Into The Unknown

Radiohead embracing Scene releases (and DIY guerilla marketing) with leak of new single?

2009-08-16T05:19:00.012+01:00

With a forthcoming EP on the cards, recent events could prove to be another masterstroke of marketing genius from Radiohead - or at the very least, a nod to the darknet release scene which has been around since the days of BBSes. Either way, one band is once again making waves across the Internet...

It hasn't escaped many people's attention that a new Radiohead single, "These Are My Twisted Words", was leaked onto the web on the 14th of August. One of the first places for it to crop up was on the private BitTorrent trackers; What.CD's entry for the track currently has over 2,400 discrete downloads of the .torrent.

The filename of the track itself? "01-radiohead-these_are_my_twisted_words-(advance)-2009-woi.mp3". "woi" stands for WallOfIce, as detailed in the release's accompanying nfofile. (update: what appears to be vaguely official artwork can be seen on @Yussavoice's twitter profile background...)

Of course, the band has remained staunchly silent on this development - and the silence to some has been a deafening confirmation that they're behind the whole thing. Of course, almost immediately after the track's leak, the release was analysed and dissected by RH fans all over the world. The article on GreenPlastic documents just how many people picked over it with a fine toothcomb, as well as the original author putting forward some of his own theories as to what exactly this 'release' means in terms of marketing and advance notice of a full-blown release.

Radiohead have stated in the past that they won't be doing more full albums for a while, as mentioned by AtEase. York himself said;

“None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off. I mean, it’s just become a real drag. It worked with “In Rainbows” because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us.”

Although some have dismissed the EP launch as mere hyperbole from AtEase, I believe it could be quite the opposite. Personally, I'm in agreement with the consensus that this is actually a legitimate 'leak' by the band, as the facts are stacked in favour of this once they are examined closely. Why? Well, let's examine the facts:

The release is tagged with a "-woi" groupname, but no prior evidence of this group's existence is available across the Internet, even when using the pre search engines
Using EncSpot, the encoder is shown to be a VERY old encoder called GoGo (a variant of Lame, and not pure Lame itself which the scene rules mandate), as well as having an ID3v1 Genre tag of "Blues"
The domain WallOfIce.com conveniently points to the W.A.S.T.E. store (more below)

The metaphor is strong with this one: not only does this leak coincide with a rumoured EP launch next week, the name "Wall Of Ice" has been interpreted by some to be a veiled xkcd reference, where the cartoon strongly mirrors the band's apparent own sentiments towards the record industry:

If this isn't enough for you, the domain WallOfIce.com (which redirects to the W.A.S.T.E. store) was created on the 14th of August - the same day as the track's leak - and has the registrant's whois information clearly visible:

Registrant: Versio
Contact: Reshad Bashir () +31.0645252730
Address: Raaigras 271, Leeuwarden, 8935 GD, NL

Reshad Bashir is a sysadmin for Versio, so he (or his company) has registered this domain on behalf of someone and his details have been put in there. Stereogum's already discussed this at length. No scene group member would be stupid enough to put personally-identifying details into a public whois record. Radiohead haven't registered the domain name directly, but it would make sense not to do so in order to stir up a bit more discussion and controversy over what it exactly means. Of course, this may all just be coincidence - someone registering the domain *after* the leak was made available on the Internet, and not done by the band - but it seems somewhat unlikely.

For the record, the most recent Radiohead scene release from an official group is a webrip of their Harry Patch tribute single: "Radiohead-Harry_Patch_(In_Memory_Of)-(Web)-2009-SiREx".

Summing up, these events can almost certainly be taken as proof once again that Radiohead are: 1) masters of drumming up Internet buzz, 2) completely in touch with their inner nerd, and 3) they 'get' the Internet a little more than some might think. They've always been in touch with their online presence; waste.uk.com was registered in 1998, nine months before even I had my own web site. Since then, they've overcome their signing to EMI, they've rapidly embraced the Internet and they've even conquered the question of variable pricing by just forging ahead and doing it off their own backs.

Now they're mimicking the release scene... Perhaps we'll see more future Radiohead releases leaked in the same way? They're certainly not the first band to leak their music via the Web, but it's quite clever of them to do it in such a way that it'll almost certainly fool those who aren't completely familiar with the usual behaviour of the MP3 release scene. Really, you can only commend the band for trying something new - this is guerilla digital marketing, and there's no telling just how much coverage they'll get from this once the mainstream media picks up on this. Personally I'll be very surprised if we don't see an EP release next week.

An aside: I have one problem with Radiohead's digital releases - if they're still using GoGo-no-coda, which is based on a version of LAME dating back to 2004, the sonic quality of their MP3s (even at 320kbps) is going to be vastly inferior compared to if they were encoded using the very latest stable builds of LAME. For this reason alone, I'll keep on buying CDs and ripping them myself (usually to FLAC).

(PS: if Thom / whoever encodes the MP3s for sale: drop GoGo! It's obsolete and the version of LAME it uses has been superceded. Get Frontah, drop in the v3.98 stable build of lame.exe into the Frontah working directory, and if you don't want 320kbps files, use the encoding paramters "-V1 --vbr-new" to encode your audio to transparent VBR files. Mmmm, sounding tasty!)

Update, 16/08/2009: someone at The Guardian has written a woefully mistake-ridden article on the same thing - and stupidly linked to the torrent on the private tracker what.cd as well. Read and enjoy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/aug/14/new-radiohead-song

Happy birthday electromagnetism!

2009-08-14T13:14:00.003+01:00

Today marks the birthday of Hans Christian Ørsted, the man who discovered that electricity affected magnetic fields. Or, in other words, the principles on which great things were built and which now (literally) power our civilisation.

The Guardian's article, 'Hans Christian Ørsted gets Google Doodled', is a great read if you knew nothing about him.

Here's a taster snippet:

Probably not even the physics geeks remember much about Hans Christian Ørsted, although Google's Doodle logo illustrates his key discovery. That is, if you run a current through a wire – in this case, from the battery at the front – then the electricity creates a magnetic field, which will deflect a compass needle.
Thus the study of electromagentism was born, and it's the basis of a lot of modern life: it led to the development of electricity generators and transformers. Remember that next time you flick a light switch.

Right. Who's got 232 candles for the birthday cake?

Babbage, Lovelace and the Difference Engine, brought to life by Sydney Padua

2009-07-12T16:52:00.007+01:00

What better way to celebrate ITU's 100th post than with a comic strip - featuring Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (also the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron), inventor of the original computer no less?

Well, if you've not caught 2DGoggles' cartoon series featuring Charles Babbage and Lovelace (Ada, Countess of) then your first encounter with the couple might be the BBC's Techlab feature strip, which made its way onto their web site on Thursday.

It's strongly suggested to read the strip in full (click on the link above), then read the strip again with Sydney's extra foot- and bootnotes on his web site. And after you've done that, go back to his first comic and read them all! It's my new favourite comic strip alongside longtime geek favourites xkcd and pennyarcade - and what's great about Sydney's web site is that she also has little featurettes and behind-the-scenes explanations of how she puts her comics together alongside the finished strips.

And with comics featuring cells like this:

(from Lovelace and Babbage in 'Economic Model!!')

You really do owe it to yourself to take the time to read through the lot... Right after you roll into work on Monday morning (I won't be held responsible if your work Internet privileges are rescinded ;)

Have a good weekend all!

ITU Quickie: Apple WWDC Keynote stream now available

2009-06-09T03:56:00.004+01:00

Apple's made the stream of their Keynote presentation from the start of WWDC 2009 available to all and sundry. To stream it, just click on the link from this page on the Apple site.

For those who want the quick rundown, here's the key points:

New MacBook Pro details and pricing
Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.5.7) details, pricing and sneak peek
New iPhone details, pricing and sneak peek (plus $99 iPhone 3G announcement)
Plus a few goofs too! (It's always comforting to see that The Mighty Fruit's not immune to Sod's Law)

Quite a few other media outlets covered the Keynote (in some cases, even did a live show streaming over the web). The RDF was in full effect too, as per usual. Even if you're not a rabid Apple fan (like myself), you still have to acknowledge that sometimes they bring innovations to the table that push other developers and manufacturers to up their own game in response. What's really going to be interesting is how Palm do with their Pré announcement and first week sales now that the new iPhone details have been released.

Something I thought was a little arrogant was when Phil Schiller took a sly dig at Palm, the grandaddy of all portable mobile devices. When describing a table showing the amount of available apps on the iTunes App Store versus RIM, Nokia's Ovi and Palm's stores, he cheekily commented that he couldn't... "read the name of that last one... It's really small." In fairness, Palm only had about 1,000 apps versus Apple's 50,000, but I have a feeling the Pré will really shake things up once the device really builds up a head of steam in the dev community.

Nevertheless, all geeks and tech junkies should absorb the contents of the WWDC Keynote and make mental notes of the important stuff, because no doubt the contents will be talking points for a while to come yet. No sign of His Jobsiness either... Could this be the beginning of Steve Jobs' move away from the helm of the good ship Apple? We can only wait and see - there still remains the possibility that he'll make a surprise appearance at the end of the WWDC convention, so don't count your chickens just yet.

ITU Quickie: Obama defends the Interwebs

2009-05-31T14:21:00.003+01:00

The US Military has taken it upon themselves to defend their national computing infrastructure on the grounds that it's a "national strategic asset". Perhaps that means they'll actually put passwords on their machines now? (...or perhaps the latest series of 24 got them thinking?)

A snippet of the press release, via the AF's web site:

5/29/2009 - WASHINGTON (AFNS) -- The nation's computer network infrastructure will be defended as a national strategic asset, President Barack Obama said here May 29.
In a White House announcement, President Obama said he will appoint a cyber security coordinator for the critical infrastructure that all Americans depend on. "We will ensure that these networks are secure, trustworthy and resilient," he said. "We will deter, prevent, detect and defend against attacks, and recover quickly from any disruptions or damage."
Personnel in the cyber security office will orchestrate and integrate all cyber security policies for the government, the president said. They will work closely with Office of Management and Budget officials to ensure agency budgets reflect those priorities, and, in the event of major cyber incident or attack, will coordinate government response. The cyber security coordinator will be a member of the national security staff and will serve on the president's national economic council.
"To ensure that policies keep faith with our fundamental values, this office will also include an official with a portfolio specifically dedicated to safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of the American people," President Obama said. "Clear milestones and performance metrics will measure progress."

Good luck with that Mr. O!

Lazy AND rich? VideoPress is waiting for you

2009-05-19T04:37:00.026+01:00

WordPress just announced their new video hosting service, VideoPress. (Primary URL at wordpress.tv, announcement and details currently on videopress.com). They've been working on this for a while, and initially announced this on the 11th with a post to their main blog.

'So,' you're thinking, 'WordPress are good at the text business, but what about video?' Well, if you're a content creator who has 1) more money than sense or 2) just can't be bothered to manage your own media hosting, this could be an ideal solution for you. Here's their announcement and introduction video (turn on HD in the top-right corner if you can afford the bandwidth and CPU cycles:

While it's shaping up to be really quite costly for the early adopters, they could be on to a good thing early here. How so? Well, they can leverage their existing grid computing setup to serve multimedia content and keep a tight rein on how it's delivered. Hopefully they can wrangle the carriage and peering costs down to manageable levels as the service scales. You also have the good karma that comes from having all of your multimedia hosted in the same place - so if you like easy, click-click-done solutions, it's a safe bet.

