Firmware 1.3, (now with no skipping) announced!

Finally ready to announce! Cesar has the semi-official blogosphere anouncement...

http://zuneinsider.com/

Huge thanks to everyone for you patience on skipping zune marketplace content. Just...a...little...longer...

cool community games

Flying to Manhattan. Delta has a great touch screen gaming system with games that let you play against other passengers by seat number! spent some happy minutes playing trivia against others, especially that loser in 31c...

What's the hard drive in apple TV for?

Cringely is convinced there's a deadly secret in the HDD in the Apple TV. He has a nice, complicated, techno-p2p theory about what they're up to.

I'm pretty sure he's wrong. Part of it is that Apple doesn't generally build those kind of cutting edge solutions. But more to the point, there's a simpler explanation.

Apple did a bunch of experiments and discovered that most networks can't really really reliably serve up video, especially if you get to HD content. While he's right that video at 1.5Mbps should be able to stream across wifi (in theory 11 or 40+ Mbps throughput), in practice there are problems.

The Mbps rating on Wifi is an average, under ideal circumstances. It drops dramatically when you are making popcorn in the microwave. Ditto when the computer or the Apple TV isn't in the same room as the router. There are many similar problems. Plus, not all users want to keep their computer on 24/7 so they can listen to music!

So Apple TV has a nice feature - you can sync music and videos to the 40GB HDD and not worry about any of the above. the videos trickle over as you get them, and they're ready on the local HDD when you want them. Nice.

This has a single main downside - cost. The $299 apple TV is a tough sell for most users at that price, and the HDD is a big chunk of the cost of goods. I think this will be a major limiting factor on it's success, but was probably the right choice for making the solution go mainstream.

Robertson unit predictions

Feeling cheeky today, so....

As a capacity planner, it turns out Michael Robertson leaves something to be desired. 50,000 units, indeed.

The ancient ones...

Paul Thurrott comments on Koleman Strumpf's recent article on file sharing and music sales:

I have my own theories about faltering music sales, most of which are based
around the notion that most music sold today simply stinks.

While I largely share his opinion, I also humbly remember my parent's comments on my music in the late seventies and early eighties, and can't escape the alternative hypothesis - I'm becoming an old fart.

I've talked to Koleman a couple of times, and while I find his methods sound his results are so unbelievable that it's hard for me to fathom. While I agree that a vast majority of piracy doesn't represent lost sales, it's hard to imagine piracy doesn't affect sales at all.

I'd suggest that his research in part shows that there is a vast amount of piracy going on outside of OpenNAP p2p services (cd burning, campus computer networks, portable USB hard drives...) that "swamps" the temporal effects of those services.

Walmart Video Store

I spent some time today on the walmart video store. Walmart has an impressive collection from the Six major studios – considerably more than iTunes. They also have TV, but that collection is less impressive. Overall, it’s a strong entry with some cute, innovative ideas. I particularly liked:

• Movie Match, a series of 6 sliders that filter the entire collection
• Movie Connection – a nice little java applet that lets you browse connections in a semantic net.

In the end, I imagine this can't really get big adoption without a mainstream-ready living room story (although you can use it with a Media Center and Xbox 360, which is a nice solution).

Movies are WMV, in the following formats:

• PC: 640 X 480 maximum resolution, 30 fps, 1,500-1,700 kbps average bit rate.
• Portable: 320 X 240 maximum resolution, 30 fps, 500-810 kbps average bit rate.

Jobs memo

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

Have to tip my hat to Jobs...but not for the reasons you're thinking. Many will applaud him for leading the way, for being against DRM, etc... but that's not really the point.

Strategically, he shows maturity in realizing that DRM hasn't been that great an asset, and that the iTunes Music Store hasn't been that successful on a per ipod basis (see posts below). More importantly he is bowing to the changing winds in the industry.

"Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold."

Not every business leader that can come to this kind of realization and proactively abandon a key part of their strategy. More on this later.

It's also nice to be Steve, who as the sole leader of the company can speak as frankly as he does here.