Wow, finally this juicy nugget in the release notes for Flash player 10...

Up until now, it has not been possible to have keyboard controls when running Flash in full screen mode (the mode where a video or game fills your whole screen). This means we've not been able to have keyboard control on WorldTV for such things as play/stop, forward, rewind on video controls, or for keyboard control of games like Free Tetris running full-screen.

Adobe has held off on this for a long time because they were worried hackers would start using Flash to imitate your computer's desktop in Flash, and get you to enter passwords or other sensitive data. It was a valid concern, and they've addressed it by only allowing keyboard access to certain 'non-printing' characters like the arrow keys, space bar, tab etc, starting with Flash 10. This is an excellent compromise... and welcomed!

Now we can see some super cool applications where Flash can take over your whole screen and allow keyboard control of the application, effectively bypass the OS, something I first dreamed about 10 years ago...

Here's the relevant text from Adobe...

"Limited Fullscreen Keyboard Access — In Flash Player 10, key events are supported for non-printing keys such as arrows, shift, enter, tab, space, etc. Limited access to the keyboard will allow fullScreen games and video controls with keyboard access in a secure way."

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For years people have talked about the convergence between TV and the Internet. We'll watch the Internet on our TV's, we'll watch TV on the Internet.

Well the latter has arguably happened, although rights issues still hamper legitimate efforts to bring TV signals onto the web. The way the TV business has historically worked makes it highly difficult to broadcast TV stations on the Internet. That's another subject which I won't get into here, but suffice to say it's a mess, and is not likely to be resolved soon.

What I am interested in and what we spend a lot of time thinking about at WorldTV is how the Internet will come to the TV in our living room. It's clear that browsing the Internet on your television is not going to take off anytime soon, failed efforts such as WebTV demonstrate little demand for this service. If you've actually ever tried to browse the Internet on a TV, even a high-definition one, you quickly find that it's an unsatisfying and impractical experience. Not having a mouse is a big turnoff, and you need a TV the size of your wall to read a web page from your sofa. I've tried... and gone half-blind in the process.

Continue reading "Watch online video on your TV - A Layman's Guide" »

Posted by Alx Klive at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the questions I frequently find myself pondering is why Google doesn't offer high grade web hosting, either traditional web hosting or in-the-cloud hosting like Amazon S3.

They certainly have the know-how, they would seemingly have the resources, you would think they could offer the lowest bandwidth prices with their size and scale. They also offer several web hosting-like services such as Google Web Applications and Blogger. For a video startup such as ours, we'd certainly like to have Google as an option for our hosting needs.

The answer is simple... they are having a very challenging time keeping up with their own internal demands for hosting, hardware and bandwidth, and the massive demands coming from the likes of YouTube and GMail. I postulate this from two separate conversations I've had with Google employees.

It makes sense - we are all used to the instant access availability and reliability that is manifested by all Google services. How many times have you not been able to reach Google's homepage or YouTube?

Only Google knows the true extent of this challenge and we can only ponder on the idea that... behind closed doors... Google is in a never ending fight to keep up with all the demand. One employee told me that there is often conflict internally over where to assign resources, and which services to promote (on the Google homepage). For some reason you just don't think this could be an issue.

So the next time you think... why doesn't Google do this? or that? The answer may just be... they need to build another data centre!

Posted by Alx Klive at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Amazon S3 is a service that many websites use to host videos, pictures and other data. It's run by Amazon.com.

Until today it had a near spotless reputation for reliability. We are testing Amazon S3 at WorldTV for experimental future features.

Many sites we like such as Twitter and SmugMug, and any number of data backup sites, use Amazon S3 to run a large part of their service. Today at 12.31pm GMT one of three Amazon S3 datacenters went down completely, causing widespread hurt for many of these sites. Just over 2 hours later, Amazon had fixed most of the problem.

The failure is disheartening for many people involved in this business, including myself, because prior to today we had a nice touchy feeling about Amazon and their product. It offers smaller teams the ability to 'box with the big boys'.

Amazon are not the only one who do what they do, after today other 'in the cloud' operators are going to get much more of a look in. To operate 'in the cloud' is possible. But it's the old adage, 'you can't put all your eggs in one basket'. You can, but you have to figure your service will be down sometimes and you will be hopeless to do anything about it. Running a second backup with another operator is possible, but this adds complexity and precious time for developers who are making the next generation of web applications.

To their credit, Amazon have been quick to fix the problem, and made several pledges to improve matters for future in posts to the Amazon S3 forum.

