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Why Did the FCC Broadcast the Broadband Plan Kickoff in a Proprietary Format?
Yesterday’s kickoff of the FCC’s Broadband Plan proceedings were broadcast over the Internet in a proprietary video format. Worse, it was likely converted from a standards-based format to a proprietary format before it was put on the Internet! (The tip-off is that the closed-captioning overlay was already composited in). Clearly, a proprietary broadband internet would [...]
Broadband Recovery Needs A Policy Preference for Royalty-Free Standards
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the “Recovery Act”, has allocated an unprecedented $7 Billion to broadband and has launched a new chapter of broadband policy in the US. The coming months will inspire an accelerated debate and consideration of what this can, and should, mean, on many levels from tactical grant-making to [...]
Why the Sad State of Interactive TV Matters and What to Do About It
What would the Internet look like today if history had been just slightly different? Say for example the Internet’s open, royalty-free foundation — protocols, HTML, etc. — hadn’t mostly won out? Leaving only proprietary solutions or shifting interest groups (and their designates) maneuvering to disadvantage, overcharge, or end-run each other as the only — and [...]
Why the Digital TV Delay May be a Good Thing
To be blunt: America has the world’s most overpriced, antiquated, under-performing and anti-convergence digital TV system, and yet another delay in transition will create yet another round of inevitably-necessary but paper-over-the-problems government subsidies to highly questionable interests of highly doubtful economic value to enfranchise millions of consumers into the digital TV transition who should never [...]
Hey Obama: Rethink Digital Television
“American consumers will purchase more than 45 million DTVs and will be overcharged more than one billion dollars in the crucial digital transition years of 2008 and 2009 alone” What? The transition to digital TV is a massive overcharging scam? That’s the gist of a filing last week to the FCC by two US-based TV makers, [...]
Royalty-Free Java DTV Specification Released for Brazil and the World
Sun Microsystems has released a royalty-free Java specification as an alternative to the royalty-encumbered “GEM” and “MHP” family of digital TV specifications developed by the European Digital Video Broadcasting group and associated groups. “GEM” and “MHP” may not be exactly household words, but they are the backbone specifications of the interactivity layer of Blu-ray, US [...]
OMS Video Draft Specification Released
The “Open Media Stack – Video Specification V0.9″ is now available for community review at the Open Media Commons website. OMS, announced in April 2008, is a project of Sun Microsystems’ Open Media Commons initiative to define a complete, royalty-free media specification, including codecs and associated elements. The OMS Video draft is a key milestone [...]