News archive (12 / 2001)

Phew, it's last day of the year 2001 and now all the newspapers and news sites are full of stories that go through this year's most important news and events. So I thought maybe we should also do the same. As we're not a news agency, I'm not going to go through the Sept 11th and all the related stuff, but let's focus on our area of expertise.

In July we saw when Napster finally shut down as a free P2P service and finally gave way to new breed of P2P networks, most notably for FastTrack. FastTrack's success has also squeezed numbers of users in once-mighty Gnutella network; according to some Gnutella developers, the traffic has dropped over 60% since spring 2001, mostly because of FastTrack.

Also, DivX finally matured into a commercial product this year when DivXNetworks released the first "official" DivX codec, DivX4. Whole year can be easily dubbed as the year of digital video revolution, even that authorities and "big news sources" don't realize it yet -- the DivX phenomenom finally reached the levels of MP3 craze in late 1990s when virtually everybody knew what MP3 meant (well, not literally, most of the people don't know, even not today, that MP3 stands for MPEG-1 audio layer III). DeCSS lost its second round in court and European Union is pushing through a new legislation called EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive), which is pretty much similiar to American DMCA. Also, major record labels finally managed to pull their online plans together and launched Pressplay and MusicNet in December.

We finally got rid of Microsoft's IIS web server today when we successfully changed our web sites to run under Apache. You might experience problems during first few days until we manage to fix all the open issues -- if you experience weird behaviour, please mail us to webmaster@afterdawn.com.

Main reason for this transfer was the fact that our application server and IIS didn't work together very well when using HTTP compression and because of our extremely high traffic and our need to reduce our bandwidth requirements, this was a burden to us financially.

-webmaster

According to their press release, TMPGEnc's developer Pegasys Inc. will finally debut with a commercial version of TMPGEnc in January.

TMPGEnc is probably the world's most popular MPEG-1/2 video encoding software and up until now there has been only the free version of the software available -- which still has all the functionality you can imagine of having. Now, the new TMPGEnc Plus, that will ship by end of January, 2002, has no 30-day limits for MPEG-2 encoding, supports higher MPEG-2 bitrates than the basic free version (new free version supports only 15Mbit/sec MPEG-2 bitrates and the Plus will support up to 80Mbit/sec bitrates), etc..

Company has also announced plans to ship TMPGEnc Server that would support multiple CPUs (basic and Plus versions support only 1 or 2 CPUs), commandline options, multipass MPEG-2 encoding (up to 20-pass vs. Plus version's 2-pass), etc..

Price for the Plus version will be 4800 Yen (appx. $37) and price for the Server version isn't available yet.

MusicCity told to its users in weekend that it will ship a new version of its P2P program, Morpheus, in next year that will add support for Gnutella P2P network. By doing this, MusicCity would bridge two of the biggest independent P2P networks, creating a P2P "monster" that would contain almost 75% of all traded files in all P2P networks.

Both networks operate without central servers and therefor are almost impossible to shut down. Gnutella network was originally developed by Nullsoft founder Justin Frankel and it rapidly became an open source P2P network that has multiple free clients connecting to it -- FastTrack has a different story, it's a network developed by Dutch-based company called FastTrack who licenses its source code and has currently three licensee; MusicCity, Kazaa and Grokster.

The AfterDawn staff would like to wish You, our beloved visitor, a happy, peaceful and joyous season. Be it Christmas or Chanukah, or some other occasion you are celebrating, we hope you'll enjoy it.

Most of our staff will be taking a break as well, so you will probably not see quite as many updates on the site. Since this the time of the year to wind down and take it easy, there's likely not much happening anyways.

We'll catch up on the week's happenings, if any, next week by latest - be sure to keep your eyes peeled!

Happy holidays everyone!

The AfterDawn.com staff

According to News.com, Dutch P2P software Kazaa is still alive and kicking despite the fact that Dutch court ordered the service to prevent illegal file trading and set a dealine for that to 13th of December.

According to Kazaa's attorney, company is negotiating to obtain legal licenses from Dutch recording company association Buma/Stemra and haven't paid any fines so far -- Dutch court ordered that company has to pay $45,000 a day after 13th of Dec if it doesn't comply with the court order.

Kazaa as well as MusicCity's Morpheus and Grokster are "next generation" P2P file swapping services that are all based on code from Dutch company called FastTrack.

Problem with service like Kazaa is the fact that they are based on "real" P2P systems and they don't have any central servers -- this means that there's no centralized control over the network and the files that users swap with each others.

Finally Pressplay kept their promise and launched the service before the end of the year, today -- the launch has been postponed so many time during this fall and winter that some people started wondering if the service will launch at all. But probably they were forced to, because rival service, MusicNet, launched its own service through Real's RealOne earlier this month.

