Digital-Lifestyles

Distribution

The new digital ways content was becoming distributed

  • NDS Threaten TiVo with DirecTV PVR

    There won’t be much surprise to hear that the now Murdoch-controlled DirecTV is readying the launch it’s own PVR around Spring 2005, whose function mirrors TiVo. Added to this, NDS the creators of the rivals PVR, claim their unit will handle Pay Per View programming better – by charging for the content when it is watched, not recorded. This will give them the opportunity to speculatively tempt the viewer with lots of yummy content.

    The divorce of DirecTV and TiVo has been long, protracted and painful to watch. Much like friends watching from the outside as a marriage crumbles, where everyone appears to know that it’s over, except the unhappy couple.

    TiVo has already had experience of the Murdoch approach to their business, when the two ‘worked together’ to bring TiVo to the UK. It is sufficient to say that TiVo stopped selling their product in the UK after only selling 30,000 units. It’s likely that most of these, probably would’ve been brought directly from the US anyway.

    The big problem for TiVo is that DirecTV is their largest single customer and it will seriously impact their business. We imagine that they’ve been expecting it since DirecTV sold its 55% stake in one lump and its vice chairman, Eddy Hartenstein, resigned from their board back in June this year.

    When this news is combined with, in our view, the near suicidal idea that TiVo plan to ‘upgrade’ the software on their subscriber’s boxes to display popup banner ads when fast forwarding through the TV adverts, you have to think that TiVo is in serious trouble.

    Times have changed, and what was once special about TiVo has now become commonplace, and sadly, they don’t appear to be able to add anything to their offering as magical as the original.

    We’re dismayed to read in the news report that the new DirecTV device will not have the ability to skip through the adverts. While we’re not surprised that an integrated company like News Corporation want to stop their subscribers for skipping through a revenue stream, we’re saddened that a feature that was so much a selling point for the original PVR, is going to be withheld. We wonder what the reaction of the subscribers that currently have the TiVo box that will be ‘upgraded’ to the new system will be? Even if the reaction is bad and vocal, it’s highly lightly that this will be a mere blip in the media landscape stretching forward.

    DirecTV
    TiVo

  • MPAA Judge Finds ‘bulldozer’ approach ‘improper’

    Last week, members of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed 11 lawsuits against hundreds of people they accused of using file-sharing networks to share infringing copies of movies. However, the Federal Judge ruled the ‘bulldozer’ approach improper, ordering that the case should be put on hold for all but one of the defendants.

    The move by the MPAA to group defendants into arbitrarily-joined actions was probably thought of as a ‘neat’ and easy way to get the message across to other US citizens participating in file sharing. ‘Bulk’ suing could also save a heck of a lot of paper shuffling and administration work.

    The MPAA sued groups of “Does” (John Doe) identified by numerical IP address and requested the discovery of names from the users’ Internet Service Providers (ISPs). However, Judge William Alsup ruled that because claims against the 12 defendants were unrelated, suing them together into one big case was improper. “Such joinder may be an attempt to circumvent the filing fees by grouping defendants into arbitrarily-joined actions but it could nonetheless appear improper under Rule 20,” the order states.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed friend-of-the-court briefs, objecting to similar misjoinder in many of the cases filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against alleged infringers.

    “This decision helps to give due process rights to the Internet users accused of infringement,” said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. “Lumping them together makes it more difficult for everyone to defend against these claims.” EFF is also concerned about the movie studios’ failure to produce evidence of infringement against even Doe #1 in this case.

    In a separate case, Warner Brothers Entertainment has secured a $309,600 judgement against an actor for allegedly making promotional ‘screener’ copies of ‘The Last Samurai’ and ‘Mystic River’ available for bootleg DVD copying and unauthorised Internet trading.

    Carmine Caridi, a former recurring actor on ‘NYPD Blue,’ is accused of copyright infringement and is facing a default judgement of $150,000 per film and $9,600 in attorney fees. Caridi and co-defendant Russell Sprague were caught because the screeners were individually watermarked for each recipient.

    According to Warner Brothers, Carmine Caridi, as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, signed an agreement before he received the 2003 awards season screeners promising not to circulate them. It is believed that he immediately sent the VHS screeners to another address where they were copied onto DVD and converted to digital files that were posted on the Internet.

  • DAB Gets Big pre-Xmas Push from BBC

    BBC DAB Xmas campaignThe BBC will be launching a multi-format campaign starting at the end of November to promote Digital Radio in the run up to Xmas. It’s being previewed in London today.

