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Sony Shows Off New Copyright Protection Tools
Pressplay music service is among the companies interested in technology designed to protect copyrighted content.
Kuriko Miyake, IDG News Service
Wednesday, August 07, 2002
Sony has unveiled digital rights management technology that can protect content for use on various types of devices and allows usage conditions for content to be controlled by the distributor.
The Tokyo company hopes its new OpenMG X will accelerate the growth of digital content distribution. Content delivery services using the new technology are expected to be launched in Japan and in the U.S. soon. For example, music Web site Pressplay, co-founded by Sony, is looking at OpenMG X, Sony says in a statement released Wednesday.
OpenMG X consists of three parts. An encoding module adds DRM information to content at the distributor's end. DRM information includes how many times and for how long that content can be played. A server module distributes this DRM information on content to users, while a third module can be used to develop applications compatible with OpenMG X.
Digital Devices
Sony expects its OpenMG X technology will be adopted in a variety of products, such as mobile phones, portable audio players, and PlayStation 2 game consoles. However, what kind of OpenMG X-compatible devices will come out and when has not been decided yet, says Tsuyoshi Sakaguchi, a Sony spokesperson.
Sony already put OpenMG X into practice for its Magiqlip software, a music player for PCs. Users can download and play music that is encrypted and distributed using OpenMG X technology. A company called Label Gate will soon start a music distribution service compatible with Magiqlip, Sony says.
Sony already incorporates various copyright protection technologies, such as MagicGate, the OpenMG Jukebox, and OpenMG Light, in its products.
MagicGate, developed in 1999, prevents illegal copies being made when digital content is transferred from a PC to an audio player using a Sony Memory Stick flash memory card. OpenMG Jukebox restricts copying of music on Sony's Vaio PCs and portable audio devices. And Sony's OpenMG Light is a DRM system for mobile phones that can receive music via the Internet.
ksquared-- i tend to agree with your preferences with a little SVR thrown in to boot
BTW: are you "just.a.woman" or "just like a woman"
bobby z.
IBiquity Digital, a developer of digital AM/FM broadcast
technology, said on Tuesday that it has acquired an exclusive license to
broadcast on-demand interactive technology from Redwood City, Calif.-based
Command Audio Corporation. Maryland-based IBiquity said the technology
will let radio broadcasters provide consumers with content-on-demand from
program selection via electronic guide to scanning content to pausing or
saving for later listening.
http://www.ibiquity.com/news/news_commandaudio.html
http://www.commandaudio.com
New MP3 player hits NZ
Monday, 5 August, 2002
The latest in portable music technology is now available in New Zealand.
ArtDio's MP3/CD player is compact, sturdy, and packed full of uncomplicated features. The retail price of just $199 is likely to make this little player a big Christmas stocking filler. The ArtDio AMP-228 runs a small 8cm 184Mb CDR disc that can pack up to 80 MP3 tracks and provide about fours of continuous play. A patented converter also lets users play a 12cm CDR that provides about 10 hours of music from up to 200 MP3 tracks – that's enough music on one CD for a car trip from Wellington to Auckland.
Of course you can also play your favourite 12cm music CD. The ArtDio will also play CD-RW format discs. The player is small enough to be stuffed into your pocket when playing 8cm discs, or can be clipped on your belt when playing 12cm CDs. It has eight minutes of anti-skip protection for MP3s (45 seconds for CDs) and a wired remote control as standard, which means you can keep the player in your pocket while you navigate the folders or crank up the volume.
The Artdio 228 has a 3-line LCD display supporting ID3 that shows singer's name, song name and album name. In addition to the basic control keys are four further keys – EQ (which activates the equalizer mode for classic, pop, jazz, rock and normal); A-B (activates playing between a user-specified point A and point B); DIR (changes skip condition by file level or directory level for MP3 disc); and Mode (changes play mode, repeat one, repeat all, repeat directory, random all, random repeat all).
The sound is stunning, and parents will be impressed with the technology of the G-Cup earphones, which offer surround-sound that significantly reduces the risk of hearing loss. Conventional earphones block the ear canal, transmitting potentially damaging sound directly at the eardrums. The G-Cup phones project sound around the ear, so while the music is still crisp and clear, you can also hear the phone ring, someone who wants to talk to you, or the sound of a tooting horn if you're out on the road.
Two alkaline batteries are supplied, which provide up to 10 hours of life using its ingenious battery-saving mode. The unit will also accept nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable batteries that can be charged overnight in the unit using the supplied 230V mains adapter.
The ArtDio MP3/CD player is distributed by Petone's Avance Tech (NZ) Ltd www.avance.co.nz. Caption: Superb sound and compact features with the new ArtDio MP3 player, shown here with and without the clip-on 12cm CD converter.
Features: World patented convertible shell from 8cm CD to 12cm CD Playable disc – CD, Multi-session CD, CD-R, CD-RW Playable format – CDDA, MP3, VCD audio Support ID3 Tag display on three lines dot matrix LCD Remote control Anti-shock protection (MP3 480 seconds, CD 45 seconds) Supports CDs with mixed bit rate, variable bit rate 32k-320k Supports multi-session CDs CD programming Forward-reverse scan Hold switch Extra bass switch MP3 per-track variable bit rate Changeable panels AC/DC adapter (DC 4.5V) Earphone jack (3.5mm) Surround-sound G-Cup earphones
============================================
compare with:
e.Digital Unveils New Ultra-Slim Silhouette MP3 CD player
Sleek Design, Superior Sound Quality Using WOW Effect by SRS and TruBass Make Player a Hit
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 25, 2002--Music lovers now can play their favorite music CDs on Silhouette(TM), e.Digital Corp.'s (OTCBB:EDIG - News) stylish, ultra-slim, portable CD player that provides users with a three-dimensional listening experience.
Silhouette is capable of playing prerecorded music CDs or CDs containing MP3 or Windows Media(TM) format (WMA) files. Silhouette combines SRS(TM) and TruBass(TM) audio enhancement to produce the WOW(TM) Effect for treble enrichment and deep, rich bass enhancement.
According to Tom Boksa, e.Digital's vice president of Consumer Electronics, "With Silhouette, music aficionados can play prerecorded music CDs or CDs they have burned, allowing them to enjoy their favorite music tracks in an ultra-slim, portable music player that produces superior sound quality. And at a suggested retail price of $149, Silhouette is the perfect summer companion for music enthusiasts on the go."
Sporting a sleek design and mirrored finish, the .70 inch (18 mm) Silhouette weighs in at a mere 6.9 ounces (196 grams), and is one of the slimmest MP3 CD players available. It effectively combines exceptional audio quality with a user-friendly interface so users can play either burned or prerecorded music CDs in a small, lightweight device. Silhouette also comes with a wired remote as part of the standard package, making navigation a snap. The versatile Silhouette player includes the following features:
MP3, WMA, and CD playback
Rechargeable NiMH batteries that quick-charge in just 4 hours
Bookmarks up to 256 songs for playback
Dual Play Modes play all songs or bookmarked songs only
WOW Effect using SRS and TruBass audio technology
Animated LCD with user adjustable backlight settings
Remembers recent settings of up to 12 CDs (song, bookmark
list, play mode, repeat option)
Firmware upgradeable
Anti-shock protection up to 16 minutes
Five named equalizer settings
Multiple language support
Variable Bit Rate support: 8 kbps -- 320 kbps
Frequency Range: 20Hz -- 20KHz
Signal to Noise ratio: 90 db
It's easy to navigate the Silhouette using either the control panel or the multi-function wired remote control. Users can bookmark their favorite songs, even during playback, and use auto sorting to sort their titles alphabetically. The LCD displays the current song title and song folder as well as the next track queued for play.
All Silhouette packages include a user guide, portable stereo earphones, a remote control, an AC adaptor/charger, a carrying case, and two rechargeable stick type NiMH batteries that provide up to 10 hours of playback time per charge. Options include an external battery pack that supplies additional power using two AA batteries for a total of 22 hours playback time, and a remote control with LCD. The Silhouette will be available to consumers in August 2002.
Hendrix voted greatest guitarist
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020806/80/d6tfq.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Rock icon Jimi Hendrix has been voted the greatest guitarist of all time in a poll by a leading European guitar magazine.
The legendary American rocker, famed for his searing performances on his trademark Fender Stratocaster, blew away the competition in the survey published in Total Guitar magazine's 100th issue on Tuesday.
Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page trailed Hendrix in second place, while Eric "Slowhand" Clapton earned a third place spot.
More than 400 guitarists were nominated in the survey of nearly 800 readers and celebrities who were asked to list their five favourite choices by post or e-mail. The magazine published the top 100 selections.
Predictably, most of the chart toppers hailed from rock's giant bands of the 1960s and 1970s.
"These guys may not be 'cool' by any music critic's viewpoint, but they are genuinely the fastest, loudest, most exciting players in rock-and roll," editor Scott Rowley said in a statement.
Other top 10 big guns were Queen's Brian May at number five and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour in eighth place, both of whom were beaten by Slash from Guns N' Roses, who ranked fourth.
Among younger guitarists, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine was ranked 13th, closely followed in 14th place by the late Kurt Cobain from 1990s grunge godfathers Nirvana.
Not one female guitarist was ranked among the top 100, with only one woman -- Tracy Chapman -- nominated among 440 names.
Rowley noted the list included a substantial number of nu-metal players, to whom he attributed the renewed interest in guitar playing.
"These are some of the loudest and fastest players in the world. They eat indie bands for breakfast. It's like grunge and Britpop never happened," he said.
TI redraws OMAP to target neophyte DSP users
By Stephan Ohr
EE Times
August 5, 2002 (10:37 a.m. EST)
SAN FRANCISCO — Though it once pitched its latest digital signal processors to big-volume customers like Nokia and Ericsson, Texas Instruments Inc. is now looking to give the big-company experience to little guys. The OMAP5910 DSP platform of silicon and tools, which will be rolled out at the company's Developer Conference in Houston this week, aims for a broader market of Web pads, telematics apps, gaming systems, biometrics and PDAs.
TI is even looking to sell this iteration of the now-mature Open Multimedia Applications Platform (OMAP) architecture to garage shops and to engineers whose experimentation with digital signal processing (DSP) is relatively new, said Greg Mar, worldwide marketing manager for TI's Catalog DSP/OMAP divisions.
The OMAP5910 is built on a dual-core processor: an ARM-925 and a TMS320C55X, connected with a specialized interprocessor communications mechanism. Targeting current RISC processor users with multimedia applications, the dual-core OMAP offers half the power consumption and twice the performance capability of such other portable platforms as Intel Corp.'s Xscale devices, Mar said.
Breadboard for PDAs
When packaged like a breadboarded PDA — including the color LCD screen, keyboard, speakers and microphone — the OMAP5910 processor becomes the Innovator Development Kit, available from Productivity Systems Inc. (PSI) in single unit quantities, Mar said.
The OMAP5910 and design kit has multiple aims: multimedia convergence, an improved human interface, longer battery life for portable products and faster time-to-market for prototypes, Mar explained.
Focus groups also revealed that users perceived the tryout process for CISC processors to be something of a "convoluted world," Mar said. While hardware and software integration was a key concern, users said they preferred API calls over writing their own assembly code. They would rely on ready-made firmware for basic processor functions but draw on their own talents for custom software. TI also learned that users do not want to learn new languages when trying out an architecture and that every microamp counts.
The company kept those wishes in mind when designing its OMAP5910. Running a GSM full-rate vocoding task, the processor consumes only 230 mW. Running a comparable Dhrystone benchmark, the PXA250 Xscale processor from Intel uses 411 mW. (The 1.5-V OMAP5910 was double-clocked from its normal 150 MHz to enable a comparable assessment of power consumption.)
MPEG-4 video compression — complete with color conversion and echo cancellation — takes half as long on the OMAP5910 as on the Intel PXA250, Mar said.
— Patrick Mannion contributed to this story.
Texas Instruments Incorporated (NYSE: TXN - News; TI) announced that Joe Crupi, TI vice president and manager of broadband communications, will speak at the US Bancorp Piper Jaffray Technology and Communications Conference in Boston, on Thursday, August 8, 2002, at 10:50 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time. In his remarks, Crupi will discuss TI's strategy to address the broadband communications market. The audio webcast can be accessed live through the Investor Relations section (http://www.ti.com/ir ) of TI's website. Archived replays are available for one week.
Texas Instruments Incorporated provides innovative DSP and Analog technologies to meet our customers' real world signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductor, the company's businesses include Sensors & Controls, and Educational & Productivity Solutions. TI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has manufacturing, design or sales operations in more than 25 countries.
Texas Instruments is traded on the New York Stock
Korea's Electronics Industry Expected to Boost Exports in Second Half
July 30, 2002 (SEOUL) -- Korea's electronics industry is expected to export US$33.5 billion in the second half, up 33.5 percent year on year, the government said.
The country's electronics industry is thus likely to register 2002 exports exceeding US$62 billion.
The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy said July 28 that it is forecasting second half exports for the electronics sector totaling US$33.5 billion, after having polled 93 companies in Korea.
Also, the ministry said that mobile phones and monitors led the exports in the first half, while overseas sales of semiconductor products declined.
Sales of refrigerators, color TVs and VCRs also increased, and their exports are expected to grow at a double-digit rate in the second half of the year.
TI Ships Audio Power Amplifier Suitable for 3G Mobile Phones, PDAs
August 2, 2002 (TOKYO) -- Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) of the United States announced volume shipments of a 1.1W mono filter-free class-D audio power amplifier, called TPA2005D1, for mobile phones and PDAs.
The audio power amplifier consists of an IC, two resistors and one capacitor.
The TPA2005D1, a class-D amplifier driven by PWM signals, can reduce the conventional mounting area by 30 percent. It measures 2.5mm x 2.5mm.
By eliminating the output filter and improving the common-mode input range, TI realized a smaller audio power amplifier with 85 percent efficiency, which is suitable for mobile devices. The company has been marketing class-D amplifiers, which do not require an output filter.
Mobile phones with audio speakers now require such functions as personalized ringing bells, alarms and hands-free features. Thus, demands for power-efficient audio amplifier have been growing in order to extend battery life.
The TPA2005D1 is available from TI and its authorized distributors in a surface mount 15-ball MicroStar BGA package
"THE PASS"
Words by Neil Peart, Music by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson
Proud swagger out of the schoolyard
Waiting for the world's applause
Rebel without a conscience
Martyr without a cause
Static on your frequency
Electrical storm in your veins
Raging at unreachable glory
Straining at invisible chains
And now you're trembling on a rocky ledge
Staring down into a heartless sea
Can't face life on a razor's edge
Nothing's what you thought it would be
All of us get lost in the darkness
Dreamers learn to steer by the stars
All of us do time in the gutter
Dreamers turn to look at the cars
Turn around and turn around and turn around
Turn around and walk the razor's edge
Don't turn your back
And slam the door on me
It's not as if this barricade
Blocks the only road
It's not as if you're all alone
In wanting to explode
Someone set a bad example
Made surrender seem all right
The act of a noble warrior
Who lost the will to fight
And now you're trembling on a rocky ledge
Staring down into a heartless sea
Done with life on a razor's edge
Nothing's what you thought it would be
No hero in your tragedy
No daring in your escape
No salutes for your surrender
Nothing noble in your fate
Christ, what have you done?
