Categories: digital media

Boxee Names First Hardware Partner: It's D-Link

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on December 07

There's a big party being held in Brooklyn tonight for Boxee, the Internet video service I wrote about in this story in May. One bit of news is the...

One-Off Viral Videos Now Can Make Money on YouTube

Posted by: Rob Hof on August 25

Ever since Google's YouTube video sharing unit started trying to make some serious money in late 2007, it has mainly tried to place ads on videos produced by people who...

Appeals Court Nixes DVD Copying, Reverses Kaleidescape

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on August 12

If you think people should be able to make copies of their own DVDs and believe that bad news comes in threes, brace yourself. Yesterday, a federal court in Los...

Hollywood Wins Key Round Against RealNetworks' RealDVD

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on August 11

Hollywood extended its nearly unbroken string of legal victories in defense of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Tuesday when U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel issued a preliminary injunction (PDF,...

RealPlayer Adds Format Conversion, Social Networking

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on June 24

In the early days of media on the Internet, RealPlayer was the indispensable tool for playing postage stamp-sized videos on your PC. Today, the Real Networks software is one media...

RealDVD Gets Its Day in Court

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on April 21

Remember RealDVD from Real Networks? The software, which let you rip a copy-protected DVD to a hard drive for viewing on your computer, barely made it out of the door...

Demand for Online Music Services Is On The Rise, But So Is Uncertainty About Their Businesses

Posted by: Peter Burrows on March 31

I'm a huge fan of online subscriptions, particularly music services such as Pandora and Rhapsody. I realized just how much I've come to rely on such services this weekend, when...

How Do I Sell My eBook: Kindle, Rights Management, and First Sale

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on February 11

Every spring, I look forward to the Stone Ridge Academy of the Sacred Heart used book sale. The Catholic girls’ school in my neighborhood fills a couple of gyms with...

The DTV Transition Will Now Happen..Whenever

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on February 04

Will the U.S. ever complete the transition to digital television? Congress set the process in motion in 1996. In 2002, lawmakers voted that the change should be complete by the...

DTV Update: Fast-track Effort Fails in House

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on January 28

An effort by the Democratic leadership to ram a four-month delay in the shutdown of analog television broadcasts through the House failed Wednesday in the face of Republican opposition. The...

DTV Delay: A Done Deal

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on January 26

The House is expected to vote Tuesday to delay the final transition to digital television in the U.S. from Feb. 17 to June 12, following the Senate's unanimous passage of...

The DTV Delay: A Bad Idea

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on January 21

It looks like the digital television conversion, in the works for 12 years, is going to be delayed for five months or so, from the scheduled Feb. 17 to June...

Blockbuster and Netflix Take Their Competing Models Online

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on November 25

Blockbuster and Netflix have very different visions of how the residential movie distribution business works in the physical world. Netflix customers pay as little as $5 a month for...

YouTube Debuts Click-to-Buy: E-Commerce for Video

Posted by: Rob Hof on October 07

When even Google CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounder Larry Page admit their YouTube video sharing site might take awhile to make more money than the sub-$200 million in revenues...

Can Vudu Save Itself With Full HD Movie Downloads?

Posted by: Cliff Edwards on October 02

As many a failed technology company has found, the fledgling digital download-on-demand market is a tough nut to crack. Consumers have balked at paying for a dedicated box in the...

Hollywood Tries To Block RealDVD; Real Networks Strikes Back

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on September 30

That didn't take long. Today, Real Networks made RealDVD, a program that lets non-techie folks copy DVD movies and television shows to computer hard drives. available for download. As I...

OK, Music Subscription Fans -- Let's Hear Your Marketing Ideas

Posted by: Peter Burrows on December 18

So here's my challenge, subscription fans: how would you market your favorite service?...Evidently, these folks need your help.

The VCs are warming to Video Fingerprinting

Posted by: Peter Burrows on October 16

Google's announcement yesterday of a new content recognition system for spotting pirated video clips on YouTube was one more sign that this technology is coming of age--for venture capitalists, anyway....

All the More Reason to Just Buy the Damn Discs

Posted by: Rob Hof on August 31

So everybody's in a tizzy over NBC Universal's decision not to renew its contract with Apple to make digital downloads of TV shows available on iTunes. Personally, I couldn't care...

Edgeio's New Model for Paid Content

Posted by: Rob Hof on August 10

Edgeio, a site that aggregates classified listings across the Internet, today is introducing a new way for content creators to sell their digital wares--and for publishers to distribute it and...

Will the Studios' YouTube Killer Fly?

Posted by: Rob Hof on March 22

It looks like the long-rumored alternative to YouTube will actually happen, as NBC Universal and News Corp. team to provide TV show clips and even full-length movies to a new...

Movie Downloads: Who Cares?

Posted by: Rob Hof on February 08

OK, so I cheered when Amazon.com and Tivo hooked up to offer movie downloads you can actually watch on your TV. But Charlie White at Gizmodo, in a post listing...

Tivo + Amazon: Finally!

Posted by: Rob Hof on February 07

Just a day after Wal-Mart announced it's doing movie downloads, Amazon.com one-upped the retail giant with a service that has seemed to me a dead-obvious thing to do: It's teaming...

