Why online resources are not free and ChromeOS will fail

Nowadays there seems to be a big push for the use of online resources to replace offline functionality. New operating systems like ChromesOS or Jolicloud are mostly web based, and more and more audio and video services are moving from downloads to streaming. On the surface it looks like this is a big win for freedom as you are much less dependent on your operating system or proprietary applications, all is in the browser. There is a big caveat however: this makes you overly dependent on your internet connection, and in a world that is more and more mobile this is a recipe for disaster.

An internet connection is expensive

The problem with many online services and applications is that they do not take into account the price of the connection. If you have to pay for an ADSL connection at home, then a 3G connection for your smartphone, then a Wimax connection (or another 3G connection, or a Boingo account) for your netbook or iPad you are looking at a frightening bill at the end of the month, even if these services are available. It is likely that many people will only afford an ADSL connection and end up "stuck at home" if they rely on online services for their application and entertainment. Streaming a video clip from YouTube may seem cheaper than purchasing the song, but it is probably not the case once the connection bill is factored in. It may look like a good idea to use picnic for editing and storing pictures, until you have to do it away from home. Initiatives like Google ChromeOS or Jolicloud may seems revolutionary, but I think they will only work for people who do not require to be mobile.

Going in the wrong direction


For years we have been evolving toward a computing experience that leveraged the internet. We assumed it was a great idea to have everything online, close by hand, only we failed to see that this reduced our physical mobility. We assumed that the internet would be ubiquitous and that we would get more and more bandwidth, and to some extend it is true: at home, on our desktops. The problem is that this is the decade of the netbook, the tablet and the smartphone and as far as mobile internet is concerned sufficient bandwidth for everybody  won't be available for years, if not decades. Current 3G networks struggle to provide barely adequate service because they are limited by available spectrum and technology. How will they fare if we all move to online streaming. What bandwidth is required to provide a fluid 480p YouTube or Hulu streaming experience to even 10% of the mobile subscribers on a wireless network? 3G won't do, 4G won't do, maybe 5G will do, but I doubt it. It will take at least 10 years to get there, if not 20, and we are only speaking about 480p,  the performance that a portable DVD player has been delivering for years. Web developers  assumed that we would get more and more bandwidth as the time passes, but users now want to access the net everywhere, meaning we get less bandwidth rather than more, and unreliable connections to boot. Most internet applications are now designed for ADSL and always on internet, but a lot of people are actually going the other way: lighter, more mobile machines, more infrequent connections, less bandwidth, less allowed transfer.

More and more laptops are sold but we are less mobile

More and more people purchase laptops or netbooks because they want to be mobile and take they computing infrastructure with them, but the increased dependence on our internet connection makes us less mobile. My wife has a nice Linux netbook she uses a lot at home, but whenever we get away from home she takes only her old Nintendo DS because most of the games she plays on the netbook are online Flash games and these don't work when the connection is lost. What does that says for the netbook mobility-wise? A failure! Who actually uses his or her netbook out of the house most of the time? Not many peopIe! Who uses his or her smartphone out of the house most of the time? Most people. In Japan mobile net access is overtaking fixed connections, soon the same will be true in the rest of the world. Soon tablets, smartphones and mini netbooks will be the way a lot of people use "computers".

Android will smoke ChromeOS

In the end I think that Android will crush Google's other operating system, ChromeOS because for the foreseeable future most people will still want to be able to take their applications, data, entertainment and games offline, or at least on a limited connection. That is something that Android is much better designed to do than Chrome. That's why streaming and Blu-ray will not destroy DVD sales for some time: impossible to rip the movie to a netbook or iPhone. That's why online games won't kill the Nintendo DS, why music streaming services won't kill iTunes. For these to take off much progress need to be make to ensure the resources are available offline since there won't be enough mobile bandwidth for all. All web applications and games should be cached. Any piece of music, video or web page that has been watched should be available for replay offline. It should be trivial to store online media or data for later consumption. Currently this is not the case and this would mean that browsers would have to be re-engineered, Flash would have to be completely re-engineered etc... Solutions like Google Gears or the HTML 5 specifications for online data don't go far enough as we do not only need to cache web data, we need to cache web functionality for offline use. Web applications and services needs to be designed for intermittent (not always on), low bandwidth mobile connections, not the monster ADSL many people have at home. What may happen is that smart developpers will create multiplatform offline applications using web technologies and tools such as appcelerator, but that will leave ChromeOS on the side.

