Flash on the iPhone is a technical not political problem
 There has been a lot of speculation lately that politics between Adobe and Apple are causing the delay in bringing Flash to the iPhone. However, beyond proving that there's tremendous demand for Flash support on the iPhone I believe these political ramblings are irrelevant. While Adobe and Apple have had their differences in the past I think this is a purely a technical issue not a political one. Apple does not have an alternative that competes with Flash. There is no conflict of interest. Flash has an install base of over 90% of all computers 1 and it is now the norm on websites for both advertising and video playback. As such Flash is an integral part of the Internet experience. Finally, as mentioned, if the amount of news and blog posts about Adobe / Apple politics is any indicator there is clearly tremendous demand from iPhone fans and developers. And why shouldn't iPhone owners expect Flash support on their iPhones? Wasn't it Apple who stated in one of the original iPhone ads: "This is not a watered down version of the Internet, or the mobile version of the Internet, or the 'kinda sorta looks like the Internet', Internet. It's just the Internet on your phone." So the demand, the interest, and the benefit are there for all parties including iPhone fans, iPhone developers, Adobe and Apple. What then is the problem? Here's my stab at the issues: - Potential hardware dependencies in Flash such as video codec support may mean many of the most popular Flash applications may simply not work well or at all on the current iPhone hardware.
- Limitations in processing power on the iPhone may lead to inconsistent or poor experiences with Flash applications in general
- Processor requirements of flash may well severely drain and reduce battery life.
- AT&T's wireless network is extremely limited, thus extraneous Flash applications in web pages such as advertisements might diminish the whole iPhone Internet experience.
Off hand I can think of one simple solution that may mitigate many of these limitations.  In order to prevent advertisements and other Flash applications from needlessly using up processor cycles, draining the battery and wasting precious wireless data bandwidth the iPhone interface could simply require an extra click before a Flash application begins to load in a web page. Anyone who's a fan of the FireFox Flashblock extension will understand what I mean. Flash applications are merely represented in the page by a Flash button and will not load / play unless first clicked upon. This simple UI enhancement would solve the problem of needlessly wasting limited bandwidth and processor cycle by allowing users to ignore all Flash applications except those which they specifically choose to load. Alternatively in order to avoid taxing AT&T's network Apple could block flash usage while on AT&T's network all together, but don't think this will be necessary. Labels: adobe, apple, ATT, firefox, flash, flashblock, iPhone
The perfect laptop sleeve for your macbook air
 The perfect laptop sleeve for your new macbook air. :) Wonder Threads has come up with the Inter-Office laptop sleeve that looks a lot like the real thing, but is made of poly microfiber complete with red tabs and a neoprene lining. Via: MoCo Loco: MoCo SubmissionsLabels: apple, design, mac book, moco logo, product design
RSS + Bittorrent distribution for TV and online video
The Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) has made their most popular TV series available DRM-free via BitTorrent, even better it's available as a subscribe-able RSS feed via software like Miro. Shown here is the subscribe-able feed in Miro the popular open source video aggregater. I just wish the show was available in English. :)  Entire and partial news programs like CNN, ABC and CBS nightly news are already widely available via subscribe-able RSS feed (podcast), and the Daily Show, Colbert Report and other highly popular TV shows have been widely distributed unofficially via similar means on TVRSS.net, but this may be the first TV show to officially embrace this technology pioneered by video bloggers. I expect that this form of distribution (RSS + Bittorrent) will become increasingly popular with TV producers as they realize it does not threaten their traditional advertising supported models. To start with I expect PBS, BBC or other distributors less threatened by peer based distribution (P2P) culture to officially embrace the RSS + bittorrent distribution model. NPR has already widely embraced RSS distribution (aka. podcasting) for audio programing with over 500 subscribe-able channels for their radio shows, and PBS has a dozen or so subscribe-able video podcasts though they are currently just partial shows or show clips. I expect timely news programs such as Frontline will be the first to officially embrace the RSS + bittorrent distribution model as bittorrent scales much better for popular, timely, high definition content, much like the Daily Show and Colbert Report. RSS + bittorrent distribution is a counter point to new proprietary distribution services from content creators like Hulu.com (currently only available via private beta) and NBC.com and which are only currently available by visiting and watching programing on website, have no subscription mechanisms, and are not available beyond desktop computers.... i.e. on your TV or hand held device. There are also alternative systems like Joost and Veoh but while these proprietary 3rd part networks have a high degree of usability and interface polish as is typical of proprietary solutions they lack the flexibility to scale to handle the wide variety of