Yesterday, while I was on a panel discussion at LeWeb3 talking about the future of video something happened that discussed my future. I was driving the computer during the panel discussion, demonstrating bleeding edge video technologies like Seesmic and Kyte on stage when someone wrote in my Kyte.tv channel’s chat room that I should check out TechCrunch. So, in front of everyone I pulled up the post. You’ve probably read it by now. It said simply: Scoble to Leave PodTech, Heading for Fast Company.

I’m sorry I didn’t break the news here on my blog, but breaking it in front of thousands of people at a major industry conference is OK too (Arrington, who wrote the post, was in the audience) because people got to see my real, unfiltered, reaction.

UPDATE: I didn’t know that Arrington was going to post about it then. Dave Winer was sitting next to him in the audience and gives his point of view.

I told everyone that it was true that I had decided to leave PodTech, but that Fast Company hasn’t been signed yet and that I’m still considering two options, one of which is Fast Company. My last day there will be January 14th. I am working on a number of PodTech initiatives, including the CES BlogHaus as well as a Blogger Bus Tour to CES from San Francisco to Las Vegas which is sponsored by Microsoft (more on the bus, as well as how you can get a seat, next week when I get back into the office).

So, what will happen on January 15th? I told the audience at LeWeb that things haven’t been wrapped up yet. I have two options I’m considering on the table and will announce what I’m doing on January 15th.

How did it leak? Well, I needed advice between these two options and so I ask my friends to give me advice (actually, Rocky and I have been thinking a lot about this and have turned down a half dozen other options). I talk too much, which is my downfall, but also I got some world-class advice from people all over the industry.

Why didn’t I blog about it? Because I had family and other committments between the panel and now (it’s currently 2:24 a.m. and we’re packing to come home now).

Why not be transparent on the blog? Wasn’t that the lesson of Naked Conversations (our book that studied how 188 businesses used blogging)?

If you read Naked Conversations you’d know that we don’t recommend putting everything about your life on your blog. We even have a whole chapter about people who’ve gotten fired because they put inappropriate things on their blogs.

Certainly discussing career moves on a blog is inappropriate if you don’t have a clue what moves you’ll make (staying at PodTech was always on the table as one of the options until a week ago, for instance, when Rocky and I made some decisions about what would be best for our careers going forward).

Why not stay at PodTech? PodTech went through a lot of managerial chaos earlier this year and I was trying to help PodTech get to profitability and help it get some focus, business wise. You’ve seen some of those moves already as PodTech has moved away from an editorial focus and toward an corporate media development one, which is where much of PodTech’s revenues (which are in the millions per year now) are coming from. That’s a decision I helped PodTech make and I think they are good ones and will help it avoid the TechCrunch Dead Pool. Companies need a lot of help creating media, so PodTech has a pretty good future opportunity ahead of it, which is why its investors continue to support it.

When did I make this decision? In the past week. I know that back in October I said I wasn’t going to leave PodTech, but a lot has changed in that two-month period. PodTech’s new management team has been working together a lot better, and the direction it’s been going is different than it was back in October.

Now that PodTech is getting some focus I found that my show needed a new home in order for it to get to the next level, too.

Before I go on, I want to thank Seagate for sponsoring my show, which enabled me to interview more than 300 people over the past year or so. Looking back at that year it’s amazing how many people have come in front of my lens.

I’m a geek, a user advocate, and enjoy doing my show more than anything else in the world other than hanging out with Milan, Patrick, and Maryam. This week I got to do all three together in Paris thanks to Loic Le Meur, and I’ll always be in his debt for that. I’ll also, too, always be in debt to PodTech and John Furrier for hiring me and encouraging me to do a daily video show and giving me the resources to do that.

I’m also seeing significant changes to how you all interact with each other. Over the past year we’ve seen Twitter, Facebook, Kyte, Seesmic, Ustream, Justin.tv, Pownce, Jaiku, and quite a few other technologies get popular.

This interview with Mogulus’ CEO and Chris Pirillo’s pioneering efforts with his own live TV channel played a key role in getting me to see that there’s a new kind of TV channel possible — one that’s participatory instead of one-way — and one that would be very low cost and potentially have high revenue possibilities compared to the cost.

Remember, you don’t need a large audience to make a lot of money in this industry. I used to help edit a computer magazine, Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal (which later became Visual Studio Magazine) and that only had 100,000 subscribers, but millions in revenues. I also love the Demo series of conferences. There the audience (usually more than 1,000 people) pays more than $1,000 each to attend and everyone on stage pays $18,000 to present to that audience.

