Last night on Top Gear, one of the segments involved a review of some fancy European car or another, I forget what kind. It’s not really important; I just watch the review segments of Top Gear to hear Jeremy Clarkson be snarky and because they’re in between the really fun parts of the show. What’s important for our purposes today is that the car in question had umpteen zillion gadgets and geegaws and electronic whatchamacallits, including a central computer brain controlled with a big chrome knob on the center console, about where the toggle switches for the machine guns were in the Aston Martin in Goldfinger.

That got me to thinking about how much more fiddly and sophisticated cars have gotten in the last 20 years or so, and how little they really changed in the 20 or so years before that, comparatively speaking.
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Lately you have have been seeing promo spots for a new TV series Scarlet, which looked like some kind of spy thriller with a female lead, similar to Alias. I’d been catching the spots mainly as a promo inserted into some TiVoCast content such as The Onion. The spots looked fairly high budget with explosions, etc. I was actually thinking of checking out the show just to see what it was like. It has a website and even an entry in IMDB. Here’s one of the versions of the teaser:

Well, there is no such series. It was all an elaborate hoax that is part of a marketing effort for a new line of HDTVs from LG Electronics called, of course, Scarlet. See, it is a ‘TV Series’ as in ‘a series of TVs’. Clever, but at the same time I feel kind of disappointed that I was misled. It feels dishonest to me, and leaves me with a bad feeling about LG. Certainly not what they were going for, I’m sure.

How do you feel about such deceptive viral marketing tactics? Did you get taken by Scarlet?

TiVo’s latest newsletter…
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Sling Media today released SlingPlayer Mobile updates for Windows Mobile Smartphone, Windows Mobile Professional/PPC, and Symbian S60. There new versions are 1.6, 1.6, and 1.01, respectively. While not updated, the Palm OS client is still available as well. US versions of the clients are available here, and UK/International versions are available here. The new versions are a free upgrade for existing register users, or a USD$29.99 purchase for new users. You can try the client for 30 days before purchasing to make sure you’re satisfied before purchasing. Of course, you’ll need a Slingbox for the client to connect to as well.

The new releases add support for additional phones such as the Treo 500v, Nokia N95 8GB, Samsung i760, and Nokia N82, as well as improved video streaming on select phones such as the Sprint/HTC Mogul. Additional changes include support for additional set-top boxes, additional channel logos, and various ‘under the hood’ tweaks.

Symbian UIQ and Blackberry clients are still planned for later this year.

Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Sling Media, and I took over as the beta manager for these three beta programs on April 7th. If you’re interested in beta testing register and be sure to keep your profile updated, especially the ‘Test Platforms’ section.

There have been a number of DVR and STB features announced as different vendors try to outdo each other. Features such as on-screen Caller ID, Multi-Room VOD, Start Over, etc.

So, what features are you looking forward to? What features are you jealous of? What do you really want out of your STB/DVR that no one is offering or announced?

The Australian Financial Review is reporting some new TiVo Australia news. Despite rumors that the Australian launch of TiVo was at risk, AFR is reporting that Seven Network still plans to launch TiVo service before their Olympics coverage begins in August. However, due to feedback from retailers such as Harvey Norman, they’ll be dropping the monthly subscription fee. Seven had planned to charge AUS$10-$12 per month, but now will be reportedly ’slashing’ that - though the new fee hasn’t been announced. The unit itself is still expected to sell for around AUS$500.

Due to the reduction in the monthly fee, Seven has had to renegotiate their deal with TiVo. That renegotiation contributed to the slip in the release date. Oddly the article also says “It is also understood Seven will not charge TiVo buyers for software upgrades for the first three years.”, which is strange since TiVo has never changed for software updates and it’d be odd for Seven to charge for them while charging a monthly fee. The original plan of using Internet telephony company Engin to handle distribution of the TiVo appears to have been dropped.

Picked up from Gizmodo Australia.

The startling fact that a commenter recognized the name of my old employer Leading Edge in the last Technosophy reminded me of this little piece, which I originally wrote up for another web board some years ago. I should note in advance that we did have some competent servicing dealers and resellers - some were in fact quite good - so if you, by chance, worked for a Leading Edge dealer in the past, you shouldn’t take personally the part where I take cheap shots at them.