To add the VideoPress service, you just log into your WordPress.com account, go to your WP blog's dashboard, and add the service from the Upgrades category in the left-hand menu... And that's just about it.

Ok, so it's snappy to setup. What else? What about the technical features and costs? Let's dig a little deeper. While this is evidently an important first step for WP as they branch out and upgrade their service portfolio, there's room for improvement. They've developed most aspects very well, but there are a few caveats. Initial impressions are good; there's no framerate conversion of uploaded content, you can embed and enable HD playback if your content is high enough resolution - right from the embedded player - and they also support filesizes >1Gb, so yes, you can upload your 720p masterpiece if you really want to.

WP say it's quite simple to get going:

Get a blog on WordPress.com
Go to your upgrades page
PayPal your way to happiness.

However, when that final step involves coughing up 59.97 credits, at the princely sum of $1 per credit, it's certainly not the cheapest way to host your HD material. Plus, there are a number of rather good competitors in the market already:

Blip.tv (great quality, an intuitive interface and a personal favourite)
Vimeo (one of the prettiest, and has a great community spirit)
DailyMotion (just plain ubiquitous and home to metric tons of content) and
the photographer-oriented SmugMug.

Vimeo is probably the next best service in terms of mindspace, quality and good vibes from the user community, so it makes sense to compare their featuresets. The best way to compare these two new services is with a matrix, so let's get cracking. All costs are in their original currency (US Dollars) to make comparison easier.

Also, don't discount Blip's and Vimeo's respective free services. Blip's basic package only encodes to FLV, and overlays small text ads in the video window. Vimeo places ads on the page under the main video window, but the videos themselves remain untouched.

Vimeo's free service is also a great way to dip your toes in the water; you get 500Mb of storage, 1 HD video upload a week and all the other good stuff (minus HD embedding, reserved for their Plus customers), and it's a cinch to upgrade.

YouTube finally joined the 21st century late last year, with first HQ (I fondly refer to it as RQ, Regular Quality) and then proper HD - 1280x720 H.264 video making its formal debut earlier this year, after the softlaunch. (remember all that &fmt=18 nonsense?) Of course, YouTube has to be THE Number One video sharing web site, but Google is pumping money into it and still not turning a profit. Aside from the mass popularity (and huge amount of pisspoor quality content), you may decide that you'd like a little more panache, a little more style, for your multimedia content hosting.

Of course, there's nothing to stop you putting your content on every service around - and there are even some analytics companies who'll do that legwork for you, and also let you gather some useful viewer statistics for pretty good rates if you're planning on producing the next hit web video series.

Having weighed up the pros and cons of WordPress hosting, I'd say that it's a welcome progression from the WP team. They've obviously worked on this tech behind the scenes for a while, using their experience with their larger corporate clients to work the kinks out of the system before going public. However, I still personally prefer Vimeo and Blip.tv - they're better value for money and you can do just as much with them.

VideoPress has some nice automation (such as playlist generation for iTunes, Miro et al, and up to three definitions of video automatically prepared) but this is nothing standout on its own. Also, you pay a hefty premium for storage. Obviously Vimeo and the others are overselling to an extent, but given the sheer size of HD content, you'd be better off doing one of two things if you produce a lot of HD:

Buy a Vimeo Plus account and get 5Gb a week for your uploads
Buy your own web hosting, use one of the many free video encoder apps and stream your content with one of the several popular embedded Flash players
... Download the VideoPress opensource framework, install it on your own server, and use that!

Yes, you read me right - the source code for VideoPress is open-source and freely available. However, there are caveats. WP themselves make it plain that "this plugin is different from other plugins because it cannot be used 'out of the box.' It is intended for self-hosted large scale WordPress MU sites that want to develop their own customized video solutions." Aside from that, it also requires one fileserver and one dedicated video transcoder, and 'considerable amounts of PHP coding and system admin skills (skillz?) to implement and deploy.'

Well, don't let that put you off. Where there's a will there's a way, and I suspect that before long, an ad-supported service using the VP framework might just surface and offer some of the VideoPress Premium features for gratis. Who knows?

I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow comparison of all the other mentioned HD video hosting services, because people with far more time and resources have already done just that. However, VideoPress aside, they all cost nothing to try out - and I strongly suggest you try each of them to see which one fits your needs. They all have premium services, and they all have their pros and cons. But when you see such achingly gorgeous design as can be found on the Vimeo web site (even their login page is a work of art), you'd have to be made of stone to not appreciate the work which has gone into that site.

I would always suggest trying out Vimeo as one of your first candidates, and its ability to offer one HD upload a week is the ideal way for most content producers to demo the service. However, for the person who desires full and seamless integration and consolidation above all else (including value for money at the moment), VideoPress might be just what they've been waiting for.

ITU Quickie: Amazon.com offering $1 MP3 download credit with qualifying purchases

2009-05-19T04:18:00.004+01:00

While digital sales are continuing in their year-on-year upward trend, it seems that customers still need a gentle push to buy digital music. Even one of the largest digital music retailers, Amazon.com, is having to effectively subsidise purchases with their latest promotion. I saw it sneak onto the web site for some items yesterday; the skinny's on their web site but here's the 10 second summary:

Add at least one qualifying CD, vinyl, cassette or DVD music item offered in the Amazon.com Music store to your Shopping Cart and complete the purchase or complete the purchase through 1-Click ordering. The music items that qualify are CD, vinyl, cassette and DVD music items offered in the Amazon.com Music store that display the offer message on their product information pages. Amazon MP3 music downloads and other music items not displaying the offer message, and all other types of items, fail to qualify for this promotional offer.
After completing your purchase, you will receive an email indicating that a $1 credit for Amazon MP3 music downloads has been applied to your account automatically.

There are some other T&Cs, but that's about the gist of it. The promotion's only valid on certain marked items (for example this DVD-Audio release of Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road), but it seems to apply to a good proportion of Universal's featured Motown releases as well as other popular stuff from other labels (the promo was also present on the SACD version of Dark Side Of The Moon).

So, maybe an excuse to do some shopping?

Innocent Londoner Ian Tomlinson assaulted, knocked to ground by Met Police during G20 protests; dies shortly after

2009-04-07T21:12:00.009+01:00

It seems that the Police may not have learnt anything after all from the Jean Charles de Menezes debacle. On the 1st of April, at around roughly 7pm, a local newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, was viciously assaulted and knocked to the ground by a member of the Metropolitan Police. After being struck twice in the leg with a baton by a riot officer, he was then pushed with a great deal of force to the ground by the same officer. He had his hands in his pockets and therefore had no protection (or warning) prior to the assault.

The last image of Ian Tomlinson before his collapse and death
from a heart attack, shortly after his assault by riot police

Mr. Tomlinson was given no assistance from the riot officers, and received only cursory medical attention - he was subsequently helped up by bystanders, and The Guardian reports witnesses as saying that he stumbled away, "looking glazed." Mr. Tomlinson collapsed and died from a heart attack several minutes later.

(It seems that throughout the G20, the police's tactics usually defaulted to aggressiveness - see this Guardian article highlighting (with eye-witness videos) just how aggressive the police were against demonstrators, mostly peaceful ones at that. Very poignant viewing.)

The Met Police subsequently issued disingenuous press releases, falsely stating things such as how protesters prevented medics from giving Mr. Tomlinson medical attention. The Telegraph reports that,

"...the Metropolitan Police had released a statement last week after the death in which they said only that officers were pelted with bottles and other debris by protesters when they formed a circle as colleagues attempted to revive Mr Tomlinson.

"The IPCC said on Monday that Mr Tomlinson was blocked from passing through a police cordon as he attempted to walk home from work helping a newspaper vendor at Monument station."

In other circumstances, it is likely that not much attention would have been paid to this story. However, a New York fund manager who witnessed the events happened to videotape them as they unfolfed, almost entirely by chance (as well as a couple of photographers who captured the moments immediately after the assault).

The video clearly shows an unprovoked and vicious assault on an unarmed, non-threatening individual - who had his back turned to the riot officers and dog units, and was walking away from them. It also wholly discredits some of the misinformation the Police subsequently issued after news of the assault first came to light. (A local blogger, Hagley Road to Ladywood, has some comment and more insight into the events.)

The Guardian was supplied a videotape of the events, which it forwarded on to the IPCC - it has made both the footage and stills available on their web site. Please watch it, as the full force of the assault is not evident until you view the events in realtime (it really is quite astonishing). In a bit of cruel irony, on the Telegraph's web page detailing the Mr. Tomlinson's assault, there's a banner advert advertising the Home Office's "Justice Seen Justice Done" campaign. I'm not sure I want justice to be done if it results in innocent bystanders being assaulted.

Several witnesses, including a woman who was forcibly pushed away from Mr. Tomlinson after beginning to provide him with first aid, have spoken to IndyMedia and given detailed statements. Read them in full here: http://london.indymedia.org.uk/articles/1019. Peter Apps, a witness, had this to say:

Another demonstrator had already called 999 and was getting medical advice from the ambulance dispatcher. "Four police with two police medics came. They told her [the first aider] to 'move along'.", said Peter Apps.

"Then they pushed her forcibly away from him. They refused to listen to her [the first aider] when she tried to explain his condition."The first aider, who did not wish to be named, said "The police surrounded the collapsed man. I was standing with the person who'd called 999. The ambulance dispatcher wanted to talk to the police, the phone was being held out to them, but the police refused."

In the IPCC's latest press release, the IPCC Commissioner for London, Deborah Glass, has this to say:

“Initially we had accounts from independent witnesses who were on Cornhill, who told us that there had been no contact between the police and Mr Tomlinson when he collapsed. However, other witnesses who saw him in the Royal Exchange area have since told us that Mr Tomlinson did have contact with police officers. This would have been a few minutes before he collapsed. It is important that we are able to establish as far as possible whether that contact had anything to do with his death.”

The press release continues;

Just after 7pm on 1 April, Mr Tomlinson can be seen on CCTV walking up King William Street and approaching a police cordon opposite the Bank of England. It is believed he wanted to get through the cordon to continue his walk home from work. Police officers refused to let him through.
A short time later, Mr Tomlinson can be seen on CCTV walking around the corner into Royal Exchange Passage. A number of witnesses have described seeing him there, getting caught up in a crowd and being pushed back by police officers. This is the aspect of the incident that the IPCC is now investigating.

Minutes later he is seen on CCTV walking back onto Cornhill from Royal Exchange Passage. Mr Tomlinson walks for about three more minutes, before collapsing on Cornhill. The CCTV shows that Mr Tomlinson was not trapped inside a police cordon at any stage. Several members of the public state that they tried to help Mr Tomlinson. Others reported the incident to nearby police officers.
CCTV shows police officers forming a cordon around him near a group of protesters so that the police medics could give first aid. They then carried Mr Tomlinson on a stretcher through the Cornhill / Birchin Lane cordon and continued first aid. An ambulance then arrived and he was taken to hospital, but was pronounced dead on arrival.

Unfortunately, the IPCC has launched a "managed investigation" into the events, which some have likened to, "a pissing stage managed investigation to protect the thug cops and satisfy the sheep." I am a cautiously more optimistic about how the investigation will pan out, but I am deeply saddened by the conduct and impropriety of the police to this point. It is very worrying that it only took the media 24 hours to receive word of Mr. Tomlinson's death - but it's taken more than a week for accurate facts surrounding his assault to be released.