Another thing that opened my eyes? The Google Open Social press conference where I had the only video, thanks to Kyte.tv and my cell phone (they had asked for me to leave my professional camera in the car — funny that’s a story I’ve heard several times, including on the panel discussion yesterday where Jeff Pulver showed off video he shot on a small pocket camera of the recent Led Zepplin concert. He told the audience that Led Zepplin wants to buy his photos and videos because they were better than the professional ones).

At the Google Open Social press conference, instead of doing “professional journalism” and cranking out an article like other bloggers and journalists in the room I opened up Twitter and started telling people what I was hearing. Then I listened to them and asked questions during the press conference that they wanted answered. It changed how press conferences should be done in my eyes forever. Add streaming video, like AMD used the other day in another press conference, and things would be dramatically different.

Which gets me back to the headline I used here: it’s your business.

I’m watching how Loic Le Meur is building Seesmic by including the community into every decision he makes. His software doesn’t have the most features out there (Kyte.tv beats it by a mile, particularly on the mobile phone side of things, which is why I love Kyte so much) but Le Meur is building up a ton of love in the community for his approach.

The participants are in control there. It is your business.

I’m tired of getting used by companies who just use and use and use without giving me anything in return. I remember three years ago when I first heard the words “user generated media.” That term still pisses me off. I’m not a user, I’m a participant. I actually love it when Christopher Coulter calls it “loser generated media.”

So, whatever I do next will place that philosophy at the center. It is your business.

One other thing: I really have hated not being open and transparent the past year. Whatever I do next will have to put up with me talking with my friends, telling you openly what’s going on in the business and in my life, and we’ll build something fun together where we’re all equal participants. Our Photowalking series gets damn close to what I’m thinking of. It’s not lost on me that our videos in the photowalking series has more comments per video than the average ScobleShow videos do and those generally have more comments than other PodTech videos do. That’s media made by participation, not by some committee or some gatekeeper or some “A list blogger” somewhere. But using the newest technologies we can even bring participation in a photowalk to a whole new level. Justin.tv demonstrated that to me.

How will we make revenues? Well, there’s a variety of companies that are leading the way in participatory philosophies: You know, those that design products with their customers, or treat their customers as participants the way that Loic does with Seesmic. HP, for instance, is bringing its customers into help design its products. I saw a laptop at HP that was partially designed by a customer. A participant. HP is far from alone in leading that charge as well.

So, anyway, thanks for all the nice notes and let’s talk again about this on January 15th after I make my final decision and start my show down a new path.

Oh, and in late January I’ll be going to the World Economic Forum, where we’ll kick things off.

Now that my player has been on TechCrunch and Valleywag I’ve been able to measure some new things about each of their audiences:

1. Audience. Just how many people visit their page (Kyte.tv shows me how many people are online concurrently. Valleywag has been averaging about 200 to 300 people, TechCrunch averaged around 1000).
2. Engagement. How many people click on links, or comment on items. TechCrunch regularly gets more than 100 comments. Valleywag rarely gets more than 10. When TechCrunch linked to me I got 1,000 visits. When Valleywag links to me it’s rare I get more than 100.
3. Loyalty. How many subscriptions do each site have on Google Reader and other feed readers. I use the example of Gizmodo vs. Engadget. Gizmodo has about 44,000 subscribers while Engadget has 350,000, on Google Reader.
4. Influence. % of posts that show up on Techmeme, Digg, my Link Blog, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, etc.

Anyone building a new metric based on these four things? If so, we could REALLY understand a LOT more about our audiences and advertisers would have a lot better information to choose from.

I’d probably add a fifth metric:

5. Concentration of people with intent. Does your site attract a lot of people who buy digital cameras, for instance? Then it’ll make a LOT more on Google advertising. That’s one huge reason why DPReview sold for a good sum to Amazon.

Anyway, this gave me a chance to dust off my old whiteboard. Oh, on my whiteboard is the Social Media Starfish. Yes, that’s a tease. I’m writing about that for Fast Company Magazine.

Google Reader tells me today: From your 684 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 32,879 items, and shared 1,693 items.

Out of those, here’s my top 35 feeds that I’ve put on my link blog, so these are my real favorite blogs out of the 684 technology industry blogs I’m currently reading.

