Subscription Music Service from iTunes

There are some reputable rumours beginning to be heard that Apple is in discussions with the music publishers to convert iTunes to a subscription music model, instead of the current, purchase-your-music-one-song-at-a-time model.

Would you pay an extra $100 with your iPod purchase for unlimited access to music downloads from iTunes?  I think that I would.  It would still be protected music from Apple, so that means iPod and iTunes only, no other music players are invited.  This would drive even more iPod sales at the expense of other models.  If this were to proceed, other music players may go to court to try and force Apple to open up their restricted music formats so that they can be stored on other music players as well.

I think the service would be only for music.  They are still trying to figure out how to price video, so it s too early to jump to a flat rate or subscription model for video.

I believe that subscription based services for remotely hosted streaming media will be one of the dominant ways that we access entertainment in the future.  For Apple, they can consolidate their hold on their online media position.  In the end, the iTunes store is more important than the iPod players – the mechanics of the players can always be reproduced, but once people are conditioned to returning to your store for purchases, then that is a much more powerful tie!

Internet Content on TV

I believe that the most important home entertainment feature that is coming in the near future is access to internet based content, both audio and video.  It will be years before high-definition discs like Blu-Ray saturate people homes (the fact that prices have increased since HD DVD withdrew from the market sends a poor signal to consumers as well), and I think that the vast majority of people don’t feel they need anything of finer quality than that.  In fact, plenty of people are very pleased with their upconverting DVD players, and they are happy to spend $10 on a DVD instead of $25 on a Blu-Ray disc.

So to me, it’s access to content that becomes more important, once the quality of the content is “good enough” for most of the market.  Streaming audio content, either from the thousands of streaming internet radio stations or subscription and free services such as Rhapsody, Pandora and Slacker ( to name just a few of over a dozen) is easily accessible with your computer, but now we’re seeing new devices that send that content right into your home audio and video equipment, no computer needed. For example the Netgear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer is a dedicated appliance that plugs into your home theatre equipment and has a very elegant interface that allows you to access not only local audio and video content on your own home network, but streaming internet radio content and RSS feeds.

What’s the Number One source for internet video?  YouTube, of course ( I make no comment on quality, just quantity…). The Netgear also offers direct access to YouTube from it’s main menus – no computer and web browser required.

A new company, Myka (www.myka.tv) just announced  a new digital media box that does what no one else has dared to do until now – download BitTorrent files directly to it’s own internal hard drive.  Once you are in the BitTorrent world, there is access to millions of both protected and unprotected (but mostly unprotected) audio and video files of current TV shows, movies, anything!  And now that you can download them to a connected box that has high-definition HDMI and component video outputs, Myka would like you to do away with the computer, access BitTorrent directly from their on-screen interface and treat BitTorrent content like you would your stored music, CDs and DVDs.

There are also a number of specialized internet services for downloading legal video over a very high quality interface – Joost (www.joost.com), miro (www.getmiro.com), Veoh (www.veoh.com), as well as the websites from the TV networks and channels themselves.  Currently these are only available through your computer, but they are set up so that the content on them can be accessed by using simple directional and menu controls that you use on a remote control.  It’s only a matter of (a short) time before there is an interface to access these internet video networks through your home theatre – my guess is a Microsoft Windows Media Centre interface will be first.  It would be just as simple to set one up for Apple TV, but since Apple is trying to sell the same content that you would be able to view for free, it’s not in their best interests so I don’t see it happenning soon (remember that it’s the iTunes music and video store that is the true valuable property that Apple owns, not the players that access it).

If it’s not Windows Media Centre, then perhaps the Xbox360 or PS3 – a device families already have on their home theatres, and another market that Apple currently has no entry into.

