News written by Rich Fiscus (July, 2007)

Movie download site Movielink is offering a free download of battle flick 300 to consumers who buy the deluxe edition DVD in Target stores as part of a promotion for the Warner Home Video release

Target is promoting the partnership with stickering on the DVD, and Movielink sent an e-mail to customers telling them to “Double the Power of 300” by buying the disc in Target stores to receive the free download.

Movielink also will give Target buyers the free 22-minute behind-the-scenes feature “Making of 300,” which isn’t included on the DVD.

The companies are the latest to tie DVD sales with online sales.

Last week, Starz Home Entertainment announced a promotion with sister movie subscription site Vongo and Trans World Entertainment, that ties sales in FYE stores to sales and subscriptions on Vongo.

A year ago, Wal-Mart offered consumers who purchased Warner’s Superman Returns DVD a download of the film through its Web site for several dollars more.

Source: Video Business

Copies of NBC’s “Bionic Woman,” ABC’s “Pushing Daisies,” The CW’s “Reaper” and several other shows were available Friday for illegal download via sites such as torrent Spy, The Pirate Bay and Mininova.

Most of the titles appear to have been uploaded within the past week. The first copy of “Bionic” was listed as uploaded two days ago, while the earliest “Reaper” file was date-marked seven days ago. Other leaked shows include Fox’s midseason “The Terminator” spin-off “The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” ABC’s “Cavemen,” and NBC’s “Chuck” and “Lipstick Jungle.”

TelevisionWeek downloaded and confirmed the content of several pilot files. The videos were of reasonably high quality, akin to the Streaming programs on broadcast network Web sites.

“This baby is real and nice quality,” one user posted about "Connor" on Pirate Bay. “Wish I could say more about the content, but there is potential.”

“We’re doing everything we can to fight piracy,” said one major studio representative who declined to be identified. “Our piracy department is playing whack-a-mole with these things.”

After Nicholas Paternoster, a sergeant in the US Army, filed a counterclaim against the RIAA regarding an investigation which lead to a copyright infringement suit against him, the organization's attorneys asked the judge to strike an exhibit from the court record.

The exhibit consisted of a list of shared files allegedly found on his computer. It included over 4,000 files not mentioned in the RIAA suit. Sgt. Paternoster's counterclaim alleges that the RIAA violated his privacy and tried to shame him into giving into their "unreasonable demands regarding their copyrighted materials."

The labels then asked the judge to strike the original exhibit from the record as a "professional courtesy" to Paternoster and his attorneys. The judge approved the request and the original exhibit was removed from the public record on July 26.

his is not the first time the RIAA has been caught using questionable tactics. After Oregon resident Tanya Andersen, who was mistakenly accused of copyright infringement by the record labels, was exonerated, she sued the RIAA for malicious prosecution. In her complaint, she accused the record labels of trying to contact her then eight-year-old daughter without her knowledge, even calling her elementary school under false pretenses.

Last week at Comic-Con, the worlds biggest comic book convention, both HD DVD and Blu-ray were pushed by industry representatives.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment hosted a Blu-ray Experience booth on the exhibition floor. Every hour, executives premiered Blu-ray clips of Spider-Man 3, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 20 Million Miles to Earth 50th Anniversary Edition. The films ran across 52-inch TV screens via a Sony BDP-S300 set-top player, a PlayStation 3 and a Sony VAIO laptop. More than 8,000 Comic-Con attendees entered a contest to win one of the three Blu-ray hardware systems.

“This is our first big show where we are really focusing in on the consumer,” said Rich Marty, Sony VP of new business development. “It’s the perfect event to showcase Blu-ray, because you’re attracting a perfect demographic. These people love films, they love gaming and they love new technology. And the biggest titles are now coming.”

Outside the exhibition floor, studios presented panel discussions about new high-def titles. CBS DVD, distributed by Paramount Home Entertainment, trotted out Rod Roddenberry (the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry) to help promote the Nov. 20 bow of Star Trek: The Original Series on HD DVD.

Microsoft hasn't divulged detailed plans for the next release of its Zune music player, but a company executive last week offered hints that seem to support reports that a flash memory-based Zune and an 80GB device could be in the works.

At its annual financial analyst meeting last week, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, said Microsoft plans to "broaden" the Zune brand with new styles, capacity sizes, and price points as well as new features, though he did not reveal the timing of releases or exact product specifications.

Several device-centric blogs, including Zune Scene, Whiz Byte, Gadgetell, and others reported that an 80GB Zune code-named Scorpio and a flash memory-based Zune code-named Draco are currently in the works.

Zune Scene also has reported a production snag that could delay the release of the Scorpio device. According to a post on the blog late last week, the production schedule of Scorpio has been delayed due to problems with wiring. The blog also said that production on Scorpio was expected to be completed on Aug. 31 but has now been pushed back to September.

While Microsoft publicly remains optimistic about Zune's ability to compete against the iPod and other MP3 players, sources close to the company report that some inside Microsoft feel that Zune should be scrapped because it is not worth the company's investment. Microsoft said it has shipped more than 1.2 million Zune units since the product was released in November 2006, but consumers still overwhelmingly prefer Apple's iPod devices as their choice of multimedia player. Apple sold 9.8 million iPods in its quarter ended June 30th.

Amazon.com’s DVD-on-demand service CustomFlix Labs has inked a deal with the National Archives and Records Administration to make historic films, documentaries and newsreels available on disc, the company said today.

Universal newsreels from 1920 to 1967, covering everything from the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate, are available starting today through CustomFlix.

"Our DVD on Demand service will make these titles readily available for purchase on Amazon.com to be enjoyed by history buffs today, as well as for future generations to come" said Dana LoPiccolo-Giles, CustomFlix co-founder and managing director.

Discs of available films are manufactured when they are ordered and shipped to customers within 24 hours.

Films are available for free at the National Archives site, but sell for around $12 on Amazon.

Source: Video Business

Magnolia Audio Video, a regional electronics retailer owned by Best Buy, has plans to go national and transform itself into the nation's leading provider of AV Design and installation services.

The re-engineered Magnolia would operate out of a smaller footprint — 3,000-square-foot showroom/design centers located next to Best Buy stores with Magnolia Home Theater shops — and would target architects and luxury home developers in addition to consumers.

CEO Jim Tweten said the expansion would fill a need for a national custom installation chain with a recognizable brand and the financial backing of a Fortune 500 company. In the process, it will create an “end-to-end solution” covering all CE bases with Best Buy, Magnolia Home Theater and Magnolia Audio Video representing a good-better-best step-up scenario.

Magnolia will begin its transformation this summer by closing six underperforming stores and remodeling the remaining 13 by early November. The chain will then spend a year tweaking and evaluating the new operation before embarking on its expansion plans.

Source: TWICE

In a presentation at an annual meeting of the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) last week, the CEO of Circuit City Stores described how a partnership with the chain could improve consumer experiences when buying and installing new hardware.

Phil Schoonover told the CTAM Summit audience that Circuit City could provide a special store to sell the hardware, with the retailer’s service division, firedog, providing installation and support services.

Concept stores include “The City” in Virginia. Schoonover demonstrated a customer experience where a buyer is approached by a sales associate with a tablet PC. The associate uses the computer to hone in on the buyer’s needs: Which room will house the TV? Where will the hardware be placed? The PC enables the associate to sketch the room, placing furniture and determining what type of TV is best: LCD in Schoonover’s case, due to bright daylight in the room.

Circuit City has 650 retail locations. With all of its TVs turned on all day, that equals 90,000 potential billboards for cable-provided services, he suggested.

This year has not been good for the Virgina based retailer. In March they announced a plan to replace over 3,000 senior employees in a move to save money.

Despite still being in beta status, Joost has announced that they've signed up 1 million viewers.

Speaking at a Skype press event in Tallinn, Estonia, Skype CEO and Joost co-founder Niklas Zennström said that the service, launched in late 2006 and formerly codenamed 'The Venice Project', was currently being tested by a million users. The figure marks the first time Joost has disclosed the audience for its service.

Joost has been funded by Zennström and cofounder Janus Friis using the money they received following Skype's sale to eBay in 2006. So far, the service has signed up a number of content providers and "around 30 Tier 1 advertisers", Zennström said.

Ensuring the service works simply despite its complex underpinnings will also be a major consideration, a problem which Zennström also sees as an ongoing issue for Skype.

"Ease of use is such an important thing for us," he said. "Ultimately, you want everything as simple as possible."

Source: APC Magazine

A federal judge has ruled that AT&T's U-Verse IPTV service meets the legal definition of cable service under the Cable Communications Policy Act. The 1984 law sets certain requirements that all cable operators must meet.

The ruling came as the result of a lawsuit filed by the State of Connecticut's Office of Consumer Counsel, the New England Cable and Telecommunications Association, and Cablevision. The Connecticut Department of Public Utility Control had previously ruled that U-Verse wasn't subject to the law's restrictions.

If U-Verse is considered a cable service it becomes subject to all federal regulations for cable operators. Otherwise it would be an unregulated service, much like VOIP isn't subject to standard telephone regulations.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs pointed out that U-Verse would be "nearly identical" in every way to any other cable TV service from the perspective of cable subscribers, ranging from programming available to on-demand services. AT&T argued that since it had yet to begin offering TV service, any comparisons between U-Verse and other cable offerings were just speculation.

AT&T has so far resisted signing franchise agreements with local governments. When setting up the U-Verse service in communities that have insisted on franchise agreements AT&T has either taken the issue to court or simply halted deployment altogether.

Like fellow Korean competitor LG Electronics, Dutch corporation Phillips, and Japanese display company Sharp, Samsung will be releasing improved HDTV technology later this year. All four companies are expected to introduce displays with 120Hz refresh rates and LED Backlights.

The increase to from 60Hz 120Hz for a refresh rate makes it a multiple of not just video sources at 30Hz, but also film sources at 24Hz. It leads to smoother motion, and less motion blurring.

JVC and Sharp already have displays that take advantage of the doubled frequency. This summer, Philips, LG, and Samsung all announced their respective 120-Hz technologies, with products coming by this fall.

The 71 series displays that Samsung is launching in August use a technology called McFi--short for Motion Compensated Frame Interpolation--to create new interpolated video frames and insert them between each frame of video to smooth out fast motion. Samsung's technology looks for any movement, then it creates an average of those movements to insert a frame in between them. Other HDTV makers insert a black frame in between frames, an approach Samsung claims fixes the motion-blur issue, but degrade the panel's brightness.

Last Monday US Senator Harry Reid withdrew a proposed amendment to a renewal of the Higher Education Act, which provides financial aid to US college students. The amendment would have required colleges to crack down on illegal file sharing.

The Reid amendment also would have required the education secretary to annually identify (and publicly embarrass) the 25 colleges and universities that had in the previous year received the most notices of copyright violations using institutional technology networks.

Unless it was a response to lobbying from the entertainment industry, the reasoning behind this is puzzling since these notices are really just complaints from outside parties claiming copyright infringement; in other words allegations that haven't been proven in court.

College officials had lobbied aggressively against the Reid provision, arguing that it would require colleges to buy unproven software or hardware and that it ignored the many efforts that higher education institutions have been taking to attack the problem of illegal downloading.

One IT official at a Boston-area school noted that the proposal would have created a kind of "revolving door" for anti-P2P software companies who would have, in effect, been guaranteed 25 new customers each year.

If you're a regular visitor to this site you're probably already aware that Ninendo's Wii has outsold both the PS3 and Xbox 360. What you may not realize is that it's not Nintendo's best selling system.

Sales figures for the first half of 2007 put the Nintendo DS as the top selling system, followed in order by the Wii, the PS2, Xbox 360, Sony PSP, and finally the PS3.

Interestingly, neither of the consoles designed around so called next-gen technology even comes close to the sales of the technologically inferior Wii. The Wii outsold the Xbox 360 by a factor of more than 3:2 and outperformed PS3 sales by nearly 3:1.

