August 20, 2007
Volume 18, Issue 11
New Board Appointment at RawFlow
RawFlow, a leading provider of live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming technology and the company behind the user-generated TV platform Selfcast, this week announced the appointment of Peter Read, a renowned entertainment, technology, and business leader, to its Board of Directors.
Peter Read also serves on the Boards of Directors of Bioss, Entertainment Insights, Mobix Interactive, and MusicNation, as well as serving on Advisory Boards for a number of high-profile web and mobile distribution platforms.
“With over twenty years of experience in entertainment and technology, Peter Read will bring substantial value to RawFlow,” commented Mikkel Dissing, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of RawFlow.
“We are delighted to add a senior executive of Peter’s caliber to the Board of RawFlow. His outstanding track record and high-level management perspective will provide us with a deeper understanding of the entertainment industry, which will be increasingly relevant going forward in the deployment of our Selfcast platform.”
On his involvement with RawFlow, Peter Read said, “I am a big believer in P2P streaming and it seems to me that the live piece is the evolutionary missing link.”
DCIA Announces P2P UPFRONT
Excerpted from Online Video Watch Report by Ben Homer
The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) this week announced it will hold the first ever P2P ADVERTISING UPFRONT with day-long conferences at the Princeton Club in New York and at this year’s Digital Hollywood Fall conference in LA.
The upfront is part of an effort to “jump-start a monetization initiative for P2P and social networking traffic and a conversion of this consumer-based distribution channel into a mainstream ad-supported medium.”
While P2P remains an immature sector in terms of mainstream use and monetization there are a growing number of companies using distributed computing technologies to increase efficiency and lower the cost of distributing video.
There is little doubt that P2P will play a role in the future of media distribution over IP and the sooner advertisers get involved the better, both for producers and for viewers.
ISPs Warn BBC over new iPlayer Service
Excerpted from Financial Times Report by Maija Palmer
Leading UK Internet service providers (ISPs) are warning they may have to restrict customers’ access to the BBC’s new iPlayer service unless the corporation contributes to the cost of streaming videos over the Internet.
Internet companies such as Tiscali, British Telecom (BT), and Carphone Warehouse have raised concerns that the iPlayer, which allows viewers to watch TV shows over the Internet, will put too much strain on their networks if it becomes popular among a mass audience.
Streaming TV shows takes up a lot of bandwidth and could clog up the network, severely slowing Internet access speeds at peak times.
“The Internet was not set up with a view to distributing video. We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite,” said Mary Turner, chief executive of Tiscali UK. “If the iPlayer really takes off, consumers accessing the internet will get very slow service and will call their ISPs to complain.”
ITV and Channel 4 have also launched Internet players and new media companies such as Joost are hoping to create businesses around on-demand television over the Internet.
However, the free BBC service, which launched at the end of July, is seen as potentially the most popular and is therefore a focus for ISP concerns.
Ms. Turner said that unless they could agree on a strategy with the BBC to share network costs, Tiscali would have to restrict users’ access to the iPlayer.
This practice of “traffic shaping” is already used by Tiscali and several other Internet companies to manage network traffic by giving lower priority to users who download large music, video, or games files at peak times.
While it would not block access to the iPlayer, it could make it painfully slow at popular times.
The alternative would be for ISPs to create a “two-tier” system for customers, charging those people who want to download TV and other bandwidth-heavy content more for internet access.
“We are in regular discussions with the ISPs and together are monitoring the costs associated with video-on-demand,” the BBC said.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 This week’s flare up among leading UK Internet service providers (ISPs), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and industry observers, not only brings a new sense of immediacy to the ongoing Net Neutrality debate, but also underscores the importance of work now underway in the DCIA-sponsored P4P Working Group (P4PWG).
Concerns were voiced about the prospective bandwidth use of the BBC’s recently launched iPlayer, a “catch-up” service that enables users to download BBC-owned programs up to a week after their airdate and then play them back offline for a month. (BT, however, swiftly distanced itself from these reports).
The iPlayer is already much more efficient than a direct-download server-client architected service. It uses VeriSign’s world-class Kontiki peer-to-peer television (P2PTV) technology to cope with heavy loads and massive files by distributing file-transfer requirements broadly among iPlayer’s user base. The more popular this BBC service proves to be, the more efficient it will be, to the benefit of ISPs, the BBC, and viewers.
Our closely related P4PWG, chaired by Verizon Communications’ Doug Pasko and Pando Networks’ Laird Popkin, has as its mission to work jointly and cooperatively with leading ISPs, P2P software distributors, and technology researchers to ascertain best practices for the use of “P4P” mechanisms to further accelerate distribution of content and optimize utilization of ISP network resources in order to provide the best possible performance to end-user customers.
P4P (or “P2P-squared”) refers to a set of business practices and integrated network topology awareness models designed to optimize ISP network resources and enable P2P based content payload acceleration.
It’s important to have a healthy perspective on the potential popularity of iPlayer. Such attractive and relatively efficient P2PTV services offer a tremendous competitive advantage to ISPs, not only driving up demand for Internet access, but also making such access increasingly valuable to consumers.
