After a tiff with Apple over pricing, NBC announced today that they would not renew their iTunes contracts for their TV shows. As their contract ended in December, they would plan to stop offering new shows on iTunes at the end of the calendar year. Why? NBC wants to raise prices above the current $1.99 per show (up to as high as $4.99) and bundle shows as packages. They also wanted more restrictive copy protection. Apple thinks their pricing is too high and wants unifromity. Hence the spat. The other major networks and many cable channels offer material on iTunes, which allows viewers to purchase ad-free shows for viewing on their computers or iPods. Apple fired back that they will not offer any of the new season of NBC shows starting in late September.

These may all be public negotiating tactics and we may well see a new deal before next month is done, but it highlights a problem in the industry’s transition to online entertainment. Traditional studios are still unsure of the market and are still feeling out the limits of what people are willing to pay to have downloadable copies of their shows. The insistence on restrictive digital rights management (DRM) copy protection highlights this. The copy protection aims to limit the number of devices the shows can be played on, but in practice only hampers the honest users. Most shows are readily available (albeit illegally) on internet sites, often in higher quality than what Apple offers. People use iTunes because it’s convenient (they don’t need to scour the net for their shows), because the ads are already trimmed out, and because the shows are pre-formatted for their iPods. I expect that NBCs move will end up driving more people toward piracy.

Part of the problem, though, is a result of Apple’s success. They are essentially THE online media marketplace at the moment, and this makes studios uneasy. It’s up to Apple to ensure they don’t abuse their power, but ultimately I think they are in the right on this one. $1.99 is already fairly steep for a single episode of a TV show, and prices of $4.99 are simply ridiculous. Perhaps NBC should stick with offering ad-supported shows on iTunes for free until they can figure out a business model that works.

I remember my parents first buying a camcorder some time in the 1980s. They transitioned from the noisy film-based movie cameras (that required a reel-to-reel projector for playback) to a not-so-compact Sony 8mm camcorder. At the time, I recall the salesman exclaiming his belief that the 8mm tape format would last far into the future. And it did…surprisingly long. Though supplanted somewhat by DVC tapes now, the basic concept is the same: record the video onto tape, which serves both archival and playback functions. It’s works fine if you keep your tapes labeled and organized, and if you typically like to watch the entire tape in a single sitting, but it is hardly convenient.

Look at what’s happened to photography – it’s rare to see people using film-based cameras these days, and for good reason. There’s no recurring media cost with digital images. You can easily snap one or two pictures and upload them for sharing immediately. Not so with tape – it’s impractical to digitize a few minutes of video tape at a time. The tape has to be rewound to the correct spot and you run the risk of either missing material for upload or uploading the same material twice.

My assumption, of course, that the ultimate destination of the video is the computer, but that’s clearly where this technology is heading. Bandwidth is good enough to easily share standard definition video across the internet, and even HD video is practical for those with high-speed connections. DVD-based recorders are a reasonable stop-gap measure, but you still end up with a pile of discs at the end of it. Two more exciting options are hard disk and flash based camcorders, with the latter being the more promising option. Hard disk camcorders record to a hard disk (no great surprise there). The large capacity of small hard disks enables the videographer to record 30 or more hours of footage before capacity is exhausted. When the camera is connected to the computer, the video is uploaded and removed from the hard disk.

This works well, but has a few limitations. If you’re on a long vacation and want to record more hours than your hard disk can support, you’ll need to bring along a computer (still, 30 hours is a lot of footage). More importantly, however, hard disks have moving parts and are prone to crashing, risking the loss of hours of irreplaceable video. Flash-based camcorders store video on solid-state memory, typically the same SD cards used for digital cameras. While the high-capacity cards can only store 1-2 hours of HD video, that’s more than enough for most people, and you can easily pick up additional cards if you run out of capacity without a computer handy.

Luddites will argue that tapes offer a timeless backup. With continuously advancing media technology, however, you’ll have to keep aging cameras available and working in order to play back older formats. Once in the digital realm, older video formats can usually be converted to more modern formats with ease. It’s also fairly easy to automate backups on the computer.

