Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Today SpiralFrog announced a free subscription-based music service. Subscribers will be able to download music to their music playing devices, but will need to listen to advertising presented on the SpiralFrog site periodically, to keep the music authorized. It sounds like the downloaded music would be WMA files, using Microsoft Windows Media DRM.

A couple of days ago, Engadget pointed at FairUse4WM, a Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 removal utility with a user friendly interface.

This FT article says that iPod+iTunes has the largest market share for legally authorized music at 80%. At the same time, it notes the growing number of non-iPod MP3 and other music players coming to market. I suspect it won’t be long before there’s a one-click utility to remove the Windows Media DRM, transcode the WMA file to MP3, and import them into iTunes so subscribers can listen on their iPod or whatever device. It probably won’t be from SpiralFrog, though.

Today’s Wall Street Journal (January 24, 2006) has a short profile of Paul Motian, an outstanding jazz drummer who was part of the Bill Evans Trio in the early 1960s. (If you haven’t heard of Bill Evans and have any interest in jazz piano, I highly recommend checking out their recordings).

What caught my attention, however, was this comment from Paul Motian on the decline of the recording studio business:

“A lot of recording studios are closing because people don’t use tape anymore, and that’s where the recording studios make their money. Everyone comes in with their hard drive, puts it on their computers.”

I still have a bunch of 1-inch 16-track master tapes somewhere out in the garage and remember spending a relative fortune on studio time and services, back in the 80s, probably the waning days of multitracking and overdubbing by hand on a mixing board. The Cars were wildly successful at the time and had opened a state-of-the-art studio at Synchro Sound, which was starting to use digital recording systems, but which far exceeded our band’s budget.

Comcast just announced that they’re raising their monthly fee by around 7% starting in January:

The package price will rise by an average of $3.13 per month, or about $44.80 to $47.93. Prices vary depending on the community.

I already pay $49.61 per month (with tax) here in Palo Alto, so the new rate will be around $53 per month. The old rate seems too high for what little we watch in our household, and the new rate is worse.

“Comcast’s Bay Area market prices reflect increasing operating expenses,'’ said spokesman Andrew Johnson, “as well as investments that Comcast is making to improve the value of the service.'’ He cited improvements in customer service as well as more programming choices that have come through advances in technology and partnerships with new programming providers.

I spent a lot of time digging up new music a couple of months ago during the pre-launch period beta tests of the Pandora music service. I put together a list of interesting music that I found, and ended up purchasing a number of new albums, and put off signing up for their paid subscription service until I finished working through the new music. I thought the fee was OK ($12/quarter or $36/year) but I simply had too much other stuff to listen to, so it would have been wasted money until the backlog cleared a bit (all the CDs I found from listening to Pandora in the first place).

Given my experience (liked the service, liked the music, put off signing up temporarily when the fees started), and the opportunity for affiliate referral fees from Amazon and others, this move to a ad- and affiliate-supported service could end up generating more revenue in the end.

The cable guy actually did turn up last week, so we still have cable TV. In the meantime, there are many interesting, non-mass-media video projects online.

A few days ago I got around to fixing Azureus on the house server so I could download Star Wreck - In the Pirkinning using BitTorrent. This is a Finnish-made take-off on Star Trek and Babylon 5, created by a group of motivated fans over a period of seven(!) years. (Wikipedia entry)

Digital video tools became drastically cheaper and better during the project, and the quality of the composited sets and special effects is impressive.

The movie is available (with English subtitles, too) free, under a Creative Common license.

See also: Rocketboom

The cable TV service at our house went out a few days ago. It’s hard to pin down exactly when, since we are atypical media consumers and often go for days at a time without television. The service tech missed his repair appointment window yesterday, so it’s going to be another day or two without network television. From time to time I consider dropping the cable service altogether. I never feel like I’m getting a good value, and some combination of DVDs and internet services seem like it will be a better fit “real soon now”.

On most school days, the television doesn’t go on at all, except if one of us is on the treadmill at home and happens to turn on the news. We don’t even use TiVo, although I occasionally try experiments with the home-built PVR du jour while wearing my “media technologist” hat.

I wrote earlier today about my reluctant late-adopter status for audio podcasting, and now I come across an article about Apple quietly introducing video content to iTunes Music Store.

The quiet, fanfare-less launch of video podcasting (in fact, it’s not even clear when it was launched) is a bit surprising for the company, but there may be a reason: there’s not too many video podcasts out there in the wild. Furthermore, video podcasts are currently only playable on your computer, although it seems clear enough that a video iPod is on the way. If you didn’t believe it before, you should definitely believe it now.

Some notes from day one at KINCON 2005 at the Palo Alto Crowne Plaza. Today’s sessions were technology-focused. Although this has traditionally been a Korean IT-related conference, and mostly chips and displays at that, the biotech presentations were the most interesting.

