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Michael Moore’s latest documentary film, Slacker Uprising, is set to be available
for free on the Internet. Does this signal a change in the movie industry or just Moore’s
desire to see Obama in the White House?
When Radiohead released their latest album, In Rainbows, for free over the Internet last
year, it was seen as a forward-thinking step which could revolutionise the way music is
distributed.
Changing The Status Quo?
The album did well, but most people still ended up downloading it via less legal means. And the
experiment didn’t really do anything to end the monopoly that the big record companies
enjoy.
Could film-maker Michael Moore do any better in persuading the movie industry that there is an
alternative to releasing movies in to cinemas?
Available For Free Online
Michael Moore, known for his hard-hitting documentaries attacking the status quo, is releasing
Slacker Uprising for free on the Internet
before it gets released on DVD.
The 97-minute-long film will be available to watch on BlipTV
for three weeks starting from September 23rd. It will then be released on DVD on October 7th
through Amazon and Netflix.
Slacker Uprising Trailer
Get Bush Out!
Slacker Uprising is a film following Michael Moore’s 62-city tour around the US
swing states in the build-up to the 2004 US Presidential Election. Moore wanted Bush out and
democrat John Kerry in.
While Moore’s hope wasn’t fulfilled, the documentary is now being released for free
over the Internet in order to reach as many people as possible before this year’s US
Presidential Election between
Barack Obama and John McCain.
Moore Speaks
Moore released a statement explaining the move:
“This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans. The only return any of us are hoping
for is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November. I think Slacker Uprising
will inspire (millions) to get off the couch and give voting a chance.”
The film cost an estimated $2 million to make, and Moore thinks that this method of release will
end up costing him $1 million. But neither Moore or the distributor, Brave New Films, plan to
profit from the release.
Conclusions
This is an intriguing development, especially as Moore could have guaranteed a pay day by
releasing this film in cinemas. He has instead decided to give his fans a present in the hope of
inspiring more people to vote.
This comes just a week after No End In Sight was announced as being the first
widely-released feature film to be
screened in its entirety on YouTube.
Will this revolutionise the movie industry? Not a chance. But it does at least show the Web is
becoming a more accepted form of distribution for long-form content.
Category: Entertainment
Released: Jul 24, 2008
Price: Free
Description:
NOTICE: Crashing RSS feeds are due to Blockbuster recently removing RSS feeds during some updates.
Update on the way to better handle this so as not to cause a crash. Managing your online movie
rental service has never been so simple! Dashbuster Free is the Lite version of Dashbuster, and
does not allow you to add movies or change their format. Dashbuster Free will also have ads in a
future update. Dashbuster Premium will return to the App Store after the update to fix the crashes
is reviewed and approved. Dashbuster lets you manage your
Netflixâ?¢ or Blockbusterâ?¢
queue with speed and simplicity unmatched by any other means, and in a format that's right at home
on the iPhone. - View your shipped, queued, and saved movies at a glance, including cover art -
Drag and Drop Queue Reordering - Swipe to Delete Movie removal - View movie details quickly and
easily; Stars, Director, Description and Cover Art - View movies from popular RSS feeds - Search
for movies on the go. - Fastest way to interact with Blockbuster or Netflix from an iPhone Note:
Dashbuster has no affiliation with Netflixâ?¢ or
Blockbusterâ?¢ Current Issues: Blockbuster continues to make
changes that are affecting Dashbuster users. An update is on the way to resolve these things.
Netflix Login - Some users are seeing Dashbuster hang at "Logging In...", there is a bug that
causes Dashbuster to hang if you have special characters in your password. Update pending, in the
mean time, you can change your password so it doesn't have special characters. Netflix Zero Queue
Items - At least one server at Netflix is presenting users with some very odd markup that causes
Dashbuster to register 0 items in your queue. This has been isolated and a fix is pending. Users
aren't tied to a server, until the fix comes out, reloading your queue seems to fix the problem at
times. NOTICE: Please, if Dashbuster is crashing, or doesn't work for any reason at all, visit our
support site and send us a message. We WILL make sure we get any bugs fixed ASAP. It is very
important that Dashbuster works like our users expect it to. Apples Review system makes releasing
updates rapidly a very difficult thing. We are working on faster system for addressing future
changes with the Blockbuster and Netflix sites.
