Darknet

TiVo shifts to help Hollywood

NY Times: TiVo Shifts to Help Companies It Once Threatened

Tivo may be getting a second chance by thinking outside the box that made it famous in the first place.

As the company that popularized digital video recorders, TiVo turned time-shifted, commercial-skipping television watching into a verb, only to antagonize the television industry and see cheaper, more generic DVRs undercut its success. Now it is trying to climb into the black by working with the media companies it once threatened and moving away from the hardware that it pioneered.

During the last two weeks, there were several promising developments for TiVo, which accounts for about 4 million of the more than 20 million digital video recorders in American homes. ...

Altered iPhones freeze up

Katie Hafner at the NY Times: Altered iPhones freeze up.

Since the iPhone hit the market in June, tech-savvy owners of the phone have been busy messing with its insides, figuring out how to add unauthorized software and even “unlock” it for use on networks other than AT&T’s.

But the Web was filled Friday with complaints from people who had installed the latest iPhone software update, only to see all the fun little programs they had been adding to their iPhones disappear — or, still worse, see their phones freeze up entirely. ...

Cue the crackdown

From the November issue of Wired, on fine magazine stands everywhere: Cue the crackdown.

It's called camming – sneaking a videocam into a theater to record a bootleg – and the Motion Picture Association of America says it costs the movie biz billions every year. Now the MPAA is cuing the crackdown: It's working with US tech firms on new tools for thwarting pirates and keeping their booty off street corners from Mumbai to Manhattan. In a few years, when you settle in with your popcorn to watch a flick, you'll be watched right back. Here's a sneak preview of anticamming strategies.

SEEK AND DESTROY
What it is » A combination optical scanner and narrow-beam spotlight, small enough to be hidden behind an exit sign or a speaker
How it works » Pans the audience looking for the faint glimmer of a camcorder's lens and blasts it with a beam of white light

HYPNO-BLOCKER
What it is » Patterns added while processing or projecting the movie, invisible to the eye
How it works » Produces "psychovisual" illusions – spinning concentric circles, moiré patterns – that become visible in recordings. Aghhh! Shut it off!

PULSE WEAPON
What it is » A speaker-shaped box mounted behind the screen
How it works » Periodically emits a pulse of infrared light, which doesn't disrupt the movie but ruins camera images

WATCHMEN
What it is » A squad of security guards equipped with night-vision goggles
How it works » Creeps everyone out by marching through theaters to look for videocams during screenings for the press or Hollywood insiders

SCOFFLAW TRACKER
What it is » Watermarks added to the movie in real time during a digital projection
How it works » Stormtroopers decrypt the embedded code to reveal the time and theater at which the copy was made (helpful if theater employees did the bootlegging)

SNEAK ATTACK
What it is » Extra frames – with text reading "Busted!" or something equally clever – inserted into the movie print
How it works » Flickers faster than the eye can register but shows up on a digital recording

The big gamble on e-voting

Sunday NY Times: The Big Gamble on Electronic Voting. Diebold declines to let Princeton researchers test the latest voting machine, which uses a standard industrial part to protect the door to its memory card slot. I quoted Felten in "Darknet" about black boxes. Here's an excerpt from the Times article:

Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton, and his student collaborators conducted a demonstration with an AccuVote TS and noticed that the key to the machine’s memory card slot appeared to be similar to one that a staff member had at home.

When he brought the key into the office and tried it, the door protecting the AccuVote’s memory card slot swung open obligingly. Upon examination, the key turned out to be a standard industrial part used in simple locks for office furniture, computer cases, jukeboxes — and hotel minibars.

Once the memory card slot was accessible, how difficult would it be to introduce malicious software that could manipulate vote tallies? That is one of the questions that Professor Felten and two of his students, Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Haldeman, have been investigating. In the face of Diebold’s refusal to let scientists test the AccuVote, the Princeton team got its hands on a machine only with the help of a third party. ...

Corporations mull how to disable your remote control

Randall Stross in the Sunday New York Times: Someone Has to Pay for TV. But Who? And How?

THEY will take my remote control away only when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

This thought followed my first reading of a patent application for a new kind of television set and digital video recorder recently filed by a unit of Royal Philips Electronics at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The design appears to threaten the inalienable right to channel-surf during commercials or fast-forward through ads in programs you've taped.

