I have a lot of Apple gear, and I’m pretty happy with it. There’s just one problem. The better Apple’s stuff gets, the less patience I have for everyone else’s clunky hardware and software. Televisions and all the boxes we hook up to them are the worst offenders. No two TV manufacturers or set-top-box makers use the same remote controls or user-interface conventions, and they’re all painfully bad (except those developed for the hockey-puck-like Apple TV, which are decent but not great). That’s why I’m hoping that Apple will eventually follow through on Steve Jobs’ dying wish, in biographer Walter Isaacson’s words, “to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”

While we await that glorious day, though, there are some existing technologies that can help ease the pain. In fact, there’s no lack of innovation in the area of video entertainment, as the acres devoted to new “digital home” technologies at this week’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas attested. The problem is a lack of unification—meaning interfaces that would make it just as easy to find, buy, watch, and share great cable content on your TV as it is to find, purchase, consume, and share great book, magazine, or game content on your iPad.

For the last few months I’ve been following a TV technology startup called Dijit Media that’s both innovating and making an attempt at unification. They know Apple is coming, and that the Cupertinoids—unless they’ve completely lost their touch in the post-Jobs era—are likely to create a product that melds beautiful TV hardware, a slick and simple operating system, and a rich content marketplace. Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based firm has built its own universal TV remote for iOS devices, and is using it to foster a new “second screen” culture.

Dijit's program listing and remote control on the iPad

The Dijit app, which controls your TV with help from a Griffin Technology gadget called the Beacon, marries channel listings from your cable operator with diverse Internet resources like Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix. It turns your iPhone or iPad into a kind of social command center for the living room—a place where you can browse listings, find out what your friends are watching, or rearrange your Netflix queue, all while sitting back in front of your big screen. It works with hundreds of models of TVs, DVRs, and set-top boxes, replacing the welter of remote controls and on-screen interfaces that come with those devices and moving all of the control and choice to the smaller but far more versatile touchscreen.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet fully integrate with Internet-TV boxes like the Apple TV and the Roku Player—and I’ll have more to say on that in a minute. But Dijit figures that the more progress it can make toward unification before Apple enters the market in earnest, the more Apple’s competitors will need to seek the startup out. “We think sooner or later Apple will come in, and it won’t be a ‘hobby,’ and it will show what’s really coming,” says Jeremy Toeman, Dijit’s chief product officer. “The Samsungs and Vizios of the world will need external technology to bridge the gap, and the only way to bridge it will be to go cross-platform. We think we can help the consumer electronics manufacturers adapt to a world where they are not as proficient at building the end-to-end ecosystem as Apple is.”

Dijit, originally known as UMEE, was founded in 2009 by former Nvidia and Riverbed Technology engineer Maksim Ioffe. It won funding in late 2010 from technology investor Alsop Louie, backer of streaming-video startup Justin.TV and mobile iOS game developer Smith & Tinker. The startup switched to its current name at CES in January 2011, which is also when it released the iPhone version of the remote-control app and announced its partnership with Griffin.

The $70 Beacon device, which is available at Apple Stores, bridges the communications gap between … Next Page »

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Beware of CEOs who dress like their company logo. Beware of Jason Baptiste.

Just kidding. Baptiste is one of the most intensely likable startup founders around (emphasis on intense). His company, New York-based OnSwipe, is trying to take the tablet publishing world by storm. And not just with its aggressively stylish magenta-and-black color scheme.

OnSwipe makes a software platform for publishers to display their content and ads on tablet Web browsers, starting with the iPad. If that sounds a bit similar to Google Currents, the mobile publishing app that the Web search giant unveiled last week, well, Baptiste doesn’t seem too worried about the competition. In response to an article saying that “Google Currents might be OnSwipe’s nightmare,” Baptiste tweeted: “I fear Currents like Twitter feared Buzz and YouTube feared Video.” (OK, he doesn’t lack for confidence.)

We caught up with Baptiste earlier this month in Boston, where he spoke about the deeper ideas behind OnSwipe at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference (you can see photos here—Baptiste represented New York with flair). He also shared some broader views on the future of Web content and advertising, and argued for OnSwipe’s vision of browsing via tablets and touchscreens.

“Instead of a world with ugly text-like ads, we’re going to see a world with beautiful full-page, magazine-like advertising that will finally fill the gap” in the $50 billion in ad spending that’s expected to move from print to digital media, Baptiste said after his talk.

In a short video interview produced by my colleague Lilly O’Flaherty, Baptiste talked a little more about OnSwipe’s specific goals and challenges. You should check out the video below, but here are three highlights to whet your appetite:

1. “The tablet is the TV of this generation.”

2. “It’s not going to be 300 channels or 3,000 channels, it’s going to be millions of channels.”

3. “If Google gained its distribution by powering search, OnSwipe wants to gain distribution by powering [tablet browsing] experiences.”