Note: The description above is the official one supplied by the application
developer and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of this site or its staff.
With
all the
newsaboutChrome,
it's been pretty easy to forget about one of Firefox's recent releases: Ubiquity. We gave Ubiquity a rave review
for giving Firefox a whole new UI. The standard commands, or "verbs", that come with Ubiquity are
great. Yet we couldn't help but want more. Developers have been working around the clock to
produce some fantastic custom verbs for Ubiquity. Here is ReadWriteWeb's list of the top picks of
custom Ubiquity verbs!
Media
Ubiquity already comes with built in search commands for Youtube, Amazon, and Flickr. Here are
our top picks for searching media sites using custom Ubiquity verbs:
Last.FM - Allows users to search the Last.FM
music network for artists pages.
So far Ubiquity only allows you to interact with one social network: Twitter. With these custom
verbs you'll be able interact with more popular social networks.
Outside of Digg, there are no other ways to share news and links with friends. So for those of
you on Reddit, Delicious, and other related sites, we have just the verbs for you!
Delicious - Bookmark an article with tags to your
delicious account.
Share On - Share a link on any of the
following sites: Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, or Fark.
Most Popular on Delicious - Get
a quick overview of the current 10 most popular delicious bookmarks.
Google Bookmark - Add the
current page you're viewing to your Google Bookmarks.
Instapaper - Save a page for
later to your Instapaper account.
Soup.io - Bookmark a page to your Soup.io account.
Tumblr - Share a ton of
link love to your Tumblelog.
Check Slashdot - Get a quick overview of
either three of the latest articles on Slashdot or any number of articles that you specify.
Notable Verbs
While searching for the best Ubiquity verbs we came across a ton that were great, but couldn't be
categorized. Without further ado here are other notable verbs:
We're sure you'll be able to find a ton of new Ubiquity verbs to subscribe to. What we'd like to
know is what verbs you're already using and what verbs you hope to see in the near future. To
start the list, we're already using quite a few of the built in verbs and most of the social
media custom verbs listed here. In the future we'd like to see verbs for Diigo, sharing items via
Google Reader, and more video related verbs. Let's hear what's on your list.
First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article,
"crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to
accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few.
Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise -- it's talented, creative and stunningly
productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating
the latent potential within us all. It's a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race,
education and job history no longer matter, where the quality of work is all that counts and
every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service,
design the product or solve the problem, you've got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered
a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent employed, research conducted and products
made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption
are inevitable.
When the original article was published, crowdsourcing still constituted a nascent business
model. A few small companies had achieved limited successes with it, and large companies had only
begun to test the waters. In this excerpt, Howe argues that in just two years crowdsourcing has
revolutionized an entire industry -- stock photography -- and may well be poised to create
disruption in other fields as well.
There's a story people like to tell about Bruce Livingstone. In late 2005, Getty Images, the
world's largest photo agency, was looking to acquire Livingstone's company, iStockphoto, the
world's most successful crowdsourcing company. Long before the contracts were drawn up,
Livingstone, to show his commitment to the deal, tattooed the word "Getty" in cursive across the
tender flesh on his inner wrist. Then he e-mailed Getty CEO Jonathan Klein photos of the tattoo
under the message: "Don't make me write another word after this!" It's just the kind of tale --
emblematic of determination and just the right amount of quirky eccentricity -- that tends to
burnish the reputation of its subject. In Livingstone's case, it has the added benefit of being
demonstrably true.
