David Isenberg has performed a public service by posting the schedule of upcoming Senate Commerce Committee hearings covering the gamut of topics feeding into the Telecom Act Rewrite. He also offers useful links to the webcasts of these hearings. The first hearing on indecency (David lists the topic as “decency” but that could be a typo…or a statement of some kind) is slated for January 20 and the last hearing is on March 14 and the topic is Wall Street and Telecommunications.
Yesterday and in an earlier post I reported on claims that MySpace was blocking its users’ access to online video service YouTube, and also censoring blog posts complaining about this blocking. According to the latest post by MySpace user and blogger Salvor, “MySpace censorship continues.”
It seems that censorship of videoclips on Myspace is very unpredictable. It seem it has nothing to do with p*rnography but seem to be because of business interests. Is the following statement true? “At a Citigroup investor conference, Rupert Murdoch…outlined future plans for MySpace.com. He said the company plans to add a video download feature where users can post and share videos”. If it is true it explains the censorship of videoclips but makes the situation much worse than I thought.
Salvor cites “a comment someone wrote on [his] flickr photo” that suggests MySpace may be blocking access to Revver.com which, like YouTube, is an online video posting service.
Anytime I post videos in comments or even just on my page the links come up as broken. Even if I just write revver>.com<…it comes up blank…Its full censorship of any media that is not affiliated with MyspaceFOX. Write Myspace and tell them you want your video and music files back
Salvor goes on to say that he tested out this claim and confirmed that “You can not write revver.com or link to videoclips on revver on Myspace.”
While some of these problems could be technical glitches or “simple misunderstandings,” it also seems quite possible that NewsCorp/MySpace is experimenting with selective blocking of “competing” services to gauge the likely impacts of doing it on a larger scale. If using this form of Walled Garden construction only generates a handful of complaints (600 complaints is a pretty small number compared to 47 million members), then such blocking may be viewed as a smart business move by News Corp. management.
And the way the MySpace’s response was reported by the Independent suggests the blocking may very well have been intentional:
A spokesman for MySpace said it would not explain how the blocking of YouTube came about, nor how it was resolved, nor whether in future it would continue to block links to rival websites or censor messages between MySpace customers.
And there are other sounds of garden wall construction at News Corp. For example, Cynthia yesterday reported here and here that News Corp.’s U.S. satellite company, DirecTV, appears to be on the verge of an investment providing it with access to a WiMAX wireless broadband network, which would provide the media giant with a bypass network to support its own alternative to the Two Tiered Internet being built by telcos and cable operators.
The reported MySpace blocking incidents, the News Corp. WiMAX investment and the ongoing discussion of DRM and other “wall-building” tools, brings me back to this comment by Observer Online editor Rafael Behr.
The News Corp strategy can be simply pieced together: take possession of the web allotments that all but the most hardened geeks depend on to pitch their blogging tents, then rent them out; sweeten the deal with privileged access to music and movies. The goal must be to marshal the energy that bloggers currently expend on creating their own content into the consumption of industry-manufactured, pay-per-view content. Big Media want to retain the marketable frisson of Citizen Media and weed out the current culture of activism. The way to achieve this is by monopolising not only the copyright material that web users like to play with, but the tools that make it so easy for them to play.
I still believe there will continue to be space (though maybe not at MySpace) for content & service gardens to bloom free of walls and user-unfriendly toll-booths. And, to some extent, the more Walled Gardens that exist, the more competition there will be among them, which means some may adopt more open and user-friendly strategies.
But I also believe that we as citizens, and the public officials we elect, should pay close attention to where and how Walled Gardens are being built, and to consider and discuss what that means for our society, and whether the greater public good would ultimately be best served by something akin to cyberspace zoning rules, or some other forms of government action. To borrow a famous phrase: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 3:36 PM | Print | Comments (2)
Speaking today at Citigroup’s Global Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference, AT&T CFO Rick Lindner downplayed the criticism of the company’s idea of charging unaffiliated service and content providers for access to the broadband network. (Webcast can be found here.) “It’s no different today from what you see in other parts of the industry. Content providers are entering into agreements with wireless providers every day to provide content,” Lindner said.
He stressed that AT&T’s proposal to charge for upgraded or interconnected broadband throughput, or what some are now calling the two-tiered Internet, won’t hinder customers’ ability to access anything on the web. “We’re not going to block our customers from accessing…any content from their broadband or DSL connection,” he said. “However…the reality is that business models are changing and I think there are opportunities..to enter into commercial arrangements that are beneficial to both companies and beneficial to customers as well.”
“There always will be some tension between companies that own and develop content and companies that have customer bases, networks and distribution of content,” Lindner said.
On the franchising front, Lindner stuck to AT&T’s position that its Project Lightspeed video service, which uses the DSL platform for content delivery, is not subject to cable franchising. “I’d reiterate that when you talk about our Lightspeed platform, our Lightspeed platform is an IP-based interactive platform that is not subject to the franchise requirements,” he said.
Moreover, cities that want to kick up dust for AT&T in this context might be sorry, he seemed to imply. “We’re working with a number of municipalities that welcome the jobs and the prospects this will bring,” he said. “We will guide investment dollars to those areas where we have a clear line of sight to the development of those services.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:37 PM | Print | Comments (0)
David Berlind continues the discussion of DRM and Walled Gardens. Describing DRM as “wall-building material,” he says Apple, Microsoft and “now Google…[are] in a bout of may the best stovepipe win…returning the industry to the stovepipe structure that the Internet’s core protocol (TCP/IP) once promised to eliminate.”