P2PTV will help UK ISPs cope with their top marketing issue: demonstrating greater value for higher tiers of service. As Nate Anderson notes in Ars Technica, “If people only browse the web, how many would feel it essential to upgrade to a 20Mbps link? But the moment that services like iPlayer become essential, those higher speeds are much easier to advertise and sell.”
We invite the UK ISPs to join the P4PWG, either individually or through their trade body, the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA). VeriSign is already a participant in this highly productive and valuable working group. P4PWG represents a practical middle-ground between the extreme ends of the spectrum of solutions for increased consumer demand for online video.
On one end, there is the basic infrastructure investment approach. According to industry observer David Isenberg, the cheapest and best alternative is simply to build out capacity: to over-provision by as much as 100 percent. There’s no compelling reason for a non-neutral Net. ISPs should simply invest in more capacity; it will be cheaper for them and it will allow customers to use any services they want at full speed. UK regulator Ofcom puts the cost of providing enough capacity at £830m over five years.
On the other end, there is the traffic-shaping approach. This week Vodafone Iceland (VI), for example, responded to its packet-inspection finding that P2P was accounting for 60% of incoming and 80% of outgoing traffic by throttling total P2P bandwidth. While the interim traffic policy that VI activated may have given certain non-P2P application users a higher quality of service (QoS), it did so at the expense of other users.
In the UK, many ISPs allow their fixed-price broadband subscribers to make use of their accounts for an unlimited number of minutes in a month, but cap the amount of data they can transfer. BT’s lowest-priced broadband package, for example, has a monthly download limit of 5 gigabytes.
The impact of this on Joost, a more robust P2PTV service than iPlayer in terms of bandwidth consumption, given estimated compression techniques equating an hour of viewing to 320MB downloaded and 105MB uploaded, would be to limit its use to fifty hours per month with this particular service plan. P4PWG represents a path for improving these ratios to the benefit of all constituents.
Further complicating this issue is the fact that most major UK ISPs also have their own TV offerings, and regulators need to keep a watchful eye on the way non-ISP owned content providers are treated from a competitive standpoint.
For instance, Tiscali now owns IPTV firm Homechoice, which provides a TV set-focused service, and also offers PC-based video-on-demand (VOD) movie downloads through Arts Alliance Media. BT offers its own on-demand IPTV service, BT Vision, launched last December. Virgin Media is a cable multiple system operator (MSO) that differentiates its TV service with a free VOD channel. Orange already offers IPTV in other parts of Europe and plans to launch in the UK. And Sky, with more than 8 million direct-to-home (DTH) satellite TV subscribers also operates an ISP offering digital subscriber line (DSL) service, promoting “See, Speak, Surf.”
What is clear is that as more consumers access and post video content on the Internet, especially those using relatively inefficient non-P2PTV solutions, the ability of ISPs to cope with the amount of data being sent across their networks is coming under increasing strain.
As major TV broadcasters move onto the web, this will obviously be exacerbated. While P2PTV clearly represents the best available set of technological solutions – from time-shifted downloads to live streaming video with interactive communications features – optimizing it through P4P makes enormous sense and can represent millions of dollars in savings to participants in the distribution chain. We strongly urge ISPs like Tiscali, BT, and Carphone Warehouse, either individually or through ISPA, to join with us in this important work. Share wisely, and take care.
Users Spend 47% of Time Viewing Content
Excerpted from Digital Media Wire Report by Mark Hefflinger
US Internet users are now spending nearly half their time online viewing content, a 37% increase in share of time from four years ago, according to a report from the Online Publishers Association (OPA) and Nielsen/NetRatings.
Online communications, such as e-mail, accounted for 46% of consumers’ time online during 2003, according to the OPA’s monthly Internet Activity Index, which is conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings.
Consumers are now spending 47% of their time online with content, compared with 33% on communications, 15% on commerce, and 5% on search.
“The dominant role of content is driven by several important factors. The first is the online transition of traditionally offline activities, such as getting news, finding entertainment information, or checking the weather,” said OPA president Pam Horan.
New online features and communities are also leading consumers to spend a larger share of their online time with content.”
Online Video: Seeing the Whole Picture
Excerpted from eMarketer Report
Video images are flooding across the Internet. No longer an unknown quantity or merely a sidekick to television, the online video medium is fast becoming a formidable viewing factor.
eMarketer projects that the number of online video viewers in the US alone will rise from 114 million in 2006 to 183 million by 2011. The share of US online video viewers as a percent of overall Internet users will likewise increase from 63% in 2006 to 91% by 2011.
“Some of the major players in the industry are fearful that the widespread availability of video content on the Internet will threaten traditional TV and film distribution models,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the new report, Online Video: Making Content Pay.
“Conversely, others see the potential to increase revenues through a variety of new business models, including ad-supported streaming, pay-to-own downloads, subscription services and online rentals.”
Currently, eMarketer estimates that news is the leading type of video content viewed online, with a nearly 14% share of the total. Movie and TV trailers are a close second at 12%, followed by music videos at about 11%.
