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Weekly News Roundup (4 November 2012)

Sunday, November 4th, 2012

Welcome to November. Not much news this week, despite a very active search. You have to think that Hurricane Sandy might be partially responsible for the relative news lull, although with the US election coming up too (and Halloween), there’s only so much news cycle to go around. As usual, the best way to help Hurricane Sandy victims is to donate via the Red Cross, as they’re best placed to get goods and supplies to people that need it the most.

So without a lot of news, I’ll be talking out of my you-know-what about a wider range of topics that are of interest, but not necessarily stuff that’s usually talked about here (or stuff that wasn’t important enough to get its own news article, but still nevertheless interesting). Since I’e already mentioned the US election, I might as well post my electoral vote prediction. I’m a huge election nerd, although I don’t think I’ve paid as much attention to this presidential election as the last one, it’s still “fun” to make a few predictions or two. I don’t think Romney has much of a chance to be elected president, and I don’t think this election is as close as the media wants us to believe (a close election = better ratings, no doubt). Based on the polls and analysis I’ve read, I think only Florida, Colorado and Virginia are really up for play, and even winning all three won’t really help Romney without Ohio, which I think is just out of reach.

Anyway, we’ll find out one way or another on Tuesday, which is also Melbourne Cup day here. I might just put money where my mouth is on Tuesday with a flutter on horses and the election in which one of the candidate’s wife owns a horse.

Oh yes, the news. Here we go …

When Megaupload was shuttered by the US government back in January, the entire file hosting industry went crazy overnight it seems trying to position themselves away from being the next target of legal action. Those at RapidShare must have been quietly please at the prescient decisions they had already taken to move away from the, often unfair, association of the services they provide to web piracy. But even RapidShare, having been removed from the MPAA/RIAA’s “bad websites” list a year earlier, was taken aback at scale of the Megaupload seizure and reacted, and possibly overreacted, by throttling free downloads to a snail paced 30 kB/s.

RapidShare removes download speed throttling for its free download service, originally put in after Megaupload’s seizure to repel pirates from using RapidShare as a replacement

It was only until this week that RapidShare felt safe enough to remove this throttling, but only because they have “more efficient” measures on the way, to be announced towards the end of 2012. I guess there just had to be a more efficient way of repelling pirates than to mangle their own services, even for those that were using the site legally.

In my mind, the whole industry is still in “freaked out” mode over the Megaupload thing, forgetting that the law is actually on their side as long as they properly enforce the DMCA, and do not reward users for uploading popular (aka pirated) files. RapidShare, perhaps because they were always one of the larger targets, I think have gone overboard with their anti-piracy initiatives. I don’t think they’ll ever convince rights holders that they warrant the right to exist, so doing what’s required is, well, all that’s required.

The only person not freaking out appears to be the person most affected, Kim Dotcom. He has promised that the next Mega-project, Megabox, will be launched in January, almost exactly a year after Megaupload’s seizure. This too may be an overreaction to the seizure, trying to get back into a game which may already be lost, but at least it’s not a cowardly reaction.

Speaking of overreactions, the UK’s Telegraph has a blog in which the blogger, James Rhodes, described his experience attending Sony’s Skyfall (trailer) premier in London, and how he felt more like a suspected terrorist than an invited guest, thanks to the anti-piracy measures being deployed.

It’s no longer a surprise to see cinema stewards spying on you during a session with night vision goggles, but when Rhodes was warned via leaflet, and email, that “physical searches of your belongings and person” was going to happen at the premier, he must have wondered if he was actually going to a premier, or to a high security facility (like MI6 HQ perhaps)? And what dangerous things were the security guards looking for? Digital cameras and smartphones, most likely, or any other recording devices (I wonder if legal weapons such as knives were actually allowed to be carried inside, which would be kind of ironic).

To me, all of this paranoia shows us just how insecure movie studios are these days. But not about piracy – it has always been around – but about the quality of their films. They do produce a lot of crap these days (and at a much higher cost than ever before, thanks to lazy and liberal use of CGI), and so I guess it’s only natural that their first reaction to their own films is that people aren’t going to pay for them if they don’t have to. But the truth is that good films, like Skyfall according to reviews, don’t have a lot to fear from pirates at all, especially not during theatrical release. Going to a cinema and watching a movie on the big screen has no real illegal alternatives, and if people are not going, it’s more to do with their perception of the fees being not worth it due to the poor quality of the film, the presentation, or just the high cost of it all. Studios have taken filmgoers for granted for too long, and when market forces and competition (yes, piracy is a competitor, if not for the theatrical run, then for the home video release at least) calls on them to up their game and produce better (even if it means fewer) products, they have been far too arrogant in their assumption that all their misfortune is completely down to “thieves”.

Every industry has to adjust to changing consumer demands. Why should be the film industry be any different?

High Definition

A major change is happening with the home video market, but for the most part, studios have embraced it, if not 100% enthusiastically. Everyone thought that the logical successor to DVDs would be Blu-ray, but I think the actual successor is streaming video – from the sales figures, in which every percentage in decline in DVD is matched by an increase in streaming (with Blu-ray doing its own thing, mostly), it seems this is very much the case.

