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Archive for August, 2011

Weekly News Roundup (28 August 2011)

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Hope you’ve had a good week. There are finally a couple of interesting news items to talk about this week, not enough to make up for the last two week’s lull though. As much as I don’t like the RIAA and MPAA, and the mass copyright law firms, they do provide a lot of news. Without them, there would be hardly any news to write about, for that, I’m grateful.

Copyright So let’s start this week’s RIAA hate with the story that, one of the four major backers of the RIAA, EMI, “lost” their lawsuit again cloud hosting website MP3tunes, although they could still end up the winners.

While the judge ruled in MP3tunes favour, allowing the website’s business model to continue, the judge still found MP3tunes and its founder guilty of several more specific cases of copyright infringement, mostly relating to MP3tunes’ sideload.com website, which allows music found on the net to be loaded into people’s cloud accounts without doing the manual download and upload routine (so a sideload, basically). MP3tunes had in its favour a strong policy against copyright infringement, and they mostly responded to DMCA takedown requests and acted promptly. And this allowed them to call on DMCA’s “safe harbor” provisions. It’s actually a good lesson for web businesses these days to take DMCA requests seriously, because in this case, the judge basically ruled that due to the existence of the DMCA and “safe harbor”, the responsibility for identifying infringing content falls to content owners, not the website operator. And this makes sense, because only the owner can identify their own “goods”, and only they can decide whether there’s need to pursue a course of action.

Sideload.com was sued by EMI as part of the MP3tunes lawsuit, and the judge found copyright infringement had occurred in some cases

And this is an important decision, because recent judgements, and mooted government legislation, have more frequently identified website operators, your Googles, YouTubes and Megauploads, as being responsible for having some kind of passive anti-piracy system, to remove offending content even without the content owner’s intervention. This is of course something content owners would want, because it means less work. But such a system would always be “false positive” heavy (there’s no way websites can know if you actually did have permission to upload the content or not), and there are also privacy issues (for example, if you uploaded a ZIP file to Megaupload, do they have permission to unzip and read your files to check for copyright infringement?), and self-censorship is a dangerous road to take. This decision is also a confirmation that the cloud hosting business model can work, but only if copyright protection is taken seriously by the cloud host.

Where MP3tunes lost was that some of the anti-piracy actions weren’t strong enough, for example, removing links on sideload.com for infringing content, but not actually removing the already “sideloaded” versions of the same songs from people’s cloud accounts. The founder of MP3tunes had also sideloaded some infringing songs, the judge found, and that could mean that EMI could still yet receive a good sized damages amount.

While EMI was busy losing one lawsuit, they, and the other three majors, were busy suing others. The four majors, and 25 other labels, have decided to sue TubeFire, a website that allows people to download YouTube videos.

If you’re first reaction is like mine, then it would be something like “what?”. YouTube download services have existed almost as long as YouTube, and there are so many out there that I don’t think anyone even considered them to be a source of piracy. I mean, when you upload something to YouTube, you kind of expect people to view it, for free, so why does Universal, EMI, Sony, Warner think TubeFire deserve to be sued? Apparently, people are downloading officially uploaded music videos and, I don’t know, viewing them or something, and that has angered the four major labels, and 25 other labels that are also part of the suit. It’s probably because their music video sales on iTunes has been affected or something – if they’re that concerned, then don’t (officially) upload to YouTube.

And since YouTube doesn’t have any serious DRM that prevents “downloading”, is it really illegal? Also, while downloading copyrighted YouTube video does occur, what about all the legal uses where people download non copyrighted video, or download for delayed “offline” viewing, a sort of time shifting if you will? And why TubeFire, and not the dozens of other websites and download tools? And what about browsers, who also “download” the video before it plays, the only difference is that they don’t allow people to keep the “download” beyond the current browser session? It is, in my opinion, a ridiculous lawsuit, especially when a lot of these online video download services do nothing more than a URL rewrite, with the download actually occurring from the original location (because even online video needs a “source” file, and a lot of download tools simply allow people to download this source file – so in effect, it’s the online video site that’s offering the download).

And the whole idea behind a music video is to promote music sales (do people buy a lot of music videos?), so does it really matter if people are downloading or streaming the videos, from a promotional perspective? Free creates hype, and that’s really an immeasurable benefit, but hugely important these days.

