I read a post last week over at MediaPost where the author wondered out loud why NFL players aren’t allowed to tweet during games and how terrible that is. I let it go as just being dumb (though I did comment on the post) but with the NFL season just around the corner I needed to say something more. Just what you needed, right?

Professional sports leagues focus on the weirdest things when they start cracking down on misbehavior. For example, the NFL doesn’t seem to particularly mind players abusing steroids (the punishment for failing a steroid drug test is a four-game suspension — basically a slap on the wrist)… but NFL players who use social media during a game are liable for a $25,000 fine. This is part of a communications blackout which decrees players may not use cell phones, electronic devices, or social media including Twitter or Facebook within 90 minutes of kickoff.

While I am not going to get into the whole steroids thing (personally, though, I feel that if a guy wants to shorten his life to play football a little longer and make more money than he could even come close to in the real world then so be it) I do have something to say about people who feel the need to know everything at every moment and then want to monetize it all.

How about this. When I watch football, I watch the game. Part of the fun is NOT knowing exactly what is going on in between plays. These guys do something different than the rest of the world and I like the fact that some of it remains unknown. I think that not knowing is often better than knowing. Maybe that’s just me.

As for this next statement, this person obviously has never played a down of organized football in his life because if he did he would know just how ignorant this sounds.

Maybe someone can explain this policy to me. I can understand banning some kinds of communication during the time around games — specifically, anything which could be used to receive last-minute tips about the opposing team’s plays. But I can’t guess what the NFL hopes to accomplish by preventing players from disseminating their own content, provided of course it doesn’t fall in the category of game-sensitive information.

Huh? Look I know football is not rocket science. During a game however you need to concentrate and understand what is happening so you can make adjustments on the fly. if your offense can’t meet because the QB has to tweet then the game is compromised. It’s just a bad idea.

Then there is this one

The policy strikes me as counter-productive because allowing players to use social media during games could be a potential gold mine in terms of driving and tracking viewer engagement. Frankly, the only time athletes really have anything interesting to say is probably during the game, when they’re sitting on the sidelines talking amongst themselves — but the viewer at home usually isn’t privy to their bench chatter (unless they happen to read lips).

Listen people of the social media industry. STOP TRYING TO MONETIZE EVERY SECOND OF EVERY DAY! Please stop! It’s just annoying.

So there isn’t much else to say. I am a big fan of the NFL and if there was ever a business that has little trouble making money it’s this one. The last thing we need to do is hear from more guys like Chad Ochocinco who are as enamored with themselves as many in the social media industry are. Ol’ Chad is just that…..old. His routine is old and played out. He is a caricature of a celebrity because he has nothing of value to add to anything so why would we need to hear MORE of his like?

So let’s leave the tweets and the like to the in between game realm. There is plenty of opportunity for something stupid to happen then. Let’s keep the game as the game for the time it is played. It’s nice to actually step away from all the social media stuff and just have fun. Oh that’s right, I forgot, it’s not fun these days unless you “share” it in some way. Please! No one cares about you or me that much either.

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Adobe Flash Player 9 now includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities. The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers.

Tinic Uro has a condensed list of bugs which have been fixed since the last release version – 9.0.64.0.

Here is a quick list of the new/enhanced features;

• New audio/video options with H.264/HE-AAC codec support
• Improved Performance through multi-core support for rendering, hardware scaling in full-screen, multi-threaded video decoding, a new algorithm for image scaling, and the Flash Player cache for local caching of common platform components to reduce SWF sizes and app loading times
• Support for full-screen mode for Linux
• MSAA Accessibility support for the plugin
• Mac OS X Leopard support
• And bug fixes

You can download the Flash Player Datasheet (PDF) from Adobe. Visit and Download the new Flash Player.

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Usually, the red indicated the buffer status. A typical use case is that you hit play, then hit pause, and then let the player finish buffering in one browser window or tab while you continue reading in another window. In other words, you’re waiting for the red line to reach the right end, so that you can then watch the whole video fluently in one go.

Only that with the new YouTube player design, the red line will never reach the right end. Google’s/ YouTube’s not-so-brilliant decision: red now indicates the current position in the video. Which is redundant, as that is already indicated by the little gray bevel circle, but OK. The buffer status on the other hand is now indicated by a darker gray color – as opposed to the lighter gray color of unbuffered parts. Check below:

Unless you watch the player the whole time (or spend extra time thinking about the interface – which already indicates bad usability), you will find it hard to even differentiate between the two gray tones. In above use case – hitting pause, to then switch to another window – the buffering indicator has thus been practically lost for casual purposes.

In the forum, David Hetfield agreed saying “I’ve been waiting for hours for a video to load, but then i realised it has already been loaded.. It’s really annoying!”

On another note, have you tried telling someone to check out a specific part in the video? The YouTube player only indicates remaining time. “Check out minute minus 3.22” is not very intuitive, though. But wait, you can click on the time indicator to change it from negative to positive display. Is that easy to discover though – again, assuming you don’t spend a lot of time exploring the YouTube player (which is only one of many web video players, each with their own interfaces)?

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Toshiba spokeswoman Jody Sally said that Kmart has decided to carry HD DVD instead of Blu-ray because of its lower price according to Home Media Magazine. The Toshiba HD DVD player sells for $299 but is available for $198 at a number of retailers including Wal-Mart and Circuit City.

Kmart will continue to sell the Playstation 3, which has a Blu-ray player inside, but its marketing will be concentrated on HD DVD. The least expensive Blu-ray player retails for $499 and Sony says it will launch a $399 Playstation 3 next month.

