December 4, 2006
Volume 15, Issue 10
INTENT Earns Best Technology Award
DCIA Member INTENT MediaWorks, a leading provider of technology for the distribution of licensed digital media content and advertising, captured the award for "Best New Digital Technology" at the Digital Music Conference in Miami, FL. INTENT was honored for its ground-breaking technology that enables profitable and consumer-friendly distribution of licensed digital music and advertising via the Internet and peer-to-peer (P2P) file-trading systems.
The Digital Music Awards recognize excellence, innovation, and creativity in the fields of digital and mobile music technology, as well as the development of new applications, content, and services. A distinguished panel of industry experts served as judges for this year’s awards.
"INTENT has exploded on the music scene with technology that bridges the gap between consumers used to having easy access to digital content and providers looking for a new business model to serve this enormous market," said Mark Frieser, Chair of the Digital Music Conference. "With INTENT, everyone wins. Consumers get licensed music and video on their terms; artists and companies increase exposure and revenue; and advertisers experience exponential growth in audience reach."
INTENT is the first company to enable providers of digital entertainment to seamlessly deliver licensed media across multiple distribution channels. INTENT’s digital platform makes digital music available to the millions of people using open P2P applications, websites, social networks, and blogs.
"When it comes to digital distribution, the music industry is realizing the extraordinary potential of shifting from confrontation to collaboration," said Les Ottolenghi, CEO & Co-Founder of INTENT MediaWorks. "INTENT makes it possible for artists and companies to harness the viral nature of the Internet to distribute their digital entertainment and advertising. Being recognized as the Best New Digital Technology of 2006 is great validation of our approach and market impact."
VeriSign Acquires InCode for $52 Million
Excerpted from San Diego Union Tribune Report by Kathryn Balint
InCode Wireless, a wireless business and technology consulting firm, announced this week that it is being acquired by DCIA Member VeriSign for $52 million.
Founded in 1998, privately held InCode employs 400 people in 14 offices located in 10 countries. In March, it acquired the mobility enterprise solutions and applications business of Peak Technologies, a provider of automatic identification and data collection systems. In 2005, the consulting firm also acquired Northstream, a Stockholm-based provider of support for business and technology issues with a focus on Europe.
VeriSign, best known for verifying the legitimacy of online stores and as the keeper of .com and .net domain names, is publicly traded on the Nasdaq.
DCINFO Editor’s Note: Separately, the US Commerce Department this week approved a contract extending VeriSign’s control over websites ending in .com for six more years. The contract between VeriSign and the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), allows the company to raise prices four of the next six years. VeriSign shares rose 7.5%.
PeerApp Joins Broadband Services Forum
DCIA Member PeerApp, whose technology enables Internet service providers (ISPs) to manage and monetize P2P networks, has joined the Broadband Services Forum (BSF). Members of this international organization include Alcatel, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Nortel, Oracle, Philips, Siemens, and Sony, among other prominent global technology and telecommunications leaders.
PeerApp’s initial product offering, UltraBand 2000, caches much-sought-after content at the ISP to markedly reduce Internet traffic and increase network efficiency. ISPs face spiraling bandwidth charges as subscribers turn to P2P for entertainment, news, and other programming – now estimated to consume 70% of all Internet traffic worldwide.
In making the announcement, Helmut Leopold, BSF Chairman and Director of Platform and Technology Management at Telekom Austria said, "We are excited to have PeerApp on board and welcome it to the BSF."
PeerApp is positioned to collaborate on technology that enhances the ability of ISPs to compete for movie and TV program distribution. "Enabling ISPs to provide more value-added services – such as motion pictures and TV as well as music and games – will improve their value proposition and give subscribers a richer, more diverse online experience," said Robert Mayer, CEO of PeerApp. "Our goal is to demonstrate that high-speed downloads using P2P file transfer will make the broadband-connected PC an entertainment hub for consumers."
Mayer added, "With digital rights management (DRM) ensuring that royalties and other fees are dispensed appropriately, P2P file transfer has become a legitimate distribution method. Entertainment industry leaders Disney and Warner are already looking to P2P to deliver movies and TV programs to consumers."
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 The DCIA congratulates Victor Harwood for a well-attended and stimulating first-ever Digital Hollywood Europe in London.
We especially commend DCIA Member RawFlow for its highly successful "Jack the Ripper" themed networking reception at Grapeshots, which was the conference social highlight for many attendees.
