Full Transcript:

Ed Kohler: Welcome to the Technology Evangelist Podcast for Friday, April 13 and time for some music.

Benjamin Higginbotham: This why CBS won’t ever put us on. 

Jeremy Elfering: What was that? Ed, you are not good at this.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, let’s start off Ed, shall we?

Ed Kohler: Sure OK, so first thing in the doc is, we made some news last night.

Jeremy Elfering: No. Ed, you made some news.

Ed Kohler: You are right, you guys didn’t know I was going to make news, but it was a slow news day I thought in the blogosphere, so why don’t we make some news and the opportunity presented itself with Don Imus being let go from CBS after first been let go by MSNBC and so someone had to replace Don Imus and …

Benjamin Higginbotham: And you thought you could do it?

Ed Kohler: Well I thought, what the heck why not give it a shot? We can fill three hours/four hours a day, five days a week, right?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely yeah, right.

Jeremy Elfering: If we were filling it with web search content, people will be asleep at the wheel.

Ed Kohler: I think there is an opportunity there. But the point is I then pod out a post saying that, “yes indeed, CBS was going to bring us in to replace Don Imus” and of course people probably aren’t ready for that type of content or our type of content during their morning drive?

Jeremy Elfering: No. Not so much.

Ed Kohler: But, enough people seemed to think that it was possible that it led to some news stories.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well hang on, why aren’t people ready for that? Let’s just assume for a moment that it's not us, that is some professional talent that actually does technology space news, why aren’t people ready for that?

Ed Kohler: Well there are technology shows that are on the radio, but I don’t think there is…

Benjamin Higginbotham: I listen to that my morning, I don’t listen to morning radio there is nothing on that interests me.

Jeremy Elfering: But, the problem is, the vast majority of people aren’t going to be looking for a technology show. They could be looking for funny, “ha…ha”.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t think Imus is funny “ha…ha”?

Jeremy Elfering: I am not saying Imus is funny “ha…ha”, but the people aren’t looking for that type of show in the morning or…

Benjamin Higginbotham: How do we know?

Jeremy Elfering: We have proved it, we have shown that there are plenty of people who listen, but they don’t listen, the people who listen aren’t the people who are necessarily driving in the morning drive time or aren’t necessarily on…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Sure, they are…

Ed Kohler: They might be in the podcast?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah exactly, Ed, what you listen to when your way to work? You got a 20 minute commute …

Ed Kohler: I listen to podcast.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What kind of podcast, do you listen to?

Ed Kohler: It could be anything, but a popular ones would be some tech shows, like say David Pogue, I was listening to him coming in yesterday.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Great, you, what do you listen to when your way to work, other than audio books?

Jeremy Elfering: I listen to sports talk show.

Benjamin Higginbotham: OK, so great, all right, so neither one of those is the entertaining funny “ha…ha” type there.

Jeremy Elfering: No, but…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Neither one of those is Imus type story and so now I polled you both and 100% of my audience might be polled.

Ed Kohler: Are not listening to Don Imus.

Jeremy Elfering: I think, well I wouldn't be listening to Don Imus anyway, because I think he is a moron, but that’s beside the point.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right.

Ed Kohler: One time I had a chance to hear a guy from “This American Life”, Ira Glass. He was talking that, he does news show it really works. His show is more or less story type show, but he was working for National Public Radio or Public Radio International and he said that they once looked at the data and found out that people like entertainment and sports in the morning and an average listener to National Public Radio was listening to National Public Radio for a bit and then flipping over to Howard Stern and then back to. So, it was like I need to eat my brand flakes, but I want to have my frosted flakes and they were bouncing back and forth…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, can we make technology entertaining with sports?

Ed Kohler: I think it depends what people are trying to achieve in that particular time slot. I don’t know if it is, where you are going to be able to pickup of big audience with this type of content at that hour?

Jeremy Elfering: And I don’t think people are looking for in depth stuff at that hour.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Doesn’t have to be in depth.

Jeremy Elfering: I am saying, but they are not looking to engage their brain at that hour either. They are looking for something to entertain them, while they drive to work. Most people don’t want to be working in their car, as they go in and that’s what they feel like.