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In a segment featured Tuesday night on the PBS NewsHour, correspondent Hari Sreenivasan brings an outsider’s curiosity to the strange, wonderful world of startup accelerators. The eight-minute report features Sreenivasan’s interviews with entrepreneurs and mentors at TechStars, AngelPad, and Y Combinator—archetypes of the venture incubator wave (or is it a bubble?) that we’ve been chronicling here at Xconomy for the last four and a half years.

This is a must-watch piece, for at least four reasons:

1) It’s the best short summary of the startup accelerator concept you’re likely to find—and a great example of mainstream media interest in what’s long been a fringe phenomenon, unknown to middle America.

2) Sreenivasan talked with celebrities of the startup world like AngelPad’s Thomas Korte, TechStars’ David Cohen, Blackbox Ventures’ Max Marmer, and Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa. It’s fun to see them all on camera.

3) The piece featured a bunch of cool startups that you may not have heard of yet but probably will, including Order.In, LendFriend, and Tapviva.

4) There’s a one-minute segment featuring me. It starts at 4:45 mark in the video; in the clip Sreenivisan used, I’m talking about the technological changes that have made it so much cheaper for mobile and Internet startups to get off the ground, and the bubbly conditions this change seems to be fostering in the Silicon Valley startup scene.

PBS NewsHour Shoot at Xconomy San Francisco

Sreenivasan does a thorough job of explaining why startup accelerators exist and how they work, and he conveys authentic flavor by talking to real entrepreneurs. It’s all framed in a way that will make the accelerator phenomenon clear to TV audiences in Idaho or Vermont who’ve never heard of Y Combinator. But there’s also a savvy to the reporting that’s a clear legacy of Sreenivasan’s days as an anchor and correspondent for CNET during the first Internet boom, from 1996 to 2002.

My only role in the NewsHour report was to spend an hour talking on tape with Sreenivasan, here at Xconomy San Francisco back in early October (the photo above shows the KQED crew setting up for the shoot). Another couple of minutes from our conversation made it into a supplement to the broadcast report, published on the PBS NewsHour website under the title “What is a Startup Accelerator?” Both the main report and the supplemental clip are embedded below.

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It is not even Thanksgiving and it has already been a busy November for Bluefin Labs, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of analytics gleaned from the wealth of comments in the social sphere about television shows. Bluefin Labs, backed by Acacia Woods Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and others, was among the startups presenting their ideas to judges during the ad:tech New York digital marketing conference, which ran through Nov. 10.

Bluefin Labs gathers data based on comments shared publicly via social media about television shows. In addition to the number of tweets and status updates that mention shows, the three-year-old company collects anonymous demographic information about the people who make the comments. Bluefin Labs and others such as SocialGuide in Brooklyn are packaging that data for advertisers and television networks to use.

Bluefin Labs’s Jack Flanagan, vice president of sales, gave the winning pitch at ad:tech in the social media category, besting native New York startups Murmur, Taykey, and Percolate. This follows Deb Roy, CEO and co-founder of Bluefin Labs, introducing his company to the city at the NY Tech Meetup on Nov. 2.

But as Bluefin Labs heads home in victory, SocialGuide—which raised $1.5 million in April from angel investors—is busy preparing a new … Next Page »

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The West Coast roll-up of Boston-area tech companies continues.

On the heels of Oracle’s acquisition of Endeca this week, networking and communications giant Cisco Systems said today it plans to acquire Boxborough, MA-based BNI Video for $99 million in cash and retention-based incentives. Cisco is one of the startup’s investors. The deal is expected to be complete by the end of this year, at which time BNI’s employees will join Cisco’s service provider video technology group.

BNI Video started in early 2009, originally known as Beaumaris Networks, to develop technology for video service providers. About a year ago, my colleague Erin reported on the company’s software, which is aimed at helping cable companies compete better with Internet video providers.

The startup’s cloud-based software manages how cable content is organized on the back end so that consumers can search and browse their programs across various Internet-connected devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The company is led by CEO Conrad Clemson.

BNI raised nearly $17 million in venture capital over two rounds, from Charles River Ventures, Comcast Interactive Capital, Cisco, TIme Warner Cable, and Castile Ventures. So this looks like a pretty healthy return for the startup’s investors. BNI had 50 employees as of a year ago.

San Jose, CA-based Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) says it plans to use BNI’s technology to advance its own Videoscape TV platform, which lets service providers deliver video to Internet-connected devices. Cisco recently acquired ExtendMedia and Inlet Technologies in the video sector, and also previously bought Starent Networks and LineSider Technologies in Massachusetts.

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Deb Roy doesn’t strike me as a Jersey Shore kind of guy. Yet he can tell me exactly what viewers are saying about the estimable Deena Cortese during any episode, or how many people are annoyed by Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and are tweeting about him (no, I haven’t been—too busy getting my GTL).

I’ll spare you the sordid details, but Bluefin Labs won’t. The Cambridge, MA-based tech company, which Roy co-founded in 2008, is all about understanding social-media conversations around TV programs and ads. Not just what’s being said and the sentiment behind it—as many other companies are tracking in various fields—but also the precise demographics of who’s saying it, what else they’re saying (and watching), and how their profile and comments are correlated with other people and programs, in an aggregate sense.