Fox content on Hulu (free) will be delayed by 8 days, and this has caused piracy to surge for Fox shows

Which is why Fox’s withdraw from the free edition of Hulu is surprisingly, to say the least. Hulu was created to offer free catch-up content, usually delayed just a single day after the original airing, to both help fuel Internet hype for shows, and to compete with pirated downloads of the same shows. Instead of people downloading pirated shows in the hundreds of thousands, people can instead go to Hulu to enjoy a totally legal alternative, and most are more than happy to put up with the ads, which then allows revenue to flow back to the networks. It’s a win-win situation, which is why Fox’s decision to delay free airings on Hulu to 8 days, instead of one, seems to be me like a self inflicted wound. For one, nobody would bother with a 8 day delayed airing – it might as well be 8 months in today’s “instant” culture. People will just find alternatives, and piracy being the prime choice. TorrentFreak wanted to test this theory, that Hulu prevents piracy, and conversely, no Hulu can cause piracy, and it seems they’ve found a correlation. Of two Fox shows (Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef), pirated downloads on BitTorrent networks increased by 114% and 189% respectively compared to before the Fox Hulu change. So instead of earning ad revenue for Hulu airings, Fox has simply “forced” users to migrate back to BitTorrent.

Fox says they’re doing it because they want to promote certain cable services that bundle Fox shows with paid for Hulu accounts that still allows users to get access to Fox shows in a timely manner. But to me, this seems like a short sighted move for a quick hit of sponsorship money, and for all the things that “promote” piracy, actions (or inactions) of content owners probably has the biggest effect. It’s like the Netflix price rises, and what the lady says at the end of this video. People don’t want to pirate stuff if they have a legal alternative, but if you take away that alternative, well …

So, on to copyright law firms. The US Copyright Group has sued a deceased for piracy of the film “The Hurt Locker”. To be fair, the USCG are only the intermediaries, the real blame goes to the producers of “The Hurt Locker”. And to be fair again, the dead seemed like the next logical target, after the blind, and then the elderly, were both sued for download porn videos. If only zombies could be sued (and if they were real). High profile mistakes aside, who knows how many other mistaken lawsuits have been filed, which is always likely to be the case with such a scatter-gun approach to lawsuits. I mean, when your only piece of real evidence is a set of numbers (the IP address), which only at best gives you the subscriber account, and not the name of the actual person that made the download, then that’s not really evidence in my opinion. And for the argument that people should be held responsible for their own Internet connections, including securing it against unauthorised usage, that would be like saying if you forgot to lock your car and somebody used it to commit a crime, you would be held responsible.

The USCG’s other big client, Nu Image, producers of ‘The Expendables’, has made a drastic change in their suing strategy as well. They’ve dropped all remaining defendants from ‘The Expendables’ lawsuit, but before we celebrate a major victory against mass copyright lawsuits, Nu Image are not finished yet with suing ‘The Expendables’ downloaders. Instead of clumping all defendants in a single case and then getting the bulk of it thrown out for jurisdiction issues, Nu Image plan to re-file numerous smaller lawsuit in different locations, and thus avoid the jurisdiction issue. And not only that, they’re going to file lawsuits for downloaders of more of their films, including ‘Drive Angry’, ‘The Mechanic’ and the still-in-theaters ‘Conan the Barbarian’. You know, if Nu Image spent more time actually producing “good” films, perhaps they might not need to spend so much time and money on suing downloads. Just a thought.

High Definition

In Blu-ray/3D news, Star Wars is going to be available on Blu-ray soon, and the first Star Wars release is a big event for any video format.

Star Wars getting released for the first time on any new video format is a big deal

But with every new release of Star Wars, there’s always the threat that George Lucas might do more “tweaking” to the Star Wars films, especially the original trilogy (the prequel trilogy, nobody really cares about). So when Lucas hinted that there would be new stuff on the Blu-ray release, fans got, understandably, a bad feeling about it all. An all digital Yoda is probably coming for Episode I, but imagine the outcry if the puppet Yoda in the original trilogy was replaced with a digital one (for consistency, you see)? Not even Lucas would dare to do that of course, but this is the Internet, this is Star Wars, and so there will be hysteria at any and all rumours. To be fair, the puppet Yoda in Episode I looked weird and out of place, so a digital Yoda in that film (and that film only) is welcomed. There are also other improvements, for example, you get to see more of Episode I due to better transfer techniques that allows more of the picture to be shown on the screen (yeah, more Episode I, that’s what fans want!). Lucas also continues to “rewrite history” by removing special effects mistakes in the original trilogy, including the infamous Wampa puppeteer arm in Empire. While some fans would welcome the removal of obvious mistakes, some others are happy with the originals the way they are (even the pre-Special Edition editions, which I was hoping would be included on the Blu-ray), while most simply don’t mind either way, probably.

