News written by Petteri Pyyny (September, 2003)

Disney has launched through its subsdiary, Buena Vista Datacasting, a new pay-per-view (or video-on-demand, whatever you wish to call it) service in the U.S. The new service targets heavy DVD renters by offering ability to download movies to a set-top box and watch them any number of times during the 24 hour rental period.

Unlike movie studios' joint venture MovieLink (that Disney didn't participate at first, but now offers movies to), MovieBeam doesn't use PC at all, but uses its own custom-made set-top box instead.

Service costs $6.99 a month for the device rental fee and each movie costs between $2.49 and $3.99, depending on the movie. At any time, system promises, there will be 100 movies available and out of those 100, at least 10 will be new releases (how new -- that they don't disclose). Basically the service aims to offer somewhat hybrid of a traditional cableTV pay-per-view and DVD rental service by offering more chances to watch the movie (as many times as user wants to, during the 24hr period), without pre-defined timeslots, but with no need to worry about late rental fees or picking up and returning the movie to your local Blockbuster.

MusicMatch launched today its own clone of highly successful Apple's iTunes service. MusicMatch's service can be seen as the first real "clone" of iTunes as it uses, just like iTunes, the desktop application to deliver and sell the songs instead of traditional website front-end.

MusicMatch has relatively good chances of succeeding as it claims to have delivered over 40M copies of its media player software, MusicMatch Jukebox, to Windows users. Definitely the funniest thing about the whole situation is the fact that MusicMatch Jukebox ships as a standard application with Apple's iPod, portable digital music player, for Windows users.

MusicMatch's store operates on same principles that Apple's does -- each song costs $0.99, can be burned to a CDR and transferred to portable digital music players. This is a sharp contrast to Buy.com's web-based music store that was launched earlier, which has severe restrictions on purchased tracks and pricing of tracks varies based on the record labels' decisions.

According to rumours, Dell is planning to launch its consumer electronics and digital music products by simply re-branding various products -- Dell will most likely use now-launched MusicMatch Jukebox as the Dell re-branded frontend to its own music store and its first digital music player seems to be re-branded version of Creative's portable MP3 player.

New version of TMPGEnc has been released. The new version, TMPGEnc v2.521 is basically just a bugfix release to one of the world's best MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoders.

The full changelog since v2.520 is here:

• Improved: In the project wizzard, for the setting concerning the bitrate, the file size in MB will be shown instead of the duration for "CD-R 74min (VCD/SVCD)" and for"CD-R 80min (VCD/SVCD)".
• Improved: When error occurs during "Prefetch Video", the details will be shown.
• Improved: When using "DirectShow Multimedia Reader", from now on only Linear PCM, 8/16 bit, 1/2 will be accepted for the audio input.
• Fixed: Problem occuring when using an external MP2/MP3 encoder. For certain settings, the CRC value or the error protection could be changed.
• Fixed: When the audio was re-sampled in high quality mode, if the input was monoral, errors could occur.
• Fixed: During the encoding, some "Drag and drop" files could be accepted from the Explorer.

Dell has announced that it will enter into consumer electronics markets with series of entertainment products.

Company will start selling LCD TVs and various other items -- but the most inetersting part is Dell's announcement to start manufacturing and selling portable digital audio devices. This added with the fact that company is going to launch its own digital audio store by the end of the year means definitely that one of the biggest PC makers is taking the path that Apple has chosen earlier.

More information: Dell's press release

European Parliament voted today on the latest technoligical hot potato, software patents. Previously, there has been no universal rule for software patents within the European Union (or there actually has been one that has stated that software can't be patented, but it has never been seriously enforced) and the fears were high that EU ends up having same kind of patent legislation that U.S. and Japan currently have.

In the U.S., it is perfectly legal to patent even very basic programming techniques if there's no "prior art" existing before the "invention". Anyway, now European Parliament approved software patents within the EU. But it seems that rather radical grass-roots movement within open source community in Europe, has managed to do something about the issue and Parliament approved the legislation only with some major amendments to the original proposal.

New approved legislation outlaws patenting algorithms, business logic (such as Amazon.com's "one-click shopping" patent in the U.S.). The specific text stated that "Inventions involving computer programs which implement business, mathematical or other methods and do not produce any technical effect beyond the normal physical interactions between a program and the computer, network or other programmable apparatus in which it is run, shall not be patentable".

DivXNetworks and AMD announced today that AMD will license DivXNetworks' Dr. DivX software and plans to provide it for a limited time for users who purchase AMD's new 64-bit CPU, Athlon64.

DivXNetworks will also develop an optimized version of its DivX video codec and Dr.DivX encoding application for Athlon64. According to companies' press release, the new version will offer significant speed enhancements over the 32-bit version.

Source: DivXNetworks' press release

A new study by In-Stat/MDR finds that market value of video subscriptions will grow from the current annual (global) level of $991 million to $4.5 billion in 2007. A whopping 350% increase can be explained by the growing adoption of broadband connections globally and developing streaming technologies.

