How long will it be 'til the FCC requires that these signals be compressed? For digital TV? I'd say about ten years ago, or whenever it was precisely that the "Grand Alliance" got together with the FCC and officially released the ATSC specification. Digital TV is compressed, typically close to 100:1 over the "raw" digital signal (eg, what's coming out of your HDMI cable). Sure, they could do 2x-3x better today using more modern compression and transmission standards, but it'll probably be awhile before they do, OTA (satellite is into AVC vs. MPEG-2 already, which gets you that 2x-3x additional compression at unit quality).
Apple is still selling primarily (but not only) DRMed music, sure. That's as much Apple's fault as the major labels. As seen with Amazon's MP3 venture, the major labels will ceed to freed downloads as long as you're willing to negotiate on other things. Apple's iron fistedness on price, and the spectre of their increasing control over the music retailing business, has the major labels largely worried.
And that, my friends, is really good for us, the consumer. If Apple could be all things to all people, alternatives like Amazon would have little reason to exist. Music sales ought to be in the hands of many, but even if it's the hands of the few, that's better than a single company being in charge. And in particular, a single company that, oh-by-the-way, is also selling a proprietary player platform with DRM that they won't license.
It's also funny how the major labels point to this as a success... it's not, this is what's really killing the major labels profits, faster and harder than file sharing every imagined. The majors had single sales back in the 60's and 70's, but as the LP faded, they largely transformed the industry to an album-oriented model. And that, my friends, is the vehicle that put them at their current (and former) levels of cash.... just look at sales numbers back then, versus, say, the late 90s.
The early days of file sharing bit them, but just a little. Folks would download a song they liked, play it on computer or whatever, but if they really liked the material, they'd check out the CD. If the CD was good, they'd ultimately buy the CD... that's the longstanding notion that file sharing can actually boost sales. In fact, the orginal Napster tapped this, not just file sharing, but online discussions about music. Every time I used the original Napster (usually while working in Germany, away from my CD collection), I wound up buying CDs I wouldn't have otherwise.
But since the 1990s, the recording industry, for reasons known only to them, pushed the idea of hit singles over hit albums. In the music they produced internally, the goal was always that one big hit. This worked great for them, when the CD was the only way (short of recording over the radio) to "own" that music. But having fostered that business model, now enter iTunes (and other downloading sites). Not one of these has a good album-oriented model (some do make it slightly easier to download an album, with a slight discount, others don't).. they're pushing singles. And users are responding, buying singles. While you might claim that some of the iTunes business replaces what would have been an illegal download, I claim that most of it replaces what would be a full-CD purchase. And this is why the major labels are bleeding money.
Now, that's not really a bad thing, unless you're one of them. These guys have been living "high on the hog", on the backs of the artists, who by and large have been their victims. They do what they can to not pay the artists when possible (radio play, internet play, downloads), they have armies of lawyers trying to reduce the payment to artists for the artists own work, when in reality, all the labels provide is manufacturing and distribution -- they're rarely a part of the actual music production process anymore. It would be ultimately very good for the music industry if the current major labels all crashed and burned. They would be replaced with a more conventional publication and distribution system (or systems, if you look at how folks like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Prince, and others have been doing "their own thing"), whereas the artist is in control of the art, and the publisher/distributer is paid for their services, that's all. The notion that Sony, BMI, etc. claim copyright on most of the CDs they sell (take a look at yours) is criminal.
The existence of a few cheap dual-format players wouldn't have been enough. That solves today's issue: "I can't get film X on format B because they're only supporting format H". But it doesn't itself solve tomorrow's problem: can I play all of my discs on a typical player of 2012? If the format war could have lasted long enough to ensure dual-format was the defacto standard (like DVD-R vs. DVD+R), this could have happened. The problem is, the format war limited the growth of both formats, and thus, the money available to invest. It also didn't help HD-DVD that they only had Toshiba in their camp... both dual-format players came from the Blu-Ray side of things. That was guaranteed, since Tosbiba was selling at or below cost, thus preventing any other CE company from entering the HD-DVD only business.
But the worst problem was the need to have dual sets of hardware royalties on a dual format players. Most of the hardware's the same, and while you need extra work and perhaps two blue laser heads on a dual format disc reader, that's a small thing, comparatively. In time, prices fall, but it's nearly impossible in this kind of war, because it's the popular adoption of a format like CD or DVD that turns your $1000 player into a $20 player... and that won't happen when most consumers are waiting for the end of the format war. Even cheaper dual format players doesn't guarantee that dual format becomes the standard... only absolute success of both formats could have done this.
Well, I would claim that at least Sony DID learn from the lesson of VHS vs. Beta (or MiniDisc vs. CD/tape, or Hi-8 vs. miniDV, or MicroMV vs. MiniDV, etc), and this is a huge part of why BD not only won, but deserved to win.
For one, like or not, they did have better specs, but they were also smart enough not to get crazy on technology -- pretty much the same tech on both formats, BD's a larger disc and supports higher bitrates. That makes it potentially better for video, demonstrably better for computer use.
Unlike most prior Sony things (aside from CD, of course), they learned that it takes an industry to make a format succeed. So they managed to get nearly every CE company, and most of the film studios, as partners in Blu-Ray.
Toshiba thought you could learn instead from the video gaming market, and build a video format the way you launch a games console, subsidizing the cost of the players by software royalties. But I don't really believe anyone wanted to see the next generation video format completely dominated by one company (well, two if you add Microsoft into the mix). Most early adopters were too savvy for this. You get the low HW prices soon enough anyway, via competition, the same way originally-$1000 CD players and originally-$1000 DVD players now come free with a gasoline fillup. Meanwhile, you're not loading the software with a heavy royalty, as you have in the video games market... of the last eight BDs I bought, all but two were priced the same as the DVD equivalents, and two were actually cheaper (these go on sale too, after all).
I think if anything, both groups forgot the lesson of Circuit City's "DiVX" format -- consumers aren't idiots. And most of us realized that the cost of the players in the first year isn't important. What matters is that your software will play five years from now. When there's a format war going, you can't guarantee that you aren't the guy with the Betamax. So most of the typical buyers of hot new technology didn't buy. The reason it only took about a month from the Warner announcement to the end of the war was that everyone else: the other CE companies, consumers, studios, etc. wanted this over. Studios don't want to deal with multiple formats, but worse still for them, people weren't just not buying blue-laser discs, they had stopped buying DVDs (DVD sales fell for the first time ever in 2007, even as movie box office went up), waiting for the HD war to be resolved. I know I did. The lesson here is that, when you introduce a format that's consumer hostile, consumers will understand this, and generally not fall for it.
Sure, you need a manufacturing infrastructure of some sort to deliver a physical product. But these folks are 100% interchangeable with one another, particularly in a commodity business such as CD replication. No one is capable of making any kind of power grap... as an artist, I hire them to replicate my CD, and if I don't get good service from one company, I go to another.
Even with downloads, of course, you're probably going to be working together with an ISP and, in the case of a big release like NiN's, you had better contract someone with significant server capability, or you won't be able to meet demand.
But this is not even remotely related to what the Recording Industry has beome. They consider artists THEIR employees, and demand the bulk of the profit on the creative work of others.
Yes, there's also the problem of creating demand... an unknown band has a hard time getting heard. But that's a separate problem, and indepedent of whether recording companies exist, they're replaced by DIY means like Radiohead and NiN, or replaced by something else (independent music publishers, for example, who work under contract from an artist to replicate, distribute, and possibly promote their works, but hold no permanent control of the content). New artists have trouble being heard today, at least on a national basis. Some get lucky and get "discovered" in unusual ways, others have to work hard and slowly build a fan base, both by recording, performing, and eventually touring.
While the media and CE companies wanted this format war, the consumer didn't. Some chose sides, most of us have been waiting for a sign of who's winning. This was appearing to be Blu-Ray earlier in 2007, which is what prompted Microsoft/Toshiba to pony up the cash to keep Paramount HD-DVD only for 18 months.... thus prolonging the war, in theory.
The Warner announcement tipped the scales, and most consumers were ready for a winner to be declared. This is the kind of thing that becomes self-fulfilling -- customers want it tipped one way or another, and if they see the tip enough, everyone goes over to that side of the see-saw as fast as possible... particularly if Sony can stop shooting themselves in the foot by redesigning Blu-Ray every three months (ok, most of the new stuff is totally optional, but it doesn't help their case to create more customer confusion).
Obviously, Toshiba will try to lure back sales by slashing prices. The most interesting thing about HD-DVD is also the problem -- Toshiba can do this, because they're running HD-DVD like it's a gaming console (whether by choice or not, I don't know)... they sell all of the hardware, they get money back on licencing fees, so they can afford to blow out systems at cost, or even below cost, just as Sony and MS do with their games consoles (at least when they're new.. eventually, they want to get profitable on the HW).
It's true TODAY that most users are consuming moderate amounts of bandwidth (you can't say "average", because most users will consumer average amounts of bandwidth, even if they all go crazy and quadruple their consumption tomorrow). But there are various market forces conspiring to change this. I see this announcement as the cables (and eventually, telcos) hedging their bets.
For example, a top-level Seagate executive announced, at the recent CES show, that "blue laser disc" has failed, and hard drive storage (presumably coupled with downloads) is the future of HD video at home. Let's put this in prespective... if I were to buy a season's worth of any television show on Blu-Ray, that's likely to be around 250GB per season (five discs, fairly comparable to today's DVD set) in the original broadcast ATSC format... divide by two for AVC encoding, forget that division if you're talking top Blu-Ray quality vs. the lesser ATSC broadcast quality, add various bits for audio tracks other than AC-3 5.1, multiple audio tracks, special features, etc.).
I can drive to "Best Buy", buy that, and get home in an hour and 10 minutes, if I know just what I'm after. On download here (HugesNet), that's going to take around 9 days at full bandwidth (1.5Mb/s)... assuming they didn't shut me down due to bandwidth caps, which they would. On a high-speed FIOS link, that would take around a day.
So that day's worth on the 15Mb/s link isn't insane, from the user's prespective. But once everyone's running their internet link at full possible bandwidth for days at a time (basic FIOS would run you three days for this download), well, no one's getting anywhere close to full bandwidth anymore.. the servers at your head end, the local nodes, etc. don't have anything remotely capable of dealing with even a moderate percentage of users sucking down full bandwidth for days at a time.
