Until recently, my interest in the upcoming demise of most analog over-the-air (OTA) TV signals was purely academic. I get cable where I live and have zippo TV reception otherwise. Thus, I'm unaffected by the switch to digital-only broadcasts--as is anyone who gets their signals from a cable company or from a satellite.
However, I knew that I'd be visiting my dad who lives on the Maine Midcoast and he does get his TV (all four channels of it) over the airwaves from Bangor (the nearest city of any size) using an old analog TV set. So I figured that it made sense to get a converter box coupon, purchase the box (which converts digital transmissions to analog), and generally get things set up and figure out if there were any issues.
There were.
Getting the converter box was easy enough. It actually seems a sensibly administered program. The $40 coupon (for a device costing about $60) arrived promptly and the amount of the coupon strikes me as giving a nice discount without encouraging people to just pick up electronics that they don't have a use for. I purchased the converter at a local big-box retailer and took it up to Maine with me. For someone with a modicum of experience with hooking up electronics (which would be me, if not my dad), getting everything connected was pretty straightforward.
Only one problem.
No signal. Not even on the two stations whose analog signals had seemed fairly strong. Double-check all the connections and so forth. Yep. Everything seemed to be working except for the no digital signal thing.
To skip to the bottom line, my dad called a local TV and antenna installer who had done some work on the house's rooftop antenna in the past to see if he had any guidance to offer. Perhaps a new antenna or re-orienting the current one would solve the problem.
Apparently not. He said that the Bangor stations were broadcasting digital signals but at relatively low power and that a large area of the coast that picked up analog at least partially couldn't tune in digital at all. Maybe they'll boost the power before the February 2009 cut-off--or maybe they won't--he said. In any case, as things stand, OTA won't be an option come February.
I can't say that I was completely shocked. I'd read stories suggesting people receiving weak OTA signals might not be able to receive them come the switch to all-digital. Indeed, that was one of the reasons I wanted to try out a converter box in case a plan B or plan C was needed.
Put this down as another data point. I suspect that readers of this blog tend to get their TV via cable/satellite, live in urban areas where signals tend to be stronger, or make a big deal out of how they don't watch TV. But there are still a fair number of people who receive only analog OTA signals (about 17 million households) and some percentage of those are going to get a surprise when this switch finally happens for real.
As for my dad, he's fine. In fact, he's probably enjoying his 200+ channels of satellite by the time you're reading this. But that's not an option for everyone.
A post earlier this year by CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland pondering how he should store photos while traveling got me thinking about the same question.
I can't claim to have come up with "the answer," but I've thought about the issues, read through some discussions about what people consider best practices, and have tried to roughly quantify relative failure rates. What's right for you will depend on priorities and circumstances, but hopefully the following will offer some food for thought.
Real-world failure rates are hard to come by. However, having been the owner of a variety of laptops and other devices with hard disk drives, a 1:100 drive failure rate in a portable device over the course of a month's vacation doesn't seem out of line. Flash memory fails too. Anecdotal information from a couple of dealers (based on product returns) suggests that a 1:1000 rate is a reasonable stake in the ground--10x the reliability of disk. Further complicating the story is that some errors are recoverable, but you'd probably better stop using the card when you have a problem.
That's the hardware. Then there's the wetware--i.e. you.
This one's even harder to quantify. However, speaking for myself, I'm always misplacing loose memory cards. Furthermore, procedures that involve a lot of multi-step copying, editing, and so forth offer lots of potential to erase something that you thought you backed up or for an operation to otherwise fail without your knowledge. Or you might, like me, sometimes just do something really dumb. Also, consider theft and other forms of loss beyond your control.
Add it all up and my guess is that, for most people, minimizing the possibility of human error is more important than incrementally reducing the impact of a potential hardware failure.
With those reliability estimates and human realities as a baseline, here are my thoughts for some reasonable practices:
- If at all economically feasible, carry enough flash memory to hold all your photos. Flash has a good 10x the reliability of hard disks, more when you consider that it's probably going to be OK even if you drop it or run it through the washing machine.
