June 18, 2007
Volume 18, Issue 2
AT&T to Target Pirated Content
Excerpted from LA Times Report by James S. Granelli
AT&T has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep copyright-infringing films, music, and other content off its network – the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.
The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T Senior Vice President.
The nation’s largest telephone and Internet service provider (ISP) also operates the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its customers and those of other providers.
As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said. The company’s top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content.
"We recognize that a lot of our future business depends on exciting and interesting content," he said. Cicconi was in Los Angeles to talk at the Digital Hollywood Summit conference in Santa Monica.
Last week, about 20 technology executives from Viacom, its Paramount movie studio, and other Hollywood companies met at AT&T headquarters to start devising a technology that would stem piracy but not violate privacy laws or Internet freedoms espoused by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Cicconi said that once a technology was chosen, the company would look at privacy and other legal issues.
"We are pleased that AT&T has decided to take such a strong, proactive position in protecting copyrights," Viacom said. "AT&T’s support of strong anti-piracy efforts will be instrumental in developing a growing and vibrant digital marketplace and will help ensure that they have a steady stream of great creative content to deliver to their consumers."
Verizon Communications, which has fiercely guarded the privacy of its customers, has refused so far to offer a network anti-piracy tool. It defeated in court the recording industry’s demands to reveal names of those allegedly involved in downloading infringing songs.
In mid-March, executives at Viacom and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) separately approached Cicconi with the idea of a partnership. Content providers have long looked for a network solution to piracy, but no operator had been willing to join with them.
Efforts to date have focused on filtering and other technologies at the end of uploads and downloads of infringing material, but those have largely failed.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has engendered a barrage of criticism for its efforts at suing people who download copyrighted songs and who trade in bootleg music CDs.
"They’ve tried the whack-a-mole approach, and I don’t think they’re winning," Cicconi said.
Cisco Invests in P2P Solutions Provider Oversi
Highlighting the many noteworthy announcements coming out of P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA was Cisco Systems’ investment in Oversi, an expert in peer-to-peer (P2P) caching and content delivery solutions. Cisco joined Oversi’s second round of financing, totaling $8 million, led by Carmel Ventures, StageOne Ventures, and TempoPark Fund.
The additional investment will be used to expand Oversi’s sales and distribution channels and global operations, and will help fund the development of new products in the P2P streaming and delivery space.
Joav Avtalion, Chairman & CEO of Oversi, said, "We see Cisco’s investment as an exciting milestone for our company, helping us to grow our business in line with the fast-evolving world of online video and P2P content distribution. With so much video and TV on the Internet, bandwidth is becoming the key issue. Using our P2P solutions, service providers can deliver up to 20 times more bandwidth using their existing infrastructures, instead of investing billions of dollars in expensive upgrades."
Avtalion continued, "We look forward to a fruitful and continued collaboration with our investment partners."
Avi Zeevi, General Partner of Carmel Ventures, added, "The addition of Cisco to the existing investors of Oversi reinforces the importance of the market for clearing P2P traffic congestion on service provider networks."
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 Thanks to all who participated in our 2007 P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA for making this by far the DCIA’s most productive industry conference to date.
Leading P2P software distributor BitTorrent received the prestigious 2007 DCIA Innovator’s Award, which was accepted during a special ceremony by BitTorrent CEO & Co-Founder Bram Cohen.
National Association of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) President Shelly Palmer inspired delegates with his visionary conference-luncheon address.
The DCIA presented its Founder’s Award to Derek Broes, SVP of Digital Entertainment at Paramount Pictures.
Feedback from attendees has been very positive in terms of value gleaned from the high-quality keynotes and panel discussions, and elite networking opportunities afforded at this event.
For those who could not attend, summit presentations can now be accessed online for AT&T, Abacast, BigChampagne, CacheLogic, EveryZing, FTI Consulting, INTENT MediaWorks, Javien, Joost & Babelgum, MediaDefender, P2P Cash, Pando Networks, Philips, Raketu, SafeNet & Ultramercial, Skyrider, Unlimited Media, and VeriSign.
In addition, the first two installments of FTI Consulting’s "Couch Potato Famine: Prospering Through an Era of Disruptive Change in Media," which FTI’s Bruce Benson discussed during his keynote address, are now available online: Part I – Three Titanic Forces Converge and Part II – Network Effects.
Kudos especially to our closing keynote speaker, Pando Networks’ CEO Robert Levitan, for coining the memorable takeaway phrase, "Disrupt. Enable. Extend." This epithet truly describes the impact our industry’s technologies have had in every instance where powerful and exciting distributed computing applications have been introduced to the digital marketplace.
Coming out of the summit, at the request of a major ISP and P2P software distributor, the DCIA is forming a new working group focused on P2P content acceleration and ISP network optimization, with an initial charter to evaluate and test innovative and promising protocol(s) for prospective voluntary adoption throughout our industry. This working group is now open to qualified participants.
