BlockBuster OnDemand Streaming on Samsung HDTV and Blu-ray Players

Blockbuster OnDemand challenges Netflix and Amazon's Instant HD Video on Demand service.

Blockbuster OnDemand is coming to a long list of Samsung TV and home theater products. The online pay-per-view streaming service will be added to Samsung's online-enabled HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and Blu-ray home theater systems via future software updates. As part of the deal, Blockbuster will also sell some of the Samsung products in its video rental stores.

The service, due to launch in September or October in the United States, is similar to Blockbuster's existing pacts with TV maker Vizio and digital video recorder maker TiVo Inc, which was announced in March.

According to Samsung, the Blockbuster OnDemand feature will be added to "Samsung LCD and Plasma HDTVs Series 650 and above, and Samsung LED HDTVs Series 7000 and above," as well as "select 2009 Samsung Blu-ray players and home theater systems."

Most probably these top HDTV and Blu-ray players will play Blockbuster HD movies:

• Samsung LN46B650 46-Inch 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV
• Samsung LN52B750 52-Inch 1080p 240Hz LCD HDTV
• Samsung UN40B7000 40-Inch 1080p 120Hz LED HDTV
• Samsung PN50B650 50-Inch 1080P Plasma HDTV
• Samsung BD-P2500 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player

Finally TV's will partially take over the role of the desktop monitors to be our window to the broadband internet. How will Netflix and Amazon keep up in this competition?

Do you like these Samsung devices or do you prefer the excellent and Vizio 32" 1080p LCD HDTV (VOJ320F1A) at a low price of ~$500?

Amazing SSD and Hard Drive Deals on Amazon

The first terabyte hard drive had been introduced 2 years ago. Nowadays you can buy 1 TB hard drives for less than $100. Great capacity at an affordable price!


2009 will be the year when Solid State Drives (SSDs) will become mainstream by offering faster disk performance and greater durability than traditional hard drives. Since they use NAND flash memory instead of spinning platters for storage, there's no waiting for disks to spin up, and there are no moving parts to worry about breaking down.

Amazon offers great deals (up to 64% discount) on traditional hard drives and SSD storage. Have a look at these selected bestsellers of Western Digital Hard Drives and Intel SSDs:

• WD My Book Essential Edition 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U10000N
  1 TB external USB disk for $120 (save 25%)
• WD Caviar Green 1 TB Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, SATA II WD10EADS
  1 TB 3.5" internal disk for $90 (save 35%)
• WD My Passport Essential 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive WDME3200TN
  320 GB portable USB disk for $90 (save 31%)
• WD 1TB GreenPower AV 16MB Cache 25dBA Hard Drive WD10EVCS
  1 TB low noise disk for audiovisual applications like TiVo for $109 (save 64%!)
• Intel SSDSA2MH080G1C5 X25-M 80GB 2.5 Inch Solid State Drive (MLC SSD)
  80GB mainstream SSD for $325 (save 49%!)

These are the top hard drives and SSD for now. Can they keep up with the huge storage requirements of HD video content?

Amazon Launch Kindle DX 9.7" Wireless Reading Device

Today is the launch of the Kindle DX, the large 9.7" screen addition to the Kindle family.

This is the customer letter by Jeff Bezos:

Dear Customers,

A strange thing happened on the way to the paperless society. We humans created more paper than ever before. Computer printers (and their evil companion, the ink-toner cartridge) have proliferated, and most of us routinely print out and lug around loads of personal and professional documents. Why? It's not that buying printers or changing ink-toner cartridges is fun. It's because reading on paper is better than reading on traditional computer displays. Printing has been worth the hassle.

Kindle starts to change that. People who see Kindle's display for the first time do a double-take. It looks and reads like real paper. People who swore they would never read books on computers are reading books on Kindle in numbers far greater than we ever expected. And they're now starting to ask: If I can carry my whole library around on my Kindle, how about I carry all my personal and professional documents there too?

We're excited to announce Kindle DX, the large screen addition to the Kindle family.

Kindle DX's display is two and a half times the size of the Kindle display. The display is large enough that you can read PDF files natively without scrolling, panning, or zooming, and without re-flowing, which destroys the original structure of the document. Text and images are amazingly sharp, and you can carry all your personal and professional documents with you in one slender package.

