Class # 8 Blog Assignment
Where and how is digital rights management is failing. If you can give a first person account of where managing the portability, delivery or re-use of digital media didn’t got the way you think it should.

I was a victim of DRM. Jaime Collum’s Twenty Something CD release does not allow me to play it on my computer. Don’t ask me how they do but it made me ticked. I bought his CD and now I’m not allowed to play it in my computer. I figured it out because I was trying to use my computer and head phones so that I did not disturb my house guests. I haven’t gone through the rest of my CDs to find out if similar problems exist. Instead I’ve avoided the issue all together by just listening to streaming audio on the web. I would still like to know why listening to a disk on a computer should be prohibited.

Class #8 Reading

DRM is a mess. Wooten’s dizzying recapitulation of the current state of affairs is not only confusing but disconcerting. Why can’t everyone use content easily and still make money? And why do those who “offer little contribution” to the end product, as Wooten says, get a piece of the licensing fee?

I think Wooten brings up a very simple solution. He suggests that licensing should be administered through a centralized clearing house just as music royalties have been for decades. What a fantastic idea! That would take all the guesswork out of determining where content has been licensed (either with VLA or MPEG LA), if content needs to be cleared for encoding and if it can be distributed/redistributed. I even think that content distributors would be willing to absorb the costs of such a service for the convenience.

But everyone wants to hold onto their little piece of territory to maintain their revenue streams. I am especially appalled by the movie industries particular aversion to redistribution. Why does music burned to your personal computer for easy mobility differ from ripping a DVD? DVD ripping differs because Hollywood presumes you are ripping their content for the purpose of redistribution. Perhaps Hollywood is nervous about letting the genie out of the bottle. Perhaps Hollywood does not want to allow ANYONE to have the convenience of ripping a disk so that that content is not easily distributed electronically without any media backup. But this is unrealistic in our current world.

People are mobile and like their content to move with them. Although viewing full feature films on your phone doesn’t seem reasonable, complete prohibition of ripping a DVD movie which you rightfully own doesn’t seem reasonable. But until some standards are put in place this is our current state of affairs. Hopefully change comes soon.

Class #7 Assignment - Brightcove site comparison

Cooking Up a Story: http://cookingupastory.com/index.php/2006/06/06/a-ministers-daughter/

This is a site for “people with a passion for storytelling surrounding food.” There is a weekly live broadcast but old version have been archived on the site. I wish I could see them though. Instead of having a screen shot of the clip I see a black screen where it should play and nothing else. But it turns out it was my fault. I was Internet Explorer.

When I switch to Firefox it works just fine. I see a still of the current segment and a listing of the previous three stories below it. I chose to watch the most current “Going Whole Hog” which was hosted by champion BBQer Mike Davis. Mike talks about how he started his restaurant after having cancer. He gives you practical ways to grill chicken and then tells his personal story. It’s a good formula.

Image quality was fantastic on every clip. The clip loaded right away without buffering. There are only slight hiccups in image frames. Considering the quality of the image, I presume the hiccup is not the encoding issue it is a pipeline issue. But it is negligible really. Considering a lot of audio was captured in a kitchen it turned out quite good. There is not issue with the tin can effect. Sound is also very good. Stories run right into one another so you get the sense you are on a regular TV channel.

This site is Beta so I’m totally impressed with the quality. Not only are the technical aspects seamless but the tips, recipes and stories are very engaging. It’s a great formula!

Dave Locity: http://www.davelocity.com/glowtv/
This site provides dance music and video syndication for club parties internationally. There isn’t much content surrounding the site other than a few links to videos. I presume this is because the audience is just about the music. Not surprisingly, image quality of the corresponding video is completely grainy.

