by Gary Rusak
Walt Disney Television International has launched the first Jetix-branded subscription VOD service in Asia. Kids in Singapore will get a chance to order up content on IPTV SingTel's brand new digital cable mio TV service.
Aimed at kids six to 14, the service will offer series such as W.I.T.C.H., Get Ed, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go and A.T.O.M.. All in, 20 hours of Jetix content will be available on the channel at any given time, with 25% of it being refreshed monthly.
The mio TV Rent-A-Pack nine-channel offering that includes Jetix will cost subscribers US$4.20 per month.
http://www.kidscreen.com/articles/daily/20070830/singapore.html
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Article: Pass the Popcorn. But Where’s the Movie?
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: August 19, 2007
AS consumers by the millions install new flat-screen, high-definition TV sets this year, more than half of which will have 50-inch or larger screens, they can proudly say that they are doing their part to modernize the movie-viewing experience at home.
Cable operators have done their part, too, building a video-on-demand infrastructure that can supply viewers with a nearly limitless choice of movie titles, available at any time of day. No trips to the rental store. No vigils at the mailbox for discs from the subscription service. No purchases of additional computer hardware to transport downloaded movie files to somewhere else in the house. Just a couple of clicks of the cable remote control.
All is ready — except an unstinting supply of movies. The studios have balked.
According to Craig Moffett, vice president and senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, cable’s video-on-demand is well positioned, technically speaking, to be the preferred way that movies reach the home, but the Cable Guys cannot get access to Hollywood’s products: “They built a Ferrari of a delivery engine, but the content owners didn’t show up.”
The movie studios are preternaturally suspicious of the new and unfamiliar. Their fear has nothing to do with crunching the numbers, but rather with large organizations’ tendency to lose sight of their interests — not to mention their customers’. Thanks to the efficiencies of digital delivery, the studios actually earn three times the margin on each video-on-demand viewed that they earn on a store rental, while charging the same $4.
Comcast now has secured rights to offer only about 300 movie titles on-demand on any given day, excluding premium channels like HBO; about 50 of those are high-definition. It has a long way to go to match the comprehensive coverage of Netflix’s 80,000 titles or Blockbuster Online’s 75,000.
But the on-demand menu does not have to attain comparable size immediately, especially since Netflix’s and Blockbuster’s lists mostly consist of the long tail of backlist titles for which demand is low — and high-definition versions are scant. The overwhelming bulk of viewers’ requests could be met simply by having the newest releases on hand in all formats.
To their credit, the major studios have shown a willingness to re-examine the artificial limits they have placed on video-on-demand. Late last year, six studios began an experiment with Comcast in Denver and Pittsburgh, making their newest releases available for viewing on demand the same day the DVD went on sale. Time Warner Cable is in the third month of a similar, six-month trial in Austin, Tex., and Columbus, Ohio.
The studios contend that the trials are necessary so they can be certain that DVD sales are not hurt by immediate availability of video-on-demand. This is supposed to be a $16 billion question, which is the size of the domestic DVD market, the lifeblood of the industry. The sum dwarfs the $10 billion in total box-office revenue or the $8 billion from movie rentals. Because prospective DVD buyers have always had a less-expensive alternative the day when DVDs go on sale — namely, renting the title — it is hard to see why video-on-demand poses a different cannibalistic threat.
Comcast has not yet released details of its findings. Earlier this month, however, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s president and chief operating officer, offered some encouraging tidbits. He said that when a movie title was made available on-demand the same day the DVD was released, revenue from video-on-demand rentals increased 50 percent — and retail sales actually went up 5 to 10 percent. To explain the somewhat surprising gains in stores, Mr. Bewkes speculated that sales of a new title were depressed in the past by the almost-instant availability of used DVDs for sale at rental stores like Blockbuster.