Amazon Prime Instant Video - New Additions

Amazon Prime is gaining market share at the expense of Netflix, but it’s still a long way off from being truly competitive

As a keen subscriber of Amazon’s Prime Instant Streaming service, I’ve personally seen the service grow from a handful of good shows and movies to a service that, as long as it continues to grow, may one day challenge the behemoth that is Netflix. There’s still not enough TV shows and new release content, but it’s getting there, and thanks to the Kindle Fire, Amazon has its own hardware platform to promote the service as well (a strategy that has worked so well, that both Google and Apple have both decided to play catch-up).

And a new survey seems to confirm that Amazon Instant is fast becoming a player in the lucrative subscription VOD market, with 22% of those surveyed now a member, up 5 points from seven month ago. That’s still nowhere near Netflix’s dominant position of 82%, but Netflix’s share has shrank 9% during the same period, which might be a cause for concern for the company.

For transactional VOD, Apple’s iTunes is still the most popular platform, with 16% of those surveyed having purchased content. This only represents a single percentage point growth, so there’s definitely more potential in SVOD (I still think Apple will have a say in this, at some point).

For devices used to consume content, for the first time, the iPad overtakes connected Blu-ray players as the most popular platform (32% vs 31%, changed from 25% vs 33% back in February). No doubt Amazon’s decision to release an iOS app for their streaming service might have played a factor here, as few Blu-ray players actually support Amazon Prime. Amazon has so far revealed no plans to have an Android version of their streaming app, most likely in an effort to prevent the cannibalization of Kindle Fire sales, even though this would greatly help with the adoption of the streaming service – this is where it still fails to properly compete with Netflix, which is available everywhere. Still, the Kindle Fire platform has proven a success for Amazon, if for no other reason than the fact that both Google and Apple have copied Amazon’s play with their own 7″-ish, video friendly tablets.

Star Wars joins the Disney family … hope the new films are better than the prequels

So I’m betting you’ve heard about the almost too strange to be true story of the sale of Lucasfilms to Disney, and the release of more Star Wars movies starting in 2015. Reaction to the announcement has been all over the place, as the thoughts of Disney getting their hands on Star Wars left a bad taste in people’s mouths. I’m actually quite positive about the whole thing, because I think George Lucas has taken the Star Wars franchise as far as he can (and it was good to read that Lucas plans to donate all of the $4b earned from the sale to a foundation focused on education).

Everyone and their Kowakian monkey-lizard seems to wanting Joss Whedon to write and direct the next Star Wars, the director having directed Disney’s hottest and most recent success, The Avengers (which I finally watched this week, after catching up on all the other related movies – it was a pretty solid film). I’m a big fan of Whedon, and I think he would do a great job on Star Wars (and if offered the chance, I don’t see how any self-respecting geek could turn down the opportunity). With my luck, it will be Michael Bay! Although I did have a dream once where the New Republic’s latest and greatest battlecruisers go into battle with the Imperial remnants, in what seem to be a very one sided battle against their ageing Star Destroyers. But the seemingly normal Star Destroyers suddenly transform into something much more dangerous, showing exactly what the Imperials have been up to since the Battle of Endor. Return of the Empire!

(Makes “call me” gesture in the general direction of Bob Iger)

That’s it for the week. Have a nice one.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Movies, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (4 November 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (21 October 2012)

Sunday, October 21st, 2012

Welcome again. Hard to believe 2012 is almost at an end. If the world is really going to end soon, then it does seem very quiet considering what is about to happen. The calm before the solar-flare-induced-mega-storms perhaps. While we wait for the obligatory twenty-storey high mega-tsunamis to arrive, the rise of Blu-ray continues unabated (I know, shit segue). The release of The Avengers on Blu-ray for the last week of September has allowed Blu-ray to post a record set of market share figures. For that particular week, 44% of all discs sold in the United States were Blu-rays, with The Avengers movie itself getting a Blu-ray sales share of 71.65%, selling more than 2 copies on Blu-ray or Blu-ray combo for every DVD version sold. There are still a couple of big releases coming, and with the holidays tending to favour Blu-ray over DVD if recent trends hold, the magical 50% mark may very well be broken in 2012. As long as the world doesn’t end before then.

An okay-ish news week, not too much, but a few interesting ones to waddle through. Let’s get started.

I’m a huge Star Trek fan, and one of the most remarkable things about the series, from the Original Series, to the barely bearable Enterprise, is how it manages titillate us with visions of how we can all benefit from future technologies (some of which have even become reality, for example the earlier communicators and flip phones, or more recently, the Padd and iPad). Having grown up with The Next Generation, the technology that excited me the most (other than the Holodeck, which was an offshoot of the same technology) was the replicator. To be able to create matter from energy, and thus be able to create anything you want at the touch of a button, is to me, the holy grail of science and a technology that will change the way everything works.

3D printing could solve world hunger and make a medical breakthrough one day, but DRM is casting its shadow on yet another promising technology

So the emergence of 3D printing, for me, is an exciting one. While the current generation of 3D printers are severely limited in scope in relation to what they can and cannot create (remember back to the first ever 2D printer, and how limited they were compared to printers of today), it feels like the start of something new and brilliant. And when The Pirate Bay launched their “physibles” section, to allow schematics to be shared, downloaded and printed, with their altruistic, perhaps right now unrealistic aim of being able “print food for hungry people”, it seems that we might be heading towards something really exciting.

And then reality sets in.

This week, a company headed by a former Microsoft CTO has been granted a patent that will add DRM to physibles, to prevent the unauthorised printing of everything from plastic toys, to edible foods, even to human skin. The terribly exciting future has just been shacked to the horribly restrictive past.

