More movies online
August 14, 2006
Kenneth Li
Twentieth Century Fox will start to sell movies including "X-Men: The Last Stand" and TV shows like "24" for downloading from Web sites owned by parent News Corp., in what some analysts said could be the first step toward creating a broader online video strategy.
Fox Interactive Media said it will begin to sell movies and shows on the Direct2Drive download site, owned by Fox's IGN Entertainment, by October. The programs can be viewed on personal computers as well as Windows portable media devices.
The programs will be made available for purchase from News Corp.'s popular online teen hangout MySpace.com shortly thereafter, Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinsohn said in an interview.
The new project is an early indicator of News Corp. Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch's ambitions to exploit Direct2Drive's technology in the fledgling movie download market, said one analyst.
"It's an infrastructure that they use to deliver gaming software that can be a horizontal platform," Gartner research director Allen Weiner, who was briefed on the announcement, said. "It doesn't matter what facade you put in front of it."
Direct2Drive, a digital media distribution system, has been contracted by other companies to build Internet media storefronts, and could some day serve as the underlying technology behind other video stores on Fox Interactive Media properties, including FoxSports.com, Weiner said.
Fox Interactive Media could also hypothetically court other movie and TV studios to sell program on its Web properties, potentially competing with the download services offered by other Hollywood studios.
Levinsohn was coy about future plans, but said: "The more we can diversify, the more it bodes well for our business."
Murdoch has time and again fostered collaboration among News Corp.'s myriad divisions, accomplishing what other media conglomerates have often attempted but often fail to do.
After buying a controlling stake in top U.S. satellite TV operator DirecTV Group Inc. <DTV.N>, for instance, the News Corp.-controlled NDS Group edged out TiVo Inc. as DirecTV's top supplier for digital video recorders.
In contrast, the world's largest media company Time Warner has rarely been able to get its units working together, most notably with its AOL online unit.
The move comes a week after MySpace selected Google Inc.as its search advertising partner in a deal that guarantees to pay Fox Interactive Media at least $900 million.
Movies will sell for about $20 and shows for $1.99 and will be playable on portable entertainment devices that employ Microsoft Corp.'s copy protection system.
Source: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=BE3AC64E67E84198F03F45B661F2124A
Capturing Online Video Pirates - Can video fingerprinting and watermarking technology stop copyright violators?
Wade Roush
YouTube visitors upload 65,000 videos every day and download 100 million of them. Since all those videos have to come from somewhere, it's no surprise that many are pirated -- that is, copied from commercial TV broadcasts and movies and posted without the permission of the copyright holders.
YouTube and similar video-sharing services deal with these copyright violations after they occur: by taking down the material if they receive a complaint from the legitimate copyright holder. But given the sheer number of videos uploaded to the Internet every day, it's a losing battle.
What's needed, say researchers in digital rights management, are ways to automatically screen out pirated videos before they're uploaded, and to track down people who make pirate copies.
And, as it turns out, such technology is nearing the point of widespread adoption. One video-sharing site, Guba, has already begun to filter out copyrighted videos using a home-grown system dubbed "Johnny." The system reduces a video file to a mathematical representation and then excludes it from the site if its "fingerprint" matches one in a database of commercial videos.
Media-technology companies such as Philips and Thomson are also working on ways to thwart video pirates. Thomson has introduced a system that embeds invisible "watermarks" in movies, allowing studios to trace online copies of movies recorded by camcorder users to the specific theater and movie showing where they were pirated.
These new technologies have their own limitations, though. For one, it's not clear that fingerprinting technology can keep up with the thousands of hours of TV programming broadcast every day. And watermarking a movie doesn't help catch the pirates themselves. But these new copyright-protection mechanisms may at least help video-sharing sites avoid the fate of the infamous music-trading sites Napster and MP3.com, which closed down after legal attacks by content owners.
Pirated video makes up about one-fifth of the moving-image content uploaded to video-sharing sites, according to Tom McInerney, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Guba. And while the sharing sites benefit indirectly from pirated videos, which generate Web traffic and advertising impressions, hosting this material is often more trouble than it's worth.
