www.jobollen.be

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Like I always said

Bill Hill, formerly of Microsoft:

The trouble is trying to innovate at Microsoft, which is a company of geeks, run by geeks, and dominated by Windows.

When TabletPC began at Microsoft, it was a research effort - outside of the regular Windows organization. Once it was re-organized into Windows, that was the kiss of death. I never really thought much about this while I worked there, but it’s my belief that despite all the lip-service paid to end-users, the only Windows customers with any real power are the Windows Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).

 ★  Like I always said

In only four short years, the worldwide mobile data traffic will reach 40 exabytes per year. This is according to new research from Cisco which sees the traffic jumping from 0.09 exabytes per month in 2009 to 3.6 exabytes per month by 2014. And in case you don't know what an exabyte is, it's 1 billion gigabytes. That's one quintillion bytes.

It appears that not only does the mobile web have a future, the mobile web is the future.

Sponsor

Global mobile data traffic has increased 160% over the course of the past year and is now at 90 petabytes per month, or the equivalent of 23 million DVDs, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Forecast for 2009-2014. By 2014, it will have reached 3.6 exabytes per month, a 39-fold increase.

The researchers said there are two major global trends driving up the data usage. One, obviously, is the increase in the number of data-ready handsets. Simply put, more handsets capable of browsing the web means more data usage. By 2014, there could be over 5 billion personal devices connecting to mobile networks and over 400 million of those devices may represent the only means of connecting to the Internet that some people will have.

However, it's important to note that in Cisco's study, they also counted laptop air cards as mobile Internet devices, so these numbers don't just speak to the proliferation of smartphones themselves, they speak to how we will increasingly be using cellular data networks to access the Web in the future.

The other major trend driving up the data traffic numbers is the consumption of mobile video content. By 2014, mobile video will account for 66% of all mobile data traffic worldwide. This represents a 66-fold increase from 2009, the highest of any mobile data application. This expected increase has been noticed by other studies, too. In September 2009, for example, U.K.-based research firm Coda reported that we'll be using 1.8 exabytes of video per month by 2017.

Another way to get a handle on the increase is to look at the average mobile broadband connection and how much data traffic it uses. Right now, the average connection uses 1.3 gigabytes per month - the equivalent of 650 MP3 music files. By 2014, the average connection will use 7 gigabytes of traffic per month or the equivalent of 3500 MP3's.

The Middle East and Africa will have the highest compounded annual growth rate (CAGR), with a rate of 133%. Following that region is Asia-Pacific (119% CAGR), and North America (117% CAGR). India will be the country with the highest CAGR - they'll be at 222%. China will follow with a 172% CAGR and South Africa will have a 156% CAGR.

These are just some of the highlights from Cisco's research. If you're interested in learning more, you can read through the entire report here.

Image credit: Toshiba netbook via Slashgear

Discuss

Sarah Perez16107177592575532503

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What's so interesting about App Engine and AppScale is that since all of the App Engine applications are created using a very narrowly defined, standard SDK, and the platform is 100% open in terms of data migration, you could theoretically migrate from Google to say, SliceHost, in a single click, completely automatically with zero downtime. A summary of App Engine

At Wolfire, we have been using Google App Engine for quite some time. To recap: App Engine is a platform where you can write a web application using a humble set of APIs via Python or Java, and you can deploy this code on Google's infrastructure. I have written about it in more depth here.

This represents the commoditization of App Engine

This is very different from virtual private servers, where you manage the entire operating system, complete with a virtualized hard drive and other virtual hardware. An App Engine app is simply a set of Python or Java files, with a few YAML files for housekeeping. With most hosting services, you can use MySQL, MongoDB, Berkeley DB, a flat text file, or an infinite number of other ways to store data. On App Engine, there is a single API to use called the Datastore. It looks sort of like this:

class Order(db.Model):
product = db.StringProperty()
name = db.StringProperty()

o = Order(product='Overgrowth', name='Jeff')
o.put()

You just write pure Python or Java code according to an open source SDK, and then Google takes this code and puts it on an unknown and variable number of servers in an unknown and variable part of the world.

But App Engine is proprietary...

Many people have criticized App Engine for being proprietary and closed, which causes vendor lock-in. This is fair criticism. It is true that Google's implementation of the App Engine API on their end, using BigTable and other technologies, is totally proprietary. However, App Engine at its core is simply an API. Google even provides an open source implementation of the spec, which is useful for running it locally on your computer -- granted, it is not remotely designed for production use.

In other words, I have all of the code for this very blog on my computer. I have all of my blog posts and other datastore entities backed up in an open format. In fact, I can run a clone of the blog on my local computer using an open source implementation of the App Engine SDK provided by Google. However, the only production ready infrastructure is provided by Google, so I am largely locked in. I would need to write a non-trivial amount of code if I wanted to migrate the Wolfire website and blog to a different platform.

Enter AppScale

However, this is about to change in a big way. I'd like to draw your attention to a rapidly developed open-source project called AppScale, developed by the RACELab at UC Santa Barbara.

AppScale is an extremely promising open source implementation of the App Engine API. It is designed to run on a number of infrastructures such as Xen, KVM, Eucalyptus, and Amazon EC2. If that doesn't mean much to you, it basically means that you can deploy your App Engine site to a wide variety of platforms, or more interestingly, to competing cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 -- or a private cloud provider.

The commoditization of the cloud

This has huge ramifications for Google App Engine, and the future of web application hosting in general. When AppScale becomes mature enough, this means that Akamai, Rackspace, Linode, and hundreds of other companies with the right infrastructure will be able to host any App Engine app.

This has already been sort of true for general purpose hosting -- e.g. you can write a webapp on Slicehost, and move it to Linode or EC2. However, this is a non-trivial process.

What's so interesting about App Engine and AppScale is that since all of the App Engine applications are created using a very narrowly defined, standard SDK, and the platform is 100% open in terms of data migration, you could theoretically migrate from Google to say, SliceHost, in a single click, completely automatically with zero downtime.

Given this ease of migration, if anyone creates the slightest reason to switch to their infrastructure, you might see thousands of apps moving immediately. Google's massively prized infrastructure has just become commoditized.