The movie studio is paid only once — when the DVD is sold the first time — and not when it is resold used. For the studios, digital delivery of a rental eliminates the problem of a physical product being resold, cutting into the sales of new copies without generating additional royalties. And studios are paid every time an on-demand video is viewed.
The digital delivery system of video-on-demand offers many advantages to consumers, too. The immediate gratification provided by instant fulfillment of a viewing request is no trifle. The Netflix model assumes that the lag between the time a subscriber enters a requested title and when that title finally shows up in the mailbox does not matter all that much — that as long as a consumer has at least one unwatched DVD on hand at any time and the queue of requested titles is kept full of good stuff, the customer shouldn’t care when a particular title reaches the top of the queue and wends its way through the postal system to the home.
Netflix customers apparently do care, however. The company has had to build out its shipping centers from one at its founding in 1998 to 44 today, in an effort to minimize transit delays. Even so, the time that elapses between a Netflix user’s request and the delivery of a title is measured in days. With video-on-demand, it’s seconds.
Netflix also struggles to have enough copies of the hottest titles on hand. The swords-sandals-and-pecs hit “300” was released on the last day of July and immediately became the top rental in the nation. Two weeks after its release, however, subscribers were warned on their on-screen queues that they faced a “very long wait.” (Blockbuster Online could not do better.)
So, too, with the No. 2 rental title, “Hot Fuzz.” In fact, in mid-August, Netflix had on hand, ready for shipping, only 4 of the top 10 titles nationally listed as the most popular DVD rentals the week before. With digital transport, a single master can simultaneously supply as many households that wish to view the DVD; inventory management problems — and “very long wait” notices — disappear.
AMERICANS have never failed to show their appreciation for services that provide speedy gratification; the instant variety is preferred most. Once the cooperation of the studios is secured, video-on-demand will become the most popular means of renting movies.
When Netflix made its debut almost 10 years ago, many movie viewers discovered that sitting at a desk at home and using a Web site to select rental titles was considerably easier than going to a store to choose a rental. Video-on-demand offers the next enhancement: ordering by remote control
while stretched across the living room couch.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/business/yourmoney/19digi.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Published: August 19, 2007
AS consumers by the millions install new flat-screen, high-definition TV sets this year, more than half of which will have 50-inch or larger screens, they can proudly say that they are doing their part to modernize the movie-viewing experience at home.
Cable operators have done their part, too, building a video-on-demand infrastructure that can supply viewers with a nearly limitless choice of movie titles, available at any time of day. No trips to the rental store. No vigils at the mailbox for discs from the subscription service. No purchases of additional computer hardware to transport downloaded movie files to somewhere else in the house. Just a couple of clicks of the cable remote control.
All is ready — except an unstinting supply of movies. The studios have balked.
According to Craig Moffett, vice president and senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, cable’s video-on-demand is well positioned, technically speaking, to be the preferred way that movies reach the home, but the Cable Guys cannot get access to Hollywood’s products: “They built a Ferrari of a delivery engine, but the content owners didn’t show up.”
The movie studios are preternaturally suspicious of the new and unfamiliar. Their fear has nothing to do with crunching the numbers, but rather with large organizations’ tendency to lose sight of their interests — not to mention their customers’. Thanks to the efficiencies of digital delivery, the studios actually earn three times the margin on each video-on-demand viewed that they earn on a store rental, while charging the same $4.
Comcast now has secured rights to offer only about 300 movie titles on-demand on any given day, excluding premium channels like HBO; about 50 of those are high-definition. It has a long way to go to match the comprehensive coverage of Netflix’s 80,000 titles or Blockbuster Online’s 75,000.
But the on-demand menu does not have to attain comparable size immediately, especially since Netflix’s and Blockbuster’s lists mostly consist of the long tail of backlist titles for which demand is low — and high-definition versions are scant. The overwhelming bulk of viewers’ requests could be met simply by having the newest releases on hand in all formats.
