RealNetworks and NBA have announced a deal to provide NBC.com TV's basketball events to Internet using RealVideo format for streaming. Deal also covers audio streaming, which is made through Real as well. Both options will be available through RealNetworks' RealPlayer GoldPass, the Real's multimedia subscription service.
NBA content will be available through real.com starting 1st of February.
Ben Charny of ZDNet News repots on the current development stage of what many believe (and wish) to be the next Napster / Scour Exchange.
Predictions that Gnutella would quickly offer an effective file-swapping alternative to Napster have proven premature, with the technology's own developers admitting more work is needed before it will take off as a way to trade free music and other digital wares.
"Gnutella is not for mainstream users who don't understand what an IP address is," said Ric Dube of digital music industry watcher Webnoize. "Lack of speed only discourages a person once they figure out how to use it. But first they have to figure out how to use it."
While Gnutella is more or less strugling with it's development, J.C. Nicholas of GnutellaWorld said their version of Gnutella, aptly named 'Gnutella2', "is going to be one of the greatest revolutions since Linux. It will revolutionize the way we exchange information on the Internet."
How exactly Gnutella2 achieves this remains to be seen, since there are no public beta versions of Gnutella2 available to date.
Read the full article on Yahoo! News.
The Napster subscription service, on which Bertelsmann and Napster agreed on when they reached an agreement last year, should be running early next summer.
It remains to be seen whether or not this will spell the end of Napster. Are there enough users that are willing to pay for a service like Napster? And more importantly can Napster and Bertelsmann come to an agreement on spreading music from other labels as well over the service.
Teen pop queen Britney Spears' "I'm a virgin and I'll always will be" -image took a blow in her recent concert at Rio. Apparently she had accidentaly switched on her microphone and was using words she shouldn't even be aware of.
Why do I think it's worth reporting? Well, frankly I have no idea whether or not the story is true or not - actually I don't even give a damn. What makes it worth mentioning is that there's an audioclip available of the whole incident on both Napster as well as BritneySpears.org.
If BritneySpears.org has to remove the clip you can always find it on Napster with the filename "swearsinrio.mp3".
You can be the judge of the authenticity of the clip.
Source:
The Register
The US ISP Verio has refused to remove a Website hosted on their servers against the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) wishes. MPAA claimed that Cryptome.org had posted illegal material, and demanded the content to be removed. The illegal material in this case was the DVD Copy Control Association president John J. Hoy's declaration which includes the DeCSS source-code.
Instead of rushing to remove Cryptome.org Verio decided to contact John Young, the administrator of Cryptome.org, and asked him to reply to the allegations.
In his reply Young states that the Hoy declaration mentioned above does not contain a "circumvention device as defined by the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act]". And thus Verio decided they have no reason for removing the site's content.
It remains to be seen if MPAA is satisfied with Young's reply.
Source:
The Register
Julien Stern of Belgium and Julien Boeuf of France, a team specializing in cryptography and multimedia, have published their experiences in defeating the SDMI challenge.
The site contains in depth information on the basics SDMI, how the specific attacks were deviced, as well as thorough reports on their findings.
I'm sure the people at the SDMI Group would have prefered paying the price to the Juliens and signing an NDA with them. Luckily for the rest of us Stern and Boeuf decided to release their findings to the public.
Read more at the DeSDMI site.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says that court decision in August 2000 against website 2600 didn't consider all the legal aspects of the DeCSS program.
Case, which was ruled in August 2000, was against website called 2600. MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) claimed that 2600 is breaking the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) allowing people to download the code of DeCSS program.
DeCSS is a program that allows people to decrypt DVD copy protection scheme, called CSS. It was developed by Norwegian teenager, so he is not sued in this case.
Now EFF claims that court failed to understand that DeCSS can be used also for legal purposes, such as backupping movies (in most of the countries this is allowed), making short trailers or just to study the CSS protection.
They're going to bring the case to 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. EFF is expecting that many human right and free-speech organizations will join to this case by filing their amicus briefs to the court.
MP3.com is looking forward to making something dot-com companies aren't famous for - profit. CEO Michael Robertson feels that the company's legal troubles are over and dealt with, and that the company should turn profitable without outside assistance already this year.