Jenny Jones MP, a member of the Green Party, the Metropolitan Police Authority and the London Assembly, has spoken out against the actions of the police involved in this assault, not long after criticising the actions of the police as a whole during the G20 protests. Another Green Party member was an eye-witness to the events, and she was quoted in the Green Party's statement surrounding the events:

Meanwhile reports have continued to come in to the Green Party's central office from party members who were at the demonstration - including a report from a Manchester Green who watched as Ian Tomlinson died.

Gayle O'Donovan said today: "The behaviour of the police was the worst I have seen on any demonstration. Late in the evening we got a call from a friend trapped in the police cordon outside the Bank of England. He had been there for several hours in the heat with no water after receiving a head injury. We were concerned for our friend and others trapped in these conditions. We wanted to bring them water but the police, for reasons best known to themselves, would not allow us to give it out.

"A few minutes later we crossed the road and saw several medics begin CPR on a man lying on the ground. We later found out this to be Mr Tomlinson, the man who died. I certainly didn't see any of the paramedics being pelted with bottles or stones, as was reported by the police. "It was later divulged that Mr Tomlinson was on his way home from work and probably not a protester.

I believe he most likely became trapped due to police tactics on the day. The police were indiscriminate about who they corraled. They shut off an area trapping everyone inside. Parents and children, the elderly and passers-by can often get caught up."

Ms O'Donovan concluded, "The tactic's known as 'kettling' because of the effect it has on those enclosed - basically it raises the temperature and makes an outbreak of anger far more likely. It is a dangerous tactic that I think must now be investigated."

Personally, I cannot decide whether to let apoplexy take over or whether I should focus my anger on making as many people aware of these events as possible. I am deeply concerned by what has happened, as it appears to be an example of fundamental failures on behalf of the police, who we as a nation entrust with our protection and security. I originally considered the de Menezes events to be a tragic but accidental occurrence. However, taking into account the contradictory reports issued by the police after the death of Ian Tomlinson, and the manner in which they behaved during the assault, I am inclined to reconsider my opinion of both this and the de Menezes shooting. We do not live in a police state - why should someone like Mr. Tomlinson be treated with such indignity?

As reasonable, law-abiding citizens, we expect in return to all be treated with the same basic human rights - which includes not being aggressively assaulted from behind by a riot police officer for no apparent reason. Is this just the tip of the iceberg, the beginning of a long downward spiral towards ever-increasingly aggressive police tactics? I am extremely worried. The officer in question, their Force, and indeed the very people at the top at both ACPO and the Home Office deserve to be brought in front of a court of law and held responsible for their endemic failures of procedure.

Please tell everyone you can about this to raise public awareness. Retweet, repeat, forward emails, write blog articles. Contact your MP. I hope that in time, a concerted effort can bring more key witnesses forward to help further clarify the events surrounding Mr. Tomlinson's assault and death - and hopefully to blame for these events will be held responsible to the fullest extent of all relevant laws.

UK.gov announces wholly British department of Hacking and Tinkering, G20 has their movie night

2009-04-01T10:55:00.004+01:00

PM Brown Announces the Permanent High Office of Hacking and Tinkering in the Chancellory of the Exchequer

EFF, April 1:
What with all the hubbub over President Barack Obama's DVD box set naff gift to Prime Minister Gordon Brown being region-coded and locked-out, Her Majesty's Government has responded with the announcement of the Permanent High Office of Hacking and Tinkering in the Chancellory of the Exchequer (hereby known as PHOHTCE). Brown warned that this was an urgent matter to be resolved by Thursday, at which time the G-20 movie night will take place, adding emphatically "and there's no need to bish bash bosh about it."

The controversy made the papers when it was revealed that "King Ralph," one of the classic American films included in the set, was not available in a Region 2 coded DVD, since none of the discs were readable with the UK DVD players available at 10 Downing Street. To avoid diplomatic embarrassment as transatlantic relations grew tense over differences in approach to economic stimulus, the Prime Minister's office simply purchased new UK copies of all the DVDs. Her Majesty the Queen's office, who had similarly inquired about the availability of the movie in British format when she was offered it as a gift from President George W. Bush in 2004, had subsequently received a VHS copy complementary from the London offices of the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

Concerned about criticism over the narrow focus of the new office, Prime Minister Brown reminded the press corps that both Afghanistan and Iraq will be implementing anti-circumvention provisions in their copyright laws in the coming year as a priority of the United States Trade Representative for the region. "This is the time for the new generation to continue the heroic work of Bletchley Park," referring to the World War II British codebreakers.

For more, see the full EFF article. Don't forget to place tongue firmly in cheek beforehand.

How much is an album worth to you?

2009-03-14T02:46:00.017Z

[Update, 27/07/2009]

As this article is proving to be one of the most popular on ITU, and it's REALLY long, I thought I'd add a quick menu to allow you to jump to the key sections.

Article Sections

1: A Little History

2: What's in an album?
How much does it actually cost to press an album? Well, here's an accurate breakdown of the usual costs, plus a comparison with a digital release for comparison.

3: The Cost-Benefit Calculation

4: Some Final Thoughts

Image credit: Musicadium

A Little History...

Here in the UK, Tesco is arguably the most aggressive major retailer. They have fingers in many pies; after running rampant through the usual grocery and non-food sectors through their chain of supermarkets, they rapidly expanded into many other sectors. In no particular order, these include "non-food" items sold in supermarkets (washing machines, toasters, kettles etc), online grocery ordering delivered to customers' doorsteps, followed by direct-to-home sales, again delivered to customers' doorsteps.

This is just the tip of the red and blue iceberg - go to their web site and explore a little to see just how many projects they now run. Tesco isn't the only major supermarket chain trying to make inroads though - Asda also has a fairly formidable online presence, followed closely by Waitrose, The Co-Op and Sainsbury's. However, if you come to the UK, the Tesco brand is fairly ubiquitous given their market dominance throughout the mid-90s right into this decade.

Enter Tesco... Image credit: Building

A couple of years ago, Tesco began to sell digital music via Tesco Digital. To begin with, their service solely offered DRMed Windows Media format - today they sell MP3s and DRMed WMAs for many albums, along with a selection of TV and films in DRMed WMV format. According to Tunetuzer Tesco Digital's bitrates are 192kbps for WMA, so logically their MP3s will be the same.

Now, while Tesco is a massive force to be reckoned with in regular retail, they have to largely play by the rulebook when retailing digital media, due to the requirements to pay mechanicals and whatever other royalties mandated through their arrangement with the various labels. According to the MCPS' current ratecard, the rate for downloaded audio (JOL) is 12%. Tesco Digital sells their tracks at 77p per track - when you consider the cost of an iTunes purchase was (until very recently) 79p, with iTunes Plus coming in at 99p/track, this doesn't leave much scope for profit by anyone's measure.

So, what really perplexed me was when Tesco decided to sell the new U2 album. They must have figured that it'd make a good loss leader, because in the opening week of sales, No Line On The Horizon went on sale for a measly £3.97 - if you purchased the whole album in one transaction. Individual tracks were, and still are, on sale for 77p each. Over the course of the next few days, they lowered the price even more - to just £2.78! However, it's currently on sale for £5.46, which equates to a shade over 49.5p per track when purchased as one album.

Quips about the true value of U2's music aside (personally I think it's worthless), this is very interesting. A major retailer prepared to experiment with some radical price cuts in order to drum up business? Is the demand that low for digital music? We continue to hear proclamations of year-on-year increases in digital music sales; heck, in 2005 the IFPI reported sales of $1.1bn, three times that of the year before, with The Register remarking that actual profits from those sales was probably closer to $280m given the apportionment of royalties. By 2008, the 2007 sales estimates were around $2.9bn, and in January this year sales figures were up once again to $3.7bn; "internationally... a sixth year of expansion."

I am all in favour of the music industry making money through legitimate retail, and through reasonable levying of royalties on those sales and performances. However, impressive statistics from industry bodies aside, there remain some important - crucially important - considerations for consumers with regards to the perceived value of digital music. Is the 80p mark for a digital audio track still too high? I began to wonder whether Tesco were experimenting with seeing if customers purchased tracks if the offer was appealing enough, based on their own perceived value of the music on offer.

I will readily admit that I am not your 'garden variety' consumer when it comes to digital media. I am well aware of the alternatives available, both legitimate and 'grey area', and in the past I've usually relied on the latter for music discovery - I have, in my many years of digital media consumption, only ever purchased one digital download (a charity single for Pirate Day last year, from the DRM-free indiestore.com).

However, I still buy many CDs (and a shedload of vinyl), and I do all my own ripping, encoding and transfer to my customised DAP (which is not an iPod - it's an iRiver H340, running Rockbox). While this puts me in a smaller camp of people who are a little more 'exacting' with where they obtain their digital media, I like to think I still have a solid grasp on the purchase habits of the majority of music fans, both ardent and casual. There is no denying that the ubiquity of iTunes+iPod is a strong market force, but Amazon's digital music service has a killer triple threat: massive brand awareness, higher audio bitrates (256kbps) and total platform agnosticism. Every digital audio player available today, including iPods, will happily play MP3s.

That said, iTunes has recently rolled out a store-wide upgrade of all audio to iTunes Plus (which also removes the layer of DRM from the audio, but increases the price). However, the quality is not that much higher - 256kbps AAC, which is on a par with Amazon's offering, but not playable on many players other than Apple's (but Apple's closed loop of iPod+iTunes is at once their biggest strength and their greatest weakness). There are other digital retailers in the UK marketplace, including some on par or competing with iTunes, AmazonMP3 et al (Play, 7digital and TuneTribe spring to mind), but today the market is saturated with hundreds of legal online retailers.

Now some of the avenues for legal digital music have been discussed, I can move on to the key point of this discussion - the true cost of digital music. What follows is a case study based on my own empirical research and first-hand experience, and is a fairly accurate representation of the costs a label faces when retailing music online. But first, let's break down the cost of a CD...

What's in an album?

With CDs, the biggest profits have always come from economies of scale. Once your CD is mastered and sent for pressing, the manufacturer can just as easily press 1,000 units as they can 10,000. If we take a scenario which I'm sure many smaller/indie labels are faced with when they produce a new CD, the costs will most likely be similar to these...

Artwork:

Barcode: ~£10 (although many labels will have blanket arrangements with the de facto provider for barcodes in the UK, GS1)
Artwork design: negotiable, sometimes done in-house
Artwork print planning: I've been told estimates of £300 for smaller runs (runs of <1,000)

Production:

Cost per CD: usually between 0.15p and 0.25p (1/4 of a penny, not 25p). Prices can be as low as 0.11p, but only for multiple million unit pressings.
Booklet: depending on page count and complexity of artwork and page arrangement, for 12 page booklet can vary between 0.20p and 25p for the first 1,000, roughly half for 2,000 or more.

8 page booklet: price decreases by ~1/3
4 page booklet: price decreases by ~2/3

Slip case / O-card: between 0.20p and 0.30p per unit, loose or shrinkwrapping is between 0.01 and 0.04 per unit (NB: most shops will not stock items if they are not shrinkwrapped)

Delivery costs: negotiable depending on arrangement with pressing company, often between £30 and £50 per 1,000 unit run. 500 units not much cheaper - CDs weigh an absolute ton when they're boxed 20 to a carton with 20 or more cartons in a box!