A second, calmer reading of the patent application revealed that the proposed design would uphold the right to avoid commercials, but only for those who paid a fee. Those disinclined to pay would be prevented from changing channels during commercials. If the viewer tried to circumvent the system by recording the program and skipping the ads during playback, the new, improved recorder would detect when a commercial segment was being displayed and disable the fast-forward button for the duration.

As a business proposition, the concept appears dead on arrival: what consumer would voluntarily buy a television designed to charge fees for using it? When I spoke last week with Ruud Peters, the executive in charge of intellectual property at Philips, to learn how it would be pitched to consumers, he explained that the patent application had no connection to any Philips products in the pipeline. And, he explained, the notion of temporarily crippling the remote control to protect advertising is already out there and did not originate with his company.

But limiting remote controls is a possibility that could be realized in a new technical standard — M.H.P., for multimedia home standard — that the television industry is contemplating for the future. Neither broadcasters nor television manufacturers, whose joint cooperation would be necessary, have yet to adopt the standard. If the television industry embraced M.H.P., broadcasters could insert special signals to immobilize the remote control during commercials. If this came to pass, Mr. Peters said the Philips technology would "give consumers the freedom of choice" — "freedom" defined as exercising the option to pay a fee in order to regain the use of the remote control. ...

Worried? Try an encrypted bubble

p2pnet.net: Worried about the copyright police? Try an encrypted bubble.

Courts need to tread lightly in patent cases

Op-ed piece in today's San Jose Mercury News: Patent-infringement remedy needs Supreme Court tuneup. Excerpt:

A single computer produced by Dell or Hewlett-Packard or IBM may include thousands of patented hardware components licensed from others. A single computer chip set manufactured by Intel or AMD may involve more than 100,000 individual patents -- many which are licensed from third parties.

What the recent court decisions fail to consider is the impact of an injunction on a key component on the hundreds -- or thousands -- of other component manufacturers whose patented intellectual property is tied up in the complex product that the plaintiff seeks to pull off the shelf.

These innocent component manufacturers and their employees have done nothing wrong, but all pay a heavy economic price. Every student of litigation abuse knows that an injunction preventing the sale of the final product could be a corporate death sentence for these other component manufacturers. ...

Annotating rich media

A videoblogger named Robert says, "Imagine how cool it would be to have everyone's annotation of video and audio media in a searchable database."

It should begin happenning by next year.

Exhibit A: The BBC Annotatable Audio project.

The project we undertook was focused on Annotatable Audio (specifically, but not exclusively, of BBC radio programming) - and we decided to look in an unorthodox direction - towards the possibilities of user-created annotation and metadata. We decided that we wanted to develop an interface that might allow the collective articulation of what a programme or speech or piece of music was about and how it could be divided up and described. Our first ideas looked for approaches similar to del.icio.us, Flickr or our own Phonetags - which create collective value by accreting the numerous annotations that individuals make for their own purposes. But after a fascinating discussion with Jimmy Wales, we decided to think about this in a different way - in which (just like Wikipedia) individuals would overtly cooperate to create something greater and more authoritative.

Exhibit B: At the Open Media Developers Summit on Oct. 20, some of the members of NYU's ITP program described their work with "video comments," a system that allows users to add comments to a specific point in a video. They moved from videoblogs, I believe, over to live chats, where a Java applet embedded within a QuickTime player let them attached comments to live chats via a time code.

I think that a non-chat environment will make better use of this technology, however.

Exhibit C: Ourmedia has on its roadmap what we're calling a rich media clipping service (regular people don't use the word "annotation"). It would allow bloggers (or anyone) to link to segments -- clips -- within an audio file or video. We've been in discussions with tech journalist Jon Udell (who has described the idea in his writings) and Doug Kaye about it, and hope to get some momentum going on the project in the coming weeks. (If you're a coder who'd like to help out on this open-source project, contact me.)

It's going to happen.

Later: Related to all this somehow: Interclipper, a real-time video organizer for the PC. Doesn't look like a social media tool, however.

Web, DVDs could mark CDs' slow death

Washington Post: Web, DVDs Could Mark CDs' Slow Death.

Why online commons are besting the mainstream media

From the ever-thoughtful author-blogger David Bollier at OntheCommons.org:

When I look at the online world these days, I feel like I’m watching one of those old nature films in which an unseen narrator excitedly whispers as a baby bird miraculously pecks its way through the eggshell and announces itself to the world. Who is this fragile new creature? I feel the same sense of amazement as I contemplate the new modes of expression made possible by digital technologies. What is this podcasting, this video-blogging and these new public-domain repositories?