You presume you are going to have a little tradeoff in image quality when you are talking about night shots but the intro piece just emphasizes that this site is about the music and nothing more. The image quality is so bad I click it off and start typing a couple of seconds after and I don’t miss it. I’m just listening now. The first few clips are clean sounding. Then I click on 18 May Tiesto and the sound is bad. They didn’t spend a lot of effort on encoding their product which disappoints me because I’m actually feeling the music. It seems like this might have been encoded by the artist himself rather than getting somebody who knew something about web delivery to produce the best possible quality.

Class #7 Mobile Delivery

Well of course, my favorite section of reading for this class was the mobile delivery section in Chapter 28. I do lament that the pithiest and most direct sentence I’ve read since delving into this book was “keep the clips short.” And yet so many networks are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in streaming TV support on mobile phones. But it looks like the investments might pay off.

M:Metics (www.mmetrics.com) Monday released a mobile usage benchmark study indicating that smart phone adopters in European countries view video 14 times more often than standard phone users. As smart phones users represent the early adopters in mobile telephony, smart phone user’s acceptance of motion content is likewise an indication of upcoming trends.

So where does this leave us as far as the technicalities? Well, I think that Wooten makes a strong argument against “garbage in, garbage out” by encouraging that mobile video be captured in high quality. This is so that as the content is compressed, a high quality source video has the greatest possible chance of achieving a compressed form that translates as it is rendered into small mobile screens.

I also found discovered some interesting areas that I think are worth further exploration. Particularly , HSDPA or High Speed Downlink Packet Access which has been developed by Motorola in order to deliver 2Mbps to the mobile devices. Consequently, I have chosen to refocus my paper on this area.

Week 6 Reading: Windows Media Player and Content

On Sunday May 21st the Sunday Washington Post reviewed Windows Media Player saying it is “no iTunes.” In May, Microsoft announced its Urge music service, a joint venture with MTV.

Urge is similar to other media services except it offers Windows Media Compatible DRM. Microsoft has thought of the future of its player and offers upgradable music that goes with upgrades to your player. It does cost $5 more a month. But these rented songs can not be burned to CD and they go silent if you stop paying the fees.

It’s an aggressive approach. Especially since Napster and Rhapsody offer the same price plans but also let people play entire songs for free for a monthly fee. Yahoo costs about 1/3 less than Urge and both it and Rhapsody give subscribers a discount on song purchases.

Downloads also don’t come with any extras, such as lyrics, printable booklets and bonus videos that are bundled with many new albums on iTunes. You can’t print a CD cover or a track listing either.

All of this hinders music pirating, but since iTunes has already provided these features it is sort of difficult to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. The success of the Urge service is based on adoption of the Windows Media Player and essentially holds users hostage by wiping out their privileges unless they continue to pay fees. This is bad business. You shouldn’t force patrons to buy your service by holding their songs hostage. I’m a strong believer in controlling content but preventing access to legally purchased content is just going to force people to find illegal methods to get content. Microsoft’s overzealous position is not going to help it achieve success in the content market.

I would like to qualify my point about Microsoft's future in the mobile media market (see 6/30/06 post). Today The Seattle Times announced that Microsoft plans to launch an iPod-like device by Christmas (See Microsoft Plans for iPod Rival to be Launched by Christmas, 7/6/06). Given the strength of iPod's market share, which constitutes 77% of the mobile media I think it unlikely that Microsoft will completely obliterate iPod. Microsoft's previous ventures into the hardware arena have not been as successful as their business side. The big M's relationship with Hollywood is therefore a stronger driver for Microsoft's success. If that relationship leads to exclusive content and lower price points than iTunes, Microsoft might have a very good chance at making a strong foothold in the mobile media market . . . as long as they don't break the bank on the hardware.

Wooten Class #5
I have a prediction: Microsoft will own the predominant technologies for mobile content. Right now QuickTime is predominant. It makes sense that QuickTime is ahead of the curve since Mac has been the pioneer for creating original content. However, I predict that Microsoft’s relationship with Hollywood and it’s already aggressive DRM policies will eventually earn it in a preferred place in content thereby forcing it’s technology to be used predominantly in mobile. Microsoft has no competition from RealNetworks at this point so all they need to do is catch QuickTime as far as market penetration.