A formative meeting and conference-call will take place this Wednesday afternoon June 20th at 3:00 PM US ET. Those attending NXTcomm in Chicago, IL or NY P2P 2.0 June Meet-Up in New York, NY can participate in person. Others may join our geographically-bridged meeting by phone. Please contact P4PWG@dcia.info or 410-476-7965 for more information or to register to attend this kick-off session.
Congratulations, too, to Victor Harwood for his great success with a much expanded Digital Hollywood Spring (DHS). We are especially grateful to Gary Croke, VP of Marketing, CacheLogic; Frank Childs, VP of Business Development, PeerApp; Eric Krock, Director of Broadband Content Management Services, VeriSign; and Laird Popkin, CTO of Pando Networks; for their participation on the DHS Next Generation P2P panel.
Gary explained that CacheLogic now provides content delivery networks (CDNs) with the option of using P2P if they wish to speed delivery. Digital rights management (DRM) will become a necessity, but interoperability and portability are also needed. The ratio of authorized-to-unauthorized content is still far from desirable, but it is improving.
Rights holders need to be careful not to alienate their customer bases nor stifle social networking opportunities to extend their content distribution virally. While music labels came late to digital distribution, this is not so with movie studios. ISPs need to get into the value chain and do their part to separate authorized from unauthorized content. In the future, P2P will be implemented increasingly as a transparent layer in content delivery.
Frank noted that PeerApp provides P2P caching solutions to ISPs and observed that there are two fundamental P2P business models: open, which supports viral distribution; and closed, which supports highly efficient content delivery. In both cases, P2P is an enabling technology for distributing content in a massively scalable way. P2P applications are just starting to integrate instant messaging (IM) and related interactive features with content display.
Anti-piracy efforts have not worked so far in part because they have tried to combat rather than embrace social networking and in part because "competing with free" by offering an inferior user experience cannot work. In lieu of the hysteria over perceived damages from leakage, a lighter-touch DRM approach could successfully capture the mass market. Open protocols can also help commercial development of the P2P channel. Media companies will continue their P2P learning curve and come to appreciate that P2P is a great technology and start deploying more innovative business models.
Eric cited Kontiki as a leading example of a closed P2P, which was acquired by VeriSign and integrated as an optional component of its Intelligent CDN. VeriSign has been educating its customers on the superiority of P2P in terms of higher efficiency and potentially greater security in content delivery. P2P should be taken advantage of in more innovative ways for content monetization. It is a new video transport medium that will foster greater freedom of expression.
Efforts to deter copyright infringement have failed; what is needed are ways to make licensed content easier to obtain. Offerings should be differentiated to take full advantage of the uniqueness of P2P technologies to provide a richer user experience with the most important goal to get this right. ISPs need to step up to distinguish authorized from unauthorized content. In the future, as a result of the advent of P2P, content will get better.
Laird described Pando as a leading example of an open P2P taking its particular technology implementation to the consumer mainstream. Adding layers will be necessary for the potential of the P2P distribution channel to be fully realized, such as persistent tracking to ensure data security. Ad-supported content outpaces paid downloads by a ratio of at least 99:1. DRM needs an enormous amount of work in order to be acceptable to consumers overall. Pando is a big believer in the potential of user-generated content (UGC).
P2P enables small independent content producers to access a means for potentially massive distribution at little to no cost. The biggest hurdle to overcome is that there is still no clear way for P2P software distributors to work easily with major content rights holders. Digital watermarking, as a form of DRM-light, might lead the way here. Above all, content providers need to stop using piracy as an excuse. Entertainment spending has shifted from outdated business models; and rights holders need to follow the money. The indisputable benefit of P2P is that is saves infrastructure costs in a very dramatic way. Industry self-regulation must continue to ensure total realization of the channel’s potential.
In the Q&A, panelists concurred that music labels need to leave their comfort zones behind, and take bolder actions such as embedding ads to monetize every P2P play on an industry-wide basis. Legacy business practices that impede progress must be replaced by legal structures that keep pace with technological capabilities.
P2P is empowering individual original rights holders to escape the constraints of traditional copyright aggregators. Yet P2P can also offer benefits to each. Efficient client-network integration will result in smart-caching of content in mobile devices, PCs, nodes, or servers, wherever it makes the most sense, to further increase the efficiency of P2P and the use of bandwidth.
Hope to see you this week at NXTcomm in Chicago. Share wisely, and take care.
Babelgum’s Big Bet on P2PTV
Excerpted from Business Week Report by Jennifer Schenker
Silvio Scaglia, a 48-year-old Italian billionaire, made a fortune in telecommunications, the Internet, and entertainment services. Now he’s the latest broadband baron to try his hand at what media pundit Shelly Palmer, managing partner of Advanced Media Ventures Group, calls the transition from network to networked television.