Truth is, virtually every ISP has a "double secret probation" point, at which your bandwidth is "on notice". Exceed that point too many times, or go totally bonkers beyond that, and you're going to hear from the company. On lower bandwidth connections, such as EvDO, this is a well known means for getting out of your contract without paying a penalty (the satellite folks don't want this, either, so they have the restricted modes spelled out up front).
You're probably talking 5-10 years before there's even the possibility of a real "all you can eat" broadband connection, when viewed through the lens of HD video sales actually replacing Blu-Ray and DVD. As well, you'll need a seriously fat storage means... consider that, at somewhere around 200-250GB per season, my Babylon 5 collection alone, in HD, would eat up the better part of a Terabyte disc. Today, that's an added $40 in storage costs per season or more. Sure, that'll drop, but that's also a 5-10 year thing.
Worse yet, for bandwidth concerns, is the notion you're going to store it all "in the cloud". That would tend to imply that every IPTV home would not become a (15-30Mb/s) * (number of TVs) virtually constant pull, and as well, users will want that to be realtime. Also not happening, and also fully capable of dropping any existing ISP to their knees, today.
We'll talk about the actual whitespace bandwidth (somewhere south of 2.6Gb/s, using current 256QAM encoding and polarization, yielding 60Mb/s per 6MHz slot, assuming zero TV channels and all available for broadband) in any general area. How many clients are expected to be pinned to each tower?
Yes, within limits, you can "de-shake" a shakey video. There are numerous commercial apps for this, and (of course) a freeware plug-in for Virtualdub (if you any video work, you should know about VirtualDub). Check out here: http://www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm
These work on the same priciple as the "software" image stabilizers used in some camcorders (as opposed to optical image stablizers). Basically, you define a window somewhat smaller than the full frame of your video (so you're really like to apply this to an HD print of a film if you can), and the software will move that frame and crop each image, based on detection of changes from frame to frame.
Obviously, on a PC it doesn't have to run realtime as it does on a camcorder, so there are going to be more tweakables. And you can run into problems. For example, full stabilization works in X and Y dimensions... but when you pan a camera with this enabled, you get suddering video, as the camera detects your smooth motion as "shake" and de-shakes groups of frame. Higher end cameras can be set to apply this in one dimension only, and of course, any camera can disable these functions, whether in HW or SW.
Maybe you could de-bounce the film, but it wouldn't necessarily be all automatic. Also, given that they're adding shake as an effect, rather than an unintended artifact, it may be different enough to be a problem... you'd have to give it a try and see.
When they asked Willy Sutton why he robbed banks, he replied "because that's where the money is". I think monsters have a similar notion about cities: people to eat, buildings to destroy, etc. What's the point of attacking a forest or desert? Or, it could well be that monsters ARE always attacking in those places, too, but without anyone to tell the tale, they just do their thing until they choke on a log, eat a poison frog, etc.
"Signs" is a good example of a similar idea ("street-level" story, rather than the omniscient point of view taken in "Independence Day" and most of the classic 50's films) told from the point of view of folks out in the boonies... though of course, the "monsters" were everywhere, not just local, but the local viewpoint was very effective. And there are a few others that at least start out in relatively obscure locales: the original of "The Blob", "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"; both versions of "The Thing". Even King Kong and some of the Godzilla films began out in the wilderness, even if (usually because of we meddling kids) they wind up in the big city.
If you could actually RENT HD-DVD, I might agree... as an upconverting DVD player with real HD content available, for rental, I might pay... well, maybe $100, given that I already have DVD player that plays HD content you can't actually get (WMV/HD and DivX-HD), for my own HD video work.
The problem is, the only HD-DVDs I could get I'd have to buy. If I think the format's secure, that's one thing... but I don't... if I had to bet, I would bet today on HD-DVD going away (if this annoucement is Toshiba's best return fire for the Warner move, that's pretty much guaranteed). Had both formats held out until univeral players were the norm (like the oft'mentioned DVD-R vs DVD+R), no one would care that much, all players would be dual format and keep being dual format, and the market would chose based only on the titles and features. But it sure seems like the Studios (well, 5 of them) would rather have more high def sales now rather than nurture a war while no one buys anything (compared to DVD, VHS, etc), and that means Blu-Ray only going forward, if this really does net them the win.
Which means, in 3-5 year when that blue laser burns out, you'll have "The Betamax Problem"... the only players available will be the ones on eBay, rescued from the closets of those who upgraded to Blu-Ray this year. You might get a player for $150, but after about six HD-DVD disc purchases, your concern is that HD software library that won't play on the standard player, not the cost of that initial player. I probably have 200 DVDs.. even if that were only 2/5 of that, that's 80 HD-DVDs, say, by the time you need to replace your player. Unless they also go bargain basement (which they can't for long, that would be liquidation pricing), that's $1500-$2500 worth of eventually useless software.
Yes, this is all a big IF based on IF HD-DVD is the loser. You bet with your money. I'm still not betting... and that's the industry's problem. I'm a classic early adopter. If there was one format, I'd have at least one player, a disc writer, software for authoring the discs, probably 20 titles on my video shelf, etc. The only reason I don't is that I'm not fool enough to get into another format war. So I, and many like me, are waiting for a clear winner.
And the funny thing is, all you need the preception of a clear winner, and, particularly when early adopters are involved, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The market will adjust their buying habits to see that the winner gets their dues, and the loser bites the dust. This is basically what happened to the original "Divx" format... rejected by the market. This is why Microsoft (maybe with help from Toshiba) ponyed up $150 million to put Paramount as HD-DVD-only... it didn't look good that only NBC/Universal was HD-DVD exclusive, and they really do understand the value of market preception.
And cutting the price might work at Wal-Mart, but that's not getting tons of HD-DVDs sold. It sure looks like desparation, and if you're savvy enough to look at blue laser disc purchases as an investment, you want to back the confident one, not the desparate one. In this, Blu-Ray has been winning for some time. Being more pricey will make consumers think there's something more there (I know the specs backwards and forewards, I would have been fine with either format claiming a victory). The fact that all HD-DVD players are Toshiba or obviously rebadged Toshiba players makes the smart consumer wonder if HD-DVD is proprietary, while practically every other CE company makes a Blu-Ray player... more of that winning preception (a lesson Sony learned from the VHS and MD era). A smart consumer might wonder where HD-DVD camcorders will come from (DVD camcorders overtook DV as the most popular consumer format in 2006 or 2007... Sony makes over 80% of them, Hitachi is already showing off a 8cm Blu-Ray camcorder, and none of the top camcorder makers are currently in the HD-DVD camp. Toshiba is know for consumery web-oriented flash memory players, not serious or super mass market camcorders).
Umm... you don't buy blu laser discs for the kids, particularly "Disney Age" kids. That player's in the room with the 50-75" HDTV, the PVR, the surround sound, and the good sofa. The kids have their own TV (in my kids case, a 53" SDTV), and they watch DVDs on their X-Box, their PS2, or their Karaoke machine. Truth.
Little kids chew on optical discs. That's why Nintendo stuck to ROM carts for so long on their game consoles.. better for the little ones, which pre-Wii, was their audience. I might buy Ratatouille for ME and let the kids watch, if I eventually get a blue laser player to go with my 71" DLP and all my HDV gear, but if it's just for the kids, they need it to play on their players. And on the portable DVD player, and the one in the car, etc. If they're older, they also want something that rips to the iPod or Zune.
As teenagers, the value of HD is dramatically eclipsed by the value of being able to watch some place parents are NOT, and telephone conversations are a regular part of the viewing experience.
There might be reasons to buy cheap HD-DVD players... I don't really know any, but there might be some. If Disney was on HD-DVD, well... no, still doesn't really help. Not that Disney (and their various labels) doesn't produce some fine films, just, I don't think the kids are a giant factor just yet. Maybe for households with kids and just one TV, that also happens to be an HDTV.... if any actually exist.
Primary computer? Not in Apple's wildest dreams. This is a flashy ultraportable, which finally delivers Jobs' obsession with ultrathin to the PC world. And while I'm no Macfaithful, I'll admit it's pretty cool looking. But it's no more intended to be a primary system than the OQO. But that's ok... Apple (like Sony and a few others) are increasingly using unique and clever industrial design to prop up margins in what's rapidly become a commodity market (notebooks used to be a higher profit business than desktops... that's what kept IBM in the business, long after they had abandoned making PCs).
Even big notebooks (like my HP dv9500t) are often a poor substitute for a desktop... which is why I have a desktop, too. For years I had a notebook (Fujitsu P2000) that, somewhat like this one, was designed to be really portable, but was not intended to support many of things one does on the desktop. On the other hand, my desktop didn't have a dual-battery setup that gave me 14-something hours of battery life, either (I used to commute from New Jersey to Hildesheim, Germany, pretty regularly).
Of course it's a niche... but so is every other notebook. Added together, you have niche coverage of over half of all PCs sold, but each one is, itself, a niche product (ultraportable, ultrabattery, multimedia, gaming, low cost, etc).
In this one move, the Recording Industry illustrates for everyone why they're in so much trouble -- they don't understand ANYTHING, even when it's so obvious most children get it. Back when I was a kid, there were SINGLEs... one song you wanted, usually (not always, usually) a filler song on the back. I never bought these, but my sister Kathy bought hundreds (and she's got a PhD from Stanford now, so maybe she knew something). Anyway, such singles usually ran about 1/7th-1/8th the cost of an LP, street price.
Singles went away, certainly killed in part by a time in which concept albums or real efforts by real artists made "Album Oriented" Rock the big thing on the radio... why buy a single when every song is good. This was great for the record industry, but it actually kind of required real artists who did these things on their own, in their own tine. As the recording industry took a heavier hand in producing music, building Pop Stars, etc. they went back to the days when many albums were a couple of sure-fire pop hits and the rest filler. In sort, they re-created the demand for the single.
And lookie lookie, there's iTunes, ready to oblige. They reintroduced the single, again at 1/8th to 1/12th the cost of the album (modern albums, composed for CD lengths rather than LP lengths, tend to have more songs... so it does vary). This is really a step back to the days of the "45", and exactly what users demand.
So now the Recording Industry wants to revisit the single... only, they can't actually bring themselves around to doing that, can they? Given the cost of CDs, they certainly COULD deliver a disc for $0.99 in the stores... to save on shipping, sell an 8cm disc in a glassine or mylar or paper envelope... 45s used to come sleeved in paper, no other wrapping (the label told you what it was). But why do that when you can be greedy and charge what looks like about 1/2 the going rate of the whole CD. But hey, look, we can sell you all this other crap too... sure, but where did that single go in the process?