With his penchant for muscle cars, rockabilly haircuts and, yes, tattoos, it's tempting to call
Livingstone an unlikely CEO. But I prefer to think of Livingstone as a perfectly reasonable chief
for some corporation from, say, the year 2020. A company not unlike iStockphoto. Located in a
single, cavernous room inside a former factory in downtown Calgary (Alberta, Canada), iStockphoto
houses a tiny fraction of its actual workforce. And Livingstone, dressed in T-shirt and jeans,
occupies a desk -- chosen, it would seem, at random -- in the middle of the floor. The corner
office clearly loses significance in a company that thrives on decentralization.
Jeff Howe explains crowdsourcing, which activates the transformative power of today's technology,
liberating the latent potential within us all.
Video: Courtesy of Jeff Howe
Westeel Rosco built the factory in 1925 to manufacture nails, screws and other bits of hardware.
Unlike Westeel Rosco, iStock's products -- stock photos, illustrations and videos -- aren't
manufactured on-site. They're created by a global, fluid workforce of 60,000 part-time
photographers and artists, only a fraction of whom make a living from the work they sell on
iStock. Yet they have a devotion to the company matched by few traditional firms. The full-time
staffers who spend their days in the old Westeel Rosco plant play a support role for the
community -- and community is the only applicable word -- that is making the product iStock
brings to market every day. And that community has been very, very good to Livingstone and his
investors. In the course of several years iStock has grown from a hobby to the third-largest
purveyor of stock images in the world. When Getty purchased iStock in early 2006, Livingstone
took home more than half of the $50 million Getty paid for the company.
The first stock photo agency was founded in 1920, and for most of the 20th century the industry
was an afterthought, trafficking in the outtakes from commercial magazine assignments. Very few
photographers tried to make a living off the market in preexisting images alone. This changed
after the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s led to a rapid growth in the publishing
industry, and to a commensurate demand for images. Suddenly photographers were making six figures
a year selling photos they'd already been paid to shoot. It was like minting money. Stock
photography is, in relative terms, a tiny industry. The annual global gross for the entire
business is estimated to be around $2 billion, which makes it a bit bigger than the market for
gift baskets, but a little smaller than the annual sales of orchids. But this little industry has
undergone big changes, and could well be a case study in how the crowd will impact much larger
businesses.
In just the last few years the influx of talented amateurs armed with inexpensive,
high-resolution digital cameras has upended the economics of stock photography. Five years ago, a
professional-quality image was still a scarce resource. No more. This isn't to say the market for
high-end photographs has disappeared. A gifted photographer will always find work. But the
professional no longer has a lock on the middle and lower ends of the stock photo business. With
a modicum of training, just about anyone can take a decent shot. Sophisticated cameras and
photo-editing software do the rest. iStock exploits this fact. Design firms and other small
companies working on a budget quickly embraced what became known as the "microstock" model. One
graphic designer told me he went from paying hundreds of dollars an image to less than $10. "I
pass on some of the savings to my clients and keep the rest. We're both delighted."
iStock might be great for buyers, but it's caused all sorts of headaches for professional stock
photographers. In my original Wired article about crowdsourcing I quoted a Los Angeles-based
photographer, Mark Harmel, saying that this influx of cheap images had caused a slight decline in
his income from stock photo sales, which had dropped to $60,000. But in the two years since that
decline has fallen off a cliff, to $35,000 in 2007. "If I look at the trend line, it just keeps
going down. I'm really concentrating on getting assignments now," says Harmel. "I recently came
back from London with 70 really wonderful shots. I'll probably use them on my website, but it's
not worth my time to bother submitting them to a stock agency. They won't sell."
Harmel's far from alone. In fact, Getty's other businesses have struggled in the crowdsourced
era. In the year I spent writing this book the company's stock slid 60 percent, falling to just
under $22 by February 2008. That month Getty was acquired by the private equity firm Hellman
Friedman for $2.4 billion, a considerably lower figure than the company had originally sought.