Bluefin Labs has gotten its share of press for its technology approach. But the company seems to be coming into its own as a business, and it has been garnering interest from TV network executives and big brand marketers as of late. So I sat down with Roy, Bluefin’s CEO, to learn more about the company’s history and approach.

Roy is a professor on leave from the MIT Media Lab. He’s an expert in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining, among other things. His company, which now has north of 30 employees, has deep computer-science research in its DNA (for better or worse). Based largely on its technology and team, it has raised more than $7 million from Redpoint Ventures, Acacia Woods Ventures, Lerer Ventures, and other investors.

My first order of business: where did the name come from? Well, the story of Bluefin Labs (not to be confused with Bluefin Robotics, another MIT startup) goes back to Roy’s research at the Media Lab, where he has been a faculty member since 2000.

As he puts it, his research program was “built on understanding the relationship between words and context.” (Roy is known for having recorded a quarter-million hours of video of his young son’s early life, in part to understand how a computer might learn human language.) Around 2007, a PhD student of Roy’s, Michael Fleischman, was working on a project to analyze video footage of baseball games and audio of announcers talking about the games—a convenient (and fun) database for associating words and context. Conceptually, the goal was to teach a machine to understand what a “fly ball” or “home run” looks like, for applications such as video search.

A program director at the National Science Foundation happened to see an article about the baseball research. He called Roy and suggested he apply for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant. Roy had no business experience—it was a “part of my brain I didn’t know existed,” he says—but he and Fleischman (who “has entrepreneurial blood running through his veins,” Roy says) wrote up a proposal. And in 2008, they were awarded a $100,000 SBIR grant. They had 48 hours to pick a name for their company, so they named it after a sushi bar in Porter Square (Blue Fin) where they had dinner. The name stuck.

Bluefin Labs started out by analyzing other types of sports programs, like football. Social media was taking off, so Roy and company ran a test with the National Football League to track what people … Next Page »

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New York startup Umami said in a press release Tuesday it raised $1.65 million in seed funding from Battery Ventures, NEA, and angel investors. Umami is a platform that broadcasters can use to publish additional content for television shows that viewers are watching. Umami said it has a free iPad app currently in a closed beta test with undisclosed television networks and others. Umami was founded by Scott Rosenberg, most recently vice president of advanced advertising at Rovi, and Bryan Slavin, former vice president of product development at Lightningcast. Umami plans to launch its services with this year’s fall television season.

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Successful businesses take pride in knowing their customers, listening to them, and exceeding their expectations. They evolve their products, services, pricing, terms, and distribution based on what the market is looking for and how the landscape is changing—not on what worked in the past. This quality has never been more important than in the past two years of jarring recession and slow recovery.

Yet most businesses are not prepared for a momentous shift in their customers’ behavior, one that transcends any particular product or industry. This shift affects not only customers but employees, suppliers, partners, and investors—in fact, every audience companies need to reach, motivate, influence, and satisfy in order to survive and thrive.

We are changing the way we consume information, more profoundly and rapidly than most of us realize. The explosion of online and mobile video is the catalyst, and the future of corporate communications clearly will hinge on the ability to exploit this shift smartly enough to gain and keep the attention of the people whose impressions, decisions and behavior determine a company’s fate.

“Enterprise Television” will be the 24×7 media identity of successful businesses. With video as the dominant vehicle for nearly all communications, Enterprise Television can significantly increase the ability to:

• Market and sell products and services;
• Increase employee engagement and commitment;
• Build and enhance brand identity and loyalty;
• Project and protect corporate reputation and image; and
• Pro-actively manage and contain all forms of crisis.

The numbers are astounding. In November 2010, 172 million Internet users in the U.S. spent an average of almost 30 minutes per day watching online video. That’s 40 percent more time per day than in 2009. Also during November, Americans viewed 5.4 billion online video ads, which reached 49% of the total U.S. population. YouTube, the most popular online video site, is experiencing more than two billion playbacks a day (150 million of those through smart phones and other mobile devices), as 35 hours of new content is uploaded to its site every minute. The number of people watching video on their mobile phones is growing at a 40 percent annual clip. As broadband pushes rapidly into even more homes, businesses and wireless communications networks, these trends will only keep rising. Cisco, the leading provider of the communications gear that keeps the Internet humming, estimates that within four years, 90 percent of the traffic moving across the Web will be video.

The opportunities for business leaders and marketers may sound familiar: reaching audiences on their terms, targeting them more narrowly and efficiently, and reaping the benefits of interacting with them constantly. Sounds like the call of the Internet, right? The dominance of online video will enable these benefits, to be sure, but also will introduce an entirely new level of possibilities—for good or ill.

