Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

I've just replied to an upset customer who, although he comes from that rather snotty school of digital self-righteousness, made a number of valid points about the service we'd provided him. Which is frustrating, because I'd like to be able to help him.

You see, I have the unfortunate job of getting in-between content producers and their digital customers. It's my task to give effect to the requirements and restrictions that producers demand, some of which would lead you to question if they really know what the Internet is or how it works. That, of course, only includes the producers willing to negotiate online rights for their content - a whole lot more would like to pretend the Internet doesn't exist at all (and that their content isn't already being distributed on it whether they like it or not).

Having said that, most of their requirements are perfectly reasonable - mostly, they'd just like not to be ripped off. If no-one pays them to make content then they won't - they'll find something else to do for a living and all we'll have left to watch is YouTube. Shudder.

On the other side are the customers, who'd like to be able to find the content they want, get it as quickly as possible and just play it. Mostly, they don't mind paying a reasonable amount for it.

In between is me, and the various processes I have to go through to secure digital content to meet producer requirements. It's quite involved, let me assure you. One content provider made me answer a twelve-page questionnaire about my production processes the tone of which suggested it had been drafted by Joe McCarthy.

Meanwhile the more I do to protect the content, the harder I have to work to keep the acquisition process painless for customers. Obviously my earlier correspondent doesn't think I'm there yet and he'd be right. Closer than he'd like to admit (for a start, just use a proper browser like the other 90-odd percent of us) and closer than most of my competitors, but not close enough.

In the meantime, my correspondent took the time to taunt me with the relative ease with which he could have acquired the content from some torrent site or other. Of course, that degree of user-friendliness is easy to achieve when you can ignore the interests of producers and you're not accountable to the people who view your content (quite aside from the appalling compression quality, where's the metadata telling you what each episode is even called?).

But in the end the customer is always right (regardless of how gratuitously they use the F-word) and producers have to make a living. So as usual, it will be technology (some of it not at its best lately, Microsoft) that has to bridge the gap. I'm looking forward to a major upgrade of my download application in the next few weeks which, while not appearing to do much more than the current one, represents quite a leap in terms of the technology under the hood and finally addresses most of the unavoidable (albeit minor) snarls in the acquisition process. At least until the next time some hacker forces a hasty patch or a new OS or browser version is released to break it again.

So what's my point then, other than a bit of a rant? Well, when I do my job well, no-one should even know I've done anything because everything should happen exactly the way they expected. I won't get any emails telling me how great my work is, but then I won't get emails with so many F-words in them either.

So you now see the greatness to which I aspire... blissful obscurity.

Who can turn the world on with her smile?

Things are working out better with the Apple TV now that I've taken a hint and buy episodes on my computer through iTunes first. Also, the catalogue is bigger than I first thought - possibly because its grown over the last week or so, but more likely because the interface on the Apple TV is ridiculously crude and makes for laborious browsing.

Doing nothing but scrolling up and down lists or flicking through cover art might be cute on an iPhone, but it gets old pretty fast with a TV remote. iTunes is easier to browse through - a shame it's absolute resource hog on a PC.

So far my choice of viewing has been a fairly predictable run of satirical animated cartoons full of pop-culture references. But iTunes has embraced the classics as well and so I'm off for a little Mary time...

Authorise This

The experiment has gotten off to a rocky start. I upgraded the Apple TV's firmware to the recently released version (3.0) and prepared to browse through their growing catalogue of TV and movie content - only to be emailed and told to upgrade to the next version (3.0.1) right away otherwise my content could disappear.

Needless to say, the upgrade to 3.0.1 thoughtfully wiped all of my network settings including the WiFi password, which is a complete nuisance to enter with a five-button remote (imagine trying to send an SMS with half the buttons on your phone missing).

But finally I was browsing! The catalogue is currently small but respectable (by way of disclaimer, my office supplies TV content to iTunes). To ensure impartiality, I settled on an episode of American Dad that I hadn't seen before. I was immediately prompted for my iTunes Store password (which the upgrade had also wiped - more painful picking out of letters) but the download kicked off and within seconds I was told the episode was ready to play.

Clicking play only got me an error message: this Apple TV is not authorised to play this content. How rude.

It turns out that despite the "ready to play" message, you need to sync the Apple TV with iTunes (on your computer) before the download will play back on the Apple TV, which is a terrible tease. I used to be able to purchase and play back on the Apple TV without this problem (I still have episodes of our own content on the device that I'd purchased weeks earlier) so I suspect this issue is the result of the recent upgrade - either a bug, or a "security enhancement".

