March 09, 2009
Videos about video technology
By Cliff Roth

We've all heard the cliche about how it's the shoemaker's kids who have holes in their soles, and a similar observation can sometimes be made about the video technology industry. How well are companies who make video chips, IP, and other related technology utilizing

Over the years I've seen some truly great demos -- some of which I've reported on in this space -- but I've also seen my fair share of sloppy, poorly lit, sound-challenged, shaky and confusingly structured videos -- which is why, I suspect, a large number of companies involved in video technology seem to avoid the medium almost entirely.

This is too bad, because we all know what a powerful and persuasive medium video can be. On the consumer side, video's appeal is what's driving the explosion in video technology. Video has a proven track record for selling and communicating all sorts of products and technologies -- everything from soap suds to political candidates.

Sometimes, it really doesn't take much to make the point with video -- like this example of a flexible touch screen demo:

Flexible Touchscreen Demo

Or, this example from an article we ran on video analytics showing the essence of bounding objects and categorizing them:

Video Analytics Demo

But these examples are demos showing off what the product does. With most video and imaging products, the "special sauce" is a bit subtler and less dramatically demonstrable. These products need to be explained, more than demonstrated.

So I've decided to do something about it, and start a new venture producing video product announcements. These will be short videos that professionally present a product or technology to an engineering audience. My thinking is that many engineers are just too busy -- especially during this downturn in which layoffs have translated into more work for everyone else -- to spend much time and effort reading up about what's new (thank you for reading this!). Videos offer a way of delivering key information to engineers without demanding the dedicated attention of reading. Plus, as in the examples above, video does offer the obvious benefits of show and tell -- sometimes seeing is believing.

I'd be happy to hear from interested companies, from engineers and any other people who'd like to be on our distribution list -- please email me at videos@cliffroth.com. I'm also always interested in seeing how others are using video to promote video technology, please drop a line if you've got anything to share.
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February 19, 2009
Why can't U.S. citizens buy hi-def DVD recorders?
By Cliff Roth

Despite all the new technology unveiled at the sprawling Consumer Electronics Show last month in Las Vegas, and despite the nation's planned transition to digital television that began two decades ago as a quest for high definition TV, one of the biggest stories to come out of CES was what was not there. A glaring omission on the new products front was the high definition DVD recorder. You simply can't buy a hi-def

You don't need to be an engineer to understand there's no technical impediment at work here. High definition Blu-ray recorders have been on sale for home use in Japan for quite some time (last September Sony introduced six new models for sale in Japan, for example, including the flagship BDZ-X100.) Any computer geek knows that Blu-ray data drives are commonly available for making recordings using PCs, too. But the powers that be who decide which products will get sold in which market when -- the same underlying thinking, incidentally, behind "regional coding" for DVD movies -- have, at least for the time being kept Blu-ray recorders off U.S. store shelves.

Who are these powers that be? The most likely culprits are the same forces behind regional coding (DVDs only work in the region where they're sold) for standard def DVDs -- the big Hollywood studios. From their perspective, an HD version of a movie is more valuable, and deserves more protection, than a lower resolution version.

Sound like deja vu? You'll have to be of a certain age to remember, but back in the 1980s almost the exact same thing happened with the then-controversial DAT audio recording technology, which allowed people to make perfect copies of audio CDs on tape. (This was before optical disc recording became commonplace.) The music industry managed to keep DAT out of the U.S. consumer market for so long that it ultimately became a high-end pro-audio product -- all the while, DAT recorders were sold freely and relatively inexpensively to ordinary consumers in Japan.

Even standard-definition DVD recorders were quite slow to come to market, and today many homes that previously had VCR recording technology still don't have any DVD recording. By delaying the introduction of recording capability, the industry effectively got the public thinking of the DVD format as playback-only.

These delaying tactics actually seem to work. By withholding a key technology from consumers for a long enough period of time, behavior patterns become established.

Consumers in the U.S. currently have the "right" to record standard definition TV shows and movies onto recordable DVD. (Hollywood is trying hard to end this "right" too, through "broadcast flags," but that's a different story.) If consumers want to save a copy of a hi-def TV program or movie, however, they're limited to using cable-TV or satellite-TV DVR technology, in which the recording remains essentially locked up within the set top box. Hollywood likes this scheme because it prevents the HD version of the movie or TV show from ever leaving the home.

It also prevents HD camcorder owners from sending grandma a convenient HD recording of the grandkids. It prevents these camcorder owners from conveniently making a Blu-ray disc for their own archives, too.

Watching a film a few weeks ago, my eight-year old asked me what it means to be "grounded." I explained that you can't leave the house. As far as HD home video recordings are concerned, the entire U.S. public has been grounded.

The fact that the U.S. is falling technologically behind, in this case, has nothing to do with our math skills, education system or work ethic. Rather, it reflects the wishes of business titans.

