Digital-Lifestyles

Content

Content in its shift to become digital

  • Netflix’s Subscriber Growth

    Netflix have released their latest subscriber numbers, and whilst the company’s user base has certainly grown, the future is certainly in online movie delivery.

    Netflix had 2.23 million subscribers at the end of Q3 2004 – up 73% from 1.29 million on its books at the end of Q3 2003. Only 4% of its current subscriber base are on free trials, and those 96% of paying subs brought in a projected US$21 million in Q3 2004.

    Netflix’s current business model is to rent up to three DVDs at a time to customers via the postal service. With the growth of home broadband, sending films out in the mail evidently has a limited lifespan, and so the company recently partnered with TiVo in a venture to designed to switch the delivery mechanism to online – finally putting the “Net” in “Netflix”.

    However, the company believes that their 25,000 title DVD library still has some legs on it – CFO Barry McCarthy commented in a statement: “Three years ago we shortened the estimated useful life for our DVD rental library from three years to one year. For a young company with limited operating experience, that accounting estimate was management’s best judgement of the useful life of catalogue content at that time. However, with several years of operating history behind us and based on analysis of this historical data, management’s current best judgement of the useful life of catalogue content is three years.”

    SG Cowen and Co. report that things won’t be so simple for Netflix, and that they will face stiff competition from Blockbuster when they go online – Blockbuster’s brand and market share will impact Netflix’s subscriber base, both in its DVD by post and online rental business, over the next few quarters.

    Netflix

  • Yahoo’s Personalised Search

    Yahoo have been fine-tuning their portal and search offering of late, as part of an effort to fend off new rivals and reduce the gap with Google. Their new wheeze is personalised searching – allowing users to save results that they find most useful, attach notes to saved searches and share results with other users via email. Yahoo promise not to harvest submitted email addresses for marketing purposes.

    Saving search results is quite handy, but then if I’m impressed by a page I generally bookmark it anyway, making the save feature less useful. Being able to attach notes to results makes the feature more relevant, but then again being able to export the notes and results to a word processor would make it even better.

    Saved pages go to a MyWeb section in Yahoo, with details on how pages were found in the first place. Users can categorise results to make navigation easier, but as it stands this is just like a slightly more useful version of bookmarking pages. Pages and results that you don’t want can be blocked from future searches, making whittling down answers much easier.

    Links and notes can be shared from MyWeb, though I feel that Yahoo have missed a trick – I would like to see what searches and pages other Yahoo users have stored, and would like to share my information with them – almost like Apple’s iMix feature in their music store. As it stands, I can only email links to people I know and can’t publish my search for other people to use. How much time would you save if you could consult someone else’s tailored search, complete with notes?

    Yahoo’s MySearch

  • BT Bars Scam Diallers… For Now

    BT has responded to the growing problem of rogue telephone diallers by blocking 1,000 premium rate numbers used by the downloaded applets.

    Diallers are generally installed without a computer users knowledge, often through a website or as part of an application or virus. The dialler then replaces the users’ ISP details and instead access the internet using an expensive premium rate number. BT admit that they have dealt with 45,000 complaints from subscribers who have fallen victim to this scam, with another 9,000 cases pending.

    With the offending numbers blocked, diallers will not be able to get through – for the time being. This is only a temporary fix – new diallers are released almost daily and I’m sure it might take somewhere in the region of about a week for someone to come up with a dialler that can check a regularly updated table of numbers that haven’t been blocked yet. Putting BT and its subscribers back where they started.

    Realistically, the only way round this is for concerned subscribers to block access to all premium-rate numbers – which can be inconvenient. BT report that some 1.5 million customers currently use this approach, and the company provides premium-rate number blocking as a free service.

    Gavin Patterson, BT’s group managing director for consumer and venture business said in a statement: “We have taken the decision to block numbers suspected of being associated with diallers as soon as we are alerted to a problem. We have offered free premium rate barring to all customers, and a removable bar for premium rate and international calls for UK£1.75 (€2.54)a month. We have made it clear that we are not the ones profiteering from people’s misfortune. In fact, we will continue to forego our share of the call revenue generated by these disputed calls.

    “We will be emailing all of our dial-up customers again to give them advice on how to avoid falling victim to a dialler, because customers need to take action as well to protect themselves, as we believe many cases aren’t fraud but are due to a lack of awareness from customers. In fact, we are seeing that many cases are cleared up when we explain where these charges have come from, which underlines our view that there needs to be greater awareness of how these services operate.”

    BT comment on diallers

  • Sony’s Vaio Type X Media Centre

    Sony have launched their latest convergent device onto the Japanese market – a digital media centre for the home with huge storage and potential. The Vaio Type X is essentially a PC with four 250Gb hard drives and seven television tuners in it, though “only” 500Gb is available for PVR functions. This means that lucky Japanese owners can record everything that’s broadcast on the country’s seven network stations all week, and then just delete the shows they’re not interested in. This brings timeshifting television into an entirely different phase with consumers selecting what they don’t want to watch, rather than what they do want.

    Recorded programmes are presented in a thumbnail view, so that users can visually select what they want to watch – Sony call this the Time Machine View, and content can be sorted in a number for ways, chronologically or by genre for example.

    The Vaio Type X has two tuner cards with three analogue tuners each – plus an integrated tuner on the main board itself. A digital tuner is an optional extra.

    The other 500Gb is for the PC part of the Vaio X, based around a 3.6Ghz P4 with 1 gig of RAM and an ATI Radeon X600XT video card.

    Sadly, Sony have no plans to market the Vaio X outside Japan, so we will have to wait to see what they have planned for the international market.

    The Vaio Type X

  • BPI to Sue UK Filesharers

    The British Phonographic Industry is about to begin action against illegal filesharers in the UK. The BPI has observed that similar programmes, notably the RIAA’s own action in the US, have worked in other countries and intends to crack down on Britain’s music pirates as early as this month. The rapid rise in broadband adoption in the UK has also spurred them into action before the problem gets out of control.

    The BPI will be following a 15/75 rule in which individuals they sue – they believe that 75% of all infringing files on the internet are being shared by just 15% of the file sharing population.

    A BPI spokesman, told NME.com: “There are a small percentage of hardcore internet users who are uploading material regardless of its illegality. It would appear that litigation is the only way to deter them. It’s becoming pretty obvious that litigation needs to be there as a deterrent.”

    We have a call in with the BPI and will bring you more information from them as soon as we have it.

    The BPI

    NME

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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