Variety’s Ben Fritz has this great piece today on the status, or at least the subtext, of Apple’s negotiations with the Hollywood studios to sell full-length movies on iTunes. As is well-known by now, the sticking point in getting films on iTunes is Apple CEO Steve Job’s demands that all movies be priced at a single flat rate.
This uniform pricing strategy paid off in spades for Apple when it came to music, much to the regret of the record industry which has been all but broken by Apple’s unwillingness to revisit music pricing terms. Now, Hollywood is facing the same unstoppable force that is Steve Jobs.
It’s that type of clout that makes many in the film industry nervous as Jobs and Apple negotiate to extend iTunes to feature-length films, a natural step after the store added TV shows last fall. Film moguls are eager to get access to the huge base of customers, especially as an antidote to piracy. But Jobs’ reputation as a brilliant yet arrogant executive used to getting what he wants has left many in Hollywood wondering whether the new-media titan will prove a friend or foe.
None of the studios (including, apparently, Disney, of which Jobs is the single largest shareholder) want to be the first to do a deal with Apple. The article also claims that the studios are trying to build up pacts with alternative online film distributors such as Amazon, Movielink and BitTorrent — I doubt Apple is the least bothered by these distant, distant rivals.
By all accounts, everybody is afraid of Steve Jobs, his tough demands, his intimidating intelligence and well-documented temper. Folks are going to be even more fearful after reading this piece. In defense of Apple’s notorious secrecy, Jobs himself tracked down and grilled a Daily Variety reporter who wrote a piece on some leaked Apple development. The scary part: he reached her on a private line of a rented condo and she hadn’t given the phone number to anybody.
When Daily Variety broke the news that Pixar had hired writers for the pitch that became the 2007 release “Ratatouille,” Jobs tracked the reporter down at the Sundance Film Festival, demanding to know her sources and threatening to fire the film’s writers. He called her on the private line of a rented condo — a number she had not given out to anyone. She still doesn’t know how he found it.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:30 PM | Print | Comments (0)
As consumer bandwidth demands escalate, broadband providers keep upping the ante with faster and faster services — Verizon’s FiOS 15 Mbps/2 Mbps service and Comcast’s equally blazing FiOS-killer are just the latest examples. Now, along comes Westford, MA-based cable TV tech company Narad Networks with a plan to help cable operators deliver 100 Mbps/100 Mbps service, the first time I’ve seen a tech vendor pitch this level of speed to the U.S. industry (Arris is testing 100 Mbps service with NTL in the U.K.)
And Narad isn’t blowing smoke — the company has been testing its residential bandwidth-expanding technology with Cablevision Systems on Long Island. (I would expect Cablevision to be among the first operators to deploy’s Narad’s full-blown turbo-charged solution, maybe even next year.)
Here’s how it works: Narad’s technology basically consists of a new Ethernet switch that works in a lot of configurations, but for the residential 100 Mbps/100 Mbps idea it sits at various coax tap locations in the operator’s hybrid-fiber network. All traffic — Ethernet from fiber and video and voice services from coax — is then fed through the switch and shipped to the customer’s home.
In the home, a Narad modem filters the different types of content so that video goes to the set and symmetrical Ethernet content goes to the PC (or ultimately wherever it’s needed).
One big problem: most cable systems are built according to fiber-to-the-node blueprints and in order to get the maximum speeds that Narad is promising, operators are going to have to push fiber closer to the consumer, or push fiber to the “curb.” However, in most situations this isn’t an costly prospect. Narad thinks operators can get the fiber extension done for $50/home. The product also works with fiber-to-the-node, fiber-to-the-curb and fiber-to-the-premises.
I talked to Narad CEO Michael Collette this afternoon about this news — I don’t often ask to be briefed by vendors, but this time my curiousity was peaked.
He said that most cable operators won’t jump to the extreme of 100 Mbps/100 Mbps but will take it in increments to pump up capacity. “Most will start with smaller bites but it will depend on whether they are under competitive pressure,” Collette said, referring to locations where Verizon is rolling its fiber-to-the-premises services.
