Webware

Hear that popping sound? It's the sound of executives in the music and movie industries taking an extra dose of heart medicine. Wednesday, a new site called Zookz began public beta-testing a service that will let users download an unlimited number of MP3 music files for a single monthly fee of $9.95. Users can also download an unlimited number of MP4 movies for the same price, or both music and movies for $17.95 per month. Those are unprotected, DRM-free downloads that can be transferred to any device or shared an unlimited number of times.

Of course there are a few catches. Currently, the site only has about 50,000 tracks--a paltry selection compared with iTunes, Amazon MP3, and other services, although the company promises to add 5,000 tracks per week. In its current early beta state, there's no browsing among titles--you have to search, which requires you to know exactly what you want, and then hope it's in the (currently tiny) Zookz database. (I didn't test it for movies, as the focus of this blog--and my main personal interest--is music, but the selection's even smaller there: only 1,500 titles.)

How can Zookz possibly get away with this when the only other subscription music-download service I know of, eMusic, charges more for a limited number of monthly downloads? Simple. According to its FAQ, Zookz is based in the Caribbean nation of Antigua, and isn't subject to U.S. jurisdiction, including copyright law. The company claims it's operating in line with a 2007 World Trade Organization agreement between Antigua and the U.S., a claim I have absolutely no qualifications to evaluate one way or the other.

If you're willing to trust Zookz with your credit card information, you can fill your hard drive and all your portable music players with music for a very, very low price. Get it while it lasts....

Yes, it's that simple. (For the record, I already own this album on vinyl, but have been too lazy to rip it.)

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The twit that got Amanda a free movie ticket.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

Ever since the end of the original Napster, it's been a known fact that music labels and movie studios watch and monitor what Internet users download. What's less known is how closely they are doing that.

According to TorrentFreak, Twitter user Amanda Music got a nice surprise Monday when Miramax contacted her to offer two free tickets to the film "Adventureland."

It all started Sunday with her twit that read, "Ugh WHY IS ADVENTURELAND NOT ON TORRENTS YET?." Apparently, she was looking to download a pirated copy (recorded by a camcorder inside a movie theater) of the newly released movie, but she failed to find a torrent for it.

(Credit: TorrentFreak.com)

Soon after writing the twit, Amanda Music got a message saying, "Cmon Amanda, don't do it. #adventureland #fbi," to which she replied jokingly, "Okay I won't, JUST FOR YOU."

Then, to her surprise, Amanda Music got a message from MiramaxFilms that said, "Thanks Amanda. In return, I have a free Fandango card for 2 tix if you're interested in 'Adventureland.' Just DM us for the code."

In the end, Amanda Music did get one ticket (instead of two) and she said she would go see the movie today. She told TorrentFreak that she "couldn't find a working 'Adventureland' torrent anyway."

While this seems like a good business practice and nobody was harmed, it is kinda scary to know how closely we're being watched. If a company can reach us to give a reward, it may very well be able to do the same when it wants something else.

Maybe it's not a good idea to tell the whole world everything you are up to.

Valve's Steam software has a new feature for game publishers that lets them sell additional downloadable content, or DLC, from within their games.

To do this, it uses a new in-game purchasing system built off of the in-software Web browser. The first title to feature this is The Maw, which now includes two additional levels that can be purchased for $1.25 each, then played immediately. Previously, all add-on content was sold as a separate purchase from Steam's game store.

The new feature is available to all developers as part of Valve's Steamworks publishing platform. For games with existing add-on content, this means that the companies will be able go back and update their titles to allow in-game purchases.

Micropayments are becoming an increasingly important part of modern games, not only as a way for publishers to continue to make money from a title after it's released, but also to help bring in extra sales from people who purchase games used.

Valve says the new system will allow users to purchase and add additional content, even on titles that were not purchased through Steam's game store, just like it does with physical software titles that were purchased from other retailers.

Previously: Valve announces best PC gaming idea of the year (so far)

Valve is now selling downloadable content on its Steam, Web-powered games distribution software.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This week Apple made a very small, but important tweak to the user rating system on its iTunes app store. It now shows which version of an application the user was running when they wrote the review. This has been applied retroactively, so that reviews written before the change will show which version the users had installed at the time they wrote it.

