Digital Media Bytes

A periodic roundup of relevant news… from our other blogs:

Broadband Issues for President Obama
The historic swearing-in of President Barak Obama has taken place, and now it’s time for the real work to begin. Alongside war and a tumbling economy, several broadband issues face President Obama in both the short and long term. There’s the broadcast DTV transition scheduled for next month that may now be postponed until June. Next up: the issue of increasing broadband access and download speeds.

AT&T’s Fiber Rollout Increasing Digital Divide

AT&T likes to brag that they now offer U-verse to over 17 million households, but after two years, they’ve still only managed to sign up 1 million subscribers. While 17 million households sounds like a pretty significant footprint, if you’re not in one of the higher tax brackets, you are probably still waiting for super fast internet access.

Placeshifting BeyondTV to the Mac

This feature makes it possible for Mac OS X users to watch recorded shows served up by a BeyondTV computer over the internet. It’s a pretty easy process that requires BeyondTV on the home PC and VLC on the place-shifting computer.

Internet on the TV – What’s Changed Since CES 2008
I’ve heard many people say that CES 2009 was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. When I think back to CES 2008, netbooks were barely on the radar, only road warriors used mobile broadband, and there were very few ways (or reasons) to access Internet on the TV. At CES 2009, all three trends showed exponential growth.

iPod Without iTunes
My stated goal, find an application or set of applications to synchronize music, video, photos, calendar, contacts, and make sure it recognizes all id3 data correctly. There are several programs and plugins that will work as partial replacements for iTunes, almost all of these require Disk Mode, and all but one cannot change the iPod into disk mode without iTunes.

Pics of the Motorola au Box from CES
With a backlog of CES content to post, I thought I’d start with some new details and pics of the Motorola-created au Box launched by Japan’s KDDI last November. The idea behind the KDDI au service is to make content transferable between au set-tops and au mobile phones.