March 6, 2006
Volume 12, Issue 7
Javien Surpasses One-Million Mark
DCIA Member Javien Digital Payment Solutions has achieved a major milestone, surpassing one million registered users on behalf of its customers. The company's technology powers sales for content providers in a variety of industries.
Javien attributes the attainment of this milestone to recent successes of its digital music customers including iMesh, MusicNet, Ruckus Network, and Transworld Entertainment's FYE Download Zone.
"Achieving this milestone reflects the industry's success in selling music through paid downloads and subscriptions," said Javien CEO Leslie Poole.
Since 2000, Javien's hosted ASP platform has been chosen by leading content providers to create online revenue streams. Inherently flexible and scalable, Javien's technology supports custom business rules and easily integrates with digital storefronts and peer-to-peer (P2P) software programs so that its customers can offer subscriptions, pay-per-view, downloads, and micro-payment purchases.
Telcordia Wins Innovation Award
Frost & Sullivan's 2006 Product Innovation Award in the field of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) interoperability has been presented to DCIA Member Telcordia Technologies for its VoIP Routing Registry.
The Telcordia VoIP Routing Registry facilitates cross-carrier VoIP calling, a feature that is increasingly driving consumer adoption of IP-based communication services. The registry is part of the Telcordia Maestro IMS portfolio, a powerful set of wireless, wire-line, and converged products, services, and applications that enables carriers to offer any service, over any network, via any device.
As VoIP traffic and subscribers grow and VoIP carriers proliferate, cross-carrier routing administration becomes exponentially more complex and expensive. Currently, inter-carrier VoIP calls or IMS-enabled services using telephone numbers are not routed entirely through IP facilities, but rather are routed via the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents the Product Innovation Award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in new products and technologies within their industry. Telcordia has shown exceptional innovation by launching a broad line of emerging products and technologies.
Wyden Introduces Net Neutrality Bill
Excerpted from MediaPost Report
As expected, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) unveiled a bill that would ban telephone companies from charging web businesses for guaranteed faster delivery of content over their phone lines. The Internet Nondiscrimination Act of 2006 would prohibit network operators from favoring certain content providers over others, which the bill says would "have a chilling effect on small businesses."
Senator Wyden said neutrality in technology "allows folks to start small and dream big." His bill would prohibit network operators from interfering with, blocking, modifying, or diverting web traffic. In addition, it disallows the creation of a so-called "priority lane" where content providers can buy quicker access.
It also calls for a transparent system in which consumers, web content, and Internet companies all have access to the same rates, terms, and conditions for service. Wyden's bill is the direct result of ongoing lobbying on the part of telephone companies like Verizon and AT&T to prevent such legislation.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 We encourage your support of Save the Music Fan, announced in late January and publicized last week at Digital Music Forum in New York by DCIA Member Nettwerk Music Group CEO Terry McBride. Digital Music Forum was co-sponsored by fellow DCIA Member Alston & Bird.
"Save the Music Fan" is a multi-faceted campaign focused on supporting consumers who wish to download music. According to Terry, it is based on the principle that, "Suing music fans is not the solution, it's the problem. Litigation is not 'artist development.' It is a deterrent to creativity and passion, and it is hurting the business I love."
"The passionate message of music is in the magic of the 'song.' The more it's consumed, the more it nourishes. Music is ubiquitous, and we need to stop treating it like a product that needs to be controlled." Nettwerk's reasons for seeking to stop litigation of music fans can be summarized as follows.
1) The RIAA has relied on data provided by Pew Internet & American Life research to claim that the litigation is working to deter illegal file sharing, stating that broadband Internet penetration is growing faster than the measurable base of P2P file sharers. Consequently, this litigation is forcing the music fans to use technologies that are not measurable or traceable, such as "instant messaging" and "BitTorrent," the latter of which now accounts for somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of Internet traffic. So in fact, we are not deterring file sharing, just deterring our ability to track it, and our chances of monetizing it.
2) Millions of Americans, including the majority of those in the music business, have shared music. This dates back to mixing one's own cassette tapes in the 70's. Breaking the law has never been about volume. Teenagers today are simply using the technology at hand, similar to how we did when we were teens.
3) These same file sharers are great music fans and are breaking new artists with little or no mainstream media support. For example Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens – not to mention the Arctic Monkeys in the UK – all owe thanks to this grassroots community of file sharers for the fact that they are selling hundreds of thousands of albums.
