ON THE WANING DAYS OF TV GUIDE

"WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' GUIDES!"*

It's been a roller-coast week in the world of media and technology and it's only Wednesday!  Don't know what I'm talking about?  Well, let me show you the dots.

1.  TV GUIDE PUNTS:  This week TV Guide, a 52 year old American media icon, threw in the towel, with its parent Gemstar-TV Guide announcing that it will:

TV Guide magazine will be transformed into a vibrant, full-size, full-color magazine delivering what today's TV viewers are demanding in a dramatically changed TV environment, it was announced today by Rich Battista, chief executive officer of Gemstar-TV Guide International, Inc. (NASDAQ:GMST).

As this Reuters article (via Infectious Greed) further explains:

About 75 percent of the content will consist of feature stories, with the remaining 25 percent made up of listings -- opposite of the current emphasis.

Obviously, the evolution of the Internet and its multiple body blows to traditional TV programming have had something to do with this state of affairs.  Let me count some of the ways:

1. plethora of free TV guides via portals like Yahoo! etc.
2. time-shifting via Tivo/DVRs (digital video recorders).
3. Interactive program guides on cable boxes.
4. explosion of programming including Video-on-demand, Pay-per-view, and almost every cable channel-on demand (1000 plus channels), making paper guides less convenient.

And these are just to get started.

But, in hindsight, TV Guide's timing may be viewed as impeccable.

2.  HUMONGOUS RECORDERS:  For in this same week, we get this breathless post from BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow:

"Promise TV -- PVR records a month's worth of shows from all channels
Of all the amazing and wonderful things I saw this weekend at London's OpenTech conference, none came close to the stupendous Promise TV box. This is a home-built personal video recorder made out of commodity PC components (primarily a LOT of high-capacity hard-drives).

What the Promise does is grab the entire broadcast TV multiplex -- all the channels being broadcast in the UK -- slices them up according to the free, over-the-air electronic programming guide, and stores an entire month's worth. Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.

The promise.tv team have produced a breadboard prototype and a single, product-like box that looks like the kind of thing you might stick under your TV. They've put up a placeholder site to collect email addresses of people who want to find out more when they do a more formal launch. I've just signed up -- I can't wait to see more of this. I'd buy one in a hot second. Link"

CNET was a little less sanguine about the whole thing, despite a headline that trumpets, "New DVR drops jaws in London".  They note:

Dominic Ludlam, Promise TV's lead developer, said the project was commissioned by the BBC and uses commodity PC hardware, including a bank of hard drives totaling 3.2 terabytes.

And end the piece by quoting Cory Doctorow again:

"But Doctorow remains floored by what he saw. He said that not long ago, the notion of TiVo recording 15 hours of television was revolutionary. And now, he said, technology has reached the point where it's possible to imagine recording 30, 60 or even 90 days of programming.

"It becomes like a Wayback Machine for television," he said."

3.  WEB HAS MEMORY OF ELEPHANTS!  Hmmmm, Wayback Machine...where did I read about that just recently?  Why, it was the front story in this morning's Wall Street Journal no less, in a story titled, "Lawyer's Delight:  Web Content does not fade away".  It explains that the web is becoming more or less a permanent storage archive of all things digital:

The Wayback Machine (www.waybackmachine.org) is run by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group started in 1996 to build a massive digital repository of cultural artifacts, including old TV shows, books and live music recordings. Named for the time-travel device in the "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoons, the free service searches for specific Web addresses and pulls up multiple versions, sometimes dating back years. The Wayback Machine has archived 40 billion Web pages using computer programs, known as "bots," that crawl the Internet and make electronic copies of information they come across.

Google's system, known as Google Cache -- "cache" is a computer term for a place where information is stored -- works in a similar way, although its archive is less extensive. On Google's results page, users can click on a link to see how sites look whenever Google last indexed them, something it does often.

And let's see...what's been Google up to lately?  Why, they've been working on Google Video, due to debut anytime now...and so quickly after they just gave the world near-infinite storage for their email, aka Gmail, and that's still in beta.

What's the common theme of all this? How ARE these dots connected??

Why it's storage of course!  Hard drives, tiny, medium, big, large, and ridiculously large complex of servers.  They're getting bigger and cheaper, bigger and cheaper, bigger and cheaper, well, you get the idea.

Back in April, I'd highlighted a new perpendicular hard drive technology from Hitachi, that already promises to give us 1 Terabyte hard drives on PCs in a couple of years, and 20 Gigabyte hard drives for our iPods in maybe a little more (via Engadget).  That compares to about 100 Gigabytes (one tenth of a Terabyte) on new PCs, and 6 Gigabytes for the biggest iPod mini today.  The technology promises even more a few years further down the road.

4.  BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE:  With good things, come some bad.  Businessweek's Blogspotting and TechBeat blogs bring us this story about a programmer overseas (again), who has created a "slurping iPod".  As Olga Kharif explains:

"A new security threat is fast emerging; it's called Pod slurping. What it is: A while back, Abe Usher, whose blog can be found here, wrote a program that allows an iPod digital music player to download more than 20,000 files an hour from any computer it's connected to.

Usher's goal was to demonstrate vulnerability of corporate security. He had demonstrated it with gusto, by running the program on his own computer. The program copied all of his PC's document files onto his iPod in 65 seconds.

What this means: any connected consumer electronics device, such as an iPod, MP3 player, a digital camera or a cell phone could, potentially be used to steal sensitive corporate data.

This problem will only snowball as the iPod and other consumer devices get wireless connectivity capabilities, as they no doubt will."

Yowza!  What a tangled web of stories, what whacky tales of wondrous wares and thunderous woes. 

And be careful with that iPod, man!  Wow, it's almost 7pm...I wonder what's on TV tonight...

*(via Wikipedia), paraphrasing:

"Badges! We don't need no stinkin' badges!"---from the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [C]

• Actual quote: "Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!" (The quote above does however appear in Blazing Saddles.)"

P.S.  If you want to take a wander down memory lane on the TV Guide story, check out TV Prediction's 3-party feature, "The Death of TV Guide"...here are the links for Parts one, two, and three.  It rivals most soap operas.  Print them out, save them for Sunday...enjoy!

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