Photo by John Atheron

Earlier this week Herkko Hietanen gave a talk at Berkman Center for Internet & Society with the provocative title “Network Recorders and Social Enrichment of Television.” Hietanen is well known for his research on Creative Commons licensing and is a practicing lawyer who counsels clients on technology related legal issues.

The subjects covered will be very familiar to the ZNF community including; TiVo, Myth TV, the rights of Consumers to use share recorded content, and if content distributors will try to stop the watching of recorded video on a mobile phone.

Although Dave doesn’t always find value in FCC meetings, it’s important to hear what the professors at Harvard Law School think of PVRs and Sling for the iPhone given their influence on case law interpretation. Video and audio only versions of Mr. Hietanen’s talk can be found here. I’ve timestamped and transcribed some key statements:

[13:39] I talked, last week to one of the big network channels and asked them if they have any idea how to get their content to mobile phones, and he said [the network broadcaster's] only strategy was to use cable company and not independently distribute content on their own…since the cable companies fear losing exclusivity.

[21:10] …for quite a long time we’ve had home [television] recorders. The problem those, MythTV especially, is that any recorder at home, starting from VCRs, people can’t program them. If it’s too difficult, people just won’t use it…Home recorders are not user friendly [...] and there’s TiVo which is a very walled garden that people don’t have control of. You can order pizza with it, but you cannot get  access to your recordings, you cannot share content with your friends.

[27:49] I’d say that there’s no doubt [content rights owners] will try to attack new technologies, so how do [new technology makers] protect against these attacks? Basically you have to have stupid recorders that do nothing but record the shows, and have smart, open, [software] that can be modified [by the consumer] that do all the modification and enrichment of the [recorded shows].

[32:50] It doesn’t make sense for each person to make individual recordings of the same show. It is a waste of resources…At some point, users are going [to want] to start sharing resources. Why get content from a central server if your neighbor has it? It is a lot faster. But this, of course, is what got Replay TV into trouble.

[34:10] Social television is not new. There have been numerous previous technologies that let you interact with your friends…but for live television, any television, I would not want to share my screen-estate [sic] with my friends. So the social has to be before the show and after the show.

[36:50] We are going to see a lot more internet connected recorders, which can, with the help of social networks, that will fix television…we are going to need some brave entrepreneurs who are willing to test whether the Sony BetaMax [court] decision will hold in the digital world as well. Having networked recorders is any different from VHS or BetaMax.

[54:20] What I am interested in is what’s going to happen. When [personal video recorders] get connected, what’s going to happen? What kind of innovation are we going to get? I am waiting for innovation at the edge to be stopped by someone.

Until now, Google Voice has been a web-only service to manage voicemail in the same way Gmail manages email. That’s no longer the case. But, as of today, Google Voice is a first class locally installed mobile application, available in the Android Market, deeply integrated with the Android operating system. (And there’s a less robust version for Blackberry here.)

Originally called Grand Central before being acquired by Google in 2007, Google Voice is currently in an invite only testing phase – but that may change soon judging by recent events. You can read more information about the general features of Google Voice mobile app for Android on the official blog. But in typical, understated, Google style there’s an intimated threat of two game changing features…

Voice mail karaoke

The “voice mail karaoke” has a scrubber bar, like found in iPhone visual voicemail, that you touch to fast forward or rewind the message. While listening to the audio, the machine generated transcription text follows along at the same pace – as each word is spoken, the corresponding text is highlighted red.

Before, one would often have to replay a voice mail three and four times over to hear the number correctly and write it down, only then to have to manually dial the phone to call the person who left the voice mail back. However, with Google Voice, if the person leaving you a voice mail message spoke the phone number they wish you to call them at, that number appears in the text transcription. So, simply long press the number and your phone dials it.

Free unlimited text messaging (SMS)

With Google Voice, you no longer need to have a text messaging plan with your mobile phone service provider or incur a 20 cent per message charge because text messages are sent through your phone’s data plan. Yes you read that correctly, that means free, unlimited text messaging. Currently, carriers like AT&T are charging the equivalent of $1,300.00 per megabyte for SMS. Testing performed in our secret ZNF laboratory show that barely two kilobytes of data were used to send each text message to other non-Android phones, all on different carrier networks.

How long will the good times last?

A recent Computer World article about Cisco Systems may be an indicator of storm clouds on the Verizon horizon:

Officials at Cisco Systems Inc. say they are closely watching Google Inc.’s aggressive foray onto their unified communications turf and plan to respond quickly by boosting the capabilities of Cisco’s offerings. Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc.predicted that over the “long term, Google will have a significant role” in the business.Analysts said that the Google Voice Internet telephony service may pose long-term problems for companies like Cisco and Microsoft Corp.

Now that Google Voice mobile app provides retrieving of voice mails and sending of text messaging for free, do you expect the mobile carriers to sit on their hands and take no action as two of their most lucrative cash cows wither and die?

(Remixed photo sourced from Elizabeth West, Flickr.)

In the aftermath of last week’s Consumer insurrection to testing of bandwidth caps, Time Warner Cable’s Glenn Britt hinted that metered billing was inevitable.

“…We continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers.”

Now Patrick Knorr of Sunflower Broadband has gone on the record by saying metered bandwidth pricing (including caps and overage fees) are a foregone conclusion. He made this statement Tuesday during a press conference at the American Cable Association’s annual summit in Washington D.C. An especially notable quote by Mr. Knorr was;

“I would like to pay the same price for my heating bill all year round, but I have to pay more in winter, when I use more.”

Both Mr. Knorr and Mr. Britt seem to be implying that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are the same as the other household utilities like electricity and natural gas. If that is the case, the subject of Consumers being able to monitor their consumption is not the issue at hand, but how that monitoring is done.

The elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about is the utility provider cannot be the one who provides the monitoring tools – it is a conflict of interest.

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TiVo programmer Ryan Rose has hacked his washing machine to send text message notifications over Twitter when his clothes are done. He did this for a practical reason, to prevent forgetting about his laundry which might sit in the damp washer and mildew. You can follow the washing machine’s activity on Twitter (412 people, including myself, already do) to be instantly informed when Mr. Rose’s laundry is done. Why would you want to? More on that later… Here’s video of “PiMPY” in action:

I’m a big fan of Activity Streams such as Twitter and FriendFeed. Once current user contributions across all the social web sites are freely distributed, with an emphasis on privacy, a new web era will arrive. My vision originates from Professor David Gelernter‘s “Life Streams” as defined in his 1993 book Mirror Worlds: The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox – How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean.

Apparently I am not alone in my opinion that Activity Streams are the next big thing. Some of the most influential people in social media (MySpace, Google, Plaxo, Comcast, Nokia just to name a few) recently attended a DiSo meeting to discuss the future of how their user’s activity will be published. (Ian Kennedy, formerly of Yahoo and now head of Nokia’s Ovi service, kindly recorded the DiSo meeting using his phone.) One of the points discussed during the event was that activity streams are not just generated by people but that machines, like PiMPY, can also broadcast what they’re doing. Mr. Rose’s place of employment is noteworthy, and it got me thinking about the possibilities of machines with their own activity streams – particularly TiVo. (more…)