Citing Larry Page’s comment at CES that “What we’ve seen with iTunes is that having a pretty good user experience is important,” David says:
Page is 100 percent correct. What Apple has proven with the way it has integrated its iTunes Music Store with the Internet, iTunes software (for Windows or OS X) and its iPods (and to some extent the iTunes phones from Motorola) is that if you can build an absolutely pristine user experience, people will take whatever drug goes with it no questions asked. Today, Fairplay — Apple’s form of DRM — is that drug. And it’s very addicting. Most people who are addicted to Fairplay-protected content (purchased through the iTunes Music Store) have no idea how difficult it will be to exit Apple’s walled garden should they choose to do so down the road (for example, if the latest greatest coolest hippest device that everyone must have isn’t sprinkled with Apple’s holy water).
Noting that “DRM is rough stuff,” David suggests that “identify management systems…the [identity] layer of the stack just below [DRM]” is an “even rougher” wall building tool.
Today, DRM is invariably based on your identity: some key token or combination of tokens like your e-mail address and a credit card that affirms your uniqueness from everyone else out there in userland. And if you think all the different DRM schemes are incompatible with other, try imagining the identity management systems that lie underneath them.
David suggests that incompatible identity management systems could seriously hobble the nascent “mashup” sector of the software and web services industry:
But, the mashup ecosystem is just getting started…there’s real interest in mashing up mission critical enterprise applications — the kind where identity management is a pre-requisite…What happens if the two systems a developer is trying to mash together into an identity-aware mashup use two completely different identity management schemes? Back in the 1999/2000 timeframe, when one of my responsibilities was to oversee the integration of Web sites like job matchmaker Dice.com into ZDNet (two sites that are identity-aware), reconciling their incompatible namespaces was an impossible task that require a significant amount of custom development. Now, I’m just trying to imagine this sort of integration — mashup style — for the masses (of mashup developers) and I don’t see identity aware systems getting bolted together as easily as the first wave of mashups were hooked up.
Let me rephrase: Is DRM simply a blade on the identity management system razor and are there a whole bunch of other blades that we’re not paying attention to?
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 11:40 AM | Print | Comments (0)
AOL announced today that it has acquired video search company Truveo, further solidifying the online company’s video search ambitions — AOL bought video search pioneer Singingfish in 2003.
Truveo claims its competitive advantage lies in its “Visual Search” technique, which extends far behind indexing text descriptions of video and actually takes into account the visual characteristics of the content, leading to a more comprehensive video search tool. AOL said in its official statement that once it has incorporated Truveo,
AOL.com will deliver a single, comprehensive and robust video ‘one-stop-shop’ search experience that provides consumers with the access, functionality, premium assets, original content, and advanced search tools for unparalleled online video discovery.
This addition, combined with AOL’s growing video portfolio and its deal with Google, which presumably will cover video search, is clearly another marker by the transitioning online giant in the online video business.
Update: According to Reuters, AOL’s purchase of Truveo, which closed late last year, was the company’s biggest purchase in 2005. Still, as the Reuters article points out, the Truevo buy was nonetheless smaller than AOL’s $435 million acquisition of Advertising.com in 2004…huh? Is that like saying it’s bigger than a breadbox but smaller than, say, a refrigerator?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:39 AM | Print | Comments (0)Never has so much ink been spilled over something that no one can predict. Now that CES is over, all eyes turn to Macworld, which kicks off today in San Francisco, and given Steven Jobs knack for announcing watershed products at this show, the press and blogosphere are all over the place in guessing what Jobs will announce this year.
But it’s a pretty empty exercise. ThinkSecret has a round-up of all the rumors here. CNN Money has this piece that lays out all the speculation, which mirrors the run-down in ThinkSecret.
USA Today has this article. The Washington Post has this article, which pretty much focuses on the futility of even guessing what Jobs will announce. The Post’s Yuki Noguchi writes:
Speculating about the speech in anticipation has become a kind of geeky parlor game, and this year is no exception. As for official comment from Apple? Well, that would be like opening your gifts on Dec. 24. “We have no comment on that at all. Not until Steve gets up on [stage for] the keynote,” said Anuj Nayar, a spokesman for Apple.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:05 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The Independent reports that “[a]ngry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites.” Thanks to Barb at thesocialsoftwareweblog, we picked up on this during the last days of December.
The incident highlights the culture clash triggered by the joining of community-oriented MySpace to the News Corp. mass media conglomerate. But it seems too early to tell whether it’s a sign of serious problems ahead or simply an awkward moment on the learning curve of a company that will ultimately find a way to profitably bridge the cultural divide. News Corp. and Rupert Murdoch have surprised the skeptics before, and a USA Today story published today suggests that the site continues to grow in popularity, with a whopping 47.3 million members (the Independent, which reported 38 million members must have been using somewhat out of date numbers).
The Independent, which includes quotes from some digruntled MySpace bloggers, sums up the incident this way:
[S]ubscribers to MySpace…discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. The intervention by News Corp in the traditionally open-access world of the web - in particular the alteration of personal user profiles - provoked a storm of angry posts in online “blogs”.
The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites such as Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, News Corp relented and restored the links. However, MySpace managers promptly shut down the blog forum on which members had complained about the interference. An online notice said the problem was the result of “a simple misunderstanding”.
A spokesman for MySpace said it would not explain how the blocking of YouTube came about, nor how it was resolved, nor whether in future it would continue to block links to rival websites or censor messages between MySpace customers.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 12:10 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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