Carl Weinschenk over at The IT-Finance Connection has expressed an interesting perspective in a post entitled, “The View from Here: The Case Against VoIP.” It’s got a few people stirring. He cites posts from Ike Elliot, Garrett Smith & Jon Arnold in making his argument. He makes a good case.
Now and again I read the forums over at Broadband Reports. This morning I see that a member I recognize has posted a thread about Netflix streaming video service, including a casual review of the new Roku/Netflix set-top box.
While doing some admin tasks today I stumbled upon a recent post by Mike Oeth at the Junction Networks blog. He says:
As long as the video is using the SIP standard, we at Junction Networks are all for it. Our OnSIP Hosted PBX already supports video codecs using the SIP standards. Today, any customer with a video phone can make video calls.
He further states:
Oddly, however, I have the capability and most of us here at Junction Networks have video cameras, but I do not make it a habit to make video calls for business. My kids call the grandparents on the video phone every now and then, but as a business tool, at least here, it has not caught on. Does anyone have an industry where they use the video phone all the time? If so, I would love to hear about it.
Amen. That about sums up the state of video phones in general.
NewTeeVee has a report on the new hardware device built by Roku that mates to Nextflix streaming online service. At just $99 it's not expensive but it looks to be only SD. There is an HDMI output so perhaps it…
Just poking around this afternoon I found this which says that Amazon is definitely working on an HD version of their Unbox movie download service. This service is operated in partnership with Tivo. The user interface is very nicely integrated into the Tivo menus. My wife likes it a lot.
They suspect that the new service will be based upon H.264 compression. That’s about the only real option around.
Neither the company nor its customers will have unlimited bandwidth so older compression schemes would be impractical. Newer compression schemes would require that Amazon encode the content themselves. Better that they settle on H.264 which is what Apple’s iTunes uses amongst others.
It certainly appears that HD-DVD lost. But it also appears that Blu-Ray did not win. Yes, this was a classic lose-lose situation. For all it’s back room dealing Sony may blow this in the end.
Blu-Ray sales peaked for a few weeks in January but have since slumped. Consumers just may not see value in the price of the players or the media. Ars Technica has the details.
Wait, the price of Blu-Ray players has actually been on the rise since Toshiba conceded the battle! Even I, who still has a first generation Toshiba HD-XA1 HD-DVD player, won’t be buying a Blu-Ray player any time soon. They’re just too expensive.