Not too soon: Moonlight 2 finally reaches beta

The team of Miguel De Icaza has released the first feature complete beta release of Moonlight 2.0.

I must say: it is about time! Silverlight 3.0 for Windows has been released last month. Although I really admire the work of Miguel and his team, Linux is still the poor child when it comes to Silverlight support.

My opinion is the following: if Microsoft wants to compete with Adobe Flash they need to offer at least the same level of service as Adobe. Since Adobe releases Flash runtimes simultaneously on Windows, Mac and Linux, the minimum that Microsoft needs to offer to be credible is the same simultaneous release schedule. This is obviously still not the case!

The only silver lining that I see here is that contrary to Flash, Moonlight is open source. This may allow the runtime to be easily ported to other computing platforms such as ARM. Also it is possible to replace the video decoders provided by Microsoft by your own if you compile Moonlight yourself. This means that someone could create a version of Moonlight that takes advantage of video decoding acceleration protocols, like Nvidia VDPAU.

That said, the delay between Windows and Linux version releases is still too much of an issue for me to accept Moonlight / Silverlight as a credible alternative to Flash. If Microsoft was serious about competing with Adobe these delays would not exists. As it is now Silverlight looks more like a attempt by Microsoft to draw the developers attention away from Flash than to create a true multi-platform runtime.

I do think that if Microsoft really wanted they could make a success out of Silverlight, but that would require them to stop favoring their own platforms and become really agnostic: support all desktop and most mobile operating system, as well as most consoles! Granted, they support the Mac, but Macs only compete with Windows in the high end consumer computing segment. Where is Silverlight for the Wii browser? What about the PS3s? What about Symbian and Android smartphones? What about the iPhone, are they even working on it? As long as Microsoft does not solve these issues Silverlight will stay an also-ran.

Reader question: buying a computer for online video

Kevin Asks:

I read your article on tech-no-media about streaming video from the internet.

I am in the market for a new computer. Streaming video from sites like NBC.com, ABC.com, and Fox.com will be done a lot.

Would there be a noticeable difference between these two systems?

Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 with a X4500 HD video card

Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 with a NVidia GeForce 9300M GS video card.

What would the percentage difference be in video quality?

Answer:

From a processor point of view the difference should be minimal, as both should be able to decode 720p flash video correctly as long as you don't run many CPU intensive programs at the same time you are watching the online video. Activities that don't use the CPU a lot like web browsing or typing should be OK as these would happen on the second CPU core and thus not interfere with video decoding.

The computer with the Nvidia card could have an advantage in the future, as the next version of flash should be able to use video acceleration on Nvidia cards. When that happen you should be able to watch even 1080p online video smoothly no matter how much your CPU is loaded.

From a quality perspective the limit will probably be the high compression of the online video and your network bandwidth rather than your computer's ability to decode the video. Again the Nvidia card may (nothing is sure) better compensate for artifacts in the future, but even if this is implemented the difference should be minimal.

So if you don't intend to multitask a lot when watching online video the cheaper computer should be OK. If you do intend to heavily multitask when watching video pick one with Nvidia graphics and better processor.

Friday Fun: Linux OS Market Share by Twibbon

One of the big problem of Linux is that it is difficult to estimate its market share. Web metrics give vastly different numbers based on the methodology used: from 2.11% for W3counter to 0.99% for Netstats. I thus propose a fun way to gauge the relative importance of Operating Systems: by Twibbon.

What the hell is a Twibbon?

A Twibbon is a little logo that you can add to your Twitter profile image to show your support to a cause, country, browser or operating system? You can have a look at my Twitter profile for an example. On the Twibbon website you can see how many Twitter users support the same cause as you, and thus conclude how important it is. Why only count Twitter users? Because Twitter is in with the hip people, anybody who is or will be somebody is on Twitter. These are the influencers, the people that matter! So without further ado let's see how the Twibbon numbers compare:

As of 23 July 2009 the Twibbon score for each operating system are:

I'm Linux: 94 supporters
I'm a PC: 124 supporters
I'm a Mac: 476 supporters
I use iPhone: 16 supporters

As you can see the most popular operating system is by far MacOSX followed by Microsoft Windows and Linux. The iPhone does not yet have many supporters, but I expect this to grow. Just for fun let's translate this into percentages and compare with the Netstat numbers:

