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A Grab Bag Of Observations And Commentary

00397_00236Yesterday Gina Sansivero wrote a really nice blog post on the rAVe blogs, called From the Periphery of the AV Industry. If you haven’t read it yet, you really ought to.

Gina’s points are entertaining, insightful, and more than a little humorous.

Inspired by her, and the fact that I can’t think of a beefier topic today, here are some of my miscellaneous observations. I can’t claim to be as insightful as Gina, but I’ll do my best.

First off, I’m deeply awed by the fact that, as far as I can tell, Enya appears to have handed in the same album to her record label seven times in 19 years, gotten paid for it, and nobody has caught on. Nice work if you can get it.

Moving on, when I look at the tit-for-tat behavior that the major players in mobile have engaged in over the past year it all seems so juvenile.

A perfect example is Apple telling Google, “You won’t give us turn-by-turn? Fine! We’re dropping Maps AND YouTube from iOS 6!” They’re all behaving like children. Spoiled children, at that.

Speaking of mobile in general, and Apple in particular, I wonder if the executives at HDMI Licencing Corporation, after looking at Apple’s new Lightning connector and is three separate IC chips and Over The Air ability to have its recognition codes reprogrammed during firmware updates, smacked themselves on their foreheads and exclaimed, “Why didn’t we think of that!?”

Thinking about HDMI reminds me: I continue to be amazed at the fact that Blu-ray isn’t quite dead yet.

One bellwether I use to determine how Blu-ray is faring is the amount of square footage retailers like Costco and Walmart devote to it. Going by eyeball alone, Blu-ray’s frontage at Walmart has at best been holding steady, and at Costco over the past year it has been reduced by half.

Just to twist the knife, DVD square footage at both the Walmarts and Costcos I patronize look to be about equal to Blu-ray. So much for one format replacing another.

Rather than turning this blog post into a collection of gripes, I’d like to express some gratitude: I’m grateful that voice and data wireless service from the various Canadian telecom carriers is so poor that demand for in-vehicle and in-building wireless signal boosters is at an all-time high.

So thank you, Canadian telecom providers, for giving my core business a massive boost last year, no pun intended. With 4G and LTE rolling out in size across Canada over the course of 2013 the booster business is looking better than ever.

Lastly, I’m grateful for the breadth of clever and articulate industry people that I’m privileged to know, both here at rAVe, as well as all over Twitter, the Internet and the world. Your opinions, insights and commentary are consistently interesting and informative. There’s too many of you to name, but you all know who you are. Thanks for being awesome.

I hope that all of you have a safe and happy New Year!

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