Thank you also to our morning and afternoon "Next Generation P2P" panelists for their valuable contributions to two excellent sessions.
Speakers included CacheLogic CTO Andrew Parker; Digital Containers CEO Chip Venters; Friend Media Technology Systems (FMTS) CTO Jonathan Friend; RawFlow Marketing Manager Ingjerd Jevnaker; INTENT MediaWorks CEO & Co-Founder Les Ottolenghi; Kendra Initiative Founder Daniel Harris; Warner Bros. VP of EMEA Anti-Piracy Operations Trevor Albery; Altnet CTO Anthony Rose; CyberSky-TV CEO Guido Ciburski; Oversi VP of Strategy and Legal Affairs Dr. Nimrod Koslowski; and FTI Consulting Senior Managing Director Bruce Benson.
Andrew Parker opened by noting that P2P first moved to the forefront of digital media distribution in 1999. It has since become the single most dominant Internet protocol now representing 65%-to-75% of all online traffic globally. Remarkably, each time that adverse pressure has been applied to slow its growth, the technology has moved forward to wider adoption. Now, economic incentives are driving content owners to explore the benefits of embracing P2P, which holds the potential to provide a near broadcast environment online.
There are still many technical challenges to overcome to achieve the full potential of P2P as an entertainment distribution channel, however, and CacheLogic is working in this arena with several critical offerings. It is important at this juncture to avoid a pendulum effect from swinging too far in the direction of extreme control with overly restrictive DRM implementations.
Chip Venters postulated that P2P is the ideal protocol for super-distribution based on the exploitation of payment systems traveling with content files – digital containers that persistently send information back to content providers – for example, when a file has moved or copies have been made. P2P today represents a market of 200 million consumers, but with not much yet available for sale to them.
P2P has gained considerable credibility since the establishment of the MGM v. Grokster inducement doctrine, and leading content owners are no longer focused on bullet-proof encryption as a pre-requisite for exploring P2P, but rather on how to make money. The current DRM mantra has become "keep honest people honest." We need to move beyond proprietary and walled-garden approaches in digital distribution; content must be able to be readily redistributed usably. With the coming of IPV6 and virtually unlimited IP addresses, Digital Containers’ harnessing of P2P will have even greater applicability and value.
Jonathan Friend expressed the view that there needs to continue to be a strong anti-piracy focus to fully develop the commercial potential of P2P. The fact is that the majority of P2P content continues to be copyright-infringing, despite court rulings and enforcement efforts. User education has also been deficient, with some 60% of P2P users not even aware of the legitimate uses of P2P. Disturbingly, too, is that recent dispute settlements have propelled an accelerated migration to open-source client development, which along with commercially beneficial attributes, has also brought a greater emphasis on techniques to guarantee user privacy, exacerbating the challenges faced by interdiction and other enforcement initiatives.
What is needed now is to combine FMTS’ more advanced anti-piracy efforts with other activities, such as marketing campaigns and educational programs. The inevitable movement to open standards must be guided towards positive aspects such as interoperability, and the industry will find additional business uses of P2P as the growth of decentralized networks continues to expand.
Ingjerd Jevnaker distinguished the use of P2P for live streaming as separate from file sharing. P2P essentially means interconnecting users computer-to-computer on the same level, and this can be to share bandwidth as well as content. There should be no contradiction between P2P and protecting content. Because of legacy issues tainting P2P’s image, however, some successful P2P applications don’t advertise that they use P2P – and users don’t care. Meanwhile, other P2P networks have increased their popularity with almost a revolutionary appeal to consumers by emphasizing P2P. The biggest emerging failures are digital services that use DRM in too draconian a manner. Flexibility is needed.
P2P companies now are either going open source and in some ways underground and non-commercial, or working to get consumers to sign onto licensed models. We need to encourage the technology sector to support and advance legitimate uses of P2P on multiple networks; and we need to encourage the entertainment sector to think about alternative business models, such as adopting RawFlow streaming and integrating ad-supported commercial content with user-generated content (UGC). In the coming future, there will be no more TVs – PCs will become the video appliance.