The US debut of Babelgum, Scaglia’s free, global P2PTV and video-on-demand service, will take place in June.
Scaglia already has poured $13.2 million of his own money into Babel Networks, Babelgum’s parent network, and plans to spend another $130 million or so of his personal fortune to get the company up and running over the next few years. And while other start-ups, such as Joost and BitTorrent, already offer robust P2PTV services, Scaglia says Babelgum will take a different approach.
Unlike other services, Scaglia isn’t just going to try to replicate traditional television on the Internet. Instead, Babelgum is offering niche fare, including independent and short films – such as Spike Lee’s "Jesus Children of America," which has never been shown on broadcast TV. "There are literally tens of thousands of very good content providers in the world that don’t distribute their content through TV channels," says Scaglia.
But there’s more to Scaglia’s plan. In the next few weeks Babelgum will launch a service that will allow professional independent producers to automatically upload their videos to its site. The producers will be paid $5 per 1,000 views and a share of advertising revenues, once Babelgum starts attracting advertising. Amateur videos such as those shown on YouTube will not be a part of Babelgum’s offering.
Babelgum also plans to offer TV channels built around hobbies such as golf, tennis, and cooking. Users will be able to build their own personal channels, establish social links, and trade opinions on what they watch.
Scaglia may run some traditional TV fare – he says he is talking to big US content providers – but it is not part of the core strategy. Rather than broadcasting content to a national audience, Babelgum wants to distribute global content to like-minded global audiences. Once there is a mass-market audience for channels dedicated to topics like golf or tennis, he figures the advertisers will naturally start flocking to Babelgum.
The question is whether Babelgum will be able to catch up to the other P2PTV offerings that are cropping up. Joost, backed by European entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, the Internet phone service sold to eBay, has managed to generate lots of media buzz and raise $45 million from the likes of CBS and Viacom. The service has already captured half a million customers, enabling it to forge partnerships with high-profile content providers and advertisers. Joost recently hired Mike Volpi as its new Chief Executive Officer; Volpi had been tagged as an heir apparent at Cisco Systems.
And Joost is far from the only hot, new, P2PTV service. US P2P pioneer Bram Cohen’s San Francisco-based company BitTorrent is striking deals with major content providers to offer TV shows, movies, music, and games for rent or purchase on the Internet to 150 million users worldwide who have BitTorrent installed. BitTorrent Entertainment Network, which is about to extend into free, ad-supported programming, has also launched a service for independent content creators to publish their own content. Since the beta launch last year, the company claims more than 100,000 users have published audio and video clips.
Scaglia isn’t fazed by the competition. He says he has enough faith in his vision and deep enough pockets to take his time to build up Babelgum, which is headquartered in Ireland and has offices in Italy, Britain, and France. It is not the company that gets out of the gate first, but the one that gets it right that will win in the end, he argues. "Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare," says Scaglia, "Babelgum is the tortoise."
It’s no accident that entrepreneurs like Scaglia, Zennstrom, Friis, and Cohen, all of whom earned their fame and fortune in broadband, are simultaneously branching out into P2PTV. Broadband uptake by consumers has reached critical mass, the price of servers that can store videos has dropped dramatically and the P2P distribution services that the broadband barons helped fine-tune in their earlier businesses are expected to become the dominant legal means of transferring video on the web. The combination of these elements allows the scaling up of P2PTV at little cost, creating what pundits call a perfect storm that will transform television as we know it.
"In the future consumers will be able to watch any video they want – and make no mistake, TV is just video – anytime, anywhere, using the Internet," promises Cohen, BitTorrent’s Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer and inventor of the technology. "The fundamental limitations of traditional broadcast technologies simply won’t be able to compete and everything will be done over Internet Protocol."
The transformation is forcing content companies to move from broadcast schedules to allowing viewers to watch when they want and on whatever device they want, including computers, cell-phones, and iPods. And, it is prompting broadcasters built on the one-to-many model to morph into "audience companies" that engage with their viewers through interactive services and offer services that allow viewers to engage with each other.
Although Scaglia is well known and respected in Italy, he has not yet achieved the widespread fame of the other broadband barons. A trained telecommunications engineer, he left a job as CEO of Italy’s second-largest mobile operator in 1999 because he was convinced that Internet Protocol (IP) services would lead the next communications revolution. Scaglia bet all of his own finances and his future on an ambitious project to wire Italy, founding FastWeb, Italy’s second-largest fixed-line phone operator and one of the first companies in the world to build a large-scale integrated IP network to carry voice, data, and video. The company, which today has 22,000 kilometers of fiber-optic networks and more than 1 million customers, was sold to Swisscom, Switzerland’s state-controlled telecom operator, for $4.88 billion earlier this year.