Here’s my excited narrator’s whisper: A lot of new media genres seem to be empowering individuals by providing them with a lightweight commons infrastructure. Unlike today’s media market – our brain-dead NYC-LA axis of TV, radio and film that cranks out sensational junk/product to mass demographics – the new online commons are soaring because they tend to be more efficient, versatile, responsive and socially authentic as modes of communications. They’re out-competing the market! ...

As we are able to capture more of our socially created value through commons (blogs, wikis, webcasts, open source, etc.), we are forcing the mass media to re-tool its business models in order to compete with the strange new forms of non-market value-creation. Can they do it? What sorts of “value-added” service will they excel in?

Hollywood's visionary outcast

As part of the weekly publication of an excerpt, interview or new material here from Darknet, I'll try something new this week. I'll publish the excerpt to Ourmedia rather than here on my blog.

"Hollywood's visionary outcast" (Ourmedia page | direct link to file on Internet Archive) is part of chapter 8, which is all about personal broadcasting (a term that also came up in my interview with the CEO of Sling Media on Engadget today).

Hollywood's visionary outcast is Warren Lieberfarb (above), the former head of Warner Home Video and the father of the DVD. Excerpt:

Lieberfarb is that rarest of birds: a longtime major player in Hollywood who has joined the tradition-smashing, innovation-addicted tech world. As a key consultant to the Microsoft team working on home entertainment technologies, he is putting together program ideas for an Internet that will become an increasing source of secure, full-motion, full-screen video procured from a wide range of new, independent voices.

"All this is going to bypass the broadcast and cable networks," he says. "The whole notion that you sit at a television at a designated time and you tune in to watch what they say you watch--it's over. It's going to take a while, but it's over."

Just as the Internet and the proliferation of low-cost digital tools have reshaped other media, the new technologies will transform our notion of television. A few years from now, when you say "television," it may no longer be synonymous with the box in your living room because you will also be watching it on your handheld mobile device or tablet PC. "What's on TV" may no longer be synonymous with network and cable programming because you'll be able to access video feeds from a wide range of new content providers. When you do watch television in your living room, you'll still wield a remote control, but you'll be watching it on a standalone digital box or one that's hooked up to a media-center device or wirelessly connected to a PC, giving you the power to pull niche content from a gushing fire hose of sources.

"People are going to discover that content doesn't have to be produced by the major media companies," Lieberfarb says. ...

Slingbox could spark new lawsuits

Hollywood Reporter today: Slingbox could spark new lawsuits

Days after the Supreme Court weighed in on digital copyright infringement issues in the MGM v. Grokster case, select consumer electronics chains began stocking a product some predict could spark the entertainment industry's next showdown over intellectual property rights.

New to the shelves of Best Buy and CompUSA this month is Slingbox, a brick-sized device that enables viewers to route the live television signal coming into their homes to a portable device anywhere on the globe via broadband connection. Slingbox costs $250 and has no subsequent subscription fee; several stores sold out on the first day.

Created by San Mateo, Calif.-based company Sling Media, Slingbox is the most prominent example of a handful of new ventures trying to repeat what TiVo achieved through time-shifting with technology capable of what loosely is referred to as place-shifting. Leading place-shifting firms even have drawn interest from cable operators interested in potential partnerships.

But a mechanism that transplants a live video feed also could potentially relocate its marketers to a federal courtroom, where they could raise questions about content transmission. ...

Place-shifting is problematic to many copyright holders because it sidesteps what is known in legalese as proximity control, which restricts the distribution of content to specific regions and times. It's a standard contractual stipulation for the MPAA, whose member studios license distribution rights to movies for distinct territories; the NFL, which considers geographic limits the linchpin of lucrative television deals, including its Sunday Ticket pact with DirecTV; and local television stations, which pony up millions of dollars for exclusive territorial rights to all kinds of programming.

"Slingbox is one manifestation of what we assume will be a cascade of similar products that are meant to manipulate our signals in ways that we think will be harmful to the network-affiliate business, if not the law," CBS executive vp Martin Franks said.

Putting aside the piracy risks, place-shifting critics offer plenty of scenarios that put the technology in murky legal territory.

Two Slingbox subscribers could send each other programming unavailable in their respective areas; an East Coast viewer could stream "Survivor" to the West Coast three hours early. The West Coast viewer could return the favor by providing access to a premium channel the East Coast viewer doesn't pay to receive.

Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian knows full well the implications of his product. Mindful of the backlash that derailed Napster, he and rival executives have been busy reaching out to various sectors of the entertainment world in hopes of educating and collaborating. He envisions a host of new revenue opportunities for content owners but realizes Slingbox requires an industrywide paradigm shift.

"The Internet has changed the meaning of what proximity and geography is," Krikorian said. "Hollywood needs to step up and deal with it. If it's disrupting existing business relations, we need to figure out how the next business models evolve that make it a win-win for the consumer and the industry."

Krikorian is a Silicon Valley veteran whose love of baseball spurred him to develop Slingbox; he just wanted to catch live broadcasts of San Francisco Giants games when he was out of town. Now he could end up redefining "remote control" with a versatile contraption that drew huge buzz at January's Consumer Electronics Show.

"I've seen their product, and it's fantastic," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "To see it is to want it."

Slingbox could have been dubbed Re-DirecTV: It attaches to your cable box (analog or digital), satellite receiver, digital video recorder or directly to the television monitor and diverts the signal to a laptop loaded with Slingbox software. Eventually, Slingbox will be able to transmit to cell phones, PDAs and other portable devices that connect to the Internet.

Slingbox might be ideal for keeping tabs on the Giants while vacationing in Bora Bora, but Krikorian believes the product will be more popular for less far-flung applications like sneaking a peek at daytime soap operas on your office cubicle's desktop.

Slingbox isn't alone in the place-shifting category. There are a few other, more expensive hardware offerings for place-shifters that have found little traction with consumers, including Sony's Location-Free Portable Broadband TV and TV2Me. More market entrants are expected.

The king of time-shifting also is involved in place-shifting, albeit somewhat differently: TiVo's new TiVoToGo offering allows subscribers to send programming to a portable platform. When TiVoToGo was announced, it was denounced by the MPAA and NFL as a copyright violation, but both relented once TiVo agreed that TiVoToGo would only transmit programs that already were recorded.

Slingbox and others can transmit recorded and live programs, which could draw fire from any number of quarters. The MPAA is studying place-shifting technology but has no set course of action.

"We're hopeful Slingbox will incorporate technology that will respect copyright," said Dean Garfield, vp and director of legal affairs at MPAA. "You don't have the authority to retransmit license work without negotiation or authorization."

No media-driven entity is being more zealous in this area than the NFL, which blitzes copyright infringers with the speed of a lottery-pick defensive lineman.

With a little trading of account information, Slingbox subscribers conceivably could make end runs around the NFL's blackout rule, which eliminates the local broadcast of a game that isn't sold out, and Sunday Ticket, the subscription package delivering out-of-market games via DirecTV, which paid the NFL $3.5 billion over five years for exclusive rights through 2010. The NFL declined comment.

Slingbox also could wreak havoc with affiliates by impairing local advertisers, who provide targeted commercials, and syndicators, whose content comes with strings attached related to timing and exclusivity.

"I would be shocked if this were used for commercial purposes and it wouldn't be a copyright problem," said Greg Schmidt, vp development and general counsel at LIN TV Corp., which owns 23 TV stations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

The potential for piracy might be Slingbox's least objectionable attribute. Slingbox does not engage in file sharing; video can't be sent to more than one device at a time. But that comes as small comfort to Franks, who singled out Slingbox as a security concern at CBS' annual affiliates conference last month in Las Vegas.

"Even if you take it at face value that it is a one-to-one transmittal device, I don't think it will be very long before some hacker in Cupertino posts on the Web the way to modify it, the way they modify a TiVo, that turns it into something that can be tapped by 50 people," Franks said.

To Krikorian, place-shifting boils down to a simple principle: Shouldn't the consumer be entitled to view the content they pay for at home elsewhere? It's a revolutionary concept at a time when programmers are eyeing new ancillary revenue streams by charging viewers additionally for each new platform including the Internet and cell phones, where TV content will be repurposed. ...

As usual, this has nothing to do with Internet piracy. It's Hollywood's business models that the copyright holders are frantic to protect.

Thanks to Mark Mc Manus of Dublin, Ireland, for the pointer.