Les Ottolenghi explained how P2P is a superior delivery method for rich media content, with INTENT MediaWorks now delivering 370,000 licensed files per day up from 10K/day a year ago and participating in such groundbreaking efforts as the recent Coca-Cola sponsored Jay-Z P2P-exclusive promotion. INTENT uses DRM to track content, converting the open P2P universe into an ecosystem for legitimate business, which is emerging as primarily ad-supported. Licensed content is provided free, giving instant gratification to end-users, with the result that 84% of discovered files are retained. Unified file-discovery across all P2P and social networks has also emerged as an important attribute for success; hence INTENT has just launched its DelveDown service to provide that functionality.
Fostering the community nature of the channel is also very important, and P2P is uniquely configured for social networking. Post-Grokster, major entertainment companies are showing more interest in working with INTENT and, globally, copyright court cases have reduced the reluctance of majors to move forward and embrace P2P. It is critical not to let telecom firms dictate what happens regarding further innovation by eliminating net neutrality. We also need to work to make files smarter – so that content packages themselves have intelligence – plus continue to improve interoperability and attract higher quality content to be licensed for P2P.
Daniel Harris provided Kendra’s perspective on P2P from its alliance of content owners and software makers. Daniel’s vision is that any application on any device should be able to browse any catalog, and there should be universal interoperability. Record labels have had different ways of managing their catalogs, historically; now we need to show them that with P2P it is possible to aggregate databases and achieve across-the-board content monetization. P2P can bring benefits of non-centralized search and publishing to all sorts of content databases.
P2P can be used for information transfer – not just file transfer. Standardization will help make this a commercially viable consumer medium. It is increasingly futile to pursue legal strategies when open standards are proliferating. Huge advancements could be made in commercial development by simply bolting payment systems onto traditional P2Ps and letting developers earn money by working to make this happen. It is time to embrace, support, and extend P2P with open standards to build a market that has enormous potential. Let’s empower developers to make this succeed with the reality of more open standards.
Trevor Albery cited Warner Bros.’ recent development of new business initiatives in the P2P sphere, while also continuing a strong focus on anti-piracy activities. Examples include licensing BitTorrent and the joint venture announced earlier this year with DCIA Member arvato mobile using its GNAB platform for the In2Movies service in Germany. So far, these approaches have involved offering filmed content in traditional business models, but with a P2P delivery aspect. It is still the very early days for the P2P distribution channel, and now is the time for experimentation in what is a nascent industry in order to learn what will work best.
There should be no apologies for the Grokster case, which was about profiting from inducement to infringe copyright, not about P2P technology. Today’s challenge is to build good services that will excite consumers and compete with unlicensed online content. There may well be more litigation, as the channel continues its legitimization. We need to bring all stakeholders together to make DRM work better so that P2P can safely monetize content. P2P will find its place among distribution channels, while DVDs will continue and other electronic distribution will as well.
Anthony Rose outlined Altnet’s experience from 2001, when, in retrospect, its approach was ahead of its time. Altnet pioneered DRM-protected content distribution through open P2Ps, but major entertainment content rights holders initially resisted. Now that legal settlements are complete, however, Altnet is finally obtaining licenses. Its newest offering, the Global File Registry (GFR), connects people who own content with people who use content. Five years ago, there was much innovation in the P2P space, but then Web 2.0 became more innovative as P2Ps faced litigation. Now we are at a stage where the transport layer for P2P works quite well, but how people use it is still not working as a business. We need renewed innovation here – for example, with better indexing technologies – so that users will not be polarized.
Of concern is the fact that dispute settlements have bi-furcated the development community into those who want licensed distribution and those who are trying to anonymize usage. What should be obvious is that value will be generated by large-volume licensed-content distribution. Social wrapping in P2P is also an area of high potential. Consumers are more empowered than ever and, therefore, trying to dictate their behavior harshly will fail and drive them to the waiting darknets. The desire for control must be tempered; the winning play will be one based on equilibrium. The future will bring an increase in hybrid systems with a mix of centralized and distributed servers.
Guido Ciburski announced that CyberSky-TV’s streaming video P2P software was declared legal in Germany two months ago, after protracted court proceedings, and that now the questions are how to put it to best commercial use and how to advertise it so that it stays that way. He said the attractiveness of the software is its higher quality online video experience, which takes advantage of higher upload speeds available to broadband users. The US Supreme court decision has been misinterpreted by many, but in the final analysis has not changed much in terms of consumer behavior. P2P usage has continued its steady expansion, notwithstanding market share shifts among applications, basically regardless of related cases and settlements.
