Opportunities, meetings, and random events conspired to bring me to the Bay Area all week.  Big doings and no doubt things that will effect my work status over the next few weeks.  If you happen to live in the Bay and want to get together and say hi – drop me an email or get hold of me on twitter!

• A device suitable for playing videos, playing music, or reading books.
• Wifi and 3G data connections
• Ability to playback interactive video/audio (similar to experience of a DVD, but QT based)
• Multi-mode use (ability to dock with keyboard/screen or use as tablet only)
• Front facing camera for video conferencing
• Solid State Drive (fewer moving parts and hopefully relatively fast on/off)
• Long battery life – 6+hours of usage w/o video playback, 4+ with video playback
• Minimum 720p playback

Specs along this line become a serious game changer for me.  This is a device I’d carry way, way more often than my laptop.  In fact, a small Bluetooth keyboard and mouse along with this would potentially replace my laptop in many situations.  I’ve come extremely close to buying a kindle in the past year and the hold out for me was it to single purpose in its intent.  If this device can serve as that e-reader, as well as a more broad media device it’s very likely to find a place in my house pretty quickly. If there is a development environment for creating interactive content that comes out with it, then i’m really excited about the idea of creating custom content with this UI in mind, both for the training and general entertainment worlds. EDIT: adding Wired’s excellent summary of what they expect on Wednesday.

I’m honestly not quite sure what I’ll be doing – I may take this opportunity to switch paths all together and follow one of my other passions (food and drink are the top of the list), though I can’t imagine not being at least partially involved in the online video space.  More will now doubt follow, but for now stayed tuned to see where i land when it all shakes out.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to come see me speak at either post production world or the Adobe booth – you asked some excellent questions and hopefully most of what i said made sense!

See you next year at NAB 2010!

Inlet Technologies (my daytime job) has a booth in the South Lower level – SL5624 and I will be there quite a bit showing off the new announcement we’ve had.

When I’m not there though, I can be found here:

Adobe Talk

“Encoding Best Practices for H.264″

Booth # SL3320  Mon-Wed at 4pm, Thursday at 1:30pm

The Adobe talk is free to anyone with a show floor pass, so drop by and say hi.

Post|Production World Conference Talks

N249-251 • Monday, April 20  •   11:45 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

N249-251 • Monday, April 20  •   2:00 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.

N256 • Tuesday, April 21  •   10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

The Post|Production World Conference is a paid event, so if you want to attend one of these talks, please visit here for info about signing up.

Book Signing

And finally, I’ll also be signing my book, Real World Video Compression on Tuesday April 21st from 1:30-2pm at the NAB store.

And if you want to keep track of my movements during the show, all you have to do is follow me on the Twitter: @andybeach

Oh Reuters, you silly goose – there is a difference between being ready for digital and HD.  The USisn’t requiring everyone to switch to HD video, just digital…

I really haven’t chimed in on this DTV switch over, but this is just plain ridiculous.  People who aren’t ready now are still not going to be ready in June, so this is just a waste of time and resources.

Don’t know what Internet enabled Television is?  Don’t worry, you will soon enough.  The geeks amongst us (hello friends) have been doing this for years, but CES this year is heralding a large amount of consumer friendly products and services that make watching video from the Internet on your living room TV.  Let’s face it – video has done an amazing job of leaping into the world of the web.  Even most grandmothers out there are now used to the idea of some funny video clips on the web being possible, even if they have no idea how it works(or why their grand kids insist on wasting so much time with them).  But web based content for most is still just that – bite size appetizers that tide you over between the big cable or satellite course every night (man I love metaphors).  Hulu has probably done the most to break that mold, by moving actual prime time content and movies onto the web in an easy to use, easy to operate format that has done a great deal to move office workers from hiding their private IM chats at work to hiding their TV viewing.

But the idea of moving that viewing back to the TV, while keeping the transmission of it Internet-based is like some sort of geek holy grail and broadcasters want in on it while your average TV watcher doesn’t even care (he just wants his shows).  Maybe this year might just be a perfect storm of technology, services, and general consumer knowledge of it all to make 2009 the year we learned how to cut the cable cord (man, I sound so optimistic there, don’t I?).  Mind you, that doesn’t mean we’re cutting the cord – just that we now know its actually possible.

Right now there is no official name for this, though “Internet enabled” as a catch phrase seems to get used often when describing it.  So what exactly am I talking about?  Well, this isn’t checking your email or your stock tips on your TV – I’m talking about using the Internet as the pipe to receive television content meant for playback directly on your living room set, not your computer.    This has been slowly creeping into our lives now for years, so it may not seem that radical;  the AppleTV, for example, for one has made it possible to watch content from the iTunes store for some time now.   But that is just one example and part of why it worked so well (for those who tried it, for it admittedly has a small segment fo the market) is that is was a closed network – with Apple controlling the content, the hardware, and the user interface.  In fact other than the broadband pipe, they were the whole ecosystem for delivering the video to your set top.  The the pipe may turn out to be one of the most crucial parts of this whole process, but more about that later – first let’s talk about the hardware, services, and know-how it takes to be one of the Internet TV pioneers.

This is an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one – but its very important and a trend that will start seeping into the mainstream more and more thanks to the technology we saw announce last month at CES and services like Netflix extending into new platforms.

I’ll never get this out in one post (heck, I’ve been sitting on this draft for 2 weeks alone, much to Matt Smith’s chagrin) so let’s break this into a few chunks.  Consider this our tee up, and over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss the infrastructure, the hardware, the software, and all the various players already tromping around…

And as always, if you have something you actually want me to write about, please feel free to ask me questions.