Is DVD on the way out? Well, it’s definitely not on the way in. A new study seems to suggest it is, but it was only really looking at portable DVD players, which the research say is being replaced by video capable smartphones and tablets. Common sense really, the same reason people no longer carry their portable electronic Sudoku player, their MP3 player, their PDA, and their pig destroying avian targeting contraptions.

As for the future of the DVD format? Every Blu-ray player is also a DVD player, so I think it will be around for a while yet.

Not much in gaming, so skipping …

And that brings us to the end of this WNR. Have a good one.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (28 August 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (21 August 2011)

Sunday, August 21st, 2011

Another relatively quiet week, but I did manage to get the NPD analysis done, for July 2011 sales, and you can view it here. Sorry for the lack of news, but I and the others that contribute news can only write about what’s there, and there wasn’t much there this week.

But quantity isn’t everything, so let’s start with some interesting copyright news. In the MPAA’s eyes, anyone that says anything positive about online piracy is as guilty as those that download movies, steal cars and shoplift stuff.

And even when they’re not being positive about piracy, but merely pointing out the observation that, given the current economic conditions, piracy may become a more socially acceptable activity, the MPAA has to go into full attack mode and silence anyone, this time, it’s GigaOM’s co-editor Janko Roettgers, that dares to present the idea that a lot people who pirate movies are just ordinary citizens. For you see, the MPAA has to portray pirates as “scum”, people that are not like good, decent, voting folks, first to portray web piracy as a serious crime that needs the government and industry’s full attention, and also to ensure the politicians they’re financially lubricating are not scared into passing laws that may affect a huge percentage of their electorate.

If you could download a car, there would be no more car thefts

The problem for the MPAA though is that, they’ve made similar observations in the past, including by their former boss, Dan Glickman, who correctly noted that “the current economic crisis makes this problem [piracy] much more serious than before” a couple of years ago. This time, the MPAA published an opposing piece, also on GigaOM (which came under some criticism for allowing the MPAA to do this, but it’s free speech, and it should be allowed, no matter how much we disagree with the opinion presented). But once again, we have the MPAA’s (represented by Alex Swartsel) comparing web piracy to shoplifting. But as I explained in the forum, web piracy and shoplifting cannot really be compared at all. Shoplifting means a physical loss for the store owners, as well as a potential lost sales, but not from the shoplifter, but from not being able to sell the item that is no longer there. For digital piracy, there is no such “loss” for the “store owner”, as pirates are only taking away a copy of the item that’s on sale, not the actual item itself. The only potential loss is in lost sales, but only if the pirate would have purchased the item anyway (you know, that old argument). Stores in London are complaining about their goods being looted, but I’m sure they’re not worried about the same looters not coming back to the stores and not buying their stuff because they’ve managed to get it for free.

And many of the actual lost sales from piracy are mainly because the consumer is unable to obtain the item, either in a timely manner, or in the format they want. DRM and release windows have seriously hampered the ability of the average consumer to purchase and enjoy content. And this is a point that the CEO of one of the New Zealand’s largest ISPs, TelstraClear, is pointing out. Allan Freeth goes one step further and actually attacks any laws protecting rights owners as legislation that artificially props up their business model, one that is obviously not working as well as before, if not failing completely. Freeth even cites surveys that TelstraClear conducted, asking its users why they pirate stuff, and one answer that kept on coming up was that people often had to wait days, weeks and even months to watch the same content people in the US already had access to (and then free access online via catch-up services like Hulu). This is something that I can sympathize with, living in Australia, where we’re also treated badly in terms of release Windows. Even the “fast tracked” shows are often a week or two behind the US airing schedule, and in this day and age of “instant”, that might as well be an eternity. Freeth also said that pricing as an issue, and if people can’t afford to consume your content, then don’t blame them for seeking free alternatives.

There was a development in the Viacom-v-YouTube lawsuit this week as well, as one of the major partners of Viacom in this case has withdrawn from it, after agreeing to a private settlement with YouTube owner Google. The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) will no longer be part of the Viacom appeal, and Google in return, will allow music publishers (those that help song writers publish their works, as opposed to recording studios that publish recordings of these same works) to participate in their revenue sharing program, something the NMPA cites wasn’t possible before. It’s a win for Google, and it signals problems for the Viacom appeal, especially if they continue to lose partners this way.

