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Monday, February 25, 2008

HD-DVD and the case for unlocking your media

The HD format war is over.HD-DVD has lost, and lost big. Lost in all the buzz about Blu-Ray's victory is the question of what becomes of those who purchased HD-DVDs. Short term, those people's lives haven't really changed. What happens though, a year from now when their HD-DVD player stops working? Some people have collected fairly large collections of HD-DVD movies. This is content that they have paid for, and content that is, unfortunately, locked to the disc.

In the audio world, it's easy to rip a CD, and have those files in a digital format. The same cannot be said for HD DVD, or Blu Ray. Here's a situation in which honest, law-abiding consumers have a legitimate reason to want to move the content from the original delivery medium. Let's not lose sight that that's what we're talking about here: media tied to a delivery medium, rather than a purchase. 

This is the first significant digital format to go belly-up. And while Blu Ray supporters are high- fiving each other victoriously, don't forget your format could be next.

But then again, maybe this is much ado about nothing. Perhaps this discussion will look quaint in five years. One would think once movies are delivered primarily online, the ability to play them would last as long as there are computers. What do you think? Should HD DVD movie buyers be able to convert those films to another format? Is this a problem that will go away in time? Should the studios be able to lock content to a particular delivery method?


Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Is the end of the iPod Shuffle near?

Today Apple announced new pricing/capacity on the iPod Shuffle, with the price of the current 1GB model falling to $49, and the announcement of a forthcoming 2GB model for $69.

The question becomes though, how low will Apple go? I've got to think $49 is the bottom-most price point for a player branded as an iPod. so as memory prices continue to fall, will the shuffle disappear? The prospect of a 4Gb or 8GB shuffle leads to questions: How many songs do you want on a device without any screen? With the both the price to capacity ratio, and size of the Nano shrinking, Wouldn't soon make sense to simply offer a 2GB Nano as the bottom of the iPod lineup? What do you think?

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Switchover Successful

This is just more or less another test entry to make sure everything is fine, post iWeb. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's an easy way to move our previous posts over here, but if anyone knows a way to do it, please let us know!

Friday, February 1, 2008

Blog Changes Coming Soon

(NOTE: All posts prior to, and including this one, were on our original iWeb blog)

If you’ve been following the site since day one, you know that we used iWeb for our initial web design. What a novel idea we thought; use Apple’s own webpage creation tool to create a highly-trafficked, user-focused website. Well, now that our brief bit of naivete as worn off, and our jaded selves have returned. It’s painfully apparent that iWeb simply won’t do what we need. It may offer great features for people hosting/creating websites with .mac, but otherwise, it can be quite a bear.


So slowly over the next 6-8 weeks, we will be transitioning out of iWeb. The first part of the transition will be to move the blog over to an industry-standard account, most likely Blogger. Once that’s done, we’ll let you know here.

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