And then there's the ringtone... how, exactly, does that get sold on a CD? You pretty much have to go online for that, since most users don't have a way to download a ringtone... Verizon customers, for example, can't do that even with Phones like the RAZR that include USB ports... too much greed at that company, too. They may have a solution, but it's not the simple and obvious "include the ringtone on the CD" answer, meaning new infrastructure, additional costs, etc... but hey, we can support that with a high fee.
Seems like everything these guys do is done by a committee of greedy lawyers and other rich people NOT otherwise involved with music. I certainly can't imagine any other way a concept so simple as "music single" could be so throughly screwed up. And sure, when it fails, it will be piracy to blame, not the fact that it was a stupid idea brought forth by morons.
It's not really DRM here... they could easily have the SoundScan people post different rates for DRM vs. non-DRM. The bottom line is that the RIAA only represent the major labels. They're comfortable where they are, and they're comfortable with you listening to Big Radio. They don't want internet radio (currently at over 50 million regular listeners) leading you to new music they don't control.
The power of the big labels has always been, well, being big. Back in the 1950's, they took the approach of the old Hollywood studios, taking in artists and pretty much running the whole show: hiring songwriters, doing the recording, etc. They stamped the records, they had distribution, etc.... no way to functionally work around this system.
As technology has improved, they started losing that power. Musicians learned to work in the studio, rent their own studio time, then build their own home studios, and that power of the Labels was no longer important. More recently, the advent of both online distribution and large independent distibution (Apple, Amazon, etc). meant that the big labels on longer had a grip on the corner record store... it's much easier to get your small project into a store online, and ANYONE can distribute from their own web site, which is more or less just as accessible as any major label's.
In sort, their reason for being has largely evaporated. Nothing obsolete dies overnight, of course, and so they've been concentrating their power increasingly as a tool for maintaining the status quo. This is why they opposed digital distribution for so long, and worked on all those failed attempts to control it directly. And this is why they fought local low-power FM, and continue to fight internet radio -- nothing good for the major labels is likely to come out of internet radio. It's main outcome is to offer exposure to independent and small label artists who otherwise would get no airplay, period.
It hasn't been great for Big Radio either. If you're a Clear Channel, you can play the same drek in two dozen major markets across the country, via virtually automated systems linked by satellite. If you're a small local radio station (assuming you still exist), your stuff is limited, and probably ranging far less than your Big Radio competition. But via the net, all can be rendered essentially equal, and if I really wanted to listen to that free form rock station from San Francisco or the one up in Wolfeboro, NH, I can do that online. And when I'm doing that, I'm not listening to the local stuff, which statistically speaking, would be Big Radio.
And you're precisely why Web Radio is such a threat! You must be stopped at all cost!
For decades, the major labels and, quite often, major radio stations have worked, increasingly in collusion, to limit your exposure to music. In particular, they're concerned about independent label music, unsigned bands, etc... anyone they don't own to whom you might be targeting your cashish, which should "rightfully" be theirs. This is precisely why Big Radio has done everything in their power to shut down the local low-power FM initiatives. This is why they, via strong armers like the RIAA and SoundScan, have gone after net radio, not just now, but several times in the past.
Ok, until recently, small internet radio outlets paid a 12% flat fee on royalties... larger companies paid what amounts to a per song-per user fee, independent of profits. The push here is to apply this across the board, making non-profits essentially impossible, and very likely shutting down any small for-profit companies.
And this isn't even remotely an effort to get net radio services to pay their fair share... it's greed, plain and simple, from the record labels... either make big bucks on interent radio, or they shut it down... either way, they think they have win here. Even some of the big radio stations have a problem with the forthcoming changes... that's because this plan also calls for this per listener/per song fee to increase from $0.0008 to $0.0019 by 2010, AND anyone affected by the increases will have to pay 18 months retroactive increase!
These are very specific to net radio, too. Satellite radio, for example, currently pays only about 7.5% of revenue in royalties. Commercial OTA broadcasters had been paying only 1.6% of revenue, and more recently have to a fixed-fee deal with ASCAP (they're one of the three major companies to whom the royalty cash is directly paid... in theory, they represent the artists, but keep in mind most recording artists will only see single-digit percentages of these royalties collected, assuming their record label isn't ripping them off), 2001-2009, covering both OTA and THEIR internet broadcasts. It's a total of $1.725 billion in royalties, but spread across the 12,000 Radio Music License Committee members and nine years, means an average of just under $16,000 a year for each station, or $43 per day (pretty much all major OTA radio stations belong to the RMLC).
If you ran an internet radio station playing 15 songs an hour, with an average listenership of 150 people, you'd be paying more... and that OTA station could not only be playing to thousands or millions over the air, they could be playing that same stuff via internet radio, to 100x more people than you, the little guy.
The brilliant minds at the RIAA, apparently whether Canadian or USAian, apparently know only one note -- It MUST be Piracy! Somebody at the big record companies (eg, their employer) ought to send some of these poor boys to class in basic economics. Back when I was a kid, the competition for my fixed entertainment dollars was split between LPs, movies at the theater, bowling, and a few other distractions. LPs were basically the only product I could take home (well, tapes, etc).
Today, the average teenager's similarly limited funds are split between PC games, games for gaming consoles (my son owns a PS2, an XBox360, a WII, and a Nintendo DS), DVDs, movies at the theater, rental DVDs, legal downloads, etc. It's also not a big surprise that the kids brought up on all of those choices have increasingly become a part of Big Music's key demographic.
And yet, Big Music doesn't understand this kind of competition (apparently, some retailers actually do), and can't grasp the simple fact that kids like mine rarely buy music of any kind. That doesn't mean they're stealing it, either, but rather, they buy games and play the radio or the PC in the background. If they buy a song, they'll get the one or two "decent" songs on iTunes, not the whole CD. They have very little first-hand knowledge of the "concept album" as we knew it... it's all random-play on the iPod (Kira) or the Sansa (Sean).
So, not understanding this, and not even really wanting to embrace the fact their very way of existence is being called to question, the one answer from the industry is always "must be the Pirates". I guess that's what they can sell to the stockholders and pretend to be addressing. They don't begin to have any answers for the real problems in their business....
Even with the infrastructure in place, there's no interest from the Telcos. When I moved into my rural South Jersey tree farm, I was on POTS with about 32kb/s on a good day. About a year later, I was getting a stellar 50kb/s-something... they put a local node in, right across the street. Great!
Of course, today, there it sits, still doing nothing but POTS. Given all the screwups from Verizon in wiring my place, I got to be friends with the local "troubleshooter" service tech. He pointed out that the node across the street is full DSL capable (he knew the proper revision of software needed and everything), and promised that they would NEVER support DSL here. Why? There are only around 30 houses within DSL range.
Plus, the telcos currently hate DSL... they know it's doomed. To hope to compete with cable, they need FIOS, so they don't want to drop coin on new DSL installations, other than in strategic areas.
The USA got universal coverage on POTS by allowing the AT&T monopoly to continue to exist, and we'd have the same thing today with broadband if such a monopoly still existed. This is exactly why so many other countries have far superior broadband -- state run or state regulated monopolies handle the hookups. If there's one company, it's automatically THEIR problem to solve. AT&T got to fund universal coverage and low-cost basic POTS service by overcharging for long distance.
In a competitive environment, it's Somebody Else's Problem, and no one's compelled to pony up cash for supporting low or no profit hookups. So you have the natural outcome of that -- some locations that have 2 or 3 different readily available broadband solutions (and, ideally, cost lowering competition), and others with little or none. Naturally, the telcos and cable companies could pay a special tax to support universal coverage, just as the long distance providers do today for narrowband coverage... and as mandated in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Of course, that's generally been mismanaged -- cash from this "slush fund" tends to mostly politicized; better to have connections than to show need. And this tends to go by state, since it's federally manages and subject to politicking. So inner city poor in Washington D.C. or folks like me in rural South Jersey are likely to be paying extra to get connections set up for neo-plantation owners in Arkansas.
As a dedicated country bumpkin, I agree -- satellite is a very real option for many people who can't get anything else. I was offered the change at cable for the $25,000 or so Comcast would charge to wire me up, and I declined. I tried Verizon's EvDO service, but even via a rooftop antenna with LNA/Amp, it wasn't up to broadband performance levels most of the time... often coming in about ISDN speeds on the downlink, and quite often slower than dialup on the uplink. Or gone entirely. No specific fault of EvDO, just the result of my place being on the fringe of their coverage.
Last year I got HughesNet, the larger "small business" dish with 2W uplink, and I'm very happy with it. Ok, not as happy as some of my pals who get FIOS at half the monthly price, but it's real broadband (1.5Mb/s down, 500kb/s up) and it's generally reliable. You do lose satellite (broadband and TV here) when there's lots of rain, so this isn't ideal for all locales, but it works fine in South Jersey. Like cable, of course, your mileage may vary... if you're on an oversubscribed spotbeam, the performance can get pretty crappy at "rush hour", but there's pretty rare in my area.
I think there's a good deal of fear about satellite, particularly given the complaining you read about online and the upfront costs. Of course, as usual with these things, the complainers are largely the folks posting online... like my issues with EvDO some years back. I certainly wouldn't run a webserver off a home satellite system, but I wouldn't do that with cable or DSL either... your site winds up running at uplink speeds regardless, and they all suck for anything serious you're doing online. The solution there is simply to find a good host (they're cheap).
Yes, there is a fairness policy. At Hughes, anyway, it's not the double-secret policy you find on EvDO or even some cable/DSL hookups, but it's plain and spelled out right in front of everyone. And you can bump into it all you like without being branded a troublemaker. If your lone goal in life is to run non-stop high-def bittorrent downloading, this kind of connection is probably not for you. But for my home office work, my kids online gaming (some games work, some suffer from the latency of course), normal levels of downloading, etc. it works fine, at around $100/month (depends on the level of service, of course).
Prior to my latest startup company, I was working on a MAME cabinet. I built it from scratch, based on an internal pine frame, with oak and oak veneer surface. I collected a number of arcade controls, and was pretty happy with both used and new stuff, particularly the Tempest-like spinner I found on one of the online sites. The only big issue was a trackball... the one I found used was a bit too used.