Doing some quick sums, just pressing a 1,000 album might well cost around the £450-470 mark for a label, which is a good wedge of cash by anyone's measure. Then there are distribution costs, promo costs, and other costs (especially if an artist has an advance as part of their contract).

Another important thing to consider are the MCPS costs (the mechanicals) - a mechanical must be paid for every CD produced, and this is arranged by way of an AP1/AP2 licence from MCPS. If the label doesn't have one of these arrangements, they are falling foul of copyright law. Smaller labels have an AP2 or an AP2a - the difference between those being the payment terms (AP2a deals allow a label longer to pay the royalties, which can be crucial for small runs or albums which sell a steady amount but over a longer period of time). The royalty to pay is around 20% based on the net price - not the Recommended Retail Price the customer sees, but the lowest price. Net Realised Price is a term commonly used to describe this amount. NRP itself is based on the PPD (or dealer price), which is what the retailers pay to buy the stock.

There are also often 'file discounts' - the major labels will generally have smaller file discounts than the indie labels because for indie labels, the balance of power is firmly in the retailer's court (so the label has to effectively sacrifice more profit to get their stock purchased and sold in the shops).

Returns have to be taken into consideration as well - if many units of stock do not sell, the label has to ensure that they have enough money in the pot to refund the distributor or retailer after the returns are completed. This can often take several months, causing major complications and frustrating periods of little income for artists who are signed to smaller labels (because if the artist was paid by the label based on every single unit of their CD being sold, but half of the stock was actually returned by the retailers, the artist ends up owing the label money!)

I may have missed some aspects out, but they are the main things to consider for physical releases. Now, compare all that to considerations for digital releases of the same material:

Banking charges when money from sales is passed on to labels
MCPS mechanicals (yes, you have to pay a 'mechanical' royalty on every digital sale! This is usually incorporated into the cut the retailer takes from each sale)
Other digital store fees (most stores will take a cut of each sale, in late 2008 iTunes was paying about $0.70 of each track sold to the label but this can and does change)

... and that's it. No production costs other than the artwork (which probably already exists if the album was simultaneously released on CD), a bit of promotion and the usual promo costs if the label engages in promotion.

The cost-benefit calculation
Digital versus physical, sound quality and the eternal value for money discussion...

Yet, although digital sales are relatively uncomplicated by comparison, how come they still cost so much? With CDs you get the original quality audio which you can encode yourself really quickly with iTunes/Windows Media Player/your software of choice (I use EAC & Lame for top quality). You also get artwork you can hold in your hand, liner notes, and a nice case to put on your shelf. You really do get what you pay for - whereas with iTunes or just about any other digital music store, you still get far less for paying about the same amount as the same music on CD. There are only very few digital music stores selling audio in lossless format - and aside from Beatport and Bleep (and a few other boutique retailers), all of the lossless digital music stores focus on classical and jazz; Passionato and Linn Records are two notable examples offering exceptional quality music (which itself is stunning) in a variety of formats to suit the listener.

Why aren't more labels and retailers pushing for this progress to be made? Who knows; maybe the mentality of "every downloader is going to steal and share their music if they buy it" is still prevalent - but people have shared music for decades! How else do other people hear about new music? And also, the attitude of music listeners being treated as 'consumers' as opposed to 'customers' is still worryingly present in the music industry. People do not treat music like they treat groceries - therefore it is inaccurate to classify music fans as 'consumers' when they are nothing of the sort.

Returning to the issue of sound quality - classical and jazz fans are regarded as appreciating high quality sound more than regular music fans, but that is not an excuse for all mainstream digital music stores to offer poorer quality audio. The BBC is currently implementing AAC+ online streams for its radio stations - you can already listen to songs on Radio 1 or Radio 2 in higher quality than you can by paying for them and downloading them, and amazing services like Spotify already offer high quality VBR MP3 tracks available to stream immediately for no cost to the listener - again, the quality of these is usually higher than the quality of the same tracks from many music stores. Services like Spotify, now launched in the UK, should be highlighting the need for the industry to step up its game and offer something to the customer which is a true deal-breaker - lossless audio would do that for me. The quality of the audio file, and the assumption of DRM schemes that you will infringe copyright (as opposed to the trust model which has worked for CDs for years) are my main reasons for still not buying digital music.

The fact that the music industry and the incumbent digital music retailers have not already pushed through parallel offerings of the same music in a lossless format to me is nothing more than legalised theft by another name. Lossy files (such as found on iTunes, TuneTribe, Tesco Digital and many other major players) should be priced even cheaper than they are now, particularly if they are DRMed - and the lossless files should be sold at the original price. Why? Well, with lossless audio, if you burn it to CD, you have an exact replica of the original audio, not a poor imitation of the original audio. Even iTunes Plus is an awful bitrate - 256kbps AAC? Not good enough. Apple already have Apple Lossless in their arsenal, but they're not using it - and there's also the popular FLAC, Shorten and Monkey's Audio codecs for lossless music. Sure, the files are larger - but you can burn them to CD to archive them, and encode MP3s, WMA or AAC files for your portable device from the originals after you purchase them. Heck, these days, with the cost of storage going down all the time, it's ridiculous to not have less than 500Gb of storage in your computer. Who cares how big the files are?

In my mind, if I'm paying as much as I would pay for a physical copy of the album, I want to get exactly what I would get sound quality-wise as if I was buying the original CD. Lossless digital files allow me to at least burn them to a CDR and enjoy the music at the same quality as if I was listening to a store-bought CD; as more and more people get familiar with the poor quality of downloaded music, they are beginning to realise that there is a big gap in quality between digital downloads and the same tracks on CDs.

With digital distribution, the costs to labels and distributors are far lower, so where are the profit margins being eaten up? I still believe an album purchased in digital format should cost far less than it currently does. Some in the industry would then argue that by pricing music any lower than it currently is, it devalues the creative output of artists to the point where it effectively becomes little more than a commodity. I would counter that for years, the music industry itself has itself done just that to music without any help from us - just look at the output of the major labels; there is the occasional gem but most of it is repetitive drivel which quickly gets forgotten about.

To sum up, do I think the price of £4 for U2's latest album in digital format is a fair and accurate price for the actual value of what you're getting? Yes, yes I do. However, the costs that the label and the retailer currently have to either pay or absorb (resulting in them selling at a loss) are still far too high. The structure of royalties and compensation for digital sales needs to drastically change before any real progress is made in digital retail - and while this is waiting to happen, people will continue to download music from the web in much higher quality without paying for it at all. Once the happy medium is found, most people will move away from buying CDs altogether - and there will be more profits for everybody. It feels to me like all the major labels are waiting for somebody else to make the bold move and give it a go - and in that kind of Catch 22 situation, we are never going to make any progress.

Will people disagree with what I've said here? I'm sure some will. I am approaching this from the perspective of a consumer who still feels like they're not getting their money's worth, not from the stance of someone working in the music industry trying to earn a crust. (It is not the framework of label + artist which is faulty, the entire system is outdated and needs a rapid kick up the backside to get it updated for the 21st century.)

Final Thoughts

The irony of all this is that if the U2 album was offered in lossless format for 99p a track, you would actually be getting your money's worth because once you have that lossless audio you effectively have your own copy of the original audio CD. The distribution and production costs are far less for everybody involved - so there's still savings to be had. You are also effectively future-proofed as a customer; when a newer audio format becomes the most popular one out there, you can just reencode your audio into that format without having to pay for it all over again. Everybody who has their music collection on CDs already does this, but everybody who buys from locked in platforms like iTunes is effectively screwed. As an insightful person wrote, quite pertinently;

If a digital music store doesn't give you a lossless copy, then it should provide you the ability to upgrade to a higher quality lossy format at any time.

The alternative is that they haven't sold you right to listen to the music; just a scratched version thereof.