P2P can still thrive after Grokster

My view of the Grokster decision mirrors fairly closely that of BusinessWeek Online. Key passages:

True, much remains to be hammered out by the courts. But the content industry might not like the results. There was little subtlety when it came to Grokster and StreamCast's behavior, making them easy targets for Hollywood & Co. However, the entertainment industry might find itself in an uphill fight should it decide to go the next step and take on companies that operate in a gray area by giving lip service to copyright protection and urging their customers -- with a wink and a nudge -- not to steal. For Hollywood, "this is a pyrrhic victory at best," says Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a group that supported Grokster's side. "P2P will live on." ...

The worst didn't come to pass. Notably absent from the Grokster opinion is any condemnation of file-swapping networks at all. In fact, the court took pains to point out the technology has legitimate uses, including distribution efficiencies for libraries, universities, and governments.

That's great news for the tech sector. The Supreme Court left Betamax intact -- no technology can be held liable for infringing just because it can -- and set a fairly low bar for innovators to clear if they want to keep on the copyright straight and narrow. Companies simply have to play by some basic rules to keep copyright lawyers at bay, such as not advertising their products' capability to infringe.

"They struck a good balance," says Michael A. Malcolm, chairman and CEO of Kaleidescape, a Mountain View (Calif.) company that builds home-viewing systems for DVDs. "The situation with Grokster and StreamCast was pretty egregious. We've always done everything the right way to be a good actor."

I agree -- and have written about the absurdity of the legal assault on innovative tech companies like Kaleidescape. Hollywood's case against such companies just got tougher.

'Ten years of chilled innovation'

BusinessWeek Online has a Q&A with Larry Lessig the day after Grokster came out: Ten Years of Chilled Innovation.

Q: Do you think in fact we'll see a dampening of innovation? A: Yes. Now, I don't think we're going to see tons of litigation. What you're going to see is innovation that's channeled in ways the copyright owners can agree to, or channeled in ways that avoids any kind of possibility of this kind of litigation.

That has already had its effect in the Valley, and already money has shifted into places which will avoid any conflict with the copyright holders. Why buy a lawsuit when you can buy a new innovation that doesn't get you a lawsuit? And you don't even see it -- you don't even know what you don't get because people are afraid. ...

Q: How does the decision make the legal situation less certain for tech companies?
A: Take the number of [Apple (AAPL )] iPods sold and take the number of iTunes songs sold, and divide it, and it's something like 25 songs per iPod. You know there's more than 25 songs on every iPod. Where did people get their music? Well, they rip it from their CDs. Is that legal? Good question. It's not protected by the audio home recording act, which explicitly said you're allowed to make an analog copy of your CD. But [on the iPod], it's a digital copy.

Ask [former Motion Picture Association of America CEO] Jack Valenti or ask the recording industry whether it's fair use to be copying CDs. Well, they don't think it's fair use. So in selling iPods...[Apple is] encouraging CDs to be ripped. If it weren't Apple, which is a relatively strong company, but another company that's starting with this new technology, what would happen if you filed a lawsuit against them? Your lawyer would tell you, you can't afford to fight this.

Q: One might say it's not Apple's strength protecting it, rather that it puts a wrapper on iPods that says "don't steal music," thus indicating a clear intent to discourage infringement.
A: I don't think that's right. Is a warning a sufficient step? Probably not, or at least there's a pretty good question whether it's enough.

Go back to the Sony Betamax case. The Sony Betamax was developed and advertised in a way that they knew they were encouraging certain kinds of behavior [copying movies], over 90% of which was illegal. Would that case have really survived the standard that was announced in Grokster? I don't know.

While I agree with many of Prof. Lessig's points -- including the increasing importance of Creative Commons licenses -- I really do think that Congress would have devised much more onerous legislative relief for the entertainment industries than the court fashioned here.

The subversive idea of DIY

Didn't have time to link to this yesterday ... from Sunday's NY Times op-ed page: A New Magazine's Rebellious Credo: Void the Warranty! A look at Make magazine, a throwback idea about DIY and tinkering that's timely again.

Make is not just a clubhouse for guys with Skittle breath and abbreviated social skills. Beneath all the home-brewed gadgets and cool software tricks lies a sly and subversive agenda. Make, its makers will tell you, is part of a grass-roots rebellion against consumer technology that they say stifles ingenuity by discouraging end-user modification. To these restless minds, increasingly sophisticated consumer products have forced users into a kind of stupefied passivity, with nothing to do but replace batteries and update software, to point and click into a zone of blissed-out consumption. Marketers and programmers anticipate our every need with products that are essentially disposable, since there is no way to fix or adapt them when they break or become obsolete. In this world, to tinker - to open the case, to fiddle with wires and see what happens - is to rebel.