Ed Kohler: The news is big though, they get into headlines, they are getting the weather, traffic reports.

Jeremy Elfering: That’s five minutes out of an hour.

Ed Kohler: Unless it is National Public Radio or something where it is…

Jeremy Elfering: Exactly, but that’s what the majority of what they are hearing? Five minutes over an hour, again the news and they feel good about that and they don’t want anymore than that.

Ed Kohler: There is audience for that. So, what’s deal with Apple delay? Is this something that…

Benjamin Higginbotham: You are trying to change topic?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I am moving on.

Jeremy Elfering: No, we are not done.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, we are not moving on.

Ed Kohler: What you got?

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, you posted this story on Technology Evangelist, saying that we were going to replace Imus in the morning and we got a little bit of feedback on that.

Jeremy Elfering: Yeah and the best part I think is, people believed it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, did they?

Jeremy Elfering: Yeah, that’s the question.

Ed Kohler: A couple of people picked it up in a believable sense and I think it is funny, because it really took off because the right people picked it up. People, who are influential, well the largest being Scoble. Somehow Scoble wrote about it, three minutes before I posted according to the time stamp, on our two sites.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well it just to prove, I believe Scoble is actually hologram.

Ed Kohler: Quite possible.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I mean how else can you adjust that many blogs per day? I think they are actually not only hologram, I think they are 30 of them, I think there are 30 Scobles who can bend space in time.

Ed Kohler: Just for Twitter alone. So, while once he posted it and then that’s where I really got some traction and other people started running from their, but I guess it was believable enough, there were just enough details that I built into it, where people thought, all right this isn’t permanent replacement, may be they are just going to shake it up and just do something fun for few days with that morning drive slots.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t know.

Jeremy Elfering: It very well, it could be that Scoble is doing it very tongue and cheek , when he posted it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, he had a question mark at the end of the post, so [Misc. Voice]

Ed Kohler: Yeah, he left the door open, but let himself a door.

Jeremy Elfering: But, unfortunately enough people thought that it was…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Why unfortunately? I think it was fun. You did your NPR interview, earlier today…

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I talked to John Gorner earlier saying about it, he said he didn’t buy it, but I think he is also a media guy, so he understands the scale of these things and how unrealistic it would be for someone to make that big of a jump.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You mentioned a good post, pointing your follow up post, see this is why we can’t be on. You mentioned a really great point in your follow up post which was the blogosphere in one breath will put down mainstream media and then next breath really wants beyond mainstream media. I think is that huge unobtainable goal that everyone like “Woo, wouldn’t that be awesome”, you want that huge audience and I just think that was interesting to see that kind of response where one someone from the blogosphere potentially moves into mainstream media, it was like “oh yeah, go for it” and then the traditional mainstream media the blogosphere like “Aa… it is just traditional mainstream media, blah…blah…blah.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, actually at Video on the Net conference when Scoble and Errington were up on stage, they were talking about this particular topic where Scoble was talking about how a story can start on a blog today and then some more influential bloggers can pickup on it, they can get some buzz, they can start to end up on few of that different aggregator sites and from there it could amplify and become a mainstream news story and a week later may be there will be something in the New York Times or Washing Post about it and Scoble was talking about how that’s just amazing. How that can happen, but Errington on his response to that was “who cares about the mainstream media, everyone who matters already knows about the story by the time that’s made it there”. So, he didn’t see that as a validation in any way, where there are, so he wouldn’t see that as a benefit, so.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, but mainstream media brings checks and balances that blogs don’t seem to have today. Blogs will check and balance themselves, right? The blogosphere will actually comeback and say “no, you are all silly”, but it takes too long to get those checks and balances in place, whereas, traditional media typically, not always, but it will typically do their checks and balances before the story ever goes live.

Ed Kohler: True, but here is a big exception between to flip that around is the mainstream media rarely ever links out from an article. Where bloggers always links out, so with occasional exception like this, because I couldn’t link to a CBS press release about our move there, but generally they are linking out to their content, if they are talking about something, they are linking out to the press release that they based their new story on or out to a product they are talking about or someone else who has written about it. So, there is just a lot more citations going on there, so you don’t have to necessarily take a blogger at their word, because you can also look at the original sources that they are talking about, as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Fair enough, yeah.

