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SigmaTel sees strong demand for MP3 player chips
Posted 10/12/2004 11:11 AM Updated 10/12/2004 2:00 PM
By Doug Young, Reuters
HONG KONG — SigmaTel, the world's biggest maker of chips for MP3 players, said on Tuesday it remained immune to the slowdown hitting other semiconductor firms after a near-doubling of second-quarter revenues.
Investors fear that certain semiconductor segments, including cell phones and PCs, are showing signs of slowing, in what could be the start of a downturn for the highly cyclical industry.
"In broad terms, our expectations on growth for the segments that we're in are meeting what we thought they would be," Mike Wodopian, SingmaTel's vice president of corporate marketing and business development, told Reuters.
"We're not seeing the dramatic declines that some of the other segments are reporting," he said in an interview in Hong Kong.
Wodopian said SigmaTel's strong outlook may reflect the relatively low cost for digital music players, which now sell for as little as $100 — far less than the average PC or cell phone.
When consumer spending slows, more expensive items are often the first to feel the effect as buyers rein in their bigger ticket purchases.
PC chip specialist Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, has been prominent in its cautious outlook, warning twice since July of signs of softness in its business.
Last month, Texas Instruments, the largest maker of chips for cell phones, also trimmed its third-quarter revenue outlook as customers worked off inventory of unsold chips.
SigmaTel has seen its business grow sharply in the last year as MP3 players have increased in popularity and prices have tumbled.
In July, the company said its earnings jumped to 23 cents per share in the second quarter from 3 cents a year earlier, as revenue grew to $36.6 million from $19.7 million. Its customers include the likes of Samsung Electronics, Thomson, Dell and Sony.
SigmaTel is riding a boom in MP3 and other portable audio players that has seen sales grow from 17 million units last year to a forecast 31.5 million units this year, according to CIBC World Markets. SigmaTel's share of that market stood at about 50% last year — a number the company believes it can improve on, Wodopian said.
In a nod to the popularity of MP3 players in Asia, and the fact that nearly all its customers are in the region, SigmaTel has chosen Hong Kong for its first support and development centre outside its headquarters in Austin, Texas.
The Hong Kong centre will start off with 10-12 people, but could grow quickly after that, including a potential future China location in the border city of Shenzhen, Wodopian said.
"Over the next two years, we plan for an office space that could house 35 people here in Hong Kong," he said. "It's going to be a whole lot easier for us to support our customers locally than from Texas."
Is the mobile phone the next iPod Killer?
By Bernhard Warner, Reuters
LONDON — English photographer Alastair Daly was in the market recently for an affordable digital music player capable of storing enough songs to pass the time on his hour-long commute through the capital city's clogged streets.
So, instead he bought an SPVC500 smartphone, a new phone from European mobile telecoms service provider Orange Plc, that can store nine albums' worth of music on a memory card.
While the smartphone's memory capacity is a fraction of the 20-gigabyte Apple iPod, the sound quality is comparable, Daly said. And, at about $135 it's cheaper than iPod, whose midline price in Britain is about $382. Plus, it functions as a personal digital assistant (PDA) as well.
"It means I don't have to carry a phone, an iPod and a PDA with me everywhere I go," said Daly, 32. "I may still get an MP3 player for all my music, but I just don't have the money right now."
Actually, Daly paid nothing for the phone. Orange was giving away the phones as part of a promotion — a staple gimmick in the telecoms industry to kickstart usage.
Daly's only expense was a 512-megabyte memory card for $143 that slides into the bottom of the phone.
Turn up the mobile
The days of a mobile phone that functions merely as a communications device capable of playing only off-key ringtone renditions are coming to an abrupt end.
A raft of new phones with souped-up storage, bright color screens and stereo-quality sound systems are hitting the market, mainly to compete with an array of PDAs that themselves double as a phone.
Together, these new gadgets have morphed into an entertainment device to challenge Apple's dominance in the MP3 player market, some analysts say.
The introduction of Samsung's new SPH-V5400 handset last month is considered one of the most interesting developments in the MP3 market as it is the first mobile phone with a built-in hard drive.
Not surprisingly, the prospect of millions of consumers paying for song downloads that can be stored directly onto their handsets has the music industry buzzing.
"The mobile phone MP3 player is interesting to us," said Richard Wheeler, head of new technology developments at London-based record label and artist management firm Sanctuary Group.
"I wouldn't say it's an iPod killer. The iPod will probably always sound better and have better storage. But there will be a market as long as the price is competitive," said Wheeler.
Discounting the players
The mobile phone service operators have a long history of discounting handsets with the aim of making back money on monthly contracts and add-on services from text messages to news headlines, and, with the advent of 3G services in Europe, video highlights of pro soccer matches and music videos.
If the practice of subsidizing continues with MP3 player phones, it could jump-start the nascent market, Wheeler said.
"The phone industry is in a unique position. They can subsidize the hardware. Apple cannot afford to do that," Wheeler added.
While pricing and bandwidth constraints remain the biggest obstacles for mobile phone song download services in the near term, it hasn't stopped the world's largest music labels and mobile phone services from rushing to market new song services.
Universal Music has deals with T-Mobile in to allow European fans of the Black Eyed Peas to download the band's videos and listen to a variety of tracks on the Motorola E398 model.
Siemens, meanwhile, has developed a handset that functions as a pocket sized jukebox. The Siemens SX1 Music smartphone has a replaceable memory chip that can store up to 120 songs; higher-capacity cards are hitting the market all the time.
Some analysts believe the mobile phone with hard disc capacity could revolutionize the MP3 player market just as the camera phone did for the photography world.
"There's no reason to think we won't have a five-gigabyte hard drive on the market next year," said Hubert Gertis, a technology analyst for Berlin-based consultancy Gertis Media.
He added top-of-the-line mobile phones could have hard drive capacity of 400 GB by 2007 — or 10 times the capacity of Apple's top-end iPod that now stores 10,000 songs.
Of course, memory capacity for all pocket-size devices is growing at an alarming rate, too. At the current rate of innovation, a PDA or MP3 player is forecast to hold 1.6 terabytes of data — the equivalent of 400,000 songs — by the end of the decade, said Gertis.
"The only question is: Does a person really need to store that much music?" Gertis asks.
If it's not a record quarter or darn close...heads will roll and no amount of excuses will be enuf to stop this from going to .01...simple as that
you have never addressed how they will generate the revenues if they indeed amount to a record for the company? Since you apparently have no clue, why do you go on and on about it? What do you suppose they failed to show these huge amounts of deferred revenue in the SEC filings?
It seems perhaps that the claim would have been made on revenues not showing up as "deferred"(how can it be??) but nonetheless coming due this quarter--what do your green eyeshade guys tell you about that? Can't figure it out..maybe reiterating over and over how it can't be done is not so smart. If you could explain it, that would be impressive and show you really knew something about the business..but alas
innuendo is your only true skill set
record quarter owd3..get ready..oh that's right it was all deferred therefore somehow it doesn't matter.
they've lost money before so if they have significant revenues...it doesn't matter
the fact that those record revenues will have come from, "check(ing) the mailbox everyday hoping APS sold another couple hundred units"...which apparently they did...won't matter
atleast...according to you and your opinions
but..you know what they say about opinions
Fonix.eom
Orb Unveils New Service for Digital Media
Oct 11, 12:20 AM (ET)
By MAY WONG
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - In a move sure to raise the eyebrows of Hollywood and its partners, a California startup will unveil a service Monday that allows subscribers to remotely access their digital media files - even watch live television - from any gadget with an Internet connection.
Want to watch your HBO while waiting at the doctor's office, or use your cell phone instead of a portable music player to listen to songs from your home's digital jukebox?
The technology from Orb Networks Inc., based in Union City, grabs a user's music, video, or photo files stored on their home PCs and streams them to Web-enabled devices such as cell phones, laptops, or personal digital assistants. A user's cable or satellite TV can also be accessed as long as the video output is somehow hooked up to a home computer network.
"We think of this as a personal media portal," said Orb's chief executive, Jim Behrens. "Your media is always with you."
Orb contends any files on a user's PC - including copy-protected ones, such as songs downloaded from Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL)'s iTunes Music Store, or films from online movie service MovieLink - will be playable on-the-go through their service.
Orb's streaming technology essentially keeps the same copy protections, including the usual restrictions against making digital copies and sharing them freely over the Internet, but lets users access their media however they choose, Behrens said.
"We want content creators to get paid for their content, but once users have paid for it, they should be able to play it on whatever device they want and wherever they want," he said.
It's a notion Hollywood has challenged in the past, battling the pioneers of VCRs, such as Sony Corp. (SNE), to the makers of digital video recorders, such as TiVo Inc. (TIVO)
So far, TiVo, which will soon let its subscribers access their recorded TV shows on other devices outside the home, has prevailed over Hollywood's piracy and broadcast rights concerns. But that won't stop the powerful studios, analysts say.
"Media companies are terrified about their content going on the Internet, and they'll fight until they're sure that the content is being sent to you and only you," said Josh Bernoff, a digital media analyst at Forrester Research. "It's not even a question of whether it's legal, it's whether or not they'll get sued, and there's a significant possibility of that here."
A startup faces tremendous hurdles in fighting deep-pocketed opponents. Just consider how former small companies with controversial video-related technologies, such as SonicBlue Inc. and 321 Studios Inc., went bankrupt, crushed by the costs of fighting Hollywood.
Neither will companies like Apple or Sony, which have designed the tunes downloaded from their music stores to be transferrable only to their respectively branded portable players, necessarily appreciate how the Orb service eludes their restrictions.
Orb executives expect opposition but said they have worked closely with lawyers and are confident Orb would prevail if confronted in court.
The Orb service will be available in mid-November starting at $9.99 a month or $79.99 per year. Additional users off the same home-based account would have to pay $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year.
Users must download Orb software onto their home computers and set up a password-protected Orb account. To access their home media files over the Internet, users need to be able to launch a Web browser and have a media player - either Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s Windows, RealNetworks Inc. (RNWK)'s RealPlayer, or one provided by Orb - on their portable devices.
The service is targeted at households with high-speed broadband connections, though during the streaming process, the quality of the videos or photos would be limited to the connection speeds and screen resolutions of the devices.
Orb claims it can access any digital media file off of a user's PC, but its reach into a set-top-box connected to a home computer network, such as a TiVo or a cable DVR set-top-box, is blocked until Orb gets permission from those companies to place its software in those boxes - a business strategy Orb is pursuing.
"If Orb could get its technology working properly, it's a promising idea," Bernoff said. "But anything with a subscription fee is also going to have to be incredibly useful to get people to pay."
EXCLUSIVE: 60GB iPod to pack photo-viewing features
By Ryan Katz, Senior Editor
October 8, 2004 - After three years of being synonymous with "digital music player," Apple's iPod will widen its horizons and gain photo-viewing capabilities within the next 30 to 60 days, highly reliable sources tell Think Secret.
The new iPod, which will sit at the top of Apple's fourth-generation line-up, will pack Toshiba's new 60GB 1.8-inch hard drive, a 2-inch color liquid crystal display, iPhoto synchronization, audio/video-out capabilities, and will sell for $499.