Consider GE. An iconic brand with a history of polished marketing campaigns, GE wanted younger audiences (its future customers, investors, and employees) to relate to its Ecomagination green initiatives. Rather than producing slick ads and buying expensive spots on traditional … Next Page »

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Bamboom Labs is beta testing a new service in New York designed to let consumers watch their favorite broadcast TV shows on any Internet-connected device. The company has raised $4.5 million from the likes of FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital, Highland Capital Partners, High Line Venture Partners, and SV Angel, according to VentureWire. For $10 a month Bamboom members can rent an HD antenna that will allow them to watch local broadcast stations, as well as record and save programs, on their PCs, smartphones, and other devices. Long Island City, NY-based Bamboom also makes Netflix’s library available via its service, and incorporates social-media features such as Twitter and Facebook.

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Brooklyn, New York-based SocialGuide, where TV viewers go to talk about TV shows as they air, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding, according to a press release. The seed round was run by Alex Zubillaga and angel investors. The company will use the money to build out its site, which is designed to foster social engagement between consumers and networks. “With more than half of the nearly 300 million Americans who watch TV having a second screen experience, the market is ripe for a social TV product that connects with consumers and networks,” said Alex Zubillaga in the statement.

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It used to be that purchases began depreciating in value the moment you bought them. A new car, for example, might as well come with a little Kelley Blue Book countdown under the odometer showing its declining resale price. Indeed, the idea that property depreciates is so universal that it’s built into our accounting methods and tax codes. Traditionally, there have been only a few categories of things that don’t automatically drop in value over time, such as homes (up until 2008 anyway), precious metals, and maybe fine art and other collectibles.

But in the realms touched by software and the Internet, something different is happening. These days, many of the tools that modern consumers depend on, such as computers, smartphones, and entertainment devices, actually grow more useful and more valuable over time, thanks to a) the constant stream of new applications that exploit the devices’ capabilities in innovative ways, and b) the relatively new tradition of free updates for applications or operating systems you already own. In fact, when it comes to digital technologies, we’ve entered what you might call the Age of Appreciation. You can buy a gadget like an iPhone, an Android phone, or an iPad, and then sit back and watch it get more powerful without having to spend another cent.

It’s true that hardware itself still ages, breaks, grows obsolete, or loses its luster. Lord knows that my iPad, which seemed so shiny and magical just a year ago, looks a tad antiquated in my eyes now that the iPad 2 is out. I’m definitely not arguing that we can or should stop buying new stuff.

But I do think it’s worth slowing down to acknowledge the amazing situation we’ve created for ourselves, only 70 or so years into the era of electronic computers. In the Appreciation Age, objects containing computers grow in value because their value resides mainly in the software code they run, and that code can be so easily replaced, supplemented, or upgraded.

What got me thinking about all of this was a pair of relatively routine upgrades to Apple TV, the little black box that lets you play TV shows and movies from the iTunes Store on your big-screen TV. Last November, Apple updated the firmware inside the Apple TV from version 4.0 to version 4.1. And then, just a couple of weeks ago, it upgraded again to version 4.2. We’re so accustomed to such decimal-point changes these days—and they usually happen so automatically, quickly, and painlessly—that they often pass unnoticed. But these two updates definitely came with enough goodies to catch my attention.

The biggest change was the addition last November of something Apple calls AirPlay. This feature connects different devices over a home Wi-Fi network so that, for example, a music or video file stored on a Mac or a PC can be streamed to your TV. I like this feature because it has turned my TV into the sound system for my whole apartment. I can start an album playing on iTunes on my Mac or my iPhone, tap the AirPlay button, and throw the audio over to my TV, which (thankfully) has decent speakers. I also like to buy season passes for a couple of TV series on iTunes and download the episodes to my iPad. When I’m at home, AirPlay lets me watch those shows on the big screen, where they belong.

The more recent 4.2 update came with a big bonus for sports fans: Apple added the ability to watch live, on-demand Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association games for people with … Next Page »

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It’s a great time to be a cord-cutter. Thanks to Internet companies like Amazon, Apple, Boxee, Google, Hulu, Netflix, and Roku, it’s getting easier every day to cancel your cable or satellite TV subscription without giving up on your favorite TV shows. There’s just one problem. If you do cut the cord—as I did two years ago—it gets a lot more complicated to figure out where to watch your shows, and when new episodes are available. These are things that your DVR usually handles if you’re a cable subscriber—and for better or worse, there’s no equivalent (yet) of a universal DVR for Internet video.

But there is help. The best service I’ve found for locating and tracking my favorite shows comes from a San Francisco startup called Sidereel. At the Sidereel website, you can search for your favorite shows, add them to a personalized calendar, and sign up for e-mails that will notify you when new episodes are out. There are also handy links to all the places online where you can watch the shows. For example, my current favorite show, Fringe, is available on Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, and Xfinity TV, and a Hong Kong-based site called Megavideo (who knew?). Last week, Sidereel also came out with an iOS app that lets you do most of the same things from your iPhone or iPad.

Sidereel isn’t a household name like YouTube or Netflix, but the angel-funded, 35-employee startup says it’s the world’s largest independent TV site. It attracts a million users every day, and over 10 million per month (the average user comes back once every three days). Unlike Apple or Hulu or most of the other players in the Internet TV space, Sidereel isn’t in bed with—or at war with—any particular TV network or media conglomerate, so its advertising-driven episode guide and tracking service can afford to be all-inclusive. With 9,200 shows in Sidereel’s catalogue, you’re pretty sure to find the shows you like.

