IP TV Times

Facebook hacker gets 8 months

2012-02-21T14:50:00.001Z

As a consequence of breaching the network at Facebook and downloading IP onto a hard drive a hacker has been given an 8 month prison sentence.

Facebook clearly object to having their Intellectual Property taken (quite reasonably). Perhaps they could more actively assist in the protection of other people's IP rather than just running the argument that they are just a mere conduit..........

Is The Future Of Broadcasting Following Google's Yellow Brick Road ?

2012-02-21T14:20:00.000Z

Google Fibre's application to set up a satellite farm in Council Bluffs, Iowa, next to one of its existing data centers, can mean only one thing... expect YouTube to get into simulcasting. The farm is basically a downlink facility to enables the ingestion of large numbers of broadcast stations, presumably for simul-transmission over the internet to its fibre rollout in Kansas City, MO.

In the US this will be quite a challenge - both legally and logistically. I'm surprised that Google isn't trialing this in the UK where it would have a number of things going for it:

1) Legally, the re-transmission of free-to-air channels is a grey area, but TV Catchup has been doing it for years based on the apocryphal 'Rediffusion Rule' (whereby TV free-to-air TV signals were allowed to be re-transmitted so they could reach geographically disadvantages receivers/viewers in the Welsh valleys).

2) BT Wholesale has rolled out multicast, so the cost of delivery would be a pittance compared to delivering over US unicast networks.

3) There are fewer broadcasters to deal with.

4) Google is utterly dominant in the world's third biggest ad market.

But, no, they've chosen Kansas City - a city that straddles two states in the Midwest. I guess we need to follow the yellow brick road to see what the future of TV holds in Google's hands.

High Court Rules on Pirate Bay

2012-02-21T11:58:00.000Z

LJ Arnold offered a clear position on copyright infringement in the UK by judging that Pirate Bay does infringe copyright in the UK. Readers may be forgiven for thinking "and bears **** in the woods" but in fact the legislation was mainly drafted pre-internet and even the fairly recent WIPO treaties leave some wriggle room.

Having ruled that this is the case the door is now open for some DNS blocking of the site later in the year. To give an idea of scale the judgment also quoted Alexa stats which showed Pirate Bay as the 43rd most popular site in the UK in December 2011.

As copyright starts to be enforced the shape of content delivery online is set for some fundamental shifts.

The Not So Bright Cove..

2012-02-17T23:02:00.002Z

As someone who has created three leading companies in the online video serving space, including taking the first internet TV platform company public in the US seven years ago, I think I'm well qualified to comment on Brightcove's IPO.

The company first came to my notice shortly before the IPO of my company Narrowstep (NRWS). It was formed by a very able guy who had created a number of successful software companies. So, Jeremy Allaire's new company was always going to have a head start.

But, the reality from then to now is disappointing beyond belief.

The company had revenues of $68m and losses of $18m last year. It's a company that has now raised $155m and this revenue is loose change for a successful startup these days. The company goes public with a balance sheet that might have been reasonable for a startup, but for a seven year old company, still making losses on this scale just proves that the numpties who bought into the IPO will, eventually, lose everything.

Meanwhile, VidZapper, a direct competitor started by me some three years ago, is profitable (not just profitable, we have gross margins of over 50%) and charges much cheaper rates for the same service. Our turnover is, however, surprisingly lower, but it's fun pointing out in competitive pitches that customers are comparing companies who have to raise money to survive against profitable and sustainable suppliers.

But, hey ho, that's the public market for you - the stock has clearly got heavy front running going on, but expect it all to fall away six months from now and become a dog as soon as the stock support is pulled.

Brightcove has already had to diversify into app creation since the core video management market it dominates is incapable of generating profits. I'm not privy to the story it sold to the markets in order to get its IPO away. All I only know that the chances of VidZapper being around ten year from now are ten times higher than Brightcove being in existence. Caveat emptor, or to mix my languages, tele-vision caveat emptor.

The Payment Revolution

2012-02-17T13:22:00.002Z

Perhaps the most ignored aspect of running online services is payment. We all take for granted the smug Visa/Mastercard duopoly, with Paypal having a dominance of online payment.

