Changes Is Good

Like everyone I often mark news items and blog post that I want to follow-up on but unless I do it within 12 hours its unlikely I’ll ever get to it. Since the exception proves the rule, I offer two exceptions.

The first is a report put out by our Cannuck friends at Solutions Research tantalizingly entitled Movie File-Sharing Booming. The report is based on phone and online surveys of some 2600 Americans and offers some interesting findings. For example they estimate that some 20 million Americans are regular downloaders of full-length movies, more then 80% of which is from P2P services. There is lots of interesting tidbits in the report but the essence is that people are both interested in and willing to watch full-length movies online. Like the music industry before them most cablers and studios have deluded themselves into thinking that people are not willing to watch full-length movies online. According to this report thats a self-serving delusion that will be increasingly hard for content producers to maintain.

Another starred item, over 12 hours old, worth mentioning is the offer from a music recognition service, Nextune. A music recognition service allows an electronic device to automatically recognize and insert track information for any CD placed into the device. The most famous of these services , CDDB (now Gracenote) was built using information supplied by users and then sold for a tidy sum by the owners of the domain.

NexTune claims to be doing things differently, they are planning to pay ten cents for every CD folks enter into their database. Of course since the recognition they are doing is song based not CD, users have to enter a great deal more information and so they probably should be paid. In a delicious bit of awesomeness, NexTunes has broken Apple’s DRM so that songs purchased in the iTunes music store play in the NexTunes music application. However, their press release limply claims that they didnt “break” the Apple DRM they enhanced it… Weak.

This company has thrown everything into the mix from a music store to paying for contributions to hacking iTunes. This is why it got starred in gmail and blogged more then 12 hours after the fact.