Digital-Lifestyles

Content

Content in its shift to become digital

  • Google IPO: Let the Backlash Begin

    Google may have chose a bad time for its IPO – the market for technology stocks is slowing and companies like Nanosys are cancelling their own offerings.

    Analysts believe that members of the public will invest in Google because of the brand, and the Dutch auction scheme has a populist appeal. Indeed, the New York Times has even reported that Jerry Kaplan, has warned his mother not to buy Google stock. Many institutions are taking the tried and trusted “wait and see” approach.

    With MSN breathing down Google’s neck with new features and Windows integration, they have tough times ahead.

    Google’s 24.6 million shares are expected to raise US$3 billion (€2.5 billion) for the company, and documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal that Google executives believe that the company will be worth up to US$36 billion (€29.8 billion) on the day of the IPO.

    It also transpired this week that Google has issued 30 million shares to staff, but failed to register them. This may be a serious breach of stock market regulations, and the company is now planning to buy the shares back – though at prices much lower than the US$108 to US$135 (€90 to €112) estimates for IPO stock. A rescission of the unregistered stock would only cost Google about US$26 million (€21.5 million) out of their US$0.5 billion (€0.4 billion) cash reserves.

    Google’s IPO

  • Nintendo’s Response to Microsoft Sale Rumour: No.

    Nintendo have replied to rumours floating around since yesterday that Microsoft wants to buy the Japanese games company with a big flat No.

    Nintendo’s chief of public relations Yasuhiro Minagawa said “Nintendo is not on sale, and there is no such talk at all.” In fact, Microsoft have not even contacted Nintendo about a possible deal.

    So where did the rumours come from? German finance magazine Wirtschaftswoche reported Bill Gate’s comments from the sidelines of a press conference: “If Hiroshi Yamauchi phones me, I will pick up at once,” he said.

    Nintendo are a very Japanese company – America is a reasonably large market for them, Europe have historically not been a priority, but they are unstoppable in Japan. Microsoft, on the other hand, are a very American company – they have no understanding of the Japanese market. The size of the XBox, the games they’ve released in Japan, even the games they’ve cancelled in Japan, demonstrate this. Even if they had a hands-off approach in their home territory, the brand would be irrevocably damaged. Western gamers, all too aware of the rubbish that gets released under the Atari brand these days, would also know the difference.

    Larry Hyrb from XBox Live’s blog

  • Curt Marvis, CinemaNow – the IBC Digital Lifestyles Interviews

    We interviewed Curt Marvis, a key player in IP-based video delivery and CEO of CinemaNow.

    CinemaNow have the distribution rights to the largest library of on-demand feature films available on the internet. CinemaNow’s distribution model is one of the most flexible in the industry: films are available with pay-per-view, download or subscription licenses.

    The company’s library comprises content from more than 150 licensors, including 20th Century Fox, Disney, MGM, Miramax, Warner Brothers and Lions Gate Entertainment.

    CinemaNow have not restricted themselves to films, however – their catalogue includes music concerts, shorts and television programmes.

    CinemaNow’s technology platform is essential to their business, and so they have developed their own proprietary content distribution and DRM system: PatchBay. They’ve also turned PatchBay into a product, and has licensed the platform to other content distributors. PatchBay allows distributors to manage, track and syndicate content whilst enforcing DRM solutions and territorial restrictions. CinemaNow’s entire business is built around the Windows Media 9 platform, which has simplified their business model somewhat, whilst at the same time allowing them to take advantage of the sophisticated features built into Microsoft’s platform.

    Curt Marvis has been CEO of CinemaNow since the company was created in July 1999, arriving there from 7th Level. He was also a founder of Powerhouse Entertainment, and in the 80s and early 90s was CEO of The Company, the Los Angeles production organisation.

    Digital delivery of video has been slower to arrive than many industry players predicted in the mid-90s, but with the adoption of broadband and improvements to codecs and DRM systems, it looks like mainstream is around the corner. There are still many hurdles – broadband isn’t quite broadband enough, consumer rights over moving content to other devices is unclear at best, content can be lacklustre and customers are confused by the many competing codecs, DRM schemes and formats in the market.

