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Five Things Hollywood Can Learn From Music 2.0
Josh Catone over at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting suggestion for Warner Bros. to get folks interested in the upcoming superhero feature, Watchmen: Take a page from Trent Reznor’s book. The Nine Inch Nails front man has been experimenting with innovative distribution and marketing schemes ever since his band said farewell to Universal Music, giving away songs and even uploading an album to the Pirate Bay. Catone admits that Warner can’t completely follow the NIN model, and our resident superhero expert Chris Albrecht had some other good reasons why the Watchmen plan might fail, but Hollywood surely could use some new inspiration.
Now, the music industry isn’t really known as a big innovator. In fact, record labels have long been the lemmings in the coal mine for Hollywood, stumbling from one disaster to another and showing what mistakes should be avoided at all costs. Remember that glorious idea to ship audio CDs complete with Windows malware ? But bands and online music startusp have started to innovate at last, developing a new type of music industry, oftentimes referred to as music 2.0, that is dominated not by brick and mortar, but by MP3 blogs, Last.fm and pay-as-much-as-you-want online sales. Maybe it’s time Hollywood took another look.
BitTorrent’s Achilles’ Heel
The popular BitTorrent web site Mininova was sued by the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN this week in a bid to get Mininova to filter unlicensed content. The organization has had some success in the past against Edonkey and BitTorrent web sites, so there is at least a possibility that Mininova will be forced to either take down most of its torrent files or shut down completely. Either way, it would be a big blow for the BitTorrent community. Since launching in early 2005, Mininova has quickly become one of the biggest BitTorent directories, with almost 5 billion torrent downloads to date.
The possibility of Mininova closing down also raises an important issue: BitTorrent is a highly centralized P2P protocol to begin with, depending on central servers both to catalog content and facilitate downloads. The growing popularity of the protocol has led to the creation of a few torrent powerhouses, with Mininova and The Pirate Bay being two of the most prominent. Could this increasingly monolithic infrastructure be the Achilles’ heel of BitTorrent piracy?
Sandvine’s New Plan to Slow You Down
Sandvine, the company behind the devices used by Comcast and others to block BitTorrent, has just introduced a network management tool called FairShare that aims to address Net Neutrality concerns. FairShare is supposed to allow ISPs to manage their networks with a protocol- and application-agnostic approach, precisely what Comcast promised to switch to before the end of the year.
Comcast isn’t the only one that could benefit from FairShare. Sandvine itself has been looking for a way to win back customers that were scared off by potential policy implications. The company saw its revenue fall 46 percent in the first quarter of 2008, a downturn that it attributed to customers delaying purchases because of the Net Neutrality debate.
So what will FairShare mean for online video? Well P2P startups will no longer be singled out as the Internet’s bandwidth bogeymen. But your P2P-powered NBC Direct downloads won’t necessarily be any faster with FairShare. In fact, all bandwidth-intensive online video applications are at risk of being throttled.
Cox Caught Blocking BitTorrent
Remember that web-based tool to test whether your ISP is blocking BitTorrent that we linked to a couple weeks back? Thousands of broadband users around the world have tried it in the last couple of weeks. Well the results are in, and guess what? Comcast isn’t the only U.S. ISP with anti-P2P network management in place. Fellow cable provider Cox was also caught interrupting its subscribers’ BitTorrent uploads.
The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, out of Germany, found that Cox interfered with roughly 50 percent of all measured transmissions. It also confirmed that Comcast is still actively blocking BitTorrent, despite numerous assurances to favor a protocol-neutral approach to network management. In fact, Comcast seems to be even stricter than Cox, disrupting roughly two-thirds of all uploads.
For Now, No Net Neutrality for Canadians
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has rejected a plea by smaller ISPs to immediately stop Bell Canada from blocking BitTorrent traffic. Canadian providers requested such a step from the commission after Bell Canada started to use Comcast-type network management practices on its wholesale accounts, meaning it blocked BitTorrent uploads from users that weren’t even Bell Canada customers.