And in DRM news, Ubisoft has backtracked and now promises not to implement “always-on DRM” in their upcoming game, Driver: San Francisco. This is only weeks after Ubisoft claimed “always-on DRM” was a huge success, despite the measure only hurting paying gamers that get their game cut off if their Internet connection decides to flake out a bit (which is an unavoidable phenomenon). I guess it wasn’t such a big success after all, or at least not enough of a success for Ubisoft to justify the lost sales from the huge public backlash. But while always-on is not longer an requirement for the latest game in the Driver series, online authentication at game launch is still very much on the cards. I’m not a huge fan of any DRM, but authenticate at launch is fine by me, as long as there’s a true offline mode (but this doesn’t seem to be the case for Driver).

Not much news in 3D/HD, so let’s skip it and move quickly onto …

… gaming. And the big story of the week was Sony announcing a price cut for the PS3. It’s only $50, but this could be a significant factor in sales over the coming months, leading up to Christmas. And this is probably the right move at the right time, because as you can see in my NPD analysis, the PS3 is now in a distant third place amongst the home based consoles in the US at least.

The PS3 price cut has already helped PS3 sales on Amazon increase by more than 400%

The price cut seems to be happening elsewhere in the world as well, where it has to be said that the PS3 isn’t doing too badly at all. Australia sees one of the bigger price cuts, $AUD 150, which is about $USD 145, but even with this huge cut, our PS3 is still more expensive than the US PS3 (so you can imagine how overpriced it used to be). Still, I’ve seen some stores starting to sell the 160GB version for just under $300, which is better, but still $60 more than the US pricing.

And that brings us to the end of yet another very short WNR. But it means I’ve allowed you to have more time to do other things, so really, you should be grateful. See you in 7.

Posted in Copyright, News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (21 August 2011)

Game Consoles – July 2011 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

Welcome to the July 2011 edition of the NPD US video game sales analysis. For July, only Microsoft provided actual figures for hardware sales, stating 277,000 units of the Xbox 360 was sold, and that their console accounted for 45% of the home based console market share. Later on, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter revealed that Wii sales had dropped 25% compared to the same month last year. With these three facts, we can then deduce the PS3 sales figures, for which Sony has yet again remained silent on. For those that are new to this, this analysis looks at US video games sales figures compiled by NPD, unreleased by NPD due to pressure from the gaming companies, but then leaked by various sources, including gaming companies, if/when it suits them.

The figures for US sales in July 2011 are below, ranked in order of number of sales (July 2010 figures also shown, including percentage change):

Xbox 360: 277,000 (Total: 28.1 million; July 2010: 443,500 – down 38%)
Wii: 190,500 (non official estimate) (Total: 36.1 million; July 2010: 253,900 – down 25%)
PS3: 148,000 (non official estimate) (Total: 17.3 million; July 2010: 214,500 – down 31%)

NPD July 2011 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of July 2011)

My prediction from last month was:

I think the Xbox 360 will experience its first year-on-year decline in ages, but still comfortably stay at the top of the home based console hardware sales charts, leaving the Wii and PS3 to fight it out for second and third place, and I think the Wii might be better positioned to win for some reason. It’s NCAA Football season again, so it will be the top seller, but otherwise, not a huge month for games again.

An almost perfect prediction, a rare event indeed. The Xbox 360 did experience its first major year-on-year decline, and it actually was the biggest fall out of the three home based consoles, but despite this, it still managed to comfortably be the best selling home console for July 2011, which is on record as the worst performing month since October 2006. And as I had predicted, the Wii won the fight against the PS3 for second place, but in full honestly, both of these consoles performed horribly, adding to the misery that is July. And new hit games were far a few between in July, and so game sales slumped as well.

As expected, the Xbox 360 saw its first major year-on-year decline since 2009 (I think). It is expected because this time last year, the new Xbox 360 “Slim” had just been released, and the sales surge from this event actually managed to give the console a 119% lift in sales compared to July 2009. So obviously, with no new consoles in July 2011, year-on-year sales dropped as a result, and I suspect this will continue for a few more month. The Xbox 360 was still the best selling home based console, with a massive 45% of the home based console market share for July – that it sold almost twice as many units as the PS3 is testament to its growing dominance.