4) The music market is down not due to P2P "piracy," but for four simple reasons: a) stiff competition for the entertainment dollar with formats like videogames and movies, both have much larger marketing spends; b) the replacement cycle is over – digital music does not scratch or wear out like past formats; c) one now has the ability to purchase and listen only to the great songs without filler; and d) mass-merchant retailers today carry only the current hits, with little to no catalog.
Nettwerk became involved in this important issue after the teenage daughter of a consumer targeted in a copyright-infringement lawsuit for the unauthorized downloading of nine songs performed by one Nettwerk management client contacted another Nettwerk artist to say she identified with "Download This Song," a track from the latter artist's latest release.
She wrote that her family was one of many seemingly randomly chosen families to be sued; and it was "no fun." She continued, saying that the song's line "they sue little kids downloading hit songs," basically sums things up, and that the "whole lawsuit business is outrageous."
Chicago-based Mudd Law, which is representing the family in this case, stated that, "In an effort to combat the continued injustice of consumer lawsuits, attorneys, musicians and artist managers have joined forces to defend the interests of this family in court. Together, these parties hope to demonstrate the injustice and impropriety of the RIAA Litigation Initiative."
"Since 2003 the RIAA has continually misused the court and legal system, engaging in misguided litigation tactics for the purpose of extorting settlement amounts from everyday people - parents, students, doctors, and general consumers of music. In doing so, the RIAA has misapplied existing copyright law and improperly employed its protections not as a shield, but as a sword."
"Many of the individuals targeted by the RIAA are not the 'thieves' the RIAA has made them out to be. Moreover, individual defendants typically do not have the resources to mount a defensive campaign to demonstrate the injustice of the RIAA's actions. Today we are fortunate that principled artists and a management company, Nettwerk Music Group, have joined the effort to deter the RIAA from aggressive tactics - tactics that have failed to accomplish even the RIAA's goals."
The DCIA shares Terry McBride's concerns about the current ongoing consumer litigation policy of the RIAA. By chasing music fans even further underground, it seriously interferes with the efforts of content providers, P2P software developers, and service-and-support companies – the DCIA's three Membership Groups – to commercially develop the P2P distribution channel.
Music fans have always shared music using whatever then-current technologies were available, often in innovative ways. Suing P2P users misses the mark on the real reasons for the decline in music sales. And in Terry's words, "Most disturbingly, it undermines the importance of these file sharers. They represent behavioral marketing at its best and as such should be embraced, not sued."
"Litigation is destructive. We are a creative community, so this approach makes no sense at all. I cannot envision any artist who I have the privilege of representing suing a fan for sharing their music."
Please click here to contribute to "Save the Music Fan" and do whatever else you can to publicize and support this important effort. Feel free to contact christina@nettwerk.com for more information. Share wisely, and take care.
Take My Music Please
Excerpted from Forbes Report by Patricia Huang
Tower Records, owner of DCIA Member 33rd Street Records, plans to open a new online service this summer that will let consumers create their own podcasts – audio and video shows designed to be downloaded onto a computer or portable media player – using a catalog of songs which Tower will provide free of charge.
So far, the major labels have been unwilling to let their music be distributed on podcasts, which don't have digital-rights management (DRM) that prevents users from redistributing files.
Instead, all of the artists available on the service are signed to smaller labels and have joined a group called the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), including hip-hop group Blackalicious and rock flashback Peter Frampton.
Tower intends to generate revenue from the podcasts by selling ads. Money generated will be shared among the user who created the podcast, the artist, the label, the publisher who created or owns the music, as well as Tower itself.
Apple's iTunes service offers a directory of podcasts, but it does not support the creation of the podcasts or offer a database of songs for podcasters to use.
"It's an excellent way to champion the breaking of new music as well as promote established artists that are not considered relevant to the highly formatted genres of mainstream radio," said Morty Wiggins, head of 33rd Street Records.
Tower intends to announce the service, TowerPod.com, at the South by Southwest Music (SXSW) Festival in Austin, TX on March 15th.
P2P Can Help Music Industry
Excerpted from Daily Cardinal Report by Adam Dylewski
The music business is in need of a radical shake-up. While the RIAA goes around suing its own customers, the music corporations it represents continue to grossly under-use P2P file sharing, online social networks like MySpace, and the Internet, in general, as a new mode of distribution and marketing.