... And I could not agree more.

~~~~

I hope this article has given you something to think about, and has maybe even persuaded you to reconsider your stance towards digital music and CD albums. I will keep on buying CDs (and vinyl) in shops until the day lossless audio is available to buy for an equivalent price in the format of my choice. What I really want to know is why labels and stores have been dragging their feet for such a long time about this - and why people are still tolerating this inadequate level of quality from digital music retailers. We're in 2009, not 1999.

In the meantime, there's just one thing I encourage everybody to do: demand lossless music from your music label or retailer! Only by asking these questions again and again and raising awareness of this whole issue will we as customers get what we want (and don't forget, the customer is always right). The music industry should be beholden to its customers, rather than the other way round - and it's about time we force the industry to rethink some of the rules to ensure we continue to get a fair deal. After all, when nobody pays for music...

BBC helps the Internet, riles the PC Brigade [updated]

2009-03-13T08:14:00.014Z

In case you haven't already seen the video, the BBC decided to do a little investigation into how easy it was to acquire, use and deploy a small botnet against a particular web site for a segment on their tech show Click.

Here's what they uncovered:

So, the Click investigators managed to DDoS a honeypot web site with just sixty-odd computers' worth of traffic. (Botnet owners must be loving all these new DSL packages with high-speed upload.) Before self-destructing the network, they also (very sensibly, in my opinion) changed the background image of all infected botnet hosts. The image contained had a detailed description of how that machine was compromised, along with a link to a special page on the BBC Click web site which explained how to go about securing the system.

Personally, I think they did the Internet a service - unfortunately this comes at a time when everybody is scrutinising everything the Beeb is doing, and they've been in the spotlight a little too much recently. Some are harping on about how this was a breach of the law (and with a rigid interpretation of the Computer Misuse Act, it most definitely was); we have people like Graham Cluley, the regular Sophos spokesperson, offering the anti-virus manufacturer's slightly condescending take on events. Others are also debating the legality - Click's producers have claimed that as there was no malicious intent behind their actions, they didn't breach the Law, some are pointing out that technically, the Law has been broken irrespective of intent. Struan Roberrtson from Pinsent Masons pointed out that;

"The Act requires that a computer has been made to perform a function with intent to secure access to any program or data on the computer," he said. "Using the botnet to send an email is likely to satisfy that requirement. It also requires that the access is unauthorized — which the BBC appears to acknowledge.

"It does not matter that the BBC’s intent was not criminal or that someone else created the botnet in the first place." Still, Robertson said prosecution was unlikely because the exercise apparently did no harm and "probably did prompt many people to improve their security." The BBC responded that there was 'a powerful public interest in demonstrating the ease with which such malware can be obtained and used,' and that the network "has strict editorial guidelines for this type of investigation, which were followed to the letter."

I fall in line with the latter way of thinking on this - the BBC mention that they consulted their own lawyers before conducting this experiment so they must feel they have a fairly solid case for avoiding penalty. I suspect their culpability is limited as many thousands of the machines were most likely situated outside of the United Kingdom, bringing the scope and geographical constraints of our lovely British law into question. (Without extraditing the entire upper management of the BBC, I suspect there's little way the Corporation could be tried in a court of law for what they have done overseas).

More importantly, are the rest of us justified, as responsible netizens (as many of us claim to be, or would at least like to believe), in the belief that we can criticise the BBC's actions and call them out for dirty tricks here? For some of their past actions, maybe; this time: no. Personally, I think they've done the Internet a service. Not only have they taken a (small) botnet out of action, but they've helped illustrate just how easy it is to acquire a pool of compromised resources and hammer a web site into submission.

As a few more clueful people have observed, what Click unfortunately didn't spend enough time highlighting (probably due to time constraints) is the ease with which the true malicious users seem to be able to avoid getting caught when buying and selling access to these botnets. There must be a large amount of shady transactions taking place for unnamed or suspect items - and Internet payment services are effectively allowing these to happen. Why can't e-money services like PayPal watch for, and flag, transactions which might be related to payment for these kinds of nefarious darknet services?

Update: the BBC responded shortly after with a press release, along with a feature from Mark Perrow which fleshes out their reasoning and underlying motivation for the investigation on their Editors' Blog. The short statement is as follows:

"There is a powerful public interest in demonstrating the ease with which such malware can be obtained and used; how it can be deployed on thousands of PCs without the owners even knowing it is there; and its power to send spam email or attack other websites undetected. This will help computer users realise the importance and value of using basic security techniques to defend their PCs from such attacks.

The BBC has strict editorial guidelines for this type of investigation which were followed to the letter. At no stage was any other data other than the IP address used. We believe that as a result of the investigation, computer users around the world are now better informed of the importance and value of using basic security techniques to defend their PCs from attacks."

I still think this was a well-considered and justified insight into the underbelly of the interwebs, and if it raised peoples' awareness (and helped a few thousand people secure their machines) then surely the BBC has done the world a small favour? This invokes consideration of the classic White Hat / Grey Hat / Black Hat issue... Would you do something borderline (or completely) illegal if it was morally or ethically justified - or in the interest of the common good - in the long run? I'm not sure if I would (but then again, I can't hide behind a Corporation!)

Last.fm in bed with RIAA over U2? Apparently not, says Last.fm

2009-02-21T12:58:00.007Z

I'd like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We've never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn't consent to it.

Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we'd never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for.

As far as I'm concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up.

A response from Russ, an employee at Last.fm, over allegations made by TechCrunch recently that Last.fm had essentially handed over massive chunks of private user data to the RIAA so they could find out who was listening to (and therefore, most probably sharing and/or downloading) prerelease leaks of the new U2 album.

Who's telling the truth? As long as no British laws were broken, I don't really care, and I'm sure we'll find out soon enough anyway once the FUD has dissipated. (I'm sure the RIAA and U2's manager are conveniently forgiving Universal Australia for 'accidentally' making U2's latest album available for digital download via their web site a few weeks before its official launch... One rule for them, another for us, just as usual.

To be honest, I'm far more interested at the moment in an announcement from Indian scientists who say they've developed a method of using enzymes to take carbon dioxide emissions and convert them into things like cement and other useful building materials. How cool is that!

Happy Geeky Valentine's...

2009-02-14T00:00:00.002Z

http://xkcd.com/55/

Much love to the fabulously geeky xkcd, as always. Buy some of their stuff and support Randall, the merch is as witty (and enduring) as his comics. :) (If you like, buy some for me!)

Best. Apple. Ever.

2009-02-11T22:05:00.001Z

So good, even I want one! And I hate Macs!

The Obama coverage was great. But was Facebook quietly hacked?

2009-01-20T18:11:00.004Z

The CNN/Facebook collaboration was a remarkable look into the way that people are moving from regular, directed TV to more 'raw' news consumption - and readily commenting as it happens.

The CNN.com Live with Facebook page, which is offering the Flash stream of CNN with a Facebook 'representative sample' of realtime status comments from other viewers, looked like this a little earlier after you loaded it:

However, a little earlier, the "Connect or Sign Up for Facebook to discuss this historic inauguration" text changed to this rather more amusing version:

... 'i love my little elf boy'? Sounds like someone's found a back door to Facebook's infrastructure ;) What worries me is whether this is a merely cosmetic hack or whether this also indicates that deeper, more important sections of Facebook's infrastructure are theoretically available to view by more unscrupulous individuals. Are my personal details still safe, having logged into Facebook via that (authentic) CNN page earlier? Is it as simple (but still worrying) as an admin's details been compromised?

People need to watch their Facebook accounts for the next few days, juuuust in case.

On a lighter note, this day was certainly one for record breaking - not only does the USA have its first African-American President, but Mashable reports the statistics announced by CNN earlier:

"The stats released, as of noon ET:
There were 200,000+ status
updates through the Facebook integration on CNN.com
At that time, 3,000 people commented on the Facebook CNN feed per minute
Obama’s Facebook Fan Page has more than 4 million fans and in
excess of 500,000 wall posts
As of 11.45am, CNN:
had served 13.9 million live video streams globally since 6am
had broken its all time total daily streaming record (from Election Day) of 5.3 million live streams
Impressive numbers indeed."

I'll say! And, in traditional British manner, our BBC live stream handily broke down just after Obama's inaugural address - and only began to work again (with a low-key announcement on the BBC News inauguration coverage page) at around quarter past six UK time. Never mind, Blitz Spirit and all that!

BBC's New Year's Resolution? About 400x224

2009-01-01T14:45:00.006Z

If you have kids who always sit on your laptop while you're trying to work, you'll appreciate the distraction value of being able to shuffle them over to another PC and put the official CBeebies web stream on. (my old boss suffered from this 'affliction', but his daughter is quite, quite happy about the whole thing.)

However, many others bemoaned the lack of the main BBC channels, as first BBC Three, then Four, were first rolled out as a trial after BBC News' move to Flash streaming (followed by CBeebies and a couple of other channels). However, on New Years' Eve, they finally made BBC One and BBC Two's web streams public - with a bbc.co.uk front page promo for the New Year's Eve and Jools Holland's Hootenanny shows, finally available as online streams. Woohoo. The quality's not spectacular, being pipped by TVCatchup - but the fact that it's being run by the BBC means that its future is almost certainly secured, and no doubt the quality will increase, mirroring the subsequent "High Quality" stream introduction for iPlayer on-demand programming.

However, given things like the ISPs' unwillingness to have to cough up for all this sudden upsurge in Internet usage, combined with Anthony Rose's recent, somewhat misguided suggestion that ISPs should consider options such as charging an extra monthly fee for high quality stream access... Well, it doesn't exactly inspire unbridled hope, but there's still scope for change.

(A little aside by way of explanation: Mr. Rose's suggestion to ISPs was that they consider charging an extra fee, maybe upwards of £10 a month on top of the customer's existing service charge, in order to offset the cost of all the bandwidth consumed by viewing iPlayer - and other online video - content. However, vocal opponents of this idea have argued that customers are already paying for access to iPlayer, both in the form of their TV Licence and their standard monthly charge. If ISPs begin to charge extra for access to the High Quality streams, it's effectively a two-tiered Internet via the back door, and the end of net neutrality while we're at it as well. Rather grim, and I'm completely against the concept of charging extra for something we should already have full access to. Happily, I'm with Be* once again for my broadband, after moving to Virgin Media last year from Be* (due to my old house's awful phone line - the main problem for ADSL2+ customers - before VM introduced the doubled speeds, STM and P2P throttling... And unlike Virgin up-shit-creek Media, Be* aren't frustratingly backward with tiered access or restrictive bandwidth caps.

Back on point now...)

Anyway, my point of view in a nutshell: if ISPs can't afford to offer the bandwidth customers are paying for as part of their package, they should price their packages more realistically or lower the allowances. Surely they've learnt something from the mistakes the Banking sector have made over the past decade?

That aside, official online streaming of all the main channels is a welcome step in the right direction, as people like me (who've paid for a TV Licence but don't have a TV at the moment) can finally watch all the BBC channels without having to rely on grey-area platforms like the reinvented TVCatchup (which is still albeit slightly better quality, although I'm not sure how long it'll last) or Zattoo (which is so-so in terms of quality, but has some other interesting channels). The fact that it's Flash streaming means that it's not fully accessible yet across every single OS, and is not available to watch on all devices - but hopefully MP4 or H.264 streaming in a regular MKV or MP4 wrapper will be available once they sort out the rights issues (I believe they're still forced to use Flash due to DRM and geolocation restrictions). Anyway, if you want to check out the streams for yourself (UK viewers only, unfortunately), here are some links I'm sure you'll enjoy:

BBC One: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcone/watchlive/
BBC Two: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/watchlive/
BBC Three: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/livearena/ (from 7pm daily)
BBC Four: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/watchlive/
CBBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/watch/cbbclive/ (7am to 7pm daily)