newly available content on the web and the various cellular, hand held and set top box platforms. Of course there are also solutions from Apple, and Tivo for television producers, but these are increasingly complimentary to RSS / Podcasting and perhaps in the future even added bittorent distribution. What makes RSS + bittorrent such a powerful combination is it's increasingly openly accessible to virtually anyone who wishes to distribute media online via various services, and RSS / podcasting is already starting to be adopted by set top box, cellular, and handheld manufacturers like Apple ( AppleTV, iPod & iPhone), Tivo, Nokia, Akimbo and many others. Bittorrent is the final piece of the puzzle allowing extremely rapid scaling for the distribution of high definition content but it may take much longer to popularize do the greater technical requirements in implementation on various hardware platforms. Labels: apple, appletv, bbc, bittorrent, colbert report, daily show, distribution, drm, Frontline, iPhone, Miro, Nokia, NPR, PBS, podcasting, rss, television, tivo, tvrss.net, video blogging
3 major things that annoy me about Apple Quicktime on the web
It has became abundantly clear that Apple Quicktime has some major failings for video playback on the web. There are many issues but right now I just want to focus on three extremely obvious things Apple is doing wrong which is pushing video makers, video watchers and video hosting sites away from quicktime. 1) lack of fullscreen playback in web browsers 2) lack of support for linux 3) conflicting keyboard shortcuts make playing quicktime videos in Firefox and safari painful. Quicktime has no fullscreen playback in the browserI could name off the top of my head over two dozen video hosting websites from Blip.tv to Youtube to Vimeo.com that have fullscreen playback as a stock feature of their video players. Nearly every single video hosting company today uses Flash as their default playback mechanism and nearly every one has a button right in the default player that allows for the immediate playback of their videos in full screen. Counterpoint this to Apple Quicktime. Apple just recently stopped requiring users to pay $30 to buy a Quicktime Pro license to be able to play videos in fullscreen mode among other things. Having to pay to play videos fullscreen has always been a thorn in the side of quicktime authors and their fans and thank you apple for finally allowing fans to view videos in any manner they choose... but... Apple has not included in either the menu or as button in the web browser player a fullscreen playback option. In an age where everyone and their mother has fullscreen playback as a default feature of their video Apple has fallen way behind. No quicktime support for linuxI've been dabbling in linux for years. For the last year or so I've been using the very nice linux distribution Ubuntu on my primary desktop computer. My one major failing with the Ubuntu platform is there's no browser plugin for playing back all the quicktime formats in the browser. Quicktime is available for Windows so why hasn't Apple released a version of Quicktime for linux or at least worked with open source developers to create a plugin that will play back Quicktime videos in web browsers on linux. Clearly linux and particularly Ubuntu are a large part of the future of desktop computing. Macromedia Flash does have an available plugins for linux, which is yet another reason why it's so popular with video sharing sites. So why not apple? Apple Quicktime has conflicting keyboard shortcuts in Firefox and SafariI recently upgraded to Firefox 2.0.0.8 (a very nice release) that makes the browser much more "mac-like" in both appearance and usability. There is however one thing that they carried over from Safari that's just plain wrong. Firefox now uses the key commands "command-option-left arrow / right arrow" to switch between tabs. They copied this shortcut combination from Safari. The problem is in their infinite wisdom the Safari team had used the same key commands to switch tabs as to play quicktime movies forward and in reverse. Therefore if you have have any Quicktime video in a web page and you flip through your tabs left or right it will automatically start the video playing in forward or reverse. Add more tabs with more videos and what you have is a major mess with multiple videos playing, your speakers squawking gibberish, and very quickly these videos start stuttering and skipping as your hard drive and your processor get over taxed and up comes the "multi-color spinning pizza of death" (or "the spinning beach ball of death" as some prefer to call it) mouse cursor as your system becomes somewhat unresponsive making it increasingly hard for you to undo what you've just started in .5 seconds by skipping between a few tabs using command-option-left / right. That my friends is piss poor experience and usability do to one of the most obvious errors in usability. First do know harm. Or better the number one rule of implementing quick keys: First make sure no other commands use the same key combination. We're talking pretty basic and obvious stuff here. I find it both funny and extremely bad that Apple, who's focus on usability is legendary, has completely missed this point with perhaps the most used application on the mac OS, Safari. I find it even more humorous that Firefox has replicated the issue by bringing the same keyboard shortcuts conflict to the Firefox browser. No doubt many people are running into this usability bug on a daily basis in some shape or form. The only workaround I know at present is to use control-tab and control-shift-tab in firefox to switch tabs. This