Currently the only real big scale video subscription service is operated by RealNetworks which has over one million subscribers in its RealOne SuperPass service that offers sports, news and entertainment in streaming audio and video formats.

Hollywood has taken its first baby-steps into online distribution during the last year as well, when major studios launched their joint venture, Movielink. In-Stat/MDR study predicts that consumers will shift from current pay-per-view method used in services like Movielink, to a monthly subscription method because of its easiness and cost predictability.

Study didn't analyze whether this development will affect traditional cable channels and DVD sales, but we think that it is highly likely that companies like European cable TV channels that focus on American TV series, etc will suffer. This is based on the fact that if major media companies start offering their latest productions directly over the TCP/IP, the current situation where European countries get American TV shows, etc traditionally 1-3 years later available to local markets, can't really survive. And cable TV channels normally push particularly these "easy-to-predict" cash cow shows to their channels. If this happens -- obviously there are issues like with some European countries where most of the TV shows are dubbed, etc -- it might mean that local TV production is the key for local companies to survive. But also the opportunities for distributing local content globally is going to get much easier when the Net is used as the distribution channel. It's not going to be a revolution -- everybody predicted that online music distribution would change the habits and kill the easy-to-listen-and-even-easier-to-sell music, but it never happened; everybody is still buying/downloading/listening the same music that they would've been even without the Net.

According to DigiTimes article, it seems likely that Taiwanese optical media manufacturers will start mass production of 8x DVD-R and DVD+R blank media in next month.

Major DVDR drive manufacturers have announced their 8x writers during the last couple of weeks, but lack of suitable media for such drives is currently the major obstacle for the next step in drive speeds. According to Taiwanese manufacturers, such as Ritek, they have postponed bigger volume manufacturing of 8x discs because their local drive manufacturers haven't been able to release 8x drives yet.

8x discs will cost appx. between $1.30 and $1.50 per disc, compared to a price bracket of $1.00-$1.20 for 4x discs. For those of you, who aren't aware of the DVDR writing speeds, with 4x it takes appx. 15mins to burn one DVD±R disc (of 4.38GB).

Source: DigiTimes

We just wanted to announce that yesterday we reached one of those big milestones that we've set for ourselves and now we have more than 250,000 forum messages in our discussion forums.

We launched our discussion forums in their current form back in February, 2001 and since then, they've grown and grown to reach the current state where we get total of over 700 messages a day to our three main discussion forum areas, English forums, Finnish forums and DVDXCopy forums.

Our main English forums have appx. 150,000 messages now and other two forums have 50,000 messages each. Forums have currently 84,000 registered members and over 50,000 discussion threads.

Thanks for you, our users -- without you, we wouldn't have achieved this!

The Wall Street Journal reports that video rental giant Blockbuster and United States' largest direct-market retailer of DVDs and videos, Columbia House are considering a merger.

Both companies deny commenting on rumors, but according to analysts, such merger would make sense and would help Blockbuster to capitalize the growing DVD market better. Blockbuster's worldwide revenues for year 2002 were over $5.5 billion (of which appx. 80 percent were generated in the U.S.). Columbia House's annual sales are appx. $1 billion.

Blockbuster currently sells most of its for-sale DVDs (sales are increasing their percentage within Blockbuster's revenues) at average $21.99 while most retailers sell their movies at $19.99. Analysts predict that Blockbuster could lower its prices without lowering its profit margins if it would be able to combine its purchase power with another retailer, such as Columbia House.

Blockbuster's majority owner, with 80 percent stake, is Viacom (company who also owns CBS, MTV, Paramount, VH1, etc).

Source: Star Telegram

RIAA has decided to sue iMesh, one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining large P2P software company. iMesh is based in Israel, but maintains corporate ties in the U.S. and states clearly on its website that all litigation against it should be done in New York.

iMesh has evolved over the years quite dramatically and company has switched network technologies more often than anyone else in the business. As far as we know, currently iMesh uses a hybrid solution -- part of their own, iMesh-specific, protocol and big part of FastTrack (same P2P network that powers Kazaa and Grokster).

The case is going to be very interesting, since this time RIAA has one major defeat in its track-record: RIAA lost its case against Grokster and Sharman Networks in April this year. And both of the P2P operators that were acting as defendants in that case were sued because of their use of FastTrack network, the very same that iMesh bases most (if not nowadays all) of their traffic. Since the case was filed, Sharman has since switched to use Gnutella network instead in its Morpheus P2P software.

Two Hollywood studios, Paramount Pictures (owned by Viacom) and 20th Century Fox (owned by News Corp), have sued several small software developers and distributors in the U.S. for selling tools that allow backing up copy-protected DVD-Video discs.

Studios have filed suits against Tritton Technologies, QOJ, World Reach and Proto Ventures and studios are seeking a premilinary injunction in order to stop the sales of their tools and unspecified amount of damages under the controversial DMCA law.