The venerable PS2 even outsold the PS3 by a nearly 2:1 margin. It's possible this is simply the result of Sony and Microsoft pricing their newest consoles out of the reach of some consumers who don't want to buy a Wii. This would seem to indicate that one or both of those consoles may eventually benefit from future sales to this group.

Sales of the PS3 have been up since Sony dropped the current US model to clearance prices, but they've said they expect those models to be gone soon, replaced by a new version that's the same price ($599) that left the current model sitting on store shelves prior to the discount.

A new site called VideoJug is determined to become the expert version of YouTube -- a place where you can find how-to videos from various experts for everything from etiquette to eBay to earthquake survival.

Most of the videos on VideoJug are professionally produced by the site. Others are submitted by users, but still vetted by VideoJug staff.

Like any other aspect of the web, video can be used for educational purposes. But such use is dependent on the veracity of the information available.

Just like traditional text based sites need to have some kind of fact checking to make sure their information is sound, video sites claiming to have educational or factual content need to make sure viewers aren't being mislead.

VideoJug's approach seems to be a good solution for this, although their fact checking process doesn't seem to be detailed anywhere on the site.

Sources: Information Week, VideoJug

After more than a year of next-gen releases in both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats, Paramount's first releases with lossless audio - Blades of Glory and Next have been announced.

In the world of standard DVD-Video discs almost all discs are released with lossy audio, meaning some quality is lost from the original recording. This is due to the relatively large size of uncompressed audio, which is the only lossless format supported by standards.

Due to the smaller percentage of the disc required to use uncompressed audio for either hi-def format, as well as the availability of Dolby TrueHD as a mandatory audio format for HD DVD, it's fairly common for releases in both formats to include lossless audio.

Paramount's delay in using lossless audio on their discs likely stems from releasing discs in both formats. HD DVD's smaller storage capacity and inclusion of the compressed Dolby TrueHD as a mandatory audio format make that the obvious choice. However, since it's not a mandatory format for Blu-ray, another audio stream must be included on those discs if TrueHD is to be included.

This week TiVo Inc. officially announced a new, lower priced, version of it's Series3 DVR. The company will begin taking pre-orders for it on its Web site Tuesday, and units are expected to hit retail outlets by early August.

"It won't suddenly unlock the door and sell millions," said James McQuivey, a vice president and analyst at Forrester Research. "But this seems like a good way to satisfy people who want the high-quality experience that TiVo is known for - with a product that will move off store shelves."

The TiVo HD DVR has many of the same technical features as its higher-priced Series3 cousin. It has two tuners, so subscribers can record two different shows in HD at the same time while watching a third, prerecorded show. It also has two built-in slots for CableCARD, allowing users to access digital programming without a separate device from the cable TV provider.

As reported on Afterdawn earlier this month, the new model will have a smaller hard drive than the original (160GB vs 250GB), as well as a simpler remote control.

Contrary to rumors earlier in the month, The device does have an external hard drive port for expanded storage, but TiVo officials say that feature won't be activated until later.

Motorola will be working with display and imaging supplier Microvision to create mobile devices with built-in projectors.

The laser based devices will project images much smaller than conventional computer or home entertainment projectors, but still much larger than mobile device displays.

Besides increasing the size of a mobile device's display for its owner, the technology could also be used to make it easier for more than one person at a time to view content directly from a mobile device.

Rob Shaddock, Chief Technical Officer of Motorola Mobile Devices business said "Working together with Microvision, we are pursuing ways that projection technology can redefine how mobile consumers view and interact with the media they take with them."

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, however the companies revealed they will work together initially to integrate Microvision's latest PicoP projector inside a functioning mobile device for demonstration purposes. This prototype handset will utilize Microvision's new, WVGA (854 x 480 color pixels) wide angle scanner, first demonstrated in May 2007 at the Society of Information Display annual conference.

No information was given about when the two companies plan to have working hardware to demonstrate or sell to consumers.

YouTube hopes recognition technology will be in place in September to stop the posting of copyrighted videos on the popular website, a lawyer told a judge presiding over copyright lawsuits on Friday.

Philip S. Beck, told U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton in Manhattan that YouTube was working "very intensely and cooperating" with major content providers on a video recognition technology as sophisticated as fingerprint technology the FBI uses.

He said the company believes the new technology goes way beyond what the law requires to stop copyright infringement.

Lawyers for plaintiffs in the two lawsuits said they welcomed any improvement that would end alleged infringement of their copyrights but believed YouTube should have acted sooner.

Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., a lawyer for Viacom International Inc., said it will take the next year to identify the extent of infringement that continues to happen on "a very massive scale."

"Perhaps the filtering mechanism will help. If so, we'll be very grateful for that," he said. He added "they acknowledge rampant activity and haven't done anything to stop it."

Source: Yahoo News

Steve Wozniak, the man who invented Apple's first two microcomputers, is working as an advisor for a company called Hotswap.com, which reportedly has developed Compression technology that could revolutionize internet video. "I like what they're doing. It's definitely a step forward," said Wozniak, adding that he signed on as an adviser to the company to "give them ideas that come into my mind.".

Hotswap.com emerged from graduate computer science research into digital "compression" technology that its founders say can make common digital camera movie clips mimic high-definition television on Web sites.

Luke Thomas, a 21-year-old former UC Berkeley grad student and Hotswap chairman, said the often-fuzzy videos uploaded by amateurs onto YouTube.com and similar Web sites can be transformed by Hotswap's technology.

The company has already won contracts with AutoNation Inc. and with Red McCombs Enterprises' chain of auto dealerships.

Rad Weaver, McCombs' vice president of business development, said the company has begun using video clips with Hotswap technology for its used car listings on the Internet.

DailyMotion, a video website with traffic second only to YouTube, is going to be getting content supplied by production company RDF USA.

Max Benator, head of RDF USA's digital division said "It's really exciting because they have amazing traffic. It's been untapped by the entertainment community, so we see this as a great opportunity to be one of the first producers to get access to those eyeballs."

DailyMotion is only the latest viral-video outpost to bring professionally produced content into the fold as competitors like Break.com have already struck similar deals with NBC Universal Digital Studios. Other pro-content link-ups have been struck through acquisition, as is the case with Sony Corp.'s purchase of Grouper, which has since been rebranded Crackle and now features original content.

RDF USA isn't DailyMotion's first content deal. the company already has wrapped up "The Great Sketch Comedy Showdown," produced by Jim Biederman, who already has produced series in that genre for established TV channels, including "The Whitest Kids U Know" (Fuse) and "The Big Gay Sketch Show" (Logo).

"Our goal is to take this big bucket of user-generated content and make it a meaningful entertainment experience for the watcher," Marcus said. "Then I think there's the other side of the fence, which is working with the creative community."

Today the BBC launched its much anticipated download service, using software called iPlayer. Users can download a selection of programs broadcast in the last seven days and watch them for up to 30 days.

Viewers interested in using iPlayer can register for the service on Friday and a Limited number will then be invited to join. The number of users invited will increase until the full scale launch this fall when the restriction will be lifted.

The iPlayer began life in 2003 as the iMP (Integrated Media Player). "At the time, it was remarkably innovative. For the BBC to use peer-to-peer technology was revolutionary," said Simon Perry, editor of online magazine Digital Lifestyles.

"If it had just launched it then it could have blown the whole broadcast world away. Who knows what the impact would have been if it had come out before the rise of YouTube," he said.

Regardless of the timing, this is still revolutionary compared to US networks which have streaming content, but no mechanism to allow downloads, let alone time shifting for up to 30 days.

Arash Amel, an analyst with research firm Screen Digest, said "technical glitches" were inevitable when iPlayer launched, partly because rival applications experienced them and partly through his own experience of the BBC's offering.

Despite most consumers being unaware that their analog television receivers won't receive broadcast signals early in 2009, the US government has only budgeted $5 million to educate them.

John Kneuer, head of the agency responsible for assuring the transition goes smoothly told the Senate Commerce Committee today that the broadcasters are responsible for educating the public.

The transition has already begun in some key areas. Cathy Seidel, chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission, said that as of March 1 all television receivers shipped in the U.S. were required to have digital tuners.

By contrast, $1.5 billion has been budgeted to give vouchers for converter boxes. Initially, $990 million will be used to pay for coupons and cover administrative costs, which are capped at $110 million. An additional $510 million may be allocated, but those coupons are reserved for households that have only over-the-air television.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., is concerned that consumers who don't get the word would take it out on their elected representatives. "They're not going to call you," she told Kneuer. "They're going to call me. And they're going to be mad."

Blockbuster will be changing the terms of its Total Access internet rental plans to limit the number of DVDs that can be returned to stores without paying extra.

Subscribers can choose from 3 Total Access plans, for 3 DVDs, 2 DVDs, or 1 DVD at a time, which used to allow them to return an unlimited number to a brick and mortar store so their next disc will ship sooner. Due to losses in the second quarter of this year, as well as well as lower revenue compared to the same quarter last year, the company will limit the number of in-store returns for each plan.

Subscribers will have the choice to either pay an additional $1.99 for each additional movie returned to a store each month or upgrade to a higher priced subscription to get unlimited in-store returns. The new unlimited return plans, called Premium plans, will cost an additional $7 per month.

Rather than characterizing the modifications as a price hike, new CEO James Keyes stressed the limit on in-store exchanges. He also said that customers subscribing to the mail only program will also be able to take advantage of the $1.99 in-store returns.

This move comes less than a week after rival Netflix lowered prices on its own subscription plans, which only allow returns by mail since Netflix has no brick and mortar stores. Ironically, Netflix decided to lower prices after competition from Blockbuster caused them to lose subscribers for the first time in the company's short history.

A French high court has ruled against the Paris-based video-sharing site Dailymotion, holding it liable for a copyrighted film posted by its users.

The court noted that Dailymotion did not take the film down even after it received a letter of complaint from the producers. The court ordered the site to pay the film's producers 23,000 euros in damages and fork over a 1500 euro fine for each day the movie stays online - though Dailymotion can appeal.

Last month, the President of the High Court of the First Instance of Paris issued a "summary order" that classified MySpace as a publisher, arguing that the so-called social-networker is more than just a hosting service and should be held liable for infringing content posted to its site.

The judgement against Dailymotion was issued by a separate arm of the court, and doesn't indicate that the site is considered a publisher.

Where web-based video sharers are concerned, American courts have yet to rule on the matter, but several lawsuits against YouTube and others - including the big one from Viacom - are pending. The outcome of those suits is likely to shape the future of not just those websites, but any site that allows the public to upload content.

Starting in October, the only standalone hi-def player on Target shelves will be the Sony BDP-S300. They will continue carrying Microsoft's Xbox HD DVD Player which requires either an Xbox 360 or computer.

Target is expected to officially announce the agreement today.

Sony executives expect the company’s endcaps at Target will feature the player, titles from a variety of Blu-ray-backing studios and marketing messages promoting consumer benefits of Blu-ray.

"Target already has a strong market share for Blu-ray, where they are among our Top 5 markets," said David Bishop, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment president. "I think this will accelerate their position in the marketplace. This is going to mean more dedicated shelf space to Blu-ray titles. This will start to build the next phase of the business."

At least for now, Toshiba's HD DVD players will still be sold through the retailer's website and HD DVD movies will still be available both online and in stores, at least giving the appearance that the company isn't convinced of Blu-ray's success.

As good as this sounds for Blu-ray, and especially Sony, right now, it may ultimately provide ammunition for an investigation into the format's developers by the European Commission.

Microsoft will be reducing the price of the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player by $20 in the US starting in August. They'll also be giving away five HD DVD movies to anyone purchasing the add-on in the months of August or September.

The free discs are an extension of Toshiba's "Perfect Offer", which accompanies purchases of that company's standalone HD DVD players. The mail-in offer allows consumers to choose from fifteen titles.

The announcement was made today at ComicCon International 2007 in San Diego. The company also announced promotions for their Xbox LIVE service that will be tied into upcoming HD DVD releases.