Most of the expected profits are, of course, from advertisement sales as well as the My.MP3.com -service. Even though the advertisement money has been slowly disappearing off the net Robertson feels that there's still money to be made there since 80 percent of MP3.com's advertisement revenues come from non-Internet companies.
Source:
Yahoo! News
We recently made some changes to our site and thought it would be nice to inform about those.
First of all, now our site features a new version of skin lists - top rated skins. This list represents the opinion of the users about the skins what we have in our archive. All users can vote skins, just simply by using the drop-down menu next to the selected skin. You can see current results in here.
Other thing is our music archive that contains free music from our artists. So far we have allowed bands to create their own "music genres" - but now, just to make things clear, we have reduced the number of genres to appx. ten so users can find the music they're looking for, more easily. You can access to our band listings from this URL.
Our beloved friends at DMusic have come up with a brilliant look at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2001.
The report covers all sorts of wonderful gadgets - from tiny portable MP3 players to DVD players fitted with HDD for MP3-playback. It's all there.
Check out the full report at DMusic.
Miramax Films has announced that it will be offering the movie "Guinevere" available for download on January 22nd. The movie can be downloaded from the movie's official site at www.GuinevereTheMovie.com. The service is provided by SightSound Technologies.
Of course the download will not be free - you'll have to pay $3.49 to get a 24h license to view the movie. If you wish to view the movie again you obviously also have to pay again.
``We can prevent for movies what Napster did for music,'' Scott Sander, president and chief executive of SightSound, said on Thursday.
Now how's that going to happen? By offering the movies for rent at ridiculous prices? Hardly. If someone is capable of downloading a legal rent copy of a movie that's hundreds of megabytes in size, they're also well capable of downloading a pirated copy of the same exact movie.
Actually a "Napster for movies" is bound to emerge as soon as more homes are equiped with high-bandwidth Internet connections. Believe me - we're going to see the Napster vs. RIAA all over again. It'll just be Mopster vs. MPAA.
Now if I could purchase a permanent copy for $3.49 it might actually be worthwhile. Now I'd rather spend $10 more and get a DVD instead.
Guys working the "next generation of DivX ;-)", dubbed as Project Mayo have decided to release their project as an open source.
DivX ;-) which was originally a hack based on the Microsoft's MPEG-4 codec, adding an MP3 audio to it, has transformed the video distribution of the Internet in past year or so.
Project Mayo's purpose was to develop a legal solution (the original hack of course violates Microsoft's copyrights as well as some other copyrights) for MPEG-4 video with MP3 audio.
Now, when the source of the Encore (DivX Encoder Core) and Decore (DivX Decoder Core) is released as an open source project, we might see a flood of video applications supporting this "standard" without requiring any hacked CODECs or so.
In the mainstream media, DivX ;-) has been dubbed as a threat against the movie industry, because it allows people easily to ditribute good quality movies over the Internet. But just like the MP3, DivX ;-) itself doesn't do anything illegal -- it's purely up to the user how he/she decides to use this format. I think we will pretty shortly see first legal music videos over the Internet spread in this format -- downloading a full-length movie with good quality in DivX ;-) format still requires more bandwidth than the regular Joe the User has in his home PC.
We very rarely have news about our site on these days, but I thought it might be a good time to say few words about us, our site and so on.
Well, first of all, our "headquarters" has moved from Brooklyn, USA to London, UK. As some of you know, this site is not maintained by any company or so - we're just bunch of guys who happen have a "personal" website that generates nice amount of traffic, but unfortunately no profit :-)
And when speaking of "moving the site" - basically that just means that I personally have moved from U.S. back to Europe. And as I am the webmaster (or dictator, call me whatever you want) of this site, it's obvious that our contact address follows me. Reasons for the move were purely personal and did involve my "real-life job" and so on.
Our server is still physically located in the U.S. since we're very pleased to our ISP and hosting fees in Europe are normally much higher than those in the States.
