What’s there to say about CES—it’s exhausting, exhilarating, a pain in the ass and there’s a lot of waiting in lines. My feet hurt, but I saw the immediate future of the media-technology world. It’s a world going in opposite directions. We are looking to connect everything together and we’re looking as having the freedom to roam. We want portability but we want to have all our gadgets and gizmos connected to alow us to play anything, anytime, where.

This “clip” is long, but has lots of cool stuff inside. Enjoy.

With the first item, Allen and Mike ruminate (aloud) on what Real Networks' freshly minted patent for online streaming video will mean to the nascent online video market.

As for the second item about EMI and Skype? Beats the heck out of us.  We're going off of one press release.

It's the end of the week and we decided we just had to do another 'cast. Highlights of todays 'cast -- Yahoo's RSS-enabled e-mail and Michael Robertson's latest shot across the music industry's bow.

I just don’t see the match between eBay and Skype. The other players who recently jumped into the VOIP game—Yahoo!, MSN, etc..—have fully fledged consumer communications platforms which include email (with a lot of storage), Instant Messaging and voice chat. eBay has none of those vital ingredients. In addition, there is no social network platform or blogging platform upon which it can build.

 

Honestly, I think a company such as Myspace or Friendster is a more viable candidate to buy a VOIP company. I doubt it’s in Myspace’s future and I doubt Friendster has that kind of money. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

What madness is this?

Allen and Mike present and then challenge the notion of Google offering a mobile phone of their own.  Whether or not you agree with the notion, we think the assumptions that go into our respective opinions are food for thought.