The issue quickly became Canada’s own Net Neutrality debate. It was fueled by the fact that Bell started to block P2P traffic right around the time that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) published its first show via BitTorrent online. CBC itself has stayed silent on the issue, but consumer advocacy groups sided with the smaller ISPs. There’s still hope for this new coalition: The CRTC declared that it will start a broader inquiry into Net Neutrality and network management issues this week.
Chinese P2P Streaming Platform PPLive Sued for Copyright Infringement
The popular Chinese P2P TV platform PPLive has been sued for copyright infringement by entertainment company Beijing Shidai Yingyin International Entertainment Co., ChinaTechNews.com reports, seeking compensation of 330,000 Chinese yuan ($47,000). This is the first time PPLive has been sued, but it’s part of a larger backlash against Chinese P2P platforms.
PPLive is hugely popular in China. The service reportedly had 85 million users in October, and it currently offers access to several hundred streaming video channels as well as hundreds of on-demand shows. Most of those are Chinese programming, but PPLive also broadcasts sports events from around the world, including NBA and European soccer games — a feature that has made the service popular with sports fans overseas as well.
Comcast Abandons P2P Bill of Rights
Comcast SVP Rich Woundy told the audience of the DCIA’s P2P Media Summit in Los Angeles on Monday that his company is not spearheading the creation of a P2P Bill of Rights anymore. Instead, Comcast will take part in a newly formed working group of the Distributed Computing Industry Association that aims to define best practices for the P2P industry.
Comcast had proposed a set of guidelines called “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities for P2P Users and Service Providers” in cooperation with the P2P startup Pando less than three weeks ago. The proposal came just two days before an FCC hearing at Stanford University about Comcast’s ongoing practice of throttling BitTorrent traffic. The suspicious timing and the vague wording of the proposed guidelines were some of the reasons why consumer rights groups decried them as “ludicrous.” The DCIA now hopes to start a more substantial dialogue among ISPs, P2P companies and rights holders, but statements from movie industry execs made at the association’s Media Summit show that this won’t be a walk in the park either. Read more of this story
Whatever Happened to Red Swoosh?
Remember Red Swoosh, the P2P company that was bought by Akamai for $18.7 million in April 2007? Red Swoosh used to be a competitor to Akamai, albeit on a much smaller scale, offering P2P-powered content delivery services to corporate customers. Shortly before the Akamai acquisition, the company reinvented itself, rolling out products for amateur videographers and file-swapping consumers.
This new direction opened up a lot of possibilities for Akamai. In particular, it offered a way for Akamai to extend its business model to blogs and other platforms for user-generated content. Call it the CDN solution for the long tail, if you will, complete with options to enter the advertising market. But none of that materialized. Instead, it looks like most Red Swoosh products have been discontinued or taken down.
Streaming is Coming to Usenet
When it comes to file-sharing, Usenet has long been considered an underground venue. Its odd archive formats and weird file extensions were just too complicated for the average user, and tasks like finding and merging 400 parts of a movie download seemed a little too laborious in comparison to the ease of use of BitTorrent. However, indexing web sites, meta file formats and a new generation of download managers are making Usenet more and more accessible every day.
Take BinTube for example. The Windows-only application looks more like your average media player than a complicated download client, and it offers a feature called “Usenet streaming”: Instead of waiting for all parts of a movie to be downloaded, it starts playing the video after receiving the first part, with downloads continuing in the background. Yes, I know — technically that’s “progressive downloading,” not “streaming.” Still, it’s light-years from what Usenet used to be.
Comcast to Create P2P Bill of Rights
Comcast said today it plans to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” in cooperation with P2P companies and other ISPs. The bill proposal is being co-spearheaded by Pando Networks, a company that recently made waves with its efforts to help ISPs with the impact P2P is having on their networks without throttling traffic. Comcast is also committing to test Pando’s technology and share those test results with the ISP community.
The bill itself is supposed to be a catalog of best-practice recommendations for P2P companies and ISPs alike, but the announcement was more than vague about what those recommendations might look like. It did mention that users should be able to “control their computers’ resources when using P2P applications,” but it didn’t specify which responsibilities and especially which rights Comcast wants to include for ISPs.
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