Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for April 13th through April 15th:

• On Netflix’s video streaming security framework – A black box look at Netflix video streaming implementation for "Watch Instantly" , built with Microsoft Silverlight for Windows/Mac or various hardware clients, and various authentication and DRM services + HTTPS
• Nati Shalom’s Blog: Designing a Scalable Twitter – A look at using in-memory data grid vs memcached architecture for a simplified Twitter-like service with goals of 10 billion tweets/day, 100 GB stored/day (with 10:1 compression), immutable tweets i.e., there are no updates, only inserts, client applications limited to 70 requests per hour.
• agile approach | World Bank Open API 2.0 Launched – Economic development indicators for 200 countries from World Bank. 1000 API calls/day free for non-commercial use, info at developer.worldbank.org
• "We think you’d also like…" and the Math of Suggestion – Teil 2 | Gründerszene – Simplified overview of recommendation algorithms used for suggesting alternative shopping choices.
• 15 Firefox add-ons for Web developers | Webware – CNET –

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.

The upcoming Zune music / video players from Microsoft are likely to have similar issues, whatever their online media network turns out to be.

I think it’s great that the music publishers are trying different business models, in this case advertising. On the other hand, I find I use services like Pandora for casual listening and finding new music, then buy the actual CDs of music I want rather than purchasing from iTunes, just so I have a clean, portable DRM-free audio file that can be shipped around the house and across whatever device happens to be convenient. I’d rather just buy clean, portable bits, without needing the physical CD. Where’s the service for that? (Other than allofmp3.com).

More on SpiralFrog from BoingBoing, TechCrunch

Update Tuesday 08-29-2006 21:16 PDT – I see that Microsoft is working on patching WinDRM to block FairUse4WM. (Good luck with that.) And on the iPod front, it looks like jHymn has been getting updates so it can work with iTunes 6 to remove the FairPlay DRM, making those files portable to non-iPod devices.

More Amazon stuff this evening:

Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade will provide paid access to books by the page, and the ability to “upgrade” access to the full contents of the book.

Press release:

The first program, Amazon Pages, will “un-bundle” the physical-world experience of buying and reading a book so that customers can simply and inexpensively purchase and read online just the pages they need. For example, an entrepreneur interested in marketing his or her business could purchase the relevant chapters from several best-selling business books.

The second program, Amazon Upgrade, will allow customers to “upgrade” their purchase of a physical book on Amazon.com to include complete online access. For example, a software developer who buys a Java programming book will not only get the physical book delivered to his or her home, but will also get 24×7 Web access to the complete interior text of the book. Buy a cookbook and you will not only have it on your shelf, but also be able to access it anywhere via the Web.

Personally, I like owning actual books, as I find them much easier to read and carry around than a computer or PDA. But something like this would be handy to get at my personal collection while travelling. Plus it might cut back on the volume of books I end up donating to the Palo Alto library.

This shouldn’t affect fiction book sales at all (who wants half a novel?), but could put a dent in sales of some types of reference books.

This seems a little bit like a “book” version of the old mp3.com service. If you owned the CD, they would let you stream the bits from their server. I seem to be slowly reconstructing my own private version of that service in our house, although if disk storage increases quickly enough I may just switch to duplicating the content everywhere.

More comments at TheStreet.com

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.

The standard (analog) cable package from Comcast is around $50 per month. For us, this is probably 5 hours / week of cartoons, plus another 5 hours / week of mostly news programs. So, rounding up, call it around 50 hours per month of content. We don’t subscribe to any premium channels, and we generally don’t watch ESPN. My wife watches Korean dramas from time to time, but these are all on DVD or by video streaming (from Korea!). I could live without the cable news, since it’s usually just CNBC with the sound off.

This works out to around $1 per hour of cable programming, or $600 per year for mostly cartoons and CNBC.

I’m not too interested in watching video on an iPod, except possibly on an airplane or while travelling. What is interesting, though, is the possibility of getting online video distribution into the mainstream. iTunes has been fairly successful in popularizing legal online music downloads, and they may have more success than others in getting consumers to adopt a paid video download service.

$1.99 per commercial-free hour seems too high, though. I’m also not fond of the iTunes DRM system, having a household full of networked computers which come and go over time. I find I would rather purchase the CD and rip it to the server than deal with managing the DRM.

If the Comcast guys miss their repair window again, it may be time to try dropping the service altogether. The primary advantage they have at the moment seems to be incumbency, and the fact that it “just works”, except that it doesn’t.

I should probably hook up the antenna feed, though, which might give me an excuse to check out the local broadcast HDTV signal.