    Running across TV, radio, online (including the BBC home page) and posters, it will be a comprehensive campaign. The TV element, which airs this Saturday, will use animations of a computer-generated world to relate its message, marketing news site mad.co.uk reveals (reg. req.). In the piece, Robert Senior, the managing partner from the company that created the campaign, Fallon, goes on about a “wider spectrum of emotions” – but that’s quotes from marketing publications for you.

    An industry insider tells us that this year the BBC will highlight what makes DAB special, rather than just talking about their additional channels, as happened last year. DAB features such as digital-quality sound and scrolling text should be highlighted.

    This is a big year for DAB in the UK. Each of the major electronics retailers will be featuring DAB equipment prominently in their advertising. This year DAB receivers have also been in all of the glossy magazine with them falling over themselves to feature DAB in their publications. Last year they wouldn’t touch it.

    The BBC’s isn’t the only campaign. The Digital Radio Development Bureau (DRDB) will be running a campaign over 257 commercial radio stations around the UK telling all and sundry that receivers can be bought for ‘under £50’.

    The desired effect of all of this should be two fold. To give a boost to the sale of DAB receivers, at a time people are starting to think about presents for their friends and relatives; as well re-reminding the UK public that there is a wider variety of radio content available over DAB than on the analogue channels.

    We learnt from the DRDB that 801,000 DAB units had been sold in the UK in the year to September. Their sales target for this year? “We’re aiming for 1 to 1.2m units before the end of the year” Ian Dickens, Chief Exec of DRDB told us.

    With over 100 models now available in many different forms factors, they’ve got a strong chance of hitting it.

  • BT And Blueprint Jointly Develop Innovative Music Distribution Service

    In yet another move in the legitimate digital music market, BT and Blueprint have jointly developed a new service based on Blueprint’s Open Royalty Gateway (ORG) and Song Centre software that allows copyright holders to take more control of their material.

    The new service for hosting, managing and distributing music and related content online, promises to accelerate the growth of the market by addressing key problems hampering the development of online music businesses, such as time to market, copyright protection, capital expenditure in IT and networking technologies, control of rights and the margin structure of the present models.

    BT brings to the table IT, networking and data storage knowledge, while Blueprint offers experience in media management software and music industry relationships. Blueprint will provide the software framework and industry interface, with BT utilising its digital content hosting platform and international network to deliver a global reach.

    The solution enables rights holders – artists, writers, publishers and record companies – to host their songs, videos, ringtones and other digital media files while having a direct commercial relationships with retailers. Content can be delivered directly to any number of media-enabled devices, including PCs, digital audio players and mobile phones. Of course, online-only distribution also dramatically reduces the time it takes to get digital files to market, but the system has to be successful in managing rights and digital licences, reporting royalties and sales to rights holders, and offering a wide variety of digital media to consumers using variable pricing structures.

    An interesting feature of ORG is that it allows rights holders to actively manage their content, including setting business rules for pricing and location, electronic contract creation, sales tracking and royalty reporting. In addition to handling ‘major label’ music content, ORG allows independent labels and artists, many of whom control their own rights, to encode, package and upload their content to the service and then manage contracts. Blueprint will also work with retailers, letting them mix and match content to create their own offers and campaigns through a service called Song Centre.

    On the other hand, the service could, however, let artists or smaller labels bypass the majors and sell their music directly to retailers or consumers. Referral and reward programmes, using viral recommendation, also means that consumers can earn back the cost of the music they purchase, by rewarding them with a commission each time one of their friends buys recommended content.
    The service has already been used by EMI for Robbie Williams’ recent No.1 hit single ‘Radio’ with Australia and New Zealand’s leading music retailers, Sanity and Sounds. Audio, video, visual and mobile content was bundled together for sale, and linked into a competition utilising Blueprint’s referral and reward technology to drive additional opportunities to win prizes. The service is now powering the global Robbie Williams ‘Greatest Hits’ digital download store.

    Blueprint
    BT

  • VCR Sales in UK Halted by Dixons

    The largest electronics retailer in the UK, Dixons, has announced that it’s to stop selling Video cassette recorders. They say as sales of DVD Players are so strong, they outsell VCR’s 40:1, that there is no demand for VCR’s anymore. Dixons sales peak for VHS (Video Home System) was in 1993.

    All of this is, of course, great for Dixons in the build up to xmas – they’re splashed across all of the papers and other media today, supplementing their already considerable media advertising spend.

    You would probably have thought that we’d be jumping with joy at this knockout move for an old, and let’s face it, pretty unwieldy format. Well quite a lot of time has passed since we at the Digital Lifestyles offices originally discarded our own VHS machines, and that gives us a chance to reflect on this news, rather than react.