(It should also be noted that when I wrote this, Compaq was not merely a brand of Hewlett-Packard, but was in fact a vast manufacturing concern in its own right which had recently finished dismembering and devouring Digital Equipment Corporation.)
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The recent TiVo software update to 9.3 had a bug for those TiVo users still using antenna. If you had your Series2 TiVo set for just Antenna or Satellite & Antenna and you did a ‘Repeat Guided Setup’ after receiving the new software, you’d be stuck. There is a procedure to unstick the unit if this happens.

TiVo is now pushing 9.3c out to Series2 users, with a priority for those who have antenna as one of their sources, with a bug fix for this problem.

Thanks to Dave Zatz for the tip via email.

ARCHOS has long been a leader in the PMP market with devices like their model 605 and 705 PMPs. And they’ve added some innovative features to their products, such as the ability to copy shows from DISH Network ViP622/722 DVRs. Lesser known is their TV+ DVR. The TV+ is a Ethernet/WiFi media player and DVR in one box, and the software seems to be based on their PMP software.

Now Archos is adding place-shifting to the TV+. Called ‘TVportation’ it will be a $49.99 software plug-in for the TV+, or free if the TV+ is registered on the ARCHOS web site. ARCHOS claims it will allow streaming of content from the TV+ to the ARCHOS 605 WiFi and ARCHOS 705 WiFi PMPs, as well as PCs, laptops and smartphones. You can also use an ARCHOS 605 WiFi or ARCHOS 705 WiFi as the streaming source, but you need to leave it docked in its base station. (So if you have two you can have one at home as the source and one as the client.) Details on the smartphone support is thin, saying only “compatible with Symbian later this spring”. Though the demo video on the website shows it running on a Windows Mobile Palm Treo.

A little exploring shows they have downloads for Windows Mobile 5 & 6 both Professional and Smartphone as well as Symbian Series60. But most curious is that all of the links are right to Monsoon Multimedia’s HAVA clients - on Monsoon’s servers! At first glance it looks like they’re leeching the clients, but perhaps Monsoon and ARCHOS did some kind of deal. Still, it looks sketchy.

There’s a lengthy demo video up on YouTube:

From the video it is clear that one client at a time is supported, so you can’t have multiple devices streaming from one TV+.

Spotted in EngadgetHD.

Disclaimer: I’m currently employed by Sling Media, which produces the Slingbox series of place-shifting products. And I suppose TVportation is ostensibly a competitor to Sling.

Forgive me for being skeptical, but I’ve been hearing about holographic storage, and how it is the next big thing, for at least ten years now. I’ve even made a few posts about it here in the past. So far not one of the announcements or pronouncements have panned out.

Well, here’s another one, InPhase Technologies has said it will announce its holographic storage product, Tapestry, in May. Since that’s a fairly concrete date, and May is just a week away, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that a real product will be available. However, from The Register is reporting it isn’t going to exactly change the world. The tech specs are respectable - 130mm x 3.5mm plastic discs (just a wee bit larger than the 120mm x 2.2mm of CD, DVD, and Blu-ray) in a cartridge (somewhat like early Blu-ray prototypes) which store up to 300GB using a blue laser. And InPhase claims they’ll hold the data for 50 years. Read/write speeds are 20MB/sec, which is respectable - that’s 160Mbps, while 4x Blu-ray is 144Mbps and can store up to 50GB. However, Tapestry media will cost $180 per disc in volume - and the drives will cost $18,000!

Future iterations of Tapestry will supposedly push the specs to 800GB at 80MB/sec, and then 1.6TB at 120MB/sec. Perhaps, but they really need to bring those prices down if they want to sell any of these.

It doesn’t even make sense from a corporate backup perspective. As The Register points out, LTO-3 tapes, which are in common usage, hold 400GB and already has 80MB/sec transfer rates. And the newer LTO-4 tapes hold 800GB with a 120MB/sec transfer rate. Tapes may not have a 50 year shelf life, but most entities don’t need to store their data that long. Tape isn’t random access like disc, but that’s generally not a requirement for backups. And when it is using a hard disk system for near-line backup and tape for off site and long term backups makes more sense technologically and economically.

Also, tape is not only far less expensive, but it is re-usable. The Tapestry discs are WORM - Write Once, Read Many - in layman’s terms, just like a CD-R, DVD-R, or BD-RE. Anyone want a $180 coaster when a burn goes awry? And even without that risk, it isn’t suitable for backup systems which tend to reuse the same media over and over. So this is really just for long-term archiving.

As a concept it is interesting, but it sounds like it has a long way to go before it finds common use in commercial applications, and even longer before it appears in consumer goods.

Spotted in The Register.