The first session was on wireless technology, mostly aimed at services for mobile phones, such as ringtones and games. Korea is a good place to try launching these services, with 76% wireless penetration rate, and 90% of the handsets capable of running games and multimedia. My observation — it’s hard to do much in this space with the mobile operators trying to extract fees from the customers and 3rd party service providers (in order to pay back their spectrum license fees). At least two of the speakers commented that most of the fee paid by the customer is to cover the billing costs.

Lots of action on the video search front lately. This post on the Yahoo Search Blog announces the official launch of Yahoo Video Search.

So what’s changed in 1.0? We’ve partnered up with some major content publishers to fortify our content offering, including MTV, Buena Vista (including the latest clips and trailers for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), CBS News, Bloomberg (check out the latest news on the Federal Reserve), Reuters, The Discovery Channel, Scripps Networks (the good people who produce Home & Garden TV and The Food Network), VH1, and more.

However, great video search isn’t just about content from large publishers, it’s also about the long tail content from smaller publishers and individuals as well. To that end, we’re indexing the Internet Archive’s Moving Image Archive. One of the great things about the Moving Image Archive is that it encompasses a wide range of content — everything from the Prelinger Archives (a collection of over 48,000 “ephemeral films” from 1927 through 1987), to user-created Open Source Movies hosted by the Internet Archive, and other collections of video. (One of my favorites is the animated legos from Brick Films. Don’t miss seeing their version of Grand Theft Auto done entirely in Lego).

via Joi Ito’s Web:

David Beckemeyer writes about an R&D activity at Earthlink which has implemented dual IPv4 / IPv6 access on modified firmware for a Linksys WRT54G wireless home gateway router.

The Linksys WRT54G is inexpensive, widely used, and is similar to many other home gateways providing NAT routing and wireless access. (It’s also popular as a platform hacking wireless router code, as it runs Linux internally). After loading the modified firmware, the router still provides IPv4 NAT functionality, but in addition provides a publicly routable /64 IPv6 network, and can directly route to other public IPv6 networks via the experimental Earthlink IPv6 routing service. You do not need to be an Earthlink customer to use the free service.

Google Video has added indexes today for keyword searches on a number of commercial sources, mostly news. (via Battelle, SearchEngineWatch)

The search results page returns thumbnails and sometimes transcripts of the content, probably from the closed captioning. Sources so far include CNN, Fox, C-Span, NBC, ABC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, and a few others. The video returned in the search results isn’t actually available for viewing or downloading.

SearchEngineWatch also notes:

It’s worth mentioning that Blinkx.TV provides searchable access to content from some of the same sources including the Discovery Channel, Fox News, and CNN. Blinkx.TV also provides the option to limit by source and VIEW the full motion video on your computer.

Can’t tell whether the user uploaded video is indexed at all yet. Only got commercial content in a few quick queries, no video blogs (like Rocketboom) or video content that’s already out there via BitTorrent trackers.

Lately I’ve been looking forward to watching the daily Rocketboom video blog, and have struggled to explain both Rocketboom and video blogging in general to non-blog-reading, TV-watching folks, i.e. most normal people. So until I get around to writing a longer introduction to video (and regular) blogging for my non-blogging / non-blog-reading friends, just go check it out .

Rocketboom features Amanda Congdon reading headlines and incorporating other video blog postings on the internet in a news-style format. It’s a little like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show with a bit of Jane Curtin’s old SNL Weekend Update thrown in, mixing up random video clips.

I enjoyed this clip posted earlier this week, which features David Letterman-style page tossing at the end of each article, David Lynch’s (of Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet etc) daily weather report from L.A., and a vintage black-and-white television ad for Wham-O frisbees.

Been thinking a bit lately about dealing with video, converged media, and search, came across a couple of interesting pieces on video search and digital content in general, first one on John Batelle’s SearchBlog, which in turn references a longer article by Mark Glaser at the Annenberg Online Journalism Review.

Ourmedia, SingingFish, and Brightcove are profiled briefly, along with Google Video Upload, Yahoo Video, and Open Media Network.

From the Glaser article:

Howe estimates there could be 300 million video streams online, but Singingfish has still only scratched the surface with just under 20 million streams indexed. Singingfish also crawls adult content — literally anything that’s legal — and includes a “Family Filter” with pretty conservative rules for what partner sites or individuals can filter out (including sex education material).

This recent article at AnandTech compares several current PCI TV tuner cards, including

• ATI’s eHome Wonder
• ATI’s TV Wonder Elite
• AverMedia M150
• eMuzed Maui-II PCI PVR
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250
• NVIDIA’s dual tuner NVTV

The Hauppauge PVR-250 and the ATI TV Wonder Elite are relatively expensive but have visibly better performance in the various tests on the cards. These are all standard video input, so the image quality is also limited by the signal feed from the cable company.

