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A new consumer electronics remote control technology gives smartphone users the fastest possible way to pair their smartphone with a media device.

Clik makes smart TVs dumb

I have seen the future of the remote control.

Actually, I've seen several futures of the remote control, from the ultimate expression of the traditional infrared remote (the Logitech Harmony products), to strong "second screen" apps (like Dijit) that use a smartphone's smarts and interface to build a better guide or remote, to the latest iPhone apps that you can download for nearly every new home entertainment product (most are awful).

One company, though, has gone off in a different direction: Clik. I think it has a new, powerful idea and a platform technology to go with it. There are several issues with it, but the high-level thinking is really interesting.

Clik is simple to use: You direct your media-playing device, say a TV or computer, to the Web address http://www.clickthis.com, which initially displays a unique QR code. Then you point your smartphone's camera, while running the Clik app, at that QR code. This quickly pairs the mobile device to the media playing product. Now you can use the app on your mobile to control what the browser is displaying on the media player.

That's the simple version, which the proof-of-concept demo, available today for iOS or Android, illustrates. With the app, you can put any YouTube video on a browser that's showing the Clik page, and control playback options.

With Clik, other users can "scan in" to take control of a screen one user is already managing.

(Credit: Clik)

It's not hard to imagine Clik offering a much more robust catalog of content: Hulu, Netflix or Amazon streams. Or videos users have saved in their Dropbox accounts. Or pictures from Flickr or Facebook.

What's technologically cool about this is that you're not relying on Wi-Fi on your mobile to stream the media. The Clik app only sends media control info, and it sends it to your browser or display by way of the Clik servers. The Clik servers then blast whatever media you have selected down to the display device. Clik assumes a broadband connection on the display, but the remote smartphone app works over any data connection. You can experience how this works more quickly than you can read it. Setup is wicked fast.

I tried the product on a few computers as well as on a Boxee Box I have connected to my television at home, since the Boxee has a browser app. It worked flawlessly. My TV itself, however, while it has a browser, does not support Flash, which Clik currently requires, so that's a strike against it.

And while cool, the current demo app is slightly irrelevant. YouTube? Who cares? Furthermore, if you really want to display a YouTube video, you go to YouTube.com or a YouTube app.

There's more here
What's exciting to me about Clik is what's beyond the demo. It's a fundamental technology, and a new way to think about remote control of entertainment devices. Clik could be used for games; it's easy to attach multiple smartphones to one game experience that unfurls on a shared TV. Clik also lets a new user quickly take control of a media device if he or she is in the room (in the demo app, you can see this: you press a button to have the display pop up another QR code so a new user can "scan in" to take control of the screen). For shared displays (conference rooms, lecture halls), it's also a powerful idea.

Clik beats any competing technology for connecting, or pairing, a remote with a device. And since it appears that we're moving to using our smartphones or tablets as remotes, this represents a big opportunity.

Clik is also able to put the content selection function and the "smarts" of smart TV into the cloud. A big part of the technology is its focus on speed and responsiveness. Using the YouTube demo, you can control playback and volume with barely perceptible lag, even when you're using cellular instead of Wi-Fi on your phone. There's no reason to use a plasticky, button-strewn remote designed by eight-fingered aliens if you can replace it with a content-aware, Web-connected, personal smart device that's always with you. People are watching TVs with smartphones in hand anyway; this technology closes the loop. (If you don't want to use a smartphone for a remote, a cheap Android tablet could also do the job.)

However, I'm not so keen on the business, due to some major challenges and competitors.

Other companies (like Flingo) are building platform technologies to meld the mobile screen with the TV experience. I believe I may already have Flingo remote technology in my new LG TV, in fact, as one of the set's three redundant user interfaces. Which indicates one of the big problems for the electronics companies: they really don't get interfaces. Give them something great like Clik, and I bet they'd screw it up.

The cool little Tubemote app (review) also allows a pretty quick way to push video plays to any browser from a smartphone. It's been around awhile and is actually a very good app for anyone who has a large screen in their entertainment system that can run a browser. Clik has a much faster setup, but Tubemote currently does more.

And then there's Airplay. If you've got an Apple TV box and an iPhone or iPad, you're already golden. You can push content--video, music, pictures--to your big screen from your mobile device or from your network. It's pretty slick.

Based on what I've seen so far, Clik is not about to become a direct consumer product, although CEO Ted Livingston (also of Kik) as well as one of his VCs, Fred Wilson, told me that the goal here is in fact to build a consumer company. Livingston plans to target the college market first: every student has a computer, and for lazily controlling the MacBook on the desk while you're sprawled on the couch, this is a very workable solution. Doesn't seem like a fundamental product, but it's a nice thing.