CBeebies: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/cbeebieslive.shtml (6am to 7pm daily)
BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7459669.stm
BBC Parliament: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/playlive/bbc_parliament/

Now, the interesting thing to note is that BBC Parliament streams from the /iplayer site. So, I decided to delve a bit - if you substitute bbc_parliament for bbc_one ... You get the BBC One stream... except those streams don't work at the moment. The same goes for "bbc_two", "bbc_three", "bbc_four", but "cbeebies" and "cbbc" do work. "bbc_news24" gives you the BBC News channel - finally, an easier to remember link than that stupidly long news.bbc.co.uk link! And, although "bbc_one" doesn't work, "bbc_one_england" does, and the same goes for "bbc_two_england". Do you smell forthcoming regional variations? All the channels' streaming pages also show the Now and Next information (and this goes for the channels' respective iPlayer live stream pages and their Watch Live pages on their respective minisites). Very handy.

Oh, and BBC Alba's also available to watch online - but as I can't understand it (it's for the Scots), I don't really care. ;)

Direct links to all of the available live streams in the /iplayer style (which I vastly prefer over the minisite-designed pages) are available via the "Watch LIVE" links at the top right of each page once you click onto the main channels. To do this, go to bbc.co.uk/iplayer and click on one of the TV channels' names in the "TV" pane - or click on TV Channels at the top of the page then click on the channel's name. Once you're there, and the channel is currently streaming, you can click the 'Watch LIVE' link. Simplicity itself (although I'd prefer a single click from the front /iplayer page to get to it, but never mind).

This is a far cry from the first public implementation of iPlayer, isn't it? Whilst not every single programme is available to view online (again, due to rights restrictions - mostly films and older programmes I would expect are not available to simulcast online, as the CBeebies "information for adults" page cryptically explains). Who would've thought that we'd still be watching Flash streams in 2009? I thought we would've been at H.264 inside an MP4 wrapper which I could stream in VLC, Media Player Classic or (shock horror) Windows Media Player, but we'll get there eventually. Hell, even a WMP stream which I could stream over my smartphone's 3G connection would be a better option, but hopefully that's in the pipeline. For the moment, Flash streams are a good warm-up for the next development :) (which hopefully should be with us soon, fingers and toes crossed on that one everybody).

Oh, and welcome to 2009 everyone! May your tech and gadget purchases be many and wonderful and without buyer's remorse.

Blogger hassle, time to dig out CSS For Dummies

2008-10-07T00:53:00.002+01:00

For some reason, my main blog has decided to go all wonky - but only after most of it has loaded (I call shenanigans!) It looks like part of what Blogger is loading *after* my site has loaded itself is breaking either the CSS or the HTML in some way; that or it's one of my many widgets. Unfortunately, this is happening in IE too - which most people still use, whether they have a choice or not is besides the point unfortunately. My (currently-dormant) sister LHC blog looks fine in IE, so that helps narrow things down somewhat. I'm going to have to pick my code apart and find out what's causing this bork, so for the meanwhile hold tight - and don't forget, the RSS feed still looks pleeeenty pretty. ;)

Cheers!

Christopher

Avast, that be the great pirate ship Google!

2008-09-19T11:17:00.005+01:00

HA HARRRRRRRRRR MATEYS, be ye taking a brief pausing in your pillaging for vittles and much good cheer, because the fair pirate ship Google be sailing past on this fair day!

Avast - if ye be wanting t' find out more, be talkin' to a fellow piratical miscreant you should! And be joining the Facebook group and celebratin' all that is devious, scurvy and sea-lubbin on this fine day!

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRR MATEY!

It's almost LHC day - join Team ITU and crunch some particles!

2008-09-10T00:24:00.005+01:00

In advance of the the LHC's first official 'beam on' tomorrow morning (between 8:30 and 9am UK time), why don't you spend a couple of minutes and sign up up to LHC@home?

One of Into The Unknown's key aims is to explore the unexplored, theorise, discover new things and challenge what you may consider to be established fact. As such, ITU is proud to share this attitude towards the future and the undiscovered along with those behind the Large Hadron Collider project (heck, it's even in the name!)

So, set your alarm clock early, tune in to Radio 4 for a day of live programmes from the LHC control centre - and watch the webcast of the first beam on. Then, once the fun's over, why don't you contribute some of your computer's free CPU cycles to help crunch the massive amounts of numbers? (With over 40 Terabytes of new raw data being produced each day once the experiment is up and running, every CPU cycle counts.)

Oh, and don't forget to join Team Into The Unknown once you're up and running! With a spot of luck, one of you will find the Higgs Boson - then, physics as we know it today would really be venturing into places it's never been before, and that's an incredibly exciting prospect.

Welcome to /Shortform, ITU's latest addition

2008-09-08T04:46:00.004+01:00

I've decided to introduce a new mini-format to ITU - the /Shortform feature. At the end of the week, I'll link to some articles and topics of discussion which I've found interesting over the past seven days, as a nice little way to 'bookend' your week.

I'll make it short and sweet: with the aim of publishing this little feature every Sunday evening, I'll post a few choice links to some of my favourite news articles of the past week from all over the interwebs. You might even find out about something you missed the first time round (heck, it happens to me all the time). So, here we go!

ITU/Shortform for week ending 7th of September, 2008:

AOL relaunching Shoutcast, "like 1999... but better" (DigitalMusicNews)
7Digital declares figures: downloads of DRM-free music from its site now more than DRMed music (DRM Watch)
Wippit laid to rest, oldskool digital music idealists wipe a solitary tear away (The Grauniad)
7 year old child in Data Protection Act farce (El Reg)
BBC announce rollout of iPlayer to Nokia N96, rest of us wonder where the mobile version is for everybody else (The Inq)
Joost dumps the desktop... Well, at least mostly anyway, they still love their plugins (DMW) (more coming about this next week)
...And finally, Railing Kitteh can't see you... oh wait. (ICHC).

See you next week!

Comes With Music comes... with DRM

2008-09-07T04:09:00.016+01:00

Nokia has recently been ramping up the press hype for its Comes With Music campaign, targeting the 15-25 demographic with music, and the magic 'unlimited' word. In a nutshell, a person buys one of the compatible Nokia handsets, and with that receives access to 'unlimited' music for a period of 12/18 months, all at no extra cost. From DMW's coverage;

The store features a library of about 2.1 million tracks, from labels including Universal, Sony BMG and Warner Music. Customers will also be able to keep all of the tracks they download after the year-long period expires. Carphone Warehouse will be the exclusive U.K. pre-pay channel offering the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic 'Comes With Music' edition handset, and started accepting pre-orders today. (September the 2nd, 2008).

Some have touted this as the first real attempt to knudge iTunes from its seemingly-unreachable podium, and I'm all for that. However, there are some small things to realise which make the CWM concept a little less appealing... while Nokia says that you can keep all the music you have downloaded after the 12 month period ends, they're keeping quiet about the caveats. I attended an AIM event recently in London called Music Connected, where representatives from Nokia and a couple of UK mobile networks explained the service in detail.

The service is DRMed. Yep, same old story. Your account is tied to one handset and one PC - Users receive a PIN and with it are given 12 or 18 months' worth of access to music, depending on the package you opt for when you purchase the handset. The service, given my past discussions with Nokia employees at Midem, is most likely going to be coordinated with Nokia's existing Music Store. It is true that the access is 'unlimited' (no doubt subject to a Fair Usage Policy, which imposes arbitrary limits on just how much constitutes 'unlimited' before you're asked nicely to stop downloading).

The kicker in all of this? Well, would you like to burn some of the music you've already paid for to a CD? Oh, well in that case, you have to pay extra for that privilege. That's what they regard it as; a privilege. No matter that in the eyes of the customer, they've already paid good money for this unlimited access, but then to be told they must pay more to burn a track to a CD to listen to - when they've already listened to it many times on their handset - is almost criminal in my opinion. The Curse of Monetisation strikes again. The Register covered this in detail way back in 2007, when the CWM idea was first rolled out into the public arena, and not much has changed since then.

Here's the key problems I have with Comes With Music:

You can only use the one PC to synchronise your music collection with
... And to facilitate this restriction, the music is DRMed.
Linux isn't supported, and neither is Mac (only XP or Vista with IE6+), making this a bit of a one-sided fight...
... And to burn the music you've already paid for to CD, you have to pay again. Per track.

Now then, this doesn't exactly come across as 'unlimited' to me, more like Unlimited*, with the great big asterisk indicating that in truth, Nokia is trying to flex the meaning of the word to fit its requirements and restrictions, just like how UK ISPs advertise "unlimited 8meg broadband (fair usage limits apply).

El Reg can always be relied on for some sharp analysis, and sums this up quite nicely:

"...In other words, it's a loyalty program for Nokia customers, with music as the bait.
Instead, Nokia conceives of certain usage rights as a value-added extra - including the ability to burn CDs. The thinking is that most people who burn a CD do so for the car, and are prepared to pay. It's a risky strategy, though."

... And go on to say,

"Intriguingly, Nokia is seeking to make a little extra money from this great music giveaway by charging for usage rights. One of those extras is the "right" to burn music to a CD. No fee has been set for this right yet - we're still a long way from launch in the second half of 2008. [the Nokia press launch on the 2nd of October this year will no doubt have full details on the exact cost of burning to CD.]

A few years ago, we thought DRM was a format scam: a way for the music business to get us to buy music we already owned in a different format, like the transition from vinyl to CD. Is it now thinking of charging for usage rights we already have?

Probably not."

Tongue firmly in cheek there. This whole business model goes against the 'inexorable move away from DRM', as The Register puts it - so why persist in DRMing? Oh wait, it's because the majors demanded it, isn't it. (The first major 'on board' was Universal). Unfortunately, I can see Comes With Music taking off in a couple of demographics - one where parents buy handsets for their children because they're worried about the kids otherwise infringing copyright, and the ensuing legal hassle that can sometimes entail.

The other demographic is those who have the cash for a spangly new handset but who don't necessarily budget for spur of the moment music purchases, or who might view CWM more as an added bonus on top of buying the handset rather than the sole means of obtaining all their music for the next year or so.

Unfortunately, Nokia aren't doing themselves any favours - it looks like they've gone with one of their lesser-featured handsets in an effort to boost sales, because the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic handset (and the first Comes With Music handset) is both butt-ugly and not exactly feature-packed either to boot. (picture: see left) A tri-band handset, it only has a 320x240 screen with a 2megapixel camera - and it doesn't even have 3G connectivity (only GPRS, EGPRS and HSCSD). At present, you can't download tracks directly to your handset from the Nokia MusicStore, but if they decided to roll this feature out in the future, it would make downloading music OTA a painful procedure.

<tinfoilhat>(Maybe this is a deliberate choice - a disincentive to stop people from downloading too much music?)</tinfoilhat>

As an aside, Comes With Music is hardly trailblazing when it comes to packaging up a mobile music store for the masses. A company of note is Puretracks, which has had a DRM-free, mobile & desktop 'dual download' solution available through select US mobile carriers for a while now, and they made much noise over the fact that the PureTracks platform is DRM free (in an attempt to corner the Blackberry OTA sales market). A key point to remember is that all Blackberries up to this point (either by accident or by design) do not support any form of DRMed media. This obviously requires any platform provider attempting to offer OTA downloads to either offer a dual-format download, or just adopt a DRM-free format such as MP3 or AAC/AAC+.

Puretracks decided to do the latter - choosing to offer their content as 64kbps AAC+, which sounds remarkably comparable to even a 160kbps MP3 if encoded well, and played back on a device with proper AAC+ support). The choice of AAC+ for OTA downloads was made to save on data charges; if a BlackBerry user is connected via Wifi, they can purchase from the Puretracks Mobile store and download an MP3 if they so choose - so the tradeoff is still only between a DRM-free format or another DRM-free format, which is by far a preferable situation to be in. Why can't other retail platforms follow suit?

Puretracks has had arrangements with Universal, SonyBMG, Warner and EMI (and some indies too) for quite a while, and they all seem perfectly happy to have their music sold in DRM free formats to customers. From this, it quickly becomes glaringly obvious that if a large pre-existing userbase of affluent customers mandates no DRM on audio in order to make a purchase, the major labels are willing to take exception and readily offer their catalogue to retail platform providers to licence. Why can't Nokia take a stand and demand that all its music comes without the shackles of DRM too? Oh wait, because they design all their XpressMusic handsets to explicitly support Windows Media and its DRM format. This isn't necessary in this day and age, and it should not be perpetuated, as it only increases the cost of the handset due to the licensing of the proprietary Windows Media formats - when that money could be spent licensing a quality AAC+ or MP3 codec and focusing on getting sound quality for those formats as high as possible. DRM should not be encouraged, and it should most certainly not be through complacency.