I’ve been quite pleased with the Hauppauge PVR-350 I’ve been working with recently, which incorporates the same tuner and video encoder as the PVR-250. I’d be interested in seeing a comparison with the more recent PVR-150 at some point. I selected the Hauppauge over some of the alternatives on the basis of both video quality and the availability of software, since some of the other tuner hardware is essentially Windows-only. In contrast the Hauppauge hardware has extensive support under Linux, in projects like MythTV, FreeVo, MediaPortal, etc.

Perhaps another alternative to Google Video upload, or is this more like the photo hosting sites? I’d like to find a way to get my personal media data closer to the internet backbone, so it’s not strangled by the slow pipe into the house, but I also don’t want all of it publicly indexed and accessible. With the photo hosting sites, they’re mostly either affiliated with a photofinisher, and are looking for print and merchandise revenue, or they’re selling to space to people who just need image storage and bandwidth.

From John Battelle’s Searchblog

Mike Homer, of Netscape and now Kontiki, and Marc Andreessen, of Netscape and now Opsware, have launched the Open Media Network, a free platform for the storage and distribution of public video and audio content. I spoke to Homer about the new network, which uses Kontiki’s video serving system on the back end. The system is a mashup of sorts between Tivo and BitTorrent - it has a well considered interface and employes a secure P2P network for file distribution (it doesn’t actually use Tivo or BitTorrent technology).

More fun with Google Maps and TiVo.

Haven’t been looked much lately at developing directly on TiVo hardware vs trying ideas out on MythTV-style PVR platforms while experimenting with video, media servers, and TV-centric information appliances. A while back it looked like you could hack things into the TiVo, but it seemed that the main advantage of the TiVo was that it worked out of the box and it was relatively cheap compared to building your own, i.e. it was an actual product, not a development platform. Building a system from parts, i.e. MythTV on Linux or Windows Media PC, isn’t an end-user-friendly activity, but can give you Unix-like flexibility where everything is possible, but you may need to do it all yourself.

Saw an article about TiVo’s latest plug for developing applications on the TiVo, I should go take another look.

Link to News.com article here

I was just trying out the performance of different video encodings over WLAN yesterday, and had been thinking about scenarios where something like this might make sense, given that people are starting to carry around more powerful client devices.

Singapore Airlines already runs a great video- and audi0-on-demand service on their flights, but it requires essentially a full PC under every seat. Moving to a bring-your-own client entertainment format might not make sense for SQ, but would be a huge improvement for me on United or any other US-flag airline.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to clog up the shared bandwidth with high quality video, and you can’t really solve an “on-demand” bandwidth problem using multicast. I’m not even sure they could count on using 802.11g or a to get the higher bandwidth, as there aren’t that many 802.11a clients around, and a mixed 802.11b/g network won’t give you the performance unless you keep out the 802.11b clients. Going the other way, I don’t think people would be terribly happy with 150-300kbps “broadband internet” quality video streams on an airline flight, but I could be wrong.

I rarely sit down and just listen to my music collection these days. Most of the time, any music I hear is on the radio, computer or CD player while driving, or working, or generally doing something else. My largest weekly block of music listening time is using an MP3 player during treadmill workouts.

So, it was interesting yesterday evening when I started noticing how bad MP3 encoded tracks sound compared with the original CDs.

I’m old enough to have actually purchased physical media (first vinyl, then CD) for nearly all the music I presently own. However, I have rarely gone back and played the actual CDs I’ve purchased for several years, as the first step after removing the wrapper is to encode them and put the bits on the file server. When my daughter was a little younger, duplicate CDs were being replaced weekly after being stepped on, spilled on, turned into art projects, and other mishaps. Other sets have been left behind on airplanes, rental cars, etc. Having everything on the server has allowed us to enjoy the music without worrying about physically destroying or losing the original.

Lots of interesting Google topics recently. Yesterday, Google launched Video Upload, inviting uploaded video to be indexed on Google in the future.

This is fundamentally different from Google Search as it exists today, in that

• Content needs to be explicitly uploaded to Google vs being spidered automatically
• All indexed content has a claimed owner (need a Gmail account to upload)
• Licensing information is built into the search metadata at Google rather than at the source

It’s unclear to me whether Google becomes the primary content server or if only metadata is served to video search clients, leaving the actual content delivery to the owner. Although Google currently makes a cached copy of web content, today’s searches are normally directed to the source URL rather than being served from the Google cache. Turning the Google infrastructure into a global media server seems like a plausible direction to consider, though.