    We spoke to Curt about CinemaNow and his hope for the future of digital content delivery, and the advantages of Windows Media 9.

    Some of the visitors to Digital Lifestyles might not know about Cinema Now. Can you give me some background on that for our readers?

    CinemaNow has been around for five years. We started the company in mid-1999, which of course was during the dot.com hayday. We started the company then do to the same thing that we continue to do today, which is to offer movies and other video content on demand over IP Networks.

    What do you think has kept Blockbuster out of the part of the market in the US for so long?

    Blockbuster is actually a small investor in our company and I think Blockbuster feels that when they get into a new marketplace they look for a market which is very, very big which the IP on demand marketplace still is not.

    I think their philosophy is that they will enter the marketplace at a moment in time when they feel there is a sufficient amount of revenue.

    You have to keep in mind as well that Blockbuster do not own the rights to distribute content in this window yet, so they have to negotiate that through a studio.

    They are sort of dabbling with it in the UK, but not in a very high profile way.

    Yes, I know Steve Middleton and they have had that trial in Hull. So I’m familiar with that. They are actually doing more in the UK than they are in the US market.

    Tell me a little bit about your IBC session. What sort of things are you going to be covering?

    We have a sort of technology platform we call PatchBay. PatchBay is the sort of central nervous system of CinemaNow, and it’s a completely Windows based platform.

    We deliver our movies exclusively in Windows Media format, but that’s not to say that couldn’t use other codecs or other players, but we chose that as our primary platform when we started the company.

    We used the installed base for that choice as well as the specific functionality of the platform, for purposes of what we can do to add additional delivery and content.

    Could you tell us a bit more about your Patch Bay product?

    Patchbay is a versatile, user-friendly, API and tool for managing all facets of online content distribution. With Patchbay, you can manage six major tasks for successfully distributing content online including: Content Management and Distribution; Content Syndication; Rights Management; User Profiling and Ad Targeting; Pay-Per-View, Subscription and E-Commerce Management; and Comprehensive Reporting.

    It’s a tested, real-world application currently being used to manage millions of streams per month over disparate networks. With Patchbay’s scalable infrastructure, CinemaNow maximizes its revenues while protecting and retaining control over its assets, even those syndicated to third-party websites.

    Windows Media 9 it has been a terrific platform for delivering and viewing and protecting your content. What excites you most about it?

    That is a big question. Is there something that Windows Media excites me?

    The Windows Media Platform is directly compatible with the dominant operating systems and you know, EU concerns and other concerns notwithstanding we felt that having a player that was most used with the operating system it was running on was best. We also frankly think that beyond that specific issue the Windows Media Platform and Windows Media Player are the superior player and platforms for digital delivery. That is why we chose them.

    Who is the typical Cinema Now subscriber? Who are you actually reaching?

    We definitely have a male dominated audience – over 75% of our users are male. They tend to be slightly older than you might initially think. Our typical user is probably between 25 and 40 years of age. Generally speaking they have a higher than average income, higher than average education – you know that sort of thing. That is the kind of profile that we have in general, although it is changing all the time, as we have more and more of the mainstream business.

    You have 455 films in your library at the moment. How many are you aiming for?

    That’s what you’re seeing in the UK. We have territorial rights which protect our content from being viewed outside of the US for films that we do not have rights to – for example the collection of movies that you see in the UK is significantly inferior to what we offer in the US. In the US on our website right now we have almost 2000 films available. By the end of this year that will grow to probably close to 4000/5000.

    In the UK, I am hopeful that we will be up well over 1000 films by the end of the year including the films from major studios.

    How long do you think it is going to be before digital delivery becomes mainstream then?

    Well, I think there are a number of factors that are sort of the driving part right now. One is the problem of availability; one is broadband penetration; one is hardware device availability and penetration in terms of everything from portable devices, media centre devices etc. etc.