I don’t know if Myka will work – no one actually has a product yet, and it should be a good show as copyright infringement claims start being tossed around.  But whether Myka, Netgear, Apple TV, Joost or Windows Media Centre, I think this is the future.  I think that within 3 years you’ll be able to use your home theatre to get at the content that you watch today on your cable box and your computer.  I don’t know what that means for the cable companies when you can access the video content online at high quality for no charge, but that’s for another article.

Home Theatre Construction – Soundproofing

So you have this great space in your basement that is perfect for your planned home theatre. How do you keep the sound inside? Good soundproofing not only helps keep peace in your home, it allows you to configure your room for better sound because it’s under your control, not leaking out.

STEP 1 – GENERAL CONSTRUCTION

I’m assuming that you aren’t planning to line your room with 6″ of concrete. If you are, congratulations – you can skip to the end of this guide!

The best approach is to construct a “room within a room”, separating your theatre room from the rest of the house. This will do the best job of preventing sound from the house interfering with the theatre, and vice versa. If you’ve seen an unfinished basement or lived through a renovation, then you know that the interior walls of a home are actually very simple constructions of vertical 2×4 studs screwed securely into a 2×4 or 2×6 top and bottom piece. Reasonably rigid, lots of open space to run electrical, plumbing, TV and other audio/video cabling, very simple tools required and lumber available at every local home improvement store. If you choose, you can have 2 stud walls built, one inside the other, with the interior stud wall being the actual interior dimensions of your home theatre room. Sound that tries to get out through the walls can’t, because there is no direct contact between the inside and the outside wall. If you want to improve the seal even more, then insulate between the 2 walls.

This works well, but isn’t always practical. You will lose a significant amount of interior space building an additional wall on all sides, plus you are essentially doubling the construction cost – time and materials.

Next approach is known as “staggered stud” construction. Instead of the more common 2×4 top and bottom plate, use a wider 2×6 or even more top and bottom plate, and you stagger each stud as you build. One stud against the inside edge, the next against the outside edge, all the way around. In essence you are building separate interior and exterior walls, just on a common top and bottom frame. For even better soundproofing, insulate between these studs with standare fibreglass bats of insulation, or you can use any number of acoustic blocking materials that come in large, heavy sheets. These materials are usually very dense and heavy, the density being one of the characteristics that allows them to do a good job blocking the sound.

These 2 methods are the most common wall construction methods for introducing good soundproofing right at the framing stage. Next step, once you’ve built these, is how to mount drywall and seal other openings to do an even better job, but that’s for another post.

If you are interested in more details, you can also go to one of the best resources on the web for all things audio video and theatre related, www.avsforum.com  The extent of resources on this site is staggering, and if you put in enough time then you can be your own expert, or at least be familiar when these topics come up in respect of your own theatre plans.

Goodbye Blu-Ray Deals

Notice what’s gone missing now that HD DVD has declared defeat and bowed out of the market? Competition, that’s what! Remember those promotional deals with 5 Blu-Ray discs (or 7 HD DVD) if you purchased a player? Gone, probably never to return. And there are far fewer sales for individual titles as well.

Remember all those home theatre package deals from the large retailers with a free Blu-Ray player with the purchase of a large-screen HDTV (especially common with Samsung packages)? Almost all gone, certainly much less common.

Remember the talk about the sub-$200 Blu-Ray player to compete with HD DVD? Gone – you can expect prices for the players to stay high for another 12 months. And when the inexpensive player does come out, don’t expect it to be able to play all the advanced interactivity features that Blu-Ray is promising. Those features are choking every Blu-Ray player on the market, regardless of cost, except for one – the PlayStation 3.

With no competition, Blu-Ray will try to maintain prices and margin to make back some of the money they lost during their battle with HD DVD. Consumers will still be confused, since the vast majority believe that DVDs are high-definition and look just fine on their HDTV. A confused consumer will not jump to pay more money for a product they don’t feel that they need, so look for continued slow growth from Blu-Ray.