Linux: 13% Twibbon market share, 1% Netstat market share
Windows: 17% Twibbon market share, 88% Netstat market share
MacOS: 67% Twibbon market share, 10% Netstat market share
iPhone: 2% Twibbon market share, 0.6% Netstat market share

This is absolutely not scientific of course, but it indicative of something: despite it's huge market share Windows does not seems to have lot of fans. If Netstats's numbers were actually correct (I doubt they are) and Windows was generating has much enthusiasm as MacOS it should have 4189 supporters. It should have 8272 supporters if it had the same level of support as Linux.

What this shows is that Windows is currently coasting on its past market share gains and on its dominance in the enterprise and the retail channel. If the young hip Twitter generation of today had shaped the computing landscape it would be vastly different from the one we know. Most of these don't seem to find Windows very interesting, but are willing to support MacOS or Linux.

In the end this is not much more that a bit of Friday fun, but maybe it is cause for a bit worry at Microsoft's headquarters and a bit of rejoicing in Cupertino and in Linux Land.

Miro 2.5 released

This is just a quick post to announce the release of Miro 2.5! There are numerous improvements to this famous video aggregator, the most noticeable is that Miro now starts and updates feeds faster. This is probably the most important update as on my netbook Miro took about 10 seconds to start and about a full minute to update my feeds! (I have a lot of feeds)

Another feature that netbook users will appreciate is the possibility to download videos from YouTube for offline watching. This is a neat way to avoid the performance problems linked to the playback of full screen flash videos on netbooks. Granted, there are Firefox extensions that do this too, but it is very practical to have the videos organized in the Miro library.

Another noteworthy feature is that Miro now has better support for audio feeds. Audio podcasts will now be present in the Miro guide, so they should be easier to find. Previously Miro was more of a video aggregator, but this update puts it on an equal footing with iTunes.

You can download Miro from here and have a look at the release notes here. Note that it looks like Miro's Ubuntu repositories are not yet updated. You can either build the application from source or wait for the update to hit the repositories.

The media player battle heats up: VLC 1.0 released

On Monday I published a nice review of Smplayer in which I explained why it was my favorite cross-platform media player. On Tuesday the people behind VLC decided to challenge this by releasing a new and improved VLC, the much awaited version 1.0. Things sure do move fast in the technology field! It is still too soon to say if this new VLC release will really challenges Smplayer's position as my favorite media player or if it simply narrows the gap between the two applications, but what is sure is that it does improve on previous versions.

New VLC features

Version 1.0 of adds a few important features. The first is the addition of several HD codecs:

· Blu-Ray Linear PCM
· Dolby Digital Plus
· AES3
· TrueHD
· Real Video 3.0 and 4.0

This should allow the playback of a decrypted Blu-ray image stored on your hard disk. Since I don't have a Blu-ray player I will not be able to test this, but it is very nice to see progress being made toward Blu-ray playback on Linux. The major remaining hurdle is of course the decryption process, but at least the codec work is done. The support of the Realvideo codecs is also a nice addition, although I am not sure these are widely used.

Another nice feature is the support for MTP devices. This should allow VLC to access media files stored on a portable media player that was designed to synchronize with Windows Media Player such as the creative Zen vision.

Conclusion

Does this means that VLC is displacing Smplayer as my favorite media player? It remains to be seen. VLC now has the advantage for the number of supported codecs and the number of features, but for me Smplayer still has the advantage of a nicer UI and better keyboard controls. What will be a major factor is performance: historically VLC has always been behind Mplayer in term of performance, but recently they have narrowed the gap quite nicely. Although it is not very important on modern desktop computers performance can be most critical on netbooks with limited processing power. I will perform some benchmarking and publish a more complete shootout of both players in the coming weeks to settle the question, so stay tuned.

What are your top 5 geek TV shows?

To finish the week on light note I propose you the following: give me your top 5 geek TV shows. There are quite a few geek shows that have entered into mainstream culture and have become big successes, but here is what I would consider to be the top 5 geek TV shows of all time:

5th position: Weird Science

Although the series never was as good as the movie, the two computer nerds that created the perfect girl by wearing bras over their heads still deserver a place in the pantheon of TV Geekdom. The film had the courage to have geeks as main characters long before geeks were fashionable.

