Category: Content

Content

Blockbuster’s Online DVD Rentals

Blockbuster Video have launched an online DVD rental business, much like that offered by Netflix. With a £13.99 (€20.78) subscription, customers can order up to three DVDs at a time from the online service. Blockbuster are are offering a library of 15,000 titles initially, with many more planned.

The service works in a similar fashion to those already in the market – you select titles from the website and up to three are sent to you from your list of desired films. When you’ve finished with a film, you return it in the reply paid envelope and the next film in your list is sent out to you. Subscribers never pay for postage no matter how many rentals they make in a month.

“Many of our customers rent on impulse and our stores are the perfect solution for this. However, the online service will suit those with very busy lifestyles who want a more up-to-date choice of movie than is available on the premium channels. It will be like having a multiplex in your front room.” said Steve Foulser, commercial vice-president of Blockbuster.

This is not Blockbuster’s first venture away from traditional forms for entertainment rental – the company is currently working with Kingston Communications to offer a video on demand rental service in Hull. Movies cost between £2 and £3.50 (€2.98 and €5.20) for a 24 hour rental, with television programmes costing £0.50 (€0.74) each.

Blockbuster

CNET launches a new MP3.com

After a lot of uncertainty about the future of MP3.com following its demise, and rumours that all of the content had been deleted, CNet has re-launched MP3.com, but as something completely different to its original guise.

The new version of the service combines extensive information about the musical groups such as the history of each member of the band and details of all of the tracks they have released. The reviews and background information about each of the major albums is also extensive. At a quick glance, the depth of detail is very impressive.

Once an individual track or album has been selected, a page is displayed showing a number of ways to get to the track. Online music download services, on-demand streaming and even where the physical CD are listed. Currently there are fourteen service listed, which we assume will increased as Cnet signs more deals. Each of the download services show the music file format, computer platform for each, as well as highlighting if the service protect their tracks with DRM.

As would be expected MP3.com provides many routes to content that you might not have thought of listening to or buying. One of the novel ones is Musicvine. A graphical representation of artists is shown, with groups of a similar musical type clustered around them, joined by lines. When a band is selected, further information about them is shown on the left-hand panel. It’s a neat idea, but we are at this stage unsure how useful it will be long term.

MP3.com is a clear attempt by Cnet to try and become the Meta music service – THE destination when individuals want to buy music. On first impressions it looks like a pretty good stab at it, but we are unsure if there is sufficient here to keep the idea unique to them.

MP3.com

Musicvine on MP3.com

Nintendo DS and Sony PSP news hits mainstream

E3, the LA games show, is on the nearly upon us and it’s a reflection on the level of competition within the games industry these days that lots of news is coming out prior to the show. Yesterday we covered the pre-show news of EyeToy:Chat and today Reuters is covering the upcoming battle between Sony and Nintendo with their new handhelds.

To those who have been following the gaming market, the arrival of the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS are not news. What will be news is the exact specification and capabilities of them, as most discussion on the subject has been conjecture.

What is known is that the PSP will be more than a games machine, it will also play music and films. The DS will have two screens – DS stands for Dual Screen.

Nintendo has tempted furious discussion in how the DS will be operated, with some who may know more added to this. “This will not be a machine where you push the ‘A’ button or ‘B’ button and move the direction pad, but a completely different way to interact with the device,” said Hirokazu Hamamura, president of “Famitsu” game magazine publisher EnterBrain.

Nintendo has been very strong in the past in getting their gaming platforms working together. The portable GameBoy Advance (GBA) can connect to the GameCube games console, and in fact games such as Animal Crossing let the game characters pass between the two to ‘live’ between them. As we’ve previously covered, Sony is planning to mirror this with the PSP, PS2 and PSX connecting.

Before either the PSP or DS are released, Nokia will be releasing its new version of N-Gage, the QD. We will be testing and reviewing it at the end of May.

Reuters – Sony, Nintendo Aim to Wow Gamers with New Handhelds

Apple iTunes hit 3.3m song in 1 week

Apple are very proud that they have reached their record sales of 3.3m paid-for music tracks in one week. We feel it is no coincidence that they are keen to tell everyone about it in the week that Sony launch their Connect music service.

They are putting it down to the introduction of iMixes. iMixes is a clever idea, which combines a recommendation list and old-school mix tapes, encouraging purchasers to widen their musical choices and in the process opening them up to buying a lot more songs. Apple report that over 20,000 of the have been uploaded already.

The big sales figure might also be down to attracting more people to the service by giving away free tracks to mark its one year anniversary. More that 500,000 tracks were downloaded.

