The Ruckus Room

Fight Night at Ruckus

We like to mix it up in the Ruckus Room a bit - from serious to silly. There are a lot of people interested in the Silicon Valley corporate culture. What it's REALLY like. Well here's a taste, on the silly side.

On a Friday nights, we do the typical pizza and beer thing (don't forget the beer). Well this particular Friday night we got to talking about CEOs, their strength, weaknesses, their attributes and detriments. Ultimately the conversation went in a weird direction thanks to one very disturbed, but not disgruntled, employee. "I'd pay BIG money to see some CEOs in an actual ring," he said.

So we then began matching up CEOs, trying to predict the outcome of an 8-round, industry-sanctioned bout. Here were some of our match-ups and decisions:

Meg is a better technical fighter and breaks Carly's nose with a hard left early in the fight. But Carly has a quicker jab and a stronger will to win. After the nose incident in the first, Carly gets to work in the second. She goes to the body then to a voracious jab. Fiorina's long reach and stamina just can't be matched by Whitman. This fight goes the length with the judges scoring the bout: 5-3, 6-2, 5-3 - Fiorina.

Dave ("Intel Inside") House is an athlete with a strong right and never-ending stamina. This guy plays every sport there is. Here's how the bout goes. Grove comes out dancing and lasts one good round. In the second, House basically corners him then literally pummels Grove with left/right combos. Grove covers up and then goes down for the entire count. The fight is short. The fans are pissed.

A relative unknown, Bobby "Steel Buns" Johnson was in the military and fights like an army brat. This is another short fight. Chambers, more the politician, comes out of the corner smiling and goes down after only six punches - 40 seconds in the the first round. At the end of the fight, Johnson attributes his success to his work ethic.

Refusing to wear a mouthpiece, Steve Jobs wears a robe with the name "Monster Jobs" embroidered on the back. Howard Stringer is a taller and stronger British guy. Unfortunately for Jobs, Stringer has a much longer reach and is taller. From the bell, Jobs has trouble getting to Stringer. But Jobs is continuously the aggressor. But you don't want to get British guys mad. After a kidney punch in the 3rd, Stringer goes after Jobs with a battery of lefts and rights. Jobs covers up, then takes a knee for a 9 count. Jobs surprisingly comes back and stuns Stringer immediately with an upper cut followed by a quick right. Stringer falls and hard but rises for the bell. The bout goes the distance with a split decision going to Stringer. Jobs contests the fight. :)

This is the fight everyone wanted to see (the main event). Don't be fooled by Ellison's Zen-like persona. He's a fighter. And Gates gets mad if things don't go his way so, while lanky, he can fight too. In this match up Ellison comes out strong, surprising Gates with a wild left hook. Once Gates gets his bearings, he starts to pinpoints Ellison's weakness.  He seems to know exactly where to hit Ellison like he's done a bunch of research. Ellison tires but drops Gates in the 3rd when Gates backs himself into the corner. Groggy, Gates manages to dance his way out of the round. Ellison bloodies Gates, who's a real bleeder, in the 4th when the referee stops the fight. Later the decision is reversed after Gates "buys the the fight."

Then, for grins, we went out of the technology industry, just for fun.

This was actually quite a difficult fight to predict. Any ex-con in the ring is formidable...no matter what the charge. And Martha has a temper. But Oprah is scrappy, and you just don't want to get her mad. In the second round, Martha deeply angers Oprah with a sucker punch when the referee breaks up a clinch. After three more rounds, Oprah sends Martha to the canvas in the 6th, then backs her on the ropes and sends her down a second time with a right hook. TKO to Winfrey in the 6th. After the fight it was reported that Stewart had bet on herself to lose.  Controversy ensued.

IPTV in Europe, Keep Your Knickers On

In Europe, IPTV is the rage. Make no mistake.

One of the most focused shows on the planet, IPTV Word Forum in London brought together an assortment of carriers, equipment suppliers and content providers displaying everything from the latest compression technology to the newest "HD-ready" set top boxes and even IPTV on cell phones.  And there seems to be more set top box makers now than there are TV manufacturers.

One of the coolest things at the show was a small company called Even Technologies. These guys demoed live video streaming over the Internet (not a private IP network) that could be displayed on a full-screen television.  They've developed a fancy (but proprietary) encoding scheme that allows full 30 frame per second video to be streamed over the Internet at an astounding 490 to 750 Kbps (168K of that is the audio). The quality was truly amazing.

