JohnTyra.com

Not exactly the most exciting thing happening this week, but it’s worth noting. Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in is an alternative for embedding rich media content, sort of like Adobe’s Flash plug-in. Their latest version, Silverlight 2, is being used by the well known ‘advertising’ company DoubleClick as a medium to inject advertising within a video.

So, in conjunction with Flash, Windows Media and Realplayer you can now expect overly loud advertisements on some popular Silverlight 2 enabled sites. This includes NBC’s coverage of the Olympics, which is claimed to be well over 2.5k hours worth of video, which will be interruped by these ads.

Like it or not, I suppose intrusive advertisements are not going anywhere soon, even for video streams…

Just last week Microsoft announced the future option of watching Netflix on your Xbox 360, and today TiVo said they are going to start offering YouTube videos on their set-top boxes. However, it’s not ALL of the TiVo models, it’s only the Series3 and TiVo HD DVR ones that will have this feature.

While this, as well as the Netflix announcement is ‘cool’ one has to think…why not just use a computer? As cheap as computers are getting, prebuilt or build-your-own, there is no reason to invenst in 3rd party hardware to do the same thing a computer will already do. Even with low-end hardware, a media-based computer can handle your DVR functions, internet streaming, scheduling and many other options. Why use multiple hardware devices when you could consolidate into a single device?

Logitech announced a Mac compatible webcam today that is able to record video clips in the ‘720p high-definition (HD) video format’. They were quick to put it on their site as well, so you can go checkout all of the pictures and specs if you’re interested. I’ll drop a picture in this post as well, just for fun. It looks pretty slick, actually, and even features a Carl Zeiss® lens which is nice.

So, the real question: Why did Logitech even bother with this? Yes, Mac users love their accessories just as much as Windows users, but most modern Macs already have a built-in webcam called the iSight which is not technically ‘HD’ but it’ll pull in 640×480 according to it’s wiki entry . Given the smaller Mac market in combination with the even smaller number of mac users who don’t already have a built-in cam, I don’t see Logitech exactly selling a ton of these units.

Only time will tell, but don’t be surprised if Logitech releases some ‘magic patch’ or other software ‘fix’ that enables Windows users to use this device in conjunction with the Mac users. Either that or another hardware version, take your pick.