The Wolfire Blog could be running on Google in the morning, casually migrate to an Amazon EC2 instance in the afternoon, and then perhaps stroll over to Rackspace in the evening. If one service leapfrogs another, you could press the button again, and seamlessly move to that one. You could even have your app running on many "clouds" simultaneously.

At first glance, this commoditization sounds pretty unfortunate for Google. However, don't feel too sorry -- Google is actually funding the AppScale project (along with research grants from the National Science Foundation).

Why would Google want this to happen?

Google is not really in the business of nickel and diming developers for web hosting. It is really hard to get this sort of information from Google and the App Engine team, but I doubt Google was expecting to ever turn a profit from App Engine, or even come close. I believe App Engine's mission was to ensure that there is a platform available for easily creating web applications and to drive the cost as low as possible. Like Google's massive investments on Chrome, it all comes back to keeping the web as open as possible, so that Google can monetize it using AdSense.

Commoditization is not necessarily cheap

I predict that the emergence of AppScale will not actually drive prices down any further. For all but the largest web apps, Google App Engine's free quota is so generous that many people (including us) don't pay a dime. Actually that is not true: Google charged us 11 cents a few weeks ago when we did nearly half a million visits due to appearing on Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, etc. at the same time!

Quite the contrary: I believe this will create a market for more expensive backends which outperform Google on a given metric, such as running instances of your app worldwide for localized performance, offering beefier, more dedicated hardware to reduce latencies, or perhaps features like not blocking the countries of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan from accessing your web app[1].

The fact that App Engine is virtually free is awesome to attract hobbyists, free hosting is actually not a huge selling point to most companies. If you are running a promotion, or selling a product, often the last thing you care about is a small monthly fee for web hosting. I appreciate the free ride, but I actually am willing to pay for better service, such as having a local instance running in Europe.

Google App Engine is fast, but it is nothing compared to say, Akamai's EdgePlatform. If Akamai runs AppScale on their global network and offers a one click migration path onto it, they will instantly get tens of thousands of apps migrating over, even if it costs several times as much as Google. Likewise, if someone one ups Akamai, all of those apps will instantly move to the new service.

There are going to be a lot of really interesting choices for App Engine developers very soon.

What's so interesting about App Engine and AppScale is that since all of the App Engine applications are created using a very narrowly defined, standard SDK, and the platform is 100% open in terms of data migration, you could theoretically migrate from Google to say, SliceHost, in a single click, completely automatically with zero downtime.

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And what is Google Chrome is doing ? Hopefully Chrome uses Core Animation. Amazing, so many things have happened in the Flash Player engineering team over the past year. Lots I would love to talk about. But the purpose of this post is to deep dive into a subject Kevin Lynch touched upon recently, specifically Mac performance and his comment about Core Animation. Whenever performance is mentioned in the context of Flash it gathers a lot of the attention and some of the technical background is lost in the PR.

So what's the deal with Core Animation in Flash Player 10.1? Let's look at how Apple's documentation summarizes what Core Animation does:

Core Animation is an Objective-C framework that combines a high-performance compositing engine with a simple to use animation programming interface.

Sounds like perfect match for Flash does it not? So yes, Flash Player 10.1 is attempting to leverage this framework to work around a few specific technical issues we've had in Safari and all other browsers on OS X.

The drawing model jungle on OS X

Before going into more specifics of why we are going towards Core Animation lets get an overview about how plugins on OS X draw into the browser window. There 4 possible ways (compared to one on Windows):

1. QuickDraw. Default mode used by Opera, older Firefox and Safari versions.
2. Quartz 2D (a.k.a. Core Graphics). Supported by newer versions of Firefox and Safari.
3. OpenGL. No browser I know of supports this properly today.
4. Core Animation. Only available in Safari 4 + OS X 10.6 right now, with caveats in the current version.

In addition to these drawing models designers can embed Flash content in 3 different ways by specifying wmode:

1. Normal
2. Opaque
3. Transparent

Normal means that you can't have overlapping HTML sitting on top of your SWF, Opaque allows it and Transparent means that the SWF is transparent and underlying HTML content will show through. Taking all these variables into account we come up with these tables which shows when a particular drawing model is used (and subject for change before we release Flash Player 10.1):

Flash Player 10.0:Safari 4Firefox 3Opera 10NormalQuartz 2DQuickDrawQuickDrawOpaqueQuartz 2DQuickDrawQuickDrawTransparentQuartz 2DQuickDrawQuickDraw

Flash Player 10.1:Safari 4 (*)Firefox 3Opera 10NormalCore AnimationQuartz 2DQuickDrawOpaqueQuartz 2D(**)Quartz 2DQuickDrawTransparentQuartz 2D(**) Quartz 2DQuickDraw(*) Actually using nightly builds of WebKit because support for Core Animation is work in progress.
(**) Core Animation is used when the SWF is the front most object on the HTML page.

What are the issues with Quartz 2D?

The basic premise of Quartz 2D as Apple describes it:

Quartz 2D is an advanced, two-dimensional drawing engine available for iPhone application development and to all Mac OS X application environments outside of the kernel. Quartz 2D provides low-level, lightweight 2D rendering with unmatched output fidelity regardless of display or printing device.

Quartz 2D is not designed for multimedia applications, like animation or video playback. That's where OpenGL, Core Video, Core Animation shine. Safari's use of Quartz 2D to draw HTML content makes perfect sense as its content is static in most cases. Everything works well until Flash comes into the picture. For instance when the Flash Player plays a SWF using the Quartz 2D drawing model is has to do so with the full involvement of the browser. The sequence of events looks like this (you can follow the stack traces in Shark):

1. Whenever the Flash Player is ready to display a new frame, the Flash Player requests a refresh of its region using NPN_InvalidateRect.
2. The browser adds the the rectangle provided by the Flash Player to its dirty region.
3. The browser traverses its own display list (the HTML DOM) and paints every node which is part of the dirty region.
4. When the browser finds a node with a Flash Player instance it first draws the HTML background and then posts an event to the Flash Player to tell it that it has to paint over the requested region now.
5. The Flash Player then finally draws its frame.