Xbox LIVE will offer the movie 300 on demand in HD starting August 14. Xbox LIVE members will also be able to download the pilot for the hit television show Heroes in high definition before the box set for the first season is released next month.

With Sony's Playstation 3 selling well after a temporary price reduction, plus the announcement that rental giant Blockbuster will carry Blu-ray exclusively, and a similar announcement from retailer Target expected today, this may not make any difference in the success of the HD DVD format.

On a typical day, 19 percent of U.S. Internet adults watch some form of video. News ranked first and comedy second overall according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at Pew, said news websites were key to making people feel comfortable with watching video on the internet, but younger viewers in particular were the primary attraction for younger viewers.

Older demographics are interested primarily in news, while younger viewers, who watch more online video anyway, appear to prefer comedy.

Those in the 18-29 age group are also more likely to have paid for video access at some point - but that's still only 10 percent of online video viewers in that group, slightly more than the 7 percent across all age groups.

This would seem to indicate that if Streaming video is going to be profitable, either a new marketing strategy or alternate revenue stream will need to be developed.

Source: The Associated Press

According to China's state run media, the production lines used to create pirated DVDs are imported from outside the country and run by highly secretive gangs.

The statement comes after Chinese and US officials dismantled a multi-billion dollar software piracy operation in China.

"Illegal production lines are the source of pirated discs and to seize these lines can effectively wipe out pirated discs in China," Chinese police official Xu Hu was quoted as saying by the Xinhua news agency.

But "most of the illegal production lines are smuggled from overseas and some were using edge-cutting technologies," Xu added. "The lines are clustered in the developed coastal regions of China and most are hidden in dark rooms and even caves."

According to Xu, Chinese police have shut down 231 production lines since 1996, but since no details were given regarding the number of operations still believed to exist, it's hard to determine how much difference that's made.

The Chinese are generally considered the world leaders in copyright infringement, with the majority of all DVDs and software sold in the country being pirated.

Henry Waxman, chairman of the House of Representatives' Government Reform Committee, characterized peer to peer file sharing networks as national security threats. The comments were made during a hearing about the technology, which was apparently used to share classified documents.

He also said that he is considering laws to address the problem, but didn't give any details as to what those laws might entail.

The comments seem to contradict the testimony of Mary Koelbel Engle, the associate director for advertising practices in the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection. She said her agency has found in its studies of peer-to-peer network use that risks to sensitive information "stem largely from how individuals use the technology rather than being inherent in the technology itself."

Daniel Mintz, chief information officer for the Department of Transportation, also testified, saying that the key to preventing such incidents is "to make sure we're really pushing the policy," which requires written authorization for installation of P2P programs on government machines.

There was no mention of manilla envelope, briefcase, or automobile manufacturers, despite these technologies all being used for the unauthorized distribution of classified documents in the past.

Politicians with a limited understanding of the technology they're determined to regulate is nothing new. Less than 2 weeks ago Ted Stevens, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, called the internet a "series of tubes", adding that an internet was sent to him by his staff, but it's delivery was delayed "because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially."

Ministers yesterday issued a response to recommendations made by the Parliamentary culture'n'media committee, which said the government should push the European Union for a copyright term of "at least 70 years". The suggestion was rejected on the grounds that most works that would be affected have previously signed contracts assigning their royalties to record labels, and therefore wouldn't benefit from the extension.

Overall the response is a mixed bag for consumers. It mentions the possibility of legalizing "format shifting", which would allow the copying copyrighted recordings from one format to another.

It's currently illegal in the UK to even Rip a CD or convert songs to MP3 format. Besides allowing both of those practices, considered commonplace in most parts of the world, it would also be beneficial to audiophiles with older, analog recording they'd like to convert to newer digial formats. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray support lossless audio Compression originally designed for the high quality DVD-Audio format, and this could finally open the door for owners of older vinyl records to copy them to digital formats.

Yesterday the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against Universal Music Publishing Group, asking a federal court to protect the fair use and free speech rights of a mother who posted a short video of her toddler son dancing to a Prince song on the Internet.

In February Stephanie Lenz uploaded a 29 second clip of her son bouncing around to the song "Let's Go Crazy," which is heard playing in the background. Last month YouTube informed Lenz that it had removed the video from its website after Universal claimed that the recording infringed a copyright controlled by the music company.

The lawsuit asks for a declaratory judgment that Lenz's home video does not infringe any Universal copyright, as well as damages and injunctive relief restraining Universal from bringing further copyright claims in connection with the video.

"Universal's takedown notice doesn't even pass the laugh test," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Copyright holders should be held accountable when they undermine non-infringing, fair uses like this video."

The lawsuit asks for a declaratory judgment that Lenz's home video does not infringe any Universal copyright, as well as damages and injunctive relief restraining Universal from bringing further copyright claims in connection with the video.

Yesterday Netflix announced that the number of subscribers to their DVD rental service dropped in the second quarter of this year. This is the first quarter in the company's history that subscriptions to the industry leading online rental service have dropped.

This follows their announcement on Sunday of a $1 price decrease to match the pricing of Blockbuster's online rental program. Industry analysts blame competition from Blockbuster for the loss of subscribers. The company still reported a profit of $17 million.

In the past, Netflix has seemed somewhat resistant to competition, at least in part due to their patents for using an automated queue of movies to be delivered and selling subscriptions to rent a specific number of items at a time. They've even managed to not only compete with Wal-Mart, but even get the retail giant in their corner after the fight.

Echostar is taking FTA set-top distributor Viewtech of Oceanside, Calif., and its founder and president, Jung Kwak to court for allegedly “distributing the requisite piracy technology and information to select individuals on Web sites or Internet discussion forums, who then offer the pirate software to consumers for download.”

The lawsuit was filed July 13 by EchoStar and its NagraStar unit, which provides Dish’s descrambler microprocessor “smart cards.”

The suit, alleging violations of state and federal law, asks the court: to issue an injunction to bar Viewtech from trafficking in FTA receivers and pirate software; for an order impounding all electronic copies of the software; for damages; and for an accounting and restitution by Viewtech for all of the gain and profit it derived by its allegedly illegal actions.

FTA set-tops can receive satellite signals that are either not scrambled or are scrambled but are available free-of-charge, typically ethnic and religious programming.

Viewtech is one of the top four FTA sellers, according to a report on FTA set-tops by The Carmel Group, “in large measure because of its superior customer service and support.”

“Whichever manufacturer provide the best piracy support, best features and functions at a price below $200 per FTA unit is going to sell a lot of FTA units,” The Carmel Group said. “This means companies like Dish Network in the United States and Bell ExpressVu in Canada are losing a lot of subscriber revenue … the FTA manufacturers and others associated with the multichannel-TV-piracy business are delivering a lot of illegal gains.”

Netflix has announced a price decrease of $1 per month for its two most popular plans. The 3 DVD at a time plan will drop to $16.99 a month, while the single disc at a time plan will be $8.99.

The cuts, which match rival Blockbuster's online only plans, are the second this year. Earlier in the year the price for the two DVD per month and two disc at a time plans also dropped $1.

Acknowledging Blockbuster has been eroding its market share, Netflix in April warned Wall Street that it won't add as many subscribers this year as it originally envisioned. The company has added 4.5 million subscribers since lowering the price of its 3-DVD plan from just under $22 in November 2004. The company is also making a lot more money, with earnings of $49 million last year compared to a $6.5 million profit in 2003.

Last year Blockbuster added an option for subscribers to pay an additional $1 per month, in return for which they can return movies to Blockbuster's traditional brick and mortar rental outlets and even pick up some movies from those stores. Online rental has at least a two day turnaround time as discs have to be sent and received through the mail.

In an interview published in Spectrum, a publication published by the IEEE, Mark Cuban says of YouTube, "They will be rolled right into Google Video, and Google Video will have ways to evaluate the video before it's posted, and that will be fine." He also adds "if I'm wrong, and the safe harbor laws apply, then I'll create a business leveraging that."

Cuban, probably best known for being the outspoken owner of NBA franchise The Dallas Mavericks, does know a thing or two about digital media and online distribution. The 48 year old billionaire first came to national attention when Broadcast.com, the company he helped run, went public and he became wealthy literally in one day. Later he made headlines again when the company was sold to Yahoo for nearly 6 billion dollars.

Besides YouTube, he also weighs in on the DMCA, file sharing, and the future of movie theaters. Regarding the DMCA he says "For example, say somebody came up with a different way of dealing with garage door openers, and they got sued over it under this Digital Millennium Copyright law. That's ridiculous."

He mentioned that he doesn't have the patience to download from a file sharing service, but apparently does check BitTorrent to see if movies from his company, 2929 Entertainment, are being pirated. When asked what he does when he finds them he responded "Nothing. Cause those kids weren't gonna spend the money anyways."

According to a report from The Carmel Group, by the year 2010 more than 50% of cable television subscribers will have DVRs.

The report projects that within the next three years, the number of cable-subscribing homes in the US with DVRs will grow to 32 million. Currently the number is less than 18 million, which is close to 30% of all subscribers.

It also said that in 2001 nine out of ten top cable providers weren't interested in providing the set top recorders, but consumer demand has changed their minds, and industry adoption of the technology has been rapid.

The secret has been recognizing the upswing in demand among consumers. Carmel Group chairman Jimmy Schaeffler compares user demand to that of black-and-white TV viewers who switch to color: "People who get used to watching TVs with a DVR don't want to return to watching TV without a DVR."

Source: Ars Technica

Unlike most video sharing sites, whose target audience is anyone and everyone, The Daily Reel's new REELEDin section is specifically designed to connect the people behind the videos with potential employers.

Launched last fall, The Daily Reel originally started as an online video guide; finding and promoting select videos from video sharing sites. It's since turned into a place for anyone from Hollywood studios to website executives to find new talent.

REELEDin allows visitors to create either a Creative or Employer account, depending on whether they're looking to market their own talent or find new talent to hire. But the point is more than just showcasing videos. It's also intended to be a social network that connects up and coming talent with their more experienced peers.

According to the site's FAQ, "REELEDin is primarily for the online filmmaker who is looking to legitimize his or her content, whether that be learning how to make money off of it, getting it exposed better to the people who matter, or improving the content itself. REELEDin is also for the n00bs to online vid as well, especially those looking to get access to those who know what they’re doing."

According to the results of TiVo's 6 month old StopWatch ratings program, DVR users are watching movie previews they could easily skip.

StopWatch is a Nielsen-like product that measures audiences for commercials on a second-by-second basis, so that clients may determine the number of people in DVR households that are watching ads live or recorded or not at all, preferring to fast-forward them entirely or in part.

The service also counts households where commercials are rewound and viewed multiple times.

According to Todd Juenger, vice president and general manager of TiVo Audience Research & Measurement, the service is intended to augment the Nielsen TV ratings, which are the currency of the television commercial industry.

According to Todd Juenger, vice president and general manager of TiVo Audience Research & Measurement, there is not necessarily a correlation between the most-watched commercials and the most-viewed TV shows.

Source: Yahoo News

Online video service JumpTV Inc. said on Tuesday it would buy a U.S. college sports broadband network for $60.25 million to expand beyond its portfolio of ethnic channels.

Toronto-based JumpTV, which offers online video channels from countries including Albania, Australia, Egypt and Hong Kong, will buy the broadband network business division of XOS Technologies Inc.

The unit of Sanford, Florida-based XOS, which developed and maintains official Web sites for collegiate and professional sports teams, streams over the Internet thousands of U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association football, basketball, volleyball, baseball and Track & Field games.

It generated about $2.45 million in revenue in the first five months of this year and logged an operating loss of $3.17 million in the same period.

last month Rivals.com, a site for fans of college and high school teams, was acquired by Yahoo Inc. of for an undisclosed price.

Source: Yahoo News

Advocate General Juliane Kokott, advising the European Court of Justice, said Wednesday that EU law directs governments to resist the disclosure of personal data on Internet traffic in civil cases.

