Entries by David Short

Here's an interesting article from CNet - Why the Zune will help kill DRM

It seems that Zune doesn't interoperate with other MS DRM systems. It's amazing that MS can't even be compatible with itself when incompatibility is one of the consumers' genuine grips with DRM. I personally avoid "encumbered" media, because I want to play my media on a range of devices without too much hassle. My preferred choice for music, for example, is an old fashioned CD (which usually comes out of it's case once to get ripped and then goes back on the shelf!) There are some interesting attempts to make DRMed media portable (e.g. Coral and Marlin) but I think that the big vendors will scupper these initiatives. They can't help "embracing and extending" standards for their own competitive advantage and in the hope that they can become the de facto standard.

I think there are three big things to understand about DRM -

• It's hard to make it portable and hassle-free for the consumer. It's almost impossible to make it respect traditional "fair use".


• It's impossible to stop people hacking DRM without the use of hardware support e.g. smartcards or "trustworthy computing". That's why the DCMA and EUCD have such ridiculously harsh punishments for attempting to circumvent copy protection mechanisms.


• Digital distribution will fundamentally disrupt the nature of the content supply chain, whereas today's DRM systems are really designed to preserve the "old" economics ie. hit based, expensive content distributed via middlemen who all take a large cut.

So, how will this all end? I think that consumers will resist DRM systems unless they are hassle-free, respect fair use and the content is priced to reflect the lower costs of online distribution. I don't think that the traditional content industries will hit any of those targets, but their are plenty of people waiting in the wings with new business models that don't reply on high cost "premium content". For example, advertising funding, low cost unprotected content, user generated and prosumer generated content.

I was at IBC in Amsterdam, saw all the high tech wonders and marvels. Just about everyone is now an IPTV company or pretending to be, and there was booth after both showing complex diagrams and costly gear.

So, I came home and hooked up my dsl laptop to my big flatscreen TV, connected the PC headphone output to the hi fi and dialled up YouTube - and watched 2 hours of old rock videos.

Priceless...you (literally) can't buy this old stuff, or I would.

And then it hit me - this is real time, real life VoD. No IPTV, no iTV, no TiVO.......just a pure IP pipe, a PC, and a TV. The content quality is not HDTV - far from it - but boy is it relevant to me. Just have to do a bit of fiddling to get the remote to work as a mouse and my couch potato existence can continue.

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Today Apple patented a " converged handheld thingy to do stuff with multimedia" (check out The Register's article on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/07/apple_handheld_thing_patent/)

To quote The Register

"In the submission, published today, Apple says that the invention is a way of operating a handheld device with limited buttons that includes two or more functions including PDA, mobile phone, music player, camera, video player, game player, "handtop" (whatever that is), net terminal, GPS and remote control.

There's aren't many new phones that don't include most of these features, leading to speculation that Apple has come up with a new smartphone user interface. But can it add anything really new?

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Advertising Age writes that traditional advertising is far more prevalent than the Web 2.0 fraternity assumes
( http://adage.com/article?article_id=111377)

They note that, according to Jupiter Research, "7% of American adults write blogs and 22% read them; about 8% listen to podcasts and 5% use RSS feeds. According to a separate study by WorkPlace Print Media, 88% of the at-work audience doesn't even know what RSS is. And recent data from word-of-mouth research group Keller Fay indicate 92% of brand conversations were taking place offline -- far more than the commonly assumed rate of 80%."

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Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly, writing in IEEE Spectrum, assert that Metcalfe’s Law is wrong ( http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4109). This is shocking news for all the hockey stick business plans of the emerging new dot.com bubble (Bubble 2.0).

To recap, Metcalfe’s Law states that the value growth of a network is a function of the square of the number of users added f(n)**2. The authors propose that instead, the value of a network of size n grows in proportion to n log(n). As they put it:

“Imagine a network of 100 000 members that we know brings in $1 million. We have to know this starting point in advance—none of the laws can help here, as they tell us only about growth. So if the network doubles its membership to 200 000, Metcalfe's Law says its value grows by (200 000**2/100 000**2) times, quadrupling to $4 million, whereas the n log(n) law says its value grows by 200 000 log(200 000)/100 000 log(100 000) times to only $2.1 million. In both cases, the network's growth in value more than doubles, still outpacing the growth in members, but the one is a much more modest growth than the other. In our view, much of the difference between the artificial values of the dot-com era and the genuine value created by the Internet can be explained by the difference between the Metcalfe-fueled optimism of n 2 and the more sober reality of n log(n).”

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There are rumours that a merger is on the cards - Have a look at this article in TV Predications.

There are a couple of points that interested me. Firstly, the argument that the merger would be approved because of greater competition from other delivery channels, IPTV in particular. It wasn't long ago that satellite TV was overwhelming dominant and this argument would not have held any water. There is a similar trend in the UK, where the digital terrestrial TV "Freeview" now matches the penetration of BskyB.

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Last week was half term week in many UK schools, and my (primary school age) brood like many others were on holiday. Now, according to Adland they should have been in front of that TV soaking up all the sponsors messages about overpriced toys, fat filled fast food and other things we parents are traditionally horrified about.
Should have been...but were they? Were they heck!
No, they were perched in front of the PC downloading others kids videos off YouTube and having a whale of a time. When not there, they were on MSN chatting to other kids in the class....or playing one of those multi user internet games where you chat to other players...a sort of sword and sworcery chatgroup.

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An article in The Register shows an interesting trend. It seems that almost any "automatic" technology is susceptible to spam. The problem is that the ease of creation is too easy! Google thought they had sidestepped this by using network theory to automatically gauge the "relevance" of a web page. But the spammers seem to be catching up and Google are resorting to "electronic counter measures" to filter out the spam.

I think that getting real, good quality metadata will be a key requirement for the continued development of the Internet and Web 2.0 in particular. The obvious place to capture it is at the point of creation, but other challenges remain - how to maintain integrity and how to stop creators lying? Maintaining integrity is a technical tractable problem. Stopping people lying? That's harder and probably requires a new generation of social networking.

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An article in shows an interesting trend. It seems that almost any "automatic" technology is susceptible to spam. The problem is that the ease of creation is too easy! Google thought they had sidestepped this by using network theory to automatically gauge the "relevance" of a web page. But the spammers seem to be catching up and Google are resorting to "electronic counter measures" to filter out the spam.

I think that getting real, good quality metadata will be a key requirement for the continued development of the Internet and Web 2.0 in particular. The obvious place to capture it is at the point of creation, but other challenges remain - how to maintain integrity and how to stop creators lying? Maintaining integrity is a technical tractable problem. Stopping people lying? That's harder and probably requires a new generation of social networking.

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The 3G Mobile fraternity believes that Mobile TV is the next big thing to drive up their flagging ARPU and growth. Is it really? Do we really all want to watch TV on screens the size of postage stamps all day? And if not, what will we watch (if anything) on Mobile TV?

The omens are mixed.....small portable TVs have been around quite a while, and have not taken the world by storm - on the other hand, watching small TV-like images on PC screens is a part of the day now...and that gives a clue - these tend to be either short, to the point broadcasts or are kept as wallpaper on the screen while we work, much like radio is used (eg Ashes feed). Its harder to do that on your mobile, and less attractive if you have to pay by the byte.

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