IBM's Palmisano Sets His Course
But if the new CEO stumbles in integrating PwC's low-margin consulting business, IBM's stock -- and his reputation -- could take a beating
Since his ascension to Big Blue's throne in March, 2002, IBM (IBM ) watchers have studied new CEO Sam Palmisano's actions in the hope of gleaning clues about his intentions for the world's No. 1 technology company. In offering somber earnings news, announcing minor layoffs, and selling some marginal business lines, Palmisano didn't much tip his hand.
Well, consider IBM's laid out flat on the table. On July 30, Big Blue announced it would purchase the consulting arm of auditing giant PricewaterhouseCoopers for a cool $3.5 billion, including $2.7 billion in cash with the remainder in stock and convertible debt.
The deal, which represents the largest acquisition by the tech behemoth since it snapped up Lotus in 1995 for the same price, suggests that IBM's wallet is going to open more frequently than it did during former CEO Louis Gerstner's tenure. But in addition to hinting at a key difference in strategy, the purchase will also be a critical test of Palmisano's leadership.
FILLING A NICHE. Gerstner was a staunch opponent of major acquisitions, arguing that big deals disturbed corporate culture and rarely worked out. When IBM did buy during Gerstner's reign, the goal was usually to acquire customers or a specific product that filled a niche. Witness the Apr. 24, 2001 deal for database company Informix. Gerstner paid $1 billion cash to buy market share and some solid software in an effort to compete with sector giant Oracle.
That's not the case with the PwC deal. True, IBM is buying PwC customers, and IBM Global Services head Doug Elix made it clear that Big Blue values PwC's blue-chip clients. But the logic behind the acquisition is that sales growth of high-tech products has slowed, while sales growth of tech services has risen smartly.
According to figures presented by IBM and PwC, the industry expects the share of profits from sales of software and services to rise to 41% in 2005, up from 29% in 2000. The share from hardware is expected to downshift to 42% by 2005, from 58% in 2000.
LUCRATIVE AREAS. Palmisano wants to grab a bigger slice of those profits sooner rather than later, and the view is that making an acquisition will be more expeditious than waiting for IBM to grow organically. PwC's 30,000-strong staff of consultants will instantly swell the ranks of IBM's own Global Services consulting unit by 20%, to nearly 180,000. And PwC specializes in some heavy software-integration tasks, such as setting up advanced inventory-and-production control systems as well as customer relations management systems.
Those lucrative areas -- some of the most profitable business software niches around, with margins in the mid double-digits -- have traditionally been weak spots for IBM. Palmisano is hoping to fill those holes with his new PwC troops.
Of course, the core asset of any service business, PwC included, is its employees. That's both good and bad. IBM won't have to support new software systems. But it will have to keep its talented PwC staffers happy and involved, or the deal could end up looking like a giant payout to PwC partners with IBM getting little in return. And Palmisano may have to struggle to meld the two teams.
BONUS BABIES. PwC's legions pride themselves on their aggressive, can-do attitude. Company policy holds that consultants must be ready to get on a plane to almost anywhere in the world with short notice. In contrast, the more staid IBM has built a reputation as a humane place to work, bending over backward to accommodate telecommuters and others who want to balance work and family commitments.
PwC consultants are also used to fat paychecks with large bonuses during big years, an expectation that IBM might have trouble getting them to shed, given that its own culture is one where salaries are far more stable.
Just as difficult will be assuaging the fears of software companies that see the move as a way to edge them out. The deal seems to alienate Oracle (ORCL ), a big PwC partner and a Big Blue rival in the contentious database and Web software field. And it could frost relations with Web application-server powerhouse BEA Systems (BEAS ), another strong PwC partner. As IBM has made inroads in Web application servers, BEA seems to have grown increasingly wary of Big Blue and its marketing tactics.
TRANSFERRING LOYALTIES? One big risk is that BEA, Oracle, and others could end up doing more business with what will now be competing consulting companies, such as KPMG Consulting and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Customers hoping to use Oracle and BEA software could end up choosing a company other than IBM for services help.
For its part, IBM has long claimed to be technology-agnostic, and it does in fact support many customers that use both BEA and Oracle products. And considering that PwC expects to post only $4.9 billion in fiscal 2002 revenues, IBM is paying less than one times sales for PwC, which some analysts see as a bargain. Big services firms usually go for three to four times sales.
Further, PwC had been in talks with Hewlett-Packard two years ago for a similar deal, albeit with a price tag of $18 billion. But PwC was clearly highly motivated to sell its consulting wing in an environment in which consulting no longer goes together with auditing and tax work. Rather than play Russian roulette with an initial public offering in the unpredictable stock market, it's no surprise PwC CEO Greg Brenneman chose the cash and a deal with Big Blue.
SLIM MARGINS. IBM claims that the acquisition will start to add to its bottom line by the last quarter of 2003. Still, Palmisano clearly will have work to do folding in the new kids on the block, apart from the cultural differences. PwC expects to have operating margins of a mere 4% on fiscal 2002 revenues. The $4.9 billion PwC expects to take in is only one-seventh of IBM Global Services' 2002 revenues of $34.9 billion.
Plus, because the PwC acquisition will swell IBM's consulting work force by one-fifth, Palmisano will need to squeeze more revenues per employee out of PwC, not to mention higher margins, to bring it in line with the rest of IBM's operations.
Perhaps most important, Palmisano will have to make doubly sure that Wall Street can see that he's maintaining organic growth within IBM and not just boosting the bottom line through acquisitions, a favorite trick of such erstwhile CEOs as Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers.
If Palmisano can make this deal a clear win, he'll look brilliant. If not, he may face questions from Wall Street, customers, and his own employees -- not to mention impatient investors who might not hesitate to clobber Big Blue for the slightest stumble.
McCain Bill Seeks to End Broadband Stalemate
By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, August 2, 2002; 10:44 AM
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking Republican on the influential Commerce Committee, yesterday introduced a bill aimed at breaking the congressional stalemate on how best to promote broadband Internet service for American consumers.
The Consumer Broadband Deregulation Act of 2002 would slash regulations restricting the ability of established local phone companies to offer long-distance broadband services to residential consumers, but in a break with several competing bills in Congress would not deregulate the business market.
Long-distance phone company representatives were not immediately available for comment, but at least one Baby Bell has already criticized the bill.
"We are frankly puzzled by the apparent failure of the bill to provide regulatory relief for broadband services in the business arena," said BellSouth Vice President of Governmental Affairs Herschel Abbott. "Business customers already have the most competitive choices for high-speed data service and no company is dominant."
Most residential broadband Internet users currently connect over cable systems, but the local phone companies dominate the business market. The bill would increase the power of the Baby Bells to offer their services to American homes.
Federal regulations prevent this from happening until the Baby Bells open their own historical local calling areas to competitors. Commerce Committee members John Breaux (D-La.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) have introduced bills that would eliminate these regulations.
Committee Chairman Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-S.C.) introduced legislation to speed broadband rollout through hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to fund studies, tax credits, loans and other spending efforts.
In the House, the Tauzin-Dingell bill -- named for House Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-La.) and ranking Democrat John Dingell (D-Mich.) -- would completely free the Baby Bells to offer long-distance service to residential and business customers, eliminating restrictions that were established in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Tauzin-Dingell is the leading broadband bill so far, having been approved in the House of Representatives. But Hollings has frozen progress on the bill in his committee.
With the high-speed Internet access debate at a stalemate on Capitol Hill, the Federal Communications Commission is considering whether to skip the legislative process entirely and change the definition of the kind of broadband access that telephone companies can offer. If the FCC reclassifies digital subscriber-line (DSL) connections as an "information service" rather than a "telecommunications service," all broadband service would be, in essence, regulation-free.
August 3, 02 Sony Music may cut 100 jobs
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The music arm of Sony says it may cut about two percent of its staff, or 100 jobs, in an effort to restructure operations as it continues to grapple with the rapidly changing music business.
Sony Music Entertainment said in a statement "it is redirecting its resources in order to maximise the efficiency of its operations and effectively meet the challenges of an evolving industry, and as a result approximately 100 employees may be leaving the company".
Sony Music, one of the five major worldwide record labels, has more than 5,000 employees in the United States.
The music industry as a whole has struggled in recent years with weak CD sales in the face of a host of issues all centred on online music, file sharing and Internet piracy.
For the fiscal year 2003 first quarter ended in June, Sony reported an operating loss for its music business of 10.25 billion yen (54 million pounds), versus a year-earlier profit of 4.39 billion yen.
The music business was the only one of Sony's five divisions to post a loss for the first quarter.
In an effort to push forward in the online arena, Pressplay, a digital music venture jointly owned by Sony and Vivendi Universal, said earlier this week it would offer its subscribers broader rights to burn CDs and copy files they have downloaded from the service to digital music players.
Sony's music division has been in the news of late because of allegations by legendary pop music artist Michael Jackson, who has accused the division of questionable accounting practices, a charge Sony has vehemently denied.
Windows Media Is The Leading Industry Choice For Music Services
* Both the pressplay (Sony Music, Vivendi Universal, and EMI) and FullAudio Corp. (ClearChannel Radio) online music subscription services offer songs in Windows Media Audio and incorporate Windows Media digital rights management (DRM) technology.
* Other examples include Rhapsody Digital Music Service (Listen.com), RioPort Inc. and CenterSpan Communications Corp., which used Windows Media DRM to rebuild Scour Exchange, making it a leading source of legitimate downloadable entertainment. In addition, international services in Europe, such as those supplied by OD2 to MSN, Tiscali, and Ministry of Sound utilize Windows Media in their offerings.
* More than 50 million movies have been distributed to online viewers using Windows Media. Leading content providers are delivering more than 9 million movies per month using Windows Media and gaining revenue as a result.
* Subscription video services from the US, Europe and the Far East are offering their VOD subscribers the highest quality video directly to their PCs powered by Windows Media. Examples include:
* In Japan, Pony Canyon's "One Day Vision" showcases films from top studios. (URL)
http://www.ponycanyon.co.jp
*In France, Moviesystem's "NetCine" offers hundreds of film titles from top studios and independent film producers. (URL)
http://www.netcine.com/root/default.asp
* In Singapore, Singtel's "Movie Magix" provides films from Columbia Tri-Star, a Sony company.
http://www.magix.com.sg/
These international VOD offerings join US-based MovieFlix, IFILM Corp., Kanakaris Wireless/CinemaPop.com, Intertainer, Inc. , and CinemaNow, Inc. to provide consumers with VOD services.
"Everyone seems to be enamored with MPEG-4. But other technologies can squeeze your video too."
Crush story
Paul G Schreier, Contributing Editor -- 8/1/2002
CommVerge
Digital video holds huge possibilities as a convergence application. Unfortunately, the adjective "huge" can also be applied to raw digital video files. Over the years, the ingenious work of compression wizards has resulted in tools that crunch those files down to manageable size. That's why today's consumers can, for instance, store a feature film (plus extras and several soundtracks) on a DVD or view adequate video images over the decidedly video-hostile Web.
But get ready, because compression technologies about to explode on the scene will make it possible to play digital video everywhere, even on PDAs and cell phones. Among these emerging formats, MPEG-4 has created by far the most buzz. However, it has also created a lot of confusion. Though MPEG-4 is promising and is gaining momentum, the standard everybody loves to hype is not the only game in town.
When examining technologies in use today and looking to the future, it's important to separate Internet-based video from non-PC applications. Today, virtually every DVD player or set-top box uses an MPEG-2 decoder. Meanwhile, a large number of chip vendors make MPEG-2 chips, which vary widely in how they implement the scheme, trading off among key parameters such as file size, video quality, and processing power.
Online extras:
A many-splendored thing: An expanded explanation of MPEG-4
One-stop licensing: The MPEG-4 brouhaha
On the PC side, in contrast, the vast majority of the streaming video coming over the Internet today uses proprietary compression schemes. The leading contenders are RealNetworks with its RealVideo format, QuickTime from Apple Computer (long ago made available under Windows as well), and Microsoft with its Windows Media Player, which works with Microsoft's own ASF (advanced streaming format) and AVI (audio/video interleaved) formats.
Both the Microsoft and Real players can work with a variety of formats, and can even download additional codecs to deal with new ones. Often this process is transparent to the end user, who doesn't know or care—as long as the streaming video works.
Such accomplishments notwithstanding, there are limits to what today's codecs can accomplish. Unless you're satisfied with matchbook-sized display windows and stuttering videos, you'll likely agree that we need a better way to move video. And you'll feel even more strongly about the issue if you're among those who hope that video will one day flow to handheld devices over relatively low-bandwidth cellular links.
MPEG-4 has been widely hyped as the standard that's supposed to save us, thanks to stronger compression and nifty features like the ability to send streams of different quality levels out from a single stored file. "MPEG-4 creates the basis for all future developments in digital video," predicts Ben Waggoner, president of digital-video consulting firm Interframe Media and author of the upcoming book, Compression for Great Digital Video: Power Tips, Techniques and Common Sense .
That may very well be correct, but it's still to early to tell; we're only starting to get our first taste of MPEG-4. In June, Apple released a public preview of QuickTime 6, the first generally available MPEG-4 player. So we can soon expect to see individuals and companies making MPEG-4-encoded video available for streaming.
But hang on, you might say, isn't MPEG-4 video already available? After all, many companies have been talking about their MPEG-4 products for some time now. However, until recently, true MPEG-4 video hasn't been available, Waggoner notes.
What about the hugely popular DivX format, which has a large user base and is touted as "MPEG-4-based?" Waggoner has conducted interoperability tests with a large number of players, including some prerelease versions, and found that DivX files won't run on MPEG-4 players.
"Although it leverages some MPEG-4 technology, DivX does not make a true MPEG-4-compatible file," Waggoner says. "It creates an AVI file using MPEG-4 video and MPEG-3 audio." Even the FAQ file at www.divx.com admits the incompatibility: "While we test the DivX Player on a wide variety of third-party MPEG-4 files, we cannot claim full compatibility with all MPEG-4 files due to the wide breadth of the MPEG-4 standard. (We do claim compatibility with MPEG-4 files created with the DivX codec.)"
“MPEG-4 creates the basis for all future developments in digital video.”
—Ben Waggoner, Interframe Media
Even so, DivX has become the format of choice for sharing lengthy video files, such as feature films, on the Internet. In fact, it has reached a status almost equivalent to that of MP3 for audio. One reason is that its compression can pack a typical feature film onto a single CD-R disk. Another plus is that it's free for personal usage. DivX estimates that 50 million users worldwide have its software on their systems.
PC-based video players that work with DivX files are readily available, but unless your graphics card has a TV port, you're stuck on the small screen. The only alternative is to convert the movie to a VCD or SVCD format, burn a CD-R, and play that disc on a conventional DVD player (although hackers have reportedly discovered how to modify Microsoft XBox consoles to play DivX videos). In an effort to expand its core technology into other areas, such as net appliances, DivX is working with Texas Instruments to develop a DivX-enabled DSP that supports DivX playback at full video frame rate and frame size.