To their credit, the major studios have shown a willingness to re-examine the artificial limits they have placed on video-on-demand. Late last year, six studios began an experiment with Comcast in Denver and Pittsburgh, making their newest releases available for viewing on demand the same day the DVD went on sale. Time Warner Cable is in the third month of a similar, six-month trial in Austin, Tex., and Columbus, Ohio.
The studios contend that the trials are necessary so they can be certain that DVD sales are not hurt by immediate availability of video-on-demand. This is supposed to be a $16 billion question, which is the size of the domestic DVD market, the lifeblood of the industry. The sum dwarfs the $10 billion in total box-office revenue or the $8 billion from movie rentals. Because prospective DVD buyers have always had a less-expensive alternative the day when DVDs go on sale — namely, renting the title — it is hard to see why video-on-demand poses a different cannibalistic threat.
Comcast has not yet released details of its findings. Earlier this month, however, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s president and chief operating officer, offered some encouraging tidbits. He said that when a movie title was made available on-demand the same day the DVD was released, revenue from video-on-demand rentals increased 50 percent — and retail sales actually went up 5 to 10 percent. To explain the somewhat surprising gains in stores, Mr. Bewkes speculated that sales of a new title were depressed in the past by the almost-instant availability of used DVDs for sale at rental stores like Blockbuster.
The movie studio is paid only once — when the DVD is sold the first time — and not when it is resold used. For the studios, digital delivery of a rental eliminates the problem of a physical product being resold, cutting into the sales of new copies without generating additional royalties. And studios are paid every time an on-demand video is viewed.
The digital delivery system of video-on-demand offers many advantages to consumers, too. The immediate gratification provided by instant fulfillment of a viewing request is no trifle. The Netflix model assumes that the lag between the time a subscriber enters a requested title and when that title finally shows up in the mailbox does not matter all that much — that as long as a consumer has at least one unwatched DVD on hand at any time and the queue of requested titles is kept full of good stuff, the customer shouldn’t care when a particular title reaches the top of the queue and wends its way through the postal system to the home.
Netflix customers apparently do care, however. The company has had to build out its shipping centers from one at its founding in 1998 to 44 today, in an effort to minimize transit delays. Even so, the time that elapses between a Netflix user’s request and the delivery of a title is measured in days. With video-on-demand, it’s seconds.
Netflix also struggles to have enough copies of the hottest titles on hand. The swords-sandals-and-pecs hit “300” was released on the last day of July and immediately became the top rental in the nation. Two weeks after its release, however, subscribers were warned on their on-screen queues that they faced a “very long wait.” (Blockbuster Online could not do better.)
So, too, with the No. 2 rental title, “Hot Fuzz.” In fact, in mid-August, Netflix had on hand, ready for shipping, only 4 of the top 10 titles nationally listed as the most popular DVD rentals the week before. With digital transport, a single master can simultaneously supply as many households that wish to view the DVD; inventory management problems — and “very long wait” notices — disappear.
AMERICANS have never failed to show their appreciation for services that provide speedy gratification; the instant variety is preferred most. Once the cooperation of the studios is secured, video-on-demand will become the most popular means of renting movies.
When Netflix made its debut almost 10 years ago, many movie viewers discovered that sitting at a desk at home and using a Web site to select rental titles was considerably easier than going to a store to choose a rental. Video-on-demand offers the next enhancement: ordering by remote control
while stretched across the living room couch.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/business/yourmoney/19digi.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Sunday, August 19, 2007
How To: Tunneling BitTorrent over SSH
Have you ever been on a network somewhere where Bittorrent simply doesn’t work? The ports might be blocked, the packets are inspected, etc…? Well, after a little research and a buck i’ve managed to come up with a pretty good solution. I’d heard about tunneling content through SSH, but never really figured out how to get it working. That is, until now.
I was really excited my first day at Blue Lava when I heard that they had a 20mbps connection. I was told I could download full Linux ISO’s in ten minutes. Pretty quick. Sadly the ports for Bittorrent were blocked and my downloading spree never began.