A Spanish court hearing a case involving Promusicae, a group of Spanish music producers similar to the RIAA, had asked the EU court for guidance on what EU law allows.

Promusicae is trying to force Spanish ISP Telefonica to hand over the names and addresses of subscribers using IP addresses allegedly involved in sharing files on KaZaa. Telefonica maintained that it was unable to hand over the information unless it was connected to a criminal prosecution or dealt with matters of public security or national defense.

ECJ judges are expected to make their final ruling later this year. The judges follow the advocate general's recommendations in roughly 80 percent of cases, according to reports. Until the final ruling, Kokott's preliminary recommendation is non-binding.

Copyright holders in Europe may get help from a proposed revision to IPRED, the EU's IP law. If passed into law, the changes would make many forms of copyright infringement criminal rather than civil offenses, potentially making ISPs liable for copyrighted materials passed through their networks. The law would only cover "commercial" infringement, however, leaving individual file-sharers only at risk for civil cases.

As multimedia content based websites become more common, an increasing amount of content is produced and performed by people discovered on video sharing websites.

Steven Starr, a former talent agent who heads the Web video site Revver, says what he sees emerging is "a creator economy online" whereby the Internet will carve out its own slice of the action, rather than just serving as a development league for TV and film.

Even if untapped talent is not necessarily easy to find, the economics of Web entertainment startups dictates that they try hard to do it. Old-school casting calls — and Hollywood's union contracts — wouldn't work for digital media that comes together quickly and relatively cheaply.

Often these online jobs are with sites that may be a step above the user-generated videos of YouTube, but still are sorting out the economics of attracting advertising. As a result, discovery sometimes comes with modest trappings. And it often extends to people who wouldn't have made it through Hollywood's old-school gatekeepers — or even tried.

It's certainly no secret that the Web can launch new faces. The medium already has its tales of regular Janes who made it big, like Lisa Donovan, who leaped from YouTube to the cast of Fox's "MadTV," and Brooke Brodack, a Net video character signed to a TV production deal by Carson Daly.

Over 60% of iPhone users have watched video on the device according to a survey conducted by market research firm Interpret. This is more than twice the total number of Cell phone subscribers who have watched video on their phones.

Interpret reports that over half have viewed YouTube clips, while nearly half have watched music videos. News or movie previews were watched at least once by a third of respondents with iPhones.

The study shows that there's a "huge untapped opportunity for mobile video," Interpret spokesman Jason Kramer said. "If the technology is there and the user experience is right, then consumers will watch video. Apple is proving that the market is there."

When it comes to paying for content, 73% of iPhone owners expected to get paid content from Apple's online store iTunes, compared to 43% of non-users. Fully 46% of non-owners expected paid content to come cable and satellite TV providers.

Source: Information Week

Nielsen will begin testing later this month a “solo meter” that can be used to detect video and audio played on any portable media device, the company told clients in its monthly report for July. A technology test of 100 of the new meters will begin later this month.

The company also created a separate wireless division called Nielsen Wireless Vector to focus on the measurement of video and other activity on cellular devices. The division will draw data from a variety of Nielsen companies, divisions and services including the Nielsen Home Technology Report, metered TV panelists and BASES.

Both initiatives are two of several Nielsen is pursuing to measure portable media devices, which are fast becoming popular with consumers as more content becomes available to them.

Source: MediaWeek

TiVo is expected to start selling a budget version of their Series 3 DVR for just $300 - less than half the price of the standard model.

The differences between the new player and its $800 big brother are reportedly a 90GB reduction in hard drive capacity with no external SATA ports, no front panel display, only a single MPEG encoder (the standard model has 2), a stripped down remote, and no THX certification.

At a discount of $500 many consumers will be happy to do without those features. With a little technical expertise the hard drive limitations can even be resolved with widely available software and instructions.

There are even some rumours that an even less expensive model with approximately the same features, but an even smaller hard drive will appear at some point.

Source: Ars Technica

According to a US trade official, the United States is seeking consultations with China over that country's policies on music downloading and cinema rights.

In a written statement to the WTO (World Trade Organization) regarding an ongoing complaint, the U.S. said "various measures in China appear to impose market access restriction or discriminatory requirements on foreign service suppliers seeking to engage in the digital distribution of sound recordings."

According to Stephen Norton from the Office of the US Trade Representative, Music from foreign sources needs to undergo content review before being distributed in China. Chinese music doesn't have to face that process," Norton told The Associated Press. "The review delays Chinese Internet providers and Chinese consumers from accessing foreign music." He also mentioned that the same discrimination barriers exist for downloading music to mobile phones.

Since Chinese law doesn't allow foreign companies to own or invest in Chinese companies that distribute music over the internet, this is a major barrier for foreign businesses.

As a country that now boasts over 160 million internet users, China is an important market to reach. With only 12.3% of the population using the internet right now, compared to the global rate of 17.6%, it should continue to grow for some time.

When AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. report quarterly results later this month, investors will be looking for proof that their expensive video strategies are starting to pay off.

The two companies have spent billions building high speed networks designed to compete with cable companies' all-in-one video, internet, and phone packages. These networks are seen by many as key to the success of traditional telephone providers, largely due to declining fixed-line phone sales and increasing competition from cable and online services.

For the traditional 13-state territory of AT&T, the company has said it plans to connect the network to around 18 million homes by the end of 2008.

AT&T shares have risen less than 1 percent in the past 3 months to trade on Friday around $39.30. Verizon shares have risen 13 percent over the same period to around $42.45.

"As they begin delivering on the metrics and people can see the product out there in the market, there will be less of a concern about the spending," said Atlantic Equity analyst Chris Watts, adding that positive consumer reaction to Verizon's FiOS video service over the past year was already helping that company's shares.

As consumers, businesses, and technical publications ponder when Windows Vista will be capable of doing what Windows XP already does, Microsoft is already talking to its sales force about the next version of the operating system.

Tentatively being called Windows 7 (ie Windows NT version 7), there was little talk about features, but quite a bit about establishing a regular release schedule for new vesions of the #1 desktop operating system in the world.

This isn't surprising given the results of a study published earlier this month by Forrester Reasearch Inc. indicating that at least a quarter of Microsoft's corporate customers with software assurance licenses will stop using the service, and the number may end up being closer to 50%.

Software Assurance is the Microsoft program that allows customers with volume licenses for Windows automatically get upgrades when new versions come out. The problem is the time between Windows XP and Windows Vista has made customers question what they're getting for their money. This is very bad news for Microsoft since their revenue from the Software Assurance program was over $4 billion in the first quarter of this year alone.

The real question seems to be whether there will be any reason to upgrade to the next version of Windows. It can easily take more than a year to get a new operating system from initial beta test phase, before which almost all major changes must at least be ready for testing. In a three year schedule that only leaves two years to finalize changes from the last version.

THX wants your digital media to give your player instructions to tweak settings for playback.

The company, which was started to help standardize movie theaters so movies would sound the way their creators intended, is hoping that their new technology, code named Blackbird, will improve the viewer's home theater experience by automatically adjusting the picture and sound properties of home theater equipment based on instructions embedded in DVDs, CDs, video games, and even downloaded content.

"This is the most ambitious thing we've tried in a long time," said Robert Hewitt, the company's vice president of sales.

Currently THX's core business is certifying car and home audio systems, video games, high-end televisions and home projectors, and DVDs. A THX certification indicates that a given product will reproduce sound exactly the way it was meant to be heard.

To make a go of Blackbird, THX executives acknowledge they must first convince Hollywood studios and electronics makers to sign on to a new format, and that's never an easy task.

Source: CNet News

Research presented at the Home Media Expo on Wednesday shows that 10% of consumers think they already have a hi-def player of some kind, while the real figure is closer to 1%.

If you've been following the development and introduction of HD DVD and Blu-ray at all over the last few years this probably comes as no surprise. In fact you may be one of the people that market research firm NPD says don't see a difference between those technologies and regular DVD. If so, you probably don't have plans to buy into either of the new formats any time soon.

Russ Crupnick, an analyst for NPD, said “Consumers are entirely confused.” He also mentioned that while smaller retailers have a good chance to increase sales by providing the needed consumer education, they should avoid investing too heavily in the next generation technologies because most consumers probably buy movies and music at so called "big box" stores.

This is in contrast to early adopters of both formats, whom Nielsen Media Research says buy most of their movies at electronics and game specialty stores.

In August Walt Disney Studios will be promoting Blu-ray releases on a 18 stop marketing blitz they're calling Disney's Magical Blu-ray Tour, which will be sponsored by Panasonic.

In a statement, Dick Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios said “Disney has always put consumers first, and we are here to help everyone understand this amazing new technology.” He also adds “It is imperative that we continue to educate and engage consumers as to the advantages and exciting features that are unique to the Blu-ray disc format.”

If these events sound more like a sales pitch than an educational event it should come as no surprise given that they're bankrolled by one of Blu-ray's primary patent holders, Matsushita (owner of the Panasonic brand), and put on by one of the format's most vocal supporters among entertainment companies.

Event participants will get a first look at previews of HD versions of Disney/Pixar’s “Cars” and Disney’s “Meet the Robinsons,” as well as an opportunity to play the interactive “Liar’s Dice” game from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”

The tour will be stopping in Canoga Park, Costa Mesa, San Diego and San Francisco, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Seattle; Minneapolis; Chicago; St. Louis; Washington, D.C.; Long Island, N.Y.; Boston; Philadelphia; Indianapolis; Atlanta; Houston and Austin, Texas; and Phoenix between August 17 and December 23 of this year.

At this year's Home Media Expo in Las Vegas the HD DVD and Blu-ray organizations are trying a new strategy to win the "format war." They're marketing directly to consumers and almost ignoring retailers.

One big difference over previous years is a new group of attendees to the annual home video industry convention. Representatives from the consumer run and oriented websites are being treated to a barrage of sales pitches directly from members of the two groups.

In fact retailers weren't even invited to a party Tuesday night thrown by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. At that party consumer representatives were given free Blu-ray players and movies.

On the HD DVD side, Microsoft and Universal Studios Home Entertainment held a panel on Wednesday demonstrating HD DVD and taking questions. Although retailers were free to attend the session, they were only promoted to consumer attendees. There was also an HD DVD player available to anynone at the show for only $99.

This is in stark contrast to other recent technology shows, like January's CES, where both groups have spent a lot of money and time selling to retailers. It's likely due to complaints from studios since the introduction of both formats that retail sales forces don't know enough to educate consumers.

Disney owned Hollywood Records is hoping to boost CD sales by introducing a new format they're calling CDVU+ (pronounced CD View Plus) which includes content which can be downloaded from the internet. The content will include song lyrics and band photos.

Hollywood Records senior vice president of marketing Ken Bunt says "We really believe if you're going to give consumers what they want, we should do it in a way they're used to." Given the number of websites that already provide free lyrics and pictures, though, it remains to be seen if consumers will consider these "extras" worth paying for.

U.S. CD sales were down nearly 20 percent in the first half of 2007, at least partly due to ever increasing competition from video games, new home video formats, and downloadable media.

Instead of trying to breathe new life into the aging CD format, it might be wise for big entertainment companies to put their research and development funding into a viable replacement. With Disney already backing Blu-ray for hi-def video, a format which supports audio far superior to CD, that might be a good starting point.

On the last day to file comments with the FCC regarding it's upcoming decision regarding so called "Net Neutrality" a coalition of 11 consumer groups submitted a detailed recommendation. It takes on a variety of common claims by copyright holders, including specifically addressing comments made recently by NBC Universal counsel Rick Cotton and NBC's own FCC filing on the matter.

Net neutrality refers to the discussion over whether ISPs should be allowed to charge differently for different content being downloaded from the internet. NBC's FCC filing suggested that as part of their decision they should create regulations to force ISPs to Block potentially infringing traffic.

