To help analyse this I would like to focus on a particular aspect of media which, I hope, the general reader has a better hands on experience.  Advertising.

The general consumer would understand, up until the advent of online/internet advertising, we had traditional and clearly understood methods.  Generally this would be listed as. TV, Radio, Print (Magazines and newpapers) and signage (Outdoor billboards and indoor poster).

Each advertising medium had been researched over many years and had expected results and associated costs.

Media sales companies would sell big chunks or media to advertising companies. They would then on sell that media to all their clients.  It was well established with clear ground rules.

Then the advent of Digital based advertising. This included online advertising and “Dynamic Digital Signage” (Screens everywhere running ads.  For example, see the movie “Minority Report”)

Let’s look at “Dynamic Digital Signage”. For quite some time now, this market has been maturing. The most well known company in this space is “PRN” in the WallMat chains.  Around the world, many local companies developing local business modems have attempted to grow this market into a powerful advertising platform.  Over the last 10 years I have seen man y of these companies come and go.  Many expecting to create the network and watch the money start flying in.

Unfortunately this is not the case. Dynamic digital signage does not fall into the traditional model of advertising.  Advertising companies saw it as a media that would suck costs from its advertising pie.  Ad the fact that dynamic digital signage is harder to get right and needs much more focus to work as effectively as it can.  It can be extremely effective.

There is no doubt that dynamic digital signage will be a powerful tool for advertising in the future.  As users start using Digital playback systems that can basically remove all advertising from media.  The effectiveness of traditional media will decline.

Dynamic digital signage is seen as having great potential however, advertising companies are having a very hard time factoring all the different formats and ideas (Fragmentation).  Unlike traditional advertising, dynamic digital signage is, as the name suggests, dynamic.  Different models work better in different implementations.  Each has different costs and returns.  As such advertising companies now have not just a handful of mediums to understand but hundreds.

The paths to advertising your product have fragmented from a handful to hundreds of advertising possibilities. Each having specialist knowledge to make it as effective as it could be.

The traditional advertising company is not equipped to handle this environment well.  Very few companies are. In my opinion, we still have a long way to go. A combination of new and old ideas has to be applied.  We need to figure out ways to utilise a lot of different advertising paths but reducing the costs of following each path. At the same time these technologies have to share justification with other advantages that come with it. Advertising should be the cream on the cake and not the cake itself.

Online Advertising is considerably different.  Online is shared infrastructure. (Ie people access if via a computer they own and control) Online Web advertising is creative and dynamic in nature however, it is one network and there is clear advantage in adopting standards.  Online is also, by nature, trackable.

We have all seen the standard web page banners.  The internet has been self serving and proposed banner resolutions and sizes have been imposed by dominant online advertisers.  These standards have made it very easy for general web developers to create advertising content that is suitable for general use across the internet.

At the same time, the paths to getting this advertising to pages that people view has funnelled to a dominant few.  This is largely been possible by the self imposed standards.  Still, these dominant players are finding it very difficult to implement similar standards for video media on the web.

Every week you hear about another startup having developed great technology that they hope will be part of these standards, as until these standards have matured even a little, effective advertising on video content is unreliable in its cost effectiveness.

What I am trying to indicate here is that online, specifically video, and how we will get it is a fast moving target.  We have Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and many other start-ups developing proprietary methods for getting this video to the consumer.  Each wanting their technology to become dominant and reap the rewards.  I.e. the market is still fragmenting.

However, in the long term, these proprietary ideas are bound to be bypassed.  I am not saying some will not be reasonably successful.  What I am saying is that, the internet will eventually self regulate itself as it did for banner ads, and an open distribution and advertising method will be adopted.  A method that the internet users are comfortable with.  A method that does not annoy or inconvenience.

For future business models to survive, fragmentation must be factored into the dynamic nature of video distribution.  For example, the model should be dynamic in nature and not bound to a walled garden approach as we are currently being offered by current players.

Evelutionary business models will adjust to conform to these models.  The return per view may not be as great, however, the potential viewer base can be much higher, and the distribution costs near $0. The direct benefactor will be the producer himself.

My main passion for writing this blog is to help navigate this channel to archive, what is in my opinion, this unavoidable evolution.

This could be the tipping stone for the High Definition war.

About 3 months into the war, I was convinced that DB would win.

I thought I would go over the reasons for this here.

Firstly, the main PLUS for HD-DVD is that the duplication plants can be upgraded inexpensively. Current blank production etc areall ready well devleoped and proven. HD-DVD was expected to flood the market as it was first to market and theoretically could archive price levels agreeable with mass adoption compared to BD.

This, however, is not the case. Lets look at some of the reasons.

1. The main reason BD has been so successful in terms of numbers of movies released is simple. The fact that BD stores much more data and is harder to get burners then HD-DVD. This is in fact a COPY PROTECTION ISSUE. For example, DVD9 disks are mostly used for distribution of DVD’s as it initially made it harder to duplicate the DVD. As so, the fact that BD is more expensive to get burners and blanks, plus the fact that if you did decode it, you need a lot more disk and time to do anything with the data. All these factors make it that little bit harder to Pirate the disks. As a Distributor, the choose is easy.
2. DB stores more data then HD-DVD. This alone ensures the future of the format as the need for DATA STORAGE alone will catapult this format into the main stream. (When purchasing a PC, you always get the biggest Hard Drive you can afford..) As we take digital videos and pictures, We will need a consumer format to store them. BD is a far better technology for this. As such it was always going to survive. So why settle for HD-DVD if you know it will be obsolete pretty much only years into its inception.

Its not rocket science. All I can say is that I hope this War ends sooner then later. The war has done its work in forcing the competing sides to get product to market faster and at more competitive prices.

Today I want to bring to light a bug in rhozet and Procoder (all versions including th new V3).

It appears that Procoder introduces a colour space compression on encoded files. This compression is a typical one used to bring the video signal into a safe levels for typical cathode ray tube display. In effect it brings the whites up a little and black down a little. Ie so no black blacks or white whites.

This is all well and good considering the past, however, as very few displays have this restriction. (Ie few Tube displays left.) and really, if I want this safe levels feature, I should have a choice to turn it on or off.

You can, however, use a filter called 601-shrink colour space. In effect, it adjusts the colour space before its encoded as so after it is encoded it comes up with a similar range of colour. However, this squash/stretching of the colour space introduces banding and other unwanted artefacts which again, make it unacceptable.

To help people understand, I have made some images to demonstrate the problem.

Note: I also include mainconcept encoder in the test to show rhoset what SHOULD result from the test.

They can be found at.

http://www2.digitall.net.au/CanopusTests/

I have been talking to rhozet about this for a while. I also spent some time making these tests to show them.

They have not bothered to download them, as such, its time to let the world know.