Category: Geographic

Movie Studios to Sue File Sharers

The major Hollywood studios have vowed to sue people who illegally download movies from the Internet. In a similar move, to the way the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is using lawsuits to fight online piracy (they have filed more than 6,000 lawsuits against file sharers since September 2003), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced that the major Hollywood motion picture studios would be filing hundreds of lawsuits against individuals using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software to share films online.

Rather than embracing P2P technology by looking for new ways to generate revenue, such a lowering the cost of movie rentals and DVDs, Hollywood is intent on further imposing its iron fist on movie fans. However, help is at hand. In connection with the music industry lawsuits, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has intervened in court to defend the privacy and due process rights of the individuals being sued, although it’s not yet clear whether the MPAA lawsuits will make similar actions necessary. Hollywood is pinning its hopes on federal legislation that would target file-sharing technology. If passed, the so-called Induce Act would close the legitimate-copying loophole and empower the MPAA to sue P2P file-sharing services such as Kazaa, Grokster and Morpheus.

The MPAA announcement comes on the heels of a recent study by the University of California, Riverside, and San Diego Supercomputer Center that shows that the music industry lawsuits have had no effect on the popularity of file sharing among US users, estimated at over 20 million. Movie studios can’t exactly argue that file sharing is about to put them out of business, as DVD sales grew 33 per cent last year and box-office receipts have never been stronger.

“These lawsuits are misguided,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer, who has been involved in the music industry suits. “The music industry experience shows that the lawsuits don’t reduce the amount of file sharing. And it’s certainly not good PR to sue movie fans for non-commercial sharing when the studios are rolling in record profits.”

“In the end, what protects the studios from piracy is the what attracts people to buy or rent movies in the first place – a good product at a good price point,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “As long as you can rent a movie on DVD for $2, movie file sharing is not likely to take a major bite out of studio revenues.” www.mpaa.org

Yahoo Hires Former ABC TV Exec

What better person to appoint to head your media and entertainment division than a Hollywood executive with shows like ‘The Sopranos’, ‘Lost’, ‘Desperate Housewives’, ‘Wife Swap’ and ‘Boston Legal’ under his belt? Prior to this, he served as co-chairman of the division with responsibility for all creative, programming and business areas of the division, which encompassed Touchstone Television and ABC Entertainment.

The man in question is former ABC Entertainment Television chairman Lloyd Braum, and he will oversee Yahoo’s movies, TV, entertainment, music, games, finance, news and weather, sports, health and kids businesses. He will also do the negotiating with Hollywood to release exclusive content on Yahoo, as well as developing original new content within the company. It has been reported that he was fired from his ABC post in April following disagreements over the direction and management of the network, which had fallen to fourth place in the ratings.

His main task will be to convince movie, TV and music companies to distribute more content exclusively on Yahoo. His impressive pre-ABC resume reads like he is tailor-made to do some convincing – chairman of Disney’s Buena Vista Television Productions, president of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, and partner at the law firm of Silverberg, Katz, Thompson & Braun.

Yahoo already took the Hollywood route a few years ago when it appointed former Warner Bros. chairman Terry Semel as its CEO in 2001. In recent months, the company has signed several deals to provide related Web content for popular television shows such as NBC’s “The Apprentice” and CBS’ “Survivor”.

It’s all about getting exclusive content. In September, Yahoo announced that it would produce, host and sell advertising for the official Web site of reality TV show, “The Apprentice,” in which contestants battle to win a job working for real-estate mogul Donald Trump.

HomeChoice now Quad-play, Adding Phones

Video Networks Ltd. (VNL) is upping their game with their HomeChoice service. It has announced the addition of a home phone service to its already rather ample HomeChoice bundle of broadband Internet, digital TV and video-on-demand, making it a serious contender for both home entertainment and communications. The service will be delivered using Carrier Pre-Selection, and VNL also plans to offer line rental in 2005. Carrier Pre-Selection entails them using BT lines to carry the phone traffic to VNL networks for delivery.

Currently the service isn’t using VoIP, but we understand from them that they may move to this in the New Year. They certainly have the equipment and bandwidth available to provide it.

HomeChoice customers can opt for either ‘Free Evening and Weekend’ calls at no additional cost, or have the option to upgrade to the ‘Anytime’ talk plan from £5 (~$9) per month. Both offering lower rates to UK mobiles and overseas numbers than similar plans from BT, TalkTalk, One.Tel, NTL and Telewest.

The ‘Free Evenings and Weekends’ talk plan offers, the obvious, free evening and weekend calls to all local and national numbers starting with 01 & 02, and a daytime rate of 2.5p to those numbers.