Their real business, it seems, is super good encoding. They can compress a 1080i HD stream to about 2 Mbps and a standard definition stream to under 1 Mbps (about 1/6th the bit rate of MPEG-2) - displayed on a full TV screen.

A small encoder (700K) is available for free and must run on a PC attached via an S-VGA plug to a TV. They've developed some real-time and VoD websites that let users subscribe and stream movies and TV shows in real time over the Internet.

And they seem to have had their encoding scheme "approved" (whatever that means) by all the content guys.  But it's hard to believe people will stray from the standards. Another problem is that they must have a computer for every TV.  That gets expensive and each computer needs to physically attached to the TV and have SOME sort of Internet connectivity.  But the technology rocks and was simply wild to see.  Ultimately people will want to be able to view their computer content easily on a TV and stream stuff to their TVs.  Smart Wi-Fi will play a role in that too - in the home.

Another cool thing was new technology from NDS that provides adaptive "forward error correction" (FEC) for video. Don't let the techno-babble put you off. Basically they are putting more bits (read data) into the stream. It's sort of like spreading out the original message in a longer message and gambling that, even if parts of it are lost, it can be understood at the other end.

Technically (for the geeks), the encoder inserts redundant (or parity) bits, thereby outputting a longer sequence of code bits, called a codeword. Such codewords can then be transmitted to a receiver, which uses a suitable decoder to extract the original data sequence.

This introduces a large measure of redundancy to convey relatively little information per each individual code bit thereby reducing the likelihood that all of the original data will be wiped out during a single transmission. On the other hand, the addition of parity bits will generally increase transmission bandwidth requirements or message delay (or both). See we CAN be serious in the Ruckus Room.

In the end, there was some real cool stuff at IPTV World Forum. And 2006 looks to be the year that the IPTV market really develops and shapes up - there's just too much momentum to stop it.

Location Free TV

Popularized largely by Sony Corporation, location free TV is going to be huge (we like the term wire-free TV).

Sony defines location-free TV as a product - a portable LCD television panel that uses Wi-Fi wireless technology to receive video content and access the Internet from a base station hooked up to a broadband connection. We see it as a much bigger, more profound concept -  that transcends even IPTV.

Just look at Sling Media and their SlingBox (there's also some Sling look-a-likes). It's one of the more creative ideas that's come along recently. While it's too early to tell whether these guys will be successful, the foundation driving their innovation is important. Digital TV where you want it, when you want it.

Basically you just connect your coax cable or TIVO directly to the SlingBox and connect the Sling box to your gateway (via an Ethernet cable). The SlingBox encapsulates the digital signal in IP and encodes the content. This allows users to access the signal over the Internet (the user installs software on their laptops that provide decoding and remote controls). 

They've also written some very clever encoding and QoS algorithms that optimize viewing to account for transmission delays seen over the Internet. The content is encoded at a low bit rate for the Internet , so the picture isn't like watching a DVD, but it's pretty damn good.

Now take this model and turn it inside out. Instead of accessing your TIVO or cable signal from some far flung remote location, access it from your bedroom over a smart Wi-Fi network. This is really what people want.

While mom and dad will probably never do this, our kids (read the next generation) will. They are very comfortable with watching video on a computer screen and expect to be able to watch what they want, when they want (wire-free). We're not talking here about Google video or progressive downloads from the Internet to watch on a small window on your computer. We're talking about full screen streaming digital TV.

Another important development in advancing the location-free TV cause is (to a lesser extent) cable cards (here’s a primer). The CableCARD is a PCMCIA Type II card (like the cards you put into laptops for network or wireless access that serves as an interface between third-party tuners and the cable company. CableCARD slots are appearing on most new digital HDTVs (units with built-in digital tuners.)

Basically a way for carriers to avoid buying and supplying set top boxes, CableCards run around US$2/month and provide “portability” for third party digital tuners and recording devices. So if you buy a set-top box or an integrated TV in one state, then move to another, that set-top box or integrated TV will be operable with the new regional cable provider’s equipment provided they support CableCARD. Encryption, security, and other private network features, typically found in set top boxes, are placed onto the CableCARD, a removable device - the size of a laptop computer’s network interface card (NIC).

So what’s the point?  TV and video will completely change just like data did with the Internet. Ultimately, IP will do for video what it did for data - bring more content choices to consumers, lower cost and more flexible deployment options to carriers and new delivery channels to content providers.

But strap yourself in, the ride will be bumpy, especially at home.