The new iPod is currently in production in Asia after delays from Toshiba in delivering its new 60GB drive hampered a planned early-September ramp up. Sources confirm Toshiba started shipping the drive to Apple in mid-September and iPod manufacturer Inventec began building the new device in the last two weeks.
The new iPod's form factor will be identical to the existing 4G iPods, sources report, but will be two millimeters thicker than the current 40GB iPod and marginally heavier.
The 2-inch color screen is identical in size to other iPods, but will sport a higher resolution for photo viewing. However, the new device's real shining feature will be its video-out port, which will enable users to tote their photo galleries with them, ready to be plugged into any television for big-screen viewing.
The 60GB iPod will feature only rudimentary built-in software for viewing photos, with no editing tools, sources say. Photo albums will be navigated in a similar fashion to music playlists, and a slideshow feature will provide transitions with user-specified background music, similar to iPhoto. Synchronizing features similar to iTunes will also be added to iPhoto.
The new iPod won't feature built-in flash memory stick slots for downloading photos from digital cameras, although such a feature will presumably be able to be employed through Belkin's $99 Media Reader.
Sources indicate that Apple will market the new photo iPod as being capable of storing 20,000 music tracks and 25,000 photos. As an added bonus for music fans, album artwork will be displayed on screen when it's available for a selected track.
Rumors of a 60GB iPod first surfaced in June, when Toshiba said that it was in the process of developing a 60GB drive and, much to the ire of Apple, confirmed that the iPod maker had already committed to buying it in quantity.
the irony was not lost on me either..LOL.eom
'iPod users are music thieves' says Ballmer
October 04 2004
by Andy McCue
Speaking to an exclusive gathering of press in London on a number of issues, such as security, Steve Ballmer didn't pass up the opportunity to take several digs at his company's arch rival Apple.
At the heart of the debate is Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology which will let content providers such as record labels and movie studios keep control of their intellectual property (IP) - or at least ensure all royalties are paid and copyright observed.
Billing Microsoft as the good guys and Apple the villains of the piece - at least as far as corporate America, rather than users, is concerned, Ballmer said: "We’ve had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'."
"Part of the reason people steal music is money, but some of it is that the DRM stuff out there has not been that easy to use. We are going to continue to improve our DRM, to make it harder to crack, and easier, easier, easier, easier, to use," he said.
However, Ballmer conceded it isn't going to be an easy battle to win. "Most people still steal music," he said. "We can build the technology but there are still ways for people to steal music."
The Microsoft boss also claimed some domestic familiarity with the issue.
"My 12-year-old at home doesn’t want to hear that he can’t put all the music that he wants in all of the places that he would like it," he joked.
ZDNet UK's Michael Parsons contributed to this story
Netflix, TiVo Team Up on Broadband Movie Delivery
Stream movies to your PC or download them to your TiVo by 2005.
Tom Krazit, IDG News Service
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Netflix and TiVo have signed an agreement to let TiVo subscribers access Netflix's library of movies over broadband Internet connections, the two companies announced Thursday.
Advertisement
The two companies do not provide very many specifics about the agreement in a press release issued Thursday. They are working out with movie studios the details of exactly how the movies will be distributed, says Kathryn Kelly, a TiVo spokesperson.
TiVo subscribers will be able to visit Netflix's Web site and either stream movies over a broadband connection or download them to their TiVo boxes, Kelly says. The companies are planning to work together on technology that will secure this content, she says.
Not This Year
No time frame for the rollout has been announced, but the service definitely won't be available this year, Kelly says. The deal is not an exclusive one for either company, she says.
Netflix believes the service will be available in 2005, says Shernaz Devar, a Netflix spokesperson.
The two companies have very close ties. Until September 30, TiVo chief executive officer Mike Ramsay sat on the board of directors at Netflix, but he resigned from the board as of the announcement to prevent any conflicts of interest, the companies say in the release.
Netflix, based in Los Gatos, California, lets subscribers choose their favorite movies on a Web site and have DVDs mailed to them, which they later return by mail. Subscribers to the company's basic plan can get as many as three movies at once and can keep them for as long as they like, but they can't have more than three at any time.
Netflix believes DVDs will continue to be the dominant medium for movies over the next few years, but the deal with TiVo gives the company a start down the road toward the delivery of movies over the Internet, Devar says.
TiVo has changed the way many people watch television. The Alviso, California, company sells digital video recorders that allow users to record their favorite television programs onto a hard drive and watch them whenever they like, skipping commercials in the process. The company also provides a service that updates programming schedules and manages the downloads.
Many companies, such as Intel, are working on technology that will let movie studios control how their content is used after it has been downloaded from the Internet. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, actor Morgan Freeman joined Intel president and chief operating officer Paul Otellini to announce that Freeman's movie studio, Revelations Entertainment, will release a movie over the Internet in 2005 the same day it is available in theaters.
Will the filing,"their best quarter ever", contain significant revenue and if so where will that revenue have come from?
Please answer the question...
when it IS a record quarter and duly recorded..what will you say then?? Ah..sorry for all my misinformation and distortion that i provided earlier.
Yeah, I think you've solved it, edig is providing all this work for APS GRATIS..no charge at all
dream on
Gee, thought I read it and most of the revenue was deferred. I also thought that revenue was not recognized until "the products sold thru"...that must be why we have a record quarter coming up huh??
but I'm sure you're a lot smarter than all of us owd...where do you think all that record revenue came from genius??
except we will have licensed our proprietary operating system "If these things do catch on,..."
money for nothing...
World's Fastest 4-Gigabit AG-AND type Flash Memory
September 27, 2004
Renesas Technology Corp. today announced the R1FV04G13R and R1FV04G14R 4-gigabit (Gbit) AG-AND type flash memories, offering the world's fastest programming speed of 10 Mbytes/sec, for high-speed recording of large volumes of data for moving picture and similar applications. Sample shipments began in September 2004 in Japan, followed by mass production in December.
The R1FV04G13R and R1FV04G14R have ×8 and ×16 bit configurations respectively, and offer the following major features.
(1) World's fastest 4-Gbit flash memories
As second-phase AG-AND type flash memories implementing multi level cell technology*2 and high speed, the R1FV04G13R and R1FV04G14R achieve a fast programming speed of 10 Mbytes/sec even with a 4-Gbit capacity. When dubbing a 2-hour movie using MPEG-4, recording can be completed in approximately two minutes.
(2) World's Smallest chip size
The use of a 90 nm process and improved AG-AND flash memory cell design has resulted in the world's smallest chip size in currently commercially developed 4-Gbit flash memory devices. The chip area has been reduced by approximately two-thirds per gigabit compared with 1-Gbit AG-AND type flash memory.
The release of these new products makes possible fast downloading and transporting of large-volume content data such as moving pictures and music. As a result, usage scenarios previously restricted to digital cameras and PCs can now be extended to mobile terminals and digital home appliances, expanding the range of system solutions that employ flash memory as a storage medium.
Product Background
High-density flash memory is beginning to permeate our lives as a bridge medium, especially in mobile applications, including use as image storage memory for digital cameras and mobile phones, and USB storage as a replacement for floppy disk drives. Next-generation flash memory cards offering portability of large-volume, high-quality moving picture data such as movies will require significantly higher density and higher programming speeds to handle fast data downloads.
To meet these needs, Renesas Technology currently mass-produces 130 nm process 1-Gbit AG-AND type flash memory offering both a smaller cell area and a high programming speed of 10 Mbytes/sec through the use of assist gates (AGs) to prevent inter-cell interference, together with multi level cell technology developed through the company's expertise in the field of conventional AND type flash memory.
To meet the demand for higher density while also achieving higher speeds, in December 2003 Renesas Technology developed a second-generation AG-AND type flash memory cell, featuring an approximately one-third reduction in memory cell area through improvements to the first-generation AG-AND type flash memory cell design and the use of a 90 nm process. Renesas Technology has now completed commercial development of the R1FV04G13R and R1FV04G14R, the world's fastest small 4-Gbit AG-AND type flash memories, using this second-generation memory cell.
Product Details
The R1FV04G13R and R1FV04G14R enable 512-Mbyte recording media to be configured with a single chip, providing storage capability of approximately 160 minutes of MPEG-4 moving picture data, MP3 music data equivalent to approximately 130 tracks, or approximately 500 4-megapixel digital camera photographs.
Features of the R1FV04G13R and R1FV04G14R are summarized below.
(1) World's fastest programming speed of 10 Mbytes/sec for 4-Gbit flash memory
As with 1-Gbit products, use of the hot electron injection programming method *3 and simultaneous 4-bank programming operation within the chip has made it possible to achieve a fast 10 Mbyte/sec programming speed by using multi level cells.
(2) World's smallest chip size in 4-Gbit flash memory
Use of a 90 nm process together with improvement of the first-generation AG-AND type flash memory source-drain*4structure have made it possible to achieve the ultra small memory cell area of 0.016 μm2 .
It results in the world's smallest chip size in currently commercially developed 4-Gbit flash memory devices. Compared to our 1-Gbit flash memory device, the total chip area of the new 4-Gbit flash chips is nearly two-thirds smaller on a per-Gbit basis.
* Improvement of source-drain structure:
A new structure has been used in which the source and drain of a memory cell transistor are formed as an inversion layer *5 that appears in the silicon substrate when a voltage is applied to the AG. With conventional diffusion layer*6 formation, there was a tendency for the source and drain to spread laterally, but as the inversion layer is formed only in the extremely shallow region of the substrate just beneath the AG, it has become possible to reduce the memory cell area.
(3) Support for power-on read function (2-Kbyte size)
When the system is powered on, up to 2 Kbytes of data can be read by controlling two control lines (the /CE pin and /RE pin) without command or address input.
(4) Cache program function during programming operation, and programming data input function during erase operation
A function is provided that performs cache programming of the next 2 Kbytes of data a maximum of two times (4 Kbytes) while the device is being programmed. This makes it easier for the system to allocate bus operation to another task.
A function is also provided that performs one-time input of up to the next 2 Kbytes of data while the device is being erased.
(5) NAND interface
The R1FV04G13R and R1FV04G14R are compatible with NAND type flash memory at the command levels, enabling their use in systems currently employing NAND type flash memory with a minimum of software modification.
The power supply voltage is 3.3 V, and the package used is a 48-pin TSOP type-1 of the same size as the 1-Gbit AG-AND type flash memory package.
Future plans include the development of a controller for the R1FV04G13R and R1FV04G14R, and development toward use in high-speed flash cards, as well as development of a 2-Gbit AG-AND type flash memory cut product and 1.8 V low-voltage product using the new memory cells.
There are also plans to develop a large-capacity 8-Gbit product incorporating two stacked 4-Gbit AG-AND type flash memories in a new type of package (WFLGA: Very-Very Fine pitch Land Grid Array) allowing high-density mounting in December 2004.
Ah seedie, does apple or hp get PAID to put their names on the CE items or do they PAY to have those items manufactured by third parties so they can put their names on them??
First Look: Creative Zen Portable Media Center
New device plays back audio and video on the go, but it sports a hefty price tag.
Liane Cassavoy, PC World
Friday, September 24, 2004
I was attracting stares on the train. And it wasn't because I had snagged a seat in the crowded car; it was because of the device in my hands: a shiny new Creative Zen Portable Media Center.
