The Thukrals wanted their son, Dhruv, to go into nanotechnology. So when he told them he’d rather be a video game developer he might as well have said he wanted to join the circus. “Are you serious?” they asked.
What would happen if you introduced one of the most lucrative business models on the Internet–search-related advertising–to the file-sharing networks that power much of the Net’s underground economy? We’re about to find out.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been staying up late glued to my screen. No, not watching the Olympics or the nonstop political gabfest on 24/7 news channels. I have been obsessively logging in to iTunes. It’s not about the songs, audio books, TV shows or movies. It’s all about the apps.
Is Google too white? No, we’re not talking about the white home page that’s so bright it motivates some people to change its appearance to save energy.
It wasn’t so long ago ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum–Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star–but the two had a similar [...]
For Warner Bros., the mission was to keep “The Dark Knight” from seeing the light of day. In an era of instantaneous digital copying and widely available high-speed Internet access, the premature and unauthorized release of a movie to the public–especially a coveted summer blockbuster–can spell disaster.
The MPAA has offered a deal to the Federal Communications Commission that could bring movies to cable and satellite viewers more quickly after their original release. The trade-off, though, is that the movies couldn’t be viewed by some high-definition TVs, nor could they be recorded by stand-alone TiVos.
Two things struck me about Roku’s newly announced $100 Netflix Player, a book-sized set-top box that lets people watch streamed video files from Netflix on their TVs. First, it was priced lower than anything I’d previously seen in the “digital media adapter” category (i.e., devices that bridge the gap between the Internet and the TV). And second, it delivered less than any of those other devices. All it can do, in fact, is connect to Netflix’s Web site, select a movie or TV show to stream, then display the chosen program on a TV set.
Ah, May! The weather gets a little warmer, high school kids nervously attend their proms and the movie studios begin to release their would-be blockbusters, eager to start the summer box-office rush early.
Time Warner subsidiary HBO has gotten a fair amount of credit today for persuading Apple to abandon its one-price strategy for TV shows at the iTunes Store. That’s an interesting development, and it could open the door for NBC to bring its shows back to the store. But what many of the reports overlooked was how little HBO decided to put onto the virtual iTunes shelves. The network is making available downloadable versions of older shows only, and charging premium prices for many of them to boot.
Like David going 15 rounds with Goliath, StreamCast Networks Inc. battled the biggest companies in the entertainment industry for nearly six and a half years before finally dropping the slingshot and hitting the dirt. The file-sharing company filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition last week, sending it down the road to liquidation. But the company’s demise wasn’t triggered by Hollywood studios or the major record labels, as much as they would have liked to have done so.
The NPD Group released a report today showing that post-holiday sales of Blu-ray didn’t exactly skyrocket after Toshiba folded the HD DVD tent in February. After dropping 40% from January to February, sales of set-top Blu-ray players (i.e., those not built into a PlayStation 3) crept up 2% in March, NPD said. HD DVD sales, meanwhile, fell off a cliff that month.
In recent months, some start-up technology companies have died or gone into comas after running out of money, a possible early sign that the resurgence in venture investment may be coming to an end. File123 is counting its days. Edgeio was edged out. TripUp has fallen. BrightSpot went dark. Firebrand flamed out and Ezmo is no more. Industry analysts say this year will bring a big wave of start-up deaths as the credit crisis gripping the financial markets makes investors cautious in other areas.
With about 300 million page views a day, Wikipedia by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn’t. Wikipedia’s business plan is, basically, to hold out a tin cup whenever it runs low on funds, which is very often. When it comes to money, “we are about as unsophisticated as we could possibly be,” Executive Director Sue Gardner said as she swept up Styrofoam packing nuts in the office in San Francisco, the foundation’s home since it relocated in January from St. Petersburg, Fla. “It’s time for us to grow up a little bit.”
Growing up can be hard to do.
A few days ago I came across an op-ed submission that called for file sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid, is a member of the Swedish Parliament from the Moderate Party–a pro-business party that’s akin to this country’s Libertarians (except in Sweden they’re more than just a fringe group). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid’s new piece added another provocative contention: that unauthorized downloading isn’t actually theft.
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