In Apple's defence, they got back to my message of complaint within a day but didn't tell me anything I hadn't already figured out. However, they certainly get the Oscar for most obsequious complaint response:

"I'm sorry to hear that the video "The One That Got Away" did not play successfully on the Apple TV it was purchased on. I sincerely apologize that this video has not met the standards you have come to expect from the iTunes Store. I can certianly [sic] appreciate how eager you must be to have the issue resolved. My name is Stephanie, and I will do everything I can to help solve the issue for you."

If nothing else, I found Stephanie's sincerity and her obvious sharing of my pain comforting.

Crazy like Foxtel

I've just moved house and finally sorted out most of the nuisance stuff that comes with a move: address changes, relocating utilities, that sort of thing.

I've moved a couple of suburbs closer to the CBD (in fact I'm now just a stroll away - wave if you see Trixie and I walk past) so you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that despite living in the centre of Australia's largest city, I can't get subscription TV. Some nonsense about strata titles, multi-dwelling complexes, Jupiter being in Mercury's quarter - that sort of thing.

What exactly made Foxtel think I'd be happy to jump through hoops for the privilege of giving them princely sums of money every month is quite beyond me.

So I saved myself the jumping of hoops by cancelling my subscription. Instead, I'm going to see if I can get my televisual requirements purely from FTA TV and from the Internet using such devices as come to hand (such as PVRs, extenders, gaming consoles, etc).

And I'm going to blog about it.

The experiment (I call it that to give it a more scientific air than it possibly deserves) will be strictly confined to full-episode content watched on my TV from a device that sits comfortably and quietly in the TV cabinet and can be used with my universal remote.

Here goes nothing...

What Apple Giveth So Shall Apple Taketh Away Again

This just in: Apple has pulled the C64 emulator from the App store just hours after it went up. Apparently their original objection was to the emulator's inclusion of a BASIC prompt. This was disabled to get approval for the App store, but some ingenious geek found a way to re-enable BASIC access... prompting Apple to pull the app (and thereby ruining it for everyone else).

I'm not quite sure what possible damage the BASIC prompt could possibly do, but there's no arguing with Apple. Previously only the Pope claimed to be infallible... it seems Steve Jobs has joined him.

Flashback

A Commodore 64 emulator has just been released for iPhone (apparently after a number of rejections from Apple). Which takes me back to my very first computer... a C64 with tape drive that appeared under the Christmas tree more years ago than I care to admit.

Sadly, William Shatner never did a TV ad for the C64 like he did for the Vic 20 (although the C64 ad is pretty bitchy) but many fond hours were spent on it learning the skills I would one day need to take over the world. Actually, most of those hours were spent waiting for the tape drive to load a program. But it was still better than going outside and playing football.

When I was in university I finally bought a second-hand floppy disk drive (something I had coveted for years as a kid) but mostly the poor old C64 sat in a trunk, until we moved to Australia and my partner decided it wasn't worth the cost of freight and dumped it(!). Mark my words, that's going to be a sorely-missed exhibit when they set up my museum.

So I'm going to have to settle for the emulator (available now on the iTunes App store). It comes with 5 games, but I'll be keeping an eye out for my favourites in future releases.

I guess its a sign of getting old, all this retro hankering. Kids these days don't know how good they got it - why, in my day....

Unwired for Sound

OS 3.0 for the iPhone is out and is attracting more attention and blog-time than is seemly, so I thought I'd join the frenzy. I've been looking forward to it mainly because it promised to introduce stereo Bluetooth (A2DP), so that my long disused wireless headphones might finally get some use.

But predictably, Apple has not quite implemented A2DP fully. For some reason, they've skipped the AVRCP protocol which is normaly used with A2DP, because it allows Bluetooth devices to remotely control the iPhone. This means that the track-skip function on my headphones won't work. Not the end of the world, I'll grant you, but annoying.

Why does Apple delight in witholding functionality like this?

Maybe we'll see it in a future update. Or maybe we'll see some kind of proprietary protocol for this kind of thing, possibly in a pair of Apple-licensed wireless headphones.

Now I'm just interested to see how long the battery in my iPhone lasts when I'm listening to music using Bluetooth. I'm open to bets on this - will I make it through a whole session at the gym? Although if you turn off 3G, you get much better battery life. Because I'm with Telstra, I get to use their Edge network when 3G is off, which isn't that much slower than 3G for browsing, email or Facebook.

But however long it lasts, you can rest assured that there is NO Cliff Richard on my iPhone. Yet.