Despite a price drop, the Wii languished in a distant second place, dropping 25% in sales from the same month last year (which was even compared to July 2009). There’s not much positive things one can say about the Wii, and coupled with alarmingly decreasing DS/3DS sales (prompting Nintendo to drop prices on the 3Ds only a couple of month after release), Nintendo will hope there are no delays to the release plans of the Wii U.

As for the PS3, this appears to be the worst month since July 2009, with a 30% sales drop compared to last year. And unlike the Xbox 360, the PS3 really has no excuses. There’s still growth between 2009 and 2011 (of around 20.5%, compared to the Xbox 360’s 36.5%), but this is comparing the pre-Slim and pre-price cut PS3, with the current one. Which is probably why Sony has just announced a price cut for the PS3, which should allow sales to surge a bit.

So overall a pretty bad month for video games, but with the economy the way it is and with most of the consoles many years into its release cycle, it’s probably not unexpected. For games, it’s been a quiet month as well, with NCAA Football dominating as it usually does at this time of the year. Just Dance 2 for the Wii continues to show off its staying power in the top 10, this time coming 5th. Here’s the full software sales chart for July:

NCAA Football (Take 2, Xbox 360, PS3)
Cars 2 (Disney, NDS, Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, NDS,PC)
Lego Pirates of the Caribbean (Disney, Wii, Xbox 360, NDS, PS3, 3DS, PSP, PC)
Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft, Wii)
Major League Baseball 2K11 (Take 2, Xbox 360, Wii, NDS, PS3, PS2, PSP, PC)
Zumba Fitness (Majesco, Wii, Xbox 360, PS3)
Fallout: New Vegas (Bethesda, Wii, Xbox 360, PS3)
New Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, NDS)
Mortal Kombat (Warner Bros., Xbox 360, PS3)

Prediction time. With the PS3 price drop coming in just a few days ago, this is just the sort of major event that makes predictions extremely difficult. There’s no doubt in my mind that the PS3 won’t come last again (Wii has the third spot amongst the home based consoles locked up), but the main question is can the PS3 outsell the Xbox 360? The price cut being only $50, and with no new console coming with the price cut like two years ago, maybe it will just come short, but it will be a close run race that’s for sure. For games, again, there’s nothing really of note. Usually at this time of the year, Madden NFL dominates, but with the Madden NFL 12 coming at the end of August, it may not have enough time to make such a major impact this time, although it will probably still be the best seller based on pre-orders alone. No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise for the PS3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution seems to be the only two other notable releases in August.

See you next month.

Posted in Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 2 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (14 August 2011)

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

Another pretty quiet news week, and once again, NPD has “released” stats for US video game sales in July 2011. More on the later though, let’s get through the small number of interesting news items this week in this relatively short WNR.

In copyright news, a couple of weeks ago, the story of a 70-year-old grandma being “caught” downloading video porn by a copyright law firm made the headlines.

If you have a Wi-Fi connection, you need to use WPA2 encryption

This week, a blind man is accused of doing the same. In a scenario that is likely to be repeated over and over again, the man, only known as Doe 2057, suspected that the Wi-Fi router his wife set up might not have been secured, which possibly led to neighbours abusing the connection to download Japanese porn, despite the man living in a “very upscale building”. Before we get to the rights and wrongs of copyright law firms, people really need to be more careful with their Wi-Fi routers. By not securing it, anyone could connect and use up your Internet bandwidth, and that’s actually a best case scenario. Worst case, they would have access to your network, and hence any file shared on the network. The same also applies to routers that use the default password (or no password). And I think router makers have to take some responsibility as well, as far too many routers ship with factory settings that do not have security turned on or use the easily broken WEP protocol – it makes them easy to install, a bit more compatible with older wireless devices, but a little bit of hand-holding in the set up software wouldn’t make the process that much more difficult either.

But with nobody taking any responsibility, the large majority of consumers ignorant of the need to secure their routers, copyright law firms are taking advantage of biased copyright laws. It’s certainly opportunistic, you have to say. The problem is that to actually fight the charges, as Doe 2057 found out, it’s usually more expensive than just paying the on average $2,500 settlement fee. And the copyright law firms know this, and have exploited it beautifully. It was also revealed this week that the number of people being “sued” this way, in the United States lone, has reached over 200,000, according to stats being kept by TorrentFreak. That’s half a billion dollar worth of settlement fees, but assuming not everyone pays up, it’s still a 8 figure amount that many law firms would be delighted to take in over the course of several years. If you ever get caught, you should definitely check out EFF’s page on mass copyright lawsuits, and learn about your options.

