Ahead of the curve : Android

CES and the future of television

Russell McOrmond — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:44:00 GMT

I normally don't follow the Consumer Electronics Show, but this year is different. The way in which it is different for me is also part of the story of the show.

I've been watching coverage of the show via the live stream from This Week in Tech. As well as this, I have Rhythmbox (an Audio/Video tool that supports RSS) automatically downloading both the MP3 audio and the Video downloads for their TWiT Live @CES.

The live video stream, as well as the video stream, has been great to watch. In fact, it makes me dream for the day when all the content I access comes this way: over the Internet. I really find television annoying, and want more content on-demand where I can automatically via RSS download it ahead of time and watch it when I have the time -- and on the devices of my choice.

I should jump back a month to my intervention at the CRTC on December 9'th. The context was the so-called "Local TV Matters" debate which has very little to do with local television. This is a public feud between broadcast networks and broadcast undertakings (cable and satellite companies), each claiming that the other one is responsible for the decline in local television content. In the beginning of my intervention I suggested that they were both wrong, and suggested my answer to them was "a pox on all their houses".

The latter part of my intervention focused on what I consider to be the best way to solve longer-term problems with television, which is to abolish this communications exception. We have other connections into our home for a variety of utilities, with energy having a structural separation between the content (electricity generation, natural gas) and the distribution network. The distribution network needs to be supplied from a fully neutral third party that is not involved in content, with the utility model being the one that I suggest.

With this structural separation we will finally get the competition we need to more forward with more options on the content and communications services side. In December I finally got rid of Bell for my home phone, switching to TekSavvy. While this switches where my billing goes to, this service is still based on a wholesale service from Bell. No matter who I hire for services, there are only two communications wires into my home: one allegedly "owned" by Bell, the other by Rogers.

I am actively looking to do the same thing for my television (getting rid of the BDU -- I don't want Rogers, Bell or ExpressView), as well as my cell phone (I don't want Rogers, Bell or Telus -- I currently use the Fido brand from Rogers). I am quite excited about the possibility of competitive cell phone companies, such as WindMobile. One of the big announcements just before CES was Google's launch of the Nexus One. Turns out that Wind is already in conversation with Google to have this phone on their network. Will I be able to get an unlocked (all meanings of the word: unlocked from carrier, and unlocked from the manufacturer with a FLOSS operating system) Android Open Source phone in Ottawa some time this year? Seems like this may happen!

This brings me back to Television. I also want this unlocked, where the content is not tied to any specific brand of devices. As soon as you lock the content it will be less valuable to me, and even if I own one of the "approved" devices I am unlikely to purchase the content. The reality is that there is so much content out there that it is simply not worth my time to access content where the distributor is going out of their way to make the content less valuable.

One of the cool devices announced was the Boxee Box. This is another unlocked media device such as the Neuros OSD device I purchased a few years back. While the OSD is focused on being a PVR device for recording and playing back what was recorded, Boxie is a derivative of the FLOSS XBMC media center that is focused on getting content from the Internet onto your television. For those in the United States they actively work to ensure that Hulu works, despite the fact that Hulu seems to be actively trying to break their service to not work with all devices. Hopefully Hulu will grow up and instead work with Boxee to ensure ongoing compatibility.

In Canada we're still waiting for a similar service, given Hulu is geo-blocking on behalf of the Canadian broadcasting monopolists rather than making arrangements with Canadian advertisers to pay for the content. I would even be willing to become a paid subscriber if that option were available, but that would assume compatibility with my DRM-free devices. The ability to download and not be dependent on the quality of the network connection would also be far more valuable than streaming.

Some shows are made available, but even the video content from CBC doesn't work on the devices that I tried. The problem is that the broadcast networks still focused on legacy distribution channels, adding to their legacy television service an online service that is only tested on the historically popular legacy desktop operating systems and browsers. They aren't looking to the future set-top boxes which tend to be more standards-based.

While the hardware and software is there, the traditional content isn't. Will this be the year that I simply switch to competing content such as what the TWIT network is building, dropping watching traditional television content entirely? When do you think Google will be offering major studio content through some distribution service (YouTube or otherwise) that will make much of the traditional BDU sector irrelevant? What are your thoughts on the future of television, and how those producing television seem to be going out of their way to keep us in the past?

