated consoles from the development process for Energy Star version 5.0 specification for computers because it hadn’t completed work on consoles (CED Oct 6 p5). The level of energy use by consoles has also drawn attention on Capitol Hill. A bill by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., would require the Department of Energy to weigh energy limits on consoles after a study.
Two leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee asked the FCC to grant waivers sought by various cities and local governments so they can make early use of 700 MHz D-block spectrum. As expected, the waiver requests got widespread support from various public safety and industry groups. Others, including the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), urged the FCC to act with care, so as to not create problems later on as a national public safety wireless broadband network is put in place.
Open-minded agnosticism is the ideal approach toward Internet architecture and network management, engineers central to the Internet’s development and academics told the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) Friday. Several times they dismissed as “religious” the views of net-neutrality supporters who claim that the so- called end-to-end principle was central to the Internet’s development. But Christopher Yoo, director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, credited FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s speech last week (CD Sept 22 p1) with the most “nuanced” view of network management from an official to date.