The view from the Bohra masjid in Colombo, near Bambalapitiya Station, on the shore of the Arabian Sea.
It’s Thursday night here, and our flight leaves on Saturday at 2am, via London. Hope Dave and Razib are keeping you all sufficiently amused in my absence 🙂
I’m going on a little trip to Colombo, Sri Lanka tomorrow and will be gone for a week. I’ve lined up some guest bloggers to fill the void in my absence, Razib Khan of GNXP and Dave Kim, one of my oldest friends. I might check in with some photos of Colombo using my new Canon G9. I’ve also got my other new toy to play with, which is even smaller in real life than I was expecting. Both toys have kept me pretty busy yesterday as you might imagine 🙂
Here’s my UPS booty:
That’s a 2GB memory stick for the EEE, a free 1GB SD card that was bundled with the camera, and a 4GB Corsair flash drive I’ve had my eye on for a while.
Here’s a size comparison of the EEE with a familiar object, just to give you an idea of the scale.
I did manage to upgrade the memory fairly easily, but installing Windows XP has been challenging. I’ll get there. And finish packing, too, sometime today. Hopefully.
I tried to use the Netflix live-movie streaming service to watch Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex and was rewarded for it with this:
that was after I was told that Firefox was incompatible, then asked by Internet Explorer to download three things and install two others, and after jumpin through all those hoops, got various “you do not have permissions to access this content” dialog boxes. The coup de grace was the message above
Sources say Apple plans to charge $3.99 a pop for 24-hour rentals. Since Apple may agree to pay closer to the $17 wholesale price paid by other retailers, it’s unclear whether iTunes might boost the price or take a small loss to help drive sales of Apple TV boxes and video iPod players.
Apple’s movie download service is going to crash and burn, and leave a bigger smoking crater than Circuit City’s ill-fated DivX did a few years back. Four bucks for 24 hour rentals?
The first company to let you click one button and download a movie – no frills, no subtitles, no disc extras, just the movie – directly to your DVD burner and stick that in your home theater DVD player is going to mint money, for themselves and for the movie studios. And yeah I’d pay five bucks a pop for that, and I’d ditch Netflix too.
Unfortunately it only took the music companies 20 years or so to figure out that DRM was Dumb Retail Marketing. Maybe we have to wait another 20 years for the movie studios to figure that out. By which time the whole concept of physical media will be obsolete anyway.
So there’s this little thing called the Consumer Electronics Show out in Las Vegas where all the big tech companies come together and show off all the geek service they’ve got lined up for the following year. Everyone except for Apple, that is, who has their own little bash a week later to be fashionable. But this year, the overlap of CES with the political cycle makes for some interesting and informative analogies. Consider this. Two candidates, each representing change from the current status quo, each promising vast advantages and benefits and superior experience. Both are locked in a drawn-out battle for the hearts of voters, but also a more pragmatic one for the minds of delegates, because each one wants to be the nominee for the bigger battle ahead. And suddenly in the very first contest between them of the year, one candidate pulls ahead with a dramatic upset, casting seer doubt on the viability of the other (who had campaigned with an aura of inevitability).
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, competing for the Democratic presidential nomination? Nope. HD-DVD and Blu-ray, competing for next-generation DVD status in your home theater (and more importantly, on your DVD bookshelf).
The big news last week was that Warner Video is ditching HD-DVD; now comes news from the Financial Times that Paramount might also abandon the format and embrace Blu-ray exclusivity:
Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD-DVD following Warner Brothers’ recent backing of Sony’s Blu-ray technology, in a move that could sound the death knell of HD-DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end.
Paramount and DreamWorks Animation, which makes the Shrek films, came out in support of HD-DVD last summer, joining General Electric’s Universal Studios as the main backers of the Toshiba format.
However, Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD-DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.
Paramount is set to have a bumper 2008 with several likely blockbusters, including the latest instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise, slated for release.
This basically leaves HD-DVD without any major must-have titles in its format exclusively, as Blu-Ray already had about 70% of the content even before you take Paramount into account. Already, TechCrunch is declaring the format war over and that HD-DVD has “joined the Deadpool”. To say this is premature is an understatement. To date, combined sales of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players and discs alike are a drop in the bucket compared to traditional DVD sales. Plus, Universal Studios still is committed to the format and as we have just seen, major studio allegiances can shift over time. The key I think to keeping HD-DVD alive is that the players are cheap, and they do the job as an advanced DVD player to upconvert traditional DVD to HDTV resolution. Take the Playstation 3 out of the equation and standalone HD-DVD players easily outsell Blu-ray; from a consumer perspective it’s the $99-$199 piece of hardware that is easier to justify than the $499-$699 one, especially when that consumer still is feeling the pain of the outlay for the fancy new HDTV (which everyone’s going to feel at some point, given the pending switchover).
I think it’s absurd to count HD-DVD out right now. Certainly the news isn’t great, but neither format is viable yet and it will be years before they even begin to approach a reasonable fraction of the existing DVD market. I’d still buy an HD-DVD today if I had an HDTV to watch it on, mainly because it would serve double duty and ultimately all of this won’t matter because the future is not physical media, it’s video download.
I’ve got a new toy en route and I can empathize with Steven’s occasional UPS blogging:
EDISON, NJ, US
01/03/2008 11:21 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
01/02/2008 07:57 P.M. ORIGIN SCAN01/02/2008 05:59 P.M. BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED
Tracking results provided by UPS: 01/07/2008 2:14 P.M. ET
I ordered on Thursday, the package left New Jersey on Friday, but it still hasn’t had an arrival scan anywhere. sigh.
