Posts from Video

I put the awesome HBO GO app on the family's iPad yesterday and tried to Airplay into our family room TV. I got audio on the TV but not video. I thought I was doing something wrong. So I rebooted everything and tried again. Same thing.

So I did a web search on the topic to see what was going on. Turns out HBO GO has disabled the video on Airplay but not the audio. That's right. They disabled the video but include an Airplay button in the app.

What kind of decision is that? If you don't want folks Airplaying the video from the iPad to the TV, don't put an Airplay button in your app. I can't imagine who would want to airplay the audio but not the video. That's messed up.

In truth, the whole thing is messed up. HBO GO requires a cable account to use the service. I have a cable set top box connected to the TV I tried to Airplay to. I just prefer the navigation on the HBO GO app and its way easier to use than the set top box. Allowing me to Airplay HBO GO from my iPad to my TV isn't going to make me cancel my cable subscription because I can't get HBO GO without one.

So they break the product instead. It's nuts. But I see big media doing this kind of thing all the time. And I just don't get it.

We've been using a really nifty service to hire our next analyst. It's called TakeTheInterview. This product/company came out of this summer's DreamIt Ventures program in NYC.

We wrote a blog post outlining the position and then linked to TakeTheInterview (note – the application process ended twelve days ago and is closed). Candidates click on that link, fill out a few key data points (name, contact info, blog url, linked in profile, etc) and then they take two short video interviews (90 seconds and 120 seconds). The minute our post went live, I put myself through the candidate flow and I found it drop dead simple. Obviously looking into a webcam and speaking articulately and well about two topics for almost three minutes is not drop dead simple but that's the point of TakeTheInterview.

For the employer, TakeTheInterview has a nice interface that makes it fairly efficient to watch a ton of video. We got about 250 completed applications so that is about 10 hours of video. About half of the people in our firm watched each and every video. The other half watched the top 1/3 of the applicants as rated by the team that watched every video. So in total, our firm watched about 45 hours of video in this hiring process. And TakeTheInterview does a nice job with the video consumption flow. I watched a bunch of the video on my family room TV via a mac mini and that worked pretty well.

The main piece of feedback we've given TakeTheInterview is that they need a better scoring system in the service. We cobbled together one using Google Docs which works, but a slick candidate scoring system in the service would have saved our team a lot of time. I suspect that won't be too hard for TakeTheInterview to build.

Our hiring process in the past started with a blog post asking for a web presence (blog url, linkedin), followed by phone screens, ending in face to face interviews with the finalists. We swapped out the phone screens with TakeTheInterview and in the process we were able to see everyone in action as opposed to phone screens with a small subset.

I'm very enthusiastic about this new tool. Seeing people live and in person without having to commit to a long in person interview creates a lot of important information early in the hiring process. I'd encourage others to give TakeTheInterview a try.

I've long thought that the mobile devices we have in our home (tablets, iTouch, phones) would be our remotes. In fact, we use them everyday for that now. We use the Sonos app on the iPad to control the music in our house. We use the Boxee remote on the iTouch to control our TV. We all have apps on our androids and iPhones that control various devices in our home.

But as we were driving out to our beach house on friday afternoon, I realized that there is an alternative scenario. The mobile devices could be our primary content consumption devices and we will simply connect them to whatever device we want them to "play to."

That's how we and surely many others use the audio in our cars. We connect one of our many mobile devices to our auxiliary input in our car audio system and then play music. We play rdio, rhapsody, mog, fredwilson.fm, hypem, and sometimes local files on our mobile device and use the car audio system for the amplification and speakers throughout the car. We sometimes use the am/fm and siriusxm radio we have in the car. But the vast majority of listening happens on the mobile devices connected via the auxiliary input. We have the various subscription and free internet audio services on our mobile devices, not in our car dashboard.

That's how we use the telephone in our car too. Our mobile phones are connected via bluetooth to the car speakers and microphone. Our address books are on our mobile phones, not in the car dashboard. Our connections to the voice networks are on our mobile devices, not the car dashboard.

And we are quickly seeing video services show up on tablets. My friend Jimmy was at our beach house in long island on friday night. He showed me the Cablevision iPad app. If you can simply "play" the video on the iPad on the TV via a technology like Apple's Airplay, then the iPad becomes more than the remote. It becomes the set top box replacement.

The implications of this alternative scenario are profound. The subscription services might be on the mobile devices, not the displays. If your friend has an MLB.com subscription on his or her tablet and they come over to your house, you could watch the game on your TV via your friend's tablet.

That's how it works with audio today. My kids' friends come over and connect their phones and iTouch devices to our audio system and play their music on it. It seems highly possible that this model will continue to develop and include video as well. And if this becomes the dominant model then the video and audio systems will remain "dumb" and the smarts will be in the mobile devices.

I think its a bit too early to know which way the market will evolve. The auto industry and the consumer electronics industry have been pushing to get smart processers, operating systems, and internet connections into their products. There's a lot of energy going into that approach right now. But consumers are moving even faster than the manufacturers right now and the market may evolve in a different direction before the manufacturers can catch up. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.