    In that 18-24 months the entertainment industry (read TV and film in this case) has had time to plan it’s future and their approach to visual media in the digital future has become firmer.

    Today’s news must make those media companies very pleased. It effectively starts the countdown to the end of access to the large collections of video content people have built up over the last 26 years on VHS, both self-recorded TV programming and pre-recorded.

    It also closes one of those pesky ‘analog holes’ that often get mentioned by the media companies, in debates over the future of digitisation of media.

    Dixons? They’ll also have the opportunity to sell all of their punters a whole range of new equipment when high-density disc formats (blu-ray, etc) arrive. Of course there’s a bigger profit margin in a £150 DVD recorder that a £40 VCR.

    We also assume this will start to open the market for high-end VHS players as people come to realise some of their old content isn’t yet available on new formats. Will there be VHS buffs, like there are analogue HiFi buffs?

  • European Broadband Pricing Drops 23% in 2004

    A new report, the European Broadband Pricing Report, researched by Quantum Web and distributed by BroadGroup, shows European broadband pricing (of speeds between 0.5Mbps and 2Mbps) dropping since January 2004 by around 23%. The numbers of supplier and packages available have increased considerably over this period with 0.5Mbps tariffs availability increasing 75%.

    455 tariffs offered by 109 operators over 36 European countries were examined over the first three quarters of this year (2004).

    At the higher speeds, 4Mbps and 8Mbps the price reductions have been less dramatic. Clearly at this premium-end of the market there is little competition and in their words “[leaves] more room for price elasticity for content providers.”

    It’s interesting to note that non-DSL products make up 20% of the European market.
    BroadGroup European Broadband Pricing Q3 2004 Graph
    We find it surprising that, given the intense competition at the 0.5Mbps level, pricing hasn’t come down more than at 1 and 2Mbps levels. We wonder if this is due to the majority of connections being provided by wholesalers to markets, such as BT Wholesale in the UK. Without competition at this level, these wholesalers (normally the incumbent telco) don’t have much impetus to lower their prices dramatically, just gradually, to keep their telecoms regulator from getting angry.

    When we asked the BroadGroup about pricing across the surveyed countries they said there was a considerable difference. Generally, the previous Eastern European counties have lower pricing, as do many of the Scandinavian countries. To us this points towards major fibre optic network runs equalling lower prices, as most of the former Eastern Europe frog leapt mainland Europe by replacing their antiquated phone system with fibre. Scandinavia is well known for their wisdom in laying copious amount of fibre. We suggest that those trying to make their countries competitive both in terms of the obvious – IT, and the less obvious – digital entertainment networks, pay attention.

    BroadGroup – Broadband Pricing in Europe Q3 2004

  • Ofcom to BT: Equivalence or else

    After a long period of deliberation Ofcom, the UK regulator, has come to its conclusion on the Strategic Review of Telecommunications Phase 2 (SRT 2 to those in the know). It won’t be forcing the split of BT Retail and BT Wholesale.

    For a very long time, most companies in the UK telecoms market have bemoaned BT Retail getting a better deal from BT Wholesale (they own the network) than they were able to achieve. In the competitor’s eyes, the market hasn’t been balanced. Many felt that BT has been expert in ‘playing’ the regulator, especially Ofcom’s previous rendition, OfTel – only making changes just before they were forced.

    In SRT 2 Ofcom investigated three options, Full deregulation; Enterprise Act investigation; BT to deliver real equality of access. They’ve come down on the side of the latter, in their words

    “Ofcom calls on BT to provide prompt and clear proposals which will achieve these behavioural changes and bring about the level of confidence required.”

    and if equality isn’t achieved, they threaten to use the second; an investigation into the market under the Enterprise Act 2002, with the potential for a subsequent referral to the Competition Commission.

    In theory, when equal access to the network is given, the need for Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) to provide competing broadband services will be reduced.

    When we spoke to Video Networks, the company behind the London-based IP VOD-services, they said the news today would “not impact their LLU plans”. EasyNet, a significant unbundler, didn’t get back to us before we went to press.

    The SRT 2 is now open for public consultation until 3 February 2005.

    It would appear that the threats from Christopher Bland, Chair of BT, in the Telegraph at the weekend that “No BT would equal No Broadband” were unnecessary.
    Update: OfcomWatch comment

  • Motorola Moves into Mesh Networking

    In a move aimed at boosting its broadband networking, mobile giant Motorola has announced it’s purchasing US-based equipment supplier MeshNetworks.