Ed Kohler: So, it is different way of adding it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Where mainstream media could learn to start linking out.

Ed Kohler: That would be nice, because I think that’s what the problem. One of the problems is, people have different levels of depth they are looking for at a news story. You can do that by writing in a reverse pyramid where you get people to hot stuff and they will go further and further down in the column with depending on how interest they are in the topic, or if they are really-really interested at, there is no worth to them to go, so they are going have to leave and you are no longer the resource, they are going to just go fallback to Google and find more information that way instead, where I as columnist you could have been the authority on that topic. You obviously looked at lot of stuff when you put together that story, why don’t you link out to some of those sources.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right, I think we've beaten this one down now, I will let you move on.

Ed Kohler: OK, let’s talk about Apple, what’s going on there, are we ever going to see another operating system for them?

Jeremy Elfering: Now, to be fair. They are delayed what four months or so?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, but they knew this was coming, this isn’t surprise they try...

Jeremy Elfering: No, this isn’t.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Here is what to lame is they try to blame it on the iPhone. They just didn’t want to admit, “yeah, we are late” and I think part of that is fear for parallel it to Vista. Vista 2.0 oh another software manufacturer can’t deliver our operating system, but that’s really what it is, there is another software manufacturer cannot deliver another operating system, I highly doubt to say this has  lot to do with the iPhone and if they are so small that they had to take so much of their team to put it on the iPhone?

Jeremy Elfering: They need to hire more team.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, that doesn’t seem like a really great excuse, seems really lame to me.

Jeremy Elfering: No, it isn’t really lame excuse, but it is not like that years and years delayed, it is like couple of months.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It is couple of months and I would have just preferred that they were honest with us and say, “You know what? We screwed up, we can’t do it, we want to make sure that it meets our minimum quality expectations, get it out the door” and just told us the truth, I don’t buy for a moment that this is iPhone related. May be they stole couple of engineers, but they had to deal so many engineers, this is delayed, how many months is it, four months or six months?

Jeremy Elfering: Four months.

Benjamin Higginbotham: They had to see so many engineers, it is delayed four months. That’s not right, not for a big corporation like Apple.

Jeremy Elfering: No, it is a very lame excuse and I am sure that’s what their press release guys or something going wrong, how we are going to spin this? We don’t want to spin this as we are late and we are going to get compared to Vista.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Why spin it, why not be add a human touch to your company and it would be like? We are human, we screwed up and they did that? they said, I forgot how they going to do, something along the lines of when you try to achieve greatness something spin-spin-spin-spin-spin, you have to make compromises, we think we made the right one.

Ed Kohler: Rather than on quality?

Jeremy Elfering: Where is it, life often presents try us, and in this case we are sure we have made the right ones.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right, that added actually slight human touch to it.

Jeremy Elfering: Yes.

Benjamin Higginbotham: But, instead of saying “we blame it on iPhone”, they should have said, “it is just not up to our minimum quality, we just don’t think it is ready for release, we are really sorry, we think that you are going to enjoy the operating system more” and just admit fess up.

Ed Kohler: Well, it is a better peer spin. If you are going to choose between cheaper, faster and better, they are not going to go down on price, we know that and they are not going to say we got this to you on time, but it is we made a couple of sacrifices on quality to hurry to get out the door.

Jeremy Elfering: Exactly.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s Microsoft, that’s what they do.

Jeremy Elfering: That’s yes, very true.

Ed Kohler: Patch, patch, patch…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Actually, they don’t even give it to you on time. Microsoft just delivers that really late and then they give you beta software and it is like “OK, we just give up, here you go”.

Ed Kohler: Get it out of the door.

Jeremy Elfering: Well, unfortunately I think there are too many media professionals are trained to “hey, we got to spin this” and sometimes they don’t necessarily need to. They can just tell the truth and say “hey, we are going to be delayed because we wanted to be perfect or better” and people will accept that, but they immediately go into “oh, this is a bad thing”.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, let me flip the coin, will they accept that? I know, I would accept it, I would personally prefer that they just told the truth up front. I am of course assuming that they are lying, they may be telling the truth, but then if they are telling the truth, that scares me even more. So, what do other people think? Am I the only one sitting this both thinking to myself this is a really lame lie, just tell the truth?