Overall, I can only see the current incarnation of Comes With Music having limited success; until they unwrap the DRM from the music, and stop charging customers (who've already paid once) for the 'right' to burn CD audio, I don't think the majority of people will even bother adopting the service. So, to summarise - well, Nokia, it's a good warm-up attempt, and I applaud you for gradually introducing the market to a proper, mature, quality on-demand music service, but Comes With Music as it exists right now definitely isn't it. Hopefully in 18/24 months' time, you'll be bringing your A Game to the party - until then though, I think I'll skip your promise of unlimited goodness and go buy some CDs and vinyl instead from my local record shop... Y'know, the shops that everybody claims are closing down because people don't buy music offline any more. (The same goes for you, Omnifone; just because you're in cahoots with Vodafone doesn't make it any better - and if I stop paying with you, my music disappears too!)

Oh, and if you're wondering why I still buy physical music, like a dinosaur... Well, I can be sure that I won't be charged more for the privilege of burning them to CD, should I want to make a mixtape or compilation for my car or introduce a friend to an artist they've never heard of. Not needing a PC to grant authorisation for each track to be played is also a big plus point (and once you've tried carrying a computer around with you everywhere you quickly realise how impractical it becomes).

Wippit put down, industry still doesn't get it

2008-09-07T03:18:00.005+01:00

Some sad (but not entirely unexpected) news to start off with today. A couple of days ago, on the 4th of September, one of the first companies to 'get it' and try to provide a legal source of digital music, Wippit, closed its virtual doors for good.

In a statement made to to Distorted Loop, and now on its web site, a spokesperson for Wippit said;

"Wippit has closed. After eight years of pushing the digital boundaries, Wippit can no longer compete in the current market climate. Thank you to everyone that has supported us over the years and apologies to those that will miss us.

A spokesperson later remarked that,

“Launching an all you can eat, legal P2P service before the iPod had even been announced as well as many other innovations meant Wippit has been a great pioneer, but eventually a victim of our own vision and optimism.”

It's a shame that not many people will mourn its passing - it only had a few hundred thousand subscribers by the time they closed - but they were a real pioneer in the Wild West that was the early days of online music retail. They came to the table with a radically different concept - DRM-free, all you can eat music for a fixed yearly price (£30, down from £50 back in 2006)... It was just too much, too soon. Of course now, as The Guardian notes, companies like Qtrax seem to think there's still life in the old dog yet (pun not intended) - although from the way they conducted their launch marketing, I'm amazed that they've not run themselves into the ground already (their stupendous gaffe was the talk of Midem this year, and believe me, nothing was quite as hilarious as seeing their massive billboard which covered the entire frontage of one of the buildings opposite the Palais des Festivals!)

That aside, Qtrax's strategy doesn't even seem as well-formed as Wippit's - once you look past the "all tracks are free" prospect, they're pandering to the majors by DRMing all the files they sell, their concept walk-up 'music vending machines' are really clunky and not very well designed either, and their selection of music is hardly astounding. I wasn't impressed by the marketing when I first heard of them at Midem, because I almost knew what to expect beforehand - and I wasn't surprised when it turned out to be more of the same, just in a different shaped package.

As other commentators have noted, PlayLouder (who bills itself as an MSP, or Music Service Provider) has offered its web-based music discovery services for a while now. I'm an occasional user, and I've discovered some really great music through it which I would have otherwise never heard. However, they've always billed themselves as a value-added service insofar as you pay a slight surcharge on your monthly ISP bill, and the ability to legally acquire and share music via the PlayLouder platform is included in your broadband package.

Recent reports seem to indicate that they're slowly nudging closer and closer to a deal with a major UK ISP (I'm suspecting either Tiscali or Virgin Media), and I'm generally in favour of this service launching to a large potential market, and doing well - they deserve it, they've certainly been ramping up and planning their main launch for a few years now. However, I do also worry that acceptance of this surcharge (or implied 'fee' for the service) would introduce a scenario whereby when you sign up to an ISP who offers the PlayLouder service, you do not have a choice as to whether you can opt-out or not - so in the end, you are effectively taxed for the service, taking us back to old ideas mooted by both individuals, major labels and even our own Government (a mandatory tax for access to music online). Like watching television, not everybody downloads music from the Internet, so why should they be forced to pay for it?

If it became a popular trend, it could really disrupt the balance of power, and the majors could suddenly perceive this as a potential goldmine and start enforcing massive hikes in the wholesale licensing cost to companies like PlayLouder - mandating raises in the tax, and rises in the cost to customers... And an unregulated market is a dangerous one to be involved in, as anybody will tell you - they have a habit of crashing spectacularly.

In other news, Napster is on the market again - if anything, proof that its legal business mode was really never much good at all. Shawn Fanning's original Napster was far better - I always hoped that the company which acquired Napster would have been brave enough to sit down with the majors and show to them the power of unfettered P2P distribution, and organise a completely transparent method for micropayments so that users who were downloading new music would pay a very small amount (far less than a song currently costs on iTunes or one of its competitors) - and they would have the track for free for a few hours, in case they got a case of buyer's remorse. Of course, they could preview it for free - and after they'd downloaded and committed to owning that track, the system would silently debit a very small amount from their 'wallet', similar to how AllOfMP3 worked.

Yes, the value of music would be measurably less (by their own metrics), but given the amount of covermount promotions, free giveaways and all of the 'free' antics the industry has pursued in order to drum up interest (and sales) in back catalogue or forthcoming releases... Would this have been a bad thing? Many labels are realising only too late that most music has been little more than a commodity for a few years now, and they've been trying to extract a level of value from their catalogue which wasn't even there in the first place. Some people like Gerd Leonhard believe in the 'music like water' principle; a move to lower prices on digital music, and more sales of said music, would still probably equal a higher amount of legitimate, licensed sales (and potentially more profit) than the smaller amount of legal sales we witness today.

Platforms such as iTunes crow about their x-millionth legal download, but what about the billions and trillions of unlicensed swapping and distribution of songs? Had a company such as Napster moved to a concept of 'small price, large volume', the majors could have easily capitalised on a concept which was to pick up speed soon after Napster 'went legit', and the infrastructure, software and userbase were all already there - all the hard work was already done for them, but they chose to ignore it and force a DRMed, proprietary solution into play - a solution which is arguably fundamentally broken, and has been so since the day it was introduced.

I suppose the point I am trying to make is that legal music services, with the exception of a handful (eMusic, Magnatune, and some niche labels who run their own services), are all still trying to perpetuate the broken concept that music still has the same amount of value as it did even just five years ago. It does not. They are also trying to march out the same DRMed solution, hand in hand with the inflated pricing, and customers are rejecting it - but at the same time, by witnessing the closure of one of the first DRM-free, fixed price music vendors, it is painfully obvious that the industry still is not ready to embrace this crop of radically different retail platforms, platforms where the music still has value - it's just sold at its retail value, and the customers aren't assumed to be thieves even before they've purchased a song.

Google Chrome first impressions (including a Twitter experiment)

2008-09-02T21:01:00.013+01:00

I thought I'd try something different, and Twitter lets you make quite off-the-cuff remarks in short spurts, meaning you can zip round an idea and have it jotted down before it leaves your brain again. So, I've done a little review as such of Google Chrome, and I've detailed my thoughts on my Twitter profile. I might make it a habit in fact (to the Internet: I hereby claim responsibility for the creation of the 'twittereview' blog category!)

I first went into my %programfiles%\Google folder, to see how big the installation is (because the 474kB 'Installer' does nothing more than download the app from Google when you load it) - lo and behold, Chrome isn't installed into the common Google folder.

>Where is it? Well, it's shuffled itself into "C:\Documents and Settings\Christopher\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application"... And there it sits, all 75 megabytes of it. (Cor!) Not exactly the tidiest or smallest of browsers, but the User Data folder takes up 27.9Mb on its own. I can also see a "chrome.7z" file, clocking in at 21.8Mb - I noticed ZoneAlarm ping me as the Google Installer was spawning 'expand.exe', so this makes sense; distribute the en-US release as a 7zip archive, then customise it with the en-GB dictionaries after download (which it did on its own). Typing in Google.com when in the browser also redirects me to the UK site, which is what I prefer, so Chrome's installer must perform a similar geolocation operation (although it may also rely on the locale of your Operating System as well) to detect which country you're in when you install it.

That's nice as a time saving feature, although I hope there's a way to change it in the future (because not every person living in a country necessarily comes from that country - thinking of people who have permanently emigrated to another country here, or those people who are on holiday in another country).

Anyway - if you want to know what I thought about Chrome as I reviewed it, just head over to my twitter profile and look at all the tweets labeled GCreview - or use flaptor (recommended, a simple URL hack shows my tweets from oldest -> newest, making them easier to follow), Summize (also good - click here for the tweets, start from the bottom and read up), or tweetscan, and look for all posts containing 'GCreview' from the user 'christopherw'.< From initial observations, Chrome is obviously positioned as a little sideswipe at Microsoft with its forthcoming browser - features such as Incognito Mode and enhanced modular handling of tabs' memoryspaces suggests that they have more coming. Unfortunately, there's just a few too many gaps in the user experience to warrant it becoming a regular browser, but hopefully using the Google Updater infrastructure they already have in place for the toolbar and other apps, this can be improved by pushing out new builds quickly and efficiently.

Underneath the surface, the browser uses WebKit, with some enhancements (the new 'V8' Javascript engine for example, plus the aforementioned modularisation of tabs' memoryspaces, meaning that one crashed tab won't necessarily take down all the others with it, one of my primary annoyances with other browsers)

According to the About dialog, my current version is

Official Build 1583

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

And IPChicken accordingly reports the raw user-agent as

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

... Which corroborates their claim that it shares some components with Firefox and Safari (indeed, the import of my bookmarks and favourites looked very similar to Firefox's import facility). For the moment, it's a good nascent start to what could well wind up being a very potent little utility. They need to make it downloadable (and portable, that'd be even better!) as it has some nifty security features. For now though, having done all the tests I need to to make sure my own code stands up to yet another browser's rendering engine, I'll sit this one out for a little while and wait for the second revision of Chrome to be pushed down to my machine. There's just a few too many little 'nags' and features missing for me to be happy with this as my primary or secondary browser.

My final thought for the moment is an annoyance: it sometimes makes pointless noises. If you open a new tab in Chrome, then click out of the address bar (so it loses focus), then press Alt+D again to bring focus back (to type something in)... Chrome prompts Windows to make the 'Windows XP Ding' noise. Why? It's completely unnecessary, and gets quite annoying after a while. Should I be reminded that I've just given focus to the Address Bar each time I press the appropriate key combination?

Chrome does this whether you hit Alt+D on a new tab or in an existing tab where you've been clicking around or working, and you suddenly decide to go to another web site. Grr. Anyway, I'm sure it's on their buglist to fix in the next revision.

Found anything I've missed? Like to comment on anything I've said or think I've missed something fundamental? Feel free to reply to this entry below, I look forward to reading your comments and opinions. Let the browser wars re-commence!

[Update: ...And this is what happens when a plugin crashes (click for full size):

Image courtesy of Brian Butterworth, freeview.tv<

[Update 2: Courtesy of twitscoop, a nice realtime-generated graph showing just how the blogosphere has jumped onto Chrome like a shiny thing [I'll get my coat]:

More stats, and realtime twittersphere tracking here.

Question: what happens if you tug at the Long Tail too much?

2008-08-18T03:00:00.009+01:00

Answer: the animal that is the General Public has a tendency to either turn round and snap at you... Or ignore you completely.

Something I've increasingly observed is traditional media publishers' apparent unwillingness to come to the realisation that the value of their productions to consumers just isn't as high as it once was. Here's two examples I've come across just this week:

Sky's Sky Player (a DRMed download platform technically quite similar to the BBC's iPlayer service, except Sky sell a lot of the content available on both a Pay-Per-View and Download-To-Own basis), and