Gizmos under threat of extinction

BBC News reports about Gizmos under threat of extinction.

"We hope [the list] will turn more people into activists in these issues and that it will make more people realise that the copyright wars are not just about arcane flags and TV signals," said [EFF attorney Wendy] Seltzer.

What it is about, she added, is making people aware of restrictions being out in place on technologies which could impact what kind of next generation portable MP3 players they can get their hands on.

Weighing TiVo's fortunes

Ed Felten in Freedom to Tinker: Why hasn't TiVo improved? Because it's cozying up too much to Hollywood.

David Pogue in the New York Times: For TiVo, It’s Not Over Yet.

They're both right. Here's Pogue's list of "some of the brilliant features that make a TiVo a TiVo, the features that make it stand head and shoulders over the copycat digital video recorders (DVR’s) provided by, for example, cable companies":

* Retroactive recording. You come home, flip on the TV, and discover that you’re 35 minutes into what looks like a great show. If you have TiVo, you can either rewind into the past (to view what you missed while the TV was off) or even record it, thanks to the TiVo buffer that always stores the most recent 45 minutes of the current channel.

* Wish list. On a TiVo, you can type something—an actor, movie title, anything—that you’re interested in, even if it’s not anywhere in the TV guide. If and when it’s ever broadcast, on any channel at any time, the TiVo will record it for you. ...

* Built-in reaction time. When you’re fast-forwarding through a show [and] you hit Play, it doesn’t begin playing from that point; it begins playing a few seconds before that, with uncanny “it knew what I wanted” accuracy.

* 30-second skip. It’s not a documented trick, but it’s nonetheless a juicy and delicious one. Press the following buttons on the remote while a show is playing back: Select, Play, Select, 3, 0, Select. Now your Advance button is a 30-second skip button. Press the same sequence again to turn off this feature. (You have to re-do this after a power failure.) It’s a much quicker, more precise way to skip ads.

* Season pass. On many DVR’s, you can ask to have a certain show recorded every week automatically—“Desperate Housewives” or whatever. But on a TiVo, you get some important options with that. For example, you can tell the TiVo to record only first-run episodes and not repeats. ...

The point should be clear: when every tiniest aspect of a machine is this deeply, thoroughly considered and intelligently designed, the result is a product that inspires fierce loyalty and makes you only too happy to join the cult.

Absolutely.

Why TiVo matters

Mike Langberg in the San Jose Mercury News (the site is currently down): Competition puts TiVo in precarious position.

What Langberg -- and every other newspaper columnist who has praised digital video recorder technology -- neglects to say is this:

If TiVo goes out of business, you can bet the farm that many of the technological advances and digital freedoms now enjoyed by the public will disappear if the cable and satellite giants are the only ones that decide what features our recording devices will have.

Listeners will pay for digital music

A letter in today's San Jose Mercury News:

Listeners will pay for digital music

While I respect Mike Langberg's opinion (Dec. 10) about the digital music market, I disagree with his belief that paid content can't compete with free.

Video and audio are available at no cost through network television and FM/AM radio. But thriving and profitable cable networks and satellite radio companies show that fans are willing to pay for better, more comprehensive content.

Snocap believes that we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg in the digital music market, and that the possibilities for a new world of digital music distribution are endless. There will always be free content available to those who want to spend the time to find it, but there are many more people who want authorized access to a broad and competitive marketplace offering the largest possible catalog of music without the stigma and risk of using unauthorized file-sharing services.

Shawn Fanning,
Founder and chief strategy officer
Snocap
San Francisco

I'm with Fanning. Give the digital media marketplace a chance. So far, the entertainment companies' efforts have been woefully inadequate.

Her so-called digital life

In today's Wired News, Adam L. Penenberg has this short piece (with little actual commentary) about my friend Mary Hodder (who's organized a blogger dinner for tonight): Her so-called digital life. "Internet consultant Mary Hodder spends most of her life online. She has gone almost entirely digital. It may not be long before you do, too."

Studios endorse new DVD format

San Jose Merc: Studios endorse new DVD format. By late next year, consumers will be able to buy HD DVD players that take full advantage of their digital televisions, offering enhanced sound and five times the picture quality of current DVDs.