Ed Kohler: I don’t, my life is going on without a new operating system.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Mine is not.

Ed Kohler: Really?

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, for four months I have to stop everything, I can’t compute.

Ed Kohler: Wow.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah.

Jeremy Elfering: Well, because you don’t have beta software, we might be able to get you some beta software and they are releasing at the World Wide Developers conference.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I am sure you could, yeah.

Ed Kohler: You need something you could break?

Benjamin Higginbotham: I do.

Ed Kohler: Have you had a chance to check out fakesteve.blogspot.com, yet? Visit the blog of Steve Jobs?

Benjamin Higginbotham: I have heard of it, I haven’t actually gone there.

Ed Kohler: It is awesome.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Is it?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, the stuff they have come up with on there like it was about this particular issue, he says that Bill Gates just called and offered to send over a team to help us code some Vista features in the Lepoard. So, it was just awesome, talking about hanging out with Guy Kawasaki wearing gravity boots while they think of ways to make Apple more green and I don’t know it is just…came out with some crazy stuff, but I think the one they summarized the best yesterday was, when he said that, he his trying to hypnotize Apple fanatics that, don’t worry it is coming, it is coming, it is like just imagine glossy white products that cost too much money and make you feel superior to other people, isn’t that just awesome.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And I do.

Ed Kohler: We are sure, obviously.

Jeremy Elfering: Of course, speaking up feeling superior to other people, did you see the two new Mac commercials that came out recently.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, I watched them online.

Jeremy Elfering: I watched them online too.

Benjamin Higginbotham: The one who is the guy all the PC’s on the card, was the first one and then one where they flashback the childhood.

Jeremy Elfering: Yeah, the part that I find humorous, I find them humorous commercials, part that I find humorous is so many people who are like, I can’t believe they are airing commercials like this, they are so factually wrong. They are commercials, they are supposed to be slanted towards one product or the other, of course they are going to be.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Factually wrong, how are they factually wrong?

Jeremy Elfering: I don’t read mostly of the articles, it is just more the outrage from PC people who said…

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t like that, I don’t read books.

Ed Kohler: That’s what TV for.

Jeremy Elfering: Yeah, it is for TV floor, what? I have seen people who commented on these and say I can’t believe they are in the things, they are not showing the whole side of the story and how PC’s are done for, that they are not just for business and all this stuff, it is like Apple commercial, first they are going to slant towards Apple.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Wait a minute, OK, who here uses a PC, to actually do video editing or anything in audio production?

Jeremy Elfering: I don’t necessarily disagree with you.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Do you?

Jeremy Elfering: No.

Benjamin Higginbotham: OK, do you?

Ed Kohler: No.

Benjamin Higginbotham: OK, 100% of my audience doesn’t use PC’s.

Jeremy Elfering: I love our informal polls.

Ed Kohler: Well put, so what’s with the MGM and iTunes deal, do you follow that?

Jeremy Elfering: Yes, a little bit.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I haven’t. I know that MGM is very large.

Jeremy Elfering: MGM is very large.

Ed Kohler: They make a lot of movies.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And then iTunes is very large.

Jeremy Elfering: Yes and MGM movies are now going to available on iTunes.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Name some movies that MGM distributes.

Jeremy Elfering: Well they have like Rocky series, The Great Train Robbery, Mad Max a lot of classics.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Really, anything new and cool like?

Jeremy Elfering: Not seen anything new and cool from their press release that’s coming out now, but I am sure they will be coming more online as the time goes on.

Ed Kohler: To me they sound like Apple or iTunes just got incrementally better, now it is not huge news that more content is available in the library today, but overtime, eventually…

Jeremy Elfering: Overtime eventually it will get better.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, when I was at the Video on the Net conference, a guy from Warner Brothers was there and he was talking about how using the DVD format they only actually distribute something like 1,000 titles, because there is limit on how much stuff that you can put on a shelf space.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That make sense, yeah.

