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Dolby Laboratories is going public. Inquiring minds want to know: what are the future fortunes of Ray Dolby’s namesake enterprise after his retirement?

Dolby earned his place on the consumer electronics map taking the “ss” out of cassette. Way back when everything was still analog. The enterprise grew with unexpected agility as all components made the transition to transistors except the speaker (and Henry Kloss is another story). Audio giants like Sony, Pioneer, or Philips could have ignored him or bought him out or Microsofted him, but they didn’t. Dolby technology and professionalism has secured for the company a big fish position in the small and dwindling pool of American consumer electronics patent owners.

Digital changed everything. Noise reduction had no place in the CD era because there is no noise created by friction like tape scraping heads. No Dolby button on a CD player in my studio anyway. But Dolby, who was no one-trick Pony, reinvented the meaning of his own brand name. Dolby Digital, the 5.1 multichannel audio codec also known as AC3, carried Dolby into the digital television era piggybacked on the ample coat tails of DVD and digital pay TV as a full-fledged audio codec. (more…)

A mere 20 years ago, Stan Cornyn produced an album of the inside adult humor troupe Firesign Theatre by the name of Eat or Be Eaten. Far from the typical big shot, Cornyn has always had my admiration, just for being himself. Google him, as I just did, and what sets his career apart comes right to the top of the list. “King of Liner Notes” is his moniker.

Liner notes on LPs were huge in the record business in the 60’s and 70’s, and Cornyn wrote great ones, born of both a feel for the music and a flair for the slice of stardom that he brought to the project pie personally. The concept of a record album was more coherent then, like a concert orchestrated as an experience, thoughtful, artful, conceptual, not merely the list of a coupla hits plus filler that later led to its disintegration when making the transition to the era of distribution via online downloads.

One fan site offers this excerpt, which pretty much captures the essence of Stan’s approach to liner notes. “This is the dean martin. It is a largish bird which, like the purple martin, is given to frequent perching and swallowing. Its dark crest is going just a shade gray at the temples. The rest of its plumage it frequently sheds in favor of all new feathers from Sy Devore’s. Specifications on the dean martin rump have not been established, this bird not having yet appeared in any European art films. Its tail is believed not to be forked, except on formal dinner occasions.” (more…)

New Scientist this month reports on a study by the Santa Fe Institute comparing dummy and actual market and limit orders on the London Stock Exchange. I do not make this stuff up, folks. If we keep getting all this hilarious copy, we shall be forced to revive Bread & Circuses, our industry humor gazette on ice, so as to clearly differentiate it from the serious stuff. Don’t make me do it!

Entitled, ‘Zero intelligence’ trading closely mimics stock market, it shows that a lot of the volatility is irrational, e.g. not tied to information. Oh, to have the luxury of time to draw parallels, but alas, I must leave that up to you. I am far too busy modeling the highly evolved behavior of Hollywood studios, record labels, and other content developers interacting with the orderly evolution of delivery technology, and predicting the logical and reasonable reaction of consumers to those coherent business activities so as to forecast markets to illuminate the most economically efficient path. Do post at will.

This story was pointed out by Ray Kurzweil’s news feed, highly recommended reading for the eclectic technophile, along with the news from Esther’s Papa Freeman Dyson, writing in Technology Review, “Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over.” Far from the threatening specter of genetically modified food supplies that substitute Monsanto’s and Pfizer’s earnings objectives for natural life, his brief description has exotic birds singing and innocent children giggling on a soundtrack hidden in the narrative. (more…)

Not to be content with issuing lawsuits against minors, the RIAA filed suit against an 83 year old dead woman, currently residing in Greenwood Memorial Park.

In response to the claim that the woman made 700 songs available illegally on the Internet, her daughter said that, while living, her mom didn’t know how to turn on a computer.

She sent a copy of the death certificate to record company officials, in an effort to get her late Mum excused from attending the hearing, but they filed the suit anyway.

Greenwood officials did not return calls seeking to determine whether the )cemetery( was indeed war chalked. (more…)

While working with the BBC, it is terribly refreshing to hear people constantly harping on listening to the consumer, using the technology to create better programming, and competing with those damn Yanks who are always trying to culturally steamroll everyone else.

The Big Kahuna of Motion Video
True 1080i high definition television is coming down a pipe and through the atmosphere to you, and soon to a disc. Meanwhile, the studios can use some necessary post-production tasks to distract themselves from the blue laser disc standards politics. Check out this interview with THX’s Rick Dean by Jo Twist, science and technology reporter, on the facial make-up lines and back-stage filing cabinets that showed up in a high def viewing of Star Wars. According to Dean, video captured at 1.2 Gb/s in HD must be compressed to 5 Mb/s, about 98%. “I think if they see real HD [high-definition], not some heavily compressed version of it, there is such a remarkable difference. I have heard comments from people who say the images pop off the screen.”

