Link: NBC to End iTunes Sales of Its Shows - New York Times.
NBC Universal is also seeking better piracy controls and wants Apple to allow it to bundle videos to increase revenue, the person familiar with the matter said.
Better piracy controls? When it's broadcasting things free and in the clear?
Is NBC on crack?
Sky will take Sony PSP users to the movies | | Guardian Unlimited Business:
"BSkyB has linked up with Sony in a deal that will enable British users of the PSP games console to download films and TV shows.The joint venture between Sony and Sky will create Europe's first official PSP video download service. It should be available to the 2 million PSP users in the UK and Ireland early next year."
I'm presuming that this will mean some kind of Windows Media support coming to the PSP, and it's unlikely that Sky will look too far beyond Microsoft for support for downloads - certainly, I'd tke a guess that it won't want to ship its content without DRM. It'll also be interesting to see if this will extend beyond Sky subscribers - and if you'll need to remain a subscriber in order to watch content you've downloaded. Plus, does Sky + have a place in this?
Virgin ditches mobile TV service | | Guardian Unlimited Business:
"Virgin Mobile has decided to dump its broadcast mobile TV service after less than a year because of poor customer take-up. The mobile phone operator's partner on the project, BT, is ending its experiment with mobile TV and disbanding its BT Movio business that was supposed to take mobile TV into other countries. It has also cancelled its contract with GCap Media, the radio business that owned the spectrum over which the service runs. The service is likely to be switched off completely early next year."
I'm not exactly surprised by this. First of all, the phone you could use with it wasn't exactly the prettiest thing you've ever seen, and - as the iPhone has proved beyond doubt - pretty phones are popular. Secondly, there's never been much demand for mobile TV in the UK, as the makers of all those tiny TVs in the 1970's and 80's could tell you. Not even TV on a watch sold well.
(Disclosure: I work on the BT account at Redwood.)
Martin Belam gazes into his crystal ball and looks at the first 14 days of BBC iPlayer. He sees many things... DRM, Daily Mail outrage, Digg, Jonathan Ross, and a Page 3 "Stunnah" demanding her license fee back. If you read nothing else on the internet today, read this. It really is rather super.
Technorati Tags: BBC iPlayer, Martin Belam, humour
Boing Boing reports that a US artist received a letter from VW demanding that he remove from sale and from a web site images he'd drawn of a VW Beetle built from insects.
I'm a supporter of intellectual property rights in general, but cases like this make me very angry, because they bring the entire notion of intellectual property into disrepute. Not only is it counterproductive - VW has undoubtedly got more bad publicity already than this merited - it's illustrative of confusion in the law and an attempt by companies to extend the concepts of copyright and - importantly - trademarking.
First of all, Boing Boing's title is wrong: the object that VW has is nothing to do with copyright. But, it turns out, VW has been permitted in many countries around the world (certainly in Canada (PDF download) and I assume in the US) to make the classic Beetle design a trademark.
What's the difference, and why does it matter? Generally, copyright protects creation of artistic, literary, or scientific work: this writing, for example, is copyright by me and you can only use it under licenses that I allow, except for limited purposes (criticism, review, and a few others). The original designs of a Beetle are copyright, but not the cars themselves once they're on the public roads. That's why you can, for example, take a picture of a street scene without seeking the permission of the manufacturer of every car in the road - which is what you'd need to do if the image of a car was copyright.
Companies hate this, for several reasons. The first is that it means that people can take pictures of their "iconic" designs and use them on T shirts and other products - something that they see as robbing them of potential money. It also means that other manufacturers can copy the design, as long as they don't copy from the original blueprints. This is a form of reverse engineering of goods, and it's generally a good thing.
So, in order to get around this, companies have sought other methods - primarily, by applying to have the image of a car registered as a trademark. Trademarks are different from copyrights: they can be words, sets of words, an image, or a representation of a product and are designed to allow companies to identify themselves uniquely, and let the consumer know who a product was made by. They're protected to prevent one company trading on another's good reputation by passing off its goods as theirs. In other words, they're designed as a method of protecting the consumer, as much as the manufacturer. One example is the famous red triangle of Bass beer, which is Englands - and possibly the world's - oldest trademark.