Clik could be more important, a more open platform than its competitors: a real contender in the electronics and apps industry, if only the electronics companies would embrace it. Which is a bad bet. The content-pushing service will also need to do deals with the companies running the content-streaming services, which is another maze to navigate. On the one hand you have companies eager to put the streaming content everywhere (like Netflix), but with content that's already everywhere, how can you sell the consumer yet another way to access it, even if it's free? And on the other, you have products that people want, but that are so tightly controlled due to license restrictions that they're unlikely to show up on something like Clik at all. Hulu, for one.

Clik could make things somewhat easier for consumers, and for the college students when they go home, by making its own cheap set-top box, running just a browser that the Clik app controls. But then it'd be selling against the $50 Roku LT that everybody seems to love, not to mention Apple TV, and again Boxee.

Somewhere in that maze of electronics companies, over-lawyered rights owners, and confused consumers, there's a nice hunk of cheese. I really like what Clik is doing, but I'm not sure Clik will find that cheese.

See the rest here:
Clik: The future of remotes, in an alternate reality

The recent revelation that the head of Media Matters walked the streets of Washington with a Glock-toting personal assistant acting as a bodyguard may make it a little awkward for the group the next time it seeks a donation from a gun control advocacy group. 

Media Matters reportedly took more than $400,000 from the Joyce Foundation specifically earmarked to promote a $600,000 initiative on "gun and public safety issues." At the same time, Media Matters' gun-guarded boss David Brock reportedly obsessed over his own security. 

"It doesn't look good," said Fraser Seitel, president of Emerald Partners Communications and a public relations expert who authored the book "Rethinking Reputation." 

"But it is a gray area in terms of public relations. Since (Media Matters) is so anti-NRA, to have their members packing heat leaves them open to criticism," he said.

Brock reportedly told confidantes that he feared for his safety and needed hired guns to keep him safe. The District's gun laws are among the strictest in the nation, which raises the question of whether Brock's assistant at times was in violation of its ban on carrying a concealed weapon.

"He had more security than a Third World dictator," one Media Matters employee told The Daily Caller. Brock's guards rarely left Brock's side and even accompanied him to his home in a tony Washington neighborhood where they "stood post" nightly, the source told the DC.

Media Matters proudly claims to be engaged in an information war to bring down Fox News, and has been exposed as a distributor of liberal talking points that regularly find their way into the reporting of mainstream media outlets, according to The Daily Caller.

Officials at the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation did not return repeated calls for comment. The nonprofit doles out donations to a variety of groups to address such issues as urban public education, job training, the environment, and gun violence.

A July 2010 grant of $400,000 to Media Matters was specifically targeted to support a gun and public safety issue initiative. As part of the initiative, Media Matters sent a representative, David Holthouse, undercover to a shooting sports trade show and had him write about the experience.

In a Media Matters article entitled, SHOT Show 2011: "The Second Amendment Ain't About Duck Hunting," Holthouse wrote that "increased lethality has become the nicotine of the firearms industry."

"Every year gun makers roll out new lines of assault rifles, tactical shotguns and handguns that hold even more bullets, or fire even faster, or boast new gadgetry that supposedly enables their user to kill other human beings more efficiently than ever before," reads a line from the January 2011 article.

Holthouse previously wrote an article for a Denver publication claiming he once planned a murder in such detail that he traveled to a neighboring state to buy a gun with a scratched-off serial number so it could not be traced back to him. His intended target was someone who attacked him as a child, forcibly raping him as a 7 year old, according to the article.

The latest revelations about Media Matters has raised questions in Washington, with some lawmakers in Congress considering opening a investigation into the group's tax-exempt status, according to reports in The Daily Caller.

More:
'Media Matters' Boss' Guard Packs Heat Despite Grant

Republican politicians are treading into murky (read: sexist) waters in the contraception debate. Earlier today, in protest of House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa's refusal to allow women onto a panel of witnesses at the hearing on the White House mandate to require employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage, Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) walked out, garnering a significant amount of media attention and setting off an ensuing furor among women and men. Why no women? Issa said, “the hearing is not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration’s actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience."

RELATED: RNC Asks Justice Department to Investigate Obama Campaign Video

Currently under the Obama plan, in cases where religious groups are involved contraception coverage will be offered to women by their employers’ insurance companies directly, so that religious employers who oppose contraception don't have to be involved with that nasty business. What Issa means is that the hearing is about whether requiring insurers to cover birth control violates the religious freedom of people who don't believe that birth control should, essentially, exist. The people on his panel, then, were men. Religious men. (Two women appeared on a second panel at the hearing. Both spoke against contraception.)