4th position: Star Trek

Are the Trekkies geeks? I certainly think so! Anybody who walks at conventions with pointy Vulcan ears speaking Klingon does deserve to be called a geek. Star Trek stand for a lot of the geek values: the cult of technology, the drive to explore new possibilities and the acceptance of cultural diversity are good example.

3rd position: Chobits

Geek and anime are two things that go very well together. I couldn't do this list without including at least one anime. I choose Chobits as this is by far one of the geekiest anime available outside of Japan. The story of the geek that found the ultimate robotic woman is too good to pass up. Humor, romance, adventure, computers and sexy robots: Chobits has all the things that a geek could desire.

2nd position: Systm

I know, Systm is not really on TV, it's on the internet and it is currently on hiatus, but it's a TV show anyway. With such classics as the beer keg robot, the home made flametrower, the DIY lightsaber, the liquid nitrogen ice cream, the giant hamster wheel and the gravity boots, Systm deserve a prize for the sheer number of geek projects on the show. This was also the first show of the revision 3 network to meet with some success, so it actually played a part in the development of the professional video podcasts industry. Since it is free head to the revision3 site and download a few episodes.

1st position: The big bang theory

This is by far my favorite geek show. the story of the four geeks and the beautiful girl is a topic that could easily turn into a "let's laugh at the geek" fest, but instead the geeky heroes seems to always come out on top. Actually I think that this is a show that would make people want to be geeks!

That was my top five geek TV shows. Now hit the comments and let me know what are your own favorites!

Hunch: a fun web-based decision engine

I have just tried Hunch, the fun website that helps you decide. Open to the public only since a couple of days I can see this "decision engine" (sorry Microsoft, Bing is a search engine, not a decision engine) becoming a successful novelty for some time at least.

What is Hunch about?

The principle is very simple: when you first get to the site hunch asks you 20 questions. it uses your answers to build a profile on your likes, dislikes and personality. Once that profile is created you can start to use the Hunch decision engine to answer questions. The questions range from "which Blu-ray player should I buy" to "how many pages should be in my resume". To help you answer the question the site will ask you various simpler questions e.g. to know the size your resume should be the decision engine will ask you several multiple choice questions on your career. The original question is then answered by Hunch and you are given the percentage of users that reached the same answer.

Yes, but what IS the Hunch?

Well, if you do not want to answer the question you can also press the Hunch button. This will make the decision engine take the decision for you based on the profile it build from your previous answers and the answers of the users whose profile match yours. Note that you can also opt to skip one question it you have trouble answering.

I expect Hunch to be successful not only because it can provide a good service but also for the entertainment aspect of the site. This reminds me of the multiple questions "test" that you find in almost all magazines and of the votes channel on the Wii, and no one can deny that these are entertaining and successful. My only worries are about the potential privacy implications: the site claims that the data is confidential, but this would be a gold mine for marketers, so I hope their security is up to scratch.

Well, don't stay there, go try Hunch and leave me a comment with your opinion!

This week on the tech-no-media blog network

What's new this week on the tech-no-media blog network.

- The first Linux tutorial for beginners has been published on From Windows to Linux for the average Joe. I start the series of tutorial by the essential question: what is Linux? However I try to go beyond the definition you find by Googling and try to explain this from the point of view of a non technical beginner.

- On Online Video Producer I made a post on the interview of Trent Reznor by Kevin Rose and the very good insights that online media publisher can get from the experience of Trent with his music group: Nine Inch Nails.

That's it for this week! Note that since this is a bank holiday week end in Belgium there will be no post on Friday.

New sub Blog: Online Video Producer

I am currently in the process of cleaning up the Tech-no-media blog. I have a lot of different interest from technology to media, and initially this blog was a place to store all my ideas and opinions.

It became clear however that the person interested in media creation is not always interested in mobile processor technology or portable devices. The reverse is also true as readers interested in the most technology focused articles have probably no interest in timing video releases based on what is playing in the theater. There is definitely an overlap between the two audiences, but they are not always the same.

For this reason I decide to give all the post on online video production, distribution and promotion their own blog: Online Video Producer.

One of the big advantage is that those interested in video production but not in technology can subscribe to the new blog RSS stream or subscribe through e-mail and receive only the posts relevant to them without all the technology noise.

