Business

In an effort to try to re-balance the near-blanket distribution of Microsoft’s Media player, RealNetworks and Intel have signed a deal to have it’s player software distributed on the driver CD that comes with some new Intel motherboards. It appears to only be for two motherboards and strangely they only support Pentium III and Celeron processors – strange as video playback results get much better the more powerful the processor.Industry analysts are split on the value of the deal with the detractors wondering if the system builders will actually install the software.Real have done lots of deals like this in the past, where the headline sounds really impressive but when you look at the detail, its value is diminished. One that springs to mind is their announcement that they were to provide their media player to Nokia. Closer examination showed they had signed a deal to provide the player for only one of their handsets.

Tucked away in BT’s disclosure last week on its progress to roll-out broadband to the UK was the fact that it had failed to hit the projected number of users for its own BT Openworld service. Clearly something needed to be done so they have inked a deal with Yahoo in the UK to re-launch as BT Yahoo. BT has finally realised that they don’t have the talent to licence or commission content so will rely on Yahoo’s substantial content library hoping this attract new users.

With WiFi still being a current buzz, here’s a sobering thought. A Sony SVP (Senior Vice President) told me recently that they understood that 60% of all wireless equipment that was bought at retail for home usage was returned. The reason is that it’s just too complicated install, even for people with technical skills. Now that’s not an economical business for anyone not the equipment producers or the retailers – and not only that but it creating a set of disenchanted easily adopters, who are the very people you need to be evangelising.Until the use of equipment is as easy as using an FM radio – place it down, turn it on and listen – this stuff isn’t going to be mass market.

The first product to come out from the TiVo/Toshiba deal, the Toshiba SD-H400, has been announced which combines a PVR and DVD player.

They have also used this opportunity to announce their TiVo Basic service. This free, non-subscription service is a cut-down version of the normal TiVo service, that only looks forward three days rather the normal fourteen days and cuts out features such as the ability to auto-record a TV show based on it’s actors or director. TiVo’s monthly subscription has often been held up as a reason that the public has been hesitant about jumping on to PVR’s.

TiVo has named Martin Yudkovitz as president. Previously he was at NBC for twenty years and leaves there as an executive vice president, so they’re clearly hoping that his address book will help them gain further acceptance with the US broadcasters.

“Yudkovitz will be responsible for driving deployment of TiVo through satellite, cable and advertising partnerships. Tivo said he will also focus on helping television networks and other content makers develop paid programming for its DVR service.”

Amazingly the RIAA is suing four US college student for running closed file-sharing networks on campus. It isn’t currently clear how the RIAA gained access to private on-campus networks.

Many commentators thought the RIAA wouldn’t take action against people from the market that actually spend huge amount of money with the record companies currently. The thinking being that you don’t attack your customers base.

Interestingly, one of the accussed, Aaron Sherman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was co-author of a paper entitled “Efficient Solutions for Peer to Peer Resource Discovery on Local Area Networks” [doc] near the end of last year. His particular contribution was software called FlatLan. There are some interesting quotes from the document

FlatLan and Celery were designed as tools to locate files on a network, and were not designed to break Copyright laws. Although there are Copyrighted materials shared on the network, there are also many files created by students that are meant for free distribution.

and

As of now the RIAA has not contacted anyone from Phynd, Celery, or FlatLan to discuss the issue further

It’s clear from this that Sherman was researching filesharing networks and was concerned with the efficiency with large numbers of music files and explicity references 1,000,000 files

At 1,000,000 files shared, and each file (file name, path, size, date) taking an average of 86 bytes, it takes 86,000,000 bytes per index of the RPI network.

which was, possibily by co-incidence, the number mentioned in the news report as the largest number of files found on one network.

I hope the RIAA hasn’t gone in and stomped all over a student who was just carrying out a research project – they really would look pretty silly.

Sad news as SonicBlue file for Chapter 11. In my view they were singularly the most progressive thinking company in the digital media space, with features like Ethernet ports on their PVR, ReplayTV, from the very beginning.

It’s not all bad news, as D&M Holdings, which in turn owns Denon & Marantz, has bought their ReplayTV and Rio business units for $40 million. One worry is that these products will be taken to the high-end and not remain at their currently generally affordable levels.

While in the US last week, I was trying to arrange a meeting with Jim Hollingsworth (Vice President of Marketing and Connected Products) to discuss their involvement in IBC. Now I know why he didn’t call me back.

Short bio on Ken Kutaragi is the person that Nobuyuki Idei, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sony Corporation calls “our Steve Jobs”.

Astonishingly, Microsoft appear to be trying to buy another market, in the same way that got them in trouble with the US DOJ. This time it’s video.

Having effectively dismissed their one time competitor, Real Networks, MS now has bigger fish to fry – the future of digital delivery of media to consumers.

The current and fairly long-running excitement with MPEG-4 compression as the standard for consumer delivery looks like it might have a challenger and strangely its from a prominent member of its own standards steering committee.

My understanding from the Gartner research [PDF] is that licensing the MS version of MPEG-4, Microsoft Media 9, is less expensive than licensing the official version. If this is correct, it’s not only strange, it’s madness.

How can you undercut an open standard? – there’s got to be something wrong with picture (pun intended).