Has Blu-Ray Won the Format War?

The format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD might be over. Warner Bros. Entertainment had decided to back the Blu-ray standard exclusively, beginning June 1. That means roughly 70 percent of available content will be in that format.

Backdoor Sony music MP3s

Sony's music download service uses the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, not MP3. So it is interesting to find this bit of advice on the download site about how to take the copy-protected Sony music and transfer it to an iPod, an operation that is the equivalent, after a bit of work on the users' part, to supporting an MP3 format free of digital rights management.

"Attention iPod users:

Our download service provides files in the WMA music format or the WMV video format, which is not supported by Apple Macintosh computers. To use your music with an iPod, simply follow the steps below:

1. Save each downloaded song to your PC
2. Burn a music CD (in CDA file format)
3. Import the music from the CD into iTunes
4. Update your iPod"

If this forecast by Strategy Analytics is correct, most of the action in the music download business, exclusive of phone-specific ringtones, will not be generated by mobile service providers.

SlingPlayer for BlackBerry

And you thought BlackBerry was an enteprise email device! Sling Media has announced that SlingPlayer Mobile software will run on RIM BlackBerry smart phones. Sling Media will release SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry later this year.

SlingPlayer Mobile will be available for a one-time charge of $29.99. If you're thinking about doing this, make sure you have a device with Wi-Fi, such as the Curve. Sure, you might be able to watch using your carrier's data plan. But depending on where you are, and who your carrier is, the results might not be worth bothering with. Even Wi-Fi connections are going to be difficult in hotel and other settings.

If you are tempted to do this in the office, remember that IT is going to figure out pretty quickly that network congestion has gone way up, and why.

Some Progress on Music Front, Unless You are Apple

Warner Music has decided to offer its complete catalog, free of digital rights management, through Amazon's new MP3 store. EMI, Universal, and Warner now offer their catalogs in DRM-free digital formats, leaving Sony BMG the lone major music giant still clinging to the DRM approach. Amazon now claims to offer for than 2.9 million songs in MP3 format from over 33,000 unique labels.

Now, with the move to MP3, the labels that have chosen to open their music have a way to encourage multiple download services to flourish, keeping labels safe from being dominated by any single digital distributor, namely iTunes.

HDTV Slingbox: More Stress on Upstream Bandwidth

Sling Media has announced a new version of its Slingbox Pro set-top box that has its own HD TV tuner and can send out a 1080i HD picture over the network. The Slingbox Pro-HD will be initially aimed at the U.S. market.

So forget about what P2P is doing to the backbone and access networks. Now users will be streaming HDTV from their homes, stressing the entire network at its biggest chokepoint: the upstream. Ouch!

Opera Upgrade

Opera Software has released Opera 9.5 software developer kit for Devices. The release will include a new beta visual effects layer that will give users an emotionally heightened Web experience with fluid transitions, panning, zooming and interactivity.

Opera 9.5 SDK will also include an improved evaluation kit that allow device manufacturers to quickly experience the potential of a product aimed to deliver the latest end-user experiences for Internet browsing, Web applications and Web-based user interfaces.

Vertical Search Salvation?

It appears lots of online publishers think vertical search is one way to survive the Google assault and prop up their walled gardens. It's too early to tell. It won't hurt. Not so clear to me that it helps much.

The ARPU Gap is the Issue

One might quibble with the precise Yankee Group numbers indicated here for voice and data average revenue per user. What remains incontestable is that there is a revenue gap between voice and data services, on either the wired or wireless business segments. So as broadband starts to become the foundation service upon which other applications and revenue streams are built, there is immense work to be done. I suppose everybody knows this, by now.

iTunes Dominates Downloads

Much as Google dominates search and search revenue, Apple's iTunes dominates legal music downloading. Aside from ringtones, it isn't so clear to me how well mobile service providers will do with their own music-selling efforts. Every little bit helps, I suppose. But music doesn not look anything like a "killer app" for mobile service providers.

Carphone Warehouse in Play?

Shares of Carphone Warehouse Group, Europe's largest mobile handset retailer, rose the most in more than five years in London trading on speculation the company may receive a takeover offer, says the Bloomberg news service.

"Rumors about bid interest from Vodafone and Best Buy have been doing the rounds for some time," says Jimmy Yates, a London-based trader at CMC Markets.

What is interesting is the strategy context driving some of the rumored suitors. Best Buy has a small stake in Carphone Warehouse, which operates 2,400 stores across Europe. Best Buy also is collaborating with the U.K. chain to boost sales of mobile products in the U.S. Best Buy stores.

So you might argue that Carphone is simply a way for Best Buy to expand its footprint in its current business.

But keep in mind that Carphone also has 2.5 million Digital Subscriber Line customers. It also has a backbone network. Consider that Best Buy's Geek Squad is in the technology services business.

And recall that Best Buy owns Speakeasy, a provider of business-class broadband access and voice services in the U.S. market. Sure, Best Buy can grow its retail footprint. But by acquiring Carphone Warehouse, Best Buy makes an even bigger bet to become a more-significant provider of broadband access, business voice and mobile services.

For Best Buy, its core business is more than acting as a retail distribution channel. It is a service provider. Owning Carphone Warehouse would only deepen that commitment.

Now consider the possibility that Vodafone might acquire Carphone Warehouse. The idea there is not so much that Vodafone wants to become a mass market electronics retailer. Vodafone, long a dominant wireless service provider, now must also become a multiple-services provider, and broadband-based services provided over wireline networks are part of the vision.