    Acquiring the wireless mesh networking company “brings sales, support and brand recognition that a startup could never match in a million years,” says Rick Rotondo, vice president of marketing for the Maitland, Fla-based company. (We suspect he was exaggerating for effect – commonly called hyperbole).

    The purchase by Motorola further legitimises the whole mesh networking concept. Only last month, North American rival Nortel announced its mesh networking product line, aimed at providing easier WiFi coverage without the need for multiple access points. In the UK, LocustWorld has been selling its Mesh AP boxes to hotels, hospitality venues and rural community broadband service providers with a great deal of success.vMesh networking provides an innovative method to build complex data networks very easily. Using the intelligence of each component, meshing helps them to join into a self-organising structure. This approach differs from the traditional “top-down” design of data networks, and provides many benefits, including flexibility, speed and ease of management, making it simply to deploy widespread networks with low overheads. It’s particularly suited to wireless networks, where the connections can’t be predicted in the same way as a wired network, catering for mobile nodes, instant growth and unpredictable variations in reception and coverage.

    Mesh networking builds up a wide spread multi-hop network, making connections between neighbouring nodes on demand. Once connected the nodes can explore the network and establish their routes through it, finding the resources that they need automatically.

    “The acquisition also represents another step in Motorola’s commitment to deliver seamless mobility to all of our customers,” said Greg Brown, president of Motorola’s CGISS. The purchase will benefit “all of our businesses ranging from mission critical and enterprise markets to automotive and home entertainment applications,” said Brown.
    SP Comment: Mesh networks are far from a new idea. Groups such as London-based Informal.org have been enthusiastic about the possibilities of a wireless mesh for a long time. For over three years they have seen the possibilities of a wireless mesh supplimenting the wired networks offering free, ubiquitous access and when combined with VoIP, replacing traditional phone services. When viewed in these terms, it is incredible how long big business takes to catchup with grass roots ideas.

    Motorola
    MeshNetworks
    Informal.org

  • Grokster and Mercora Team Up for P2P Radio

    Grokster, the peer-to-peer (P2P) software provider, and Mercora have rumours that Sony are interested in working with Grokster

    Grokster
    Mercora

  • AtomFilms And CustomFlix: DVD compilation service

    When I first used CDuctive in 1998, I was hugely excited. Using a Web browser, you could preview and select music tracks from different artists, pick the order of the tracks, pay for it and have it posted to you. The disks would arrive a short while later with a professionally printed cover, listing the selected tracks. I was so impressed with the idea, I thought the service was worth investing in.

    These days the idea doesn’t seem that revolutionary. Indeed it appears a little old-fashioned, having been outdated by music downloads.

    Today, AtomFilms and CustomFlix are announcing that they’ve got together to offer the video equivalent – DVD compilations of short films. Using CustomFlix’s Build-Your-Own DVD™ service (isn’t it amazing what you can trade mark these days), purchasers are able to choose up to 10 pieces, initially from a selection of 125 of AtomFilms’ shorts. There are a couple of limits – there cannot be more than a total of 90 minutes of footage onto one DVD and each video clip can be up to a maximum of 30 minutes long. In the same way that CDuctive worked, the disc’s content and packaging reflects the selected films. The disc then arrives in the post.

    It’s a good idea, a DVD duplication service combined with a content company, opening the market to those who don’t have sufficient bandwidth to view films online. Posting DVD’s is a very efficient method of bandwidth delivery. 4.7Gb of data transfer costs a lot more than the price of an envelope and a stamp.

    They label it a “major step forward in the distribution of on-demand”, which is stretching the concept of on-demand a little – with that logic anything you buy or rent is now on-demand.

    After a quick look, it is encouraging to see that it looks like the service is deliverable outside the US. An advantage, I assume, of the contracts signed by AtomFilms for the original material being delivered via the Internet – by definition they are likely to have global distribution rights.

    What is not clear is why there are only 125 films initially offered. Is it that Atom doesn’t have rights to physically distribute the other material or perhaps the material isn’t held, or even available in DVD quality?

    It’s hardly worth mentioning because it’s too obvious, but clearly when broad-broadband is universal, online distribution will significantly reduce the demand for services like this. We’re not there yet, and clearly many parts of the world are far from close to that, so this service does have the ability to last a while.

    There are advantages of buying it on DVD, over the future online delivery methods. The purchaser will own the DVDs content, free to play it on the device of their choosing and it will be DVD resolution, not a version compressed for download. If you go looking for CDuctive, I’m sad to see that it looks like it faded away – but that was six years ago.

    CustomFlix
    Atomfilms