Verizon FiOS

Want Olympics fare on FiOS VOD? Verizon is promising highlights, complete event replays, info on the Olympic park in Calgary, and even Olympics trivia. On the HD front, FiOS customers will get less than half of the VOD content in high-def, but Verizon did just make the announcement that it’s launching MSNBC in HD, just in time for the opening ceremonies. Oh, and if you’re looking for some interactive TV, stay tuned for an on-screen FiOS app with medal counts, bios, and more.

Comcast Xfinity

Yes, it’s officially Xfinity now in several markets, but so far the branding hasn’t changed on my Comcast guide. In any case, the VOD menu is full of Olympics clips: an intro of Team USA, physics lessons around different sports (hockey, snowboarding, etc.), a “Where Were You” category with highlights from yesteryear, and a “Best of the Day” selection, which promises daily coverage once the games begin. By my observation, it appears that all of the content is available in HD.

AT&T U-verse

AT&T is heading into the Olympics not just with on-demand content, but also with a Multiview app for watching several events at once. The U-verse NBC Olympics Application includes up to four different channels on screen and links to information like event schedules, athlete bios, and medal count. According to AT&T, its on-demand fare will include “exclusive Team USA” videos. Not sure how valuable that will be, but exclusive is always good, right?

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

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Fortunately, I don’t need to come up with the perfect “Ads of Super Bowl 44″ lede as NewTeeVee pretty much nailed it: Beer solves lots of problems, women hold men back from their dreams and this year, pants are optional. But I can’t say there are any commercials we’ll remember beyond this week. My personal fave was the Kia ad (above) – fun, engaging, not crass, and it made me think about their product. (What does Go Daddy do again?) Speaking of crass, the most entertaining pantless commercial didn’t even make it on the air. And I’m bummed Denny’s Nannerpus nemesis has been replaced by chickens.

In what’s become an annual tradition, TiVo determined the top ads of Super Bowl 44 “using aggregated, anonymous, second-by-second audience measurement data about how 30,000 TiVo subscribers watched the game, and for the first time, determined not just the most viewed commercials, but instead the most engaging ads throughout the game.”

1. Doritos – “House Rules”
2. Snickers – “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”
3. Focus on the Family – “The Tebows Celebrate Life”
4. Doritos – “Underdog”
5. 2010 Intel Core Processors – “Jeoffrey the Robot Gets Hurt”
6. E*Trade Financial – “Baby Love Triangle”
7. Bud Light – “Observatory”
8. CareerBuilder – “Casual Fridays”
9. TruTV’s NFL Full Contact – “ Punxsutawney Polamalu”
10. Hyundai Sonata – “Brett Favre MVP, Still Playing at 50”

If you missed any of the commercials, or just want to catch them again, hit Hulu, CBS, or YouTube. What were your favorites?

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

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Me, I’m instinctively skeptical of anything that’s in 3D except the real world–the effect fails to work for me as often as it succeeds, and the glasses give me a headache. (I blame the fact that I wear glasses anyhow, and must jam the 3D ones over my normal specs.) I’ll believe it’s the next best thing when it stays popular for more than, oh, nine months.

But let’s use this as an excuse for a T-Poll:

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The San Francisco-based web phenom has partnered with Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment to develop an unscripted TV skein described as “putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.”

I don’t wanna judge a series I haven’t seen–and, come to think of it, probably won’t make time for even if it’s a smash. But Twitter’s celebration of celeb-watching (as seen in its recommendation that you follow Britney Spears and Kim Kardashian) makes me nervous. I have nothing against following the rich and famous via Twitter, but it’s not the thing I’d be proudest of if I’d invented Twitter.

Side note: The Twitter TV series was created by Amy Ephron, whose sisters Nora and Delia came up with 1998’s AOL-inspired You’ve Got Mail–an earlier attempt by Hollywood to cash in on an online trend. It was the first thing that jumped to mind when I read about the Twitter show, even before the Ephron connection dawned on me. Wasn’t 1998 about the time that AOL jumped the shark?

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That is all.

No, wait–part of the reason behind the delay is the mess that is the government’s $40 coupon program for converter boxes–too many people who need the coupons don’t have them. My buddies at consumer electronics info site Retrevo aim to help with a Good Neighbor Coupon Exchange Program. They’re serving as an intermediary to put people with extra coupons in touch with folks who can use them. And they’re also offering a 20-page survival guide for the whole transition.

OK, now that is all. For now, at least…

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Today, however, the House of Representatives failed to fall in line: It didn’t pass the bill. Unless someone throws a hail-mary pass to extend the deadline through other means–and it sounds like that could still happen–some Americans will turn on their TVs come mid-February and find nothing but static.

I’ve been trying to figure out whether I’m in favor of the delay or not, and I’m still grappling with the issues. Over at ZDNet, my friend Sam Diaz makes a cogent argument in favor of just pulling the trigger on analog and moving on: There’s been tons of advance warning about the switchover, and some folks will fail to be ready even if you delayed the transition to 2019. And a delay would cost the broadcasting industry millions.