I designed my own electronics for system control, largely because most of the MAME controllers of the day weren't doing trackball/spinner correctly -- they were sampling the quadrature signals in software, and could alias with a fast enough spin... mine used a CPU with hardware counters. I had the setup for most configurations of one or two player games, a bright LED driven marquee (lexan bezel set into oak, the marquee graphics themselves printed on roll paper), etc.
This was at the time using an old PC, which has since gone onto other things. I'd have a faster Athlon XP if I got back to it today. Had a coin drop extracted from a real arcade machine, high end PC speakers built-in, with an amp and alternate speaker outputs to use this as a jukebox as well. If you push on the panel below where the controls box goes, it pops out and offers access to a PC keyboard, just in case. Got some since textured molding for the edges, too. The whole design was made to match the bar in my gameroom, so it would look pretty nice, thus being resistant to wife-complaint syndrome (well, we already have bumper pool, air hockey, and foosball up there with the bar, so it's not exactly the livingroom anyway).
I'd love to get back to this sometime, though I'd be tempted to use a better CPU on the controller these days, maybe support some more I/O. The basic cabinet is awaiting some final sanding, I still need to build the controller box, and track down a better trackball. But those 100 hour weeks, other home projects, etc. may keep this on the shelf another year or two...
In truth, Be managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the end. There were quite a few music and multimedia companies working on BeOS projects. The audio people were waiting for the multichannel audio API, which was supposed to be delivered in (as I recall) BeOS 5.0. Right before that release, however, they decided to not only announce BeIA (the BeOS for "smart appliance" type machines, rather than whole personal computers) and essentially they announced that regular BeOS was over. So none of this support hit the market, despite the possibility that the expected software and driver support from multiple major companies could have had a nice snowball effect.
The ironic thing is that, in 1998, I was VP of Technology at Metabox, AG, and we had approached Be, Inc. for something very much like BeIA... we wanted to use a real OS on our high-end Set Top Box. Be didn't have a clue about this, all they knew about was personal computing, and wouldn't deviate from the $50/copy PC price for the OS. So we went with OS/2... IBM understood appliance computing a little better (though honestly, if you only had x86 supported, you didn't really understand the embedded market). So anyway, I was close to shocked when a few years later, Be threw it all at essentially the same kind of market.
The logic was probably based on the clear notion that, in the late 90s, non-Windows OSs started getting free. You had Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD of course, but also Solaris, free MS-DOS clones, and various other stuff. Added to that Microsoft believing they owned your PC and creating big problems for any company that wanted to sell a machine with Windows and some other OS installed, and Be was unfortunately backed into a corner. But they had, by far, the best OS for multimedia that I'm aware of... really cool stuff in there, pervasive multithreading in the days most Windows programmers didn't know threads from their left butt cheek, multi stream synchronization at the OS level, all kinds of goodies. It's a real shame they didn't live on in some form... Palm seems to have used their acquisition only as a tool to sue the ZetaOS guys in Germany.
Not exactly... the Amiga concept was sold to investors as a games machine, quite simply because, in the early 80's, game machines were very hot. However, while it was an excellent architecture for games play in the day, that was hardly the whole plan. At the time it shipped, the Amiga 1000 had, by far, the most sophisticated operating system available on a personal computer. You don't need that for games. And there was never a mid-stride mission correction. There were a few changes after Commodore got involved and pumped money into the Los Gatos-based Amiga, Inc, basically updates for the times, like changing the 5.25" floppy to a 3.5" floppy, going to standard I/O ports, and incorporating some CSG (Commodore Semiconductor Group) I/O chips and other common C= parts.
Of course, by the time the Amiga shipped, "games machine" was a detractor, largely I suppose because so-called serious computers, like the IBM PC and the Macintosh, were all but useless for games play. Now, of course, it's games that actually push the PC technology more than anything else -- you don't need high performance PCIe graphics or highly tweaked processors to run Word.
This is EXACTLY the model used on radio... an album hits, and a "first single" is released. Forget about the fact there hasn't actually been a popular single format since the 45rpms of the 70s (there are CD singles, but people don't usually buy them, and most record stores only stock them spottily... I love 'em, because there are usually alternate takes, rarities, live cuts, etc on these from the bands that produce them), they still "release" a "single", which is what you hear on the radio. This has the interesting effect of having DJs yammer on about the "new single" from your favorite artist, 6-12 months after you bought the CD (on the day it came out).
But yeah, that's the model, and it's designed to spread the appeal of the CD/album... you'll get some people buying right away, others waiting to hear other cuts. Funny this is that, with digital downloading, there's little or no downside to waiting on an album purchase (though I rekon most downloaders are single fans anyway... why DL a crappy MP3 or AAC if you're paying for the whole CD anyway, and roughly the same price as a DL)... you just download the current hit, if you like it.
It's in this way the music industry is really cannibalizing their own CD sales, and that's why I agree that this is a "sea change" in the industry, and really going way beyond the relatively small (and debatable) effect of piracy.
... I was just commenting on this in a closed forum the other day. I agree, an average cellphone is probably shipped with a battery good for the life of the phone. Of course, you can define "life of the phone" differently when I know I'll pay $10 or less for a new RAZR in two years, a far cry from $600 or so for a far cooler toy.
But that's also ignoring that the usage pattern is going to be different, if you buy an iPhone and actually use it. I charge my RAZR every 3-4 days or so, but the iPod is supposed to be a phone, an MP3 player, a PDA, a bad pocket (-ish) web browser, etc. That means you're charging it every night if you actually use it for this stuff. A modern Li-poly cell is going hit the 80% capacity mark at 400-500 charges... which means you're in serious battery hurt before you're halfway through the second year of your contract.
Of course, there will be plenty of folks who just buy this as a toy and use it like a plain old everyday phone. There's not enough flash for any real video use, anyway, and chances are, anyone buying one of these already has an iPod, so maybe it doesn't actually get used "for real" by enough users.
And anyone watching Apple for very long already knew this would be the case -- no user serviceable battery, just like the iPods. It's all about Jobs' ego, that it would just be horrible to have a couple of screws in the back of the unit (like my Sandisk Sansa), allowing easy and supported user-replacement of the battery. Better still, for a phone/PDA anyway, would be an actual detachable battery, like my RAZR or my Zaurus. But Apple has always been about style over substance, and hey, whatever serves the cult... I was never a potential customer for this anyway.
This is a typical case of the music industry shooting themselves in the foot. The Album was the logical outcome of real artists gaining creative control over their music, soup to nuts. This began in the 60's with folks like the Beatles, Hendrix, etc. and continued. This sort of artist may not have huge megahits, but they more than likely have a dedicated following, many of whom will order their new works before even hearing them. I'll run out and buy a new Radiohead, Bright Eyes, Dave Matthews or R.E.M. album the day it hits the stoe shelves.
To reward this loyalty, the big labels have pushed their catalogs to favor Big Pop Hits. They've cut their catalogs and their artist rosters, and increasingly grown dependent on a smaller number of big hits. These are also largely corporate managed artists... producers write the songs, do the recordings, etc. and the artist is little more than an employee on a large project.
This works, of course, as long as the big labels can anticipate public taste.. which is why they're failing. They don't anticipate taste, they follow up a surprise hit with another dozen instant clones of that artist, probably with the same producers behind these works. Even for established "real" artists, the labels dictate release schedules... often leading to those albums with one or two good songs, the rest filler.
Both of these practices lead to the demand for singles... and this time around, the internet and Apple were there, at the right place, right time. I believe that a very large percentage of online sales are coming right out of album sales -- Pop fans get their instant gratification with an iTunes download, and they never really wanted the album anyway. Compilations like the "Now That's What I Call Music" series echo this... this was formerly the territory of bad direct-response ads on your local cheesy independent TV station; today, these CDs hit #1 pretty much every time... Pop fans know they get a handful of hits. They've been taught by the music industry, and their cartel with Big Radio, not to care about albums.
The only surprising thing at all is why The Big Labels are surprised about a drop in CD sales. After all, they've spent 10+ years engineering this very outcome. It may have been hastened beyond their liking by online sales, lead by Apple, and even a little by piracy (though in most cases, there's little evidence pirates actually would pay if they couldn't easily steal), but the conclusion was inevitable.
For those who like album-oriented music AND the option to rip said music, losslessly, to hard drive, the CD is a very good distribution medium. There are potentially better sounding formats (no, not vinyl, but DVD-Audio or SACD), but neither is normally rippable in full quality via digital means. Downloads are these days generally in fine consumer quality for one's MP3 player, but at a lower quality than a CD.
The problem with CDs is one largely created by the recording industry themselves, in particular, the major labels. In their continual efforts to marginalize artists and own an increasingly large portion of the market, they have drastically cut artist rosters, and increasingly relied on Big Hit Records to maintain their profit levels.
So a funny thing happened... they replaced "real" artists with those manufactured by the labels; not 100% across the board, but enough to make the hits extremely mandatory, every year.... there were no longer enough established artists with a long-term fan base to fill in the holes between hits. And art has never been something you could put on a production line.
In addition, most people have a fixed entertainment budget. When I was a kid, you could buy a record or a book, or go see a film, that was pretty much the extent of consumer media. These days, there's music (purchase or download), DVD, videogames, rentals, online subscriptions, etc. All competes for the same buck.
Legal downloads have become a kind of pressure release valve for much of the listening public. Rather than add to sales, they've reduced them.. the same people who might have chose "CD" over "Game" this month can now just download that hit or two, they only songs they really wanted anyway, and still spend most of their cash on the DVD or game or whatever. I grew up with album-oriented rock radio... I still listen to whole albums, still buy them. But the recording industry destroyed this model with their push to Hit oriented radio... sure, they'd like a CD with multiple hits, but in the downloading model, you have to win each hit purchase, not simply that first one that bags the CD. Most kids don't think in terms of albums, period. This is the same culture that took compilation CDs away from bad K-Tel TV ads and put them (the "Now that's what I call music!" series, for example) into the top 10... that's just another form of single.
I don't think CDs are necessary anymore, but until there's a lossless download available, with similar pricing, I won't be buying downloads. I did subscribe to eMusic.com sometime back, when they offered unlimited downloads (128kb/s MP3, yeah, but DRM-free), but I dropped it when they went to a limited model... which was single-oriented, even on an "indie" oriented service like eMusic. I can't see spending the same money for a lesser product. The CD is still superior to downloads, but doesn't necessarily remain so forever...