Of course I will still keep the faithful tech-no-media readers informed of the post on Online Video Publisher that could interest them through a small post on the main blog.
To subscribe to the main Tech-no-Media blog:

There is a problem playing flash video on a netbook.

Many Netbook users have been complaining of having a problem playing flash videos such as from Youtube or Hulu on the Atom processor. The same people can play the same videos fine in their normal media players or in VLC media player.

This requires a little bit of explanation. The big difference between playing flash video online and the same video in H264 stored locally is that for the online flash video the decoding and rendering is handled by the flash plug-in of your browser, while locally it is handled by your media player. You media player can be configured to take advantage of many OS specific GPU accelerated video frameworks that will take some of the burden of the video decoding from the processor. ( see this article for an in depth explanation of GPU assisted video decoding!)

The problem playing flash videos is that the flash plug-in can at best take advantage of the simplest form of acceleration: hardware stretching to fill the screen, and even that is a very recent development and not implemented in most flash based video players! This means that most of the actual decoding (and sometimes stretching) is performed by the CPU, and that places too much processing demands on it for the Atom processor. Providing better GPU acceleration for Video decoding in the flash plug-in would help, but will be difficult to implement because the frameworks are different on each OS and sometimes different for each GPU brand ( Nvidia and AMD do it differently). Supporting all this is what you pay the powerDVD developers for when you buy their product.

A solution to the problem playing flash videos is to first download the flash video locally from sites like Youtube and then play it in a dedicated media player that supports flash video such as VLC. The VLC media player will use some GPU acceleration to render the video and the it will play fine even on a netbook!

To download the video locally there are 2 convenient Firefox extensions you can use:

Flashgot allows you to download flash video with your usual download manager.

Video Downloadhelper allows you to queue the download in the extension itself and even to trans code the video if required. The trans-coding can be useful because flash video use the H264 codec that may be too much for the old 7 inch EEEPC 600 MHz processor.

Now these extensions don't support all flash sites, but for Youtube at least they offers a workable solution to the problem playing flash videos on a netbook.

Read more in the Online Media Category
Ensure you don't miss a Tech-No-Media post:

Media Review: Digg Dialogg

I had a look at the latest show from revision3: Digg Dialogg. The idea is to apply the principles of Digg to interviews: Users submit the questions that they would like to see the interviewer ask and the community "Diggs" the questions they like. The 10 questions with the more "Diggs" are the ones that the interviewer will ask to the interviewed personality. I have seen two of the Digg Dialogg shows already (Trent Reznor and Richard Branson) and in my opinion the system works very well. Not only were the questions interesting but also covering things that a professional journalist would maybe not have asked.

Since we have not seen that many innovative non-fiction podcast shows recently Digg dialogg is a breath of fresh air that really takes advantage of the "two way" nature of the internet. Another point I noticed is that the celebrities interviewed seemed very comfortable answering the questions and the interviews seemed more "intimate" than what I am used to see on TV. I think that this is an advantage of the podcast media over TV: there is no schedule pressure, the guests can take as long as they want to answer the questions without fear of being cut. Also they are pretty sure that the audience is interested in what they have to say (they wouldn't download that episode of Digg dialogg if they weren't) and they seems more willing to go into details answering the questions.

As usual for a revision 3 show the technical aspects of the podcast are handled flawlessly and Digg Dialogg is available at the usual places such as iTunes or Miro in various formats from iPod to 720p HD. The show is definitely recommended as long as you are somewhat interested in the celebrity being interviewed.

How to bypass hulu US only restriction.

I recently blogged about Hulu's lack of international content, as well as the reasons that force it to limit streaming to IP addresses registered as being in the US.

However as a newteevee article reminded me it is actually possible to bypass Hulu's US only restriction and watch Hulu in other countries such Canada, the UK and Australia.

I tried the system from Belgium and the streaming seems to work OK, even if you need to let the Hulu videos buffer a bit longer to compensate for the degraded network performance.

This makes Hulu's US only policy event more stupid as it can easily be bypassed by determined users but will keep away the casual user. This may also slow down the deployment of an Hulu alternative in some countries, as a lot of the early adopters would use Hulu itself instead, making the newcomer less profitable.

UPDATE: it seems that this application is now banned from Hulu.

Read more in the Online Media Category

Technology and media: married for better or worse!

