Category: Content

Content

Madonna releases latest single as an MP3

I see that Madonna has released her latest single, American Life, as a downloadable MP3 well in advance of its official release on 29 April 2003.

It’s encouraging to see that her label, Warner Brother Music, are being adventurous with an international star and it gives a glimmer of hope of the music business in the digital age. It may of course also be partially driven my Madge herself, as she’s normally pretty quick at picking up on things, not that this is lightening quick.

The purchaser can download two differing qualities of the track, 128k, 192k, both in two formats, straight MP3 and Windows media with DRM. There’s even an affiliate scheme.

Unfortunately, it’s not all upsides.

  • It costs $1.49, and in return you get a one of the mixes (radio version with rap) that will appear on the physical CD, but you don’t have a choice which mix it is.
  • $1.49 doesn’t reflect the huge cost savings of shipping bits instead of producing and shipping physical goods. Interestingly, it’s also around the price of one of the tracks of the CD version of the album.
  • It’s only available to US-based customers.
  • You can only pay for it using PayPal

On the plus side, it’s refreshingly easy to go through the initial steps of purchase (Sadly I couldn’t complete it as I don’t live in the US). Warner are officially sanctioning the purchasers burning it to a CD – once and they are also allowing the copying of the track to portable audio players.

Strangle the affiliate programme, which differs in one important regard – you don’t get any money, but you do get entered in to a competition to win Madonna goods.

The advantages to Warner are many, for the price of sacrificing (as they would see it) of one mix of the single, they get quite a bit in return:-

  • Find out if users actually has an appetite for paying for MP3’s even if they are a high priced
  • As I assume that each of the downloads is individually marked with an ID linked, they get too watch the extent of file-exchange
  • Find out that given the option of an open file format like MP3, if consumers would be interested in having a file with DRM.
  • They’ll get lots of free publicity for the new album as coincidentally has the same name

The only cloud on the clarity of the results is that, as it will probably be seen as a protest single, I’m not sure if the purchasing behaviour will reflect the normal patterns of purchase.

I’m looking forward to hearing anything that Warner choose to release about their experiment.

War is good for streaming

Forbes has a piece covering how streaming media is getting a boost from the public appetite for all things war. This is the same for text news — I know there has also been a considerable spike in usage for Google with their excellent news product.

Media player for Xbox

There’s an interesting open-source project on SourceForge called XboxMediaPlayer that gives modded Xboxes the ability to show video/audio/pictures on a TV’s. The development is highly active, which has taken it to the four most active on SF.

This kind of project will make Microsoft deeply unhappy.

Reuters launch “Raw Video”

In an interesting move, Reuters announced the launch of their “Raw Video” service coverage of the now-current war. After looking at it, it’s not quite the warts-and-all unedited rushes that the service first sounds like, but is certainly a step in an new direction.

Yahoo Platinum AV service launches

Yahoo launch their $9.95/month Platinum audio and video service on Monday. It’s going to be going head-to-head with RealOne SuperPass. Lots of the sports content that Yahoo have is from the purchase of Broadcast.com, who had signed exclusive, opened ended deals with the baseball teams — at a time when the teams hadn’t recognised that there was value in it.

RTS London Student Television Awards

Last Friday I was one of the judges at the Royal Television Society (RTS) London Student Television Awards.

The nine strong jury was an interesting assortment of people from many areas of the TV industry. Amongst others, there was a live TV producer, an ex-Channel 4 commissioning editor, a senior producer of children’s programming and a former head of education and health at the ITC/IBA.

The entries came from five of London’s media colleges and were categorised in to animation, factual & non-factual. The highest number of entries came from Ravensbourne.

Animation I thought that all of the entries in the category were very well drawn, using sophisticated animation techniques to create thought provoking pieces with strong uses of music. Watching it is the easy part, there’s a huge amount of work involved in their production.

Factual I felt that this was the strongest category, with a very professional finish on some of the pieces.

Most pieces had clearly received a lot of pre-production and a good depth of research that showed in the depth of information of the best pieces.

There’s a lot of concern in TV generally about “young people”, currently those under 35, not watching news and many, particularly at the 18 to 25 end of the scale are not really watching TV at all.

One piece, “Common day”, took an interesting approach of joining factual and fiction. A detailed, informative discussion about a photographic competition was joined to a fictional piece.

I felt this version didn’t quite gel but it’s interesting approach to TV for people who aren’t used to watching TV – putting across facts/education while entertaining. A good programming idea for the short attention span generation.

Non-factual This category was a good reminder of how hard it is to create good TV drama, as there are a large number of elements, which all need to be strong and in the correct balance. There were a couple of very good uses of lighting and one excellent set. The winners of the awards will be announced on Monday 24 February at the London Television Centre.

Further TiVo content deals

There was a further announcement from TiVo’s advertainment division yesterday, in a new deal to place promotional material on TiVo’s. This time it’s with Fox Studios to promote five of their films this year. The content could include video elements from the films, including the full-length theatrical trailers, exclusive interviews or behind the scenes footage. Other video elements could also include music video performances associated with the film or film soundtrack.

From the piece, it doesn’t sound like an opt-in scheme, as they refer to putting the content on the “reserved” hard drive space of TiVo’s and quite what channel the content will be pull from isn’t specified.

One of the opt-in advertainments that sounds like an idea is “Telescoping” 30-second commercials. When the viewer is watching TV they will be able to link through to further material held on the TiVo, while the live TV is paused, ready to continue watching when they’ve finished with the extra material. Quite how this will work practically isn’t clear as advertisers don’t know all of their showings, certainly in the UK – I guess it’s just their big spots, live the Super Bowl, etc.

Disney copyright extended to 95 years

In a win for Disney at the US Supreme Court. It looks like there’s a lot at stake

Copyright holders stand to collect about $400 million more a year from older creations under the extension

The extension of copyright clearly benefits the corporation over the consumer

Copyrights lasted only 14 years in 1790. With the challenged 1998 extension, the period is now 70 years after the death of the creator. Works owned by corporations are now protected for 95 years.

But what did everyone expect?

One advantage I would assume is that the rapidly growing content restoration business will be growing even more, as the media company capitalise on their back catalogue.

[via David Galbraith]