The $499 handheld multimedia player is the first device based on Microsoft's new Portable Media Center platform. I found a lot to like about the Zen, but I'm not convinced I'd be willing to shell out the cash to buy one.
The First of the PMCs
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Portable Media Centers, or PMCs, display still images and play audio and video (including TV programs and full-length movies) stored on their hard drive. They do not feature wireless connectivity and they do not stream video or audio. The Creative Zen is shipping now; PMCs from Samsung and IRiver are due later this year.
All will have common features required by Microsoft, including minimum specs for hard drives, display, and resolution. The shipping Zen I tested had a 20GB hard drive and a 3.8-inch display with a screen resolution of 320 by 240. The Zen, which is about twice the size and weight of my IPod, feels sturdy and features firm, shiny buttons and a shiny black case. Unfortunately, that shine can cause light to reflect off the screen at times, making images hard to see.
All PMCs require a Windows XP or Windows XP Media Center Edition PC. You connect the device to your PC via USB 2.0 and transfer content using Microsoft's newly-released Windows Media Player 10. I tested out the Creative Zen on a PC running Windows XP Pro and found it easy to install (though my PC wouldn't recognize the PMC before I upgraded to Windows Media Player 10).
Get in Sync
To transfer content to the Zen, I selected the "Sync" tab in WMP 10. From there, the app presented me a screen split in two; on the left I could build a list of content I wanted to transfer to the Zen, and on the right I could select the Zen itself (you also have the option of syncing content to your CD or DVD drive, or other forms of removable media storage). Then, with one click, the sync began. Transferring a three-hour baseball game (a 469MB WMV file) I downloaded from MLB.com (a Microsoft content partner) took just a few minutes. You can also set WMP 10 to sync content automatically.
PMCs support several content formats, including Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio, MP3, and JPEG. The device and included software also make it easy to convert files in other formats--MPEG, MPEG2, MPA, WAV, and AVI, for example--into formats you can use.
The Zen is also one of the first devices to support Microsoft's new Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10 (formerly code-named Janus), which will let you transfer subscription-based content from your PC to another Janus-compliant device. Should your subscription run out, the content also expires on the player.
If you use a PMC with a TV-connected Media Center PC (or even a standard XP-based PC with a TV tuner card) it becomes a much more useful device. You can record television programs and transfer them to your PMC to watch while you commute or travel.
However I wasn't entirely pleased by the way WMP 10 managed the Zen. First, it was hard to find the correct software button to safely disconnect the PMC from my computer--there was no equivalent of the "Eject IPod" button found in ITunes. I had to manually shut down the device using the icon in my system tray. Second: when I built a playlist of songs using WMP 10 and then tried to transfer it to the PMC, only the songs on the list were transferred--not the playlist itself.
Let the Audio and Video Play
Playing back audio, video, and still images on the Zen was a breeze. The device powers on in less than 5 seconds, and the opening screen shows a basic start menu that lets you choose from "My TV," "My Music," "My Pictures," or "My Videos." Select one, and you can browse through your media collection and play back your files. The Zen includes both a headphone jack and a built-in external speaker. The included earbuds are serviceable, and the speaker will do in a pinch, but you'll really want better quality headphones to best enjoy the audio.
The Zen includes a removable rechargeable lithium ion battery. Creative says the battery will power up to 22 hours of audio playback or 7 hours of video playback between charges.
Video quality was mixed, depending on the source. Movies from CinemaNow were crystal clear, but the baseball game I downloaded would occasionally blur, much the way streaming video appears on my PC. Despite its small size the screen proved easy to see, even when watching big-picture events like a baseball game.
The Zen also features A/V out slots that let you connect the device to a TV to watch a movie or television show. Unfortunately, watching stored video on my 27-inch television wasn't pleasant, as the image appeared distorted. It reminded me of watching video recorded on an old VHS tape. But the Zen is really meant for mobile use, and it does that job fairly well. Still, I'm not convinced it's worth the money for most people. Frequent travelers or TV lovers (especially those with a Media Center PC) might find it to be a dream device, but for the rest of us the price is just too high.
Zen Portable Media Center
Creative
Creative's new PMC is handy for playing back audio and video on the go, but it sure is pricey.
$499
www.creative.com/PortableMediaCenters/
Budget carriers rule the European skies
With cheap, no-frills flights, Ryanair's traffic has surpassed British Airways'
10:45 PM CDT on Tuesday, September 21, 2004
By ERIC TORBENSON / The Dallas Morning News
LONDON – Budget fliers, are you ready to pay extra for ice with your soft drink?
Looking to shave every bit of cost, Ryanair, Europe's top discount carrier, has conditioned passengers to pay extra for anything that might be considered a frill.
The Dublin-based airline always charges for on-board drinks and food. It dings passengers for checked baggage that weighs more than 15 kilograms (33 pounds). Planes have no window shades. Seats don't recline.
At an industry conference here Tuesday, Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary joked a special ice fee could be next.
"We'll charge for anything that's discretionary," Mr. O'Leary told about 400 attendees of the World Low Fare Airline Congress.
Then, in deference to the Dallas-based discounter that wrote the book on discount flying, he said: "Southwest Airlines in the States has proven the model that the lowest cost and the lowest fare will always win."
It's too early to say if the "no free anything" ethic will find its way to U.S. airlines.
Facing record prices for jet fuel, U.S. carriers have been trying a variety of cost-cutting moves, from altering crew schedules to tweaking maintenance procedures.
Most changes have been invisible to the flying public.
But many carriers recently imposed fees that charge passengers more if they don't book their tickets through the carriers' Web sites. And nearly all airlines have tacked on fees for extra-heavy bags.
Just as Southwest and others have made life hard for traditional network airlines in the United States, Ryanair and other low-fare carriers are taking it to traditional "flag" carriers in Europe.
A low-fare explosion has changed the face of travel here, and Ryanair now flies even more passengers in the United Kingdom than venerable British Airways.
Ryanair says its passengers pay on average 39 Euros per flight ($48), compared with 268 Euros ($330) on British Airways and 225 Euros ($277) on Germany's Lufthansa.
The flights are so cheap that travelers sometimes book trips and then don't even use the nonrefundable tickets, said Ian Briggs, communications chief for London's fast-growing Luton Airport, where both Ryanair and EasyJet, another major discounter, just announced major expansions.
"I just did that myself with a ticket I bought recently," Mr. Briggs shrugged.
Cheap fares drive traffic to smaller airports, just as they do across the pond. Alberto Kachirisky of San Diego, Calif., sipped coffee recently at Luton, en route from Germany to Madrid.
"I was going to have to pay $800 if I flew through Heathrow," he said. "I got this for $150."
Added services
While Mr. O'Leary has taken the Southwest business model to the extreme by cutting frills, Ryanair also sees advantages in adding new services – for a fee.
The carrier said Tuesday that it would start renting handheld in-flight entertainment systems for about $7 per flight. The digEplayer systems offer movies, television shows and video games.
Ryanair said it expects to recoup its $12 million investment in the devices in just 12 months, even if only 3 percent of its passengers use them. The systems were developed by a baggage handler at Alaska Airlines.
"These will become as common as the in-flight magazine," said a frequently profane Mr. O'Leary, dressed in jeans and a checkered blue-and-white shirt, at a conference where most men wore dark suits.
"I'd expect you'll see other airlines follow this in about five minutes," he said.
Southwest, mentioned a half-dozen times by speakers Tuesday as still the pre-eminent model to follow, has been considering some sort of in-flight entertainment system.
JetBlue Airways Corp., based in New York, offers live satellite television for its passengers.
Big competitors
While the spread of low fares has helped push big U.S. airlines into bankruptcy or near the edge, Europe's top carriers aren't struggling. British Airways is solidly profitable despite the surge of low-fare rivals.
"We're about 20 years behind the U.S. in deregulation, that's one reason," Mr. O'Leary said in an interview after his press conference to announce the digEplayer.
With many European nations still protecting their airlines, low-cost competition isn't as damaging as in America, he said.
Tough times could await some European carriers in the path of Ryanair and Easyjet.
Mr. O'Leary predicts a "bloodbath" in coming months as high fuel prices combine with low fares. Already, flag airlines such as Italy's Alitalia are on the edge of insolvency.
Ireland's Aer Lingus went through a painful restructuring, cutting its costs nearly in half just to stay alive against Ryanair.
"We're talking to more than 200 additional airports in Europe," Mr. O'Leary said of Ryanair, which serves 88 cities. "We just want all of Europe. We're not greedy."
E-mail etorbenson@dallasnews.com
Microsoft radio venture gives DJs pause
Tuesday, September 21, 2004 Posted: 10:00 AM EDT (1400 GMT)
SEATTLE, Washington (AP) -- Fans of the Seattle music pop station Kiss 106.1 FM usually have to sit through an array of disc-jockey antics and advertising between listening to favorite artists like Avril Levigne and Ashlee Simpson.
But not anymore. As part of its much-touted new MSN Music offering, Microsoft Corp. is testing a Web-based radio service that mimics nearly 1,000 local radio stations, allowing users to hear a version of their favorite radio station with far fewer interruptions.
It's a move analysts say is annoying, but not seriously threatening, the stations.
"Because it's a beta and because it's Webcasting, it's not yet considered a tremendously important competitor to radio," said Brida Connolly, technology editor at the Los Angeles trade publication Radio & Records. "At this stage it's considered more of an irritation."
The service also poses no serious problems yet because most people still listen to commercial radio in their cars and Internet broadcasting is still in its infancy, analysts say. But they warn that the service could be a harbinger of more competitive online threats to come.
For $30 a year or $5 per month, Microsoft's service -- which is still in early testing -- will deliver the songs without commercial interruption. The free service includes ads but no DJs.
Microsoft builds its versions of the local stations by licensing playlists from the various local radio stations through Nielsen Broadcast Data System, an independent group that tracks commercial airplay.
The Redmond, Wash. software titan's feed differs slightly because the company must adher to different rules on what can be played on the Web and is barred from playing songs for which it has not independently secured rights.
Connolly said radio stations are less concerned with Microsoft's move to mimic popular playlists -- which can be licensed -- than with the fact that Microsoft refers to specific call letters and nicknames.
For example, the listing for the Seattle pop station says "Like 106.1 FM" followed by the description "KBKS KISS 106.1." Such nicknames are "taken very seriously" as part of a station's branding and competitive edge, she said.
Connolly stresses that no one is considering taking legal action regarding the use of those names, but she said radio stations have been unpleasantly caught off guard.
Rob Bennett, Microsoft's senior director of MSN entertainment, said Microsoft would be willing to remove the nicknames and call letters -- but not the playlists -- if radio stations request it.
But instead of being a threat to local radio, he sees Microsoft's Webcasts as an opportunity for radio stations to extend their brand and maybe even form a partnership with Microsoft's online music site.
Although Microsoft's service poses no major competitive threat for radio stations right now, analyst Phil Leigh with Inside Digital Media in Tampa, Florida, said the service should serve as a wake-up call for what's to come. After all, he notes the paid service could prove very attractive to consumers who are sick of DJ jokes and intrusive advertising -- especially if Web sites find ways to transmit wirelessly to cars.
"Radio stations are seriously challenged with tech obsolescence," he said.
