04/15/2009

Digital Media Revolution Episode 8: Internet Killed the Blockbuster Star

Category dmr Digital Media Revolution podcast
Hey all! Here are the show notes for Episode 8. Enjoy!

- Answer some fanmail about removing DRM
- iTunes rolls out high def content in the iTunes Store
- iTunes new pricing model goes live
- DOJ sending file traders to jail
- Wii may start streaming movies
- Lars Urlich the Pirate
- The current state of the video market and where it is headed
- How to unmask Backwards Masking using Audacity
Download File DMR Episode 8.mp3

Posted by Dave Gilmore At 5:19 AM Location Studio | | Comments (0)

04/11/2009

Here's an Example of The Ridiculous Money Hungry Lawsuit Bulldog Tactics The Record Labels Employ

Category litigation

Its one thing for the Label Lawdogs to go after blatant copyright infringing sites for sharing music illegally. Its quite another to go after someone who uses a sites API to gather content in the same suit as is the case for Ryan Sit, a developer who decided to use the Seeqpod API in one of his side projects.

Seeqpod, a streaming music site whose aggregation method is a little questionable to some legal entities, offers a developer API, which allows third parties to interface with it and reshape its content Web 2.0 style. The site's legality is still undecided, but that is not the focus of this article. There is a dangerous precedence being set here because not only is EMI suing Seeqpod but they are going after Sit as well as a third party developer for happening to use a service Seeqpod offers - the same as thousands of other hapless developers do.

The thing that worries me here is this. Developers, inventors and investors make the world go round. They are the ones who come up with new and innovative ways to do things, or finance those who do. But, if there is a threat of being sued just for merely using a site's API people will be much more apprehensive to do development or finance developers. And in times of economic woe it is creative thinkers that will help solve our problems or come up with new, great ideas that get people spending money again. The best example I can think of is the Sony vs Universal City Betamax case in the 80s where Universal tried to sue Sony, the manufacturers of the Betamax device, under the pretenses that it was copyright infringement. Now, can you imagine what would have happened if they won? Ever since the day Sony won (and betamax was then surpassed by VHS and VCRs), home movies have been the biggest stream of revenue for the studios (up until recently, of course, but you'll have to catch Episode 8 of Digital Media Revolution for my thoughts on that). If Sony would have lost, or backed down because of the suit, how different would the world be right now? Who knows?

In a sense,it's like the argument that you should sue Smith & Wesson because they made the gun that someone used to shoot someone else. If you are going to get litigious, you need to focus on the subject actually breaking the law or you look like what you are - a suit happy, money grubbing bully.

Posted by Dave Gilmore At 11:51 PM Location Studio | | Comments (0)

04/11/2009

WaTunes to Compete with Tunecore To Distribute Your Music

Category distribution music

Last month in the Digital Media Revolution we talked about tunecore - a new service that will distribute your digital music to iTuens Amazon and many other online retailers for a fee. Recently, WaTunes has announces that it will provide the same service entirely for free. WaTunes will help independant artists get their tracks listed in places such as Best Buy, iTunes, and Amazon and the artist will get 100% of the royalties. Sound too good to be true? How does WaTunes plan on making money to keep their doors open? CEO Kevin Rivers says they are planning on spinning off a social network where fans can buy tracks and ringtones through its storefront that will also be ad driven.

With a plethora of other social sites like MySpace Music, Pandora and Last.fm it is hard to tell what newWaTunes can bring to the game. But free is free - doubtful they will have problems atracting artists if their name gets out there.

Posted by Dave Gilmore At 8:41 AM Location Studio | | Comments (3)

04/10/2009

Ocarina iPhone App Blows

Category iPhone music
There are lots of cool apps in the various mobile app stores but SMule's Ocarina takes things to a whole different level. Ocarina is the brainchild of Ge Wang, an associate music professor at Stanford. He runs the Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics there as well as co-directs the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO) and the Stanford laptop orchestra, which uses anything electronic it can get its hands on to make music.

