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Viodi View Newsletter – January 5th 2004 Issue
Indie Telco Local Content Workshop Advertisement
In This Issue: Persistent Encryption, Franchises 101…..
- Sunny Wireless Days
- Time for Persistent Encryption?
- See You at CES
- Franchise This or Not?
- Ironman CEO In Our Midst
- Book Review – Digital Videomaker
- Are You Board?
- Another Good Reason to Move to Roseville
- TheKorner – Drunk Computers?
If Mondays are the worse day of the week, then the week after New Years must be the worst week of the year. The gray sky of winter combined with too much New Year cheer is enough to slow down anyone. Fortunately for me, I will be enjoying the balmy sunshine of the Phoenix environs by the time you get this issue of the Viodi View. Well, I will be in Phoenix, but probably will not see much of the Arizona sunshine from the inside of the hotel conference center.
Entone to Sponsor Local Content Workshop @ BobComm
Operators Attend for Free
Entone will be generously lending its support to the Local Content Workshop to be held Thursday, January 20th at Mid-State Engineering’s BobComm conference. This workshop will feature a subset of what is normally presented in an entire day and represents a value of up to $249 (the normal cost of the workshop). Free Registrations for this event are limited and are reserved for telco operators. To reserve a free slot, please either send us an email at [email protected] or call us at 408 551-0320. For more information on this workshop, please check out http://www.viodi.com/local/
This workshop is a must attend event for any telco that had deployed or is considering deployment of video services.
I will be there covering and recording NTCA’s Wireless Symposium. This event features over 30 experts who will be discussing the latest wireless topics including emerging standards, such as WiMax, regulatory concerns and applications. This two and a half day conference is a great value, highly recommended and is applicable to not only independent telcos, but to anyone with an interest in applying wireless technologies to solve real world communications challenges.
Time for Persistent Encryption?
While we are on the subject of NTCA, I had a chance to listen to their December 16th webinar regarding persistent encryption. Andy Mathieson of encryption provider, Latens Systems, and Rob Lingle, Vice President of Engineering for TVN, were the featured speakers. To learn about TVN’s idea to create an encryption methodology that could facilitate the rollout of VOD over multiple platforms, click here.
From Phoenix, I will be jetting to Las Vegas to moderate a panel, the Telco-Video Entertainment Partnership. I am looking forward to this as the panelists include Jonathan Hurd of Adventis, Derek Kuhn of Alcatel, Mark Turner of British Telecom, Jonathan Symonds of ICTV, Phil Corman of Microsoft and Jeff Weber of SBC. I look forward to learning more about SBC and 2 Wire’s announcement to build a home entertainment applicance based on DSL. I also hope to learn more about SBC’s franchising strategy at this event, which is most likely tied closely to the aforementioned appliance.
As mentioned a few Viodi View issues ago, Howard Shapiro of Bennet, Bennet and Bennet, PLCC addressed some alternatives to franchising over a year ago at the IP Video conference at Telecom ’03. His presentation foreshadowed some of the potential strategies that larger telcos could employ to speed deployments of video. We have managed to pull Howard’s presentation from the archives and are making it available for the next couple of weeks on the Viodi View; think of it as a slightly late, Christmas gift from your friends at Viodi. Click here to view and listen to Howard’s insightful presentation.
On a related note, Carrie Bennet, the CEO of Bennet and Bennet, PLCC was recently profiled by Forbes magazine regarding her success at completing several Ironman competitions. Forbes did an online video interview with Bennet last month. In that interview, she discusses how the things she learned from training for and competing in the Ironman competition helps her deal with the challenges of running her business. Click here to check out the video.
Book Review – Digital Videomaker
One of the upsides to time-off is the chance to catch up on reading. This year I had the chance to sit down with the book Digital Videomaker – Guide to Digital Video and DVD Production. This book will be of interest to anyone who is involved with websites or cable television. Click here to read my review on this book and why it will be the text we use for the Local Content Workshops in 2005.
One of the benefits of the holiday break was a great deal of windshield time as my lovely spouse navigated the treacherous wintry roads between the rainy Bay Area and the snow-packed mountains of the Lake Tahoe region. I utilized this “downtime” to work on a new layout for the Viodi View. The graphics aren’t pretty, yet, but the initial goal is to make the site a bit easier to use (Thanks to Roger Bindl for the help with CSS)..
