Crude Technologies

John Newton at TechNewsWorld writes:

"A now-famous AT&T Labs report, "Analysis of Security Vulnerabilities in the Movie Production and Distribution Process," revealed that of a total of 285 movies sampled on P2P networks, 77 percent were leaked by industry insiders. ... What's more, only 5% appeared after their DVD release date."

We already knew Mom and Dad aren't ripping DVDs. Now we know, neither is Junior.

Where's the disconnect? I think the problem is that Hollywood is forgetting the principles of usability and value. People don't go to the theater because they want to see a movie; they go because they want to "go out" and enjoy an "entertainment experience". Only a very very small segment of the market can duplicate that experience at home.

For the equivalent of a theater experience, you need at a minimum: a 400 sq ft room with no windows and a black ceiling, sound absorbing walls, a 200 inch screen, a 2000+ lumen DLP 16x9 projector with wide throw, a DVD player (or external device) with HiDef upscaling, a THX certified 7.1 channel 1500 watt amplifier, seven three way speakers plus a powered 15" subwoofer, comfortable seating, and a popcorn maker. After this extraordinary expense, just eight people can comfortably imagine themselves at the the theater.

Jack Valenti said, "I visited the labs at Caltech, and they're running an experiment called FAST where they can bring down a DVD-quality movie in 5 seconds. The director told me it could be operative in the market in 18 months. Well, my face blanched."

He damn well should blanch, because the MPAA has the opportunity to disintermediate HBO, cable PPV, and the local Blockbuster, and they're not doing it.

There's a tradeoff in the consumer's mind as she evaluates content accessibility, ease of use, desirability, and even the environmental or social payoffs of the interaction with media. For some things, the equation says "go to the theater" while for others, it says "Netflix". Her sister drops by for a drink and a chick flick, and the equation says "Blockbuster". Only the rarest confluence of variables are going to say "e-Donkey 2000" or "handycam copy".

What MPAA needs to do is place their media squarely at each key choice a consumer's variables may suggest, and simply ignore any segments that aren't worth pursuing. There's no point in making those segments illegal, because it both alienates potential future customers and decreases marketing exposure of the product. The guy for whom the variables say "Illegal download" may recommend the movie to a half dozen friends for whom the variables say "Buy the DVD at Circuit City or Amazon.com."

As the AT&T study suggests, professional piracy won't be stopped by making life difficult for Mom, Dad, and Junior. Hollywood needs to get control of their own, make life difficult for the mass producers of fakes (the ones you see sold on the street in the city), and change the value equation for the home consumer not through legislation and fear but through market segmentation and targetted products.

Posted by MST at 12:36 PM | Permalink

We've heard this everywhere, but could iPhone debut be for real? Mums the word over and Moto, and Cingular is zipped, but Apple announced on Monday that it would host a news conference on September 7.

I've got a beef with these all in-one phones. Several beefs, actually.

First, gimmie input! I want a keyboard at least Sidekick II or Blackberry quality. Motorola's iTap and Nokia's T9 input, even with predictive text, may be ideal for cats, but we primates know how to use our opposable thumbs.

Next, gimme a no nonsense bluetooth stack and conduit on my PC that I can give permission to link without intervention, triggering bidirectional sync with Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Outlook 2003, Entourage, and the Mozilla email and calendaring suite. When I'm back at my desk, voicemails should show up in my Inbox. Sure, we already have this. Let me know when it works.

But finally, and most relevantly for the iPhone, headphones need to get rid of the wires. I hate wires. Nothing should have wires. Wires are exceptionally crude, and we're well beyond the era of flying kites in lighting storms to trap a bit of electricity in a leyden jar. We've done it for hearing aids; we've done it for bluetooth headsets; now it's time to do it for stereo earbuds. A batterypack/charger/bluetooth device should hold the earpieces and relay signal from registered bluetooth phones or PCs to the L+R earbuds.

But there's hope -- One & Co partnered with Plantronics to make the Versa wireless earbud concept shown here.

What's new is old... in the 1970's I could listen to stereo without unsightly wires, using the entirely self-contained "Bone Fone" FM radio. Unfortunately, it looks like you ripped off Gumby's leg to wrap around your neck. With this thing on, nobody could see the Izod alligator on your polo.

