10 Years Ago
OK - so I didn’t mark this exactly with an October 12th anninversary - but it was 10 years ago that Dave Winer first ‘blogged’ me - rapping out my Marc’s 10 Things.
In honor of this auspicious anniversary - I’d like to comment on or update many of these claims on things that the media should be covering on Multimedia and Interactive TV but isn’t.
I wrote (in 1994):
Interactive Music Videos
1. Interactive Liner notes are great. Repackaged old music is fine, but MediaBand has started a new category - called Interactive Music Videos - which are original pieces that combine songs, music videos and videogames. It’s a new artform that breaks down the barrier between artist, musician and programmer.
I was in the midst of pushing our ‘MediaBand’ interactive music video ensemble in 1994 - which put out a CD ROM, performed live, had a screenplay and had it’sd own broadband network to interact with folks - in real-time.
So I was seriously into brow beating all my colleagues who simply licensed Bob Dylan or Prince and cranked out shitty ass CD ROMs. To me - that really missed the essence of what was possible combining, music, video and interactivity.
To this day, this new artform is just kind of bubbling beneath the surface - not really making it out. Dance Dance Revolution is the sign of times - now.
BTW a young artist named Moby took some of our MediaBand Director files and added his own artwork and music to it.
Kid’s Content
2. Kids today see the twitchy-ness of Nintendo and they see the production values of MTV. Multimedia today is neither. We need to combine the interactivity of Nintendo with the production values of MTV.
This area certainly has matured and grown. We were in the videogame business back in ‘81-’83, but we never dreamed that gaming would be so ‘off the hook’ - as it is today.
But Mimi (my daughter) has a great time playing with the Barbie fashion Designer software - and Dora the Explorer rocks. So I’d say this category has fulfilled it’s destiny. At least so far.
CD ROMs
3. We didn’t call it a floppy disk industry, so how come it’s a CD ROM industry? In fact CD ROM [mentality] is holding back the creativity and growth of the entire interactive digital media industry.
Just take out CD ROM and insert ‘web’. Same problem exists today. This is why we have CMSs.
I call the solution to this challenge “scalable content”. In fact we were using this term way back in ‘94. Marqui outputs scalable content - BTW.
So CMSs have matured and we don’t have to convince folks to de-couple their content from their form anymore. Thank goodness.
Scalable Content
4. Scalable content is an important concept when developing interactive media today. You don’t want to design yourself into a corner, letting the technology define the content. Ideally you’d let the content define the technology. Scalability means downsizing through compression, it means user interfaces that work with both single and multiple users, it means getting ready for Interactive TV.
OK - so I just correlated how CD ROMs ‘holding back’ creativity were similar to what happened with ‘the web’. And I said that we called that Scalable Content.
Now let’s take my definition of Scalable Content (back then in ‘94) and extend that to mean ‘dynamic user interfaces’ - that adjust themselves to who you are, what level of technology you feel comfortable with and what content you’ve created yourself.
It’s amazing to me to read what I said in 1994, and see how these words influenced my thoughts and ideas over the past 10 years and how some of these ideas remain unchanged, while others have morphed and adapted themselves to world today.
The word ’scalability’ is just so malleable that you can twist and turn it to mean anything you want it to mean. But is IT clear - that us humans need to be in charge much more of our user experiences - and THAT’s a key part of ‘activity based computing’.
Audio
5. The classic line is “Audio is the orphan child of multimedia” - why do people still say this? What is behind the hodge-podge of audio - especially on the PC? How come it’s taken so long for manufacturers to include audio on their motherboards? In 1984 it was $3 in parts!
MIDI II?
6. What about MIDI? How many people know what that is? Why isn’t there an advanced MIDI format in place? The original MIDI frequency standard (32k) is based a 1Mhz crystal readily available in 1982.But what’s the problem today? Why hasn’t MIDI evolved and grown?
RAM
7. RAM apparently is not following along the path of Moore’s Law. The price is still where it was 5 years ago and systems are suffering. Today MPC II is still speced at only 4M - MediaBand needs 8M. Standard business systems should have at least 16M TODAY!
Tee Hee Hee.
You see I’m a musician by training and we put out the first music product for computers that had a piano timeline notational system, qurter note and eigth notes and a piano and real-time interaction. That was 1984.
So 10 years after that - in 1994 - I was bitching about…. well it’s now 10 years later and we still don;t have clean audio solved. But we’re getting pretty close. Podcastign is evidence of that.
Time stamp - Dec. 2004 - $60 for a 128M MP3 player. Retail price.
MIDI II got usurped by all sorts of things - including OSC - I keynoted at their conference this summer.
Amd I just love to see Shawn Fanning appear in “The Italian Job” and just adore the notion that Mark Cuban sold broadcast.com for $5.6B.
All this is evidence that they’ll be plenty more Googles, Netscapes and Eminems.
Set top tests waste of time?
8. The whole industry hopped when John Malone announced he was going to deploy one million set top boxes with MPEG chips in them. Once it became clear that he was practicing FUD, everyone backed off of their predictions, delayed their test trials and are now waiting for the next thing to react to. The tests going on (or planned to start soon) are not based upon the same technology or even marketing premises. What good will these tests do? Will any of these tests actually grow into a real service network.
Interactive Commercials
9. What exactly is an Interactive TV commercial. Lots of people talk about it, but no one does them.
This one is dedicated to Om Mailk. I hope to see him tomorrow night at the Geek Dinner.
I spent allot of the 90’s waiting for and explaining why set top boxes suck. They still do. Oh well.
Set top boxes have always been a kind of thorn in my side. In fact I hope to get a Comcast PVR setup in time for the Alias 2 hour season premiere on Jan. 5th. Wanna guess how long it’ll take to get?
And the Interactive Ads future - is in John Battelle’s able hands. Search meets ads in the valley of the targeted consumer. It’s finally here.
Support?
10. Where’s the support? As the industry moves towards 900 # support and low priced consumer software, what happens to support? Dealers obviously can’t supply it. Is this a new growth market?
Well we’re still looking for good Support.
I don’t think that will ever change.
OK - so that’s it - my 10 year update. I hope you enjoyed it.
Also - how symbolic that Dave’s post show’s my old Applelink address which went back to 1985. We were the 10th Mac developer. That’s why I was D0010.