As it happens, HBO encoded the program with DRM--a dated self-destruct mechanism and when Tivo ran it's nightly update and the clock turned over the program was deleted without any interaction from Tivo.
(Side note: Tivo support is really good and very nice. I can't fault the company or the support team for any of this.)
I was trying to think about this a bit and figure out what HBO had to gain by removing a kids show from my Tivo without telling me and making it difficult for my baby to go to sleep. The answer is really nothing.
HBO, like all DRM obsessed companies find it necessary to "control" the content. It's especially odd in this case as HBO owns the content (meaning they wouldn't be paying royalties) and I would think they would want us locked into their service and their content.
And as far as I can tell the terms that one agrees to with HBO (or any other network) are outside the control of Tivo and Comcast, and there is no clear explanation of what might happen when, or under what circumstances when you sign up for HBO through a cable provider.
Was it wrong for me to rely on the program to be in the Tivo? I don't think so. There was no warning, or meta-data or other information that said the program would be deleted. The whole thing is just rude and an effrontery to the consumer.
Last night I ordered the DVD overnight from Amazon so that the blessed child can go to sleep. I am pretty sure that I am going to cancel my HBO subscription but I'm not sure if I am taking this too personally.
My biggest realization is that I now realize that I need to continue to own physical media as I have no idea what these scumbag companies might try to pull over on consumers.
It's pathetic that as the software world opens up, the media world continues to be an evil dark overlord.
I am trying to get my hands on this new report from the Standish Group that says that open source is decimating the traditional software market.
Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA
If the $60 billion is true (and I would assume based on Standish's five years of research it is) then we have been dramatically underestimating the impact open source is having on the traditional vendors. We've known there is a effect, and now we finally have some numbers (and $60 billion is a whopper.)
MySQL Marten Mickos has often spoken of "taking a $10 billion market and making it a $3 billion market." If you consider that open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues there will be a bloodletting in the proprietary world soon enough.
It's a great time to be an open source company.
For those of you who have young children you know that you need some kind of bedtime ritual to get the kid to go to sleep.
At our house we watch the Goodnight Moon show that we Tivo'd from HBO. I should have bought the DVD a few months back instead of just now but we figured it would always be in the Tivo!
This 30 minute masterpiece does an amazing job calming the savage beast. But today we got quite a surprise when the Tivo deleted the show on it's own and doesn't show it in "Recently Deleted Items" or offer a way to search for deleted items. So now the damn thing is just gone and we had to wrangle the kid to sleep after reading her a book. (Yes, I know we should probably do that anyway, but the video is magic.)
So, who's to blame? I don't know. I checked the Tivo forums and read that HBO is now expiring programs from people's Tivo boxes, and I don't trust Comcast a whole lot so I am sure there is collusion in there somewhere.
I am incredibly annoyed and honestly feel like my rights as a consumer (especially one who has owned 3 Tivos and pays a whopping cable bill) have been trampled. I am sure there is some explanation but it's infuriating. There is nothing in my contract with Tivo (or Comcast) that says they can delete material on my Tivo that I continue to pay a subscription for.
Having been a *very* happy Tivo owner for about 7 years this is the first time where I have been so pissed that I want to throw the thing out the window. I guess I will go check out MythTv.
I was able to dial Dan on Skype and he was able to call me via Skype all on our corporate wifi. He was also able to use his VZW laptop card to connect to the iPhone. Very cool and extremely useful when traveling abroad or generally on the road.
ZDnet has video demos and Fring themselves have a demo video on YouTube.
I have to admit I am bit jealous and I really wish Blackberry would realize that their devices while fantastically functional are just not very fun.
When Gartner analyst Robert Desisto wrote this week on the idea that SaaS companies are going to adopt tons of open source I was thrilled. And yet some of the blogosphere seemed to think that meant they wouldn't pay for support and services offered by open source vendors.
Nine out of ten software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2010 to save money, but the cost savings likely won't be passed onto customers, Gartner says in a new research note.
From an open source vendor perspective, I can tell you that the interest we are seeing from SaaS companies is tremendous. In my case Mule offers the integration/abstraction layer for SaaS to bridge internal applications and data structures (and really if a SaaS architecture is not service-oriented the vendors are going to have serious problems) and Galaxy provides the governance and lifecycle to manage the services. (Disclosure: I am CEO of MuleSource)
But that's just one example--If you consider that Adobe is using Alfresco as part of its online PDF product or that MySQL powers a great many SaaS applications and that both of these companies make money as open source providers I think it shows there is a great opportunity.
... Read more
Salesforce.com's tie-in with Google Apps makes Salesforce the complete center of the user's universe.
