How Long Can the Xbox 360 Hold Netflix?

A big hoopla was made in the games and tech blogosphere today when Microsoft bragged about its exclusive partnership with Netflix. The agreement brings streaming Netflix movies to the Xbox 360, and not to competing consoles. (Of course there are still plenty of other non-gaming options.)

As Crispy Gamer’s Kyle Orland points out, this exclusivity has been known about ever since the partnership began last summer. In other words, today’s reports messed up. (And for the record, I previously overlooked the deal when asking if the Playstation 3 would ever get Netflix support.)

Nonetheless, I think the question of how long Microsoft will hang on to this partnership is perfectly valid. Microsoft has stayed quiet on that matter, fitting with consumer tech companies’ natural secretiveness about exclusive deals. Understandably, the company doesn’t want people glancing at their watches. If you’re on the fence about which console to buy, and Netflix support is a major consideration, you’d obviously be less concerned if you knew when, if ever, the service would migrate to all consoles.

So you have to wonder who stands to gain the most from the partnership. The advantage for Microsoft is intangible. It’s essentially a selling point for the console, but there’s no way to tell exactly how well this is working. For Netflix, the Xbox 360 is another set-top delivery box, but it’s a big one. In February, Netflix and Microsoft said 1 million people had signed up for a free Netflix trial over the Xbox 360, potentially translating to a lot of new customers.

On the other hand, Netflix is missing out on the opportunity to be on the Wii and the Playstation 3. I’m not privy to the details of the agreement, but as all the consoles get bigger install bases, Microsoft will find it harder to keep Netflix by its side unless it threatens to pull support, which I doubt will happen.

We don’t know specifically how long the deal between Netflix and Microsoft will last, but when the contract expires, I expect Netflix to cozy up to the Xbox 360′s competition.

Tr.im Lives

On Sunday, Nambu said it was shutting down Tr.im, its URL-shortening service. An uproar and offers of help ensued.  Today, there’s sort-of-good news: Nambu says it”ll keep Tr.im running indefinitely while it considers its options. (It has strong opinions about what should happen to the Tr.immed URLs if someone else takes them over, though–for instance, it isn’t interested in selling out to someone who’d insert ads or otherwise frame the URL that Tr.im pointed to.)

Nambu’s decision sounds more like a stay of execution than a pardon– “indefinitely” is, by its very definition, a fuzzy term. The world can do just fine without any new Tr.immed URLs being created, but one way or another, I hope all the ones created to date get saved. And hey, “Tr.im” may be the best name anyone ever gave a URL-shortener; if I were in the biz I’d be interested in saving those URLs for the name value alone.

Is Apple Building iSocial? Sounds Good to Me.

Rumor on the Web this morning has it that Apple plans to add new social features to iTunes and maybe even launch some sort of social application, both of which would hook into popular social networks. There are even some fuzzy, could-be-real-could-be-fake screenshots showing the last.fm radio service and a “Social” playlist within iTunes. I don’t know if there’s any truth here, and don’t even have a gut reaction as to whether this stuff sounds likely or not. But this is the type of scuttlebutt that’s fun to ruminate on whether or not it leads to anything.

Apple has a huge group of passionate, engaged customers that every other tech company on the planet envies. (There may be far more Windows users than Mac ones, but there’s no comparison when it comes to the passion-per-user quotient.) Yet the company itself is a loner by nature, one that’s inherently cautious when it comes to participating in stuff it doesn’t control The company has largely opted out of the social aspect of the Web–it doesn’t blog and it doesn’t tweet. (It is dabbling in Facebook, at least, but iTunes only got an official Facebook page in May.)

The company’s social-media caution extends to product design. There are certainly social aspects to some of its apps–every time I use hotel broadband, I’m startled anew by the fact that iTunes’ library-sharing feature lets me see the music of random fellow guests. And the iPhone has become an extremely social beast thanks to third-party apps like the official Facebook one and the surging sea of Twitter clients. But I can’t think of any examples of an Apple product including built-in support for someone else’s social network except for the Facebook uploading that the company added to iPhoto ’09.

If Apple does decide to dive into social networking feet first, it would be cool. Building features into iTunes to let listeners share playlists, songs, and other music-related items across various social networks would be a relatively minor first step. As for the rumors of Apple building a social application of its own–well, being able to update statuses across multiple social networks is pretty mundane, and I have trouble believing that Apple would make that the core feature of anything it would bother building.

But…

All the apps in iLife, from iPhoto to iMovie to Garage Band, are about creating stuff. When people create stuff, they want to tell their friends about it. So it might well make sense for iLife to add an application–let’s call it iSocial–that serves as a central hub for telling friends, family, and random strangers about things you’ve created and put on the Web (as well as music you’re enjoying) via the major social networks.