Right now I am sitting in a Starbucks right near the south shore of Oahu, Hawaii. I’ve got Azureus open and its downloading at a steady pace of 170kbps, I’ve pretty much maxxed out the connection over here. The funny (or cool) thing is, the ports are blocked! So how can you bypass your corporate firewall or public hotspot (like Starbucks T-Mobile WiFi) and work out your download muscle? Read on!
First of all, you are going to need some sort of shell account to tunnel everything through. I’ve already tried using my Silenceisdefeat account, but their SSH server is not configured the way that we want it, so that won’t work. A friend of mine told me about Disflux, a service almost exactly like Silenceisdefeat. Disflux has their SSH servers configured the way we want em though, so that is what we are going to use.
UPDATE: Turns out that Disflux died or something. But! Don’t flip out! As it turns out (Thanks Chris! - #19) Silenceisdefeat.org, which is my choice of shell anyway, does work with this guide. However, it will only work if you connect to ssh.silenceisdefeat.org!
So I shelled out the $1 for my disflux Silenceisdefeat.org shell account (I actually already had one, best thing ever), and went on my merry way figuring out how to configure everything else. Some may think that paying for something like this is nuts, but honestly, Bittorrent has become a part of my everyday life, I depend on it like a crack addict depends on his crack. One buck is totally worth the hours of glee BitTorrent has to offer.
First thing you need to do after buying your shell account is open up a terminal (in OSX its in the Utilities folder), or download putty if you’re on Windows. If you are on Linux and don’t know how to open a terminal I feel sorry for you.
In the terminal type “ssh username@domain -D portnumber”, this goes for OSX and Linux. Now, with PuTTY on Windows I am not quite sure how to go about doing this. I am pretty sure you would just type “-D portnumber” into a extra flags option box or something, but I am really not quite sure. Edit: Scroll down for Eberth’s Windows guide! Or you lazy people can clicky.
For example, I use: “ssh whalesalad@ssh.silenceisdefeat.org -D 7777″. You can use any port you want, but make sure it isn’t being used by anything else. I happen to like the number 7777 so thats what I chose.
Screenshot_3.png
NOTE: In the screenshots Disflux is used, simply replace shelly.disflux.com with ssh.silenceisdefeat.org after creating an account and you will have no problems!
Now, what does this do? This has your open SSH session act as a SOCKS proxy. This is what we are going to have Azureus or any other bittorrent client of choice use.
Once that terminal is open, just minimize or hide it, but leave it open. The proxy will only work if that terminal is open and connected, so try not to fiddle with it.
Now we have to configure our BitTorrent client of choice. I recently “switched” to OSX and am using Azureus, but if I had my way I would be using the greatest client ever: uTorrent. Because I can’t get the internet working in Paralells at the moment I can’t help explain how to configure uTorrent, but here is what you need to do to get Azureus up and running with our newly created SOCKS proxy.
First of all you need to enable the Advanced options area of Azureus. You can do this by re-running (or running if this is your first time using Azureus) the configuration wizard. On OSX this is under the Azureus menu, I’m not quite sure where it is on Windows (=P). Choose the advanced user option, this will let us configure Azureus to use proxies. Once this is done, open up the preferences area of Azureus.
Screenshot_4.png
From there open up the “Connection” sub items and then the “Proxy Options”. From there, check the “Enable proxying of tracker communications” and “I have a SOCKS proxy”. In the host field enter “localhost” and in the port field enter whatever number you used to start the proxy, for me thats “7777″.
Save your options and thats it! Now you should be able to head to any one of the online tracker websites and download away! Legal files of course, we don’t encourage piracy or stealing here at the salad. Make sure to leave comments if it works for you, and any other tips or tidbits you’d like to share!
Edit: For all you windows users out there, Eberth made a comment below on how to get this working. He did such a good job, I’m going to include it right here in my guide.