works on mac, not sure about windows or linux. No idea on a work around in safari. You also cannot change these keyboard shortcuts in safari, firefox or quicktime with the Mac OS system wide "Keyboard Shortcuts" control panel because none of them can be selected via the menu so they're not scriptable. I've also checked the "about:config" settings in Firefox, and done some initial digging around in the system and library folders on the Mac OS. Still there appears to be no way to change these settings. If you know of any please leave a comment. :( In summaryIn summary it has become increasingly clear that Apple Quicktime supported formats such as MP4 have huge advantages when it comes to video syndication and distribution. They scale well to high definition, they're downloadable and portable unlike many Flash videos and they're playable on a wide range of devices from iPod's to Tivo to the Zune and Sony PSP. However, when it comes to web based playback of video Flash is kicking Apple and everyone else's butt (including Windows Media and Real Media). Flash has become so popular for web based playback because it has such highly customizable playback interface and streams so well. In many ways flash is fulfilling much of the promise of what many used to call "interactive television" or "interactive media". Instead of being able to click on the skirt of model as she walks down the runway to get more info on the item or purchase it... Instead of "choose your own adventure" in video interactivity has been primarily obsessed with a few key features such as the ability to share a video via a wide range of options and the ability to click through and view a whole host of alternative videos, content, links and meta information that goes with the video (and don't forget commenting). While these forms of interactivity are nothing like the slick ideas we were so focused on in the past they are in many ways far more powerful, robust, interactive and meaningful then anything we'd previously imagine. As I'm fond of saying: The future is nothing like we thought it would be and yet so much better. Where as purchasing a skirt worn by a model on a runway is one of those silly ideas of the past. The present reality of interactivity is thousands of people seeing a video on a website like youtube, sharing the url with their 14 million friends via IM email and other means, favoriting it, downloading it, remixing it, posting it to their own blogs and thereby potentially effecting great change in the "hearts and minds" of a nation. The later example may not be as slick and shiny an idea of interactivity as the first but in is in it's simplicity of technology and the sophistication and ubiquitous social nature far far more power. web-services As the market evolves instead of these online viewing and offline viewing paradigms converging they seem to be at least for the moment diverging. While the the iTunes Podcasting Directory and podcasting with it seems to go one direction web-services like youtube seem to be going another. Both are equally as important though. Meanwhile the core user group, video bloggers / video podcasters and the web-services that best represent their interests like Vimeo.com and Blip.tv are increasingly offering MediaRSS feeds that contain many different enclosure formats for playback in various situations including Flash for playback on the web, low res Quicktime for playback on the iPod and various hand held devices, and the latest greatest buzz high definition MP4 or h264 encoded videos for playback on HD television and/ or with video aggregators like Miro. The point is video will get more ubiquitous. Platforms will become more varied. They will become simultaneously higher definition and lower resolution. They will also simultaneously become longer in form and shorter. More personal and more aimed at entertaining or informing a general audience. Simultaneously more interactive and more passive.The cell phone and ubiquitously connected wifi handhelds like the iPhone are one of the next hot platforms. And more and more videoblogs are also finding their way onto high definition TV screens in the living room via media centers and set top boxes like the Tivo and AppleTV. And of course with great new linux distro's like Ubuntu 7.10, aka. Gutsy Gibbon, increasingly a larger share of the general public is going to be using operating systems other than Apple and Microsoft. Let's not forget all the proprietary operating systems in handheld devices and set top boxes either. While web playback is the key the video space is increasingly becoming about far more than just the two primary operating systems Apple and Microsoft. This is not be a winner take all game. In fact there's room for many different codecs and many different formats, sizes and resolutions. The web browser as in so many markets is the key platform. However as this market evolves whomever pays the most attention to and puts the most resources into bringing video these evolving markets like linux, cell phones and set top boxes is going to obviously take a key position in this market. Right now Flash has very quickly (really since the advent of youtube only a couple years ago) taken the upper hand with web based playback. Apple has a very strong position with portable devices with the iPod and AppleTV (bringing media to the pocket and the living room). Apple would also seem to have a lead in the cellular market with the iPhone, but Flash has very bright prospects there as well with it's ability to be customized for streaming and playback over 3g and wifi. We'll see how it all plays out. Labels: adobe, apple, firefox, flash, macromedia, quicktime, real media, the future, usability, videobloging, windows media