1. Mashable! (items shared: 93)
2. Planet Intertwingly. (61)
3. TechCrunch . (60)
4. MSDN Blogs (which has more than 3,000 Microsoft employees blogging on it). (41)
5. GigaOM Network. (46)
6. Read/WriteWeb. (25)
7. Media 2.0 Workgroup. (24)
8. Wired’s Epicenter. (22)
9. Lifehacker. (22)
10. AppScout. (19)
11. Vecosys. (19)
12. MAKE Magazine blog. (17)
13. VentureBeat. (17)
14. 901am. (15)
15. Adobe Blogs (lots of Adobe bloggers). (15)
16. Engadget. (15)
17. Gizmodo. (15)
18. NewTeeVee. (15)
    
19. PaidContent. (15)
20. StartupSquad. (15)
21. Beet.TV. (13)
22. O’Reilly Radar. (12)
23. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang — he works with me. (12)
24. Boing Boing. (11)
25. CrunchGear. (11)
26. Digg/Technology. (11)
27. dzone.com. — links for developers. (11)
28. Google Blogoscoped. (11)
29. Thomas Hawk, photographer. (11)
30. Andy Beal’s Search and Internet Marketing. (10)
31. Loren Feldman’s 1938 Media — funny videos. (9)
32. Dare Obasanjo, dev at Microsoft. (9)
33. Ryan Stewart’s Rich Internet App Blog. (9)
34. Geeksugar. (9)
35. Google Maps Mania. (9)

Congrats to everyone on this list, you are the top of the top.

What are your favorite tech blogs?
Any that aren’t on my list? I’ll put up the list every few months or so.

Fortune Magazine says that AppleTV is a dud.

Apple hits back and says they are bringing YouTube to Apple TV.

UPDATE: Engadget’s Ryan Block covers Steve Jobs’ announcement at the D Conference. Jobs says that Apple TV is “a hobby.” But says lots of other things too.

How did Fortune disparage it? By calling it “Zune like.” Ouch!

Personally Fortune is right, but doesn’t quite expose the elephant standing in the middle of the room.

The elephant in the room? Simple: Apple could have really taken over the HDTV world and held it for decades. Instead it has left the door open to its competitors.

Microsoft loves competitors like Apple who leave doors open.

What am I talking about?

Do we have a wide-screen iPod yet? One that matches the form factor of my 60-inch HDTV? No. Microsoft executives say that a wide-screen, 16:9 form factor, Zune is on the way this fall.

Do we have a 16:9 1080-full-res MacBookPro out yet? No. Dell has one. So does Acer. Just look for an WUXGA screen. But Apple hasn’t shipped one of those yet in a laptop.

Do we have HDTV iTunes yet? No. But ABC.com is giving us HDTV Lost. Stage6.divx.com has tons of close-to-HDTV content. Joost is going to bring us close-to-HDTV content. Where’s Apple?

Do we have an entertainment system that joins our computers and our big screens? Microsoft has Media Center and Xbox. Plus Xbox Live now joins gamers on PCs with those on Xbox. Why hasn’t Apple made a deal with Sony yet to bring PlayStation 3 to MacBookPros?

But, actually, the AppleTV +is+ going in the right direction. Apple should take over the HDTV market. The fact that it’s not is emboldening its competitors. It’s just that AppleTV’s reliance on HDTV, without having the other parts of the ecosystem in place, is exposing Apple’s weakness in dealing with HDTV.

That said, I love my AppleTV. If you actually get some high resolution stuff into iTunes it works really well. I watch tons of stuff on my AppleTV. It’s just that folks who have a big HDTV screen expect a lot more than Apple’s delivering currently.

Key line in the lengthy AppleTV Review over on Engadget: “Simply put, if anyone is thinking about buying this to watch HD movies and videos: don’t.”

I already have a Media Center (running Vista) and an Xbox 360, so I wasn’t going to rely on it for HD stuff, but I have found the Apple TV to be pretty unsatisfying if you are trying to watch any of the shows off of ABC TV’s hot new video player (which, by the way, works just as well on MacOSX as it does on XP — a Vista version is coming soon).

Also, the hot new video thing is Joost. That can’t play on Apple TV either. Neither can my old show over on Microsoft’s Channel 9 (Apple TV can’t play WMV).

That said, for what the Apple TV does do it does pretty well. Works great with most of the stuff over on Blip.TV and my current show works pretty well on it (although it’s definitely not HD and on my big screen is about as blurry as standard TV albeit my stuff is in widescreen so is better than most of the standard TV stuff, which I find mostly unwatchable on my big screen).