Mixed vibrations
Returning to MPEG-4, even though true MPEG-4 video content is just starting to appear, there's plenty of buzz about that codec—and just as many questions. Will its additions and improvements be enough to attract attention from developers and users?
"In the profiles people are working with today, MPEG-4 doesn't add any new functionality to the video world," Waggoner says, referring to the standard's usage profiles, which define subsets of features tailored for various applications (see the sidebar, "A many-splendored thing"). "Later, though, developers will be able to add interactivity to their content. Next year you can expect to see lots of interesting functionality emerge."
A few more specifics come from Didier LeGall, vice president for home media products at LSI Logic. "The MPEG-4 Simple Profile isn't really a breakthrough compared to MPEG-2," he says. "Instead, it's roughly equivalent. A more advanced solution is coming in other formats. For instance, the Advanced Simple Profile offers at least a 15 percent compression advantage compared with MPEG-2."
If 15 percent doesn't sound overwhelming, don't despair. There's another promising format out there, which isn't currently part of MPEG-4 but will likely become so down the road. "The technology of the future is based on the work of the H.26L project of the ITU [International Telecommunications Union]," LeGall says. "This breakthrough achieves a 45 to 50 percent gain in compression efficiency compared with MPEG-2."
This is a case where the technology and the associated groups are evolving so rapidly that it can be difficult to tell the players without a scorecard. H.26L began its life in 1977 under the auspices of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group. Today, it appears to be far superior to MPEG-4 as presently defined. Most of the performance gains come from improved motion estimation.
“To have a format broadly accepted, you must freeze the format at some time. And once MPEG-4 Part 10 becomes widely available, the competitive advantage of proprietary codecs will go away.”
—Rob Koenen, MPEG-4 Industry Forum
Studies by UBVideo, which is working to implement this technology on a Texas Instruments DSP, show that compared with MPEG-4's Simple Profile, H.26L permits an average reduction of 50 percent in bit rate for a similar degree of encoder optimization. At the same time, it offers consistently high video quality at all bit rates. Furthermore, it can operate in a low-delay mode to adapt to real-time communications applications and is also error-resilient, with the ability to deal with packet loss and bit errors.
The scheme shows such promise that the ITU has joined with another standards body, ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standards/International Electrotechnical Commission), to coordinate activity on video coding. The new working party is called the Joint Video Team (JVT), and its work will likely produce two key results. The first is a new ITU-T Recommendation, which, if it follows standard naming conventions, will become H.264. The second is an addition to the MPEG-4 standard, likely to carry the name MPEG-4 Part 10. For now, H.26L, H.264, and MPEG-4 Part 10 all refer to the same work.
As for a timeline, Rob Koenen, president of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum (M4IF), predicts that the standard, including H.26L, should be frozen by the end of this year. We should see software shortly thereafter, with hardware following later, he adds.
However, warns Doug McIntyre, CEO of compression-technology supplier On2 Technologies, "H.26L won't be commercially viable for a couple of years. Yes, it will be possible to compress video to a high degree, but the rate today is a frame per minute. It's good technology, but it has not yet been optimized and it will need a couple of years before it sees productization."
LSI Logic's LeGall, agrees—somewhat. "Yes, some vendors of proprietary codecs point out that H.26L runs very slowly on PCs and it's impractical today," he says. "But in two years it will work in real time and compete strongly with those suppliers."
Bucking the standard
While considerable work is taking place on the MPEG-4 front, proprietary codecs continue to attract considerable usage. "Proprietary codecs are still somewhat better," admits the M4IF's Koenen. "Their developers can release new versions every half year, taking advantage of the latest research. But to have a format broadly accepted, you must freeze the format at some time. Consider the example of MP3 for audio, whose adoption has been great for the overall market. Once MPEG-4 Part 10 becomes widely available, the competitive advantage of proprietary codecs will go away."
“Every two weeks there’s a press release on a new breakthrough in a proprietary codec—or is it a breakthrough in marketing only?”
—Didier LeGall, LSI Logic
LeGall echos that sentiment. "Every two weeks there's a press release on a new breakthrough in a proprietary codec," he says. "Or is it a breakthrough in marketing only? You've got an international standard, and then Microsoft, and you want to compete against that pair with a proprietary codec? Good luck."
LeGall's mention of Microsoft brings us to Corona, the code name for an enhanced media toolset and codec slated for release by the end of this year. Unsurprisingly—considering Microsoft's history—Corona won't play MPEG-4 files and instead will use proprietary technology. Microsoft is making some aggressive claims about Corona's video quality and capabilities, many of which have yet to be borne out in practice. Nonetheless, the technology can't be ignored. "It looks very promising," Waggoner says, "and this year I believe it should perform better than MPEG-4."
In addition, most industry observers believe that Microsoft will ultimately incorporate some level of support for MPEG-4 when the company can no longer ignore the large amount of video content that the standardized codec will attract.
That's a common tack for vendors of proprietary codecs to take. "We all believe that our codecs are far superior to MPEG-4, but we must also ensure interoperability," says Dave Cotter, group products manager in the media-systems division at RealNetworks. "How do we do so? By creating standards in the delivery protocols. In fact, we at RealNetworks agree that the delivery system is the future; design engineers don't really have to worry where the codec train is going."
RealNetworks and Microsoft are not going to go away, says On2's McIntyre. "So any codecs that interoperate with these players have a better chance of survival," he says. "I'd be betting on a distribution system—not on which codec works in it. Those two companies will always try to push the best codecs or use their considerable engineering staffs to write good ones."
Given these comments, it's interesting that On2 hasn't made its own latest codec technology compatible with Windows Media Player. "Support for Apple and RealNetworks is good enough," McIntyre says. "As of yet, there's no commercial reason to move to Windows Media Player. We believe that 90 percent of all PCs have both RealPlayer and Windows Media Player installed, and as long as we run on one of them, I'm fine."
In the hand
The idea of being able to upgrade or enhance a media player with multiple codecs is easy to envision in the PC world. But the concept doesn't transfer quite as well to closed devices, where codec code is burned into memory. Certainly, MPEG-4 won't be limited to streaming applications on PCs any more than is MPEG-2, which today is incorporated into virtually every DVD player.
“I’d be betting on a distribution system—not on which codec works in it.”
—Doug McIntyre, On2 Technologies
"The key that will drive this market consists of the MPEG-4 chips being developed," comments Kent Libbey, vice president of marketing at iVast, a vendor of MPEG-4 software. "Chips made the MPEG-2 market what it is today, because DVDs, PVRs [personal video recorders], and satellite boxes all use them." iVast supplies the codec technology behind e-Box, an effort among seven companies, including Sharp and Pioneer, to bring MPEG-4 to set-top boxes. Cable provider Comcast is also collaborating and will be the first to test the system on its release next year.
A market shakeout in the number of codecs, led by MPEG-4, will also help chip vendors. "We don't want to deploy 50 codecs," says LSI Logic's LeGall. "We do about a dozen now, and each must be a value proposition." The company's DoMiNo architecture supports a range of codecs, including DV (for camcorders), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 Simple Profile. In the future the family will also support the Advanced Simple Profile as well as Part 10 and even Microsoft's Corona. "We're not sure that just one format will be a winner, and we look at solutions that accommodate multiple formats," LeGall says.
That sounds like good advice for any player eyeing the digital-video space.
Author information
Contributing Editor Paul G Schreier (pgschreier@amitechmarketing.com) is waiting for the compression algorithm that can efficiently compact weeks of research into a 3000-word feature article.
A many-splendored thing
If you've seen the term MPEG-4 thrown around in seemingly incompatible contexts, don't be surprised. Rather than a single, universally applicable standard, MPEG-4 is best understood as a multimedia framework that addresses the needs of a wide variety of applications—including but not limited to studio editing, interactive broadcasts, Internet streaming, and playback on wireless devices.
Today, MPEG-4 is broken down into eight separate major parts (ISO/IEC-14496-x), two of which address visual and audio functions. However, because the standard is object based, it extends far beyond those two areas to support interactive multimedia, which will play an important role in the future.
You may hear that MPEG-4 and Apple's QuickTime are the same, but that's not really the case. The MPEG-4 group selected the QuickTime file format to start with, so MPEG-4 software does share a deep level of compatibility with QuickTime. However, the standard has evolved in scope and functionality, so the two are no longer directly compatible.
While the MPEG-4 standard includes hundreds of features, no application will need all of them. Depending on the target application—be it digital cinema or cell-phone video—only a subset of capabilities will be invoked. To help developers of encoders and decoders work under some common assumptions, the standards group has defined a number of profiles (which define features from a qualitative aspect) and levels (which nail down specific performance requirements for these features).
The formal specification lists 19 different Visual Profiles, "only a few of which will actually be used," says Rob Koenen, president of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum.
Here are some details on the profiles you're most likely to encounter in the wild:
Simple Profile: Provides a technology baseline upon which the other profiles build, and is suited for use on mobile or other low-power devices.
Advanced Simple Profile: Adds enhancements for better visual quality, such as global-motion compensation and quarter-pixel motion estimation (Simple uses half-pixel motion estimation).
Simple Scalable Profile: Allows a server to modify the bit rate depending on demands on image quality, frame rate, or resolution. Useful for applications that provide services at more than one level of quality due to bandwidth or decoder limitations.
Fine Granularity Scalable (FGS): Will allow for extremely high quality video.
Core Profile: Adds support for coding of arbitrary-shaped and temporally scalable objects. Useful for applications such as those providing relatively simple content-interactivity (Internet multimedia applications).
Core Scalable Profile: Adds variable frame rates and resolutions.
Main Profile: Supports interlaced video and appears to be a candidate to support interactive HDTV. To the Core Visual Profile, adds support for coding of interlaced, semi-transparent, and sprite objects. Useful for interactive and entertainment-quality broadcast and DVD applications.
The profiles spell out some generic functions and requirements, but also leave plenty of room for interpretation, such as how intensively the underlying technology will operate. But developers need to nail down more specifics for implementation. This is where the levels come into play.
In any given profile, each level dictates a least-common-denominator with regard to key operating specs, such as the maximum frame rate, data rate, resolution, and number of objects. With levels, a developer can make certain assumptions about the ultimate system.
For example, within the Simple Profile, Level 0 targets the wireless industry, where screen sizes are small and processing power is low. The level allows a maximum frame rate of 15 frames/sec, limits luminance pixel resolutions, supports 99 macroblocks (16-by-16-pixel areas), and caps overall screen size at 176 by 144 pixels. Other levels don't dictate a max image size, but they can specify the number of macroblocks. For example, Level 1 allows 99 macroblocks that can be configured as 1584 by 16, 176 by 144, or any other rectangular size divisible in each direction.
Despite these commonalities, MPEG-4 products designed to the same profile/level can vary dramatically in how they trade off speed and visual quality. For instance, the standard does not specify how to transport bits over various networks. "The standard defines a bitstream," explains Ben Waggoner, president of digital-video consulting firm Interframe Media. "But there's a tremendous amount of room for innovation at either end of the stream. At the encoder end, you can trade off quality versus speed. On the playback side, the developers can look for ways to get smoother playback. When MPEG-2 first came out, we needed 4 Mbits/sec to achieve DVD quality, but that has since improved to 2 Mbits/sec for a good picture. We'll likewise see MPEG-4 improve as the encoders get better."
And if all this isn't complicated enough, note that the ISMA (Internet Streaming Media Alliance, www.isma.tv) has also defined a common set of requirements and functions—and has unfortunately chosen to use the "profile" nomenclature. For instance, the ISMA's Profile 1 is the equivalent of the Advanced Simple Profile at Level 3 combined with the Audio Profile at Level 2.
This is an important combination, Waggoner says. "The ISMA Profile 1 will become what everyone means by MPEG-4 this year," he says, adding that Profile 1 isn't as good in quality as proprietary codecs and that companies won't migrate toward it for that reason. Instead, they'll like the broad interoperability it affords. "Given MPEG-4, I don't see that somebody like AOL Time-Warner will want to get tied down with a proprietary codec," he comments.
Streaming at windmills?
One hears a lot of hype about streaming video to cell phones and other wireless handhelds, but it's going to be a while before that application becomes a reality. In the meantime, the PC streaming market offers a potentially sobering lesson. To wit: It's not clear whether anyone can turn a profit streaming video to PCs.
"There are very few business models for streaming video that make any money," says Doug McIntyre, CEO of compression-technology supplier On2 Technologies. "Perhaps the only one is porn. Will people watch long-form video on PCs? I think not. In fact, the amount of streaming video on the Web, particularly on multimedia sites, is contracting. People are retreating from this side of the market because there's no way to make money. In the future, I also see decreasing use of video players because consumers will use PCs as a gateway to move video data to a set-top box or PVR [personal video recorder] for more comfortable viewing."
People are more likely to use PCs for specific applications, such as videoconferencing and distance learning, he continues. "For those applications you'll want interaction and a more sophisticated GUI," he says. "Those programs will be far more than simple video players."
Not surprisingly, a representative from RealNetworks has a different viewpoint. Dave Cotter, group products manager in the company's media-systems division, argues that it will be possible to make money with streaming video. "It's not that the model is flawed, but that the technology has been too expensive," he asserts. Higher-quality content that will attract users is becoming available. "In addition, bandwidth costs are dropping, in conjunction with our compression, making streaming video more cost-effective," he says.
One-stop licensing
MPEG-4 is a complex scheme that exists thanks to the work of many companies, which hold patents for various portions of the underlying technology. Rather than make users of the technology approach each company individually for a license, a company called MPEG LA offers a one-stop licensing service. It collects fees on behalf of the patent owners and distributes the proceeds. MPEG LA has successfully shown how this approach works by creating a patent portfolio for the MPEG-2 video compression standard, which it began licensing in 1997.
In January of this year, the company announced its intentions to do the same with portions of the MPEG-4 standard, specifically patents essential to MPEG-4 Visual (Simple and Core Profiles), which involves patents owned by 20 companies. MPEG LA also disclosed a proposed fee structure, under which licensees would pay 25 cents each for MPEG-4 decoders and encoders, with fees capped at $1 million a year for each licensee. The company also suggested charging a per-minute rate with no cap.
These terms created an immediate uproar, with some companies believing they would make MPEG-4 nonviable and open the door for proprietary formats. Other companies were more sanguine. "We took MPEG LA's initial proposal as an opening round of negotiations, while others took it as a fait accompli and overreacted," says Kent Libby, vice president of marketing for iVast. "We analyzed it and reported our findings to the company, as did other responsible parties. It's a living scheme, and things will work out fine. The same process happened with MPEG-2."
True to this prediction, MPEG LA has softened its stance. In mid-July, the company announced the terms for the licenses it will officially roll out in September. The revised terms feature "reasonable" annual limitations on certain royalties, royalty options that require no royalty reports, and threshold levels below which some use-based royalties would not be charged, according to MPEG LA.
"This sounds the starting bell for the whole broadcast and multimedia industry to start releasing MPEG-4 products and services," said Rob Koenen, president of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum, in the press release announcing the terms. "The licenses are the long-expected prerequisite for MPEG-4 being fully accepted and deployed."
