(Credit: Comcast)Cable giant Comcast plans to add movies from the cable channel Starz to its test of "On Demand Online," a new service its testing that allows Comcast subscribers to watch cable TV online at no additional charge.
Comcast is set to begin testing the service in the next few weeks with about 5,000 customers. And in addition to video content from Time Warner's Turner networks TNT and TBS, participants will also be able to view about 300 movies from Starz's lineup in standard definition. Some of these movies include Wall-E, Pineapple Express, and High School Musical 3.
High-definition versions of movies and additional content will be added later in the trial. Starz also plans to offer original series like Crash, Head Case, and Party Down.
Comcast announced the On Demand Online trial last month as well as a new partnership with Time Warner to drive the development of the service. Some of the TV shows that Time Warner plans to offer include The Closer, Saving Grace, and My Boys.
Comcast plans to make its On Demand Online service available to all of its subscribers in the fourth quarter of this year.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)If you want to quickly buy a phone, or just check out what AT&T and Verizon Wireless have to offer, it just got a little more convenient.
Amazon announced Thursday its beta launch of AmazonWireless, a new Web site that offers cell phones and service plans from, for now, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. The online store features Amazon-style shopping, without the rebate hassles that cell phone carriers are notorious for, and free two-day shipping on a large selection of phones.
During this beta-testing phase, Amazon plans to expand the selection of phones and services as well as add carriers. It will also be testing features and gathering input from customers.
According to Paul Ryder, Amazon's vice president of consumer electronics, AmazonWireless is designed for both existing cell phone customers who want to upgrade and those who want start a cell phone service.
AmazonWireless currently offers more than 120 phones, including a large selection of high-end smartphones, as well as the latest budget models. Customers can use their existing Amazon accounts to upgrade their phones or shop by carrier, phone feature, price, color, and brand. You'll also find other familiar Amazon features, such as bestseller lists, product descriptions, and customer reviews.
It's important to note that not every phone offered by the carriers is listed. For example, I checked for the iPhone 3GS just now and it wasn't even mentioned.
I've written about TuneCore many times in the past: it's a service for independent musicians that submits their recordings to iTunes, Amazon MP3, and other big online stores--and it's helping some artists make a good deal of money.
The fees are quite reasonable; they top out around $20 a year, although the precise pricing depends on what you're submitting and how many stores you want it in--and artists have had some substantial financial success using it. Earlier this month, an unsigned hip-hop artist named Drake sold 300,000 copies of his single through TuneCore in just 14 days; The New York Times listed him as having the No. 3 download in the U.S. For those of you keeping track at home, that probably means the artist earned around $150,000 in two weeks--that's take-home money, not a label advance that needs to be earned back through future sales.
(Credit: TuneCore)Drake's story is instructive: days after distributing the single through TuneCore, he signed a deal with the world's largest record label, Universal. Today, TuneCore announced its own deal with Universal; specifically, the TuneCore Store will resell services offered by Universal Music Group Distribution, such as mastering (the final step in a professional audio production) and album art. Guitar Center, a massive guitar retailer with more than 200 stores, will also cooperate with Universal Distribution to sell physical CDs by TuneCore artists at its stores.
But the real opportunity is more subtle. You have to ask what a big label like Universal gets out of the deal. Simple: this is a way to discover independent artists without doing the traditional boots-on-the-ground work of an A&R (artist and repertoire) representative. If a TuneCore customer buys Universal services, and then turns out to be a hot-seller, the artist and the label already have a relationship on which to build. Big-label contracts aren't--and shouldn't be--the goal of every indie musician, but for those who want a shot at reaching a large audience fast and are willing to give up some control to do so, they're still tempting.
Joe Sibley (left) and Kiwi Camara
(Credit: Camara & Sibley law firm)The elder member of Jammie Thomas-Rasset's legal team is a former U.S. Army Ranger. He doesn't say whether he's proud of that, but his voice does dawdle when he says the words "special forces."
"I like pain. I like fighting. I like conflict," says Joe Sibley. "Going to war was something I always wanted to do (but didn't)...later in life I discovered I was more capable of fighting and ending wars with my mind."
The younger member of Thomas-Rasset's legal team says, half kidding, that he spent his youth disappointing his parents, who wanted a career for him in medicine. Instead, he fecklessly pursued a Ph.D in economics at Stanford University, and then drifted into law school at Harvard. When he graduated, magna cum laude, Kiwi Camara was 19 years old.
They are the founders of the Camara & Sibley law firm, and they are pretty much all that's standing between Thomas-Rasset, the music-pirating mother from Minnesota, and the $1.9 million judgment that's hanging over her head. Last month, the attorneys sat next to Thomas-Rasset when she was found liable for willful copyright infringement, the second time a jury has decided against her.