‘Anytime’ talk plan includes calls to all local and national numbers starting 01 & 02. It costs £9 (~$16) per month for 512Kb broadband customers, £7 (~$12) per month for 1Mb broadband customers, and £5 (~$9) per month for 2Mb broadband customers.

You don’t need a special box or a prefix code. You can use your existing phone and phone number, and the existing standard BT line in your house, for which you will still pay rental. But you have to take VNL’s broadband and digital TV services to avail of the free calls.

The first to offer four services in the UK, VNL geared itself up for this expansion earlier in the year by appointing Vijay Sodiwala, former managing director at Broadsystem Ventures, a News Corporation company, to develop the home phone services.

The service faces stiff competition from rival fixed line offerings such as Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk brand, One.Tel, BT, NTL and Telewest, but no doubt the £1 million (~$1,841,100) marketing push will give it a kick start, and hopefully (pardon the pun) ringing endorsements.

HomeChoice

Premier 3G Concert Broadcast

U2 special edition iPods, ‘phone cast’ Rooster concerts on 3G mobile phones, Robbie Williams new video premiered on 3 mobile phones – is rock becoming virtual?

Avoid the crowds, the heat, the general mayhem, (but sadly also the atmosphere) and virtually experience live gigs on your 3G mobile phone wherever you are, and make as many calls as you want during the intermission.

Yesterday in London, rock band, Rooster played the first ever concert broadcast by 3G mobile phone. Rooster was chosen because 3 is already in partnership with their record label, BMG. The 45-minute gig was really a trial run by 3 to discover more about how people use their video phones. 3, which already provides 1.2 million customers with 3G services in the UK, has already planned a series of gigs to happen throughout 2005, and is hoping that the move will lure more people into buying video phones.

The broadcast was trailed on Rooster’s Web site and on 3’s own phone-based news and entertainment channel, and about 10,000 people signed up for a free pre-gig reminder. Ten minutes before start-up, these 10,000 users were sent an SMS inviting them to visit a “virtual box office” where they could pay £5 to view the gig, and the first 1,000 were admitted.

Another world first was the release of Robbie Williams’ new video ‘Misunderstood’, exclusive for a week on 3 video mobiles before being premiered on the TV or the Web. The deal between EMI and 3 allows fans to either stream or download the video straight to their mobiles. This is a clever choice since the video for ‘Misunderstood’ – which features in the Bridget Jones sequel, ‘The Edge of Reason’ – includes clips from the forthcoming film.

Staying in the digital arena, Robbie Williams also recently announced the release of his greatest hits album on memory-card format for mobile phones, which will be released this month.

Some commentators might say these developments let fans get closer to artists, and if you were selling the equipment you would say that, wouldn’t you?

“It sounds exactly as you would expect a live band playing down a telephone line to sound”, says Alexis Petridis today in his Guardian review of the Rooster event – “a Library Of Congress field recording from the 1930s.”

http://www.roosterofficial.com http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1342211,00.html

BT Offer Public WiFi for £1/month

It’s just bargain after bargain, as companies keep pushing out the barriers to attract new customers or hang on to existing ones, using every technological and communications innovation available. Now BT is offering its new and existing, business and consumer broadband customers, public wireless broadband for just £1 a month. Remember that BT already have a Bluephone in the offing – a mobile phone that will provide cheap Web-based phone calls from Wi-Fi hot spots anywhere in the world.

The service is called BT Openzone and there are two introductory discount deals of £1 per month for up to 500 minutes available to BT Business Broadband customers and BT Broadband and BT Yahoo! 500 minutes is only eight hours a month though, and this may not be enough for some people. It is offered to BT customers, who sign up before December 31, 2004. After the first three months, customers can continue using the exact same service for a further 12 months for £5 a month.

Aimed at people on the move who need to keep in touch, customers can log on to BT Openzone with their Wi-Fi enabled laptop or PDA when within range of over 7,000 hotspot locations across the UK, including hotels, airports, railway stations and coffee shops. With cable companies, mobile operators and VoIP providers always offering trendy alternatives, Telcos have to keep going back to the drawing board.

But (she asked, scratching her head), why would you bother paying £5 or even £1 per month if all you have to do is hawk your laptop down to the nearest café, and get the whole lot for free, plus a really well-made cup of coffee?

Thousands of BT Openzone hotspots can be found in the UK and Republic of Ireland, in motorway service stations, airports, conference centres, hotels and cafés. Also, a Wi-Fi roaming agreement with BT Openzone, has increased the number of T-Mobile UK hotspots to 1,900, and customers of BT Openzone will now also have access to T-Mobile’s 600 UK Wi-Fi hotspots, as well as thousands more across Europe and the US. Now all we have to worry about is wireless security!