P.S. Two more episodes of Dollhouse, and then I'll be buying the Season 2 DVD as soon as it is released. It is quite possible that buying DVDs is how I'll be watching TV Drama in the future. I'll be a paying customer, but my support won't go into the bogus statistics used to determine what shows will have new episodes made.

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Russell McOrmond is a self employed consultant, policy coordinator for CLUE: Canada's Association for Free/Libre and Open Source Software, co-coordinator for Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments (GOSLING), and host for Digital Copyright Canada.

The era of the superphone?

Dave Webb — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:10:00 GMT

Bad news, everybody. That smart phone for which you paid a fortune (or locked yourself into a mobile contract until the end of time for a discount)? Worthless. Google's created a whole new category: The superphone.

Cue the sound of thousands of iPhones being chucked in the bin.

But hold the phone, everybody (pun intended). Is the Nexus One, launched Tuesday at an event at Google's Mountainview, Calif., headquarters, really a revolution, or even a game-changer? On the surface of it, no.

Yes, it's slick. Andy Rubin, vice-president of engineering for Google, said its power is comparable to that of your laptop of three or four years ago: 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset, 512MB of flash memory, 512 MB of RAM, up to 32MB on a removeable SD card. It's got microphones on the front and back for noise suppression. It has a trackball with a three-colour LED to notify the user of incoming e-mail, chat and text messages arrive. Hey, look, the picture gallery tilts in 3-D!

In other words, hardware-wise, the revolution was not being televised (er, Webcast). It doesn't support multitouch, for example, so pinch-and-spread zoom fans will not be knocked out. And many of the flashy software features demo'd in the Webcast were, well, more flashy than functional.

Asked point-blank what the difference between a smart phone and a superphone is, Rubin talked performance, the new delivery channel (Google will sell them online as well as through operators, though the device was designed and built by HTC), the app store and the ecosystem of developers. Which, on the face of it, sounds an awful lot like the iPhone, and even its legion imitators.

There's a hint of what really sets it apart, though, in its voice-enabled keyboard, which works in every text field. Say it, the Nexus spells it. Not so impressed? The key is, that speak-and-spell functionality is on the server side, not the device. The system that's training the voice recognition isn't training on a single user, but on what will eventually be a pool of millions.

As technology icon Tim O'Reilly notes, it's not the hardware, or the apps, really, that set Google's offering apart. It's the data sets and the algorithms, and they don't make 'em bigger or better than Google's.

"Collective intelligence is the secret sauce of Web 2.0, and the future of all computing," O'Reilly blogged. "We're moving from the era in which the device is primary and the web is an add-on, to the era in which a device and its applications are fundamentally dependent on the internet operating system that provides location, speech recognition, image recognition, social network awareness, and other fundamental data services."

The Nexus One isn't a huge improvement on the iPhone, and in some ways, it's not even as good. Apple's App Store is bigger, its interface more intuitive, its music retailing infrastructure is superb. But if you buy O'Reilly's thinking -- and nobody in tech journalism ever got fired for doing that -- the revolution may be just around the corner, and Web-native phones might be the fifth column.

Google, T-Mobile to unveil first Android phone next week

Rafael Ruffolo — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:09:36 GMT

In an effort to keep pace with recent iPhone and BlackBerry product launches, the first mobile phone running on Google Inc.’s Android platform is set to be revealed at a Sept. 23 T-Mobile press conference in New York.

T-Mobile’s HTC Dream, expected to be available for consumers at the end of October, will be unveiled to media and company executives next week. Conference attendees will be able to see the Android OS in action, while also demoing the handheld’s iPhone-style touchscreen and BlackBerry-like trackball navigation tool.

Google’s Android project was initially launched last November when the search engine giant teamed up with 34 companies – including mobile manufacturers such as LG, Motorola and Samsung – to form the Open Handset Alliance.

Want more IT World Canada coverage on Google's Android project? Read about the biggest obstacles facing Google's Android project and why the search giant might be using the OS to challenge Microsoft's enterprise IT supremacy.