On Monday, her attorneys filed a motion for a new trial and asked the judge to set aside the verdict or reduce the damage award to the minimum of $18,000. If they don't get that, they plan to file an appeal. They will argue that forcing Thomas-Rasset to pay $2 million for illegally sharing 24 songs is unconstitutional, the equivalent of "sentencing someone to life in prison for shoplifting $25 worth of merchandise," said Sibley.
"We actually think that the jury award of $1.9 million is helpful to our argument about unconstitutionality," Sibley said. "Here's a real life award of a ridiculous amount of damages for a group of songs that costs $25 on the Internet."
That's not how 24 Minnesotans saw it. Thomas-Rasset has had two goes at proving to juries she wasn't the one who used her computer to illegally share music on a peer-to-peer service. The first time was in October 2007, when she was found liable for $222,000 in damages. The judge threw that decision out after acknowledging he erred in giving jury instructions.
As for Sibley, 34, and Camara, 25, the Thomas-Rasset case could be a springboard that launches them to the upper ranks of attorneys who defend downloaders and tech companies from copyright suits. They could certainly boost the reputation of their fledgling Houston-based law practice, which they opened in February, by helping Thomas-Rasset break her losing streak.
Pointing fingers
In her first trial, Thomas-Rasset was represented by another attorney who suggested to the jury that an unknown hacker might have commandeered her computer and shared the music. Sibley and Camara, who didn't take over the case until three weeks before her retrial, were skeptical anyone would believe some unknown third party was responsible.
Instead, the attorneys went with the only other choice they had, in effect fingering the only other people who had access to Thomas-Rasset's computer: her ex-boyfriend and her children. While on the stand, Thomas-Rasset said it was possible one of her children or her former boyfriend, who had babysat while she was away on three separate occasions, could have shared the music.
"On one end, if the jury believed it, they could let her off," Sibley said. "On the other end, if they disbelieved it that could create the opposite effect. If the jury thought she was lying and pointing a finger at family members, that could result in inflation of the statutory damages and in my opinion that is what happened in this case."
After such a dramatic defeat, how do they go forward?
"I think there is a fair shot that (U.S. District Judge Michael) Davis will grant (some of the requests) in our (new trial) motion," Camara said. "I think the arguments are strong, there's lots of law behind them and it's the first time he's heard them."
There's little doubt the case is headed to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, Camara said. The side Davis rules against will surely take the case to the higher court.
Facing long odds
Both Sibley and Camara acknowledge that they knew they were facing long odds when they offered Thomas-Rasset their services pro bono. The truth is that anytime a lawyer takes on the RIAA or MPAA in a copyright dispute, he or she knows that the opposing team has an almost perfect batting average, certainly with regard to the most high-profile disputes of the past decade. Tick off the names: Aimster, Napster, Grokster, and TorrentSpy, all wins for the copyright owners.
These are precisely the kind of long-odd cases that Sibley and Camara say they want. Sibley said one of his greatest regrets was that he joined the Army too late (1993) and missed the fighting in Somalia. He's spoiling for big fights. The calmer Camara said the duo is willing to take on cases that "matter, make a difference" regardless of how tough they are or whether they involve technology, securities or anything else.
The partnership was formed when the duo arrived at Harvard. Sibley and Camara were the first people each other met that first day on campus. Their individual trajectories to reach that point were vastly different.
The child of two doctors, Camara wrote a paper on treatments for rheumatoid arthritis that was published in a medical journal in his home state of Hawaii. He was 11. He dropped out of the 8th grade to attend college and graduated at 16. After Harvard he began teaching at Northwestern University School of Law. He was groomed for academic greatness.
In contrast, Sibley was an also-ran for most of his life, a poor kid from East Texas always battling more privileged and pedigreed opponents.
After getting out of the Army, he took a series of odd jobs in his East Texas hometown of Spring. No one in his family had ever gone to college and he never thought he would either--he was an average student in high school who got disciplined a couple of times for fighting--until one day he woke up and wanted to study philosophy and Frederick Nietzsche. First came community college then the University of Texas, where he took 21 hours of course work each term and graduated with honors--all the while working part-time, maintaining a marriage and raising a child.
At Harvard, said Sibley, he and Camara became friends and allies despite Sibley being one of the oldest students and Camara being the youngest. What they had in common was their conservative political views, which made them "outcasts" among the liberal majority, Sibley said.
They stuck by each other even when Camara stirred what became a controversy on campus that spilled out into a national debate via The New York Times. Camara posted course outlines on a student-operated Web site and used a racial epithet to describe African Americans. There were protests and denunciations. Camara seems to accept that the incident is going to trail him for a long time.
"The story has been covered in lots of other places," Camara said. "I have apologized many times and I think the existing coverage is adequate."
He and Sibley, who said he knows the pairing might seem odd to outsiders, don't seem willing to allow the controversy to define them or their practice.