Down the years I've worked with, or tried to work with, pretty much every payment providing service and system out there, and it's been a huge frustration that something so simple is made so complex.

In Africa people have been using mobile phones to do their banking for nearly a decade, and finally Barclays have launched a similar service in the UK called Pingit. Paypal, of course, have had a mobile app for some time.

Meanwhile, in the us, Stripe has been working on simplifying the whole process of integrating payment into a website, where Paypal again has a clear lead. And they seem to have struck on a good formula, although their product is aimed at developers not WordPress users.

Now, launching a solution to protects trademarked content is something that many have tried and largely failed.

Apart, of course, for Apple, who are profiting handsomely from thinking through the payment problem for copyrighted products better than anyone else.

Balance of Power

2012-02-17T11:37:00.000Z

Powerful new tech always creates ethical and legal challenges - the emergence of nuclear power being a good example. The worldwide web in its broadband configuration combined with the shift to digital is probably even more significant and offers great freedom to the users but on the other hand an unbelievable level of power to the State to monitor and control its citizens. See George Orwell's 1984.

One reason the debate around control of IP Piracy is so fierce is possibly that there is a lurking suspicion (particularly among the unfortunately tagged "freetards") that the State will use this as a back door excuse to ramp up even further the monitoring of its citizens for other purposes - defence of the realm, protection of duckhouses, collecting parking tickets and other sums the State feel are due. The explosion of CCTV surveillance and use of RIPA powers in the UK by public authorities (at least 500,000 examples) without judicial sign off add weight to this argument. See Tom Bingham's The Rule of Law.

IP rights must be protected but the process needs to be fair, transparent and under the control of the legal system not the State. All our data shows that there is no need to "go after" ordinary people in order to manage IP Piracy effectively.

A lot of sting could be removed from the discussions if there was more clarity around Article 8 (the right to a private and family life) providing some reassurance that just because the banks blew up the economy suddenly any public official can listen to your phone calls, look at your emails and open your post.

I am miles away from being a bleeding heart liberal but the alarm bells do start ringing when Governments start to undermine human rights arguments on the basis of economic good (see Adolf Hitler) and to mislead / PR the public on human rights issues - evidence obtained under torture cannot be used even when from a suspected terrorist.

Nick Clegg has pushed forward the Protection of Freedoms Bill but it still remains unclear where the lines are drawn.

Essentially a pre-requisite to resolving the legal structure around IP Piracy is to first clarify the right to privacy under Article 8.

The Irish Problem

2012-02-15T22:31:00.001Z

Some of the UK's biggest and most courted employers like Microsoft, Google, Dell and Facebook pay, effectively, little or no tax in the UK.

The only reason they are able to do this is that they - totally immorally by any measure - invoice from Ireland. But EU law allows for this. I personally have no idea why the UK is still in the quagmire that is the EU.

The UK is owed some £70bn by Ireland. Therefore Britain does not want a harmonised EU tax regime, they do not care if Google and their US software ilk pay the tax they should be paying through blatant tax avoidance schemes. They just want to make sure that Ireland has enough money to pay the interest they owe the UK. Let's face it, Ireland is to the UK what Greece is to Germany.

In fact, I don't believe that the UK does not care about the EU or the Euro. The UK has a liability in Ireland that is greater than all its other liabilities mounted up and this is what makes up policy.

The good news is that the Irish are great creditors. They are adept at exporting their greatest asset - their brilliant people, and at exploiting their second greatest asset - not taxing corporations - for as long as they can get away from it.

As ever in history, Ireland is the UK's biggest problem. At least now it's down to economic bombs, not real ones, but the use of UK taxpayers' money to prop up Ireland is just wrong. Like Greece, Ireland needs to recalibrate to a realistic level, and the UK needs to take back the £7bn or so of lost taxes that are indulged to our celtic brethren every year. And, more than anything, corporate taxes across Euope need to be normalised if we are to pretend to have a single market.

