Technology360

BitTorrent: The Great Disrupter

Daniel Roth writes:  "... What [Bram Cohen] came up with was BitTorrent, a deceptively simple program that has grown into the hottest way to download anything bigger than a music file—from the legal (like militaryvideos.net’s amateur videos of the war in Iraq) to the infringing. It makes pirating a copy of the latest movie out of Hollywood a snap. All it takes is a free download of the BitTorrent software—something 45 million people have done—and anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. TorrentSpy, a site unrelated to Cohen that helps people find content available for download, averages more than 600 new BitTorrent files a day. A sampling: Microsoft Office 2003, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, episode two of CBS’s Ghost Whisperer (in high definition, for serious Jennifer Love Hewittians), plus a file containing over 400 Amazing Spider-Man scanned-in comics. Those huge files have made BitTorrent one of the biggest forces on the Internet, accounting for more than 20% of its traffic at any one time. That’s double the volume generated by the most common Internet activities combined: clicking on web pages, sending and receiving mail and spam, even streaming videoclips. ...¶...Yet this time the plot has a twist: the entertainment industry seems to have found a disrupter it might be able to live with. In mid-September the recording industry issued cease-and-desist letters to seven popular downloading-technology companies, including BearShare, LimeWire, and eDonkey (prompting eDonkey’s CEO to announce to a Senate subcommittee that he was “throwing in the towel”). BitTorrent was noticeably absent from the assault. It was also MIA last winter when the movie industry went after sites hosting copyright-busting BitTorrent content. Instead of fighting the entertainment establishment, Cohen is courting it. ..."  Link:  Fortune.

The future of TV

Marguerite Reardon writes:  "Imagine a day when you would be in total control of creating your own TV channel lineup.  ¶ Instead of subscribing to a service from a cable, satellite or phone company that might offer you hundreds of channels you'll never even watch, you would be able to select what you want and watch it on your own schedule.  ¶ That day might not be so far away. Slowly but surely content that's broadcast over cable networks and through satellite providers is being distributed through the public Internet.  ¶  In terms of the technology, all the elements are falling into place to deliver high-quality video from the Net directly to viewers in their living rooms. Software has been developed to ensure the quality of video distributed over the Net. And companies such as Microsoft and Cisco Systems' Linksys home division are developing products that enable Internet video to be viewed on TV sets instead of only on PC screens. ...¶... Much of the infrastructure to provide broadcast quality video directly over the public Internet is now available. Companies, such as Kontiki and EdgeStream, have already developed software to secure content and ensure the quality of streaming video. ..."  Link:  CNET News.com.

Brightcove overview

Richard MacManus has an overview of video purveyor Brightcove in his ZDNet weblog.  --Dennis

Collaborative Filtering strikes back (this time with tags)

Rashmi Sinha has a good overview of collaborative filtering: "... What is collaborative filtering? Technically, it's an algorithm for matching people with similar interests for the purpose of making recommendations. In non-technical terms, it's a system for helping people find relevant content. Unlike search, where you parse a query to and the most relevant content, with collaborative filtering you find some way of gauging an individual's interest in content, and then recommend what other similar users liked. ..."  Link:  Rashmi Sinha weblog.

Ambient Findability

John Hagel writes:  "... Companies today realize that push approaches to marketing are less and less effective. As I have written about elsewhere, we are entering the era of reverse markets.  Ask business executives to define a market and they will likely say that it is a place where vendors can find customers and sell them more and more stuff.  Instead, we need to view markets through the reverse lens of customers who are trying to find appropriate vendors at relevant times and get the most value they can out of the their vendor. Powerful forces are re-shaping markets to make this reverse market lens much more helpful in determining how to create value.  ¶  If businesses are going to succeed in the future, they need to master pull approaches to marketing – how do you get potential customers to seek you out and how do you pull complementary resources together to become ever more helpful to customers? These pull approaches hinge upon the ability to improve findability. ..."   Link:  Edge Perspectives with John Hagel.

