How often does Light Reading get to strut its stuff with exclusive photos? Not often. (It’s a telecom rag!) So enjoy the slide show Phil Harvey has put up showing a blown-up, AT&T fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) cabinet. This thing was charred to smithereens. And Light Reading has the before and after evidence - a full 18 photos.

Building the perfect DVR/video-entertainment device is hard, which is why cable or telco TV plus a Netflix or Blockbuster + Movielink service is probably your best bet right now. But lest ye be sitting in your living room bemoaning the state of your set-top set-up, let me offer up a bit of context on why building the perfect box is so hard.

There’s the leased set-top model used by cable operators. In an effort to make those set-tops as cheap and efficient as possible, a lot of constraints are applied. There can’t be too much storage or processing power, too many added features or too much open access for modification that could muck up the service for everyone. Not an ideal situation, but on the other hand, these operators bring DVR to the masses.

There’s the retail model, which is owned by TiVo. People who have TiVo tend to love TiVo, but relatively few people have it because of the price. Plus, there’s the issue of plugging TiVo into your cable or telco network. Either you need a separate set-top from your service provider or you need a CableCARD. CableCARD certification is a serious technical challenge (more than I think most people realize) and it still doesn’t provide access to two-way services like video-on-demand and switched digital video.

Finally there’s the Internet model. All those media extenders that made big news early in the year, and P2P services like Joost (the box here being your computer). Here the problem is both content and bandwidth. Not enough appealing, timely content to keep people happy, and/or not enough bandwidth to keep content flowing efficiently.

So what’s on the horizon? (more…)

I don’t read much in hard copy anymore, but I did leaf through the print version of PC World while on the beach last weekend. One article caught my attention as much for what it didn’t say as for what it did report. The piece, Early IPTV Uses Only a Little of Its Fat Pipe, missed a few critical points. And having made my own share of mistakes and errors of omission in the blogging business, I thought I’d make some amends by adding in information where I do have a little knowledge.

First, the IPTV story profiles AT&T and Verizon, but it does so without making the distinction that AT&T delivers all-IP TV, while Verizon uses RF with an IP return path. Essentially Verizon has chosen to use IP only for certain interactive services, and actually more closely emulates a cable network architecture than AT&T’s offering.

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Knowing my love for Pandora, Dave sent me a link to Slacker a couple weeks back with a little nudge suggesting I try it out. The service has been getting ridiculously positive press reviews, and apparently the company will be launching its own hardware devices in the near future.

So how does Slacker stack up? The Web application is fabulous. It is extremely easy to set up customized radio stations based on any range of musical artists. Any artist in your list also brings up recommendations for other artists in the same genre that you can choose to add to your station. Then there’s a nifty little function called fine tuning. Fine tuning lets you decide the levels of music discovery you want to include in your channel, as well as how popular the songs should be, how often your personal favorites should be included, and what musical eras can be referenced. It sounds complicated, but in reality the fine tuning function is simple, fast and very powerful.

I’ve had some issues with Slacker crashing on me, but not enough to deter me from using the beta application. My bigger issue is that right now, I’m addicted to the Squeezebox and being able to access customized radio without my PC. We’ll have to see what happens when the Slacker hardware comes out later in the year. Whether I think it’s worth converting to Slacker will probably depend on two things:

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A couple weeks ago I referenced the fact that Comcast’s basic cable subscriber numbers have declined of late. Now it turns out that Verizon’s DSL subscriber numbers are also slowing, with Verizon only signing up 85,000 DSL users in the second quarter, down from 329,000 a year ago. Some of that loss is due to the popularity of FiOS, but not all of it. So where have the DSL users gone? Where FiOS isn’t available, I would guess that Verizon is losing ground to cable, much like over in the wireline side of the business. It’s interesting to watch this push-pull dynamic as the big service providers choose where they want to compete. It’s only going to get more interesting over the next few years.

Emerging Media Dynamics has a report out claiming that 20% of broadband homes (roughly 12 million households) will have media extenders by the end of this year. Anybody else astounded by that number?

The report is including in this category devices like Apple TV, the Xbox 360 and Sling’s SlingCatcher. All of these products are brand new so it utterly shocks me that 12 million people will have them by the end of 2007. Wishful thinking?

A survey from across the pond suggests that illegal music downloading has skyrocketed, at least in part because of the “democratizing” force of social networks. On the other hand, a survey earlier this year in the U.S. by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and Harris Interactive found just the opposite. According to the BSA, illegal downloading has decreased significantly among 8- to 18-year-olds over the last three years. Why? Fear of downloading a computer virus (62%), fear of legal trouble (52%), fear of downloading spyware (51%) and fear of getting in trouble with mommy and daddy (48%).

I certainly can’t refute the findings of either survey, having not spent the time interviewing thousands of Internet users. However, I can add an anecdote from a lunch discussion I had last week. My favorite financial analyst related a story about an associate of his, an author and copyright expert, who spoke with many college students about their music downloading habits. Apparently it was a point of pride among these students that most of their music had never been paid for. It was actually embarrassing for them to admit it when they purchased a song.

Are these just the morals of our misbegotten youth? Or is this a trend starting with a new generation? (And yes, I really just wanted to use the phrase “misbegotten youth”)