One of the more interesting topics was the difference between unauthorized and illegal copying of content. It points out that "Because an "unauthorized" use is not necessarily an illegal one, no technology or method should give the desires of a copyright holder priority over the first amendment."

Referring to Cotton's remarks that piracy causes financial hardship for corn farmers, which we reported last month, the document says "NBC's specious attempt to follow the chain of cause and affect to its absurd limits is driven by the fact that it is a minority copyright holder engaged in special pleading for government favors."

Samsung is releasing a new phone in Sourth Korea which will have not only a video camera, but also basic video editing capabilities.

The SCH-B750, which will also have a built in mobile TV receiver, will not only be able to create videos, but will also be capable of uploading them to video sharing sites.

The video camera will create videos at a resolution of 352x288 with internal editing features that include adding captions and audio. It also boasts a 8GB internal hard drive as well as accepting MicroSD flash memory cards. In addition, it boasts TV out capabilities.

The display swivels 90 degrees, making the phone appear feel more like a camera, and it's even being marketed as a "Camcorder Phone."

It will be sold through SK Telecom and will cost around 600,000 won ($655).

Sources: Yahoo News, I4U News

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is offering "revenue sharing" deals for Blu-ray rentals. According to SPHE president David Bishop, “Virtually all retailers can have Blu-ray on a revenue-sharing basis."

He adds "We think it’s important to the retailer, so they are perceived as being on the cutting EDGE of new technology.” He believes it will it enables retailers to stock Blu-ray discs earlier than they might otherwise.

This seems like a very bold move in light of the European Commision's investigation into Blu-ray's developers. The investigation seems to be centered around possible anti-competitive business practices in an attempt to prevail over the competing HD DVD format.

As recently as two years ago Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the music division of the entertainment giant, paid $10 million in a settlement with the State of New York for bribing radio station employees to promote their artists. While other companies, including major Sony rival Matsushita (Panasonic), stand to gain financially from Blu-ray's success, the stakes are arguably much higher because the success of either hi-def format ensures companies holding related patents a revenue stream that could be profitable for many years to come.

In an attempt to ensure member countries don't fall behind the rest of the world, the European Union officially backing the DVB-H standard for mobile TV services. Such services are designed to broadcast directly to handheld devices.

Telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding said "We can either take the lead globally - as we did for mobile telephony based on the GSM standard developed by the European industry - or allow other regions to take the lion's share of the promised mobile TV market."

Reding warned at the beginning of the year that Europe risked losing a chance to be a global player in the burgeoning mobile TV market.

The use of the DVB-H standard will be "legally encouraged" among all 27 member states with the view to mandating use, if necessary, next year, said Ms Reding. identified 2008, with important sporting events such as the European Football Championship and the summer Olympics, as a crucial year for mobile TV.

Unfortunately for mobile viewers in the UK this could cause some problems; at least until the year 2012. That's when the portion of the UHF spectrum required for implementing the EU's DVB-H specifications will be completely available, although a spokeswoman for UK regulatory agency Ofcom says that a portion of the required frequencies will be available in 2008 or early 2009.

As prices drop on most DVDs, Warner Home Video is making retailers happy by unveiling plans for 14 DVD collections to be released in the fourth quarter of this year.

Since many of these multiple-disc sets are lavishly packaged and include exclusive add-ons, they carry pricing of $100 to $200 or more. Sets will include Harry Potter Years 1-5 Limited Edition Gift Set and The Gilmore Girls: The Complete Series.

“There are opportunities in the marketplace at a time when there is erosion in pricing,” said Jeff Baker, Warner senior VP and general manager of theatrical catalog and sales. “We are moving upwards in price" with the upcoming collections.

Such DVD collector sets represented more than $500 million in consumer purchases last year, according to Warner research. Year-to-date, the category is 7% higher in sales than the same 2006 Frame, the studio believes.

Baker also singled out Warner’s upcoming 25th anniversary Blade Runner releases, which include four-disc and five-disc configurations, as especially critical for the studio.

After losing a suit against an Oklahoma woman for supposedly "vicariously" aiding copyright infringement, the RIAA has been ordered to pay nearly $70,000 in legal bills for the defendant.

Deborah Foster, whose daughter Amanda the RIAA won a default judgement against because she failed to defend herself, has always said she had no knowledge of any such activity.

The RIAA had the case against her dismissed without prejudice, meaning they reserve the right to bring further action against her for the same alleged activities, which would normally protect them from paying her legal fees. However, Foster's filing against the RIAA argues that she deserved the judgement because "the RIAA makes a practice of repeatedly bringing claims and then dismissing with prejudice after inflicting substantial litigation costs on the opposing party and the judicial system."

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) also filed a "Friend of the Court" brief on her behalf, stating "a fee award would deter the RIAA from continuing to prosecute meritless suits that harass defendants it knows or reasonably should know are innocent."

Sources: EFF, CNet News

In a paper delivered to the 2007 SERCI Congress in Berlin last week titled Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright, Rufus Pollock concludes that the optimal period for copyright is 14 years.

Pollock, a graduate student in Economics at Cambridge, has been researching intellectual property extensively over the last three years while working toward his PhD.

In order to determine the optimal copyright period Pollock started from the original premise of intellectual property laws, which means that the optimal period would be produce the maximum number of creative works. He then attempts to quantify factors such as the cost of production, ease and cost of copying both legally and illegaly, and ends up with an equation that suggests the optimal term of 14 years.

Before arriving at the 14 year figure, the paper starts by showing that the optimal copyright term drops as production costs fall and that in general it falls over time. The calculations and conclusions in the paper are based on analysis of various studies published in the US and UK over the last 10 years and cover subjects ranging from the effects of recent copyright extensions to file sharing among college students.

Home video executives blame a nearly 5% drop in consumer spending on home video on a lack of interest in new theatrical DVD releases. Rental spending was down 3.3% from last year while sales dropped 6.5%.

The cumulative box-office of DVDs released in the first half of 2007 was off 5%, and there were fewer releases with a box-office topping $100 million. According to 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment president Mike Dunn, “Those big $100 million movies lift all boats in the category.”.

With box-office on summer releases due on DVD in the second half already up 5% over last year, home video execs are cautiously optimistic that consumer spending will end up flat in 2007, with some even predicting a small increase.

“Everybody is expecting the biggest fourth quarter ever given the strength of movies coming out this summer,” said Matt Lasorsa, New Line Home Entertainment executive VP of marketing.

Despite the growing number of Hi-Def televisions, players, and movie releases DVD sales continue to increase and dominate the market. According to Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, U.S. households went from buying 12.5 discs on average four years ago to 14.4 last year.

Sony's Grouper, a video sharing site older than YouTube which Sony bought last year to promote their home video equipment has been re-launched as Crackle.

Unlike Grouper, which focused on amateur video, Crackle will feature videos by aspiring professionals, including some funded by Sony. Among other things, Sony hopes this will attract advertisers who weren't particularly enthused by the idea of amateur video.

In order to jump start the service, Sony has even set up "Crackle Studios" which has 15 employees who will produce segments for the site. They'll also be accepting submissions from the public, although they won't be paying for them.

Sony hopes to use the service to find a new generation of filmmakers, and will be accepting proposals, which if accepted will be funded by the company.

Viewers that either don't know about Crackle or simply don't visit the site will still have a chance to see the videos on sites like AOL, MySpace, and FaceBook.

Source: International Herald Tribune

VeohTV, the new software from Veoh Networks, is a web browser with a twist - it only displays Internet video.

The softfware, just out of beta testing, lists videos from sites that include Fox.com, NBC.com, and YouTube in a program guide and can play them either in a small window or fullscreen.

According to Veoh Networks chief executive Dmitry, “There are full-length episodes at Fox.com, but many customers don’t know how to find them. The Web browser is fine for short clips. But if you just want to sit back and watch video on the Web, this is what you will want to use.”

VeohTV's channels each represent a single website, allowing you to find episodes of shows like Heroes, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Bones, and 24. These shows are already offered on television network websites, but many viewers either aren't aware of it or don't know how to find them.

Shapiro would like to have advertising deals with content owners to make sure they have an incentive to provide high quality video online, he doesn't believe it's legally required since the videos are already available.

Veoh Networks' investors in the project include both Time Warner and former Disney chairman Michael Eisner, who is also on the board of directors.

Sun Microsystems said Wednesday that AT&T plans to use its Sun Fire servers and storage arrays to power its Internet Protocol television service, called U-Verse.

The deal is significant for Sun because it could be a foot in the door to eventually sell AT&T its new, advanced Sun Streaming System, which includes Sun Fire servers and other technology that can be used to stream 160,000 simultaneous IP video streams onto a network.

Sun created the Sun Streaming System to serve the emerging IPTV market. Phone companies around the world, such as AT&T, are using IP to deliver television service. And the Sun Streaming System, which can cost as much as $8 million, provides a scalable and cost-effective way to deliver video-on-demand services to thousands of homes. A deal with AT&T, the largest phone company in the United States, would be a huge validation of the technology.

"Sun can't comment on whether or not AT&T is currently evaluating the Sun Streaming System," a spokeswoman said. "But this deployment definitely provides a great opportunity for working with them in the future.

Source: CNet News

"We have engaged in a lot of litigation at Viacom, of which I have been a primary mover," Redstone told a group of reporters Friday morning, responding to remarks earlier in the day from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Redstone, who started his own career as a lawyer, noted several major legal battles his company has engaged in previously, including against cable TV pioneer John Malone, media and cable giant Time Warner Inc., and against longtime Hollywood mogul Barry Diller.

But Redstone insisted that he resorted to lawsuits only if absolutely necessary. "The bottom line is I hate to fight," Redstone told a group of reporters gathered on the steps of a Sun Valley hotel building, in front of a quiet pond where swans were nesting.

"I don't enjoy a battle," Redstone said. "I would rather be a lover than a fighter."

The stakes are high for both Google and Viacom in the dispute over YouTube, a hugely popular amateur video-sharing Web site that Google bought a year ago for about $1.7 billion.

Viacom claims that Google is willfully violating its copyrights by allowing users to upload clips from Viacom's TV shows. Google counters that it's obeying the law by immediately responding to requests from Viacom and other copyright holders to take down any material found to be infringing.

Nickelodeon is testing the waters of original online content with the July 22 launch of its first broadband series.

Marjorie Cohn, executive vice president original programming and development at Nickelodeon Networks, said Nick properties such as "Mr. Meaty" and "Avatar" have developed a huge following online, so introducing an original series to air exclusively on TurboNick was the next natural step.

"Just in June alone we had the highest month ever for streams, up by 535 percent from last year," Cohn said. "This is a good choice for our first online experience because of the format -- reality lends itself to content that's a little shorter."

The 15-minute, five-episode series, dubbed "Nick Cannon's Star Camp," will follow eight youngsters as they work toward success and stardom in the high-stakes world of music.

Director Debbie Allen and choreographer Fatima Robinson will join music industry legend Quincy Jones, his son Quincy Jones III, and series star Nick Cannon behind the scenes.

With TurboNick receiving triple-digit increases in viewership during the past year with a record 122 million streams in June, Cannon and the younger Jones envision the series becoming a regular viewing staple on the broadband video player, in the vein of "American Idol."

The success of newcomer Sara Bareilles is being partly attributed to iTunes offering her album for download at a discounted price of $6.99 instead of the usual $9.99.

A week after iTunes launched a new discount section on their site called "The Next Big Thing" which included Bareilles' album among other releases. Around 14,000 ownloads from the site accounted for around 80% of her total sales. By comparison, albums from Paul McCartney and the White Stripes sold around 16,000 digital copies during their first week of release earlier this year.

As music sales have moved online from traditional brick and mortar stores, music labels have complained that if iTunes would adopt a variable pricing model it would help boost industry sales. Judging from iTunes' results, including a 152% spike in sales of Atlanta rapper Unk's several month old album, they may have a point.