I wanted to find out more about this unusual and under-recognized startup, so I headed over to Sidereel recently to spend some time with founder and CEO Roman Arzhintar. Right off the bat it was clear that Arzhintar isn’t your typical brash SoMa/Silicon Valley CEO—he’s more John Hodgman than Master of the Universe. He came to startup life only after abandoning careers as a lawyer and a globetrotting novelist. He says it’s “almost the story of my life” that “things end up being great but for all the wrong reasons.”

Arzhintar got interested in media at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, where he was a protege of the college president, former CBS president Arthur Taylor. But he took a roundabout path into the media business, getting a law degree, spending three years as a corporate attorney for a technology firm, realizing that “not only was I a bad lawyer but I also hated being a lawyer—there’s no interaction with people,” then spending a while writing fiction while touring France, Spain, Argentina, and Chile.

He finally ended up in San Francisco working for Guba, a startup that had created a search tool for Usenet, the vast Internet discussion system that predates … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Covario, a five-year-old startup that provides analytics and services for digital marketing, convened its annual users conference in downtown San Diego yesterday. The event draws top marketing executives from companies like Intel, Procter & Gamble, and Research In Motion (RIM), which led Covario to develop a movie theme around the “Top Guns” of search, social media, and digital advertising.

Dressed like Tom Cruise in a leather jacket and aviator glasses, Covario co-founder Russ Mann took the stage to announce, “I’m Russ Mann, CEO of Covario—and ‘Maverick.’ “

Yet with the Super Bowl looming as the single biggest U.S. advertising event (distinct from the weeks-long World Cup or Olympic Games), Mann might have made a bigger impression if he had dressed like Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu, with his trademark long, curly hair.

Russ Mann (aka "Maverick")

TV commercials for the Super Bowl, which are estimated this year to cost $3 million for 30 seconds, have long been in a league of their own. Nielsen Sports media research estimates that almost half of those watching the game this Sunday are actually tuning in to watch the commercials more than the game. More than 106 million people watch last year’s game.

At Covario’s event yesterday, some of the most interesting insights stemmed from efforts by the chief marketing officers at major companies to bridge the gap between online digital marketing, where everything can be quantified, and old media marketing, where advertisers relied on focus groups and intuition in the hopes that ad spending will translate into greater product sales.

Advertisers these days view TV advertising as a catalyst, said Sean Corcoran, a senior interactive marketing analyst for Cambridge, MA-based Forrester Research. In a keynote presentation yesterday, Corcoran said “the Millenials” (people born in 1980 and later) tend to multi-task—they’ll check the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) during a movie and player stats during … Next Page »

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Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show dominated San Diego’s tech news last week. We have the highlights from the two dozen San Diego tech companies that attended the annual conference, along with the rest of the local biztech news.

—In one more sign that Wi-Fi is becoming increasingly important to the future of wireless network infrastructure, San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said it’s buying San Jose-based chipmaker Atheros Communications (NASDAQ: ATHR) for roughly $3.1 billion. The acquisition, if finalized, is Qualcomm’s biggest ever—and expands the wireless giant’s reach into products that span cellular, home, smart grid, and sensor networks.

—Motorola split into two new companies—Motorola Solutions, which will remain in Motorola’s headquarters in Schaumburg, IL, and Motorola Mobility, which is moving, for now, to nearby Libertyville, IL. There’s no word yet on whether Motorola Mobility, now headed by former Qualcomm COO Sanjay Jha, will move its HQ to San Diego, the Bay Area, or Austin, TX, the three cities Jha said the company was considering late last year.

—The annual Consumer Electronics Show regained its appeal as more than 140,000 attendees flooded the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center last week. The hottest electronics categories this year included smart phones, tablets, and TVs, and we saw the world of software apps moving from complex suites such as Microsoft Office to simpler “best of breed” apps available online at places like the Apple App Store.

—Sony Electronics, whose North American headquarters is in San Diego, led the charge in Web-enabled television with its lineup of sets powered … Next Page »

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Hi, my name is Wade, and it’s been 20 months since I paid for premium cable TV.

As longtime Xconomy readers know, I canceled all but my basic cable channels in March 2009. Back then, it was a fairly radical thing to do, but nowadays I run into people all the time who’ve realized that they can find most of the shows they like online. When I moved to San Francisco this summer and told the local Comcast rep that I only wanted voice and broadband in my new place, she seemed wholly unsurprised, if a little sad.

Two advances gave me the courage to go totally cableless. One was the Roku Player. I got this nifty little box, made by Saratoga, CA-based Roku, back in mid-2009 for $99 (today’s starter version is just $60). Plugging the Wi-Fi-enabled gadget into my 32-inch HDTV allowed me to tap into the thousands of TV shows and movies that Netflix has made available through its Watch Instantly program, which is available free to any Netflix user who subscribes at $8.99 per month level or higher. It also connected me to Amazon’s video-on-demand service. The upshot was that I was never at a loss for programs to watch. When I finally discovered Showtime’s award-winning series Weeds, for example, it turned out all six seasons were available on Watch Instantly. Score!