If you’re looking for a player, the PlayStation 3 is still the way to go. If you want a good deal, pick up a HD DVD player and as many HD DVD discs that you can, all at greatly reduced prices. The HD DVD discs will look fantastic, and the player will work as an excellent upconverting player for standard DVDs.

What Makes a Good Home Theatre?

You can spend a few thousand dollars or a few hundred thousand to set up a home theatre, but how do you spend wisely?  Where do you get the most benefit for your investment?  This is particularly important for our clients, who usually have tight budgets to deal with and have to spend wisely.

First, and usually the most ignored, is THE ROOM ITSELF!   Not the equipment, not the audio and video, but how you set up the room.  This covers a few areas – comfortable seats and sight lines so that you can enjoy yourself, and the acoustics of the room itself.

If people are aware of acoustics at all, they often think of it as something that only the most high-end home theatres will deal with, to allow them to get the most performance out of their very expensive equipment.  In fact, it’s exactly the other way around.  The better equipment that you have, the more brute force you can use to overcome any acoustic problems that your room has.  The vast majority of the rest of us have more modest equipment that may not have the reserves of power to overcome a poorly designed room, and so we need to pay more attention to it.

If you’ve ever gone into a properly acoustically designed theatre, you can “hear” it as soon as you walk in and close the door behind you.  The echoes that you hear in other rooms are uncontrolled, an effect that you don’t even realize is there until you walk into a room without them.   You can do a fast experiment in almost any room – close your eyes, listen and you will build a mental picture of how large the room is. School gyms, classrooms and auditoriums with hard surfaces and lots of echoes, so that it’s difficult to follow the conversation of someone even 10 feet away from you.  Moderate echoes from a living room with high ceilings, maybe one that is open to a staircase leading up to a second floor.  The close sounds of a bedroom.  You can hear the size of these rooms.  But a well designed theatre is acoustically neutral.  You can’t hear how large the room is.  There is some natural amount of echo or reverberation – you need some or your room sounds dead and listening can be strenuous – but words and conversations are clear and distinct and easy to listen to.  It’s kind of a blank, neutral palette, a good background for whatever audio and video you want to overlay on top of it.  How do you achieve this?  The right kind of floor and wall treatments which absorb the echoes that you don’t want, and make it easy to hear the sounds that you do.  Bass traps, which control low frequency sounds that can help create standing waves which can cause areas of higher or lower volume within the same room

So the first step, is a well designed room.  The second step is trying to achieve acoustic isolation.  This is not so much so that you aren’t bothered by the noise in the rest of your home, but so that the home isn’t bothered by you!  Your theatre will definitely be the loudest room in your home – if it isn’t then you must have alot more kids than I do.  There are a number of ways to help isolate your theatre from the rest of the house – double studding the walls, staggered stud construction, double drywall with “green glue” (an acoustic compound that you spread between drywall layers), RSIC channel construction, or a good 6 inches of poured concrete.

More on this later…

Blu-Ray Wins – Now What?

For the past 2 years, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have been fighting over which would become the next digital video format. This was mostly a fight that played out in press releases, as the VAST majority of consumers decided that their collection of regular DVDs looked pretty good, even on a large screen. And until there was a single next generation format there was no point in purchasing a new disc player and new discs when the odds were 50% that their purchase would be a technological dead end.

There was no doubt that either of these formats looked a lot better than standard DVDs (I’d even argue that HD DVD was the better format, with better disc players on the market, but that doesn’t really matter anymore). And now that Blu-Ray will be the high-definition video format, I can recommend it to customers without worrying that some other format will replace it, at least for the next 5 years. Except…

There is still only 1 decent Blu-Ray player on the market – the Sony PlayStation3. It’s more of a comment about how poor the rest of the players are rather than how good the PS3 is. Other players take well over a minute to start up to the point where they will start to display a disc, which feels like an hour when you are tapping the remote waiting for your big screen to light up. Many of the othe players in the market are not powerful enough to take advantage of all the interactive features that Blu-Ray has been promoting. Many other Blu-Ray players will not play all Blu-Ray discs. Many Blu-Ray players do not support the new lossless audio formats which were introduced with Blu-Ray and HD DVD, and which can make a HUGE difference in the quality of the surround sound experience with these discs. And, worst of all, many Blu-Ray players cannot be upgraded to support all these features. That is where the PS3 is different – it’s much more powerful than your average desktop computer, and that gives it enough processing power to support all different audio and video features, and as well it has the built-in capability for upgrades over it’s integrated network connection.