According to a report released at the time of the sale, Goldman Sachs estimates that Getty's core
business -- the sale of rights-managed, professionally produced images -- will continue to suffer
an irreversible decline, falling to just 29 percent of its revenues by 2012. In the same period
the investment bank projects iStock to continue its rapid rate of growth. iStock sold $72 million
worth of images in 2007, a figure expected to jump to $262 million by 2012.
In this light, paying $50 million for a crowdsourced photo company looks like the smartest
decision Getty ever made. The company is in the midst of transforming its business, from one
reliant exclusively on professionals to one that is at least equally reliant on amateurs. As the
Goliath of the industry, where Getty goes its competitors are sure to follow, which is to say,
stock photography itself has been utterly transformed through crowdsourcing, in which a
once-scarce commodity has become abundant. The question to ask is whether the upheaval roiling
stock photography is only a leading indicator, like the minor volcanic eruptions that can precede
a catastrophic earthquake.
Already the trend is migrating to other fields. Most immediately, the same dynamics that made the
stock photo ubiquitous -- affordable digital SLR cameras and burgeoning communities of
enthusiastic amateurs -- are affecting other markets for visual images. So-called "citizen
paparazzi" use cellphone cameras to snap impromptu shots of stars and then sell them to new photo
agencies such as Scoopt, which specialize in buying up and marketing their work. Amateurs can
beat professional paparazzi for the simple reason that they vastly outnumber them. It's a
question of probability: The throng of pedestrians in Greenwich Village, for instance, have a
much better chance of catching an unkempt Gwyneth Paltrow than a single paparazzo.
And photography may well be just the beginning. iStock itself is doing a burgeoning business in
the sale of stock video footage, and the crowd is also making commercials, collaborating on TV
scripts, and recording and distributing their own music. They're writing political analysis,
creating their own video games, and making feature-length movies. For the time being, all this
activity has taken place in something of a parallel universe, without causing any of the economic
upheaval visited on the stock photo or pornography industries. But those universes are beginning
to collide as more companies attempt to package all this outpouring of creativity into a
marketable product.
While crowdsourcing has already emerged as a potent force in the media and entertainment
industries, it's also profoundly influenced the way even Fortune 100 companies like Procter &
Gamble do business. Once famous for its insular culture, Procter & Gamble now crowdsources
much of its R&D process, using global networks of scientists such as InnoCentive and
NineSigma, which boast a combined membership of 2 million professional and amateur researchers.
Even companies operating in a conventional field such as mining have found crowdsourcing
applications. The Canadian gold-mining group Goldcorp put geological survey data online and
offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could identify likely areas for exploration. Goldcorp says
the contest produced 110 targets that yielded $3 billion in gold. Following its lead, the mining
giant Barrick Gold Corporation recently offered $10 million to anyone who could improve its
silver-extraction process. The open call of crowdsourcing is also being used by companies such as
Google (to develop applications for its Android mobile platform) and Netflix (to improve its
recommendation system). The question is whether the iStock secret sauce can be applied to
industries like television and journalism and, possibly, even beyond to any business that
traffics in bits and bytes. To answer that question, it helps to know what's in the secret sauce.
The Community Is the Company
iStock has been compared to a cult, and the analogy isn't entirely unfair. It's no accident that
the most successful companies in the web's second coming -- most of whom traffic in the crowd's
creative output -- are led by outsize personalities. "Bruce is to iStock what Tom is to MySpace,"
notes Garth Johnson, iStock's VP of Business Development. (Johnson resigned his position after
this book went to press.) For those readers over the age of 30, Tom is Tom Anderson, the
president of the social networking behemoth MySpace and the first "friend" to greet any new user.