About our traffic. We're very pleased that you guys have helped this site to grow in very nice scale. A year ago, in beginning of y2k we had only some tens of thousands of page views each month. Since then, the boost has been enormous - we're still a very small site if you compare us to any "major site", but considering the fact that our target audience is very small, we're very pleased to these numbers any way. Currently our site generates appx. 300,000 page views a month (pageviews meaning the stats that we get from our ad networks - so, they're 100% accurate and if they have some difference to real life, they tend to be slightly lower than the number of real pageviews).
Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten, who has claimed that his team has successfully cracked the SDMI scheme - a music copyright protection method developed by the RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America. They claim that they cracked the SDMI protections when SDMI consortium challenged hackers all over the world to freely crack the protection scheme and to take part of their cracking competition.
Anyway, Princeton team didn't take part of the competition, because under the terms of the competition, the group wasn't allowed to publish their results.
Now, team's legal advisors say that they shouldn't publish these results in any case, because if they do publish the results and technical information about the SDMI and how to crack it, they could be sued by the SDMI claiming that they've violated DMCA laws (=Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which makes it illegal to spread (in U.S.) anything that can be used to violate copyrights. The same set of laws is also used against the sites that have spread the DeCSS, notorious program that allows users to by-pass the DVD copy-protections.
BMG which is widely agreed to be the leading player in the digital music industry (of the traditional record companies) at the moment says it will extend its music selection available through its online retail channels.
Currently BMG has appx. 3,000 tracks available online and they have 50 retail partners to sell digital recordings from their artists. BMG also made an agreement with Napster and results of that licensing and distributing agreement are yet still to be seen.
MP3.com announced it will hold free artist/label promotion lunch on January 25th at their headquarters in San Diego, CA.
The seminar will showcase a demonstration of MP3.com's recently unveiled Music InterOperating System (IOS), which allows different segments of the music industry to work together in new ways. Industry experts will discuss a number of methods for labels to generate revenue online, including utilizing the Internet to discover music licensing opportunities in television and film; successful strategies for gaining exposure in business establishments; using the Internet to promote and develop concerts and events; and marketing artists online to generate advertising-driven revenue.
Read more and register at:
http://www.mp3.com/events/
Dave Matthews Band's single "I did it", which the band offered for free download last week on their web site, will be featured on Napster. This is the first time Napster is able to promote a major artist from a major recording label.
The band's record label, BMG Entertainment-owned RCA Records, has not officially backed the release, but is not expected to oppose it either.
Speaking at the Future of Music Policy conference at Washington MP3.com chief executive Michael Robertson said MP3.com should not be required to pay royalties for music already owned by their users. He was refering to their My.MP3.com service which allows users to instantly beam CDs they own on to their My.MP3.com account.
``What are my rights in the digital world when I buy a CD? That needs to be clarified,'' Robertson said.
Robertson supported a bill introduced last fall by Rep. Rick Boucher who co-chairs the House Internet Caucus. The bill would exempt My.MP3.com from further royalty payments.
``We do need, I believe, some common sense injected into the copyright landscape,'' he said.
Common sense, however, seems to be one thing there's not an abundance of...
Rumour has it that Microsoft is working on a peer-to-peer sharing project code-named Farsite.
The concept behind Farsite is a serverless file system - files are stored on a distributed network of clients with no centralized server or hierarchy.
"We know that (PC) disks aren't full today and machines are idle most of the time. Disks are getting bigger faster than files are. If you could build a centralized file server, it would be more reliable and it wouldn't require centralized administration," Bolosky explained.
Napster and other peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software are built on a similar premise, but with one key difference, Bolosky said.
"Napster does have a central directory. Only its file store is peer-to-peer," he said.
Source:
ZDNet: News
The first annual Coalition for the Future of Music Policy Conference will take place Wenesday and Thursday in Washington DC. The choice of venue represents the shift from courtrooms to the chambers of Congress.
On the schedule are issues like fair use policy, the digital-copyright law, the collection of digital royalties and post-Napster legal landscape. One panel pairs the head of a much-hyped new audio-encryption standard with the Princeton professor whose students claim to have cracked its code.
The conference was put together by a group calling itself the Future of Music Coalition, whose Web site features a spiky manifesto calling major record labels ``exploiters'' and claiming the Recording Industry Association of America, the powerful industry lobbying group, cannot be trusted to represent artists.
The conference has signed up 750 attendees, including 300 musicians. RIAA President Hilary Rosen is also scheduled to speak.