Ed Kohler: But, they have like 5,500 titles that they could distribute. They just haven’t figure out how they want to do it, yet. So, it could be through iTunes, it could be through their own service. There is just a ton of stuff they are sitting on, that people are sure would watch if they had a access to it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, it is interesting that’s not even long tail type of stuff, because point of long tails that you got just a ton of stuff that’s very niche and then you sell a few of a lot of stuff, but they have got a lot of stuff that is not very niche, so…

Jeremy Elfering: yeah, Lot of things over there, people so want.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, there is a huge potential outside for them to distribute the stuff online.

Ed Kohler: Right, like you ever know Universal Studios out in California?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, well Florida.

Ed Kohler: OK and the California is where they filmed all of their westerns, where I mean they were just like 24 hours a day, round the clock they were making westerns.

Jeremy Elfering: For a while, that was all they did.

Ed Kohler: Right, that stuff, if it was available, I am sure there would be people everyday who would just fanatics land ove that kind of stuff, they would collect it.

Jeremy Elfering: Exactly, but the problem is even with DVD, as long as if it is available there is still is a smaller portion that normal DVD sales. So, iTunes model is the prefect way, because they just know, they don’t have to worry about supply.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, I will tell why, care no? all of the sudden when I start to carrying that MGM and here is why, according to TalkShoe, Dogling says 007.

Ed Kohler: That’s fine.

Jeremy Elfering: Yeah, very good.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Little Casino Royale going on.

Ed Kohler: Are will people collect movies, if they are downloaded them or people had huge VHS collections in their house and then they went and re-bought those movies in DVD format, now they have huge DVD racks next to their TV in their house, but what happens when things go to digital distribution as they are now.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Hard Drives.

Jeremy Elfering: Hard Drives.

Ed Kohler: Are people going to have like a Hard Drive sitting there like “here is my movie collection”.

Benjamin Higginbotham: My concern is that, OK, so these other mediums can die over time, DVD’s have the shelf life, VHS has a, what is it a seven years shelf life? Something like that?

Jeremy Elfering: Something like that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Before that magnet and then DVD’s have much longer shelf life, but Hard Drives don’t have very long shelf life as compared to say an optical DVD. So, what happens when a Hard Drive crashes and here is the other thing, so you lose one DVD right? If it gets destroyed, I lost my copy of Casino Royale, it is gone for ever, just that one disk, I lose a Hard Drive that has 30 titles on it? That’s expensive.

Jeremy Elfering: That’s very expensive and one that just came up in TalkShoe was flash drives.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, but those have shelf life too. A lot of people think that those just work forever and they don’t. There is a limited number of rewrites on them and they will die over time as well, just like Hard Drives and they are slow. So, there is a mis-conception that flash drives are like you can’t destroy them, there are no moving parts and that’s true, they are harder to destroy, but they do die too and don't get me wrong, optical drives, optical disks also die, but I think the difference is that you are killing one item, so you lose one item as suppose to half of your library, which you probably spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on this library.

Ed Kohler: You certainly could. It looks like one of the studios made a ton of money of just getting people to upgrade their media format from one format to the next. So, people who had VHS they re-bought the same movies in lot of cases in DVD format and they are now, re-buying those same movies again in a digital download format in some cases and it seems like in case of Apple, you could buy the same movie from Apple more than one time, depending on as they start to incrementally increase the resolutions, so…

Jeremy Elfering: Which they are going to have to do

Benjamin Higginbotham: Where Apple seems to be doing a pretty good job of, if you bought the movie the first time and then we make the movie again available. So, for example, let’s do the double resolution AAC no DRM files, if you purchased it for a dollar before and you want to get the new version?

Jeremy Elfering: You only pay for the upgrade.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, you only pay the 30 cents difference between the original version and the new version and they will automatically tell when the new version is available, so apple seems to be doing right by the consumer line.

Ed Kohler: Is that available for on the video side as well?

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t know, they haven’t made any announcements on High Definition video at all. So, sure…

Jeremy Elfering: Everything right now, still the 640x480 or whatever it is.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, 640 wide and then it is 16x9 is 360, so half the resolution of 720p or 480. Dogling says, just back your stuff up, that’s how you solve stuff. Let me ask you this, how many typical consumers do you know that backup their computer?