Major record labels and movie studios need to take time at this point in their migration to a digital distribution marketplace to listen more to consumers. There has been too little feedback from users factored into digital distribution strategies. There needs to be more interaction with the community of P2P users, and an effort to maximize the satisfaction of consumers with new business models. Going forward, the increase in broadband penetration will drive more growth of P2P, and local storage capabilities and content consumption patterns will change as a function of more speed and capacity.
Dr. Nimrod Koslowski articulated a new vision by stating that content being redistributed via P2P networks can be both controlled and accelerated. Oversi’s patent-pending caching system enables ISPs to monetize P2P and deal with network imbalances arising from the widespread adoption of P2P. It should indeed be experimentation time in this channel. Major content companies can participate at very little risk by putting some of their deeply archived, least monetized, long-tail content into P2P trials. Let material that is not the highest value content travel freely and find new ways to monetize it. There are many new interactive advertising and value-adding layers and payment mechanisms. Experiment and then scale what works.
The Grokster decision should be a clear green light that P2P is legal; inducement to infringe copyright is not. Going after end-users for enforcement purposes is a failed proposition, however. Encouraging content to be redistributed with new forms of monetization will be the winner. We need to get away from proprietary formats and embrace P2P in intuitive ways and couple it with operating systems. The industry needs to relate to the way content actually is being redistributed in terms of developmental priorities and not fight it. Don’t block applications. P2P will become much more integrated into the online environment in the future; not just files, but also acceptable levels of security integrated into our digital-social fabric.
Bruce Benson concluded with his observation that the entertainment industry is indeed evolving to digital distribution – and that such iconoclastic developments as music companies learning to market MP3s rather than DRM’d content may be coming, as well as movie companies adopting new approaches to market their entire libraries online despite legacy sequential-distribution windows. What’s working in P2P is free content. What’s not working is paid content. We need to take a lesson from the video/DVD market, which learned that it could more than makeup with high volume lower-unit-cost transactions (rentals) what it lost from relying exclusively on sales.
FTI Consulting believes it could generate sixty cents per view in ad-supported P2P movies for example. There is the opportunity to put whole libraries to work in this channel. The problems are rights complications, executive bandwidth, etc. – business issues rather than technology issues. Copyright laws are outdated and the US Congress writing tuck ‘n fixes for what has become too complex is no longer going to be effective – copyright laws can’t deal with mash-ups for instance. Rights holders should digitize everything and clear the rights to be able to monetize their works as new P2P models become clarified. We will see the completion of a cable by-pass online, and content elasticity will continue to expand as YouTube has so aptly demonstrated.
Audience questions ranged from how to get tech savvy kids to pay for content to how to convince ISPs that P2P can provide desired quality of service (QoS) levels. Answers confirmed that people will pay for convenience, value, and reliability; and enhanced hybrid P2P systems can do this better than alternatives.
All affected parties need to participate actively in developing a new commerce engine, which is different from just putting up toll-booths. It’s time for more resources to be directed towards creators and innovators. This is a uniquely open environment with the lowest barrier to entry of any channel and enormous possibilities. Share wisely, and take care.
Nettwerk Wants to Change How Music is Sold
Excerpted from Canada.com Report by Elianna Lev
Terry McBride isn’t interested in selling CDs despite having some of the world’s biggest musicians on his roster.
But with artists like Avril Lavigne, Dido, and Barenaked Ladies among those attached to DCIA Member Nettwerk Music Group’s management company, record label, or both, the music company is obviously selling something right.
That’s because in a time when record sales are in decline for even the most popular artists, McBride is more interested in selling songs than albums.
"We’ve got ourselves in this situation where our metric system of measurement is an album," the CEO of Nettwerk said at the Transmission music conference in Vancouver Thursday.
"What’s an album have to do with music? An album has nothing to do with creating a song."
McBride is considered a maverick when it comes to music management. Having started Nettwerk from his Vancouver apartment in 1984, he has since become an advocate for the future of music distribution.
The number of artists selling more than a million albums these days is rare compared with only 10 years ago. But McBride stresses that doesn’t mean people have stopped listening to music.
"Music is more popular than it’s ever been," he said. "It’s a matter of looking at that behavior and learning how to market that behavior versus fight that behavior."
McBride realizes that radio stations and even record labels are losing the power of telling music listeners what’s popular. Instead it’s the fans who decide. File swapping and websites like Myspace, which allows musicians to display their songs for users to listen to for free, are getting music to the masses and giving fans more choice.
