snapshot 7/24/08

Britain agrees plan to tackle online music piracy
Britain's music and film industries launched a fight back against online piracy on Thursday, persuading the six biggest Internet providers to send warning letters to those suspected of illegal file-sharing.


Pretenders pour "Concrete" into MP3s
The Chrissie Hynde-led rock band the Pretenders will roll out their new album, "Break Up the Concrete," as one MP3 per week leading up to the September 23 release of the CD via Shangri-La Music. The first song, "Boots of Chinese Plastic," is available for free download via AOL's Spinner.com and the Pretenders' Web site. Subsequent tracks will roll out through various partners, among them QuickTime, ClearChannel.com, CMT.com and iLike.


If Microsoft Opens the Xbox Is an App Store for Apple TV Next?
Opening up game consoles could actually be very important in revolutionizing all of home entertainment. Remember that Xbox 360, Tivo and Apple TV boxes are fundamentally similar devices optimized for different purposes. All of them take information from a hard drive and an Internet connection to display entertainment on a television screen. Yes, the Xbox has much better graphics processing and an optical drive. The Tivo decodes cable and broadcast signals. But the platforms are converging. Xbox does a brisk business in downloaded movies and has a new deal with Netflix. Tivo downloads movies from Amazon and now links to YouTube.

So think about this: a version of Apple’s app store for Apple TV. This could serve as a basic game platform for Apple–not so basic if the company beefs up the graphic chip in the device. Moreover, apps for Apple TV could offer the sort of info snacking that iPhone apps do: weather, yellow pages, photo sharing, viral videos and so on. I assume video, photos and entertainment apps would be most popular, but there is someone who will do anything. And that’s the beauty of an open environment.


Want to Beat the iPhone? First Beat the iPod.
Someone savvy will come along and build a program with a nice interface that gives you options for the source for your downloads. Wal Mart, Amazon and DRM free iTunes songs would be sourced along with P2P sources. Users could choose where to get the song/movie of their choice from.


Microsoft in first meetings for Zune phone?
Microsoft has held its first concrete meetings to design a Zune-branded cellphone, according to an unconfirmed but allegedly credible leak from jkOnTheRun. The device is well away from completion but is intended to use multi-touch input and would use a variant of Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft's first major overhaul to its smartphone platform since 2005. Windows Live services will be a major focus along with the Zune's emphasis on media playback.


Yahoo pulls an MSN Music (only faster)
This afternoon, Yahoo alerted customers of its erstwhile downloadable music store that it would no longer provide support after Sept. 30 (download the cheerful e-mail here). The upshot: starting Oct. 1, said customers won't be able to revive frozen tracks or move working ones onto new hard drives or computers, because Yahoo won't be providing any more keys to the songs' DRM wrappers. But hey, they can always buy MP3 versions from Yahoo's new partner Rhapsody!


Dolby and DTS' new audio schemes worth it?
You bought an audio-video receiver a couple of years ago, and now you're wondering whether it's time to trade up and get a model that features Dolby and DTS' new lossless codecs, TrueHD and Master Audio, respectively. Judging by the numbers they should sound markedly better than standard Dolby and DTS, but according to a recent article in Home Entertainment magazine, the sonic differences were small to negligible. You can read the full article here.


Blockbuster Beta-Testing Movielink Downloads
Blockbuster may be planning in-store download kiosks, but their recent beta-testing of Movielink downloads seems like they're aiming for at-home downloads as well. They've picked 500 Total Access customers to test out the $2 rental, $8 purchase system from Movielink, which will allow customers to rent when flicks hit video-on-demand, and buy when they hit DVD. It's fairly interesting that Blockbuster will charge extra for movies when Netflix is going with a free, albeit limited, streaming service. We'd like Blockbuster to follow suit.


How big of an impact is Internet-delivered video making in consumer living rooms?
· Xbox 360: 10.5 million units sold in the U.S.
· Netflix: 8.2 million subscribers
· Netflix Player by Roku: 10,000 units sold (estimate)
· TiVo Series 3: 250,000 units sold (estimate); 750,000 Series 2 and Series 3 units are connected to the Internet via broadband (two-thirds are estimated to be Series 2 devices).
· PlayStation 3: 4.9 million units sold in the U.S.
· AppleTV: 350,000-400,000 units sold in the U.S. (estimate)
· Vudu: 15,000 units sold in the U.S. (estimate)