One force that could favor startups like Babelgum is the entertainment industry’s desire to see multiple outlets on the Net for their content. Film and TV studios, for instance, are wary of Apple, which now dominates the music download business through its popular iTunes service. "Content is king if there are a lot of distributors but not with one big distributor," said Bruce Benson, FTI Consulting’s New York-based Senior Managing Director responsible for the entertainment and media industry. "In the music sector, Apple controls 90% of legal downloads and can fix the price," said Benson. "If you are a content owner, you want to encourage as many distributors as possible."
That explains why US television networks are themselves streaming advertising-supported, full-length episodes of their prime-time shows online. Networks are also starting to allow new P2PTV players to distribute content from their back catalogs in exchange for a big cut of the advertising. Warner Brothers Television Group, for example, said in May that it would launch science-fiction programming on Joost, its first experiment with launching branded services online.
BBC World and Al Jazeera, meanwhile, have agreed to release some of their content to Jalipo, a pay-per-minute P2PTV network for high-quality, professionally produced video and television content.
Further blurring the lines, the networks are taking steps themselves to actively marry traditional TV fare with the Web. News Corp. and NBC Universal are partnering to launch their own tools and sites for premium online TV content. For its part, CBS announced partnerships May 24th with community-building websites and social-application providers such as Goowy Media, Meebo, and MeeVee to allow Internet users to embed CBS clips into their profiles, websites, blogs, wikis, widgets, and community pages.
CBS appears to be embracing Babelgum’s premise that professionally produced original programming will attract new audiences. On May 22nd the network announced the acquisition of "Wallstrip," a professionally produced daily web show focused on financial news. "CBS recognizes that original web content – whether it’s news, sports, or entertainment – is starting to show real traction with audiences, producers, and advertisers," Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, said in a statement. "As CBS evolves from a content company into an audience company, we need to build a team of talented web producers who ‘get’ the growing online demand."
The pressure is on. A report entitled Couch Potato Famine: Prospering Through an Era of Disruptive Change in Media written by FTI Consulting’s Benson, predicts that soon every TV show and movie will be available on demand somewhere on the web; the browser and the TV will merge in the living room. That will cause conventional TV networks and cable to lose a third of their current viewers, including many younger viewers coveted by advertisers.
Those changes are already happening. A recent study of 6-year-olds shows that many children no longer distinguish between watching television on computer screens, their living room television, or the screens embedded into the seat in their parents’ cars, says new media pundit Palmer, author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV and President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS).
Adults, too, are increasingly tuning in on their computer screens. On June 7th, Michael Dell indicated his PC company will gradually phase out its television business because more and more people are watching TV on their digital computer monitors. "In Japan, 50% or more of PC users are already watching TV on their PCs," said Dell, explaining that the company will focus on a new generation of products that marry the TV and the PC.
Although questions about fuzzy picture quality and bugs are now dogging new Internet TV companies, those problems are expected to disappear pretty quickly. FTI Consulting’s Benson predicts that over the next decade bandwidth will increase tenfold and compression will at least double while delivering higher quality. "At these rates virtually anything can be moved around the Web at consumer-acceptable speeds.
With all the changes on the horizon, "My belief is that media is only 20% invented yet," said Benson, a speaker at the June 11th P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA in Santa Monica sponsored by the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA).
Scaglia doesn’t disagree, but he doesn’t believe that Babelgum will replace traditional television. "What will change is thematic shows" shown on cable or satellite TV, he predicts. When it comes to shows about hunting, fishing, sailing, or cooking, he says, it makes more sense to watch them in an online, on-demand environment and to share opinions and advice with other viewers.
Such participatory viewing won’t happen overnight. It will take time to build up an audience. For that to happen, Babelgum will need to boost the quantity of content available, from the roughly 400 hours available now to 100,000 hours or more. That will pave the way for building social communities around the channels, and for attracting advertisers. Scaglia predicts he may have to pump more than €50 million a year into the company over the next few years, with profits rolling in only by about 2010. "We believe this is a long journey and we are just at the beginning," he says. Stay tuned – well, logged on – for more news.
INTENT MediaWorks and Unlimited Media
INTENT MediaWorks announced plans at the P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA to support watermarking technology, as a component of its Palladia 3.0 media distribution platform, by aligning itself with Unlimited Media, a leader in innovative e-music and video watermarking technologies.
Unlimited Media’s proprietary CuGate technology "earmarks" music and video in a very unique and friendly way. Unlike competing solutions, the CuGate technology survives playback recordings and transcoding, helping content owners track and manage assets regardless of where consumption occurs.
"Unlimited Media is considered one of the leading developers of watermarking solutions for digital media distribution management," said Glenn Martin, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder of INTENT MediaWorks. "Watermarking is clearly one of the technologies that will be required to meet the demands of integrating channels into our digital media distribution platform."