AP Review: New Media Players Too Small
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Sep 17, 11:52 AM (ET)
By RON HARRIS
(AP) The Creative Zen Portable Media Center is seen in San Francisco, Tuesday Sept. 14, 2004. Zen...
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - It was a Holy Grail looming on the personal electronics horizon: a pocket-sized device with a workhorse battery and the capacity to hold hours of audio and video.
After all, because people already stuff multimedia files on their cell phones and personal digital assistants, or PDAs, why not give them one dedicated device to swiftly handle all their entertainment-on-the-go needs?
The answer will disappoint: The new breed of portable media players is finally here, but the devices are too small to comfortably watch movies on and too bulky to compete with my MP3 music player.
The $499 Creative Zen I tested, from Creative Labs Inc., is about twice as thick as a PDA, as well as longer and heavier, so it's not something you'd toss in your purse or pocket. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and iRiver Inc. make competing models (the companies would not provide test units).
They all use Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s Windows Portable operating system, which is really just Windows CE, the operating system commonly used in PDAs, minus some personal information management tools. Microsoft is hoping people will want to pop these devices open while they cycle at the gym or squeeze into a coach seat on a cross-country flight.
Zen sports 20 gigabytes of memory and plays loads of multimedia file types, including ".wmv,"".asf,"".mpg,"".jpg" and ".mp3." It gets content from the desktop PC, via Microsoft's new Windows Media Player 10 application.
Multimedia content dragged into the library of the Media Player software was synched to my Zen when I connected via USB 2.0 cable. This electronic kiss between desktop and device is important and worked seamlessly.
The Zen's navigation screen is intuitive enough. There are four directional buttons on the upper left with a round "OK" button in the middle to toggle me through the colorful menus. A nifty green button in the far corner flying Microsoft's four-colored flag takes you back to the equivalent of a home page listing "My TV,""My Music,""My Pictures,""My Video" and "Settings."
When I clicked on "My Pictures," the folder I designated for synchronization appeared, as did my wedding photos inside. I'm can view photos one by one or play them as a slideshow.
But to have to first sync the machine with your desktop seems redundant. It's not as if I can plug my compact flash card into the Zen and see photos I've just taken, so I'm hardly sold on the value of the traveling photo album on Zen's 3.8-inch LCD screen.
For audio, the Zen is great for storage, and Creative promises 22 hours of straight battery life for audio playback. It delivered hours for me without losing one of the three battery level indicator notches on screen.
The Zen's onboard speaker is useless, though, under most circumstances. The volume range runs from 0 to 20, and you have to crank it to about 18 to hear anything. But at higher volume settings, the audio tends to distort. The sound through the headphones was fine.
Creative's rechargeable battery pack also promises seven hours of video playback.
Microsoft has partnered with a few content providers, and I used one of them, CinemaNow, to buy a documentary on Area 51 and a spooky thriller called "Anima," for $2.99 each. Most of the CinemaNow titles are B-movie fodder.
"Anima" weighed in at 318 megabytes and took about 20 minutes to download. The movie was encoded at 514 kilobits per second, meaning when you look at it on a SMALL screen like the one on the Zen, it's as clear and crisp as a bell. Any larger and it would pixelate badly, and it did when I connected the Zen to a television using the supplied cables. But if I've got a TV nearby, why use the Zen at all - right?
Watching videos is fine when there's a close-up of an object or a person on the screen, but background details get really tiny. You also have to look at the unit head on, and any viewing from a slight angle is nearly impossible because of the unit's screen glare.
Another oddity came into play here. My download of "Anima" continued to play on the Zen nearly a week after the 48-hour viewing window had expired. Creative's portable product brand manager, Linda O'Malley, said a realtime clock on the Zen should have prevented that. The copy on my desktop did indeed time out.
With Zen's $499 price tag, it's not exactly a steal. The gadget masters over at TigerDirect.com will sell me a 20-gig laptop with a DVD-ROM drive for only $100 more, and a portable DVD player with a 5-inch screen can be had for less than $200 at Target.
Using the Zen only made me want an iPod Mini and a new laptop instead. Convergence, at least for now, will have to take a backseat to usability.
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On the Net:
http://www.creative.com/PortableMediaCenters/
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Startup aims for easy transfers of Web snippets to cell phones
Posted 9/10/2004 3:13 PM
By May Wong, Associated Press
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Have you ever gone online to get driving directions, only to leave the printout behind? Have you made movie plans, but forgot to jot down the show times? Or do you simply need an easy way to feed phone numbers to your cell phone?
A trio of entrepreneurs believe they have a solution.
With cell phones becoming more like computers and people carrying them wherever they go, the founders of Vazu have developed what they consider an easy way to transfer phone numbers and other data from PCs and the Internet onto handsets.
They quietly released their first product earlier this year for users to transfer contact information from desktop address books without any special cables or software. With little publicity, "Vazu Contacts" won rave reviews and garnered thousands of users in 40 countries. (Related story: Vazu takes advantage of Net telephony)
But cell phones are becoming more of an anchor tool in daily life: part mobile phone, part personal digital assistant, part camera, part MP3 player — and one day, with the arrival of mobile commerce applications, part wallet as well.
Vazu hopes to capitalize on that trend by creating a channel for folks who want to easily populate their phones with data.
So at this week's elite DEMOmobile tech show in San Diego, Vazu is launching more ambitious products designed to turn cell phones into even handier reservoirs of information.
Instead of just phone contacts, the new applications promise to deliver any snippet of information from a Web site to a mobile phone with ease, from street addresses to train schedules and driving directions.
"It's the power of the Web and connecting it to your phone," said Ramiro Calvo, Vazu's chief executive and co-founder. "And we've gone from personal addresses to searchable content to anything on the Web."
"Vazu Click" is a free, plug-in application for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. It lets users highlight and send Web text to cell phones. It also automatically tags phone numbers on a Web page so users can send the number to their cell phones by simply clicking on the Vazu icon.
With "Vazu Seek," which is still in a "beta" test mode, users can go to the Vazu Web site, search phone directory listings and send the results to their handsets.
Later, the company aims to feed cell phones with song files and images.
"Contacts is the beachhead, and we're expanding to other digital content, breathing new life into the phone," Calvo said.
PocketThis Inc. and Xpherix Corp. have similar PC-to-phone technologies, but sell their services through wireless carriers. Vazu is targeting cell phone users directly, regardless of their mobile provider.
With "Vazu Contacts," users send an e-mail with an attachment containing address book information to an online Vazu account. From there, it is delivered to the cell phone via text messaging. Users can even send data directly to a friend's Vazu account or cell phone.
Because Vazu keeps a record of what users send, contacts can be transferred to a new handset with just a few keystrokes should an old one get lost or upgraded. No more thumbing in contacts one by one.
The service currently works with address books for Microsoft's Outlook, Apple's Mail and Novell's Linux Evolution e-mail programs. All you need is a cell phone that supports text messaging — and most phones do.
"It's cool," said James Cox, a British information technology consultant who recommended the service on his Web journal after trying it out. "I uploaded about two dozen phone numbers, and within a minute or so, they were all on my phone."
Cox had previously used Apple's iSync software to transfer some of his contact numbers, but complained it didn't work smoothly. He said he's looking forward to using Vazu when he upgrades to a new phone soon, something he does about once a year.
Vazu's products are free for now, though users still have to pay wireless carriers for text messages. The Palo Alto-based company may later charge either a subscription or usage fee, or possibly for premium services such as restoring archived data. Vazu is also exploring advertising and partnerships with Internet portals and wireless carriers.
The vision behind Vazu took shape about two years ago after Calvo, Soujanya Bhumkar and Ken Thom — all Silicon Valley veteran managers — started to meet weekly. After many nights of pizza, their hodgepodge of brainstorming ideas whittled down to the mobile phone application. The trio brought engineer Jay Geygan onto their founding team and set out to work.
The founders hope the name — derived from the Spanish word "va" and the German word "zu," both of which roughly mean, "go to" — will become a vernacular verb similar to "Google" and "TiVo."
"In the end," Bhumkar said, "we want people to say 'Vazu me,' and it will mean, 'send to my phone.'"
AudioFeast Delivers Internet Radio Service to Portable MP3 Players
Sounds familiar...
Mountain View, Calif. -- Consumer audio developer AudioFeast on Wednesday introduced a portable Internet radio service, offering 400 channels of news, sports and other programming on the PC and portable devices through "time-shifting" of broadcasts. The company has 70 media partners, including NPR, The Wall Street Journal Radio Network and BBC Radio, and plans to add portable music to its subscription service in October. AudioFeast uses a "virtual broadcast network" to deliver its programming via peer-to-peer technology. The service, offered for an annual fee of $49.95 per year, is compatible with MP3 players from Creative Labs, Dell, iRiver, iRock, RCA and Rio.
http://www.audiofeast.com
Ah..I think it's because one of the larger STB maker's also seems to think that the pPVR format is likely to be a big hit in the near future...
sure looking forward to your "facts" tho...
Intel and Industry Leaders Spearhead New Storage Interface
CE-ATA tailored to unique demands of handhelds, consumer electronics
(September 09,2004)
A new initiative to define a storage interface tailored to the unique needs of handheld and portable consumer electronic devices is being led by Intel Corporation, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Marvell Semiconductor Inc., Seagate Technology and Toshiba America Information Systems.
These prominent companies are jointly defining a standard interface for small form factor disk drives that addresses the requirements of the handheld and consumer electronics (CE) market segments, including low pin count, low voltage, power efficiency, cost effectiveness and integration efficiency.
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The announcement was made today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
"No disk drive interface exists today that is tailored to the needs of the handheld and CE market segments, so disk drives have had to make do with other interface alternatives that are complex and cumbersome or simply ill-suited to meet the needs of disk drives in space and power constrained tiny handhelds," said Knut Grimsrud, Intel's CE-ATA senior principal engineer. "With the explosive growth of portable consumer devices, the CE-ATA initiative attends to a tremendous need for an efficient small form factor disk drive interface. Collaboration with industry leaders to deliver a unified solution best addresses the needs of customers."
The benefits of CE-ATA are many. From an industry perspective, small form factor disk drive suppliers can take advantage of a storage interface tailored to the needs of such devices, resulting in highly optimized disk drive designs. Host silicon providers and product integrators will also benefit from the improved integration that the tailored interface affords due to its low pin count, favorable voltages and efficient protocol. For consumers, a disk drive interface tailored to the needs of the handheld and portable consumer market segments could spur storage use in innovative new products and lead to products with a more efficient storage solution.
The specification is scheduled to be completed in the first half of 2005. The first end products supporting the new technology could be available several months thereafter.
The new initiative is organized and operated in a manner similar to how Serial ATA was organized. CE-ATA is being developed separately from SATA because handheld and portable consumer applications do not have the same requirements for high interface transfer rates as mainstream computing, requiring instead modest transfer rates at maximum power efficiency. CE-ATA will focus on highly cost-effective integration and the highest power efficiency to best address the needs of small form factor devices and the handheld consumer market segments.
The promoter companies for CE-ATA are among the most prominent and capable companies in the small form factor disk drive and handheld consumer market segments. Many are also leaders in the Serial ATA International Organization, whose formation was announced today at Intel Developer Forum.