The iTunes Music store now has 700,000 song and is adding to them all of the time. They have just done a deal with Motown, who are marking their 45 year anniversary, are to make the “vast majority” of their albums available digitally for the first time.

Apple iTunes press release

Dixons to promote Napster 2.0 in the UK

The now-legitimate music download service Napster has signed a multi-faceted deal with UK electronic retailing giant Dixons. Dixons will install Napster 2.0 software on all the own-brand computers (Advent, Ei System and Patriot) and sell Napster-branded blank CDRs, CD wallets and CD labelling kits in store. Dixons have also committed to promote the service on its Web site and in stores, with the campaign starting in two weeks.

Despite announcing the closure of 300 stores around the UK Dixons are the dominant electronics retailer in the UK with more than 1,100 outlets in the UK, including the PC World, The Link and Currys chains.

The costs of the UK version of Napster are not known but at current exchange rates the US equivalent would be singles at $0.99 (£0.53) and full albums for around $10 (£5.33).

Napster have also announced that they will launch their service in Canada, claiming it to be the first legitimate offering there. They will be provding Canadian consumers a localised version of Napster 2.0, complete with Canadian-specific radio stations, promotions and content from domestic acts. Details of the UK offering have not been revealed.

First – DSL Sells Faster than Cable Modems in the US

The US has always been a stronghold for cable modems and up until last year it outsold DSL two-to-one. This makes it all the more surprising to hear from Reuters that DSL has, for the first time, sold more high-speed Internet connections than cable providers.

Feeling threatened by the rise of VoIP (Voice over IP), that could enable cable-customers to discard their phone lines while keeping phone services, the telephone companies are undergoing a big push to try to ensure that their phone customers stay with them. “The bundle with DSL is incredibly sticky, more so than even long distance,” Verizon Chief Financial Officer Doreen Toben told Reuters. “If you can get DSL into the bundle, the customer will not leave you.”

SBC, one of the four ‘Baby Bells’, is finding price a big determinant in converting and keeping customers on high-speed access. “When you’re selling this at $45, a customer buys it and gets his first bill and panics and cancels,” their Chief Operating Officer Randall Stephenson told analysts last week. “When you’re selling it at $30, you have much less of that.” All of this is good for the US consumer, in the short term at least.

Reuters story

Dis/located Drama – Mobile Bristol in Queen Square in Bristol

1831 Riot! – “an interactive play for voices” played in Queen Square in Bristol until 4th May. The play is the latest fruit of the Mobile Bristol project – a collaboration between HP Labs, the University of Bristol and the Appliance Studio, which is working to overlay a wireless ‘digital canvas’ on the city and to explore the social and creative possibilities enabled by such a fabric.

Queen Square is the largest square in England outside London, dating from the early 18th century and recently restored to genteel, leafy tranquility following the removal in 2000 of a dual carriageway driven diagonally across the square in 1936.  It was also the scene of some of the most significant events of the 1831 riot in Bristol – which was instrumental in the eventual passage of the 1832 Reform Act significantly increasing the number of men who had the vote and starting Britain on the road to universal suffrage.

The current production is a specially commissioned piece which attempts a documentary style, fictionalised recreation of some of the key events of the riot which took place in and around the square.  To experience the drama you visit a stand on one side of the square to pick up a small backpack containing a GPS enabled iPaq, a large pair of stereo headphones and an A4 flyer providing a brief explanation of the project, but woefully little background on the riots themselves.  You are then free to wander the square at will until you have exhausted the experience, your enthusiasm or your stamina.

On the morning that Richard Higgs and I visited it was bright, sunny and warm.  As we strolled around the square different segments of audio were triggered as we moved between different areas.  The effect was most like tuning in to the middle of an afternoon play on Radio 4, with similar production values and the same instantly identifiable style – a somewhat ironic choice for a riot.  Even knowing the nature of the beast there was a strong tendency to try and construct a coherent story of the events from the fragments available, which was far from easy – perhaps appropriately for a riot. 

Despite wandering around the square side by side we often found that what we were hearing at any given time differed – sometimes due to a simple time lag and sometimes due to hearing different segments on different visits to the same area.  Our movements clearly triggered some, but not all, of the changes to what we were hearing and it was hard to distinguish such changes from simple scene changes within a segment.

The headphones were large, well padded and effectively blocked out external noise – this made it difficult to conduct the intermittent conversation with which we peppered our walk.  It also had the strange effect of divorcing us from our surroundings much like listening to music on a Walkman or an iPod, which seemed at odds with the very idea of interactive locative media.  I would have been happier with something that allowed the mundane noises of the square on the day to bleed into the authored experience rather than trying to cut them out.