Anyway, Pressplay, a music service owned by Sony and Vivendi Universal, is now available through its distribution partners; MSN, Yahoo and Roxio.

First two weeks the service is running a free trial and users can download 20 songs and stream 200 songs for free. After that the service fees will be based on the number of downloads and number of tracks that user can burn on CD. Songs can not be transferred to portable digital audio players. Service is powered by Vivendi Universal's MP3.com.

While rival MusicNet lets its distribution partners such as Real, Napster and AOL decide their own pricing models, Pressplay has chosen a different tactic and has fixed pricing for its various service levels. Pressplay's prices are:

• Basic: $9.95 for 300 streams and 30 downloads
• Silver: $14.95 for 500 streams, 50 downloads and 10 burns
• Gold: $19.95 for 750 streams, 75 downloads and 15 burns
• Platinum: $24.95 for 1,000 streams, 100 downloads and 20 burns

On Friday last week, music industry and major American radio stations told U.S. government that they've settled their dispute over Net broadcasting royalties.

Dispute began earlier this year when music industry said that radio stations should pay royalties from the music that they stream over the Internet -- traditionally in U.S., broadcasters don't pay any royalties for radio play of the music.

By annoucing their settlement -- without revealing the rate that parties have agreed -- they also pulled the case from Copyright Office's Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel that normally settles royalty cases.

Webcasters, radio stations that operate only via Internet, are still locked in negotiations with music industry and analysts don't expect to see any results before February.

In attempt to reduce our monthly traffic flow, which tends to exceed our monthly limit, we've been installing various web server filters to our site, but unfortunately some of these have caused major problems yesterday and today.

They're _almost_ solved now, but minor outages might still occur later today. This week sucks.

Philips has developed a music recognition technology that will, at least partly, get rid of that annoying feeling when you hear a song but can't remember the song's or artist's name.

This is how it basically works: You hear a song from the radio and want to know the information of it. You call to "shortnumber" (specially assigned premium rate phone numbers with length of max 5 digits or so) from your cell phone and put your cell phone against the speaker for three seconds and hang up. After 4 seconds you receive an SMS (that's a text message..) to your cell phone with the song's name, artist name and possible name of the album where the song is from.

Philips says that technology is extremely accurate and hopes to start licensing the technology by end of 2002 to mobile phone operators and content providers.

MP3.com, a subsdiary of Vivendi Universal, has inked a deal with Oregon-based CD Baby company to distribute CDs from MP3.com artists.

CD Baby will provide warehousing, fulfillment and customer service for MP3.com artists, whose pages will be linked to CD Baby's online store. The company collects $4 on each CD sold.

Source: CNet

In something that people have already called the biggest bust of the century, authorities in U.S., Finland, Norway, United Kingdom and Australia, have seized three major software piracy groups.

Groups that were busted were DrinkorDie (DoD), Razor1911 and RiSC. U.S. authorities executed 37 search warrants in 27 different cities across the U.S. and internationally two search warrants were executed in Finland, 2 in Norway, 10 in United Kingdom and some in Australia.

The main target was DoD which is one of the oldest PC groups, founded in Moscow in 1993. Group became famous for releasing a copy of Microsoft Windows 95 two weeks before Microsoft began selling it.

"They are a notorious elite Internet pirate organization," said Bob Kruger of the Business Software Alliance, an industry trade group. "I doubt there's much that's out there that people want that (DrinkOrDie) can't provide."

DrinkOrDie now has two leaders, one in the United States and another in Australia, officials said. Piracy scene has 1500 members in the U.S., officials estimate, and eight to 10 major groups.

Authorities claim that they've successfully seized 130 computers globally that were running FTP sites on them -- average amount of pirated software, movies and music in each computer were around one and two terabytes (TB = 1,024 gigabytes).

After many days of silence because of ISP problems, world's biggest independent Net radio service, Live365, is back online.

AOL TimeWarner told today that it launched a public test version of its version of MusicNet, a subscription-based music service owned by three major record labels (BMG, AOL TimeWarner and EMI) and RealNetworks.

AOL's expects to roll out its service in full scale in next month. AOL's service will cost $9.95 a month and it allows users to download or stream 100 tracks a month from a selection of 78,000 songs.

RealNetworks launched its own version of MusicNet in last week and MusicNet's rival, Pressplay, is expected to launch within next few weeks.

The another major record label -backed music subscription service, Pressplay, announced today that its users will be able to burn limited amount of music they download from the service to blank CDs and listen those tracks using regular CD players. This sounds pretty good decision from consumer point of view, but even Pressplay wont let users to play tracks using portable digital audio players.

Pressplay is about to launch within next few weeks, probably before the end of the year. Pressplay's rival, Musicnet, launched its service through RealNetworks' RealOne service in last week.

