Content and services

Comcast, which has been criticized of late for apparently trying to throttle peer to peer (P2P) file sharing traffic, seems to be shifting focus by investing in a P2P business start up. This is a good sign. As I and others have argued for a long time, we need to shift away from the "bucket of bits" model of broadband and move toward a service-oriented business and network model. P2P file sharing is just another service.

At the Broadband Properties Summit, there was a case study on IP TV (TV delivered via broadband). DirecTV and an apartment owner in Alexandria, Virginia teamed up to provide competitive TV services in a large, 350 unit apartment building. Some of the highlights of the experiment:

Prior to the introduction of the new service, the biggest tenant complaint was about the incumbent TV provider service. The number one tenant demand was for more choice in selecting a TV provider.

After introducing the competitive DirecTV service, complaints are down and compliments are up.

The use of BitTorrent, a peer to peer file sharing service, is up 24% in the past four months. Like the big jump in YouTube traffic in December, some it may be related to the writer's strike. The lack of anything new on that old-fashioned TV thingy in the rec room apparently had people headed in droves to the Internet for some mindless entertainment. And of course, the Internet has plenty of mindless entertainment.

Recently, when we have had people over to house for dinner or when at someone else's home, I notice that a common topic of discussion is what is showing on YouTube. Everyone has a story about some usually goofy thing they saw recently on the video site. Anecdotally, several people have shared that they often just spend a little time in the evening goofing off on YouTube. This is usually followed by the admission they don't turn on the TV much anymore.

Google has announced a new "search within a search" option that has online retailers worried that the search behemoth will steal customers. The new option lets you use Google to search only pages that are part of a single site. So if you want to buy a digital camera and go to Google to start the search, you get the usual search results page. If you click on a Best Buy site, as an example, Google will now do an extended search only on the Best Buy site.

According to this report, the merger of XM and Sirius has stalled, a year after the deal was first announced. It is a perfect storm because you have a combination of FCC confusion, Congressional confusion, silly prices paid for on-air talent, and a bad business model.

There are reports that Toshiba has decided to cut its losses and discontinue manufacturing HD-DVD equipment. Microsoft is the other loser in this battle, as the company had been a backer of the HD-DVD format. Christmas 2008 will be a good time to invest in the high def players and recorders, as by that time there will be plenty of competition and lower prices.

Video continues to drive bandwidth needs, and the habits of the American public are changing rapidly. According to this report, December 2007 broke a lot of records, as people sat down in front of their computers 10 billion times to watch "TV."

Now rumors are circulating that Yahoo! may partner with Google to avoid the likely ignominious end of the company via a Microsoft acquisition.

Google has already started preparing for an anti-trust challenge if Microsoft is successful, so it is hard to see how Google could argue that hitching Yahoo! to behemoth Microsoft is bad but hitching Yahoo! to gargantuan Google is good.

I had been hearing favorable reviews of the new "Terminator" TV series, but am usually busy with other things in the evening, so I have not been able to catch it at its broadcast time. So I downloaded the pilot from iTunes--the first episode is free.

You read the headline correctly: "Music sales plunge amid rising sales." Only the music industry, clinging desperately to Mr. Edison's gramaphone technology, could make a 14% growth spurt sound like doom and gloom.

The lead on a widely circulated story about music sales in 2007 is full of hand-wringing about the precipitous 9% decline for the "fast fading" music business.

Walmart has killed its movie download business, which is not even a year old. There were many problems with it:

Microsoft and Google are each prepping for a fight to the death over ownership of users. This SlashDot article discusses the approach each is taking and what the consequences may be for both users and the two firms.

Google has a more clearly defined strategy; the company thinks most applications like email, word processing, spreadsheets, and graphics will be hosted by Google computers, and users will access the applications over an ever fast broadband network.

The somewhat elderly Eagles rock band has given record companies the boot with the band's latest album. The Eagles simply skipped working with a record company at all, and went straight to Wal-mart to sell their new CD. The two CD set is priced at a very reasonable twelve bucks. The artists get a bigger share of the sales, and music lovers spend less and get more.

Even more interesting, the two CD set is priced low enough that some music stores are simply going to Wal-mart, buying a bunch of the CDs, and then marking them up and selling them in their own stores.

This article suggests that the iPod may be the new TV and radio. The writer talks about how she is regularly downloading radio and TV programs to her iPod and watching them on her train ride home every afternoon from the office.

Internet radio dropped off the radar years ago because of royalty issues. Start up Internet radio stations streaming music were not always paying royalties, and the record companies responded by imposing absurdly expensive royalties that put most Internet radio stations out of business.

Newsweek reports that Google search may be slipping. I have complained for a long time that Google searches tend to have too many results, and many of those results are not relevant. It turns out lots of other people have noticed that as well. More and more Internet searches are being performed by other search engines like Ask, Dogpile, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

A lot of companies are frustrated at Apple's domination of the portable music and video market via the popular iPod, which has about 80% of the market for such devices. NBC recently announced it is pulling its TV programs from the iTunes store, and now Universal is going to distribute its music catalogue via SpiralFrog, which will compete directly with the iTunes store.

In yet another Google flop, the company has announced it is closing its video store. Some thing work, some things don't. No problem there. But customers who downloaded videos from the Google store received a letter from Google notifying them that the videos they had "purchased" were going up in smoke. The movies have DRM (Digital Rights Management) attached to them, and once the store is closed, the movies are no longer watchable.

Competition is a wonderful thing. As NetFlix and Blockbuster battle each other over customers for mail-based DVD movies, Blockbuster has purchased a company called MovieLink to compete with the NetFlix movie download service. The acquisition is particularly interesting because MovieLink has license agreements with several major movie studios, which are worth a lot more than any technology and systems the company might have in place.