Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

Tom Yager, chief technologist of the test center over at InfoWorld (no more paper InfoWorld) wrote an interesting column recently about creating "an unbreakable link between media and its delivery end point."

During a visit to AMD, a representative said new chips "will “block unauthorized access to the frame buffer.”

In short, that means an unauthorized party can’t save the contents of the display to a file on disk unless the content owner approves it.

There is a short list of parties who will be unauthorized to access your frame buffer: You. There is a long list of parties who are authorized to access your frame buffer, and that list includes Microsoft, Apple, AMD, Intel, ATI, NVidia, Sony Pictures, Paramount, HBO, CBS, Macrovision, and all other content owners and enablers that want your machine to themselves whenever you’re watching, listening to, reading, or shooting monsters with their products.

The death of DRM might be a bit premature, as with all the iTunes and EMI coverage seems to imply. (BTW, DRM-free doesn't mean it is legal to share it.)

Mr Yager says that there will will be a distinct benefit to IT from the DRM efforts.

It’s easy to write off entertainment content owners and distributors as a money-grubbing cartel; for the most part, they are. But the technical work they do to protect what they own matters, even that work which we find distasteful given needless extremes of use such as pay-per-single-view. They’ve got the money to drive the science of data and content protection. If they perfect that unbreakable link between the media and the delivery end point, if there’s never another DVD image splattered all over the Internet, then IT will be able to make a promise that, to date, it couldn’t: Nobody can view or copy your data without authorization.

Link to Content in lockdown | InfoWorld | Column | 2007-03-28 | By Tom Yager

With iTunes 4.8, Apple has quietly added video clip support. Now, any QuickTime movie can be dragged into a playlist in iTunes. This allows easy download, sorting and playback of digital video clips.

But the challenge for Apple is not getting content from the studios, or protecting it, or the technical details of distributing it. Rather, the challenge is to convert iPod and iTunes listeners into viewers.

This also begs the question: How quickly will iTunes replace NetFlix?

About a year ago, Microsoft made great strides in legitimizing its technology for broadcasting by getting its Windows Media 9 video codec (now grandly titled Video Codec One, or VC-1) accepted by the industry's standards body SMPTE.

And both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray groups, representing the two competing High-Definition DVD hardware formats, have agreed to support Microsoft's codec as well as the MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding standard in their new hi-def players.

This presents an interesting question. The Windows VC-1 and MPEG AVC camps are fighting over which is the "best hi-def codec". But with the future media players supporting both codecs, does it matter which one content producers choose? I think the software doesn't matter anymore.

By Damien Stolarz for SiliconValleyWatcher
I used to keep a patent watch blog that tracked peer-to-peer (P2P) technology patents. Basically, when you start a company, you're expected to patent your technology, either offensively or defensively, whether you think it warrants it or not. So every company that enters a field starts patenting everything it thinks up, and, to take a cynical view, as long as the diagrams in your patent are different than other patents, you'll have a unique invention - enough to safely do what you're already doing without risk of being sued for patent infringement.

But what if your patent covers your entire industry? And what if you never build your technology but simply sell the patent to a licensing company? That's the case with a company called Acacia (just Google "acacia patent"), which has been enforcing its Digital Media Transmission (DMT) patent since 2002. The patent basically covers any kind of video transmission: download, progressive download, over any type of network, as long as there is file storage involved. Legally, Acacia has a patent on pretty much any type of digital download.

Instead of going after the technology creators, however, Acacia has decided to go after people using the technology profitably. This makes perfect business sense.

Streaming media, as far as I can determine, is a euphemism for "internet audio and video.". Companies don't want to be typecast as audio or video specialists, so they use the term "streaming media". But unfortunately, "streaming" is one of those useless "in" terms. When I told the flight attendant on my way to a New York conference that I was speaking about streaming video, she stared blankly and asked what streaming was.

