Digitalwerks

As a follow up to my previous posts about the G1 Android phone from T-Mobile (and Google!), and from a personal interest, I wanted to gather as much information about the phone’s video capabilities as I could.  In general, there has not been much information available about the detailed video specifications of the G1, which has proven somewhat frustrating to those people interested in using it as a portable viewing device.

Word came down today from boxee and Hulu that the content owners behind Hulu do not want their shows to be available through the boxee interface.  According to Avner, the CEO of boxee, the two companies have been negotiating the last couple of weeks to prevent the cut off, but without success.

I’m going to have to assume this move makes sense from the perspective of NBC and Fox, because it certainly does not from a user’s point of view.  The stream of Hulu content that a boxee user viewed was precisely the same as what one saw from the Hulu website, including the embedded commercials that are the source of Hulu’s revenue.  The only thing missing was the wrap around interface of the site itself, which is not all that compelling in my opinion. So now a boxee user interested in watching The Office or Dollhouse will likely just get it off of Bittorrent, with all the commercials stripped.  Not sure how that’s a win for anybody.

Maybe the content owners heard that boxee got some VC funding and think they are deserving of a cut, but that is like them demanding money from the creators of Firefox, because the browser is the most popular manner users are accessing the Hulu website.  Silly.

I would suspect, with no real knowledge, that it would take the boxee team literally minutes to figure out a way to keep the Hulu content coming through their interface, no matter what the content owners say, but Avner and company are respectful and will not do that.  I’m sure others, though, will gladly take up the challenge and create plug-ins or hacks to get around any hurdles Hulu puts up.  In other words, the result of this action will likely mirror what’s going on at The Pirate Bay Trial right now, with the perceived outlaws getting a ton more publicity and the flow of content hindered not at all despite the wishes of Hollywood.

Also interesting is that this is a serious misstep on Hulu’s part (regardless of who actually made the decision).  Jason Kilar and his team have done a pretty amazing job walking a fine line between users, technology, and their content backers, but this really lays bare the tensions underneath the surface of the site.  This is not likely to be the last time such issues crop up, and Hulu is going to have to be very creative and sure-footed to maintain a positive relationship with their users.  It may prove an impossible task in the long run.

Clearly not taking to heart the Leia maxim I pointed out recently, another content owner organization is taking to the legal system to solve their piracy problems.  In this case, though, it is the Swedish government, on behalf of Hollywood et al., that is trying to eliminate a pesky business model upsetting technology, The Pirate Bay.  Janko has the all the important information over at NewTeeVee, but to really get a flavor of events in Stockholm, everyone should check out the trial site maintained by the legendary Pirate Bureau themselves.  It gives a great flavor of the intelligence, humor and overall snottiness of the Pirate Bay crew that has endeared them to millions of pirates (and others) over the last few years.

I predict two things to come from this trial.  

First, Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde (the three main admins behind the site) will from a media relations standpoint run rhetorical rings around their opponents.  They are experts at it and the spectacle will actually be the most entertaining element of the trial, without a doubt.  

Second, and more important in the long run, nothing that happens legally at the trial will make any difference in the real world.  Guilty, not guilty, it won’t matter.  If the Pirate Bay site is taken down, if the admins are put in jail, if they receive a huge fine, etc., it will have no material impact on the availability or speed at which illegitimate content gets shared via Bittorrent or other networks.  Other sites will just pick up the slack.  Nothing will be achieved, other than to create far more publicity for the site and to engender more sympathy for the admins themselves.

Both the New York Times and The Economist published articles in the last couple of days examining what is happening with online video.  Brian Stelter and Brad Stone in the NYTimes talked to the MPAA, Eric Garland of Big Champagne and the owner of the streaming site SuperNova Tube; the authors conclude that the pirates are “winning” the battle against the studios.  The Economist instead looked at Hulu and declares it the winner over YouTube and Joost, and feel that Hulu proves the superiority of the advertiser-supported in-browser streaming over download or separate application playback.

Janko at P2P-Blog has already pointed out that the NYTimes mistakenly placed TorrentFreak in Germany, not the correct Netherlands (hi Ernesto!) but applauds Stelter and Stone for high-lighting the MPAA’s admission that lawsuits are not going to be a long term answer.  And the reader comments to the article very rightly point out that the figures cited by the studios are utterly meaningless, and that TV and films should probably be analyzed separately because of the very different geographic and financial models of their distribution.  The Economist instead looks beyond piracy for the most part, but does lump it into its criticism of Y0uTube as a visually confusing and unsavory place for professional content (read ad dollars) because of all the user-generated content.

A few points occur to me in reading both these articles back-to-back.  First, the MPAA, I believe, quite deliberately elides any notion of quality in their statements about pirated content.  Yes, as the article says, The Dark Knight was available for download within a few hours of its release to theaters this summer.  However, as previously shown here, the only copies that existed for the first seven weeks of the film’s release were extremely low quality camcorder recordings (a decent copy didn’t show up on P2P networks until September 9, HD not before November 21st).  And considering that The Dark Knight is now the 2nd highest grossing film of all time, those cam copies did little to nothing to impact the film’s financial success, at least at the domestic box office.  Piracy likely does impact DVD sales and box office outside of the US, but certainly not in the widely exaggerated claims of the MPAA that considers every single download to be a loss of a sale.