Craig Kornblau, president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment, which supports HD DVD said the $200 price will help to reach a mass audience. Sally agreed that the lower price would help sales.

"There was no official move on our MSRP, but I’m happy to see the strong sales momentum on our players," Sally said. "We experienced a great lift in player sales when Transformers (Paramount) was released, and the strong momentum continues."

What Portable Media Player Owners Want

Forty-four percent of portable media player owners said appealing video content and optimized video viewing were their main motivations to watch more videos on the portable platform, while 33 percent are motivated by the cost of content, 19 percent by personalization and connectivity features, and 16 percent by ease of use.

"The PMP market has not reached one tenth of its potential yet, and this data explains why," commented Harry Wang, Senior Analyst and author of the report.

"None of the PMP vendors have a perfect score on these five mega factors, although Apple clearly leads the pack in fulfilling the high-ranking needs of the PMP early adopters."

"If they act quickly enough, Apple’s competitors can take advantage of this rare showing of vulnerability in an otherwise a seamless execution of the iPod+iTunes model," Wang said.

Everyone’s claiming they invented YouTube’s ad style, the overlay ad. VideoEgg ran a banner on their site, saying, “We invented the video overlay ad about a year ago”. Of course, YouTube invented the embedded Flash player VideoEgg puts its videos inside of, Brightcove has been doing it for two years, and everybody takes good ideas from everybody else. After all, if it’s sucha good idea, why wouldn’t everybody use it?

Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley got herself in an embarrassing situation, as she tried to predict YouTube’s future revenue growth and misunderstood the meaning of CPM. By mistaking CPM as “cost per impression” instead of “cost per thousand”, she overstated her analysis by a factor of a thousand, predicting $4.8 billion in revenue for YouTube next year (which, if it happens, I’d eat my hat).

Of course, since the new estimates were a mere $4.5 million, and analysts don’t make their money with tiny numbers, Mary tweaked the estimates so that even though they dropped a factor of a thousand, they were more optimistic than before in terms of percentages. As Henry Blodget explains, that’s called “backing into the numbers”, making them fit your expectations, and it’s why I don’t like analysts.

Anyone can predict anything based on making up numbers. Sure, you can do a lot of math to calculate what your guesses mean in the long term, but if you are still guessing, you aren’t bringing anything of value to the table. Unless analysts hold themselves to a higher level of proof than this, they should just sit back down and stop wasting our time.

A significantly large bunch of stupid YouTubers completely misunderstood the new system, proving once again the immaturity of the YouTube community, and their complete inabillity to RTFA. These users started threatening to boycott or just plain leave YouTube if Google started putting ads on their videos. Problem is, Google is only putting ads on videos it has a partnership with, and the complaining idiots are (a) too stupid to understand that and (b) too unimportant to have been offered partnerships.

If you really hate the ads, TubeStop supposedly never shows the ads, and it has the added bonus of turning off auto-play on YouTube videos. Vunderbar.

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Once in place, visitors can view video highlights like Barry Bonds’ 756th home run from MLB’s ‘Silverlight-powered page. Microsoft said its Silverlight plug-in will work on Windows XP, Vista, and Server 2003 when running IE7.

Older stuff like IE6, or Firefox 1.5 or 2, on Windows 2000 hasn’t received support yet.

Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in works on Windows or Mac, though Linux isn’t supported as an operating system. Like Adobe, Microsoft sees a future where much of the business of content distribution will go to the company that can give the best assurances about protecting copyrighted material.

A product called Silverlight Streaming should emerge as an option from Microsoft for those content owners. Microsoft described it as an optional paid turnkey offering for supporting DRM-encoded video.

Any thanks should go, in part, to SplashCast – it’s this company’s technology that made the move possible.  “Facebook users can add the application to their profiles (via the URL http://npr.org/facebook ) to automatically receive new NPR Podcasts episodes to listen to and to share this great content with their friends,” wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick on the corporate blog.

Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be accurate to think of NPR as some stodgy member of “old media” – a press release rightly describes the organization as “a leader in digital media, incorporating new technology to offer a wide-ranging slate of its news, information, talk, entertainment, music and arts content on all platforms.”

Now, as for that content – I’m most excited about the availability of “Car Talk.”  But “Fresh Air,” “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!,” and “Story of the Day” are also presented as options.

Hat tip to Mashable’s Kristen Nicole, who wrote, “Splashcast’s customized Facebook application option will be appealing to many in the media industry . . .”

YouTube responded to user criticism, rolling back that feature within a day of the new interface, showing they are listening and care if people really hate a new feature. It was kind of annoying, and I’m glad to see it work this way. I still don’t like the way the thumbnails rip off Apple’s dock feature, and in a way that makes it kind of hard to browse (too sensitive), but they seem committed to improving it, so I wouldn’t be too worried.

Garrett at ZDNet says he thinks Google might introduce sponsored videos into the related videos section, giving them a new revenue source for YouTube. Not a bad idea.

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“The new RealPlayer will give you the power to download Internet video instantly,” reads their website today. Beet.TV and lots of others caught the announcement at the D Conference in California:

The new RealPlayer makes it easy for consumers to watch videos whenever and wherever they want, burn them to DVD and CD, and share video links with friends. Most major formats are supported, including Real, Windows Media, Flash, and Quicktime.

If a video does not have DRM, Real Player will be able to download it. Most Flash videos, like those found on YouTube and many other sharing sites, have little to no DRM, Beet.TV said.

NewTeeVee writer Liz Gannes invited her readers to move quickly and snag some pre-release Real accounts ahead of the mid-June formal debut. She made a prediction that likely echoed through the techie audience at D and elsewhere: “Get it fast