More often than not, Apple’s iLife updates are on an annual schedule. (Although it’s usually been unveiled at the Macworld Expo keynote that won’t happen next January, so it’s impossible to pin even a tentative date on when the next version might show up.) Here’s hoping that the new version of iTunes that will almost certainly be announced in September and the next iLife turn out to be definitive signs that Apple is no longer a social-networking skeptic or dabbler, but a full-fledged enthusiast.

I’m Hosting a Small Business Security Webinar

Do you run a small company? I’m tickled to announce that I’m hosting a Webinar I created on small business security on Wednesday, August 19th at 2pm EST. (It’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart–in part because security was consistently the single most popular topic when I worked at PC World, and in part because I run a small business myself these days.)

I’ll cover real-world security tips and strategies, especially those that can help prevent problems from happening in the first place. I’ll also field questions from the audience. (In fact, if you have any questions now, throw them out in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them during the event.)

The Webinar will happen at Verizon’s Small Business Center, and if you can’t make it on Wednesday of next week, it’ll be available in prerecorded form, too. Here’s a page on the Small Business Center’s program of Webinars, and here’s the registration page for mine.

Hope to see some of you there!

Should Microsoft Kill IE6?

A few weeks ago, a blog post at Digg talked about Internet Explorer 6, the challenges Web sites have in continuing to support it, and the declining-but-still-meaningful percentage of Web users who run it–often because it’s still the browser provided at work. IE honcho Dean Hachamovitch responded yesterday at the official IEblog: “The choice to upgrade software on a PC belongs to the person responsible for the PC.”

Of course, it’s not that simple. Microsoft, like all software companies, eventually terminates support for previous releases of its products. That don’t force you to update, but it provides a gigantic incentive to do so, which is presumably one reason why software companies do it.

Later in his post, Hachamovitch says:

The engineering point of view on IE6 starts as an operating systems supplier. Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have.

Or in other words: Microsoft doesn’t want to stop supporting part of a product, and therefore thinks it should support IE6 until it stops supporting versions of Windows that include IE6.

If I have this right, even the newest version of XP, Windows XP SP3, includes IE6. Microsoft officially ended “mainstream support” for XP on April 14th of this year, but “extended support” is scheduled to continue on until April 8th, 2014. Which would mean that Microsoft’s official policy would be to take no steps until then to murder IE6, although usage at that point would likely be tiny.

(For the record, about seven percent of visits to Technologizer are made via IE6, and I’m guessing most of them come via PCs under the control of conservative IT people.)

Anyhow, here’s today’s T-Poll

5Words for Tuesday, August 11th 2009

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

More on Trim’s (possible) future.

Labels’ new format for albums.

Gizmodo: Don’t preorder Windows 7.

Microsoft won’t kill IE 6.

Will Sony Ericsson make netbooks?

Nintendo patent: ridable, inflatable horses!

Windows 7 on ancient PCs.

Meet “Caffeine,” Google’s new engine.

We need a Verizon iPhone.

Zune HD prices leaked. Cheap!

Fifteen Classic Game Console Design Mistakes

Video game systems may be toys of a sort, but they’re also complicated machines. They require precision engineering, specialized hardware design, and careful industrial design to successfully achieve what seems like a simple goal: to play games on a television set. Throughout the history of home game consoles, each generation of machines has brought new opportunities to innovate. Along the way, companies have often slipped up and made mistakes that came back to haunt them later–some of which were so serious that they helped to destroy platforms and even entire corporations.

This list is by no means exhaustive, nor are all of these consoles bad overall (see The Worst Video Game Systems of All Time for that list). And though some of these problems keep popping up in one form or another–like the bad call of feeding power to the console via the RF switch shared by RCA’s Studio II and Atari’s 5200–other errors in judgments were unique to one console. Thank heavens for that.

Continue reading this story…

Roku Adds Baseball’s MLB.TV Service

Roku,  the Internet video box that’s simple and fun to use, with a near-impulse price ($99.95), has a new source of content: Major League Baseball. The Roku folks have signed a deal with the MLB to put live broadcasts of all games on the player, starting with the rest of the reason. The games are available to folks who subscribe to the MLB.TV Premium service, which runs $19.95 a month or $109.95 for the year (or $34.95 for the remainder of the 2009 reason). The gamecasts join Netflix Watch Instantly and Amazon on Demand video among Roku’s offerings.