So far so good, makes sense I hope. So what's the technical issue? Think of a fairly complex HTML page, for instance a page with a CSS gradient in the background. Add to add a SWF which runs at 30 frames/sec. You will see that a lot of time is spent in the browser, not in the Flash Player. This is where Core Animation kicks in: step 3 and 4 pretty much go away (as long as the SWF is the top most object).

Core Animation in the Flash Player

Flash Player 10.1 implements the Core Animation drawing model to fix this technical issue, among others. Instead of using a CGImageRef + CGContextDrawImage to get the bits to screen we pass a CAOpenGLLayer to Safari and use an OpenGL texture of type GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE_ARB to get our bits to the screen.

The support for the Core Animation drawing model was originally driven by Apple and we have worked feverishly to finish the engineering work on both sides. Yes that's right: This was and is a joint effort between Apple and Adobe engineers. Given the now almost perfect integration of Core Animation plugins into Safari I hope that future versions of the Flash Player will take advantage of more capabilities of OpenGL. And that without the requirement of setting any special wmode. I am pretty stoked about it.

As of today (2/10/2010) we are getting closer to having it stable enough for public consumption. That means though: You will need Flash Player 10.1, OS X 10.6 and updated version of Safari (or the nightly WebKit build), otherwise you will not see anything.

What difference does it really make?

This is by no means panacea for all performance issues in the Flash Player. Far from it. But it is a small step to a larger goal which is to improve the experience in the browser with the ever more complex web content out there. That said here is a comparison between Flash Player 10.0 and Flash 10.1 using this test case (this only works in Safari). Keep in mind that that is an extreme test case which has little to do with real world web content.

Flash Player 10.0 + nightly WebKit + OS X 10.6


Flash Player 10.1 + nightly WebKit + OS X 10.6


PS: You might have noticed that Core Animation is a Cocoa API. Yes, Flash Player 10.1 is a true Cocoa app now (with a Carbon fallback to support Firefox and Opera which are not Cocoa yet). And what is Google Chrome is doing ? Hopefully Chrome uses Core Animation.

In an apparent effort to position the iPad as the ultimate media consumption device, Apple is reportedly contemplating lowering the price of TV episodes on iTunes to just $1, down from their current price of $1.99.

The Financial Times reports:

The test, expected to coincide with the April consumer debut of the iPad, will offer some shows at the lower price as a way to test whether reducing the cost of video programming will ignite sales, people familiar with the discussions said.

Some television networks agreed to the lower prices after months of negotiations, and having initially resisted Apple’s push. Media executives are under pressure from declining DVD sales and cut-rate rental services such as Redbox, that offer rental DVDs for $1.

Telling chart from Silicon Alley Insider breaking down Microsoft’s operating profits by product division. Makes you wonder how much longer they can continue ride the Office wave.  And as for the Zune, the XBox and Microsoft’s other entertainment related endeavors, well, let’s just say that Office 2010 is gonna be off the hook!

YouTube and Hulu are frequently touted as the top destinations for viewing online video — but while those sites frequently top the lists for number of videos viewed online, it turns out that consumers spend more time watching videos elsewhere, according to comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review.

YouTube is still the dominant online video site, controlling about 26 percent of all time spent viewing videos online in December, according to comScore data. The next 24 top video destinations accounted for an additional 22 percent of time spent viewing videos online. That means the remaining 52 percent of time spent watching online video happens in the long tail of online video.

In addition to charting the amount of time spent on top video destinations versus long-tail sites, the report tracked some other key stories that emerged over the year. One of the bigger stories was the emergence of Hulu as a major online video destination. Hulu saw dramatic growth in the number of videos viewed on its site, as well as strong growth in the amount of video the average user watched. The amount of time viewers spent on the site ballooned 140 percent, to more than 5.8 billion minutes, meaning that the average Hulu user spent more than two hours on the site during the month.

The number of people viewing online video also jumped almost 20 percent in 2009, with viewers watching video for longer periods of time — from 3.2 minutes per video in December 2008 to 4.1 minutes per video a year later. While that could indicate growing patience among online video viewers, it could also be linked to an increase in the number of long-form videos being watched on sites like Hulu. The average number of videos viewed per user almost doubled over the course of the year, up to 187 videos during December.

Related content on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Not Your Grandfather’s Streaming Video Business

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Openess on the internet allows for better representation of a democratic forces. Everybody can see and comment on everybody. There is an interesting new book called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. I think the book is interesting for anyone who's trying to understand determinants for human well-being and thriving. Psychologists have known for a long time that situational arrangements importantly affect many aspects of our mental functioning and this book is a great and evidence based Openess on the internet allows for better representation of a democratic forces. Everybody can see and comment on everybody.

Last night, the news started to come out about Glitch, the new massively multiplayer online game that a few of the key cogs that built Flickr had been developing in secret for much of last year. Today, I got to see a still relatively early build of the game. It is both beautiful and impressive.

I met up with Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr, so he could demo Glitch for me. Sitting in a hotel lobby on a WiFi connection being used by who knows how many other people, the game, which runs in the browser and is Flash-based, was incredibly smooth. Even more impressively, Butterfield was able to manipulate the game from the backend (using his “God” mode tools) to add new elements on the fly right in front of me. This is a key part of what will likely make or break Glitch.

While Glitch itself as a game is still coming together (it’s not going to be released until Fall 2010), Tiny Speck, the company behind the game, has spent much of the last year creating a backend that can allow them to quickly and easily build out an expansive multiplayer world. In fact, up until this point, about 80% of the time has been spent on building this backend, with only 20% devoted to the frontend of the game itself, Butterfield says. Over the next nine months, that will flip.

So how easy is it to add elements to the game? Right before our meeting, Butterfield asked one of his developers to create a Michael Arrington element in the game. When we sat down, there was Mike, in the game, ready to go (see picture below). Butterfield also dynamically altered worlds on the fly and added new elements all with a few mouse and keyboard clicks.

