A Virtuous Cycle (Or some cliché like that)

Doug Mohney — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:32:00 -0400

After months of negotiations and delays, a nationwide WiMAX network is coming to the United States. And this is a good thing for online video lovers everywhere.

The goodness is going to come in four ways. First, WiMAX will enable faster, more affordable mobility. You'll be able to pull down video faster than EVDO-based cellular services and in more places than vanilla WiFi, without the headaches of WiFi. You'll see more variety and form factors for portable devices outside of the stock cell phone and stock laptop, with some of them showing up embedded in vehicles ranging from large family cars to full-blown coaches. Trains might be an interesting platform to take advantage of WiMAX's range and speed.

WiMAX will also put the screws to vanilla DSL and cable pricing. In more competitive markets, where fiber and high-speed cable are already in a slow leapfrog race to 100 Mbps to the household, WiMAX may not bring much more to the party. With smaller markets, WiMAX will provide some needed competition. Faster and cheaper pipes mean better access to video, be it live or on-demand. If it lights a fire under Verizon to continue to deploy FiOS and AT&T to get around to deploying more fiber to the home, then it's a good thing.

Faster mobility leads to faster and easier capture and delivery of video from remote locations. A vacationing family will be able to record several hours of activities during the day on their WiMAX-video camera, and beam it back to the family server overnight. The next day, they go out and do it all over again, no fuss, no muss. If this sounds a little far-fetched, Sprint and others have repeatedly said WiMAX chipsets are going to end up in non-traditional devices including video cameras. It's going to bring an interesting twist to the use of the traditional news van.

Finally, WiMAX will end up driving a long-overdue upgrade to the backbone networks expected to transport those faster data streams. And if you don't think that has to happen, then how do you think the first rollouts of LTE will be supported in a couple of years? LTE backhaul will require fiber optic networks, and those networks will most likely be the same ones being built to carry WiMAX today.

Faster backhaul networks will also (hopefully) mean lower broadband costs, and lower broadband costs means more video delivered faster to more places.

Thank you, Dan Hesse, for getting a deal done.

- Doug

The Value of Good Enough

Doug Mohney — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:02:27 -0400

People talk about HD and high-end video cameras and the need for higher-speed broadband, but there’s a lot of “good enough” content playing on YouTube. The video quality isn’t something that will work out the full capabilities of your 42 inch 1080i widescreen TV, but the content and presentation are sufficient to provide satisfaction.

I wanted to have a way to poke around with online video, a method to record a couple of minutes of life and then quickly edit and post it. My first go-to thought was to pick up a $300 to $400 mini-DVD or hard drive video camera. You get the zoom, you get hours of video, easy data portability via disk or cable and the option for fun home movies outside of business hours. You also get weight, the need to drag around data and charging cables, and extra disks if you go the mini-DVD route.

Plan B was inspired by David Pogue’s review of the Flip video recorder. Flip is about the size of a mid-sized digital camera without a folding lens, lightweight, carries all of the software you might need onboard, has a pop-out USB prong so you can plug it into a Mac or PC so there’s no video cables to futz with, powered by a pair of AA batteries for up to 2 hours, and it will store up to 60 minutes of recorded video. Very KISS. Flip has even thoughtfully put a screw mount on the bottom so you can plunk it on a tripod or a folding stick and do a lightweight imitation of Les Stroud on Survivorman. I’ve been lugging it back and forth to work over the past week and haven’t even noticed the weight.

Flip saves videos to an .AVI file, with a minute of video taking up around 11 Mbps. Not bad and more than reasonable for meeting YouTube’s 10 minutes/100 Mbps upload role.

Now, this isn’t an HD-based solution, it doesn’t have any bells and whistles on it, like say GPS-location stamping, and Flip doesn’t even have a port to add on an external microphone. Other than the USB port and the screw mount, there’s a single open plug for putting video on the TV and that’s it.

It’s not the best solution, but it is good enough. And that’s the way a lot of people need to start thinking about online video. Ultimately, you’d like to have HD and a lot of other features, but right now it is good enough to start using and making money.

Doug

Video Camera

A Virtuous Cycle (Or some cliché like that)

The Value of Good Enough