I am enjoying David Krug’s 901am blog more and more each day … and today is no exception. Today, on David’s blog, I found a link to a UK database of common pay rates for journalists (per word/page/article), photographers (per piece/day), and broadcasters (original link to David’s story). Looking through the tables - it seems as though they have data for some very mainstream periodicals such as Wired, Blender, Marie Claire, Runner’s World, Maxim, and more.
As a freelance writer, I’ve found it’s hard to know how much to expect for my work, across various publications. I’ve been getting the same per-word rate for … oh … about the past decade or so. Which, overall, is fine for me as I only write and sell a handful of articles a year … but if I were going to try to write on a more regular basis, this type of competitive information would be critical in negotiating a fair price for my work.
I have been puzzled in the last few weeks, in watching the commentaryfloating around about the proposed “.xxx” domain name extension that ICANN was considering - intended to delienate sources of adult content and pornography on the Internet from other sites. Similar proposals have been made in the US to require that port 80 be porn free.
Am I missing something obvious here, or have I just been around for too long? Wasn’t this tried about a decade ago with the Internet Content Ratings Association’sPICS system? I remember writing about this long, long ago when doing an article on Internet Explorer at the time - and how you could define content ratings to block right in the browser configuration. Gambling, pornography, alcohol - you name a vice, and it seemed as though ICRA had a way to voluntarily indicate that your site or pages had content with that material in it. You can see an example page here.
I can see references to PICS going all the way back to 1997. So if we had a system for websites to voluntarily label themselves a decade ago, and browsers could act on those ratings — why do we need to be considering all of these new systems? Because PICS never caught on … and the main reason, to me, seems rather obvious — traffic is king. It was true back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s … and it’s definitely true now in the days of AdSense enabled websites popping up everywhere. As long as traffic drives more revenue for site operators, it’s highly unlikely that most operators will obey these systems. Even Playboy still employs the ICRA PICS system - you can see their configuration here - but for some reason, we need to move them off of port 80, or off of the .com they’ve invested heavily in?
No … frankly, this model is never going to work … so I don’t know why ICANN and lawmakers keep trying to come up with new magic-bullet solutions to a problem you can’t fix.
I’ve had the Apple TV for exactly 10 days now … and I have to say, I’m still quite impressed with the unit and happy with my purchase. Despite some initial difficulties, I definitely stick by my original assessment that it’s a keeper. My thoughts after 10 days …
Content Quality
Content quality, and stories of fuzzy or pixelated content on high-definition television sets, have been commonly reported in many of the early reviews of the Apple TV. I have a feeling that this will continue to be an issue for Apple TV for a little while yet, even though it’s not an issue with Apple TV itself.
It would seem as though much of the content on the iTunes store varies in quality, when expanded well beyond iPod sized screens and up to 40, 50, 60+ inches. In my own experience, a downloaded episode of Battlestar Galactica was a bit fuzzier than I expected … and the motion of the video had a tendency to jerk a bit from time to time. In my initial review, I thought this was due to watching content via streaming, while the initial iTunes sync was taking place replicating all of my content. I guess this isn’t the case, and that the problem is in the media file itself - it’s just not encoded very well.
This reminds me of the early days of Music CD’s back in the 80’s (yes, I’m dating myself a bit here), there was typically a three-letter designation of the back of any CD you might purchase (known as a SPARS code) - AAD, ADD, DDD - with each letter referring to a portion of the creation process (initial recording, mixing, and final mastering) and whether it was done via analog or digital. So, of course when you bought CD’s in the 80’s you always looked for the “DDD” on the back of the case, assuming that would have the best audio quality. But the reality was that a studio could do a spectacular job with analog if they were good, and a poor job with digital if they were bad.
Same seems to be true for video content in the iTunes store, as some titles are a bit marginal (the aforementioned Battlestar Galactica episode) and others are rather well done - like the copy of The Prestige that I purchased. Of course, the movies in iTunes still are not in true high-definition yet … but on my 46″ screen, I would have to say they’re quite good.