But the fact that MPEG LA has revised its license fee structure hasn't removed all objections to the scheme. In fact, Doug McIntyre, CEO of On2 Technologies, a developer of a proprietary codec, argues that there's an even bigger problem. He asserts that MPEG LA is running an illegal patent pool that has not been approved or sanctioned.
"While the MPEG-2 group did get provisional approval for their activities, to my knowledge the MPEG-4 group has not even applied for approval," he says. "It's simply illegal to set pricing in this fashion. It creates a barrier-to-entry for others. We've filed complaints with all 50 state attorneys general, as well as the US Justice Department Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission."
Meanwhile, you may wonder how companies that are talking up MPEG-4 codecs can do so without having signed licensing agreements. "Technically," notes Larry Horn, MPEG LA's vice president of licensing and business development, "they're violating the patents, because the license covers MPEG-4 video in any form or shape. All uses are liable to the patent holders." Meanwhile, MPEG LA looks upon the use of MPEG-4 as a vote of confidence in the technology and the licensing scheme.
"We hope to have a product that allows users to get whatever they need from one place," he concludes.
The main text of this article indicates that the future may lie with H.26L (Part 10), which, Horn notes, is completely divorced from MPEG LA's efforts.
Also, there may be questions about codecs that are billed as "MPEG-4-based" yet don't play on MPEG-4 decoders. "If they use MPEG-4, they will need our license," he says. "But otherwise you have to take a closer look at what 'MPEG-4-based' means. They might need a license for some of the underlying patents from individual patent holders."
http://www.e-insite.net/commvergemag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA236131&pubdate=8/1....
culater
Listen.com Distributing Rhapsody Service Through Broadband Providers
San Francisco -- Listen.com, a provider of digital music subscription
services, announced on Wednesday new distribution agreements for its
Rhapsody subscription service with Hughes Electronics' DirecTV Broadband
and AOL Time Warner's Road Runner high-speed Internet service. Under the
terms, subscribers to both broadband Internet access services will be
offered a free subscription to Rhapsody for the month of August. DirecTV
Broadband and Road Runner will both also market the service -- which
offers a selection of 175,000 tracks from all five major labels and some
independents for on-demand streaming -- to their subscribers via email and
website promotions.
http://www.listen.com
Toshiba Shows Off Speedy Hard Drive
Latest high-capacity drive features increased rotational speed, offering you faster access to your data.
Kuriko Miyake, IDG News Service
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Toshiba has boosted the rotational speed of its latest high-capacity hard drive to 5,400 revolutions per minute, the company announced Wednesday, promising faster access to data for end users.
Toshiba unveiled its first 60GB, 2.5-inch hard drive in April with a rotational speed of 4,200 rpm. The new product, the MK6022GAX, improves on that model by increasing the rotation speed, which means a data is transferred faster and average random access times are reduced.
The drive's faster throughput rate is supported by an increased buffer memory of 16MB, offering better performance for high-end notebook and desktop PCs, Toshiba says in a statement. The company plans mass production of the product in September this year.
Higher Capacities
The Tokyo company also increased the areal density of the drive to 49.8 gigabits per square inch, up from 48.8 gigabits per square inch. This means 49.8 gigabits of data can be stored on one square inch of magnetic recording space. This translates into 30GB of capacity per 2.5-inch platter, so a 60GB hard drive can be crafted using two platters.
Fujitsu, another leading hard drive vendor, last week unveiled a 60GB drive that it claimed has the highest areal density, at 53.2 gigabits per square inch. Such a density also allows 30GB of data to be stored on a platter; however, its disk rotation speed remains at 4,200 rpm.
IBM's Travelstar 60GH rotates at 5,400 rpm, but with an areal density of 28 gigabits per square inch takes four 2.5-inch platters to make a 60GB drive, according to information on the company's Web site.
Toshiba's new MK6022GAX has an average data transfer rate of 100MB per second using the Ultra DMA Standard, and an average seek time of 12 milliseconds, it says in the statement. It measures 2.8 inches by 3.9 inches by .4 inches and weighs 3.6 ounces.
FujiFilm, Olympus Propose New Memory Card
XD Picture Card, poised to compete with existing formats, could lead to smaller digital devices.
Martyn Williams, IDG News Service
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Two of the companies behind the SmartMedia card format, Fuji Photo Film and Olympus Optical, have announced plans to move away from that card, choosing to develop a new format of their own. The move means that the pair will not line up behind an emerging format from SmartMedia co-developer Toshiba called Secure Digital.
The announcement of another memory card format is likely to bring moans from users of digital still cameras and other portable digital equipment, who already have to deal with six formats, the latest being Sony's MemoryStick Duo launched earlier this month.
The two chose to develop the new format, named XD, for Extreme Digital, Picture Card, for two main reasons, says Yoshiaki Yamada, a spokesperson for Olympus. The new card will be physically smaller, allowing manufacturers to design smaller digital cameras than are available today, he says, and will also help satisfy consumer demands for higher capacity memory cards.
Comparing the Cards
In a shoulder-to-shoulder comparison with its competition, the XD Picture Card comes closest to the MemoryStick Duo in terms of size. The Sony card, which is just over half the size of the original MemoryStick, is about half a centimeter longer than the new XD format and otherwise has similar dimensions, which means users will likely see little difference between them.
In terms of capacity, it is too early to tell how the XD Picture Card measures up because commercial products are not expected to be available until the third quarter of this year. Olympus says it plans to launch the format with 16MB, 32MB, 64MB, and 128MB cards, and follow with a 256MB card in December. The only other capacity firmly on the roadmap is a 512MB card due next year, although Yamada says the card specification scales up to 8GB.
Those plans mean the card will be playing catch-up to CompactFlash, which is available in capacities of up to 1GB, and SD, which is available with up to 512MB capacity. Most other memory card formats are presently stuck at around the 128MB mark.
The cards will be officially launched alongside new digital still cameras from Fuji Photo and Olympus Optical that are due in the coming months, the companies say. In addition to the cards, the two plan to put on sale PC Card and Compact Flash adapters that will allow XD Picture Cards to be used in devices supporting those formats.
Poised for Success?
The leading positions held by the two companies in the digital still camera market might be enough to drive the card's success, despite fierce competition, says Michito Kimura, an analyst at IDC Japan.
"The success of memory cards is driven by the digital still camera market so [XD] has room to grow," he says. "Toshiba and Panasonic are pushing SD cards but it has not been as successful as they expected. Last year Sony's MemoryStick had very good growth, and the reason is very simple: Sony's digital camera had very good sales. Toshiba and Panasonic are not in a good position in the digital still camera market."
"This combination of Fuji and Olympus, with top market shares, meansa?/[that] in the next few years the market for this card is likely to be big," he says. However, the analyst adds, as third-generation cellular services become popular and manufacturers build memory card slots into 3G handsets, those handsets are likely to start taking over as the driving force in the memory card market.
Making Memories
In choosing the XD Picture Card, the two companies are not totally moving away from Toshiba, which together with Sega and Tokyo Electron formed the five-member consortium that first launched and promoted SmartMedia (then called Solid State Floppy Disc Card, or SSFDC). Toshiba will manufacture the XD Picture Card, but would not comment on whether it was disappointed that the two had not chosen SD for their next generation product.
"As long as they are selling some type of flash memory card, we can do business with them," says Kenichi Sugiyama, a Toshiba spokesperson, noting that the company is still making money by supplying flash memory chips for XD Picture Card.
The announcement does, however, mean another nail in the coffin of SmartMedia, which became the first mass-market memory card format when it debuted in 1995, shortly before the CompactFlash format was launched. Since Toshiba stopped using the format in favor of SD, FujiFilm and Olympus have been two of the largest manufacturers of products based on the card.
compare and contrast:
e.digital---january 5, 2000:
e.Digital Corporation offers an engineering partnership for the world's leading electronics companies to link portable digital devices to PCs and the Internet. Engineering services range from the licensing of e.Digital's patented MicroOSTM file management system to custom software and hardware development and manufacturing services. For more information on the company, visit www.edig.com.
edig pps: $6.25
===============
e.digital--- july 31, 2002
e.Digital Corp. offers an engineering partnership for the world's
leading electronics companies to link portable digital devices to PCs and the Internet. e.Digital develops and markets to consumer electronics manufacturers complete end-to-end solutions for delivery and management of open and secure digital media with a focus on music, voice and video players/recorders, and automotive infotainment and telematics systems.
Other applications for e.Digital's technology include portable digital music players and voice recorders; desktop, laptop, and handheld computers; PC peripherals; cellular phone peripherals; e-books; video games; digital cameras; and digital video recorders. Engineering services range from the licensing of e.Digital's patented MicroOS(TM)file management system to custom software and hardware development,industrial design, and manufacturing services. For more information on the company, please visit www.edig.com. To shop at the e.Digital online store, please visit www.edigital-store.com.
edig pps: $0.62
http://www.mubot.com/
Exporadio Systems, llc. is a recently created young-minded company, committed to giving excellent service to all internet users. Our primary focus is to broadcast songs to our users, and in the near future we wish to use the song request patterns to provide radio stations, the recording industry and other interested parties with accurate statistics of the most requested songs.
mubot.com is presented in partnership with Radio Group Califormula Inc.; for more information please visit http://www.califormula.com.
mubot.com is growing by leaps and bounds - we really believe in our services, and we are excited about the upcoming updates to the site. If you are interested in possible business opportunities with our group, upcoming investment opportunities, or simply wish to get more information about who we are, please feel free to contact us at info@mubot.com.
Thank you for your support! As always we rely on our users to help us make mubot a better and universal site, by presenting their suggestions and offering their help and support. If you would like information on how you could become involved in the evolution of mubot.com, please feel free to contact us. For more information on contributing to mubot.com, visit our collaborations page.
mubot.com is proud to offer you the chance to collaborate with us. If you believe that you have an idea that can improve this site, you can suggest or submit it as a free collaboration with mubot, and we will credit your work; making you a special part of the mubot team, and as a thank you we may send you a special gift.
All potential collaborations will be reviewed by our team. Remember that it is our decision to make use of any of your ideas; we are not obligated to use any suggestion submitted, however we will do our best to fairly review each submittal.
mubot.com, does not in any form maintain any special contractual obligation with free collaborators, and by submitting one you agree that any work is solely a donation to our website unless otherwise noted.
mubot.com will be looking for a more serious way to collaborate with your ideas, so keep checking this page for updates.
Send us your resume, ideas, or collaborations to info@mubot.com.
We will review your application as a free collaborator within a period of 1 to 3 business days.
Once again, help us help you in developing mubot to your needs. Thanks again for your support.
Cirrus lowers MP3 player cost
Matthew Broersma
Cirrus Logic has launched an audio processor which it says will allow
manufacturers to sell MP3 music players for under $50 (about £32), taking
them into a price range that more traditional portable music devices have
long occupied.
Since the CS7410 music player is designed to decode compressed digital
music stored on a CD, it requires users to have access to a CD burner to
store their music. However, the use of CDs to store compressed formats
such as MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) is growing rapidly in
popularity, because of the high storage capacity and low cost relative to
the Flash memory used in many players.
Cirrus cites research from IDC predicting that CD-based compressed music
players are set to surpass other types this year, with sales growing from
one million units in 2001 to more than 18 million in 2006.
CD-based compressed-music systems are popular partly because
manufacturers often build them into more traditional, mainstream devices
such as DVD players, boom boxes and portable CD players. Cirrus promises
that its highly integrated chip will substantially lower the cost of
adding the features, with a cost of $8.62 in quantities of 10,000.
"You can store hundreds of tracks on it, as long as people are happy to
burn their own CD from a PC," said Michael Noble, vice president of
European sales for Cirrus. "It enables you to carry a whole library
around on one CD-ROM."
Cirrus estimates the chip will appear in new products in about six
months' time, and said it has possible partnerships in Taiwan and
elsewhere in Asia.
The CS7410 is based on technology from LuxSonor Semiconductor, acquired
last October for $10m cash and 2.2 million shares.
so just WHAT IS the rumor????-----LOLOL
The Netflix way
Will the success of the pioneering DVD-rental company convince a reluctant music industry to embrace its own subscription strategy?
By Damien Cave
June 6, 2002 / John Andrews first heard about Netflix when his class at Harvard Business School studied the company in 2001. But it wasn't the business model that persuaded him to sign up for the service, in which people register online and pay $20 a month for a rotating crop of DVD rentals that arrive by mail. He simply thought a Netflix subscription would make his movie-watching activities more convenient -- and he has yet to doubt his initial hunch.
"I like that I can go online when I think of a movie I want to see and I can add it to my queue," he says. "Or if I'm not sure what I want to see -- I've been trying to catch up on classics; I just returned 'A Streetcar Named Desire' -- I can go to 'genre' and search for ideas of what I'd like to watch. The service works far better than walking into a video store and looking at the new releases."
Andrews' enthusiasm seems to be contagious. In the midst of a pronounced technology slump, Netflix has become the rarest of all Silicon Valley breeds: a rising dot-com star. The Los Gatos company has netted more than 600,000 subscribers since launching in April 1998. On May 23 Netflix raised $80 million in one of the most successful initial public offerings (IPOs) of 2002.
A combination of luck and savvy is goosing the company along. Sales of DVD players began to take off just as Netflix switched to a subscription service in late 2000, and Hollywood studios signed deals with the company at about the same time, in order to balance the growing power of Blockbuster. Consumers, tired of paying late fees and enthralled with their new DVD players -- 35 million have been sold to date -- welcomed the idea of a service that lets you hold on to a movie until you watch it.
Netflix also benefited, digital media experts argue, from its uncanny ability to shift entertainment consumer behavior toward a service and away from traditional systems in which people buy or rent a single piece of entertainment for a specific period of time. Netflix, with its focus on flexibility, comprehensiveness and ease of use, has essentially persuaded consumers to accept a system of eternal borrowing. Call it faux ownership. Netflix subscribers pay about $20 a month for the right to hold on to DVDs for as long as they want; to watch movies over and over again without paying extra fees. The only limitation is that they can't hold on to more than their allotted number. To get a new DVD, they have to send back an old one.
And here's where the Netflix story could get really interesting. If Netflix's success continues, experts argue, it would be the first online entertainment company to earn both a profit and a rabid following. As such, it might offer a model that other entertainment companies could follow -- especially the music industry. If Netflix's convenience, portability and price attract millions of people and make millions of dollars, why can't the idea of faux ownership catch on in the world of digital music?
The music business already has its toes in the water, having launched several subscription services that are essentially jukebox rental systems. But fearing the cannibalization of their billion-dollar CD business, record companies have moved cautiously, bogging down their offerings with complex protection schemes that put off potential users.
Could Netflix be the catalyst that finally forces the music business to embrace real change? A runaway subscription success might persuade entertainment industry moguls to let go of copy protection, while persuading consumers to accept flexible borrowing rather than collecting. EMusic -- a subscription service offering MP3s from independent labels, without copy protection -- is already paying close attention to the Netflix model. And music lovers, particularly those who love Netflix, seem more willing than ever to embrace a flexible subscription model.