"Kids are not formatted, they just like music," said McBride.
Despite having seven offices in four different countries, Nettwerk does not have an artist and repertoire (A&R) department. Instead, McBride said all 139 employees at the company are considered A&R reps.
"We’ve allowed music to come into the company based on peer recommendation, based on people just loving music," he said.
This is how McBride sees the future of music: peer-to-peer file sharing.
He predicts that soon someone will be able to text message or e-mail a song to a friend. If that friend likes it, they will be given the option of purchasing it. If the receiver buys the song, the sender will get a portion of that sale.
McBride said the technology is out there to do these types of things, but fear is stopping the music companies from doing anything.
"Stop talking about having kids transfer music to every device they have. Just do it," he said. "You can do it right now. There’s nothing stopping you. The only thing that’s stopping you are your egos."
Nettwerk is showing no fear. A recent marketing strategy includes giving Sarah McLachlan fans access to the vocal track of one of her Christmas songs and allowing them to re-mix it.
"There are now hundreds of thousands of Sarah mixes, all over the place, getting played, and it cost us nothing," McBride said. "Fans are doing with it what they want to do with it. And that’s only going to sell Sarah’s music."
Steve Pratt, the director of CBC Radio 3, said McBride’s vision puts a really exciting face to the future of music.
"I think it’ll help the different areas of the industry come together rather than fighting for separate interests, and being protectionists," he said.
Pratt said right now the music industry is still focused on pushing out what they want and restricting content for reasons that work for them rather than for the music listeners.
"Ultimately the people decide what they want and how they want it; the faster the industry can adapt to that… the faster they’ll be back on track working together rather than fighting each other," he said.
What to Watch on the Web
Excerpted from BBC News Report
YouTube, the trailblazing site that has brought Internet viewing to the mainstream, embraces everything from people filming themselves on hand-held camcorders to endless archive clips of music and TV.
The imagination and enthusiasm of some home-made offerings put the professionals to shame, even if the vast majority never rises above silly dances and inane rants.
Despite its sudden rise, YouTube still exists in the Internet equivalent of the Wild West, where the copyright sheriff has not gained control.
And that is arguably the secret of its success – enter the name of your favorite band or program and you will be presented with a string of nostalgic clips happily ripped off from TV or video.
Dozens of other video-sharing sites also now exist – some of the biggest are Google Video, MySpace Video, Revver, iFilm and Metacafe.
Many broadcasters now put full shows online as well as on TV - either for a fee, with adverts or completely free.
In the US, Apple’s iTunes sells hits like "Lost," "The Office," and "Battlestar Galactica" for $1.99 an episode. Amazon Unbox and AOL also offer major shows.
And networks such as ABC, FOX, and NBC have all put their top shows on their own websites.
In the UK, the BBC is planning to offer its TV channels live over the web plus a seven-day catch-up service with its iPlayer next spring.
Channel 4 already offers a simulcast and is about to sell whole shows for 99p, while ITV is also preparing to launch a simulcast and 30-day catch-up service.
Two more new sites promise to bring online TV shows and social networking functions together, making it easier to find, share, and recommend professional shows on the web.
"Tape it off the Internet" currently indexes more than 2,000 shows from a mixture of authorized and unauthorized sources.
The Venice Project, set-up by the people behind Kazaa and Skype, will offer shows for free from legal sources using P2 technology, paid for by adverts.
Further afield, WWITV and Jump TV list hundreds of global TV stations that broadcast online, from Albania to Zimbabwe.
Watching Videos Online Supplants TV
Excerpted from Reuters Report
The boom in online video has started to reduce the hours people spend watching television, a survey said on Monday.
The ICM poll of 2,070 people for the BBC found that some 43 percent of Britons who watch video from the Internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less traditional TV as a result.
Three quarters of users said they now watched more TV online or on mobiles than they did a year ago.
Online video viewers are still a minority though, with just 9 percent saying they go online regularly to watch clips.
Online and mobile video is far more popular among the young, with 28 percent of those aged 16-24 saying they watched more than once each week. That figure fell to just 4 percent among over 45s.
The success of sites such as YouTube has boosted access to videos for those who want easy ways to find, watch, and share them over the Internet.
Unlike in the United States, where hit TV shows are routinely available from networks’ websites and services like Apple’s downloading store iTunes, Britain is still in the early stages of an online viewing boom.