SOCA close down music website and threaten criminal sanction

2012-02-15T15:57:00.000Z

As we reported on Twitter the Serious Organised Crime Agency has closed down a leading file sharing site and arrested the organisers. A further step has been taken which involves the threat of criminal prosecution against the users.

Without knowing the background to this it is difficult to draw too many conclusions but given that Parliament has been unable to produce a clear Digital Economy Act the average person can perhaps be forgiven for not understanding where online IP infringement begins and ends.

Perhaps it might be worth starting a dialog with the Search Engines, ISP's and advertisers who control the infrastructure and provide the funds. Tools are available to manage this problem effectively..........

VidStorer Offers Low Cost Streaming

2012-02-14T15:04:00.001Z

One of the biggest frustrations that I come across with internet video is that smaller users have to pay through the nose for access to high quality hosting of their video and often end up using their own servers or YouTube for their hosting, which is neither scalable nor gives them the control they want over their video serving.

So, at TV Everywhere we've decided to do something about this and have just launched into beta a new service directly addressing this market.

The proposition is dead simple. We aggregate a lot of bandwidth on world class networks such as those of Alcatel Lucent, Amazon and Level3, and can therefore offer is at low cost to even low volume users. Indeed, at the time of writing the cost is around half of that offered by similar services such as Streamzilla and Bits on the Run.

The new service is, somewhat unoriginally, called VidStorer. So, if you know anyone who's paying for video bandwidth, either live or demand, please send them our way and let's see if we can help them save money!

The Media Downopoly

2012-02-11T05:01:00.001Z

A reported £30 billion invested over 30 years - most of it quite literally in holes in the ground - and what is left of the UK cable industry, now called Virgin Media, finally turns in a profit.

Considering the write downs and mergers,it's surprising how long it has taken, especially since BSkyB has long generated massive profits.

Perhaps the biggest lesson is how difficult it is to make money from TV. The UK is a money pit to any new entrant, as Netflix will soon find.

It was my hope that the internet would break the oligopoly that is British TV, but I was so wrong, all that has happened is that the hegenomy has been reinforced with new American monsters like YouTube created.

So, Sky, BBC, YouTube. There you have it. Two US controlled corporations and a nationalised industry. That's what our television amounts to these days..

Jeremy Hunt is a highly intelligent guy who expends most of his energy destroying British media by offering unconditional love to companies like Google, who pay little tax in the UK and have no interest in our intrinsic institutions.

Idiotic ideas like a 'Silicon Roundabout' need to be replaced with serious thinking about why we generate the best media in the world,but fail to build world class media companies and why our telly is either a state controlled monster or US controlled. Imagine if UK companies owned the majority or TV in France, Germany or the US...

£1,100,000,000,000,000,000

2012-02-09T12:02:00.001Z

Before offering avid readers an explanation for the random big number in the title (not Bob Diamond's bonus) it is good to see some stellar results from NewsCorp. Aside from the hacking issues it looks like cable income at Fox / FX plus some strong movies have pushed profits up and seems to validate a content led strategy.

Chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch said: "The significant growth we reported in the quarter in the cable network programming, television and filmed entertainment segments clearly validates our strategy to develop and distribute superior wide-ranging content."

That monster number represents £1.1 trillion (I think as I ran out of fingers) which is apparently the size of the UK public sector pension liabilities in 09/10 - they may be even larger now and about the same size as UK GDP !

Once the banker bashing has finished (and they have all left) the new gilded elite may well be those on public sector gold plated final salary pension schemes drifting into a relaxed late middle age after years of strenuous public service. We can be confident they are going nowhere (other than perhaps on a cruise).

A more complicated question is who will pay - perhaps like Stephen Hester they will simply accept a reduction in entitlement even though they have a contractual right..........answers on a postcard.

When we hear about the protection of "vital front line services" are we really hearing about the need to keep pumping cash into those pension pots ?

Superbowl gets Piracy under control / reaches record audiences

2012-02-08T14:40:00.000Z

The US Department of Homeland Security, in typically robust fashion, seized 16 websites planning to illegaly stream the Superbowl LIVE online and arrested and charged Yonjo Quiroa (28) with criminal infringment of a copyright.

