HomeWeekly News Roundup (3 November 2013)
Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Can’t believe it’s November already, still haven’t even gotten used to writing 2013 on dates yet. A final reminder for our Australian readers of my other site Streambly’s Chromecast competition – entry closes 6th of November.
Let’s go!
Let the whack-a-mole games begin. And may the odds be ever against the MPAA’s favor. Or something like that. A week after the original isoHunt was downed, a site claiming to be the new isoHunt has been launched, and another group called ArchiveTeam has also revealed that they managed to save 240 GB worth of isoHunt data before it was taken down.
Cynics may decry the opportunistic launch of isoHunt.to, which other than a similar design to the original isoHunt, has very little in common with the original (and is definitely not associated with anyone who used to work on the site). The even more cynical have said that this new site may even be a trap, a honeypot, to catch unsuspecting uploaders and downloaders.
I don’t know who is correct, but it does show how pointless lawsuits and shutdowns are, when it’s so easy to just start a new torrent site. Instead of one isoHunt to deal with, the MPAA may find themselves dealing with hundreds of clones, all started by people that now know it’s smarter to remain anonymous – a Balkanization of torrent sites that will lead to an un-winnable game of whack-a-mole for rights holders.
The MPAA’s legal and political maneuvering might make sense in the corporate world in which they exist, the truth is that on the Internet, it’s the individual that has the power. Individuals can start a new torrent site and remain anonymous (or out of the reach of the law). Individuals can also seek other ways to upload and download copyrighted content. And even the MPAA and their members’ vast resources will not be enough to go after and take down everyone.
Fresh from a positive set of third quarter earnings results, Netflix wasted no time in lining up their next line of attack: cinemas. Netflix’s content guy Ted Sarandos used his keynote address at the Film Independent Forum to attack theater owners for stifling innovation, something that he says could eventually kill movies as we know it.
Netflix aiming to disrupt the cinema business by launching original movies that will be available at a theater near you, and via Netflix, at the same time
Pressure from theater owners put paid to plans by studios to try simultaneous VOD releases for movies that are still on their theatrical run, as a way to fight against film piracy. Sarandos says you cannot prevent people from getting movies the way they want it (legally), and not have serious consequences, including the death of theaters and movies.
Netflix already have plans for the release of an original movie on 2014, to be made available on Netflix on the same day as its theatrical release, and Sarandos wants Hollywood’s biggest movies to join in the experiment.
Theater owners are not convinced. To be precise, they’re incensed that Netflix would even suggest it, and says that Netflix are the ones that will kill movies (after having already killed DVDs, according to them).
Sarandos’s plans are good for consumers, by giving them more choice, and obviously good for Netflix. It’s not so good for cinema owners, but it probably won’t kill them either, as the cinematic experience cannot really be replicated. If the market has to respond to what users want, then less business for theater owners, and more for online services may just be the new reality. Someone wins, and someone else will inevitably lose.
But before Netflix start thinking about competing with a movie’s theatrical run, how about just making sure the big movies are all available on Netflix within a reasonable timeframe of their Blu-ray/DVD debut? It’s far too random at the moment.
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Mozilla happy Cisco decided to pay up and make H.264 royalty free
Just when Mozilla was ready the throw in the towel in their brave but ultimately futile war against proprietary video codecs, specifically H.264, networking giant Cisco comes out of nowhere to provide a third option. Cisco has announced they will absorb licensing costs for their open source implementation of H.264, allowing open source developers like Mozilla to bake in native H.264 support without endangering their own licensing terms.
So while H.264 remains encumbered with royalty fees, Cisco will pay all these fees for anyone using their open source implementation. And thus ends the incredibly tedious HTML5 codec wars, in which HTML5’s default choice of video codecs became a serious point of contention, with the industry preferring H.264, and the open source community unwilling to accept the closed off and commercial nature of the codec. Cisco’s intervention now makes everyone happy.
And if you need to know why Cisco, a company you usually associate with the Internet’s backbone, would intervene is a debate about online video, then all you need to do is to read Cisco’s white paper on network usage forecasts. It’s their predictions that the growth in bandwidth consumption will be largely driven by video applications, and more bandwidth means more Cisco equipment everywhere. So it’s easy to see why the company is willing to spend a small part of their vast fortunes to smooth out any speedbumps for the future of online video transmission.
A sprinkling of gaming stories this week. We start with the Wii being discontinued in Europe and Japan. It’s been a good run for the Wii. Probably the first console since the original Nintendo Entertainment System to be so successful at capturing the attention of so called non gamers, and one that in all likelihood will outsell the original PlayStation console when it is finally discontinued in the US. I somehow ended up with two of these things, a white one and a black one, neither of which I’ve played with for the better part of two years. But I might just do that next week, dust off the old Wii Sports (still probably the best game on the console) and give Wii tennis a whack or two.
Out with the old, and in with the new, we have a couple of PS4 related stories too. With Sony still supporting the PS3 for a little while longer, the possibility of cross-platform multiplayer between the PS3 and PS4 version of the same game may be possible, according to Sony.
No audio CD support, no MP3 playback, and no DLNA client support – the PS4’s media capabilities are much worse than the PS3’s
Other interesting facts revealed in the reveal-all FAQ document include the fact that the PS4 will be quieter in general than the already pretty quiet PS3, with a stepless speed fan system to eliminate the “jet engine” effect. The PS4 will also be featuring a faster and better browser than the PS3, which in all honesty, isn’t a hard thing to do.
Slightly more interesting for me is the revelation that Netflix will be one of the launch apps available on the PS4, and just like on the PS3, you don’t need a PS Plus subscription in order to use it.
Not so nice is the fact that the PS4 won’t support audio CDs (I guess that’s not a huge problem), nor MP3s (that is a huge problem). It seems the only music that Sony wants you to listen to on the PS4 will have to come via their Music Unlimited subscription service. Alright, I’ll just use PS3 Media Server or TVersity to stream stuff to the PS4 via DLNA, you might be thinking. Unfortunately, the PS4 does not support DLNA either, which is strange considering this is one of most useful non gaming features of the PS3.
With Microsoft focusing on media integration, the PS4 can ill afford to start removing features that were standard on the PS3. They’ve gotten a lot of goodwill over their DRM stance, but not having DLNA support seems crazy considering almost every other Sony device has it.
But if this upcoming generation of console gaming has taught us anything already, is that making a fuss actually brings results. There is already enough of a public backlash for Sony’s President of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, to suggest that these missing media features (specifically, MP3 playback and DLNA support) will be up for “future consideration” by the PS4 dev team, so let’s keep it up!
Alrighty then, that’s that for the week. See you in seven.