This is important on two levels, with the first being how transparent user reviews are. No longer do you have to wonder what version a user had installed when they said there was a problem, or broken feature. If you find several reviews chiding a bug that has since been fixed, it may lead you to dismiss them and make a purchase, which could end up bringing in more sales for both Apple and the developer.

It also doubles as a permanent record of application updates, that is assuming the user reviews make mentions of new or updated features. When an application is updated the developer can put out a list of what's been fixed, added, or removed, however Apple does not offer users a way to go back and review a change log. Sites like AppShopper.com have started to build an archive for this very purpose, and with this update this is the closest thing users have received.

In addition to showing you which version users had installed from the mobile version of the App Store, Apple has also built this into the latest version of iTunes. Here, as usual, iTunes users get an extra layer of depth compared to their mobile brethren in being able to sort the reviews by version number. Unfortunately, Apple does not let you skip to a specific version, it simply puts them in order, which forces you to skip through several hundred pages to get to the version you're looking for.

This is a promising sign of further changes coming to App Store reviews, but on the mobile side it's still a long ways off from offering some of the great sorting features iTunes users are able to get on the desktop.

App reviews on both iTunes and the iPhone's App Store now show which version fo the application the reviewer was running on. Click to enlarge.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Firefox, for all its great functionality and superior performance, has long been a laggard when it comes to managing PDF content on the Web.

Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers both give users the option of reading Portable Document Format content within the browser, while Firefox forces users to navigate to PDFs through its Downloads window. Not very convenient.

Leave it to Firefox's online community, however, to remedy this failing. While there are a range of Firefox plug-ins to help manage PDFs documents, two stand out for me.

The first, Download Statusbar, doesn't actually enable in-browser rendering of PDF documents but gives the user a status bar at the bottom of the browser window that displays the progress of downloads and allows the user to double-click any download to open it in the application of one's choice.

In other words, no more searching for the Downloads window to check on the status of a file download, and no more scouring one's hard drive to remember where the download went. Download Statusbar keeps it all in Firefox. For my PDF documents, I just double-click the status bar to open them in Preview. Easy.

If you use a Mac and you prefer to have PDFs rendered in the browser, you can thank Google for its simple but excellent Quartz PDF viewer, which does one thing really well: opens PDFs as if they were HTML right in the browser. If you want it to do more than that, well, it's an open-source project, so feel free to contribute.

If you use the two together, Google's Quartz PDF viewer overrides Download Statusbar for PDF files. So, if you want to manage PDFs through Download Statusbar, you won't want Quartz PDF viewer. But through add-ons like this, Mozilla and its large and diverse community have you covered.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

The new purchase option shows up on the bottom left-hand corner of selected videos.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

On Thursday, YouTube launched a new system for partners in the U.S. to make their videos available for download and purchase. While the download feature showed up as early as mid-January for some videos, little explanation was given by Google on how video creators could offer it on their own content.

With the new system partners who are admitted into the program can choose from one of five different Creative Commons licenses, and can set the pricing of a video to anything they want. Users who want to buy the video go through a special Google Checkout page that uses their existing Google account credentials.

There's already a selection of partners that have made their videos available for purchase. One, HouseholdHacker.com, is pricing its video downloads at 99 cents a pop. These videos are only available in the .MP4 format (which is provided DRM-free), although YouTube could add additional formats to match what Google Video once did with copies encoded and re-sized for portable devices like the iPod and PSP.

One serious concern YouTube, and content partners must have with this new system is that it's still quite easy to copy a video with a number of stream-ripping tools--many of which don't require any software whatsoever. If YouTube expects people to shell out for a digital copy of the clip it's going to have to do something to keep these types of tools from easily getting at the source file.

Update: Regarding third-party stream-ripping tools, Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou tells us that YouTube is hard at work "putting in place engineering solutions that prevent (such tools) from working." Also worth noting is that downloading a YouTube video without using the new download option is a violation of YouTube's terms of service, which says "you shall not copy or download any User Submission unless you see a 'download' or similar link displayed by YouTube on the YouTube Website for that User Submission."

