RealNetworks and NBA have announced a deal to provide NBC.com TV's basketball events to Internet using RealVideo format for streaming. Deal also covers audio streaming, which is made through Real as well. Both options will be available through RealNetworks' RealPlayer GoldPass, the Real's multimedia subscription service.
NBA content will be available through real.com starting 1st of February.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says that court decision in August 2000 against website 2600 didn't consider all the legal aspects of the DeCSS program.
Case, which was ruled in August 2000, was against website called 2600. MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) claimed that 2600 is breaking the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) allowing people to download the code of DeCSS program.
DeCSS is a program that allows people to decrypt DVD copy protection scheme, called CSS. It was developed by Norwegian teenager, so he is not sued in this case.
Now EFF claims that court failed to understand that DeCSS can be used also for legal purposes, such as backupping movies (in most of the countries this is allowed), making short trailers or just to study the CSS protection.
They're going to bring the case to 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. EFF is expecting that many human right and free-speech organizations will join to this case by filing their amicus briefs to the court.
We recently made some changes to our site and thought it would be nice to inform about those.
First of all, now our site features a new version of skin lists - top rated skins. This list represents the opinion of the users about the skins what we have in our archive. All users can vote skins, just simply by using the drop-down menu next to the selected skin. You can see current results in here.
Other thing is our music archive that contains free music from our artists. So far we have allowed bands to create their own "music genres" - but now, just to make things clear, we have reduced the number of genres to appx. ten so users can find the music they're looking for, more easily. You can access to our band listings from this URL.
Guys working the "next generation of DivX ;-)", dubbed as Project Mayo have decided to release their project as an open source.
DivX ;-) which was originally a hack based on the Microsoft's MPEG-4 codec, adding an MP3 audio to it, has transformed the video distribution of the Internet in past year or so.
Project Mayo's purpose was to develop a legal solution (the original hack of course violates Microsoft's copyrights as well as some other copyrights) for MPEG-4 video with MP3 audio.
Now, when the source of the Encore (DivX Encoder Core) and Decore (DivX Decoder Core) is released as an open source project, we might see a flood of video applications supporting this "standard" without requiring any hacked CODECs or so.
In the mainstream media, DivX ;-) has been dubbed as a threat against the movie industry, because it allows people easily to ditribute good quality movies over the Internet. But just like the MP3, DivX ;-) itself doesn't do anything illegal -- it's purely up to the user how he/she decides to use this format. I think we will pretty shortly see first legal music videos over the Internet spread in this format -- downloading a full-length movie with good quality in DivX ;-) format still requires more bandwidth than the regular Joe the User has in his home PC.
We very rarely have news about our site on these days, but I thought it might be a good time to say few words about us, our site and so on.
Well, first of all, our "headquarters" has moved from Brooklyn, USA to London, UK. As some of you know, this site is not maintained by any company or so - we're just bunch of guys who happen have a "personal" website that generates nice amount of traffic, but unfortunately no profit :-)
And when speaking of "moving the site" - basically that just means that I personally have moved from U.S. back to Europe. And as I am the webmaster (or dictator, call me whatever you want) of this site, it's obvious that our contact address follows me. Reasons for the move were purely personal and did involve my "real-life job" and so on.
Our server is still physically located in the U.S. since we're very pleased to our ISP and hosting fees in Europe are normally much higher than those in the States.
About our traffic. We're very pleased that you guys have helped this site to grow in very nice scale. A year ago, in beginning of y2k we had only some tens of thousands of page views each month. Since then, the boost has been enormous - we're still a very small site if you compare us to any "major site", but considering the fact that our target audience is very small, we're very pleased to these numbers any way. Currently our site generates appx. 300,000 page views a month (pageviews meaning the stats that we get from our ad networks - so, they're 100% accurate and if they have some difference to real life, they tend to be slightly lower than the number of real pageviews).
Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten, who has claimed that his team has successfully cracked the SDMI scheme - a music copyright protection method developed by the RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America. They claim that they cracked the SDMI protections when SDMI consortium challenged hackers all over the world to freely crack the protection scheme and to take part of their cracking competition.
Anyway, Princeton team didn't take part of the competition, because under the terms of the competition, the group wasn't allowed to publish their results.
Now, team's legal advisors say that they shouldn't publish these results in any case, because if they do publish the results and technical information about the SDMI and how to crack it, they could be sued by the SDMI claiming that they've violated DMCA laws (=Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which makes it illegal to spread (in U.S.) anything that can be used to violate copyrights. The same set of laws is also used against the sites that have spread the DeCSS, notorious program that allows users to by-pass the DVD copy-protections.
BMG which is widely agreed to be the leading player in the digital music industry (of the traditional record companies) at the moment says it will extend its music selection available through its online retail channels.
Currently BMG has appx. 3,000 tracks available online and they have 50 retail partners to sell digital recordings from their artists. BMG also made an agreement with Napster and results of that licensing and distributing agreement are yet still to be seen.
Texas Instruments and RealNetworks have announced a strategic alliance to provide streaming content for appliances using TI's DSP chips and technology. These devices include Internet radios, etc.
Users of these devices will be able to watch music videos, sport events, news and to listen to music radio stations, etc. And of course, all this is Real's formats..
Even though the U.S. markets (especially the customers) are way behind in the mobile business overall, major companies in the U.S. still see the possibilities in this area, which is very good sign for the whole industry.
Several used-to-be-major players of the online music industry are suffering financially. Just to grab the latest headlines; Listen.com has laid off 25% of its staff few days ago, trying to achieve profitability as soon as possible. Also, custom cd maker, MusicMaker.com has plans to liquidate the company referring to bad financial status and failed licensing negotiations with major labels.
Also, big online music site AudioGalaxy.com has sued Launch.com, another big digital media site, over unpaid advertisement fees. Meanwhile, Launch.com itself has filed a suit against Checkout.com - Launch claims that Checkout owes almost $300k to Launch.
OMG, it's good that our site isn't based on VC money :-)
