Dear Mr. Jobs,
As professional video editors and animators, our work-flow depends greatly on our ability to render and encode in a timely manner. The lack of any Mac related announcements at WWDC is disconcerting for my production studio as we would like to upgrade our Mac Pros and Apple Cinema Displays.
The current revision of Mac Pros were released almost a year and half ago and the accompanying 30″ cinema screenhit the market almost 4 years ago. We have been considering purchasing PCs because of the availability i7 Hexacore processors, which would really help with our rendering times. Of course we are currently committed to Final Cut Pro, which will pose a problem.
Since we use Adobe’s After Effects and the rest of the Creative Suite, we are considering a move to Adobe Premier. This will be painful to say the least, but in the end it could save a lot of time and thus money.
It’s clear that recent the slew of Apple hardware released is generating much excitement and high regards and for good reason. Your iOS based hardware units, including the iPad and iPhone are solid and revolutionary. Business is good at Apple, new and existing customers are buying your products in droves. You must remember one thing though, your professional users have always been your most loyal customers, ignoring their NEEDs for faster high-performance hardware is frustrating.
It appears that Apple is slowly moving away from fostering platforms prime for digital media production and towards media consumption and hobbyists. The “just works” ethos is fine but digital media professionals, especially in the video and animation space also need a assurance that things work effectively. It’s not obscene to believe that the i7 Hexacore processors will reduce rendering time by significant percentiles, this is why we can only wait so long.
To tell you the truth Mr. Jobs, the longer I have to watch a progress bar, the less thrilled I am to have (be) a Mac.
Regards
~The Biz Media
Google and Apple may be giving a TV internet a shot but there maybe an unsuspecting underdog, DivX. The DivXTV is a product of a partnership made between Best Buy, Cinema Now and of course DivX. This is a promising system because it can integrate into a number of items sold by Best Buy, especially their house brand Insignia. Compared to Apple and Google the DivXTV will have a late start simply because they don`t have a preexsisting relationship with users. This is just one more sign that internet video will soon be replacing TV.
Steve Jobs recently had this to say at D8 about Internet in the Living Room:
The television industry fundamentally has a subsidized business model that gives everyone a set-top box, and that pretty much undermines innovation in the sector. Ask TiVo, ask Roku, ask Google in a few months. The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it. But right now, there’s no way to do that….The TV is going to lose until there’s a viable go-to-market strategy.
How do you make something apparently dry and impersonal more engaging and awesome? Add video. Above is a viral video produced by Thomson Reuturs to promote their new video service.
Thomson Reuters, one of the worlds most influential news and financial information companies has designed their own video portal.
Thomson Reuters claims there video feed will have the following features:
- Daily video coverage of top international news, including political developments, science and technology features,human interest pieces and major sports or entertainment stories
- Delivery of approximately 20 stories Monday to Friday and 10 to 15 stories on weekends
- Stories are generally between 60 and 120 seconds long
- Each package includes video, audio with natural sound and English voiceover,thumbnail image, headline, introduction and a full script
- Videos are formatted allowing for customized voiceovers to accompany the natural sound audio track
- XML metadata provided for easy integration and cross-linking to other content
“The move marks a recognition that the trading community is increasingly relying on video, often with data and charts embedded in it, to drive trading decisions. It will take the video and online social networking revolution into the financial sector…
….The idea is that a range of video commentaries on market events – such as last Thursday’s turmoil on Wall Street – can be viewed not only easily in a “one-stop shop” on a desktop screen, but can also be sent out to the user’s clients, with charts and other Thomson Reuters data attached.” — Financial Times
Watchout Netflix and Apple, YouTube is “unofficially” in the online video rental space. With a quiet debute today, YouTube opened YouTube.com/store, which if accessed from outside the U.S will bring you to someone’s vacant channel.
The biggest advantage Youtube will have in the rental space is its access to more independent/ non-movie content. Sure you can rent the latest blockbuster or even art films from Netflix but you can’t rent a semi-pro tutorial on how to use After Effects CS5. This monetization of amateurish content is part of the evolution of online video.
It will be a while before Youtube allows for non-movie or TV show content to be sold. It’s not hard to see its inevitability.