Although we were left feeling that full the potential hadn’t quite been realised, it is early days for this kind of experience design and 1831 Riot! is a valiant and at least partially successful attempt to paint something interesting and worthwhile on the digital canvas. 

Bristol Wireless

Apple’s iPod dissenters continue. Are they right?

It is no surprise to see a rise of articles questioning whether Apple can hold onto their storming lead in selling MP3 player and the music that goes on them. They currently have, by most estimates, around 50% of the MP3 player market to themselves and 70% of song sales. Many companies, technology, consumer electronics and content owning, are now waking up to how far they have let Apple go.

Some people are starting to raise the possible ghosts of Macintosh – where Apple foretold the rise of windowed interfaces for computers, only to be overtaken by the growth of Microsoft. Apple’s response then was to pursue niche markets, originally DeskTop Publishing (as it was known then) and latterly Desktop Video. It is arguable that this is the approach they have taken again with music

Last time around they made mistakes. Steve Jobs bringing John Sculley onboard to run the company, and Sculley subsequently persuading Apple to remove Jobs, being the biggest. Sculley then went on to make many, many mistakes of his own. Who knows how different it might have been if Jobs had stayed in charge.

Many have drawn comparisons between the recent attempt to ‘open up’ iPod to other music services and Microsoft’s similar, and ultimately doomed attempt to open up Macintosh.

We feel it is important to not forget Apple had a 909 percent increase (not a misprint) in iPod sales in the first quarter of 2004 over the same period the year before. Equally let us also not forget that this is the start of media becoming digital and Jobs hasn’t even started on either music devices for home use or and type of video device.

Reuters – Apple’s iPod Lead Creates New Challenges, Analysts Say

Jens of Sweden release MP130, complete with mirror

The latest MP3 Flash-memory music player from Jens of Sweden has just been announced (so recently that they don’t have English details available). The stylish devices has all you would expect from a mini-MP3 player, currently up to 512Mb of storage, record function dictaphone and FM-radio. Amazingly this little beauty weighs the same as eight sheets of A4 paper.

The unexpected features start with a mirror finish for use when it’s not on. When it is on, the multi-coloured organic LED display shines through the mirror and interestingly it has a clock and alarm built into it. The other surprise is the addition of support for Ogg Vorbis, the open, patent-free audio encoding format that is the preference of the tech-savvy. Jens have improved the battery time over the MP-100 to 18 hours and can drive big headphones.

We’ve spoke to Jens and they tell us that there is a 1Gb version coming out in June. The recommended ex-VAT UK prices are 128Mb £105, 256Mb £145 and 512Mb £190, which should be slightly cheaper in store.

Sadly they are only supporting USB1.1, not USB2.0, which would significantly reduce the speed music could be exchanged with it.

We at Digital Lifestyles office are fans of Flash MP3 players, given their unnoticeable weight during commutes. Longer journeys demand hard-drive-based players.

Jens of Sweden MP-130

Ogg Vorbis

EU challenges EU-wide music royalty structure

The European Commission has sent a shot across the bows of the EU royalty collection agencies, saying they fear by them working closely together across the EU, but bound within their own territories, they will extended the national monopolies the societies current hold in the off-line world, to the Internet, potentially in breach of EU competition rules.

The EU executive said it sent a ‘statement of objections’ detailing its regulatory concerns to the organisations over their so-called ‘Santiago Agreement’ – a pan-EU system that allows national organisations to collect music authors’ copyright proceeds.

In 2001 the collecting societies of the UK (PRS), France (SACEM), Germany (GEMA) and the Netherlands (BUMA) notified the Commission of the ‘Santiago Agreement’. Since then, all other societies from the European Economic Area, with the exception of the Portuguese society (SPA), have signed up. They were also joing by the Swiss society (SUISA).

While strongly supporting the “one-stop shop” portion of the Agreement, and acknowledging adequate copyright protection and enforcement, the Commission “considers that such crucial developments in online-related activities must be accompanied by an increasing freedom of choice by consumers and commercial users throughout Europe as regards their service providers, such as to achieve a genuine European single market. “. The EU wants to encourage competition between the agencies, not consolidation, in their words,

“The Commission considers that the territorial exclusivity afforded by the Santiago Agreement to each of the participating societies is not justified by technical reasons and is irreconcilable with the world-wide reach of the Internet”.

Coming on the heels of the EU record fine of Microsoft Media player, we feel this shows that the EU Commission is serious about protecting the rights of the public to the fair and reasonable access to media in a digital age.

The collecting societies have two and a half months to reply to the Commission’s objections.

EU Press release – Commission opens proceedings into collective licensing of music copyrights for online use