Kindle DX is also terrific for reading books, magazines, and newspapers. The Kindle Store has more than 275,000 books to choose from, including 107 of 112 New York Times bestsellers. Thin as a magazine, Kindle DX holds up to 3,500 books. The larger screen size especially benefits highly formatted books like cookbooks, computer books, and textbooks.

Kindle DX is wireless so you can think of a book and start reading it in under a minute. Email personal documents to your Kindle DX, and they too will be delivered wirelessly. Our vision is every book ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds. Inching a bit closer to a paperless society sounds good too.

We hope you enjoy this new addition to the Kindle family.

Jeff Bezos
Founder, Amazon.com

P.S. To have Kindle DX shipped the day it becomes available, preorder today to reserve your place in line. The Kindle DX page has a side-by-side comparison with Kindle so you can choose the right one for you.

Some additional details from Wired Gadget Lab:

Among the new feature are an auto-rotating screen, technology iPhone users will be familiar with, and a native PDF reader, finally adding support in that ubiquitous digital format.

The device measures one-third of an inch thick. Its 9.7-inch screen offers 1200 x 824 pixels at 150 dpi, and 16 levels of gray (like the Kindle 2). The screen is held within a plastic housing that measures 10.4″ tall by 7.2″ wide; the unit weighs about 1 pound 3 ounces. Like the two earlier Kindles, the Kindle DX has wireless download capabilities via the Sprint EVDO network.

It contains about 3.3GB of usable memory for storing books, and can display or play a wide variety of text and document formats — including, significantly, at least three open formats: PDF, MP3 and TXT.

Shipping this summer, the Kindle DX costs $489 and is available for pre-order from Amazon.com.

Amazon Instant HD Video on Demand Streaming Movies and TV Shows

2009 is the year of HD Video on the internet.

Amazon.com (AMZN) has launched "Instant HD", a high-definition video version of its on-demand service, offering consumers the ability to rent movies and purchase television episodes shown in HD.

Amazon will add more than 500 HD TV shows and movies to its Amazon Video On Demand service. Titles are from major networks and studios like Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Showtime Networks, with new-release movie titles including "Twilight" and "Frost/Nixon" and TV shows such as "The Tudors", "Saviors" and "Smallville".

Customers can use Panasonic Viera CAST-enabled HDTVs, the Roku Digital Video Player, certain types of TiVo and the Sony Bravia Internet Video Link device to order and watch HD movies for $3.99 to $4.99 each. Television episodes are available for purchase at $2.99 each.

Customers also can buy the content to watch on their personal computers or download it for later viewing offline. Finally the promise of on demand HD video streaming has come true.

Kindle 2 by Amazon Raises the Bar on EBooks

The Amazon Kindle has the potential to start a new wave of innovations for ebooks and mobile internet devices. The second-generation Kindle ebook reader has much improved aesthetic thin design with aluminum back. It feels almost like an Apple product.

The Kindle 2 will costs $359, but it's much thinner than the angular original -- in fact, it's thinner than an iPhone at just .36 inches. Read to Me can read any content on the device back to you in a decent-sounding computerized voice, but there's also seven times more storage, a sharper 16-level e-ink display that turns pages 20 percent faster and 25 percent longer battery life.



Jeff Bezos the CEO of Amazon (AMZN) has announced the new Kindle 2 on amazon.com:

Dear Customers,

Today, we are excited to introduce Kindle 2 - the next generation of our wireless reading device.

Since launching the original Kindle a little over a year ago, customer response has far surpassed our highest hopes - and we're grateful and appreciative for that. More people are reading more books, newspapers, and blogs on Kindle sooner than we ever imagined.

We kept everything readers love about the original Kindle - the convenience of reading what you want, when you want it, the immediacy of getting books wirelessly delivered in less than 60 seconds, and Kindle's ability to "disappear" in your hands so you can get lost in the author's words.

We chose the same 3G wireless technology used in advanced cell phones, so you never need to hunt for w Wi-Fi hotspot. But unlike cell phones, there are no monthly wireless bills, no service or data plans, and no yearly contracts. There is no software to install and no syncing required.

Improved battery life means you can read for up to two weeks on a single charge. Its new, streamlined design makes Kindle 2 as thin as a typical magazine and lighter than a paperback. We added more storage, allowing you to carry over 1,500 titles. An advanced display provides even crisper images and clear text for an improved book-like reading experience. Our new Text-to-Speech feature means Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you.