Just imagine, Captain Picard ordering a cup of Tea, Earl Grey, Hot, and instead of a cup of delicious tea appearing, the English tea drinking Frenchman is instead asked to key in the serial number for both the tea and the cup it comes in, before waiting for the ship’s computer to receive, via subspace, the authorisation unlock code that would permit good old Jean-Luc to be able to finally enjoy his cup of tea. Of course, the created objects would just have to be programmed, within its molecules, to self-destruct or to do something even more horrible if Picard does not return the items promptly back to the replicator for disassembling after enjoyment, as this is a condition that’s been written down in the 60 page license agreement that Picard had to agree to before being allowed to even order the drink.

Even the Ferengi aren’t that avaricious, I suspect.

American Assembly - Copy Culture Survey - Music File Collections: P2P Users vs non-P2P Users (US And Germany) Source: American Assembly

People who pirate a lot of music, have more music and buy more music. Not rocket science, but still doesn’t seem to be well understood within the music industry.

To the credit of the music industry, they moved on from DRM pretty quickly, if not quietly. Although it’s probably something they still regret to this day. What they haven’t moved away from is their desire to punish their enemies: the music downloaders that they call “thieves”. But a new comprehensive study has found that, perhaps to the surprise of only the music industry themselves, people who pirate a lot of music are also the music industry’s best customers.

There seems to be this idea that there are two mutually exclusive groups of people, downloaders and buyers, when in reality, people who buy also download. And if you think about it, it isn’t all that surprising that people who download a lot of music actually love music, probably more so than people who don’t download as much. And music lovers buy more music.

And this is where I think the industry’s anti-piracy strategy fails, because by trying to kick pirates off the net, they may end up keeping their best customers from being able to continue buying. The correct strategy, in my opinion, starts with identifying the reasons why people that buy a lot of music also chooses to download some of them at the same time. It will be a complicated answer, but I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to simply labels these people as “thieves”.

Do they only buy content that they’re sure is “good”, and use piracy as a way to discover new content (might this explain why for music, Spotify is doubly good in allowing people to use it instead of piracy to discover music, and at the same time monetize the free streaming)? Did they simply run out of money and did not want to stop experiencing new music? Is it an issue of availability, ease of use? The answers to these question should then determine what the anti-piracy strategy should be.

The study also revealed that music downloading is actually a much smaller problem than traditional piracy methods, including sharing with friends/family and good old CD ripping. This corresponds with the RIAA’s own research on the matter and it kind of makes a mockery of the claim that the music industry’s sufferings started with the emergence of the Internet. You do have to wonder if there’s another agenda in play for putting so much focus on the web piracy, rather than just a major case of scapegoating. Perhaps by exaggerating the Internet piracy problem, the industry can get policymakers to step in and help protect their dying business model. And perhaps the right lobbying will also give the industry more control over content distribution on the Internet to ensure a bigger than warranted slice of any eventual pie.

And in the eagerness of help, policymakers ended up creating copyright laws that either don’t reflect real world situations, or are so heavily biased, cause everyone to become hysterical about the whole thing. ISPs and web hosts have been the front lines of this war, unfairly so in many cases (ISPs are no different to telephone companies, and web hosts are akin to landlords that rent store-fronts to businesses – neither of them should be made liable for what their customers/tenants get up to, especially when they cannot be aware of what’s going on without taking extraordinary measures, such as spying on their customer/tenants). And their fear of getting sued has allowed some ridiculous situations to develop.

Just this week, web host ServerBeach deactivated an account hosting 1.45 million educational blogs because of a single DMCA notice for a single page on just one of these blogs. This particular example may point more to a communications breakdown between web host and client, as opposed to being simply a case of copyright hysteria, but ServerBeach’s written DMCA policy still seems to be a case of deactivate first, ask questions later. ISPs and web hosts need to know their “safe harbor” rights, and should be willing to defends these rights even as rights holders try to water it down to suit their own agendas.

The Pirate Bay moves to the cloud to create a more resilient, more raid-proof version of the website. Source methodshop.com @ Flickr, Creative Commons

And if web hosts can get into a tizz about a single link on a single page on one of 1.45 million blogs, then you do wonder sometimes how the hell The Pirate Bay manages to find web hosts willing to host their stuff. But the TPB folks seems to be well aware that this is either already a problem or will be in the near future, and so they’ve turned to the mythical cloud for their solution. Moving The Pirate Bay’s website to the cloud does seem like the most sensible thing to do for the website that’s often the target of law enforcement, and also victims of their own success (being so popular and all, the logistics of keeping the website online, on a budget, cannot be easy).

By using virtual machine instances on cloud providers in different countries, and with everything to and from the cloud encrypted (un-snoopable, and with the cloud provider probably not even aware of what is actually being hosted), a new layer of resilience, privacy and security has been added, and all apparently for a lower cost than before. If one cloud provider goes down, another can be sourced easily and a new instance can be made up and running in short order. Replicate this that a couple of times more, and trying to kill TPB would then be as difficult as slaying the mythical Hydra – cut off one head, and two more will take its place.

All the unwanted attention that TPB has be getting, with authorities trying to trap the elusive website with ever more elaborate mousetraps, seems to have only produced one thing: a better mouse!

