Content and content providers

Google has its own satellite

acohill — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 05:53:38 -0700

Google now has its own satellite, or at least exclusive access to one. The firm made a deal with the U.S. government to help finance a new image mapping satellite in return for exclusive commercial rights to the images. It was probably cheaper than paying for images from other commercial and government satellites.

AT&T and Verizon say "No" to customer tracking

acohill — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 06:34:55 -0700

Verizon and AT&T deserve congratulations for endorsing an opt-in approach to tracking online behavior. This means they won't try to build dossiers of where you go online unless they get your permission. The online dossier information can be valuable, as data can be mined and sold to advertisers.

Internet radio may finally take off

acohill — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:36:33 -0700

Back in 1995, I foolishly proposed a project for the Blacksburg Electronic Village that would have us partner with the local public radio station to begin broadcasting over the new Internet thingy that was just beginning to take off. It was very modest, and involved streaming audio news reports over the Internet--5 to 10 minutes of mostly local news a day, but in four languages, because of the large international population in Blacksburg.

No one believed anyone would ever be interested in listening to audio over the Internet.

A few years later, streaming radio and podcasting took off in a big way. But streaming radio got knocked down almost immediately by huge increases in royalties that made it financially impossible for small start-up Internet radio stations to develop a market, and even for bigger operations, the cost of royalties was difficult.

A tentative agreement has been reached between the RIAA, which controls music royalty, and the radio industry. For Internet radio operations, they will pay 10.5% of annual revenue instead of a per song fee. This makes perfect sense, as it will allow small niche Internet radio operations grow without high royalty fees that are not linked to actual income. And musicians and songwriters will still get compensated in some indirect proportion to the number of people actually listening (radio stations with a large audience will have more revenue, and will so the royalty revenue will be higher).

This approach is identical to the revenue sharing models adopted by broadband projects like nDanville and The Wired Road. Revenue share models allow many new and innovative services to start up inexpensively because the fees to content owners or the network are paid in proportion to success.

Colleges check MySpace and FaceBook

acohill — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 05:28:29 -0700

FaceBook and MySpace have been interesting experiments in the social uses of the Internet. As the use of these social networking sites evolves, a better understanding of the effects of those uses also evolves. Not only are employers using the sites to evaluate potential employees, it turns out that a significant number of colleges are also using the sites to evaluate potential students. So if you have a child in high school who is beginning to apply for admission to college, it might be worth taking a few minutes to check their FaceBook and MySpace pages to see just what they have posted.

As the world becomes less and less private through the widespread use of online services and applications, privacy is going to become more and more valuable. The good news is that we still have some control--we can choose to be prudent about what we post about ourselves online, and we can be prudent about using "free" online services that give the service provider the right to use whatever we create, write, or email with those services.

Google owns your pictures

acohill — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:40:42 -0700

The debate over the terms of Google End User License Agreements (EULAs) continues. Last week there was much discussion online about the EULA for Chrome, the new Google Web browser, which resulted in a change to the EULA that no longer gave Google the right to use anything you uploaded with the browser.

However, the broadly worded license terms still remain in other Google products, including Picasa (Google has the right to all your photos), Google Docs (Google has the right to use all your word processing and spreadsheet documents), and Blogger (Google can use all your blog posts).

I suspect that at the current time, Google is doing something relatively benign--using the license terms to build advertising dossiers about users of their services. But the license terms give Google very broad rights to their customer-created content.

NBC upset that people use on demand video

acohill — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:15:25 -0700

NBC, which has exclusive rights to broadcast the 2008 Olympics in the United States, is apparently upset that people are simply not bothering to wait for prime time to watch NBC's repackaged broadcasts. Instead, viewers are simply going to the Internet and watching the Olympics on the Web sites of media outlets in other countries.

The Olympics is a long and complex series of events that has never fit neatly into a two hour evening broadcast, but in olden days (say four years ago), that was about all we had. The much wider availability of broadband connections and the widespread use of online video sites like YouTube provides people with alternatives to broadcast and cable TV. Right now, the video folks are watching is of generally low quality, but demand for HD online video is going to increase rapidly, and more and more people are going to want to watch live events in real time, not NBC time, and will want those broadcasts in HD format. And the current DSL and cable modem systems simply don't have the horsepower to deliver it.

How cool is Cuil?

acohill — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:27:29 -0700

The new search engine Cuil (pronounced 'cool') aims to take on Google, like a bunch of other search engines that have tried and failed to dislodge Google. But Cuil is designed and owned by a former Google staffer and her husband who just may pull it off if they have the financial staying power to slug it out over the next couple of years.

Cuil promises better search results by not just counting inbound links but by actually trying to parse whether or not the contents of a Web page are a good fit for the search terms. Cuil also promises a more usable format for results, which wouldn't take much, given that Google has not bothered to give itself a face-lift since the company started. Finally, the Cuil founders promise not to snoop around and store everyone's search results, a refreshing change from Google's policy of developing dossiers on everything you have ever searched for.

Are Internet ads about to collapse?

acohill — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:58:32 -0700

This analysis of the current state of Internet ads suggests that some of the big ad brokers on the Internet (e.g. Google, among others) may be near an inflection point with respect to ad demand. Lookery, a firm that sells ads on sites like FaceBook and MySpace, just lowered the cost of its ads by 40%, suggesting very soft demand. And Google's AdWord system, according to the article, seems to be propped up financially by Google's practice of setting very high minimum cost per click fees.

I have always maintained that Google is making a lot of money from businesses that are willing to pay modest amounts month after month for a few ads. When times are good, it does not look like a lot of money. But when the cost of other business necessities like fuel and shipping go up, unproductive ads producing few results may be the first to go.

Airlines eye mobile phones for income, saving money

acohill — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:30:45 -0700

According to The Register, the airlines are planning to use mobile phones to cut costs and to sell ad revenue. As you book a flight, you will give your mobile phone number to the airline. They will use this to push information on the flight to you (not so bad), and once you get to the airport, they may even check you in electronically via your phone, which is already underway in Japan. What could get ugly is the the notion that they could also push ads to your phone once you get in the airport, so the idea is that you'll pay a fortune for a a cramped seat and then get spammed at the same time. If you have flown recently, you may have noticed some airlines have put ads on the seat back trays, so as you "enjoy" your free beverage (snacks seem to be out completely now on some airlines) you get to read the ad on the surface of the tray.

Comcast invests in P2P

acohill — Tue, 20 May 2008 05:47:14 -0700

Comcast, which has been criticized of late for apparently trying to throttle peer to peer (P2P) file sharing traffic, seems to be shifting focus by investing in a P2P business start up. This is a good sign. As I and others have argued for a long time, we need to shift away from the "bucket of bits" model of broadband and move toward a service-oriented business and network model. P2P file sharing is just another service. It is not inherently bad, and in fact, can be used very efficiently to move large files (like TV programs and movies) around various parts of the Internet.

While some of the content providers simply want to outlaw P2P software because it is sometimes mis-used, that's also silly. It would be equivalent to outlawing cars because they are sometimes used to commit bank robberies. P2P, as a service, has real value, and if used to deliver licensed and legitimate content, it can be a service that people are willing to pay for. But the key is to have networks designed to deliver services, not just a bucket of bits. And that means changing not just the technology that manages network (relatively straightforward), but also changing the business models of broadband companies--that is also straightforward, if the company culture is willing to change--that is the tougher challenge.