A new study seems to show that good games are pirated more, which might sound like common sense to you and me, but nevertheless the study “confirms” it as fact. Except it sort of doesn’t. The TorrentFreak article on this study has more details, including the top 10 list of most pirated games, there are a few cases, such as the awful TRON Evolution game, that still managed to be popular with pirates, despite being unpopular with critics. Similarly, the fairly average and not all all popular (sales wise) ‘Two Worlds II’ managed to get into the top 10, and the hugely popular Starcraft II wasn’t the most pirated game (Fallout: New Vegas was, which is fair enough I suppose). I would actually like to see a study that tries to find a correlation between game sales, piracy rates and the quality of the game. What I would like to know is that if high quality games have a higher or lower ratio of pirated copies versus paid for copies. And then take into consideration things like the exclusive online features of the game (eg. Starcraft II’s Battle.net support), as well as any DRM employed (eg. Ubisoft games). I think the results may be very interesting.

Speaking of DRM, Walmart is pulling out of the digital music business according to leaked memos, and this has implications for those that purchased DRM’d music from them prior to 2007 (before they went DRM-free). Luckily, Walmart seems to be doing the right thing and will keep the DRM servers online (they learned the hard way about turning off DRM authentication, back in 2008 when they tried it and met with strong public condemnation). But how long will they do it? Indefinitely? At some point, Walmart will decide unilaterally that it no longer needs to maintain DRM authentication, and all those “purchases” would be made invalid. The sensible thing for Walmart seems to be to transfer the DRM’d songs to DRM-free version, which should not really be that difficult, but I suppose it means extra licensing costs. It again highlights the problem with DRM, not only for consumers, but for content providers having to get locked in to a proprietary system for an undefined number of years.

High Definition

In Blu-ray/3D news, I posted a 3-in-1 news story just yesterday on developments in the 3D world.

The first of the three is not really that interesting, a story about 3D glasses vending machines outside of selected cinemas in California. The fact that people may pay $70 for a pair of passive 3D glasses out of a vending machine, in this economy, just seemed funny to me.

A standard for 3D glasses could help end consumer confusion and lead to cheaper glasses, but will it help 3D uptake?

The second story is slightly more interesting, but let’s talk about the third one first, which is about AT&T’s U-verse no longer carrying the ESPN 3D channel, due to low consumer demand. The blame is either with lack of 3D devices being sold, or lack of interest, and both could be true. The thing is, 3D is a gimmick, and one that perhaps you might want to give it a go from time to time, but the majority of TV watching will be in 2D.

Back to that second story, and this one is about a new standard for active 3D glasses being formed by Panasonic, Sony and Samsung, three of the biggest manufacturers of 3D. Panasonic hinted at this quite a while ago, especially when it found that Samsung’s active 3D glasses can actually workon Panasonic sets, but only if you wear them upside down, the ridiculousness of this probably prompted a rethink by these manufacturers. They also plan to address a major problem with home based active glasses, in that they’re mostly based on infra-red or RF signals, both of which are susceptible to interference, and in the case of IR, line of sight issues. Hopefully, with a standard in place, and other manufacturers signing up, the cost of 3D glasses can decrease over time.

And finally in gaming, as mentioned earlier, the July NPD figures have been released. Microsoft, as usual, were the first to provide actual hardware sales figures, not surprisingly because their Xbox 360 was the best selling home based console yet again. They also made it interesting by announcing the market share figures, at 45%, which meant that as long as one Nintendo or Sony release figures for the Wii or PS3, then we would know the sales number for the other (based on a simple calculation).

Unfortunately, neither companies came out with any figures, and it was left to Analyst Michael Pachter to come up with the good, via a sneaky reference to the Wii’s year-on-year result. So once I get all the maths done, I should have the NPD analysis up.

Alright, another short-ish WNR, but if there’s no interesting news, then there’s no interesting news, it’s not as if I can make it up or anything. Or maybe I can?

See you next week.

Posted in 3D, Copyright, Electronics, News Roundup, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (14 August 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (7 August 2011)

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

A pretty light week in term of news, and since I’m running a bit behind, let’s see if I can wrap this one up quickly.