User-generated videos are currently the next largest segment with more than 9%, followed by jokes/bloopers also over 9%.
The lowest-ranked categories are either niche genres, such as cartoons and business/financial reports, or content of longer duration, where picture quality is a consideration, such as full-length movies and TV shows.
Weather information is at 8%, entertainment news at 7%, TV programs 6.5%, spots clips/highlights over 6%, cartoons 4%, business/financial news 4%, and full-length movies at 3%.
“Many online video revenue models are emerging, but the growth of an ad-revenue model for online video will be critical to the health of the industry,” Mr. Verna said.
By 2011, 165 million US Internet users will have seen online video advertisements, according to eMarketer projections. That number will total 90% of the online video viewership in the US. Comparatively, in 2006, 88 million people — or 77% of US online video viewers — experienced Internet video ads.
“There is currently a debate among advertisers, web publishers and consumers over the length of online video ads,” Mr. Verna says. “But so far no consensus has emerged on an online equivalent to the 30-second standard that has prevailed on TV for decades.”
If the relationship between online video content and online video advertising is key to the growth of the Internet video industry, the interconnectedness between TV and the Internet will also play a leading role in how the market for online video evolves.
“Rather than a wholesale shift in viewership from TV to the new media channels, both mediums will actually grow in the next several years,” Mr. Verna said. “Internet video will entrench itself in the content mainstream, right alongside TV, although not in such pervasive numbers.”
According to eMarketer projections, by 2011 there will be 200 million broadband Internet users. Of them, 91% — or 183 million — will watch online videos.
“Eventually, a number of devices will converge in some form of the long-promised ‘digital home,’” Mr. Verna said. “But even in the foreseeable future, consumers will use currently available technologies to enjoy all manner of video content, from Hollywood blockbusters to homespun videos.”
To get the whole picture, please read the new eMarketer report, Online Video: Making Content Pay, today.
Video Surge Divides Web Watchers
Excerpted from WSJ Report by Kevin Delaney & Bobby White
Researchers have long warned that rapid increases in Internet usage could strain the capacity of the data lines and gear that make up the network, severely slowing traffic and even knocking out service. For years, they’ve been wrong as Internet-access providers and telecom carriers have added routers and other hardware to keep ahead of demand, and the data-carrying capacity of the Internet pipes has greatly expanded thanks to technical advances.
But could the doomsayers be right this time? It depends on whom you ask. Prompting the latest concerns is the rapid growth of bandwidth-hungry applications like online video, file-sharing programs, and Internet telephone service. Transmitting a minute of video can require 10 times the bandwidth of audio – or more, depending on the quality. Already, P2P video swapping is estimated to represent in the range of more than one-third of all Internet traffic this year. US Internet video sites alone transmit more data per month than was carried over the entire US Internet backbone monthly in 2000, according to network gear maker Cisco Systems.
“One of the key possibilities for 2007 is that the Internet could be approaching its capacity,” analysts at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu wrote in a January report. “Our belief is we’ll start to see some brown-outs or service slowdowns or service issues,” said Phil Asmundson, the National Managing Partner leading Deloitte & Touche USA’s Telecommunications practice.
But some analysts and Internet companies such as Google play down the idea that there’s an impending crunch, pointing to the forecasters’ poor track record of predicting such problems. There are also political implications to the debate. As part of the “net neutrality” scuffle in Washington, telecommunications companies say Internet companies should help foot the bill for more data lines and equipment if they’re sending lots of video traffic at high speed to consumers.
One issue causing alarm is that access providers often don’t have the gear in place to provide the bandwidth they promise to DSL or cable Internet customers. They practice over-subscription in the way airlines overbook planes with the expectation some people will fail to show up. Cable companies are particularly susceptible because their network design shares bandwidth among neighbors, allowing a few Internet users to degrade service by using more than their fair share. Some warn that new applications from start-ups and media companies using P2P technology to transmit TV shows online could increase any strain if they prove popular.
Telephone companies face another challenge. Many own networks that are a hodgepodge of older equipment, much of which is inefficient at handling new forms of traffic like video. There are some other potentially critical spots, such as the points where data traffic from undersea lines and other big data pipes converge. Deloitte & Touche’s Mr. Asmundson says major Internet hubs could struggle with the increases.
Still, many say fears of significant strain are overblown. Eve Griliches, Telecom Analyst at research firm IDC, says five years ago analysts and engineers voiced concerns, but the result was a surge of innovation. “It feels like we are hyping again,” she said. “When we did this before, we found intelligent ways to handle problems with bandwidth.”
Some of that innovation is now coming from network equipment makers such as Cisco Systems. The San Jose, CA, company is expected to release new research findings that predict Internet infrastructure capacity will keep up with traffic for the foreseeable future.
Cisco and others are producing new gear aimed at better managing Internet traffic by prioritizing which bits of data are transmitted across the network. That contrasts with older equipment, which fulfilled a more basic task of moving vast amounts of data between countries and cities.