Universal Music snubbing Apple and its customers
Anymore I love reading about what the major music labels are doing, because it's so damn entertaining! Re: DailyTech - Universal Jumps to SpiralFrog's Free Downloads: iPods Not WelcomeIn what appears to be a snub to apple (like NBC's recent move from the Apple Store to Amazon.com) Universal music has chosen to sell it's music through a music service that doesn't work on the iPod, I assume it uses the irrelevant and unsuccessful Microsoft DRM, but the truth is it doesn't even matter. Has Universal ever been more irrelevant? They're behaving exactly like a spoiled child. This is a fight Universal fundamentally has no chance in the world of winning, because it's not about Apple. It's about them waking up and finally realizing that mp3 IS the standard. It's the only one true way to sell music in this era. A recap, first Universal makes Apple the king/master by demanding DRM on their music, apple delivers the only successful DRM option, then Universal rails against the master they've made. Finally Universal tries to snub it's master by choosing to make some other 3rd party the general public has never heard of their master. What Universal fundamentally doesn't seem to get is by snubbing apple's Fairplay DRM and the open MP3 format they're snubbing ANY and ALL successful or working options to sell music to their customers. They're giving them no choice BUT to steal music! Which is why Trent Rezner of NIN, one of their biggest artists is off in Australia telling his fans to just go ahead and steal the music. (read on.. I'm getting to it) I have one further suggestion for Universal based on their brilliant logic. Universal: 99% of all P2P shared music is ripped straight of a CD! (epiphany) Why don't you simply stop selling CD's as well? Anyone selling CD's is clearly inducing copyright theft. You must stop selling CD's!Furthermore I would suggest Universal then start selling ties, and start calling themselves a clothing company, because they certainly aren't by definition in the music industry anymore. They seem to be doing anything but selling music. In related news (as mentioned above) Trent Reznor of NIN and also represented by Universal Music was so disgusted by the price gouging by Universal on NIN CD's in Australia, a topic that he spoke out against months ago, that he told his fans at an Australian concert "...Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means ? STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin." Enjoy the clip yourself, I've embedded it below. It's short, sweet and clear. There's no question about the issue. This just makes me laugh and laugh. Universal has outlived it's utility in the music age. It's whole *idea* of the music industry is, is dead. The only competency they have left is as a marketing arm to promote bands in traditional media. Which is funny because anymore radio and TV are increasingly loosing relevance to word of mouth music sharing on the internet. Web services like Last.fm and iLike.com have far more relevancy in shaping tastes and developing the music market then pretty much all of traditional media combined. The CD is dead as a format. Therefore there's no need for distribution, so what it all comes down to is there's just no need for Universal at all. Adios Universal, unless you pull your head out of your *ss and start selling mp3's you're dead... of course you've been dead to many like me for a long long time anyway. Labels: apple, ipod, itunes, music industry, music packaging, NIN, trent reznor, universal music
Universal to sell DRM free songs
It's happening as predicted. Since the announcement by that Apple would be selling non-drm music in iTunes from EMI other major labels are slowly falling in line. The New York Times is reporting that the Universal Music Group is going to be selling part of its catalog sans DRM for the next few months to gauge consumer interest. This is great, but the only catch is that these DRM free songs won't be available via iTunes. Universal, in an effort to lessen Apple's dominance of the digital music market, will be offering up the DRM free music via Amazon, Google, RealNetworks, and Wal-Mart for $.99 a song (a price many accredit Apple to pioneering). From: Universal to sell DRM free songs, but not on iTunes - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)Also You might recall that Universal recently decided not to renew their contract with Apple to sell music in iTunes, and switched their commitment to a month by month basis. What does all this mean? I am betting that this experiment will succeed, and that Universal will reverse their decision and sell DRM free tracks via iTunes, why not sell your wares on the top online music store? Boingboing.net has a good take on universal's inevitable move to selling non-drm music too. The original article is on NYTimesLabels: amazon, apple, drm, economics, emi, music industry, new york times, universal music
T-Mobile announces seemless VOIP / cellular package
Of all the rotten times to launch an amazing new service. On July 5th T-Mobile announced T-Mobile HotSpot @Home. In a word it is a cell phone that also does VOIP. For only $10 extra a month you can make calls from the same phone both via cellular and VOIP potentially saving yourself thousands of dollars a year. To put it another way, this service offers all the ubiquity of a cellular network with all the inexpensiveness of VOIP. Re: IPhone-Free Cellphone News - New York TimesIt?s called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it?s absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like that are extremely rare.