The main problem, up until now, has been the lack of decent, affordable SD-card HD camcorders. One of the prime contenders is the Panasonic HDC-SD5, a more compact and streamlined version of their popular HDC-SD1. The smallest HD camcorder (at least for now), this upcoming model looks to be fully equipped with the all the key buzzword features (though it loses the surround-sound capability of its predecessor). Samsung enters the fray this fall with its SC-HMX10, a similarly compact HD-camcorder. The Panasonic model offers a higher, “full HD” 1080p resolution using the somewhat contentious AVCHD video format which can compress large amounts of video into small amounts of memory at the cost of some motion artifacts and limited compatibility with editing software (notably, Apple’s iMovie recently gained AVCHD compatibility). Samsung offers the lower 720p HD resolution, but comes in at a cheaper price ($799 vs Panasonic’s $999) and uses the popular H.264 video format.

Both of these look appealing and will be available in the next month or two. The real question will be what the quality looks like once they get into users hands. Low-light video (i.e. most indoor recording) is a challenge for many small camcorders, and it will be important to see how these two stack up. Regardless, I know there’s one thing my next camcorder won’t have: a tape drive.

When I moved in to my current home several years ago, it became the first place I had lived in with recessed lighting built into the ceilings of almost all the rooms. The ceilings are high – close to 10′, and I am far from that height (some men are known to exaggerate their height, but that’s a bit of a stretch). This would make changing bulbs a bit of a challenge, but fortunately for me, the bulbs were all fresh when I moved in and only recently have started to burn out.

Like most people, I’ve typically used standard incandescent light bulbs without putting much thought into it. For years, there wasn’t really much alternative. In past years, however, I’ve noticed these odd looking compact fluorescent bulbs advertised as energy efficient replacement for their standard counterparts. You’ve probably seen these. They’re typically spiral shaped (unlike the long tubes that most people associate with fluorescent lights). They don’t flicker, though sometimes take a second or so to turn on after the switch is flipped. The big advantage is that they supposedly use about 1/4 of the power of standard incandescent bulbs while producing a comparable amount of light. They also are advertised as having a particularly long life (up to 5 or more years, based on the packaging). I’ve used a couple of these previously in non-recessed fixtures with moderate success. The only downside is that the color these light bulbs produced is a bit, well, greenish compared to the standard fare.

I never paid much attention to the color of light coming from bulbs until recently. After all, aren’t most bulbs white? It turns out there’s quite a spectrum of “white” that is generated by different types of light. Most incandescent “soft white” bulbs generate a white that has a “color temperature” of 2700K. That’s actually a bit yellow. Anyone who has taken photographs indoors and outdoors with the same camera without taking the advantage of some sort of white balancing mechanism (built in to many cameras) will realize that, though our eyes are able to adjust to the differences in lighting color, there is a big difference in the “white” generated by different light sources. Though I always think of sunlight as being yellowish, it’s actually a less yellow than the light produced by most indoor bulbs. I’m particularly partial to halogen lighting, which is typically not very efficient but produces a slightly cooler (bluer) white at around 3000K. The light from a camera flash is bluer still at 5000K.

Fluorescent lighting has typically been on the blue end of the spectrum. Many modern compact fluorescent bulbs have been formulated to blend in to the standard indoor lighting mix by generating a light of around 2700K. Unfortunately, there’s more to light than just the color temperature. Light can have a different “quality” depending on the spectrum of colors it generates. Apparently a “color rendering index” of 100 is the best, though most compact fluorescents I’ve seen are closer to 82. Perhaps that’s why they seem to look a bit greenish to my eyes, even though their color temperature should place them at a similar level of white to my other bulbs.

Now that my recessed lighting is starting to need replacement, I’ve been looking to see if I can be a bit more energy efficient by switching to CF bulbs. I’ve leared a good deal about a vast sea of knowledge that was previously foreign to me. It turns out the bulbs I use are of the “R30″ variety and are on a dimmer circuit. Recently, several manufacturers have started cranking out R30 dimmable compact fluorescents. Perfect, right? Not quite.

I installed the first bulb, a GE FLE15/2DVR30SWCD (quite a mouthful) along side its incandescent neighbors in the kitchen and the difference was subtle, but easily apparent to the observant eye. The aforementioned greenish hue is one factor that separates this bulb. Despite using only 15W (vs the 65W of its standard cousins), it’s actually a bit brighter than the other bulbs, though they say compact fluorescents fade over time. The most apparent difference is that it dims far less than the incandescents. While the standard bulbs can dim down to only a hint of brightness, the GE 15W can limit it’s output to what seems like about 50% of its maximal luminosity.