ComedyDemon.com, a new UK-centric web site offering comedy, entertainment and animation, which is part of the RDF Media Group and also produces for TV and radio.

Why would both of these platforms be doomed to failure if they were the only revenue stream for the respective companies behind these two ventures? Their content costs too much. Sky, for example, has the Road Wars Series 6 available to view on-demand. It's a very engaging series which I watch often on Sky One - in fact, Dad and I have watched nearly all of the episodes between us.

However, this is where my love affair for Sky ends. The series is listed as Pay-Per-View, and each episode costs £1 (€1.50 for ROI viewers) each time you watch it. No rental download, no download-to-own. This means if you want to watch each episode once, and maybe a couple of eps twice, you're talking about a £25 bill. The Sky TV 'Mix' which includes Sky One plus all the other basic entertainment channels is only about £8 a month!

Sky also have Battlestar Galactica Seasons 1-4 up too (as far as Season 4 has aired, anyway), again as PPV, but also with the option to 'Buy to Own'. Pricing is slightly different here: "£2.00 / €3.50 for Sky TV customers with Variety Mix" to 'Buy to Own', or "£1.50 / €2.25 for Sky TV customers with Variety Mix" to rent PPV-style.

This is per episode, of course.

So, on top of your Sky subscription, we're talking £20 for just the ten aired episodes in Season 4 so far, with the bill for Season 3 (at £1.50 per episode) clocking in at £30. How is this possibly good value? You're paying a hefty chunk of money for nothing more than DRMed Windows Media files, and the bitrates aren't outstanding either. But oh wait, how much is the BSG Seasons 1-3 DVD boxset? Currently the 16-disc, 53-episode boxset is only £52.98 from Amazon, working out at £17.66 per series, or (conveniently) £0.99 per episode.

Now, someone kick (or twitter) me if I'm wrong, but I thought the digital revolution was supposed to mean digital content is not only easier to acquire, but it's cheaper too. I fully understand about studios' ever-present desires to recoup and then turn a profit, but when your only legal sources of TV shows in digital format are seemingly actively trying to price the same shows' DVD sales out of the market (and failing miserably), you have to wonder exactly what the studios' long-term strategies are going to be. No wonder torrenting TV shows is so prevalent. Fans of TV shows are known to be obsessive about collecting each episode, but they're not cash-wielding idiots.

In the States, Fox already has their Hulu-based Fox On Demand player, where you can watch oodles of stuff for gratis. Not entire runs of seasons, but a good fair chunk of enjoyable material is available, 24/7, for free. They're obviously using the VoD aspect here as a loss-leader, but it definitely works.

Even if Sky priced each episode of a show at 50 or 60 pence (75 or 80 pence for a high bitrate, high definition copy), I think they would in the vast majority of cases still make more money from someone watching that one series than they would from one person's entire month-long Sky subscription! This is something the studios need to bear in mind - why aren't they running their own online outlets? Because the aggregators, like Apple's iTMS, and the select few international broadcasters with any kind of online retail presence, are holding up the market's development. £1.99 per episode on iTunes? Don't make me laugh. Don't get me started about the proprietary nature of the distribution platform AND the proprietary format the episodes come in... And that's not even counting the DRM slapped onto the file for good measure.

If we look at the BBC, a broadcasting establishment I regard to be almost without compare, save for a few exceptions (NHK in Japan and the joint organisation of German broadcasters under the name of ARD)... Well, their whole iPlayer system makes a rolling seven days' worth of TV and radio programmes available for FREE to all licence payers! I know it's not quite the same, as we have effectively all paid for this service already, but it's a marvellous incentive to watch more of the BBC's programming - and then watch their linear channels more, and even buy their DVDs and other merchandise at subsequent dates. This approach works, and works well, incentivising the viewer and keeping them hooked - unlike most other current pay-to-download schemes.

I might as well critique RDF's ComedyDemon.com, because when compared with Sky, they're a far worse offender! Potentially, they're sitting on a goldmine. Thanks to RDF's buying ability (and the fact they created some of the shows), they currently have rights to classic series like Black Books, Banzai (one of my faves), Blackadder and Spaced. Prices for the episodes seem to hover around the £1.80 mark. They've also got a fair crop of radio shows for around the £10 mark, including the last ever episode of The Goon Show (a true classic) - but they want £7.79 for that episode alone!

How is this good marketing? They have a few token clips from classic shows like Harry Enfield And Chums, which aren't even the best ones, for free. Right, and this is supposed to sufficiently entice me into handing over my money? Er... No. RDF, in their haste to get as much money as possible as quickly as possible, has fallen into the classic trap: 'if you sell it, they will come' does not always hold true. If they sold their episodes for 50p or 99p each, people might buy a couple of episodes on a whim. A dozen times £1 is still more than one or two times £1.80!

This may be partly due to factors beyond their control, but they should negotiate lower prices, and that means negotiating with actors, royalty collection agencies, and other contract holders, so that repeat viewing fees are reduced and people won't expect so much money back per purchase. We should be heading towards near-micropayments for content in this day and age, and half-hearted attempts to sell back catalogue of any kind in a manner such as this are only doomed to failure. They also only serve to delay the true development of the legal digital media market for months or years.

To put it bluntly: ComedyDemon is a weak attempt to monetise by any means possible - and that means ignoring the true market value of such back catalogue material. When you can buy entire series of Blackadder or Spaced for £10/15, there's absolutely no incentive to hand over your hard-earned cash for digital video files which will be awful quality in comparison AND most likely locked to a single machine with some form of DRM. When will rightsholders learn?

People wonder why P2P downloading and sharing of TV shows is so high... Well, this may go some way to explaining why. Consumers can't just be milked daily like unwitting Fresians. Using myself as an example now... I may be slightly atypical in my tech knowledge (I am an out and out geek) but these days, downloading a file via BitTorrent is remarkably trivial. There's many how-to guides on the web, easily accessible via Google, which instruct the user on how to choose and download a BitTorrent client, and most of them play very nicely with most network setups. Then, it's a quick stop to Google again (or a torrent site of your choice, depending on if any of your friends have recommended favourites) - I like EZTV for its quality and comprehensiveness.

What sets them above other trackers or collections of TV series torrents is that they are now roling out .tstream progressive-streaming of torrents, using the P2P-Next Swarm Player. It works remarkably well for recent episodes of most of the popular shows - I sometimes use it to watch The Colbert Report or The Daily Show if I've missed them on TV, because they're shown at stupid o'clock on FX and Paramount Comedy respectively (and I have better things to do with my time these days than to sit and wait for a show to start on linear television!)

Now to confess my fan credentials: I'm a massive Stargate fan, both of SG-1 and Atlantis, and BitTorrent keeps me current. I can download the 720p HD copies of each week's show less than 24 hours after they air in the US. and likewise I am a big fan (although not quite as devout) of Battlestar Galactica. I've used BitTorrent to watch these, and a fair few other shows (in no particular order: Firefly, Eureka, Family Guy, American Dad, The Unit, NCIS, Star Trek [before it was cancelled], Farscape... The list goes on). Many of these shows are either shown in corrupted forms on UK television (not shown in widescreen, shown out of order, shown much later than in the US, not shown in sync with US airing schedules, or one of any number of other things). We subscribe to Sky at home, and I am an awful one for boxsets - if I like a series, I'll buy its boxset(s), often without considering the financial consequences! I think I've spent (literally) hundreds of pounds on Firefly and Serenity licensed merchandise and DVD releases, including paying a true premium to import exclusive, limited edition versions (of boxsets I already have) from Australian retailers... Most recently even going so far as to buy an Xbox HD-DVD player and hacking it to work on my laptop (not hard) so I could watch the Serenity HD-DVD I'd bought six months prior to that!

What TV studios, and broadcasters, seem to be either unable or unwilling to realise is that while the Long Tail is there, and wagging furiously, nobody will pay the premium for digital video files when they can own a physical product for the same cost or less - and with no doubts as to the legality of whether they truly own that copy, unlike digital video files. DRM further devalues digital video; no kid wants to ride their bike with the stabilisers on when they're a fully competent rider, yet that to me is what DRM feels like to the consumer; "oh, no, I know we can trust you, but we're going to make sure, just in case, because you're still quite new to all of this". Stop being so condescending! Strip out the DRM and up the quality of the files, and maybe people will start buying the content - but only if the price is roughly half of what it currently is.

I don't care how broadcasters or content owners appease the rightsholders with these new parameters, but they'd better work something out (both the rightsholders and the organisations who turn out the content in the first place) because otherwise, nobody is going to earn anything from the digital media revolution - except the fans, who'll keep on downloading and sharing their favourite shows for free.

While I'm on a roll, here's an idea: why not pay the release groups who already do a truly excellent job to legally record, encode and release the content over BitTorrent, then work out some kind of marketplace scheme, based around a private tracker solution, where you pay a SMALL amount either per series or per episode and get a unique hash to connect to the tracker and download the file? I'd happily pay 75p per episode for a 720P copy, 35p or so for a standard definition version. The files would continue being encoded and released in the same manner: in open standards such as XviD and x264, allowing true interoperability across standalone and PC playback platforms. The only 'DRM' would be on the mechanism used to allow customers to connect to the bittorrent tracker in the first place to complete the download.

Regular P2P rules would still apply: if you constantly leech without seeding, you get barred from the tracker for a period of time, so it still encourages true P2P distribution, just as we all benefit from today, yet it means there's a controllable way for the content producers to recoup. It might take longer, but it'd be more fan-friendly. Another idea to retain the customer base would be to provide bonus credits, exchangeable for free or subsidised episodes - these could be accrued by simply 'seeding' the content they have already downloaded for a time after they have downloaded the file. This again is similar to how some private trackers currently operate, except the bonus credits can be swapped for 'upload credit' (thus improving their download:upload ratio). All the biggest private trackers rely on users continually sharing the majority of the content they've downloaded from others in order to keep the pool of available material available to the most users as fast as possible, and they are 'rewarded' for their continual seeding. Faster internet connections help, but the generosity of users towards fellow users is what keeps these private trackers going.

Why not capitalise on the P2P mentality many Internet users already have, and simply adapt the existing mechanisms to benefit everyone? Why - well, because companies are scared, and at the moment the Long Tail is wagging the dog in the wrong direction.

To the content creators: accept the truth that you will earn more by getting thousands of customers to pay a few pennies, as opposed to a hundred or so paying a hundred pennies or so. The commoditisation of digital content instantly knocked a huge slab off the perceived 'value' of anything you try to sell, and in truth you only have yourselves to blame for that. There will always be somewhere else to find your content, and often that alternative will be cheaper - or free... And while no fan of a TV show wants it to die out because the studio has run out of money, almost no fan will pay over the odds for a collection of 0s and 1s if the physical, comparatively unencumbered equivalent is available to buy for a much more reasonable price.

As long as DVD boxsets of my favourite shows are available, I'll buy them when I have the cash - but in the meantime, until I can download XviDs via BitTorrent for 50p each, legally, I'll still build up my collection of XviD AVIs, courtesy of the P2P community and the shows' loyal fanbases.

So - hurry up and get with the plan, online retailers! You're missing your golden opportunity! Just experiment a bit and I'm sure you'll find most of the hard work has already been done for you... Be brave, go on, just a little bit, I'm confident that you'd soon find more than enough people almost falling over themselves to 'go legit' (myself included)! With the current state of play however, that won't be happening any time soon - and we consumers won't be the ones to concede first in what is fast becoming a modern-day war of attrition.

There's Zombie Movies, and then there's UGC Zombie Movies...

2008-07-21T00:07:00.004+01:00

... No, I'm not talking about zombie movies shown at the now-defunct chain of UK cinemas. Smartypants.

Although I'm not sure how it'll turn out, it's still fun to follow the progress of a film while it's in production - and in this case, I'm just glad to see that someone's making the effort to try something new. What am I on about? The world's first User-Generated-Content Zombie Movie, that's what. Oh, and BBC Three, ever keen to appeal to the 16-30 tech-aware demographic, is running a series around the making-of of this entirely.

The person behind it all? An enterprising soul by the name of Bryony, and she's documenting her progress right up to the film's release date on Hallowe'en on both the BBC Three site and her own blog. Not as big budget as the thought-provoking A Swarm Of Angels project, but sometimes the low-budget, more unpredictable projects yield the most exciting results.

Hurray for the interwebs!