RELATED: How Contraception Ate the News Cycle: A Timeline

But back to Issa's statement: How do you take "reproductive rights and contraception" out of a conversation about birth control? You can't. You might try to ignore those parts of the conversation because you want to get a specific answer, for a specific purpose. And allowing women on a panel to talk about how and why they need birth control -- and how and why they need insurers to pay for it -- detracts from that mission. 

RELATED: Obama's Approval Rating Hits a New Low

In tackier, more sensational headlines, Rick Santorum pal Foster Friess announced on MSNBC today that back in the old days the "gals" used to just put some Bayer Aspirin between their knees as a handy (and cheap!) contraception method. In addition to winning "most moronic statement of the day," Friess went on to further belittle the issue of birth control, insinuating that all this focus on stupid lady crap when there are more important issues at stake (like wars), is the marking of a randy, sex-obsessed culture:

Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed, we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex. I think it says something about our culture. We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are. 

Rush Limbaugh comes down on this side, with a bit more of a conspiracy angle, saying Democrats "ginned up" the contraception debate to divide the GOP and distract from the real issues. 

RELATED: Even Republicans Want Employers to Cover Birth Control

But what are the real issues? Sex, and everything related to it -- you could argue that very little is not related to sex in some way -- surely, is one of them. Surely Friess knows that. (We dare say his words have the confessional mark of "methinks the man doth protest too much.") 

RELATED: A Sign of a Third Newt Comeback

Friess, Limbaugh, and Issa, each in different ways, are trying to desexualize and downplay the importance of an issue that is, at its core, about not only sex but also men and women, power, religion, socioeconomics, relationships, healthcare, equal rights, and, not to speak too broadly, but pretty much our entire global future. We'll throw Issa a bone: Fine, this particular hearing is also about freedom of religion and conscience -- things that women have opinions on just as much as men do, just like men should care about birth control just as much as women do. But, two facts: Men don't actually get pregnant, and we have nothing to gain from a one-sided conversation about an issue that impacts us all. It's doubly insulting when women, who have been dealing with birth control on their own for years, are left out of the conversation or added as an afterthought. Come on, politicians. We're all grown ups here. If you feel the need to giggle behind your hand when someone mentions sex, you should excuse yourself from the table. Didn't we all take health class back in high school? (As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said today, “What else do you need to know about the subject? I may, I may at some point be moved to explain biology to my colleagues.”)

The simple answer of why men are dominating the conversation on birth control is that, regardless of strides made, men continue to largely dominate the conversation in politics. The more complicated answer is that the men who are dominating the conversation on birth control -- and you can count Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio among those who've come out against the White House contraception plan -- are deeply afraid of losing the conservative vote, and, it seems, conservatives continue to be deeply afraid of women having free and equal control over their own bodies and all that follows from that. Like having sex. Creating fewer unwanted children. And women taking care of themselves. What a sin. 

Image via Shutterstock by Mathom.

Read the original post:
Why Are Men Dominating the Debate About Birth Control for Women?

Media Matters reportedly took more than $400,000 from a pro-gun control group even as its boss walked the streets of Washington with a Glock-toting personal assistant acting as his bodyguard.

A donation from the Joyce Foundation was specifically earmarked for use by Media Matters to promote a $600,000 initiative on “gun and public safety issues.” But reports that paint Media Matters boss David Brock as a gun-guarded boss obsessed with security might make the next solicitation for Joyce funds a bit awkward.

“It doesn’t look good," said Fraser Seitel, President of Emerald Partners Communications and public relations expert who authored the book "Rethinking Reputation." "It’s subject to easy criticism.

“But it is a gray area in terms of public relations. Since [Media Matters] is so anti-NRA, to have their members packing heat leaves them open to criticism.”

Brock reportedly told confidantes that he feared for his safety and needed hired guns to keep him safe. The District's gun laws are among the strictest in the nation, which raises the question of whether Brock's assistant at times was in violation of its ban on carrying a concealed weapon.

“He had more security than a Third World Dictator,” one Media Matters employee told the Daily Caller. Brock’s guards rarely left Brock’s side and even accompanied him to his home in a tony Washington neighborhood where they “stood post” nightly, the source told the Daily Caller

Media Matters proudly claims to be engaged in an information war to bring down Fox News Channel, and has been exposed as a distributor of liberal talking points that regularly find their way into the reporting of mainstream media outlets, according to the Daily Caller.

Officials at the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation did not return calls for comment. The non-profit doles out donations to a varierty of groups to address such issues as urban public education, job training, the environment, and gun violence.