And now for the best part of the WNR – the end of it! See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (21 October 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (16 September 2012)

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

Welcome to another issue of the WNR. For yet another month, I waited naively in the vain hope that more figures would start leaking out for August’s NPD analysis, but alas, that wasn’t to be the case. So as usual, the gaming section is where August’s NPD will live (on life support, coming in and out of the coma).

iPhone 5: Faster, lighter, thinner, and bigger where it counts (the screen). But is it still exciting and innovative?

Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet week. I suppose I should talk about the iPhone 5 release or whatever. Was that perhaps the most anti-climatic launch event in Apple’s recent history? Through the various leaks, almost everything about the new iPhone had been fairly well known long before the Wednesday launch event – Apple seems to have given up on the almost impossible job of trying to keep things secret. And even if we somehow didn’t know about the larger (well, taller anyway) screen, LTE and the other new stuff, none of it would have been a huge surprise anyway. There’s nothing wrong with incrementally improving an already well established product, but having failed to keep up with its competitors in terms of screen size, and features such as NFC, the least Apple could have done was to inspire us with some of the ways to use newly added features. This has been their strength in the recent past, so to hear them talk more about “faster CPUs”, “better graphics”, brings back painful memories of the PC upgrade cycle and how pointless it all was talking about MHz and RAM sizes.

With all that said, the iPhone 5 is set to become the fastest selling gadget of all time, so maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about (more than probable). Vote in our poll to tell us your thoughts about the new iPhone.

Google’s self-censorship continues this week, with The Pirate Bay joining the list of blacklisted search terms that will no longer be part of Google’s Autocomplete and Instant search products. The name of the website, and its domain name, joins notorious terms such as “torrent” and “RapidShare” as part of Google’s blacklist.

I have no idea what this latest move, part of Google’s appeasement policy, will actually do to combat piracy at all. I guess people who want to search for The Pirate Bay, but don’t know how to spell the words “Pirate”, “Bay” and “The”, may just give up and buy movies and music instead, or something. Interestingly, searching for “teh pyrat bey” still brings up TPB website as the first result, as Google’s auto-correct features appears to still show love for the website.

Meanwhile, TPB co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm has arrived safe and relatively well back in Sweden to face new hacking charges, and to serve the prison sentence imposed on his for his crime of being initially part of The Pirate Bay (as well as pay the million bucks he will be unable to pay), and further jail time for not appearing for a court hearing earlier in the year.

Speaking of millions of bucks in damages, the legal merry-go-around continues for Jamie Thomas-Rasset, as the appeals court ruled this week that the damages decision from the second of her three previous trials was the one that was perfectly valid, and that the judge had no right in those trials to reduce the damages amount to something reasonable like $54,000. Instead, Thomas-Rasset will be asked to pay $222,000 for the act of sharing 24 songs. I guess that’s better than the $1.92 million from the third trial.

There’s no doubt that a large percentage of the $222,000 is punitive in its nature, as even considering the thousand songs that Thomas-Rasset is supposed to have shared (only 24 of those were included as part of the trial), there’s no way that $222,000 worth of damages could have occurred via direct damages. If we take the calculation used to come up with the $222,000 in damages, and couple it with the 11,000 copyrighted songs that the RIAA identified were being shared on LimeWire before its demise, each having being shared a thousand time (the RIAA actually claimed each were shared “thousands” of times), the resulting total damages would be worth excess of $101,750,000,000 (that’s $101 billion). Even if you take the $222,000 and divide by the 1,000 songs that Thomas-Rasset is alleged to have shared, multiply that by the LimeWire figures, then that’s still more than $2.4 billion. And this was just one music sharing method.

The real question is, given Thomas-Rasset’s intent (ie. to download songs for free), is it really fair to class her actions along with wilful pirates that make and sell counterfeit CDs, or start websites fraudulently charging people to download songs that are pirated in the first place? Her intent was to save a few thousands dollars, at best, by downloading instead of buying, so should the punitive nature of the damages be hundreds of times greater?

As controversial as the French “three-strikes” Hadopi regime has been, with the very same thing coming to the US (but twice as many strikes! Beat that Frenchies. USA! USA!), the trials and tribulations of both Thomas-Rasset and her compatriot Joel Tenenbaum would have been far more agreeable if they had fallen foul of these graduated response laws, rather than having to go through the civil court system.

Ironically, three-or-more strikes actually works out better for those that do admit to pirating stuff. At least compared to the threat of a civil lawsuit. But for one craftsman in rural France, his Kafkaesque ordeal might point to the more unfair aspects of graduated response.

Alain Prevost has the unfortunate distinction of being the first person to be fined under France’s Hadopi laws. This is despite Prevost proving he wasn’t responsible for any downloads by bringing the real perpetrator, his soon to be ex-wife, to court to testify to this fact. Prevost was still fined 150 euros for failing to secure his Internet connection.

Having received two warning emails and letters regarding illegal downloads, Prevost actually implemented his own punishment by disconnecting his Internet account, and instructed his wife’s lawyer to write to Hadopi to explain everything. But the Hadopi agency did not like the fact that Prevost stopped responding to his emails (hard to do when you don’t have an Internet connection), and wrote to Prevost to order him to travel all the way to Paris to explain himself. Prevost declined the invitation, feeling such a trivial matter should not warrant the expense of travel. This apparently made Hadopi even more angry, and it was at this point the police were involved. Prevost was summoned to the police station to explain himself, and it is here that Prevost made his biggest, and possibly only mistake, in this whole ordeal – he told the truth!

