Cisco comments on IPTV: It was another hot day on the markets in generel. The buzz on the news-feeds for the stocks in my imaginary portfolio at Yahoo-finance-portfolios seemed to be in the race to get broadband IPTV equipment to market. Nortel (NT.TO) seems to be promoting its efforts — are they on time? The news article calls the area “hotly contested” amoung Alcatel, Cisco/SFA, etc. Personally I’m not as excited since this technology should be delivered to the PC, right? I suppose there must be something behind the scenes in the routers to cut down on the bandwidth usage?
Day: February 24, 2006
AACS is now ready – let the BD’s flow
Xbit Labs is reporting
that the hold-up by AACS is gone.
So it probably delayed the intro of both Blu-ray and HD-DVD by about 2 weeks.
Roger’s video direct (.ca)
This seems to be zip.ca’s system, but it was advertised to me here on techtok through a google ad a few days ago, so I tried it out. The first 2 DVDs arrived today. I was busy catching up on the Olympics (Hurrah for Shizuka Arakawa! She got the gold for Japan in the lady’s figure skating. When I found out, I went and ran through the PVR recording of today’s stuff. Ack, I was rooting for Miki Ando (JPN), but she totally cracked — it was hard to watch.) so I haven’t watched the DVDs yet. Well so anyway, the first movie I received in the mail was “Blackboard Jungle”, a classic movie of some sort which pops up in a DVD quiz game I like to play, so I thought I’d better watch it. The service is good for things you might want to get caught up on. It has (somewhat erroneous) lists of Film Festival movies, for example, and I also lined up “To have and have not” (Bogart) to be sent to me automatically when I mail back the 2 movies I have right now (also popping up in the movie quiz game we play here).
Another bonus is that the local Roger’s doesn’t rent Mystery Science Theater 3000, but rogersvideodirect.ca (zip.ca?) does rent them out one disk at a time. This is good because I’m a newbie with MSTK3000 and don’t know if it’s to my tastes. I also lined up several Toronto Film festival movies and since its a new service, I was sure to skew their ratings system for “The Island” 2005 along with a review of it.
From a financial markets perspective, I think the future is there for Amazon or Google or Cisco to grab hold of a bunch of dark fiber and start shipping the old movies at full resolution (as opposed to Yahoo!’s lo-res thing which has been around for about 3 years now(?)). In the mean time zip.ca’s blu-ray or hd-dvd snail-mail will have to do.