At Amazon, we're always been obsessed with selection, and we know that even the best reading device would be useless without the books you want to read. Today, the Kindle Store has more than 230,000 books, including 103 of the 110 New York Times Best Sellers, plus top newspapers, magazines, and blogs. We added over 40,000 new titles in just the last three months. Our vision for Kindle is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds.

We hope you enjoy Kindle 2.

Jeff Bezos
Founder, Amazon.com

P.S. If you'd like to have Kindle 2 ship to you the day it becomes available, we recommend you preorder today to reserve your place in line.

Is Kindle the future of reading? It can be if Amazon executes its Platform Business Model well. The integrated broadband access and the number of available ebook content can fuel its acceptance. The Kindle roadmap promises color display and international access though the dates have not been announced.

Google App Engine + Opensocial = Web 3.0?

Web 3.0 has been defined earlier by Eric Schmidt as applications living in the cloud that are pieced together. It is a fundamentally different application model that we have ever seen in computing before. Google App Engine is a big step towards this cloud computing vision. It lets developers run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. How does App Engine fits into the Web 3.0 world? Let us review the definition by the CEO of Google:



Take Google App Engine and OpenSocial and a couple of other APIs to get to Web 2.5. It is the beginning of The Big Switch - the coming age of information utility. They let developers focus on innovation rather than the undifferentiated heavy lifting of IT operations, such as setting up and maintaining scalable servers, databases, storage, and networks.

Google is not the first big company to offer utility computing or platform as a service (PaaS). Amazon leads the space with its successful Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). There are very interesting analysis and comparison of Google App Engine and Amazon AWS on the SmoothSpan Blog.

App Engine costs nothing to get started and there are dozens of examples to check out in the Applications Gallery.

App Engine applications are easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. The open source Scalr aims to offer similar Auto-scalability on the Amazon AWS platform.

Welcome to the cloud computing age! Let clouds do the dirty work of operations and let developers innovate.

Management 2.0: Business Model Innovation

Innovation is core to internet startups. What kind of innovation?

• Business Model Innovation
• Product & Service Innovation
• Process Innovation
• Technology Innovation

It is usually the business model and not the technology that creates unique competitive advantage. Alexander Osterwalder of Arvetica examines the role of business model design and innovation in the age of management 2.0.

Alex examines and visualizes the innovative business models of Zopa, Google, Grameen Phone, Apple iTunes & iPod, Amazon S3, Skype, Netflix and others. It is an excellent and very informative presentation on strategy and innovation.

The slides include valuable tools such as

• Business Model Framework
• Business Model Template
• Big Picture on Business Model
  

Amazon EC2 Flash Video Streaming

The ability to host web video clips in the Cloud is getting near with the release of the Wowza Pro media server for Amazon EC2 (beta).

Wowza Media Server Pro Unlimited is a high-performance, extensible and a fully interactive, Flash media server for live and on-demand flv streaming, chat and recording.

Wowza Media Systems has teamed with Amazon Web Services to make billing quick, easy, and secure for the combination of Wowza Media Server Pro, machine time with various EC2 instances and bandwidth.

Pricing of Wowza Pro Unlimited for Amazon EC2 is:

• Instances
• $0.14 per Small Instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
• $0.45 per Large Instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
• $0.88 per Extra-Large instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
• Data Transfer
• $0.12 per GB of data transfer in
• $0.20 per GB of data transfer out
• Monthly Charge
• $5.00 recurring monthly charge

This pricing includes all charges for the use of Wowza Pro instances on Amazon EC2 (both Wowza Pro licensing and Amazon EC2 fees).

It is still in beta so improvements might be expected related to

• performance
• load-balancing
• using Amazon S3 for hosting videos
• management

Streaming video using Amazon EC2 and S3 is a great utility computing and storage application. It could help startups with limited resources to compete with youtube and other video hosting services. Check out the user guide and the forum to learn more.

