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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Netflix: There’s a Movie Waiting on Your iPhone

netflixiphone_thumbAmong the 1,000-plus new features included in Apple’s iPhone 3.0 is a new open standard for live video streaming over HTTP, and soon, Netflix will make use of it. Well, that’s the rumor anyway. An industry executive said to be familiar with the company’s plans tells Multichannel News that Netflix plans to extend its Watch Instantly video-streaming service to the Nintendo Wii and to the iPhone and iPod touch as well.

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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Sue. Rent. Rip. Return.

Turns out RealNetworks Inc.’s new DVD ripper RealDVD is as legal as its creator is litigious. Real debuted RealDVD this morning and along with it a preemptive lawsuit against the Hollywood interests that will inevitably attempt to litigate it into oblivion. Brought against the DVD Copy Control Association and a who’s-who of major studios, the suit asks the court to rule that RealDVD complies with the DVD Copy Control Association’s license agreement.

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Monday, September 22, 2008

Grave New World

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Monday, September 8, 2008

One–Make That Two–Words: Plastic Logic

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Rent. Rip. Return.

RealNetworks Inc. CEO Rob Glaser calls RealDVD, the company’s new “legal” DVD ripper, “a compelling and very responsible product that gives consumers a way to do something they have always wanted to do.” But really what it’s giving them is a more cumbersome way of doing something that they’ve already been doing for years now with DVD Decrypter, AnyDVD, Handbrake, MacTheRipper, RipIt and the like.

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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Napster Sad

napster-bad.jpg It took nearly a decade, but Napster’s finally managed to license music from all the major labels. This morning the company, which once terrorized the music industry with free peer-to-peer file sharing, launched what it claims is the world’s largest digital music store.

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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

“Comes With Music,” DRM & Sony BMG

Sony BMG (SNE) has signed on to Nokia’s (NOK) new “Comes With Music” program and really, who better than the pioneer of the rootkit digital-rights management scheme to endorse Nokia’s DRM-hobbled prebundled music initiative?
This morning, Sony BMG became the second record label to jump on board the Finnish phone giant’s Comes With Music offering, which–when [...]

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Intel’s Antitrust Pig Pile

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Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Nokia ‘Comes With Music’ Service Also ‘Comes With DRM’

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‘Comes With Music’: Free, as in Pay Us Per-Song Usage Rights

If terms of Nokia’s new “Comes with Music” program appear impossibly generous to the consumer, who will pay no monthly fees for Universal Music Group’s entire catalog, it’s because they are.
Though “Comes with Music” does indeed permit owners of certain Nokia cellphones to download as many songs as humanly possible in one year (with no [...]

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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

The Tech 10: Wal-Mart Goes DRM-Free, MTV and RealNetworks Confront iTunes and a ‘Moviestar’ Is Born

Note: John Paczkowski is on vacation and won’t be writing or posting videos until he returns Monday. To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. We’re calling it the Tech 10 and it appears here.

  1. Retailing behemoth Wal-Mart will sell digital-music downloads on its Web site without copy protection, Reuters reports. The so-called digital-rights management software insisted on by some record labels can stymie where the average user plays the songs.
  2. Taking on the juggernaut of iTunes, MTV and RealNetworks are forming an online digital music venture. According to The Wall Street Journal, Verizon Wireless has signed on as mobile distributor of the joint content.
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Friday, August 10, 2007

Dude, You’re Getting a Financial Windfall

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iTunes Is the ‘Control Group’–As in ‘More Control Than We’re Comfortable With’

Universal Music Group appears to have finally taken Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music” essay to heart–although not in the way the Apple CEO might have imagined. Heeding Jobs’s call to abandon digital-rights management, the company announced late yesterday that it will sell at least some of its music catalog online without copy protection for the next few months.

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Thursday, August 9, 2007

Movielink Tapped to Star in Blockbuster Remake of Netflix Business Plan

From top to bottom, Blockbuster is deliberately and willfully infringing on our patented methods. Netflix invented a 100 percent better mousetrap that Blockbuster copied.
- Netflix spokesperson Steve Swasey, April 5, 2006
Apparently, Blockbuster isn’t as hopelessly tethered to its VHS rental-business past as you might think. Yesterday, the video-rental retailer acquired studio-owned movie download [...]

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Friday, May 18, 2007

Time for Your Lithium, MPAA …

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About John

John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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