Sites such as Firstrowsports.com were siezed and it is alleged that the defendant made $13,000 from online merchants. It will be interesting to see which brands were supporting this activity.

The Superbowl also hit a record audience of 111.3 million - could these facts be in any way related ?

On The Face Of It..

2012-02-08T14:15:00.002Z

The Facebook IPO is worrying on many levels.

First of all, you just know that it's a bubble - the only question is, will this be a bubble that will continue to rise to stratospheric proportions, or one that will burst sooner rather than later.

The second worrying factor is that this offering will create a (hopefully) benevolent dictatorship - a company where the founder will continue to control the company despite owning the minority of shares. Of course, this has happened before (NewsCrop has a similar share structure and Apple handed similar rights at the second coming of Jobs), but it does devalue other shareholder's capital - it basically says that the shares are actually worth so much that they do not carry any rights. Hardly a democratic or even capitalistic concept.

Then there is the value per user. Each 'active' Facebook user is valued at around $125. When do I get paid ? Or is this the most parasitical business model the world has ever seen ? In 2011 active users generated around $4.50 each in revenues for the firm - and nothing for themselves.

Finally, that valuation. 27x revenue and 100 x earnings if a $100bn market cap is achieved. If earnings double every year, that's the next three years' growth already factored into the price, in my opinion.

Zynga makes up 12% of Facebook's revenue, which is quite a dependency, but is probably a positive since it proves that the platform can grow sizable businesses within its ecosystem - a pre-requisite for any company this size after explosive growth.

So, to invest or not invest? Well, if you get in on the float, you can undoubtedly make a quick buck, but look out for six months in when insiders can sell, and an undisclosed date when the book running by the market makers and underwriters ends.

Google saw stellar early growth and appreciation for shareholders, but quickly hit the buffers. Facebook, I suspect, has a narrower timeframe still for shareholders to make any money, especially since the insiders are taking so much.

Pub trouble for FAPL

2012-02-06T12:11:00.003Z

The reporting of the recent High Court judgement by Lord Justice Kitchen in FAPL v QC Leisure suggests that the outcome was a partial victory for both sides. It might be that I should have gone to SpecSavers but from the transcript of the judgement it looks like the FAPL did not secure much.

To quote LJ Kitchen "I my judgement S.72(1)(c) means what it says (the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988). The showing or playing of a broadcast in a public house to members of the public who have not paid for admission does not infringe any copyright in any film included in the broadcast". This covered, for those not familiar with the case, the showing of FAPL matches in pubs using foreign decoder cards.

He went on to refuse to grant relevant injunctions and refer matters of detail to the Patent County Court.

It is difficult to see how these two outcomes were what the FAPL were after (maybe like the grim smile when another reindeer jumper comes your way at Xmas) .

There is doubtless an opportunity to take a different approach based on unauthorised use of trademarks and focus on the IP specifically owned by the FAPL but this was not really the basis of the action initially

Common sense requires that the law is changed here as clearly while this is legally correct it does not help protect IP owners and creators which has been a major thread in all the recent European Legislation. If the Digital Economy Act ever emerges properly this would be another area (on the long list) that needs careful consideration.

The Price Of A Telly

2012-02-05T09:47:00.001Z

Between them, Sony, Sharp and Panasonic lost $16.9 billion dollars last year. The business of producing TVs isn't what it was..

Just think about that £399 forty inch, web connected flat screen in the corner of your living room for a moment. Of that cost, £80 is tax. Another £120 goes to the retailer, and shipping it in a box, invariably from China, probably cost £10. That leaves £190 for the manufacturer to cover R&D, parts, manufacture, assembly and packaging. I suspect that many of these screens are sold at a loss.

So it's not surprising that more and more of these manufacturers are looking to launch content services in an attempt to emulate the razors and blades business model (or indeed the game console and games model).

TV As Radio

2012-02-01T21:32:00.001Z

A map or two, the odd painting, many, many pieces to camera from some bloke and lots of GVs. That seems to be the norm for BBC historical programmes. With a didacticism that disdains any type of discourse, the BBC's The Crusades is crude, cheap TV that makes Current TV seem high in production values.