UPDATE: ok finally arrived in Wisconsin!
OAK CREEK, WI, US
01/07/2008 9:05 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
01/07/2008 2:11 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
looks like it finally made it from new Jersey to the distribution point in Milwaukee. It left seven hours later, probably for the regional center in nearby Wausau, and will be out on the truck for delivery by tomorrow morning. But good grief, it took five days to get from New jersey to Wisconsin?? Even taking into account that there was a two day weekend in between, that still seems absurdly long. Do the trucks make multiple stops en route?
UPDATE 2:
WAUSAU, WI, US
01/08/2008 6:43 A.M. OUT FOR DELIVERY
01/08/2008 4:30 A.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
aaargh! I mean, yay!
Warner Studios made a big splash this past week when they announced they were going to ditch HD-DVD in favor of Blu-Ray. The ripple effect of this hasn’t fully played out, but one consequence appears to be that the Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit, one assumes) will only be on Blu-Ray:
According to Variety, New Line and HBO will follow Warner’s lead to side only with Blu-ray Disc. BBC Video, the company behind the popular high-definition nature documentary Planet Earth, has not yet publicly expressed its intentions with format exclusivity.
New Line already positions its Blu-ray Disc products with greater priority than the equivalent HD DVD. New Line’s first high-definition film, Hairspray, hit Blu-ray Disc in late November 2007, while an HD DVD version was only promised sometime in early 2008.
[…]
Perhaps the most important outcome of New Line’s upcoming decision is that the studio owns the rights to The Lord of The Rings trilogy. Should the (second) most compelling motion picture trilogy hit high-definition home video, it’ll be on Blu-ray Disc.
If anything, this means that it’s better to just stick with legacy DVD and get my HD content via the internet. At least until the price of Blu Ray drives falls to the $100 mark or below (territory already occupied by HD-DVD). It also should be noted from the article that part of the reason for the preference of Blu-Ray is again the region-coding issue.
telling quote from Matthew Fox, star of the hit TV show Lost:
“I’m telling you, the story is going to charge and move rapidly in the next 48 episodes,” Fox tells EW. “One of the knocks on the show is that it hasn’t moved fast enough.”
A television show where it takes 48 episodes (hour long ones, mind you) to start moviing “fast enough” ? It’s much quicker to just read the wiki.
the last holdout, Sony, admits defeat:
In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com’s (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.
Given this, what will Apple’s excuse be for maintaining DRM on the iPod? Attention Steve Jobs! Doesn’t music want to be free?
I don’t even know what to call this other than “Aziz’s brain works in odd ways” but it occurred to me that there are movies which reunite actors from totally unrelated films. For example, we know Christopher Reeve was the iconic Superman, and Michael Keaton was the original big screen Batman. So with all the talk of a Supes vs Bats movie out there, some people fantasize about a Keaton-Reeve casting. But it’s been done! The movie was called Speechless and costarred Gina Davis.
Likewise the mom and dad from Seventh Heaven (on television) were both sidekicks to Captain Kirk in Star Trek movies (mom was Gillian from IV:The Voyage Home and dad was Decker from I:The Motion Picture).
Can’t think of any other examples off the top of my head but do chime in if you’ve got one.
In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.
In 2007, 83.9 million albums were sold, down 21.4 million from last year. A 20 percent drop in sales is more than a blip; it’s serious trouble.
The industry has been under pressure for years, of course. Back in August, we took a detailed look at trends in the movie, music, and video game businesses and noted that RIAA companies have seen sales drop by 11.6 percent between 2002 and 2006, even as movies hold steady and games are showing sales increases.
the Warner Music Group said on Thursday that it would sell songs and albums without anticopying software through Amazon’s fledgling digital music service. […] Warner is the third of the four major music corporations to reconsider its use of so-called digital rights management software, known by its initials as D.R.M., and offer its catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format. […] EMI Group broke ranks with the other major labels and agreed to sell unprotected music through iTunes in April.
Now, some music executives are privately backing the idea of dropping the software from music sold through virtually every service except iTunes, in order to strengthen Apple’s rivals and potentially diminish Mr. Jobs’s advantage. The major labels have been upset with Apple’s inflexibility on music pricing, among other issues.
Warner’s move comes roughly four months after the industry’s biggest company, Universal Music Group, part of Vivendi, said it would sell music without restrictions through an array of services, including digital stores run by Wal-Mart, Real Networks and Amazon, but not iTunes.
Apple and Fox have indeed (finally) agreed on an iTunes movie deal, and while details are admittedly scant at the moment, chances are Stevie J. will get to the nitty gritty come Macworld. What we do know, however, is that the alleged partnership will enable iTunes users to rent new Fox DVD releases and keep them around “for a limited time,” though pricing figures weren’t speculated upon. Additionally, it sounds like Fox will be spreading its digital file inclusion from select titles to all flicks, giving DVD purchasers a FairPlay protected file that can easily be transferred (read: without third-party transcoding software) to a computer and / or iPod for later viewing.
Apple is betting on the wrong horse here. I’m coming around to the view that Steve Jobs’ famous anti-DRM letter was just a negotiating tactic and didn’t represent any genuine pro-fair-use sentiment.