As I mentioned before, one of the touted benefits of these “CFLs” (compact fluorescent lights) is their longevity. Naturally, when the next bulb decided its time had come, I reached for another GE dimmable CFL. While trying to quiet a crying baby, I took advantage of its dimmabilty to try to create a calm environment that I hoped would induce a sleep. And induce sleep it did, in both the baby and the bulb. The bulb’s sleep, however, was permanent. Though it had been installed for less than 24 hours, it flickered briefly then refused to awaken from its slumber, even after I had given it what I thought was more than adequate time to recuperate. I’m not sure if bulbs need to recuperate, but I figured it was worth a shot.

GE was understanding and they are shipping me a replacement of the rather expensive bulb. We’ll see if this one lasts closer to the promised 4 years. And if going green is worth the hassle in the long run.

…Apple announced a boatload of goodies: 

• new aluminum framed iMacs with a smaller enclosure, lower prices, and faster processors
• new iLife software with an updated iPhoto (allowing Aperture-esque grouping of photos), a totally new iMovie that supports new HD formats (like AVCHD, the emerging HD camcorder standard) as well as a far improved organization system for movies, and updates to iWeb, iDVD, and Garage Band
• new iWork suite with a refreshed Keynote (an excellent PowerPoint alternative), an updated Pages word processor (we’ll see how good this is), and the new Numbers spreadsheet.

I’ve ordered iLife and iWork ’08. The trial version of Pages seems fairly slick. It is able to import Word documents flawlessly, even pulling in the track changes information. The main barrier for adoption for me is lack of Endnote compatibility (though Endnote is terrible…I’d be happy to switch to something else if anything works reasonably well).

As maintaining a separate site here is becoming burdensome, I’m going to start redirecting the Tech Recs posts to my main site, Infobhan. This site will stay up for a bit to enable access to the old posts.

Yet another distraction – today is one of those Tuesday’s when Apple makes some major product announcement. The word on the street is new iMacs and new iLife and iWork software. I’m looking forward to all three, but particularly the software. iMovie needs to be updated to support the new AVCHD HD camcorder format and iWork could emerge into a legitimate Microsoft Office alternative. Office, which is still lagging behind with its 2004 Mac version, has not been optimized for the Intel processors that Macs now use. It’s showing its age and its replacement, Office 2008, is not due out until, well, 2008. I’d just as soon avoid it completely if Apple can offer a viable alternative. Apple’s Keynote is already superior to PowerPoint, but the word processor Pages has a ways to go. We’ll see if it catches up later today.

I’ve had the iPhone since it’s release, and I have been extremely satisfied. One of the barriers to use for many people is their work’s corporate email system. Many places use Microsoft’s Exchange server, which interfaces with Outlook. The iPhone can support these servers if they have the IMAP feature turned on, but many companies lock their email behind a firewall, only allowing a few select ways to get access to your email from outside the companies. One of these ways is typically to use Blackberry’s service, which the iPhone doesn’t support. Another is to use Outlook Web Access, which does work on the iPhone, but the experience is suboptimal and not integrated with the standard e-mail software.

Recently, someone at work discovered a Java based program called MrPostman. This program runs on any computer connected to the internet (including your home computer). It serves as a bridge to link Outlook Web Access (as well as many other web-based email systems) to POP, an standard email access protocol. You configure your iPhone to connect to your home computer, and MrPostman takes care of getting your corporate mail via Outlook Web Access. It’s not perfect: the scripts and settings may require a bit of fine-tuning to work with your company’s email. It’s not IMAP, so it doesn’t really sync with your Outlook account (if you delete messages in Outlook after they have been downloaded to your iPhone, they won’t automatically get deleted from your iPhone), but it works fairly well.

Another option is Synchronica,  a paid service that basically does the same thing, but uses IMAP (to keep your iPhone and Outlook account in sync) and does the job of hosting the mail server so you don’t have to run anything on your home computer. No word yet on pricing, but there’s a free trial. I tried it out, but Synchronica is getting hammered by users and doesn’t really seem ready for the load. It was too slow to be usable. That said, it may be worth a second look in a few weeks.

From the “winning bidder” of one of my eBay auctions…

Hi seller,Am pleased to be the winner of this item and this item is Birthdaygift for my girl friend who study in west africa…and i know you only ship within U.S.A..it because am presently in london for a business trip sand i won’t be back untill next 2wks…so i’ve called the ROYAMILA(3 to 5days) Service office to know how much the item will cost to Nigeria…i was told Eu ,{add $200 USD for the shipping and insurance}as i will be paying you via paypal.

Turned out he had hijacked someone’s account…