Month: October 2004

Coral Cross-Industry Group to Address DRM Interoperability

Well, I must say I’m pleased at the announcement – let’s hope it comes to something: seven major technology and media companies have come together to form the Coral Consortium, with the objective of promoting interoperability amongst the competing digital rights management systems in the market. Coral has been founded by HP, Intertrust Technologies Corporation, Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, Sony Corporation and Twentieth Century Film Corp.

Fragmented DRM systems are threatening to dull the public’s enthusiasm for digital media as they discover that they can’t play files that they’ve bought the rights to on all of their devices or can’t transfer music and video to their new PC because of license incompatibilities.

The group aims to ensure interoperability between standards and systems so that consumers will be able to access their digital media easily – however, they won’t be doing this by making DRM systems compatible. They plan to do this by introducing a new technology layer that will allow DRM systems to co-exist, and by publishing a set of specifications based around interoperability. Their ambition is to make the whole process transparent to the end user, so that they don’t realise what’s going on under the hood.

“The classic approach to solving the interoperability problem is to either use a single proprietary platform for media distribution, or to standardize a common content protection and management technology,” said Jack Lacy, Coral Consortium’s president and Intertrust’s SVP of Standards and Community Initiatives. “Consumers typically just want to buy, play, and use content in an intuitive manner and do not want to dwell on differences between esoteric technology features. Coral aims to provide them with such functionality and ease of use.”

Coral

Web 2.0 Conference

More than 50 thought-leaders and entrepreneurs are slated to present in an interactive format stressing audience participation. Recent additions include Andrew Anker of Six Apart, Brendan Eich of Mozilla, Steve Berkowitz of Ask Jeeves, Trip Hawkins of Digital Chocolate, Charlie Hoffman of Covad, Joe Kraus of Jot, and Michael Weiss of Streamcast. Hotel Nikko, San Francisco http://www.web2con.com/

Sony Japan Rethinks Copy-Protected CDs

Sony has dropped copy protection from their CD range, as they believe they’ve educated the public not to make illegal copies – and that only a small proportion of people made the copies in the first place. So, if this is the case they won’t be introducing another form of copy protection later on, then? Sony had previously been amongst the most enthusiastic proponents of copy protection in the market and indeed only recently decided to support the protection-free MP3 format in their range of digital players.

My guess is of course that Sony are giving in to market pressure – piracy is still robbing artists of millions of euros every year but restrictive copy-protection turns the public off and harms revenues too. Sony has looked at the popularity of the iPod and other MP3 players, seen that it wasn’t the end of the world for recorded music and decided to jump on the bandwagon. Neatly avoiding potential legal action at the same time. Now, in order to avoid legal threats and criticism from its customers, Sony will supply all CDs after 17th November without copy protection.

Sony’s copy protection system was unpopular with the public as it sometimes prevented CDs from playing in a range of devices, such as car stereos, and also infringed some citizens’ legal rights to make copies of purchased media for personal use. The copy-protected CDs are not strictly CDs, and incorporate a technology for preventing computers from ripping the music on the disk, but contain a compressed and DRM’d version of the music for use on music players and PCs.

A guide to CD copy-protection schemes

Vivisimo’s Clusty Takes on Google

Search engine company Vivisimo have launched the beta of their new Clusty search engine, and it’s open to the public to try out.

Clusty’s main selling point is that it clusters results into separate categories, hopefully making it easier for users to sift through searches that return hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of results. For example, a search run today for Kubrick returned 182 initial results – but Clusty split those for me into ten categories, including Film-maker, Space Odyssey and DVD. More categories were available if I wanted them, and could be applied to the entire 200,000+ results returned.

Vivisimo have gone for the current fashion of a simple, uncluttered search page, though there is something about it that says “Ask Jeeves” to me. The search box itself has a a row of tabs across the top, allowing users to search for different formats of information, including News, Images, Shopping and, a new one, Gossip.

