While the music
industry has reluctantly crept toward technology, Hollywood is sprinting to online distribution
The process has been slow,
but has steadily gained momentum. In late 2005, EZTakes began offering
downloads of public-domain films – the only content they were able to get back
then. The service has gradually expanded to offer some rather obscure indie
material, exercise videos, horror flicks, and even a few winners of film
awards. Those are international awards, of course, not Oscars. The big Hollywood studios haven’t signed on with EZTakes. But
they are starting a download experiment with CinemaNow. In addition to the few
hundred films for download to PCs, CinemaNow offers a few hundred movies that
can be burned to DVD.
It started in May with films
from Vivid Entertainment -- a purveyor of high-grade
pornography. But as history shows us: Where porn goes, mainstream media soon
follows. In July, CinemaNow started offering mainstream titles – about 100
movies and music videos.
In the era of iTunes, it may
be hard to remember how lethargic the music industry has been to embrace the
Internet. But it's been roughly ten years from the emergence of MP3 Internet trading
to the Beatle's announcement that they were finally preparing their music for
online distribution. And that news came during their latest, and ill-fated,
lawsuit against Apple Computer. (We're still waiting for AC/DC and Led Zeppelin
to go online.)
In comparison, the video
business is streaming ahead. While burn-to-DVD titles are rare, PC-based
downloads are abundant. In addition to its hefty porn collection, CinemaNow
offers a good chunk of new mainstream releases. Could the quality be better?
Sure, but that's true of online music as well. Are the prices reasonable? No. $19.95
is excessive for occasionally fuzzy video that is tethered to your laptop.
"I would prefer to offer it cheaper," said Cinema Now's president, Bruce
Eisen, whose pricing structure is dictated by the studios. Eisen is gunning for
$10 per download, as is the 800-pound gorilla of online media, Steve Jobs.
Assuming historical
precedent holds, Jobs will probably get his way. But even without Apple, online
video will continue to explode because so many other companies are pushing it.
The legal music download business is dominated by a mere two players: iTunes
with about 61 percent of the market, and eMusic -- a
distributor of mostly indie titles with about 12 percent.
Providers of online video,
in comparison, are legion. CinemaNow competes with two virtual alter-egos:
MovieLink and Vongo. Google and Yahoo offer vast archives of footage, as do the
until-recently-unknown companies YouTube, Revver, and Grouper. Plus new players
keep popping out of obscurity. In June, a Usenet archive with the not-so-catchy
name GUBA began offering top-tier current films and campy
old TV shows from the Warner Brothers archive. In July, GUBA signed on Sony. And
while iTunes doesn't provide movies yet, its half-year-old collection of TV programs
is already overwhelming. I've watched entire seasons of Battlestar Galactica exclusively
on my laptop.
Unlike songs -- which can be
played dozens of times per week on traditional, satellite, and Internet radio
stations -- TV episodes are limited to a prime-time debut and occasional runs
in syndication. A decade ago, if you missed a song on the radio, you knew you
would hear it again soon. Or you could buy the CD, tape, or LP. But if you
missed a show on TV, you didn't know when, if ever, you could catch it again.
That wasn't just bad news
for viewers, but for the networks, too. They were sitting on huge archives of
valuable content, with limited ways to make money from it. So reviving old
shows on the Internet represents almost pure gain for them.
And unlike movie studios, TV
networks aren't worried about "cannibalizing" DVD sales. Getting a
series onto DVD is a slow process -- about a season or two behind the broadcast
airing. That hurts viewership, because it's impossible for new viewers to catch
up. (TiVo helps. But what if you first become interested in recording a show
two seasons after it debuted?) If you make episodes available online shortly
after they hit the TV, people can join in at any time and become dedicated
fans. That's a lot different from music. Bands don't (yet) issue a song every
week or two, stretching an album over several months. Nothing appears until the
entire CD is ready. It's the exact opposite with DVD collections of TV shows.
Television networks are a
lot different from recording studios. Both produce media, but networks are also
responsible for broadcasting it. In the past they have used radio waves, cable,
and satellite. Now they are adding Internet Protocol.