Registering an design as a trademark gives you some key advantages. First, trademark law is more flexible than copyright law, which has very strict provisions on what's actually copyrighted (the plans for the original Beetle are copyright: it's image is not). Secondly, unlike copyrights, trademarks have no fixed term. You simply reregister them every few years and - if you do - they're yours for ever.
Normally, when attempting to turn a copyright into a trademark, companies simplify a design to make it more iconic, and turn it into a "maker's mark". For example, Mickey Mouse's ears in the iconic shape are a trademark of Disney.
However, the way that VW is using trademark law is completely different to this, as it's claim is that any representation of the Beetle shape - no matter how different - is a violation of its trademark. This looks like nonsense to me. Not only is the artist not attempting to pass off his work as VW's (how could he? It's a picture, not a car), the images are very different to the trademark VW images, thanks to their use of insects. It's as if Bass sued someone for using a blue triangle of the same proportions on a t shirt.
It's well worth anyone who works at the BBC looking at the BBC News talkback from viewers on whether the TV licence fee be increased. By and large, the viewers are opposed to the increases - perhaps unsurprisingly.
But it's interesting how the same old nonsense is trotted out by viewers. Let's look at a few of the myths:
They should be made to compete in the open market like ITV.
This, of course, would be the last thing that ITV would like. If the BBC was competing with it for advertising revenues, the effect would be to almost instantly halve ITV's income - thus destroying it. And, of course, the amount that the BBC would get wouldn't cover its own budget. Total net TV advertising revenues, split across all channels, was £3.4 billion in 2004 according to Ofcom (ITV's total of this is about £600 million). In the same year, the BBC allocated roughly £2.3 billion to television alone across all its channels - which gives you an idea of just how advertising revenue it would have to take from the current commercial channels in order to retain its current programme making strength. The only other option would be to cut back its programme making budget drastically - which would, of course, mean more repeats and less original programmes, which is the exact opposite of what the audience consistently says it wants.
The licence should be scrapped and the BBC made more accountable, it's almost like a government dept, wasting taxpayers money.
The BBC, of course, is not a department of the government, which has no say in its running beyond making appointments to its most senior managment.
Stop paying staff so much money and spend the licence fee on better programmes if they don't like it tell them to get another job. Most people don't get paid anywhere near Wogan.
Neither, of course, do most people at the BBC. In fact, the majority of people I've met who work there get less than the going market average for their job. There are, of course, other tangible benefits - the BBC pension scheme, for example, is excellent - but mostly they work there because of the public service aspect of the place.
Scrapping the BBC would improve the quality of private broadcasters due to the decreased competition. All the best TV is from America and is privately funded.
This is the first time I've ever seen the argument that a lack of competition improves quality. I'd certainly suggest that the writer go watch some old Soviet-era Russian TV, where competition was barred and quality was, to put it mildly, minimal. And I'd suggest that he watch Fox News and compare it to either News 24 or even ITN News if he thinks that all the best TV is from America.
I have no problem paying for the BBC - its a unique public service and Britain would be poorer without it. I object to paying for BBC programming twice, though. The entire historic output of the BBC should be free to Brits on the Internet.
A position I have a lot of sympathy for, but which - alas - is not that simple. There's two issues here. The first is the issue of rights. People who make and appear in programmes have "rights", which means that if it's repeated they're entitled to a fee. Not much - but over the course of an actor's career, these rights can amount to a lot of money. Now if you're allowing people to download programmes for free, how much money do you pass on to those actors? The BBC would like to do this, and is at the moment spending a lot of time and money on working out how to through efforts like the Interactive Media Player and Creative Archive.
The second issue is more difficult. The government has, for a while, been keen on supporting the independent television industry by ensuring that a proportion of the BBC's money goes to independent TV makers - hence those "A Joe Blogs Production in association with BBC Wales" type of credits at the ends of programmes. In fact, the government insists at present that around 25% of the BBC's output on its main channels is outsourced.
All well and good, but it means one problem: The BBC doesn't actually own everything that goes out on its channels. Copyright resides with the production company, or is split between production company and BBC - which in turn means the BBC only has limited rights to show the programme, usually repeated for free within a strictly-set window after first showing. Any more showings, and the BBC has to pay more. And, of course, allowing people to download the content would cost more. A lot more.
Why oh why can't the BBC be paid out of central government taxes. Then it would be paid through our ability to spend/pay. The argument that it would be under government control does not wash, as it is the government that sets the License Fee.