The service includes DVR-like rewind, fast-forward, and pause features and HD when available, and you can watch a week’s worth of archived shows. It’s the latest evidence that the MLB is the most progressive organization in sports when it comes to tech savvy; early instances included its release of the wonderful At Bat app for the iPhone and deal to put MLB.TV in Boxee’s media-center software.

Why start showing ballgames well past the All-Star break? Roku’s Brian Jaquet told me that the new service is in beta, and that it “opens avenues” to put other sports on the Roku player.  Roku says that an update to the player’s software that enables MLB.TV should be ready for Roku owners starting tonight; it hasn’t shown up when I check for updates on the Roku box I’m using, but  I’m looking forward to giving it a try. I don’t need access to every game, but when your favorite team is 3,000 miles away, getting to watch any game you choose sounds mighty appealing.

Apple to Fix MacBook Pro Drive Flaw. With Software?

Apple said today that an upcoming software update will correct a problem that Apple MacBook Pro notebooks owners are experiencing with malfunctioning hard drives. I’m not entirely convinced that would fix the problem, and would like Apple to shine some light on the issue.

MacBooks equipped with 7200rpm 500GB hard drives have experienced clicking sounds that are frequently followed by stalling, and customers have been complaining about the issue for months. Apple is working on a software update in response to the complaints, but has not said when the patch will be delivered.

There could very well be a low-level problem that Apple could remedy with a patch. Its systems are very well designed, and usually have high quality drivers and firmware. It’s just hard for me to fathom that the problem is just a software issue.

Call me a cynic, but when hard drives click, it oftentimes means that the drive has bad sectors and is failing. Apple could very well be dealing with a bad batch of hard drives, and all a software update would do is to glaze over the underlying problem to make the delays less noticeable.

If Apple reduces the number of customer returns by even 10 percent, it will save itself a lot of money. I hope that it is not simply putting off dealing with the full scope of the problem. I would like to hear from customers after they install the patch.

Video Games Are Dead, Long Live Video Games

DigitalTrends’ Scott Steinberg is trying his best to be provocative today, releasing the first part of a video documentary entitled “Video Games Are Dead.”

Of course, they’re not. The online video is a clip reel of talking heads — analysts Michael Pachter and Jesse Divnich, Epic President Mike Capps, Wired GameLife editor Chris Kohler, among others — jockeying for the best sound bite on why video games could be, but mostly aren’t, headed for disaster.

It’s familiar ground to industry watchers. There’s too much risk and not enough innovation, the interviewees say; publishers got too ambitious, but they’re still making money; developers aren’t getting paid properly, but that’s changing; the dedicated gaming console will be replaced by cloud gaming, or gaming through cable, or it won’t be replaced at all.

What the documentary leaves us with is a lot of ideas, but no big picture. I have a feeling Steinberg and his crew will try to tie it all together as the documentary continues, but I’ll take a stab at it now:

Video games will stick around even if the industry crumbles. By sheer coincidence, I got a press release today from Nielsen Games stating that console gaming increased by 21 percent in June, compared to June 2008, even as sales figures took a historic dive. For this entire year, it seems gaming is bigger than ever.

But we are starting to see a shift. The time is quickly approaching when development costs escalate beyond viability. This was foretold by veterans like Greg Costikyan, whose four year-old essay “Death to the Games Industry, Long Live Games” inspired my headline. That’s why every console maker is shooting for the 10-year cycle, backed by new peripherals with games that are cheap to make and fun to play. In this economy, there’s not too much room for blockbusters to thrive.

This isn’t a gloomy scenario, though. It’s actually a good thing, because we’re seeing a resurgence of smaller-scale downloadable games that are just as enjoyable as their big, boxed counterparts, with less overhead. Shadow Complex, a downloadable Xbox 360 game due out next week, is being marketed as such.

The future of the games industry is too sprawling a topic to cover with sound bites (or with a short-form blog post, for that matter), but am I worried that my favorite pastime will die? No.

Facebook Snaps Up FriendFeed

Facebook, the planet’s largest social-networking site, is buying one that’s relatively small but extremely influential, FriendFeed. The deal involves FriendFeed living on as a standalone site for now, but it sounds like the long-term idea is to build new FriendFeed-like features and technologies into Facebook itself. It’s clearly a major move in Facebook’s chess game with Twitter, and presumably reduces (but doesn’t eliminate) the possibility of Facebook buying Twitter itself at some point.

Reaction among serious FriendFeed fans to the news seems to be largely guarded-to-negative (although FriendDeed überenthusiast Robert Scoble is guardedly optimistic, and here’s Louis Gray’s thoughtful take). Me, I’m basically a FriendFeed dabbler/lurker at best, and I’m keeping my mind open. FriendFeed is impressive in many ways, but it’s complex enough that it’s remained kind of a secret weapon of serious geeks. If there’s one thing Facebook has done well, it’s figured out how to make a complicated (confusing, even) service appealing to millions of people of all sorts. Maybe it’ll be able to work some magic with the FriendFeed team that’ll make all of this makes sense.

