News written by Jari Ketola (May, 2003)

At least that's what the Malaysian government instructs. Deputy Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Minister Datuk S Subramaniam told the Malaysian consumers to stop quit spending their money on CDs and DVDs to force the industry to lower the prices.

The suggestion to lower prices was made to the music and movie industry to reduce ever growing piracy in the country.

"There are some new local movie releases that are priced at MYR10 ($2.64). The VCDs are affordable and not bootlegged by illegal manufacturers," said Subramaniam. "Those priced at MYR30 ($7.91) and above are normally the ones that get pirated. This proves that the price factor is the main reason why consumers buy pirated CDs and VCDs."

I wonder... If the prices dropped to, say, MYR15, would people rather buy the originals than pirated copies at, for example, MYR10?

Source:
The Register

RealNetwork has dropped the price of download&burn song prices at Listen.com Rhapsody service to 79 cents a piece. That's 20 cents lower than Apple's iTunes.

Unline at iTunes, RealOne Rhapsody customers must pay a monthly subscription fee of $9.95 to get access to the 79-cent downloads. To actually be cheaper than iTunes, one would have to buy 50 tracks at Rhapsody, ie. spend $49.95 a month.

RealNetworks has also increased its investment in the MusicNet to 40 percent. However Real will only provide the technology to MusicNet in the future, and will no longer be offering MusicNet services.

Source:
internetnews.com
BetaNews

Graham Spanier, the president of Pennsylvania State University, has proposed a scheme where universities would provide their students with a legal MP3 downloads within the campus network. The costs would be covered by increasing each student's fees by a few dollars. If the student wishes to burn the tracks on CD, he or she would have to pay extra.

Spanier's concept has two main goals: to provide an alternative to digital piracy, and, what seems to be the ultimate goal, to reduce the load P2P file sharing causes on the university networks.

Even though there's still alot to discuss with the music industry, Spanier expects pilot programs to begin as early as this fall at some universities.

Source:
Boston Globe

Hitachi has developed a technology which allows up to 400 hours of DVD-quality video on a single DVD disc. The capacity is achieved by using more than two layers to store the data. Current DVD specifications allow a maximum of two layers per side, and two sides per disc. That adds up to around eight hours of video at a decent bitrate.

Hitachi hopes to make the technology commercially available by 2007. I'm sure there will still be demand for a 900 GB optical disc then, even with the release of the blue-laser formats.

Source:
ZDNet

Disney, the friend of the environment, will start producing self-destructing DVD-discs. The idea is that consumers can "rent" a DVD, or EZ-D, as it's called by the developer Flexplay, by purchasing the disc and then viewing it freely for two days. Once opened the disc's coating will start reacting with oxygen and eventually turns black. The DVD won't be readable after that.

Although the price for the discs has not been announced yet, there will surely be demand for low-cost rental DVDs that are available in numerous retail stores, and that you don't have to worry about returning. But the discs should obviously still be properly recycled. If the buyer is too lazy to return a rental disc, it's quite naive to think that he'd go further than his trashcan to dispose of the EZ-D. Pay-per-view HDTV would make much more sense to me. In any case, the EZ-Ds hit the stores this August.

Of course it is possible to extract the DVD to, say, hard-disk during the 48-hour period, as it is with any rental DVD.

Source:
Flexplay press release

Paramount Pictures and Twenieth Century Fox have filed for an injunction in New York to bar Internet Enterprises Inc., RDestiny LLC, HowtocopyDVDs.com, DVDBackupbuddy.com and DVDSqueeze.com from selling DVD copying software. Meanwhile the lawsuit against 321 Studio is in court in San Francisco.

The movie studios argue that they could be losing billions of dollars in the future, if DVD copying software, such as DVD X Copy XPRESS are ruled legal. The manufacturers of the software feel that consumers should have the right to take backup copies of the movies they own under the "fair use" provisions of the copyright law, and even circumvent copy protections when doing so.

Source:
Reuters

Who ever said you can't sell music on-line and make a profit obviously forgot to mention that to Steve Jobs. Apple's iTunes on-line music store has sold over 2 million songs after its launch only 16 days ago.

Internet.com writes:
"At 99-cents a song or between $4 and $18 for an album, Apple is beginning to see a hefty profit. The company has yet to disclose how much its profit is being offset by the hosting costs or the reported 60 percent cut that goes to the labels. Still using rough estimates, Apple just made an estimated $2.3 million in a week and upwards of $5 million in the last two weeks based solely on its iTunes service."