Starting as usual with the copyright news, we start with the MPAA’s win against Zediva, as the judge in the case handed down a preliminary injunction against the “innovative” video rental service.

Zediva is a great deal for consumers, but it can only do it by using loop holes that Hollywood is trying to close

A little background info. Zediva’s service works by allowing you to rent physical discs, but instead of sending the disc to you like what Netflix would do, they do what Netflix’s other service does, by offering you a streaming version of the same movie. Zediva then reserves the disc you “rented”, and removes it from circulation. Or basically as Zediva puts it, you rent the disc, and they play it for you over the Internet (imagine a DVD player with a really really long cable). Why did Zediva do this? They did this – and this is where I think Zediva’s downfall will be – to avoid having to pay licensing fees for streaming content.

You see, the problem is that Zediva’s motivations, it seems to me, are born out of trying to avoid paying these licensing fees and release restrictions, and make more money than they would otherwise. If this is Zediva’s real motivation, then good luck to them, but I don’t think they have a snowball’s chance in hell with their case. And in the judge’s summary of the ruling, it’s made quite clear that the judge sees real problems with Zediva’s argument, and that if Zediva was allowed to continue operating, it could harm the existing video-on-demand industry, Netflix included.

Now, it could be debated that what Zediva is doing actually does not hurt Hollywood if you compare it to traditional disc rental, but that it does hurt Hollywood studios when compared to what they can make from streaming deals, and even Zediva won’t deny this, as after all, their business model is to save on licencing costs. This then leads to the debate as to why streaming should cost more than traditional rentals, why Hollywood should choose to not only “tax” new innovative distribution methods, but to place artificial limits (like a 30-day embargo to help increase disc rental income), when these help to fight piracy. But that’s their business decision, and they may be right or wrong, but that’s not for Zediva to decide. So people get pissed off with Redbox waiting times for new releases, or the somewhat hysterical reaction to the Netflix price increases (best encapsulated in this video), and it might hurt Hollywood more to be too greedy when it comes to streaming licensing fees and release schedules, if people do decide to “screw it” and use BitTorrent.

Pron magazine/website Perfect 10 is making legal headlines again this week, twice actually, as they launch yet another lawsuit against yet another online company, this time Megaupload. As you may or may not know, Perfect 10 has in the past sued Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the middle of these three recorded a win against Perfect 10 this week in which the Ninth Circuit court rejected Perfect 10’s appeal over an earlier decision favouring the search giant. But while courts are reluctant to rule about top tech companies that have been Perfect 10’s target before, they may be more favourable to ruling in Perfect 10’s favour against Megaupload, especially since the MPAA’s case against similar file hosting provider, Hotfile, seems to be going okay. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be Perfect 10’s first victory, but it all depends on how frequently their content has been uploaded by users of Megaupload, and if it’s not frequent at all, why Perfect 10 didn’t file DMCA notices to get those content removed, instead of launching a lawsuit (“to make more money” is not an excuse the court would accept, I think).

Diablo III will use 'always-on' DRM, but not for anti-piracy, says Blizzard

Good will amongst gamers is something every game developer needs, and up until this week, Blizzard, the makers of the addictive World of Warcraft and Starcraft series, probably thought that the had enough good will stored in the bank to pull a nasty surprise. But, as Blizzard will admit, they might have miscalculated. What happened was that Blizzard announced the next episode in another one of their addictive franchises, Diablo III, would have “always-on” DRM, meaning gamers won’t be able to play the game offline, even for a couple of seconds. So Blizzard decided to do a Ubi, and as I talked about last week, nobody likes Ubi DRM. The funny thing was that Blizzard probably never intended to do this as a form of anti-piracy, but only as an anti-cheating feature. This may very well be true, but Blizzard could have avoided this whole controversy (and still used “always-on” DRM) by including an offline mode, much like how Test Drive Unlimited 2 does it (offline and online progress are recoded separately). The statements made by Blizzard immediately after the backlash began didn’t help either – executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo’s statement about there being other games to play when people are offline, for example on long plane trips, was the most ill-conceived of them all (yes, “other games” that people will buy instead of your games).

So it’s a lesson for Blizzard and any other company that chooses to use draconian DRM, for whatever reason – beware of the backlash, which might ultimately hurt revenue more than a couple of extra pirated copies would have (or the cost of adding an offline play mode).