Source:
Yahoo! News
Texas Instruments and RealNetworks have announced a strategic alliance to provide streaming content for appliances using TI's DSP chips and technology. These devices include Internet radios, etc.
Users of these devices will be able to watch music videos, sport events, news and to listen to music radio stations, etc. And of course, all this is Real's formats..
Even though the U.S. markets (especially the customers) are way behind in the mobile business overall, major companies in the U.S. still see the possibilities in this area, which is very good sign for the whole industry.
There are tons of nice portable MP3 players available on the market but none of them are really suitable for enjoying the music in car. Sure you can use a tape adapter, but that's not too convenient - especially if you're driving.
On Thursday, Los Angeles-based PhatNoise announced a deal with Visteon Corp., the second-largest auto parts maker, to license its MP3 jukebox, which will enable drivers to bring music from their PCs to the road.
The jukebox is an add-on to car's existing audio system. It uses a small cartridge as it's storage medium on which the user can transfer MP3 files from his or her PC.
Michigan-based Dearborn is also going to release a similar product. The MP3 player will be available late February, and will let users playback MP3s burned on a CD-R.
Source:
ABCNEWS.com
Several used-to-be-major players of the online music industry are suffering financially. Just to grab the latest headlines; Listen.com has laid off 25% of its staff few days ago, trying to achieve profitability as soon as possible. Also, custom cd maker, MusicMaker.com has plans to liquidate the company referring to bad financial status and failed licensing negotiations with major labels.
Also, big online music site AudioGalaxy.com has sued Launch.com, another big digital media site, over unpaid advertisement fees. Meanwhile, Launch.com itself has filed a suit against Checkout.com - Launch claims that Checkout owes almost $300k to Launch.
OMG, it's good that our site isn't based on VC money :-)
Motorola spin-off First International Digital announced that it will begin shipping the Irock 680 -player. The Irock 680 player plays back songs in both MP3 and MP3i format.
The MP3i, short for MP3 interactive, is a format deviced by Sondog Network and it integrates graphical data with digital music files. Lyrics, album covers, notes, photographs, advertisements etc. can be shown while the music is playing on the device. If the player does have MP3i support the MP3i files are played back just as standard MP3s are.
At the moment MP3i files can only be purchased at MP3Karaoke.com. There's also a simple beta version of a MP3 Karaoke Player for Windows available at the site. It's more of a technology demo than a player for serious use. You can also download a free copy of the Jingle Bells with karaoke lyrics at MP3Karaoke.com. You can also buy other songs for around $1.50-$3.00 at the site.
Of course having lyrics in MP3 files is nothing new - there even exists the Lyrics3 Tag v2.00 standard for adding timestamped lyrics to MP3 files. Of course MP3i is not compatible with the Lyrics3 standard.
The Irock 680 player will retail at $299 with 64MB of RAM, an FM tuner, a 6-line LCD, built-in microphone, voice recorder, USB-connection and two headphone jacks.
MP3.com will be celebrating the unveiling of the second generation of their My.MP3.com services on Thursday, January 4, 2001. The event will feature demonstrations of latest new music devices, as well as latest in software and wireless technologies from MP3.com and it's partners.
To register and reserve a seat for the event send email to www.mp3.com/events for more information.
Happy New Year everyone! I hope you've enjoyed the next millennium so far! Here's a quick recap on the happenings over the holiday season:
12/29: Napster back in court, but this time they are suing. Napster has sued online retailer Sport Service for trademark violations at NapsterStore.com. The NapsterStore.com is made to look like an official Napster store - which it is not.
1/1: Napster CEO Hank Barry shared his New Year's resolution: To make Napster prosper as a real business and to see that it is just a normal part of how people listen to music. I'm sure we are look forward to seeing the resolution realized!
1/2: Intel pushes into consumer goods with an portable audio player. With the move Intel is looking to broaden it's product line - an expected move after the problems Intel's processors, namely the Pentium4 chip, have gone through lately. The player would hold four hours of digital music in e.g. MP3 format, and retail at $299.99.
Check out the player's home page for an interactive demo and more information.
I guess that's all for now. Stay tuned for for more!
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