"(Physically) I wouldn't pick him in a fight over too many people," a chuckling Sibley said of Camara. "But when it comes to mental toughness and ability he's one of the smartest people on the planet and he's scrappy. He doesn't take any s***. He's not the stereotypical sort of genius. He's more like the evil genius."
As it defends itself against allegations of copyright infringement made by multiple copyright owners, Google's YouTube won some minor legal victories on Tuesday, legal documents show.
No, the decisions had nothing to do with the main event, which is the suit filed in March 2007 against YouTube by Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures. But Google's attorneys did manage to convince a federal judge to dismiss a number of the claims for statutory damages asked for by group of copyright holders that included a European soccer league and music publishers.
U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton, of the Southern District of New York, also threw out punitive damages, saying that the videos, from the Premiere Football League, were foreign works and weren't covered by U.S. copyright law.
Stanton wrote that the Copyright Act "bars statutory damages for all foreign and domestic works not timely registered."
The soccer league is part of a class action group that includes, The National Music Publishers Association and Bob Tur, the videographer who filmed many well known clips of the Los Angeles riots and the O.J. Simpson police chase in the early 1990s. He was the first person to sue YouTube for copyright infringement.
How the judge's decision will affect the rest of the plaintiffs is unclear. The work by Tur and the NMPA, both based in the United States, are presumably covered by U.S. copyright law.
Lawyers from the New York firm Proskauer Rose, which represents the class, did not immediately respond to an interview request.
Viacom has cooperated with the class-action group and even combined some parts of their case but the entertainment conglomerate is not a member of the class and was not named in the judge's order.
Weeks ago, the news of Michael Jackson's passing brought major news sites to their knees, so Tuesday's memorial service for the singer was expected to bring similar results.
This time it appears sites were better prepared for the traffic onslaught.
According to Gomez Incorporated, a company that monitors Web usage quality, there were both slowdowns and outages, including one that dramatically slowed Twitter's performance. The company analyzed performance on seven news sites from multiple locations during Tuesday's event, with some of the biggest slowdowns coming to streaming video. Asia experienced a 40 percent increase in what the company calls "stalling issues," with the U.S. experiencing an increase of around 5 percent.
One of those news outlets that was serving up live streaming video was CNN, which according to internal data, topped out at 781,000 concurrent streams of the event. Between midnight EDT and 4 p.m. the site also pulled in 11 million unique users who turned 72 million pages.
Ustream, which provided live streaming in a partnership with CBS, says the event was the "largest ever" that had been hosted on the service, in part because it was a worldwide broadcast. The service had 4.6 million streams of the memorial going, made up from 1.6 million unique users. It also had more than 12,000 messages posted every minute to its built-in user chat rooms. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)
Besides slowdowns in streaming video, news sites also had lower availability, which means some users were unable to access them. Gomez recorded that number as low as 98.2 percent, whereas the sites usually maintain uptime in excess of 99.65 percent. Response times also took a hit. News sites experienced double, and nearly triple the load time to serve up pages. In the case of Twitter, many users were unable to view or post messages to the service. At what was seemingly the peak of Twitter's load, Gomez benchmarked it as taking around 62 seconds for the site's home page to load, then allow users to log in--a process that normally takes just a few seconds.
Update: See also Larry Dignan's analysis over at ZDNet. He points to data host Akamai's visualization tool, which shows real-time activity on its sites which represent around 20 percent of the Web's traffic. There's a noticeable bump around the time the memorial service begins.
Internet Web traffic hit its peak right around the beginning of the service, according to Akamai.
(Credit: CNET / Akamai)CNET News' Greg Sandoval contributed to this report.
Tim Westergren
(Credit: CNET News)Internet radio got a break Tuesday when the sector reached an agreement on streaming-music royalty rates with SoundExchange, the group that collects royalties on behalf of artists and labels.
The two sides announced the deal, which comes after more than two years of negotiations, political maneuvering, and fans pleading with lawmakers to save Webcasting. It should be noted, however, that Webcasters are still at a disadvantage when competing with traditional broadcast radio. Over-the-air stations aren't required to pay royalty rates to artists or labels.
Steve Marks, an executive vice president for the Recording Industry Association of America and one of the people who helped close the deal, said the settlement is proof that the music industry wants to partner with technology firms.
"Supporting new business models through innovative licensing agreements is critical to the future of our industry," Marks said. "We are pleased to have found an alternative in the hope of avoiding costly litigation in favor of building partnerships."
The agreement calls for large ad-supported radio services, such as Pandora, to either share 25 percent of revenue with the music industry or pay a per-stream rate of 0.08 cent retroactive to 2006, whichever is greater. That rate will increase until reaching 0.14 cent in 2015.
Sites that generate less than $1.25 million in revenue must pay 12 percent to 14 percent of sales for streaming rights.
