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Thursday, February 24, 2011

HOLY CRAP! Check Out How Thin The Latest Issue Of Time Magazine Is!

Time magazine was kind enough to send us a couple of complimentary issues to showcase its Davos coverage.

(Yes, we know, Davos was months ago, but we guess some folks are still interested in it.)

Anyway, the main thing that occurred to us as we slipped the issues out of the envelope was that there must be some sort of mistake.

These couldn't be actual issues of Time magazine, could they? These pamphlets?

Time magazine used to be thick and beefy, stuffed chock full of ads. Of the newsweeklies, it was supposed to just be Newsweek that had shat the bed--Time magazine was supposedly still coining money. So these HAD to be some sort of special international edition, didn't they?

It seems not.

As best we can tell, the two issues Time was kind enough to send us are ACTUAL RECENT ISSUES.

And, holy crap, are they thin!!!

Here's a top-down view. That's a pen on the left and an iPhone on the right.

Time Magazine top

And here's the sideview. The pen (left) and iPhone (right) tower over the darn thing! In fact, the magazine is hardly thicker than the iPhone's SCREEN!

Time Magazine side

Here's hoping Time's circulation revenue is hanging in there. Because they sure can't be eating well on those ads...

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HOLY CRAP! Check Out How Thin The Latest Issue Of Time Magazine Is!

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Sunday, January 16, 2011

Google's Latest Move In Web Video Is Another Attack On Apple (AAPL, GOOG, ADBE)

eric schmidt

Google recently announced that it would stop directly supporting the H.264 video format in Chrome, favoring its own WebM format going forward. (It acquired the assets behind WebM when it bought On2 in 2009.)

There are several ways to interpret this move, such as Google simply favoring a video format it controls over one it doesn't, Google putting more weight behind Adobe Flash, etc. (Google's lame reason is that its goal is "to enable open innovation." Uh huh.)

But this is also an attack on Apple, the latest in Google's escalating war with Apple.

How?

Since Chrome is going to natively support WebM and not H.264, it makes sense that YouTube would eventually move its videos over to WebM, and eventually stop making H.264 copies of everything, so as not to require 2X the storage space.

Since Apple is such a huge H.264 supporter -- and has performance-boosting H.264 hardware decoders built-in to its iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad -- it's unlikely to become a WebM supporter or build-in WebM hardware decoders (once they exist) to its gadgets. Especially given how many other video companies have adopted H.264, such as Netflix, Hulu, Major League Baseball, etc.

Therefore, there could someday be a time when some or all of YouTube won't play on iOS devices because some or all YouTube videos aren't in H.264 and iOS devices can't natively play WebM videos. This may take many years, or it may happen sooner, or maybe never. But it's a possibility. And YouTube is such a big video site (and was a strong initial partner for iOS) that it would be considered a blow to Apple. Google Android and Chrome OS, of course, will probably be optimized for WebM, something Google may try to use as a marketing advantage.

If Apple someday does have to support Google's video format for YouTube to work on an iPhone -- either natively, or through a plugin, or maybe even through Flash -- Google can laugh about that.

Google's move to strip out native H.264 support in Chrome means Chrome users would have to use Flash to play back H.264 video. That's fine, because Flash is pretty ubiquitous. But it could also be considered anti-Apple because of Apple's hard line against Flash on iOS devices, and Flash's generally crappy performance on Mac computers (relative to PCs).

It's a little weird that Google is giving Flash such a boost here, because Google doesn't have (that we know) any financial interest in Flash's and Adobe's future. Maybe it's all about locking people into Flash so Flash ads continue to flourish at the expense of HTML5? Maybe it's to annoy Apple? Maybe Google wants to buy Adobe? We confess we don't know, but it's a bit odd.

Big deal? Not yet -- not from a consumer's standpoint, especially. Very little is likely to change for the typical user for a while. But if you work in video, you're definitely thinking about it.

And someday, it could mean lower availability -- or less efficient playback -- of YouTube video on Apple devices.

For more discussion around this, check out last week's "Talk Show" podcast episode hosted by John Gruber and Dan Benjamin, or Ed Burnette's ZDnet column.

Read: Only Now Are We About To See The Real Battle Between iPhone And Android

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