Smart Home Archives - Page 41 of 43

Staten Island Residents Get PhotoShowTV

Time Warner Cable quietly launched PhotoShowTV in Staten Island last week. I say quietly because it appears there was very little press coverage. Granted the service was already operating in Hawaii, but this is the first time PhotoShowTV has been available on the mainland, so to speak. And it’s a very cool service.

SimpleStar’s PhotoShow has been around for quite a while as a simple tool for creating photo slideshows with music, graphics and even some animations. (Comcast subscribers can download the Deluxe version on Comcast.net) The TV part comes in with the combination of PhotoShow and Time Warner’s VOD service. Staten Island TWC subscribers can now create PhotoShows online and then submit them for public viewing on a local VOD station. In other words, what you create in your living room can be watched on Grandma’s TV screen across town.

It’s Fandango-tastic!

A million years ago, and for a very brief period of time, I did some public relations work with the Comcast High-Speed Internet division. At the time, Comcast was pushing its Comcast.net portal as a destination site for news, video, entertainment and applications like photo sharing and shopping. Unfortunately, only Comcast subscribers could access everything … Read more

Boob Tube-onomics

The latest study out of Nielsen Research (also covered by MultiChannel News) has a raft of interesting TV statistics. But since we all know how deceiving numbers can be, I thought I’d add a little context to the facts and figures. For your reading pleasure…

Boob Tube-onomics

• There are an average of 111.4 million TV homes in the United States for the 2006-07 TV season.
Given a US population of around 300 Million, with an average household of 2.5 people (see below), this means that roughly 93% of American homes have TVs.

• The average U.S. TV home has 2.5 people and 2.8 television sets.
The primary TV in consumer homes was bought at an average price of $783. Not cheap, but even doubled or tripled it’s a lot less expensive than .5 of a kid for your typical couple.

• 28% of U.S. TV homes have digital cable.
More than half of cable subscribers to the top two cable companies get digital services: 52% of Comcast subscribers and 54% of Time Warner subscribers.

More after the jump…

March Madness On-Demand?

Well, sort of. The NCAA and CBS SportsLine announced back in February that they’d be offering all NCAA tournament games online again this year for free. (Woohoo!) As a pre-registered, VIP member, I got into the streaming application pretty quickly, though I did get a few error episodes along the way. Unfortunately, the video seems … Read more

One Feature to Rule Them All

The Uverse users site is running a poll to see what feature people most want added to the service (AT&T’s IPTV offering). With a whopping 109 votes in (okay, that’s probably a decent percentage of Uverse users…), the winner is whole-home DVR.

Web Not Good Enough for TV?

There tends to be a lot of confusion around the term IPTV. It doesn’t mean video streamed over the free-and-clear Internet like YouTube. It means television that is streamed over a regulated IP network. In other words, IPTV requires some service provider manage the quality and security of the television experience.

Yesterday Google warned publicly that the Web cannot support broadcast-quality Internet TV over the long term. The system won’t scale. So what does Google plan to do about it? Apparently the company wants to work with cable operators to “combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks’ high-quality delivery of shows.”

TiVo Top Ten

If you watched the Super Bowl last night, chances are you tuned in for and even repeat-viewed some of the commercials. It’s the one time of year when couch potatoes actually want to watch ads, and TiVo capitalized on the phenomenon by making certain commercials download-able for enthusiastic fans. TiVo also put out a list … Read more

Who’s On First: Voice, Video, Data?

I was perusing the transcript of a Verizon webcast the other day (yes, I am that lame), and ran across two interesting and related points. First, Ron Lataille, Verizon SVP of IR, acknowledged that many young people don’t get wireline phone service when they move, but rather stick with just a cell phone. Not surprising in itself, but Mr. Lataille also suggested that starting a family seems to be a trigger point for converting from a cell-phone-only residence to one with a landline.I seem to be just past the cell-phone-only demographic, or at least among people living outside of NYC. However, I have to admit that if I had only had a cell phone a few years ago, that would have changed when I had my daughter. It’s not so much that I worry about the wireless infrastructure. Any phone system can go down with enough traffic overload. No, I worry about leaving my phone uncharged and then discovering that my power adapter doesn’t work. (It’s happened. Several times.) I also still worry about the issue of dialing 911. Until my cell phone is GPS-enabled, I want a landline the police can track my location on. (VoIP discussion, anyone?)