- Common wisdom is that name brands are, in the aggregate, more reliable, and some higher-end cards also come with data recovery software. This seems reasonable. However, I've never seen actual data to bolster this belief--only random stories about crappy off-brand cards purchased on eBay. One data recover company notes that differences in build quality are indeed part of the reliability story but goes on to say it doesn't correlate in any consistent way to brand.
- Because photos can sometimes be recovered from memory cards after they've had a problem, it's a good idea to have at least one backup card. That way, if there's a problem, you can take the card out of the camera and work on it when you get home. Messing with it in the field is a recipe for losing data that could otherwise have been retrieved.
- A lot of people advocate putting fewer eggs in one basket. That is, they suggest using multiple smaller cards rather than one or two larger ones. This is hard to argue against so long as you develop a good system to ensure you don't lose the spare cards or accidentally erase or otherwise mess something up while you're swapping them around. Given overall flash reliability, I don't see this as a particular win--and may even be a net loss if taken to the extreme of some complicated scheme of rotating cards in and out of the camera.
- Although I tend not to bother, making a periodic hard disk backup of your memory cards is good belt-and-suspenders practice. If you're traveling with other people, a hard disk is also a good way to trade pictures. A computer is one possibility. Hard disk-based media players or portable devices specifically designed for the purpose are others.
- If you can't keep everything on flash, then you obviously need to copy it somewhere. Based on the numbers I threw out above, I wouldn't trust a single hard disk backup as my only copy of anything I really cared about. In this case, I'd want either a second hard disk or a way to burn a copy to DVD. (One advantage of making DVDs is that you can potentially mail a copy to yourself at home. (Laptop and DVDs were the solutions that Shankland eventually decided on.) If you have a bunch of spare thumb drives of reasonable capacity laying around, that may be another possibility.
- Cameras break too--maybe more so than any of the other parts we're talking about here, especially if you're in harsh conditions. I'm not sure of the final digital camera mortality rate on the Grand Canyon boating trip I took a couple of years back, but a fair number bit the dust. So definitely consider a backup camera. Sharing memory card format and/or batteries between main and backup is nice, if feasible.
Ultimately, it's all a matter of playing the odds of hardware failure, while keeping in mind all the dumb things that we can do to sabotage ourselves.
Eastman Kodak didn't really miss the digital wave.
In fact, it dipped its toes into digital relatively early on. One of the issues with Kodak's Photo CD effort wasn't that it was late to the digital photography game, but that the market wasn't ready to widely embrace photos in a digital form yet.
One can, of course, fairly fault Kodak for allowing itself to be pushed further and further toward the periphery of the photographic ecosystem as digital imaging grew in importance. However, as I've discussed previously, the bigger issue is that digital photography has vastly eroded Kodak's consumables business. You sell a camera once. You sell film and processing week in and week out.
Thus, this piece by Claudia H. Deutsch in the New York Times caught my eye. It discusses some of Kodak President and COO Philip Faraci's growth strategies.
Kodak is benefiting from the moves that some publishers are making to recoup at least some of those lost advertising dollars. He notes that the Chicago Tribune and some others are trying "microzoning"--printing several versions of the paper in the same city, each with ads aimed at a specific neighborhood. And, he said, newspapers all over are using more color.
All of that, he said, promises to yield increased sales of Kodak's high-speed production printers--particularly of the 1,600-page-per-minute printer Kodak is about to introduce. And far more important to the company, the trend can yield a steady stream of orders for inks and other highly profitable consumables.
Faraci was named president and COO last fall; he joined the company in 2004.
What's really interesting here is that Faraci was at Hewlett-Packard for 22 years where, among other roles, he was senior vice president and general manager for the Inkjet Imaging Solutions Group. This is someone who knows consumables.
Maybe Kodak is starting to find a revenue and profit replacement for film, which is what it's always really needed rather than more amorphous "digital imaging products."
(Credit:
TiVo)
TiVo's making a big push with its TiVo HD unit. That's understandable. The company's original foray into high definition, the TiVo Series3, carried a $799 price tag (now $599) that priced it out of the range of all but the most fervent TiVo fan. At $299 or so, the TiVo HD is much more in line with what typical audio and video gadgets go for and therefore something that it actually makes sense to promote.