Wooten Class #4 Reading

In reading about protocols, I was considering DRM and mobile content. Since RTSP is preferable for long clips I would presume that this would be the preferable protocol for mobile content. Since RTSP is preferable for long streams this would make watching full feature content like Lost or Desperate Housewives. In addition, RTSP provides some inherent protections against pirating because it is difficult to capture according to Wooten.

However, I’m wondering about those sophisticated users that Wooten references as being capable of capturing RTSP streams. Those users would be able to use mobile technology to pirate content and perhaps distribute to other uses in the same fashion as on a traditional computer. So a solution needs to be found since once content is mobile it’s harder to put it back in the box. The Open Mobile Alliance has proposed DRM 2.0 to be provided in phones but there are still a large percentage of phones that are noncompliant. So how does this content get encoded and protected from the streaming side? It’s something I hope to answer this quarter.

I also have some thoughts about uni-casting. I understand this a method to cut down on multiple streams and reduce the load on the server by having people share the stream. However, I’m thinking that this might be a security issue. I would think Wootens’ claims about sophisticated users capturing streams in RTSP would be the same warning here. Could hackers get in through this stream? Could they capture the content more easily without being tracked? Would you lose control of that content more easily? Anybody know about uni-casting encryption?

I chose to review the Getty Images Change Me site.

http://changeme.gettyimages.com/main.aspx?isource=changeme

Change me is a community forum about change influence through imagery.

Well, first and foremost, this site has a flash intro. So, we all know what Kathy says about Flash intros - users don't like them. This one is OK. I see why they have taken this liberty. They are trying to set a tone. But I'm easily made impatient and I want to get to the real site. Unfortunately they force me to forward through each slide. I am not able to stop the show and go directly to the main menu.

Then when it gets to the actual content -- a written description of the purpose of the site. Comparitively bland next to the flash intro, but necessary. Still jarring after being in the media section. They could have done a better job. Once you get to the landing page, you still have to wait to load the main menu. I'm still not in the site yet. Annoying.

Next you go into the site. Takes a long time to load and no wonder. Lot's of Flash animation on the left nav. Everytime you mouse over you get a different effect; arrows and stars, etc. Still, I think it was an attempt to evoke a certain feeling but it becomes sort of annoying as being oversribbled. But then again I tend to be a minimalist.

When I use the left Nav the screen actually rotates to the next page. Cool effect but again overkill.

So this site makes me torn. Generally, I feel like the techonology is taking away from the display of the media and the goal of connection with others. Interesting how media can actually compete on the web.

Streaming Media - Class #3

I find myself focusing on minutia this week, but here it goes.

So I find it interesting that video does not use square pixels and was wondering if that had any affect on how video is compressed and rendered on computer monitors. I would think that resampling would be easier if you had more rounded edges but Wooten never says specifically that video pixels are rounded. Perhaps they are triangular or rectangular. Anyone know? Although this may seem like minutia to some, fore me it is indicative of my own interests. Digital image manipulation is something I have a lot of familiarity with so I find it interesting that the building blocks of images depending on format can be so fundamentally different.

Since digital photography goes straight into the computer, I presume there isn’t a conversion from raw into .tif or .psd or .gif that makes rounded pixels into square. I hadn’t heard of such a thing. My remedial queries might surprise some but I am, in fact, new to digital media. I shoot analog photos and generally scan negatives and prints because I do a lot of restoration work.

Again, Wooten has some cool info on mobile media but only vaguely touches on the technicalities of editing for mobile devices. After all that jargon in the video section I had hoped for more salient info in the mobile segment. I was also a little disappointed that he focused on a PDA which is no longer being made as Sony has gotten out of building the Clié. I guess that leaves the door open for my own personal explorations.