Prevost told the police that his wife was most likely the responsible party for the downloads (something that his wife would agree to testify to), and that in a show of good faith, he would hire the services of a local computer expert, at his own expense, to clean his computer of any infringing files. If Prevost thought that explaining away his responsibility and taking pre-emptive actions to remove any infringing content would lead to the end of the matter, he would be sadly mistaken.

Prevost was then summoned to appear in court over his audacity to ignore Hadopi. Prevost brought along his wife to testify to the fact that he had not done anything wrong, but having told the truth to the police earlier on, this was used against him by the court who opined that Prevost must have had prior knowledge of his wife’s illegal activities, and therefore was still responsible. Prevost was eventually fined 150 euros, a lower amount than the prosecutors had asked for due to the fact that Prevost has no criminal record.

All of this because his wife might have downloaded two Rihanna songs, and all to only result in a small fine that probably doesn’t even cover a tenth of the expense that Hadopi used to catch this criminal mastermind. And what benefit to rights holders? Who knows.

High Definition

After the demise of HD DVD, everyone (including yours truly) thought that the next battle would be between Blu-ray and DVDs, and to an extent, that has been true. But the super quick way in which services like Netflix, VUDU, Amazon and iTunes have become ubiquitous among today’s connected multimedia devices suggests that the real battle is not between the new and old disc formats, but between having a disc format and, well, having no discs at all.

Fox Digital HD will allow HD digital copies to be purchased weeks before the DVD/Blu-ray ones

So when Fox, one of the biggest and earliest supporters of Blu-ray revealed plans to release purchasable digital downloads of their movies ahead of their Blu-ray and DVD releases, a few eyebrows were definitely raise. While early release digital downloads are not new in the strictest sense, they’ve mostly been one-offs – a release here, a release there. But the Fox initiative plans to bring the strategy forward for most of their A-listers, including the upcoming releases Prometheus and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and they’re doing it across as many devices as possible (supported platforms currently include Amazon, CinemaNow, iTunes, PlayStation, VUDU and Xbox Live).

And most importantly, all of these releases as part of Fox’s “Digital HD” initiative will be available on glorious HD (well, glorious by today’s download standards), thus directly competing with Blu-ray (although HT die-hards like myself might disagree, at least when talking about the quality of HD).

The immediate risk for Fox is that the digital downloads will cannibalize their disc sales, and also increase the risk of piracy. So Fox are either super confident about the DRM systems being used by its third party partners, or they’ve realised that pirates will pirate anyway, and that the pirated version would most likely already have been available long before the DRM-laden digital download version makes its official appearance.

August’s NPD figures, well what was made available anyway, showed nothing particularly alarming or surprising. The Xbox 360 continued to be the most popular console, with 193,000 units sold, down 37% compared to the same month last year.

The 193,000 was 48% of the entire home based console market, leaving 209,000 units between the PS3 and Wii. Given the most recent known results, this probably breaks down to something like 130,000 and 79,000 for the PS3 and Wii respectively, possibly even higher for the PS3 given that the proximity to the Wii U’s introduction.

Speaking of the Wii U, Apple weren’t the only ones to have launched a product this week, with Nintendo officially launching the $299 Wii U (with a more expensive “premium” version for $349, with more storage and accessories). Surprisingly, the rumours from last week about the release date was in fact correct: November 18, for North America.

Wii U TVii: Digital download and streaming for the Wii U, but the optical drive is a no-go zone for movies

What I found most interesting was the TVii announcement, which is set to turn the Wii U into a digital media hub in the same way that the PS3 and Xbox 360 already are. Supporting the latest digital streaming services such as Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and also offering support for TiVo DVRs, the Wii U is an odd device in that it does use Blu-ray sized optical discs, but it appears the only way to play movies would be via digital streaming or downloads. The next evolution of the game console may very well see the disc drive removed, with games being distributed digitally too.

But we’d all need bigger bandwidth allowances, if not unlimited quotas, before that can become a reality. Personally speaking, I’ve used up half of my allowance last month viewing Amazon Prime streaming titles, to the point where I had to ration my usage towards the end of the cycle. An additional $30 to move up to the next bandwidth tier doesn’t seem economical to me, at the moment.

That’s it for this issue. See you in seven.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, Gaming, News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (16 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (2 September 2012)

Sunday, September 2nd, 2012

How’s your week been? Me? Well, I’ve recently been working on a new project that’s come far along enough for me to provide some vague hints about. It’s another game app (and not just for Android this time), but one that’s a bit closer to home in terms of subject matter (as opposed to being a galaxy far far away). I hope to have it finished within a month or so, but that’s probably not going to happen given my track record.

As for news, not a lot, but interesting enough, so let’s get started.

Political lobbying is an art, and the MPAA have been one of the better performers on the stage of politics. Their bi-partisan approach to lobbying, not that dissimilar to the kind employed by Wall Street, is extremely effective at creating a solid foundation of support from within both major political parties. And with the Republican convention just finished in Tampa Florida, and the MPAA wasted no time in deploying their strategy yet again by praising the Republicans on their anti-piracy platform.