Finding HD Podcast Feeds
Since high-quality source material is a bit harder to come by, it’s worth checking your favorite video podcasts to see if they offer a high definition or large format version. Overall, I would say they look rather good on the Apple TV, especially considering that most podcasts are produced on a budget that is a fraction of the cost of commercial content. Having all of my podcasts automatically synchronized with my Apple TV is making it easier for me keep up with the shows that I like, in the comfort of my living room. This is the feature that I like about Apple TV the most, and am looking forward to what new types of podcast concent will be created in the next few years.
Green Screen Workaround
Here’s the great news - I seem to have found a work-around for my HDMI green-screen bug, that I discussed in my last blog entry. I had mentioned in the video recording that I’d made that changing the resolution of the TV didn’t fix the problem. I wasn’t exactly accurate. I had tried going into the resolution settings and re-selecting 1080i as the resolution I wanted to use. This did not fix the green screen issue. However, out of curiosity the other day, I stepped the resolution down to 720p and this fixed the probelm — permanently. I can now turn the TV off and on, switch input sources, it doesn’t matter … the background color stays the proper black that it should be. Many thanks to all those who had come up with creative suggestions in my previous blog entry. I’m glad I was able to find a workable solution for me for now, and hope this may help anyone else experiencing this problem. Hopefully when I get my next television later this year, I’ll have more luck with 1080 (even though my TV supports 1080i, and is made by Toshiba - one of the founders of the HDMI specification).
Needs Rentals
The first thing I would really like to see Apple do is make movie rentals available via iTunes and Apple TV. The delivery mechanism for purchasing a movie works good enough for me for now - I select something on iTunes on my PC, and it’s available on my Apple TV shortly thereafter. But I really don’t want to pay $10 to $15 for every movie that I want to watch this way … simply because I don’t feel like owning every movie I may want to watch. I would assume that rentals are in the works over at Apple, and I look forward to the day they release them.
Conclusion
While I don’t think the Apple TV is going to get up to iPod types of market share figures in the near-term, it’s a solid platform that has a lot of future potential as Apple works to maintain their lead in the digital media market. if Apple can continue to execute with the Apple TV, with as much success as they’ve done to improve the iPod, they’ll be the act everyone will be trying to follow in a few years.
(NOTE: Be sure to Digg and Furl this article via the links at the bottom, so that as many people as possible can be informed about this possible bug, before spending $299 for an Apple TV)
—
Ok, maybe death is a bit to strong of a word. But annoyance just doesn’t seem to cut it. Here’s the story so far …
When my Apple TV arrived early Tuesday morning, I couldn’t wait to get it set up and start enjoying all of my iTunes content on my HD television set (a Toshiba Theaterwide 46″ HD set). Not patient enough to wire things up right (and the fact that I was lacking a HDMI cable at the time) I borrowed the component cable connection from my DVD player, and hooked the Apple TV up to that connection. At the first power up, I could tell I’d made a good investment with the Apple TV - all of my podcasts, music, TV shows, and movies started coming down to the unit … and the quality met my expectations.
So, over the weekend I decided it was time to wire things up right, so I stopped by the local BestBuy and purchased an Acoustic Research 6′ HDMI cable for ($59.95) so that I could give the DVD player its component connection again, and leverage the HDMI connection on the Apple TV and my television. I’d never used the HDMI connection before, and I was quite excited about the idea of one simple cable that carries all the hi-def audio and video. Smart idea…
(Note: I know that I could have gotten a cheaper HDMI cable if I’d simply purchased online from XYZ electronics, or whatever - I know the market for these cables is overly inflated … which is why I didn’t leave BestBuy with the Monster Cable HDMI at twice the price)
I took apart everything that was hooked up to the TV, and then rewired it from the ground up. One by one, I worked my way through the video inputs were operating as expected. Antenna feed? Check. TiVo? Check. X-Box? Check. HD feed from Comcast? Check. DVD Player? Check. Apple TV? Erm … uh … well, this is what I was greeted with:
A lovely shade of mint green, whever there should be black. And since so much of the Apple TV interface is black, it’s rather overpowering to look at. Puzzled by this, I figured maybe one of the cables wasn’t seated properly … so I disconnected the HDMI cable at both ends, and re-seated it. Nope — same problem.