One reason Tiny Speck is able to do this is because they decided to focus on making the game 2D rather than 3D like some of the more popular MMOs out there right now, such as World of Warcraft. This saves them countless hours of rendering time for countless angles. More importantly, Butterfield says he realized during his last gaming project, Game Neverending (which eventually gave birth to Flickr, before it was bought by Yahoo), that how a game looks matters less to a lot of users after a few minutes of play. All of that peels back to the fundamental gameplay, which Glitch is focusing on.

And that’s not to say Glitch doesn’t look nice. In fact, as I noted above, it looks great. Tiny Speck has several artists developing the landscapes for the different worlds in the game, as well as different intricately designed elements that you use in the game itself. The game already has a distinctive look even though Butterfield is quick to point out that maybe the key element, the characters you inhabit in the game, aren’t done yet.

So what’s Glitch all about? Well, it’s a bit convoluted, but basically you start out in the future and travel backwards through time to save the future. In doing so you jump in and out of the minds of eleven giants. Or something. See? Convoluted. But that shouldn’t matter — many of the best games are.

Ultimately, it’s a collaborative puzzle solving game on a massive scale. Interacting with people in the game is key, and meant to be fun. It’s a big part of Tiny Speck’s goal to do for MMOs what the Wii did for console gaming — which is to bring it beyond the stereotypical players and to the masses. Butterfield notes that while World of Warcraft is huge, its player base is just a fraction of those who play Farmville, for example. The goal is to find a middle ground.

And that middle ground applies to revenues too. While World of Warcraft is pulling in a ton of money for each player (thanks to its subscription model), Farmville pulls in much less (because it’s mostly based around micro-transactions). Butterfield sees a middle ground here too that Glitch will try to tap. While the core game will be free to play, users will be able to buy items in the game, and hardcore users will probably be able to pay for special rights, maybe even voting on new features (an interesting idea that Butterfield floated out there).

Since the game is Flash-based, I asked Butterfield for his thoughts about the recent controversy surrounding Flash-maker Adobe since Apple and Google appear to be moving away from Flash and towards HTML5. Butterfield said that while they have no allegiance to Adobe, there is simply no way they could have made Glitch the way it is trying to use anything but Flash. And while performance is often a knock of the technology, Tiny Speck has done a ton of work to optimize things on their end to keep the game running smoothly, even as it scales (obviously, they test that sort of stuff even in this early stage).

I also asked Butterfield why not just build Glitch as a Facebook game, like Farmville? His response was that their vision for Glitch was to use more than the small window within a social network. Fundamentally, it’s an extension of what he started with Game Neverending, but they’re far beyond what was capable back then, so the technology is finally matching the vision.

And as a best case scenario, Butterfield also hopes to see Glitch extend beyond the browser and onto systems like the Wii and Xbox 360. And while there may not be a full iPhone app, he foresees them using that platform (and Android) to make app mini-games of sorts that give you power-ups in the game when you play them.

On top of being a co-founder, Butterfield is serving as President of Tiny Speck. His other co-founders include Eric Costello (also the Client Lead), Cal Henderson (the former head of engineering for Flickr who is now Tiny Speck’s VP of Engineering), and Serguei Mourachov (who is the Server Lead). As we noted back in September, they also hired Digg’s lead designer to be their be their Director of Design, Daniel Burka. There are about a dozen or so people working on Glitch now, with most based in San Francisco or Vancouver (where Butterfield spends most of his time).

Tiny Speck quietly raised a seed round of funding last year led by Accel Partners, and including angels such as Marc Andreessen, and Jeff Weiner. Butterfield said they’ll soon raise a larger Series A as well. They’re going to need it for such a lofty goal. And they’ll get it, when the VCs see how nicely the game is coming along.

CrunchBase InformationGlitchTiny SpeckInformation provided by CrunchBase

I know there’s a few of you out there who will be interested in this. The Lego Universe Beta sign ups have gone live over here. No word as yet for when it will kick off, but it can’t be long. It might be worth registering with the main Lego site too, as there’s an option for logging in with Lego ID? Hmm.

Related stories:

• Lego Universe Gallery
• LEGO Universe Details
• CES Lego Universe Enormo-Footage
• Lego Universe: First Images

Writer: Jim Rossignol. | 29 comments

Post tags: lego, lego universe, netdevil | Help RPS: donate or subscribe
This article is © Rock, Paper, Shotgun Ltd., 2010. If you're reading it on another site, they're thieves.

Last Friday, comScore released its Dec. '09 data for online video usage. I've been tracking comScore's data for the last 3 years and Dec put an exclamation mark on what many of us already knew: 2009 was a blistering year of growth in online video consumption. Below are graphs of the most important data (Click here if you'd like a complimentary PDF download of all of the slides.)

The first graph shows total online video views more than doubled from 14.8 billion in Jan '09 to 33.2 billion in Dec '09. The historical growth is even more impressive. Just two years ago, in Dec '07, comScore reported 10 billion video views.

 

Online video usage is now nearly ubiquitous in the U.S. According to comScore, in Dec '09, 86.5% of all U.S. Internet users watched online video, up nearly 10 percentage points from the 76.8% in Jan '09. That translates to 178 million people watching video in Dec '09, up from 147 million in Jan '09. Back in Jan '07, there were 123 million viewers.

 

Those users are watching a whole lot more videos as well. For Dec '09, comScore reported that 187 videos were watched per average viewer, up 85% from 101 in Jan '09, and more than triple the 59 watched in Jan '07.

 

As well, those viewers spent a lot more time watching online video. In Dec '09 comScore said that the average online viewer watched 762.6 minutes or 12.7 hours, more than double the 356 minutes viewed on average in Jan '09. Here's the really incredible stat: back in Jan '07, comScore pegged this number at just 151 minutes or about 2 1/2 hours, meaning average viewing time has more than quintupled in the last 3 years.

 

I've talked many times about how YouTube is the 800 pound gorilla of the online video market, and 2009 only further cemented this. Videos viewed at YouTube surged from 6.3 billion in Jan '09 to 13.2 billion in Dec '09. To put this in perspective, Google closed its acquisition in Nov '06. In Jan '07 (the first month comScore publicly released online video data), YouTube notched 1.2 billion views. That means that in the 3+ years that Google has owned YouTube, it has grown more than 10x in size. More amazing is that even with all the growth by other sites (particularly Hulu), YouTube has kept up its approximate 40% share of the overall online video market, starting the year at 42.9% and ending at 39.8%.