But the people who are still receiving analog TV are, almost by definition, the most helpless of TV watchers. They’re technophobes. Or people who watch very little TV but might need it in case of emergency. Or folks so poor that the fact they can’t get a $40 converter coupon is an obstacle.

I keep having these visions of my grandparents fiddling with their little portable TV and wondering why they can’t tune in Lawrence Welk, Gunsmoke, and the CBS Evening News. My grandma and grandpa have been gone a long time, but there are plenty of other grandparents out there, and some of them will be flummoxed by the transition.

Of course, you could make the argument that the best way to get stragglers on board is to deprive them of TV by completing the damn switchover: If analog broadcasts disappear on Feburary 17th, it’ll nudge some folks to head out to RadioShack and buy the coverter boxes they should have known about a long time ago.

Anyhow, I’m going to throw the decision in your lap while I continue to think about it. What’s your take?

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Standard loudspeakers reproduce sound by moving a cone back and forth. Edge Motion does the job by using arrays of motors to wiggle the edges of a clear membrane. The motor arrays can be built into the frame that surrounds a TV, monitor, or laptops’s display, and the clear membrane sits in front of the screen–it’s a much more space-efficient approach than that of traditional speakers, since it utilizes the screen real estate that’s already there. (The bigger the screen, the bigger the membrane can be; the bigger the membrane, the better the sound.) End result: Audio quality you associate with bulky speakers without the bulk.

Here are some images from Emo that explain how it works:

The notion of a loudspeaker system that involves a bunch of motors that move a piece of plastic in front of a screen is a little hard to process mentally–at least if you know as little about audio engineering as I do. It sounds like it would be noisy and that you’d be able to see the membrane jiggling about. Nope. The demos that I heard worked wonderfully well.

Before the Emo exects I met with told me how Edge Motion works, they showed me a Diana Krall concert on an ordinary-looking medium-sized flatscreen TV, and the sound was big enough that I wondered if they’d tucked a multi-piece speaker system with a subwoofer out of sight. Another demo involving a 15-inch LCD such as the ones built into notebooks was equally impressive. Or maybe even a bit more so, since the loudspeakers embedded in notebooks usually range from abysmal to tinny-but-marginally-bearable-as-long-as-you’re-not-at-all-discriminating.

Emo plans to sell the speakers to consumer electronics manufacturers who will embed them in their products. I’m not an audiophile, and my ears aren’t always smart enough to be impressed by sound-related demos which I’m assured will impress me. But the benefits of Edge Motion were obvious the moment I listened; if it sounds as good in shipping products and doesn’t cost radically more than standard audio technology, I think it’ll be a major hit.

We’ll have to wait awhile before we know for sure: The company says that it hopes that TVs will be ready in time for Christmas, but availability might slip into 2010. Edge Motion speakers for notebooks will come along later (it’s a trickier engineering challenge to squeeze the technology into the more limited space provided by a portable computer). Over time, Emo has hopes of putting Edge Motion into just about any device that has a screen and a need for sound, including pocketable gizmos such as cell phones.

I look forward to watching (and, more important, listening) as Edge Motion makes its way into the market…

[NOTE: Commenter John Mulvaney notes that Emo's technology looks similar to NXT's SoundVu...I'm going to ask Emo for their input on how the technologies compare.] [FURTHER NOTE: An Emo representative says that the company has no association with NXT, and that the technologies are fundamentally different. I hope to get more details...]

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Odds are most of your TV watching still occurs in comfort of your living room with your TV set. But increasingly, consumers are watching video anywhere they can: from work on the PC, on the road from a laptop, on iPods and iPhones, and other portable media players.

Even the term watching TV can be misconstrued, since there are so many options today. Does it mean watching a live broadcast TV channel as it is being aired? Does it mean viewing a show on-demand from your DVR? Does it mean buying the latest Daily Show episode from iTunes and watching it on your iPhone during your morning commute? Or maybe you’d rather go to NBC.com and watch the full episodes of Heroes for free (with limited commercials, of course).

I’ve recently been thinking about an old phrase from the early days of Internet video: Lean forward vs. sit back. Essentially, it’s the difference between PCs and TVs. PCs are more interactive while TVs are a passive experience. Lots of companies I spoke to back then were interested in the future of television and interactive TV services and wanted to blur the lines between PCs and TVs.

Not much has changed today; I believe that the PC-vs.-TV contrast still holds true. According to ComScore Networks’ Video Metrix service, the duration of an average online video was just three minutes. By comparison, most TV shows are 30 to 60 minutes, and movies are even longer than that.

So why is there such a gap? Lean back vs. sit forward. People are multi-tasking on their PCs, and can only take short breaks. So a three minute online video is the perfect break for someone that’s been crunching numbers on a spreadsheet all morning. Think about the last Internet video clip you watched and try to remember how long it was. Thirty seconds? A minute? Odds are it was a lot shorter than half an hour, even though thirty minutes is considered short on traditional TV.