I finally took the plunge to HD when TiVo offered to transfer the lifetime subscription from my Series2 for $199. I bought my lifetime before they switched to offering only perpetual monthly payment plans and figured that I ought to get some money out of it while I still could. Plus I got an HDTV last year so I had started thinking about upgrading to digital cable service. Finally, TiVo was just in the process of releasing a software upgrade that lets you use external eSATA storage on your TiVo. That was the decider.
I called to make the transfer today and I thought my experiences worth sharing.
... Read moreI'm here shaking my head at much of the media coverage around downloading Radiohead's Rainbows album. ABC News gives a short summary:
Last month, Radiohead announced it would let fans set the price for its new album, available for download on the British alt-rock band's official Web site.
Now, the statistics are in and it looks like offering fans free downloads turns them into freeloaders.
More than six out of 10 fans worldwide--62 percent--who downloaded "In Rainbows" between Oct. 10 and Oct. 29 paid nothing for it, according to digital research firm ComScore Inc. The 38 percent who did cough up cash paid an average of $6 each. A total of 1.2 million people downloaded the album.
Much of the news media has apparently decided en masse that these results indicate a marked failure of the voluntary payment model. (To be clear, the band's Web site does ask for payment rather than a "donation," a subtle but important difference.)
Headlines include: "Fans Shortchanging Radiohead's Rainbows?" (E! Online); "Radiohead Lets Fans Set CD Price; Most Say $0" (ABC News); and "Thanks for the Free Album, Radiohead!" (TMZ.com). Those are just the ones at the top of Google News this morning; there are many others in a similar vein.
What nonsense.
To put this in some historical context, back in the 1980s I spent many late nights working on shareware programs for DOS and Windows. In particular, I wrote a program called Directory Freedom, a DOS-based file manager, that made its way onto a number of "best of" shareware lists.
Shareware, at that time, mostly referred to "try before you buy" commercial software. In this case, the author typically set a price and requested payment after a certain evaluation period. Unlike today's software trials and demos, however, the software typically remained fully functional indefinitely. (The Association of Shareware Professionals promulgated rather detailed rules about what constituted allowable registration inducements.)
I made some decent beer money off Directory Freedom and my other software; I was hitting about $7K a year at peak. A few shareware developers, such as Bob Wallace, built real businesses on the shareware marketing model. However, most made very little even relative to my modest earnings.
There were never, to the best of my knowledge, any studies to systematically measure payment rates. However, the shareware author community bandied around figures of 10 percent or less. (Corporations may have paid at a higher rate; over half my revenue came from businesses even though I suspect my software was used far more by individuals.)
Thus (back to the topic at hand), I find that 38 percent of downloaders paying an average of $6 each a great conversion rate with an average price of $2.38. This figure may be less than what an album normally goes for, but it's actually more than what two songs on the iTunes Music Store would cost. And, as lots of folks like to remind us, many people buy CDs for only one or two songs.
The number may be less than Billboard's $5 assumption of what this album would bring in but it's really hard for me to imagine how anyone thought such a figure was likely. Especially when you consider that some of the downloaders may have been just listening to the music for the first time and, therefore, their downloads were more in the vein of a trial than a purchase.
All that said, I wouldn't read too much into this data and this data point. This is an extremely well-known band with a loyal following. The fact is that most downloaders probably had heard at least some of the music as would not necessarily have been the case for a more obscure band.
Furthermore, this was a singular, well-publicized case. As such, there's psychology involved that might not be present if this were more widespread. "We have to show the RIAA that people will pay for music given the opportunity," some might say.
On the flip side, the data doesn't reflect the many people who got the music from friends or over P2P networks--meaning that the percentage of people who paid is lower than the data indicate.
Bottom line? Digitization of movies and music will continue apace with all the broad implications for back-end infrastructures and consumer devices that implies. This particular example doesn't tell us much new about the process and dynamics involved. Many will pay but many won't, given the choice. But we knew that--or should have.
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