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When you start down a path of explaining the physical universe, you eventually find yourself at the Big Bang and the singularity, the cosmological event that supposedly started our Universe. Now, it goes without saying that scientific evidence is pretty much irrefutable on this: there was a Big Bang and …
Here we are again. Another year gone, another year yet to unfold. And unfold it will…especially in the streaming video industry. Just like last year, I’ve taken a look at many of the technologies being considered, tested, and perhaps even shunned and created not only a tech radar diagram but …
I apologize for the seemingly random nature of this post. I started with just the premise that “time is not an illusion” and ended up speaking about entropy. Time is just an arbitrary means to quantify a system’s entropy. Everything decays. Everything moves from new to old to degeneration into …
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It is a common time-travel trope that if you wander backwards in time, you will have the chance to meet the younger version of your self which, in some scenarios, could cause irreparable harm to the fabric of time and the universe itself. In fact, many fictional narratives have been …
Ten years ago, had you asked the question, “What will the future of video be?” most people would have painted you a picture straight out of Minority Report—a personalized, interactive experience in which viewers can engage with the objects in the video by clicking on them. But look at the conversations …
When we talk about how video is changing, we tend to focus on the viewer—how the experience today is different than it was even a few years ago; about cord cutters, online, and OTT vs. the traditional TV experience. But when we emphasize the ways that technological changes have affected …
If you were asked the question today, “Which video content is more important—yours or your viewers’?” you’d probably answer, “Mine.” But would you be right? Before I answer that question, let’s take a brief look at content production as it stands. You might assume that professionals—people who make a living …
In case you haven’t heard, esports have been taking the world by storm. From Asia to Europe to the Americas, kids playing video games compete against each other for millions of dollars in prizes. No, you read that right. Kids playing video games are making millions of dollars. Not all …
Apple’s recent launch of a much-revised and improved Apple TV experience brings the family room back into the spotlight, where a long-standing war has been raging. From game consoles to set-top boxes (STB) to smart apps, a host of hardware and software companies have been vying for the coveted “gateway” …
We can’t escape the voices in the industry. “Cable television is dead.” “Cord cutting is for real.” “Millennials watch all of their content online.” But have we truly reached a point where online video is replacing traditional broadcast television? Sure, it’s clear that online video is growing in popularity. The …
If you have your finger on the pulse of the online video industry, then you probably already know that it’s no trivial task to start streaming content. Getting your service up and running can involve cobbling together a lot of different pieces from a very big ecosystem, from encoding to …
It’s easy to talk about the future of television as if it won’t exist. With all the hype surrounding streaming, you might be inclined to think that TV is close to uttering its dying breath. I know that I’ve been guilty of portraying that future, where consumers transition between linear …
Kevin Kelly, founder and former editor of Wired, recently asserted that even though the internet is more than 30 years old, we’re only at the beginning of realizing the opportunities and technologies it enables. And that got me thinking about streaming video. When we compare streaming video with broadcast television, we see …
When we think about what’s happening in the video space—the gradual transition from broadcast to online distribution—one comparison between TV and online video always comes to mind: “broadcast quality.” I know that I write and talk about this comparison until I’m blue in the face, but here it is again: …
It seems we are hearing more about the death of television every day. No, pundits and press aren’t coming out and espousing “TV is dead,” but more and more is being written about “cord cutters”—those pesky consumers who are opting out of traditional television subscriptions in favor of getting all …
Despite an increasing consumer appetite for digital content, broadcast television still rules the roost. In fact, according to Nielsen, broadcast television is watched five times as much as online programs, even though connected TVs (which include apps capable of accessing online content) reached 50 percent market penetration in the U.S. …
In a recent announcement, CenturyLink indicated that it was scrapping its IPTV offering in favor of OTT. The logic? It is simply cheaper to deliver over the internet than over fixed line. But CenturyLink isn’t alone in this movement. Comcast, with the Xfinity platform, has been advocating OTT over IPTV for …
I think we can all agree that the traditional television experience—you know, sitting on your couch and watching the TV according to some sort of schedule—is undergoing a transformation. The different ways people watch video content is exploding across devices, apps, and websites. Video has been unchained from the family …
Streaming video has come a long way in just a short time. Compared to how long it took broadcast television to take root and gain widespread adoption, online video has happened in the blink of an eye. Of course, the environment for adoption was different. When TV first showed up, …
About exlocus
Welcome to my blog. I am a career creative technology guy. What does that mean? Basically, it means I don’t really have a career home. I’ve spent a lot of my life building and architecting software, designing technology services and products, marketing those technologies, and lots and lots of writing. Although my advanced degree is in Literature, I have spent my life living in both the literary and science worlds. As much as I love writing fiction and poetry (with some very minor success), thinking about philosophy (I lean pretty close to Alan Watts), I also love neuroscience, physics (QM mainly), and math and have spent lots of free time (decades really) exploring those subjects. This blog is really the brain vomit of everything that’s going on inside the mushy gray mass in my skull. Sometimes you may find yourself going down the rabbit hole (like in my explorations around time travel and QM) and so all I can say is, “I hope you have a good journey.”