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How long will it be 'til the FCC requires that these signals be compressed? For digital TV? I'd say about ten years ago, or whenever it was precisely that the "Grand Alliance" got together with the FCC and officially released the ATSC specification. Digital TV is compressed, typically close to 100:1 over the "raw" digital signal (eg, what's coming out of your HDMI cable). Sure, they could do 2x-3x better today using more modern compression and transmission standards, but it'll probably be awhile before they do, OTA (satellite is into AVC vs. MPEG-2 already, which gets you that 2x-3x additional compression at unit quality).
Apple is still selling primarily (but not only) DRMed music, sure. That's as much Apple's fault as the major labels. As seen with Amazon's MP3 venture, the major labels will ceed to freed downloads as long as you're willing to negotiate on other things. Apple's iron fistedness on price, and the spectre of their increasing control over the music retailing business, has the major labels largely worried.
And that, my friends, is really good for us, the consumer. If Apple could be all things to all people, alternatives like Amazon would have little reason to exist. Music sales ought to be in the hands of many, but even if it's the hands of the few, that's better than a single company being in charge. And in particular, a single company that, oh-by-the-way, is also selling a proprietary player platform with DRM that they won't license.
It's also funny how the major labels point to this as a success... it's not, this is what's really killing the major labels profits, faster and harder than file sharing every imagined. The majors had single sales back in the 60's and 70's, but as the LP faded, they largely transformed the industry to an album-oriented model. And that, my friends, is the vehicle that put them at their current (and former) levels of cash.... just look at sales numbers back then, versus, say, the late 90s.
The early days of file sharing bit them, but just a little. Folks would download a song they liked, play it on computer or whatever, but if they really liked the material, they'd check out the CD. If the CD was good, they'd ultimately buy the CD... that's the longstanding notion that file sharing can actually boost sales. In fact, the orginal Napster tapped this, not just file sharing, but online discussions about music. Every time I used the original Napster (usually while working in Germany, away from my CD collection), I wound up buying CDs I wouldn't have otherwise.
But since the 1990s, the recording industry, for reasons known only to them, pushed the idea of hit singles over hit albums. In the music they produced internally, the goal was always that one big hit. This worked great for them, when the CD was the only way (short of recording over the radio) to "own" that music. But having fostered that business model, now enter iTunes (and other downloading sites). Not one of these has a good album-oriented model (some do make it slightly easier to download an album, with a slight discount, others don't).. they're pushing singles. And users are responding, buying singles. While you might claim that some of the iTunes business replaces what would have been an illegal download, I claim that most of it replaces what would be a full-CD purchase. And this is why the major labels are bleeding money.
Now, that's not really a bad thing, unless you're one of them. These guys have been living "high on the hog", on the backs of the artists, who by and large have been their victims. They do what they can to not pay the artists when possible (radio play, internet play, downloads), they have armies of lawyers trying to reduce the payment to artists for the artists own work, when in reality, all the labels provide is manufacturing and distribution -- they're rarely a part of the actual music production process anymore. It would be ultimately very good for the music industry if the current major labels all crashed and burned. They would be replaced with a more conventional publication and distribution system (or systems, if you look at how folks like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Prince, and others have been doing "their own thing"), whereas the artist is in control of the art, and the publisher/distributer is paid for their services, that's all. The notion that Sony, BMI, etc. claim copyright on most of the CDs they sell (take a look at yours) is criminal.
The existence of a few cheap dual-format players wouldn't have been enough. That solves today's issue: "I can't get film X on format B because they're only supporting format H". But it doesn't itself solve tomorrow's problem: can I play all of my discs on a typical player of 2012? If the format war could have lasted long enough to ensure dual-format was the defacto standard (like DVD-R vs. DVD+R), this could have happened. The problem is, the format war limited the growth of both formats, and thus, the money available to invest. It also didn't help HD-DVD that they only had Toshiba in their camp... both dual-format players came from the Blu-Ray side of things. That was guaranteed, since Tosbiba was selling at or below cost, thus preventing any other CE company from entering the HD-DVD only business.
But the worst problem was the need to have dual sets of hardware royalties on a dual format players. Most of the hardware's the same, and while you need extra work and perhaps two blue laser heads on a dual format disc reader, that's a small thing, comparatively. In time, prices fall, but it's nearly impossible in this kind of war, because it's the popular adoption of a format like CD or DVD that turns your $1000 player into a $20 player... and that won't happen when most consumers are waiting for the end of the format war. Even cheaper dual format players doesn't guarantee that dual format becomes the standard... only absolute success of both formats could have done this.
Well, I would claim that at least Sony DID learn from the lesson of VHS vs. Beta (or MiniDisc vs. CD/tape, or Hi-8 vs. miniDV, or MicroMV vs. MiniDV, etc), and this is a huge part of why BD not only won, but deserved to win.
For one, like or not, they did have better specs, but they were also smart enough not to get crazy on technology -- pretty much the same tech on both formats, BD's a larger disc and supports higher bitrates. That makes it potentially better for video, demonstrably better for computer use.
Unlike most prior Sony things (aside from CD, of course), they learned that it takes an industry to make a format succeed. So they managed to get nearly every CE company, and most of the film studios, as partners in Blu-Ray.
Toshiba thought you could learn instead from the video gaming market, and build a video format the way you launch a games console, subsidizing the cost of the players by software royalties. But I don't really believe anyone wanted to see the next generation video format completely dominated by one company (well, two if you add Microsoft into the mix). Most early adopters were too savvy for this. You get the low HW prices soon enough anyway, via competition, the same way originally-$1000 CD players and originally-$1000 DVD players now come free with a gasoline fillup. Meanwhile, you're not loading the software with a heavy royalty, as you have in the video games market... of the last eight BDs I bought, all but two were priced the same as the DVD equivalents, and two were actually cheaper (these go on sale too, after all).
I think if anything, both groups forgot the lesson of Circuit City's "DiVX" format -- consumers aren't idiots. And most of us realized that the cost of the players in the first year isn't important. What matters is that your software will play five years from now. When there's a format war going, you can't guarantee that you aren't the guy with the Betamax. So most of the typical buyers of hot new technology didn't buy. The reason it only took about a month from the Warner announcement to the end of the war was that everyone else: the other CE companies, consumers, studios, etc. wanted this over. Studios don't want to deal with multiple formats, but worse still for them, people weren't just not buying blue-laser discs, they had stopped buying DVDs (DVD sales fell for the first time ever in 2007, even as movie box office went up), waiting for the HD war to be resolved. I know I did. The lesson here is that, when you introduce a format that's consumer hostile, consumers will understand this, and generally not fall for it.
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It's hardly the same thing.
Sure, you need a manufacturing infrastructure of some sort to deliver a physical product. But these folks are 100% interchangeable with one another, particularly in a commodity business such as CD replication. No one is capable of making any kind of power grap... as an artist, I hire them to replicate my CD, and if I don't get good service from one company, I go to another.
Even with downloads, of course, you're probably going to be working together with an ISP and, in the case of a big release like NiN's, you had better contract someone with significant server capability, or you won't be able to meet demand.
But this is not even remotely related to what the Recording Industry has beome. They consider artists THEIR employees, and demand the bulk of the profit on the creative work of others.
Yes, there's also the problem of creating demand... an unknown band has a hard time getting heard. But that's a separate problem, and indepedent of whether recording companies exist, they're replaced by DIY means like Radiohead and NiN, or replaced by something else (independent music publishers, for example, who work under contract from an artist to replicate, distribute, and possibly promote their works, but hold no permanent control of the content). New artists have trouble being heard today, at least on a national basis. Some get lucky and get "discovered" in unusual ways, others have to work hard and slowly build a fan base, both by recording, performing, and eventually touring.
While the media and CE companies wanted this format war, the consumer didn't. Some chose sides, most of us have been waiting for a sign of who's winning. This was appearing to be Blu-Ray earlier in 2007, which is what prompted Microsoft/Toshiba to pony up the cash to keep Paramount HD-DVD only for 18 months.... thus prolonging the war, in theory.
The Warner announcement tipped the scales, and most consumers were ready for a winner to be declared. This is the kind of thing that becomes self-fulfilling -- customers want it tipped one way or another, and if they see the tip enough, everyone goes over to that side of the see-saw as fast as possible... particularly if Sony can stop shooting themselves in the foot by redesigning Blu-Ray every three months (ok, most of the new stuff is totally optional, but it doesn't help their case to create more customer confusion).
Obviously, Toshiba will try to lure back sales by slashing prices. The most interesting thing about HD-DVD is also the problem -- Toshiba can do this, because they're running HD-DVD like it's a gaming console (whether by choice or not, I don't know)... they sell all of the hardware, they get money back on licencing fees, so they can afford to blow out systems at cost, or even below cost, just as Sony and MS do with their games consoles (at least when they're new.. eventually, they want to get profitable on the HW).
It's true TODAY that most users are consuming moderate amounts of bandwidth (you can't say "average", because most users will consumer average amounts of bandwidth, even if they all go crazy and quadruple their consumption tomorrow). But there are various market forces conspiring to change this. I see this announcement as the cables (and eventually, telcos) hedging their bets.
For example, a top-level Seagate executive announced, at the recent CES show, that "blue laser disc" has failed, and hard drive storage (presumably coupled with downloads) is the future of HD video at home. Let's put this in prespective... if I were to buy a season's worth of any television show on Blu-Ray, that's likely to be around 250GB per season (five discs, fairly comparable to today's DVD set) in the original broadcast ATSC format... divide by two for AVC encoding, forget that division if you're talking top Blu-Ray quality vs. the lesser ATSC broadcast quality, add various bits for audio tracks other than AC-3 5.1, multiple audio tracks, special features, etc.).
I can drive to "Best Buy", buy that, and get home in an hour and 10 minutes, if I know just what I'm after. On download here (HugesNet), that's going to take around 9 days at full bandwidth (1.5Mb/s)... assuming they didn't shut me down due to bandwidth caps, which they would. On a high-speed FIOS link, that would take around a day.
So that day's worth on the 15Mb/s link isn't insane, from the user's prespective. But once everyone's running their internet link at full possible bandwidth for days at a time (basic FIOS would run you three days for this download), well, no one's getting anywhere close to full bandwidth anymore.. the servers at your head end, the local nodes, etc. don't have anything remotely capable of dealing with even a moderate percentage of users sucking down full bandwidth for days at a time.