As The Economist rightly points out, streaming is an entirely different beast from download, and combined with a genuinely interesting catalogue of content, Hulu has attracted a sizable audience and in a form that advertisers are relatively comfortable supporting.  The other YouTube competitors, including Veoh, Joost, Revver, Metacafe, and Stage6 all followed what they saw as the YouTube model, i.e., grow an audience through liberal upload policies for user generated content and then use that audience to attract premium content and advertising revenue.  As even the leviathan YouTube has shown, advertisers are just not interested in UGC, so it was going to take something far more managed like Hulu to achieve any kind of critical mass.  As a veteran of the Stage6 experience, I can personally attest to the difficulty in  allowing uploaded content while keeping a site free of porn and illegitimate content, not to mention while burdened by the bizarre strictures of the DMCA ruling.  Sadly, Stage6 ultimately had to close down precisely because it could not find an acceptable balance between attracting eyeballs and paying for the bandwidth those eyeballs were using, not to mention the ever present threat (and eventual reality) of lawsuits.

Of course Hulu has its problems too, particularly around the geographic limitations that rights-holders force it to respect.  And it’s not really sure that the current model for Hulu is self-sustaining, depending as it does on rather fluid advertising dollars and the continued cooperation of the participating networks, something that is far from assured as the re-launch of cbs.com may demonstrate.

Based on my experience, I believe the key dynamic that brings the two stories together to give us a deeper understanding of what is “working” on line is the geographic element.  Wide-scale video sharing took off in the wake of DVD and broadband, but it took off far more strongly in Europe than it did in North America (just look at the market penetration of DivX enabled DVD players to track that phenomenon).  The key driver was the desire to see movies and tv shows that had high consumer awareness but no distribution, that is, high profile, highly marketed films or shows that had been released in the US but were delayed in Europe, so the only avenues available were illegitimate channels.  As communications and marketing become more global, instantaneous, and community driven, they rapidly move beyond any effective notion of geographic boundaries, especially among tech-savvy online participants.  If Hulu can be said to work, it is only in the US context, just as the BBC iPlayer does in the UK, but neither really work outside of it, and in fact likely drive viewers to precisely the kinds of illegal distribution channels mentioned in the NYTimes piece.  Until the geographic restriction/opening window issues get resolved, it will be hard to say that online video “works” as well as it should, or as well as users demand.  And piracy will continue to provide an experience that meets those demands, regardless of the wishes of the content creators.

As reported by MG Singler over at VentureBeat, there is evidence to believe Apple successfully pressured Google to keep the multi-touch feature off of the first Android phone, the G1 from HTC, even though the phone has the capability to implement it.  

If this is true, or if Google just feared what Apple would do if they implemented multi-touch, I have to say, it would severely disappoint this G1 owner.  I fully realize that Android has compromises in regards to openness and hackability (the key features that drew me to it in the first place), but if Google of all people is so easily bullied away from innovation, that raises real questions about the value of the Android platform over the long haul. Hopefully this was a minor misstep that Google will learn from and never repeat, but it certainly bears very close scrutiny in the future.

Public Knowledge, via Clay Shirky, via BoingBoing, is reporting that the Capitol Hill lobbyists for the MPAA are rushing to get “network monitoring provisions” into the broadband stimulus package before Congress right now. Apparently they believe that if they get to look at every bit of data that passes through US ISP’s, then Hollywood will be able to stop the illegal sharing of video content.

According to the rules of Internet memes, I will quote from Star Wars to describe the likely result of this, “The more you tighten you grip Tarken, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”  In other words, the people who create, develop and maintain file-sharing networks and P2P technology are not going to hear this news, shrug their shoulders and give up.  They will innovate around it, and come up with something that is even harder for the MPAA, the RIAA, BREIN, etc. to combat.  An easy solution would simply be to encrypt the traffic. All the major Usenet providers already offer an encrypted solution and I’m sure something could be figured out for large-scale Bittorrent and direct download sites.

Of course a better solution would be to just have the ISP’s themselves stand up for themselves and their customers and rightly point out that this idea is ridiculous.  Or to have Congress do the same.  But I’m not counting on that, and nor will the P2P community I suspect.

Every year Andy Baio does a very cool thing, he tracks how quickly the films nominated for the Oscars got leaked online to P2P networks.  It’s interesting for a number of reasons, but primarily for demonstrating how unreliable the actual Academy members themselves are in keeping Hollywood’s goods off the Internet.  Every year the results are relatively similar: usually within a week, or sometimes a bit longer, after an Academy screener is released a version of the movie is available for download via Bittorrent (to say nothing of Usenet, Rapidshare, etc.).  What would be interesting to see, however, is if the illegal downloading activity spiked after the nominations came out, to see if the file-sharing community is as affected by the hype surround Oscar nominations as the box office often is.  Alas, that would be very difficult to study with any great confidence since the data is not really available.  In general, though, the most reliable analysis of Bittorrent behavior is provided by TorrentFreak in their weekly top 10 lists, which generally show a strong correlation between mainstream audience taste and downloaders’ preferences, with some notable exceptions, that is, pretty much anything Science Fiction.

A couple of categories get overlooked by Andy, however, including the documentary and foreign nominees, and also whether any of the nominated films are available in HD resolutions.  The documentary and foreign films are easy to skip since they barely appear on the radar of most film-goers to begin with, and HD is not something that is too relevant to Andy’s study as all of the official screeners are standard definition DVD’s.

As someone very interested in foreign and documentary films, however, I wanted to see what I could find out about their availability for download.  The reality of file trading community is that while it tends to reflect a young, male, tech-savvy demographic, it is also vast, diverse, and maturing.  Napster was almost 10 years ago, and the first large-scale video sharing happened after 1998 with the release of DeCSS, early versions of DivX, and The Matrix DVD.  In other words, there are a large number of file traders who have been doing it for some time, and their tastes have likely developed as well.  It would not surprise me if there is a large amount children’s video available for download, as the initial generation of traders got older and started having kids.  But fundamentally, a savvy video downloader likely has a far better library of available content than any one legitimate service could possibly provide, and that includes the relatively esoteric world of foreign and documentary films, and while not every one of the Oscar nominees are currently uploaded, quite a few of them are.
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