Lower rates were vital to the survival of Internet radio stations, Tim Westergren, Pandora's founder, said in September. The Copyright Royalty Board set a performance rate at 0.19 cent but Webcasters argued that the rates would drive them out of business.
But here's the rub: Pandora's heaviest users will now have to pay, according to a story in the blog All Things Digital.
CNET News Poll
Westergren told the blog that Pandora will begin charging listeners who use the service for 40 hours a month to pay $0.99 to hear more music after hitting that mark.
"There's a very small percent of listeners who are using it a ton," Westergren told the blog. "That's great, except when you're paying per song."
As for why Webcasters must pay these royalties and traditional broadcasters do not, that is at the center of a struggle going on now on Capitol Hill. The music industry is trying to get the Performance Rights Act passed in Congress, which would force over-the-air broadcasters to pay the fees, while the National Association of Broadcasters is pushing its own legislation designed to shield it from the royalties.
Dennis Wharton, an NAB spokesman, said that the Webcasters are subscription services that are trying to get people to pay, just as Pandora is doing now. He also says that traditional radio is a huge promotional tool for the major music labels and Web radio's following is still tiny.
"I think there is big recognition that the shear number of people who listen to over-the-air radio generates a massive amount of revenue for the record labels and artists," Wharton said. "If you added up the competition, say Pandora, or Live365, we would dwarf them."
Yahoo has decided to punt rather than continue to oppose the National Football League's players union.
The company filed a notice of voluntary dismissal with the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota on Monday, effectively ending a lawsuit it filed just a month ago seeking a judgment that Yahoo shouldn't have to pay for access to the player stats needed to run a fantasy football Web site. The AP, which spotted the filing, reported that both Yahoo and the union declined to comment on the suit's dismissal.
Fantasy football requires a wealth of statistical information to tally points and cause armchair general managers to wonder what they were thinking when they drafted Matt Hasselbeck. Yahoo, buoyed by an earlier court decision involving fantasy stats that favored CNET parent company CBS Interactive, had been seeking a similar determination that it would not have to pay for access to the stats, which it alleged the players' union was threatening.
It's unclear exactly what led to the collapse of the suit, but perhaps Yahoo was given assurances that it wouldn't have to pay--at least this year--for fantasy stats. The players union is currently appealing the decision in the CBS Interactive case.
Amazon.com has filed for a number of patents that hint at ad-supported books for its Kindle e-reader--more specifically, a free or discounted ad-supported e-book for customers who buy the physical version.
Amazon Technologies, a subsidiary of Amazon, filed for a patent ("Method and system for access to electronic version of a physical work based on user ownership of the physical work") in December 2006. It was approved last month and makes it possible for buyers of a physical book to have an e-book bundled with it.
But two additional patents, filed a year later by Amazon employees (and not yet approved), are the more interesting ones: these, according to MediaPost, "clearly note that Amazon would insert advertisements throughout the e-books, from the beginning to the end, between chapters or following every 10 pages, as well as in the margins."
It looks like the story first surfaced on Slashdot last Friday.
Presumably, this could be a way to guide potential Kindle customers through the transition--which some find daunting--from consuming primarily physical books to digital ones, subsidizing the price of either or both of them in the process.
Ad money would be an additional revenue stream for Amazon too.
This post was updated at 10:14 a.m. PT.
VideoLAN VLC's logo
VideoLAN's VLC media player, arguably the world's best media player, hit version 0.9.9 in early April. Three months and more than 78 million downloads later, VideoLAN has announced VLC 1.0.0, or "Goldeneye."
Your media will never be the same.
In fact, with VideoLAN's VLC media player for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it doesn't have to be. One of the amazing things about VLC is that it can play anything that you've ever even thought about playing. That random media format that one site in Ecuador requires--VLC likely plays it, while Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. likely will not.
This is, in part, a natural result of VLC's open-source heritage. Licensed under the GNU General Public License, VLC attracts a diverse array of developers with disparate media interests. Those interests translate into a media player that really can play every obscure media format I've ever thrown at it. (And in my hunger for Arsenal videos, I've found many different video formats that Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. didn't know what to do with.)
Here are a few of the features now available in VLC 1.0.0:
- Live recording
- Instant pausing and frame-by-frame support
- Finer speed controls
- New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, ...)
- New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, ...) and major improvements in many formats
- New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
- Video scaling in full screen
- RTSP Trickplay support
- Zipped file playback
- Customizable toolbars
- Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
- Better integration in Gtk environments
- MTP devices on Linux
- AirTunes streaming
I regularly use VLC to transcode media files, including files I originally streamed from the Web:
VLC can transcode virtually any media file.
(Credit: Matt Asay)If you don't have VLC, I encourage you to download it and give it a try. It really is an amazing media player, one that has far more tricks up its sleeve than the proprietary media player that came with your computer.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