"It could work," says Andrews, who is now a consultant at DeLoitte Touche Tohmatsu. "It would have to have a substantially larger queue. But I have a ton of music that I've downloaded, mostly from Napster, and I've got this one playlist that I put on whenever I'm home. If I could always easily go in and swap out 10 or more old songs and insert new ones, and if I could take them wherever I wanted, that would definitely hold some value."
CEO Reed Hastings says he started Netflix to fix a few problems he had with the video rental business. His epiphany came in 1997. He had just sold his software company, Pure Atria, to Rational Software, and after returning a late copy of "Apollo 13," he garnered a $40 fee. There had to be a better way.
"It was my fault in some sense. The movie was about three months late," he says. "But I realized immediately that it was a poor customer experience. It was also suboptimal for the companies -- the retailers and vendors."
Hastings figured that a subscription service, without late fees, would work better. It would be cheaper and easier for both the studios and consumers because, he says, "it would take out the selling costs around the individual content items. Without having to pay as much for promotional costs, the content owner gets more money and the consumer gets a better deal."
At the time, an entertainment subscription service was unheard of, so Hastings decided to postpone the idea and start with a more traditional model: individual DVD rentals, ordered online and sent through the mail. During the first year, Netflix even charged late fees.
"We were worried that it was too radical," Hastings says. "We thought, let's first implement a more simple mode for consumers so they can get used to us." The extra time let Netflix develop a simple sign-up system and envelopes that let users send back a DVD in the same package it had arrived in. Growth, however, only started to take off after the subscription model launched in late 1999. The company signed up 85,000 subscribers by January 2000; a year later, the subscriber rolls had swelled to 300,000."
Users say that Netflix stands out because the model gives them a high level of flexibility without much hassle. Subscribers can pick DVD titles whenever they're using the Net; they can watch the movies wherever they want, for as often as they want. And when they're done with one movie, they can rely on Netflix to handle new orders with speed and efficiency. The music industry should take note.
"It's the ease of use and the convenience that make it so compelling," Andrews says. "And it's at a price that, given how much I would spend for movies anyway, is affordable."
There's a psychological force at work, Hastings suggests. Users don't mind paying because they feel they're being given a great degree of freedom and control. "Consumers enjoy and are willing to pay for an unlimited model because it gives them freedom," he says. "Some months they watch a lot of DVDs; some months they don't. But regardless, they have the freedom to decide for themselves. It's the same reason why people get the unlimited mileage when they rent a car -- they don't want to feel nickel-and-dimed."
Netflix shows what economists have known for years: that consumers think beyond simplistic value propositions such as a flat monthly fee divided by number of movies watched. They consider flexibility a value that's worth paying for, says Jim Griffin, CEO of Cherry Lane Digital, a specialist in rights management for songwriters and movie studios. "They're paying a flat fee for the anarchistic use of the content," he says. "That's an important part of the system."
For decades, businesses have enjoyed this privilege, what Griffin calls pool (in contrast to per piece) economics. Restaurants, health clubs and other public venues can all pay the music industry a flat fee for the use of whatever songs they want. Netflix simply extends the buffet model to consumers.
"Disney CEO Michael Eisner keeps saying that if we can't control all the content, we won't let it out there," Griffin says. "But that's historically incorrect. It's the lie being used to shove digital-rights management down people's throats. The truth is that with radio, television, satellite TV and webcasting, we've always let content out. This is the future, and our past."
At least one music subscription company recognized the significance of Netflix early in its trajectory. EMusic has been watching Netflix and learning from its focus on convenience and freedom since 1999.
"We spent a lot of time understanding their service before we launched our subscription service in July 2000," says Steve Grady, an EMusic general manager. "There are differing dynamics between music and DVDs, but in terms of how you communicate with the customer, the services are very similar."
Specifically, EMusic mimicked Netflix's use of the free trial and tried to follow the overall flow of its Web site.
"Netflix does a very good job of obscuring the complications," Grady says. "They focus on the main benefits of the service, then start asking, What kind of customer are you? We decided to follow that idea because, like Netflix, we were offering a new kind of service."
EMusic also maintained a similar level of portability. Just as Netflix users could take their DVDs anywhere, and order from any Internet-connected computer, so can EMusic's 50,000 members play their music however they like. Because the company's catalog uses the MP3 format, songs can be burned to a CD, shared, or copied to a portable MP3 player.
"In essence, in a broad conceptual way, EMusic is doing the same thing as Netflix," Griffin says. "They're saying [to users], Look, you don't have to account for each play. You just cut us in on the money and we'll untether this stuff for you."
But in today's music environment, flexibility has its consequences. EMusic's focus on portability looks like kryptonite to the major labels -- the kind of thing that will kill the industry. And if EMusic is the audio stepchild of Netflix, it's practically an orphan.
Most of the other music subscription services that have risen up in Napster's wake are complicated and confining. Signing up for them may be easy: PressPlay, MusicMatch, and Real's RealOne service -- the main players in the music subscription game -- all offer free trials and registration systems that take less than 10 minutes to fill out. Searching for music is relatively simple too; the interfaces for these services seem to have ripped a page right out of the Napster playbook.
But once the searching is done, these services spiral down into a Escheresque labyrinth of complications. All of the services make listening to digital music far more complicated than it needs to be. MusicMatch's Radio MX subscription service and Real's RealOne offering both prohibit burning. Even if you pay top dollar -- about $25 a month -- you can listen to the music only if you use specific software from the appropriate company.
"The files won't work where you want them to work," says Tim Bithoney, the former technology director for Radioactive Media Partners, which streams radio for Barnes and Noble and other sites. "You can't transfer them to a car or Rio. You have to constantly be connected to the Net and you have to use their products."
PressPlay offers slightly more flexibility. Users who sign up now get to burn 10 songs to a CD for $9.95 a month (after three months, the price goes up to $14.95). But not everything is available for burning. Eminem's latest singles are marked with the flame icon that signifies burnability, but others, like Pat Benatar's "You Better Run," can only be streamed and downloaded.
These services also don't let you keep what you've collected. When users stop paying subscription fees, the music expires, becoming unusable. And it's not as if the services are comprehensive. Each service is essentially its own fiefdom. PressPlay, a partnership between Sony and Universal, doesn't yet have rights to music from Warner or BMG. MusicNet, a joint venture between EMI, Warner and BMG, doesn't yet have access to music from Sony and Universal. And EMusic, with its focus on flexibility, has only licensed music from independent labels. Grady says that EMusic wants to stay away from the majors because it's aiming for a niche of hardcore fans. But Cherry Lane Digital's Griffin scoffs at his claim.
"Come on," says Griffin. "They want everything [but] their own corporate owner" -- Vivendi, owner of Universal Music -- "won't give them everything they have."
Last year, Congress looked into the music industry's licensing practices to see whether the labels were exercising illegal monopoly power. But so far, nothing has come of the inquiry and the standoff continues. The only services that contain music from all the major labels are the unauthorized peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA, which the industry is trying to sue out of existence. Meanwhile, the official services remain littered with holes. Without the kind of comprehensiveness and portability that Netflix offers, some argue, they're destined for failure.
"No one's going to use them because of the extra rules they impose and their proprietary formats that won't go onto a CD or MP3 portable," says Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who also leads a techno band called Mobius Dick. "They'll fail like Circuit City's DivX did, not because there's anything wrong with the concept, but because people just won't want to deal with the hassle of managing when their songs 'expire' or which ones they have to delete to make room for the new 'N Sync single."
And yet, despite their flaws, the services can be seen as signs of progress, says Griffin. "Their services are the industry's first toe into the water," he says. "They're saying, OK you can pay one fee to get into the pool and then you can use kind of what you want, kind of how you want to. It's not perfect but it's not per piece economics either. It's a shift."
The labels have moved slowly. "They are engaged in Tarzan economics," Griffin says. "They're clinging to a vine that pays their salaries while they're swinging to the next vine that they don't yet have in hand."
Hastings agrees. "In the music business, none of the subscription services have been particularly compelling because the content owners are afraid of undercutting other channels of revenue," he says.
But Netflix may encourage them to accelerate the process of change. The industry claims to be working as fast as it can. PressPlay expects to have access to music from all the major labels by the end of the year, and Erik Flannigan, vice president of music programming at Real, says that RealOne members will soon be part of a "rent to own" plan.
"The real key is establishing the value of the temporary copy," Flannigan says. "The permanent copy is the underlying royalties minus the physical cost of goods. But if I keep a song for seven months and listen to it 33 times, how much is that worth?"
Flannigan says that Real will have hammered out the details within a few months. Other services might take longer. Figuring out the pricing details can be difficult, says Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. "It's not as easy as flipping a switch," he says. "This is an evolving process where all the players are constantly working to make the systems more efficient, more cutting-edge and reflective of consumer tastes."
But money is the ultimate motivator. If Netflix continues its rise, some argue, the music industry might move faster. Subscription-based entertainment could proliferate once the industry realizes that "Netflix would be far less successful if it only offered films from half the major studios and if the DVDs it delivered could only be played on certain sorts of players," says Kelly Truelove, an indpendent peer-to-peer analyst. "Comprehensiveness and portability are appreciated as necessary conditions for success."
"In essence," says Griffin, "because we will find that we can't end the anarchy, and because new technology will add to the anarchy, we'll find a way to monetize the anarchy. That's what good business does."
Not every user would be interested in a massive jukebox that comes with a monthly fee. "It can't be a subscription," says Bithoney. "It has to be purchase." But there would seem to be a large and growing contingent of entertainment users who would welcome the change.
"I like looking at my CD collection but a lot of them collect dust," says Andrews. "If there's some kind of subscription playlist that's big enough, if I can have control of the queue, if I can turn things over when I want to, then I'd go for it. If you take away the temporary feeling, I'm in."
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Sour notes
The legal crackdown hasn't squelched MP3 trading -- it's just made it more of a pain. But the music industry would still rather fight than give its online customers what they want.
By Farhad Manjoo
July 30, 2002 / The fight against online music piracy entered the realm of the bizarre last Thursday, when Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., proposed giving the recording industry sweeping new powers to do what, for the rest of us, would be illegal: hacking computer networks.
Berman's bill, the Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act, allows record companies to respond to the "theft" of copyrighted materials by "disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, [or] otherwise impairing" a peer-to-peer file-trading network. As long as record companies do these things to prevent the trading of their copyrighted works, they couldn't be prosecuted under computer crime statutes.
Nobody knows what specific attacks copyright owners would carry out, but the bill seems to allow companies to do what many "hackers" have been jailed for -- denial-of-service attacks, for example, that would prevent users from accessing a Web site or other online service. Berman's efforts are being championed by the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry's trade group. In a statement, Hilary Rosen, RIAA's CEO, called the measure an "innovative approach to combating the serious problem of Internet piracy."
Because the bill has almost no chance of becoming law in the short term -- just a few weeks remain in the congressional session, and there is not yet any companion legislation in the Senate -- file traders and civil libertarians responded to its introduction with a bit of bemusement. For some, the bill is just more furious hand-waving from an industry that fears it's going under. "It's not that different from making it legal to break into someone's house to make sure they don't have any illegal Mickey Mouse posters on the wall," says Adam Fisk, a Gnutella developer who works on LimeWire, a popular file-trading software application.
The Berman bill could be seen as a new low for the industry -- further indication that it sees the fight against MP3s as its defining cause and will go to any length to pursue it, no matter how outrageous. During the last three years, the battle against file sharing has become the entertainment industry's version of the War on Drugs, an expensive, protracted, apparently ineffective and seemingly misguided battle against a contraband that many suggest does little harm. The labels' main strategy -- busting the biggest dealers in an attempt to strangle the supply of free MP3s, while offering few palatable solutions to stem the demand -- is a classic tactic from the War on Drugs book, and it has failed just as clearly. Despite the RIAA's recent settlement with AudioGalaxy -- in which the trading service agreed to make available only those songs that it had formal permission to list, an agreement that renders AudioGalaxy useless -- researchers believe that more people are trading music than ever before.
But the RIAA's latest moves -- the Berman bill as well as rumored legal action against individual file traders -- are nevertheless curious, because they come at a time when the industry ought to be declaring victory. Precisely measuring the traffic on peer-to-peer networks is difficult, but there is at least anecdotal evidence to show that trading services no longer offer the cornucopia they once did and, at the very least, are much more challenging to use than was true during Napster's heyday.
While it's still easy to download some of the music you want, finding all the music, these days, is near impossible. Downloading a whole album? Even on a fast connection, even if it's a popular album, even if you have tricks up your sleeve, you might have to spend as much as a half hour of your workday. Then there are the increasing, and increasingly annoying, concerns posed by the file-trading applications themselves: the adware, spyware, Trojan software, and even possible security holes.
If the industry were smart, it would seize this moment. Instead of trying to hack its customers, it would seduce them with a pitch that goes like this: Getting free music is a dodgy affair -- pay us a little bit, and we'll give you a Napster-like free-for-all. But the music business isn't doing that; instead, through its antiquated, complicated and allegedly anti-competitive licensing practices, the labels have given us subscription services that fall short of fun. Even the good ones lack many useful features -- like CD burning, or the ability to play your downloaded music on many machines, or to listen to as many songs as you like for your monthly fee -- that any online music fan needs. And that's a shame, because a good service, released now, could cash in big.
The demographics of file-trading are boom and bust. Until it was shut down, Napster constituted nearly the entirety of the file-sharing market. "Then we saw a huge uptick in at least 10 other services, and there weren't as many consumers in any one of those services as there were in Napster," says Aram Sinnreich, an independent music industry analyst in Los Angeles. But some of those networks started getting more attention than others, and they came out ahead. "Morpheus and AudioGalaxy really became the leading inheritors of Napster's user base," Sinnreich says. Then the two services lost their footing. In February, Morpheus suffered a technical glitch that booted it off its network -- which it shared with users of KaZaA and Grokster -- and it was forced to switch to Gnutella. And AudioGalaxy began blocking more and more files until its RIAA-imposed crippling in May. Now it seems that KaZaA, a client called WinMX, and the various clients on the open-source Gnutella network handle the bulk of file sharing.
And they all have their problems. Salon spent several days trying to download all sorts of songs from these services. The main test was this: How much elbow grease would it take to get a recently released, barely known -- though not obscure -- album? The album that seemed to fit was "Come Away With Me," the debut release from the "pop jazz" singer Norah Jones. Jones, who's 22, has a voice that critics seem incapable of describing without using the word "sultry"; she's generally received the sort of critical acclaim that most young musicians would sell a kidney for. Some radio stations play Jones' music, though not the stations that play top tracks from Billboard Hot 100 -- precisely the situation that made her a good test subject.
File trading has long been justified on the grounds that it lets people listen to new music before purchasing. Whether people are actually more likely to buy the new music they like after they've downloaded it is a question that still hasn't been resolved (there are several conflicting studies) -- but it nevertheless stands to reason that for artists like Jones, artists whose "distribution channels" are limited, file trading might be more help than harm.
So which was the best trader? At various times all of them seemed, on average, to be worth what you pay for them -- which is near, but not exactly, nothing. You pay with your time, and you pay with your computer's processing power and your network's bandwidth, which some of the clients gobble up madly. (One popular Gnutella client, QTraxMax, seemed to stop all other local network traffic into my computer each time it did a search.) The process was fraught with the usual hassles of trading -- the songs are there but the downloads hang, terminate inexplicably or, if they come through, sound as if they were recorded on wax cylinders.