BT Group plc

VoD, NVoD & DVR All to Grow In Europe – Yankee

Combined Annual VoD and NVoD revenue will increase fivefold to Euro 2.2 Billion by 2008, while DVR service penetration will also increase to 20% of Western European Digital TV Homes by 2008, says Yankee Group.

Video on demand (VoD) and digital video recording (DVR) are phrases that service providers are getting very used to – because that is where their business is heading, and both will “coexist as complementary options for digital TV customers,” says Jonathan Doran, Yankee Group Broadband & Media Europe senior analyst, in yesterday’s news release.

Yankee predicts that Video-on-demand (VoD) and its variants will account for an increasing proportion of digital TV revenue in Western Europe, with products like FastWeb and arrivo accounting for a growing proportion of European pay-TV revenue in the next 3 to 5 years.

Two reports, On-Demand TV, Part 1: VoD Will Grow Europe’s Pay-TV Markets, but Not Much, and On-Demand TV, Part 2: Operators Must Move Fast to Add DVR to Their Digital Proposition, mention some challenges that VoD must face. Cable operators, for example, will have to fork out for digital upgrade costs and provision of customer-premises equipment, while satellite operators won’t be able to provide true VoD services if they don’t have a return path. Furthermore, while services such as Sky+ and PILOTIME are showing strong initial appeal among early adopters, high subscription fees will deter many users.

But most importantly, Yankee says platform operators will have to recognise that VoD represents an enhancement of the digital TV value proposition rather than a core application, so that although VoD will become an intrinsic part of digital TV, it will only account for a modest share of overall service revenue.

Operator-provided DVR service faces numerous challenges, Yankee warns, like competition from standalone retail DVR and DVD-R units. However, as equipment prices continue to fall and platform operators increase their marketing push, consumer adoption of DVR service is increasing. “DVR services will be more widely and frequently used by digital TV subscribers than regular VoD offerings that are limited to the less ubiquitous cable and broadband platforms,” says Jonathan Doran.

It’s still more theoretical than practical at the moment, so many cable operators will have to play it safe and offer both VoD and DVR until a demand pattern is established.

Europeans don’t Get Portable Video Players Yet

A new survey has found that Europeans are not enamoured by the all singing, all dancing devices that play songs and films, play video games and have a video-playback feature. Only 5% are interested in buying a device that plays both music and video, while a mere 7% would like their device to play games and video. But almost a third are interested in listening to music on a portable player such as an iPod.

5,000 consumers from Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, Spain and Italy were recently surveyed by Jupiter Research and the results were published yesterday.

Things might change, of course, if the multi-purpose gadgets could stay small, neat and inexpensive, and indeed Apple has managed to add photo display capabilities to the iPod without increasing its size.

It makes sense that 27% of European consumers would prefer to have music-only while on the move, since unlike movies, you really can listen and enjoy it whilst running or walking. As for the 13% who want to watch video while out and about, maybe they are the ones who have to wait the longest for buses and trains.

So, gadget makers sit up and take notice. Consumers want music, just music – 39% of French and 31% of British consumers were most interested in music players – and they want the sound quality to be top notch. That’s why lots of them have dedicated, digital music players. This is probably not really what Bill Gates wants to hear, with his Portable Media Center waiting in the wings.

Last months Jupiter Research report, ‘European Digital Music: Identifying Opportunity’, predicts that digital music revenue will reach €836 million(~$1,062m), or 8% of the total market, by 2009. While the growth of digital music players like Apple’s iPOD or the Creative Nomad Jukebox feature a lot in the news, CD’s still rule. So, it is sobering to remember that these statistics and reports are only referring to a tiny proportion of the music-listening public.

Qualcomm to Spend $800m on Video to Mobile Network

As if the cell phone was not already overburdened with cameras, music and video players and handheld computers, Qualcomm now want to add TV programs to the mix.

Qualcomm, the San Diego developer of wireless technology and maker of computer chips for cell phones have spotted a gap in the market that might increase sales of their chips. They have just announced plans for a subsidiary, MediaFLO USA Inc to deploy and operate a nationwide “mediacast” network, delivering high-quality video and audio programming to third-generation mobile phones at mass market prices in co-operation with US cellular operators.

QUALCOMM intends to offer the network as a shared resource for US CDMA2000 and WCDMA (UMTS) cellular operators, enabling them to deliver mobile interactive multimedia to their wireless subscribers without the cost of network deployment and operation. Content will be delivered to mobile devices in the 700 MHz spectrum that will enable the network to serve the whole country. It will be based on QUALCOMM’s FLO (Forward Link Only) technology, and will use the MediaFLO media distribution system for content aggregation, delivery and viewing.

The chain of events happens like this – MediaFLO will deliver news, sports or entertainment programs over the new ‘mediacast’, high-speed cell phone network to US wireless companies, who will in turn pay for the service beginning in 2006.

