channel on SWiK

Freesat EPG TV Channels

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:52:34 -0700

Freesat the digital satellite service from the BBC and ITV, the BBC and ITV have confirmed plans to launch a rival to BSkyB's 'Freesat from Sky' offering. The new service - also to be called Freesat - will target the estimated 25% of homes unable to receive Freeview Digital terrestrial.

Face the Music: It’s Time To Fix Licensing

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:11:50 -0700

I was talking to an executive at a major label the other day. We were talking about startups and he noted that they either sue these companies out of business or legitimize them out of business. That is not far from the truth. How many legitimate, standalone digital businesses can you name that rely on licenses from the labels for their primary business and are profitable? Let’s categorize by business model:

E-Commerce/Transaction-based: iTunes immediately comes to mind. It may be profitable on its own, but we all know that Apple’s main business is to sell iPods and now iPhones. eMusic is the other one, and I think it has a real business on its hands — of course the vast majority of its repertoire is non-major label.

Music Subscriptions: This segment is dominated by Rhapsody and Napster. Neither is solely a music subscription service, but that’s what both are best known for. At any rate, neither is profitable. RealNetworks’ music business lost $1.9 M in the second quarter of this year. Napster? Well its stock chart kinda says it all; it’s currently trading for a little less than the cash it has on its books.

Ad-Supported Music: This includes on-demand audio and video and also Internet radio. The major players here are the radio divisions of companies like Yahoo, AOL, CBS (Last.fm and CBS Radio), MTV, Clear Channel, MySpace, Facebook and then independents like iMeem, Last.fm, Pandora, Live365 (my alma mater) and a number of others. It has been widely reported that the standard license for on-demand consumption is $0.01 per play, which amounts to a $10 cost-per-thousand plays, not including other costs such as publishing, bandwidth/streaming and ad sales and serving costs.

In short, I think its very hard for any of the ad-supported players to build a meaningful basis from licensed music. Instead, many of the larger players will use it as part of a larger strategy to attract audiences and offer related products that generate higher-margin revenues. For instance, Clear Channel might have a sponsor for its Stripped series, which will probably not have the same license cost as a regular music video. Or MySpace will sell an ad campaign around an event that it hosts. As for Internet radio, there is a lower royalty rate, but the CPMs are lower, too. Pandora’s founder was recently quoted as saying the service may have to throw in the towel if things don’t change with the fee structure. iMeem has licenses from several labels but it’s been reported that it gave up a significant piece of the company and agreed to onerous terms, so, needless to say, it likely isn’t profitable on its licensed music either.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of business models nor of the companies within each segment, and there may be companies within each that are profitable. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that the labels have been lulled into the conviction that their rates are ‘market’ since some of companies have been willing to pay such rates to license music as a loss leader. The labels have been penny-wise and pound-foolish in cutting deals with seemingly lucrative rates. However, that is not the recipe for a vibrant, competitive ecosystem of licensees large and small, with no one company having too much market share — which is exactly what I’d want if I were in their shoes.

The good news is that I know this has been recognized by people with the major labels, and they’re experimenting with new licensing schemes. Hopefully it’s not too late.

Raghav “Rags” Gupta is VP of International Partnerships at Brightcove, where he has worked since ‘05. His blog can be found at www.ragsgupta.com.

Hardware Mismatch for Fibre Channel Hard Drive

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:47:52 -0700

We had a hard drive (FC) mismatch and had to rebuild the path_to_inst file and /dev/rdsk/*, /dev/dsk/* and /dev/rmt/* directories. We had two drives (but the backup drive was inoperable), so instead of booting off the backup, we had to recover via cdrom. That part was a little trickier than expected. After a little web searching, a handy disaster discovery procedure (hardware mismatch) was found on the Sun BigAdmin site.

Method 1 (towards the bottom of the Sun page)

Here is what was done.