INTENT MediaWorks has become one of the leading distributors of authorized digital media and advertisers via P2P file-sharing networks and has gradually been expanding its offering to more distribution channels, including social networks, video sites, and online download and subscription services.
"INTENT is a perfect example of the types of customers we like to work with," said Memo Rhein, CEO of Unlimited Media. "INTENT has always focused on helping to manage distribution of media through P2P, but also places a high premium on consumer privacy. Watermarking technologies help distributors protect the rights of content owners, without forcing consumers to do things via privacy-invasive technologies."
INTENT MediaWorks is now being used by several large music companies and independent artists, and was the recipient of the 2006 DCIA Innovator’s Award.
CuGate is the new proprietary watermarking technology that was developed by Unlimited Media over the last ten years. Unlike all other known watermarks, CuGate is 100% identifiable, trackable, and traceable, creating for the first time a complete chain of rights from owner to end-user. It is completely transferable regardless of media format and does not affect the end-user experience.
In addition to its partnership with INTENT, in recognition of the future role of P2P networks in the distribution of copyright content on the internet, the Multi-Media Production Association (MMPA) of Taipei, as the sole agent for examining and censorship of publishing material for the Taiwanese Government, selected Unlimited Media "to help improve the respect for copyright, to clamp down on piracy, and to legitimize and further encourage P2P transactions."
Following an extensive review, the Association concluded that the CuGate watermarking software developed by Unlimited Media is one of the world’s leading solutions. The Association is implementing the CuGate technology for digital distribution in Taiwan and promoting it as a mandatory measure to The Taiwanese Government for online music distribution practice in the future.
Unlimited Media is also a music and video content provider for independent producers around the world. To ensure the integrity of its own distribution system, and based on its extensive experience with copyrighted works, Unlimited Media developed an innovativemethod of making all its material 100% identifiable, trackable, and traceable. After ten years of research, development, and testing, Unlimited Media is now partnering with other companies and organizations around the world with the goal of establishing a global standard in watermark technology. Please contact memo.rhein@unlimitedmedia.net for more information about CuGate.
Veoh Goes for the Big Money
Excerpted from NewTeeVee Report by Liz Gannes
Veoh Networks has raised $26 million in Series C funding, according to peHUB, with Goldman Sachs leading the round and Spark Capital and Shelter Capital Partners upping their stakes. peHUB thinks it’s likely Michael Eisner’s Tornante and Time Warner Investments participated as well.
San Diego-based Veoh has raised more than $40 million in total. peHUB makes a big deal about the amount, which we’ll grant is huge, saying, "It dwarfs what Veoh’s competitors have raised."
However, Veoh, which has always had a desktop client component, is developing technology that would put it in competition with Joost and Babelgum. Joost recently raised $45 million in one round alone, and Babelgum has taken $13.2 million in personal funding.
Veoh’s user base is now 12.5 million, up from 4.4 million in February.
Veoh Networks CEO Dmitry Shapiro said, "This is an extremely exciting time for Veoh. We are not ready to disclose all of the specifics due to ongoing discussions with a number of strategic partners. Once all details are finalized, we will announce the full scope of this major company news."
A Proposal for Monetizing P2P
Excerpted from Future of Music Coalition Report
We all know unauthorized downloads far outstrip licensed downloads every year. Therefore, how to monetize unauthorized P2P downloads is one of the $64,000 questions facing the music industry right now. FMC associate Jeremy Sheeler put together this look at some attempts to take a crack at the problem.
Is ad-supported music the future of digital music distribution? Jupiter Analyst Mark Mulligan seems to think so, as he has outlined in his recent report "The Future of Digital Music: Fighting Free with Free."
According to BigChampagne, a company that tracks activity on P2P networks, downloads on these networks are surpassing a billion a month. So the dilemma is: how do you go about monetizing these downloads to compensate the copyright holders of the songs? Because, as Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Big Champagne, Joe Fleischer, has said, "Competing with free means you have lost". Additionally, it is not only free that they are competing with but also the availability of live tracks, rarities, out-of-print, demos and other things that aren’t even available for sale but are available for download on the P2P networks.
There have been a lot of companies that have popped up recently that all have different ideas of how to create advertising supported digital music distribution.
INTENT MediaWorks is one that seeds existing P2P networks with copies of participating labels’ songs that contain advertising to help pay for the transaction.
QTRAX is another company that will be offering content from all four major labels as well as many independent labels using a heavily restricted, ad-based system that allows the downloader five listens and then an offer to buy the song.
Each company has come up with its own way of embedding the advertisements into the downloads. Some plan to offer a range of ad formats including sponsorships, videos and display units.