Posted by Alx Klive at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today was every Apple lover's birthday as Steve Jobs stood up in San Francisco to deliver his traditional post Christmas bag of goodies at MacWorld.

While his announcement of the 'thinnest notebook computer in the world', the MacBook Air, has been getting most of the press, the most significant announcement for me was a major upgrade to the AppleTV.

Perhaps the least known and least successful of Apple's recent consumer devices, the AppleTV was a product ahead of its time when it launched just under a year ago. It was hobbled by poor software and poor content offerings, complicated further by the now common geographic restrictions on content.

Well the geographic restrictions remain, but everything else is now fixed with today's announcement that all AppleTV users will get a free software upgrade in two weeks time, that will unveil a host of new and very cool features. For a start, the AppleTV will become your in home movie rental store. For $4.99 you'll be able to rent the latest movies from all the major movie studios in HIGH DEFINITION. (Bye bye Netflix and their clones, bye bye Blockbuster).

One of the big problems with version 1 of AppleTV was that you had to network it with another mac in your house to get access to music and video podcasts. It was a pain in the behind frankly even if you did get it connected, and my own AppleTV sat unused on a shelf for the past 10 months. With version 2 of AppleTV, you can now do everything directly from the AppleTV itself, as it should be.

The TV content selection still leaves a lot to be desired, but direct access to thousands of video podcasts, including high definition ones, means a host of free content on your living room wall. Access to Flickr and .Mac photos is pretty cool, but the killer app in my view is high def movie rentals, existing YouTube functionality, and HD video podcasts.

For more coverage, see the AppleTV page on Apple.com or watch Steve Job's keynote in full.

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Launching at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year is a new product which lets you get VHS tapes into your computer with ease. So new that Ion, the company which makes it, doesn't have it up on their website yet, (although they might by the time you read this).

Useful if you want to add some old footage to your WorldTV channel for example.

Check out the video

Posted by Alx Klive at 05:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan Rayburn has written an interesting article about some of the issues preventing the growth of the online video industry, and specifically video advertising.

Posted by Alx Klive at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Loch's very cool rooftop pad in Chinatown provided the venue for the launch of the Techcrunch UK website. With the exit of former Editor Sam Sethi, a new editorial team headed up by Mike Butcher has been put into place for the redesigned site which went live this morning.

The party was a who's who of the European tech scene - Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström from Joost, Brent Hoberman (LastMinute.com), Alex Tew (Million Dollar Homepage), Celia and Mike from WeeMee, my good friends from YesNoMayb.com, and much of the UK VC scene were among those in attendance.

The party went late and I got out just as the hot tub started to get warmed up. In other words... before it got too crazy!

Thanks out to Mike Arrington and Heather from Techcrunch for a great party!

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Online video editing is now possible in a similar way to how sites like Picknik offer online photo editing. You don't need any software, all the work can be done through your web browser.

Today's announcement about MySpaceTV and it's editing features courtesy of Flektor raise the question of whether online video editors actually make sense.

For the more technically inclined, online video editing seems at first like a bad idea. Editing video is one of the most processor intensive applications you can do on a computer, and trying to replicate that experience through a web browser seems like it would be an exercise in futility.

Nonetheless, several online video editor websites already exist, MySpaceTV notwithstanding, and with YouTube recently rolling out the YouTube remixer, this article takes a closer look at what's out there in this space, and whether you should give these online video editor sites a closer look.

Continue reading "Online Video Editing - Does it make sense?" »

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a cool site which should appeal to lovers of user interfaces and technology nuts.

Fast Digg lets you scan the latest technology stories from popular site Digg.com, using only a keyboard for control, no mouse required. It's great if you fancy leaning back a little to take in a world of news - simply use the cursor keys to control, and an occasional CTRL-W.

It works best in Firefox for the PC and Safari for the Mac. Unfortunately Internet Explorer is hopeless as usual.

Fast Digg

Posted by Alx Klive at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Flash video gets a bad rap.

Proponents of Quicktime, Windows Media and Java based video often point out the superior quality of those systems, and many in the industry still genuinely believe that Flash video has intrinsically poor picture quality.

This simply isn't true.

The reason this myth is perpetuated is due mainly to YouTube, the site that is the poster child for Flash video and unfortunately contains some very poor picture quality videos.

This isn't actually YouTube's fault, you can upload extremely high quality video to YouTube if you know what you are doing, but the vast majority of users don't do this.

It's simply the case that most videos uploaded to YouTube have been poorly converted from other formats, and YouTube's processing and file size limitations can get in the way too.