The Republican Convention is barely over, and the MPAA is already issuing high praises for their light on details copyright platform. Image/Photo Credit: Fifth World Art @ Flickr, CC

This is despite the Republican platform on copyright enforcement, particularly the online kind, being very light on details and high on rhetoric. There’s nothing in there specifically referring to any solutions or measures to tackle the web piracy “scourge”, with most of the platform being focused on dealing with nation states and the unspecified threat of “foreign” entities. But it’s hard to imagine that anything a potential Romney administration would do on the copyright issue that the MPAA wouldn’t be happy with, just as they’ve been pretty well served by the Obama administration these last 3 and something years, and will most likely continue to be well served should President Obama win re-election.

The truth is that both parties are firmly in the pockets of the MPAA, and that’s really a sad state of affairs. The fact that the MPAA will most likely be equally gushing of the Democrat’s platform when it is released at their convention shows why politicians are no longer caring about carrying out the wishes of the people, at least not on the copyright issue. There are obvious exceptions, of course, but you get the feeling that there’s too much respect for big business in Washington, from both sides of politics, when, given their actions in the last decade or so, it’s not really merited as well.

One well known victim of big business, the music industry in this case, is PhD student Joel Tenenbaum. Unfortunately, it seems that his copyright nightmare is set to continue, as a new judge this week found that the original penalty of $675,000 for downloading 30 songs was perfectly reasonable. The judge cited Tenenbaum’s disregard for warnings about his illegal activities, and also the fact that the wilful infringement fine of $22,500 per song isn’t even close to the highest possible, which is $150,000.

Joel Tenenbaum ordered to pay $675,000 again after new judge says fine is perfectly reasonable for 30 song downloads

Of course, this latest ruling goes against the rulings of both the original judge, and the appellate court judges, all of whom agreed that the $675,000 was excessive (they only disagreed on the reason for why this was excessive, with the original judge using constitutional grounds, while the appellate court judges did not feel this was appropriate). With these earlier rulings in hand, it’s unlikely Tenenbaum’s lawyers would simply accept this most recent verdict, and instead will continue on with their appeals.

Even if you include the upload component of Tenenbaum’s actions, it’s hard to see where $675,000 worth of damages come from. From a punitive point of view, perhaps, but surely $67,500 is just as punishing for a PhD student. And let’s not forget that statutory damages were invented in an era where most if not all copyright lawsuits involved companies, not individuals, and most of those infringement cases involved profit based motives, not the motive to simply save a few bucks on CDs (especially since downloads, especially the cheap iTunes kind, were rare at the time Tenenbaum did his deeds. I suspect he wouldn’t have done it if he had the choices available to him today, which speaks more about the industry’s late response to the Internet than the actions of Tenenbaum).

The RIAA obviously wanted to make an example of Tenenbaum, but this has not had the effect they had hoped for (to scare people to not pirate), and the longer this drags out, the worse it looks for the RIAA. If they hadn’t been so greedy (not for the money, but for their wish of an ever greater impact the verdict was to produce), they would have accepted the $67,500 verdict and the statement made from this verdict would have been a much clearer, cleaner one. Instead, they now look even more like bullies, and the back and forth movement within the legal system actually makes their case look much weaker as a result, in my opinion.

High Definition

Two weeks ago, I mentioned the news that the Moving Picture Expert Group had formally approved the draft standard for H.265, or more sexily known as HEVC (okay, not that much more sexy, I know). A lot of bold statements were made back then, with claims of HEVC being twice as efficient as H.264, but a lot of it was based on data analysis, rather than a subject analysis of the actual visuals (what looks good from a signal-to-noise ratio point of view, may not look good for the human eye).

This week, the results from a human visual study has been released that backs up the claims that HEVC will, given the same bitrate, offer better quality visuals than H.264 (already considered near “reference” for high bitrate encodings, such as Blu-ray). The best thing about this study is that, instead of looking at quality from a boring mathematical and error analysis perspective, this one simply involved 30 people (with some training beforehand) looking at videos and judging, subjectively, which was better.

The result? HEVC was comfortably the winner, especially at the lower bitrates. The study used videos encoded in near 4K resolution, and so by using bitrates as low as 0.75 Mbps (this was for an animated clip), the low end efficiencies of HEVC were fully exposed. Whereas H.264 struggled (understandably at 0.75 Mbps for 4K content), HEVC still managed to produce a more than decent job (a rating of just under 70 out of 100). For more complicated scenes, for example a live video of pedestrians crossing a busy intersection, 5 Mbps in HEVC yielded the same subjective visual quality as a 15 Mbps H.264 encoding. It’s only towards the higher end that H.264’s perceived quality started to catch up with HEVC’s, but it’s clear that for things like mobile or even broadcast TV transmissions, HEVC will be able to carry 4K streams without using up more bandwidth than current 720p or 1080p streams.

HEVC should help with the broadcast of 4K Ultra HD broadcasts, without requiring more bandwidth than today’s 1080p broadcasts. Image/Photo Credit: Pop Culture Geek @ Flickr, CC

This suggest that the need for a dramatic increase on the capacity being offered by Blu-ray at the moment, even for 4K content, may not be that great. Although even if the Blu-ray disc format remains unchanged, players will still need to be changed in order to support HEVC decoding. But versatile, and powerful devices like smartphones, tablets and maybe even game consoles, could all theoretically be upgraded via software to support HEVC. So for example, given a powerful enough device, Netflix could roll out an update that enables HEVC decoding, and allow Blu-ray quality 1080p video to be streamed without having to dramatically increase bandwidth requirements. But if a video format is tied to an optical disc, and non versatile hardware player (most Blu-ray players fall into this category, unfortunately), then there are all sorts of technical and standardization problems that makes HEVC rollout difficult without inventing a whole new optical disc format.