Truth is, virtually every ISP has a "double secret probation" point, at which your bandwidth is "on notice". Exceed that point too many times, or go totally bonkers beyond that, and you're going to hear from the company. On lower bandwidth connections, such as EvDO, this is a well known means for getting out of your contract without paying a penalty (the satellite folks don't want this, either, so they have the restricted modes spelled out up front).
You're probably talking 5-10 years before there's even the possibility of a real "all you can eat" broadband connection, when viewed through the lens of HD video sales actually replacing Blu-Ray and DVD. As well, you'll need a seriously fat storage means... consider that, at somewhere around 200-250GB per season, my Babylon 5 collection alone, in HD, would eat up the better part of a Terabyte disc. Today, that's an added $40 in storage costs per season or more. Sure, that'll drop, but that's also a 5-10 year thing.
Worse yet, for bandwidth concerns, is the notion you're going to store it all "in the cloud". That would tend to imply that every IPTV home would not become a (15-30Mb/s) * (number of TVs) virtually constant pull, and as well, users will want that to be realtime. Also not happening, and also fully capable of dropping any existing ISP to their knees, today.
We'll talk about the actual whitespace bandwidth (somewhere south of 2.6Gb/s, using current 256QAM encoding and polarization, yielding 60Mb/s per 6MHz slot, assuming zero TV channels and all available for broadband) in any general area. How many clients are expected to be pinned to each tower?
Yes, within limits, you can "de-shake" a shakey video. There are numerous commercial apps for this, and (of course) a freeware plug-in for Virtualdub (if you any video work, you should know about VirtualDub). Check out here: http://www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm
These work on the same priciple as the "software" image stabilizers used in some camcorders (as opposed to optical image stablizers). Basically, you define a window somewhat smaller than the full frame of your video (so you're really like to apply this to an HD print of a film if you can), and the software will move that frame and crop each image, based on detection of changes from frame to frame.
Obviously, on a PC it doesn't have to run realtime as it does on a camcorder, so there are going to be more tweakables. And you can run into problems. For example, full stabilization works in X and Y dimensions... but when you pan a camera with this enabled, you get suddering video, as the camera detects your smooth motion as "shake" and de-shakes groups of frame. Higher end cameras can be set to apply this in one dimension only, and of course, any camera can disable these functions, whether in HW or SW.
Maybe you could de-bounce the film, but it wouldn't necessarily be all automatic. Also, given that they're adding shake as an effect, rather than an unintended artifact, it may be different enough to be a problem... you'd have to give it a try and see.
When they asked Willy Sutton why he robbed banks, he replied "because that's where the money is". I think monsters have a similar notion about cities: people to eat, buildings to destroy, etc. What's the point of attacking a forest or desert? Or, it could well be that monsters ARE always attacking in those places, too, but without anyone to tell the tale, they just do their thing until they choke on a log, eat a poison frog, etc.
"Signs" is a good example of a similar idea ("street-level" story, rather than the omniscient point of view taken in "Independence Day" and most of the classic 50's films) told from the point of view of folks out in the boonies... though of course, the "monsters" were everywhere, not just local, but the local viewpoint was very effective. And there are a few others that at least start out in relatively obscure locales: the original of "The Blob", "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"; both versions of "The Thing". Even King Kong and some of the Godzilla films began out in the wilderness, even if (usually because of we meddling kids) they wind up in the big city.
If you could actually RENT HD-DVD, I might agree... as an upconverting DVD player with real HD content available, for rental, I might pay... well, maybe $100, given that I already have DVD player that plays HD content you can't actually get (WMV/HD and DivX-HD), for my own HD video work.
The problem is, the only HD-DVDs I could get I'd have to buy. If I think the format's secure, that's one thing... but I don't... if I had to bet, I would bet today on HD-DVD going away (if this annoucement is Toshiba's best return fire for the Warner move, that's pretty much guaranteed). Had both formats held out until univeral players were the norm (like the oft'mentioned DVD-R vs DVD+R), no one would care that much, all players would be dual format and keep being dual format, and the market would chose based only on the titles and features. But it sure seems like the Studios (well, 5 of them) would rather have more high def sales now rather than nurture a war while no one buys anything (compared to DVD, VHS, etc), and that means Blu-Ray only going forward, if this really does net them the win.
Which means, in 3-5 year when that blue laser burns out, you'll have "The Betamax Problem"... the only players available will be the ones on eBay, rescued from the closets of those who upgraded to Blu-Ray this year. You might get a player for $150, but after about six HD-DVD disc purchases, your concern is that HD software library that won't play on the standard player, not the cost of that initial player. I probably have 200 DVDs.. even if that were only 2/5 of that, that's 80 HD-DVDs, say, by the time you need to replace your player. Unless they also go bargain basement (which they can't for long, that would be liquidation pricing), that's $1500-$2500 worth of eventually useless software.
Yes, this is all a big IF based on IF HD-DVD is the loser. You bet with your money. I'm still not betting... and that's the industry's problem. I'm a classic early adopter. If there was one format, I'd have at least one player, a disc writer, software for authoring the discs, probably 20 titles on my video shelf, etc.
The only reason I don't is that I'm not fool enough to get into another format war. So I, and many like me, are waiting for a clear winner.
And the funny thing is, all you need the preception of a clear winner, and, particularly when early adopters are involved, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The market will adjust their buying habits to see that the winner gets their dues, and the loser bites the dust. This is basically what happened to the original "Divx" format... rejected by the market. This is why Microsoft (maybe with help from Toshiba) ponyed up $150 million to put Paramount as HD-DVD-only... it didn't look good that only NBC/Universal was HD-DVD exclusive, and they really do understand the value of market preception.
And cutting the price might work at Wal-Mart, but that's not getting tons of HD-DVDs sold. It sure looks like desparation, and if you're savvy enough to look at blue laser disc purchases as an investment, you want to back the confident one, not the desparate one. In this, Blu-Ray has been winning for some time. Being more pricey will make consumers think there's something more there (I know the specs backwards and forewards, I would have been fine with either format claiming a victory). The fact that all HD-DVD players are Toshiba or obviously rebadged Toshiba players makes the smart consumer wonder if HD-DVD is proprietary, while practically every other CE company makes a Blu-Ray player... more of that winning preception (a lesson Sony learned from the VHS and MD era). A smart consumer might wonder where HD-DVD camcorders will come from (DVD camcorders overtook DV as the most popular consumer format in 2006 or 2007... Sony makes over 80% of them, Hitachi is already showing off a 8cm Blu-Ray camcorder, and none of the top camcorder makers are currently in the HD-DVD camp. Toshiba is know for consumery web-oriented flash memory players, not serious or super mass market camcorders).
Umm... you don't buy blu laser discs for the kids, particularly "Disney Age" kids. That player's in the room with the 50-75" HDTV, the PVR, the surround sound, and the good sofa. The kids have their own TV (in my kids case, a 53" SDTV), and they watch DVDs on their X-Box, their PS2, or their Karaoke machine. Truth.
Little kids chew on optical discs. That's why Nintendo stuck to ROM carts for so long on their game consoles.. better for the little ones, which pre-Wii, was their audience. I might buy Ratatouille for ME and let the kids watch, if I eventually get a blue laser player to go with my 71" DLP and all my HDV gear, but if it's just for the kids, they need it to play on their players. And on the portable DVD player, and the one in the car, etc. If they're older, they also want something that rips to the iPod or Zune.
As teenagers, the value of HD is dramatically eclipsed by the value of being able to watch some place parents are NOT, and telephone conversations are a regular part of the viewing experience.
There might be reasons to buy cheap HD-DVD players... I don't really know any, but there might be some. If Disney was on HD-DVD, well... no, still doesn't really help. Not that Disney (and their various labels) doesn't produce some fine films, just, I don't think the kids are a giant factor just yet. Maybe for households with kids and just one TV, that also happens to be an HDTV.... if any actually exist.
Primary computer? Not in Apple's wildest dreams. This is a flashy ultraportable, which finally delivers Jobs' obsession with ultrathin to the PC world. And while I'm no Macfaithful, I'll admit it's pretty cool looking. But it's no more intended to be a primary system than the OQO. But that's ok... Apple (like Sony and a few others) are increasingly using unique and clever industrial design to prop up margins in what's rapidly become a commodity market (notebooks used to be a higher profit business than desktops... that's what kept IBM in the business, long after they had abandoned making PCs).
Even big notebooks (like my HP dv9500t) are often a poor substitute for a desktop... which is why I have a desktop, too. For years I had a notebook (Fujitsu P2000) that, somewhat like this one, was designed to be really portable, but was not intended to support many of things one does on the desktop. On the other hand, my desktop didn't have a dual-battery setup that gave me 14-something hours of battery life, either (I used to commute from New Jersey to Hildesheim, Germany, pretty regularly).
Of course it's a niche... but so is every other notebook. Added together, you have niche coverage of over half of all PCs sold, but each one is, itself, a niche product (ultraportable, ultrabattery, multimedia, gaming, low cost, etc).
In this one move, the Recording Industry illustrates for everyone why they're in so much trouble -- they don't understand ANYTHING, even when it's so obvious most children get it. Back when I was a kid, there were SINGLEs... one song you wanted, usually (not always, usually) a filler song on the back. I never bought these, but my sister Kathy bought hundreds (and she's got a PhD from Stanford now, so maybe she knew something). Anyway, such singles usually ran about 1/7th-1/8th the cost of an LP, street price.
Singles went away, certainly killed in part by a time in which concept albums or real efforts by real artists made "Album Oriented" Rock the big thing on the radio... why buy a single when every song is good. This was great for the record industry, but it actually kind of required real artists who did these things on their own, in their own tine. As the recording industry took a heavier hand in producing music, building Pop Stars, etc. they went back to the days when many albums were a couple of sure-fire pop hits and the rest filler. In sort, they re-created the demand for the single.
And lookie lookie, there's iTunes, ready to oblige. They reintroduced the single, again at 1/8th to 1/12th the cost of the album (modern albums, composed for CD lengths rather than LP lengths, tend to have more songs... so it does vary). This is really a step back to the days of the "45", and exactly what users demand.
So now the Recording Industry wants to revisit the single... only, they can't actually bring themselves around to doing that, can they? Given the cost of CDs, they certainly COULD deliver a disc for $0.99 in the stores... to save on shipping, sell an 8cm disc in a glassine or mylar or paper envelope... 45s used to come sleeved in paper, no other wrapping (the label told you what it was). But why do that when you can be greedy and charge what looks like about 1/2 the going rate of the whole CD. But hey, look, we can sell you all this other crap too... sure, but where did that single go in the process?