While labels themselves are popular targets for blame regarding sales figures, it's reasonable to believe that nearly all aspects of the fledgling online music business have room for improvement in the coming years.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Despite recent comments by Warner Home Entertainment Group president Kevin Tsujihara, most major studios aren't planning to change the delay between release dates for movies on DVD and Video On Demand.

Studio interest for earlier VOD releases ranges from Warner's very public tests that include releasing The Astronaut Farmer on both DVD and VOD earlier this week to Sony, the only studio that hasn't taken part in tests with Comcast to determine the results. Disney, Fox, Universal, Paramount, and Lionsgate have participated in the tests, but haven't released any results, although they have all incidated that the tests are inconclusive.

While it's possible that Warner's increased interest in VOD is related to their ownership of Time Warner Cable, although Warner president Ron Sanders points out that the current test they're running with Time Warner Cable was preceded by a test with Comcast. He also said he doesn't expect a major change in release timetable this year.

Source: Video Business

Internet broadcasters reportedly reached a temporary deal with royalty payment collectors that would put a $50,000 cap on royalty fees and delay the collection of those fees for an undetermined period of time. Congress also stepped in with the introduction of a bill that would postpone the implementation of the new fee schedule until Sept. 13.

The fees were initially supposed to go into effect on May 15, but the CRB extended that deadline to July 15. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Wednesday rejected a request to delay that deadline a second time.

House Small Business Committee Chairman Nydia Velasquez, D-N.Y. and ranking Republican Steve Chabot of Ohio on Thursday introduced H.R. 3015, which would delay the CRB's Internet radio royalty rate decision by 60 days, until September 13.

"A commitment has been made to negotiate reasonable royalties, recognizing the industry's long-term value and its still-developing revenue potential," according to a Friday post on SaveNetRadio.org, a coalition of Internet broadcasters.

Source: PC Magazine

It turns out that the much anticipated price cut for the PS3 is only a temporary measure to move the remaining stock to prepare for the new 80GB model.

Sony Computer Entertainment of America's director of corporate communications David Karraker told GameSpot, "This is absolutely not a bait and switch," he said. "We are offering a full-featured PS3 for $100 lower than the original price and will do so for months to come, allowing consumers the opportunity to acquire this model at this adjusted price."

The price cut for the 60GB PS3 was never intended to be a permanent cut for the product; it was only intended to clear out stock for the new version to be sold at the old price. GameSpot has reported that Kaz Hirai, Sony Computer Entertainment's CEO and President, has confirmed in a video interview that the 60GB PS3s are no longer in production, and that all new PS3s will be 80GB models to be sold at $599.

Source: CNet News

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, speaking with reporters at a hotel bar at the 25th annual Allen & Co. moguls meeting, said litigation was the foundation of the company that owns the MTV Networks, Paramount movies studio and video game developer Harmonix.

"Viacom is a company built from lawsuits, look at their history," Schmidt said on early Friday.

Schmidt's comments refer to an antitrust suit Viacom filed against Time Warner Inc. in 1989 regarding their HBO cable channel, which was eventually settled out of court for $75 million and an agreement to buy a cable system from Viacomm above market value. In addition, as part of the settlement Time Warner began making the Viacom owned Showtime channel available on more Time Warner cable systems.

Viacom has demanded that YouTube takes down thousands of segments from its popular programs including The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park.

Schmidt said the closing off of social networks was a "transient" phase and that these companies will eventually see the value of open borders.

Source: Reuters

A new website launched Wednesday provides an organized listing of online videos on websites including YouTube, MySpace, and Google Video, organized into over 200 categories they're calling channels.

According to the sites first press release, "WeShow thrives off of the explosion of online video that has until now frustrated a significant portion of consumers on the Web," said Marcos Wettreich, CEO and founder of WeShow, in a statement. "By consolidating the highest quality and most popular content from across the Internet into a simple and personalized view of all the top quality videos from around the world, WeShow is making online video a pure entertainment experience similar to that of television."

Unlike many existing video sites that rely purely on search technologies to yield relevant content, WeShow brings a human-powered approach to filtering and organizing content. Each day, WeShow uses technology and a global team of category experts to scour more than 15 video repositories such as YouTube, MetaCafe, Google Video, MySpace, Dailymotion and many others.

The company cites a study conducted by Kelton Research in June 2007, stating that more than 60% of Americans feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of online videos and 46 percent of these people do not watch more online videos because they dread the task of weeding through too many search results. The study also states that 96 percent of Americans cannot find the videos they are looking for when initially conducting a search for specific content and 45 percent of people only view videos when they are recommended by a friend or colleague. These people are not utilizing online video as a primary entertainment source.

Earlier this year, Clear Channel Communications Inc.'s Premiere Radio Networks unit began marketing data on the most popular downloads from illegal file-sharing networks to help radio stations shape their playlists.

Premiere's Mediabase market-research unit is working on the venture with the file-sharing research service BigChampagne LLC. BigChampagne collects the data while a Premiere sales force of about 10 people pitches the information to radio companies and stations. Premiere declined to disclose how much it charges.

Joe Fleischer, BigChampagne's vice president for sales and marketing, adds that the legality of grabbing music is a separate issue from the insight into peoples' taste the downloads offer. He also notes that the company incorporates legal, paid downloads from sites like iTunes into its data, though they represent a tiny fraction of all downloads.

Universal Music Group also looks at file-sharing data, largely for help figuring out which songs are working best or what to pitch to radio. But executives have mixed feelings about the information. "It's troubling that there is so much activity [that] it's useful" for research, says Larry Kenswil, executive vice president for business strategy.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment is suing a company that developed antipiracy software for CDs, claiming the technology was defective and cost the record company millions of dollars to settle consumer complaints and government investigations.

Sony BMG filed a summons in a New York state court against The Amergence Group Inc., formerly SunnComm International, which developed the MediaMax CD copy-protection technology.

Sony BMG is seeking to recover some $12 million in damages from the Phoenix-based technology company, according to court papers filed July 3.

The music company accuses Amergence of negligence, unfair business practices and breaching the terms of its license agreement by delivering software that "did not perform as warranted."

In a statement, The Amergence Group vowed to fight what it described as unwarranted allegations by Sony BMG.

The company also suggested that lawsuits against Sony BMG over CD copy-protection primarily stemmed from Sony's use of another technology.

It began including MediaMax on some of its compact discs in August 2003 and shipped about 4 million CDs equipped with the technology in 2005.

Last fall, the company agreed to pay a total of $5.75 million to settle the litigation and resolve investigations by officials in several states.

Scandinavian founders of new online video service Joost—Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, who once terrified the media industry with file-sharing technology company KaZaa, and then the telecommunications industry with Skype, are first-time guests at Allen & Co's 25th annual media conference in Idaho.

Joost has distinguished itself by seeking partnerships with content owners before making any of their shows available. The company landed its first big distribution deal with Viacom Inc just days before Viacom sued Google Inc. and its video-sharing site YouTube for copyright infringement.

"The time in the market is good for traditional media and digital to come together," Mike Volpi, Joost's newly appointed chief executive, told Reuters. "Technology has matured to a point where rights can be protected properly."

The Joost trio replaces last year's big attraction, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, whose wild popularity both terrified and attracted big media.

Source: PC Magazine

Prices of the mainstream liquid-crystal-displays used in computers and televisions are rising and analysts and company executives expect further increases as manufacturers enter one of the busiest selling seasons of the year.

Analysts and company executives say the outlook for the third quarter is bright as demand picks up especially for PC-use panels ahead of the back-to-school shopping season, and supply in the market remains tight.

"LCD prices have risen sharply while companies have been working to lower manufacturing costs by moving production to more advanced facilities. That should enable most LCD makers to report a second quarter profit and the outlook for the third quarter is even better," said Hyun-Sik Moon, an analyst at Seoul-based Meritz Securities.

The price of a 17-inch LCD monitor panel rose to $127 in early July from $122 late June, according to Taiwan-based market research firm WitsView Technology Corp. Meanwhile, the price of the mainstream 32-inch LCD TV panel rose to $320 from $315 in the same period.

Executives at AU Optronics Corp., Taiwan's largest maker of LCDs by revenue, said the LCD maker will post a profit in the second quarter, after reporting a record loss of 5.11 billion New Taiwan dollars in the first quarter.

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment are backing a new Web site aimed at steering high-definition consumers toward Blu-ray Disc.

While the name, Hollywood in Hi-Def, suggests that it would include information about both competing high definition disc formats, even a cursory examination clearly reveals a slant in favor of Blu-ray. Headlines reading "Yahoo!Tech Comments "Is Blu-ray Preparing a Death Blow for HD-DVD?"" and "Crave Comments Pie Charts Indicate Blu-ray Victory over HD DVD Assured" are featured prominently on the site's front page, with the page featuring just about as many blue elements as they could use without everything blending together.

Scott Hettrick, former editor-in-chief of Video Business magazine and current editor of Hollywood in Hi-Def, will reportedly have access to executives that otherwise might not comment.

According to Hettrick, “A lot of the companies that are supporting Blu-ray got together and decided to do something different and more credible than a promotional web site.”

A recent article on the website of the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) attacks Google for a lack of filtering to remove copyrighted material from YouTube and Google Video.

The article argues that Google avoids filtering this content because of the revenue generated by those websites, and also compares the situation to the large scale production of pirated DVDs in China, but gives no evidence to support the contention that the two are equivalent financially.

It goes on to make an argument that "many other Internet operations such as MySpace, TorrentSpy, DailyMotion and Break.com have set up filtering systems to Block copyrighted material. Google is a $158 Billion company with arguably the most advanced search technology in the world. The argument that they cannot block pirated content because of technological or financial reasons is laughable."

Included in the report is a list of 50 videos that they were able to find links to on Google Video and YouTube. They say they're specifically targeting Google Video because it's generally ignored in favor of YouTube when this issue is discussed.

It also states that "Our goal is to do our best to expose the pirating of copyrighted material by finding and posting as many apparently pirated works as possible. For starters, we are focusing on Google Video because it hosts many full-length movies and concerts and because it has received less attention than YouTube, also owned by Google." While this is a commendable goal, I have to question whether comparing those who violate copyright in this way to Chinese organized crime figures is a step in the right direction.

The Orchard, a digital music company that has built a business distributing albums from independent labels to online stores like iTunes, plans to announce today that it will merge with Digital Music Group.

The Orchard, which is owned by Dimensional Associates, the private equity arm of JDS Capital Management, makes deals to acquire digital distribution rights from labels, then takes a percentage of sales. Digital Music Group makes similar deals, but that company also controls the online rights to some classic television shows like My Favorite Martian and owns some recordings outright.

The combined company will control a substantial catalogue of entertainment assets, with over one million music recordings available for sale and thousands of hours of television, film and video programming, and will be a market leader for independent distribution of digital music and video, with powerful marketing, promotion, distribution and operations capabilities throughout the world. The company will continue to serve artists, labels, music publishers, television, film and video library owners and other rights holders by developing new and inventive ways to market and sell digital content. In addition, for digital and mobile retailers, advertisers, consumer brands and technology companies, the company will continue to provide a single point of access to one of the world's largest and highest quality digital content catalogues that spans global superstars and niche and specialty artists, together with state-of-the-art marketing, promotion and programming capabilities.

SOHU.COM, China's third-largest Internet portal, will upgrade its eight-million-member blog channel.

The updated version, to be launched next month in a big gala of Sohu bloggers in a park in Beijing, will allow users to upload their own videos and share with others, who don't have to download any extra software to play the clips.

As to the copyright issue, Sohu will monitor uploaded content and conduct its own censorship, said Fang Gang, vice editor-in-chief for Sohu.

Sohu, which recently made a renewed foray into online gaming with the launch of its Tian Long Ba Bu game, is looking to re-position itself as a social networking site, according to Charles Zhang, the company's chairman.

"The overall strategy of Sohu is to be not only a news portal but also a big community—like MySpace," Zhang told Reuters on Wednesday in an interview on the sidelines of ChinaJoy, China's biggest video game conference.