This is dreadful, awful TV and the BBC should be ashamed of airing something that should have been shelved long before being aired. This is radio, not TV.

Fred the Human Shield

2012-02-01T09:37:00.000Z

As political thoughts drift to the next election and UK economic growth appears as dead as a parrot (it has ceased to be) the voters could be forgiven for to some extent blaming the solution applied by the Govt to the problem (lack of interest in and allocation of resources to the promotion of growth ). The time has now passed for Gordon Osbrown to be a credible target.

That time has not passed for Fred Goodwin. Few will defend him, the legions of the great and good regulators lawyers, accountants, PR's and regulators who profited from his deals have busily re-written history so we are all being asked to answer the question Why is the economy so crappy ? - its Fred's fault - look he lost his gong.

Will the voters fall for it ? Well probably much depends on how the economy goes over the next months but interestingly a key assumption in the current Govt plans was that the UK consumer would borrow increasing sums to protect their lifestyles and therefore spend and create growth - latest figures show the opposite.

One of the justifications for stripping Goodwin of his gong was that he has become a "symbol of what was wrong with the british economy". Unfortunately this totally subjective approach is a step closer to the kangaroo courts and show trials of those who are "not in the National Interest" in this time of "Economic War". Goodwin did very stupid things but it will be very interesting to see who is next on the hit list. Hester spotted this and decided he didn't fancy it.

To matters media - Sky are launching an online media service for Movies and will no doubt make a great success of it - the form of delivery is not really at the heart of the model.

The Rights Battlefield

2012-01-31T16:52:00.000Z

It looks like the UK is going to become a rights battlefield as more and more player pile into the paid for online video market. First of all there was the venerable Blinkbox and the domestically reared Lovefilm (although subsequently bought by Amazon), then Netflix created a beachhead. Now, ITV has announced that it will launch a paid for service, and BSkyB is the latest player to enter the fray. I have it on good account that Sony and Samsung will also look to leverage their presence in the living room with services, and, last but by no means least is Apple's iTunes.

It's interesting to note that most of these are PC based services - the likes of Boxee, Roku and Vizio are yet to make an impression - probably since they would be second boxes in living rooms dominated by the likes of Sky and Virgin Media. This is probably the reason that Fetch TV closed its doors last week after a valiant attempt to make an impression on this sector.

But there again, I remember when there were four video rental stores on our local high street. Needless to say, they are long gone...

Time Warp

2012-01-31T12:27:00.001Z

For those with a keen interest in my home entertainment setup (don't all shout at once) I finally rigged up my Internet enabled Sony Bravia and enjoyed a replay of Hustle on the BBC I-player. Pretty standard broadband connection distributed within the house via the power system. BT infinity is still to come in about 8 weeks.

The picture even on a pretty big screen was flawless with no buffering - so with very little fanfare convergence really arrived in the Lewinton household. Next stop LoveFilm and NetFlix.

About 10 years ago I did a similar thing with the HomeChoice service (entertainment over DSL) and it may be interesting to consider the similarities / differences.

1. BBC interface much improved and the menu system is very shallow in comparison

2. I would guess that the bandwidth for delivery was about the same @1.5mbp

3. Far less of a walled garden approach (although Sony still trying hard)

From a consumer perspective more similarities than differences.

From a business model perspective the differences are stark;

1. BBC are going straight to consumer whereas HomeChoice licensed content from the BBC

2. HomeChoice provided the connectivity as part of the consumer proposition and had to pay BT about £350 per year per consumer for connectivity alone. Today the consumer picks up the bill for the broadband.

3. Broadband was only available in about 15,000 homes and BT were in no hurry to speed things up - possibly due to concern about cannibalising telephony revenue.

Intriguingly there is an icon on the Bravia Internet menu for Daily Motion (known for not always carefully monitoring the copyright issues around the content it shows) so pirate material may well now be only a few clicks away from legitimate material on a big screen TV in the main living area. More to follow on this.

Google and IP Piracy

2012-01-30T10:23:00.001Z

Eric Schmidt responded to Rupert Murdoch's comment about Google being a "piracy leader" in a way which appears to suggest he has slightly lost his grip on reality.