On the BBC Annotatable Audio project...

Tom Coates writes:  "... It's officially my last day at the BBC today, but with the permission of my outgoing boss ... I'm going to make the very best use of it by talking about a project that we've been working on for the last few weeks. I consider it one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on, and BBC Radio & Music Interactive one of the only places in the world where I would have been able to have done so. ...¶... The project we undertook was focused on Annotatable Audio (specifically, but not exclusively, of BBC radio programming) - and we decided to look in an unorthodox direction - towards the possibilities of user-created annotation and metadata. We decided that we wanted to develop an interface that might allow the collective articulation of what a programme or speech or piece of music was about and how it could be divided up and described. Our first ideas looked for approaches similar to del.icio.us, Flickr or our own Phonetags - which create collective value by accreting the numerous annotations that individuals make for their own purposes. But after a fascinating discussion with Jimmy Wales, we decided to think about this in a different way - in which (just like Wikipedia) individuals would overtly cooperate to create something greater and more authoritative. ..."  Link:  Plasticbag.org.

How Niche Radio Combines Broadcast and On-Demand Formats

David Jennings writes:  "... On the one hand [Sirius'] E Street Radio is another example of the proliferation of music products I referred to a couple of days ago. But if you've been reading many of the entries on this site, you'll know how I go on about radio, how its value changes with the extra control that digital format offer, and how it complements the on-demand listening modes offered by MP3 players. (My essay What does on-demand media really mean? is the most comprehensive collection of my thoughts.)  ¶  Crucially, once the amount of content the listener is interested in exceeds a manageable amount, programming or curating this content into a useful sequence provides extra value for the listener. And that's what radio does. ..."  Link:  D J Alchemi.

Interview with Open Media Network founder Mike Homer

Update 11/11/05:
Part two of this interview with Mike Homer, Why Open Media Network?, has now been posted.  Part one is linked below.  Link:  AlwaysOn.

AlwaysOn's Tony Perkins has an interview with Mike Homer about Open Media Network.  This is the first of four posts and I'll link subsequent ones here.  Mike is its founder and also chairman of Kontiki.  I'm chairing the Public Service Publisher initiative which is partnering with OMN.  --Dennis

BBC Relaunches its Television Web Site

"The BBC has relaunched its television Web site (bbc.co.uk/tv), with the goal of having it serve as a platform for showcasing its TV programs on the Web. The site now allows UK users to watch exclusive previews of upcoming programs, as well as to access interactive TV applications previously available only behind the red button. It also provides viewers with catch-up videoclips ..."  Link:  [itvt].

The Video Future Approacheth

Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes, "... Meanwhile, technology is, as usual, passing Congress by. Because while the long-planned switch to HDTV creeps along, video technology is advancing by leaps and bounds in areas that, in what I'm pretty sure isn't really a coincidence, Congress hasn't managed to get its hands on yet. The result, widespread video podcasting, is likely to bring about something far more revolutionary than higher resolution commercial broadcasts: It might actually produce TV that people want to watch. ¶  Podcasting is already big, with people producing 'radio' programs for Internet distribution using nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection. Video podcasting will make producing and distributing TV programming nearly as easy. Podcasting and audio MP3 technology have demonstrated pretty clearly that in the audio world people care more about hearing what they want, when they want, than they care about super high sound quality. I suspect that video podcasting will demonstrate the same thing: a pretty good picture coupled with a show that you actually like is worth more than a stupendous picture coupled with a show you don't care about that much. And according to some people, the Video iPod is already good enough to ensure that video podcasting will be 'huge.' ¶  If Congress cared about promoting video distribution technology, it could do a lot -- without even spending taxpayer dollars -- by reforming intellectual property law to make it easier on amateur producers and distributors. ..."  Link:  Tech Central Station.  Thanks to John Bracken's Media Review for the tip.  --Dennis