eWeb Applications

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.” Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

July 13th marked the 100 million song download mark. On August 14th the catalog reached 1 million songs. On October 14th it hit 150 million downloads. By October 27th the EU store was launched. On December 17th, music fans had purchased and downloaded more than 200 million songs from the the site. Today at the NAMM convention, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had served a quarter billion songs.

According to the Financial Times this morning, the second highest ranking contender for the heavyweight music industry title sales championship is former scourge of copyrights, scoundrel of the Web, turned NASDAQ-listed good guy, Napster, now with Chris Gorog at the helm replacing bad boy Shawn Fanning. Gorog just sold off Roxio, another former object of RIAA litigation, to Sonic Solutions to bankroll the $90 million for a possible move into movie downloads. Speculation that Apple, too, has its sites on adding feature film downloads to the iTunes store by rumor mill monger Robert X. Cringely has been made public. Read the rest of this entry »

It is de rigueur to pay attention to what your contemporaries, colleagues, friends and relatives are consuming when it comes to media. The result is eclectic, cross-genre, multicultural, multinational, and intelligent programming. For years we have come, without realizing it, to accept the programming offered at the schedule time of broadcast and pay-tv television networks, the packaging of songs into record albums by the labels, and the rotation of only bestsellers in book, record, movie, and game retail stores, and even the hits/talk programming defaults of the consolidated radio broadcasters. It is a breath of fresh air, that realization my friend Mark Fitzsimmons described of being in a room full of stale air that deteriorated so gradually you didn’t realize how little oxygen was left until somebody opened a window.

It is one of the most fascinating outcomes of the ultimate community information network, the visions of Vannevar Bush in Memex, Ted Nelson in Xanadu, Doug Englebart in NLS, Alan “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” Kay in Dynabook and Tim Berners-Lee in the World Wide Web. It echoes the spirit of Friendster and the bubbling up of social and business networking groups.
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Rock star David Bowie and carmaker Audi have announced a contest: mash-up (mix together) two Bowie songs to win an MP3 recording of your remix and an Audi TT. How progressive, really, inviting fans to compete for violating your copyrights. Of course, it doesn’t say you can publish the remix, like Endless Noise did on its site with the two segments it created from the old “Rebel, Rebel” and the new ‘Never Get Old” for an Audi TV commercial.

But hang on, “David Bowie is a copyright terrorist”, says Canadian poster Max Keiser and author of the forthcoming novel “Buy Love, Sell Fear”, writing on Digital Rights on the blog KarmaBanque, the anti-American-corporate-culture-and-capitalism site. Read the rest of this entry »

The world just loves a good love-hate relationship. Here’s the wonk’s-eye-view of Epic Drama Number 1, content v. technology. Sure you can say it is a gross oversimplification, but I prefer to regard it as a value-added crystallization.

There are several forces battling for survival and prosperity in the coming decade, and they can be summarized as follows:

Epic Drama Number 1: Those Impassioned Lovers, Content and Technology.
“No, please, you be the razor blade and I’ll be the razor this time, I insist.”
“Oh no, it’s my turn to bundle a discount coupon for your latest HD-DVD player with my next trilogy release, oh, say 50% off? Your turn to do the tech support, of course.”
“Now, now, have another cosmopolitan, and be reasonable. We’ll bundle a limited edition version with…w-where do you think you’re going? Come back! You can’t leave me. You need me more than I need you! You’re nothing without me!!!”
“HA! I’m leaving you and going somewhere where content is appreciated.”
“Oh yeah? Like where?”
“Like, um, wireless broadband. Yeah, that’s it!” Read the rest of this entry »

I am just a lousy conspiracy theorist, or else I would surely accuse organizations like IFPI and now IIPA with planting research on their sites to make them look objective because it conflicts with the basis for their lobbying for regulatory relief. The RIAA is a member of both umbrella organizations, but they are governed differently. I like both organizations because they are systematic supply-side data collectors of record for the industries they represent, their data attempts to represent the total economic value of the sector not just the part their members contribute, and they release their data to the public, not just to their members.