"It's the black market," notes Sinnreich, "and the black market should feel like the black market. I don't think file sharing is decreasing, but there's never a lot of stability there. It's a world where every six months people have to choose new software."
For the brief period that AudioGalaxy was in its prime, its elegant Web-based system did away with these frustrations; maybe that's why it was killed. But still, in Salon's research -- even if it took a bit of time and a lot of micromanaging -- the Jones album was, in the end, ultimately available from every trading network.
And the numbers reflect that. According to Ipsos-Reid, an independent market research firm, there are many more people downloading MP3s today than there were when Napster was around. At the root of it, researchers say, is a consumer sense that there's nothing morally wrong with using the systems. Edison Media Research recently asked people what they thought of this statement: "You no longer have to buy CDs, as you can download the music for free from the Internet." Twenty-two percent of people between 12 and 44 agreed with it. When you just ask teenagers, says Jayne Charneski, an Edison vice president, the results are even more dismaying for the record industry. "Seventy-four percent said there's nothing wrong with downloading or burning music," she says. "Then when we put it in form of, 'Well, do you know musicians aren't being compensated?' that number comes down a little. They cared more for the musicians than the record labels, but only a little bit."
Asked whether such research indicates that RIAA's legal pursuit of file-trading services has been ineffective, Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman, said no. In an e-mail, he wrote: "We believe that our legal strategies are having success. We have never lost a case and two of the most popular, easy-to-use sites are either now offline or finally respecting intellectual property. The online shoplifting of music does continue to plague the industry, but our legal track record so far is clearly having an impact." Lamy agreed that many consumers don't think that music trading hurts anyone, and he said that the RIAA would do more to change that attitude. "It's more than just protecting our legal rights through the courts," he wrote. "It's also educating people about the reasons why unauthorized file sharing hurts the music they care about in the long run. That's a key component of any long-term effort to change people's behavior."
But if the industry tries to educate people, will they listen? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that in addition to going after file-trading services, the RIAA is planning to take legal action against individual file traders. Like the news of the Berman bill, the report immediately caused a stir in file-trading circles, and the RIAA appeared to step back from the issue. (Lamy declined to comment on it.) But many people say that such proposals have created such a distaste for the music industry that it's going to take more than the hazy notion of "hurting music" to get them to change their attitudes toward file trading. "I don't think 10 years ago consumers thought much about record labels one way or the other," says Sinnreich. "These days you have a music-buying populace that is completely disenchanted by the people selling it to them. Is that a healthy business?"
The Berman bill won't help the industry win any more friends, either. Although Berman -- whose top benefactor is the entertainment industry, from which he received more than $180,000 for his 2002 reelection campaign -- suggests, in a statement, that his bill is "narrowly crafted, with strict bounds on acceptable behavior by the copyright owner," critics say it's anything but. Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that the way he reads the bill, victims of the industry's hacking "don't get to go to court unless the attorney general signs off on it. And you have to prove that they knowingly or intentionally crossed the line, which is exceedingly hard to prove."
Sinnreich, the music analyst, says that some people in the industry are fine with their anti-consumer line. "They think the only way to go against file trading is to bash consumers into submission," he says. Perhaps that's not an unreasonable initial reaction to the scourge of file trading. After all, it's obvious that music buyers don't have any qualms about stealing music -- and what business person wouldn't want to stop the outright theft of product? But after a while, says Sinnreich, "You have to think 50 million consumers can't be wrong. Actually, you're talking about half a billion application downloads of file traders. How can half a billion downloaders be wrong? They can't. The consumers set the tone for the marketplace."
In other words, there's no way out of this mess for the recording industry other than to implement real subscription services. And with all these many rifts in the music industry, it's amazing how many people seem to agree that legitimate music subscription services can become a viable alternative to free trading. According to the RIAA, there are now nine such pay services, and as they become "more and more appealing to consumers, they will draw users away from the illegitimate sites," Lamy wrote.
Civil libertarians, too, say the same thing. "The reason the [Berman bill] is not a long-term solution to the problem," says the EFF's von Lohmann, "is that if you want to stop casual piracy you have to offer a compelling legal alternative." Sinnreich says that there's "overwhelming year-over-year survey data" to show that people will pay for a subscription service that has all the perks, and none of the hassles, of a free system. "We've asked them in 10 different ways, in ways that they didn't even know they were being asked, and always there's a huge number saying they'll sign up."
But fewer than 5 million people have tried such systems, and it's easy to see why. The services differ widely, with varying price scales, music catalogs and options for downloading, and none offer both the range and flexibility of the free file traders.
Some services, like Listen.com's Rhapsody service, offer "streaming," meaning that the music doesn't reside on your computer. Others, like Pressplay and MusicNet, offer downloads instead, but they limit the number you can have each month.
"None of these services seems to know what the consumer demand is for," Sinnreich says. For a subscription service to work, he thinks it needs to offer four features: content from all five record labels; the capacity to play songs from as many computers as you like; CD burning, for an incremental fee; and "no limitation on the number of songs you listen to in a month -- you have to make them feel like they're getting a lot."
As they're currently designed, none of the services let you feel that way. Listen's $10-per-month Rhapsody service has a fantastic interface, and, since it has content from all five labels, you can find much of what you'd like on it. The Norah Jones CD was there, and with a broadband connection it streamed over beautifully. You can listen to any song as often as you'd like -- an option that gives a taste of what a perfect subscription service would feel like. The only trouble is, Listen won't let you burn -- and, as one file trader asked, "Who wants to be stuck listening to shit at their computer?"
A Listen spokesman says that the company is working on offering CD burning, but the licensing issues make it difficult right now. Pressplay, on the other hand, does let you burn a limited number of tracks, depending on how much you pay. The $15-per-month plan, for example, lets you burn 10 tracks, though you can't have more than two from the same artists per disc. (Though he didn't provide details, a representative for Pressplay said that the company would soon unveil a new version, and the company's pricing model would change "significantly.") Pressplay's catalog is lean, though, too lean to pay much for. And its many rules, like the many rules of all these systems, have a way of sticking in your craw; as you keep using the system, and it keeps telling you how much less "credit" you have, it's hard not to get annoyed and wonder why you ever left the land of the free.
According to the subscription services, their limitations can be traced back to licensing deals with the record labels. There isn't any uniformity to it; different labels release different catalogs to different services, with varying restrictions and at confusing price scales. For example, subscription services must pay more to the labels to offer a download than a stream, even though, on a broadband connection, there is hardly a difference between the two -- and the stream, which can be played on many machines, may in fact be preferable if the download can only be played on one machine, which is a common restriction. Why do the labels have these restrictions? It smacks of old-style thinking -- an inability to recognize that the longer they delay these services, the bigger, and more out of control, trading will become.
You can understand why the music business is frightened. In 2001, CD sales declined 10 percent. Musicians -- and not just the crazy ones -- are accusing labels of placing them under "indentured servitude." Perhaps a tad unfairly, music critics blame the industry for the quality of today's music. (It's probably more appropriate to blame Carson Daly.) And fans? Music fans, for a litany of slights, some perceived and many real, can't stomach the labels.
For the music industry, file trading has become the convenient cause of all its ills. CD sales down? Must be due to Napster. Fans don't like us? Must be Morpheus. It's come to the point that even some artists believe that line. Moby, a guy known for his business and techno savvy, recently blamed the poor sales of his latest album, "18," on his fans' facility with trading apps. "I described the 'Pearl Jam Effect' as being a phenomenon wherein bands who have very technically savvy fans will see their records do poorly in the charts, whereas bands/artists who have less technically savvy fans will do quite well on the charts," he wrote on his blog. "This is owing to the fact that bands/artists with technically savvy fans will have a lot of fans who will end up downloading music or burning CDs where as less tech-savvy fans will end up buying their CDs ... Pink outsells Weezer in the States not so much because she's more popular, but because her fans are more likely to buy, as opposed to burn, her CDs." It couldn't possibly be that "18" just isn't as good as his previous release, "Play." Nope -- it's gotta be those CD burners out there.
The downturn in CD sales could just as easily be explained by the overall economic downturn, and the end of the boy band teen-pop cycle. But that's not to say there isn't a real threat to the way the recording industry does business right now.
"Obviously, any market can become a zero-dollar market if the supplier ceases to provide to the demanders what they want -- and there is danger of that occurring here," Sinnreich says. On the other hand, people like music and they're willing to pay for music. But will they pay for something they can get for free?
Christopher Allen, an executive at MusicMatch, a company that offers a subscription radio service, answers that question this way: "You can get free coffee at work, but there's a ton of people going to Starbucks."
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Workers' downloading puts employers at risk
By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY
Workers using company computers to download music and movies are exposing employers to lawsuits and computer viruses.
Worried employers are disciplining workers and barring them from downloading copyrighted entertainment. Experts say bootlegged music and movies are also a drain on corporate tech resources.
Some workers download songs at the office because of the high-speed Net connections there. Downloading a song at the office can take 20 seconds, compared with 20 minutes at home.
Tempe, Ariz.-based technology and business consulting firm Integrated Information Systems paid $1 million to settle a lawsuit with the Recording Industry Association of America over downloaded music files. The association said the company allowed workers to access and share thousands of copyrighted MP3 music files over its network. Works included songs by Ricky Martin, Aerosmith and The Police.
"It's a huge risk," says Jim Garvey, CEO of Integrated Information Systems. "One employee can rack up millions and millions of dollars in liability on your network."
More companies are buying Internet filtering software to restrict downloads. San Diego-based Websense reports that 30% of 250 companies polled are blocking access to music download sites. Nearly 15% had resorted to disciplining or reprimanding workers.
The risk grows as Web sites that allow entertainment to be downloaded proliferate. Sites allowing file sharing and transfer grew more than 535% in the last 12 months, according to Websense, to nearly 38,000 Web pages. "This is going to become an ever increasing problem," says Harold Kester, chief technology officer at Websense.
He's seen it firsthand. At a previous company, Kester said employees downloaded an episode of Star Wars and watched it at work — even serving popcorn.
Besides legal concerns, downloaded files gobble up bandwidth, draining reserves. And they may contain viruses or create an opening into company networks.
Lawyers say companies that don't take action could find themselves facing more lawsuits from groups such as the RIAA.
Louisville-based Thornton Oil blocks sites where music and movies can be downloaded. "If the radio and music industry can prove a Thornton employee is downloading material, that's a risk," spokesman Matthew Embury says.
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Digital cameras do run out of memory
Tue Jul 30, 9:32 AM ET
Jefferson Graham USA TODAY
SPRINGDALE, Utah -- Scott Pincus had a hunch that in their rush to go digital, shutterbugs would travel without enough memory for their expensive new toys. That's why he began offering visitors a service to transfer digital pictures from their memory cards to CDs at his shop in front of the entrance to the breathtaking Zion National Park.
''I figured many people would come in with full cards, and that would prevent them from taking more pictures,'' says Pincus, owner of Zion Photo.
For vacationers who use ordinary 35mm cameras, running out of pictures means simply buying another roll of film. But digital photographers, particularly those who travel without a laptop on which to dump images, risk getting that nasty ''out of memory'' message on the road. It leaves few options aside from spending $30 or more on a new card, if there's a nearby store that sells the type needed.
Pincus' solution, rarely seen at remote places such as Zion, in the heart of southern Utah: ''I download the images onto a CD, clear off their card and let them go out and shoot more,'' he says. ''Every day, more people are coming in and doing it -- about 10 a day, which is almost as many as are getting their film developed.'' He charges $15 for the service.
Look around you this summer and you'll probably see a lot more people vacationing with digital cameras, among the hottest of today's tech toys. Consumers love seeing their pictures immediately after they've been taken, as well as not having to pay for expensive film developing.
But solutions such as Pincus' spotlight the problems of traveling with digital cameras. Most of the cameras store images on memory cards of various sizes and formats; they're much more expensive than film, though they can be used over and over. But when the cards are full -- introductory 8MB and 16MB cards that come with cameras hold only 15 to 35 images -- pictures either have to be transferred or deleted. That's why many serious shooters tote laptops on vacation.
Jude McGee was on vacation in Amsterdam with her husband and only one 64MB card; they ran out of space in the ninth day of their 20-day trip. ''We even brought the laptop along, but left the (connecting) cord at home by mistake, so there was nothing we could do,'' she says.
She investigated buying an extra memory card, but prices were substantially higher in Europe, so they spent time at cafes deleting pictures to make room. ''Next time I guess I'll bring along an extra card from home,'' says McGee, 56, a writer from Los Angeles.
What to do if you want to leave your laptop at home? Thanks to the increasing popularity of digital photography, the list of options is growing:
* Carry a ''digital wallet.'' When the professional photographers for the latest Day in the Life book project headed to Africa last year, they were armed with a top-of-the-line Olympus digital camera and a Mindstor ''digital wallet,'' a hard drive without a computer, from a company called Minds@Work. The $300 hand-held unit holds 10 gigabytes and includes slots into which you can insert memory cards to transfer images. When you get home, you can transfer them from the wallet into your computer.
''Yes, memory prices are coming down, but we think you get a lot more for your money with our product,'' says Paul Kuptzin of Minds@Work.
The only snag is that the Mindstor doesn't include a preview monitor to see the images and confirm the transfer. (They are referenced by file name.) The just-released Archos Jukebox solves that problem but is pricier at $400, plus $50 for a photo adapter. It's similar to the Mindstor but has a 20GB hard drive and can be used as a digital music player. Also new, the Nixvue Vista ($449 for 5GB, $649 for 30GB) works like the Mindstor but has a built-in LCD screen.
* Bring in your memory cards to get ''developed.'' The photo industry is working hard to persuade digital photographers to drop memory cards off at labs, as with film, and get prints made. Chains such as Wal-Mart and Ritz Camera offer the service, although the printless ''download'' that Pincus provides is still rare. ''Right now, you'd have an easier time buying a replacement card than having it downloaded,'' says Gary Pageau of the Photo Marketing Association. Some stores, if you have prints made, will offer to save the files to CD for an additional $5 to $10.
* Take a tiny printer. Canon's $249 CP-100 plugs directly into Canon cameras and makes 4-by-6 prints without going through a computer. Best of all, it's only 18 ounces, about the size of a portable CD player, and can fit in a camera bag. HP's $179 Photosmart 100 -- as large as a boom box, and it works with any camera -- makes 4-by-6 prints directly from memory cards, again without a PC. Print out your work in your hotel room or campground and have them scanned to share with friends and family via the Web at a local cyber cafe or when you get home.
Pageau estimates the average vacationer shoots six 24-exposure rolls of film, about 150 images, on a week's holiday. The same number of pictures shot digitally would need a 64MB card. And while cards are cheaper than before and much easier to find, ''film is still the most available, anywhere in the world,'' he says.
Jim Gustke of manufacturer Lexar says prices of memory cards have fallen by half in the past year; a 128MB card, which holds more than 300 high quality images, can now be had for less than $70. ''The easiest way to travel is by carrying multiple memory cards,'' he says. ''That way you're prepared.''