This morning I tried an xperiment. I went to NBC.com and tried to watch the latest full episode of Heroes online. I figured that watching a professionally produced TV show, rather than some random user-generated video would make the experience more compelling (not to mention longer).

As I sat down to watch, I quickly realized that my office chair is comfortable, but it’s not great for relaxing, especially for long periods of time. After only a few minutes my attention started to wander. I began thinking about work. Then a phone call interrupted me. An instant message. Facebook. E-mail. Digg. Finally, I cracked and started fully multi-tasking as I watched the show.

After a few minutes, I was concentrating too much on typing and writing, and not paying attention to what was happening on the show. I realized I was paying much more attention to the sound of the show, rather than the video, since I was looking at my work, not the video screen. (No wonder I prefer to listen to music while I work, rather than watch TV.) So I abandoned my experiment after just a few minutes.

When I watch TV in the living room I’m more apt to give it my full attention. There’s nothing in the way to distract me, and thus, I can sit back and watch longer shows. There’s no keyboard, no mouse, no Microsoft Office or browser staring back at me. In fact, on the TV screen I find that I don’t want any interruptions. One of the main reasons why I use TiVo is because I can fast-forward through commercials and compress a half hour long show into about 22 minutes.

So the primary difference between TV and PC is the location. PCs are not usually found in living rooms, but in a separate room like an office. PCs are also usually tucked away into a corner of a room, not like a TV standing tall and proud for all to see in the middle of the living room. Also, the primary purpose of a TV is to do nothing except give us TV programming. PCs are a bit more complex and can do a little bit of everything.

The secondary difference is attention. In the living room, I’m more apt to give my attention to the TV. In my office, I’m more apt to pay attention to work and shorter distractions.

One exception to the lean forward/sit back rule, is mobile video. More and more people are using portable electronics like laptops, mobile phones, or portable media players to watch TV shows. Mobile video changes all the rules because location can be anywhere. So one minute I may want to check my work e-mail, while in five minutes, I might be ready to relax and watch a random YouTube video.

If the lean forward/sit back axiom essentially boils down to location and attention then I believe that consumer habits will eventually change in the future. Change is already happening, albeit slowly. Researching Internet video consumption for this article, I found that the length of an average online video clip has increased from 2.7 minutes in September 2007, to 3 minutes in December 2008. How we interact with TV  will surely change as well, since TV is finally becoming a lot more like the Web–and vice versa.

Jose Alvear (jose@alvear.com) works as an independent digital media consultant, researcher and analyst. He is currently an IPTV Analyst for Multimedia Research Group, a market intelligence and research company focusing on next-generation TV. He also blogs about digital media at Digital Media Bulletin.

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One of the things that has kept SED out of our living rooms–or at least out of the living rooms of the exceedingly well-heeled–is a nettlesome patent lawsuit that has dogged the technology since 2005. But the Financial Times is reporting that SED’s legal woes are over, and Canon–which bought out Toshiba’s interest in the technology–is now free to manufacture sets.

Which doesn’t mean that it’ll do so any time soon. The FT quotes Canon’s president as saying that the current price plunge for LCD and plasma TVs means it would be a lousy time to introduce a new technology. That leaves open the possibility that SED could be trumped by OLED–another nascent technology that’s actually available in sets you can buy–before it ever gets going. (I’m not enough of an expert on display technologies to really compare SED and OLED’s pros and cons and chances of success–I just remember being wowed by SED, and I’m being paranoid.)

I’m kind of assuming that Canon won’t be trumpeting SED at next month’s CES. But it’s nice to know it could do so without it being an utter pipe dream.

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Well, maybe a little bit, but as I strolled the appliance halls at the show today, I was mostly struck by how separate the worlds of electronics and traditional appliances remain. Yes, virtually everything from microwave ovens to irons are packed with sophisticated ciruitry these days. But I had visions of new-wave kitchen and laundry gadgets that sit on a home network and do double-duty as entertainment devices, and I saw almost nothing at the show that even hinted at such a merger of devices in the home.

I said almost nothing. Vestel, the Turkish company whose Yoda laptop I already covered, also had a large booth full of kitchen equipment. And it was demoing some concept kitchen/entertainment products which it doesn’t intend to actually sell to anyone.

One was a dishwasher with a built-in TV…

Another was a refrigerator with a TV…

And the third was another fridge with built-in, touch-sensitive MP3 playback. (It was also the shiniest appliance I’ve seen, so it serves a third purpose as a mirror–that’s USA Today’s Ed Baig snapping a photo in the reflection.)

I can kind of see why Vestel isn’t planning to turn these into real products, since none of them look particularly practical. (Especially the dishwasher, unless you’re a midget for whom the TV is at eyelevel.) All the technology exists to make appliances that have consumer electronics-style functionality. But designing ones that make sense is still a challenge. Come to think of it, I can’t think of any examples of anyone succeeding at doing so, unless you cound iRobot’s Roomba.

I’m still convinced we’ll see more examples of smart appliances, including ones that have consumer appeal. Just not at IFA 2008, and maybe not anywhere for a while…

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