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April 02, 2007 — IDG News Service — A news conference in London later Monday by Apple's Steve Jobs and EMI Group could see the announcement that the first of the four big music labels will ditch digital rights management (DRM).
Ever since invitations went out to the event, scheduled for 1 p.m. local time (noon GMT) at EMI's London headquarters, speculation in the media and online has centered on two possibilities: the Beatles catalog coming to the iTunes Music Store, or EMI ditching DRM. The latter is fast becoming the favorite, especially after The Wall Street Journal said such an announcement would come at the event.
DRM is applied to many downloads to prevent illegal copying or sharing of the content, but it also prevents legal copying and can tie users into a certain product or technology. For example, Apple's iPod won't play DRM-protected songs purchased from anything but the iTunes Music Store, while owners of Creative Technology's devices aren't able to use the iTunes store because those downloads are incompatible.
Jobs called for an end to the use of DRM on music files in a blog-like posting on the Apple homepage in February. In it he argued that consumers would benefit because any player would be able to play music from any online music store and not be restricted as it is currently.
"This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat," he wrote.
google T1SP
Yahoo Mail to introduce limitless account size
Apple TV Has Landed -- Wow, requires a 16:9 television, which in the US means an HDTV. Not sure I would have gone that way. And I have trouble with the "iPod for your TV" analogy. My iPod has a disk twice the capacity of the Apple TV. Where do you even get a 40 Gig drive these days, from "Ye Old Computer Shoppe"? But I may have to get one anyway.
Cable TV embraces an old foe: antenna
Planned device may give industry leverage when it negotiates fees for local broadcasts
Apple TV projected to surpass TiVo, Netflix
Flash drives being used in bigger devices
I've seen some articles popping up on this topic. This is from USA Today, so the PR is catching. Here's a blurb from a CEA newsletter that sounds like a flash manufacturer's press release ...
Flash drives transition into larger electronicsFlash is fragile, so they oughta watch with the throwing of the stones. Flash is fragile in a different way. It wears out due to write cycles. Given the way OS's like to fuck with files all the time, using flash with a general purpose OS is something to watch out for. Having a RAM disk absorb the thrashing and then writing to the flash on a much, much, much less frequent basis may result in a reliable disc-less system. Just popping in flash to replace the hard drive and hoping for the best is not so good.
Durable and consumer-friendly flash drives are making the transition from smaller devices, such as cameras and cell phones, into larger electronics. Sony's new Vaio UX Premium and two Samsung laptops replace fragile hard drives with the more stable and energy-efficient flash offerings.
By the way, when did you last do a backup?
I've been meaning to get up to speed on VoIP, but haven't really ever found the time. I know Skype must be pretty easy, but again, I haven't ever used it. There has just been some barrier there for me, and I'm generally a pretty early adopter of on line technology. But MagicJack sounds like it might be lowering the bar enough for me to take the plunge.
Techs, telcos team up to set Internet TV standard
A word of explanation: "Open IPTV Forum" isn't about having open, non-proprietary IPTV for the end-consumer. It's about having open, non-proprietary systems components for the service providers to choose from to build their closed, proprietary service delivery platforms.
Analogous organization: DVB, which sets standards used by a variety of satellite, terrestrial, and mobile TV systems ... some of which are "open" from the end consumer's perspective.
Will Apple TV Be Bigger than the iPhone?
EU may force single mobile TV standard on cellular carriers
Shares of BigBand Networks Spike After Pricing of $139 Million IPO
BigBand is a developer of technology that allows cable TV providers and telephone companies to offer video, voice and data services.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based company has raised more than $100 million from investors, and achieved profitability last year.
Its clients include Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox and Rogers Cable.
Nice to see an IPO in this space. Although with $100M in at least some of the VCs got less than the 10-1 pop that they dream of.
Unused TV spectrum eyed for Web service
CBS shoots the NCAA to YouTube
Mark Raby, March 16, 2007 10:42, San Bruno (CA) - Bringing March Madness to the online video forefront, CBS today announced a new advertising partnership with Pontiac to bring NCAA game highlights to YouTube.
Nintendo's Still the One
By Fred J. Aun, TechNewsWorld, 03/16/07 11:04 AM PT -- Nintendo blew away the competition in February gaming console sales, according to an NPD report. The company sold 485,000 DS units and 335,000 Wii consoles in the month. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Xbox 360 sold 228,000 units, while Sony continued to struggle as its PlayStation 3 lagged with only 127,000 units sold.
Aggressive Intel Quad-core Price Cuts Before "Barcelona"
Intel is trying to steal AMD's thunder by cutting prices deeply. The Q6600 is a Core 2 Quad with 1066 MHz front side bus (connects to the memory controller chip), 8 MBytes of cache, and 2.4 GHz operating frequency. It will be $266 (in quantity) by Q3 of this year. Earlier this year, the retail price of the 2.93 GHz sibling was around $2k.
Four screaming-fast 64-bit processors for $266. Awesome.
Blu-ray Outsells HD-DVD For Second Month Running
Sells 2:1 against HD-DVD in February.
by Gerry Block
March 13, 2007 - Trade magazine Video Business reported today that Blu-ray outsold HD-DVD in February for the second month running. According to the magazine's figures, roughly 250,000 Blu-ray movie titles were sold in February compared to only 125,000 HD-DVDs. In January movie sales for each format were roughly the same.
Why isn't Viiv working for Intel?
NEWEST MULTIMEDIA PC BRAND HASN'T GENERATED MUCH BUZZ
The most common Viiv approach seems similar to Apple TV. A media adapter gizmo sits next to the TV, and connects to a personal computer. The delay in availability of the media adapter gizmos and a new media-aware OS (i.e. Vista), have taken some of the wind out of the sales of Viiv.
One of the "gizmos" is described in the September 2006 article below -- but it's still in beta and currently only supports presentation of photo and music from the attached PC to the TV: Don't even think about moving media in the other way.
DirecTV's Viiv box almost ready for prime time
I'm still not clear why a PC needs Viiv to do this. Fast boot and power-on via LAN perhaps?
The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007: Cupertino plans to add H.264 hardware support to its entire line.
Internet Radio on Death Row
Jesse "Doc" Wendel: "The Day The Music Died"