Recommended books on Flash Video Streaming:

• Hands-On Guide to Flash Video: Web Video and Flash Media Server
• Flash Video for Professionals: Expert Techniques for Integrating Video on the Web
• Networking IP Video: Video on your IP Network - Streaming, Surveillance, Conferencing, Telepresence, and Video Telephony - and How to Deploy them all (Cisco Technology Series)
• Hands-On Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting: Emerging Media Tools for Business Communication

Amazon EC2 and S3 Surpassed Amazon.com

Amazon has announced in its fourth quarter earnings release that the bandwidth usage of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) has surpassed all of Amazon.com’s global website traffic combined. This milestone means that the 330,000 registered Amazon Web Services (AWS) developers collectively use more bandwidth than the web retailer itself. Amazon has become the leading cloud computing service provider with its own internet platform.

The Amazon Web Services solution catalog lists more than a hundred solutions based on AWS including innovative backup, archival, community and media hosting services by web 2.0 startups and developers.

The resources of AWS Developer Connection grows rapidly. Check out these featured tutorials and articles:

• Using Amazon S3, EC2, SQS, Lucene, and Ruby for Web Spidering
• Building a Small Business Backup System Using Amazon S3
• Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3
• Economical Use of Amazon S3 with Ruby on Rails
• Making Money with A2S, the Associates Program, and PHP
• Building Facebook Applications on AWS
  

The Amazon Cloud propels new innovation by changing the economics of scalable computing and storage resources. Let's prepare for the Big Switch!

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

I have found this amazon.com review today:

Don't walk, run to your nearest bookstore to read Carr's dazzling THE BIG SWITCH. If you can only read one book in 2008 this should be it. The writing is clean, pure as spring water and thoughtful. Nicholas Carr makes the coming "information utility" simple for the layman to understand. The description of the development of electricity and its impact on society is fascinating and lays the groundwork for the likely outcome of the information age over the next few decades. I enjoyed this book which is a must for anyone interesting in the future of the information utility.

I am looking forward to receiving my copy of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

The Big Switch's full ramifications are still far from clear, but the areas it has touched so far are profoundly changed. We are further along in The Big Switch than most people suspect, and the momentum to continue is unstoppable.

The Big Switch represents a great opportunity for the next wave of internet innovations. In fact utility computing or cloud computing is maturing quickly thanks to Amazon EC2, Google and many others. Let's get ready for a great ride!

Amazon SimpleDB - Scalable Cloud Database

Amazon has announced the limited beta of Amazon SimpleDB - a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Together with the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other web services Amazon offers a complete utility computing platform. SimpleDB was the missing piece of AWS - the scalable structured database.

Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data like:

• CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data.
• GET, PUT or DELETE items with attribute-value pairs
• QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators

Users pay only for the resources that they consume. Pricing is based on

• Machine Utilization
  $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed
  (normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor)
• Data Transfer
  $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
  $0.13-$0.18 per GB - data transfer out
• Structured Data Storage
  $1.50 per GB-month
  

Get started today with the Amazon SimpleDB Guide.

Many companies already use Amazon Web Services as their utility computing infrastructure like finalists of the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge:

• Ooyala - a platform to deliver video content for publishers
• Brainscape - an engine for measuring the networks in the brain
• Commerce360 - optimize paid search campaigns to deliver improved campaign efficiency
• Justin.tv - a massively scalable live video platform
• MileMeter - “auto insurance buy the mile”
• UserTesting.com - quick and cheap website usability testing
• WeoGeo - a one-stop marketplace for mapping

With the introduction of Amazon SimpleDB utility computing just got even better!

Amazon Kindle Bundles Broadband Wireless

Amazon wants to change how you shop for and read books with its new device, the Amazon Kindle. Its bundled hidden wireless connectivity marks a new wave of internet innovations. No monthly wireless bills, service plans, or commitments—they take care of the wireless delivery so you can simply click, buy, and read.

Bundling broadband internet connectivity with devices such as the Amazon Kindle or the Apple iPhone is a new way for companies to create compelling gadgets and services. Kindle connects to Whispernet which is based on Sprint's national high-speed (EVDO) data network to enable you to wirelessly search, discover, download, and read content on the go. Unlike WiFi, there is no need to find a hotspot.

Arc Technica posted a detailed review on Amazon's eBook reader.

How To Deliver High Definition Video on the Internet

Today more and more households have HDTV sets and broadband internet connections with 6-8+ MBit/sec bandwidth. However the scalable delivery of HD video content is still a big challenge.