The second advance was that more and more of the first-run TV shows I liked—the kind of stuff that doesn’t turn up on Netflix until long after a season is over—-were available at Hulu or the networks’ own websites for free, or on iTunes for a buck or two per episode.

So, my old TV-viewing cost structure: about $90 per month, payable mostly to Comca$t. New cost structure: about $20 per month, for Netflix plus a few iTunes shows plus the Roku box amortized across 18 months. This kind of spending dropoff, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of households, must have cable and network executives weeping inside, even as they continue to insist publicly that the cord-cutting trend is “purely fiction.”

The Roku was the king of my entertainment center for a good long time. But as soon as Steve Jobs unveiled the rebooted version of Apple TV this September, I knew the Roku’s reign would eventually be put to the test. This week I finally made a pilgrimage to the San Francisco Apple Store, where I steeled myself to walk right past the luscious new MacBook Airs and ask for an Apple TV. I’ve spent the last few nights testing it out (such are the labors of the technology writer!) and I’m now ready to share a few thoughts that may assist other cord-cutters wondering how to choose between Roku and Apple.

Before we get to the core issue—which is, of course, the selection of content on the two devices—a few hardware notes. If it were round instead of square, the $99 Apple TV would pass for a hockey puck. It’s less than half the size of my Roku and about a quarter as large as the previous version of Apple TV. (Not that space is really at a premium in our increasingly barren entertainment centers and TV stands.) A power cord is included, but you have to buy a separate cable to connect to your TV’s HDMI port. It’s $20, annoyingly. (Apple’s overpriced accessories must be one of the big reasons it has $51 billion in the bank.)

Like the Roku, the Apple TV runs silently—there’s no hard drive or fan—and it pulls video data from your home network via Wi-Fi. Both devices, in other words, are small, unobtrusive, and functional. My only real complaint about the Apple hardware has to do with the … Next Page »

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Seattle-based BuddyTV got its start as a place where people could go online to talk about their favorite shows. But five years later, a lot of the hit shows have changed, and so has Buddy TV’s strategy as it seeks to stay relevant.

BuddyTV has undergone a transformation this year as it seeks new ways to capture and engage the fan bases around popular TV shows like Glee, True Blood, and Desperate Housewives, to name just a few.

One of BuddyTV’s competitors, Wetpaint rolled out its own new strategy, which shook up its entire business model, emerging with a brand new venture, Wetpaint Entertainment, that it hoped would reinvent the publishing industry. BuddyTV, on the other hand, has decided to go an entirely different route—a “bet the company” move, on engaging TV viewers through smartphones and tablet devices, according to chief executive Andy Liu.

When we spoke with BuddyTV back in January, the company was showing some impressive progress. It was the No. 2 fastest-growing website in the U.S., according to comScore, and, with its some 6 million monthly visitors, was seeing annual traffic growth of around 300 percent. But even with its success, the company was already looking for ways to diversify and expand beyond its bread and butter Web advertising revenue stream.

Late last month BuddyTV launched its mobile social campaign, releasing a new app for the iPhone and iPad that offers an entirely different experience from its website. The space, Liu says, is a new territory of social TV.

“We’re making a big bet on the mobile and tablet side of things,” Liu says. “When I watch TV, I’ve got my iPad open, I’ve got mobile phones nearby as well, and I think in the next 12 to 18 months this whole movement towards being a lot more social in television is really going to come together, and we just want to get ahead of that. It’s amazing how much hardware has changed this space.”

In the same vein of Comcast’s Tunerfish, Google’s Miso, and Facebook’s Hot Potato, the BuddyTV app utilizes the same idea behind location-based social networking—except instead of checking in to your neighborhood coffee shop, you can check into intangible things like books, music, and in this case, your favorite TV shows, while you’re watching them.

BuddyTV’s aim, according to Liu, is to build onto the basic check-in experience, to create something more personal. Through the app, fans will be able to check-in to more than 500 shows (and new ones are being added all the time), and jump into an active conversation pool, called the … Next Page »

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With so many options for finding, managing, and viewing video available today, from Netflix to Hulu to Boxee, the traditional cable TV interface is starting to look a little old-fashioned. Boxborough-MA-based BNI Video says it has software that could help cable operators out of that bind.

Cable companies have become increasingly sophisticated in the types of and volume of content that they offer to subscribers, but have lagged in the options they offer for browsing and managing that content, says BNI CEO Conrad Clemson.

“It’s like these guys have brought knives to a gun fight,” he says, explaining that cable companies mostly rely on the traditional set-top box that has evolved little in 20 years, still requiring consumers to clumsily scroll through channels despite the increasing volume of stations, OnDemand TV shows and videos, and consumer-recorded content.

“In our view Comcast has a much richer, better, deeper content library than something like Hulu, but if you cant find it, it doesn’t matter,” Clemson says.