The Apple TV is definitely putting pressure on videobloggers to deliver a higher resolution version of our shows, which will prove troubling to deliver for a variety of reasons (I record my shows on tape in HD, which looks glorious, but don’t currently capture those tapes into the Mac in a high res format cause I just can’t deal with the file sizes and, mostly, compression times). Thanks to my Seagate partnership I’m working on some HD tests, though, just to see if we can make the workflow work for, maybe, a show a week (most of my stuff really doesn’t need HD, but there definitely is some that would be fun to do).

Anyway, is the Apple TV a good purchase? Yeah, I’m happy with it. But that just might be the Steve Jobs’ distortion field! :-)

The Engadget review is a must read for anyone who still hasn’t bought one and there’s definitely more media tests ahead in my house!

Favorite Male videoblog: Ze Frank.
Best Community Vlog: Chuck Olsen. Minnesota Stories.
Best Cooking Vlog: Freshtopia.
Favorite kids and teens videoblog: Jetset Show.
Favorite news vlog: Rocketboom.
Best Female Vlogger. Ryanne Hodson.
Favorite Tech Vlog: Bleeding Edge TV.
Entertainment Vlog: Chasing Windmills.
Controversial Vlog: Josh Wolf (who’s currently in jail for refusing to turn over his video tapes).
Videoblogging Book: Secrets of Videoblogging.
Green Vlog: Treehugger TV
Vlog directory: Mefeedia
Best Vloggervangelist: Michael Verdi for his work on Node 101.
Comedy Vlog: Ask a Ninja.
Diary Vlog: Josh Leo.
Entertainment Vlog (non Fiction). LoFi St Louis
favorite entertaiment vlog (fiction): chasing windmills
Video Hosting: BlipTV
Site Design: It’s Jerry Time
Experimental Vlog: Pouringdown TV
Insirational/Spirtual: Beachwalks.
Vlog Collaboration: Bottom Union, Carp Caviar
Best Vlog: Alive in Baghdad. (Big Winner, got a standing ovation — their stuff is really awesome)
Best Group Vlog: Alive in Baghdad.
Best Political Vlog: Alive in Baghdad.
favorite interview vlog: alive in baghdad
Favorite Corporate Organization vlog: netsquared
Favorite Travel Vlog: travelvlog.org
favorite video production tool: enric’s vpip
favorite viral video: singing woodchuck
Favorite Special Effects: Galacticast
favorite documentary vlog: american king
favorite educational vlog: freevlog
favorite editing : stutterframes
favorite site design: itsjerrytime

There’s a whole debate going on over on TechMeme about whether or not more people should videoblog.

There’s a lot of opinions out there on both sides, so let’s do a little bit of “truth or fiction.”

1) Mark Evans says he’s not doing it cause it takes more time than doing a podcast. TRUE. But not for the reason you might think. It’s cause the files take longer to upload. An hour podcast can be something less than 20mb, but the same hour of video can be 800 MBs, which can take a considerable time to upload. I find that I can do the same kind of show, though, with the same quality on video.

2) Jon Watson says “To create a videocast you have to have set/studio; lighting; personal appearance; visuals.” FALSE. You don’t need a set/studio. I do my videoshow in geek’s offices. You don’t need lighting (but you do need to be aware of it). You don’t need visuals, although it makes you look professional. Who said videoblogs need to look professional? If someone told you that they are totally missing the point. We’ll talk more about this after my show is up, though. But keep in mind that I wanted a more professional look than is possible with just standard videoblog content.

3) Mathew Ingram and Alec Saunders say “Alec says he doesn’t find video a very good way of getting information across, which is why he doesn’t follow many vlogs — and I would agree.” FALSE AND TRUE. False because there are some things that just require video. Here’s a test. Give me one minute of video or 10,000 words to explain to me what Halo 3 does. The video will beat the text every single time, even if you have a Pulitzer-prize winning author write the words. True because words are far easier to skim, far easier to search, far easier to store, far easier to upload, and generally have more information imparted per minute spent consuming than video does.

4) Alec Sanders says “And conversely, why would I want to turn my blog into just two minutes of daily sound bites?” Translation, he thinks that videoblogging needs to be two minutes each post. FALSE. My Channel 9 videos were regularly 50 or more minutes long and, while some people complained, I really didn’t ever listen to them. It still built an audience of 4.3 million unique visitors in a month. If you want to watch short videos that don’t go in depth I suggest you don’t watch my show (although I won’t always have long ones either, some topics/demos/interviews only need two to five minutes to cover well).

There are a few other things I’ve heard on the street about videoblogging too.