Ocarina emulates an ocarina flute for the user, allowing you to blow into the mic of the iPhone and press the virtual valves on the screen to emulate the sounds of the instrument. Its even smart enough to recognize changes in the strength of the breath and you moving the phone around to change pitch and attack.

Wang said he did not write the app for musicians in mind but wrote it to unlock expression and creativity in all of us. And plenty of people have given it a go. Its been downloaded over 700,000 times from the iTunes store, and hundreds, if ont thousands, of YouTube videos are available of people playing songs.  They have even posted instructions for certain songs on the site so you can jump right in and get playing.

Here's one of my favorite YouTube videos for Ocarina. Its Wang playing the theme from The Legend Of Zelda

<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/RhCJq7EAJJA&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RhCJq7EAJJA&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>

Posted by Dave Gilmore At 1:00 PM Location Studio | | Comments (0)

04/03/2009

Justifying the 4.2 Billion Broadband Funding Initiative

Category politics DMR broadband
In past episodes of the Digital Media Revolution, I have brought up the provisioning in the recent economic stimulus package President Obama has put in place. In my head I saw it as a good thing but often questioned its necessity faced with people losing houses, hospitals closing and all of the other economic issues we face. Getting people broadband connections just seemed not as important. But then I read this article by John Chambers of Cisco and it seems every bit as important as anything else now. Allow me to comment and expand on some of the things he brings up.

When I heard about this part of the stimulus package the only thing that crossed my mind was trying to get broadband to people who didn't have it in order to bring them onto a more level playing field with those of us who do. And while this is important for sure because it allows them to take advantage of many resources and things today's broadbander takes for granted I now realize there is so much more affected by this measure.

Chambers compares the internet superhighway to the national highway system erected in the 1950s. In order to achieve growth one needs growth in ones infrastructure. So just as highways connected cities, states and coats in ways never before in the 1950s so too has the internet thus far and it will only get better as boradband will become faster (more lanes on the freeway) and father reaching.

So just as new industries popped up in support and symbiosis with the highway system (things like truck stops, diners, even cities) so to will new industries pop up around technological innovation.

In health care, for example, dynamic collaboration by way of ultra high-speed networks will help researchers find cures for diseases faster. On a more personal level, remote consultations with doctors via our HealthPresence system are enabled when life-size, “HD” images and information are transmitted over such networks to doctors who can speak to directly to patients, view the data real-time and help make a diagnosis hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Indeed, as the Baby Boomers place ever-more stress on our health-care system, telemedicine is the next frontier, but it cannot happen unless all of our connections are fast and reliable, be they in the office or at home.


Think about that. If there is a neurology expert in Boston and you are a patient in LA who has just suffered massive brain trauma the hospital where you are will be able to send him high definition brain scans to look at and he will have them in minutes - from his house even. No more waiting for the mail to arrive or large files to download. It will be almost instant.

Another theory he mentions is that faster broadband will reduce commuting because people will have the same technology at home as they do in the office. This, in turn is good for the environment because that means less oil consumption and less emmisions because less people will be on the roads going to and from work.

And it takes people to build that infrastructure, too, by the way. An estimated 2 million people will be needed to dig up ditches, run wire, install hardware and get people connected in their homes and businesses.

Its pretty fascinating to me how one thing can "stimulate" so many other things. And the broadband stimulus piece is just one small area compared to all of the bigger components. I have never claimed to be much of an economist so I can't look at a the stimulus package as a whole and tell whether or not its a good idea. But this part sounds pretty good to me so far.

Posted by Dave Gilmore At 2:19 PM Location Studio | | Comments (0)

04/02/2009

Some Notes Thus Far on DMR

Category dmr podcast
Hey Gang,

Just wanted to give you a quick update on some things that have been on my mind lately.

First off I want to say thank you to everyone who has had a chance to listen to the shows and given me feedback. It has been absolutely invaluable as I evaluate where I want to take the show. Digital Media Revolution started off as an idea and with your help I can shape it into something that the audience wants to hear.