Jeremy Elfering: Hardly any.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Think of how much data is on that computer, I read an article once it said that, “if you lose the content of your Hard Drive, it is an estimated, $40,000 worth of lost time, data, just information and people don’t want to spend the 150 bucks to get backup drive and they don’t ever actually run the backup software. Some people do, but they are in the minority and I highly doubt that people are going to do the same thing with the media, which is going to just start filling Hard Drives.

Jeremy Elfering: You know how I got my mom to actually start backing up stuff?

Benjamin Higginbotham: You did it automatically, lock me and back up.

Jeremy Elfering: No, she lost her hard-drive three times that’s how we got.

Ed Kohler: It feel enough pain?

Jeremy Elfering: Yeah, there was enough pain.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You IT guys out there, who have to manage these things for your family and whatnot. Logmein backup, it runs automatically, silently in the background and takes care of everything for you. Highly recommended, it is really inexpensive.

Jeremy Elfering: To me, it seems wasteful, if you were to have tons of people who are all backing up the exact same movie, over and over and over again, so if everyone, say you have 500,000 families you have the movie Casino Royale at home and now they all need a remote backup or something, so there are 500,000 unique copies of that sitting at amazonS3 or logme in or whatever, it is like come on what the heck? That’s just getting ridiculous.

Jeremy Elfering: Well, that may be the model for the future as we get better connection, it is not backed up on your computer it is all about the movie, but it is on someone else server.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, but now we go into bandwidth issue.

Jeremy Elfering: Yes.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, which is more rare, which is harder to get, Hard Drive space in the home or bandwidth to the home?

Jeremy Elfering: Right now, it is bandwidth to the home.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, but further foreseeable future its bandwidth to the home as well, I don’t see ISP is actually trying to put fiber into that, with exception of Vorizon who growing pains aside, good for them, with exception of Vorizon, do you see your local Comcast provider or Roadrunner Time Warner or freacking Quest trying to get anything fast into your home or do you see them trying to say we need to apply quality service to the client, we need to dump down your bandwidth, we need to prioritize packets?

Jeremy Elfering: Unfortunately that’s the latter.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right.

Ed Kohler: What about having something where when you buy a movie through iTunes, you can basically buy that movie for life, where if you do destroy your computer, you get rights to re-download, I mean they do that with the music at this point where you can hose your entire system and they will give you a slap on the wrist and makes you re-download thing. So, that’s another way seems like you could or may be you could do it where you have like insurance program, where when you buy the movie for an extra dime more per year or something, if I ever destroy in this by having my Hard Drive or something I can re-download it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Could be.

Jeremy Elfering: Could be, but again iTunes is been good by the consumer and say we know you screwed up or whatever.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, they are not in that front.

Jeremy Elfering: On the music front?

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, they will let you re-download if a new version comes out, that’s higher quality than you originally purchased. You can pay the price difference and get the new version, but if you lost your media, their sticklers on that, they are like “yeah, you should have backed up”. They even put warnings in the software saying “Dude, back this up, we are not letting you download it again”.

Jeremy Elfering: I am incorrect on that I'm sorry

Ed Kohler: They will allow you, but…

Benjamin Higginbotham: You have talk them into it, it is not an easy process, it is like [crying words] and you have to go through that whole thing.

Ed Kohler: Right which is a little pathetic

Jeremy Elfering: Can I bring you into my home would you that for me.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Was that pretty good, you like that?

Jeremy Elfering: That was very entertaining.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I was emoting for everyone.

Ed Kohler: Now, what about on the social side of movies? Where, if you have a DVD collection in your living room and you have some friends come over or may be some people you have never met before and strangers in your house, looking for something talk about? Well, movies are conversation piece, where if you have them all sitting on a Hard Drive, you never lost that? So, is there a social side to that or is there going to be a way where people can real fun?

Jeremy Elfering: Here is the other part is, how often do you trade movies between friends? I just watch movie and here it is pretty good, watch it?

Benjamin Higginbotham: I think you just broke the law?

Ed Kohler: No, you can do that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Really? I don’t know.

Ed Kohler: You can pass around movies.