4) You need a professional camera rig. FALSE. Geek Entertainment TV got an audience of thousands per month by using a borrowed cheap camera without good microphones or lights.

5) You need a tripod. FALSE, but I wish it were TRUE. Most video can be dramatically improved with the use of a tripod. But, I watch a lot of videos that have good content even though they are shaky.

6) You need to worry about sound. TRUE. There are few things worse than a videoblog that you can’t clearly hear. Almost all of the complaints about my work come when the audio is faint or obscured by some noise.

7) If you want a pat on your back from other videobloggers you need to have good lighting. GENERALLY TRUE. One trick I’ve learned is that you need to keep the brighest thing in the room BEHIND the camera. Why? Cameras don’t have the dynamic range of your eye, so you need a consistent source of light. Putting something bright behind you, like Andy Abramson here does, makes the video look unprofessional (he is too dark in many parts of this video). Oh, and Andy also makes another common videoblogger mistake: too much headroom. He looks like he’s falling off of the bottom of the frame.

8) You need to keep the camera within three feet of whoever is talking. TRUE (maybe). This is true if you’re using the on-camera microphone, which generally sucks. If you use a wireless lavalier microphone then you can put the camera wherever you like.

By the way, we’re working on “The Vloggies” which is a contest to find the best videoblogs. That’ll be in San Francisco, November 4. Judges are being picked by the community (we all hang out on the Yahoo videoblogger mailing list, this is a great place to get help doing your own videoblog).

My answer to “should you videoblog?” It depends. :-)

UPDATE: Andrew Baron (the guy who does Rocketboom) points out that videobloggers are joining the A list at a very quick rate. THAT is a reason we’ll see more videoblogs.

I knew that traffic in Silicon Valley seemed a bit light this week. Everyone is at Burning Man. There’s a fun video site from there. I wish I was there. It just didn’t work out this year, but it’s one of the things I really want to do.

One thing about Burning Man. I’m told it’s something you need to experience. Watching a little two inch video about it won’t really do it justice.

For the record, I loved the OQO I was sent. It’s sexy. Fast. Has a nice screen. Is a great executive computer. But, and it’s the only but I have about it, is that it’s $2,100. I’ll be honest. I couldn’t afford it on my current salary and lifestyle. And, if I could, it would be one of those six-months-of-thinking decisions for me. It would be at the expense of something else. Get a new TV, or get an OQO? Get a new car or get an OQO? Get a new full-size Tablet PC or get an OQO? I’ll be honest, I would pick something other than the OQO in all those matchups. Why? Sheer utility/ROI for my life.

Is the Origami going to be any different? We’ll see on Monday. Dennis Rice’s post is what caused me to write this post. He’s right. It’s not going to be a device for everyone. If I were an executive making $400,000 a year I’d buy the OQO or Motion in a heartbeat. At my salary level, though, I’ve gotta be far more discriminating about where I spend my own money.

You can watch along. I’m sitting in the Bellagio with a bunch of geeks watching on a video feed. Updates to come. Oh, Engadget did a point-by-point of the keynote too (with pictures!) But, Memeorandum is the best place to go to see all the reaction from around the world.

I heard he won’t use any PowerPoint slides tonight. That’ll be interesting to see.