Here?s the basic idea. If you?re willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you?re out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual.
But when it?s in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always ? you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features ? but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.
These phones hand off your calls from Wi-Fi network to cell network seamlessly and automatically, without a single crackle or pop to punctuate the switch. As you walk out of a hot spot, fewer and fewer Wi-Fi signal bars appear on the screen, until ? blink! ? the T-Mobile network bars replace them. (The handoff as you move in the opposite direction, from the cell network into a hot spot, is also seamless, but takes slightly longer, about a minute.) I say hurrary! This first generation service may not be perfect but at the very least it shows that T-Mobile "get's it". Cellular companies are no longer in the voice communications business... they're in the internet communications business. This service is a huge step forward. For a cellular company to embrace VOIP to save their customers money and in so doing potentially make much more profit itself is unprecidented. But this isn't the only way for a cellular company to utilize the internet to make more profit. Many may also see a direct parrellel between this service and the potential offerings of the iPhone. The iPhone is after all among other things a device that already has all the hardware capabilities of T-mobiles new service. It is an "internet communicator" to quote Steve Jobs... yet it has no VOIP application on the phone. I assure you hackers and many others are VERY hard at work trying to bring VOIP to the iPhone. Personally my friend Adam (a non-blogger but brilliant guy non-the-less ;) thinks Apple is trying to use the iphone to leverage itself into the world of communications in exactly the same way it used the iPod and Pixar to leverage their Apple from simply computers into media. This final piece of the puzzle would of course give Apple the unprecidented power to sell and deliver digital media and services DIRECTLY with it's customers anywhere and anytime. What's more with already ubiquitous WiFi and the potential for ubiquitous WiMax sometime in the next 2-10 years my friend thinks Apple is going to try and leverage the iphone into being a communications company by either buying out a current cellular company or slowly using their leverage to turn all important cellular services into a mere commodity regardless of whether the end use of their networks is voice, data, text messages or accessing ANY webservice. This may sound like a long shot, but it is VERY similar to what apple is now doing with the iTunes Music Store in shaking up the music biz and turning major music labels product back into a simple 99 cent commodity. Not only do I think my friend is right on all counts but I'll one up him. Given DRM dies in a fast and firey death as it is extremely anti-competitive and a huge hindrence to fluid markets the commoditization of BOTH these markets (digital media AND cellular data) will bring TREMENDOUS innovation to both markets over time accellerating the pace of innovation and creating ironicly explosive growth and revenue for Apple's unwitting and often disagreeable partners. In so commoditizing cellular services into merely data access providers much like internet service providers I think the cellular companies will find a cornicopia of growth like they've never seen before as millions of webservices innovators, so called web 2.0 companies, strive to deliver services over their networks. As cellular networks stop trying to be the gatekeepers of cellular networks like Cable TV operators... offering extrmely limited services like 10 cent text messages and $2.99 ringtones and finaly offer full unprecidented access and integration with the internet like the iPhone and T-Mobile's new Hotspot @Home service... the tremendous innovation in web based services will add tremendous value to their network and with it exponetial usage and revenue increases. The most basic lesson here for cellular network providers is this: Better to make a penny a kilobyte then a buck a minute.Cellular services only THINK they are in the voice communications business. Soon they will wake up and realize they have it all wrong. While they were slumbering on their profits or trying to find more ways to nickle and dime their customers to death their industry changed. Cellular network providers are no longer in the voice communications busines they're in the mobile internet access business. Labels: apple, cellular, communications, iPhone, media, NYTimes, Pixar, T-Mobile, VOIP, web 2.0, Wifi, WiMax
Amazon to launch music store with DRM free music