First, allow me to give a bit of a mission statement of the Digital Media Revolution and why I decided to podcast on this particular topic. From as far back as I can remember I've always been a bit of a media "hacker". And I don't mean hacker in the sense of someone who breaks the law and steals information or does some other nefarious act. The term hacker used to be more synonymous with tinkerer than lawbreaker. So I've always been the former (tinkerer) but with media. It started with me as a little kid in my bedroom and a dual cassette deck stereo recording and mixing my own radio shows complete with music and break checks (if the DJ Jazzy Bret and the Fresh Fish tapes ever surfaced we would be in trouble :)). So then, as I got older, I would make mix tapes. Then, when CD burners became less expensive - it was mix CDs. I know mix CDs are pretty common (even archaic) now but back then there was no MP3 codec and it was all WAV files, Sound Forge and CD Architect. I think my biggest moment of clarity was when I stood in my good friend's home built PC-based recording studio in a dumpy little garage in Oxnard and I thought "man, this isn't as complicated as I thought it was. I can do this too!" And thus, my vision was clear. Producing and Engineering was where its at for me.

Fast forward to now. I look back at all the things I had to go through to get my media organized and sounding the way I wanted it and I look at all of the cool things we have today and I think to myself this is soooo easy now! And I want to let everyone know how easy it is, too. I want to help everyone else have that same epiphany I had in the garage studio. Its really easy to take some video clips you have and edit them together into a simple movie to show your family and friends. Is it going to look like broadcast TV or the movies? Of course not. But there is no reason you can't have a little fun with those vacation videos you shot in Hawaii and your favorite Jimmy Buffet song playing in the background.

Digital file formats have also ushered in a whole new era of laws, court cases, technologies and business model changes. And, as I found myself hearing all the litigation going on or the efforts to stop people from being able to use the songs they paid for out of their pocket in a simple video I kinda started scratching my head and saying "what in the world is going on here? I paid for the song. Why can't I have it on as many computers as I want that are mine?" Or "well you wouldn't stop me from spinning the CD on 300 CD players so how do you have the right to stop me from ripping it to 300 PCs if they are all mine?" And I started to take a greater interest in my rights as a digital citizen and consumer. And I started to see the relationship the record labels and the file traders had with each other and witnessed the destruction and forced reinvention of a 70 year old model of record sales. And I thought, "I bet most people don't even know half of the crap that goes on or what it is they are paying for and the rights they are giving away unknowingly". Now, granted, your rights as a digital consumer are minuscule compared to a lot of other social issues we are dealing with these days. But, if there is a topic to be covered someone will cover it. So why not me?

So now we arrive at the idea for Digital Media Revolution. When I sat down and started to plan this out and what I was going to do I had a few goals in mind. I wanted to get people excited about tinkering with their media. I wanted to get them excited about trying out new technology I told them about. And I wanted to let them know what their rights are and how they are being affected by current litigation and laws being put through in various levels of government. I think some people don't get that when they use subscription based music services and stop paying the monthly fee their stuff is no longer theirs. Or they don't know that there are better, cheaper, more feature rich options out there. So I was going to tell people about it and tell them how to use them. Bring the Revolution to the masses as it were.

Now, after 7 episodes I see a few tings I am doing that need tweaking or changing. Foremost to me the show is too long. People will likely lose interest after 20-30 minutes of hearing me drone on. And an hour long show at this stage is not going to build me an audience. But there is so much news to cover! So I think what I will be doing is blogging more and podcasting less on the news. I'll still write entries here on a lot of the stories but only really talk about the 3 or 4 I feel most passionate about on the show. Then that will give me more time to go over some how-tos and such like I have planned. I also want to bring on some more guests but if the news runs 30 minutes in itself there will be no time for the guests to talk.

With that said, look for more blogging this week and an episode to follow next weekend likely. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to keep your comments coming to dmr {at} sonicjams dot com. This is a show for you. This is your show - I'm just the mouthpiece. If you feel I'm focusing on one area too much and are opposed to it let me know. Not covering something you feel is relevant let me know. Want to know how to do something? Please let me know. This show is here for you so lets make it a great resource together.

Shine ON,
Dave

Posted by Dave Gilmore At 12:02 PM Location Studio | | Comments (0)