Probably the company still most invested in good old optical technology is Sony, one of the founding fathers of Blu-ray, but even they see the writing on the wall as this week, Sony announced they will cease production of PC optical drives starting early next year.

Instead, the company will focus more on drive-less devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and get them to tie in more with the media arm of the company and their digital distribution platform, Sony Entertainment Network. Productions of drives for their non PC devices will continue unaffected though, but it’s clear that even Blu-ray players and PS3s are becoming more of a gateway for online digital content, rather than simply doing their “full time” jobs.

Personally, I can see the move to pure digital speeding up once rightsholders get over their fear of the Internet and piracy. It’s an irrational fear, because discs can be even more easily ripped, copied and uploaded, but if you control the entire streaming platform, down to the hardware that plays it, it ends up being more ripping proof. Plus, instead of trying to make more on a selected few high profile titles, having a huge accessible library allows for “long-tail” traffic, which means you can offer a huge library of not so new stuff at much lower prices (ie. the Netflix model), and thus reducing the demand for pirated content. I would love to see some stats, but I suspect the piracy rates of all the stuff that’s already on Netflix streaming has dropped and continues to drop.

The biggest problem though, and this includes Sony’s move to create their own ecosystem by tying their hardware devices to the SEN, is that the traditional retailer will be cut out of the loop (as well as the companies that support/rely on them, like transport companies). Look at Apple – a lot of retailers sell their hardware, but only they can sell content on their devices. The closure of music stores and video rental stores is just the beginning of this phenomenon, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of solution to the problem. I would certainly hate to live in a world where all content is only available to rent or buy from a handful of companies, your Apples, Netflix and your Sonys, and I think it’s in the best interest of content owners to actually have competition. Otherwise, terms will be dictated by the select few that have a virtual monopoly on content, and nobody really wants that kind of a situation.

Problems aside, I still very much yearn for the day where I can turn on my TV and, within a couple of clicks of the remote, have at my disposal every piece of visual entertainment ever made. If nothing else, it would be a fantastic thing for preservation of older content.

That’s it for now, hope it wasn’t too painful a read. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (2 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (19 August 2012)

Sunday, August 19th, 2012

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. NPD “released” its July 2012 sales stats for US video game sales, but unfortunately, only Microsoft again chose to divulge its hardware sales stats. So no July NPD analysis, which is a shame, but there wasn’t any real surprises anyway. I’ll talk a bit about it in the gaming section below.

Another pretty full news week, so let’s get started …

So much for “do no evil”. Google gave in to the demands of the MPAA and the RIAA this week by signalling it is ready to start self-censoring its own results to reduce the visibility of alleged piracy websites. Without going as far as removing suspected websites, Google will start demoting any website that receives an unspecified number of DMCA notices.

Google has started demoting websites that receive too many DMCA notices, the image on the left shows the demoted rankings, while the image on the right (for the yet unchanged Greek version of Google) shows the previous rankings

It’s own YouTube website, and “major brands” will apparently be exempt from this new rule (webmasters have long suspected there’s one rule for the web top 100, and another rule for the rest), but the rest will now have to live in fear of the system, which is already being massive abused by those seeking an unfair advantage (57% of all filed notices, according to a Google report from 2006), and made even more attractive as a “black hat” weapon of choice now that the entire domains of competitors can be demoted. Since Google started releasing DMCA stats, the number of DMCA notifications has risen from about a million per month, to now over 4!

Except none of this will work to stop piracy, because people aren’t turning into pirates just because they see some links to The Pirate Bay on Google. I don’t know if it’s naivety, a head in sand attitude, or a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters, but the idea that good, people are being fooled and misled into downloading pirated content online is, to put it simply, hogwash. People pirate and they do it willingly, and knowingly. And they spent a lot of effort learning and honing their piracy skills. They will most likely alredy have go-to places to get their piracy fix, or custom search engines that does more work separating the wheat from the chaff, so the idea that they’re all relying on Google to find the S01E08 of The Newsroom is simply a fantasy.

But despite Google’s proactive steps in reducing piracy, the MPAA/RIAA still wants more. In a joint submission to the US Copyright Czar, the MPAA and the RIAA have called on the government to do even more in the CRusade Against Piracy (CRAP™), including going all “Megaupload” on websites like The Pirate Bay. Basically a wish-list and a preview of what the copyright landscape could be like if the MPAA/RIAA get their way, the submission also talks about increasing criminal sentences for copyright offences, including making the unauthorised streaming of videos a felony.

Showing that they’ve not quite given up on SOPA/PIPA, the submission also calls for tighter control of domain names, including those outside of the jurisdiction of the US government. The groups also say that the government needs to go out and threaten private businesses like domain name registrars, search engines, and advertising agencies and get them to fall in line with the MPAA/RIAA’s vision of copyright enforcement. So it’s simply not good enough for Google to only demote websites that have yet to be proven, in a court of law at least, of doing anything wrong – no, the MPAA/RIAA says search engines like Google must “delist rogue sites”. Note the use of the term “rogue”, the same type of language that’s also being used to describes countries like North Korea and Iran, and I don’t think this is a coincidence either.