A July 2010 grant of $400,000 to Media Matters was specifically targeted to support a gun and public safety issue initiative. As part of the initiative, Media Matters sent a representative, David Holthouse, undercover to a gun hunting trade show and had him write about the experience.

In a Media Matters article entitled, SHOT Show 2011: "The Second Amendment Ain't About Duck Hunting", Holthouse wrote that “increased lethality has become the nicotine of the firearms industry.”

“Every year gun makers roll out new lines of assault rifles, tactical shotguns and handguns that hold even more bullets, or fire even faster, or boast new gadgetry that supposedly enables their user to kill other human beings more efficiently than ever before,” a line from the January 2011 article read.

Holthouse previously wrote an article for a Denver publication claiming he once planned a murder, so far as to travel to a neighboring state to buy a gun with a scratched off serial number so it could not be traced back to him. His intended target was someone who attacked him as a child, forcibly raping him at 7-years-old, according to the article.

The latest revelations about Media Matters has raised questions in Washington, with some lawmakers in Congress considering opening a investigation into the group’s tax-exempt status, according to reports in The Daily Caller.

View original post here:
Brock and the Glock: Armed men guarded Media Matters boss as he took $400,000 gun control donation

MAINZ, GERMANY--(Marketwire -02/16/12)- MBC Group has been a leader in broadcast technology and innovation in the MENA region, having made the transition to an entirely tapeless environment with file-based workflows in its programming area in 2010. BFE has worked with MBC Group as their partner of choice throughout the tapeless conversion and also helped plan for the transition from SD to HD. BFE also assisted in defining the new workflows, processes and requirements for the centralized MAM.

Dalet Media Life was selected as the programming MAM for the group's ten TV channels after a rigorous RFP evaluation process that included an on-site proof of concept at MBC's Dubai headquarters. Dalet Media Life includes an open, robust and flexible asset management platform that unifies disparate systems into an integrated workflow that streamlines program preparation and facilitates content delivery to broadcast and other distribution outlets. At MBC Dalet will integrate with several systems including Harris Broadcast Master for scheduling and SGL for archiving.

"The openness of the Dalet solution was a very important aspect of this project," says Jürgen Loos, Director of Sales for BFE, "Dalet Media Life acts as the structural "glue" between different systems to create a truly seamless workflow with metadata management throughout the entire production and broadcast chain."

The Dalet MAM platform tracks media, metadata and essences throughout their lifecycle. Assets can be readily searched and retrieved. Even content from archives can easily be restored to production use. Media Life also has fully integrated, task-specific tools that improve productivity throughout the digital production chain. These include tools for content manipulation and program prep, such as ingest, QC, subtitling, and captioning.

About MBC Group
The Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) Group, headquartered in Dubai, is the first free-to-air satellite broadcasting company in the Arab World. MBC broadcasts 10 TV channels via satellite, creates several radio programs and boasts a broad online and digital presence. With more than 1,500 staff members worldwide, MBC reaches more than 150 million Arabic speakers in the MENA region and around the world.

About BFE Studio und Medien Systeme
BFE is one of Europe's leading suppliers of broadcast turnkey solutions and media systems. Around 250 employees work in specialized fields such as software engineering, electronics, mechanics, joinery, assembly and quality control. BFE also provides services such as project planning, process and requirements analysis, workflow design, IT system design, installation, commissioning, training and support. By combining audio and video technology with innovative, IT-based solutions, BFE turns customers' requirements into tailor-made systems such as TV and radio studios, transmission lines, editing and archiving systems, OB vans and other media technology applications.

About Dalet
Dalet solutions enable broadcasters and media professionals to create, manage, and distribute content to both traditional and new media channels, including interactive TV, the Web, and mobile networks. Dalet combines, into a single system, a robust and proven Asset Management platform with advanced metadata capabilities, a configurable workflow engine, and a comprehensive set of purpose-built creative and production tools. This integrated and open environment enables end-to-end management of the entire News and Sport and Program content chain for Radio and TV, and allows users to effect significant improvements in efficiency, and to maximize the use and value of their assets. Dalet is traded on the NYSE-EURONEXT stock exchange (Eurolist C): ISIN: FR0011026749, Bloomberg DLT:FP, Reuters: DALE.PA. Dalet is a registered trademark of Dalet Digital Media Systems. All other trademarks and products mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

BFE Studio und Medien Systeme GmbH
Jürgen Loos, Director of Sales
Phone: +49 6131 946 120
e-mail: jloos@bfe.tv
An der Fahrt 1
55124 Mainz
http://www.bfe.tv

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MBC Group Selects Dalet Media Life as Programming MAM Solution With BFE as Integrator