As predicted it's happening, the wall is crumbling. Now that apple has announced DRM free music offerings in their music store on EMI we knew soon others would follow. Amazon was as predicted the next, also partnering with EMI to sell EMI's catalogue DRM free. Jeff Bezos puts it very clearly in the amazon press release. "Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. "We're excited to have EMI joining us in this effort and look forward to offering our customers MP3s from amazing artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones and Joss Stone." To paraphrase, "MP3-only mean it will play on any device." That's something everyday ordinary people who don't spend all day obsessing about their music can not only understand, but always have understood. The market wants MP3 and always has. It's just taken the music labels 8+ years to listen to them. That's two major stores and one label down. About four more major labels to go. My prediction is this holiday season will pay big rewards for Apple, Amazon, EMI and others selling DRM free music. Putting a serious haste in the step of anyone still not selling mp3's. By this time next year nearly all the major labels will be selling non-DRM music and there will be over two dozen major online music stores like Apple, Amazon and other early players like the wonderful emusic, CDbaby and innovators like ArtistShare. Users will once again have choice, as to where they want to buy, what hardware they want to use and where they want to listen. This combined with podcasting will put an end to things like satelite radio, win and real media, digital music stores like napster that sell DRM music, and whole industry of middle players that have sprung up to serve this inequity in the market. This includes the P2P black market. Well may actually start seeing a slow down in it's explosive growth, though any decline in p2p's popularity will take years. It occurs to me that in as little as 3-5 years time that people won't even remember what "DRM" was in the first place... that most people won't even know this battle was fought to keep the future of music, media, culture and innovation open. It's a silent fight mostly, one the majority of the public doesn't really even fully understand let alone will most realize this battle has taken nearly *10 years*, and cost billions in lost revenue. We'll be taking it for granted again in no time. In five years time music mainstream artists profits will be at an all time high and the music market will have realized it's explosion not only in profits by the major labels, but in the breadth of new music and artists in the market. Labels: amazon, apple, black markets, drm, emi, jeff bezos, music industry, napster, p2p, the future
Why Microsoft is dead
Paul Graham's article " Microsoft is Dead" on why Microsoft's relevance in the computing world has radically declined is a gut check on how far we've come in the last few years. Microsoft is no longer a threat to competition and progress not only because of increased competition from linux and apple, but primarily because the desktop is no longer the most important platform. As gmail and other web services have proven the web and the web browser are the new platform. So called "office 2.0" has taken over. Gmail is the new Outlook, wiki's are the new Microsoft Word, and various other services like Upcoming.org and a whole lot more have put a severe dent in Microsoft's control with the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office. Computing has also moved beyond the desktop with cell phones and mobile computing and media has taken a bigger role and microsoft is completely failing to get a handle on media, see it's failure with the zune, Play's for sure drm, right up to Vista which is frighteningly anti-consumer... and ironically all this would appear to be wasted as per the EMI and Apple announcement to sell non-drm media... though admitedly the video market and new technology like HDTV, Blueray, and HDDVD have yet to play out. The biggest realization of this for me came when I was chatting with a friend via IM and I called twitter "cross platform". No longer does cross plaform necissarily mean Mac, Win and Linux. It now means many things and among them cross platform can mean the world wide web and the mobile web. The operating system has lost some of it's relevance, which is why I can happily write this blog post from a computer running Ubuntu... because the majority of my primary applications are either open source like Firefox or web based like Gmail. The big question is... is this the end of the tyranny or are we just swapping on tyrant for another. Clearly google is the leader in the new economy trailed closely by yahoo, while they have seen their share of critics neither exercises the dominance or control Microsoft once held. Labels: apple, competition, cross platform, drm, googlezon, microsoft, monopoly, new economy, office 2.0, open source, paul graham, tyranny, ubuntu, web 2.0, yahoo
The market is correcting itself
It's happening. Since the announcement by Apple and EMI to sell non-drm songs the long predicted shift to DRM free music is starting. Microsoft changes tune on selling DRM-free songsWhen the tracks actually start selling we should see market forces move the market quicker and quicker to non-DRM music. 8+ years of digital culture prohibition is starting to come to an end and I couldn't be happier. :) Labels: apple, digital culture, digital prohibition, drm, emi, free market, intellectual property, market forces, microsoft, music industry, zune