 

Speaking of Hulu, in its first full year of operation, the site surged from 250 million views in Jan '09 to 1,013 billion views in Dec '09. Unique viewers increased from 24.4 million in Jan '09 to 44.1 million in Dec '09. But if you look at the red line in the graph below, you'll see that uniques jumped to 41.6 million by Mar '09 which I believe must be due, at least in part, to a likely measurement change by comScore. Since Mar you'll notice that uniques hovered right around 40 million each month, dipping below during the summer and then bouncing back in Q4.

 

A few months ago I speculated that Hulu's relatively flat pattern in uniques could suggest that, in its current configuration, Hulu may have saturated the market for its content and user experience (for example, contrast Hulu with YouTube, which grew its uniques by 33% in '09 to 135.8 million by Dec '09). I'll be looking to see if Hulu can notch more noteworthy increases in uniques during '10; if not, then I think my thesis will be proven correct.

Nonetheless, Hulu's viewers clearly love the site, with average number of videos per viewer more than doubling to 22.9 in Dec '09, up from 9.8 in Dec '08. Users are spending more time on Hulu, increasing the amount of total minutes on the site from 58 in Mar '09 to 132 in Dec '09. What's remarkable though is that the average minutes watched per video (the yellow line below), has stayed virtually constant at around 6 minutes each month. That shows that while there's plenty of long-form consumption happening at Hulu, clips are still very popular too.

 

comScore is a great source of month in and month out online video data, but as always my caveat is that no third party can ever track usage as closely as the sites themselves, so take these numbers with a small grain of salt!

Click here if you'd like a complimentary PDF download of all of the slides.

What do you think? Post a comment now (no sign-in required).

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Nokia not considered a smartphone vendor, euh, okay A strong holiday quarter helped to grow Apple's share of the U.S. smartphone market by 1.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, giving the iPhone a 25.3 percent share of users, according to a new report. Nokia not considered a smartphone vendor, euh, okay

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Insightfull! By now, everyone is tired of hearing about the iPad, but the negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it would be wrong to waste this opportunity. Even better, we can look back at the 2001 iPod launch and see the exact same mistakes. But this isn't about the iPad or the iPod -- it's about product design.
The most famous iPod review was from Slashdot, which simply declared, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." The iPad reviews are similar in that they focus on the "missing" features. Those missing features are typically available in a variety of unsuccessful competing products, which leads people to erroneously conclude that a successful product would necessarily have even more features!
I believe this "more features = better" mindset is at the root of the misjudgment, and is also the reason why so many otherwise smart people are bad at product design (e.g. most open source projects). If a MacBook with OSX and no keyboard were really the right product, then Microsoft would have already succeeded with their tablet computer years ago. Copying the mistakes of a failed product isn't a great formula for success.
What's the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product -- the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can't make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That's it -- no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg -- nothing but the essentials, well executed.
We took a similar approach when launching Gmail. It was fast, stored all of your email (back when 4MB quotas were the norm), and had an innovative interface based on conversations and search. The secondary and tertiary features were minimal or absent. There was no "rich text" composer. The original address book was implemented in two days and did almost nothing (the engineer doing the work originally wanted to spend five days on it, but I talked him down to two since I never use that feature anyway). Of course those other features can be added or improved later on (and Gmail has certainly improved a lot since launch), but if the basic product isn't compelling, adding more features won't save it.
By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product. If your product needs "everything" in order to be good, then it's probably not very innovative (though it might be a nice upgrade to an existing product). Put another way, if your product is great, it doesn't need to be good.
So where does this leave the iPad, with it's lack of process managers, file managers, window managers, and all the other "missing" junk? I'm not sure, but one thing I've noticed is that I spend more time browsing the web from my iPhone than from my laptop. I'm not entirely sure why, but part of it is the simplicity. My iPhone is ready to use in under 1/2 second, while my laptop always takes at least a few seconds to wake up, and then there's a bunch of stuff going on that distracts me. The iPhone is a simple appliance that I use without a second thought, but my laptop feels like a complex machine that causes me to pause and consider if it's worth the effort right now. The downside of the iPhone is that it's small and slow (though the smallness is certainly a feature as well). That alone guarantees that I'll buy one to leave sitting next to the couch, but I'm kind of atypical.
Ultimately, the real value of this device will be in the new things that people do once they have a fast, simple, and sharable internet window sitting around. At home we'll casually browse the web, share photos (in person), and play board games (Bret's idea -- very compelling). At the office, maybe we'll finally have an easy way of chatting with remote people while discussing a presentation or document (e.g. audio iChat with a shared display). Of course these things are theoretically possible with laptops, but it always ends up being so clumsy and complicated that we don't bother (or give up after trying once).
Making the iPad successful is Apple's problem though, not yours. If you're creating a new product, what are the three (or fewer) key features that will make it so great that you can cut or half-ass everything else? Are you focusing at least 80% of your effort on getting those three things right?
Disclaimer: This advice probably only applies to consumer products (ones where the purchaser is also the user -- this includes some business products). For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability.
Insightfull!

The emerging HTML5 specification lifts video playback out of the generic <object> element and into specialized <video> handlers. Explicit markup for audio and video places elevates moving pictures to a similar native rendering capacity as <img> markup we are used to but with more fine-grained details about underlying formats and compression available before loading. In this post I will dive into implementation details of HTML5 video based on currently available consuming agents and outline some of the nuances of preparing media for playback.

1. Inside the video element
   1. Browser workflow
   2. JavaScript-based workflow
2. Implementation nuances
3. Player UIs
4. HTML5 video and Flash
5. Summary

Inside the video element

The video element is the top-level element of a cascading element set designed to handle graceful degradation across a wide array of HTML rendering engines. If a web browser or other consuming agent unpacks the DOM and does not understand what you have described it should process child elements until something makes sense or it reaches the end of your element tree.