6:45 p.m. Bill just came out. He’s talking about winning the Time’s person of the year with his wife. Noted that in 1982 the PC won that award.
6:47. Notes that last year Microsoft saw 11% growth in Windows PCs.
6:48. Showing a futuristic home of the future screen that you can touch.
6:49. Shows off a cool holographic office screen. Shows images that wrap around you.
6:50. Demonstrates a Tablet PC that is virtually displayed along with the wrap around screen.
6:52. He’s demonstrating the PlayTable (a prototype table — someone just wrote me and said this isn’t the PlayTable. Oh, oh. Still very cool. And, I’ll definitely follow up with that team). He drops his cell phone onto a surface and images fly out of it. Wild. Oh, cool, now that the Table has been demonstrated I can talk about this. It’s no demo. It really works. It’s unbelieveable technology. How does the Tablet work? It has a projector underneath it, projecting onto holographic glass. Under the glass (you can’t see these) are two cameras that triangulate in on the surface of the glass. How does it know that Bill’s cell phone has been laid on the surface of the glass? A barcode on the bottom of Bill’s cell phone.
6:58. Bill is talking about the industry.
7:00. Windows Vista demos start.
Aaron Woodman is on stage talking about Vista. First, fresh user interface.
Live previews of applications. Switching apps is easier. Flip 3D is being shown (shows various Windows you have open in 3D interface).
Sidebar being demoed showing Gadgets. RSS feed reader in Sidebar. Dave Winer will be happy.
7:04. You can search. From the start menu.
7:05. Tabbed browsing with a twist. MSN Search done, brings up new tabs by clicking on links which opens new tabs. Then shows off quick tabs. Shows thumbnail of different tabs. Very cool.
Built in parental controls. Shows how games rating works for parents.
7:06. Experiences? New Flight Simulator being demoed. Whoa!!! Damn, that’s unbelieveable. You have to see this to believe it. Unbelieveable game experiences are coming.
7:09. Photo experiences. It shows that it always save the original photo. So, if you crop you can go back. If you change color, you can go back.
7:10. Motion video working right next to photos in new Windows media sharing app.
7:11. Windows Media Player. New UI. No long lists anymore. Resizeable icons and info. Very nice.
7:12. Van Toffler, Group President, MTV Networks is onstage. Announcing partnership. 100 CD-quality radiostations. Urge is name. Subscribers will drive the service. He used the word “sucks” on stage. Ahh, customers can tell them it sucks and they’ll listen. Two million tracks available. All you can eat OR download and buy your favorite track.
7:13. Blogging in a music service? Did I just hear that right?
7:18. Justin Timberlake just walked out on stage. Just announced his new album in conjunction with Urge.
7:21. Ttttttttaaaaaaabbbbbbblllllleeeeeeettttttt. Heheh. New Gateway Tablet shown. I’ll take a look at that tomorrow in the booth.
7:22. New passive digitizers talked about. This lets manufacturers build new kinds of devices that don’t require as much expense.
7:23. Windows Mobile. Bill is playing with the new Treo. Verizon is selling it starting tomorrow.
7:26. Messenger buddy list on new Phillips phone. Calls through Internet. Whoa. Through Windows Live Call Services. Gotta learn more about that.
7:27. Talking about TV now. Get ready for HHHHHDDDDDTTTTTTVVVVVV. Heheh. That was a note to Maryam. I wanna buy an HD screen.
7:30. Media Center. 6.5 million sold so far. 130 manufacturers.
7:31. Viiv from Intel is what Bill’s talking about now. Chip level surround sound. Dual core.
Direct TV video on Media Center. Ahh, talking is over, let’s get Joe Belfiore out here. VP of Media Center division. 15 minute tour coming.
7:34. Showing off a cool Media Center screen. You gotta watch this. It’s too hard to describe in ASCII text.
7:36. PC from Averatec. Small and quiet PC that have tuner. For less than $1000 with tuner. $499 without tuner. Sold!
7:37. Showing off new Portable Media Player. New Starz, Vongo service. Lets you buy movies and other media. Subscription!! All movies you want for $9.99 a month.
7:43. Windows Live messenger. Lets you ask for help with TV programming through IM bots. I have to wrap my head around that! “What’s on tonight?” Brings up results in another Window. Very cool.
7:46. Showing off HD-DVD on Windows Vista. Demonstrating interactivity capabilities of HD-DVD. Oh, this is cool! Get to move scenes without leaving movie. Or, get see what actors are on screen in the scenes you’re currently watching. Neat! Patrick just emailed me and said “that looks cool!”
The producer head talking on top of the movie got lots of reactions from audience around me (I’m sitting in a room at the Belagio watching this with about 100 other geeks).
7:50. Digital Cable. Applause!! Yes, we can get digital cable signals straight into Media Center. I’ve been been waiting for this. You can get premium stuff off of digital cable systems now. Will definitely check that out tomorrow.
7:55. XXXXXXXBBBBBBBBBOOOOOOOOOOOXXXXXXXXXXX
7:56. Xbox 360 launch stats. 30 countries. 4.5 to 5.5 will be sold by end of June. 4 games per console attach rate (that means Xbox 360 is selling two more games than any other console per console sold).
7:59. Announced that four million Xbox Live subscribers added.
8:01. More games coming.
8:02. HD disks announced? Yes. Later this year. Xbox 360 external HDDVD drive coming.
8:03. There it is again. HDTV. Maryam, you listening?
8:04. Boxing promoter came out. Oh, geez. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates are gonna play an Xbox boxing game together on stage. The crowd here is eating this stuff up!
8:08. BillG beat SteveB. The replays are pretty gruesome. Knockout! New EA game, Fight Night Round 3, here’s what they were playing. Wow, Xbox Live is immediately pushing out a demo for people who have Xbox 360s to try out. That’s cool.
8:11. It’s over…