Tell Steve Jobs to set the music free
Defective by Design has followed through on Steve Job's " thoughts on music" with a petition to ask Steve Jobs to put his money where his mouth is. Point number one is that Steve Jobs allow independent artists to sell non-DRM music in the iTunes store. The petition has already far surpassed it's goal of 1000 signers with over 2100 signatures as of this writing. The message is dead on. Help us all call Steve Job's bluff. Either he's genuine or he's simply a hypocrite. Let it be known by adding a punctuation mark and signing the petition! 1) Drop DRM on iTunes for independent artists
Many independent artists and labels distribute their music through iTunes and many wish to do so without DRM, but you won't let them. You could show good faith immediately by dropping DRM for those artists and labels.
This will make it clear which artists are actually locked to one of the four big labels, allowing your customers to avoid those labels and the burden of DRM. Independent artists, who respect the desire of the fan to be free from DRM restrictions, will receive more support.
You can set the ethical example and be the first "major" to drop DRM, by freeing independent artists. You have the direct power to do this. From: An Open Letter to Steve Jobs | DefectiveByDesign.orgRelated Post: Mr. Jobs tear down this wall!Labels: apple, defective by design, drm, fairplay, free software foundation, itunes, steve jobs, tear down this wall, thoughts on music
Washington Post on new media
From: Apple - profiles - washington postVideo: apple_pro-washington_post_720x416.mov (video/quicktime Object) Today's theme is snarky-ness. I'm blogging this just for reference. I despise it but it is interesting. So let's kick the tires. It's a slickly edited piece from apple. It has no authenticity. It's only interesting because it give a fakey insight into the Washington Post's video journalism group. They have 50 people on staff roaming with camera's... that's interesting. But it's low on real information and insight. I'm sure the people involved are very interesting people but apple does a nice job of making them seem like passionless boring people without original ideas... because heh, it's not about the people, it's about selling Final Cut and apple computers, and if the people are boring it makes the technology look more interesting. "I like it when the technology just goes away and you can focus on the aesthetic." Are we on message? Yack. Fluff. Apple needs to rethink their marketing strategy. But then Apple boycott's the blogging world, and doesn't get authentic and real people. Rather ironic. The most interesting point was what Jim brady, the Exec VP, called "appointment viewing". Apparently "appointment viewing" is the misguided idea that people will come back once a week to re-visit a story to see a new five minute video clip. Here the opportunities for internet based distibution for media are wide open and Jim is taking the worst thing about television, that it's not space or time shiftable and recreating it on the internet in a vain homage to obsolescence. The only thing he's missing is to make their video pieces disappear after being online for an hour, which is why there content isn't a complete failure because shows stick around long enough that enough people stumble on them. And stumble is the word. Here's a hint washington post. Throw out the interactive flash storytelling crap put the story in a nicely packaged downloadable video format like MP4 and throw it in a good subscribeable RSS/Media RSS feed with some permalinks to some supporting web page based information. It's called "subscribership"... and you should know what that is because you've been delivering newspapers to people's doors for a century. So why do you make people work so hard to follow up on stories online? Why don't you just work on a virtual baseball bat that can beat them over the head. You're version of delivery is akin to leaving the newspaper laying half way to the front porch in a puddle in the rain. I don't know why mainstream press people are so resistant to getting a clue. I guess they've just started grasped the web1.0 idea of the "web page" and can't see anything beyond it. They think they have... but they haven't realized "flying type" is not real interactivity. RSS, metadata, microformats... beyond the web page... beyond the desktop even. Clue into it. Tags: brand interactive-brand nprness washingtonpostness storytelling video-editing tom-kennedy apple final-cut washington-post laptop-editing video-on-the-net distribution jen-crandall journalism creative-class rob-curley appointment-viewing=bs Labels: andy-carvin, apple, appointment-viewing, brand, creative-class, distribution, interactive-brand, journalism, nprness, storytelling, tom-kennedy, video-on-the-net, washington-post, washingtonpost-ness
Mr. Jobs tear down this wall!
