Content – Page 184 – Digital-Lifestyles

NAB: Want to interact? Dial #YES

YES Communications have a new interactive mobile phone service for radio listeners in the US. Dialling #YES (#937) on a mobile phone connects listeners to a sophisticated voice service that allows them to identify, rate, share and (importantly, no doubt) buy any song that’s been played on participating stations in the last 24 hours. Listeners can also participate in live polls and promotions.

The service goes live in the autumn – and will provide access to play lists from MTV, MTV2, VH1 and 2,500 radio stations. The service will therefore need to keep track of 600,000 songs in a 24 hour period.

The YES service is free to radio stations and costs the user US$0.79 (€0.66) per call, plus US$0.20 (€0.17) per minute. Radio stations then get a cut of the revenue for promoting the service.
“YES turns more than 600,000 songs per day into advertisements for themselves. The 2,500 stations we offer have about 75 million listeners at any given moment, so we provide a response platform for 45 trillion impressions every day,” said Daniel Goldscheider, CEO of YES Networks, Inc. “It will be a great tool for radio to turn listeners into active participants, to get deeper insight and to open a new and recurring revenue stream.”

The service reminded us vaguely of Visual Radio, but seems somewhat backward by comparison with Nokia’s project.

As previously reported, Nokia are rolling out Visual Radio to stations in Helsinki, allowing users to view video, take part in polls, quizzes and games, and download songs, ringtones and graphics. Whilst the number of tracks that YES deals with is certainly impressive, the service itself trails way behind Visual Radio in terms of scope and interactivity – we believe it’s another strong indicator that the mobile phone market is far less well-developed in the USA.

We don’t think the Finns will be losing any sleep over this one.

Yes Communications

A demo of Visual Radio

Pay More For Music, or Pay More For the Player?

There is some disagreement in Europe at the moment on how artists will be paid for all that music you’ve downloaded to your iPod. There are two competing models: DRM-based and taxation.

Levies in EU countries bring in a lot of money – and only Britain, Ireland and Luxembourg don’t have the system. The International Herald Tribune estimates that Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands alone will see revenues from their private copying taxation rise from €309.39 million (US$) to an impressive €1.465 billion (US$) by 2006. You can understand why they’re so keen on it now.

There seems to be a clear ideological split in effect here – if you’re a software provider or a store owner, you prefer Digital Rights Management. If you’re a European collection agency, then taxation is the only way to go.

National royalties collection agencies in 12 European states are proposing a tax on digital music players – the Society of Music Creators in France has levied €20 (US$24) on every iPod sold in the country, as it is classed as a “copying device”… and Apple has refused to play it, preferring to go to court.

Apple prefer the other model of artist renumeration – DRM.

Enter the European Commission – who will be adopting a policy paper next week with the intention of bringing EU collection agencies into the 21st century. A mere 3.5 years late.

The policy paper suggests a pan-European licensing system for protected content and examines ways in which DRM may finally replace blanket taxes in the EU states. Apple and lobby groups representing some 10,000 companies across Europe are keen on the policy recommendations as it will allow them to get on with their business models whilst paying artists, yet avoid negotiating with 15 different collection agencies.

We much prefer a sensible implementation of DRM – artists are renumerated directly, it’s fairer on the consumer and promotes more innovation. Taxing “copying devices” demonstrates a lack of understanding of the entire field, is inaccurate and does not reward artists fairly. Also, making all consumers pay a piracy tax is in entirely unfair.

Whatever happens, it’s up to us to make sure we don’t end up paying the labels TWICE.

The International Herald Tribune

Search iTunes Without iTunes

Downhill Battle, the site behind Grey Tuesday, are hosting a rather handy script that allows you to query the iTunes store, and even listen to the previews, from a web browser. The perl script was written by Jason Rohrer (“painter — scholar — poet — lover — scientist — composer – disciplinarian”), as part of his minorGems Sourceforge project.

As Slashdot points out, now that the iTunes protocol has been reverse engineered, it’s now possible to write whatever front end to the shop you want. Well, theoretically. And until you get a cease and desist order.

Try it for yourself

Get the perl script

Jason Rohrer

Slashdot on the story

New Desktop HD Editing Solutions

Good news for video professionals working in HD – support for the format in desktop editing packages has just got much better.

First up, Premier Pro 1.5, announced at NAB today. This new release builds on previous HD support, including the ability to export projects in Windows Media 9 HD format. Adobe have concentrated effort into Premier’s project management features, with multiple, nestable timelines and better sound support, including 5.1 surround sound. The inclusion of support for Advance Authoring Format (AAF) eases Premier Pro’s integration in mixed environments, and should save a few editors from having nervous breakdowns when flipping back and forth between packages.

One of Apple’s Final Cut Pro’s top features is that it can capture HD footage directly over Firewire without the bit loss that come about from all that compressing, decompressing and recompressing. Editing is done in the camera-original format and then output down Firewire when finished.

As Final Cut Pro can scale from DV to SD, HD and film with out down-converting to offline formats for editing, users can work in their output format from start to finish.

Adobe Premier Pro 1.5’s new features

Apple on Final Cut Pro HD

Apple’s Profits Up 230%

Apple has reported a a net profit of US$46 million (€38.4 million) in the three months up to March – almost entirely down to its popular iPod player. The iPod sold 807,000 units during that period, Apple’s CFO Fred Anderson has stated that the player accounted for half of the company’s revenue growth.

