In Memoriam

Joel H. Levitt
1946 – 2008

Our founder, president and most of all, friend, passed away Saturday morning.

Joel had been fighting a brain tumor for the past year.
He was an inspiration to us all and will be dearly missed.

Contributions in his memory may be made to the Police Athletic League of Philadelphia.

Please leave condolences, thoughts, prayers and memories in the comments. Thank you.

XStreamHD

The Home Theater Blog has a post about the XStreamHD and its new type of delivery mechanism.

The device is an HD media server that receives its content via satellite. The best part is noted by the “HD” in the name:

supposedly XStream has semi-formal agreements from the studios to offer HD content ahead of or directly with disc based release dates

The device is also expected to be fairly reasonably priced at $399.

Learn more about the XStreamHD.

One Problem With Electronic Delivery

The rallying cry from many is that the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war was pointless because we’ll all be getting our media delivered over the wire very soon anyway.

I have no doubt that will be true eventually, the real question is when.

In the mean time there are some significant problems to overcome with electronic delivery.

In a recent article in Slate, the author compares using desktop computing applications to software-as-a-service web-based applications.  The problems he runs into are pretty much the same ones you would run into with electronic delivery of video or other media.

For the time being, physical media still offers significant advantages in many areas.  There are certainly projects and applications where electronic delivery is a better choice, but it’s going to be a while before it’s the right choice for most situations.