FCC chair magically discovers the AT&T T Mobile really is anti free market after the public outcry becomes deafening. With his unpopular boss’s re-election prospects dimming, this is one crony deal that may not make the cut.
High debt and the promise of more new competition inspires Wall Street to lose it’s enthusiasm for Netflix. The short term winners to watch for are big media companies that own large content libraries as demand for their product grows.
Penguin nixes library lending of eBooks. On self inflicted bullet to this publishers right foot, with five more to go.
Protect IP filibuster planned by Senator Wyden. It will include the reading the names of citizens who oppose it. Is your name on the list? If not you can add it here.
Core wars: 144 CPU chip goes into production.
The Warner Music Group has pulled out of a deal with Google-YouTube having not reached satisfactory negotiations. So it looks like YouTube will have to start pulling artists content off the site when the current terms expire –
WMG, the first music label to climb into bed with YouTube and lend the video publishing site an air of legitimacy, is now the first to roll out. The two companies first inked a deal in September 2006, where Warner would get a share of revenue from ads running alongside its content in return for allowing its music to be used within user-created videos.
But lately, Warner felt the money hasn’t been worth it. Best estimates put WMG at receiving a fraction of a penny per video viewed.
“We are working actively to find a resolution with YouTube that would enable the return of our artists’ content to the site,” Warner said in a statement. “Until then, we simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.”
Warner ought to be commended for being the first to recognize the opportunity that YouTube represented. But to pull out for not received sufficient compensation is pretty short sighted. WMG ought to know that anything they receive from this venue is gravy rather than critical income. They surely know that artists don’t need them anymore.
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That’s right all you folks that are going to be live blogging tonights second Prez debate, it will be streamed on Hulu. No need to turn on the blasted telly. Fire up that browser and live blog that sucker in your pajamas!
Link for the Hulu feed.
See ya on the stream!
Earlier today, we posted a discussion of where we think wireless telephony is headed. Here’s a topical 26 minute audio download offering another point of view from Moto’s software architecture honcho.
Motorola’s Dr. John Waclowsky takes a big-picture look at what is happening in the world of telecommunication technology. Adopting the viewpoint of the end-user, he discusses the impact of technological advances, and he translates this into opportunities for those in the industry that have the foresight to take this perspective. (from IT conversations)
Bear in mind that Dr. Waclawsky is addressing a conference of telco people and his remarks are directed to their interests.
300,000 is the difference in viewership between CNN and Breitbart.TV. That 300k difference balanced against millions spent by CNN monthly doing it the ‘ol’ way vs 2 people, a couple of computers and 2 cameras delivered over the Internet. —
About a minute into the latest B-Cast by Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV (whom we interviewed a few weeks ago on PJM Political), they casually mention that their previous show attracted about 400,000 views.
In and of itself, that’s an impressive number for a newscast. (Any show on MSNBC would be considered a hit if it pulled those numbers.) But consider the extreme economy of scale going on here:
As of 2005, CNN in primetime attracted less than 700,000 daily viewers, but with a budget of zillions of dollars and a ton of real estate, technicians and on-air talent. In contrast, the B-Cast is, I believe, run out of an office in Pittsburgh by two people with one set, a couple of cameras, laptops for the on-air talent (in other words, Liz and Scott) to cue those cameras and YouTube clips, and I guess another computer or two to record the sum of all those parts and upload the show to Andrew Breitbart’s news aggregation site. The hosting of the video itself is supplied by any one of numerous online video hosting sites, which helps to reduce what was once a significant expense: the high-bandwidth, and associated costs, of online video.
Now I don’t play a TV exec in the movies, but I do hold a MBA in real life and occasionally sleep at a Holiday Inn Express from time to time. So even I can read where this is going. First we need to change CNN, euphemistically called ‘Chicken News Network’ to ‘Comatose News Network’ The CNN system is probably worth more now split up and sold off as pieces. The towers and licenses have value. CNN’s biggest property is probably their presence in every major airport hub in the nation. But if I really wanted to make $$ I would take the presence and switch to Breitbart.TV. under a long term contract.
Read the whole thing at Ed Driscoll’s site.
Breitbart.TV.
Well it happened. Sony BMG the last major record label supporting DRM on its media FOLDS. As the grave diggers lay the dirt down on DRM lets consider —
The impetus to lift copyright protection represents a sea change for the recording industry, which for the better part of a decade has used DRM to guard against what it considers illegal distribution and duplication of songs purchased online. In abandoning DRM on à la carte song purchases, the labels could create a raft of new, less restrictive ways of selling music over the Internet, such as through social networks like Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace. Partnerships with retailers such as Amazon could also help the music industry take a swipe at Apple (AAPL), which has come to dominate the legal download market through a one-size-fits-all pricing scheme record labels find restrictive.
Details of Sony BMG’s plans are expected to emerge in the coming weeks. Justin Timberlake, the popular recording artist signed to the Sony-owned Jive label, is participating in a Super Bowl promotion with Pepsi (PEP) that will kick off Feb. 3 and offer free distribution of 1 billion songs from major labels, including Sony BMG, through Amazon’s DRM-free download service, according to a person familiar with the matter. Sony has been experimenting with DRM-free songs for about six months. The company began giving away DRM-free promotional downloads for recording artists that sell less than 100,000 units, and at least one artist gained mainstream exposure through the effort. “A lot of these tests have led people to believe that maybe this works,” says a Sony BMG executive who asked not to be identified. A Sony BMG spokesman declined to comment. Amazon also declined to comment on its DRM-free deals, beyond what it has disclosed in press releases.
Does this mean RIAA is on the way out too? Not for the foreseeable future. But someone who might also bow out of DRM will be Microsoft. DRM has been the source of much of Vista’s issues. What motivation would Microsoft have for a subcomponent that nobody wants? Could a Vista II show with no DRM by 2009. I figure 50/50.
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