<video width="480" height="320" id="video" poster="video_frame.jpg" controls="true" autobuffer="true">   <source src="video_high.mp4" type="video/mp4; codecs=&quot;avc1.64001E, mp4a.40.2&quot;" />   <source src="video_base.mp4" type="video/mp4; codecs=&quot;avc1.42E01E, mp4a.40.2&quot;" />   <source src="video.ogv" type="video/ogg; codecs=&quot;theora, vorbis&quot;" />   <object id="flashvideo" width="480" height="320" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/swflash.cab#version=9,0,115,0" standby="Loading your video...">     <param name="movie" value="video-player.swf" />     <param name="quality" value="best" />     <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />     <param name="loop" value="false" />     <param name="flashvars" value="movie=video_high.mp4" />     <!--[if !IE]>-->     <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="320" data="video-player.swf" standby="Loading your video...">       <param name="quality" value="best" />       <param name="loop" value="false" />       <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />       <param name="flashvars" value="movie=video_high.mp4" />     <!--<![endif]-->       <img alt="animated GIF" src="video_animated.gif" width="480" height="320" />   <p class="robots-nocontent">We tried to show you a video but your browser does not support native video playback and does not have a copy of <a rel="nofollow" href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/">Adobe Flash</a> installed. Please upgrade your browser and plugins.</p>     <!--[if !IE]>-->     </object>     <!--<![endif]-->   </object> </video>

Look complicated? It is! The static markup above describes six possible video interactions with the web browser. Three different source videos are described in HTML5 markup: a MP4 file container with a H.264 video track using the High profile Level 3 and low-complexity AAC audio (suitable for desktops); a MP4 file container with a H.264 video track using the Baseline profile and low-complexity AAC audio (suitable for mobile phones); an Ogg file container with a Theora video track and a Vorbis audio track. I will dive deeper into file format and codec nuances in a separate post. If the HTML5 video markup fails, or none of the three specified source videos are compatible with the consuming agent the markup falls back to double-baked markup for the Flash Player plugin. If HTML5 video fails and Flash embedding fails the markup includes simple information about the video and an animated GIF preview.

Behind the scenes the web browser is converting your markup string into its own set of mapped elements, passing off to the appropriate handler, and adjusting page layout based on its new discoveries.

Browser workflow

1. Read the markup string.
2. Build an element tree.
3. Find a <video> element.
4. I know how to process a <video> element. Map defined attributes.
   1. Found width and height attributes. Prepare the page layout for new content.
   2. The controls attribute is present and I know how to process the attribute. The publisher would like to use the default playback UI built-in to my video handler.
   3. Found a src attribute. Try to load the referenced resource. Similar handling to an <img> src.
   4. Found an autobuffer attribute and I know how to process the attribute. Start buffering the movie resource before the viewer initiates playback.
   5. Found a poster attribute and I know how to process such an attribute. The publisher would like to show a poster frame image inside the video object dimensions before the viewer initiates playback.
   6. The src attribute is either undefined, unavailable, or incompatible. Continue parsing child elements for a better content match.
      1. Found a source element and I know how to process such an element.
         1. The type attribute value references an Internet media type I recognize and support for Internet video. It's possible I might be able to read the file format and unpack the video container after download.
            1. A codecs parameter is specified within the type attribute, defining the video codec and audio codec needed to decode the container's video and audio tracks respectively.
         2. The src attribute exists. Queue the referenced resource for network loading after the viewer initiates playback, or immediately if autobuffer was specified in the video element.
      2. No suitable source element found. Continue searching.
5. Found an <object> element with an object handler specified using the classid attribute. My name is most likely Trident/IE.
   1. The classid attribute value matches a plugin installed on the viewer's computer: Adobe Flash Player.
   2. The version of Flash Player currently installed on the viewer's computer is less than the minimum specified value in the codebase attribute.
      1. Attempt to download and install a new Flash Player ActiveX control at or above version 9.0.115 "MovieStar." The specified Flash Player version is capable of handling a MP4 video container with an H.264 video track and AAC audio track.
      2. Stop processing the video object; reload later.
   3. A <param> element exists with a name attribute of movie and a resource location declared in the value attribute.
   4. Display text specified in the object's standby attribute value while I attempt to load the Adobe Flash browser plugin and its SWF file interpreter. Pass the specified param element key-value pairs into the Flash interpreter as well as the FlashVars query parameter describing dynamic values interpreted by the SWF at runtime.
6. I don't care about conditional comment blocks targeting Trident/IE or such a conditional evaluates as true.
7. Found an object element with an object handler specified using the type attribute.
   1. The type attribute specifies an Internet media type connected to a known plugin registered in the plugin system (most likely NPAPI).
   2. The data attribute exists and specifies a valid resource.
   3. Display text specified in the object's standby attribute value while I attempt to load the Adobe Flash browser plugin and its SWF file interpreter. Pass the specified param element key-value pairs into the Flash interpreter as well as the FlashVars query parameter describing dynamic values interpreted by the SWF at runtime.
8. No acceptable video player found. Display an animated GIF preview of the movie. Let the viewer know they are missing out on the full content experience.
9. Acceptable movie found and queued.
   1. Attempt to progressively download or stream the specified video element.
      1. Does the Content-Type returned by the server match our expected value(s)?
      2. Does the server accept downloading individual pieces of a file at a time (Accept-Ranges)?
      3. Did the resource return a X-Content-Duration header specifying expected playback length in seconds?
   2. Send downloaded video pieces to the video decoder for decompression.
   3. Initiate a playback buffer.
   4. Fire events related to the final loaded stage of the process.

Yes, I have over simplified.

JavaScript-based workflow

It is possible to test playback capabilities of the browser and its related plugins through JavaScript (if JavaScript is available on the page of course). If you are considering supporting HTML5 video at some point in the future but are curious how many of your visitors could support the new playback method you could track analytic events today to influence your product roll-out months down the road.

Video element support

Test the current consuming agent's support for the <video> element by declaring a new DOM object and evaluating the browser's default handlers. If the created DOM object contains functions present in a default HTMLVideoElement or HTMLMediaElement interface we know the consuming agent applied special handling to our video element declaration and likely supports HTML5 video.