(Credit: Amazon)

Amazon.com on Tuesday launched its first foray into digital downloads for games. The new online store offers more than 600 casual titles without the need for physical media. Amazon says all the titles at launch are under either $6.99 or $9.99 with older titles leaning towards the lower end of the spectrum. As an added promotion, the company is giving away three free titles, which gamers have a week to scoop up before the prices return to normal.

The launch comes just a little over two months since Amazon acquired Reflexive Entertainment, a casual-game service that is still selling titles with its own DRM solution and store front. In Amazon's case, purchased games must be downloaded with a special download tool similar to what's required to grab music tracks from the company's MP3 service. The games then phone home the first time you launch them to verify the purchase information.

Each game can be played for 30 minutes as a timed trial before the need to purchase. This model directly competes with that from Yahoo Games and to a certain degree Valve's Steam service, although unlike Valve, Amazon is not yet offering a download service for larger AAA titles from major publishers.

The service is PC-only for now, which is mostly a limitation from game developers who don't offer the titles on computers running OS X or Linux. However, a Mac version of the store is likely in the works.

My CNET News colleague Charles Cooper's kvetching about YouTube not offering a download option for political videos seems to be answered. Such an option now appears right underneath the player on certain videos, including President-elect Barack Obama's weekly addresses.

While users have long been able to grab YouTube clips both with Flash rippers and H.264 stream downloaders, this would be the first time such an option has appeared on the site as an official offering. The new option gives users a full-quality H.264 file--the very same copy that's sent out to YouTube-capable set top boxes and iPhones.

Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig seems to be the first to have noticed the new option, and says it will be spreading out to other government-uploaded videos. I've pinged Google to see if and when the option will be made available for everyone else's videos--and am still waiting to hear back. Update: YouTube's Hunter Walk says "Nothing further to announce at this time. We're just excited to have made this feature available in preparation for a historic week in American politics."

One thing to note here is the timing. This comes just two days after the announcement that Google Video would no longer be accepting user uploaded videos. Google Video let you download an iPod and PSP-friendly H.264 encoded clip that's the exact same size as what YouTube is now offering, leading me to believe that this will soon be available as a standard publishing feature for those who enable it on their clips.

Some YouTube videos now have a direct download option that gives users a H.264 encoded copy of the video to play offline and use in mash-ups.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

We don't write much about old boring installable software here on Webware. We're not about that. But a new company, OpenCandy, is taking a proven Web 2.0 model--the ad network--and applying it to software installation. It's very clever. And it will probably work.

The concept is this: If you're a software developer, you can insert the OpenCandy library in your app's installer (Windows only, so far). When users install the app, they get a pitch to also download another app. As the host of the pitch, you can either hand-pick apps you want to associate with, for free (the spread-the-love model), or you can have OpenCandy select from apps that will pay you a bounty if your users choose to install them (the make-money model). Or you can specify a mix: some users will get one of your hand-picked apps pitched at them, others will get one that the network has chosen.

Two installs for the price of one: OpenCandy recommends downloads that compliment the program you're installing.

(Credit: OpenCandy)

The module, when it runs, can base its pitches on information from the user's computer, which it gathers from the installer. Since installers can sniff the registry to determine what hardware and software is installed on the PC, the recommendations can be specific. For example, the module can tell if the user has one or more developer's tools installed, and make a pitch for product like Notepad++, a developer's editor.

Mercifully, the pitch to download the additional software is always opt-in. If you blithely just press "next" on each installation screen, you won't get the additional product.

Developers who want to take advantage of the network currently have to contact OpenCandy to get onboard, although in the future getting added in may be self-serve. When developers sign up, they can specify the bounty they will pay to other developers, and what types of users they want to pitch their apps to.

I expect that a lot of Web services with downloadable components (think uploaders, toolbars, AIR apps, and so on) will want to use this program, since desktop-resident pointers to Web services are potentially good traffic drivers.

OpenCandy is based on a model that has been proven at least once. CEO Darrius Thompson built the product after adding the download bounty program to DivX, which he co-founded. He says that the program generated millions of dollars a month for DivX, as a ride-along to the company's consumer software. And that's just one product.

This is a good business idea for riding on top of the still-kicking software industry.

Developers also get analytics.