Also this week, Apple chose to rebuff RealNetwork’s overtures regarding the iPod – obviously the streaming technology company are keen to get a sniff of the action.

Rob Glaser, RealNetworks’ CEO wants to meet Steve Jobs but, as spokesman Greg Chiemingo told AP: “He’s in the neighborhood, but whatever meeting Rob wanted with Steve isn’t happening, Steve just doesn’t want to open the iPod, and we don’t understand that.”

Oh come on guys – what do you mean you don’t understand?

Let us spell it out to you: They have the most popular music player and the most popular music service and they seem to be doing quite well without sharing it with anyone.

Apple’s second quarter results

Amazon’s A9 Search Engine Goes Live

Amazon’s A9 search engine – complete with browser tool bar and diary function, has gone live. The new service is unique in two respects: you can search through the full text of many books on Amazon, and there’s an innovative diary function enabling users to make notes on any web page, and retrieve them on any computer you use.

The full text book search is welcome, based on Amazon’s Search Inside the Book service, and allows you to see the actual page of the book queried. However, the book search is limited in functionality and is essentially a mechanism to allow Amazon to sell more books.

The search engine is based on good old Google, and requires users to create an account and log in to view their saved searches and notes. Oh, wait a minute … even more data for Google to mine! Plus Amazon will have access to your searches and promote relevant books to you.

It’s a strange hybrid – not quite Google, but not Amazon either. We’ll be keeping an eye out to see who absorbs who.

John Battelle’s Searchblog on the launch

Nokia Picks Visual Radio Partner

Remember we reported on Visual Radio? Nokia have just chosen Hewlett-Packard as a technology partner to help get the service into the market. They intend to develop Visual Radio further, with the aim of making it available to other handset manufacturers through HP.

Felice Swapp, director of strategic initiatives for HP said “As you drive to this ‘digital lifestyle’ where it’s fundamentally mobile and digital and virtual, and content becomes much more meaningful, how do you have business models in that world?”

Their answer is to employ HP to sell Visual Radio to phone makers and radio stations, providing installation and support.

Research from Nokia indicates that phone owners with FM receivers in their handsets only listen to radio once a week – but the company is hoping that their new service will encourage users to take more interest in radio and use Visual Radio to buy ringtones and other music-related content.

Forbes on the announcement

TellTale Weekly: A Project Gutenberg for Audio Books

Telltale Weekly are building an audio library – on a cheap now, free later model. They are looking to add at least fifty titles to their library every year, releasing them under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

The professionally recorded, DRM-free, texts are available as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis audio files and can be transferred and listened to however the user wishes, for personal use. The site currently has 23 titles, but are looking to expand as quickly as they can acquire content, and they’re looking for contributions from authors, performers and producers.

TellTale Weekly hope that by charging a small sum for new titles now, they will be able to offer them free later, after five years or 100,000 downloads. “Paying to hear the text now (and for the next five years),” they say, “helps to cover the costs for the production, recording, and bandwidth of the performance you purchase, and supports future releases so that we’ll still be producing new audiobooks by the time our first one hits the public domain.”

TellTale Weekly

Creative Commons

Slashdot on TellTale

Google’s GMail May Be Blocked

Google’s plans to incorporate targeted advertising in emails sent to its GMail subscribers have hit another setback – Liz Figeuroa, a Democratic Senator in California is drawing up legislation declaring that the adverts are intrusive and the service is an invasion of privacy.

This puts a rather large dent in Google’s business model for the site: the storage for all those one gig accounts, even compressed, won’t be cheap and targeted advertising was really their only revenue stream for the service.

Figeuroa wrote a strongly worded letter to Google urging them to forget the whole thing: “I cannot urge you strongly enough to abandon this misbegotten idea. I believe you are embarking on a disaster of enormous proportions, for yourself and for all of your customers.”

European privacy groups are already sniffing around GMail potential privacy infringements, specifically Google’s lack of a promise that anything deleted on GMail is deleted forever.

We’re a little baffled that this concern is levelled only at an email service – there are plenty of other areas where people are giving their privacy away. People don’t have to sign up for the free email service, and there are plenty of others around, admittedly with less storage. Many people already choose to give away personal information, purchasing habits and other private data in exchange for something “free”, and there seems to be no shortage of willing punters: look at those store loyalty cards in your wallet for example. If you have a Nectar, Boots, Game or other reward card, you’re already presenting marketing companies with a rich, moment-by-moment picture of what you buy, when and what with.

Kron4 report the story

BBC News on GMail

US CD Sales Up 10%

With sales of CDs up 10.6% for far in 2004, figures in a new report from Neilsen represent the best year the American music industry has seen for some time.

All music sales (including legal downloads, music on DVDs and CDs) were up 9.2% in the first quarter of 2004.

The data for the survey was collected by Nielsen’s Soundscan system which collects data from 14,000 point of sale registers across the US and Canada.

Record companies, fresh from a three year slump, were claiming an ongoing decline blamed on piracy. Some industry observers still blame the slump on the labels and artists themselves, with a dearth of quality product in the market to drive sales.

Record labels are still cautious about the upswing, and are taking nothing for granted, and is citing surveys that indicate piracy has decreased since the RIAA started taking people to court.

Neilsen Soundscan

Silicon Valley