Newsletter #76 Saving Private Hollywood

Created on 14/03/03

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Conflict between copyright owners and new technologies has existed since Gutenberg developed and used the first printing press in 1454.

Often the content producers stand in the way of progress purely because they lack vision. For example, Jack Valenti the present chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America once said, "The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to a woman home alone." VHS and DVD now account for around a third of Hollywood's revenues.

On the other side, consumer technology companies know that there is a huge demand for products that enable users to, in effect break copyright laws. Witness Apple's advertising slogan for the iPod: "Rip. Mix. Burn." This aggressive stance doesn't exactly endear them to Hollywood and Big Music. The battlelines are increasingly being drawn between the copyright owners, and technology companies like Microsoft, Intel, Apple and Sony.

Fueling the battle tension is the convergence of four technological advances:

1. Compression. The MPEG4 standard shrinks audio and video by a factor of two to three and is expected to be a standard feature in new computers, stereos and DVD players next year. This ability to shrink digital packages will make it far easier to transfer them through networks.
2. Cheap Storage. According to BusinessWeek (www.businessweek.com) "When Napster surfaced in 1999, a gigabyte of storage--enough to hold around 250 MP3 songs--cost $12.27 wholesale. Now, it's down to $1.15..". The incredible advances in this area make it possible to put 20 gigabytes into handheld devices of all kinds.
3. Digital Recording. TiVo and ReplayTV have pioneered Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) that make it possible to digitally record any TV show and skip through commercials. This technology is now being included in a wide variety of devices.
4. Wi-Fi. This new low cost high-speed wireless standard is taking off in campuses, cafes and homes around the world. The latest standard, 802.11g promises speeds up to 54Mbits per second.

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When you put all these advances together you can see that content providers do have a problem. Firstly there is the ability to network all entertainment devices within a home so that movies or TV programs can be effortlessly sent between them. One of those devices connected to an external broadband connection will enable (and already do) viewers to send movies to friends. Viewers can own, and share, nearly everything they see. "The next wave of the personal computer is the digital lifestyle," says Philip W. Schiller from Apple.

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig points out that millions of consumers are downloading music and other material onto their hard drives because slow dial-up connections make streaming (you see it in real time but don't store it) of content unreliable. Once broadband is ubiquitous, streaming would seem to be the ideal way to keep both Hollywood and viewers happy.

Hollywood have been down this road before with the VCR. What did they do? They made it far cheaper to rent a video rather than going to see a movie in a theater. This is what I think the business model is:

If you assume these prices:
An adult movie ticket is $12, a one night video hire $7, then a streamed digital movie should be around $2. Once you have watched it once, subsequent streamings cost $1. However for that price you can't record it. If you want to buy a movie that you can own, edit, use for presentations or school projects, then it'll cost $10. It would be illegal to send this owned copy to anyone else.

To me this sort of model makes sense as it is so cheap that you wouldn't bother storing copies of most movies and why bother getting the latest illegal movie from a friend when you can get it legally for very little? It should be low cost as the content producer doesn't have to arrange delivery in the normal sense, they just have to have enough bandwidth to allow people to access it.

If they thought about it innovatively Hollywood could provide a variety of versions or directors cuts of the popular movies and because they wouldn't have to arrange the physical delivery of these it would be very cost-effective. Viewers would often watch more than one version and more movies in total because they would be far more accessible. The interactive possibilities are endless too, but we won't go there.

If Hollywood doesn't come up with an online model something like described above, they are going to struggle for the control of their content. And hey, this model would make them more money than Tom Hanks ever did!

Alex Garden

PS I'd love to hear what you think.

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Newbies

In many email programs, messages are automatically previewed for ease of use ie. you can just click on a message to be able to view it. However many viruses run purely by being previewed. Another advantage of turning the preview pane off is that you can delete spam without even looking at it! To turn off the preview pane in Outlook Express go 'View', 'Layout' then in 'Preview Pane' click the checkbox 'Show preview pane'.

For previous tips visit www.netinsites.com/hottips.cfm

Power Users

For several years PC keyboards have had three extra keys. The two "Windows" keys each have the Windows logo on them and they are between the "Alt" and "Ctrl" keys either side of the space bar. The "Shortcut menu" key is on the bottom right side of the keyboard between the "Ctrl" and "Windows" keys.
"Windows" opens the Start Menu
"Windows+R" opens the Run dialog box
"Windows+E" opens Windows Explorer
"Windows+F" opens Find Files
"Windows+M" Minimise all open windows
"Windows+Tab" Cycles through tasks
"Windows+F1" Windows Help
The Shortcut menu key will display the shortcut menu for the selected object.

For previous Power Tips visit www.netinsites.com/hottips_power.cfm

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"i used to believe" is a collection of ideas that adults thought were true when they were children. It will remind you what it was like to be a child, fascinated and horrified by the world in equal parts. What you find is the things you used to believe weren't so strange after all! www.iusedtobelieve.com/.

A great place to find clipart for children is the Discovery School site. They have clipart that your kids can use at home, for school projects or for building their own Websites.
http://school.discovery.com/clipart/

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No new articles this month.

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"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." Bill Watterson, cartoonist

You can see our other Quick Quotes on the front page www.netinsites.com; just refresh the page to see another one randomly selected from our database. Great for presentations or times when you want to appear to be a techno-dude(ss)!

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Best wishes

Alex Garden

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