Under this new archetype of a company -- in which the community, as much as the customer, comes
first -- the cult of personality plays a crucial role in community building, and Livingstone has
been as essential to the growth of the iStock community as Anderson has been to MySpace's. "Bruce
has a really strong, extremely charismatic personality online," says Johnson. "And that's really
helped us build the community."
It's safe to say that iStock has left the community-building phase behind: Sixty-thousand people
have combined to create an enormous portfolio of over 3.5 million images and 100,000 videos. By
contrast, Getty's other divisions combined only use 2,500 photographers. The iStockers offer the
company their artwork, and in return iStock goes to extraordinary lengths to keep the iStockers
happy. The site offers the budding photographer all manner of free tutorials, and the forums buzz
-- at a rate of 38 posts per minute -- with questions about lens sizes, polarized filters and
F-stop settings. iStock doesn't offer a chance to get rich. It offers the chance to make friends
and become a better photographer.
"We don't own anything, the community does" says Johnson. "Everything we do affects these people,
whether they're just earning enough to pay for their equipment, or they're making mortgage
payments from their photo sales. They all want a voice, and we have to give it to them, because
really, the community is the company."
The upside to this state of affairs should be obvious -- a dedicated, efficient workforce with no
expectation of receiving a living wage -- but there are downsides as well: Even the smallest
changes can roil the fickle, passionate community of iStockers. In March 2006, iStock launched a
new feature on its web forums, a "forometer" which measured an iStocker's popularity through
"bafflingly complex scientific methods" including the date and number of posts to the forum. The
forometer displayed its results through a set of red, yellow or green bars. It did not go over
well. The community questioned the principles behind the feature, as well as its functionality.
Not long after its launch, the feature had been removed. Employees may be hell on overhead, but
they're paid to accept all but the most draconian policies with a polite nod. Communities, on the
other hand, aren't paid to stick around, and nothing stops them from selling their photos to one
of iStock's many competitors. "They don't work for us," Livingstone laughs. "We work for them."
If the iStocker feels a sense of ownership over the site, that's understandable: The iStock
community predates iStock the company.
Livingstone didn't set out to revolutionize an industry, he just wanted to fill a personal need
and help a few friends at the same time. In 2000 Livingstone was running a small graphic design
and web-hosting firm in Calgary. Bruce is an avid photographer himself, and over the years he had
developed an extensive network of photographers and designers. Early in the year he took 2,000 of
his images and put them online. Anyone could download his photos in exchange for giving him an
e-mail address. Livingstone's friends decided they wanted to share their images with the public,
too. That June the budding community instituted a credit system: A user could download one image
for every image of theirs that had been downloaded by someone else.
It was a classic example of the gift economy, the non-monetary exchange that grew up alongside
the internet. During iStock's early years, everyone took something and gave something in turn.
"The feeders and the eaters were the same people," as Livingstone puts it. Everyone profited by
acquiring new images, though no one made (or spent) a dime. Soon friends of friends heard about
Bruce's nifty idea and started uploading their images, too. Then around 2002 a wider public got
wind of iStock, and the site began to hit critical mass. Soon Livingstone was paying $10,000 a
month for the bandwidth to support it. He could have taken advertising to cover the cost of
hosting, but he felt that would violate the spirit of the site. "The focus was on the community,
and good design. Advertising would have cluttered the site," says Livingstone.
Instead, he started charging a quarter for each image, and he opened the system up to the public.
This proved to be a momentous decision. Word quickly spread among publishers that there was a
site offering cheap, usable images, and photographers began flocking to iStock to upload their
portfolios. Traffic to the site skyrocketed, and soon Livingstone raised the price to $1 per
image. "I thought it might become a sideline business," he says. It quickly became much more than
that. The quality of the images wasn't always as high (or as consistent) as a traditional stock
agency's, but the differences were indiscernible to the general consumer, and after all, you
couldn't beat the price. By 2004 a host of other so-called "micro-stocks" had sprung up with
strategies similar to iStock's. The professionals panicked. Microstock photos, they charged, were
flooding the market with subpar images. At first, the industry aligned itself against iStockphoto
and other microstock agencies such as ShutterStock and Dreamstime.