But the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 are planning to offer most of their shows on demand on the Internet from the end of this year or the start of 2007.
Send Video without Killing Your PC
Excerpted from CNET News Report by Michael Kanellos
DCIA Member Pando Networks earlier this year launched a service that lets consumers send 1GB attachments with e-mail. Basically, the download is sent across P2P networks. Now the company has released plug-ins that let users add the attachments without leaving their e-mail applications.
"In the first version, you installed the software. Then you opened the application and typed in an e-mail address. We had a standalone product," said CEO Robert Levitan. "Now you can go to Yahoo e-mail or Outlook or Gmail, hit attach and go."
Although consumers tend to be initially skeptical of the software, it works, and it’s gaining in popularity. After all, everyone hates bounce-backs. 1.8 million consumers have downloaded the company’s software so far. About 40 terabytes of data travels over its service a day.
"We’re doing five million downloads a month," he said. "Video is most of it."
Pando makes its money on ads: an ad pops up as the recipient is receiving his or her payload. Early next year, the company will release a premium version with a low subscription fee, he said.
Levitan founded iVillage and Flooz, two Internet companies from those crazy days in the late 90s.
OkCupid CEO at Interactive Conference
DCIA Member OkCupid, a free online dating site that uses unique matching algorithms and personality quizzes to bring people together, announced that its CEO & Co-Founder Sam Yagan joined Yahoo and Microsofton a panel about social networking at The Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media 2006 conference last week. In the past 24 months, the social networking space haswitnessed nearly $2 billion in merger and acquisition activity and has quickly become the foundation of successful online experiences. Yagan and his fellow panelists discussed ways to develop relevant and fun content to attract new audiences to the next wave of social networking and search destinations.
"Through my experience launching successful online sites like SparkNotes and eDonkey, I know firsthand that people are attracted to interactive online destinations that are free, fun, and effective," said Yagan. "This is a topic that will undoubtedly impact the next wave of online communities and more importantly, the way in which people interact with one another online and offline." OkCupid is the largest free online dating site in the US. OkCupid’s 500,000 active users have answered over 100 million questions on what matters most to them in relationships. Unlike any other personals site, OkCupid uses this information and advanced mathematical algorithms to match users together.
Skype Up and Running in Korea
Excerpted from Korea Times Report by Kim Tae-Gyu
Korean subscribers to the service of DCIA Member Skype, the world’s leading web-based telephony service provider, can now receive incoming calls from traditional phones or mobile handsets on their personal computers.
Skype announced it will commercially launch the Skype-In service, or phone-to-web application, in collaboration with the country’s top online auctioneer, Auction.
Those who want to use Skype-In sign up at Skype’s Korean-language website free of charge. Then, they select an 11-digit Internet phone number with a dialing prefix of 070 after paying 13,200 won for three-months of service or 39,600 won for a year-long membership.
"Skype-In is beneficial for both callers and receivers – callers will be charged with inexpensive local telephony rates regardless of the receiver’s location," Auction director Beh Dong-chol said.
"Receivers don’t have to pay fees other than the initial payment. Furthermore, they can forward the incoming calls to a regular phone or a cell-phone," he said.
With the introduction of Skype-In, the company’s service line-up is complete, with services for PC-to-PC calls and PC-to-phone calls, called Skype-Out, already available.
Skype and Auction rolled out the free PC-to-PC call applications in February before introducing Skype-Out in late September with a fixed rate of 23 won per minute.
Necessary peripherals for the Skype services, technologically known as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), are microphones and headsets.
Those who want to use the VoIP services with regular phone-type hardware can buy a universal serial bus (USB) phone that sells for between 20,000 won and 50,000 won.
Earlier last year, Skype was acquired by eBay, the world’s leading online retailer, which also retains more than a 99-percent stake in Auction.
Babel Networks to Launch Beta
Babel Networks, the company behind Babelgum, a new Internet platform that is redefining television, is planning to launch its beta this month.
Babelgum blends the lean-back experience of traditional TV with the inherent power of the Internet to create a whole new medium for viewers, content owners, and advertisers.
Babelgum uses cutting-edge P2P technology to stream videos to its users PCs safely and efficiently at near-TV resolution. Viewers are empowered to create their own TV channels with niche-to-mainstream content from around the world tailored to individual interests. With usage, Babelgum users’ TVs will learn what they like, and the service will grow more personally customized.