I’m Speaking at Chicks Who Click

I’m not personally a chick, but many of the smartest people I know in technology are. And I’m happy to report that the folks at Chicks Who Click, a social networking organization, have asked me to moderate a panel on women in high-tech startups at their conference in San Jose on August 22nd. The panelists are Tara Anderson of Lijit, Emily Olson of Foodzie, and Suzanne Xie of Weardrobe. The whole conference should be both productive and a good time; more details, including registration info, are here.

Where Do You Keep Your Gigabytes?

I’ve contributed another guest post over at WePC.com–this one’s on the question of backup and storage, and whether you want to keep your data in your home or on a remote server. (Actually, I think the answer is clearly “both, for at least your most important stuff,” but I’d be skirting the truth if I told you I’m doing a very good job of backing up files to the cloud, where they’ll be safe and sound even earthquake, mudslide, wildfire, or attacks by rabid OS/2 holdouts put my local backups at risk.)

Anyhow, I called my post “PC Storage: Your Desk vs. the Cloud.” Check it out, and lemme know what your personal desk/cloud storage strategy is…especially if you’ve found a remote backup service you love.

Rise. Shine. Check E-Mail.

The New York Times has noticed a trend that’s been going on for…well, for decades, probably, but it’s now entirely mainstream: Folks sometimes leap online first thing in the morning, before they’ve so much as brushed their teeth. (Back in the 1990s at the height of AOL addiction, I’m sure plenty of people started their day by checking to see if They Had Mail; as a high school student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I sometimes took the idea to its logical conclusion by staying up all night on the computer, so there was no waking up involved the next morning.)

Here’s today’s T-Poll–I’m refusing to take this one myself, but you can probably guess what my answer would be…

Toshiba Finally, Inevitably, Does Blu-Ray

Sometimes it takes tech companies an amazingly long time to confront the inevitable. The whole war betwen Blu-Ray and HD-DVD was a rotten idea from the start (both formats were announced in 2002). But all parties involved in both camps insisted on wasting billions developing two competing HD formats. Then it took ages before HD-DVD prime mover Toshiba accepted that it had lost the conflict and discontinued the format. That was in February of last year.

And then it took another eighteen months for Toshiba to announce the inevitable conclusion to the whole saga: It’s joining the Blu-Ray Association and will be selling Blu-Ray players and laptops with Blu-Ray drives. I feel for the the company, I don’t think its stance that HD-DVD was the superior format was utterly irrational, and if and when the day comes that I buy a Blu-Ray player, it’s as likely to come from Toshiba as any other company.

But a panel of relatively well-informed consumers could have figured out the likely outcome years before Toshiba ditched HD-DVD and embraced Blu-Ray. Wouldn’t it have made sense for everyone involved to get here more quickly?

(Note: The Toshiba Blu-Ray Disc logo shown above is my quick mockup–I wonder if Toshiba still winces when it sees its name and “Blu-Ray” in close proximity, or if it’s over it?)

Sixteen Reasons the Windows Vista Era Never Quite Happened

In a small way, this is a significant post: It’s the first one in which I’m going to refer to Windows Vista in the past tense. Which might be premature and/or unreasonable–Windows 7 won’t reach consumers until October 22nd, and millions of copies of Vista will be in use for years to come. But last week, I was writing a piece on Windows 7 for PC World, and started to refer to “the Windows Vista era”–and then I realized that it’s hard to make the case that the Vista age ever started. (Even today, two and a half years after Vista’s release, 63 percent of the people who visit Technologizer on a Windows PC do so on Windows XP, versus 27 percent who use Vista–and if anything, you guys should be more likely than the world at large to have adopted Vista.) Already, I’m thinking of Vista as part of the past–in part because I’m looking forward to Windows 7.

More than most technology products, Vista seems to be entirely different things to different perfectly intelligent people. Some say its bad rep is unfair. Others continue to trash it. But you’ll have trouble finding many people outside of Redmond city limits who’ll contend that Vista has been a hit.

What happened?  It wasn’t one issue that hobbled Vista, it was all kinds of mishaps, none of which would have have been a disaster if it had been the only thing wrong. (In fact, most of them mirrored problems that had happened with earlier, far more successful versions of the OS, such as deadline problems and driver glitches.) Taken as a group, however, they confronted Windows Vista with both karmic and all-too-real difficulties that it never came close to resolving.

Continue reading this story…