The industry collusion that's behind this outrage is something the new Obama administration -- ostensibly keen on "re-regulation" -- should look into. Especially since at the heart of the matter is a development everyone seemed to be hailing at CES just one year ago -- the end of the high definition DVD format war -- granting Blu-ray what everyone in the consumer electronics industry at the time thought was vital for moving forward: a monopoly.

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February 11, 2009
Macrovision, TV Guide, and "Gemstar patents": Yes you can!
By Cliff Roth

I went to CES in Las Vegas last month wondering what was up with Macrovision, and more specifically the Gemstar patents that are considered vital to creating a street-legal EPG, at least for the U.S. market (and more, they'd argue -- see

So where did this all leave those Gemstar patents -- including the most notorious claim for generating a simple EPG grid with channels on one axis and times on the other? Right smack in the middle of Macrovision's plans.

I met with Macrovision at CES and, as explained to me, they sold the web site but held onto the listings service -- providing the raw data for EPGs -- and they continue to provide interactive program guides to the cable-TV industry, including TV Guide-branded EPGs and the widely deployed Passport-brand interactive program guides. And they have retained the entire patent portfolio, making Lions Gate licensees of their patents in the web site transaction.

Most important to designers of STBs, DVRs and other home video devices: Macrovision says they will license their listings data, their technology, and their patents to all who want them, and though we did not get into details on pricing, they say it's all reasonable.

This is quite different from the Gemstar of a decade ago, who was notorious for not returning phone calls from designers looking to license their patents, and who sued anyone with deep enough pockets and the nerve to go ahead and make an EPG without Gemstar's blessing.

So it appears that the long and often outrageous saga of the Gemstar patents has finally come to a near-end. (Just in time, too -- now TiVo appears to have stepped up to the litigation plate, with their long-running battle with Echostar over DVR patents.) Unfortunately, with Replay long bankrupt, with TiVo barely staying alive, with Moxi just re-launched to consumers, and with the economy in a mess, this might not be the best time to introduce new consumer DVR technology in the U.S. But it's nice to know the opportunity is there -- and now, thanks to the kinder and gentler "Gemstar," you don't have to risk a lawsuit to do it.

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February 04, 2009
3-D "Chuck" & Super Bowl recap
By Cliff Roth

How good was the 3-D shown during last weekend's Super Bowl commercials and then Monday night on NBC's series, "Chuck"? (See

It was better than traditional red-blue 3-D glasses, and my kids were indeed thrilled by it, but the glasses were annoying and reminiscent of a suggestion my optometrist made and I once rejected for a similar reason: I don't like each eye doing a different thing, I like them to work together.

As nearsighted contact lens and eyeglass wearers age, they have problems focusing close-up, and need reading glasses. With eyeglasses bifocals are the preferred solution, but for contact lens wearers one solution is to use lenses of different strengths for each eye: One sees close-up, while the other sees distance.

That's kind of the philosophy behind this new/old anaglyph technology, in which one eye sees most of the color, and the other sees the "depth color", which is blue. The idea is that one eye sees the two-dimensional image and the other eye sees the depth dimension (or more accurately, two-dimensional cues that a third dimension exists -- see New 3-D TV format to be demo'd during Super Bowl.)

This is a matter of belief -- I offer no rational explanation other than that it's more unnecessary work for the brain, and seems inherently unnatural -- but I don't like my eyes receiving completely different images, I like my eyes to see very similar looking images.

Additionally, when not watching TV, because one eye sees almost normal while the other sees nothing but blue light, the glasses are less comfortable to wear before and after the 3-D programming. This is quite different, again, from the far superior polarized-light 3-D glasses. With polarized lenses, things look perfectly normal when you look away from the screen. Though a minor point, if you're running to the refrigerator or the bathroom it's nice to be able to leave the glasses on and see OK.

So what happened during NBC's 3-D presentation of "Chuck" Monday night in the U.S? Unlike the 3-D commercials during the Super Bowl, which lasted only a few minutes, and contrary to my earlier prediction, the entire hour-long episode of "Chuck" was indeed in 3-D. At the very beginning of the show the character Chuck told viewers to put the glasses on, but then after commercial breaks, which were not in 3-D, the program would just come back on as if nothing was different, except for a subtle "NBC 3D" watermark on the lower left of the screen.

I found the hour-long presentation in this format too long, and the commercial breaks were particularly annoying, because it seemed to take several minutes to "get into" the 3-D illusion after each set of commercials. (One eye is seeing an all-blue image, and it took a while for my eye-brain system to get the two images aligned with each other to make sense of it all and see depth.) By the end of the hour, I had gotten so sucked into the silly plot of the show, and was so annoyed at the 3-D (despite my usual cheerleading attitude) that I actually watched the end in 2-D, which looked almost OK except for prominent yellow (and to a lesser extent blue) shadows around objects and people in the picture.

Was this the first-ever hour-long presentation of a 3-D program on U.S. (and/or world) television (aka 3DTV)? I think it was, but I doubt the experiment will be, or should be, repeated.
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