This distribution model may work for major labels that engage a more casual music listener that is more interested in singles than full albums and is used to listening to advertisements when they hear the songs on the radio anyway. But for an independent artist, this may not be the way that they want to distribute their music to their fans because they may not want to be associated with advertisers if they have no control over with whom they get associated. If an artist or label can have pre-approval over the advertiser, then they may not have a problem being supported by their advertising money. But an independent artist, generally speaking, is independent because they want control over their music and their image, which has a lot to do with who they associate themselves with.
So far it does not seem that any of these companies have found a viable way to make this amalgam of music and advertising work correctly, but it is definitely a necessary process. The entire ad-supported model may not even work, but at least companies are starting to think outside of the box. New and innovative ways of digital distribution are needed to try and attract people away from unlicensed music that does not compensate the copyright owner. As
Terry McBride, the chief executive of the Nettwerk Music Group, a label and artist management company that works with INTENT MediaWorks, has said companies have to "figure out how they’re consuming music, market to that, and monetize their behavior."
RawFlow Selected as Disruptive Start-Up
RawFlow, a leading provider of live P2P Internet streaming technology, was selected as one of only six companies to be showcased at the NMK Forum 07 in London. Showcase companies were selected based on their use of social media (widgets, UGC TV, live streaming, social, mobile, and community aggregation) combined with a technology strategy to disrupt the marketplace.
RawFlow Chief Executive Officer Mikkel Dissing said, "RawFlow’s technologies and products are disruptive in two ways. On one hand, our P2P streaming technology solutions enable scalable, low-cost broadcasting to a global online audience, which means they can be disruptive to current solutions for content delivery. On the other hand, our user generated broadcast application, Selfcast, can potentially become disruptive to existing broadcaster content creation, because it allows anyone to become a broadcaster for free".
Dissing presented why the business is disruptive to media, marketing, and other technology businesses in the space, and how social media fits into this. His focus was on RawFlow’s revolutionary live publishing tool Selfcast, for which users can now apply to test the beta version.
"It is a common claim is that if you give consumers simple and free tools for interacting and creating rich content, they will spend less time with traditional media such as TV. Selfcast, however, is also disruptive because it brings down the last remaining boundary between broadcast media and user-generated content (UGC), which is the ability to broadcast live", continued Dissing.
RawFlow’s technology for Intelligent Content Distribution (ICD) forms the core of the company’s P2P-based pro-streaming solutions and the to-be-launched live user generated TV portal, Selfcast.
Raketu Makes a Racket
Excerpted from Voxilla Report by Carolyn Schuk
What’s interesting about Raketu is that it offers web-based converged communications that work on your computer and your smart-phone. You don’t even have to install the Raketu desktop client.
It reminds me of something from the early days of the web: a portal. Portals were supposed to be the single place where users connected to everything they wanted. So I might call Raketu a web 2.0 communications portal.
Making phone calls is only the beginning – although the company consolidates the Skype and JaJah approaches nicely. You can also make conference calls with up to five people for free.
You can connect with Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ICQ, Skype, Jabber, and Google buddies without loading any of those clients. You can also conference across services and send offline messages.
You can send e-mails and low-price SMS text messages from the RakWeb site to anyone on your contact list. You can also send them files.
And that’s just the communications piece.
Raketu also offers the framework for IP entertainment, including an integrated media player, online gaming, IPTV, and video-on-demand (VOD). Like kyte.tv, Raketu has incorporated social networking into the viewing experience.
The service also integrates RSS feeds and podcasts, and even a travel planner.
Raketu has a good concept. It’s a promising development and one that encourages me that, someday soon, unifying communications won’t require changing or installing software or devices. It will just be a matter of signing up.
SafeNet Launches MediaSentry BI Service
SafeNet, a global leader in information security, announced at P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA that its MediaSentry Business Intelligence (BI) services portfolio will now feature the world’s first direct measurement of user activity across the most heavily trafficked P2P networks globally. The BI Direct Measurement service represents a significant opportunity for content owners and online advertisers to achieve an unprecedented level of visibility into P2P networks that have historically proven difficult to measure and understand.
By leveraging a combination of SafeNet’s proven techniques for identifying and tracking content online and the unique analysis tools and reporting capabilities offered with BI Direct Measurement, customers will now be able to monitor, track, and understand user behavior and consumption on global P2P networks. This insight into global consumer demand across one of the world’s largest bases of content seekers can be used by content owners and online advertisers alike to understand emerging markets and measure consumer response to new distribution techniques, marketing initiatives and advertising campaigns.
"As the media industry identifies and begins to embrace a variety of new and innovative methods for turning next-generation consumers into captive audiences there is a desire to dedicate a larger portion of overall investment to online channels," said Zippy Aima, Analyst, Digital Media Practice, Frost & Sullivan. "Success reaching these new and evolving consumer segments requires a comprehensive and accurate understanding of what is truly happening on P2P networks. Until now, this type of data has been minimal at best."
