political

IFilm is one of the most prominent Internet companies to sign a deal with Acacia Research, the company that says it owns patent rights to on-demand streaming media. Acacia announced the deal today.

Acacia is seeking royalties from virtually every operation--cable TV, Internet, satellite, hotel in-room movies--that streams audio or video in any way. Disney's signed, along with a host of others. Acacia isn't asking for much, and most companies appear to think that agreeing to pay is cheaper than fighting a patent lawsuit. The company only reported $666,000 of revenue on the patent licenses last quarter, … Read more

The San Jose Mercury News says MSN's music store may appear this week (registration required). This is the online store that Microsoft is launching to compete with iTunes. It will probably be part of the company's newest Media Player software--but if so, that might also trigger some competitive concerns. As long as they continue providing links to Napster and others in the software, it will probably pass legal muster, though.

The company scheduled, and then canceled, a big digital media event for reporters next week. Gates was even rumored to be attending. Supposedly too many people had conflicting … Read more

Boeing and iPass say it'll be just six months before many more travelers can whip out their laptops and log in to the Net using a Wi-Fi connection at 30,000 feet. For now, only German carrier Lufthansa offers this, but Boeing says seven additional airlines are wiring their planes for wireless surfing.

This is cool, and I'll probably use it, but here's my prediction. We're going to hear about a terrorist component to this soon. We'll hear about al-Qaida planning coordinated attacks onboard by using instant message-equipped laptops, and then Homeland Security will get … Read more

But bring some snacks for the wait. CED Magazine has a column on the Bells getting interested in high-quality video over DSL, particularly if ADSL2+ comes along. One of the driving factors may be high-quality compression codecs like Microsoft's Windows Media 9 and MPEG-4 AVC.

But for context, let's go back to one of my own 1999 stories about SBC's "Project Pronto" investments: "This is going to make streaming video real," Steve Dimmett, vice president of marketing for SBC, told me. "This is going to be video on demand."

The Bells … Read more

Ma Bell head Dave Dorman sat down with us for an hour today to talk about how he's turning the company around after the collapse of its cable business, the sale of the wireless business, and his own withdrawal from the traditional consumer phone business. The future is VoIP, he says. On the business side, he's got twenty-some billion dollars of revenue from data and wholesale products, and that's still looking good. But forget about consumer infrastructure, he's happy to work with the cable companies from now on.

That means that on the consumer side, the … Read more

Electronic Arts says it has sold more than 1.3 million copies of Madden NFL 2005, and signed up 315,000 new accounts for online play, in the game's first week of release. This online tournament biz has been one of broadband's quiet success stories (and is helping change the culture of mainstream gaming). You hear a lot more about EverQuest and Counter-Strike in the gaming community, but in fact there are now hundreds of thousands of regular sports fans joining online game groups who wouldn't be caught dead swinging a +1 sword online.

A representative from the New York Times late Thursday contacted me with some breaking news. The venerable paper of record was posting rare video clips and interviews from inside Iraq's Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf.

For people following the war, this was a glimpse inside the last hold-out of radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army. While news reports today differ over whether the militants have given up one of the holiest Shiite shrines, the video clips were a testament to how the Web can offer a parallel, multi-dimensional element to the news.

The media has been … Read more

According to research firm Parks Associates, ISPs have helped install more than 1 million home networks for their customers, and are on track to reach 2 million by the end of this year.

That's a drop in the bucket, I'd say. There are now 29 million households with broadband in the U.S. Google is temporarily failing to find me what proportion of those have a little Wi-Fi hub going, but I'd bet it's far higher than 2 million. Wi-Fi is simple plug and play these days, and there's not much role for ISPs to … Read more

Much broadband gaming news. The new version of Valve's Counter-Strike, for a while the most popular online computer game in the world, hit the Net last night. The developers used BitTorrent to help distribute the game, easing demand on their own servers, according to Broadband Reports.

Valve's been having a string of bad luck. Last year, a hacker broke in and stole source code for much of their upcoming release Half-Life 2 (which is about as eagerly anticipated as the average new Beatles album). This week, they apparently uploaded the entire script for Half-Life 2 along with some … Read more