Given that Google and YouTube have pretty advanced image and text search tools the idea that poor old Google are struggling to get it right against the pirates is not really credible.

In particular Google are a top purchaser of inventory on pirate sites and over the Xmas period data collected by our SnifferDog showed a concerted campaign run across pirate sites for Google Chrome.

Google ad sense is also a favourite mechanism for pirates to monetise the audiences they generate from copyright and trademark infringing material and Google are on a pretty fat cut of the revenues generated.

Perhaps Mr Schmidt has reasonable responses to this.......we would love to hear them and are very happy to share data ?

Comparing Sky+ and Virgin Tivo

2012-01-23T20:44:00.001Z

Yeah, yeah, I know. I swore that I wouldn't do it, but it was the red button wot did it.

I paid for Sky Sports online and on Virgin and was still unable to watch Welsh rugby teams play in Europe (without resorting to Justin.tv, of course..), so our home in Wales now has BSkyB TV, along with Sky Sports (and that pesky red button).

So, now I have full on experience of Sky+ and Virgin's Tivo box, so here here are my impressions.

The interfaces are both far from perfect but Sky gets 7/10 and Tivo 3/10. Sky has fewer services and plugins, but everything works seamlessly and is very fast, with a great remote control that works from a good distance (this may seem a minor point but is my single biggest bugbear, click, click...nothing..). The Sky interface is more logical and takes far fewer clicks to achieve anything. The Tivo interface seems to be a cobbled together bunch of services that have nothing to do with each other which take days to load and navigate. The Sky box seems to be on rocket fluid compared to the Tivo interface. I often give up on trying to reach content on Tivo since the process is so painful.

The Tivo remote gets 2/10 and the Sky remote 6/10. The Tivo remote is barking - the buttons are all in the wrong place and are totally illogical. The Sky remote has far too many buttons, but at least there is a logic to the layout and functionality.

The picture quality on Sky gets 9/10 and Tivo 6/10. To be fair, this may be an aspect of my screens, but both are of the same age and I can get HD on the Sky one, but not on the Virgin box; even this notwithstanding, the image quality on Sky is significantly better .

On recording functionality Tivo gets 7/10 and Sky 6/10. The gap here really should be greater since the Tivo box has an additional tuner and can record three channels to Sky's two, but the Tivo box is just hopeless. You can adjust the top and tail time, but then you lose the end of programmes, or you can record three programmes, but then nothing for the following hour. Sky somehow seems to manage this a bit better, but the Tivo functionality is better on this measure.

Tivo also wins on the marginal ability to find the beginning of a programme when fast forwarding, but knowing that the box can actually automatically wind past ads, but doesn't do this for commercial reasons, is a bit annoying.

Of course, Sky has better content, including the red sky content and the HBO driven Sky Atlantic.

Overall it's a total walkover. Tivo is a disaster. It's what a medieval knight would expect from a STB (although still a bit up the food chain from Humax's dreadful, dreadful Freesat offerings). Sky looks like a decent sixties chevy. God knows what a decent product could do in this market.

Game, set and match to Apple TV ?

We'll see..

Is Google Destroying Value ?

2012-01-23T13:55:00.001Z

On the 2nd Nov 2007, Google's share price hit an all time high of $711.25. Five years later, it stands at $585.99. In other words, the pin up company of the internet has managed to lose nearly 20% of its owners' money over the past five years.

The endless free and uncommercial services that blight the online business world are being paid for by shareholders. Every time you watch a YouTube video a Google shareholder is, effectively, putting their hand in their pocket to pay for your pleasure: the internet brought with it a raft of new business models (or lack thereof in many cases), and some were madly successful - such as Google's Adwords - but many others simply have not worked. Almost nothing else Google does makes money, and it has amongst the most obfuscated of core business metrics as well as business models.

In 2007 Google had revenues of $16.594bn and income of $5.084bn; in 2011 this had grown to $37.905bn with income of $11.742bn. So, even doubling the business seems not have returned any value to shareholders, suggesting that investors think that Google is a very poor investment and its business model a bad way of utilising capital.