Music sales are down, but it's not file sharing that's hurting the "Big Four" – EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group – the most. According to "Music's Brighter Future" in The Economist, "an internal study done by one of the majors showed that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in the United States had nothing to do with Internet piracy."
The rest seems to stem from other underlying problems with the music biz – less retail space, competition from other media, the rising cost of CDs and, above all, the quality of the music itself. So what's a multi-national music corporation to do?
First off, turn to DCIA industry data resource BigChampagne for marketing advice. BigChampgane started off by analyzing the same P2P networks that cost the Big Four an absurd amount of legal fees, but soon after started tracking online music sales, streamed songs and videos, and more traditional media for music distribution.
The hearty digital soup that results from this diverse collection of metadata can find "whether listeners have found a hit before radio" and give the music industry a better measure of an artists' success, according to "The Chumbawamba Factor," an article by Chris Dahlen at the online music critique hub Pitchfork Media.
Dahlen wrote that modern music dominates the hits on download charts, but exceptions can arise – last August, Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" broke into the iTunes top 25 when "Family Guy" and "Laguna Beach" both used the song.
The Big Four should heed this phenomenon and peddle their back catalogs the same way they market their new music – there is an enormous audience of music fans out there, both young and old, that don't pay much attention to releases after 1990.
Where did this audience come from? They got fed up with modern music outlets. Music execs need to realize that MTV and the thousands of Clear Channel-owned stations out there aren't the tastemakers they used to be.
While a lot of these disgruntled consumers run to classic rock and oldies radio for their musical fix, many indie music fans turn to PitchforkMedia.com and MetaCritic.com to find new artists. A lot of the time these guys get it right, to the benefit of fledgling artists and music fans everywhere.
The "Pitchfork" effect can be seen in the success of bands like Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The latter, then-unsigned group became an overnight Internet sensation after their self-titled record got a 9.0 on Pitchfork. Thousands downloaded the album and, after a few months of online acclaim, sold over 40,000 records – all without a record deal.
If the major labels took a closer look at MySpace profiles and Pitchfork, they could get nearer to the hearts and minds of file traders, as well as their wallets.
Still, the music industry would have to do a whole lot more to regain their lost audience. In 2004, the mobile ring-tone industry grew to one-tenth of the size of the music business. The Big Four have made inroads towards this market through Motorola's new iTunes-ready phones, but this is only the first step.
The inevitable success of a wireless-enabled iPod that could access iTunes has huge implications for the music industry. Instead of grappling with Steve Jobs about the prices of songs on iTunes, the Big Four needs to strengthen this partnership to stay afloat in the future.
And while Big Champagne's data mining is already informative, it cannot track BitTorrent downloads. According to British Web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent downloads account for 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet. As it stands, BigChampagne is missing a huge chunk of downloaders in its statistics.
All of this will take time, of course, but when iTunes sold its billionth song last week, it heralded a future shift in the music industries' business model and the de-stigmatization of downloading music. Like the New Pornographers – a Pitchfork favorite – sang, "It was crime at the time / but the laws, we changed 'em."
PassAlong to Retail P2P Selections
Excerpted from Digital Media Wire Report
PassAlong Networks, the provider of p2pREVOLUTION, a file-sharing network with 1.6 million songs, has introduced a new service that will let consumers choose digital songs online and then pick up a custom CD of their selections at a nearby store within an hour.
The company partnered with PhotoChannel Networks, which powers the online photo printing services offered by Wal-Mart Canada, CVS, Eckerd Drugs, and Costco Canada, to deliver the custom CDs to customers.
PassAlong said the CDs will include customized jewel cases with track listings. The service is scheduled to launch later this year.
P2P Soribada to Charge Fees
Excerpted from Korea Times Report by Han Eun-Jung
South Korea's largest file-sharing network Soribada announced plans to relaunch with a new subscription service. Soribada will resume services in March with its latest version, Soribada 5, the P2P network said in a joint press conference with the Korean Association of Phonogram Producers (KAPP) in Seoul.
"And as of April 1st, after a month study of patterns of use in Soribada 5, we will charge subscribers of file exchange services,'" said Soribada CEO Yang Jung-hwan.
The new Soribada will be modeled after other subscription services like SKT Melon, Bugs, and MaxMP3, but will be somewhat different, Yang said.