I am always amazed at the number of articles online where media corporations seems to blame new technology for loss of revenues.

The reason that I am amazed is that without technology, and especially digital technologies, the media industry would certainly not be what it is, and without an healthy media industry the technology industry would not be what it is either.

As a first example lets take the movie industry in the 90'. movies were making some money during their theatrical releases, then a very little bit of money from tapes sales and finally some money when the movie was shown on television. Sales of recorded media couldn't really matter because the duplication costs where high, meaning the media had to be expensive, and the machines to read them were expensive and bulky. Then came the DVD revolution: one digital standard for video distribution, on a media that can be duplicated for a few cents, the possibility of video consumption on laptops, portable players and iPods (after ripping). Nowadays is not only much more media sold (to the point that a movie's DVD sale are now as important as the theatrical sales) but much more is available. Whole shops now specialize in DVD. The movie and video industry grew tremendously out of the digital revolution.

Let's take another example: the music industry. Since the arrival of downloadable music and the rise of the iPod, the general population has access to and listen to more music than ever. Apple became a mighty consumer electronic company and music distributor. And the music industry? It actually lost out on the short term, but will most probably benefit greatly on the longer term. The reason it didn't work for the media industry in this case is resistance: the music industry didn't want to see the iPod revolution succeed! Why? this a very good question for which I don't really have a good answer, but i suppose that for some industries it is difficult to abandon a known business model for a new, uncertain one.

The problem for the music industry was that Technology and media are married: if one moves forward the other has to follow, or it will be left behind to whiter and die, replace by a new companion. In the case of the music industry the new ones where Emusic, iTunes and the P2P networks. As long as these were supported by the technology industry the music industry had no chances of going back to the CD: it had to evolve or die.

The future:

The future of both media and technology are more linked together more than ever by they new child: the internet, the ultimate mix of technology and media. Because of the internet the technology industry sell computers, netbooks, ADSL connection and iPods. Thanks to the internet new media can flourish better than ever: practically anyone can now be part of the media or media production: independent filmmakers and musicians, bloggers, short story writers and podcasters. Everything is up in the air again and the CBS of yesterday may be replaced by revision3, for the greater benefit of us, the watching public.

In a future post I will describe how the main media resistance to interned distribution and insistence on DRM is playing in the hand of the independent and new media publishers. Don't hesitate to subscribe to this blog to be sure not to miss it.

Welcome to a bright new future!

Miro adopt a line of code

Miro has just launched a new campaign to raise money to further the development of the Miro multi platform Video distribution application. I decided to participate and give $4 a month, in return I get a dedicated web page where I can see my line of code grow. This is a very nice idea from Miro, and raises an often ignored issue: how to pay for the development of a big free project that will benefit a lot of users but no big enterprise like IBM or Google?

In the case of browsers you have the possibility to sell you default homepage to Google, which will bring you money without costing a cent to your users, but for other application a stable revenue sources is not so easy to come by. Corporate sponsoring is always a possibility, but in the case of Miro this could generate some conflict of interest, as Miro position itself as a champion of open and independent media. The best remaining option is probably to request a donation. In a way this is logic, if we use the software and we want it to be independent, the best way is to pay for it ourselves.

In a world where ad sponsored television and websites has been the norm for decades this may be shocking, but this is not so bad if you take a minute to think about it. Let's compare Miro to iTunes:

- iTunes is entirely free to install, but only works on Mac OSX or Windows, if you want to use Linux you are out of luck, while Miro works on all 3 platforms. Why? because users want to watch vidcasts on Linux, while Apple want it's users to watch them on OSX.

- When you open iTunes you are greeted with advertisement for music in the iTunes store or other commercial content, then you have to navigate to the podcast category. In Miro you are greeted by the selection of the best new free podcast (chosen by the Miro team). Under that banner is a list of the "most subscribed today" vodcasts of random category. Why: miro want you to see the best free podcasts made by your peers, Apple want you to purchase it's partner's content.

- In Miro the ranking of Vodcasts is based on the active subscribers to a stream. this is very clear. In iTunes we don't really know...

The conclusion is clear, if we want really free and open media we will have to make some efforts to get it, whether it is through donations or by creating content ourselves.

Amazon Buy Stanza: the birth of an E-book market monopoly??

There has been a lot of noise about Amazons purchase of Stanza, the famous E-book reader application for Windows, Mac and iPhone.