As search engine catalogues get bigger and, inevitably, more the same, the big brand search engines need to provide a unique benefit or reason for people to stay loyal. Hence the recent introduction of new features such thumbnail views of web pages, multimedia searching and new ways of navigating the millions of results returned. Whilst Clusty acquires its search results themselves from a number of other engines, Vivisimo’s clustering technology is proprietary and is fully automated – no maintenance is required and the company claims that it can cluster any type of textual information with little or no customisation.

The clustering feature is interesting – but is it really enough to distinguish it from Google? And without patenting the concept, what’s to stop Google from developing its own clustering technology and staying out in front? Or just licensing it? However, Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo is sure it’s enough to win them new fans.

“The success of today’s search technology has left users awash in information,” he said, “The net result is that users cannot or will not wade through all of the options a search engine offers up. The fast and friendly Clusty.com puts users back in control and ensures that they truly know the full extent of resources that are available to them in the vast online world. Clusty also helps them zero in on what they were looking for and, often, leads them to discover new things along the way.”

Try Clusty for yourself

Palm’s T5

Palm have announced the latest in their popular line of PDAs – the T5. There have been months and months of speculation over what features the T5, may or may not have, but the most interesting thing about the new handheld is its memory configuration.

The T5 is built around 256mb of Flash memory – 215mb is available to the user: 55mb is system memory, leaving 160mb for storage. As it’s Flash memory, data is much safer from sudden hard resets or the occasional month away from a power socket. Palm are clearly capitalising on the success of USB key drives and their ability to carry large amounts of documents between the home and the office. No doubt security managers everywhere will be shaking their heads in woe again.

The PDA runs PalmOS5.4, and whilst it features the T3 320 x 480 screen, there is no slider on the new model. Cunningly, there is a little groove where the screen might have slid apart, though this might just baffle some people.

No WiFi (that caught a few people out), but Bluetooth is still in – expect a WiFi SDIO card in due course. Street price is about US$399 (€322).

Palm T5

Loudeye Launch Mobile Music Service in Norway

Loudeye and USArtPhone have launched a subscription-free mobile music service in Norway. Customers can buy music directly from their handsets, paying through their usual mobile bill. The bad news is that the tracks aren’t delivered to your phone – you need to get to your PC to access them. However, it’s a handy way for labels and music stores to sell content to people who don’t have credit cards – like the under 18s and insane.

The service, branded Mobster, will be available to all 4 million mobile customers in Norway, but Loudeye plan to roll the service out across Europe.

The service is simple for the user and requires only that they send a text message to a special number. The user is then sent an email with a URL in it linking to the file they have bought.

“We’re very excited to be able to announce this new technology in what is rapidly becoming one of the world’s biggest industries – digital music distribution,” said USArtPhone founder and CEO, Sverre Fjeldheim. “Over the past five years we’ve seen a completely transformative use of the mobile phone for much more than just verbal communication. Consumers are taking and sharing photos, text messaging and using the web, and through this announcement today, they will be purchasing digital music directly from their mobile handset. We believe this evolution will continue and mobile phone functionality will expand to include many interesting business models in the future.”

Hopefully that functionality will expand to being able to download Loudeye-licensed music directly to mobile phones for playback and storage.

Loudeye

Microsoft FAT Patent Claim “Bogus”

Microsoft’s patent on the File Allocation Table disk format has been rejected by the US Patent Office, on the grounds that it should never have been granted in the first place. The Patent Office has ruled that, although the patent was granted in 1996 and is not due to expire until 2013, the technology was obvious and there was prior art. Two big no-nos if you want to register a patent, basically.

The re-examination was prompted by the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), a non-profit legal services organisation that aims to protect the public from miss-use of the patent system.

Although first introduced in 1982, and largely superceeded by file formats like NTFS, the decision is a blow to Microsoft. FAT is currently enjoying an extended lifespan because it is used in Flash memory cards and by Linux to read DOS and Windows drives, and Microsoft were using the patent as a revenue stream by charging a licensing fee to those who wanted to use the technology. If you buy a Lexar Flash card for your camera, US$0.25 (€0.20) of the cost is for the FAT technology.

Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT’s executive director said: “The Patent Office has simply confirmed what we already knew for some time now, Microsoft’s FAT patent is bogus. I hope those companies that chose to take a license from Microsoft for the patent negotiated refund clauses so that they can get their money back.”

Microsoft have 90 days to put their side of the story forward or lose the patent claim altogether.

Public Patent Foundation

Ofcom: A New Framework for Public Service Broadcasting

Ofcom, the UK communications regulator has published the second phase of their review of public service broadcasting. Their review contains a number of proposals intended to enhance and strengthen public broadcasting in the UK to ensure that it is not damaged by the country’s transition to a multichannel, digital market. Ofcom are also keen that the public’s subsidy of the TV market, currently standing at around UK£3 billion (€4.35 billion) should not increase.

The frame work has seven proposals and includes:

  • Supporting a independent, fully-funded public BBC
  • Channel 4 to remain as a non-profit free to air broadcaster capable of entering alliances and joint partnerships with other organisations.
  • A competition to run a new Public Service Publisher using new technologies and distribution systems to meet audience needs – though the BBC is obviously disqualified from entering.

The closing date for responses to the Ofcom report is 24th November 2004, though the review will not be completed until after Phase 3 is published.

Ofcom’s report

Disney and Intel to Launch “Mickey Symphony”

Disney and Intel are to launch an interesting broadband content service in Japan – an interactive version of some segments form Fantasia 2000. The three initial sections are “Pomp and Circumstances”. “Rhapsody in Blue” and, always a favourite, “Carnival of Animals”.

Users will be able to enjoy interactive special effects, arrange the scenes’ backgrounds, and dance with Donald and Daisy. Which can’t be too bad. There’s a preview that I’ve linked to below – though when they say broadband, they mean broadband: it takes ages to load.

Though currently rather limited in scope, the product hints at what Disney might be able to offer in the future with its rich range of intellectual property.

Koji Hoshino, President of Walt Disney Japan said: “As a leading media company, Disney is committed to delivering content which satisfies a broad range of consumer demands utilizing new technologies … The achievement with Mickey Symphony has taken us to a new level of content creation and distribution. Intel and Disney, leaders in technology and media respectively, joined forces to create this milestone product in Japan and expect to continue further expansion of our collaborative relationship.”

Disney believe that this will be just the first of many such products, and that it will act as a catalyst for increasing public demand for broadband content and services.

Have a look at Mickey Symphony

Jupiter Research: The CD Will Be With Us for a While Yet

A new report from Jupiter Research describes the European music market in 2009 – and shows there there’s still plenty of life in the CD format yet.

Jupiter estimate that the entire market will be worth €10.2 billion (US$12.55 billion), with digital downloads accounting for a mere €836 million (US$1.03 billion) or 8% of the total. Growth for digital music services such a s downloads and streaming has been increasing rapidly, from €10.6 (US$13.16) million in 2003 to an estimated €46.3 million (US$57.50)at the end of this year.

Jupiter claim that the CD will remain the format of choice for a long time yet. Recent attempts at revising the format with extra features and gimmicks have shown that the CD of 2009 may be slightly different from those in the shops in 2004. Copy protection techniques may have moved on by then, though news this week that Sony has dropped copy-protected CDs in Japan show that a rethink on this technology is due.

“Although Europe’s digital music market has finally begun to take off after a sluggish start, it will remain a relatively niche market, considering the total European music market in 2009 will be €10.2 billion. Even with the success of the new services, digital music spending will make up less than a half of a percent of Europe’s total music market at the end of 2004,” stated Mark Mulligan, Research Director at Jupiter Research. “In the context of successive years of declining music sales, digital music distribution will be an important alternative revenue channel for the music industry but it is not about to replace the CD,” added Mulligan.

Jupiter Research