Right on the main page of the IIPA site is a link to a press release detailing a study apparently commissioned by the IIPA released in 2002 showing that the industries which sell copyrighted intellectual property, including motion pictures, recorded music, entertainment software, business software and books, grew more than twice as fast (7%) as the U.S. economy (3%) over the last twenty years, and continued that rate of growth as recently as the study was conducted in 2001, to reach $535 billion or 5.25% of the entire GDP, and representing 6% of total employment. You can read the whole thing here. Read the rest of this entry »

HDTV, DVD-Audio, 3G, FTTH, nanoscale processors, blade servers, HDVD/BD…what do these have in common? They are big, they are fast, they are expensive to commercialize, and they are hungry…what are they hungry for? Information, in some combination of communications, computations, and/or content. The future of these and hundreds of similar products and their components, systems and applications softwares, and distribution channels, and the future of all the companies that make them, and the future of the workers that make up those companies, and the future of the communities in which those workers live, depends in no small part on creating and/or facilitating the demand for information in all of those forms.

I don’t pretend to know much about the technology that supports communications and computations except tangentially as it relates to the technology I am passionate about, that which supports content. Over the more than 20 years I have been researching the trends and futures for content and delivery technology, I have been drawn to the consumer sector because of it’s, well, turmoil, for lack of a better short explanation, but sometimes my attention is drawn back to the business information sector. On the Red Herring Blog today is a post about Reuters’ new information delivery strategy, in which they are looking for subscription revenue from consumers and advertising revenue from institutions, and therefore are cutting off their feeds to Yahoo, the Motley Fool and other licensed sites. I am not close enough to these decisions to render any judgment as to why they are attempting to do the reverse of the revenue model in which they and companies like them in the professional information space have pursued. It makes me very uncomfortable, like floundering tends to do. Read the rest of this entry »

Writer Don Labriola gave me an idea when he told an insider’s listserv of tech experts he bookmarked my blog. I was flattered, of course, and I wondered what company I was in, i.e. what other blogs he had bookmarked that I’d like to see. Sort of like social networking of people’s blogs. The thing is, if it’s anything like my bookmarks for favorite websites, no one but me and my staff know what the bookmarks represent because they are cryptic and are organized by an internal hierarchy of our research subjects…unless I tagged them with descriptors. Or would it be enough just to know they were Don’s favorites, that his discretion alone spoke volumes, and the rest was my discovery?

I picked up on something from a blog (sorry, I forgot to note whose) about Webjay, a non-profit site that had formed to let people recommend and link free MP3s on the web. There was no bio of the recommender or even real names, no review like on Amazon, just a list with links and a genre tag. Unencumbered by any recording contracts with any labels, major or indie, I listed a couple songs Wes Garner recorded of my first jazz vocalist gig in 2002 that were sitting on my diva website so I could see in a week if that boosted traffic at the site. It works for Janis Ian, so who knows. Unlike those highly posed, touched-up studio pics that make it impossible for you to not disappoint anyone seeing you in person, people could like me even more in real life after given how much my sound has improved since then. Read the rest of this entry »

I am in macro mode this week as I revise the entertainment market model taxonomy for the new edition of Forecast 2020. I am in The Big Picture.

I had the occasion to write Esther Dyson today, with good wishes on the recent acquisition of her publishing firm EDventure Holdings by CNET. I ribbed her that a postcard in pearls was in order. Years ago I recalled her announcing a change of address (after buying her first newsletter business?) with a photo of her in an elegant evening dress complete with a long strand of pearls, perched on a stack of moving boxes. For those of you not old enough (or too old?) to remember, Esther was one of the few women experts at early computer industry conferences, but always noticeable as the girlish figure in t-shirt and jeans sitting cross-legged on the edge of some stage fielding the most important questions of the day from 1980s cognescenti and wannabees. She is also credited with originating the idea in my mind that content wants to be free.

I recalled CNET founder Halsey Minor and his coinage of the great term disaggrenomics, whereby vertically integrated online companies would be out-competed by horizontal players. Read the rest of this entry »