Category: Content

You may remember Movie88.com from last year, you could log on to the Taiwan-based site and play complete Hollywood movies for around US$1. The Hollywood studios got upset about this and leaned heavily on the Taiwanese Government to get them shut down, which the were successful in doing in February this year.

They’ve now open up again under the name Film88.com and the clever-cookies have based their servers in Iran – which hasn’t had a diplomatic relationship with the US for a few years. This article suggests that the only approach to get the site shutdown is to ask the naming authority, Verisign, to rescind the domain – which I personally can’t see a legitimate justification for.

The unauthorised placing for copyrighted material on the Internet has always been a threat to copyright holders and a concern, but the idea of it actually happening from a country that they have absolutely no influence over must have movie world crying in their cocktails – and other copyright holders.

I’ve written here in glowing terms about the theory and features of the Moxi Media Centre. Back in March Diego bought Moxi and they’ve now reported receiving a positive from the cable industry at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) annual tradeshow in New Orleans. Motorola showed their Moxi based “Broadband Media Center’s”, the BMC8000 and 9000, which they are building under license.

They also reported their first sale to Charter Communications, the fourth largest cable company in the US, who will be deploying them in Fall this year. I’m sure there’s no coincidence that Paul Allen owns large portions of both Diego and Charter. He may succeed where his old business partner, Bill Gates, failed, in becoming THE household entertainment device.

During the inevitable press build up to the release of the new Star Wars film “Attack of the Clones”, there are two interesting news items doing the rounds.

The first is that this is the first ‘major’ film to have been totally shot digitally, but sadly most audiences will see it on film due to there only being eighty screens in the US that have digital projectors.

The other is that DV video cameras are being used to shoot the projection of the film in pre-release showings and theses copies are being distributed around the Internet well ahead of the public release, some say the furthest in advance of any film so far. Hardly surprising given the Star Wars/Geek crossover.

BT start to build their OpenWorld exclusive video content by bringing ADSL user an early showing of the Ant and Dec video – groan. For the lucky people who don’t know who Ant and Dec are, they are a UK kids pop duo, who happen to have been picked to sing the World Cup song this year. I must admit I’m a bit confused by this, sure in the UK Ant and Dec are well know, but their audience is not the people who will be paying for DSL to be installed at home, so I can only assume BT are relying on children’s pester-power to get the service taken up.

Sony has bought 1% of Real Networks to demonstrate how they are getting closer together, in their attempt to fend off Microsoft taking control of digital music.

In contrast to the football World Cup, all international cricket from India will be broadcast live on the Internet to registered users of wisden.com.

Yesterday the audio webcasting industry went silent for the day, as a protest to the recently recommended fee of 0.14 US cents per track played. Webcasters say they already finding it hard to survive and the additional financial burden of paying, what initially looks like a small amount of money, would add about an extra $9,000 to their monthly cost. Clearly the record companies don’t see it that way and by 21.May, we will all find out what the final figure due will be as that’s when the Librarian of Congress is required to set sound recording performance royalty rates for Web radio stations.

The details of the online viewing of the Korean-held World Cup have now been announced. For a cost of $19.95 viewers will be able to watch four-minute video packages at up to 300k of each of the 64 matches and listen to bespoke commentaries in either English, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish or German. They will be available two to three hours after the match finish, to keep the TV stations happy I suspect.

An interesting trial is going to be starting soon, making CinemaNow’s content available to students at Duke university using their broadband network. I hope/assume the US universities have better bandwidth available to them than their UK cousins, which are normally really slow.

Microsoft is planning to freeze the format of their Video files in an attempt give them a chance of becoming as the de facto standard, an approach that has previously been successful for them with the Audio format.