Unlike other measurement services which employ a traditional sampling approach whereby data is captured in snapshots over specific time intervals, BI Direct Measurement continually captures all download activity for a chosen piece of digital content in real-time. Thus, visibility into how and when content is propagating globally across networks increases exponentially. Valuable download metrics including total quantity of files available, time of day, geography, version, download duration and success rates to enable content owners to further assess consumer interest and content demand as well as quantify the impact of digital piracy.
"With more than 12 million users at any given time, P2P networks represent a tremendous business opportunity," said John Desmond, Vice President, MediaSentry Services, SafeNet. "Our goal is to provide the insight customers need to effectively protect their most valued digital assets while also finding ways to turn these growing communities into lucrative marketing, advertising, and distribution channels. BI Direct Measurement delivers this insight thus enabling our customers to develop forward-thinking distribution strategies which offer consumers attractive and compelling alternatives to pirated materials online."
P2P Technology Delivers DVD Quality Video
The French Tennis Open and1-Click Media have launched a new free P2PTV service in DVD-quality on the Roland Garros 2007website. Visitors will discover the new service, called the videocast, in the multimedia area of the website.
Like a video podcast, the service enables viewers to automatically receive daily highlights of the famous French tournament. A thumbnail image appears on the desktop to alert users when a new video is ready to be watched.
In order to view the videos, users install a P2P plug-in developed by 1-Click Media to manage downloads and share easily with other users. The P2PTV solution of 1-Click Media, based on the BitTorrent principle, is used to offer best quality videosfor free and reduce delivery cost.This allows an infinite numbers of viewers; and the more people that download, the faster the download will be delivered.
Arthur Madrid, Chairman & Founder of 1-Click Media said, "CDN networks and P2P delivery now create the strongest way to deliver massively high-quality content. P2P is now seriously considered as the hybrid architecture of choice when companies develop their online video distribution portal, while client-server architectures are being depreciated."
1-Click Media is the French leader in P2P delivery working with almost all French TV channels: M6, TF1, Roland Garros, and Boonty; and now with 500,000 users. 1-Click Media enables its users to begin watching videos before downloads are complete by means of its "P2P progressive download" technology.
PodZinger Now Does EveryZing
Excerpted from Online Media Report by Gavin O’Malley
PodZinger, known until now as a podcast search engine, is getting a new name and more ambitious mission. Rechristened EveryZing, the company now hopes to make searchable the multimedia libraries of the largest media companies around.
"Podcasts were too narrow as a brand opportunity," said Tom Wilde, EveryZing’s CEO of about two months. "The company needed to move more broadly to make all multimedia searchable, browsable, and navigable."
EveryZing is attempting to leverage speech recognition, search, and optimization technologies to increase the volume of consumable multimedia content offered by partner media companies.
"For our partners, higher consumption translates to an increase in inventory to monetize at a higher value," according to Wilde.
Launched early last year, PodZinger first allowed content providers to make their audio and video files available through its search engine. The company later launched an ad platform serving targeted 10-to-15 second pre-roll video and audio ads before podcasts.
PodZinger has also provided "white label" audio and video search services for media partners including Entercom Radio and TwiT.tv, looking to boost ad revenue.
Wilde sees marketing to media companies like Entercom as a more practical business model than trying to establish itself as a household brand name like Google.
"It’s really tough to create a consumer product, and I don’t think search verticalization is where the industry is going," he said. "Users seem to expect one search box to create all the magic."
Video search rival Blinkx just went public with the help of Autonomy, a British provider of search tools. The two companies had an existing relationship, with Autonomy offering several of Blinkx’s services. Combined with Autonomy’s consumer technology, Blinkx was floated in May on the London Stock Exchange’s secondary Alternative Investment Market – established in 1995 as a vehicle for trades in small, high-growth companies.
Five Things to Know about P2P Networking
Excerpted from Electronic House Report by Ron Miller
Electronic House spoke to James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research who covers television and media technology, to learn more about P2P.
What is P2P networking? McQuivey said there are two ways to distribute files. In the traditional client-server model, a server (or multiple servers) sits in the middle and serves content whenever a client requests it. This works fine, McQuivey said, so long as the files aren’t too big – like a video file, for example. "As soon as you start requesting big files from a lot of different clients at the same time, the server can’t handle it," he said.
The P2P approach, said McQuivey, uses network resources more efficiently. "Everything on the network is a peer of everything else, so everything on the network can be both client and server. Instead of having a big old data repository and trying to connect to that sever, each computer on the network has the authority to request information from any other computer on the system, using spare processing power or bandwidth as needed to respond to the request," McQuivey said.
McQuivey also pointed out that when you request a file on a P2P network, pieces of that file could be all over the network and in fact might be duplicated across multiple computers. The goal of your computer is to find the easiest way to get all of the pieces in order to download the file in the most efficient manner.