In a well-publicized case in February, for example, NBC threatened legal action against YouTube if the site refused to remove a video of a popular "Saturday Night Live" skit (a skit that would not have become popular, ironically, if it hadn't been posted on YouTube). YouTube complied, but caught flak from hundreds of its users for supposedly buckling under to a giant "old-media" company. And in July, the helicopter pilot who filmed the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles sued YouTube for hosting a pirated copy of his video. He's demanding $150,000 in damages for every viewing of the video.
Clearly, life would be easier for the owners of video-sharing sites if copyrighted content could be blocked before it's posted. And that's what Guba claims Johnny can do. The company was founded in 1998 to build a tool that could search for still images and videos posted to Usenet discussion groups. But as soon as the company began to aggregate such content, it started receiving complaints and takedown requests from copyright holders. "We wanted to make it easier to find things, but we ended up demonstrating how much copyrighted content is really out there," says McInerney.
That inspired them to switch gears and start developing Johnny (named after the Keanu Reeves character in "Johnny Mnemonic"). "We needed a system that could identify and classify [copyrighted] video without human assistance," McInerney says.
The centerpiece of the system is a huge database of digital fingerprints for copyrighted video. Each fingerprint is created using wavelet compression technology that distills the video signal into a few compact mathematical representations. It does the same for the audio track, and it uses computer vision technology to measure the frequency of scene changes, providing a kind of time signature. The compressed video and audio signals and time signature together make up the file's fingerprint.
Johnny extracts a fingerprint from every video uploaded to Guba, and if it matches a fingerprint already in the database, the file gets quarantined and flagged for review by a human. The system is so effective, McInerney says, that only one percent of the flagged video files turn out not to be copyrighted.
Guba may eventually license Johnny to other video-sharing sites; but for now the technology -- and the company's commitment to copyright protection -- are giving it an advantage in negotiating with networks and movie studios for the rights to sell downloads. Already, Guba is hosting downloads of full-length films from Warner and Sony.
Nevertheless, digital rights management experts aren't convinced that fingerprinting technology will be a silver bullet against video piracy, even though it has been used successfully by the music business. One problem is simply the burgeoning amount of copyrighted content needing fingerprinting. "The universe of music tracks to be fingerprinted is relatively tractable, compared to copyrighted video clips such as every day's newscasts on television networks and stations throughout the world," writes Bill Rosenthal, editor of Jupiter Research's DRM Watch. "Updating such a large and fast-growing fingerprint database, and making it efficient enough to be used in the filtering of copyrighted material from a site like Guba, seems utterly impractical."
But to survive, says Guba's McInerney, video download services "are going to need to make efforts to scrub the copyrighted stuff off their sites -- and we think the best solution is a technological solution."
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17343&ch=biztech&sc=&pg=2
Fox To Sell Shows, Movies Online
The new "X-Men" movie and television shows
like "24" are coming to a computer near you.
Fox will tap into a platform now used to sell video games and let visitors buy movies and television shows that they can download for computer playback and transfer to devices running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Player technology.
Movies available in October include "X-Men: The Last Stand," "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties," "The Omen" and "Thank You for Smoking." Availability through Fox's Direct2Drive service will be concurrent with the DVD release.
Also, Direct2Drive will make available Fox's "24" and "Prison Break" and FX's "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" within 24 hours of each episode's broadcast.
Other movies and shows will be added later.
Movies will sell for about $20 and TV shows for $1.99 an episode.
Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store already sells many television shows, including "24" and others from Fox, for $1.99 apiece, but those can only be played on the company's market-leading iPod devices or through its iTunes software on
The movies and TV shows from Twentieth Century Fox will carry copy protection, limiting playback to two Windows computers, each supporting one portable device. Sales will be limited to the United States.
Direct2Drive is a service offered by IGN Entertainment Inc., which Fox's parent, News Corp., bought last year for $650 million.
Over the next year, video sales will come to other Fox sites as well, including MySpace.com, the popular online hangout that is now second only to Yahoo Inc. in U.S. page views.
Mickie Rosen, general manager for entertainment at Fox Interactive Media, said each site will likely use the Direct2Drive technology but offer a different user experience and different movies and shows, the offerings tailored to the site's audience.
Earlier this year, Fox made available free and for-sale downloads of "24" on MySpace. It also sold about 200,000 audio and video clips of performances at AmericanIdol.com.
Source: http://www.accesshollywood.com/news/ah1222.shtml
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