    I think there has got to be an alignment if you want to drive fast market adoption. When we started the company in 1999, we thought that by 2004 that time would have arrived. I can tell you now that is just the beginning and we will probably see this become a mass market over the course of the next two to four years – somewhere in that timeframe.

    You mentioned that you don’t have the rights to distribute all of your films in all territories – what kind of problems are you facing in getting rights clearances for content in different markets?

    No real problems, but rather an issue of needing to be set up in these countries with strong distribution partners before it is worthwhile to spend money acquiring local content and preparing it (encoding and storage) for distribution. Keep in mind that content is distributed on a territory by territory basis and with each version comes new contracts, payments and prepping.

    Are you considering a global pricing model or will you be pricing the same content differently on a market by market basis?

    We will try to keep it as consistent as we can, but we will definitely need to follow pricing schemes that are consistent with differences in the traditional distribution businesses.

    Many content providers are getting excited about supplying content for mobile phones — when you do see serving media to mobiles becoming a mainstream business? Will there be a point when consumers will want to watch long media streams like films on their mobiles? Is there a maximum length that consumers will watch?

    I think mobile distribution is really a business in the next few years for portable devices such as tablet PC’s, Portable Media Centers, etc. Cell phones for full length content seems a long ways away, if ever.

    What of the content that is being delivered to people the films and content that they are buying has quite often incompatible DRM schemes behind it. What do you think is going to happen in that space over the next four years?

    Windows Media has DRM that has been adopted by a lot of different people. I think there will be a shake-up in the market very shortly and one DRM system will be adopted by 95% of the content delivery industry.

    What worries you about the future of digital delivery? What keeps you awake at night?

    Well, I think, I sleep very well actually. I think the biggest concern is that people will jump into the marketplace prematurely – before there is a high quality user experience to be had, and that consumers will be turned off on the concept if it doesn’t work properly at first or it is not a compelling product offering.

    I hope that companies recognise that this is still very much a virgin market, and that when it really begins to take off I think it’ll dwarf the size of what is happening in the DVD industry, and it’ll open up avenues for huge amounts of libraries, great content opportunities etc. I think you will see people consume more and more content and I think there will be plenty of room for a lot players to get into the business.


    Curt is a panellist in the ‘Understanding the Range of Platforms – A Multitude of Destinations’ session between 14:00 and 15:30 at the IBC conference on Sunday, 12th September in Amsterdam. Register for IBC here

    CinemaNow

  • Apple Settles EU Online Music Patent

    E-Data and Apple have settled a patent case over selling music online in Europe. E-Data’s “Freeny” patent was established in 1985 and covers the transmission of information to a remote point-of-sale location, where the information is then transferred to a physical object. Basically, if you have a music service that allows tunes to be dropped onto any physical medium – CD, iPod, robot dog – then you’ll be hearing from E-Data.

    You can bet that the person who thought the patent up back when Phil Collins was in the charts with Sussidoo was probably only dimly aware of ARPANET, if at all. Since MP3 didn’t exist then either, no doubt they dreamed of the 150 hour wait it would take for one of these new, exciting “CD” things to come down a high-technology 14k modem line.

    E-Data have also settled with Microsoft in the past and, buoyed by these successes have launched no less than 14 more infringement suits against companies including Amazon and the New York Times. E-Data don’t actually make a product or operate their own music service.

    E-Data Chairman Bert Brodsky said: “This settlement with Apple marks another important milestone, as we aggressively pursue companies that are infringing upon our intellectual property. We have identified additional companies that are infringing upon our intellectual property, both in the U.S. and abroad, and will seek the necessary legal actions to ensure that our rights are enforced worldwide.”

    Tantalisingly, none of the financial details of E-Data’s settlement deals have been made public – we’d like to know how much they’re charging.

    E-Data

  • IceRocket Takes on Google

    Who’d have thought that, at least a couple of years after people thought the search engine battle was over, companies old and new are fighting for your searches and eyeballs. Of course, it helps that Google have shown that there is money to be made out of a successful search engine after all.