Babel Networks will make it possible for viewers to discover new content through friends, contacts, and people with shared interests, and to tell others about the content they love or hate. Babelgum will create a whole new medium for video.
BitTorrent Signs Movie Studios & Cable Nets
Excerpted from Digital Media Wire Report
BitTorrent, a P2P file-sharing service, announced on Wednesday a slate of partnerships with Hollywood studios including FOX, Paramount, Lionsgate, Palm Pictures, and MTV Networks to distribute movies and TV shows on its network.
Palm Pictures will break new ground by becoming the first studio that will distribute full-length movies on BitTorrent before both their theatrical and DVD release dates.
BitTorrent said it will provide pricing details closer to the retail marketplace launch, scheduled for February 2007.
Launched in 2001, BitTorrent’s millions of current users account for as much as an estimated 40% of all worldwide Internet traffic.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and other copyright holders have aggressively targeted operators of BitTorrent servers in Scandinavia and other regions.
Meanwhile, TechCrunch is reporting that BitTorrent has raised $25 million in its second round of financing from Accel Partners and Doll Capital Management, and that CEO and BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen is stepping down.
The report adds that the company has hired the headhunting firm of Heidrick & Struggles to find a replacement.
How to Protect P2P Privacy
Excerpted from Australian Personal Computer Report
Without getting into the quagmire that is the debate over P2P, fronted on one side by sane technologically able people and on the other by a dying breed of middlemen with an outdated business model, the use of the technology aptly includes both legitimate claims of copyright infringement and illegitimate claims that this is all the technology is good for. In fact, P2P is rapidly becoming the de-facto mechanism for distribution of all sorts of content on the Internet.
If you use P2P software, and this can include programs that use it for distribution (which may not be immediately apparent to you), whether you like it or not you’re putting your IP address and machine on the global invitation list. It doesn’t matter that you’ve got a firewall – for while it does its job at the protocol and port level, it can’t protect you from the applications you run that openly share information about you or your machine.
While there are as many legitimate uses of P2P software as there are free, community-produced, and non-commercial files on the networks; there are just as many illegal transfers happening as well. And irrespective of whether such actions are justified, the RIAA litigation engine gets its endless source of defendants to sue by logging the contents of and exploring the systems of those users who run P2P software. It doesn’t matter whether you are or are not sharing copyrighted material, your machine will be logged none the less.
The scary part is, you don’t know just how frequently and from the range of sources prying eyes come knocking until you use a piece of software designed to prevent exactly this sort of eavesdropping.
For Windows there are two popular solutions – the open source Peerguardian and Protowall. Quite literally, these tools are optimized IP filters that can blacklist known abusers. They operate by installing a driver, essentially an IP queue, to filter incoming connections based on regularly updated blacklists.
And there’s an added advantage to using them, too. It’s not just the big media magnates and their legions scouring the networks that are a threat, the IP block lists include known spam, phishing, virus, and spyware sources as well.
And perhaps that’s where some of the 200,000 IP address ranges that make up the core blocklists are populated from, not just the obvious culprits but also all those lovely spammers and purveyors of spyware.
While these tools are quite mature under Windows, Linux is a different story. At one stage there was a Peerguardian version for Linux, but this has since handed over the torch to MoBlock. Still in development, MoBlock accepts as input Peerguadian block lists (.p2b) and adds a queue within the kernel to be managed by IP-tables for filtering.
Coming Events of Interest
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Innovating in a Web 2.0 World – December 7th. There is a tremendous amount of focus on Web 2.0 and yet there are as many questions as answers. What is it? Who’s using it? How can you get started? Join WebSideStory for a free webinar on how your online business can innovate in the midst of this Web 2.0 world.
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2007 International CES – January 8th–11th in Las Vegas, NV. With four decades of history, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reaches across global markets, connects the industry and enables CE innovations to grow and thrive. The DCIA will moderate the "Next Generation P2P" panel on Wednesday January 10th, featuring DCIA Member executive Les Ottolenghi, Co-Founder & CEO, INTENT MediaWorks.
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P2P MEDIA SUMMIT NY – February 6th–8th in New York, CA. The Winter DCIA Conference & Exposition will cover policy, marketing, and technology issues affecting commercial development of this emerging high-growth industry. Exhibits and demonstrations will feature industry-leading products and services. For sponsor packages and speaker information, please contact Karen Kaplowitz at 888-890-4240 or karen@dcia.info. Plan now to attend.
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