Boot from CDROM
ok boot cdrom -s
# mount /dev/dsk/c1t#d#s0 /mnt
Rename path_to_inst
# mv /mnt/etc/path_to_inst /mnt/etc/path_to_inst.org
Remove all old device links
# rm /mnt/dev/rdsk/c1*; rm /mnt/dev/dsk/c1*; rm /mnt/dev/rmt/*
Rebuild path_to_inst and devices (this (syntax) was the part we were missing)
# devfsadm -r /mnt -p /mnt/etc/path_to_inst
**Note: Suspect corrupted bootblock? - reinstall it.
# cd /mnt/usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs
# /mnt/usr/sbin/installboot bootblk /dev/rdsk/c1t#d#s0
Unmount root slice and reboot
# cd /
# umount /mnt; init 6

By the way, we tried method two (boot -rav) prior to performing the web search but each attempt failed.

ajtak

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:47:43 -0700

You may watch Aajtak live for free and many other channels here:

http://www.entertainy.com

SipTheeSkype - SIP to Skype Gateway Bridge Proxy Adapter Converter Interconnect

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 13:16:42 -0700

Internet Tablet Talk Forums - View Single Post - watch 93 TV stations round the world from your NIT

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:17:54 -0700

Internet Tablet Talk Forums - View Single Post - watch 93 TV stations round the world from your NIT

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:17:37 -0700

SipTheeSkype - SIP to Skype Gateway Bridge Proxy Adapter Converter Interconnect

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:09:14 -0700

Escay.nl

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:43:27 -0700

Frequency converter

RSS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:55:20 -0700

MartJack - Articles and Press Releases

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:49:16 -0700

http://www.martjack.com/articles_and_press_release.html MartJack – Articles and Press Releases

Redmond Channel Partner Online | Feature: 2008 RCP Salary Survey: Partners See Bigger Bucks

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:03:29 -0700

The results of RCP's second annual salary survey show that a possible recession isn't yet hitting partners' pockets.

input sources config | MythTV | Users

Fri, 30 May 2008 18:38:10 -0700

REST and POX

Fri, 16 May 2008 18:13:57 -0700

Free Blender Workshop - Sao Paulo, Brazil, March 19th.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:47:02 -0700

The Alpha Channel School is preparing a Blender seminar in São Paulo Wednesday, March 19th.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Cable and Broadcasters Align to Fight FCC

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:41:45 -0800

The switch to digital cable isn’t just yielding a multibillion spectrum auction, it’s also prompting cable companies and broadcasters to join forces and fight against a government mandate.

The government’s been worried about how cable subscribers would get their less-watched local broadcasts once the analog signals go dark next February. Enter the dual-carriage rules, which were put forth by the Federal Communications Commission last fall.

The rules dictated that unless a cable carrier was really small, and paid the legal fees to get an exemption, operators needed to carry certain programming (such as public access channels and local niche programming) in both dual and analog versions until all subscribers had a digital set-top box or TV capable of converting digital signals.

Cable companies don’t mind doing this for popular local broadcast channels, but smaller ones will take up twice the space on a cable network under these rules. Obviously cable companies, which already face capacity constraints, would like to choose how they allocate their capacity, rather than have the government mandate it.

The major cable operators represented by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association grudgingly agreed to the rules, but the American Cable Association, which represents smaller cable firms, came out against it. On Monday, six programmers representing cable channels including C-SPAN, Discovery Communications, The Weather Channel and Scripps Networks sued to stop the rules from going forward, saying that if it did, cable operators might have to dump their channels to make room for the duplicative signals.

Skins - E4.com

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 03:39:13 -0800

Skins portal on E4

MySpace.com - Skins - 19 - Male - UK - www.myspace.com/e4skins2

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 03:39:12 -0800

Skins TV show on MySpace

Tech-Recipes - Wii: Hack to View Wii Shop

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:59:59 -0800

[from bushwald] Jamcracker Inc.: Overview

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:15:42 -0800

"Jamcracker acts as a wholesaler of different 'best-of-breed' on-demand solution providers." These people are weirding me out. SaaS re-sellers? Or a SaaS VAR? Or are they like OpSource?

downloads_right_down

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 06:44:59 -0800

XMLTV Scheduling for the UK

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:45:43 -0800

The Weather Channel On The Market For $5 Billion+

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:52:28 -0800

Cable TV network The Weather Channel is on the market for a reported $5 billion or more, according to the NY Times.