DMCA outlaws tools that allow circumventing copy-protection technologies, such as CSS. Previously studios have attacked against distributors of freeware tool DeCSS and against the 321 Studios, the creators of DVDXCopy.

Most of the companies now sued are simply selling DVD backup products via their websites and according to various sources, some of them simply sell packages made out of freeware tools. At least one of the companies in question, QOJ, has managed to get itself into virtually all known spam blacklists in the world with their domain copiesanything.com. Tritton is the only one of the companies now sued that has brick-and-mortar distribution deals with major retailers in the U.S.

Ulead Systems has announced that it will license DivX technology from DivXNetworks in order to use the MPEG-4 based video codec in its upcoming video editing products.

Ulead will promote DivX technology to its OEM customers and will also distribute DivXNetworks' products using its worldwide distribution channels.

Ulead is famous of its video editing products, such as Ulead VideoStudio and its DVD tools, such as Ulead DVD MovieFactory.

Source: Mi2N (press release)

SBC Communications, the 2nd largest "Baby Bell" (regional phone operator, Verizon being the biggest "Baby Bell") in the U.S., has refused to hand out its subscribers' personal details to the RIAA.

Despite Verizon losing its similiar case in June, SBC has announced that it will fight every single one of the subpoenas in court if necessary or until the court decides that they have to hand out the details for every subpoena request they receive.

SBC has sued the RIAA over the subpoena demands in California. SBC is the biggest broadband provider in the U.S. with over three million broadband subscribers. It is also the only ISP since Verizon lost its case in June that has refused to co-operate with RIAA. RIAA has quickly responded to SBC's statements pointing out to a recent SBC's print advertisement that said, in part: "Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like. Go MP3 crazy. Try new music. Build a song library. Whatever." and claimed the SBC's only motivation to protect its customers against RIAA is pure greed. According to SBC, last time the ad was run was in January 2002 and it is totally "irrelevant to the current issue of consumer privacy and protection".

A recent study published by the AT&T Labs revealed that most of the illegal copies of movies available on P2P networks have been "leaked" by the movie industry insiders, not by movie enthusiasts armed with digital camcorders.

Almost 80 percent of 300 copies of different movies found by the researchers on P2P networks, were apparently leaked to the Net by people working within the movie industry. According to AT&T Labs, this is the first study that tries to identify the sources of leaks for popular Hollywood movies. Nearly all of the movies in the study were found on the Net before their official U.S. DVD release date, some of them even before their movie theater release.

"Our conclusion is that the distributors really need to take a hard look at their own internal processes and look at how they can stop the insider leaks of their movies" before taking measures that might hamstring consumers' technologies and rights, said Lorrie Cranor, a researcher at AT&T Labs and lead author of the study.

This study sheds a very, very different light over DVD backup tools that movie industry is trying to outlaw all over the world (and have done so successfully in various countries already).

Apple Corps, the corporation owned by The Beatles, announced today that they have sued Apple Computer over its iTunes service and violation against companies' previous agreement on trademark use.

Apple Corps was founded back in 1968 and handles virtually all Beatles' business issues. Companies have fought over the trademarks earlier as well, back in 1989 the lawsuit was settled out of court by Apple Computers paying $27 million to Apple Corps and agreeing not to enter the music business.

Now, since Apple Computers has been very much in the music business during the last couple of years with its iPod digital audio player and its mega-successful iTunes music store, Apple Corps' opinion is that Apple Computers has violated against the contract they signed in 1989.

Source: CNet

Elaborate Bytes, the company behind CloneCD announced last night that they will sell the rights of CloneCD to an antiguan company, because developing tools such as CloneCD is virtually impossible in European Union after the EUCD legislation has been put in place in EU countries.

This is ElBy's press release:

Cham, 2003-09-11 - As a reaction to the new Copyright Law in Europe, Elaborate Bytes AG has to stop the distribution of CloneCD. The new law, which will come into force in Germany in the next days, will prohibit to copy protected media - even for private use.

CloneCD will neither be available as a boxed version in the big stores nor as an online version from Switzerland. Bilateral contracts between Switzerland and most of the European countries prohibit the sale from Switzerland to the respective countries.

Elaborate Bytes AG will sell the rights of CloneCD to SlySoft, a company located on Antigua. Only the online version of CloneCD will be available for sale on the Internet. The price will approximately stay the same and the clients of Elaborate Bytes will keep their one-year free update rights. Read more...

DVD-R writer. The number puts the company in clear lead in recordable DVD market.

Company's DVD writers have been included in many OEM machines, such as those from Apple. Pioneer has so far put all of its bets behind the DVD-R format, but released this year its first multiformat drive (that supports also DVD+R and DVD+RW), Pioneer A06 and has now announced that it will start shipping its next dual-format recorder, A07, in late 2003.

Pioneer's push towards DVD-R has also paid off, according to Santa Clara Consulting Group, DVD-R has gathered 54.9 percent of this years blank media sales (and the remaining portion of media sales is divided by the other four formats, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM).

Souce: Yahoo! Finance