Feeding into the paranoia and hysterics that aims to paint college kids downloading movies as something much more serious, the MPAA/RIAA also strategically brings “organized crime” and “gangs” into the equation in this submission. But as far as I know, Tony Soprano purchased his copy of The Godfather, and it may be just me, but I just can’t imagine the Crips and the Bloods getting into the torrent search engine business.

High Definition

The wait is finally over. The kind people at Fox studios have finally allowed their customers to buy Avatar on Blu-ray 3D, for a price that isn’t a ridiculous 3 figure number.

Fox’s deal with Panasonic, where the electronic giant has exclusive rights to distribute the Blu-ray 3D version of Avatar with the 3D electronics, was one of the more controversial movie deals in recent times. Coming just at a time when Blu-ray 3D needed a launch title that could only come from the most acclaimed and most financially successful 3D movie of all time, the exclusivity deal meant that the format lacked a killer title available in stores that would have helped the format’s early adoption. As such, Blu-ray 3D hasn’t taken off in the way that electronic manufacturers and movie studios had hoped.

The Panasonic exclusive version of Avatar on Blu-ray 3D is still fetching 3 figures on eBay and Amazon, but the retail version will be available in October

With that said though, while people aren’t using 3D as much as studios would have liked, they’re still buying them because the price premium of 3D over 2D ranges between inconsequential and non-existent. Try and find a top of the range 2D TV that isn’t also 3D, and you’ll struggle. And when there’s only a $20 difference between a 2D Blu-ray player and its 3D equivalent, consumers don’t really have to make any hard choices.

Still, the retail release of Avatar on Blu-ray 3D should help the format break all kinds of records when the disc is released in October. The price is a bit higher than your average Blu-ray movie, $28 at Amazon, but it’s definitely better than paying $128 for it on eBay, right?

But don’t bet on this Blu-ray 3D Limited Collector’s edition to be the most definitive 3D version of the film to arrive on disc. The fact that this release might not even feature the extended cut means that Fox is already planning a quadruple dip of the film sometime in the near future.

Even for the 2D version, it’s only a matter of time before we see the 4K or whatever version of the film on possibly a new disc format, or if bandwidth issues are resolved, via streaming or download. Projects like Australia’s NBN and Google Fiber will aim to fix for the bandwidth issue once and for all with the move to fibre optics, which has almost an unlimited capacity to carry TB/s and beyond, but another solution is to increase the efficiency of the delivery codec. Which is why it was interesting to read about the news of a new format being officially approved by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), which promises to provide the same visual quality as H.264 with only half of the bandwidth needed.

H.264 is already super efficient, so it’s hard to believe that something could come along and double that efficiency, but HEVC, or H.265, aims to do just that through more computational intensive algorithms. Mobile applications would probably benefit the most from H.265/HEVC, due to their inherent bandwidth limitations, although faster (and more power hungry) devices may be needed to decode the video.

The other main beneficiary from a more efficient codec would be the web streaming industry, finally allowing the likes of Netflix to do true Blu-ray quality streams on connections less than 20 Mbps.

For other applications, 4K is an obvious candidate, but 4K only really benefits super large screens (say 80″ or above), and it’s an overkill for anything smaller. And if staying at 2K or 1080p resolution, the increased efficiency of H.265/HEVC may allow for same bitrate, but higher quality encodes, although you’ll get diminishing returns on any quality improvement for Blu-ray encodes, many of which are already visually flawless to the average viewer.

Blizzard’s Battle.net has become, perhaps, one of the most tempting targets for hackers in recent times. Not only does the company hold a heck of a lot of data for a heck of a lot of people, Blizzard also holds tons of financial information for all those subscribers to WoW, and all those buyers/sellers on Diablo III’s Auction House. And the company’s stance towards “always-on” DRM for D3 meant that anyone who pokes holes in their security will instantly receive a lot of “web cred” for their efforts.

Blizzard was hacked last week, with a ton of user information stolen in the process.

So unsurprisingly, Battle.net was hacked this week, with a heck of a lot of data being stolen in the process, including emails, (encrypted) passwords, security questions/answers, and even data related to the mobile authenticator that’s supposed to prevent hackers from getting into your account. The scale of the breach is actually quite spectacular, with the email addresses of every Battle.net account (except for those in China – probably on different servers) being leaked, and pretty much all accounts on the North American servers being compromised further.

Just the other week, Blizzard was boasting about how effective “always-on” DRM has been in preventing piracy, which has meant the company has made record amounts of money selling the hit game. It’s a shame that they didn’t invest enough of their loot (using it in the Diablo III sense) in protecting their users, but when you treat your customers as criminals by forcing draconian DRM on them, their rights were never that important to start with.

And as mentioned in the intro, the July NPD report was released, with the Xbox 360 once again riding high among the home based consoles, selling 203,000 units. But it was still 26.7% down compared to the same month last year, although the other home based consoles probably didn’t fare much better (the Wii in particular). The holiday sales period is coming up soon, and with the Wii U out around that time, it will be interesting to see if the Xbox 360 and PS3 will make a comeback, or take a further hit, when sales ramp up for this period.

But a price discount could do wonders for the two ageing consoles, especially when up against the compartively pricey Wii U.

That’s that for the week. See you in seven!

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (19 August 2012)

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Weekly News Roundup (19 August 2012)

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