They'll also be locked down with industrial-strength encryption. But at least our old DVDs will play on the new machines.

A '24' for cell phones

From Cynopsis:

Fox is producing a spinoff of its drama series '24' that will produced solely for cell phones. Called 24: Conspiracy with characters and actors separate from the television series, will also be produced with 24 episodes, each one minute long, made available on your cell phone weekly. Actually, they aren't being referred to as episodes by Fox, but rather as 'mobisodes' - a term News Corp trademarked per Variety. In the US, 24: Conspiracy will be available to Verizon users and is expected to launch next spring. In the UK however, the cell phone series begins in January, at the same time the series is scheduled to make its 2004-05 season debut where the technology (called 3G) is available sooner via Vodafone.

Death knell sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp

BetaNews: Death knell sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp.

By Nate Mook, BetaNews

November 10, 2004, 1:26 PM

The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned.

Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.

Winamp's demise comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January.

The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent. After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion. Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, It wasn't long until the two ideologies collided.

Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.

Gnutella was unveiled in March 2000, much to the chagrin of an unprepared AOL; executives feared the program would encourage copyright infringement and damage the company's pending merger with Time Warner. AOL quickly clamped down on Gnutella, but not before the software's source code leaked. Gnutella-based alternatives soon followed, igniting a peer-to-peer land grab that has yet to subside.

But AOL knew it had to protect its investment and turn a profit from the freely available Winamp. Frankel and crew found themselves in hot water numerous times, but always escaped with little more than a proverbial slap on the wrist.

However, growing displeasure reached a boiling point with Nullsoft’s unsanctioned release of WASTE -- an encrypted file-sharing network -- in June 2003. Frankel threatened to resign after AOL removed WASTE, but remained with the company long enough to finish Winamp 5.0.

Frankel's departure followed AOL layoffs and the closure of Nullsoft's San Francisco offices in December 2003.

With AOL struggling to stave off declining subscriber numbers and 700 additional layoffs planned for next month, the company’s focus has shifted away from supporting acquisitions such as Winamp.

Despite the somber farewell, Nullsoft's former masterminds are proud of their accomplishments. Winamp helped start a digital audio revolution and boasts an incredible 60 million users per month.

After a disappointing Winamp3, Nullsoft developers returned to the drawing board and completed long-standing goals with the release of Winamp 5.0 in late 2003.

Nullsoft's Shoutcast, which pioneered audio streaming over the Internet, is called "the Net's best secret" by its creator Tom Pepper and has reached 170,000 simultaneous users accounting for 70 million hours of listening each month.

For its part, AOL says it remains committed to Winamp, stating it is "a thriving product that AOL continues to support and will continue to support."

But without those who poured their heart and soul into building the software, Winamp seems destined to meet a fate similar to fellow audio player Sonique, after Lycos saw the departure of its development team. Sonique has stagnated for years, and development ceased altogether last March.

Emerging Media Audiences

Kim Garretson has launched a new blog, Emerging Media Audiences, which looks at the intersection of tech-enabled social networking and emerging media audiences. Kim hopes to intend to invite J-school students to participate in the blog. Excerpt:

The most important content in your life is what you create -- or receive from those closest to you.

Here are the simple but hard questions I've asked over a couple of decades of creating emerging media products: Will new and unfamiliar forms of media find a mass audience, and will a sizeable subset spend enough time consuming enough content for advertisers to see a measureable ROI? The spectacular failures are many, starting with the dreadful ad-supported CD-ROM efforts of the 80's, through the dotbombing of the industry in the 90's.

Today, emerging trends such as "Social Networking" put media storytelling in the hands of the audience. Topics considered also rise from within these continuously-connected network of friends, families and colleagues. Often, at best, content from media companies gets clipped into tiny pieces of microcontent, or memes, and shared within a personal network. And the media and its advertisers never see this audience.

So, can the media industry continue its role as the primary storyteller and influencer of topics considered by an audience? Or, will audiences abandon media properties as we know them today in the future? ...

The 'next big thing' in digital media

CIO Today:

U2 iPod May Lead New Customization Trend. Apple's special-edition U2 iPod may be the precursor of other special-edition models.

Apple Introduces iPod Photo. Apple has unveiled the iPod Photo, which stores and displays digital photos as well as playing music. The $499 device has a 22 x 176 color display and holds up to 25,000 photos, Apple says. Taking your photo collection with you "is the next big thing," predicts Apple's Steve Jobs.