Technology360

Artists: Radio surely can afford royalty

Brooks Boliek writes:

Proponents of a new royalty for music that is broadcast over-the-air contend that a government study bolsters their argument that the radio industry can afford to pay.  ¶  The artist-industry alliance known as the MusicFirst coalition points to an FCC study that examined radio market concentration and said it shows that broadcasters have been jacking up their rates.  ¶  Annual growth of radio advertising rates since 1996 was about 10%, while the CPI has averaged a 3% increase per year over that span, FCC senior economist George Williams found in his study that examined the market through March 2007. ...

Link:  Hollywood Reporter.

Updated 12 November 2007:
Also see Andrew Glass, Singers: Stations should pay (them) to play:

Lyle Lovett wants to get paid for music he made famous with his bluesy twang. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is giving him a stage to make it happen. Leahy is scheduled to hold a hearing Tuesday to review a nearly century-old law saying radio stations don’t have to give the four-time Grammy winner a dime when they play music he performed that was written by someone else. ...

Link:  Politico.  --Dennis

National LambdaRail + Internet2 merger off

News that the long-awaited merger between National LambdaRail (NLR) and Internet2 is off doesn't cheer most people in the academic/research advanced networking community.  For the story, see John Timmer, Internet2, LambdaRail can't even agree to disagree; merger called off (Ars Technica); John Fischman, Breaking Up, Internet2-LambdaRail Style (Chronicle of Higher Education); and Anick Jesdanun, Ultra-Fast Internet Networks Won't Merge (AP).  For analysis see Gordon Cook, A Sad Day as Emotion Drives R&E Networking in the USA (Cook's Collaborative Edge); Internet2 Responds (Cook's Collaborative Edge); and Some Unsolicited Advice: NLR Should Blow Its Own Horn (Cook's Collaborative Edge).  --Dennis

HD DVD players hit $99

Most pundits (e.g., Phillip Swann) have been saying that Blu-ray will beat out HD DVD in the high definition disc format wars, but don't count the latter out just yet.  Matthew Moskovciak from CNET reports that Wal-Mart and Best Buy are offering the Toshiba HD-A2 for sale at $99 while quantities last, one-fourth the cost of the cheapest Blu-ray player.  To sweeten this sweet deal, Toshiba is offering five free movies.  I bought the HD DVD format when it reached $300 at Costco a few months ago -- but then I owned two Betamax VCRs by the time I realized that VHS was going to win.  Link:  CNET.  --Dennis

Does Web Distribution Stimulate or Depress Television Viewing?

Joel Waldfogel of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has published a study of students at his university on this.  Here is his abstract:

In the past few years, YouTube and other sites for sharing video files over the Internet have vaulted from obscurity to places of centrality in the media landscape. The files available at YouTube include a mix of user-generated video and clips from network television shows. Networks fear that availability of their clips on YouTube will depress television viewing. But unauthorized clips are also free advertising for television shows. As YouTube has grown quickly, major networks have responded by making their content available at their own sites. This paper examines the effects of authorized and unauthorized web distribution on television viewing between 2005 and 2007 using a survey of Penn students on their tendencies to watch television series on television as well as on the web. The results provide a glimpse of the way young, Internet-connected people use YouTube and related sites. While I find some evidence of substitution of web viewing for conventional television viewing, time spent viewing programming on the web – 4 hours per week – far exceeds the reduction in weekly traditional television viewing of about 25 minutes. Overall time spent on network-controlled viewing (television plus network websites) increased by 1.5 hours per week.

Link:  Wharton School (pdf).  Thanks to Eric Bangeman for the tip in his post, Study: proliferation of web video a blessing to networks.  Link:  Ars Technica.

Updated 11 November 2007:
For another view, see Richard Wray's, Young networkers turn off TV and long on to the web: 

... The EIAA study shows the effect on TV viewing, especially among the youth audience which is using the internet more often than TV for the first time.  The survey shows that 82% of 16- to 24-year-olds use the web between five and seven days a week while only 77% watch TV as regularly - a drop of 5% from last year. ...

Link:  The Guardian.  --Dennis

McLuhan's web

Nicholas Carr writes:

Marshall McLuhan is back. The 1960s icon’s theories about “electric media” have new resonance now that the internet is becoming our all-purpose conduit for news, information and entertainment.  ¶ McLuhan was an obscure Canadian academic until the mid-Sixties, when his best-selling book Understanding Media turned him into a pop-culture phenomenon. His playfully radical ideas and deliberately disjointed prose perfectly reflected the spirit of the times, when the air was filled with revolutionary rhetoric and pot smoke. Tom Wolfe, in a 1965 article, suggested that McLuhan might be ''the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov.''  ¶  McLuhan’s central thesis, encapsulated in the famous phrase “the medium is the message,” was that the technologies through which we take in information—the media, broadly defined—become “extensions” of our bodies, exerting a profound influence over how we think and act. When an important new medium arrives, it can reshape who we are as individuals and as a society. ...

Link:  Rough Type.  Version in the Guardian.  --Dennis