Now, this has, of course, been a rocky period for any business, but the Apple share price has gone from $88 to nearly $400 in the same time and its revenues quadrupled. The Apple business model is very transparent and it is ruthless in not supporting unprofitable business lines.

In the more ruthless business environment we now operate in, it is worth asking if there is a place for companies like google on public market unless they start returning value to shareholders in the form of dividends, as Microsoft has had to do.

Equally, I'm longing for the day when bad execution of unprofitable business models subsidised by deep pockets are no longer tolerated by shareholders and management alike.

The Vicious Eunuch

2012-01-20T01:10:00.002Z

Around seven years ago I wrote a review of UGC video sites (user generated content) and YouTube was low down the list. Since then I've spent a career trying to fight that gorilla, despite, or perhaps because of doing what they did weeey before them.

Being the first doesn't count - in TV terms, ask Philo Farnsworth or John Loggie Baird.

Understanding a market doesn't count. Even correctly predicting the future doesn't count.

All that counts is execution. And being lucky. Oh, and having deep pockets...

The YouTube guys had a dreadful product and impossible business model, but by finding a sugar daddy in Google who threw hundreds of millions at the problem, they may have a business that has some value. The irony is that they have destroyed thousands of startups in the video space, but are still incapable of competing with mainstream broadcasters.

Meanwhile, the rest of us live off crumbs, and I spend my life being asked to replicate YouTube - for free, of course, since people are often too lazy and/or stupid to think of video beyond YouTube.

So, here comes the next challenge. Taking on YouTube at its own game...

NewsCorp's Shine Adopts Rights Tracker

2012-01-19T23:53:00.001Z

The past few months have been highly challenging for us here at TVE as we bed down a number of massive new client wins that we've been unable to publicise... until now!

I'm delighted to announce that Rights Tracker has been adopted by NewsCorp's Shine production subsidiary to manage all of its rights. Here's the press release:

Leading rights management software developers Rights Tracker has licensed its web-enabled software suite to global production group Shine. The system will completely manage the Group’s Production and Distribution Rights end-to-end.

Rights Tracker Enterprise is a bespoke, configurable system which has been designed to integrate with Shine’s business platforms. Multi-company functionality will allow companies within Shine Group to independently control their licenses and title metadata. Meanwhile, the system will manage the Group Sales and Distribution arm Shine International’s end-to-end acquisitions and sales processes. As phase one of the implementation Rights Tracker’s modules have been integrated into Shine International’s financial package.

Ronan Walsh, Rights Systems Manager at Shine Group: “As part of a wider business systems initiative, Shine Group had identified a need for a web enabled solution covering our product life cycle, from group production companies through to our international distribution division. The Rights Tracker solution fulfilled all of our requirements.”

Ross Bentley, Rights Tracker’s CEO comments: “It is tremendous news that Shine has made the decision to use our software in order to manage their business processes. The Group is a hugely impressive global player whose ability to grow super-brands such as MasterChef speaks for themselves. Shine understands that rigorous management of rights and metadata from initial production through to international exploitation and beyond is key to ensuring maximum return on their brands. This deal points to a very exciting future for us.”

Kodak in Chapter 11

2012-01-19T11:13:00.000Z

Sadly Kodak was put in Chapter 11 today. The US system is weighted towards keeping the business going as opposed to the UK system of administration (pre-pack being closer to Chapter 11) so something may yet rise from the ashes.

However this is quite a significant point in the transition to digital and marks the end of a 131 year old analog giant of the US economy. Basically Kodak did not accept fast enough that a large number of consumers would move from film to digital believing that brand and "habit" would be enough to keep consumers locked in the past. A very good parallel would be the paper based book / journal business.

As Iolo suggests things are really moving now - perhaps because financing to prop up "zombie" business models is not about anymore.

On the subject of copyright and IP protection online we need new rules to govern in the digital age and SOPA and PIPA (does it look good in a wedding dress ?) are doing a great job in sparking a debate - hopefully at the end of it a decent set of regulations will emerge after everyone has had their say. Both the uber censors and the "property is theft" nutcases are equally wrong.