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Storage technology is improving in performance one order of magnitude every five years (Schwerin’s Law, first theorem). Each main segment of technology is one generation apart in performance, i.e. for a given capacity of fixed magnetic, removable optical is one order of magnitude behind, and solid state one order behind that (Schwerin’s Law, second theorem). Storage technology is thus progressing along a similar trajectory as Moore’s Law. Transmission bandwidth and display resolution, which along with processors and storage form the four sectors of digital CE and PC devices, also proceed at a similar velocity of change over time.

Content delivery technology is both network and physical in nature, i.e. transmitted or stored locally. Data transmission from a remote host is best suited for infrequent access or rapidly changing content, whereas delivery to local storage suits archiving content which is frequently accessed but does not change rapidly.

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Norwich, VT USA. Entertainment economy and technology forecaster Infotech predicts a bullish market for home media storage in general and blue laser recorders in particular. Infotech research indicates a simultaneous decline in sales of two formats, CD and DVD over the next 5 years. The anticipated strong growth in consumer content collecting over the next five years is among the very favorable conditions cited by the veteran trend modelers. “Unlike previous generations,” observed Julie Schwerin, Infotech founder and CEO, “the majority will be recordable devices.”

The fifth generation holographic disc will enter the market by the end of the decade, but risks being eclipsed by nanotech storage technologies before realizing its full potential. (more…)

After the thrashing Sony received in the Financial Times last week for disappointing analysts on the Street, London and Tokyo by missing its third fiscal quarter earnings projections, something needed to be done to shore up the online music business. Chris Deering, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Chairman and Sony Europe President, and Ken Kutaragi, Sony Computer Entertainment Group CEO, charged to the rescue yesterday with a daring yet intriguing plan.
News yesterday that the rave Sony Playstation Portable would have a companion music service launched in Europe and in the US for spring was welcomed as a positive move. (more…)

ne of my 2005 predictions, hardly a stretch perhaps and yet beyond my typical zone of expertise, is that open source will flourish as a mainstream practice. So you can imagine how exciting it was that the details of the Intertrust Coral DRM scheme are to be made open source, allowing every vendor to customize it to their own product while maintaining total interoperability. Intertrust is a DRM development organization bought by Philips and Sony in 2002, and is therefore likely to form the basis of the BD DVD DRM. Are you still with me?

If you have been following the development of the next generation blue laser videodisc formats HD DVD and Blu-Ray of BD DVD you know about the HD DVD group favoring an extension of the existing DVD technology in the form of a disc that will hold three times the amount of data and that they have been working on a copy protection scheme called AACS. You know the BD DVD group has a proposal that requires new manufacturing equipment but offers five times the current capacity, and details of the DRM scheme it would propose to movie studios completely preoccupied with copy protection was sketchy until now. (more…)

Almost 90 years ago, the musician’s union was faced with it’s first catastrophic shift in industry structure that resulted in the unemployment of 20,000 musicians over a period of 3 years. These jobs were replaced by a handful of studio jobs as musician’s laid down soundtracks rather than playing live music to accompany motion pictures. Talkies were assailed by the American Federation of Musicians but to no avail. The change was unexpected, as even many studio heads did not think the public wanted to watch talking actors.

Tim Schoonmaker has some perspective about how technology changes content businesses. Whilst at Emap, as a new MBA, he was in the right place at the right time. He sold an electronic publishing venture to British Telecom just as the Internet boom was gathering steam in the US, and the City (London Stock Exchange) traded the stock aggressively, boosting the share price and funding a series of acquisitions as a result. He then acquired newspaper and radio properties with equal finesse, and developed the British version of MTV before going on his own to become an independent dealmaker.

In an interview with KPMG media advisory practice chief Calum Chace in today’s Financial Times, he opines on the tough spot media companies are in, where success breeds complacency. “When a company grows big and successful on a particular business model, it falls in love with the present.” (more…)

The China Daily reported late last week about the continuing dispute between Chinese DVD manufacturers and the 10 companies whose inventions form the majority of the patent pool. “Two Chinese-based DVD manufacturers have filed a lawsuit against the 3C Patent Group in the United States, alleging that it violated US laws, leading to unfair competition. Patent fees of around US$20 per unit are currently levied on manufacturers of Chinese DVD players, accounting for some 20 to 30 per cent of their production costs. However, US manufacturers’ patent fees are much lower, only 3 to 5 per cent of their production costs. ”

What US manufacturers? you may be thinking. Could they mean Thomson, the 1C? Last I heard, they were still headquartered in France. The Japanese won most of those jobs years ago and now they are losing them to Taiwan, South Korea, India, and China. Time Warner is the only other possibility, and they do not manufacture hardware. Never mind, that’s not the point. (more…)