But in a new-school twist, neither of these applications completely locks you in. You can get your data out, if you need to (albeit somewhat painfully) from Salesforce, and since you have your Google e-mail stored outside of the Salesforce system, you can effectively leave whenever you want and resplit the applications, should you so desire.
While the technical details are not totally clear, this appears to be an example of Web-oriented architecture, or it at least demonstrates the idea that an abstraction layer allows for data to be more easily integrated. Or maybe it's PaaS (platform as a service)--I am sure it's some acronym.
The theoretical benefits of the combined service outweigh the negatives (mainly clarity around service-level agreements, security, and Google's perpetual beta tests)-at least for now.
... Read moreI haven't been able to kick this back problem (2 weeks with a slipped disc) but we did manage to record episode 15 of the Open Season podcast series.
This time we talk about:
- The Cloud and why we need Java there
- The inevitable fall-out from Microsoft's Yahoo tomfoolery
- Google AppEngine
- and so much more!
If anyone out there has a better way to record these things we're open to suggestion. Ashlee's latest Skype move (port forwarding and all that) is pretty much crap.
I spoke with Gavin Clarke over at The Register about his piece "Fresh blood - the new fight for open source" several times over the last few weeks about how there are a great many corporate developers creating additions and such for open source projects but how it's difficult for them to get the code out of the corporate boundaries and back into the project.
The real challenge facing open source is how to bring in fresh contributors and code contributions to sustain projects and meet users' needs. Without fresh blood, projects progress relatively slowly and are likely to stumble towards meeting the requirements of the end user, the consumer of IT.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst mentioned this at OSBC as well and Gavin sums the sentiment up very well:
Only by convincing the business managers that it's in their company's best interests to participate will open source attract more individuals from end-user organizations. According to Zorro, user participation in projects and groups such as Eclipse - popular with the industry but woefully lacking in end-user representation - will legitimize open source at last, providing a broader understanding and enabling individuals like him take off the mask and contribute in force.Developers--be like Kiss and unmask yourselves.
Cote at RedMonk noted that IBM didn't once mention open source at their SOA-focused Impact 2008 Conference. My guess? IBM wants the SOA paradigm to remain a rich-man's sport and they want their army of consultants to put IBM products into place. As such they focus on "the Business" instead of just solving the problem.
Instead of embracing open source as a part of SOA, IBM is choosing to push only it's own expensive and cumbersome products, which simply doesn't make sense.
To be puckish, I bet the open source world would have a new take on the question, "what's an SOA?" It might even include an answer that doesn't require getting The Business on board, which seems to be the spurted crazy-glue that locks up all clear-headed discussions of SOA.IBM makes a ton of money from open source and make very large investments in some open source projects. But, they really seem to have no interest in open source companies being successful. I have to assume that open source SOA products are a very real threat or else they would take the same low-end approach they did with Geronimo to seed the market for Websphere.
As Cote further notes:
As a buyer of IT, you'd like your vendor to only make as much money as needed, and no more, and you want those cost savings passed on to you. Your dream vendor is one who's (a.) stuff works, and, (b.) margins are slim. And, yes, to emphasis the point again: you want your vendor to stay in business for as long as you want to use their wares. You just don't want to be the one gold-plating their elevators.
IBM is trying to use SOA to gold-plate more elevators, but I think it's clear that open source is a threat. Sooner a later there is a point where the scale falls out of balance....IBM is smarter than this, let's hope they realize it soon.
There is a key missing piece for cloud computing to really go mainstream--a higher-level programming language to be able to do more advanced logic and functionality.
I wonder why Sun hasn't figured this out and why there isn't already a "Java-in-the-Cloud" distribution that has the functionality of Java with some level of restrictions or other permission management geared toward SaaS.
Maybe Sun just doesn't get it or care enough? This concept to me is the key to making the cloud a reality--and making Sun relevant again (MySQL was exciting for five minutes, but is almost forgotten already.)
I couldn't figure out why Salesforce.com developed Apex until I started looking at how difficult it is to get "real" programmatic functionality into a browser and on-demand applications. Now I get it.
Coghead and Bungee Labs offer very cool platforms for application development, but they need to be fully embedded into the SaaS offering for them to be truly valuable. As it stands, it's not great to have to go through multiple vendors applications and architectures in order to solve one problem. On the positive side, it's clear that the problem can be solved and those two have gone a long way to make it happen.
The Smoothspan blog notes that Cloud Computing may be perishable, which is an interesting way to think about it--for the moment it's a one horse race with Amazon as the leader. Google AppEngine only supports Python and you have to upload files, so, while a nice start it has very limited appeal for the moment.
Some of the big vendors like HP, Microsoft etc. haven't even began their real efforts so the game is far from over. Amazon will be forced to deal with the enterprise, which the BigCo's are already skilled at, where Amazon is not.