To clarify the situation for those of you that don't follow the ebook market, there are currently a few major players: Fictionwise, Amazon with it's kindle and Mobipocket which runs on many PDAs and smartphones (but not the iPhone) and which is also owned by Amazon. the fourth sizeable player was Stanza, with it's excellent application supporting Mobipocket, Fictiowise and ePub formated eBooks, as well as allowing conversion of some books to Amazon's kindle. The success of Stanza clearly overshadowed the official amazon reader for the iPhone, which was not very advanced.

The problem in my opinion is that now Amazon controls most of the major eBook players both in the content and application space!

On the content field they have Amazon (of course), Mobipocket and Stanza. the only major player remaining is Fictiowise and a few "specialty" eBook providers like Baen who specializes in Sci-Fi.

On the application space they have the Kindle reader, the Mobipocket reader and now stanza. The only remaining competition is Adobe Reader and the Open source FBreader and Plucker (which should work on, the Palm Pré in emulation mode)

Why is this bad? because we might end up with a virtual monopoly, a situation where you can't really distribute an eBook if you are not supported by Amazon, and where you can't really offer eBooks on a device if Amazon refuses to support you. This situation is very problematic in any market or industry because it leads to stagnation, as it is not in the interest of the dominant monopoly to "rock the boat" with new ideas or innovation, and in the eBook market (as well as in other creative markets) we NEED innovation.

What does this means for the eBook consumer? That the pace of innovation may slow down, especially on non mainstream platforms. I expect that in the medium term only specialized device such as the kindle or very successful platforms like the iPhone will be supported with professional content, the other having to make do with open source readers and free content. On the flip side we may finally have only one consolidated library for all our commercial content.

For the writer the situation is not so clear. As long as Stanza and the kindle continue supports open formats it will probably still be possible to distribute your content from your own site as long as you don't want to use DRM. If you wish to be distributed by major sites you choices have been reduced dramatically: it is either a site owned by Amazon or Fictionwise, and that's pretty much it. If you get rejected by Amazon your prospect are not bright.

What I do hope is that this will not reduce the amount of eBook content that is mode available, as this would be a loss for both consumers and writers.

UPDATE: it looks like I am not the only one worried about this!

Tech-no-media: what is it about.

The name Tech-no-media may surprise, so I will explain what it means in the context of this blog. The "no" in the title shouldn't be understood with the English meaning but with the Japanese meaning (I am a big fan of Anime). This would pretty much mean "the technology of media".

So what does this means in the context of this blog and what is this blog about?

This blog aims to cover my opinion and advice on new technology from the angle of new media consumption. From the latest hardware and software (Linux and Windows) that allow you to access the internet from anywhere and enjoy the free digital entertainment available online to informed opinions on the state and the future of the technology and media industries, you will find it all on this blog.

The technology and media world are unavoidably linked together, from the invention of the printing press to the internet, cheap computers and free open source software. This blog aims not only to inform you with useful advice on technology but also to present you with some analysis and opinions on the direction that this technology is taking. I will often make predictions on the future and try to start a discussion.

But the Tech-no-media network is not only the main blog but also includes "From Windows to Linux for the average Joe", a blog about Linux for the absolute beginner, and "Online Video Producer", a blog focused on creating and publishing videos and podcasts for the web.

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Ars on the state of the eBook market

This is a very good article on Ars Technica about the state of the eBook market.

I used to read quite a lot of Baen books on my palm, and I still do it to some extent, but it has diminished for several reasons:

- First Baen seems to be the only publisher that offers books in DRM free multiformat, so I only bought from that one publisher, which is somewhat limiting.

- Second there are a lot of other media competing for my reading time. Music, Video, Games (Nintendo DS) and short stories webzines published for free on the web (such as Aphelion) all compete with professional eBooks for my time.

5 years ago you couldn't get a satisfactory Video or gaming experience in a pocket format, now most PMPs and portable games consoles deliver this. the problem for publishers is that these compete with eBooks AND printed sales. This doesn't mean I won't buy eBooks from Baen again (I still look at their new offerings from time to time), but this means that book publishers really need to get their act straightened up or they will lose even their printed market.

I think the publishers that get it will get a decent market share however. After all, if you count the eBooks I bought more novels from Baen Books that from any other publisher in the last 10 years.