First of all, it would end the arms-length relationship between government and BBC that allows the government its indepence. Secondly, it would mean that the BBC budget would be subject to direct political interferance: do a Panorama about how Tony Blair was a weasel, and you can bet that next year's budget for news would be cut.
There is no need to venture into territory that is more than adequately covered by commercial television companies. They should be putting all their money into making quality programs for BBC 1 & 2 only.
Ironically, the reverse would be true: ITV does a decent job of competing with BBC1, while C4 and (increasingly) C5 are doing excellent work on minority programming and documentaries (despite it's low-rent reputation, C5 has done some very good documentary TV of late). BBC 1 and 2 would be the first for the chop if you decided that the BBC could only cover non-commercial territory - and under that system, the BBC would become a minority set of channels, and critics would justifiably ask why everyone had to pay for them.
I find it hard to understand why some programmes are screened on digital TV first as this forces people to pay a premium for the box to receive programs they have sponsored anyway.
Part of the remit for the digital channels is to experiment with low-budget programmes that might prove to be popular, but might not. They allow a higher level of risk than terrestrial channels, so that programmes like Little Britain can find an audience without the kind of major promotional budget that they'd need for BBC's 1 or 2.
And finally...
How about scraping it? We are fed up with being taxed for everything we do in life!
How about you grow up and realise that everything in life has to be paid for?
Torin Douglas does a fantastic (and only slightly gloat-esque) look at ITV"s 50th birthday at BBC News. One of the very well made points is that ITV's audience has slipped in parallel to a percieved fall in the quality of its output:
The days seem long gone when, in return for "a licence to print money", it was made to produce an ambitious range of drama, documentaries, current affairs, religion, arts and children's programmes.
Examples abounded in ITV's 50 Greatest Shows voted for by viewers. It included such cerebral fare as The World At War,
Hillsborough, The Naked Civil Servant, Brideshead Revisited, World In
Action, Death on the Rock and The Jewel in The Crown.
The standard reaction to this is that it's mostly down to either (a) the BBC getting an unfair advantage in the shape of the license fee, or (b) the multi-channel world robbing ITV the most. "Lord" Birt - and if ever there was a less deserved lordship, I have yet to find it - puts this view in an interesting way:
"The main consequence of the explosive growth in the number of
television channels is that ITV - whose share has particularly tumbled
- is clinging onto the public service tradition by its fingertips. When analogue switch-off occurs, and when ITV is more
or less on a level playing field with a welter of commercial
competitors, it will no longer be, in any meaningful sense, a public
service broadcaster."
In other words, ITV is shafted because it can't differentiate itself from the welter of low-rent, low-budget TV channels that exist on cable, satellite and Freeview.
But wait a minute. Look again at that list of superb programmes that viewers themselves pointed out: the likes of Brideshead Revisited, World In Action, Death on the Rock. Those are the differentiators. A channel like, say, Living TV has its qualities, but production values aren't part of that (as people at the channel would probably happily admit). Instead, ITV has attempted to "give people what they want", which usually amounts to Celebrity Love Island, rather than using the (still substantial) budgets it has to make TV programmes that other commercial channels simply couldn't match.
TV, even in the multi-channel world, is simple: Make good programmes, using imagination and intelligence, and you'll get an audience. In the case of ITV, which still has big budgets compared to all its rivals, there's no excuse for a market share that's fallen so badly. All the talk of multi-channel futures, multi-media landscapes, and so on is just an excuse for a lack of ability to focus on making good television. It's a failure of intelligence. It isn't rocket science
Make good programmes, and the rest will follow.
Link: Wired News: New Dr. Who Leaked on Purpose?.
"I told them they should release things before their time, like what they've done with Doctor Who," he said. "Give out the first episode online, because it's going to be valuable. You've got that cool factor, and it's the whole, 'I've seen it before you have' kind of thing."
Bailey said the leak "is great, and it's the first time we've ever seen them do it, and so we're really impressed with them."
The only comment I've heard about this from BBC insiders is "bullshit". So I'd take Mr Bailey's claims that one of the world's largest media organisations is following his plan with a pinch of salt.
Yes, Superstars is back. OK, we're unlikely to see any current England international removing chunks of their legs by falling off bicycles, but still - a great day for television.