Some operators are eyeing the idea of moving to an all-IP platform for all services, and 100 Mbps is enough for everything — voice, video and data. “There are certain MSOs that are looking at next generation architecture and they might be phasing in plans next year,” he said. “The 100 Mbps, which is up above existing video, data and voice, it’s enough for all voice, data and services into the home.”
Collette’s reference to the “up above existing video, data and voice service” relates to Narad’s use of spectrum outside the normal operating frequencies used by cable systems. The company initially invented the technology so that cable companies could roll out commercial high-speed services by squeezing T1-like capacity out of their networks.
But…cable companies are moving as quickly on commercial services as some in the industry anticipated a few years back. For one thing, it’s expensive to serve businesses and for another, it’s not cable’s expertise.
Narad decided to leverage its technology for the booming residential marketplace. “The stuff we did for commercial was cool but it was sort of productized in a way that the costs to deploy it were a bit high,” Collette said.
Cable operators may not be quite ready to deploy 100 Mbps/100 Mbps service — some execs wonder exactly what consumers would do with that much capacity. “I find that kind of a hard thing to understand. The number of things we don’t do today in the economy because there is not enough pipe out there” are too numerous to count, Collette says, such as remote data storage (e.g. backing up a PC online), two-way video conferencing and streaming video security services.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:47 PM | Print | Comments (0)
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has failed to win a majority among his fellow commissioners on the issue of multicasting and has pulled the item from the upcoming FCC meeting agenda. Even though the FCC has a Republican majority, Martin was unable, apparently, to persuade the latest addition to the Commission — Republican Robert McDowell — that cable operators should be forced to carry not only the primary digital signal of local television stations but also the additional niche channels that some broadcasters are preparing to launch.
This issue is truly a divisive matter even among Republicans — Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) supports Martin on multicasting while House Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) opposed him on this mandatory carriage requirement. Meanwhile, everyone understands that cable operators, who have been fighting the must-carry fight for 25 years, would litigate all the way up to the Supreme Court any Commission rules that forced them to carry two, three, four or five local television signals where they had only reluctantly carried one.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:41 AM | Print | Comments (0)
In another coup for Cambridge, MA-based Internet video pioneer Brightcove, Sony BMG is launching a Brightcove-powered site called Musicbox Video. The site is offering free access to Sony music and related videos including interviews, live performances and footage from Sony’s extensive catalog.
In a move not typical for a record company (and Sony in particular, which just finished a bruising legal battle over its damaging “rootkit” DRM technology), Sony is encouraging users to link to the site, thereby pushing its music and video further out onto the Internet. Brightcove scores big with this deal — not only is Brightcove supplying the technology to make the channel work, it is also selling ads to support the effort. DreamWorks Animation SKG and HP will be among the first advertisers on the site, promoting the release of a new animated film, “Over the Hedge.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:52 AM | Print | Comments (0)
After looking at the new revised Stevens bill over the weekend, I asked whether the new section containing an “Internet Consumer Bill of Rights” isn’t almost, but not quite, what net neutrality advocates need. While the bill doesn’t outright ban discrimination, and it still bars the FCC from actively regulating, it also preserves the consumer’s right to access any Internet content or application. More importantly, it extends First Amendment free speech rights to the Internet.
Now, it’s clear that Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) intended for this section to be a compromise to satisfy net neutrality critics — a move aimed to remove impediments to the bill’s passage this Congress. Drew’s take on this:
Most significantly, this new draft makes good on the pledge Stevens made, 11 days ago, to significantly modify the Net Neutrality provisions of the legislation. Indeed, an entire new section is present — “Internet Consumer Bill of Rights Act” — goes so far as to “apply” the First Amendment to Bell companies that would attempt to “limit, restrict, ban, prohibit or otherwise regulate content on the Internet because of the religious views, political views, or any other views expressed in such content unless specifically authorized by law.” All of the Bell and cable companies have already said that they wouldn’t block or impede the abilty of consumers to access such sites.
Reuters’ Jeremy Pelofsky also recognizes the new “Bill of Rights” as a step toward accomodating net neutrality critics of telecom reform legislation.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:14 AM | Print | Comments (1)
Blogs We Read