As well as providing the leading cable weather channel, the company also has a big web presence, with Weather.com the 25th most popular site in the United States, according to Alexa. The Weather Channel provides data to a range of leading online destinations including MySpace, Yahoo and AOL and started offering mobile video forecasts with technology from Vantrix in October.

Potential buyers are said to include NBC, Comcast and News Corp.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

LauPro TVFreq - TVFreq

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:45:32 -0800

W3C on Freenode

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:01:41 -0800

"Just realized that some of you might not know, but some people of W3C hang out on #w3c channel on IRC freenode server"

Sourceforge.net puts its commercial hat on | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:41:22 -0800

PBS Notices a Miro Related Traffic Spike!

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:31:42 -0800

Hey everybody, pwidmer here. I’m one of the volunteer members of Team Miro. I’ve been a channel moderator for some time now, and I’ve recently been helping by submitting bugs, working on documentation, and helping out wherever else I can.

Just before the Miro 1.0 release, I approved and featured the e2 | PBS channel — I thought it was a great show that other users would appreciate. I sent out an e-mail to the creator of the show (as we have been trying to do for all the channels now) to let them know that their channel had been featured.

I received a response from the Associate Digital Producer of PBS thanking us for featuring their show. He was curious about the huge spike in user subscriptions to their WIRED Science channel and wanted to talk on the phone.

They gave me the following statistics for WIRED Science:

70% spike in user subscriptions
80% of these were from Miro users
Their subscription rate jumped by ~15,000 users in a single day!

I explained that the reason their show had received these additional subscriptions was because their channel was included among four Starter Channels in the latest Miro release. Another fine point I raised was that these additional 15,000 subscribers were all NEW users of Miro. If a person was simply updating Miro to a new version, they wouldn’t have counted towards this number — they would keep their pre-existing channels.

It was a great experience and I was also able to get feedback on the Miro Guide itself, in terms of ease of use for a video producer. He mentioned a few bugs, so I promoted the priority of these issues. They should be fixed soon, thanks to Miro developer Paul S!

Overall, the folks at PBS are VERY happy and impressed with Miro. They plan on putting all their channels into Miro Guide, as soon as new shows hit the Internet. Check out all the PBS channels currently in the Miro Guide.

After this experience, I realized the significance of the direct connection between the content creator, regardless of their size, and their channel. By having this direct connection, the content creators can ensure that they have an accurate description of their show, the correct images, etc, and for the user they know for sure that this channel is good and maintained by the producer! Thanks for the great interest of PBS and to Dean for letting me handle this issue!

Update: Hey, it’s Dean — I just wanted to add this plug for Paul’s extended works. If you like this piece, make sure you check out his blog at pwiddy’s 2 cents.

10 Questions To Ask Your BPM Vendor - IT Channel - IT Channel News by CRN and VARBusiness

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:36:30 -0800

[from bushwald] Dell To Sell Solaris Servers -- Solaris -- InformationWeek

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:32:19 -0800

Whao, now there's a channel/partner/etc.

Long-Form Video Gaining Viewers on the Web

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:34:37 -0800

When it comes to Web video, short clips under three minutes still make up the vast majority of what people watch. But as the quality of video improves, more people will be willing to sit and watch streams of half-hour sitcoms, hour-long dramas, and maybe even entire movies. Already, there is some anecdotal evidence of this shift.

Move Networks—which powers the media players and back-end streaming infrastructure for ABC, ESPN360, Fox On-Demand, and the Discovery Channel—released the following data today for videos streamed from all its customers’ Websites collectively:

· So far in November, more than 100,000 new individuals are watching long-form video (anything 20 minutes or over) online each day, twice as many as in August.

· In November, the average session length is more than 50 minutes.

· In October 2007, more than 6 million people watched long form streaming video online.

· Since March 2007, Move has streamed almost 50 million hours of television.

These numbers still pale compared to actual TV, but as the growth continues they will start to attract even more advertising dollars than they do already.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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