In its research, Cisco says consumer video will be responsible for a significant portion of the Internet-based traffic increases from 2006 to 2011, with video streaming and downloads increasing from 9% of all consumer Internet traffic last year to 30% in 2011. But the traffic generally isn’t enough to overwhelm service providers, Cisco concludes. Google’s YouTube, the most popular US video-sharing site in terms of the number of views, represents only about 4% of North American consumer Internet traffic, it estimates. Network operators and access providers are “staying ahead of the curve,” says Paul Bosco, Vice President for Video and Broadband Initiatives at Cisco.
High-quality video delivered over the Internet to play on TV sets is a major wild card. If consumers begin downloading massive amounts of high-definition movies and TV shows, that could start clogging the so-called last-mile connections to homes.
And the large size of such video files means that jams can occur even if not many people are accessing them. About 40 hours of high-definition video represent as much traffic as one million e-mail messages.
Vinton Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, says changes in usage will help address the issue. “I believe people will get quite comfortable saying ‘I want the following movies to watch,’ and there will be systems online that will take care of scheduling and downloading and putting it on your hard drive,” he says.
Most involved in the debate acknowledge the perils of any predictions. Robert Metcalfe, a venture capitalist at Polaris Venture Partners who helped build the early Internet as an engineer, in a 1995 magazine column warned of a “catastrophic collapse” of the Internet in 1996. He vowed to eat his words if it didn’t come to pass.
There were some service outages, but Mr. Metcalfe eventually conceded he was wrong. At a 1997 conference, he put his column in a blender with liquid and slurped it down in front of the audience.
Today, Mr. Metcalfe thinks online-video traffic could cause slowdowns in Internet service for consumers, but that could lead them to use online video less, resulting in a sort of equilibrium. “I’ve been talking about the next big Internet thing, ‘the video Internet,’ for years now,” he says. “See – some of my predictions do come true.”
Whose Bandwidth is it Anyway
Excerpted from Globe and Mail Report
An Internet storm has been brewing for some time now, and the latest bit of bad weather comes from across the pond in Britain, where a number of ISPs are warning the BBC that its new iPlayer video application had better not suck up too much bandwidth, or the ISPs will be forced to restrict the use of it, or charge customers more.
The storm in question goes by many names – including net neutrality – but the reality is that it stems from a clash of two forces: the Internet providers whose pipes we all have to use, and increasingly bandwidth-intensive applications such as BitTorrent and Joost.
Internet providers have been selling the idea of almost unlimited bandwidth for years, but as more people try to use it, the ISPs are finding their networks overloaded and/or the peering fees they pay to larger carriers are rising. That’s why almost all of them use bandwidth or packet shaping to give some kinds of traffic priority over others.
If you’re an Internet user, this is going to strike you as an obvious cash grab. If you’re an ISP, however, the kind of ultimatum that British providers are giving to the BBC no doubt seems completely justified. As more than one observer has pointed out, streaming-video providers in particular are effectively offloading the cost of bandwidth onto ISPs, and that can only continue for so long.
However, if it wasn’t for bandwidth-intensive applications like video, people wouldn’t need the high-speed accounts that the ISPs have been making so much money selling. Perhaps this one falls into the category of “Be careful what you wish for.”
LimeWire Launches Online Music Store
LimeWire, the company behind the peer-to-peer (P2P) based file-sharing application of the same name, is launching an online music store.
The service will initially be a stand-alone website, with links integrated into the LimeWire client. Subsequent releases will enable users to purchase content directly from within the application.
Independent music partners Iris Distribution and Nettwerk Music Group will make their catalogs available through the platform in MP3 format at launch, encoded at 256 kbps and without digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. Consumers will be able to sign-up on a “book-club” subscription basis or download titles a la carte. As yet, no major labels have licensed content for the service.
According to its developers, downloads of the LimeWire client have run into the hundreds of millions, and as many as four million unique users access the program on a given day.
The company also reports that in early 2006 it began developing a beta filtering system, so that copyright owners could register files not to be shared, downloaded, or uploaded using the LimeWire client.
LimeWire’s current sole source of revenue comes from sale of the LimeWire PRO software, which offers upgraded features to the freely available basic version of the client.
Grooveshark Offers Indie Music Program
Grooveshark this week announced a new independent artist and label program that allows independent musicians – who once were limited to playing music in local venues – to make the world their stage and have their music discovered and purchased globally.
Grooveshark is the P2P music file-sharing community that brokers music files free of digital rights management (DRM) among members. Its system offers the best elements of online file sharing, ensures that copyright holders are compensated for their work, and provides consumers with the value of music files that can be played on any computer or device.
By simply completing the free registration on the Grooveshark website, www.grooveshark.com/labels, independent artists and labels have the opportunity to not only populate the community with their music, but also take advantage of the profit potential available through the first P2P community that pays artists and copyright holders.
“What all artists want is to have their music heard and to profit from their passion and talent,” said Travis Keller, a musician and owner of the independent label Buddyhead. “The power of social media combined with the fairness and money-making opportunities provided by Grooveshark open doors and even careers for countless musicians.”
