tinyurl.com/c3be5 -> www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051208.html
i, cringely search cringely go The Frog The original Cringely frog mascot, circa 1998. MP3tunes is one of the companies owned by Michael Robertson, w ho founded MP3com back in the Internet boom years and sold it for a ton of money. Robertson, a serial entrepreneur, has Linspire (formerly Lind ows) and SIPphone and probably other companies, too, in addition to MP3t unes. Daring and willing to spend money if he has to, Robertson is a for ce to be reckoned with. There are no storage limitations or extra bandwidth fees. The system is legal becaus e the MP3tunes server can only be accessed by you, so it is no different than ripping your CDs on your home PC. Of course, you have to bother to do the uploading, but special software makes that fairly painless if le ngthy. Music is encoded at a maximum of 192 kbps, so this isn't really D VD-quality, but I don't generally get along well with the kind of people who can hear the difference, so it doesn't matter to me. But bandwidth is probably only a percentage of the total cost for creating and marketing such a system . If raw bandwidth is only 25 percent of the cost and the average user l istens less than 700 hours per year Oboe can make a profit, but I have t o wonder about the storage and infrastructure costs? If they really keep each user's music unique, they'll need petabytes of storage. Can this b usiness really make enough to be worthwhile or is it just a Trojan horse for something else? "Don't look at bandwidth and storage economics today," said Robertson. There will be millions of music lockers in five years and it wi ll a profitable delivery business. We will be the cable/satellite for the delivery for music." And isn't Oboe likely to be sued by the record companies? "If they sue me, they should sue Gmail first," says Robertson. "Gmail giv es you two gigabytes of free storage with no access controls -- nothing stopping users from signing up for anonymous account and then loading th at up with 2 gigs of music then widely distributing the password. If the music industry sues, I will po litely point them to the DMCA" Still scratching my head, I'm not sure if I buy the economic argument. Ye s, storage and bandwidth costs are going down all the time, but Oboe sti ll has to function in the real world and I think to be profitable ,Rober tson will have to hope that most subscribers don't upload very much musi c A few gigabytes are fine, but Andy Hertzfeld's terabyte of digital mu sic (including every live Dylan concert ever recorded) would be unprofit able for Oboe today OR five years from now. But Robertson is better at making money than I am, so this idea of an acc essible media storage locker will probably stick. The second important event I alluded to above has yet to actually happen, but the Mac rumor site Thinksecret. com seems quite sure that Apple will announce a video locker strategy of sorts at the January MacWorld show. Though I have written quite a bit about what I believe to be Apple's emer ging media strategy, I have no specific knowledge about this upcoming an nouncement. That doesn't mean, however, that there isn't a lot of materi al to analyze from just the Thinksecret account, which you'll find among this week's links. Apple's take on enhanced Digital Rights Management, according to Thinksec ret, is never actually allowing copyrighted bits to be stored on the use r's machine. Instead, when you buy or rent a movie from iTunes, the vide o will sit on Apple's server and be accessible to the purchaser or rente r in accordance with the rules of that particular transaction. If you do n't have the bits on your machine, the theory goes, you can't steal them . It is a clever plan and one that actually makes a lot of economic sense b ecause Apple isn't saddled with Oboe's task of keeping five million diff erent copies of Louie-Louie on its server. The Apple system can keep onl y a few copies and simply assign access rights. It works well for bandwidth, too, in part because the data only ever travels in one direction, unlike Oboe, which has to pay to receive it from the subscriber then pay again to serve it back. I'm not sure it works as well from a security standpoint. There are alrea dy software products that can hijack video and audio streams in real tim e as they play and though Apple can work to defeat those, it will probab ly be a losing cause. Still, with FairPlay on top of this locker strateg y, Apple has something better than what's being offered by its competiti on. Movie studios are eager for new revenue sources and Apple has the mo jo, so we'll probably see a bunch of movie studio announcements to this effect in January. What really bothers me about this Thinksecret it em is how they finesse the language of what's actually happening from a technical standpoint. Yes (if the item is correct at all) the movies wil l stay on a server somewhere. Yes, they'll be played on your PC or Mac And yes, they'll never be stored there because of some clever Apple cach ing technology. For the Thinksecret item to be correct, Apple will be in the business of streaming movies rather than downloading them. Downloading can take as long as r equired with the only real criteria being that at the end of the process a perfect copy is on your computer. Downloading can work over any speed of connection and can be made to work around any other network traffic. Streaming likes to have as mu ch bandwidth as possible RIGHT NOW. To make streaming of high-bandwidth content as painless as possible, Apple would need the kind of distribute d architecture I've been describing at Google. Maybe Apple has that, but if they do, nobody has told me. Maybe Apple is using the Akamai n etwork or its equivalent. Maybe the distribution system leverages peer-t o-peer in the same manner as BitTorrent. Maybe there is some secret tech nology Apple will pull out from behind Door Number Three. But whatever t echnical solution Apple presents, the company will still have a LEGAL pr oblem. Burst has been quiet lately, which could mean something or n othing. Certainly, they haven't announced that Apple has bought a licens e like Microsoft did last year for $60 million. If Apple introduces this video service as described but without a license, Burst will undoubtedl y try to shut it down. So if you believe the rumor, then look for an Apple/Burst announcement.
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