First you need to get PuTTY. It’s a great client, back when I used Windows it was my SSH client of choice. You can find a direct link to PuTTy here.
Open up PuTTY and enter shelly.disflux.com into the host field.
Go to Connection > SSH > Tunnels, and write your port on the source port field (in this case i’m using the same as Michael, 7777) and select the “Dynamic” checkbox, click the add button.
I’d reccomend what Eberth explains in his comment, which would be to save your session so that next time you can just fire up PuTTY and double click your saved session to reload the same settings. Enter a name for the saved session and click save, its as easy as pie!
Now you’ve got your SOCKS proxy running, time to fire up your favorite BitTorrent client. Azureus users can use the same configuration that I have above, but if you’re smart you’re going to be using uTorrent. Here is a screenshot of the way Eberth configured his client:
Thanks Eberth!
http://www.whalesalad.com/2006/08/27/tunneling-bittorrent-over-ssh/
I was really excited my first day at Blue Lava when I heard that they had a 20mbps connection. I was told I could download full Linux ISO’s in ten minutes. Pretty quick. Sadly the ports for Bittorrent were blocked and my downloading spree never began.
Right now I am sitting in a Starbucks right near the south shore of Oahu, Hawaii. I’ve got Azureus open and its downloading at a steady pace of 170kbps, I’ve pretty much maxxed out the connection over here. The funny (or cool) thing is, the ports are blocked! So how can you bypass your corporate firewall or public hotspot (like Starbucks T-Mobile WiFi) and work out your download muscle? Read on!
First of all, you are going to need some sort of shell account to tunnel everything through. I’ve already tried using my Silenceisdefeat account, but their SSH server is not configured the way that we want it, so that won’t work. A friend of mine told me about Disflux, a service almost exactly like Silenceisdefeat. Disflux has their SSH servers configured the way we want em though, so that is what we are going to use.
UPDATE: Turns out that Disflux died or something. But! Don’t flip out! As it turns out (Thanks Chris! - #19) Silenceisdefeat.org, which is my choice of shell anyway, does work with this guide. However, it will only work if you connect to ssh.silenceisdefeat.org!
So I shelled out the $1 for my disflux Silenceisdefeat.org shell account (I actually already had one, best thing ever), and went on my merry way figuring out how to configure everything else. Some may think that paying for something like this is nuts, but honestly, Bittorrent has become a part of my everyday life, I depend on it like a crack addict depends on his crack. One buck is totally worth the hours of glee BitTorrent has to offer.
First thing you need to do after buying your shell account is open up a terminal (in OSX its in the Utilities folder), or download putty if you’re on Windows. If you are on Linux and don’t know how to open a terminal I feel sorry for you.
In the terminal type “ssh username@domain -D portnumber”, this goes for OSX and Linux. Now, with PuTTY on Windows I am not quite sure how to go about doing this. I am pretty sure you would just type “-D portnumber” into a extra flags option box or something, but I am really not quite sure. Edit: Scroll down for Eberth’s Windows guide! Or you lazy people can clicky.
For example, I use: “ssh whalesalad@ssh.silenceisdefeat.org -D 7777″. You can use any port you want, but make sure it isn’t being used by anything else. I happen to like the number 7777 so thats what I chose.
Screenshot_3.png
NOTE: In the screenshots Disflux is used, simply replace shelly.disflux.com with ssh.silenceisdefeat.org after creating an account and you will have no problems!
Now, what does this do? This has your open SSH session act as a SOCKS proxy. This is what we are going to have Azureus or any other bittorrent client of choice use.
Once that terminal is open, just minimize or hide it, but leave it open. The proxy will only work if that terminal is open and connected, so try not to fiddle with it.
Now we have to configure our BitTorrent client of choice. I recently “switched” to OSX and am using Azureus, but if I had my way I would be using the greatest client ever: uTorrent. Because I can’t get the internet working in Paralells at the moment I can’t help explain how to configure uTorrent, but here is what you need to do to get Azureus up and running with our newly created SOCKS proxy.