According to Sam Tarantino, Grooveshark Founder & CEO, “We’ve created this system to finish what the digital revolution started: to let any person in the world make their music available to anyone in the world – but this time, everyone gets paid.
“The music industry is clearly in a state of change right now, and that can seem rough at times, but we are at the dawn of a new era,” Tarantino added. “Some of the best new music is coming from the independent ranks, and Grooveshark offers an unprecedented opportunity for artists and labels to get exposure around the world.”
There is no charge to sign up, and copyright holders receive a portion of the revenue generated by the exchange of their music on the Grooveshark network.
Step Toward Free Ad-Backed Songs
Excerpted from MediaPost Report by Laurie Sullivan
Universal Music Group’s decision on Friday to test selling digital music tracks online without copy-protection technology is seen by some as a step toward providing ad-supported digital music for free.
Although not available for purchase through Apple’s iTunes store, thousands of music tracks from UMG artists Gwen Stefani, Stevie Wonder, Johnny Cash, and others will sell through online retail stores Amazon, Google, Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy, RealNetworks’ Rhapsody, Trans World Entertainment, PassAlong Networks, and Puretracks. The tracks are playable on any device compatible with the MP3 format, including iPods.
Early next year, UMG will reevaluate the service and determine whether to continue selling music available in a file format not protected by standard anti-copying software, known as digital rights management (DRM), which puts restrictions on how songs are downloaded, played, and shared. “We are running this trial for six months to test consumer demand and the effects of piracy,” said UMG spokesman Peter Lofrumento.
The deal relaxes restrictions that now prohibit consumers from transferring music files between music players, specifically to Apple’s iPod. “You just need a label or two to lead with this DRM-free model and others will follow,” says Kevin Nakao, Vice President of Music Services at RealNetworks.
Other major labels also have begun to sell DRM-free music. Earlier this year, EMI Group allowed Apple and Snowcap MyStores – P2P technology that has hooked up with MySpace to let people share music for free – to begin selling versions of its songs without copyright protection.
DRM-free music content will open doors for ad-supported free music models, too. Nakao believes it will lead more brands like Heineken and Neutrogena to purchase music downloads in bulk and give to consumers as incentives or promotions because DRM-free music files can play on any MP3 player.
Marty Lafferty, CEO at the P2P trade group Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), and James McQuivey, principal analyst at Forrester Research, believe releasing music files from copyright restrictions will eventually lead more music download sites to offer both pay and ad-supported free music.
“Most music labels will begin to support sites that gradually incorporate purchase-this-track, ad-supported, and subscription options,” McQuivey said. “For now, music labels are just trying to stimulate competition by giving other companies a way to compete against Apple, which will sell about 20% of all music sold, not just digital, in the United States this year.”
Recently launched digital music download service We7 and soon-to-debut QTRAX and SpiralFrog rely on DRM-free ad-supported models to distribute music.
We7, introduced in late April by musician Peter Gabriel, tech entrepreneur Steve Purdham and finance guru John Taysom, operates on an ad-funded music business model but also gives consumers an option to download ad-free content for a fee. The site relies on a file format not protected by DRM. Consumers can listen to all tracks on any MP3 player.
Gareth Reakes, CTO at Oxford, London-based We7, says in the free music model, ads download with tracks. “We believe those who download music want to see artists get paid, and others want to try new music but don’t want to pay 99 cents at iTunes,” he says. “When consumers download and sample tracks at We7 for free, artists are paid through ad revenue.”
We7 supports about 60,000 consumers who have downloaded 250,000 digital music files, supported mostly by promotional ads. The dynamically created ads differ each time songs are downloaded, depending on the time of day, region, search history, and download behavior.
Developing a Better World
Excerpted from The Age Report by Nick Miller
From the comfort of an armchair, with a philosopher’s hat on and a Che Guevara print on the wall, many people will defend P2P services. They will attack “the man” for standing in the way of progress and praise the paradigm-smashing technology that enables music and video to gush around the world in unstoppable torrents.
But Phil Morle, 39, is one of the few who had to do it in court. His days as Chief Technology Officer for the hugely popular P2P application Kazaa are behind him - he now works for a range of technology start-ups.
But Mr. Morle is best known as a respondent in the 2004 Australian Federal Court case that made headlines around the world, when the Australian music industry tried to shut down Kazaa. The court found that Kazaa had authorized users to infringe music industry copyright, though proceedings against Mr. Morle were dismissed.
“I was - and still am - a believer,” he said. “I joined Kazaa to make a better world for artists, and I believe we were part of a global change that accomplished that. I was never comfortable with copyright infringement, and every day I went to work to do tangible things that reduced it.”
Mr. Morle founded KAOS experimental theatre company in the UK in 1991 and brought it to Perth, subsidizing that career with web development work that eventually became his main focus.
While working at Brilliant Digital, he led the team that designed the Kazaa website while it was still owned by Consumer Empowerment in Holland. When the company was sold to Sharman Networks in Australia, he was asked to come on board as Chief Technical Officer.