Well done, Apple! Maybe RIAA, and music labels should learn from them and focus their efforts on bringing similar music services to PC-users as well, instead of wasting their money on trying to force people out of the habit of sharing their music. Is there an alternative for us, the PC-users, if we want to listen to MP3s? I'd say: no, we don't. If I can't rip my CD to MP3 format due to a copy protection scheme, I turn to one of the numerous peer-to-peer networks that are at my disposal. Given the choice, I'd rather purchase and download albums in MP3 format, and burn an audio CD should I need one.

We now have a DVD X Copy XPRESS tutorial guide
DVD X Copy XPRESS is a fast, easy-to-use high-quality DVD-to-DVD-R transcoding tool from 321 Studios. Please read the guide to see how easy it is.

Remember: if you've already purchased DVD X Copy, you can obtain an upgrade license ID for DVD X Copy XPRESS.

Toshiba will be preseting its developments in the research of a dual-layer, 36GB Advanced Optical Disk (AOD) rewritable medium at Optical Data Storage meeting in Vancouver, Canada this weekend. Dual-layer AOD tightens the competition between AOD and rival blue-laser technology -- Blu-Ray. Dual-sided Blu-Ray discs offer a maximum capacity of 50GB. Last month Sony announced the first Blu-Ray recorder for consumer markets with a 23GB storage capacity.

The AOD technology developed by NEC and Toshiba was chosen by DVD Forum as the next-generation DVD-format. It is physically compatible with current DVD format, which makes the development of AOD hardware easy, and lowers the costs.

Source:
EE Times

Digital video recording service provider Tivo on Thursday announced it will start licensing a light version of its service to DVD player manufacturers.

The Tivo Basic service, which will be first included in DVD players by Toshiba, allows users to pause live TV and record TV programs by time and date. The service can be upgraded to full Tivo service for $13 a month, or a one time fee of $299. The full service allows automatic recording of TV shows based on users' viewing habits, recording of movies and shows based on search criteria (eg. record all movies starring Kevin Bacon), and other advanced features.

Tivo currently has about 600,000 subscribers. By licensing the technology to DVD manufacturers Tivo is looking to increase the number of paying subscribers. There are some DVD+DVR combinations available already, such as the Panasonic DMR-HS2. Tivo, however, lots alot of added value compared to "dumb" digital video recorders.

Toshiba will start shipping Tivo-enabled DVD-players later this year.

Source:
Reuters

Microsoft and Panasonic announced on Wednesday that they will be extending their HighMAT media access technology to cover DVD-recordable formats as well. DVD-RAM and other recordable formats will be included in the High-performance Media Access Technology (HighMAT) by the end of the year.

HighMAT is a technology designed to offer a common way for PCs to store digital photos, music, videos and other digital files, and provide a standard for consumer electronics devices to access the data. Currently there is no accepted standard that accomplishes this, so there are no stand-alone players that would allow you to, for example, view digital photos stored on a CD or DVD. HighMAT attempts to address this problem.

So far HighMAT has only supported CDs. With the growing popularity of DVD-recordable formats, the extension to cover DVDs as well was a natural move.

HighMAT is currently supported by 14 companies, who have announced one or more HighMAT-capable products. The most recent members of the "HighMAT family" are CD-burning software manufacturer Roxio and audio hardware company Creative Labs

Source:
News.com

According to New York Times the record companies are developing new weapons in the fight against online piracy. Decoy files and warning messages are nothing compared to these new countermeasures.

How would you feel if you faced a personal Denial of Service (DoS) attack, if you were sharing copyrighted material? Or if you downloaded a file that looks like an ordinary song, but is infact a trojan software that scans your hard disk drive and wipes every file it considers illegal? Those are the kinds of actions that are being explored by the record companies.

Of course all of these measures are glaringly illegal, but apparently the copyright laws can be enforced by breaking other laws. Should any of these measures be realized, I'm quite certain the companies would soon be facing the barrel of their own shotgun -- just like Madonna recently did.

Source:
New York Times

Artisan Home Entertainment will be releasing two special edition movies -- "Shadows of Motown" and "Terminator 2: Judgement Day". What makes these releases worth mentioning is the fact that both movies include an extra DVD-ROM disc -- a disc that can only be played on PC using Microsoft' Media Player 9.

This would all be just fine unless Microsoft had named the disc HD-DVD. The Microsoft Media Player 9 -based "HD-DVD" is not an HD-DVD format approved by the DVD Forum. Microsoft just think it's an appealing name. The video resolution is nowhere near HDTV-level.

Maybe this will speed up the real HD-DVD development somewhat.

Source:
the inquirer