And then there's the ringtone... how, exactly, does that get sold on a CD? You pretty much have to go online for that, since most users don't have a way to download a ringtone... Verizon customers, for example, can't do that even with Phones like the RAZR that include USB ports... too much greed at that company, too. They may have a solution, but it's not the simple and obvious "include the ringtone on the CD" answer, meaning new infrastructure, additional costs, etc... but hey, we can support that with a high fee.
Seems like everything these guys do is done by a committee of greedy lawyers and other rich people NOT otherwise involved with music. I certainly can't imagine any other way a concept so simple as "music single" could be so throughly screwed up. And sure, when it fails, it will be piracy to blame, not the fact that it was a stupid idea brought forth by morons.
It's not really DRM here... they could easily have the SoundScan people post different rates for DRM vs. non-DRM. The bottom line is that the RIAA only represent the major labels. They're comfortable where they are, and they're comfortable with you listening to Big Radio. They don't want internet radio (currently at over 50 million regular listeners) leading you to new music they don't control.
The power of the big labels has always been, well, being big. Back in the 1950's, they took the approach of the old Hollywood studios, taking in artists and pretty much running the whole show: hiring songwriters, doing the recording, etc. They stamped the records, they had distribution, etc.... no way to functionally work around this system.
As technology has improved, they started losing that power. Musicians learned to work in the studio, rent their own studio time, then build their own home studios, and that power of the Labels was no longer important. More recently, the advent of both online distribution and large independent distibution (Apple, Amazon, etc). meant that the big labels on longer had a grip on the corner record store... it's much easier to get your small project into a store online, and ANYONE can distribute from their own web site, which is more or less just as accessible as any major label's.
In sort, their reason for being has largely evaporated. Nothing obsolete dies overnight, of course, and so they've been concentrating their power increasingly as a tool for maintaining the status quo. This is why they opposed digital distribution for so long, and worked on all those failed attempts to control it directly. And this is why they fought local low-power FM, and continue to fight internet radio -- nothing good for the major labels is likely to come out of internet radio. It's main outcome is to offer exposure to independent and small label artists who otherwise would get no airplay, period.
It hasn't been great for Big Radio either. If you're a Clear Channel, you can play the same drek in two dozen major markets across the country, via virtually automated systems linked by satellite. If you're a small local radio station (assuming you still exist), your stuff is limited, and probably ranging far less than your Big Radio competition. But via the net, all can be rendered essentially equal, and if I really wanted to listen to that free form rock station from San Francisco or the one up in Wolfeboro, NH, I can do that online. And when I'm doing that, I'm not listening to the local stuff, which statistically speaking, would be Big Radio.
And you're precisely why Web Radio is such a threat! You must be stopped at all cost!
For decades, the major labels and, quite often, major radio stations have worked, increasingly in collusion, to limit your exposure to music. In particular, they're concerned about independent label music, unsigned bands, etc... anyone they don't own to whom you might be targeting your cashish, which should "rightfully" be theirs. This is precisely why Big Radio has done everything in their power to shut down the local low-power FM initiatives. This is why they, via strong armers like the RIAA and SoundScan, have gone after net radio, not just now, but several times in the past.
Ok, until recently, small internet radio outlets paid a 12% flat fee on royalties... larger companies paid what amounts to a per song-per user fee, independent of profits. The push here is to apply this across the board, making non-profits essentially impossible, and very likely shutting down any small for-profit companies.
And this isn't even remotely an effort to get net radio services to pay their fair share... it's greed, plain and simple, from the record labels... either make big bucks on interent radio, or they shut it down... either way, they think they have win here. Even some of the big radio stations have a problem with the forthcoming changes... that's because this plan also calls for this per listener/per song fee to increase from $0.0008 to $0.0019 by 2010, AND anyone affected by the increases will have to pay 18 months retroactive increase!
These are very specific to net radio, too. Satellite radio, for example, currently pays only about 7.5% of revenue in royalties. Commercial OTA broadcasters had been paying only 1.6% of revenue, and more recently have to a fixed-fee deal with ASCAP (they're one of the three major companies to whom the royalty cash is directly paid... in theory, they represent the artists, but keep in mind most recording artists will only see single-digit percentages of these royalties collected, assuming their record label isn't ripping them off), 2001-2009, covering both OTA and THEIR internet broadcasts. It's a total of $1.725 billion in royalties, but spread across the 12,000 Radio Music License Committee members and nine years, means an average of just under $16,000 a year for each station, or $43 per day (pretty much all major OTA radio stations belong to the RMLC).
If you ran an internet radio station playing 15 songs an hour, with an average listenership of 150 people, you'd be paying more... and that OTA station could not only be playing to thousands or millions over the air, they could be playing that same stuff via internet radio, to 100x more people than you, the little guy.
The brilliant minds at the RIAA, apparently whether Canadian or USAian, apparently know only one note -- It MUST be Piracy! Somebody at the big record companies (eg, their employer) ought to send some of these poor boys to class in basic economics. Back when I was a kid, the competition for my fixed entertainment dollars was split between LPs, movies at the theater, bowling, and a few other distractions. LPs were basically the only product I could take home (well, tapes, etc).
Today, the average teenager's similarly limited funds are split between PC games, games for gaming consoles (my son owns a PS2, an XBox360, a WII, and a Nintendo DS), DVDs, movies at the theater, rental DVDs, legal downloads, etc. It's also not a big surprise that the kids brought up on all of those choices have increasingly become a part of Big Music's key demographic.
And yet, Big Music doesn't understand this kind of competition (apparently, some retailers actually do), and can't grasp the simple fact that kids like mine rarely buy music of any kind. That doesn't mean they're stealing it, either, but rather, they buy games and play the radio or the PC in the background. If they buy a song, they'll get the one or two "decent" songs on iTunes, not the whole CD. They have very little first-hand knowledge of the "concept album" as we knew it... it's all random-play on the iPod (Kira) or the Sansa (Sean).
So, not understanding this, and not even really wanting to embrace the fact their very way of existence is being called to question, the one answer from the industry is always "must be the Pirates". I guess that's what they can sell to the stockholders and pretend to be addressing. They don't begin to have any answers for the real problems in their business....
Even with the infrastructure in place, there's no interest from the Telcos. When I moved into my rural South Jersey tree farm, I was on POTS with about 32kb/s on a good day. About a year later, I was getting a stellar 50kb/s-something... they put a local node in, right across the street. Great!
Of course, today, there it sits, still doing nothing but POTS. Given all the screwups from Verizon in wiring my place, I got to be friends with the local "troubleshooter" service tech. He pointed out that the node across the street is full DSL capable (he knew the proper revision of software needed and everything), and promised that they would NEVER support DSL here. Why? There are only around 30 houses within DSL range.
Plus, the telcos currently hate DSL... they know it's doomed. To hope to compete with cable, they need FIOS, so they don't want to drop coin on new DSL installations, other than in strategic areas.
The USA got universal coverage on POTS by allowing the AT&T monopoly to continue to exist, and we'd have the same thing today with broadband if such a monopoly still existed. This is exactly why so many other countries have far superior broadband -- state run or state regulated monopolies handle the hookups. If there's one company, it's automatically THEIR problem to solve. AT&T got to fund universal coverage and low-cost basic POTS service by overcharging for long distance.
In a competitive environment, it's Somebody Else's Problem, and no one's compelled to pony up cash for supporting low or no profit hookups. So you have the natural outcome of that -- some locations that have 2 or 3 different readily available broadband solutions (and, ideally, cost lowering competition), and others with little or none. Naturally, the telcos and cable companies could pay a special tax to support universal coverage, just as the long distance providers do today for narrowband coverage... and as mandated in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Of course, that's generally been mismanaged -- cash from this "slush fund" tends to mostly politicized; better to have connections than to show need. And this tends to go by state, since it's federally manages and subject to politicking. So inner city poor in Washington D.C. or folks like me in rural South Jersey are likely to be paying extra to get connections set up for neo-plantation owners in Arkansas.
As a dedicated country bumpkin, I agree -- satellite is a very real option for many people who can't get anything else. I was offered the change at cable for the $25,000 or so Comcast would charge to wire me up, and I declined. I tried Verizon's EvDO service, but even via a rooftop antenna with LNA/Amp, it wasn't up to broadband performance levels most of the time... often coming in about ISDN speeds on the downlink, and quite often slower than dialup on the uplink. Or gone entirely. No specific fault of EvDO, just the result of my place being on the fringe of their coverage.
Last year I got HughesNet, the larger "small business" dish with 2W uplink, and I'm very happy with it. Ok, not as happy as some of my pals who get FIOS at half the monthly price, but it's real broadband (1.5Mb/s down, 500kb/s up) and it's generally reliable. You do lose satellite (broadband and TV here) when there's lots of rain, so this isn't ideal for all locales, but it works fine in South Jersey. Like cable, of course, your mileage may vary... if you're on an oversubscribed spotbeam, the performance can get pretty crappy at "rush hour", but there's pretty rare in my area.
I think there's a good deal of fear about satellite, particularly given the complaining you read about online and the upfront costs. Of course, as usual with these things, the complainers are largely the folks posting online... like my issues with EvDO some years back. I certainly wouldn't run a webserver off a home satellite system, but I wouldn't do that with cable or DSL either... your site winds up running at uplink speeds regardless, and they all suck for anything serious you're doing online. The solution there is simply to find a good host (they're cheap).
Yes, there is a fairness policy. At Hughes, anyway, it's not the double-secret policy you find on EvDO or even some cable/DSL hookups, but it's plain and spelled out right in front of everyone. And you can bump into it all you like without being branded a troublemaker. If your lone goal in life is to run non-stop high-def bittorrent downloading, this kind of connection is probably not for you. But for my home office work, my kids online gaming (some games work, some suffer from the latency of course), normal levels of downloading, etc. it works fine, at around $100/month (depends on the level of service, of course).
Prior to my latest startup company, I was working on a MAME cabinet. I built it from scratch, based on an internal pine frame, with oak and oak veneer surface. I collected a number of arcade controls, and was pretty happy with both used and new stuff, particularly the Tempest-like spinner I found on one of the online sites. The only big issue was a trackball... the one I found used was a bit too used.