“The challenge I accepted was to take the hugely popular Kazaa application and legitimize it through adding the kind of licensing and marketing technology you see in iTunes today,” he said.
But it was more than just a technical challenge - he had loftier aims.
“Technology empowers people and opens up new markets,” Mr. Morle said. “Early file-sharing tools like Napster and Kazaa allowed consumers to demonstrate what they wanted from the media companies. iTunes is built on foundations that Kazaa laid down.
“If you look at Kazaa, Skype (P2P telephony software) and Joost (P2PTV software), these have the same technology at their heart. All three have opened up new marketplaces and provided extremely powerful, accessible tools for everybody.”
“The difference among the three products is that Kazaa was demonized by the incumbent media companies while Skype and Joost have been embraced to fully exploit their possibilities.”
Though he wasn’t part of the team that built the successful Skype, the Kazaa team was among the first beta testers. “I’ve got this geeky picture of me in Estonia wearing a huge pair of headphones testing a command line version of Skype.”
After leaving Kazaa in 2006, he advised Yoick, a research-driven start-up experimenting with using P2P technology, to build massive-scale 3-D worlds. Earlier this year he joined Omnidrive, “a humungous hard-drive for the web, so you can treat the internet like your local PC”.
He draws a common thread through his various projects: “People power. With all these technologies, the barriers to entry fall away and anybody can start an international business or start their own TV station or become their own record label. This creates value and opportunity through a cornucopia of creativity, choice, and diversity.”
Digital Killed the Analog Star
Excerpted from Silicon Republic Report by John Kennedy
Ireland is a hotbed of innovation determining the future of digital, high-def and Internet protocol TV (IPTV).
There’s a scene in the “Back to the Future II” movie where Michael J. Fox’s character is being dressed down by an angry boss via the living room TV screen for taking part in an illegal scheme. That was 1989 and to Irish audiences this represented the future.
“That’s in the lab right now,” quips Fintan McTiernan of Cork-based DigiSoft, a technology company that is at the spearhead of the latest international developments in digital TV and which earlier this year unveiled its own IPTV set-top box.
The TV world is in a state of flux as cash-rich adults opt for the latest high-definition television (HDTV) hardware and deploy digital video recorder (DVR) devices to capture their favorite cable or satellite programs.
In the paid-for TV space Sky Digital users are already using personal video recorder (PVR) technologies, while earlier this week UPC Ireland introduced its DVR set-top box, which can store up to 160GB of programs or 80 hours of TV.
“People who use DVR can watch their favorite programs back-to-back without relying on TV schedules,” explained Simon Kelehan, Video and Content Manager at UPC Ireland.
While in the terrestrial space, following the passing of the new Broadcasting Bill, after 40 years of service, Ireland’s analog TV network will be switched off by 2012 to pave the way for digital terrestrial television.
Meanwhile, teenagers are subscribing to a parallel revolution, that of internet television, or IPTV, and are happily downloading music and films on demand from services like YouTube thanks to faster broadband speeds.
Into this emerging space, P2PTV players like Joost and Babelgum are hoping to give people with broadband access to their TV services any time, anywhere over the internet. Established TV broadcasters like the BBC with its iPlayer and Channel 4 with its 4oD services are also keen not to be left behind and have services available online.
Ambitious P2PTV player Babelgum will create 100 jobs in Dublin to develop its technology for the world market. Already 40 of these jobs are in place.
The company’s chief executive Valerio Zingarelli explained, “We would define Babelgum as a global personal media company that is different from other IPTV and traditional broadcasting companies.
Zingarelli describes Babelgum, which will have its commercial launch in March, as a multimedia version of Google. “People can find programs through a search engine. We’re really a web company, not a TV company. Also you don’t need a really fast internet connection to use it; you just need at least 384Kbps so it would be ideal for 3G mobile users too.”
Zingarelli says Babelgum will be aiming at niche content from independent production companies and some majors. “The idea is to serve people with niche content not easily available on mainstream TV stations. For example, a scuba diving enthusiast would be able to search for and view quality programs on scuba.”
Competing with Babelgum will be Joost, set up by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom who have raised US $45 million to create what they claim is the world’s first broadcast-quality internet TV service.
While Joost is currently the darling of majors like Warner Brothers and MTV, young Irish independent production houses are keen to get involved.
Stephen McCormack of Dublin firm WildWave already has four channels live on Joost. These include: IamTV, an Asian indie music channel; the Wildlight Channel for independent film; Havoc Television for indie music and action sports; and the Wildcard sports channel, which brings niche sports such as Canadian league football to a global audience.
“It’s a game of two halves,” says McCormack. “In traditional cable, satellite and terrestrial TV there’s plenty of innovation.”
“But also on the P2PTV side you have players trying to catch up. The next level will see internet television products routed to your TV in the living room as well as to your mobile phone and games console.
“P2PTV set-top boxes will colonize what you see on your living room TV and you may even see Joost buttons on your remote control. Both Apple with its Apple TV and Microsoft with its Xbox and Silverlight technologies are keen to be involved.”