Middelhoff exit hurts Napster
30th July 2002
Reuters
The future of the peer-to-peer service appears to be in doubt after the loss of Bertelsmann's moderniser
Napster just lost a good friend and its biggest supporter at Bertelsmann, the parent company that has been keeping it afloat.
With the resignation of Thomas Middelhoff as chief executive of Bertelsmann, the future looks even bleaker for the debt-riddled and lawsuit-plagued music file swapping company, experts said on Monday.
"This can't bode well for Napster," said Peter Fader, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's hard to see a scenario where Middelhoff goes but Napster stays."
Fader attributes the shake-up to "dot-com backlash" as Bertelsmann and other media companies tire of throwing money at unprofitable Internet companies.
"It's a shame to throw the baby out with the bath water and that's exactly what might be happening here," he said.
"People are either running scared or being pushed out," said one employee of an online music company who asked not to be named. "With respect to Napster, it could be the final nail in their coffin."
Maverick Middelhoff
Middelhoff, considered a maverick at the conservative media giant, was forced out over the weekend, with the Gutersloh, German-based company citing differences of opinions on strategy.
He was focused on modernising the company, which owns book publisher Random House, Pan-European broadcaster RTL Group, and BMG Entertainment, which includes RCA Records and Arista Records. He reportedly was aiming to take the company public in 2005 and he oversaw the acquisitions of music retailer CDNow and MyPlay, an online music storage service.
"I thought Thomas was an aggressive guy who took risks and tried to establish a clear vision," said Hilary Rosen, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). "He wasn't a great listener, though."
Bertelsmann's investment in Redwood City, California-based Napster was one of Middelhoff's more controversial moves.
"Middelhoff upset the status quo at BMG when he purchased Napster," said Tess Taylor, president of the National Association of Record Industry Professionals. "Napster has been sidelined not only by all the lawsuits, but by competitors. Even if they were able to revive it, Napster would have a lot of catching up to do."
Napster irked the recording companies by providing a way for people to share songs with each other. BMG Entertainment, along with Vivendi Universal, Sony, AOL Time Warner and EMI sued Napster in 1999 for enabling copyright infringement with its service.
A US federal judge ordered Napster in July 2001 to shut down its service while the lawsuit proceeded. The service had about 60 million users worldwide at the time.
Napster faces lawsuits, rivals
In the meantime, Napster has been developing a subscription-based commercial service and trying to get the labels to license their songs.
Bertelsmann invested in Napster in October 2000 and in May 2002 agreed to acquire Napster outright. As part of the deal, Napster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Bertelsmann has reportedly spent about $80m (£51m) keeping Napster afloat. Napster will still have to pay damages and royalties to the record companies before it can relaunch.
BMG also has invested in a fee-based online music service, MusicNet, with EMI, AOL Time Warner and RealNetworks that competes with a similar venture from Sony and Universal Music called Pressplay and rival Listen.com.
Those services face tough competition from free services that cropped up in Napster's wake, including Kazaa, Morpheus and Audio Galaxy, which will be harder to shut down since they don't have a centralised directory like Napster did.
Online music at risk
Experts said the future of online music itself is in trouble. Earlier this month, AOL Time Warner chief operating officer Robert Pittman and Vivendi Universal chief executive Jean-Marie Messier were pushed out of their jobs.
In July, Andy Schuon resigned as chief executive of PressPlay. At Bertelsmann, Andreas Schmidt, head of BMG's electronic commerce group and the man who oversaw the Napster deal, left late last year.
"This is an environment where you're competing against wholesale piracy and media companies don't have a lot of discretionary money available," Rosen said. "So, it's an uphill battle."
Companies Align To Advance Broadband Entertainment
from BroadbandWeek Direct - April 8, 2002
Consumers' appetites have been whet, and the digital set-top box marketplace is poised for growth, one analysis says. Century Embedded Technologies and VT Media Technologies are joining forces to capitalize on this popularity by delivering cost-effective STB systems.
Research from Gartner Dataquest indicates that digital set-top box systems are the fastest-growing consumer video application, projecting 49 million units will be shipped this year. By 2005, that number is expected to grow to 92 million.
To get their slice of the STB pie, Century and VT will focus their efforts on the low-cost broadband/IP STB market. The companies intend to combine their engineering, sales and marketing resources. The goal of the alliance is to bridge the gap between low-cost hardware and the features needed for today's advanced set-top box systems, the companies say.
Software developer Century brings a range of products from server and management applications for the head-end to content encryption and video streaming applications to the alliance. VT Media will supply hardware.
The companies believe the future of broadband entertainment will depend on the availability of low-cost devices that offer consumers video streaming, pay-per-view, video-on-demand and Internet access.
This alliance is not the first time Century and VT Media have worked together. Earlier this year, the duo released the VT100, a broadband set-top box priced below $150, aimed at the residential digital TV market.
VENTURING IN BROADBAND ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY:
Opportunities in the "Second Wave"
The Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum Presents:
October 16, 2001
As the Internet stocks crashed this past year, broadband entertainment technology companies were among the hardest hit. According to Kagan World Media, streaming media and Internet media stocks are down 80 and 70 percent, respectively, from their 52-week high. For the same period, NASDAQ and Internet retailer stocks are down a smaller 52 and 27 percent, respectively. Napster usage has fallen over 80 percent following court orders to stop trading copyrighted material. Many broadband entertainment technology companies such as Scour and Load have closed due to litigation and lack of financing. The survivors, such as Launch.com and MP3.com, have been snatched up by the established media companies.
However, over the past few months, a second wave has emerged - led by established entertainment companies. In music, Universal and Sony joined forces to launch Pressplay, and Warner, BMG, and EMI launched MusicNet. In motion pictures, Sony, Universal, Warner Brothers, MGM, and Paramount announced their joint venture MovieFly. The following week, Disney and Fox announced Movies.com, a venture in video-on-demand. Cable companies have been aggressively upgrading their systems for video-on-demand and broadband content. Streaming media stocks have rebounded 31 percent from recent lows, and content providers have started releasing product over the Internet to thwart piracy and create new sources of revenue. Meanwhile, established firms like Cisco and Microsoft have begun to pursue this segment aggressively - muscling out the newcomers with their business clout and deep pockets.
While the big players move into the broadband entertainment technology arena, where are the opportunities for entrepreneurs? In this program, the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum takes a critical look at broadband entertainment technology and explores the applications where entrepreneurs are likely to find their greatest success.
What have we learned from the "first wave" of broadband entertainment technologies?
What technologies are emerging as winners?
What applications most interest venture investors?
What is the new "killer app" for this technology?
How should entrepreneurs get started in this industry?
Should entrepreneurs start now or wait until the market is more clearly defined?
We answer these questions through a panel of industry experts and broadband technology entrepreneurs who will provide a critical look at the emerging broadband technology market and the opportunities for entrepreneurs in this second wave of market expansion. Following a round of audience questions, we will close the program and provide an opportunity to network and talk informally with the panelists about their perspective and remarks.
Digital Radio Comes Back to Earth
FCC to evaluate IBOC standard
By Steven Fyffe -- Electronic News, 10/15/2001
A digital radio circuit board from Texas Instruments Inc.
As the In-Band On-Channel (IBOC) standard for terrestrial digital radio moves into the approval phase in the United States and other digital radio efforts ramp up in the rest of the world, semiconductor companies are positioning themselves to grab a piece of what could be a massive market.
Texas Instruments Inc. is thinking big.
"Today we have AM and FM radio," said Naresh Coppisetti, business manager for digital radio at TI (nyse: TXN). "Just like cell phones and cameras—all that is going digital. The move from analog to digital transmission must happen. We know that. If you agree with that, then why not be involved early in the transition?
"More than 300 million radios are sold each year worldwide. It is the second or third largest volume market after cell phones," he said.
And the similarities to the cell phone market don't end there. Like the fragmented cell phone industry, proponents of digital radio have split into different standardization camps across the world.
Europe and Canada have adopted the Eureka 147 Digital Audio Broadcasting standard, and Asia looks set to climb on board as well.
As usual, the United States' spectrum squeeze has forced the country to take a different tack. Columbia, Md.-based intellectual property (IP) company iBiquity Digital Corp. is building its business on the hope that the U.S. market will rally around its proposed IBOC standard, which is set to be sent to the Federal Communications Commission for final approval early next year.
On top of these standards, XM Satellite Radio Inc. launched its proprietary service in select U.S. markets in late September, and rival Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. is expected to launch its own service soon.
iBiquity has recruited a strong roster of chipmakers to its cause, including TI, Philips, STMicroelectronics and Agere Systems.
Those four allies have split into two main factions based on their historical design strengths and customer needs. "There are two basic design approaches," said Ben Benjamin, co-chief operating officer of iBiquity. "There is the typical DSP approach that gives a shortend product realization time because you can upgrade the software. Then there is the ASIC approach that optimizes the chip size and gives you somewhat lower cost, but it is less flexible for changing feature sets."
Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Royal Philips Electronics and Geneva-based STMicroelectronics Inc. are both working on drop-in ASIC chipsets so car radio OEMs can take out the current chip and slot the new one in without having to drastically modify the whole radio design, Benjamin said.
"It takes a while to put a new design into a dashboard, and that is one way to get around it—fitting a new IC into an existing footprint."
Car radios are the first big target for chipmakers in the digital radio market, Benjamin said. Philips and STMicro are hoping their strength in auto electronics will translate into a first-mover advantage in terrestrial digital radio.
"Sixty percent of Americans spend 21 hours a week listening to the radio in their car," Benjamin said.
Allentown, Pa.-based Agere Systems Inc. and Dallas-based TI are attacking the market from a more purist DSP angle. While ASICs are traditionally cheaper in high volumes, TI believes its experience in the cell phone market will help make its DSPs cost competitive.
"We were able to do it in cell phones, why can't we cost reduce the thing and be a real player in the DAB market?" Coppisetti said. "Cost is everything if you want it to be a mass market. We are playing very well in the cell phone market, and it is very similar to digital radio."
In Europe, TI currently sells a baseband processor, based on its C5000 core, bundled with 12 other analog components for $15 to $17.50. Other components are needed to make a functioning digital radio, including an RF chip, memory and passive components. But TI claims OEMs can manufacture digital radio boom-boxes, using the licensable reference design it developed with London-based RadioScape Ltd., for less than $200.
According to market research firms, consumers should be willing to pay for the better-quality sound and limited data-casting capabilities of IBOC terrestrial digital radio when the price comes within $100 of conventional analog radio, Benjamin said.
In contrast to satellite digital radio, which will offer around 100 channels nationwide for a monthly subscription, terrestrial digital radio in the United States will be free, piggybacking on the current AM-FM system.
"We see terrestrial radio as largely a local phenomenon," Benjamin said. "Most people use it because they can get information, entertainment and local advertisement."
TI is also exploring the possibilities of combining a portable digital radio with an MP3 player, Coppisetti said.
"A digital walkman would be very easy," he said. "MP3 decoding can be done on the same chip as the baseband. We think that the convergence of MP3 and DAB is going to be a powerful proposition for consumers. You have MP3 instead of a cassette, and you can record DAB music onto a flash card.
"TI is very uniquely positioned in this convergence because of the programmable nature of our baseband processor," he said.
Power consumption is the major technical hurdle to creating the all-in-one digital walkman, Coppisetti said. "Our target is to run the walkman on two AA batteries," he said.
Combined MP3, DAB walkman products should hit the market in the second half of next year, Coppisetti said.
Tinker with your MP3 player, get 5 years in jail
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 29/07/2002 at 17:21 GMT
We were suspicious a few months back when US Senator Joseph Biden (Democrat, Delaware) introduced proposed legislation with Senator Fritz "Hollywood" Hollings (Democrat, South Carolina) to protect emblems of authenticity for digital media, such as holograms, with the same tough laws that criminalize bogus labels on designer-wear.
A Biden aide told us at the time that the proposed legislation would have no effect on DRM features; it was merely meant to cover software and music packaging. We doubted it was so, and now we see that the Dynamic Duo have indeed attempted to swindle consumers on behalf of their Benevolent Masters in the software and entertainment industries.
The bill's language, in particular the term 'authentication feature', has now been greatly expanded to include "any hologram, watermark, certification, symbol, code, image, sequence of numbers or letters, or other feature that either individually or in combination with another feature is used by the respective copyright owner to verify that a phonorecord, a copy of a computer program, a copy of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or documentation or packaging is not counterfeit or otherwise infringing of any copyright."
Thus "illicit authentication" could be anything a consumer might do to make older, legally-purchased media and software run on DRM-enabled computer hardware or software or household gizmos such as CD and DVD players. The language is wide open here; in practice it will mean whatever the movie and music industries, and the BSA paramilitaries, decide it should mean.
It dovetails beautifully with Fritz Hollings' copyright Final Solution, a loathsome piece of legislation which would force DRM compliance on all hardware sold in America. Meanwhile, he and Biden are sneaking around to the back door to ensure that any liberties taken by consumers to free themselves from this odious Copyright Regime becomes a felony under federal law.
The RIAA, MPAA and BSA certainly are getting their money's worth out of these two fine representatives of the people (who matter). ®
Cell phones adding flash
By Richard Shim
Special to ZDNet News
July 29, 2002, 8:45 AM PT
Removable flash memory cards are poised to make a breakthrough into the ranks of cell phones.
The storage devices are leaping ahead in capacity while their price per megabyte remains relatively stable, opening up opportunities for card makers.
Prices of flash memory cards, fixtures in digital cameras and audio players, have been high enough to hamper sales of devices that use them as a means of storage. But that's set to change. Research firm IDC estimates that average memory capacity will increase from about 42MB per card this year to about 83MB in 2006. Price per megabyte will drop from 45 cents this year to 10 cents in 2006.
For the next few years, the removable cards will continue to be used primarily with digital cameras. IDC estimates that digital cameras account for about two-thirds of total shipments of flash memory cards.
"Only 15 percent of U.S. homes have a digital camera, so there is still a lot of room for growth," said Eric Stang, chief executive at card maker Lexar Media. But Stang sees cell phones becoming a big area of opportunity.
Lexar will begin shipping 512MB Secure Digital flash memory cards priced at $399 starting Aug. 1, the company expects to announce Monday. Secure Digital is the latest major format to hit the market, and while it represents a fall in price, it is still among the more expensive of the formats per megabyte.
Following an uncharacteristic year in which price per megabyte for flash memory fell by 75 percent, levels are stabilizing and in the second quarter declined only 8 percent, Stang said.
Calling on memory
Industry insiders expect that in the coming years most shipments of the cards will be for use with cell phones. Demand for memory cards will get a boost over the long term by cell phones that will run on next-generation wireless networks, according to IDC analyst Mario Morales.
"As high-speed networks become available, we'll be moving toward data-centric phones, and they will gradually incorporate advanced features," Morales said.
IDC expects shipments of cards used in cell phones to explode from 600,000 units in 2001 to nearly 150 million units in 2006, vaulting them over digital camera shipments from well behind to well in front. From 2001 to 2006, deliveries of flash memory cards used with digital cameras are expected to grow from 35 million units shipped to nearly 62 million, according to IDC.