Benjamin Higginbotham: We better ask the RIAA.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, we tried to ask them about that, in the consumer electronic show, but they weren't at their booth.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, that’s right. That’s a very good point, I think to give around the social thing, you do something like what Apple TV does, with the screen saver, where just start sliding your pictures up the screen. If you got a High Definition television just kick it on and just start showing the album art of the movies, just spike that up and then you can be like “oh, I didn’t know you had both of….” that’s my Sims speak right there. That’s how they speak in this intellect.

Jeremy Elfering: I thought that, that was Charlie Brown.

[Misc. Voice]

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, that’s how you get on that and then Jeremy, mentioned how do you share the media. Well, if you can do that today sort of with an Apple TV, but you have to give me your computer and then I can link to your computer and stream it to my Apple TV that way. Not quite the same as handing me a DVD.

Jeremy Elfering: No, I don’t hand over my computer to many people.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t know how to fix that today.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, it is little bit less social there, but may be it is just things like NetFlix where you can share your watched list and ratings sound systems, where people are can then get it themselves from that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, there are other service again TalkShoe at the rescue, they are mentioning Orb or Sling box will be another one and there are couple of other, but if we are talking about high-def files here, these services are going to crush their bugibers out of the video and that’s it is just not a very good experience when compared to the original file, especially since the original file already has been crushed and stomped on, now you are going to crush and stomp on it again, I don’t want to call it on washable, you could watch it, but the experience is far less than it should be and frankly iTunes should be delivering surround sound 720p, no here is what they should be doing, they should be doing surround sound 1080p videos in the Apple TV should be able to play 1080p content, but it can barely play 720p, so I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.

Jeremy Elfering: We can hope.

Ed Kohler: And there should be a full featured DVD’s with all the extras.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Exactly yeah, I should be able to get all the cool stuff or if they are going to take the extras out, drop the price.

Ed Kohler: Right, yes.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t mind spending four bucks for a video that doesn’t have any extras, because who cares.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I would be want to pay 50 cents less for one that doesn’t come with the Spanish version, for example.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Exactly, anything you can do is, cut down the bitrate, other than making it look like horrible, horrible stuff that they have got right now.

Ed Kohler: Sure, what you think of the features besides television, besides skipping commercials, what do you think is the best feature on TiVo’s today?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, the best feature which is implemented poorly I think is the ability to download video casts automatically, as if it were a just another show. So, my TiVo is downloading Rocket Boom, the New York Times information and couple other shows, right off of TiVo central, is at TiVo cast. I think that’s really cool, but it is implemented very poorly, there are walled gardens around the content, so you can’t grab Technology Evangelist content, if you wanted to and it is Standard Definition only in a series 3, I bought this nine bagillion dollars, series 3 playback device and it is designed for high-def and they are like OK, use your high-def player, here is some standard-def content online, yip-de-freeking-do

Jeremy Elfering: Which is always looks good on your High Definition.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, looks horrible, looks worse than iTunes, it looks just awful and the hardware in the TiVo should be capable of playing back 720p, 24 H264 content how that acronyms?

Jeremy Elfering: That's beautiful.

Ed Kohler: You're really laying it down there.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, laying the acronym down and I would love to see them upgrade the quality of that, because here is what that does, so with the TiVo doing that video cast support, I can download my video cast from my favorite weblogs, be at Scoble or net at night or twit whatever it is, Technology Evangelist of course is assumed, I can download that content, I can also record my High Definition cable content over the air and I can get all of my media on one universal box then it makes the Apple TV, obsolete , why do I need an Apple TV when I can download direct to the device? But, TiVo because of that lack of high-def support they can’t compete and because of those stupid walled gardens.

Ed Kohler: Right, well obviously…

Jeremy Elfering: You might get frustrated a little bit.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah.

Ed Kohler: You should be able to subscribe to any sort of content that will play. I mean if you don’t play in Apple TV why you should be able to play on TiVo.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Which is four times the size and way cool, it is a cooler device. I think we are…

Ed Kohler: It has anice interface.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It is and I think we are just waiting for, I am hoping we are just waiting for a software upgrade to enable the playback of that, but TiVo support a lot of stuff that Apple TV doesn’t do. I can download from Amazon on box, I can do my video cast I can share videos between two TiVo’s now. The personal video cast support, but they screw it all up, they come out with this really cool features and then they just, they are like their engineering team, just gets it. They understand it and then their marketing team blows it and they don’t do any PR stuff on it and then they charge you for the services, stop it, TiVo stop it, throw it in for free.