RealNetworks announced yesterday that it will support MPEG-4 video format in all its upcoming products, offering a real possibility for an interoperability between various applications and platforms.

So far Real and Microsoft have focused on strengthening their propietary formats' positions on the market while the rest of the streaming video industry has struggled to create a real global standard for wireless video. Bunch of streaming technology heavy-weights, including Apple, have already formed an association called ISMA, to create a standard for video streaming based on MPEG-4.

MPEG-4 is a relatively new standard from MPEG group which has also developed MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 formats. MPEG-1 format is used widely in VideoCDs and it is also the core of MP3 format (MP3 stands for MPEG-1 audio layer III). MPEG-2 is used in digital TV broadcasting and it is also the format that is used on DVD-Video discs. World's best-known MPEG-4 -based format is called DivX, a format that has created a craze all over the world to ditribute movies over the Net just like people do for MP3s.

Now only major player that isn't using standardized MPEG-4 in its player is Microsoft who wants to stick with its own propietary format, Windows Media Video -- funnies thing is that WMV is also based on MPEG-4, it just has Microsoft modifications in it that makes it non-compatible with other MPEG-4 applications.

RealNetworks predicts that upcoming third generation mobile phone networks (or 3G) will create a huge business opportunity for it and it has already managed to make significant deals with various vendors around the world -- earlier this year, Real made an agreement to distribute its mobile version of RealPlayer to Nokia's 9210 Communicator.

Today Real announced that four operators have deployed its technology to their existing 2.5G (or GPRS) networks and are running trial tests with the technology. Operators are AT&T Wireless, Sonera from Finland, StarHub Mobile from Singapore and Telefonica from Spain.

"It's just a technical trial, and shouldn't be taken as an announcement of any planned products or solutions from us," AT&T Wireless spokeperson Jeremy Pemble told Wireless NewsFactor.

Napster announced on Thursday that it will license the entire music catalog of Matador Records to its upcoming subscription-based service, due to launch in early 2002.

Matador Records is the home of such acts as Belle & Sebastian, Stephen Malkmus and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

One of the Net's most popular radio stations, Live365, was forced to shut down this week. The backbone provider for Live365's ISP cut the service for the unnamed ISP because of repeated spam complains related to the ISP.

Live365 has announced on their website that they're looking for a new ISP, but because of Live365's extremely high bandwidth requirements, this task isn't easy.

Live365 offered a free radio station service for various broadcasters who were willing to add streaming ads to their stations.

CNet has the full story.

In November Vivendi Universal bundled its online music companies, including MP3.com, under one division and now it has come time to trim the division. Vivendi axed 20 percent of the staff and the layoffs at the unit will be across the board of all the companies, a company spokeswoman said.

New company formed in mid-November, Vivendi Universal Net USA, combined Vivendi's acquisitions such as MP3.com, EMusic.com and GetMusic.com with gaming and gambling sites Flipside, Uproar and IWin.

Just wanted to mention few things to you, our dear users. First : THANK YOU! You guys helped us to push our traffic over 1,000,000 page loads in last month, for the first time in our history :-)

Also, number of our registered users finally reached another "magic number" -- we have now over 10,000 registered users and that number is also growing rapidly.

Also wanted to mention/promote/whatever our "featured software tools" -- we've selected some of the best shareware tools, those that have been listed in AfterDawn.com for ages with 5 star rating and approached their developers. Now some of the developers support our site financially as long as you guys keep on testing out their great products. So, definately the easiest way for you to support us financially is to try out these excellent tools (trial versions are free and if you like them, register them):

1.Collectorz.com MP3 Collector
2.Collectorz.com Music Collector
3.Collectorz.com Movie Collector
4.Blaze Media Pro
5.AudioEdit Deluxe

Just after yesterday's announcement that Listen.com launched its music subscription service, Realnetworks follows and launches first MusicNet-based service under its RealOne service.

Consumers can join RealOne's music service for $9.95 a month or they can order the full subscription package that also includes exclusive sports streams, etc for $19.95 a month.

It is expected that first Pressplay-based services will appear within next few weeks.

Listen.com was the first one to launch one of the much-hyped music subscription services. Listen.com launched its Rhapsody service yesterday. Rhapsody debuted without content from major record labels, although company is told to be in licensing negotiations with several major record labels.

Service debuted with two separate channels, Nexos Classical is Listen.com's classic music channel and costs $5.95/month and Sampler which offers music from various genres and costs also $5.95 a month. Sampler Plus package combines these two for $9.95 a month.

One of the most popular audio and video information/news resources, Webnoize, has suspended its operations until "early 2002" when it promises to re-emerge "with new and improved events, products and services".

Webnoize has focused on providing news, in-depth reports and conferences related to audio, video and P2P industries. Company's announcement might be yet another sign that digital music business is in deep recession.