"Hollywood is definitely moving faster"
than the music business, said Jeremy Allaire, whose company Brightcove
develops the Internet video distribution systems for TV channels such as MTV
and The Discovery Channe "They are launching
new businesses left and right, building direct digital channels with their TV
networks, and doing digital media licensing deals all over the planet."
In some cases, Hollywood is pushing
harder than the technology and legal constraints will allow. I spent days
trying to download one of the Vivid Entertainment DVD files. First my PC's
security software blocked the download. Later, I was able to retrieve it, but the
digital license required to make the file play wasn't delivered. So I had to
start over again. And quality is not quite as good as that on a regular DVD,
but it is close.
Licensing is also a
roadblock. Rights for most movies and TV shows were negotiated long before the
Internet, and renegotiating for online distribution is tedious. One of the
stickiest matters, in fact, is securing the rights to music used in programs. But
many other players are also involved -- far more than for a typical song.
"We've had a bunch of meetings where you see a ton of excitement from the
studios," said Rob Bennett, the general manager of entertainment and video
for MSN. "Then the needle gets scratched across the record when someone
says 'What about the Director's Guild? What about the Actor's Guild?'"
Despite these glitches,
online video is quickly moving forward. New licensing deals for movies and TV
shows are incorporating Internet rights. And while Hollywood players are still frustratingly cautious on some matters, they recognize that
they can't keep their content off the Internet, so they might as well play an
active roll in getting it online. In this matter they owe a huge debt to the
recording studios, which clearly showed them how not to react to a new technology.
Stop the Megapixel Madness!
Here's the problem, though -- more megapixels produce WORSE pictures. Yes, worse. You may have heard or read my rants on this before. But now I have concrete, saddening proof.
Last week I met with folks from Pentax and saw their new K10D digital SLR, which immediately won my heart. Pentax is no Canon or Nikon, but it makes very respectable little SLRs at good prices. If you don't have (realistic) pro aspirations (and most of us don't), Pentax is a great way to go. The K10D has Pentax's cool vibration reduction technology via an image sensor that "floats" in a magnetic field so that camera jiggles don't cause it to move around. (The technology premiered in the K100D and works great, according to my tests.)
But the K10D also has other fantastic features. For the first time, Pentax has attached a name to its image sensor: The Pentax Real IMage Engine. OK, it's a clunky name, but it has a nice acronym -- PRIME -- which undoubtedly came first. Why didn't Pentax name their processors before? Because they weren't THEIR processors. They just bought 'em from a chipmaker. (They wouldn't tell me which one.) One of the coolest things about PRIME is that it takes DDR2 memory. What does that mean? Unlimited shooting. Press the shutter, and the camera keeps taking pictures until the memory card fills up. I'm not certain, but I don't think ANY other camera does this.
Another cool thing -- a very sophisticated analog to digital converter. This takes the gobbledygook from the sensor and makes it into a package of nice ones and zeros for the camera to process. Analog has a virtually infinite range of values, and every time you convert it to nice little ones and zeros, you make some compromises in accuracy. But the K10D doesn't make many. It has a 22-bit converter -- meaning it interprets 2 to the 22nd power shades of meaning. Its previous cameras had a 12-bit converter -- ten orders of magnitude less refined.
There's just one problem with the K10D: Its 10-megapixel sensor. This problem can be measured. In low-light shooting, it makes the K10D only half as good as Pentax's old six megapixel K100D. While the K100D goes to ISO 3200 sensitivity, the K10D can only go to ISO 1600. Pentax confirms that the sensor is the problem. So, new processor, new digital-to-analog converter, and worse low-light performance. That's how much damage comes from trying to squeeze an extra four million photodiodes onto a sensor of the same size. They are so tiny and receive so little light that you need all this new processing power just to get an image that is not quite as good as that from the entry-level camera. Oh, what a shame. So now, I get almost twice as many pixels, but they are fuzzier. So I can make giant prints that look like they are growing mold, or I can hide the fuzz by making prints that are as small as or smaller than those from the 6-megapixel camera.
September 28, 2006 in Commentary | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)