There are several potential uses for flash memory cards in cell phones: Phone owners can, for instance, store images for transfer over wireless networks or back up files.
A key issue for cell phone users is security, and the industry is moving to address that area. On Thursday, a group known as the 5C announced the creation of the Mobile Commerce (MC) Extension Specification for flash memory cards, which they hope will encourage cell phone owners to perform transactions over wireless networks.
The specification is intended to keep strangers from capturing sensitive information when it is being transferred wirelessly and to protect data if a consumer loses a card. The specification can be used in all the major flash memory card formats, including CompactFlash, Secure Digital and Memory Stick.
Several phone companies have already announced intentions to use flash memory cards in upcoming phones, including Sony Ericsson in its P800 and NTT DoCoMo in its i-shot mova D25li. Both phones come with built-in digital cameras and use Memory Stick Duo cards.
The formats likely to benefit most from the expected increase in use of flash memory in phones are the smallest of the major formats, Secure Digital and MultiMedia Card, according to IDC. Sony has been promoting Memory Stick Duo, which is about the same size, to serve as a smaller Memory Stick format for use in cell phones and small digital audio players.
Lexar's Secure Digital cards come in capacities of 32MB, 64MB, 128MB and 256MB. The company also sells other card formats, such as Memory Stick, CompactFlash, SmartMedia and MultiMedia Card.
Intel Pushes Personal Video Player Design
*** check out photo
July 29, 2002
By: Mark Hachman
Intel Corp. has begun pushing a "personal video player" gadget design to consumer-electronics manufacturers, the company said Monday.
The "PVP", as Intel calls it, won't be designed by Intel. Instead, Intel is encouraging electronics manufacturers to adopt a series of basic specifications for the handheld video player, which would apparently approximate the video screen used by larger cell phones, but without the communication capabilities.
Several consumer-electronics companies have expressed "strong interest", the company said, although Intel did not disclose which firms.
Intel envisions the device as a personal multimedia player, able to view pictures or video, but apparently lacking the capability to play games or serve as an organizer. The device, designed to include a small 20-Gbyte hard drive, would download pictures or video from a PC via a USB cable or 802.11 wireless connection.
Intel, which cut its own consumer-electronics group in a restructuring last year, said the initiative is part of a "concept platforms" program to seed consumer-electronics companies with products incorporating Intel technologies. The concept is similar to IBM's "pervasive computing" initiative, which produced an IBM-Honda speech-recognition deal on Monday.
Recommended key features of the PVP would include the capability to store up to 70 hours of high-quality video using MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 codecs, as well as the ability to play over four hours worth of audio or video without recharging. Intel would also like the device to able to transfer that amount of video from PC to PVP in just under 3 minutes.
Intel envisions the PVP containing an Intel Xscale processor, a 20-Gbyte hard drive, a 4-inch diagonal (320x240) LCD display, and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. The device would measure about 5" x 3" x ¾",weighing less than 12 ounces with the battery. Intel said it would provide an update to the specification later this year.
"The manufacturers of the devices will set the actual price, but Intel believes that the price point for volume adoption is around $400," the company said in a statement. Actual products could be in place by next year, according to Intel.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,426323,00.asp
Unheralded hard drives a catalyst for better gadgets
MAY WONG, AP Technology Writer Sunday, July 28, 2002
(07-28) 12:38 PDT SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) --
Next to semiconductors that keep screaming more and more gigahertz, there's a quieter catalyst for ever more powerful and shrinking high-tech gadgets: hard drives.
Disk drives keep our personal digital data -- from treasured e-mails and personal finance records to photos and music. On a larger level, they are repositories of critical databases, storing everything from bank transactions to government documents.
Now the magnetic drives are getting cheaper, smaller and denser than ever, cropping up in all kinds of devices, fueling society's unstoppable transition to all things digital.
Hard drives now come in packages almost as small as a quarter.
IBM Corp.'s 1-gigabyte Microdrive holds the equivalent of 700 floppy disks in a half-ounce, one-inch package. And credit-card sized hard drives in laptops can now hold 20 GB of data.
Worldwide shipments of hard drives -- the majority of which still go to PCs -- dipped with the economic downturn to 196 million in 2001 from 200 million the previous year.
But boosted largely by hard drives' inclusion in devices other than PCs, shipments should rise to 213 million this year and to 352 million in 2006, the market research firm International Data Corp predicts.
The cost of hard drive storage has dropped from $10,000 per megabyte when IBM invented the hard drive in 1956 -- a few years before Fairchild Semiconductor invented the integrated circuit -- to about $1 per gigabyte today.
And that means hard drives are cheap enough to put anywhere we'd want to store data.
Seagate Technology, a leading drive maker, has now dedicated a lab to work exclusively with electronics manufacturers who are building hard drives into home media servers, personal digital video recorders, cable and satellite set-top boxes, game consoles, audio jukeboxes and home security systems.
Microsoft's Xbox game console has a hard drive and Sony plans to integrate one in its Playstation2.
Toshiba Corp.'s 1.8-inch hard disk allowed Apple Computer Inc.'s pocket-sized iPod to hold 5 GB of data, or 1,000 songs, when the portable music player debuted last year. Toshiba has since quadrupled the drive's capacity.
Makers of car accessories are also big on hard drives.
PhatNoise Inc. is using a rugged 2.5-inch Toshiba hard drive to power its car jukebox while Blaupunkt has an audio player that allows users to download 18 hours worth of music onto a Microdrive.
Such drives can be costly -- a 1 GB Microdrive is $369 retail.
Solid-state flash memory such as CompactFlash, SD cards and Memory Sticks, are generally less expensive but store far less data than hard drives.
With hard drives, bits of data -- in the form of 0s and 1s -- are stored in magnetic patterns onto rotating disks coated with iron oxide. Similar to the needle of a phonograph, an electromagnetic head moves above the disk to read or record the data.
Disk speeds doubled in the 1990s: most hard drives in PCs and consumer devices spin at 3,600 or 7,200 RPM, while high-performance ones for large computer servers hum at 15,000 RPMs.
At the same time, more data is getting squeezed into smaller areas, with capacity doubling nearly each year. Hard drive makers are also switching to fluid- instead of ball-bearing motors.
These improvements have made hard drives more reliable, faster at finding blocks of data, and quieter.
But as incredible a technological feat as they are, hard drives -- as mechanical devices with moving parts -- have a limited life span.
Hard drives experience wear and tear each time a computer is turned on and off. They generally come with three- to five-year warranties and analysts say it's best not to trust them to last that long.
That's why for long-term storage of data, backups -- either onto another hard disk or onto CDs or other hardier storage mediums -- are always recommended.
"If you have a gigabyte of photos stored on a portable disk that cost you $350, the last thing you want to do is lose those," said Dave Reinsel, a hard disk drive industry research manager at IDC. "It's like pulling your negatives out of the roll -- it's gone forever."
To show for her neglect in data backup, Ellen Silverberg of Farmington Hills, Mich. has a $1,300 bill from a data recovery company.
A virus-triggered crash of her home computer's 8 GB drive erased years of e-mails, hundreds of photos of her baby son, tons of contacts, her archive of homemade birthday and Christmas cards and a 900-member family tree.
The Ford Motor Co. product development manager was able to salvage the digital pieces of her life -- for about the cost of a new, more powerful computer.
But a hard disk drive's value is not lost on Silverberg. She remains devoted to the whirring magnetic platters of data storage.
"You can't give up on this kind of technology," she said. "It's like giving up the telephone."
NTT DoCoMo to launch large-screen handheld
NTT DoCoMo is to introduce a handheld computer with a 3.5-inch display in Japan this autumn.
The Musea will offer subscribers access to web content, including streamed music and video.
It will be available via DoCoMo's InfoGate PDA service, which supports 3G connections.
The device will be based on the Pocket PC 2002 operating system.
Windows-based applications available will include a function to record and store web pages for offline browsing.
Musea will launch in Japan at the beginning of September.
Its price has yet to be confirmed.
just a thought: clearly edigital and digitalway knew exactly what they were doing when they designed the Odyssey 1000 to look so similar to the IPOD; the Forbes article raises again the spector of Apple suing; while that involves a fairly complicated issue related to trade dress and whether or not the similarity in design causes a confusion in the minds of the consuming public, it's just possible that edig /digitalway really doesn't care and secretly hopes that apple WILL sue them; as many others have pointed out here this would bring great publicity to the odyssey 1000; just suppose edig/digitalway ALREADY had a backup design ready to go; think of the AD promotion campaign re the player apple tried to kill but won't be stopped; since it is digitalway's design; hopefully, edig and DGN already have an agreement that if apple sues, the defense costs come out of DGN's pocket not edig
bosox-- last report from evolution that I saw stated that evolution/mtv does not intend to introduce its player until late Sept/early Aug 2002 because not enough prerecorded content will be available until then
STM/BOSE DSP-based Digital AM/FM Radio Chipset Directly Digitizes IF
By Mark Long -- e-inSITE, 7/16/2002
STMicroelectronics has begun sampling a new AM/FM radio receiver chipset that directly digitizes the 10.7MHz intermediate frequency in IBOC (In-Band On-Channel) digital radio applications. The new chipset consists of an analog front-end chip in the 0.7-micron BiCMOS process (TDA7515) and a digital AM/FM IF sampling processor in 0.18-micron CMOS (TDA7580). The offering also includes embedded DSP software for implementing advanced algorithms for boosting receiver performance jointly developed by ST and Bose Corporation.
According to the company, the new design also features the implementation of complex equalization techniques that can be deployed to reduce multipath reception effects from adjacent channels. In addition, the chipset's software design approach will allow additional features to be added later without requiring a hardware redesign.
ST claims that the new chipset will smooth the path towards dual standard IBOC/FM receivers by allowing a single DSP to be equipped with the software for handle both. This should give the IBOC-equipped radio a user-transparent FM fallback mode when encountering borderline reception conditions. In addition, the chipset offers support for tuning frequencies worldwide, allowing a single application to cover all markets by simply making software changes.
ST's DSP software for the TDA7580 includes the implementation of algorithms developed jointly by ST and Bose Corporation. However, system designers using the chipset may also elect to modify or extend a portion of the standard software package for the purpose of adding new features or for embedding their own proprietary technology.
The TDA7515 and TDA7580 chips are supplied in 44- and 64-lead TQFP packages, respectively. According to the company, very few external components are required because most functions are performed digitally. In addtion, a hardware decoder for Radio Data System (RDhas been included in the TDA7580 so that RDS decoding can be performed without placing additional demands on any DSP resources.
Already sampling, the TDA7515 and TDA7580 are scheduled to reach volume production in 4Q02.
7/26/02 New on the club scene: hard disk DJs `spinning' MP3s
NEW YORK (AP) - Friday nights at Brooklyn's BQE bar appear like most others.
Attractive hipsters fill the high-ceilinged space with laughter and cigarette smoke, bopping their heads to the beat as they order $7 gin and tonics. They come to meet friends and hear the disc jockey spin the week's worries away.
What most don't know, however, is that this DJ's turntables are empty -- all the music comes from two10-gigabyte disk drives, each smaller than a pack of cigarettes.
Ben Kirkendoll leaves the records at home in favor of his iPods, Apple Computer's disk-based music player, which he simply plugs into an audio system's mixer.
He's part of a small but growing number of DJs who have turned to MP3 music files for their accessibility and convenience.
Some equipment manufacturers are even getting hip, offering specialized products beyond the iPod, a general usage music player. A few digital DJ systems are already available, and one due in September promises to combine MP3 technology with old-fashioned mixing capabilities.
New York ad salesman Michael Parrish, who noticed the BQE's DJ was turntables-free when he requested a song, says anyone can be a DJ now.
``When I was younger I felt like there was a talent to it because they were spinning records backwards and forwards and really cutting it in and overlapping songs,'' Parrish says. ``It doesn't take much talent to be a DJ anymore. You just have to have a good flow of songs.''
Kirkendoll, by day an artist at a New York advertising agency, acknowledges that plugging an iPod into a sound system and cueing up tracks doesn't require even a fraction of the skill needed to spin records.
And he can't use iPods to match up beats, alter the pitch of music or spin records back and forth for a scratching effect -- all things that professional club DJs consider essential.
But Kirkendoll, who calls himself ``The Podiatrist,'' was hired for his collection of music and penchant for feeling the vibe of a crowd, not his ability to mix or scratch.
``I love that you can walk into a bar with two little gimmicks in either pocket and have over 4,000 songs to play,'' says Taya Pocock, booking manager at the BQE.
Part of the beauty of MP3s, Kirkendoll says, is that a regular guy with a day job and a passion for music can be a DJ without years of practicing and thousands of dollars scouring record shops for those rare must-haves.
Peer-to-peer networks and Internet download sites provide Kirkendoll with a hefty supply, though he still relies heavily on CDs from his own collection, which he converts into MP3 files.
Manufacturers are starting to recognize that DJs are obtaining more of their music from the Internet -- some legally, others not so -- or converting their CD tracks. And they're responding with products.
Pioneer is promising for September the DMP-555, an MP3 player it says will include scratch capabilities and pitch controls normally available only to conventional DJs. And Gem Sound has the MP3X-Pro mixer, which allows digitally downloaded music to be stored in the unit itself.
There are also software-based programs, such as PCDJ by Visiosonic and DJPower by DJPower International LLC, but they require a computer.
Gerald Webb, a DJ who switched from vinyl to CDs eight years ago, thinks many manufacturers have been reluctant to offer MP3 devices because they fear copyright lawsuits.
Pioneer's response is the Secure Data Card, which stores and transfers digital files for the DMP-555. The SD card allows the same song to be copied only three times and permits transfers only to computers from which a file originated.
But as for assuring the digital files were legally obtained to begin with, ``there's really no way that we can regulate what our users are doing,'' Pioneer's Brian Buonassissi says. ``They have to cover themselves.''
Gem Sound takes a similar stance.
``MP3 is definitely legal,'' marketing manager Barry Seiden says. ``There are ways to do it that are illegal. The person that's using it has to decide.''
A 1998 copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, bans circumventing anti-piracy measures built into software and devices. But it does not require manufacturers to incorporate such measures.
A bill pending in the Senate would. That proposal, from by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., would ``shut down electronic DJ culture,'' said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a University of Wisconsin professor critical of modern copyright laws.
Further, manufacturers are increasingly placing controls on CDs so that they'll play in a CD player but can't be converted to MP3 format. That means some legally obtained music already can't be transferred to iPods and other MP3 devices. Officials from the Recording Industry Association of America refused comment for this story.
For now, the digital movement's effect on DJing is limited largely because many longtime DJs still frown on the technology.
``I think we kind of tend to stick to the tried and true stuff. Not that we don't embrace technology, it's just very new,'' says Brian Pember, co-founder and creative director of Groovetech, a Seattle-based Web site that broadcasts live DJ sets and deals electronic music.
He says DJs who use laptops, MP3 players and digital turntables in clubs get scoffed at by the ``purists.''
``You'll definitely see a lot of snickering and sneering,'' Pember says, ``but really it's out of a sense of fear.''