BNI has developed cloud-based software, called a video control plane, which manages how the cable content is organized on the operators’ back end, and would allow TV-watchers to search through their cable-based media much in the way Netflix and Hulu enable viewers to navigate their content with different search and menu functions. The system also includes a content router that creates an open standards environment for cable companies, enabling them to work with different networking technologies, as well as analytics for the cable providers to track how the video content is being consumed.

BNI’s software also allows consumers to search and manage their cable-based content on their other Internet connected devices, such as laptops, iPads, and smartphones. The company ultimately wants to help cable companies offer actual programming via these devices.

Started in 2009, BNI has raised nearly $17 million, with a $6.8 million Series A round in June of that year from Charles River Ventures, Comcast Interactive Capital, and Cisco Systems. Time Warner Cable and Castile Ventures joined those existing investors for a $10 million Series B round in July of this year, Clemson says.

We had been following the startup while the company was still in stealth mode and … Next Page »

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With each new product that Apple announces, including the revamped Apple TV and the new Ping social network, Steve Jobs reveals a little bit more of his plan to dominate the media universe. But I can summarize that plan’s fatal flaw in one word: iTunes.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Apple’s hardware is unbeatable, and my admiration for it has only grown since I got my first iPod back in 2003. My home/office is virtually an outpost of the Apple Store: with the exception of the TV, the videogame console, and the coffeemaker, almost every device in my house is an iGadget of some kind. The operating systems that power my Apple devices are pretty good, too. I love OS X and I’m very glad that Xconomy is a mostly Mac shop. On the mobile side, Android is impressive, but iOS is the slickest and most user-friendly mobile operating system out there, in my judgment.

But there’s one piece of the Appleverse that I’ve always detested, and that’s the desktop version of iTunes. The ugly duckling of the iFamily, this program is hard to understand, hard to use, inelegant, and ill-behaved—in short, the very opposite of most other Apple products. I dread booting it up every day, yet I can’t sidestep it. What makes iTunes’ deficiencies so infuriating is that the program is indispensable: it’s the nerve center that stores all of your Apple-related media content, mediates all of your Apple-related purchases, and connects all of your Apple devices.

The rollout of iTunes 10, the latest “upgrade” to this nearly 10-year-old program, was one of the two centerpieces of Steve Jobs’ keynote talk on Wednesday, the other being Apple TV, of which I’ll say more in a moment. And the big new feature of iTunes 10 is Ping—a Facebook-like social network designed to help users discover music by seeing what their friends are buying for their iPods.

I’ve been playing with Ping, and it seems to have most of the features you’d expect of a media-centric social network circa 2010—profiles, friending, news feeds, comments. Plus, of course, you can easily preview or buy the songs or albums mentioned in your friends’ news feeds. It’s easy to see how Apple might expand Ping beyond music to facilitate conversations around media of all sorts, including movies, books, and mobile apps.

That said, Ping has some serious limitations that, to me, are symptomatic of the larger problems with iTunes. For example, there’s no integration with Facebook or even with your contact lists, so it’s virtually impossible to find real-world friends to connect with. For a social networking tool, this is a bit of a problem. (Kara Swisher at AllThingsD grilled Steve Jobs on this very issue, and his suggestion for finding friends was to “type their names into search or send them emails inviting them to join.”)

And there’s an even bigger issue: Adding a social networking interface, on top of all of iTunes’ other functions, is like grafting another limb to the forehead of an octopus. It’s just too much.

Few people may remember this far back, but iTunes predates even the iPod. It started out in early 2001 as nothing more than a program for ripping CDs and playing the resulting MP3s from your computer. (It was based on … Next Page »

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[Corrected, 11:00 am. See below] First it was the iPad vs. the Kindle. Now the battleground is shifting to television.

Apple keeps rolling out new devices to control how consumers interact with screens of different sizes. What the world really needs is a smart, stretchable display material so people could adjust their screen to whatever size they want, from a smartphone to a TV. Then they wouldn’t have to go buy a separate iPhone, iPod, iPod Nano, iPad, and now, Apple TV. Of course, that wouldn’t make Steve Jobs very happy.

Yesterday, Apple’s CEO and co-founder unveiled a smaller and cheaper version of its Apple TV, which is a box that lets people play movies and network shows on their TV via the Internet. The new Apple TV box is about the size of an ice cream bar, and will cost $99 instead of $229—the price of the old, larger Apple TV, which debuted in 2007 but hasn’t been much of a hit. The new device will be available within a month, Jobs said.

In conjunction with the release, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) will be offering 99-cent rentals of TV shows and $4.99 streaming video of first-run, high-definition movies, all through iTunes. Media companies including Fox and Walt Disney have signed up as partners so far. Consumers also will be able to watch streaming movies from Netflix on the Apple TV.

The announcement is a particularly big challenge to Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). The Seattle-based Internet retail firm has been working quietly to develop a TV and movie subscription service, which will be available to consumers through Web browsers, Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray players, and Xbox 360 consoles. This news was leaked to the Wall Street Journal yesterday (probably strategically to coincide with Apple’s announcement). Amazon already sells some TV episodes and movie downloads in this format, but it is looking to form big partnerships with the likes of NBC Universal, Time Warner, Fox, and Viacom.