“It is all about niche as well as major content,” McCormack continued. “You’ll have your usual Big Brother and X-Factor stuff combined with super-niche content. Anything that justifies having a magazine on shelves today will tomorrow have a TV channel. If you want to know the future of TV, look at the magazine shelves, and not just the top shelf.”
When Cool Tools Get the Cold Shoulder
Excerpted from IT Week Report by Kelvyn Taylor
Why do firms wait for technologies to acquire a veneer of corporate respectability before using them? Nothing grieves me more than when a perfectly good technology, for whatever reason, becomes technica non grata.
The process I’m referring to usually follows this pattern: company X announces product Y that uses some cool new technology to allow users to do Z, which will make them perhaps happier and certainly more productive. Everyone just manages to get out a collective “Wow!” before the massed ranks of doom-mongers show how it will actually make your network into the world’s largest botnet in a matter of milliseconds, and so should be avoided with the world’s longest bargepole.
The technology is therefore immediately seized upon by consumers, who proceed to devise “innovative” ways in which it can be used, and it takes the world by storm. But it’s never seen again in corporate environments until some vendor wraps it up with a new name and an eye-watering price tag, at which point it becomes the business flavor of the month and starts spawning expensive consultants.
The first stages of this process have happened to several of the most promising and useful technologies I’ve seen over the years - and which are some of the most successful in terms of dominating the world.
P2P file sharing is perhaps one of the best examples, particularly in the form of the incredibly innovative BitTorrent. I remember when the likes of Intel and Microsoft were banging the gong for business P2P, only for those services to disappear without trace into the consumer world as P2P gained its technica non grata laurels.
BitTorrent is now in danger of reaching the final stage of the process, powering corporate content delivery services such as those offered by Solid State Networks.
FolderShare, a secure, business-oriented P2P app that yours truly praised when it appeared a few years ago, was bought up by Microsoft only to disappear into the innards of Live Messenger.
PC remote control and access is another sad story. Despite the technology progressing in leaps and bounds, many workers are unable to reap the benefits because of legitimate security worries. SMTP mail relays are another lost cause - it used to be so easy sending e-mail from anywhere. Instant messaging has made the corporate transition but is still viewed with suspicion.
I’m sure there are many more examples, but a common thread is that the technology often ends up becoming “respectable” largely because of cultural and social pressures from users, not because of any particular improvements in the technology. And in my book, that is no way for businesses to keep ahead of the curve.
Solid State Networks & Bandcon Partner
Wholesale network infrastructure provider BandCon and Solid State Networks, developer of high-performance, distributed content delivery solutions, announced this week a strategic partnership that will enable content publishers and distributors to build their own peer-assisted content delivery networks (CDNs).
Solid State Networks’ solutions are based upon its own proprietary implementation of the BitTorrent protocol. Solid State’s offerings are ideal for the distribution of high-demand, massive digital objects, including PC and console video games, high-resolution video including feature films and television programs, music, and software programs.
Through this arrangement, companies can now seamlessly exploit the incremental growth framework enabled by deploying Solid State Networks’ proprietary software over BandCon’s premier infrastructure.
“BandCon’s unique ‘pay-as-you-grow’ business model is a great fit for our customers that want to create or expand their own network footprint for delivering content,” said Rick Buonincontri, President & CEO of Solid State Networks. “We have found that many content owners are not in a position to take on the high levels of risk associated with making the leap to become conventional CDN owners.”
“BandCon’s ability to provide access to a variety of quality networks and strategic peering exchanges combined with their customized service terms and fast implementation allows our customers to create highly flexible CDN solutions that are tailored to their needs,” Buonincontri added.
Under the agreement, the two firms will cross-market services to provide the best solutions for their clients. With direct access to a greater array of services, both firms are optimistic about the possibilities for their customers and see this arrangement as a precursor to future custom peer-assisted CDN deployments.
“Content owners are constantly seeking out the qualities that are inherent to Solid State’s offering: high scalability, high performance, low per-unit delivery costs,” said Ari Benowitz, CEO of BandCon. “We believe the Solid State Networks technology will become an important component of future CDN deployments, and this partnership creates an ideal opportunity for content owners to license and deploy the software - quickly and easily through a ‘one-stop-shop’ fostered by the agreement.”
Error in Skype’s Software Causes Shut Down
Excerpted from NY Times Report by Brad Stone
The online telephone service Skype was not working for much of the day on Thursday, leaving its 220 million users, some of them small businesses that had given up their landlines, without a way to call colleagues, customers, and friends.
Executives at Skype, a division of eBay that is based in Luxembourg, said its engineers worked throughout the day to bring the service back online.
But they said that while they had pinpointed the source of the problem, they still did not know why it had resulted in a network failure, and they could not ensure that the service would be running smoothly again by Friday.
“There is a chance this could go on beyond tomorrow, but it’s our hope that it’s going to be resolved,” Kurt Sauer, Skype’s Chief Security Officer, said. “What happened today was caused by a unique set of events, the genesis of which is not entirely understood.”