Then in early 2006, Getty announced it would buy iStockphoto for $50 million. "If someone's going
to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses," Getty CEO Jonathan
Klein told me shortly after the sale. Smaller magazines, nonprofit organizations, and all manner
of websites have continued to flock to iStock's high-volume, low-cost model. As of February 2008,
iStockphoto had 2 million regular customers purchasing photographs, video footage, illustrations
and animations. "Bruce's brilliance," Jonathan Klein once told me, "is that he turned community
into commerce." Livingstone uses a slightly different formulation: "I turned commerce into
community,"
iStockphoto has perfected the Jedi Mind Trick that's at the heart of crowdsourcing. It's an
incredibly cost-effective strategy -- iStock boasts a 55 percent profit margin. And yet,
Livingstone stumbled into this business model by creating a context -- a community of like-minded
enthusiasts -- in which financial measures take a backseat to considerably less tangible
concerns. Ask someone in the office, and they'll tell you: It's not about the money. Ask an
iStocker and they'll tell you the same thing. In fact -- would-be crowdsources take note: If it
is about the money, it won't work. It will fizzle, not sizzle, as one of iStock's designers put
it. "What's funny is, the money people, they pretty quickly get pulled aside in the forums by the
core people. Or they just don't have a voice. People will ignore them, like 'Oh, that's just so
and so, they're just here to make money.'"
That doesn't mean the iStockers are unmotivated by self-interest. The more a photographer's
images are downloaded, the more recognition they receive in the community, and the more credits
they earn to download other people's photos to use in their own designs. And the additional
income is also welcome, of course. Unlike other cases in which large corporations have attempted
to monetize community, iStock does reward its contributors. It paid out $21 million in 2007. It's
significant that people in online communities like iStock's react with great hostility to the
idea that crowdsourcing is a form of cheap labor -- despite the fact it demonstrably is. After
all, no one wants to feel exploited. In the end, what iStock provides is an invaluable if
impossible-to-measure currency: meaning. The crowd will give away their time -- their excess
capacity -- enthusiastically, but not for free. It has to be a meaningful exchange.
The set-top-box market is slowly but surely building.
Every company seems keen on getting a device out there and in to our living rooms capable of
streaming video from the Internet. And there’s now a new contender on the scene.
We already have market leader Apple TV, as well as other
alternative such as
VUDU. But there are many more devices entering the fray.
New Competition
May
saw the release of the sub-$100 Roku box complete with Netflix streaming capabilities built
in. Since then, Roku has stated its intention to
increase its content partners, with YouTube and Hulu the front runners to be added in the
future.
At the end of July, we saw
the first sighting of a forthcoming Blu-ray and streaming video hybrid from LG called the
LG BD300. Now the company has filled in the details.
The LG BD300 is set to be released and available in the US from October. It will retail
for $399.99 but for that you’ll get full Blu-ray capabilities coupled with the ability to
stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix (assuming you choose to subscribe).
HD… Sort Of
But while the machine will enable users to watch Blu-ray films in full 1080p glory, the content
streamed from Netflix will only be close to DVD quality.
Netflix is looking at offering HD quality downloads in the future but for now, you’ll have
to purchase Blu-ray discs to experience a true high definition future.
A Tough Time Competing
Luckily, due to the Internet connection, the new player will be equipped with BD Live, meaning
its guaranteed future-proof due to constant firmware upgrades. But seeing as that is something
the Playstation 3 already does, it’s not that big a deal.
It’s satisfying to have the first Blu-ray player also able to stream content on the market,
but with the Roku box being available for $300 less, and the PS3 and Xbox 360 also offering real
(and cheaper) alternatives, the LG BD300 will have a tough time competing.
