Content and services

The Register has a short article about a new service Google is quietly testing. It puts a little telephone icon in Google ads, and if you click the icon, a little form pops up and asks for your phone number. Your phone starts to ring, and when you pick up, Google transfers the call to the advertiser.

Two of the biggest online dating sites (match.com and Yahoo!) are accused in separate lawsuits of defrauding members. Match.com is allegedly paying people to go on dates with fee-paying subscribers, which on the face of it sounds absurd. It's hard to see how you could make any money over the long term with that kind of business strategy.

Yahoo! is accused of posting fake profiles to make it look like there are more available "dates" registered in the service than there actually are.

I've always thought newspapers were well-positioned to take advantage of the Internet, if they could break out of the dead trees model. The Roanoke Times gets a hap tip for jumping into IP TV.

The Flash-based news clips have excellent video and audio quality on my cable modem connection, and the somewhat sardonic commentary is closer to a blog in style than traditional television news. The clips are only a few minutes long, and the videocasts are a peak into the future.

The music industry has been complaining bitterly that online music has been cutting into the sale of CDs (legal and illegal downloads). But new data shows that online (legal) music sales have been flat for some months. This suggests what many people, including me, have been saying for some time--that the music industry has been serving up crummy music.

Google has announced a new service called GoogleBase. The "base" part of the word is from "database," which Google appears to be trying to co-opt. They probably hope to create a new verb, as in, "Let's look in GoogleBase," or "Let's GoogleBase it."

In yet another "new media" development--they seem to come almost daily--Cingular is going to offer a $6.99/month radio service that works with certain cellphones. It is an interesting offering, since lots of people have cellphones (yes, most of them don't work with this service yet).

Sony has really made a mess of things with their Digital Rights Management software. In a utterly misguided attempt to prevent copying of their music CDs, the company hid software on the CDs that secretly changes the core operating system on Windows.

CNN has announced a beta TV news on demand service that will offer multiple news feeds and access to an archive of CNN video segments.

Why are so many players getting into this so quickly? For one, it is relatively simple. For the larger content providers like CNN and the other alphabet channels (CBS, ABC, NBC) they already have staff to throw at this. It is no big deal to digitize video (and much of it may already be recorded as digital) and stick it on a Web site. And they have enough server resources and bandwidth to support a pilot project.

Just weeks after Apple's video iPod was introduced to great skepticism (...who wants to download TV programs?), all the major studios are getting into this new business. The iPod was released with some primetime ABC shows available for download, but now CBS and NBC have announced plans to sell episodes of major shows for ninety-nine cents, bypassing the iTunes store and undercutting the ABC prices by half.

Over the long term, I don't think products like Tivo have a future, for two reasons. First is more philosophical: If you can get any content you want on demand (like some kind of video program) via broadband, you don't need a device to store it. Second is more practical: If you do need something to store it, I think a "media computer" with a Tivo-like software program will be cheaper and easier to use, and will not require that you give away all your personal information (what you watch and when you watch it), like Tivo requires now.

The media loves nothing better than stories about itself, so there is much handwringing in the media about the drop in newspaper circulation. I predicted this in 1994 at a meeting of newspaper folk who came to Blacksburg to hear about the newfangled Blacksburg Electronic Village thing.

What I told them then has not changed--newspapers have a golden future ahead of them if they would only stop thinking their job is to print the news on paper and toss those clumps of paper in people's driveways.

Anyone who thinks that the new video iPod is strictly a novelty item for teens and twenty-somethings should probably think again.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? Could it be ten thousand words (about twenty pages)?

That sounds about right to me. Zoom and Go, a popular travel site, is putting their entire library of travel videos in iPod format. According to the site, that is about ten thousand videos.

This article talks about Sony's Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that comes on Sony music CDs. The DRM works in part by installing a bunch of secret software on your PC, without your permission! In other contexts we call that computer trespass and/or illegal behavior.

What I and others have been predicting for years is starting to come to pass. As the number of broadband providers has narrowed to a duopoly of the cable and phone company in most regions, these firms are starting to muscle out third party service providers. VoIP startups are the first target because both the phone and cable company want VoIP customers of their own, and the simplest way to do that is to simply block all VoIP data packets except their own. Evidence of this is clearly visible as hardware manufacturers begin to sell VoIP blocking appliances.

CNet reports on the looming battle between Google and book publishers, who are outraged that the search company intends to scan millions of books and make them available to search online.

Another nail was hammered in the coffin of analog TV yesterday with Apple's one-two hammer slam. The company rolled out a new version of the full size iPod that stores and plays video. They also rolled out a new version of iTunes (works on Windows and Macs) that allows you to store video on your Mac or Windows computer just the way you store music.

Google's new partnership with Sun is creating a lot of speculation, in part because the details of the agreement are quite vague. Sun has agreed to download the Google Toolbar with every copy of Sun's Java software. The Google Toolbar is unpopular with a lot of net folks (including me) because it actually inserts links into a Web document where there were none. In other words, the Toolbar changes the meaning of a Web page without the author's permission. And the links, of course, point to Google content.

Universal Studios has announced that it will put its movies online by the end of next year. The link has very little detail, but the fact that a major studio has committed to this is very significant.

What is not mentioned but important is that you will only be able to download movies if you have a broadband connection. Those that worry about investing in community broadband infrastructure on the theory that people won't use it should rest easy. Everybody (or at least a very high percentage) watches movies.

USA Today reports that IP TV is booming, just as I have been saying. IP TV shows have been attracting audiences of half a million people, which many cable TV channels would kill to have. And advertisers are pouring billions into the new medium--they love it because their ads can be much more narrowly focused for specific audiences, and someone interested can click right through to the advertiser's site.

With movie attendance down this year, it has apparently forced the studios to think outside the box a bit. Universal Studios has been offering free previews of the movie Serenity to bloggers around the country. The idea is that the bloggers, will, um, blog about it, and create buzz.

It appears to be working. Serenity is a science fiction film based on an obscure cable TV show called Firefly that lasted only seven episodes. But tech-oriented Web sites and blogs are abuzz with discussions of the movie, most of them positive.