Ed Kohler: I think on the PR side they are trying to figure out, how they want to define the product overall and it is seems to be doing pretty well as the I can skip commercials, it is a line to people understand and I think that alone will sell it, but adding this additional stuff I think, in some ways confuse the product for a lot of people who don’t know what the heck of video blog is today, so…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Maybe, but we have got Apple TV trying to forge into this market, when TiVo is already been here. What Apple TV is doing isn’t that innovative, we sent out extenders have been around for years, and TiVo has been able to do this for a while, through TiVo casts, but no one is really marketed that or really pushed step, put their best foot forward and said, “look, we can do when Apple comes along and they are like do, seriously none of you get it”. Now, the Apple TV device is not the holy grail quite yet, but if TiVo came through and say, “our device can get you, you local cable service with no commercials or fast forwarding through commercials, you can download video content online, you have to call video cast to say download content online, I think consumers will understand that and it supports everything in High Definition, I think some people would take a very good serious look at the $600 TiVo versus $300 Apple TV and move to a TiVo, they sell more hardware, they sell more services, it is great for TiVo all the way around, but they charge in arm and a leg for every little upgrade that they do.

Ed Kohler: Jeremy, do you have any features that. your favorite TiVo features or same boat as Ben there.

Jeremy Elfering: Well, unfortunately TiVo we are on, we don’t have a lot of these features, because we are doing it through Dish or direct TV, so it is we are not able to get these things on direct TV, which is unfortunate, but it is the way it is and really the biggest thing we can do is you can record and you can skip through commercials.

Ed Kohler: OK, here is the story that happened to a friend of mine the other day, he was doing a pay-per view of a movie through Comcast and I think the strings attached to that were, you had 24 hours to watch the movie and he bought the movie and my wife and I actually came over to his house at that point and they ended up not watching the movie that night, the next night when they went to watch the movie, started to watching it, 10 minutes left in the movie and it timed out and shut off out.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s no good.

Jeremy Elfering: I feel for them, but I have to ask, why do you order a movie, if you are not about to watch it?

Ed Kohler: It will be nice, if their system was just a little bit nicer about it, where if it just switched, you get to watch movie one time through at least. No matter how long it takes you watch it, one time through, why cut them off on that?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, I agree, because something came up, all right, so I ordered this movie and all of sudden my wife has to go to the hospital for some reason and it is just we bring her in, she get taken care of, we comeback home, now we want to finish the movie, I am a heartless person, aren't I?

Ed Kohler: Yes, you are.

Jeremy Elfering: Now, here is a question, why didn’t you just play it and record it?

Benjamin Higginbotham: You can’t do that, you can’t take an OnDemand movie and record it.

Jeremy Elfering: See we don’t have on-demand movies?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, that’s because you are on satellite, you don’t get most of everything.

Jeremy Elfering: Exactly.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, your feature at least.

Jeremy Elfering: Yeah, pretty much.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You get TV at a really low quality, OK there you go.

Ed Kohler: Yes, they end up coughing up to buy the movie a second time, just they could finish it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Jeremy, I just curious, how is that snow storm for you? Was your TV working?

Jeremy Elfering: I believe it was, four days that we had no TV.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, go satellite, yeah.

Ed Kohler: And it might be a problem in Tucson, but in Minnesota you can get snow on the dish.

Jeremy Elfering: Yeah, it wasn’t just like a little snow on the dish that I could go cleanup, it was literally a snow drift four feet high.

Ed Kohler: You need to get a high powered laser pointer next time, so you can just melt that off .

Jeremy Elfering: Melt that off.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Or you know what will work better? Not-satellite.

Ed Kohler: They have cables that will run right into your house these days.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh no, this new thing of technology. You could even, here is the concept, here is an idea, download your media online. I know I have just blown your mind.

Jeremy Elfering: I know and there are some media that I do download online, but beside the point.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right.

Ed Kohler: Well, let’s wrap it for the day, I think we have bounced around enough topics for the day and we call the week here, but thanks to the people in TalkShoe for joining in and participating in the chat there, we appreciate that and we will see you all again on Monday. So, thank you.