Then, at the conference, after my six hour talk on Windows Media, my friend, also a presenter, told me that he didn't consider "streaming media" an industry. A day later, while speaking to a prospective publisher, the editor wondered if "streaming media" was a good term to use.

I tend to agree. Sure, with enough branding, the abused term "streaming" could take hold. In marketing buzz-speak, it essentially means "putting video on a web page or something."

By Damien Stolarz for SiliconValleyWatcher

A few years ago, the battered industry of Internet video was dominated by the "big three" - Windows, Real, with Apple's QuickTime trailing a distant third. But in 2002 Macromedia, now part of Adobe, came out with its MX series, equipping Flash with the Spark codec, a simple codec based on H.263.

The Spark codec was nothing to write home about in terms of performance - it lagged the other major vendors in raw compression capability - but that didn't matter. What was important was that it worked well, and, notably, allowed the blending of natural video (i.e. from a video camera) and Flash animation into one seamless presentation (a feature that was supposed to be part of MPEG-4 but which never really materialized.) While it took a few years for Flash video to take hold, it has certainly done that now. The "buzz" I am hearing is that more and more video web projects are switching to Flash for their video.

SVW's Damien Stolarz is delivering an all-day Windows Media tutorial on May 16 in New York at Streaming Media East (http://www.streamingmedia.com/east/workshops.asp).

Here's the topic:

Microsoft's Windows Media is possibly the most complete streaming media toolset available today. Windows Media provides interoperability across a wide variety of devices, which is essential when the streaming landscape encompasses PCs, handhelds, mobile phones, and high-definition TVs. Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are gradually gaining trust with the major movie studios, and the next-generation DVDs are all slated to support Microsoft's video codecs. This workshop begins with a panoramic view of the Windows Media tools, and then zooms in on how to do specific tasks such as multi-bitrate encoding, server setup and capacity planning, Web casting, and using the digital rights management tools. The workshop will be packed with lots of practical tips and techniques to satisfy a wide range of audience skill levels.

In recent articles at Guardian Unlimited and at Movieweb, Lucas and Star Wars producer Rick McCallum are quoted saying that they'll start converting the Star Wars series of movies to digital 3D in 2007.

They also mention that they're waiting for the cinemas to catch up. Once HD DVD comes on the market, you will have a situation where the resolution and sound quality of home cinema will rival the quality of today's ubiquitous analog cinema. A digital HD DVD experience will be consistent, sharp, with none of the analog glitches and wear that an over-run movie has today.

Here's how it works: You buy a Clearplay DVD player (or run Clearplay DVD software on your computer), and you subscribe to Clearplay's edit list. You aren't actually getting an edited DVD from Clearplay; they're merely instructing your DVD player to bleep, mute, or drop scenes and language you don't want you or your children to hear.

Before I tell you the punchline is "software DRM doesn't work," go ahead and read this chapter on DRM from my book Mastering Internet Video.

Here's probably my favorite part of the chapter:

The fundamental difference between encryption techniques and DRM challenges is the trusted parties. In usual encryption scenarios, the end users are assumed trustworthy and a malicious third party is assumed to be the threat that the user needs to defend against. In contrast, DRM assumes that only the devices are trustworthy, and that the users are the potentially malicious interlopers. This is why DRM cannot depend on encryption technology alone--it is only one technical component of a complete DRM solution. Vendors that brag about the strength or complexity of their encryption are saying little about the robustness of their DRM.

DVD Video Format Wars?

By Damien Stolarz for SiliconValleyWatcher

In the mid 1990s a video codec called MPEG-2 was standardized, and DVDs were standardized. At that time, computers ran at less than 100Mhz and it required a special microchip to decode the MPEG-2 video. Fast forward 10 years and two new high-capacity DVD-disk formats are racing to be the standard for high-definition video:
Blu-Ray and HD DVD.

Major computer and consumer electronic companies have chosen sides in this debate and it has been compared to the VHS/Betamax war of the 1980s over the format of consumer videotapes.