According to a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday, Viacom is expected to announce a licensing deal with Joost, a new Internet service that specializes in commercial video content. You can get some background information from my previous posts.
The collapse of talks between Viacom and YouTube/Google just few weeks ago had resulted in 100,000 video clips been removed from the popular video site. What are the tricks that Joost has put in place to win the trust from Viacom? The answer is simple - Joost is designed for commercial video content from day one.
Joost makes it possible to distribute streams of video to its users using P2P technology. There is no central server involved in the process. Each user plays a role in distributing real time video streams just like BitTorrent.
There is no Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection applied on the content. Each user only gets a fragment of the content and it is not saved on the disk to make up the whole video watchable offline.
Written and directed by Josh Faure-Brac, the video starts with the usual fights between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The fights are meaningless and both should just concentrate on providing their respective users the best of Internet connected experiences. The Internet will make platform war obsolete forever.
When compared to Commodore 64, the best selling single personal computer model of all time, Windows Vista and OS X are both far more advance. Both platforms have added more and more features that are identical and often indistinguishable with the common intentions of facilitating better connected experiences. Why the fight?
Gmail, Google’s email service started in April Fool’s Day in 2004 as the first to offer one gigabytes storage for its users. Major email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail soon followed with the fear of losing out in the market. Gmail remains an invitation-only email service since then. You couldn’t simply sign up for the service by filling in a form, there wasn’t one.
On Wednesday, Google has decided to lift the restriction to join the nearly 3-year-old service in North America and a swath of Asian and South American countries. The primary reason for the restriction was to give away time for Google to build up the infrastructure to accommodate the generous amount of free storage provided by the e-mail service. Google has built enough of them now. However, Gmail is retaining its “beta,” or test, status, signaling that Google still considers the service to be a work in progress.
In December, Gmail attracted 60 million unique visitors which is far behind Yahoo!’s 249 million and Hotmail’s 236 million. Advertising revenues remain a heavy weight in the revenue structure of companies like Google and Yahoo!. Advertisements are usually priced in proportion to the daily traffic of a site.
The pressure on Google to institute more aggressive copyright protections and policies is growing.
A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 newspapers that complained the Google’s “cached” links offered free access to chargeable contents. The court ordered Google to remove any articles, photos or links from its sites.
Google faces a fine of 1,000 euros a day if it does not remove the copyright violated contents within 24 hours once it has been told in the future.
The media companies have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with Google in the past months. These media companies have established sales channels that are more lucrative than putting their contents online. Two incidents stand out.
1. News Corp. has subpoenaed YouTube for the identity of users who uploaded full episodes of Twentieth Century Fox’s prime-time series 24 before they even debuted on television. YouTube gave up the identities, according to a Fox statement last week.
Microsoft marketing power is once again proven phenomena. The video shows you what a Vista ad looks like when presented on five 40″ LCD displays in JFK airport. The ads is undeniably “clear” and gives tons of “Wow”.
If you do not have enough “Wow”, Microsoft has much more - 100 of them to make you speechless. The top five:
- It makes using your PC a breeze
- Because all of your music is just a remote control click away
- It’s the safest version of Windows ever
- See your world in a whole new light
- It can find your stuff
PC World recently gave 15 reasons to go ahead upgrading to Vista and only 6 reasons to wait. I have to say there are valid reasons to stay despite only six against fifteen.
The key asset of Internet is the domain name directory known as DNS. A root name server is a DNS server that answers requests for the root namespace domain, and redirects requests for a particular top-level domain to that TLD’s name servers.
There are currently thirteen root name servers around the world. Most of the servers reside in the United States while the rest exist in multiple locations on different continents. The US government plays a key role in supervising the asset.
In the early hours of Tuesday, three key servers were hit by a barrage of data in what is known as a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). There is no evidence of damage proving once again the robustness of the Internet.
The servers under attacks are as follow:
- G-root, G.root-servers.org at Columbus, Ohio, USA
- L-root, L.root-servers.org at Los Angeles, California, USA
- UltraDNS, authoritative for .org and .info TLDs
The new Wal-Mart Video Downloads website (still in beta) imposes tons of restrictions on the movies or TV episodes you purchase from them.
1. You must be 13 years of age or older to register for the service. Wal-Mart Video Downloads complies with the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and no adult content is available on the site.
2. The service is not Mac friendly. The video that you download requires Digital Rights Management 10 (DRM 10) software, which is not compatible with the Mac OS X.
3. There are two formats on offer - PC Format and Portable Format. The Portable Format enables you to play the video in a portable player. The PC Format has 640 X 480 resolution, 30 fps and 1,500-1,700 kbps average bit rate. The Portable Format has 320 X 240 resolution, 30 fps and 500-810 kbps bit rate. You can purchase movies in PC/PC & Portable Format but only Portable Format is available for TV episodes.
Continue reading ‘Top 10 Facts About Wal-Mart Video Downloads’
Back in September last year, I wrote an article comparing Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. The article is still great to read until today. However, it is nowhere nearly as illustrative as what the video is going to show you. The video will help you understand more about Web 2.0. It will also help you to explain to your friends or families about Web 2.0.
The background song, “There’s Nothing Impossible” by Deus, is equally impressive.