So what is the highest quality you can get with flash video?

In theory, there is no limit, Adobe can introduce new higher quality compression codecs whenever they like, and with infinite bitrate available in theory, you can have infinite quality. In practice however you are limited by two constraining factors - Internet bandwidth and computer processor power.

Continue reading "Understanding high quality Flash Video" »

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Apple's Steve Jobs turned the cellphone industry rule book on its head while negotiating a deal with wireless carrier Cingular.

For one, only three executives at Cingular got to see the phone, and then only after a deal had been struck. Secondly, the phone will carry no Cingular branding on the inside or outside and will only be available direct from Apple and Cingular (no 3rd party phone stores etc).

The iPhone was also developed under unprecedented secrecy, with network technicians having to test a dummy phone, that by the sounds of it only had the phone's electronics in it and no case.

While all this is perhaps unsurprising, it still makes for fascinating reading, and you can get the whole skinny from the Wall Street Journal here.

Way to go his Steveness!

Posted by Alx Klive at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If your bag is tech, you could do a lot worse than head on over to MikeTV.

Hosted exclusively here on WorldTV, MikeTV is a daily dose of robot videos, gadget videos, technology videos and other geek friendly clips.

Mike scours the Internet for these videos so that you don't have to, and the first videos on the site include some really fascinating stuff.

There's the video of the four legged quadraped robot which survives being kicked in its side, a holographic television with the image hanging in mid-air, a multi-touch input screen with some mind altering demos (the same technology that's going to be in the iPhone), slow motion videos of a speeding bullet smashing through fruit, playing cards and drinks cans, a couple of fighting robot videos from Japan, a video of a water powered acetylene torch, and a video of the Da Vinci surgical robot that is revolutionising surgery procedures in hospitals.

Mike says his focus will be stuff that is 'real' but has not yet hit the mainstream or public conciousness, with the occasional irreverant or funny clip thrown in.

We love it!

Posted by Alx Klive at 06:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The lads over at Gizmodo put this question to the test during the recent State of the Union address by George Bush. Since each network (CBS, ABC, FOX etc) was brodcasting the address live, and using the same feed from the same high definition camera, it offered an excellent opportunity to compare apples to apples.

Which network do you think had the best high def signal?

Answers here

Posted by Alx Klive at 01:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Came across this while surfing today. It's a Google ad which the Skype for Firefox extension has added a click-to-call link to. First time I've seen this.

It seems the Skype Firefox extension (which scans web pages for phone numbers to highlight them in this way) can pick phone numbers out of Google's javascript Adsense ads. This is different I feel from the 'happy' arrangement between Google and Skype's parent eBay last year where they were working together to test click-to-call links.

With the recent suggestions of a cooling in relations between the two companies, it may just be that this is a shot across the bow from the eBay camp.

Posted by Alx Klive at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few months back I treated myself to a new Logitech webcam and poked around with its avatar and video effects features. Basically these let you overlay an animated face and other facial accessories such as a beard onto your real face during a video chat or web broadcast. The software based system uses facial recognition technology to figure out where your mouth, eyes and eyebrows are, and then adapts a 3D model (of a cartoon character for instance) to your features.

The whole thing works seamlessly so that other bits of software on your computer such as Skype receive the modifed video (I now doubt this, have been having problems - ED)

I recently updated the software and was pleasantly surprised to find that the entire package (Quickcam) has been overhauled significantly since the Summer. The avatars and video effects features have moved on leaps and bounds, and the facial recognition technology is much more impressive. Under very poor lighting conditions (see below), it picked out my features using a new 'training' wizard, overlaying dots onto my face similar to those found on a motion capture suit. Once calibrated, it picked out my movements very accurately, despite the poor lighting.

The physics engine in general seems to have been overhauled, and is now able to identify left, right, up, down, tilt left and tilt right head movements. It also picks out the opening and closing of your mouth and the blinking of your eyes. With the new 3D avatars supplied with the software and others available on Logitech's website (earlier versions were 2D only), the effects are really impressive.

I was surprised to find Logitech giving away additional avatars and facial accessories for free. I would probably have paid a couple of bucks for a package of new avatars or even individual ones if the payment system was fast and intuitive.

Avatars in general are going to be big business in my opinion. WeeMee, CrazyTalk, Klonies and Logitech's system show the current state of play.

Posted by Alx Klive at 01:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Sony HDR-SR1 is the world's first high-definition, hard drive camcorder. It represents the start of a new era, and is a camera I've personally been waiting many years to see arrive.