And the other point is, how much longer will the discs matter? People of my age and older still think of entertainment content, whether music or video, as something they own – racks of CDs and DVDs, boxes (usually covered with dust) of cassettes (and mix tapes!), LPs, etc. Meanwhile, what is important to the younger generation isn’t ownership, but access. Why buy a single CD for $10 when for about the same amount per month you can access a few million tracks from Rhapsody streaming music service? Why watch TV when you can download episodes when you want them from iTunes, or even better watch the shows on the network web sites for free by the next day? DVD-quality movie streaming over the internet is just beginning to creep into the edge of awareness of the majority of consumers.

In my opinion, the next step should be integrating a small local network box that can cache a selection of movies, along with an interface that can be manipulated with your home theatre remote, or even better a software interface that will work with something like Windows Vista Media Centre, Apple Front Row, or Linux MCE. Once all your digital media can be manipulated from the same location, what difference does it matter how it’s stored or where it’s stored?

Distribution of “your” content is all digital, meaning it’s send over a network until it’s decoded into audio and video right when it reaches your display. And the “network” can be inside your home, or extending out to the Internet.

So what’s the difference if the disc is in your home or not? Blu-Ray is probably the end of the line for an actual disc that you can pick up and own. There is already enough licensing restrictions built into the format that, if all those features are turned on, there is minimal advantage to actually owning the disc anyway – there are restrictions on where and how it can be played, how often and what quality the output is. And if there is no advantage to ownership, why tie up your money is a collection that you can’t use freely? You’re better off paying for access rather than ownership.

So enjoy Blu-Ray. You’ll probably never see anything like it again.

Zedware on the radio

Zedware was on live internet radio today here in Toronto, Canada at the studio of thatradio.com. Click on the link below – you can listen to the archived broadcast if you have a free hour or download the podcast and listen at your convenience

Zedware On The Radio

Listen in to the show dated February 4

We had a solid hour to discuss some new trends in home entertainment including the following topics…

1. If you’ve never considered a projector for your home theatre, YOU SHOULD!
2. A typical affordable configuration for a connected home, including a theatre room and whole-house audio
3. What customers are asking to include – game systems and iPod connections
4. How the technology of a new generation of products is enabling tremendous performance and features and more affordable prices than ever before.

I was interviewed by John Klotz as part of his Toronto Talks seminar series. Usually John interviews financial professionals but he wanted something a little different today, and I was glad to accept his offer.

The success of the Nintendo Wii

What is the most popular game system for my kids and their friends? The Nintendo Wii, with nothing else even close. Now, since my children are all under 10, they certainly are right in Nintendo’s prime market – Nintendo has always been the most popular game system for young children.

What’s interesting now is watching how the children and their parents are playing together. The intuitive Nintendo controller encourages easy and improptu participation, regardless of age. The most popular new games are non-violent and participatory, for example Guitar Hero and Rock Band (coming in the spring for Wii).

The 2 other current game consoles (Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3) both offer higher resolution, better sound, network connections and much more power, but Nintendo lets them compete between themselves for the relatively small hard core game market – primarily male and young. Instead, Nintendo starts with their traditional base of kids, and expands it to include casual gamers like their parents, or even their grandparents, potentially a much larger market. On top of that, Nintendo makes a profit from each system while Microsoft and Sony lose hundreds from each console and hope to make it back on software.