The capacity to deliver high definition video already exists at the edge of the network – leveraging the massive build-outs of individual networks. The challenge comes from how you tap into that capacity. The best way to solve this problem is to deliver from the edge using distributed architectures.

The potential benefits are huge and the demand for high definition video is growing. How to deliver HD content to the internet? Let's examine the possibilities.

1. Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai have tons of servers distributed across hundreds of cities. These servers can deliver high bandwidth content such as HD video from the Edge to the users. Even YouTube moves most popular content to a CDN. Akamai has recently announced their plans to bring High Definition to the internet. Their platform is architected to meet the following technical requirements:

• Technology and an operational model to operate serving devices in the largest high-throughput networks around the world
• Established relationships with the largest high throughput networks
• Support for delivery, storage, and management of files greater than 2 Gigabytes
• Support of VC-1 and MPEG-4 video standards
• Support for files with resolutions of 720p, 1080i and 1080p

2. Use Utility Computing services such as the Amazon S3 and EC2

Utility computing and storage services are another way to host scalable video content and applications. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides such an on demand distributed service. However these services are not yet proven for hosting High Definition content. Check out my previous post on Amazon S3 for Video Hosting.

3. Use Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocols such as BitTorrent

P2P file sharing applications have been popular in the last couple of years. P2P could be used for TV and movies as well:

• Joost offers a new way of watching TV using P2P as the underlying architecture
• Vuze offers Hi-def Theater using their BitTorrent based client software

Although P2P could be an efficient way to distribute content it can have significant bandwidth overhead for the users.

Which way to go?

The optimal choice depends on the requirements. CDNs are proven technologies but P2P could be cheaper as it matures. Utility storage services are similar to CDNs and the two could became competitors. What is your choice?

Amazon S3 for Video Hosting

In an earlier post I have written that the next YouTube could be built on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) by two guys in a dorm for roughly $0. It is indeed very easy to host videos on Amazon S3.

All you need to do is to sign up for an Amazon S3 account and upload your videos with the Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer (available here: S3Fox). To see this in action check out this interesting Amazon S3 video hosting tutorial by Perry Lawrence on YouTube.

You can simply include the hosted files in your web pages. However it is also possible to create nice web applications or mashups using the video content on S3. The book Amazon.com Mashups by Francis Shanahan will help developers to get familiar with Amazon Web Services. The examples in this book demonstrates how to integrate AWS with APIs from Yahoo!, eBay, Google and YouTube. Check out this sample chapter on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) available at Wrox.

It has never been easier to create your own YouTube!

Amazon EC2, S3 + Hadoop = Open Source Utility Computing on Google Scale

Google is the undisputed King of Scalability. The High Scalability blog collected the open secrets of the Google Architecture. Two important components are:

• The Google File System
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

These distributed technologies are the foundations of their scalable and reliable storage and processing clusters.

The open source Hadoop project implements these functions so you can build a Google like cluster in your data center. In case you do not have 100s of servers at your disposal ask Amazon for help. The Amazon EC2 and S3 utility computing services can host your cluster at a reasonable price. Check out this tutorial by Tom White who illustrates how to use Hadoop and Amazon Web Services together using a large collection of web access logs:

• Running Hadoop MapReduce on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3

Yahoo has recently announced their support for Hadoop.

"Looking ahead and thinking about how the economics of large scale computing continue to improve, it's not hard to imagine a time when Hadoop and Hadoop-powered infrastructure is as common as the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack that helped to powered the previous growth of the Web."

Amazon + Two Guys + $0 = Next YouTube

Utility computing and storage is changing the way web services are built.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy and affordable:

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred (cheap bandwidth makes this possible)

The next YouTube will be built on Amazon’s Web Services by two guys in a dorm for roughly $0 (see SmugBlog). Amazon S3 now has 5 billion objects stored in it. What's more, it had 920 million S3 requests on its peak day, and 16,607 requests in its peak second (see ReadWriteWeb).

Sun Microsystems offers Utility Computing @ network.com for $1/CPU-hr.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy and affordabe at $0.10/instance-hour! It is in limited beta but already popular.

Google has many assets and APIs related to utility computing. All kind of data can be stored in Google Base. Their web-scale distributed computing platform is well known. This paper on the Google Filesystem gives us a peek into the future of Web applications and platforms.

Who will build the next YouTube on these utility computing platforms?