Currently Sohu's blogs only allow text and audio clips. The Website has a separate broadband video channel for entertainment news and clips, but they are not uploaded by Web users.

"We are not worried about how to make money (from the updated blog service) at this stage" said Zhang.

Hollywood figures ranging from Will Ferrel to former Disney CEO Michael Eisner are involved in Hollywood projects to take advantage of the profits generated by web video on sites like YouTube and MySpace.

The latest venture in this area, 60Frames Entertainment, is a partnership between Hollywood United Talent Agency Internet-based advertising agency Spot Runner.

As one of Hollywood’s largest talent agencies, United Talent represents stars and filmmakers as prominent as Vince Vaughn, Johnny Depp and Ben Stiller. Spot Runner, which is partly owned by the WPP Group advertising conglomerate, has helped smaller advertisers make and place television ads with a Web-based system. It expects initially to sell ads for 60Frames through a sales force rather than through its site, a spokesman said.

“We were finding it could be as difficult to make deals for a Web production as for a TV series,” said Mr. Weinstein. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

To clear the path, 60Frames expects to provide capital for Web productions that typically run for a few minutes and cost “in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands” of dollars to produce, said the executive. It will then try to distribute the videos on a variety of Web sites and cellphone services, while placing ads wherever possible, and leaving a major stake in ownership to the creators.

Just months after its second-generation Blu-ray Disc player hit the streets, Samsung already has a third generation version in the works.

The company will display the model, the BD-P1400, during the 2007 IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin on Aug. 31, confirmed a company representative.

The player is expected to support Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby True HD and DTS-HD audio formats. The BD-P1400 also should boast a built-in Ethernet port, which had been the most notable upgrade for the second-generation Samsung BD-P1200 over the company’s first-generation BD-P1000.

If the new Samsung player ships to retail after Oct. 31, it will be mandated by the Blu-ray Disc Assn. that it include certain features that were not required of Blu-ray models that streeted prior to that cut-off date. One new required enhancement will be the capability to playback picture-in-picture, in which one separate stream of video runs currently with the running feature film. To date, no Blu-ray stand-alone features picture-in-picture playback. HD DVD hardware has been required to handle this feature since the launch of the format last year.

Coverage of Live Earth, which already broke the previous record for delivering Streaming media, has continued to be a money maker for MSN, who owns the rights for 90 days.

In total, Live Earth on MSN had delivered 30 million live and on-demand streams through Monday morning. During the live series of concerts, which lasted from Friday night at 9 p.m. EST through 11 p.m. EST time on Saturday, the site streamed 15 million clips.

According to MSN officials, usage peaked on Saturday afternoon, when 237,000 users streamed footage all at once, despite warm, sunny weather throughout much of the country. MSN executives claim that figure represents a record concurrent streaming audience for an entertainment event (CBS’ online streaming of the NCAA college basketball tournament did exceed that number in 2006).

Rob Bennett, general manager, MSN entertainment and video said that Live Earth had resulted in few technical glitches, despite the heavy volume. Unlike CBS, which deliberately capped the number of users who could tune in to see live college games during March Madness, MSN never considered placing limits on Live Earth.

We have a new guide for encoding video to Nero Digital format using Nero Vision 4.

Read it at:

https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/nero_digital_encoding.cfm


Visit our guides section for more guides on digital video as well as other topics.

Within weeks, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to set conditions for the auction of the most valuable wireless spectrum still available in the U.S.

The spectrum, in the 700-MHz band, is highly coveted by a range of broadband providers, technology vendors and wireless voice providers because such signals are able to broadcast long distances and penetrate buildings and other obstacles. With no other auctions of large spectrum blocks on the horizon, many organizations have pitched a range of conflicting ideas and auction conditions to the FCC.

In early 2006, after more than a decade of debate, Congress voted to require television stations to move to digital broadcasts and abandon the 700-MHz band between channels 51 and 69 by Feb. 17, 2009.

The move to digital television, or DTV, will free up about 84 MHz of spectrum, with 24 MHz set aside for public safety. The remaining 60 MHz is set to be auctioned by early 2008.

Advocacy groups such as Public Knowledge and Consumers Union say the auction represents the best and last opportunity for large portions of the U.S. to have a third broadband provider that competes with the cable and telecom giants. These groups are asking the FCC to require that part of the auctioned spectrum be sold with so-called open-access rules attached, meaning the winner of the auction would have to sell wholesale access to the network to any company that wants it.

Paramount has apparently sent DMCA "takedown" requests to YouTube to have copies of a teaser trailer showing before the hit Transformers movie.

Several copies of the trailer, seemingly shot in theaters with a camcorder, were posted on YouTube by Thursday morning. But by Thursday afternoon, some of those links had been taken down, replaced by an advisory saying, "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Paramount Pictures Corp."

Cloverfield, which revolves around a monster attack in New York as told from the point of view of a small group of people, is being produced by Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams.

The entire project has been shrouded in secrecy from the beginning. The cast was even selected with no scripts being sent out.

The question that immediately comes to mind is how Paramount would expect to maintain that level of secrecy while simultaneously showing the trailer in theaters.

Source: Yahoo! News

In comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission on Monday, the RIAA urged the agency to "make clear that its approval of a merger is conditioned upon the continued protection of sound recordings from unlawful infringement."

The RIAA's comments came on the final day for submitting comments about the public-interest implications of the XM-Sirius deal in general.

Under copyright law, separate licenses exist for the "performance" of a song and for the recording or "distribution" of it. Satellite and Internet radio broadcasters (unlike traditional radio) are already required to pay performance-based royalties.

But the RIAA said it's concerned that both satellite radio companies have invested in technologies that allow them to shortchange artists on the distribution side "by giving users the ability to download copyrighted sound recordings to portable devices, effectively transforming a radio-like service into a digital distribution subscription service like Rhapsody or Napster."

The FCC is still accepting comments for at least another month on a more specific question: whether, if it finds the XM-Sirius deal is hunky-dory for the public, it should waive a decade-old rule prohibiting a single operator from controlling all of the satellite radio spectrum.

Sprint has signed on as the first company to underwrite a song to be distributed on file-sharing networks, agreeing to embed its logo on copies of tracks from Atlantic Records hip-hop artist Plies, sources told The Post.

Sprint and Atlantic Records are teaming with ArtistDirect's Media Defender division for the initiative, which essentially amounts to an advertising buy for the telecom company.

According to sources familiar with the deal, Media Defender will push 16 million Plies song files embedded with the Sprint logo onto peer-to-peer networks over a three-month period in return for a "substantial six-figure" fee to be divided between Media Defender, Atlantic Records, Plies and his publishing company.

Once embedded, the Sprint logo will be attached to the files forever and will appear alongside Plies' name and the song Title on the screen of a desktop computer, iPod, cellphone or any other digital music player.

According to Steve Yanovsky, a former record industry executive who consults for Mindshare Interactive, which counts Sprint as a client, the deal positions Sprint "as an innovator and will help drive perception of them in the marketplace."

Users of TiVo Inc.'s digital video recorders will be able to order movies from Amazon.com Inc. directly from their TVs starting Tuesday.

The two companies partnered in March to deliver Amazon's Unbox download service to TiVo machines, but the feature required customers to place their orders on a computer through Amazon's Web site.

Now, PC intervention won't be needed. The new ''Buy on TV'' feature allows TiVo users to search Amazon's video catalog and rent or purchase titles using their TiVo's remote control.

In conjunction with the new feature, TiVo developed a safeguard so users would have to punch in a five-digit password to complete the transaction, said Jim Denney, TiVo's vice president of product marketing.

"We wanted to avoid the baby sitter scenario where you come home to find a bunch of movies on your TiVo that you didn't order," he said.

Sourc: Share on Facebook

Uri Geller, who became famous as a "paranormalist" in the 1970's with an act that included bending spoons, supposedly with his mind, is at the middle of a controversy regarding YouTube and other online video sites.

At issue is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which makes it easy for Geller and others to persuade Internet companies to remove videos and music simply by sending so-called takedown notices that claim copyright ownership. Most companies, including YouTube do almost nothing to investigate the claims.

"All it takes is a single e-mail to completely censor someone on the Internet," said Jason Schultz, a lawyer for the online civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing Geller over an unflattering clip posted on YouTube for which he claimed a copyright ownership.

For nearly as long as Geller has been bending spoons and moving compass needles with the wave of a hand, professional magicians have been loudly debunking his claims of psychic ability.

A new generation of critics led by 30-year-old Brian Sapient of an organization called the Rational Response Squad have taken their crusade online. Sapient and others recently posted several video clips to YouTube demonstrating how Geller allegedly uses simple sleight of hand in his act.

The video game industry's annual showcase is saying goodbye to scantily clad booth babes, extravagant multimillion dollar exhibits, blaring lights and pounding music. Celebrity appearances from the likes of Paris Hilton or Snoop Dogg are a thing of the past, too.

The event, which starts Wednesday, looks to be more like a country club getaway, an invitation-only gathering complete with luxury beach-side hotels, sushi restaurants and meetings in private conference rooms.

After last year's expo, organizers decided it had become too big for its own good. With more than 60,000 people cramming into the Los Angeles Convention Center, there was a feeling that the needs of no one -- be it the media, retailers or video game publishers -- were being addressed particularly well.

Only about 30 of the largest video game software and hardware companies are attending, down from the hundreds that packed the sprawling Los Angeles Convention Center in previous years. Also missing will be the army of small-time bloggers, zealous game fans and others who somehow managed to infiltrate the trade-only event.

This week's event, which runs through Friday, will focus on the industry's largest players, including No. 1 game-software maker Electronic Arts Inc. and console makers Microsoft Corp., Sony Corp. and Nintendo Corp.

According to EA chief executive John Riccitiello, in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, "We're boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play."

Riccitiello became CEO at EA in April in his return to the game maker. EA's former chief operating officer had left the company in 2004 to help found Elevation Partners, a media and entertainment buyout firm.

The video game executive criticized the industry for rolling out sequels to new games that add little from the previous version.

"For the most part, the industry has been rinse-and-repeat," he was quoted as saying. "There's been lots of product that looked like last year's product, that looked a lot like the year before."

At a time when both the XBox 360 and PS3 are losing sales, apparently at the expense of the Nintendo Wii, Riccitiello's comments seem dead on. While the Microsoft and Sony consoles have the advantage in technology and established titles, the Wii seems to be thriving on something completely different. It's fun.

Source: Reuters

According to company sources, Last.fm is about to become the largest web radio service after signing a deal with Sony BMG for access to the entire catalog of Sony music.

"We've always aimed to have everything ever recorded available to listen to on our site, and having access to Sony's collection of some of the world's most popular music takes us another huge step closer," said Martin Stiksel, co-founder of the service.

Last.fm allows users to connect with other listeners with similar music tastes, to custom-build their own radio stations and to watch music video clips.

The software also tracks what users play on their PC or MP3 player to make recommendations.

Thomas Hesse of Sony BMG said this was key in its decision to partner with the UK firm.

"The Last.fm Streaming service will give our established artists a platform through which they can reach new audiences, and its unique recommendation system will provide our emerging artists with an important opportunity to build their fan base," he said.

Last.fm was purchased by CBS in May for $280 million.

NBC believes affiliates will sign on with their new venture with News Corp. called New Site, especially since they can participate on a non-exclusive basis, but it may not be as simple as that.

As we reported last week, NBC decided to change their web strategy, replacing a partnership with many affiliates after only 14 months. Although affiliates were generously compensated for their share of NBBC, the process left many of them bruised. “We weren’t sure of the [NBBC] deal to start with,” said Alan Frank, president, CEO of Post-Newsweek Stations. “The affiliates partnered with them and then it went away; it wasn’t a happy occurrence.”

Affiliates won’t have as much control in New Site as they did in NBBC. “The benefit of NBBC wasn’t so much as a distribution vehicle, but being a partner. So we were disappointed that NBC’s strategy changed relative to their own affiliates,” said Dave Lougee, executive vp, media operations for Belo Corp, owner of multiple NBC affiliates.