Here’s why Apple’s move yesterday is problematic for Amazon. One of the main pathways into homes for Amazon’s existing video-on-demand service has been the Roku digital video player, from the Saratoga, CA, startup of the same name. Owners of the Roku box, which connects directly to a TV and gets content over a home wireless network, can also sign up for other “channels” such as Pandora, Revision3, and Blip.tv, but the device is marketed mainly as a way to watch streaming video from Amazon and Netflix without a computer. The new Apple TV is, in essence, a Roku box with an Apple interface: it’s got the same wireless networking features, the same HDMI output, and roughly the same form factor. Roku dropped its base price from $99 to $59.99 this week, presumably for competitive reasons. [An earlier version of this article said Apple TV is the same price as Roku. This paragraph has been adjusted to reflect Roku's price change---Eds.]

The major difference is that the Apple box will, naturally, come with slick Apple-designed software for browsing and selecting video content, photos, and the like. It’s likely to make the Roku interface look clunky by comparison. And that could be enough to siphon away many of the consumers who want to experiment with Internet video and might otherwise give Roku and Amazon a try. As far as we know, Amazon has no plans to introduce a new piece of hardware to compete directly with Apple TV—but it might need to do that.

All of this underscores the fact that the race to bridge the gap between TV and the Web has become incredibly crowded and confusing. Google TV, which has yet to roll out, will supposedly let consumers search for and watch TV programs and movies from live TV, digital video recorders, and the Web. And MSN TV from Microsoft already exists, but is primarily a service for browsing the Web and e-mail from a TV set. With Roku, Boxee, Hulu, and Netflix already duking it out in the “Web TV” sector, look for some consolidation among the smaller companies in the next year—and, let’s hope, lower cable bills.

Wade Roush contributed reporting and analysis to this story.

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When you think of Concord, MA, you’re more likely to visualize Revolutionary War skirmishes or Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond than factories full of complex machinery. But in fact, Concord was once a major hub of the clockmaking industry—in 1800 there were at least seven well-known clockmakers in the city, along with a network of suppliers including brass foundries, iron forges, wire mills, and cabinet builders. And as I learned during a recent visit to display maker Prysm, whose facility sits just across an abandoned railroad right-of-way from the Massachusetts Correctional Institute, the manufacturing spirit is alive and well in Concord.

At the core of Prysm’s plant—in a clean room that I was only allowed to visit after putting on a gown, shoe covers, and a hairnet—are four large screenprinting machines that are in nearly continuous operation, churning out the rubbery layers of phosphor material that make up the heart of Prysm’s displays. The way the company’s engineers explain it, the machines work just like those used to print designs on T-shirts—except that the phosphor stripes on Prysm’s screens are just millimeters wide, are made of exotic chemicals that glow red, green, or blue when exposed to laser light, and must be positioned with absolute precision. Which is not too different from clockmaking, when you think about it.

“Our first printing machine wasn’t even in a clean room,” says my host, Patrick Tan, Prysm’s vice president of panel development and manufacturing. “It was in the old Clock Tower Place mill building in Maynard, directly below the offices of Monster.com. Any time they had a party, it would rain wood fibers. We lived with that for as long as we could, but eventually we had to move—and that’s why we’re here in Concord.”

The startup finished that move last August, back when it was still known by its stealth name, Spudnik. It wasn’t until this January—almost five years after its founding by Boston University alums Roger Hajjar and Amit Jain—that the company finally lifted the veil on its technology, which it calls the laser phosphor display, or LPD. As I wrote in one of the first published profiles of the company, Prysm has big plans to use this old-meets-new technology to disrupt the market for large-format displays—that is, the wall-sized displays used for trade shows, stage productions, train station departure-time screens, and Times Square billboards.

Prysm’s current product isn’t huge by the standards of today’s flat-panel displays—it’s a 25-inch-diagonal screen, code-named Maui. But the screen on the Maui has no bezel, which means the units can be lined up edge-to-edge and stacked vertically to form a single, nearly seamless display of any required size. And perhaps the biggest selling point for the new display is that it’s driven by highly efficient lasers—the same commodity blue-violet lasers, in fact, that are found inside Blu-ray players. LPDs therefore use far less electricity than today’s dominant technology for large-format displays, arrays of light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

“Our first targeted application is for large indoor venues like airports, train stations, shopping malls, and convention centers, where LED displays are fairly entrenched today,” says Tan, a veteran of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). “One of the big problems with LED installations is that the first order of business is to get Tony the electrician to install power, they’re such big power consumers. For us, we should be able to run off of wall sockets.” A 142-inch screen that Prysm demonstrated recently in Amsterdam (shown in the picture here) used no more power than a microwave oven, Tan says.

The part of the Maui unit that’s being manufactured in Concord, inside a 32,000-square-foot building that formerly housed a maker of components for electron microscopes, is the business end—namely, the phosphor-covered layer of glass where … Next Page »

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