Soribada was developed in 2000 by Yang and grew to become the most popular P2P music-sharing service in South Korea with more 22 million registered users.
Phone Preinstalled with Skype 2.0
E-TEN Information Systems has announced that its tiny PDA-enabled phone (E-TEN M600) will be shipped with preinstalled Skype 2.0 for Pocket PC, from DCIA Member Skype.
The device features wide wireless communication opportunities – it supports quad-band GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. The company positions it as the world smallest PDA-enabled phone with integrated Wi-Fi. E-TEN M600 is powered by a Samsung 400 MHz processor and Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system. It has 128 MB of flash memory onboard, a 2.8-inch LCD, a 1.3-megapixel camera with flash, and 4X zoom.
Serious About P2P Telephony
Excerpted from VoIP Magazine by Christian Stegh and Philip Matthews
Since the early days of P2P networks, developers typically have built proprietary solutions for specific purposes, such as VoIP calling and file sharing. Each application, no matter how widely deployed, has been an island unto itself with no possible interoperability.
As Napster, Skype, and BitTorrent generated significant press and experienced swelling user communities, mainstream businesses also recognized the value of P2P and began a string of mergers that have garnered much interest from the telecom industry and media.
Standards organizations have recently shown an interest in standardizing P2P VoIP as well. A few informational drafts have been written within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and interest is building in ad hoc birds-of-a-feather sessions.
P2P enables a telephony system that has no need for a centralized server; location information about the called party is kept within the endpoints themselves rather than in a server. Peers know about one another directly or by sharing information with other peers in the network. When a caller doesn't know the exact location of the party it wants to call, it asks other network peers that are closer to the "callee." Together, they create a logical communications network using an IP vehicle.
Distributed Computing Cracks Secrets
Excerpted from Heise Online Report
By harnessing the power of distributed computing among thousands of PCs, an open-source project that goes by the name of M4 has decoded the first of three historical secret radio messages from the Second World War. At the time they were sent, the radio messages in question were encrypted with the help of an Enigma machine of the German Navy featuring four scrambler disks.
The first message to be broken can be read on a page of the M4 Project. For a long time, the code of the electromechanical encryption machine Enigma – especially its Navy version with four scrambler disks – was considered impossible to break. Not until the mathematician Alan Turing came up with the design for the computer dubbed Colossus II was a breakthrough achieved. The technical details of Colossus were kept secret by the British government until 55 years after the end of the Second World War.
Although meanwhile numerous replicas and simulations of Enigma machines exist, original parts are still objects of desire among collectors. At the beginning of April 2000 an unknown thief stole a counterintelligence Enigma machine with four scrambler disks from the Bletchley Park ("Station X") location of the British Museum. The perpetrator had threatened to destroy the device unless the museum paid a ransom for it of 25,000 British pounds.
Free TV Not That Free
Excerpted from LA Times Report by Dawn Chmielewski and Meg James
Amanda Palmer hardly fits the profile of an Internet outlaw, but her obsession with the ABC show "Lost" makes this self-described "bubbly, nutty mum" the television industry's worst nightmare.
Like thousands of other British fans, the 30-year-old personal assistant can't bear to wait the nine months it can take for new "Lost" shows to air in England. So, soon after the closing credits roll in America, she downloads each episode off file-sharing networks.
And most alarming to TV industry executives, Palmer admits not a twinge of guilt. "It's TV, isn't it?" she said. "It would probably be different if it was a movie. If it is free on everybody's TV, why worry about it?"
The $60-billion TV industry has a simple answer to Palmer's question: because the future of free TV may depend on it.
Although still far behind music, television shows represent the fastest-growing type of files downloaded online. As Internet speeds increase and software improves, almost anyone can get high-quality bootlegs of such popular shows as "Desperate Housewives," "24," and "The O.C." – minus the commercials that make "free" TV free.
Software such as BitTorrent makes material easy to download; episodic TV ensures a fresh supply of content; and the popularity of devices such as Apple's iPod creates an appetite for video.
"In the same way that the original Napster was synonymous in the minds of virtually everyone who used it with free music, today if you say 'BitTorrent,' they're thinking television," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a research firm that tracks online traffic.
