Encapsulation of a recent consumer research effort we conducted at One Touch Intelligence. This report was published by Jack Myers and crew at MediaBizBloggers.

Internet video usage: a tale of two communities

Stewart Schley – One Touch Intelligence

“There are basically two types of people,” observed Mark Twain. “People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”

That’s downright pithy. But it’s just one in a long list of “two kinds of people” quotations. Another, and a personal favorite, goes like this: “There are two kinds of people in the world: People who believe there are two kinds of people in the world, and people who don’t.”

But seriously, in the world of Internet video, there really are two kinds of people: those who watch TV shows and movies online, and those who don’t. Increasingly, it’s the former camp that’s getting deserved attention as a range of video industry participants get excited, or worried (or both) about a changing environment for receiving television programming. Read the rest of this entry »

Call me Mr. Buzzkill, but I’m not buying the supposed consumer rush to 3D television. This post I wrote for MediaBizBloggers explains why.

3D TV: a post-CES perspective

Stewart Schley – One Touch Intelligence

The 3D mania pouring forth from January’s Consumer Electronics Show has subsided enough to allow entertainment industry executives room to consider something the nascent 3D medium itself promises to deliver: perspective.

While it’s true (and exciting) to realize that 30 motion pictures will be shot and produced in 3D this year, from a living-room television standpoint the hype over 3D must now give way to the slow grind of progress. Even though a constellation of disparate industry participants (studios, TV networks, video distributors and electronics manufacturers) is aligned in support of 3D at large, the economics and adoption rates associated with the medium remain very much in question, in our view. And as our recent White Paper, 3D Entertainment: Dimensions of an Emerging Market points out, much work remains to be done to vault 3D video technology into the consumer mainstream. Read the rest of this entry »

College football’s season of realignment means big changes for the University of Colorado, which once tore through the Big 8 with a running attack tailor-made for the hard-nosed conference. Here’s my SportsBiz column on the subject from ColoradoBiz magazine, July 2010:

CU’s Pacific heights

By Stewart Schley

As the football coach at the University of Colorado in the 1980s, Bill McCartney invented a powerful offensive weapon: the T-bone.

The four-man backfield attack was a variation on the wishbone formation that had been sharpened to perfection by Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma Sooners, and it was ideal for the Big 8 Conference, where winning in early November, in the biting fourth-quarter winds of Norman and Lincoln and Stillwater, meant you had to know how to run the ball. Read the rest of this entry »

This “Memory Lane” column from CED Magazine, July 2010 channels the ghosts of movie theater owners past to argue that new media creations tend to supplement, not kill off, their predecessors.

Substitute this!
By Stewart Schley

In the early 1950s, as it began to become apparent that a new medium called television was going to stick around awhile, movie theater owners and radio station operators came to the same conclusion: they were doomed. Read the rest of this entry »

From the May 2010 issue of the nicely redesigned Denver Magazine, which is becoming a pretty interesting read these days.

He’s Got Game

From Denver Magazine, May 2010

During a tense scene in Army 360, the new Russell Phelps movie, a seemingly friendly Afghan villager offers an extraordinary gift to a U.S. Army officer: a finely crafted scimitar that has been handed down for generations. But seconds before the officer can accept the sword, the villager’s brother erupts in anger, shouting that the stranger is an undeserving intruder. Dimly lit, with shadows suggesting an undercurrent of menace, the moment crackles with tension and a possibility of violence.

It’s good filmmaking, but you’ll never see it at the multiplex or on Blu-ray. That’s because Phelps isn’t a Hollywood film director, and Army 360 isn’t a feature film. It’s a simulation program played over personal computers and produced by InVism, Inc., the Greenwood Village company Phelps founded. Read the rest of this entry »

There are more than 50,000 season-ticket holders for The Denver Broncos. But I’m no longer one of them. This ColoradoBiz column explains why. Sort of.

SportsBiz: Calling it quits

From ColoradoBiz, April 2010

There won’t be a teary press conference. No jersey will be retired. You won’t see a new name unveiled on the Ring of Fame this fall. But yes, the rumors are true. I have retired as a Denver Broncos season ticket holder. Read the rest of this entry »

Klaus Obermeyer, founder of an Aspen, Colo. sportswear company bearing his name, is 90 years old this winter. And he can beat you or me down the mountain any day. Had a chance to visit him earlier this year…here’s the column from ColoradoBiz.

SportsBiz: Aspen’s Better Man

From ColoradoBiz Magazine, February 2010

Klaus Obermeyer, who lives, works and skis in Aspen, wasn’t supposed to end up in Colorado, making clothes for a living. Educated in pre-war Germany as an aeronautical engineer, Obermeyer was supposed to spend his professional life huddling over drafting tables as he puzzled over propulsion theories and celestial mechanics.

But when he came to the U.S. in 1947, the airplane business, post-war and pre-Boeing 707, was in a slump. The only engineers getting hired were rocket scientists.

“I was out of work,” Obermeyer remembers. “And I thought, ‘Well, I can always be a ski instructor.’” Read the rest of this entry »

A recent Memory Lane column for CED Magazine, exploring the enduring link between aliens and the television business.

MEMORY LANE: Did You See That?
By Stewart Schley, Media & Technology writer, Denver, Colo.
CedMagazine.com - December 01, 2009

The 1938 radio drama “War of the Worlds” didn’t just scare the pajamas off of American audiences, it united them. (The audiences, not the pajamas.) Read the rest of this entry »

Hot off the web server: the freshly minted website for The National Cable & Telecommunications Association’s annual Cable Show. I write the copy, (including hand-selected punctuation marks and complimentary spell-checking). An exercise in writing compact, bite-sized snippets for smallish web page footprints.

Look, up in the sky! It’s a torrent of broadband content, flowing to your handheld phone. This White Paper I wrote (along with uber-technologist Randy Fuller) for broadband technology provider Camiant explains why new approaches are needed to manage the flood of data traffic that is transforming cellular communications.