What is the benefit to consumers? P2P offers consumers the potential for instant access to high-quality downloads.
"From a consumer standpoint, the benefit of the technology is that the day will come when you can go to your television and instead of having a hard-to-navigate menu of 500 video-on-demand titles provided by your cable system, you will have an Internet-enabled set-top box and you will have access to very high-quality – likely high-definition (HD) – content that goes right to your television and starts immediately," McQuivey said.
McQuivey contrasted this with the Xbox 360, which enables you to download and rent high-definition movies today, but on a good day, he said, it takes more than an hour to download, and on a bad day much longer. P2P delivery offers the promise of much faster content delivery than we have today.
How does P2P benefit content owners? "P2P enables content owners to deliver higher quality content for a lower price," McQuivey said. Today, he explained, it costs as much to stream high-definition video as it does to produce a DVD and ship it to a store.
According to McQuivey, BitTorrent is an example of a P2P network positioning itself as a cost-effective delivery mechanism. "The only other way for client-server to deliver large files is to put out tons of servers to essentially deliver on request." But, he said, it’s too cost-prohibitive to deliver in this fashion, especially since consumers don’t want to pay a lot for digital assets. P2P will reduce this cost because it won’t require the large overhead cost of supporting a network to deliver the files.
Why does P2P scare content owners? Until recently, McQuivey explained, content owners have seen P2P strictly as a security nightmare. People have used services like Napster and Gnutella, he said, to distribute copyrighted content without authorization.
"Media companies hate that philosophy, so they concluded that P2P must be bad," McQuivey said. "P2P is not bad; it’s the way it’s used. The technology is good." He added that engineers and others have convinced media owners that P2P is an efficient and cost-effective way to deliver content. As media owners separate the risks and benefits of P2P, they are coming around to the idea of delivering content in this fashion. "It’s just a question of whose P2P implementation will get you there faster without exposing any more security risks," he said.
Will ISPs Eventually get upset by P2P networks using their bandwidth for free? McQuivey wondered at what point the Internet service providers (ISPs) will begin complaining about the bandwidth usage by P2P vendors such as Joost. In his view, the ISPs will eventually try to strike a revenue deal with more successful P2P vendors.
"You have all these P2P-like applications asking you to provide access to your bandwidth and storage capacity on your computer, and if you don’t disable it after you install it, even if you don’t use it again, you’re essentially helping their business, and your ISP is basically subsidizing the P2P vendor because your ISP is giving you a broadband connection," McQuivey said.
Coming Events of Interest
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NXTcomm – June 18th–20th in Chicago, IL. The next-generation global forum and marketplace for the business of information, communications, and entertainment technology. The forces that drive communication and the solutions to harness it converge here. The DCIA will participate with Digital Hollywood.
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NY P2P 2.0 June Meet-Up – June 20th in New York, NY. Pando Networks’ CTO Laird Popkin will present a "Brief History of P2P Networks." INTENT MediaWorks’ Andy Cooper and CacheLogic’s Marco Parente will also speak. RSVP now so you don’t miss out on the very latest in the rapidly growing P2P industry.
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Web Video Summit – June 27th–28th in San Jose, CA. This workshop is about video distributed over the Internet, bringing together the pioneers of an exploding industry. They’ll explain what you need to know about shooting, editing and encoding, distributing and promoting your work, and claiming your rewards. Real choices, working techniques, and field-hardened creators.
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Edinburgh Television Festival – August 24th-26th in Edinburgh, Scotland. Janus Friis, Co-Founder of P2PTV service Joost, will deliver the inaugural Futureview Lecture at this year’s festival. The aim of this year’s event is to assemble a cast list from the hottest shows, the most exciting new technologies, and the biggest TV controversies of the year.
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International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) – September 6th-11th in Amsterdam, Holland. IBC is committed to providing the world’s best event for everyone involved in the creation, management, and delivery of content for the entertainment industry, including DCIA Members. Run by the industry for the industry, convention organizers are drawn from participating companies.
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PT/EXPO COMM – October 23rd-27th at the China International Exhibition Center in Beijing, China. The largest telecommunications/IT industry event in the world’s fastest growing telecom sector. PT/EXPO COMM offers DCIA participants from all over the world a high profile promotional platform in a sales environment that is rich in capital investment.
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P2P Advertising Upfront – Sponsored by the DCIA October 26th in New York, NY and October 29th in Los Angeles, CA in conjunction with Digital Hollywood Fall. The industry’s first bicoastal marketplace focused on the unique global advertising, sponsorship, and cross-promotional opportunities available in the steadily growing universe of open and closed P2P, file-sharing, P2PTV, and social networks, as well as peer-assisted content delivery networks (CDNs).
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