In fact, some people now use file sharing as a source of on-demand programming, outpacing the industry's efforts to set up their own pay-for-view services. Instead of programming a VCR or digital video recorder to record the latest episode of FX's "Nip/Tuck," these users simply download it the next day.
Clicking the mouse instead of the remote has dramatic implications for the TV industry. Producers of popular programs often take in as much as a third of their revenue from foreign sales – a pot of money that would presumably evaporate if overseas downloading catches on. In addition, producers also rely heavily on the profits that flow from DVD compilations of their biggest hits.
"It's a serious problem," said Peter Levinsohn, President of Fox Digital Media at News Corp. "There is a voracious appetite for this content."
Reinventing the Boob Tube
Excerpted from CNN/Money Report
Dmitry Shapiro wants to reinvent television – and he's counting on help from the millions of fans of Internet video. Shapiro's formula is part Napster, part Amazon, and part YouTube, the popular site where users view each others' homemade videos. By combining P2P file-sharing technology, collaborative filtering, and the popularity of viral video clips, Shapiro is hoping to create a killer app for Internet video.
On Wednesday, Veoh Networks, Shapiro's San Diego-based startup, launched a web-based version of its video-sharing software to compete with the likes of YouTube, iFilm, and vSocial, which each let users watch, post, and share videos online. Whether or not Shapiro ever catches up to this already-crowded pack, he does have a few ideas that may very well point to how we will all one day be watching TV – and not just over the Internet.
Veoh started last fall with a P2P video file-sharing application. It attracted 30,000 users who swapped 250,000 files – a test run that showed the limits of trying to get users to download software. Now that Veoh's on the web, Shapiro is betting that it can become a serious distribution platform for Internet video.
While YouTube and other video sites may serve up millions of free short video clips a day, often the videos are jerky or low-quality, even over broadband connections. But Shapiro does a few things differently. For one, he has a way to deliver DVD-quality, even high-definition, videos to laptops.
For another, his system allows the people who create the videos in the first place to either charge for downloads or to share in advertising revenue. And finally, using advanced vector math, he plans to employ a sophisticated recommendation engine that will target shows and advertising.
Veoh's success is predicated on its ability to attract the best video content from both amateurs and professionals. Right now, on Veoh's beta website, there are a few amusing user-created shorts featuring Lego characters, a bunch of skateboarding clips, and some soft-core bikini videos.
More interesting is what you can do with the videos. You can rate them, embed them in your blog, create your own curated series of Veoh shows, or download higher-quality versions of them. To do so, Veoh has users download its file-sharing software, which can download video much faster than a web browser.
Veoh is not just relying on users to contribute content; it's also relying on their computers to distribute that content efficiently. Bandwidth is expensive, and serving up high-quality video can cost 65 cents per gigabyte or more. By using P2P software and having users download the video from other users' computers, Veoh can do it for a few pennies per gigabyte.
Shapiro is hoping to persuade Hollywood to open its vaults. "The big media companies are clearly nervous," notes Shapiro. "They realize they need to do something." Some TV shows are now on sale at iTunes, to be sure, but a much greater number are on file-sharing networks.
Veoh offers what could be a compelling business proposition. For one thing, it has a mechanism to pull copyrighted material off the network. Any video publisher on Veoh can choose to charge for downloads and keep 70 percent of the revenue, with Veoh getting the rest.
Or publishers can offer their content for free and split the advertising revenue, with Veoh taking a larger cut since it plans on selling the ads. "We've modeled that most of our revenues will come from advertising," says Shapiro.
To sell advertising, Shapiro is using what he calls "crazy math" from Veoh's chief scientist, Ted Dunning, who created the music recommendation engine for Yahoo Music. If a critical mass of people start using Veoh, Dunning's software will track what they search for, what they preview, what they download, what they watch, how many times they watch it, what ratings they give it, which friends they send it to, what those friends are watching, and so on.
Based on all of that data, it will start making recommendations. Sometimes those recommendations will be videos. But sometimes they will be advertisements. And viewers might not even know the difference.
"We look at advertising as content," says Shapiro. "Targeted advertising is potent content." As an example, he shows a clip of a blogger driving around in a Porsche in Germany. It's not an ad, but it might as well be one. What if, suggests Shapiro, after viewing it, you then got the option of viewing longer, official Porsche driving videos?
If users could control the advertising like that, they might watch more of it. And advertisers might pay more to reach them – and even create videos just to reach that demographic. If Shapiro or one of his competitors could pull something like that off, that would pretty much qualify as reinventing television.