!!document.createElement('video').canPlayType Individual codec support

Testing support for the video element is only the first step. We also need to check playback support for the specific video and audio codecs used in our source videos. The canPlayType method returns the likelihood a given file container, video codec and audio codec are supported by the consuming agent.

var v = document.createElement('video'); var supported = v.canPlayType('video/mp4; codecs="avc1.58A01E, mp4a.40.2"'); if ( supported == 'probably') { return true; } Detect Flash

Flash Player 9.0.115 and above is required to play MP4 file containers with H.264 video and AAC audio. The Flash Player detection kit provides client-side detection libraries and automatic upgrade capability for site visitors not already using the latest version of Flash.

Check for an ActiveXObject of ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash.10 or ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash.9 and compare the full version string.

In a NPAPI plugin environment check the navigator.mimeTypes array for the key "application/x-shockwave-flash," verify the associated plugin is enabled, and parse the version number from the plugin's description string.

DOM insertion

Once your script has determined the best available video playback method you can insert the appropriate markup using a subcomponent of the markup used above.

Implementation nuances

In the static markup method of describing content the consuming agent cycles through possible <source> elements one at a time in search of a suitable match. In my testing on mobile WebKit (iPhone OS) this test cycle removes the poster frame image described in the <video> element and instead places a broken video image inside the element dimensions instead. If a later <source> element matches a generic playback image is added to the element. Source element cycling is the new flash of unstyled content for the HTML5 video world.

The dynamic insertion method relies on the canPlayType method and its return values of "probably" or "maybe." Maybe is not good enough for my needs if I have a Flash fallback option, but if you are in a constrained playback environment such as low-power mobile devices then acting on a response of "maybe" is better than nothing. Just be sure to send along some alternate HTML as a failure fallback.

Player UIs

Each web browser supporting HTML5 video uses its own backing software to power the video playback experience. Chromium and Google Chrome use a specially patched version of FFmpeg. QTWebKit uses Phonon. Layer on top platform-specific video acceleration, UI, and handling and you will see a variety of final UIs across browsers and platforms. Including the controls in your <video> element is the quickest path to launch but you will give up control over interactions.

If a web browser supports HTML5 video it almost certainly supports native vector graphics as well. It's possible to craft your own UI with supported JavaScript methods triggering play, pause, and final frame handling in the native video handler.

HTML5 video and Flash

Flash is the dominant method of video playback on the web today. Native browser support of HTML5 video and business excitement to reach low-power devices such as the iPhone provide compelling reasons to offer content using HTML5 video markup. Flash supports progressively loading MP4 files with H.264 video and AAC audio since 2007. Flash Player 10.1, expected in the next few months, speeds up playback with less resources thanks to specialized GPU handling and more efficient code. HTML5 video and Flash playback solutions will need to co-exist for maximum reach (that's the reason you are using Flash in the first place).

Playback is only one component of the total video experience. You will need to develop analytics and advertising capabilities to match or exceed your current Flash experience. Advertisers don't publish interactive advertisements in <canvas>. The high-CPM pre-roll and post-roll video advertisements we see today are based on a Flash ecosystem built up over the years. HTML5 video and your money maker of choice will need to find a way to co-exist (banner and text advertisements still work well) and drive your development budget. I expect to see better JavaScript libraries from the open-source community as well as advertising networks solve some of the problem in the near future, just like a suite of XHR handlers popped up once Ajax started to take off.

Summary

HTML5 video has arrived and is deployed across a wide enough user base for sites and developers to stand up and pay attention. File support and markup varies by browser and there is currently no native support in Internet Explorer. Developers are excited to take advantage of the performance gains of native video handlers and reach new audiences in the smartphone market. If you are thinking of getting implementing HTML5 video in the future it's possible to start measuring your audience's playback compatibility today so you at least know your deploy targets.

Shared by Cast42
impressive

Simple web-based painting/drawing app. No Flash.

 ★  impressive

Filed under: Multimedia

Matthew Dempsky has discovered a bug which will crash the Flash player on every supported platform. That might not seem like a huge deal, except that he discovered this bug in September of 2008 and has reported it to Adobe, which hasn't fixed it yet.

16 months later.

If you'd like to test it for yourself, make sure there's nothing important open in your browser window and head to http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/.

In Safari and Google Chrome, this crashes the plugin but not the browser. It took Firefox 3.6 down entirely.

Why would Matthew post such a page? Isn't that reckless? Well, he explains on that page:
"Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today," Lynch wrote. "Addressing crash issues is a top priority in the engineering team, and currently there are open reports we are researching in Flash Player 10." (Source: PC Mag, "Adobe Defends Flash, Calls Apple Uncooperative")

He goes on to say:

This page exploits a bug that I reported to Adobe in September 2008, and has affected every release of Flash on every platform since then. Despite numerous email exchanges with the Flash product manager about the bug, the bug report being hidden from the public for "security" reasons, and [although] Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch's claims otherwise, it continues to be an issue.

...I'm not an Apple fan boy out to prove Steve Jobs right in Apple's decision not to support Flash on the iPhone / iPad. Instead, I'm just a software engineer who at one time had to deal with Adobe's sorry excuse for a development platform and made an earnest effort on several occasions at helping them improve it for everyone. (This issue is merely the tip of the iceberg of ridiculous bugs and random backwards and forwards incompatibilities known as Adobe's Flash Player plug-in.) After trying to work with them to fix this issue and experiencing nothing but frustration, I just don't give a damn anymore.

Adobe has been able to rest on its laurels with Flash, because it was a de facto standard. Now that the platform is being left behind by new mobile devices and computing metaphors, Adobe is making an appeal to the public that Flash isn't that bad.

Adobe's been able to do much the same with Photoshop and CS4. Even people who love the apps and use them every day have learned to live with the crashes and other problems. Adobe seemed not to be in too much of a rush to get Snow Leopard compatible versions out. Ditto for when Apple switched to Intel.