“We look at all the options, and we’re not necessarily dependent on what NBC does,” said Steve Wasserman, vp, general manager of WDVI, Post-Newsweek’s Detroit NBC affil.
In general, the Web continues to be a moving target for station execs. “We’ll review [New Site]; we look at everything. But right now, we’re just keeping it local,” said Randi Goldklank, vp, gm of WHDH, Sunbeam Television’s Boston affiliate, which did not participate in NBBC.

Kiosk company TitleMatch Entertainment Group has inked a distribution deal with Bollywood film company Eros Entertainment to make the supplier’s films available for on-demand burning through in-store kiosks and online.

Eros will make a range of new release and catalog movies available through the TitleMatch DVD On-Demand service. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

TitleMatch offers on-demand sales of DVDs through Overstock.com and has plans to burn DVDs on demand at in-store kiosks. The company has a deal with a retailer for a pilot test of its DVD kiosks later this year, said VP of business development Mary Litchhult, without naming the retailer.

The company plans to operate movie kiosks similarly to photo departments. Shoppers would pick out the movie they want on the kiosk. The order would be sent to the “factory” area of the store (such as a customer service department) where the DVD is burned and packaged by the retailer. The customer would then pick up the order.

TitleMatch’s On-Demand system uses CSS encryption for DVDs it manufactures on demand, and the company has been waiting for the DVD Copy Control Assn. to approve burn-to-DVD to move forward.

A consumer advocacy group has expressed outrage over Apple Inc.'s battery replacement program for the iPhone.

On the day of the phone's release, the Foundation for Consumer and Taxpayer Rights fired off a letter to Apple and AT&T Inc., the Cell phone's exclusive carrier, complaining that customers were being left in the dark about the procedure and cost of replacing the gadget's battery.

The iPhone's battery is apparently soldered on inside the device and cannot be swapped out by the owner like most other cell phones.

Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Hakes said Thursday the company posted the battery replacement details on its Web site last Friday after the product went on sale.

Users would have to submit their iPhone to Apple for battery service. The service will cost users $79, plus $6.95 for shipping, and will take three business days.

The procedure is similar to the one it has for the company's best-selling iPod players, but because some users will not want to live without their cell phones, Apple is also offering a loaner iPhone for $29 while the gadget is under repair.

The service is also similar to the iPod in that all data is cleared from the iPhone during the replacement process, so you have to make sure that you back up all data on the device before sending it in. Apple says the iPhone battery is good for between 300 to 400 charges before performance will start to decline, which generally is the case for any lithium-ion battery over time.

The British 'HD for All' campaign, designed to promote hi-def TV, drew a withering blast from Sky yesterday.

Sky public affairs head Martin Le Jeune described it as a "shabby alliance between a group of public service broadcasters who should know better [and] vendors who sell expensive product". It was "genuinely silly", he told a Westminster audience.

It was insulting to compare the provision of HD programming to something as fundamental as universal healthcare, he said. HD TV is the mass-market technology that never arrives - but Sky has been offering the service for real for over a year now, and actually has some viewers.

Westminster's eForum gathered MPs, broadcasters, and regulators at Millbank yesterday to discuss the state of HD TV in the UK. The day's debate confirmed that in Britain the talking would carry on for some years to come.

At the core of the delay is the issue of spectrum. The established public service broadcasters say there isn't enough of it to go round. This view was encapsulated by Simon Pitt, "director of platforms" for ITV.

Pitt said squeezing HD programming onto the spectrum allocated was "theoretically true but practically difficult". But this is prime spectrum, and lots of people want it. Mobile TV (such as DVB-H) is another way it could be put to use; local TV is another.

The Live Earth global POP concerts on Saturday broke a record for an online entertainment show by generating more than 9 million Internet streams, Microsoft Corp. Web portal MSN said.

People can stream an event more than once -- by switching it on and off -- so 9 million streams does not necessarily mean 9 million people watching, MSN said.

Live 8 was the first major multi-venue event successfully streamed live with Time Warner Inc.'s AOL portal on the Web. AOL said 5 million people had logged on to the event on the day of those shows, but it did not say how many Internet streams of the event there had been.

Live 8 was streamed by users more than 100 million times in the six weeks following the shows.

Live Earth is predicted to be three times bigger with organizers expecting more than 80 percent of the viewership will be on-demand in the days after the event.

Source: Reuters

Music industry organization SoundExchange is offering a new deal to internet radio broadcasters who say upcoming royalty hikes will kill online broadcasting.

The proposed compromise puts a ceiling on the new set of hefty royalty rate hikes that takes effect July 15. Under SoundExchange's latest olive branch, royalties would be capped at $2,500 per service, regardless of the overall number of stations or channels they are Streaming.

The Digital Media Association, the trade group representing internet broadcasters, said it will accept the proposal if the cap was extended to the entire term of the CRB's ruling, which would terminate in 2010. Currently the rate cap proposal ends in 2008.

"Any offer that doesn't cover the full term is simply a stay of execution for Internet radio," DiMA said in a release. "The looming 2009 billion-dollar threat is destabilizing and inhibits investment and growth. DiMA, like thousands of artists and millions of consumers, wants a solution that promotes long-term industry growth. A billion-dollar 'minimum fee' is equally absurd in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 or 2010. It should be eliminated – period."

The Live Earth event on Saturday is set to reach millions more people than previous global productions with its reach boosted by the fast-growing power of Web video sharing and social networks.

Organizers estimate television broadcasts of the live concerts staged to raise awareness about climate change will be available to up to 2 billion people although there is no estimate of how many people will actually watch the shows. But that viewership may be trumped online where a generation hooked to social networks like MySpace and video site YouTube share ideas, photos and videos with their peers.

The global Live 8 concert to fight poverty in 2005 was the first major multi-venue event successfully streamed live with Time Warner Inc.'s AOL portal on the Web. But Control Room, which produced Live 8, found it was the on-demand streams days after the event which had the most impact, especially after clips were passed round by e-mail.

Live 8 was streamed by users over 100 million times in six weeks. Live Earth is expected to be three times bigger.

Source: Rueters

In June, MTV quietly introduced its free Video Remixer service, which enables users to create their own version of select videos using clips from the original video, archived MTV footage, photos and other media. MTV then airs the top-rated submissions.

The first video available was Kelly Clarkson's "Never Again" on June 5, followed shortly by Nelly Furtado's "All Good Things (Come to an End)" June 29. Additional artists are being lined up for the coming weeks. In Clarkson's case, the official version of "Never Again" was a top 10 video on MTV and was streamed "hundreds of thousands" of times, according to Holt. The remix contest, meanwhile, received more than 750 submissions in less than a month. About five of these were viewed more than 1,000 times, with the most popular surpassing 2,000. Approximately 30 gained more than 100 viewers, while 360 received less than 10.

From a promotional view, it's difficult to draw a direct cause-and-effect relationship. But from a revenue opportunity standpoint, more spins, plus a longer shelf life, equals more money. It has become standard practice for record labels to demand a cut of the revenue for ads sold around online music videos. The more videos watched, the more money the labels and the remix services get. And as traffic increases, so do ad rates.

A new federal rule set to take effect today could mean that radios built on "open-source elements" may encounter a more sluggish path to market--or, in the worst case scenario, be shut out altogether. U.S. regulators, it seems, believe the inherently public nature of open-source code makes it more vulnerable to hackers, leaving "a high burden to demonstrate that it is sufficiently secure."

By effectively siding with what is known in cryptography circles as "security through obscurity," the controversial idea that keeping security methods secret makes them more impenetrable, the FCC has drawn an outcry from the software radio set and raised eyebrows among some security experts.

"There is no reason why regulators should discourage open-source approaches that may in the end be more secure, cheaper, more interoperable, easier to standardize, and easier to certify," Bernard Eydt, chairman of the security committee for a global industry association called the SDR (software-defined radio) Forum, said in an e-mail interview this week.

The Forum, which represents research institutions and companies such as Motorola, AT&T Labs, Northrup Grumman and Virginia Tech, urged the FCC to back away from that stance in a formal petition (PDF) this week.

Sony Corp. has no plans to cut the price of its PlayStation 3 (PS3) at present to pep up demand and counter surging sales of Nintendo's rival game console Wii, Sony's president said on Friday. Sony President Ryoji Chubachi also said in an interview that operating profit margin at its mainstay electronics unit, which makes hot-selling Bravia LCD televisions and Cyber-shot digital cameras, was likely to exceed its 4 percent target for the current year to March 2008.

The higher price tag and lack of attractive software titles have been cited as main reasons the PS3 has been trailing the Wii in sales, and analysts have been widely expecting Sony to soon slash the price to spur on demand.

"If you take a look at how PlayStation and PlayStation 2 have taken off, this is not such an unusual start," Chubachi said. Chubachi said the company was on Track to hit its target of a 5 percent operating profit margin for the year to March 2008, and its electronics division will likely exceed the 4 percent target.

The margin targets, set in 2005, have been considered as the most visible indicator of success for turnaround efforts by Chief Executive Howard Stringer and Chubachi.

NBC Universal informed its affiliates Monday that it was shutting down NBBC (National Broadband Company), the online video syndication venture the network formed with affiliates. NBBC will be folded into New Site, the NBC-News Corp. online video venture set to launch this year.

NBBC was formed in April 2006 to share and monetize video aggregated from NBC’s affiliate stations, the NBC Universal library and other content partners.

As part of the transition, NBC bought back the affiliates’ share of NBBC. Affiliates were given 30 days notice of the change and will now need to negotiate a new arrangement in order to participate in New Site.

Source: MediaWeek

The European Commission has expanded an informal probe into whether the licensing strategies of two rival groups of DVD developers are anti-competitive by seeking information from film studios, an EU executive said. So far the probe is still at the stage of basic fact-finding, and a formal investigation hasn't been opened.

The European Commission, the European Union's executive body, appears to be particularly interested in the activities of the Blu-ray group because of its dominance in Hollywood, according to people familiar with the situation. The commission is investigating whether improper tactics were used to suppress competition and persuade the studios to back their format.

In its formal request to at least one studio, the commission has asked for documents related to any decision to release movies on Blu-ray exclusively and not HD DVD, as well as communications on both formats with certain individuals associated with Blu-ray.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal
PC World

Microsoft Corp. announced that Katherine Styponias will join the Media & Entertainment Group as general manager, where she will lead the business development team working with major content suppliers. Styponias joins Microsoft from Prudential Equity Group LLC, where she served as senior vice president and the senior cable, entertainment and satellite equity analyst.

She was named in The Wall Street Journal’s “Best on the Street” poll for earnings-estimate accuracy and stock picking in the entertainment category. She was also recognized in Institutional Investor magazine’s All-America Research Team poll and was named the No. 1 earnings estimator for the media sector in the Forbes.com/StarMine Analysts Awards for 2004.

Along with Microsoft's position as a major supporter or HD DVD, this move could help establish them as a major player in online content delivery. According to Styponias, "After 12 years covering developments in entertainment, I'm looking forward to turning my knowledge and relationships into opportunity for the industry," Styponias said. "This is a time of tremendous change in the way entertainment is being delivered, and Microsoft is a great place to influence the game."

Several movie studios have licensed an audio watermarking technology from Verance Corporation for Blu-ray and HD DVD. The technology, called VCMS, adds a digital signal to analog audio which can be used by players to recognize content that's been recorded in a movie theater. The technology was approved by the AACS LA in February 2006, allowing it to be used on AACS encrypted discs. AACS is expected to release final license agreements requiring the inclusion of VCMS/AV detector technology in HD DVD and Blu-ray players in the next few months. Verance watermarking is already used on DVD-Audio discs.

"The Verance watermark technology provides value to all participants in the marketplace by encouraging availability of a broad selection of compelling titles for consumers to experience in new ways while discouraging the use of the emerging formats as a growth platform for piracy." according to Nil Shah, chief executive officer of Verance.