    Talking of Google, Mark Cuban has invested in a start-up, IceRocket, in the hope that they can beat them at their own game.

    Any search engine appearing on the web today has to do considerably more than just retrieve pages featuring the words you typed into a little box, and IceRocket hope that they have a range of features that will change the whole search market around.

    IceRocket’s offering looks, shall we say, rather like Google and uses a combination of the company’s own search technology, plus a meta-search agent that queries other engines. After all, why not take advantage of the fact that some of the larger engines have already done much of the cataloguing for you?

    I tested IceRocket’s image search – and am still laughing a bit. Naturally, I thought I’d look for a picture of myself. The results for “Fraser Lovatt” were basically thumbnails of an enormously fat man, and a trombone. Yes, that is entirely wrong – thanks for asking. Looking out the window, I tried for further inspiration – and searched for images of pigeons. That search also turned up a very fat man and a trombone. As did a search for cars. Early days yet, though, eh?

    Now to the good bit – the web search seems to be very good indeed. It found loads of things that even I’d forgotten about. I tired some of my favourite, regular searches on Google with impressive results. The image thumbnails of the page that your result features on is very useful and provides a lot of information to help you decide whether or not you want to visit that site.

    IceRocket also has an email search agent – searches can be emailed to the engine and the results are sent back. Handy for PDA users. A blank email to [email protected] with “monkey furniture”in the subject line returned five reasonably relevant results a few seconds later.

    As Marc Cuban says on his blog: “So try it out and let me know what you think and if there are any other features you would like to see added.. If we can do them, we will !!! This is just the beginning, Watch out google, here we come :)”

    One to watch out for.

    IceRocket

    Marc Cuban’s Blog

  • 321 Studios Closes

    321 Studios has closed down after a series of court decisions that ruled that its key product, DVD X Copy, was illegal to distribute.

    The software had been marketed as a tool that allowed consumers to exercise their legal right to make backups of legally purchased products. Whilst consumers do have this right, they must defeat the copy protection present on disks in order to do so. Defeating a copy protection system is illegal in a number of countries, including the US and Europe.

    Since copy protection systems are seen to interfere with consumers’ fair-use rights, groups like the EFF believe that revisions to the law to make it fairer for customers are not far off.

    321 Studios, based in St. Louis, had faced several court cases this year from industry leaders such as Vivendi Universal Games and Atari, and had even revised their product to remove the DVD descrambling component, CSS.

    At the high of its business, 321 Studios employed nearly 400 staff and expect make US$200 million (€166 million) in sales in 2004.

    The injunction only applies to 321 Studios – it is not illegal to own or even operate the software itself.

    321 Studios

  • South Korean company, Daum, Buys Lycos Inc.

    South Korean internet portal Daum has bought Lycos Inc for US$95 million (€79 million) – considerably less than the US$12.5 billion (€10.4 billion) in shares its Spanish owner Terra paid for it just four years ago. In fact, it’s less than 1% of the original price.

    Even April this year, the price sought was nearer $170 million (€140 million).

    Daum’s new acquisition gives it a subscriber base of 170,000 paid users and a 6% slice of the US banner advertising market. Lycos also features Wired News, the stock market information service Quote and thousands of user created Tripod websites.

    Daum president Lee Jae-Woong said that the acquisition of Lycos Inc meant that they were now ready to embark on a global initiative: “a springboard for our company to venture into the US Internet market and become a global player.”

    Their new purchase might give Daum a foothold in the US internet market, but Lycos Inc has been loss-making for some time now, and it’s a very tough market out there – they’ll be facing stiff competition form a newly revitalised MSN and a cash-rich Google.

    Daum.net

    Lycos Inc

  • iTunes on Linux with Crossover Office

    Codeweavers have released version 3.1 of their CrossOver Office application – and this new version features support of Apple’s iTunes jukebox.