Closing the loop, the Japanese recently introduced a bone conduction headset, while the Brits want to put one in your tooth.

Posted by MST at 12:30 AM | Permalink

The British Broadcasting Corp. is planning a new service for 2006 to let Web users download its television and radio programs up to a week after they have aired. That they're doing this isn't surprising.

More interesting was BBC Director General Mark Thompson's realization that the march of technology is forcing their hand. "I accept", he said, "the premise that if the BBC remains nothing more than a traditional TV and radio broadcaster then we probably won't deserve or get license-fee funding beyond 2016."

Every organization spending the money to produce time sensitive content should immediately make that content avaliable to a secondary market to reach an additional audience or generate additional revenue, using the same content. This is one of our refrains.

The early days of the BBC put today's streaming in perspective. I found more about this history at http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/, largely based on book from 1950, "Here's Television". Quoting from the book:

There were no television sets on the market in 1932, but a hobbies magazine told you how to make one for yourself. In 1927 a picture had been sent by wireless over a distance of 250 miles in the United States. The news had been received with sarcastic scepticism. Twelve months before that, John Logie Baird had sent images short distances by his own television transmitter, which was a proper eccentric's rig-out of old tin discs, wire and string. After a few months he sent the image of an office boy through the wall into the next room. That was not news at all, but the few who heard about it were mightily impressed...

But it is Gus Chevalier for whom I have a soft spot in my television memories-and those other pioneering artists who shared a fanaticism for television with the handful of BBC staff who were coping with those experimental programmes, below ground level at Broadcasting House. On several nights, I walked round the windy corner of Broadcasting House's prow-like frontage in Portland Place, to watch Eustace Robb put out the 30-line "low definition" television programmes, which were really the first BBC sound and vision broadcasts.

Gus, on top of a day's work at the Windmill, would allow himself to be blotched and streaked with the black and white greasepaint, then used to give sharp definition to the features. He had a white streak down the centre of his nose, black lines under his eyes, and white above. Standing in the flickering light, which threw a spot of light up and down the body, he did his lugubrious "Inventions" act, for the doubtful benefit of a score or so of fanatical enthusiasts, scattered about London, using home-made sets, on which they sometimes saw a hazardous picture six inches high by four inches wide. Nobody knew how many viewers there were.

By 1934 Robb's experimental programmes had to be taken seriously, one way or the other. The BBC, never rash with money, had to decide whether it was backing a winner or a loser, down there among the greasepaint and flickering light in the basement. The studio had been equipped because there was "sufficient technical interest" in television to merit, tests. That kind of interest was certainly abundant. A number of radio apparatus manufacturers had all along been devising methods of television transmission and reception. But the Corporation, a public service, had to decide whether the thing had programme value.

For the rest, read the article at http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/.

For those of us in the streaming industry, the nineteen ninties were a lot like the 1930s. In 1998 and 1999, I, and my crew of "webcast engineers", worked just as feverishly in the sweaty basements of every major sports arena in the United States. From two different cities every two weeks, we produced the World Wrestling Federation's "BackStage" streaming video shows, broadcast to the Internet audience in real time as the arena action aired on network TV.

During the first show, fans--and advertisers--around the country dialed their modems then crowded up to their computer screens to watch a tiny 160 x 140 pixel window, with the video barely pushing 8 - 15 frames per second. We were faced with the same decision as the BBC. Viewership doubled, quadrupled, exploded to numbers beyond anything seen online. We got the same answer as the BBC---"the thing had programme value."

Posted by MST at 01:28 AM | Permalink

I came across this interface yesterday, and was blown away. AgencyNet designed their web site as a cutaway view of their office floorplan, complete with tiny furniture, computers, and people, even a receptionist.

Granted, it's derivative of two of the best selling computer games of the past ten years: Myst (click everything to see if it does anything), and The Sims (look, it's tiny people!). Naturally, Myst owes a thank you note to the Hypercard games before it, while The Sims take a bow to The Borrowers, who tip a hat to Gulliver's Travels.

Still, this site implementation in Flash, with perfectly bluescreened video actors in an exquisitely interactive dollhouse, is impressive. For example, if you click on the room second from left (the room with a man at his desk talking to a woman in an arm chair w a TV in the corner), you can click on the lights and turn them on and off while the man talks to you.

