Digital cable has a great deal of promise but in many ways it has failed to deliver.  A decade ago as people were starting to transition from analog cell phones to digital cell phones in the states, many people rightly recognized that the digital phones were not as powerful or as good as their reliable analog phones.

The two phones ran on different systems and the chopped down nature of digital made the early sound quality sound rougher and in general the service was not as good.  The technology was really good for the carriers because they could now quadruple the number of calls that an antenna could carry from say 1,000 to 4,000.

Digital cable is supposed to deliver more channels to cable subscribers, just like digital cellular antennas could handle more calls.  The problem is that the digital packets often times get chopped up and don’t always make it back together again.

This week I have been watching the digital cable channel lottery as I watch one channel after the next fall victim to pixelation.  Its usually either Fox News or CNN and sometimes a few others, but this week it seems to be rotating through about two dozen channels through out the day.

If I am going to pay for 500 channels of nothing on I expect them to be clear and crisp and well watchable!

This isn’t the case and at times it is almost worthless to have a 24 hour news channel that you can not hear or see more than half of the time.  I currently have Comcast, but used to have a different problem with Dish, called rain storms that wiped out all of the channels for a couple hours every few days out of the month.

Until the cable companies can figure out that I do not need 100 more channels of nothing on, but I do want the first 500 or at least the first 100 to be viewable with some reliability, I am going to be very tempted to jump ship and take the first alternate option that comes along, just like we all learned to jump ship with our wireless carriers a decade ago, until we developed a cellular churn culture.

The cable companies are likely to learn very soon that digital TV can lead to a subscriber churn culture as well.

Technorati tags: Broken Technology Series, Digital Cable, Comcast, Dish, Pixelation, Why does my digital Cable look fuzzy

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Oh Canada! 

Canadians according to Canadian law might be one of the largest groups of pirates that history has ever seen if we exclude online music piracy.  Snagging free MP3 files garnishes a great deal of attention, but were you aware that almost a million Canadians or better are stealing Satellite signals not sanctioned by the Canadian government?

That’s right Canadians are picking up signals that include everything from Dish Network to XM Satellite radio wherever they can get it.  Funny thing is these Pirates are not stealing from the satellite company, they are paying for the content!  They set up illegal ‘offshore’ accounts in the US to pay their cable bills. 

Technically its on the same shore but from a legal jurisdiction perspective a Sovereign nation can be viewed as offshore, in fact some states within the US even offer Offshore banking to citizens of other states in the US.  Caribbean climates don’t often come to mind when we think about offshore banking in Montana or Nevada but that is the way it is.

The services do not necessarily mind and the equipment dealers and distributors make a fortune from the practice as US satellite receivers of both cable TV and radio can command double the price seen in the US as its smuggled into Canada and sold on the black market.

Up until recently the service considered the Canadian consumers as more of a smuggler than a pirate and turned a blind eye mostly to the activity.  But recent crack downs of forces from both the government and the cable companies are making some Canadians see red or more precisely static as their cable connection is removed.

Now many Canadians are beginning to demand their satellite rights to American shows.  Canada despite the North American Free Trade Agreement has a very long history of protectionism within its broadcast industry.  Protected markets however cannot always survive market forces and taking away someone’s cable, well those are fighting words where I come from.  Let’s hope Canada does not break down into the quagmire of civil war over this very important and difficult issue.

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This one is so simple that its obvious, especially if you are an expert at picking locks.

Most door locks, pad locks and other types of locks have not evolved well with the times.  Yes there are some high end products that provide somewhat better security but in general the door lock is in need of an overhaul.

The Wall Street Journal ocvered a piece a couple weeks back about a group of crackers that work to pick locks.  They among other thing provide their findings to the manufacturers and the world for that matter by sharing tutorials and videos on the internet.

That’s right YouTube may be carrying the black hat equivalent of open source cracks on your front door.  Forget the security flaws in your Windows XP system that Microsoft just learned about a week ago when a sixteen year old programmer from The Netherlands published a flaw on the internet.

These guys and girls might be publishing video instructions on YouTube that will help someone walk in your front door.

Sure that’s scary in a Department of Homeland defense color coded red sort of way, but the open source share the weakness and make it public so the public will demand better kind of approach has some validity.  Many police officers will tell you and show you after a break in that your door locks are probably sub par.  So maybe a little social awareness of the broken technology of locks is what we really do need!

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The music distribution system was broken several years ago.  Steve Jobs was able to put humpty dumpty back together but its all bandaids and scotch tape. 

The iPod is a fantastic device in lots of ways, but the iTunes distribution process is ugly.  iPod has about 75% of the portable music player market and this is a huge influence on music downloads.  Album sales in the traditional sense have been declining year after year, but there appears to be a little light at the end of the tunnell.

First, the portable music download industry is growing and there are more choices available to consumers.  Many still go with the default of iTunes, but with heavy hitters like Wal-Mart and Microsoft and many more trying to carve out a slice of pie, pricing should improve.

New technologies are also pushing growth into areas such as Podcasting -> named not so much after the iPod but coincidentally at about the same time the iPod launched and when it was still marching up to its first million units sold.

Video and other types of media are starting to grow more dominant on the devices themselves and as Google has recently purchased YouTube and Brightcove has launched its beta after signing a deal with MTV, we could begin to see the model changes as music mixes into the state of things.

The bottom line is that a dollar a song business model thrown out there back in 2001 is really no better than the $15 dollar a CD (for 15 songs) model the music industry offered in the years leading up to Napster.  The internet is a great leveller and as more and more artists are moving into music distribution spaces such as MySpace there is ample opportunity for many of the major players to stake out a new territory or have their industry handed to them on a plate by a start up.

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Could it be that since the battery was invented claims about battery life have been greatly exaggerated?

Robert Conrad used to challenge people to “knock the battery off my shoulder” for Eveready as if to challenge us to even consider thinking the battery wasn’t tough enough for the job.

Truth be told its not the batteries fault.  It just does what it does, but battery life and expectations are often set too high.  This is made even worse when a consumer electronics product designer attempts to estimate and advertise esoteric notions like ‘play time’, and ’standby time’ and don’t hold your breath waiting for a lot of ‘talk time’.

Battery life is to consumer electronics what EPA miles per gallon is to sticker listings on a new car and don’t worry I’m not going on a rant on new cars just yet.

I just read a review of Microsoft’s new Zune Player reviewed by Walter Mossberg of the WSJ on November 9, 2006, (sec B1,3).  He wrote,

But Battery life on the Zune was very disappointing.  Microsoft Claims 14 hours of music playback on a single charge with the wireless feature turned off . . .

. . . . I got just 12 hours and 18 minutes of music playback, versus 14 hours and 44 minutes from an iPod under the same usage pattern.

He elaborates that Microsoft assesses their number based on a special set of circumstances where the the volume is always at default, the same track repeats endlessly and the backlight time is reduced down to a second.

Who does that?

Who listens to the same track repeating at default volume for 14 hours straight?  Why can’t the consumer electronics manufactures come up with a standard testing system with say 10,000 tracks of songs provided in the same order with the volume level calibrated to a certain level of decibels based on a standardized beep or whistle on the very first track.

Put the tracks out for distribution with manufactures and designers, and give it the Mossberg Audio Test of Playtime Analysis (MATOPA).  A simple standard would then allow us to measure if various devices stand up against each other on the MATOPA scale.  Plus, they should then run say 100 devices in a random sample off the manufacturing line throughout the year to keep their MATOPA rating for truth in advertising.

Pick your device and a similar test could be devised, but do we all really need some absolutely useless and faulty advertising information presented to us in countless reviews websites and product packaging information guides. 

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