    Codeweavers CEO Jeremy White said in a statement: “iTunes has been our number-one most requested application. We remain confident that by the end of 2005, the majority of Windows applications will be supported by CrossOver Office. Until then, we’re pleased to be bringing the appeal of iTunes to Linux users through the development of Version 3.1.” Indeed, Codeweavers intend to have 95% of Windows applications running by the end of next year.

    CrossOver Office relies on Wine to make Windows programs work under Linux. Wine is an open source re-implementation of the Windows API, and does not use Microsoft code. It’s not an emulator either – think of it as a wrapper that allows Windows programs to run under Linux.

    Unlike RealNetworks’ Harmony product, released last week, CrossOver office makes no changes to iPod and does not reverse-engineer any code. Apple has yet to make a comment, but it is unlikely that they will be as vehemently opposed to CrossOver Office as they were to Harmony.

    Codeweavers

    Wine Is Not an Emulator

  • SunnComm Upgrade MediaMax, Provide Carrot

    SunnComm have upgraded their MediaMax copy protection system to make it harder to circumvent, and have even added extra features to bring some benefits to CD users.

    MediaMax was controversial from the outset – putting a CD protected by the system into your PC automatically installed a driver to protect the content of the disk. Unless you held down the shift key, as Windows does not let CDs auto-run when the shift key is held down. Also, if you put a protected disk in your Mac, you basically had to send it back to Apple for repair. Oh, and MediaMax didn’t work in all home CD players, and worked in even fewer car stereos.

    Circumventing a copy protection system is against the law in the US and Europe, so this made holding that shift key down a bit of a legal grey area. Mind you, installing software on a system without the owners permission is also illegal – and so is breaking someone’s Mac – so labels avoided SunnComm in droves.

    MediaMax is back now, somewhat reinvented – security has been enhanced, and the disks are 100% compatible in consumer players.

    The new iteration still requires software to be installed on your PC before it’ll read the protected optical medium. I hesitate in calling these CDs, because they are encoded to a different schema from CDs and are no longer compliant with the Red Book standard.

    SunnComm, a company so paranoid you have to click a disclaimer before even viewing their homepage, seem to be learning a valuable lesson: the consumer is the one who is paying for the product, and so it is their rights that are important. As SunnComm’s president, Peter H. Jacobs, said: “Everyone at SunnComm believes that the best digital security technology should be ever mindful of the consumer experience.”

    To provide the carrot for consumers, MediaMax can provide special features for consumers –videos, song lyrics and picture galleries.

    Unlike DVDs, where special features come on a second disk and space is generally less tight, these little extras, plus the drivers, plus the software, and the video use up space that consumers might prefer to see spent on storing some nice, clear audio. Which is why they bought the disk in the first place, right? MediaMax might be a good option for disposable pop, but will never be acceptable to audiophiles, who need all of that 650mb for the music.

    Finally, will I be able to play a 2004 vintage MediaMax disk in my PC fifteen years from now? Probably not – who is going to make sure that there’ll be a driver available for Windows 2020? You know how difficult it is to get your old DOS games working now, don’t you?

    SunnComm

  • Doom 3 Leaked to P2P Networks

    Doom 3 has been cracked and up loaded to the world’s various P2P networks – even the most casual search will uncover dozens of download sources.

    This is terrible news for id Software, the game’s producers, after more than four years’ of work on the title. The game was due to go on sale on Tuesday in the US, and next week in the UK – so it is likely that this is final code version of the game, possibly taken from an advance or review copy, rather than stolen code in the case of Half Life 2.

    First person shooter enthusiasts and Doom fans will undoubtedly buy legitimate copies of the new game, but it is likely that id will lose a lot of sales from P2P downloads. Because of review copies it is virtually impossible to stop PC games appearing on file sharing networks before titles appear on shelves.

    id ran into problems earlier on this year when, predictably, attempts to stop a demo of Doom 3 from proliferating on the very same P2P networks failed.

    Valve’s own Half Life 2 shooter was delayed for months after source code was stolen by hackers and then found its way onto the internet – it will finally be seeing release in the autumn, after a substantial rewrite of key sections of code.

    Doom 3