When JVC introduced the Everio line of hard drive camcorders in late 2004, I figured it would only be a couple of months until they came up with a high definition version of the same. Prosumer high definition camcorders were already available at the time, so it seemed logical they would marry the two at the earliest opportunity.

The closest they came, was an optional hard drive attachment for the very sexy GY-HD100 . But Sony has caught up with JVC, and taken the lead in the consumer market, with this groundbreaking and reasonably priced camcorder.

I managed to get my hand on one of these when they were launched in the UK last month. I've now had a chance to put it through its paces...

(Please note this is not a full review of the HDR-SR1. You can find a comprehensive review here. Instead I focus on some of the practicalities of dealing with Sony's new file format AVCHD).

Continue reading "Review of the Sony HDR-SR1 - The Practicalities of AVCHD" »

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (81)

Industry rag Variety has officially called the death of VHS after 30 years of trusty service.

Posted by Alx Klive at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent post on Jeff Pulver's blog and my own recent review of the DivX web video system got me thinking again about the future of video delivery on the Internet.

As Jeff points out, there are a lot of companies working on various proprietary systems for delivering video over the net. Each claims 'the best quality' or 'best platform’, and all are working hard to find buyers. In my personal opinion, all of these systems will ultimately fail.

The winner in this game will undoubtedly be Flash video.

There are only two factors that ultimately determine the quality of video you can watch over the Internet - the speed of your Internet connection, and the processing power of your computer. Everything else is just software, and fairly routine software these days.

Continue reading "Pushing Flash Video to the max" »

Posted by Alx Klive at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Philips has developed a system that can scan video files, comparing them to a database, in order to identify copyright infringing material, among other uses. This is similar to how music fingerprint service Shazam works.

Clearly there is interest among the more conscientious video sharing sites to automate this process, if only to stem the tide of work being generated by complaints from copyright holders. Just yesterday for instance, Microsoft acknowledged that it had asked YouTube to remove the Ricky Gervais Microsoft training video from its system, a video featured on the WorldTV charts. (At the time of writing it is still available on Google Video).

The challenge with these systems is being resilient to situations where the content is significantly altered, for instance adding a logo, re-encoding with a much lower quality compression scheme, cropping, etc. It's much easier to identify music, because music still has to sound the same to the end user, and there is less data to process, whereas video can be put into black and white, sytlized, have noise added, etc, without really affecting the user experience.

Philips claim the system can overcome these challenges and is pushing it as a solution to copyright infringement on video sharing sites and P2P networks. They also suggest that it can be used within broadcast environments for remote triggering of advertisement inserts etc. I can think of several other applications including media monitoring for businesses, video library organization, security applications and automated billing for stock footage usage.

No system like this is perfect, but it doesn't need to be. If it can flag content for manual review with just an 80 or 90% success rate, that makes a huge difference to labour costs. If it gains sufficient traction however, and is used on a wide range of sites, it will undoubtedly come under substantial attack from those wishing to subvert it.

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you've not seen this device before, it basically lets you rebroadcast your home television signal out over your Internet connection, allowing you (and only you) to view what's on your television, on a laptop or computer somewhere else. You can control the Slingbox remotely, and change the channels on your TV if you want. Great for people going on holiday, ex-pats, that kind of thing.

The only problem is the cost - a whopping £180 for something that should cost less than £50, based on the technologies and components involved.

I have the exact same system set up on my home TV system, and it cost me less than £30 to put together. I used free software (Windows Media Encoder), and a neat bit of kit called the Red Eye Serial, which basically lets you control a Sky set top box from your computer. A few lines of PHP code later, and I can now view and change channels on my TV set from anywhere in the world. I can even set Sky+ up to record and play back shows remotely.

If sufficient people are interested in how I did this, I'll write up a full tutorial. Drop me a line at the address listed on the contact page.

Posted by Alx Klive at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Little bit of a stretch this one but the technology is very cool.

An Israeli company is showing off its video glasses, that will one day be as common as iPods. They're a breakthrough in terms of their much lower weight, and the fact they use a single piece of optical plastic to host the twin stereo images needed to simulate a larger screen.

It's a given that one day we'll all be completely comfortable with the idea of people wearing video 'specs'. Just as it was weird when people first started wearing headphones in the 80's (but we later grew accustomed to it), so it will be the same with these puppies. You'll be sitting on the train, and the person sitting across from you will be wearing 'sunglasses', but will be watching a music concert or movie. Eventually we won't even know they're doing so.

Posted by Alx Klive at 01:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)