The major change to the layout is the addition of the menu on the left hand side. This menu will be expanding over the next few months. The significant additions are the “Viodi Forums” and “Multimedia Search” sections. The Viodi forums are open to club.viodi members and Local Content Workshop alumni. The Multimedia Search section opens a page that discusses a unique opportunity to license a proven multimedia search engine that is receiving 3 million page views per month.
Another Good Reason to Move to Roseville
While enroute to Lake Tahoe last week, I had the chance to see the SureWest video system for, amazingly, the first time. They truly get what needs to be done and they are pushing ahead to stay competitive. I guess then I should not have been surprised to see their announcement on Monday that they are now offering 3 Mb/s down and 768 kb/s Internet service for $42.95 per month. Off the top of my head, this seems to be very competitive from a dollar per bits measure.
An unnamed source sent me the following note about seven months ago. Given that New Years is a time when many of us indulge in the consumption of adult beverages it seemed like this tale of good wine gone bad would be an appropriate way to ring in the Korner for 2005. What you are about to read reminds me of a very ugly incident that involved yours truly, a bottle of champagne, an airplane galley and a notebook – that story will have to wait for another time. On to my friend’s story.
“About three weeks ago I got up from my business laptop to take a break. My son asked if he could surf. I said ok for the next 30 minutes. I had left a full glass of wine beside my laptop. He managed to knock it over and spill it all into my laptop that instantly responded by shutting down as in DEAD! As our entire business was situated on this laptop I was initially devastated. But I pulled the laptop out of its docket, removed the hard drive and battery and noted they were dry. Whew! I can at least recover all the data from my hard drive if I have to get another computer.
So then I decided to take that sucker apart to clean it (a Dell Insperion 5000 Laptop). After about 49,000 screws I had it almost apart except for seemingly one screw or Chinese secret somewhere. I had it open like a sandwich (about an inch open when pried) but in the very middle I could not find what was holding it together. I spent hours trying to figure what the %$#@&! was keeping this thing from coming apart. Honestly I came close to just physically ripping the sob apart…but did manage to contain myself.
Then I had a revelation. I was trying to take this thing apart in order to clean it out from the wine. I had already rationalized the computer had protectively shut down due to leakage current going every where internally so it was probably ok if I could just clean it out. Letting the thing dry out was not good enough as I had tested dry wine on the kitchen counter top with a volt/ohm meter and the sticky aftermath was conductive. So the revelation was, well I didn’t need the thing entirely apart to hand clean it, I had it opened and exposed internally enough to maybe hose it out. I knew water would not hurt it if power was not applied. All I needed was to make sure it was dry after the hosing. Right?
So I wedged the computer out to expose internally what I could and threw it into the dishwasher for a full 45 minute wash cycle (no soap). My wife was flabbergasted and thought I was nuts. What the hell could it hurt as it was dead anyway.
After the dish washing I placed it on our coffee table and turned the directly above over head ceiling fan on high and let it run for 24 hours to dry out. After inspecting it to insure it was dry I then put the battery and hard drive in, placed it in its docket and fired it up.
VIOLA! The hard drive was spinning! Then my keyboard flashed recognition lights! Then the hard drive started gurgling and chugging and gathering its brains! Then the screen begins to light up! Wait until I tell everyone about this! They won’t believe it!
But wait! What’s wrong with that screen – all red and with strips up and down! Wait! What’s that frying sound I’m beginning to hear? Argghhh! The LCD screen has water in it!
Let me tell you about my brand new computer – an IBM emachine desktop and a beauty of a flat panel 17” display. It’s pretty cool and you can’t spill wine into it.”
The link above leads to the USAID web site, which has a listing of non-government agencies that it is working with to bring relief to the victims of last week’s Tsunami and Earthquakes. The Red Cross has an interesting program whereby people can donate loose change through Coinstar machines. They estimate that $65 million could be raised if people who live within 2 miles of a Coinstar machine bring in a dollar of loose change.
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IP Video @
Telecom 04 Recordings
Available Now
Listen to and see what you missed at the IP Video @ Telecom 04 conference. For less than $100, you and your staff can view the conference over and over again from the comfort of your own office. With over 20 speakers talking on subjects ranging from engineering to regulatory to marketing, there are bound to be nuggets for everyone on your team. To order, contact Sean Sullivan at [email protected].
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