MTV Embraces YouTube Sharing Site
Excerpted from Hollywood Reporter Story by Andrew Wallenstein
YouTube, a popular video-sharing website, is starting to make friends in the TV world. The site has struck its first formal partnership to obtain copyrighted content with MTV2, a cable channel overseen by Viacom's MTV Networks.
MTV is seeding YouTube.com with multi-minute clips from a pair of series promoting new seasons and DVD releases this month: "The Andy Milonakis Show" and "Wonder Showzen." The website already is home to dozens of other clips drawn from the network but uploaded to YouTube without the network's consent.
The partnership comes amid increasing concerns that YouTube is becoming more of a breeding ground for copyright-infringing video than a source of user-generated video. Last week, NBC Universal directed YouTube to remove hundreds of clips from the site, and CBS News did the same regarding one segment that became a popular YouTube attraction.
YouTube instituted changes to its site this week to make it a more corporate-friendly environment. Users seeking to upload material are now instructed to agree that they in fact own the content that they intend to distribute, which the company hopes will serve as a deterrent to copyright violators. In addition, the upload process is now embedded with a "premium content provider program" that offers to co-brand professional material.
For MTV, the YouTube alliance is part of a broader effort to drum up interest in new programming with various viral-video sites, including iFilm, which Viacom acquired last year.
BitTorrent Launches Video Store
Excerpted from Light Reading Report by Mark Sullivan
One of the best-known names in P2P file sharing, BitTorrent, plans to take a more active and profitable role in Internet video distribution by opening its own retail site. BitTorrent will enter a growing Internet video business, a phenomenon happening concurrently with the telcos' rollout of IPTV service.
Since 2001, BitTorrent has distributed its P2P technology to millions of file sharers at no cost. The company only last year became a corporation, and now plans to leverage its brand name to sell licensed video content on its own retail site.
"We want to aggregate video and other content and make it available in a sanctioned area," said BitTorrent Co-founder & President Ashwin Navin.
In a show of good faith, BitTorrent promised the MPAA last year that it would remove copyright-protected content from its P2P search-engine results. "There is a huge emphasis, especially post-Grokster, on 'intent' and, in every situation we've encountered, people understand our intent to be friendly to content owners."
BitTorrent is making the case to content owners that a friendly relationship might help everyone get paid. "The MPAA tells us that 650,000 movies are being downloaded every year, and nobody's getting paid," BitTorrent's Lily Lin says. "We see P2P being utilized so that the publisher, the artist, and the ISPs all get paid for content."
BitTorrent delivers video files using a method known as "swarming." Small pieces of the file are gathered from the PCs of users who already have the content, then quickly reassembled on the downloader's PC. Swarming is far faster than a linear download from a central server.
The popularity of P2P coupled with the large file-sizes have placed a heavy burden on ISPs. BitTorrent and other P2P files account for as much as 60 percent of the bandwidth used by ISP customers.
"The ISPs are already dealing with a lot of P2P traffic, so consumers clearly want audio and video," BitTorrent's Lin says.
BitTorrent will participate in a P2P video trial with the British cable group NTL starting in April. BitTorrent will aggregate video content and provide NTL with the P2P distribution platform.
BBC Apologizes for P2P Claim
Excerpted from PC Pro Report by Simon Aughton
The producer of the BBC's "Newsnight" has apologized for an item about BitTorrent that described file sharing as theft. Following a "torrent" of complaints, Adam Livingstone publicly withdrew the assertion in an article for the BBC website.
"File sharing is not theft," he wrote. "It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many RIAA press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We're very, very sorry."
"Newsnight" viewers described the report as sensationalist, hysterical, appalling, and ludicrous; and said they were stunned at its attempt to link file sharing with pedophilia and terrorism.
"To say it was sensationalist, hysterical, and ill-informed would be a gross understatement," said H. C. Hamilton of Ayr. "To misrepresent all users of the BitTorrent format (huge numbers) because of increasing encryption of this standard was an incredible, not to say hysterical, leap of logic."
Livingstone tempered his apology by insisting that the program had a legitimate point to make, that BitTorrent now accounts for a third of Internet traffic. The sheer weight of all this traffic makes it impossible for the security services to decrypt (if it is encrypted) and sift through it all.