About IDF
Intel Developer Forum is the technology industry's premier event for hardware and software developers. Held worldwide throughout the year, IDF brings together key industry players to discuss cutting-edge technology and products for PCs, servers, communications equipment, and handheld clients. For more information on IDF and Intel technology, visit http://developer.intel.com.
Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com.
Flextronics CEO says inventory buildups no problem
Thu Sep 9, 2004 02:06 PM ET
NEW YORK, Sept 9 (Reuters) - Concerns about growing inventories are "unbelievably overblown", the chief executive of Flextronics International Ltd. (FLEX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , the world's biggest contract maker of electronics, said on Thursday.
Flextronics, which said on Aug. 26 that investors were overly concerned about the current build-up of inventory in electronics products, saw its share price rise more than 6 percent on Nasdaq on Thursday.
Chief Executive Michael Marks said during a Webcast from an investor conference that inventories are likely to continue to increase but that this should not be cause for alarm.
"A building of inventory is a natural event. It will probably build some more. I just don't see it as a reason to panic." said Marks, adding that the impact of increasing inventory levels is "unbelievably not understood."
Because the build-up of products in the supply chain -- which includes everything from factories to shops to distributors -- is coinciding with an extension in lead times for product orders and increasing product prices, it should not be a problem, Marks added.
Flextronics shares were up 77 cents at $13.04 in afternoon trade.
Marks said that fears about rising inventory levels were based on concern that the 2001 meltdown in the technology industry would happen all over again. But he said problems like that are unlikely for the foreseeable future.
"In my opinion, 2001, not only is it not happening (again) this year, it's not happening in our lifetimes," he said.
Viacom Starts Blockbuster Exchange Offer
40 minutes ago Add Business - Reuters to My Yahoo!
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Viacom Inc. on Wednesday said it had begun an exchange offer to split off its Blockbuster Inc. unit, and put the video rental chain in the hands of Viacom shareholders.
The offer contemplates that New York-based Viacom, owner of the CBS television network, MTV and Nickelodeon cable TV channels, and Paramount Pictures, would dispose of its entire 81.5 percent stake in Blockbuster. Last month, Blockbuster announced a special $5 per share cash dividend, generating more than $700 million for Viacom.
The split-off would free Viacom of a business that faces pressure from video on demand and other technologies that take movies directly to people's living rooms.
Blockbuster also faces competition from discount chains such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and rivals such as Netflix Inc., which rent DVDs over the Web for a flat monthly fee.
In July, Dallas-based Blockbuster said second-quarter profit fell more than 23 percent, and said falling demand for movie rentals from its nearly 9,000 stores should put pressure on its business through 2005.
The exchange offer calls for holders of Viacom Class A and Class B common shares to receive 2.575 Blockbuster Class A and 2.575 Blockbuster Class B shares for each Viacom share tendered.
Based on Tuesday's closing prices, holders of Viacom Class A shares would receive a 17.6 percent premium, and holders of Viacom Class B shares would receive a 19.2 percent premium, Viacom said. These will change as market prices fluctuate.
The offer expires at midnight EDT on October 5, Viacom said.
On Tuesday, Viacom Class A shares closed at $34.60, Viacom Class B shares closed at $34.13, and Blockbuster shares closed at $7.90.
Combo CD-A/V Player Unveiled By TI, iRiver
September 07, 2004 (11:00 AM EDT)
By TechWeb.com
Texas Instruments and iRiver unveiled what they say is the world's first combination audio/video (A/V) CD player: iriver's IMP 1100.
Announced Tuesday, the firms said the device enables consumers to watch home movies or digital photos on a two-inch, color LCD screen for up to six hours on a single charge of the device's lithium-ion battery. The IMP 1100 carries a suggested retail price of $279.99, and it will be available later this month, the firms said.
The IMP also supports various audio formats, including MP3, Windows Media Audio (WMA), and ASF. Video formats supported include JPEG and BMP.
At the same time, the firms also announced an A/V player with a hard-disk drive and FM tuner, called the PMP-100. The PMP-100 supports more features than the IMP 1100, including MPEG4 video. The $479.99 device with 20-GB hard drive is USB 2.0-enabled and has a 3.5-inch LCD screen. Both devices are powered by Texas Instruments' Digital Media family of digital-signal processors, as well as by TI analog components.
BMI posts record year, despite music industry doom and gloom
Posted September 3, 2004 @ 6:17PM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher
Everyone knows that piracy can affect an artist's bottom line, and very few people would argue that artists, programmers, and the like, should work for free in all instances. Indeed, while there is a lot of hostility to lobbying groups like the RIAA, most folks do want to support the bands and songwriters that they like. That's why the RIAA (and sister organization, the MPAA) often use the notion of the starving artist to justify their attacks on piracy-it plays at the heart strings and gives a sense of imminent doom. The groups routinely claim that their business is not just suffering, but even eroding on account of piracy. One result, we're told, is that artists are suffering everywhere, and this could have dire effects on the entire industry.
Such claims seem rather silly though when the actual financial results are published. Most recently we have the example of BMI, one of the largest music companies in the world which represents artists directly (songwriters, performers, composers, etc.), has posted a record-breaking fiscal year.
BMI reported revenues of $673 million for the 2004 fiscal year, an increase of nearly $43 million, 6.8% over the prior year. The performing rights organization generated royalties of more than $573 million for its songwriters, composers and music publishers. Royalties increased by $40 million or 7.5% from the previous year. BMI President and CEO Frances W. Preston said both the revenues and royalty distributions were the largest in the company's history.
Such results are confusing when we're told every month that the industry as a whole is on the verge of destruction, mostly on account of piracy. We're told that the industry, and artists are suffering (just ask Senator Hatch). Surely, one might think, that this year is an exception, but for BMI, they've seen a 9% average growth every year for the last 10 years. The songwriters and performers represented by BMI, it would seem, are doing rather well. No one wants to say that they're doing too well or that they shouldn't be doing well. No, that misses the point. The point is very simple, and rather subtle: when the industry as a whole is posting great numbers (and sometimes trying to conceal them), and in the case of BMI they're posting record numbers, it's simply disingenuous to pretend that the threat against the industry as a whole is nearly so serious as to justify the argument that artists are actually suffering immensely.
Of course, we don't live in a binary world, no matter how much dichotomies such as "good vs. evil" are attractive to those with public voices and private aims. Piracy undoubtedly diminishes profits, but the extent to which this this represents a state of emergency is debatable. If BMI is breaking its own profit records, and if BMI represents songwriters, performers, and composers, how can it be said that those same people are on the verge of economic disaster?
We have the right and responsibility to ask: why is civil law being revised when the industry as a whole is seeing all time highs? Not only has BMI posted record results, signaling strong economic stability for the artists themselves, but the record companies are making more money, too. Why is there an open and vicious attack on Fair Use when record companies are making more than ever, as are artists' representation groups?
Why do they want to spare themselves the cost of civil lawsuits against infringers by goading the Department of Justice to bring civil cases themselves? Why is it that relatively no one is discussing how the RIAA bends its statistics to wrangle for more and more support for their business model? Why is it that the RIAA and friends want legal rights and powers that are not even available to law enforcement? Fair Use, that's why. It's the content industry's #1 enemy.
Too Smart For Their Own Good
By Don Bauder
Published on September 2, 2004
In the 1940s, there was a satirical radio quiz show in which panelists were stumped by questions such as, "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" That show ennobled the words, "It pays to be ignorant." Sixty years later, the words are ringing true on Wall Street.
That is to say, if you want to win an arbitration against a brokerage firm that sold you unsuitable stocks or junk bonds that crashed, it pays to be ignorant. If an arbitration panel feels you're smart or well-educated, it is likely to rule that the brokerage house can get away with dumping garbage in your portfolio. You should have known better -- even if your field of expertise is metaphysics, not the stock market.
Consider Dagmar and Jeffrey Barnouw of Del Mar. She is a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Southern California; he is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Texas. They were long-term customers of Paine Webber, now UBS Financial Services.
In early 2000, just as the long, frothy bull market was about to peak and plunge into one of history's worst bear markets, the Barnouws, on the advice of their broker, loaded up on volatile technology stocks, all touted by Paine Webber analysts. The Barnouws lost $660,000. One of their stocks plunged 99.76 percent -- about as ugly a wipeout as you can suffer.
While the Barnouws were on sabbaticals, traveling extensively in Europe and not in contact with their broker, their stocks tanked. Their broker asked them why they didn't use "stop-loss orders," that is, put in an order for a stock to be sold automatically if it fell to a certain price.
"We did not even know about stop-loss orders," says Jeffrey Barnouw. He says he has "some sophistication" about certain areas of the stock market, "but my ignorance is nonetheless pervasive."
The Barnouws went into arbitration late last year against the brokerage firm. The professors appeared to have an advantage. Several months earlier, ten major U.S. brokerage firms, including UBS Financial Services, had agreed to pay a collective $1.4 billion to settle regulators' charges that their stock-market analysts had issued overly glowing research reports on companies so that the firms could get cut in on investment-banking fees handed out by the companies.
Also, there had been several state actions against UBS Financial. The firm admitted in the arbitration that four analysts who had recommended stocks purchased by the Barnouws were actually paid by the investment-banking side of the business -- in theory, a breach of ethics. Those analysts worked on 10 of the 13 stocks in question in the arbitration.
But the Barnouws lost and were forced to pay fat fees. Among many things, the arbitration panel ruled that "The Barnouws were sophisticated investors. Both were professors," says Eileen L. McGeever, the Carlsbad attorney who represented them. "Regardless of what the analysts said or their brokers said," the Barnouws, despite their rudimentary knowledge of the stock market, supposedly "had the moxie to sell if they found it necessary."
In essence, the arbitration panel "said we were far too intelligent to trust brokers and advisers," says Jeffrey Barnouw. UBS Financial refused comment.
A client of San Diego attorney Eric Benink had 90 percent of his portfolio in one stock. "It skyrocketed, then plummeted, but the broker never told him it was a good idea to diversify," says Benink. The brokerage firm's defense was that the investor had been in the market a long time and had a master's degree, although it was not in business administration. "The mediator sided with the defendant, saying the investor was sophisticated," and the case was settled for a small amount.
By contrast, in June, San Diego attorney Erwin J. Shustak won a judgment for the estate of the late Joyce Douglas, who had been declared mentally incompetent because of advanced Alzheimer's disease. Her daughter, Laura Mitikas, who had "virtually no experience with investments or brokerage firms," says Shustak, entrusted her mother's account of $1.45 million to a broker at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.
The broker sold the conservative stocks in the account and bought low-quality tech stocks, junk bonds, and the firm's own mutual funds, according to the complaint. In less than three years, almost half the value of the portfolio evaporated. Also, the broker urged the daughter to borrow against the account, argued Shustak. The firm countered that its broker warned Mitikas about excessive spending and that she actually initiated the loans against the account. In this case, the arbitration panel awarded Mitikas $750,000. Ignorance was an excuse. But Morgan Stanley plans to proceed against her for causing the losses.
A most interesting case will go to arbitration in January of next year. It revolves around the stock of a San Diego company, e.Digital, which has a history of boasting about revolutionary products on the horizon. But time after time, the stock runs up, the products don't materialize, and the stock plunges again -- sometimes after insiders have dumped shares. The company is a chronic money loser, has a $69 million cumulative deficit, and admits that its ability to continue operations is in substantial doubt.