High Definition

In Blu-ray/3D news, exciting news, sort of, although it’s technically neither HD nor 3D (not yet anyway).

I’ve been talking up UltraViolet for a while now, and it’s not like me really to voice my support for anything Hollywood comes up with, especially if it’s wrapped up in all sorts of DRM, which UltraViolet will no doubt be. But for me, UV is a huge shift in the way we “buy” movies, and it comes just at the right time when cloud storage is all the rage.

UV, simply puts, turns buying a movie into really buying a movie. The idea is that, instead of buying a movie on each platform, on disc, then on iTunes, then another version for your Android device … instead of doing this, you buy the license to watch the movie, and then you get access to all the versions via the cloud, for all of your popular devices. It’s like Digital Copy, except it’s all done in the cloud. So when you buy a Blu-ray movie at Walmart, you can instantly get the movie to play on your Android phone, as long as you have a good Internet connection. And at home, instead of finding and popping the disc in or pre-ripping it to your media player, you can just fire up your TV’s UV app, and watch all your purchased movies from the cloud.

Flixster is already available on a variety of mobile devices, and so, it's the natural fit for delivering and managing UltraViolet

The big news this week in regards to UV is the first announcement of UV compatible movies, as Warner Bros. announced both Bad Bosses and Green Lantern will feature UV support. I’m not surprised at all WB is one of the first companies to announced UV support, as they’ve always been quite open to new formats, having supported VCD in Asia, and HD DVD before they decided not to. And WB’s recent acquisition of Flixster is starting to make sense as well, as it seems Flixster is the app that WB plans to use to allow users to manage and watch UV content. As Flixster is already available on a wide variety of mobile devices, it’s an easy decision for WB to use it for UV.

What was more interesting was that WB also announced that it would even be possible for users to bring in their old DVDs to retailers, and have them “enable” access to the UV version of the movie. I don’t know how this will work, or whether there might be a way to do it without having to go to the store, but it does sound interesting. And as mentioned earlier, I really hope TV and console manufacturers embrace UV as well, as this would allow me to digitally stream my movie collection without ripping (also need studios and ISPs to work out some kind of deal to offer free bandwidth for watching UV movies).

In related news, Time Warner owned HBO plans to make available console versions of the HBO Go app, which is great news for those that are actually in the regions that can access HBO Go, which sadly does not seem to include Australia (we miss out on Hulu as well … boo!). The announcement also mentioned other “connected devices”, which sounds a bit vague, but hopefully will include things like Blu-ray players and TVs, for easy peasy catch-up viewing.

And finally in gaming, Sony has, as expected really, announced a strong degree of integration between their upcoming portable console, the PlayStation Vita, and the PS3.

This will include the ability to use the Vita as a controller for the PS3 (so allowing the touch surface, gyroscope, microphone, camera … all to be used to control PS3 games), plus the PS3 can also send graphics data to the Vita to display. Sounds familiar? It should, because this is exactly how the Wii U controller would work.

PS Vita will offer Wii U like features, much earlier than Nintendo's console

With the Vita coming to the US probably early next year, and the Wii U much later than that, it’s a shot across the bow for Nintendo, if not directly at them. The only issue is the price. At the expected price of $249, and add the $299 cost of the PS3, yes, you might have a system that rivals some of the innovative parts of the Wii U, but might be more expensive, and not have as good graphics as the Wii U (which must surely be an ironic situation for both Sony and Nintendo). But then again, the Vita can be used as a standalone gaming console far far away from the Wii U (the Wii U controller also allows independent play, but only within close proximity to the main Wii U console). So a Vita + PS3 combination could in fact replace the Wii U + DS combination, and if that’s true (and if graphics quality is discounted as a factor), then Sony becomes the better value proposition. And a PS3 price drop, or a PS3 + Vita bundle, may help. Of course, Nintendo knows how to make fun games, and Sony struggles at times, and this could be the deciding factor.

For the Xbox 360, they’re going in a totally different direction, which could work for and against them. But Microsoft has demonstrated Windows Phone integration with Kinect and the Xbox 360, so they’re planning something similar too – and it will be even better value for those already with Windows Phones.

So we come to the end of another WNR. Hope you enjoyed this issue, and see you next week.

Posted in Copyright, DVD, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (7 August 2011)

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Archive for August, 2011

Weekly News Roundup (28 August 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (21 August 2011)

Game Consoles – July 2011 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Weekly News Roundup (14 August 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (7 August 2011)

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