Livingstone's article and viewer comments can be read on the "Newsnight" section of the BBC website.
Television Disrupted
A new book, "Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV," written by Shelly Palmer and published by Elsevier Press/Focal Books, will be introduced at the National Association of Broadcasting (NAB) Conference in April.
"Television Disrupted" promises to empower its readers to make informed business, career, and investment choices by giving insights into the technologies, business rules, and legal issues that are shaping the future of television: time-shifted and on-demand viewing, mobile video, file sharing, interactive and advanced media, advertising, copyright laws, paradigm shifts, parlor tricks, and much, much more.
This is a book for media, entertainment, and telecommunications professionals who need an overview of the new competitive landscape. Professionals who think of their customers as "access lines," "subs," "unique users," or "TV Households" need to read this book.
Shelly Palmer is an inventor, technologist, award-winning composer, and television producer. He is Managing Partner of Advanced Media Ventures Group, a technology and marketing consulting practice. He is the inventor of Enhanced Television ("Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," "Monday Night Football") and the host of "Media 3.0 with Shelly Palmer," a weekly television show.
Shelly is also First Vice President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. He created and chairs the Advanced Media Technology Emmy Awards which honors excellence in the science and technology of the media business. Please click here to learn more about the book, which is already listed on Amazon.
Coming Events of Interest
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OFC/NFOEC 2006 – The IPTV trend (television content over the Internet) will be a hot topic at OFC/NFOEC 2006 – presentations, sessions, and workshops will focus on IPTV. Speakers include leading experts from AT&T, Alcatel, Detecon, Harmonic, Lucent, and Ovum/RHK. The Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC) and National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC) March 7th–9th in the Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, CA.
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Social Marketing: Tapping Into The Power Of Connected Customers – March 7th in Toronto, Canada. More and more ad dollars are moving online, but smart companies are approaching social media with care. In a world of one-to-one conversations, how do you get real reach? Forget everything you know about traditional advertising - in social media, the rules of brand identity no longer apply. What advertising practices deliver results in social media? This event will cover how companies can use tools like blogs, RSS, and podcasting to connect with their customers.
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Digital Media Revenue Strategies – March 27th at Digital Sandbox, New York, NY. Advancements in delivering and monetizing digital assets are happening at an extraordinary pace. Find out how leading edge B2B media companies have used digital technology to increase revenue, streamline operations, and open up new markets.
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Omma West Conference and Expo-Hollywood – March 27th-28th in Los Angeles. The rash of technology innovations and content syndication deals over the past year, coupled with consumer adoption of broadband, DVRs, VOD, and an unwavering insistence on media control, are taking the shape of an infrastructure the media industry's most forward thinking prophets have long heralded. The Internet is now becoming what it was meant to be – the distribution channel for all media.
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Digital Hollywood Spring – An expanded agenda of events will be featured during the 17th Annual Digital Hollywood Spring at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel in Los Angeles, CA March 27th-30th. Digital Hollywood is the leading gathering of entertainment, media and technology executives. Digital Hollywood Spring 2006 will have tracks and panels of special relevance to the DCIA. Plan now to attend.
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MIPDOC and MIPTV – MIPDOC is the international showcase for documentary screenings April 1st–2nd at the Carlton Hotel, Cannes, France; and MIPTV featuring MILIA – is the world's largest audiovisual and digital content market for mobile, iTV, and broadband distribution April 3rd–7th at the Palais des Festivals also in Cannes, France.
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First Annual DCIA Conference & Expo – June 22nd, Tysons Corner, McLean, VA. Panel tracks at this first-ever global "P2P Media Summit" will cover policy, marketing, and technology issues affecting commercial development of the emerging file-sharing industry. Exhibits and demonstrations will feature industry-leading products and services. DCIA Member Alston & Bird's Aydin Caginalp and Renee Brissette will conduct a special session on corporate value optimization for firms in the distributed computing industry. Plan now to attend. For sponsor packages and speaker information, please contact Karen Kaplowitz at 888-890-4240 or karen@dcia.info.
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Washington Digital Media Conference – June 23rd at the Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner, McLean, VA. An executive briefing on emerging business, policy, and technology issues & opportunities. This is a must-attend event for media, entertainment and technology businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies involved in the digital distribution of media. The Washington Post calls the event: "a confab of powerful communicators and content providers in the region."
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