Supporting 50-100 national and local content channels, including up to 15 live streaming channels, this system will give TV stations and networks, cable TV and satellite operators and networks a major new distribution channel, enabling them to reach their audiences when they are away from home and on the go. Content will be delivered in an easy-to-use and familiar format at quality levels that dramatically surpass current mobile multimedia offerings through the use of QVGA video at up to 30 frames per second and high-quality stereo audio.

Dr Paul E. Jacobs, president of QUALCOMM Wireless and Internet Group sees this move as “the logical next step in the evolution of the wireless industry.” The network will cost US$800 million over the next four to five years.

It may not take on in Europe though. Only yesterday we learned from Jupiter Research that Europeans are less taken with the multi-functional gadgets.

Qualcomm

RIAA Files 750 New File-trading Lawsuits in the US & CD sales up 10%

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on behalf of the major record companies, has just issued a new round of copyright infringement lawsuits against 750 illegal file sharers using peer-to-peer (P2P) software. Including 25 users on 13 different university campuses, who used their university servers to perform the dreaded deed. This brings the total number of lawsuits filed by the RIAA against alleged file sharers since September 2003 to over 6,200.

The file sharers that were sued were using (P2P) services such as eDonkey, Kazaa, LimeWire and Grokster, although maybe Grokster miscreants will receive universal absolution if the deal between Grokster and Sony BMG to make file sharing respectable goes ahead. In keeping with practice used in previous cases, the RIAA suits have been filed against ‘John Doe’ defendants – a method used to sue defendants whose names are not known. They will instead be identified by their numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address. Names can only be obtained by music company lawyers’ issuing subpoenas to Internet access providers.

In addition to the 750 ‘John Doe’ litigations, 213 separate lawsuits were filed against named defendants who were already identified through the litigation process but then declined or ignored an RIAA offer to settle the case before it proceeded any further.

This is despite the fact, that legitimate downloading services seem to be doing rather nicely, with the RIAA’s recently released mid-year figures showing that 58 million single tracks were downloaded or burned from a licensed service for the first half of 2004.

Furthermore, the figures also show that full-length CD shipments to retail outlets increased by 10.2 percent this year, compared to the amount of shipments over the same time period in 2003 – the first time in five years that the first half of the year has experienced such an increase.

People are still flocking to the record store to buy their music, as overall, CDs and all other audio and video music products shipped to retailers increased by 8.5 percent in the first six months of 2004 compared to the same period in 2003.

It’s a funny thing that while all this litigation is going on, that the RIAA has just given out the first-ever Gold and Platinum awards for digital downloads, albeit for legally sold ones.

RIAA
Subpoena Defense site

ShowCenter 1000g Gets UK Launch from Pinnacle

Pinnacle ShowCenter is by no means a new kid on the block but its latest version, ShowCenter v1.7 has some new features that make it worth revisiting since it has just been released in the UK.

For starters, Pinnacle ShowCenter is now 802.11g wireless network ready, and includes a compatible wireless module, making it easy to set up ShowCenter on a wired Ethernet, 802.11b or 802.11g home network, and giving it a realistic chance of supporting wireless delivery of audio and video.

Funky new features include the ability to listen to music without turning on the television – users can now assign radio stations or play lists to individual buttons on the ShowCenter remote control. But coolest of all, you can now pause live TV and schedule recordings on your PC.

For the uninitiated, Pinnacle ShowCenter is a set-top device that connects to wireless and wired home local area networks (LAN) allowing streaming of multimedia files from any PC on the network to any television or home entertainment system in the house. It’s really a complete media management software suite for organising and managing media files. Unknown file formats are automatically converted and streamed to the ShowCenter in a recognisable format, while you can control the PVR features on your PCTV tuner from the ShowCenter unit – if you have Pinnacle PCTV Pro, PCTV Stereo, PCTV USB2 or PCTV MediaCenter products.

The ShowCenter software has now been updated with audio and media management enhancements and from early 2005 users in the UK will have online music access via RealNetworks Rhapsody Internet jukebox service.

Pinnacle ShowCenter 1000g carries a suggested retail price of £199.99, while current ShowCenter owners can download v1.7 software-only features for free. Existing customers who wish to add 802.11g functionality to their units, can return them for retooling at a cost of £69.

“Digital media receivers such as Pinnacle ShowCenter are allowing customers to enjoy their PC-based digital music, photos and movies to the fullest extent — throughout the home,” said William Chien, director of product management, digital home products, Pinnacle Systems. “Customers have tremendous flexibility with the option to browse and use the ShowCenter media manager on the PC or from the comfort of their sofa on the television monitor with a remote control.”

http://shop.pinnaclesys.com
www.pinnaclesys.com