OK, let's keep this simple. If Steve Jobs is not a hypocrite and was indeed genuine in his open letter about his willingness to sell music without DRM then Apple needs to allow independent artists and labels the opportunity to sell their music through the Apple Music Store without DRM. I'm not even going to discuss Apple's position on MacOS running on Intel boxes, nor the closed nature of the new iPhone, and above all the distribution of Pixar movies with DRM but I've got to call B.S. on steve Jobs open letter titled " thoughts on music". It's not because I don't believe what he wrote. I absolutely agree with it! Indeed it is a beautiful letter full of sentiments of the majority of all digital music lovers for as far back as five years. The cruxt of the matter is this. An *open letter* is the last attempt of a desperate customer... it is the act of a desperate person... a person who doesn't have control or power to make change. An open letter is an appeal to the common good when no other action can be taken. One must ask as a precursor of this letter, is Steve Jobs so powerless that all he can do is write an open letter and post it to the web like all us everyday people and bloggers... or is there something he can do more with his vast resources and power as the CEO of both a media company, Pixar, and the CEO of the largest digital music reseller in the world, Apple? The answer to that question is YES, there is most definitely something Steve Jobs can do to back up his open letter, to put his money where is mouth is. Something quite obvious in fact. Now that Steve Jobs has said it... now that he's declared himself anti- drm... now that he's called for the major four music labels to stop living a lie and sell digital music without DRM it's time for him to put his money where his mouth is and start allowing independent musicians and labels to sell music through the Apple Music Store without DRM. Everything in the Apple music store is NOT from the big four labels. Steve Jobs does NOT need their permission to sell other music without DRM as his letter seems to imply or at the very least ignore. It's time for Apple to allow independent artists and labels already selling music in the Apple Music Store the opportunity to sell music without DRM. I've been stymied as to why more bloggers have not asked this question, but now I now find that I've got some good company. Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb.com the EFF and Jon Lech Johansen (famous for cracking the DVD encryption) are in agreement with me. From the EFF post. We agree wholeheartedly with Jobs, since EFF has been making exactly the same points for several years now. As a first step in putting his music store where his mouth is, we urge him to take immediate steps to remove the DRM on the independent label content in the iTunes Store. Why wait for the major record labels? Many independent labels and artists already recognize that DRM is a dumb idea for digital music, as demonstrated by the availability of their music on eMusic. Apple should let them make that music available without DRM in the iTunes Store now. From Jon It should not take Apple?s iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users.
Actions speak louder than words, Steve. The bottom line is it's time for Steve jobs to sh*t or get off the pot. He's said it. Now it's time for him to back it up by allowing independent artists and labels to sell their music in the iTunes music store without DRM. I feel like this is in a very real way a Reagan / Berlin Wall moment in digital culture. Mr. Jobs tear down this wall!From: AppleInsider | Jobs gains support from Yahoo, Monster on DRM issueIn an immediate response to the Apple cofounder's February 6th letter, Electronic Frontier Foundation urged Jobs to put "his music store where his mouth is" by promptly stripping the company's proprietary Fairplay DRM protection from independent music on the iTunes Store for which it is not required.
Jon Lech Johansen, an infamous DVD protection cracker known as DVD Jon, seconded the motion and even did some background research on the matter.
"It should not take Apple?s iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM," he said. "Actions speak louder than words, Steve." Labels: apple, berlin wall, drm, DVD Jon, eff, emusic, fairplay, itunes, readwriteweb, Reagan, steve jobs, tear down this wall, thoughts on music
mmeiser blog » February 2005 » January 2005 » December 2004
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