Skype allows its users to make calls over their computers. Calls to other Skype members are free. To make and receive calls to and from traditional telephones, users are charged below-market rates.
The Skype network uses a P2P infrastructure, meaning that calls are routed through other users’ computers instead of a central hub. But it does have servers around the world, known as super-nodes that manage access to the network. A flaw in a crucial piece of software that connects users to these servers appears to have been the source of the problem.
Skype engineers said the flaw existed in every copy of the Skype software that had been downloaded since the service’s start in 2003.
Skype executives said they still did not know why the error, sitting dormant for four years, suddenly crashed the network. They cited problems with the Internet backbone in some parts of the world as a possible contributing factor.
In the community of devoted Skype users, the shutdown was met with a few conspiracy theories and a little frustration that a communication tool they had come to rely on was not available.
Phil Wolff, editor of the Skype Journal blog in Oakland, CA, said he uses Skype to communicate with contributors in a half-dozen countries. “It’s just really awkward,” he said. “All of a sudden these channels of communication aren’t available anymore.”
Mr. Wolff and Mr. Sauer of Skype noted that the service had never had a major breakdown like this.
“We have a good track record about uptime,” Mr. Sauer said. “That doesn’t help people who were down today, but we are working every moment to recover from this issue and not to let it occur again. We want to get it fixed quickly and ensure that we are what we always said we were — a highly reliable, resistant network.”
Skype Back Up – Details Monday
Excerpted from the Skype Corporate Blog by Villu Arak
Skype is back to normal.
On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order. We know how difficult and frustrating the past two days have been. And still, your good wishes kept flowing in. Thank you for the amazing patience, trust and support!
Not all P2P is the Same
Excerpted from ZDNet News Report by Russell Shaw
Skype-specific vulnerabilities were exposed by its outage, rather than vulnerabilities to P2P in general.
Like its predecessor Kazaa, Skype uses a system called super-nodes. A super-node system is one in which customers rather than network servers handle traffic management. Super-nodes are just normal computers that get promoted by the Skype software to serve as traffic cops for the entire network. In theory this is a good idea, but problems can happen if the network starts to destabilize.
Skype, as a company, has no physical or programmatic control over a vital piece of its service. This of course exposes vulnerabilities to any business based on such a system – systems that, in effect, are not within the company’s control.
Another flaw with super-node models concerns system recovery after a crash. Because Skype lost its super-nodes in the initial crash, its network could only recover as fast as new super-nodes could be identified.
Other companies such as SightSpeed that use P2P do not suffer from this flaw, since these companies manage and handle all core functionality centrally. Standards based telephony protocols such as SIP were designed from the outset to be fault tolerant.
Yes, there are several flavors of P2P, and all P2P shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush.
Ballmer and Chambers to Share Stage
Excerpted from Seattle Post Intelligencer Report by Todd Bishop
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will appear with Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers at an event in New York City on Monday. These types of events between tech giants typically stir all sorts of speculation about possible new partnerships and strategic moves.
In this case, however, Microsoft representatives are downplaying that notion, telling reporters that there won’t be any specific news announced. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be newsworthy. As detailed on the VAR Guy Blog, the relationship between the companies is complex.
The web page for the event says the two “will discuss the future of the technology industry and their shared vision for addressing today’s customer requirements.” TV host Charlie Rose is moderating the discussion.
Advanced Media Technology Emmy Awards
The Call for Entries for the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards is now available online. If you are working on something interesting, interactive, broadband, Internet-based, P2PTV-oriented or almost any kind of online video system, you should download the rules and regulations and submit your work today. It's easy: just start by clicking here and downloading the .pdf file.
Entries must be submitted by September 20th. Judging will take place in October and the awards gala will be held in Las Vegas on January 7th at the CES Show where the DCIA is presenting the first-ever P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LV on January 6th. For information about the Emmy Awards, visit www.emmyonline.tv.
Coming Events of Interest
- 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.
- 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.
- Broadcasting 2017 – September 27th in London, England. What do the leading players in television and new media across Europe predict for the future of broadcasting? Find out during “Broadcasting 2017” at BAFTA. Join industry giants such as Silvio Scaglia, Founder & Chairman of Babelgum for a day of stimulating sessions.
- Digital Music Forum West – October 3rd–4th in Los Angeles, CA. The seventh annual Digital Music Forum event now at the newly renovated Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Several DCIA Member company executives will be featured speakers and the DCIA will present a special session on “The Evolution of P2P and Music.”
- 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.
- 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).
- Streaming Media West – November 6th–8th in San Jose, CA. Streaming Media conferences have become the premier online video events in the world. Streaming Media West is totally focused on the business and technology of online video. The DCIA will participate featuring industry leading P2PTV providers and support services.
- P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LV – January 6th in Las Vegas, NV. This is the DCIA’s must-attend event for everyone interested in monetizing content using P2P and related technologies. Keynotes, panels, and workshops on the latest breakthroughs. The Conference will take place in N260 in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Conference Luncheon in N262-264. This DCIA flagship event is a Conference within CES – the Consumer Electronics Show.
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