I'm amazed by people who continue to defend Flash, including those who believe that alternatives will have a chance if web developers weren't pushed to start using newer alternatives like H.264 and HTML 5. (No, I'm not saying H.264/HTML 5 is a drop-in replacement for Flash, and I'm not even going to mention SVG.)

If we all went with the "de facto standard" we'd be using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. Actually, we'd probably be using Internet Explorer 4.

No doubt that Flash has done some great things. At one time, it was cutting edge stuff. Now it's a dull butter knife.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't remind you about ClickToFlash which I've reviewed previously.

(Hat tip to Craig Hockenberry and Mike Damm for bringing this story to our attention.)

TUAW16 month-old bug continues to crash Flash originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track Limited, and Enterbrain, Inc. track the three biggest gaming markets in the world: the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. How did those three markets do in 2009? A report from the three groups claims overall sales were down eight percent, with game sales totaling 379.3 million units.

The year-end report also shows the top five games in the world for the calendar year 2009. There isn't much in terms of surprises, but the number of copies of Modern Warfare 2 sold shows the power of the US market in the gaming world, and Nintendo's dominance on the list likewise shows that company's stranglehold on the industry.

With four of the top-five selling games being Nintendo first-party releases, and the best-selling game of the year being powered mostly by American dollars, it's clear that Nintendo and Activision had a very good year... and that the West is a powerful force in game sales. While we don't have access to the numbers below the top five, it must be quite a battlefield down there.

Even without that data, this offers even more evidence that the Wii is very comfortable at the top of the heap. Sales this strong of both Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit mean that both the Balance Board and MotionPlus peripherals will continue to gain traction in the marketplace, which should lead to stronger support in terms of both first- and third-party software.

bkuchera@arstechnica.com (Ben Kuchera)

With all the discussions about the place of Flash on the ever-evolving web and the excitement following Google’s announcement about YouTube going HTML5, one would almost forget that YouTube is only at the very start of their “open video” endeavor. The limitations of the current implementations are numerous; there’s no OGG (damn), no ads (yeah!) and no embedding either (damn) for example.

After looking into ways to call the YouTube mp4-file from within a Video for Everybody html-block (which is not possible, Google protects raw video-files using what seems to be a session-based hash that has to be provided in the URL), I decided to take another (dirty) approach; faking it!

The solution is entirely javascript-based and is as un-elegant as it is simple; create a html-file with a script include of http://futtta.be/newTube/newTube.js and a div with “id=newTube” containing a link to a YouTube-page and the script automagically takes care of the rest. Check out http://futtta.be/newTube/ to see it in action.

The result is an embedded YouTube player which will display the HTML5-version if you’re running a browser which supports mp4/h264 playback (i.e. a recent version of Chrome or Safari) and if you enrolled in the beta. If either of these preconditions aren’t met, you’ll just see the plain old Flash-player.

Don’t get your hopes up, in reality newTube is probably pretty useless (for reasons I’ll get into in a follow-up post, when I have some time to spare that is). You’ll have to wait for someone (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, … are you listening?) to offer real embeddable html5-video (with support for both mp4/h264 and and ogg/theora).

But I did have fun creating the very first html5-capable embedded YouTube-player

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Firefox 3.5 and tinyvid.tv do Ogg/Theora
• Google loves html5 (in Android 2.0)
• Bridging the gap between html5 and Gears

In 1994, Steve Jobs was not on top of the world. Which is why he was willing to let Rolling Stone probe him at great length in this classic, must-read interview. The insights—into Steve and the industry—are astounding.

This quote is actually more true today than it was in 1994 when Steve Jobs said it:

"The problem is, in hardware you can't build a computer that's twice as good as anyone else's anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You're lucky if you can do one that's one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it's only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software."

Today, everybody uses the same guts, whether it's in big computers or little ones. The same chips from Intel power Windows PCs and Macs, which didn't used to be the case. iPhones and Palms Pres and Android phones and basically every other damn phone uses ARM-designed processors. What separates them all now? Software.

Steve takes a few stabby stabs at Microsoft too. Referring to the stagnancy of Macintosh in 1984, he sneers, "It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. " And says that the reason consumers often don't see the benefits of a technology before businesses is because "unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don't know any better."

Like I said, a must-read interview. [Rolling Stone via Marco Arment]

matt buchanan09005412747339743236097335556837405436930529093706915234540513910321758014902851157633363035481594130534807734720325159415838595855371226301040164741864886208970597289228616563262205843491076565481580157512884444074819141645032849885512696018415829495891028128060417674178037604040911402837168783519500306771517812718533176362669309213584991256453091593152493716810518491547126075012467011470859022721831662092024918725211097562011573655561162052253309328273960786668742083605389907859055110791448194103996689091820753910108530117604918487200889468897582261859037399959101113805490482933265468512214900673489645062683076181204687090654377301327519000357366426910434923705196586092

The newest game in designer Sid Meier’s illustrious Civilization franchise will be begin beta testing with Facebook users this June, according to Variety.

The Facebook platform game — called Civilization Network — was announced a few months ago, and both gamers and the press noted that Civilization and Facebook seem like an excellent match. It’s easy to picture the addictive-but-relaxing, turn-based gameplay of Civilization IV or Civilization Revolution adapted to the same platform that plays host to FarmVille — and we all know how huge that game is.

Unfortunately, some fans of the series had gotten the impression from the original announcement that the game would be coming sooner. Not so. Meier said he’d be looking for beta testers “soon” and that the “full game will be available next year.” Game publisher Take Two Interactive didn’t say whether or not the beta will be open to everyone.

If you want to know more about the game, you’re pretty much out of luck; not much has been announced yet. You can become a fan on Facebook to receive future updates, though. For now, here’s what Meier said about it.

“You can coordinate your strategy to win great battles, share your technology to jump ahead of your rivals, lobby your family and friends to form your own government and win vital elections, manage and grow your cities to maximize production and happiness, spy on your enemies, and work with your friends to create the great Wonders of the World. The game will offer everything you enjoy in Civ in a fully persistent environment – you can play as much as you like, whenever you like, and it’ll be free to play.”

Reviews: Facebook, game

Tags: Civilization Network, facebook, games, online games, Sid Meier, software