Throughout the piece, clocks show the current time, analog devices in the rooms display in sync with the digital presentation, and many objects have quirky/humorous behavior, such as the magnets from the fridge falling off the screen if you try to put them on a non-metal surface. All the little people have their own fidgets, bringing the whole piece alive.

Explore the site at http://www.agencynet.com/.

I don't want to even imagine how much money and people it cost to put this together, but it was most likely worth it. The site makes learning their background engaging while showing off their competency to perfectly integrate every type of digital media their target market might want.

Posted by MST at 01:25 AM | Permalink

In the United States, our historic holidays leave a little to be desired. Look, someone signed something---let's blow things up to celebrate! Hey, fat birds---let's eat one to celebrate! The most recent millenium Americans noticed celebrated an event in Israel two thousand years ago.

Managing a couple offshore offices adds persepective. At our Kazan, Russia, office we're celebrating the 1000th anniversary of Kazan's earliest discovered foundation stones. On August 30, 2005, Kazan will be 1000 years old.

In America in 1005 AD, the Viking sailor Leif Ericson decided turkey wasn't as filling as roast boar, so sailed back to Norway in his Viking ship.

Since the Vikings, we've forgotten how to build with wood. As a child, I visted Norway's millenium old stavekirke (tarred wood churches) and realized the smallness of our place in the world. These days, we can't even keep a thousand year old church from burning down.

As our staff in Kazan enjoys the well deserved festivities, imagine for a moment what America might be like on 26 June 2585 (Roanoke Island) or 13 May 2607 (Jamestown). Personally, I think that long before then, we'll have all suffocated under a giant nationwide warning label.

Posted by MST at 12:07 PM | Permalink

A nineteen year old in Missouri was caught video taping "Bewitched", then uploading it to a peer-to-peer network. For this, he faces up to 17 years in prison under federal law.

This case illustrates a couple points. First, RIAA's lobbying is more effective than violent crime victims' lobbying. But RIAA has more money, so that's fair.

The second point is more important. As long as people can see or hear movies or music, they can record them.

Most recent efforts around DRM center on the idea of supporting consumers rights through degraded duplication. Record labels include low bitrate tracks on CDs they'll allow people to copy to players. HDMI interfaces between players and televisions force protected signals to drop to a lower quality when routed through a recording device. DVD players and satellite receivers aren't allowed to output through Firewire. This is a largely rational approach. If a consumer wants a "master" quality recording, buy one. Otherwise, tape it from the radio.

But this is where I get lost when figuring out how the sentence fits the crime for 19 yo Curtis Salisbury.

I don't see the huge moral leap from taping a song on the radio to taping a movie in the theater. Certainly not 17 years worth. Okay, it's the whole movie, but many radio stations play entire albums. In fact, I'd argue there is no comparison---a videotaped movie just can't compete. I'm perfectly willing to sit through a cassette someone taped off FM, but I've seen the results of a handheld videocamera in a theater and it isn't pretty. If you've seen the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer tapes art movies, you've got the right idea. I won't sit through one of those. With options like Netflix and all the movies you can eat for $14.95, who would want to? Only people that aren't part of the market for the product anyway. If the strategy really is degraded duplication, Curtis's product represents no danger to Hollywood.

Maybe Hollywood should take a closer look at themselves. Last I heard, 77% of movies on P2P networks had been leaked by insiders. The other 23% have some guy's head in the way.

Posted by MST at 10:46 AM | Permalink

Neil Harvey's objective is to make your company more profitable through information technology. To help you keep track of your newfound profitability, he's posted a guide to strapping a Verizon Samsung i700 Smartphone to the back of a Robosapien toy so you can see and hear what's going on, remotely.

I've fooled with both the large and small versions of the Robosapien, as well as the robotic dinosaur and just about every other robot gadget. A first generation Sony Aibo still keeps guard near my desk. I think this comes from reading too much Asimov as a child.

But Neal's Mini-Me guide shows you how to "control, see, hear, and talk through the Robosapien from any place or distance via TCP/IP over a cellular network", without any programming.

If you're wondering, "Why bother?" then check out the videos. If you're still wondering, borrow a copy of Asimov's Robot Visions from a library.

Posted by MST at 08:30 PM | Permalink