So this left me puzzled. Obviously, the Apple TV had worked just fine on the component connections — unfortunately, my TV only has two sets of component inputs … which I use for the HD cable tuner, and my DVD player. So I really had a need to understand what might be going on with the HDMI interface so I started searching around on the Internet a bit.
Seems as though there are a few people that have reported strange HDMI behavior with their television sets, similar to what I was experiencing. So, at least I knew I wasn’t alone … but I wasn’t finding an answer to the problem. Finally, in this post, a suggestion could be found — power up the TV first, then power up the Apple TV second.
Since the Apple TV doesn’t have a proper power button - either on the remote, or the main unit itself - this is rather annoying and required disconnecting the power cable and reconnecting it. A hard boot, if you will. So, I gave that a shot - I turned on the TV, selected the HDMI interface (still showing Apple TV in its lovely green shade) and pulled the plug on the Apple TV. When I plugged it in, I was amazed by what I saw - it had gone back to its proper black background display!
Sure enough, consulting page 15 of the PDF manual for my television, this little “note” is printed on the side of the page …
Admittedly, I don’t know a whole lot about the HDMI specification - but it would seem that there’s some sort of “handshaking” that needs to take place between the display and the device … and by not following the proper sequencing, that handshaking gets a bit messed up. Ok, so now I had the display back to normal. The real question was, though - would my TV remember if I powered it off and then on again, or even just switched to another input and then back to HDMI again? The answer, sadly, is a “no” on both counts. Once I’ve got the Apple TV running in its normal black display mode - I’ve got to stay there, or go through the hard boot exercise to get it back again.
In a word, this sucks. I’ll certainly call Apple support on this one and see what they say about it (and will report my findings here on my blog, so check back if you’re interested in seeing what happens) but this is one of those issues that can easily fall into the “inbetween” area where one vendor can simply point a finger at another. Initially, I assumed it was likely the Toshiba’s fault … but then it occurred to me, who would have more experience implementing the HDMI specification properly - Apple Computer or a HD television manufacturer? And in the final few posts of the thread mentioned above, a few interesting bits of information can be found:
“It [presumably a Time-Warner cable HD tuner box] was working fine for several months, then all of a sudden, started getting that horrible green tint when powering on. Don’t know what happened, I assumed that TWC downloaded some sort of patch or upgrade to the box.”
Which tells me that it can be the box itself, not a problem with the TV set. And then this final post in the thread:
“…some source devices with less robust firmware have issues with timing out with HDCP authentication or other handshakes when the TV is off. Technically, all sources should attempt to authenticate HDCP indefinitely as the spec requires, but there are some devices that will timeout this process, thus requiring the source to be power cycled in order to force it to re-authenticte.”
Interestingly enough, that 2nd quote comes from a user named HDMI_org on AVS Forums, with a tag line of “HDMI Organization”. So maybe there’s some actual credibility to that assessment.
A similar thread, with an XBox user experiencing similar problems via HDMI, can be found here.
If Apple can do anything, a future firmware update would certainly be nice to fix this problem. Certainly, I’m not the only person on the planet with this television … and given how many components are OEM’d across multiple manufacturers - I’m sure there are many other product lines that have the potential to exhibit this behavior. If the problem is in Toshiba itself, I’ll probably have to just live with it until I get a better television later in the year (because no one is taking my Apple TV back unless they pry it out of my cold, dead hands).
If you are thinking of buying an Apple TV to use with your HDMI connection, and if you’ve never used your HDMI connection before - you might want to consult your user manual and see if it includes a note like mine does above. If it does, you might want to have a backup plan ready to stick with component inputs instead. Unfortunately, since I have no component inputs left, seems as though I’m stuck with the situation for a while.
Check back for updates after I call Apple and log a case for this problem. I’ll let you know what they say.
Here’s a YouTube video showing the entire situation, if you’re interested …
April 1st UPDATE! I’ve found a workaround for the Green Screen bug, and you can read about it here at my 10-day review of Apple TV.
Neal over at GeekBrief TVhas found a great video from David Pogue, famed NY Times technology writer, as to why the Apple TV is so cool. For anyone that doesn’t quite “get it” yet … have a look at his video. At the very least, the geek in all of us can appreciate his animated personality as he starts running speaker wire from the PC upstairs down to the living room speakers …