I designed my own electronics for system control, largely because most of the MAME controllers of the day weren't doing trackball/spinner correctly -- they were sampling the quadrature signals in software, and could alias with a fast enough spin... mine used a CPU with hardware counters. I had the setup for most configurations of one or two player games, a bright LED driven marquee (lexan bezel set into oak, the marquee graphics themselves printed on roll paper), etc.
This was at the time using an old PC, which has since gone onto other things. I'd have a faster Athlon XP if I got back to it today. Had a coin drop extracted from a real arcade machine, high end PC speakers built-in, with an amp and alternate speaker outputs to use this as a jukebox as well. If you push on the panel below where the controls box goes, it pops out and offers access to a PC keyboard, just in case. Got some since textured molding for the edges, too. The whole design was made to match the bar in my gameroom, so it would look pretty nice, thus being resistant to wife-complaint syndrome (well, we already have bumper pool, air hockey, and foosball up there with the bar, so it's not exactly the livingroom anyway).
I'd love to get back to this sometime, though I'd be tempted to use a better CPU on the controller these days, maybe support some more I/O. The basic cabinet is awaiting some final sanding, I still need to build the controller box, and track down a better trackball. But those 100 hour weeks, other home projects, etc. may keep this on the shelf another year or two...
In truth, Be managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the end. There were quite a few music and multimedia companies working on BeOS projects. The audio people were waiting for the multichannel audio API, which was supposed to be delivered in (as I recall) BeOS 5.0. Right before that release, however, they decided to not only announce BeIA (the BeOS for "smart appliance" type machines, rather than whole personal computers) and essentially they announced that regular BeOS was over. So none of this support hit the market, despite the possibility that the expected software and driver support from multiple major companies could have had a nice snowball effect.
The ironic thing is that, in 1998, I was VP of Technology at Metabox, AG, and we had approached Be, Inc. for something very much like BeIA... we wanted to use a real OS on our high-end Set Top Box. Be didn't have a clue about this, all they knew about was personal computing, and wouldn't deviate from the $50/copy PC price for the OS. So we went with OS/2... IBM understood appliance computing a little better (though honestly, if you only had x86 supported, you didn't really understand the embedded market). So anyway, I was close to shocked when a few years later, Be threw it all at essentially the same kind of market.
The logic was probably based on the clear notion that, in the late 90s, non-Windows OSs started getting free. You had Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD of course, but also Solaris, free MS-DOS clones, and various other stuff. Added to that Microsoft believing they owned your PC and creating big problems for any company that wanted to sell a machine with Windows and some other OS installed, and Be was unfortunately backed into a corner. But they had, by far, the best OS for multimedia that I'm aware of... really cool stuff in there, pervasive multithreading in the days most Windows programmers didn't know threads from their left butt cheek, multi stream synchronization at the OS level, all kinds of goodies. It's a real shame they didn't live on in some form... Palm seems to have used their acquisition only as a tool to sue the ZetaOS guys in Germany.
Not exactly... the Amiga concept was sold to investors as a games machine, quite simply because, in the early 80's, game machines were very hot. However, while it was an excellent architecture for games play in the day, that was hardly the whole plan. At the time it shipped, the Amiga 1000 had, by far, the most sophisticated operating system available on a personal computer. You don't need that for games. And there was never a mid-stride mission correction. There were a few changes after Commodore got involved and pumped money into the Los Gatos-based Amiga, Inc, basically updates for the times, like changing the 5.25" floppy to a 3.5" floppy, going to standard I/O ports, and incorporating some CSG (Commodore Semiconductor Group) I/O chips and other common C= parts.
Of course, by the time the Amiga shipped, "games machine" was a detractor, largely I suppose because so-called serious computers, like the IBM PC and the Macintosh, were all but useless for games play. Now, of course, it's games that actually push the PC technology more than anything else -- you don't need high performance PCIe graphics or highly tweaked processors to run Word.
This is EXACTLY the model used on radio... an album hits, and a "first single" is released. Forget about the fact there hasn't actually been a popular single format since the 45rpms of the 70s (there are CD singles, but people don't usually buy them, and most record stores only stock them spottily... I love 'em, because there are usually alternate takes, rarities, live cuts, etc on these from the bands that produce them), they still "release" a "single", which is what you hear on the radio. This has the interesting effect of having DJs yammer on about the "new single" from your favorite artist, 6-12 months after you bought the CD (on the day it came out).
But yeah, that's the model, and it's designed to spread the appeal of the CD/album... you'll get some people buying right away, others waiting to hear other cuts. Funny this is that, with digital downloading, there's little or no downside to waiting on an album purchase (though I rekon most downloaders are single fans anyway... why DL a crappy MP3 or AAC if you're paying for the whole CD anyway, and roughly the same price as a DL)... you just download the current hit, if you like it.
It's in this way the music industry is really cannibalizing their own CD sales, and that's why I agree that this is a "sea change" in the industry, and really going way beyond the relatively small (and debatable) effect of piracy.
... I was just commenting on this in a closed forum the other day. I agree, an average cellphone is probably shipped with a battery good for the life of the phone. Of course, you can define "life of the phone" differently when I know I'll pay $10 or less for a new RAZR in two years, a far cry from $600 or so for a far cooler toy.
But that's also ignoring that the usage pattern is going to be different, if you buy an iPhone and actually use it. I charge my RAZR every 3-4 days or so, but the iPod is supposed to be a phone, an MP3 player, a PDA, a bad pocket (-ish) web browser, etc. That means you're charging it every night if you actually use it for this stuff. A modern Li-poly cell is going hit the 80% capacity mark at 400-500 charges... which means you're in serious battery hurt before you're halfway through the second year of your contract.
Of course, there will be plenty of folks who just buy this as a toy and use it like a plain old everyday phone. There's not enough flash for any real video use, anyway, and chances are, anyone buying one of these already has an iPod, so maybe it doesn't actually get used "for real" by enough users.
And anyone watching Apple for very long already knew this would be the case -- no user serviceable battery, just like the iPods. It's all about Jobs' ego, that it would just be horrible to have a couple of screws in the back of the unit (like my Sandisk Sansa), allowing easy and supported user-replacement of the battery. Better still, for a phone/PDA anyway, would be an actual detachable battery, like my RAZR or my Zaurus. But Apple has always been about style over substance, and hey, whatever serves the cult... I was never a potential customer for this anyway.
This is a typical case of the music industry shooting themselves in the foot. The Album was the logical outcome of real artists gaining creative control over their music, soup to nuts. This began in the 60's with folks like the Beatles, Hendrix, etc. and continued. This sort of artist may not have huge megahits, but they more than likely have a dedicated following, many of whom will order their new works before even hearing them. I'll run out and buy a new Radiohead, Bright Eyes, Dave Matthews or R.E.M. album the day it hits the stoe shelves.
To reward this loyalty, the big labels have pushed their catalogs to favor Big Pop Hits. They've cut their catalogs and their artist rosters, and increasingly grown dependent on a smaller number of big hits. These are also largely corporate managed artists... producers write the songs, do the recordings, etc. and the artist is little more than an employee on a large project.
This works, of course, as long as the big labels can anticipate public taste.. which is why they're failing. They don't anticipate taste, they follow up a surprise hit with another dozen instant clones of that artist, probably with the same producers behind these works. Even for established "real" artists, the labels dictate release schedules... often leading to those albums with one or two good songs, the rest filler.
Both of these practices lead to the demand for singles... and this time around, the internet and Apple were there, at the right place, right time. I believe that a very large percentage of online sales are coming right out of album sales -- Pop fans get their instant gratification with an iTunes download, and they never really wanted the album anyway. Compilations like the "Now That's What I Call Music" series echo this... this was formerly the territory of bad direct-response ads on your local cheesy independent TV station; today, these CDs hit #1 pretty much every time... Pop fans know they get a handful of hits. They've been taught by the music industry, and their cartel with Big Radio, not to care about albums.
The only surprising thing at all is why The Big Labels are surprised about a drop in CD sales. After all, they've spent 10+ years engineering this very outcome. It may have been hastened beyond their liking by online sales, lead by Apple, and even a little by piracy (though in most cases, there's little evidence pirates actually would pay if they couldn't easily steal), but the conclusion was inevitable.
For those who like album-oriented music AND the option to rip said music, losslessly, to hard drive, the CD is a very good distribution medium. There are potentially better sounding formats (no, not vinyl, but DVD-Audio or SACD), but neither is normally rippable in full quality via digital means. Downloads are these days generally in fine consumer quality for one's MP3 player, but at a lower quality than a CD.
The problem with CDs is one largely created by the recording industry themselves, in particular, the major labels. In their continual efforts to marginalize artists and own an increasingly large portion of the market, they have drastically cut artist rosters, and increasingly relied on Big Hit Records to maintain their profit levels.
So a funny thing happened... they replaced "real" artists with those manufactured by the labels; not 100% across the board, but enough to make the hits extremely mandatory, every year.... there were no longer enough established artists with a long-term fan base to fill in the holes between hits. And art has never been something you could put on a production line.
In addition, most people have a fixed entertainment budget. When I was a kid, you could buy a record or a book, or go see a film, that was pretty much the extent of consumer media. These days, there's music (purchase or download), DVD, videogames, rentals, online subscriptions, etc. All competes for the same buck.
Legal downloads have become a kind of pressure release valve for much of the listening public. Rather than add to sales, they've reduced them.. the same people who might have chose "CD" over "Game" this month can now just download that hit or two, they only songs they really wanted anyway, and still spend most of their cash on the DVD or game or whatever. I grew up with album-oriented rock radio... I still listen to whole albums, still buy them. But the recording industry destroyed this model with their push to Hit oriented radio... sure, they'd like a CD with multiple hits, but in the downloading model, you have to win each hit purchase, not simply that first one that bags the CD. Most kids don't think in terms of albums, period. This is the same culture that took compilation CDs away from bad K-Tel TV ads and put them (the "Now that's what I call music!" series, for example) into the top 10... that's just another form of single.
I don't think CDs are necessary anymore, but until there's a lossless download available, with similar pricing, I won't be buying downloads. I did subscribe to eMusic.com sometime back, when they offered unlimited downloads (128kb/s MP3, yeah, but DRM-free), but I dropped it when they went to a limited model... which was single-oriented, even on an "indie" oriented service like eMusic. I can't see spending the same money for a lesser product. The CD is still superior to downloads, but doesn't necessarily remain so forever...