Nonetheless, Louis Barinaga, a retired dentist in Vancouver, Washington, somehow managed to have 95 percent of his retirement portfolio in e.Digital stock, which is now selling for around 20 cents a share. Barinaga is "a classic pigeon," say his attorneys, and was vulnerable to the pitch of the broker pushing e.Digital. Barinaga is going into arbitration against the Portland, Oregon, brokerage that got him to buy the stock and insisted he not sell it after it soared.
As e.Digital stock cratered, the broker there repeatedly told Barinaga not to sell because his sales would accelerate the plunge, according to the complaint.
UBS Financial is also named in this complaint. It was borrowing Barinaga's e.Digital stock so that its customers could short it or bet it would go down. (Short sellers borrow stock, sell it, and hope to return the borrowed stock when the price is cheaper.) But Barinaga was not told UBS Financial clients were shorting the stock, according to the complaint.
The broker was making money on the stock that UBS borrowed -- another reason why he didn't want Barinaga to sell, according to the complaint.
So Barinaga makes an interesting observation. The Portland broker didn't want him to sell his e.Digital stock because he told him it would go up. But the broker was also making money from a shorting arrangement that would pay off if the stock went down and was also putting downward pressure on the stock.
At some point, Barinaga learned that Robert Putnam, senior vice president of e.Digital, had been his patient years ago in a small town in Oregon. Barinaga was such a large shareholder in the company that he regularly called Putnam, as well as e.Digital's chief executive. "Putnam would tell me that he was glad I was loyal and not selling the stock," says Barinaga.
But Barinaga discovered that on February 3, 2000, at a time when e.Digital stock had shot up mysteriously, Putnam sold 125,000 e.Digital shares for $10.97 that he had acquired for a dime apiece. The company's chief executive was also jettisoning his shares in big bundles at this time. "Had I known they were selling, I would have bailed out so fast your head would spin," says Barinaga. But at the time, he was having trouble getting his shares from the Portland brokerage and UBS Financial, he says.
Putnam claims those conversations didn't take place. In their discussions, Barinaga "would say, 'What should I do?' " claims Putnam. "I said, 'You are looking at retirement. Diversification is important. You have appreciated assets; you should think about diversifying' " away from the heavy concentration in e.Digital, says Putnam.
Barinaga was no pigeon, and actually "was a sophisticated investor," insists Putnam.
E.Digital has not been sued. The Portland brokerage would not return repeated phone calls, and UBS Financial again refused comment.
But you can bet that the defendants will claim that a retired dentist should have known better.
Legit music busts out on campus
By JEFFERSON GRAHAM
No longer a site for illegal downloads, Napster.com has had success in signing university campuses to inexpensive student music plans.
When Lisa Staib was choosing colleges this spring, her cousin, a Penn State student, helped sway her decision by describing an unusual campus perk: free Napster.
A onetime Internet music outlaw, Napster's gone legit. And it's competing with the biggest firms in the industry -- including Sony, Apple, Microsoft and Wal-Mart -- to get students and other music fans to buy songs online instead of stealing them.
Colleges are hotbeds of music piracy. To give students a legal alternative, digital music meisters are wooing campuses with generous deals on Internet music-on-demand.
Penn State struck the first deal with Napster in January. The trial program was so successful that many other schools took notice. Now, when students return to school at Penn State and many other top colleges, they'll find free, legal digital music as the latest amenity, alongside cable TV and campus concerts.
More deals ahead
About 25 of the nation's 3,300 colleges will offer music to their students on campus networks this fall. An additional two dozen or more are finalizing deals in coming weeks.
"There are very few things in life that are more important to students than music," says Penn State President Graham Spanier. "Any school that buries its head in the sand on this is not serving its students well."
Students at schools such as Penn State and Cornell University will have access to Napster as part of tuition. Normal subscription rates are $9.99 a month. Other schools are cutting deals to make subscriptions available to students at discount rates.
"It clearly has reduced the need to pirate songs," Spanier says.
But it certainly hasn't eliminated the problem. The licensed services still have gaping holes in their catalogs -- no Beatles or Led Zeppelin, for instance -- while so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) programs such as KaZaA and eDonkey seem to have everything, plus movies, TV shows and oodles of porn.
Even with a celestial jukebox that amounts to a virtual well-stocked record store, the industry has a ways to go to change consumer behavior.
Weaning college students from P2P services "is going to be a significant hurdle," says P.J. McNealy, an analyst at American Technology Research. "Colleges are P2P factories."
The original Napster was created in Boston in a Northeastern University dorm room in 1998 by Shawn Fanning as a tool to help students get easier access to Internet music files, commonly referred to as MP3s.
The music industry hasn't been the same since. Many record stores, especially in college towns, have shut down, as students responded to free MP3s by no longer buying CDs.
Lawsuits continue
Even in the face of record-label lawsuits against song swappers --nearly 4,000 have been sued since September -- online swapping is bigger than ever. Internet measurement firm BigChampagne says 1 billion songs were available for online trading in June.
More file swapping takes place on college campuses than anywhere else, says Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which has been fighting to recover from a three-year, 18 percent drop in CD sales. The association says $4.2 billion is lost each year from file swapping.
The fall college digital musical alliances will teach students "that music isn't something that should be stolen but paid for," says Sherman. "Hopefully, they will carry that with them for the rest of their lives."
Intelligent Conversation -- with Your Car
SEPTEMBER 1, 2004 • Editions: N. America / Europe / Asia / Edition Preference
NEWS ANALYSIS
By Steve Hamm
Honda and IBM are teaming to bring a far-more-capable voice-recognition system to three 2005 models. Ask, and it shall answer
A talking computer called "Hal" helped create a chilling vision of a computer-controlled future in Stanley Kubrick's classic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hal took control of the space ship from what he saw as incompetent humans. Well, Hal has finally arrived in the real world -- and he's really a nice person. Advertisement
American Honda Motor (HMC ), with a lot of help from IBM (IBM ), is set to introduce the most advanced voice-navigation system ever: an on-board computer that responds to voice questions and commands just about instantly with a friendly spoken response. The system will be standard equipment on the 2005 model of Acura RL sedan, coming out in October, and optional on Acura MDX sport-utility and Honda Odyssey minivan, which both arrive in September.
Honda's move shows how rapidly digital technology is transforming the auto industry's landscape. Manufacturers are tapping into the latest innovations in an attempt to differentiate their vehicles from the rest of the pack. "We're at the beginning edge," says analyst Thilo Koslowski of Gartner Group. "The car is becoming an extension of your personal network. It helps you get where you want to go and to communicate along the way."
BEYOND NAVIGATION. Honda already had the most advanced voice-controlled navigation system on the market, but the new version, announced Sept. 1, introduces a slew of improvements. They include the ability to process natural-language commands and questions, and giving people voice responses rather than requiring them to look at a computer screen.
Once a person asks for directions to an address, the computer reads them out loud. If the driver wants to know about stores or restaurants near a location, the computer lists them. It even reads reviews from Zagat's restaurant guide. The computer responds to 700 types of commands and holds a database of 1.2 million city and street names.
For Honda, voice commands go way beyond navigation. You can also use them to control the audio system and air conditioning. And if you tell the computer a phone number, it will look it up in a reverse directory and give you the address. Using a separate voice-recognition system, a driver can use his cell phone hands-free.
"UNDER CONTROL." The new system required some advanced engineering. Scientists from IBM Research tinkered with algorithms to make it possible to respond to commands without having to be trained to recognize a particular person's voice. Also, they made the system powerful enough to understand unusual regional pronunciations.
While it's whip-smart, there's no danger the computer will take over and direct you to a place you don't want to go. "We finally have Hal, but we have Hal under control," says Jim Ruthven, program director for IBM Telematics Solutions.
This is just the start of the automotive digital revolution. Carmakers and their technology partners are working on wireless systems that diagnose problems in cars without having to bring them into the repair shop and which monitor vehicle performance so quality and durability can be improved in future models.
NIGHTIME UPGRADES? Honda later this year will introduce a system for broadcasting tips on how people can to get more out of their cars. In the future, it foresees being able to download new software capabilities wirelessly. "You can see a future where while you're sleeping we're upgrading the software in your car," says Robert Bienenfeld, senior manager for product planning at American Honda.
Maybe some of the info-tech giants will pick up some useful tips about handling seamless software upgrades from their auto maker brethren.
Apple iPod with Video and WiFi Capabilities?
Posted: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 10:25:26 GMT
Author: Matt Cameron
Apple is currently seeking an engineer for its iPod hardware division. However, they are not looking for just any engineer. They are seeking an engineer with WiFi and Video integration experience.
"The iPod group is looking for a Hardware Engineer. This person will be an individual contributor on a top notch team with responsibilities for the design, implementation, and integration of digital and analog electronics. Experience in the following areas is important: system integration, digital logic, SDRAM, Flash, ASIC’s, processor selection, ATAPI, various communication protocols (ie: GSM, Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11, Firewire, and USB), display types and video and analog integration."
Does this mean we are very likely to see an iPod with a video display and capable of sending and receiving music via WiFi? This is very likely.
TiVo-like software draws ire of XM Radio
Posted August 26, 2004 @ 11:06 PM
by Eric Bangeman
Time Trax, a program designed to record XM radio programming directly to a PC's hard drive, has drawn the attention of XM Radio and the RIAA — and not in a good way. Frustrated by his inability to listen to all the broadcasts he wanted to, Ontario programmer Scott MacLean wrote and began selling Time Trax. The application creates an analog recording of songs broadcast over XM along with track information which is then stored as an MP3 file. It will only work with the XM PCR receiver, as the auto and home stereo receivers lack a PC interface.
Predictably, the RIAA and XM Radio are not amused, and are looking deeper into the legality of the software:
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America said his organization had not reviewed the software, but said that in principle it was disturbed by the idea. "We remain concerned about any devices or software that permit listeners to transform a broadcast into a music library," RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said.
Yes, heaven forbid that a paying customer should be able to save broadcasts for his own personal use. Both XM Radio and the RIAA are looking closely at MacLean's creation to see if it violates either the XM user agreement or copyright laws, apparently fearing that saved broadcasts could wind up on P2P networks. XM also has plans for a new version of its receiver with pause and rewind functionality, which is not as compelling when there is software that provides the same functionality.
Look for the lawyering to start soon, as XM considers it an "unauthorized" product. It's a shame... not just because it's a cool program, but because XM is displaying the typical knee-jerk reaction that media companies have when customers decided they want to use their products in a way the manufacturers did not intend. Too bad XM is choosing to see Time Trax as a potential legal battle rather than an sales opportunity.
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HD Radio Prospects Pick Up With Cox
By Joseph Palenchar -- TWICE, 8/23/2004
Atlanta— Cox Radio, the third largest U.S. radio broadcaster in revenue, joined Clear Channel and Entercom in announcing aggressive HD Radio rollouts.
Cox said it will upgrade 80 percent of its 78 AM and FM stations over the next four years to digital. The company’s stations are clustered in 18 markets, including Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio and Tampa. It currently offers digital radio in Atlanta and Miami.