Carphone Warehouse would give Vodafone much more heft, in that area. It might not strike you as significant that wireless and wireline services are converging. It might be a bit more surprising that retailers are moving from simple channel partners into the service provider business.

Google Can Index Test in Images and Video

A patent application lodged by Google in July 2007 but recently made public seeks to patent a method where by robots (computers) can read and understand text in images and video, notes Duncan Riley at TechCrunch. That would be a big step forward in indexing visual media, since there would be no need to manually attach tags to such visual media.

Basically, the patent covers a method whereby any visible text in an image--a street sign, for example--can be automatically indexed. Obviously, as with any of the developing Web-based technologies, there are privacy issues. As someone who has to work with lots of images, and spends lots of time wading through images that a search suggests are appropriate, and aren't, this is really helpful.

Does Music Industry "Get It"?

as someone who arrogantly and wrongly has accused whole industries of "not getting it" at points in the past, I never like to presume I understand executive thinking better than they themselves do.

What sometimes appears as "cluelessness" often has more to do with deliberate timing. and rational calculations about how long to let one revenue model atrophy before heating up a replacement revenue model that will cannibalize the older model.

So let me be charitable. Perhaps U.S. music executives do have a plan for changing their business model and packaging. Perhaps they are executing on that plan even now.

Album sales declined 9.5 percent last year, while digital song sales grew 45 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Physical product sales were down 15 percent, including sales of "singles."

So maybe the issue is simply figuring out better ways to handle digital rights that aren't unfriendly to consumers who have paid for their music, nor damaging to copyright holders. It's a tough problem, to be sure.

And the problems extend far beyond copyright issues. As someone who has made a transition to iPod as my primary music playback system, and as someone whose PC-embedded hard drives need to be replaced once a year or so, the issue of storing and managing the music collection is a serious problem.

The reason, of course, is that each iPod syncs with just one hard drive. Lose that hard drive and one has two options: completely erase the contents of the iPod, or never change the data already on the iPod.

So now I have to take two paths to make sure the music isn't lost: store the copies on an external hard drive that hopefully "never" dies; and then keep the compact disk as well, since the external hard drive will ultimately fail, forcing me to restore or simply forget about the music stored on it.

As a simple music customer, this is a problem. Unless I have physical media backup, the music always is at risk of loss, for mechanical reasons. But keeping those CDs is not ideal, either. And the process of restoring lost music is time-consuming. So music storage "in the cloud" seems promising, at least to me.

OS Shift?

Amazon's top-10 "Most Wished For in Computers & PC Hardware" list includes, in order or popularity:
1. Asus Eee PC 8G
2. Asus Eee 4G
3. Asus EEE 4G
4. HP Pavilion DV6662SE
5. Nokia N810 Portable Internet Tablet
6. Nokia N800 Internet Tablet PC
7. Apple MacBook
8. Apple MacBook Pro
9. HP Pavilion DV6626US
10. Apple MacBook MB062LL

A couple of things strike one about this list. First, the prevalence of Linux-powered machines at the top three spots. Second, the prevalence of smaller form factor, highly portable devices among the top 10. Third, the prevalence of operating systems other than Windows in the top 10. Fourth, the prevalence of devices optimized for Web and Internet use.

On Amazon's "Bestsellers in Computers & PC Hardware" list, five of the top 10 devices use operating systems other than Windows. On Amazon's "Most Gifted" list, six of the top 10 devices use operating systems other than Windows.

Here's the other angle: some people carry smart phones with them when traveling, and leave their PCs behind. Top management and sales personnel are more likely to do so than people who have greater needs for text entry and Web app access. The point is that at least for shorter trips, the smart phone goes, the PC stays.

Almost everybody who owns a smartphone takes it, not a PC, when traveling locally, because email and text communications that otherwise would require a PC still are available.

To the extent that this trend continues, and more-mobile PC style devices also get traction, as the Amazon data tends to indicate, what does it mean? Web. Remote computing and storage. Need for better interfaces.

Small devices almost have to lean more heavily on applications in the cloud rather than local processing and storage. And several of the new devices plow new ground in the form factor/power/price equation, banking on Web apps to reduce price footprint, for example.

Navigation on a small device also is more problematic, so devices get an even-bigger push for new input options. Speech and touch, for example. Finally, taking all notebook PCs and smart phones together, and looking at them as a single market, not separate markets, one can observer that there already is more diversity in operating systems than has been the case in the desktop PC market.

Open Source Trend for 2008

Without proclaiming 2008 the "year of" anything, open source seems to be getting traction in the enterprise computing environment in server farms and on desktops and mobiles. Open source is preparing for additional traction in the consumer mobile markets. Linux has grown its presence in the consumer mobile area, and Google's Android initiative will start to bear fruit sometime after 2008.

Motorola Unveils WiMAX Endpoint

Motorola has announced the latest addition to its portfolio of WiMAX customer premises equipment, the CPEi 100, a single data port, 2.5 GHz “plug-and-play” WiMAX solution designed to sit on a desktop and serve as the interface between a computer and the WiMAX network.

It is expected to be available in 2008 for WiMAX operators who have systems in the 2.5 GHz band.

Motorola’s family of wi4 WiMAX solutions support15 WiMAX contracts and more than 57 WiMAX engagements in 38 countries worldwide, including 44 active trials, the company says.