Ethernet TV

As cluefully highlighted on The Jeff Pulver Blog:Reflections on Broadcasting on Four Internet TV Networks (Simultaneously), all this fragmentation in the EthernetTV space is great fun for us geeks and innovators; however, at some point all our fun will have to become aggregated to some extent and packaged for wider comprehension and consumption. I’m not implying that there will ever again be anything like an authoritative portal for video over Ethernet, but I am insisting that there must be sub-portals that make sense to various niche markets for video publication and consumption. Moreover, very clueful insiders at USC suggest that the need for END USER TOOLS for simplified post-production and syndication by everyday folks is an absolute no-brainer.

I’m thrilled to see experiments like this increasing in frequency and duration because it means the market timing is at hand to seriously inject funding to build the tools and extend the infrastructure to ignite what is STILL a nascent market for P2P video.

CNetTV’s new player is out and the interface is extremely well done. I only wish it had worked in Firefox on my very commonplace T43 Thinkpad with XPSP2 and all the usual updates.

The Quick Tour is not needed in terms of getting started, but it does do a great job of highlight CNet’s Product Management savvy. The PM team deserves a lot of credit on this one; it’s not easy to negotiate the millions of options and competing stakeholder interests to complete a complex design like this (as much as we’d love to see Epiphany and Konquerer support some day). And there will be plenty of more essential bugs to address … like the new player didn’t work for me on FF w/ XP right out of the box. But overall, if you have your updated and Flash player and IE, you should be in good shape.

#1 on the wish list for all these services: STANDARDS COMPLIANCE for mobility. I’m not talking about playing into the How-Can-We-Kill-WiMAX cellular carrier G3 push, I’m talking about web standards that enable people to use any standards-compliant web browser on any web-standards compliant device.

While Opera has probably done the most to make up for design-side limitations from a browser standpoint, it would be great to see more providers sticking to more widely supported standards like Java (or even following the guidance to use UTF-8 as default!) in order to reach the widest possible audience, including Linux and BSD (hence, Mac/Darwin) geeks; who can be some of the most dynamic evangelists for any new technology or service. Satisfy that critical 1%, and you just may win a more lucrative micro-market than you imagine, and perhaps capture a larger chunk of 99% at a faster clip, as a bonus.

Use the Category pull down menu in the embedded player to find more live channels. For example, try [ Category | Movies ] & [ Channel | Sci-Fi Channel ].

Click on the dials on bottom of the TV set, below. To set your own stations, use the settings knob at far right, Change Stations, click “Remember play mode on refresh,” then click Save.

Remember back in 1999-2001 when you asked, “why would anyone need all that bandwidth?” and missed the chance to completely OWN the new telecom infrastructure environment? Um, deet-duh-DEEEEE, dude. Netflix: Instant Viewing.