Earlier this month, Entercom Communications, the fourth largest radio broadcaster in revenue, announced plans to roll out digital broadcasting to 80 percent of its more than 100 AM and FM stations during the next four years. Entercom’s stations are located in the top 75 markets, mostly in the top 50 markets, said a spokesman. Most of the company’s stations are FM. The first Cox stations to make the digital transition will be in Boston, Seattle, Denver and Portland, Ore.
Entercom’s announcement came shortly after the late July announcement by Clear Channel, the nation’s largest broadcaster, that it will convert 1,000 stations to digital broadcasting over a two-year to four-year period and that it plans to offer HD Radio in 95 percent of its top 100 markets within three years. Clear Channel has more than 110 million listeners each week.
“With the technology now ready for broad-based deployment, we are stepping up our efforts to provide digital radio to our listeners,” said Cox’s president Robert F. Neil. “Digital radio not only brings CD quality sound to our listeners free of charge, but also enables us to deliver other valuable services such as traffic updates, sports scores, artist information and song titles to name a few.”
OT More amazing exposure for ATCO..
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/SciTech/Vote2004/high_tech_sound_040825-4.html
Musicland Looks to the Internet
By NAT IVES
Published: August 24, 2004
N June 2003, Best Buy transferred ownership of the Musicland Group to a private investment company, asking for nothing but the investors' assumption of Musicland's debt and lease obligations.
Just over a year later, Musicland, of Minnetonka, Minn., has named Zimmerman Partners in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to handle its account, with billings estimated at $50 million. The two companies are poised to execute the next step in a turnaround plan: makeovers for the 900 stores that Musicland runs under the Sam Goody, Media Play and Suncoast Motion Picture brands, which collectively sell CD's as well as entertainment products ranging from DVD's to movie posters to books.
The strategy envisions stores that embrace the Internet's role in music sales and emulate the loungelike atmosphere of chains like Barnes & Noble and Starbucks.
"All retail organizations of any kind, in order to stay fresh in the eyes of the consumer, have to constantly be bringing innovation," said Eric Weisman, who was brought in last August as chief executive at Musicland to lead the turnaround.
"The Musicland companies and its retail concepts had gone a number of years without making such changes in their retail perspective," Mr. Weisman said. As a result, while Suncoast had turned in good sales, Sam Goody and Media Play stores had faltered.
The music industry has undergone a seismic shift. With the iPod popularizing digital music and the majority of Internet users in the United States adopting fast broadband service, new approaches are required if retail is to use the Internet to its advantage, consultants said.
Apple says that its iTunes online music store, the most popular legal download service, has sold more than 100 million individual songs. Traditional retail sales remain much larger, and are even up so far this year, but they have suffered over the long term partly because of the online onslaught.
Music fans bought 667.9 million albums and singles in stores last year, down from 683.2 million in 1993, according to Nielsen SoundScan, a VNU unit that tracks music sales.
"What the current music outlets have in common is that they are all common," said Candace Corlett, principal at WSL Strategic Retail in New York, which studies shoppers' behavior and experiences. "They all look alike," she said, "and they're selling what is quickly becoming a dated product."
Over the weekend, a conference of music industry executives and retailers heard similar concerns from Clive Davis, who is chairman and chief executive at the music company BMG North America. Digital distribution of music was just one challenge, Mr. Davis said. Buying music should be fun, he said, "and you're not making it a fun experience."
Virgin Megastore is trying to break that mold with MegaPlay kiosks, which allow visitors to hear digitally stored music without buying anything. New kiosks in the San Francisco store allow customers to download a rotating selection of 30 to 75 tracks to their MP3 players, in a strategy the retail chain plans to spread nationwide. Virgin is part of the Virgin Entertainment Group.
Jordan Zimmerman, chairman at Zimmerman, part of the Omnicom Group, said that learning from the Starbucks approach was one way to revive the energy in music stores. "People are working, lounging," he said of Starbucks customers. "It's an extension of your comfort areas at home. Our stores will become an extension of that as well."
Even as Musicland incorporates elements of the Web and Starbucks, Starbucks is trying to incorporate elements of the Web and music. Starbucks has begun opening stores called Hear Music Coffeehouses, designed to fuse music, technology and the coffeehouse culture. The two already open, in Santa Monica and Berkeley, Calif., offer room to lounge with a coffee drink while creating individualized CD compilations from a bank of digital music.
As Musicland stores strive to adapt to the online world, the core concept is "clicks-and-bricks," a spinoff of sorts to "bricks-and-mortar," which was used during the dot-com boom to differentiate traditional retail stores from online challengers like Amazon.com.
"You'll have lounges, digital playgrounds where you don't have to buy anything hard," Mr. Zimmerman said. "You can download books, games, music, videos." If the transformation catches on with customers, they will turn to Musicland for downloads even when they are at home or at work, he said. That service is expected to be available early next year.
While Mr. Zimmerman declined to describe the creative approach of the campaign that will promote all the changes, he said it would rely heavily on guerrilla tactics like advertising on coffee-cup sleeves and pizza box tops.
"We're going to be able to go out street to street and make Sam Goody or Suncoast or Media Play part of the fabric of the community," he said.
Mark Cuban blog..HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future
I love looking for ways to screw up conventional wisdom. Right now in the entertainment world, the conventional wisdom is that both sides on the HD DVD vs Blue Ray DVD will battle it out and a standard for HD on DVD will emerge. No one is trying to rush to a compromise because the big media companies want to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out the current DVD business cycle.
Good. The longer it takes, the less chance any format of DVD has of having a place in the future of home entertainment. Don’t look now, but the price and size of hard drives have fallen like a rock, while capacities have soared, with no slowdown in site.
Which leads to the question — What is the best way to distribute content? DVDs which will be limited in capacity to 9.4gbs on a single DVD for another year, and then after that 50gbs on a single disk for years to come after that, or rewritable media that can hold 2gb already in a device half the size of a pen, or in a hard drive that can hold 200GBs plus in a drive the size of your cell phone?
Which device should content distributors like HDNet invest in ? DVD, knowing that the future standards will be locked for 7 to 10 years, or these storage devices that will grow in capacity, and shrink in size and price, not to mention the additional flexibility of being able to erase and rewrite the drives?
It’s not a question being asked in many places, but it is something we are talking about at HDNet. The choices we and others in the industry make can have a big impact on the future of your home entertainment.
Personally, I like putting content on rewritable drives. Let me tell you about how I personally made the USB Flash Drives work for me.
I had a couple DVDs that I had PURCHASED, that I hadn’t had the chance to watch. I had a couple 512mb Flash Drives that I had bought specifically to test them out for video. I took the first movie, and using an encoder with compression (not going to tell you which one, don’t want to play favorites), I encoded the movies at DVD quality and saved the output onto each of the 512mb Flash Drives. I popped those tiny little puppies into my pockets and off I went to the plane. Keys, some money and my keychain flash drives in one pocket, phone in the other. No hassle, no fuss no muss.
On the plane, I popped the first keychain drive into the USB Port. Got the ready signal, got prompted to open my video player, and watched a nice movie right from the keychain drive. On the way home, did the same thing with the other movie. I loved it. Far less space than DVDs. Could put them in my pocket instead of filling up my briefcase. I immediately went out and bought a 1gb keychain drive so I could hold 2 movies on 1 drive, in addition to my first 2 drives.
After having such a great experience with putting my DVDs on the keychain drives, I decided to test HDNet content in HD. The keychain drives, even the 1gb didn’t have enough capacity to hold a full movie, so I tried just some of our promos. They were short enough that they would fit in 512mb, but long enough to let me see if it worked.
I used a standard HDTV MPeg2 transport stream. The keychain drive wasn’t fast enough to allow me to pull the video directly. I had to copy it to my hard drive on my laptop, where it played with no prob, as it should.
Since I was getting fired up about the possibility of putting HDNet content in a format that could be transportable and work easily with MediaCenter PCs, and in the not to distant future, USB or FireWire enabled TVs, PVRs and Setop boxes and even DVDs (yes, tvs with hard drives are right around the corner, and yes, all your CE devices with a future, will have storage and expansion ability), I decided to buy a portable 20gbs USB 2.0 drive that was about half the size of a pack of cigarettes. Cost me 150 bucks. I also bought an external 80gbs FireWire Drive for under 100 dollars. I loaded a full 2 hour movie on the cig sized drive, and all the episodes I had of our HDNet Word Report.
Connected to my laptop, the cig drive couldn’t quite keep up. It had a couple hiccups, but it was close. If I had used any compression at all on it, no doubt it would have kept up no prob. After copying to my laptop hard drive, it played no problem at all.
I connected the 80gb firewire drive to my HP Media Center PC and to my PC, it was fast enough to play without any problems. I loved it.
I loved it, for a ton of reasons. Let me name a few.
I know that the price per GBs of an external hard drive is now down under 50c. That price is going to fall further. A lot further as capacities increase. This time next year we should be talking about 1TB (that’s 1,000GBS) drives at 25c per GB or less. The increased capacity means not only that I can stick more HDNet movies or TV shows on a drive and sell them to consumers, but it also means that I can increase the quality of the picture substantially.
What few people realize is that when we shoot something in HD for HDNet, the quality we capture the content at is far, far better than the picture quality that you see on your HDTV. We have to compress it to fit in the bandwidth defined by broadcast standards. That compression reduces the quality of the picture you see. Your TV can handle the quality we capture it at, but we don’t have a way to get it to your TV at that quality level — yet.
Bigger cheaper hard drives gives HDNet the ability to use that additional storage to hold our content in uncompressed quality and increase the picture quality that you can see on your TV. A bunch. We can take advantage of new cameras to capture at better and better qualities, and of new compression schemes that approach future camera capabilities, only because we have ever expanding storage. That’s something DVDs will never have. So by delivering content on Hard Drives rather than DVDs, we will be able to continue to increase the picture quality for years to come.
The other cool part is that the video playback devices that will be in your home over the next couple years will have the ability to connect via USB or Firewire to these drives. PVRs, Set top Boxes, Media Center PCs,even DVDs designed to play today’s DVDs and whatever future DVD standard is settled on, all will have the ability to connect to Hard Drives in some shape or fashion, or people wont buy them. There is going to be a big, big war to host your content in your house. Whoever does it the best, provides the most flexibility, and expandability at the best price, will win.
Next on my reasons to love this approach to distribution is that it basically kills off the “Piracy is going to kill us” threats from the big movie companies. Hard Drive storage is expanding far more quickly than upload or download speeds to our homes. The ability to use that hard drive storage to increase the quality and file size of a movie, makes it practically impossible to distribute it over the net. I have a question I always ask at speeches, and have asked for the last several years. I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand. That is in spite of the fact that HDTV has been in the clear, over the air since 1998. EVERY SINGLE SHOW that has ever been broadcast over the air, and continues to be broadcast today, could be picked up and copied by any of quite a few different, now under 200 dollar HD encode/decode cards and then put on the net. It hasn’t and won’t happen, because shipping around 18gbs per 2 hour movie isn’t going to be fast anytime soon. Make the file sizes bigger to accommodate better quality, and forgettaboutit.