Microsoft and Content Protection: Where's the Love?

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on January 02

University of Auckland (New Zealand) security researcher Peter Guttman created a bit of a stir over an otherwise quiet holiday week with his thoughtful and detailed analysis of the cost...

Amazon Unboxes Digital Video Service

Posted by: Rob Hof on September 07

After watching all day for the rumored debut of Amazon Unbox, the online retailer's much-anticipated digital video download and rental service, I see from a tip on on Alan...

Movie Downloads Coming on iTunes

Posted by: Rob Hof on September 01

... starting in mid-September, says my colleague Ron Grover. It appears that Wal-Mart is not happy about the pricing: $14.99 for new DVDs and $9.99 for older ones, compared with...

Wait, Now It's Google + Apple. Or Is It?

Posted by: Rob Hof on August 29

Lots of speculation about what it means that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is joining Apple's board. Marshall at TechCrunch muses that Google's just-announced online office suite on Apple computers might...

Amazon's Video Download Service Unmasked?

Posted by: Rob Hof on August 21

Alan Taylor discovered what appears to be a beta site for Amazon's widely expected video download service, which looks like it's called Amazon Unbox. Taylor, a former Amazonian, clearly did...

Apple to Debut Movie Rentals?

Posted by: Rob Hof on July 18

ThinkSecret says Apple will introduce a movie rental service in three weeks at its developer conference. I have no inside knowledge to know if this will actually pan out, but...

Dailies Strike Back: Too Little Too Late?

Posted by: Rob Hof on July 14

My colleague Jon Fine has an interesting column this week that breaks news about discussions between Yahoo! and newspaper publishers MediaNews (owner of the San Jose Mercury News) and Hearst...

The Right Stuff?

Posted by: Cliff Edwards on April 10

Could it be that a content provider is finally getting it right? Disney, which owns the ABC network, as well as the Soapnet, ABC Family and Disney Channel cable networks,...

Blu-ray versus HD-DVD

Posted by: Cliff Edwards on April 03

Another day, another delay in the battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Samsung Electronics had been expected to be first out of the gate with players in the new Blu-ray high-definition...

Movie Downloads Cometh--or Not?

Posted by: Cliff Edwards on April 03

Slowly, oh so slowly, major Hollywood players seem to be warming to the idea of digital downloads. Universal, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, Paramount and Twentieth-Century Fox are finally allowing consumers...

MovieBeam Redux

Posted by: Cliff Edwards on February 14

If at first you don't succeed... A lot of people who thought the MovieBeam video service had been left in a pile of dead tech ventures apparently guessed wrong. The...

Who Wins the Most as Disney Buys Pixar

Posted by: Rob Hof on January 24

Steve Jobs and Apple, for sure. Doncha think? I have to believe that, contrary to all the stories that wax on about how much Jobs can change Disney culture, the...

Bursting Hollywood's Bubble

Posted by: Sarah Lacy on January 24

Forgive me for veering from my usual beat here, but as I was driving into work today I heard Steven Soderbergh on NPR's Fresh Air. I groaned. I'm not the...

The Future of Media: Microchunks or Brands?

Posted by: Rob Hof on January 12

VC Fred Wilson and serial entrepreneur Mark Pincus are debating what the next era of media will be. Fred think it's RSS-style microchunks of content that carry ads and are...

Amazon Ups the Stakes in Online Books

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 03

Amazon.com just announced that it's planning to offer customers the chance to get online access to selected pages for a fee, as well as buy complete digital copies when they...

The Same Old Song

Posted by: Rob Hof on August 10

After hearing StreamCast Networks, makers of the file-sharing software Morpheus, and a couple of record labels go at it for the Nth time at the Music 2.0 conference yesterday, I...

Is Amazon Finally About to Offer a Digital Music Service?

Posted by: Rob Hof on August 04

That's what the blog paidContent.org logically assumes from an interesting job listing posted to its own Digital Media Jobs Blog. (BUT SEE UPDATE BELOW.) The "forthcoming Digital Music Service" referenced...

Changing the Copyright Debate

Posted by: Rob Hof on July 21

In the wake of the Supreme Court's Grokster decision, a lot of tech folks in Silicon Valley are licking their wounds over the apparent rebuff to their ability to release...

Wikipedia's Word on Folksonomy

Posted by: Rob Hof on July 14

Steve Rubel notes that there's a debate at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia about a new listing for the word folksonomy, which it defines as "a neologism for a practice...

Grokster Goes Global

Posted by: Heather Green on June 29

Now a word from our international friends about the recent Supreme Court ruling on file sharing. Ben Hammersley reminds us that we Americans are forgetting the clause in the U.S....

Keeping with the Grokster Theme

Posted by: Heather Green on June 29

How VCs may react post Grokster.

Bad News for Newspapers

Posted by: Rob Hof on June 18

On the face of it, a new survey from Nielsen//NetRatings doesn't look that bad for newspapers. According to news coverage, the survey appears to show that about a fifth of...

BitTorrent Crackdown: Battling the Hydra

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 26

It's hard to blame the movie studios for wanting to shut down those BitTorrent sites that let people download pirated movies. And in this case, they succeeded. But I can't...