One of the more low key annoucements at CES yesterday involved Comcasts official rollout of Fancast.com . Partnering with Amazon's IMDB and the likes of CBS, Viacom, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, USA, Bravo, BBC, SciFi, and Hulu, Fancast aims to be "the" place to go for streaming video. Through it's licensing arrangements with major studios it has at it's fingertips over 100,000 video properties. Currently there is only a fraction of this available directly from the site in live streams, but expect the streamable content to grow quite a bit going forward.
Signifying Comcasts boldest step yet into online content, it also shows how important online advertising is becoming to traditional market players bottom lines. Comcast will capitalize this new portal through an advertising based model as well as through tie-ins with Fandago , the online movie ticket portal it purchased last year.
Though it was officially announced in a press release a few weeks ago, it looks like people will finally get to see the real thing tomorrow. Intel will be showcasing their new Z-P140 Solid State Drive platform at the Storage Visions Conference in Las Vegas, January 5th . We also expect Intel realizes CES is in town in a couple of days as well, so we'll expect to see Intel waxing philisophic on the merits of their new storage platform at CES 2008.
Initially available in configurations from 2GB to 8GB, Intel expects to have 4GB to 16GB versions of the hardware available by mid year. And though the existing platform currently rides on a PATA interface, adequate for the performance characteristics of the platform currently, Intel will also preview SATA interface versions of the platform. The current penny sized 2GB Drive module supports a burst rate of 40MB/sec, 30MB/sec write speeds and, naturally considering it's flash based, no mechanical latency along with extremely low power requirements (1.1mW idle, 300mW active). All while providing performance characteristics similar to, and in some areas quite superior to existing magnetic storage systems used in mobile devices.
This development could better establish Intel as a significant player in the embedded and ultra mobile flash storage market, one currently dominated by Sandisk.
Several fundamental PC market shifts are beginning to take place in an unlikely realm. The United States. With heavy hitting brands in the U.S. like Dell and HP at first glance it would seem we're quite well served here, but with the changing landscape of computing itself comes opportunity. Despite the fact that overall unit sales growth is slowing in the U.S. due to saturation and the fact that most actual growth is shifting to newer and less economically developed markets, this is really only true in the commodity desktop market. A market already under huge price and profit margin pressures. Solution? Cater to growth categories and higher margin product lines.
Though not exactly a new story, eMediaWire put out a press release earlier this month on a survey conducted by Digital Music News and BigChampagne regarding the market penetration of the big kahuna of p2p applications, Limewire. From a survey sample of 1.66 million desktops worldwide they found Limewire present on 36.4% of all PC's in the survey.
With this past weeks announcement by Warner to release its entire catalog to Amazon in MP3 format with no Digital Rights Management, you would think that the organization that represents them, The Recording Industry Association of America , would begin changing its tune. However, in an inane display of hubris and futility, the RIAA presses on in it's tirade against the very consumers its partners rely on by (we're not making this up) suing individuals who merely rip CD's they've purchased legally.