When we get to TB hard drives for under 250 dollars, we will be able to fit 50 movies in HD quality on that drive. More than ONE THOUSAND movies in DVD quality on that drive. The keychain drives will be able to hold an entire HD movie and cost under 20 dollars. That same keychain drive I talked about earlier, in the next 2 years or so, will be able to store a DVD and cost under 10 dollars. So which is the better way to deliver a movie or movies? On a DVD with a boring, lifeless future, or hard drives?
Once the prices of a keychain drive get to a couple bucks for storage enough for a DVD quality movie, then it will be easy to distribute and sell to consumers. (Of course they will still be packaged in pain the ass plastic that no normal person can open right when they buy it, but that’s another issue.) The question will be who other than HDNet will be selling it that way. Will companies stick to DVDs because that’s the way they feel comfortable, or will they support a new medium?
That’s a little question. The bigger question, the Billion Dollar question is how to deliver content on or to hard drives, regardless of size and capacity, in a way that consumers will enjoy it, and do it cost effectively today?
Realize, that whatever happens in the next couple years, that you won’t be able to buy the newest releases and the biggest hits this way. There is no major media company who is going to disrupt their DVD cash cow to take a chance on a new business like this. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentally is big. But again, that’s a good thing for entrepreneurs with content. While they hope it won’t break, we can be out there trying to break it, and then they usually can’t fix it.
So without the biggest hit movies, what is the best way to deliver content to homes and for travelers?
We are looking at kiosks. Walk up to an airport kiosk, or a kiosk at a retail location. Pick the movies or shows or music they have available, pay for it via credit card, and wait a couple minutes while the content is copies from a server right there on the premises.
We are looking at customizing it per user. Go online, pick the content you want. Pay for it, the next day your hard drive with all the movies, shows, music, whatever, shows up on your doorstep. You plug it in your MediaCenter PC, your DVD, PVR, whatever, and watch, listen and play.
There is also the Netflix rental approach that could work as well. Pay 100 bucks for the first 200gbs external drive. Pay us 20 bucks a month, and we send you a new drive with the new goodies, and you send us back the one you just watched — Easy and breezy. Well, that is if consumers like working that way.
Probably the best short term solution is to work with high end home theater installers. The best belong to CEDIA (www.cedia.org). They are the folks that are most capable of integrating Media Center PCs, Hard Drive based storage systems , HDTVs and all the media devices in your house. I can only guess that they would have a field day selling hard drives full of HD quality or better movies to their high end customers who want to truly enjoy their home theater systems.
There are a lot of open ended questions and challenges in this, but that’s what makes business fun. What kind of device will be the content server in the home? Who will sell it? How will content be delivered, and by who? What will the pricing be? What will the business model be?
A ton of questions. The good news is that none of the solutions involve good ole’ fashion DVDs, other than as an interim solution. That means there is one hell of an opportunity out there for HDNet and others — as long as we can execute.
I also wanted to add just a couple of comments, questions, remarks.
1. Why haven’t the Media Center PC companies and the cable and satellite industry gotten together to put set top box capability in mediacenter PCs? People who buy media center PCs, might want to use them as media centers, and given that cable and satellite deliver the media, doesn’t it make sense to combine the two? It would cut customer costs for all involved significantly.
2. Why aren’t Media Center PCs promoting the fact that they can play HD files and shipping with Demo and samples to show them off? All of them can. I just bought a new HP Media Center PC, and it didn’t come with squat to show off what it can do. It works great, but I had to figure out all of its capabilities. A showcase would make it a far better solution.
3. The biggest decision facing HD cable and satellite distributors today is quality vs quantity. Right now most are looking at using compression to squeeze more channels into the existing space they have rather than squeeze a better picture into the same bandwidth that channels take today. The reason it’s a huge decision is that once they decide to fit in more channels, they can’t go back. You can’t all the sudden decide you need 15mbs per channel to deliver a picture that compares to a competitor’s better picture after compressing down to 6or 8mbs per channel.
4. In a world of multiple Terrabye drives, is VOD a good business? One of the things I learned at broadcast.com is that when you give thousands of choices on demand, people go to the little things that they couldn’t find anywhere else. The sailing fan will choose the show about sailing over the blockbuster movie because they can’t get the sailing show anywhere else. Or maybe they choose both. The problem is that when people all choose different things at the same time, its a huge bandwidth hog. Thousands of choices, thousands of people using different movies, particularly when the expectation is for HD quality, and there is a huge problem. The cost of delivery per movie if the system is used a lot is incredible. Unicasting DVD or higher quality video is an incredibly inefficient business. (Unicasting is where there is one connection per user to the movie being shown. Each user has to have his own bandwidth, they cant’ share streams) It’s why movie delivery over the net will never be a big business.
I know bandwidth on your own network is cheaper than the net, but when hard disk storage costs 25c per GB, and falls fast from there, unicast won’t be the best way to go.
The real solution for VOD is TIVO/PVR from the main office. PVR customers are becoming trained that when you fill up the hard drive, you have to delete something to get something. Put some PVR software on the front end, and allow users to pick from a menu of content that they can add. Then overnight, they are multicast the content , whether its via cable or satellite, it’s saved to the hard drive. If they watch it, they get billed for it and everyone is happy, and distributors maximize their revenue per bit.
Ok, I’m HD worn out — for now. Thanks for letting me core dump some of the things that have been on my mind re HD and the future.
HP readies TVs, media hub products
By Declan McCullagh
CNET
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ASPEN, Colo. — Hewlett-Packard plans to announce by next week a set of home entertainment products, including large-screen TVs and a digital storage console, embedded with copy protection technology.
Shane Robison, HP's chief strategy and technology officer, said at a conference here that the announcement, which will be made in about 10 days, is designed to curb copyright infringement though an unspecified form of digital rights management (DRM) technology.
Mr. Robison said that while he couldn't divulge details, the products also would include "very cool" interfaces to personal computers, wireless links and a media hub. His comments on Sunday evening came at a conference organized by the Progress & Freedom Foundation.
HP's news likely represents the next evolutionary step in its consumer product lineup. Last August, in an event dubbed "Big Bang 2," the company announced 158 new products and a simpler way to make computers, printers, digital cameras and other gear work together. HP has been hinting at plans to enter the TV market since late last year.
In addition to an expected update of its traditional consumer products, such as printers and cameras, the company is also expected to introduce an HP-branded version of Apple's iPod in September. The device will be based on Apple's fourth-generation iPod, which debuted in July.
In a speech in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, HP chief executive officer Carly Fiorina outlined HP's plan for more content protection as well as for the LCD televisions and an HP-branded iPod. Ms. Fiorina also outlined a technology called LightScribe that HP will add to its CD and DVD burners, allowing the drives to etch labels onto the surface of optical discs.
Mr. Robison said the planned announcement reflects HP's commitment to stronger ties with movie studios, which tend to be strong proponents of DRM technology. He appeared on stage with Darcy Antonellis, a vice-president for antipiracy operations at Warner Bros. Entertainment, and touted the two companies' close working relationship. In April, HP announced a deal with Warner Bros. Studios to supply rendering power to restore old movies.
Ms. Antonellis said Warner Bros. and other studios "can't sustain growth and development without their intellectual property being protected throughout the entire value chain." Warner Bros. movies include Exorcist: The Beginning, Catwoman, Harry Potter, and the Matrix trilogy.
Until the last year or so, Hollywood and Silicon Valley were at loggerheads over how to deal with DRM and piracy, but now, the two industries are finding common ground, Robison said. Previously, the line was, "I want absolute 100 per cent guarantees that everything is protected, or I won't do business with you," he said, "but we're in the middle ground now."
One point of disagreement arose over whether new laws were necessary to address peer-to-peer piracy. HP's Robison sounded a note of caution, while Ms. Antonellis said her industry "has to be aligned with and supported by legislative activities. We can't get there alone."
More colleges get cheap online music
Published: August 20, 2004, 3:17 PM PDT
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Another group of colleges is getting access to cut-rate digital music subscriptions, care of MusicNet and partner Cdigix.
Cdigix, which offers packages of video, music and educational services to schools, said it will distribute MusicNet subscriptions to students at Marietta College, Ohio University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Denver, Wake Forest and Yale University beginning this fall. The service will cost $2.99 a months for unlimited access to music, plus 89 cents to download a song permanently. Napster has deals with another eight universities to offer similar services.
So nice we can be connected in some small way to suppressing American democracy...
Police Turn Up Volume for GOP Convention
Thu Aug 19, 7:08 PM ET
By TOM HAYS, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK - Forget the megaphones. Police will have a much more high-tech — and louder — option to make themselves heard over the din of Manhattan traffic and noisy protesters outside the Republican National Convention.
It's called the Long Range Acoustic Device, developed for the military and capable of blasting warnings, orders or anything else at an ear-splitting 150 decibels.
Authorities on Thursday unveiled a mini-arsenal of devices and counterterrorism equipment they're getting ready for the convention, which opens a week from Monday.
The sound machines are being tested at an airfield in a remote section of Brooklyn along with other devices such as hand-held radiation detectors — for a possible "dirty bomb" — and mechanical barriers strong enough to stop a moving vehicle in its tracks.
At the Brooklyn training site on Thursday, police practiced disarming a truck bomb at a checkpoint. Scores of officers also made mock arrests of police academy cadets who posed as protesters.
Chanting "no justice, no peace," the cadets surrounded a bus full of "delegates" before officers in riot gear raced in, slapped on plastic "flex cuffs" and led them away to vans.
The demonstration was intended to show how the nation's largest police department hopes "to put a comprehensive security net over Madison Square Garden and the rest of the city," said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
"I think you'll see we're prepared."
The department recently bought two of the 45-pound acoustic sound machines for $35,000 apiece, and plans to mount them on Humvees posted outside Madison Square Garden. It would mark the first time the instrument — which can beam sounds for 300 yards or more — has been used by a civilian force.
"We believe we'd be able to use them in a number of scenarios," said Paul Browne, the police department's chief spokesman.
Two possible uses cited by Browne: directing crowds to safety following a terrorist attack or other calamity, and reminding protesters where they're allowed to march and rally.
The military, which has used the machines in Iraq (news - web sites), bills them as a "non-lethal weapon" designed to disperse hostile crowds or ward off potential foreign combatants by delivering prerecorded warnings in several languages and, if needed, an earsplitting screeching noise. But police insist the latter feature won't be used at the convention.
"It's only to communicate in large crowds," Inspector Thomas Graham of the department's crowd control unit said Thursday.
Graham said police had tried out the device in Times Square, and found it delivered clear, even sound over four blocks. Decibel readers will be used to keep the volume at a safe level, he added.
Still, Bill Dobbs of United for Peace and Justice, which has planned a massive anti-war demonstration on the eve of the convention, called the sound system "a potential Big Brother nightmare."
Police "are trying to use technology and machinery to control every aspect of life on the street, rather than relax a little and let a part of democratic society unfold," he said.
Mobile metal barriers — a variation of those installed outside government buildings, courthouses and embassies — will form a series of checkpoints around the arena. Once a bus, truck or car is secured between two barriers, it will be screened for bombs or other contraband by cameras that provide real-time video images from underneath.
The department also will deploy a new fleet of motor scooters to cut through gridlock should trouble arise. Hand-held radiation detection devices will help officers patrolling the streets and subways to guard against a "dirty bomb."