There is further news on the previous story of Sonicblue’s Chapter 11 troubles. They now plan to auction off the ReplayTV and Rio business units, after negotiations with D&M Holdings didn’t reach mutually agreeable terms.
A large part of Sonicblue’s troubles were down to it having to spend $3m a month on legal fees.
Security holes have been found in RealPlayer and QuickTime. Patches to fix the probelms are available.
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.
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:-
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.
The question that is always raised, when one or more TiVo owners are gathered together is — why doesn’t everyone have one? I know that I couldn’t live without mine. In fact I don’t watch live TV, unless there happens to be a war on. In-Stat/MDR latest report reveals that 83% of their respondents were either “Extremely satisfied” or “Very satisfied” with their PVR.
After a very slow uptake, annual shipments of units have finally reached 1m Worldwide and In-Stat predicted this will rise to 11m by 2005 as manufacturers include PVR function in their other products, as was signalled by Panasonic when they shipped the PV-SS2710, a 27″ TV with build-in PVR back in Feb.
This, tragically coming the business day after ReplayTV’s SonicBlue filing for Chapter 11, shows the innovators don’t always reap the rewards.
Sad news as SonicBlue file for Chapter 11. In my view they were singularly the most progressive thinking company in the digital media space, with features like Ethernet ports on their PVR, ReplayTV, from the very beginning.
It’s not all bad news, as D&M Holdings, which in turn owns Denon & Marantz, has bought their ReplayTV and Rio business units for $40 million. One worry is that these products will be taken to the high-end and not remain at their currently generally affordable levels.
While in the US last week, I was trying to arrange a meeting with Jim Hollingsworth (Vice President of Marketing and Connected Products) to discuss their involvement in IBC. Now I know why he didn’t call me back.
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.
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 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.
Short bio on Ken Kutaragi is the person that Nobuyuki Idei, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sony Corporation calls “our Steve Jobs”.