ianneubert.com

Toshiba announced today that they will, “no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.” according to this Engadget article.

So Blu-ray it is I suppose. I’m hoping that we can just start to download 1080p soon though. I’ve been dreaming of a multi-terabyte storage array with a Mac Mini sitting at each TV in my house to hook into it. That’s not really far off as XBMC on OS X continues to improve. Hopefully they will get 1080p decoding working on currrent gen Mac Mini’s. That would be sweet!

As I type this Steve Jobs is still giving his Keynote presentation at Macworld in San Francisco. The most interesting thing that I was looking forward to was anything to do with movies on the iTunes store and HD. As it turns out, they will be supporting HD movies in the movie store, at least for rentals. Here are the rental specs:

iTunes Movie Rentals

• HD quality
• $3 library titles, $4 new titles, extra $1 for HD
• 30 days to start watching
• 24 hours to finish watching
• Movies can be streamed

$4 for new releases?! What are they thinking? Here’s a quick comparison with my Netflix account. In December, I rented 8 movies, and it cost me $15.07. Some quick math: $1.88 per movie. And that’s in HD!! That pricing scheme is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d never spend that much to rent a movie anymore, not with great alternatives like Netflix around.

With Macworld starting up on Tuesday, there are lots of rumors going around about what Apple plans to introduce. Lots of blogs predict a sub-compact notebook, with USA Today reporting that it may be 50% thinner than existing MacBooks. The announcement I’m looking forward to the most however, is movie downloads. Movie rentals are expected to be announced on Tuesday, but I’m more interested in what Apple plans to do with their Apple TV set-top box and what extra may be had in the iTunes Store.

The battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD is seemingly at an end. But, I think that we’re going to be downloading movies quicker than we think, making Blu-ray not really all that exciting. That’s why I’m looking forward to what Apple might have in store. I’m hoping that they’ll introduce HD content into the iTunes Store. That would finally make movies on iTunes exciting to me.

One problem remains though: DRM. The music companies have just now figured out that DRM on music is bad for business. But, the movie companies haven’t learned that yet. If you bought the latest movie release on iTunes, you’d have to plunk down $9.99 to $12.99. And then you could only play it on an Apple approved device: like an iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, or iTunes itself.

I don’t think that movie downloads are really going to take off until DRM is removed. It’s just too risky to spend $10 bucks per movie and be looked into a device that you can’t control. Until the studios realize that though, they’ll probably just fracture the market with many different DRM schemes and end up confusing the consumer. Just like they did with HD-DVD vs Blu-ray.

I’m getting really close to closing down my Facebook account. After reading this article, I’m even that much closer. Here’s what I don’t like about Facebook:

• Pokes & Application requests. Stop sending them. They’re annoying.
• Privacy issues like crazy.
• Never ending feed of what I change on Facebook. I think I got that to stop tracking my activities, finally.
• Pages and pages of privacy settings. All of which is open by default.

I just downloaded Miro 1.0, which used to be called Democracy player. It combines an RSS news reader, with a Bittorrent client, and specializes in playing video files. There are many built in video RSS feeds to choose from, including many that are in HD, and all of them are DRM free.

The idea behind Miro is awesome. Instead of watching (or recording) live TV and tuning in to a program at the right time at the right channel, you just subscribe to it. Kinda like how season passes work on a Tivo, any new programs will just appear in the player. Internet+RSS+Video=No more TV.

The big problem right now is content. The shows I want to watch: CSI, Heroes, etc. Are all owned by Big Media, who have no clue how to use the Internet, and so I can’t just subscribe to the Heroes RSS feed and watch each new episode when it comes out. If that ever happens, then I’ll be in “TV” heaven.