First, thank you to sellers. Increased my position very nicely.
Strongly suggest all read this:
microsoft.com
Read the following excerpt:
".......................I mention that because while this box is the same one that people have been buying since the end of November, in fact, the software I'm demonstrating is actually a beta test version of the next release of the software that we will download into all those existing boxes. So, probably in June of this year, some of the new features that I'll show and mention here today that are not part of the product people bought when they took it home, will actually one night be downloaded into their boxes without them having to do anything or worry about it, and they'll wake up the next morning with an introductory piece of email, or video mail that will actually explain to them the new features that they got in the box through the software download.
Now, what you actually see here is the local cable service here in the convention center being fed directly into this box and, as you see, we have here what we call the TV Home Page. This complements, and I'll come back to this, what we think about as the Internet home page. What you see here is actually the original WebTV capability. You navigate with a remote control. The big yellow box indicates what is actionable at this point. And so, anything that the box will stop on as you move around is something that you could, in fact, tell it you want to go do.
The system provides electronic mail capability, and to show just another way of thinking about the use of broadcasting and video bits, here's actually a piece of video email that was sent to us by one of the guys in our Japanese subsidiary. So, I open up a standard piece of email, there's a little piece of video clip here, and what you're looking at here is essentially low bit rate video.
To put this in perspective, this is 180 kilobits a second that is software decompressed in this box using just a standard microprocessor. And so, while no one would say, hey, is this high definition television, the goal isn't that. The goal is to begin to take a step towards the day when people will be able to send messages back and forth to each other, not because they're expert with the keyboard, but because they can sit in front of their television, have a little video camera stuck on the top, or their camcorder on the top, and in fact that feature, the first step in that, will come out with this new version of software.
There's a video input in the back. You can put your camcorder in there, and you can essentially use this to take video stills, embed them in email, and send pictures of the kids home to grandma. So, this is not science fiction anymore, this is the kind of thing that will be happening. And increasingly, in probably less than a year, that type of low-bitrate video could actually be captured and delivered even with only the phone wires as a way to do the two-way communication..........."
Hmmmmm.....Ampex high end video technology in a consumer application....????????????? |