First of all you need to enable the Advanced options area of Azureus. You can do this by re-running (or running if this is your first time using Azureus) the configuration wizard. On OSX this is under the Azureus menu, I’m not quite sure where it is on Windows (=P). Choose the advanced user option, this will let us configure Azureus to use proxies. Once this is done, open up the preferences area of Azureus.
Screenshot_4.png
From there open up the “Connection” sub items and then the “Proxy Options”. From there, check the “Enable proxying of tracker communications” and “I have a SOCKS proxy”. In the host field enter “localhost” and in the port field enter whatever number you used to start the proxy, for me thats “7777″.
Save your options and thats it! Now you should be able to head to any one of the online tracker websites and download away! Legal files of course, we don’t encourage piracy or stealing here at the salad. Make sure to leave comments if it works for you, and any other tips or tidbits you’d like to share!
Edit: For all you windows users out there, Eberth made a comment below on how to get this working. He did such a good job, I’m going to include it right here in my guide.
First you need to get PuTTY. It’s a great client, back when I used Windows it was my SSH client of choice. You can find a direct link to PuTTy here.
Open up PuTTY and enter shelly.disflux.com into the host field.
Go to Connection > SSH > Tunnels, and write your port on the source port field (in this case i’m using the same as Michael, 7777) and select the “Dynamic” checkbox, click the add button.
I’d reccomend what Eberth explains in his comment, which would be to save your session so that next time you can just fire up PuTTY and double click your saved session to reload the same settings. Enter a name for the saved session and click save, its as easy as pie!
Now you’ve got your SOCKS proxy running, time to fire up your favorite BitTorrent client. Azureus users can use the same configuration that I have above, but if you’re smart you’re going to be using uTorrent. Here is a screenshot of the way Eberth configured his client:
Thanks Eberth!
http://www.whalesalad.com/2006/08/27/tunneling-bittorrent-over-ssh/
Friday, August 10, 2007
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Article:'Baby Einstein': a bright idea?
Infants shown such educational series end up with poorer vocabularies, study finds. Researcher says 'American Idol' is better.
By Amber Dance, Times Staff Writer
August 7, 2007
Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study released today.
For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.
Parents aiming to put their babies on the fast track, even if they are still working on walking, each year buy hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of the videos.
Unfortunately it's all money down the tubes, according to Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies' vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo.
The researchers found that 32% of the babies were shown the videos, and 17% of those were shown them for more than an hour a day, according to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics.
The videos, which are designed to engage a baby's attention, hop from scene to scene with minimal dialogue and include mesmerizing images, like a lava lamp.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television for children under 24 months.
The Brainy Baby Co. and Walt Disney Co., which markets the "Baby Einstein" videos, did not return calls from the Los Angeles Times.
Christakis said children whose parents read to them or told them stories had larger vocabularies.
"I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos," Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits.
amber.dance@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-sci-babyeinstein7aug07,0,3226267.story?coll=la-tot-topstories&track=ntottext
By Amber Dance, Times Staff Writer
August 7, 2007
Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study released today.
For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.
Parents aiming to put their babies on the fast track, even if they are still working on walking, each year buy hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of the videos.
Unfortunately it's all money down the tubes, according to Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies' vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo.
The researchers found that 32% of the babies were shown the videos, and 17% of those were shown them for more than an hour a day, according to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics.
The videos, which are designed to engage a baby's attention, hop from scene to scene with minimal dialogue and include mesmerizing images, like a lava lamp.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television for children under 24 months.
The Brainy Baby Co. and Walt Disney Co., which markets the "Baby Einstein" videos, did not return calls from the Los Angeles Times.
Christakis said children whose parents read to them or told them stories had larger vocabularies.
"I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos," Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits.
amber.dance@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-sci-babyeinstein7aug07,0,3226267.story?coll=la-tot-topstories&track=ntottext
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