Maybe it was the bad economy. Maybe it's the back-to-school season or an
attempt to generate more interest ahead of Christmas shopping period. In any case, Microsoft
(NSDQ: MSFT) hopes to see a sales boost now that its XBox console is now cheaper
than rivals Nintendo Wii and Sony (NYSE: SNE) Playstation3, FT
reports. Microsoft, which consistently ranks third in console sales behind its two rivals, is
cutting prices in the U.S. and Japan. In the U.S., Microsoft's 360 Arcade console, which doesn't
have a hard drive, is getting a 29 percent price cut—from $279.99 to $199.99.
By comparison, the Wii sells for $249.99. Microsoft's 60Gb hard drive model will now go for
$299.99, which is being lowered by $50. That makes it $100 cheaper than a similar PlayStation3.
However, price isn't everything, as the 60Gb model doesn't have its Blu-ray drive and Wi-Fi
capabilities. The high-end, high-def Xbox 360 Elite, which has a 120Gb hard drive and wireless
controller, will retail for $399. The lighter price tag is also designed to complement XBox's
moves on the content side. Earlier this summer, XBox, which has roughly 12 million users,
struck deals with Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and NBC Universal.
Internet video
streaming services keep getting better -- but we still haven't seen one that could come close to
dethroning the cable industry.
New this week: A
new on-demand video streaming service from Amazon.com, which is an improvement over its
previous "Unbox" video store. Nice selection, and great competition for Apple's (AAPL) iTunes
store. But in our brief testing, the video quality leaves a lot to be desired. And Amazon (AMZN)
still hasn't made it easy enough to watch their movies on your living room TV.
So between those options, and Apple's iTunes/Apple TV product, we think on-demand viewing is
still cable's game to lose. Why? Let's start with two assumptions, which we think are reasonable:
That most people still want to watch movies on their TV, not their computer.
That people with hi-def TVs want to watch movies with good to great video and sound quality.
This is where the cable industry still has the upper hand:
Every cable (and telco-fiber TV) subscriber has a high-capacity pipe running directly into
their living room, designed specifically for video, and capable of streaming hi-def video with
surround sound in real time.
Each of the 38 million U.S. digital cable subscribers already has a set-top box hooked up to
their TVs -- most of which can handle on-demand programming, and many of which can handle HD
video on demand.
To be sure, cable's on-demand programming libraries are still pretty thin: They don't have as
many titles available as Apple or Amazon -- hundreds of movies, not thousands. But that's a
business hurdle they could solve relatively quickly -- not a technical problem. And cable's HD
offerings beat the majority of Apple's movies and all of and Amazon's and Netflix's.
Bottom line: As movie delivery shifts from disc to digital, a lot of companies are going to try
to be the ones who deliver high-quality video content to your TV -- Internet companies like
Amazon, consumer electronics companies like Apple and LG, movie rental companies like Netflix,
game console makers like Microsoft and Sony, etc. But so far, we think the cable industry --
which already owns the pipe and already has a box in your living room -- still has the upper
hand.
Amazon’s Video on Demand is the latest service
that will attempt to have you turn off your TV and turn on your PC when you want to be
entertained. But Amazon is jumping in to an increasingly crowded market, so how does its service
fare compared to similar offerings from Hulu, iTunes, and Netflix? I gave all four a spin under
similar conditions to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.
EASE OF USE (THE BASICS): All of these
services are simple to use, and Amazon is no exception. All of them let you browse available
titles, and — in most cases — begin watching a video with just a few clicks. Amazon
and iTunes offer TV shows and movies for rental and download. If you rent a movie online, you
have 24 hours to watch it; if you download it, you can watch it whenever you’d like. You
are limited in what you can do with the file you’ve downloaded, though: You can only
transfer it to a certain number of computers, set-top boxes, or mobile devices.
Hulu doesn’t offer content for downloading; it aggregates streaming video, including
movies, TV shows, and video clips. Netflix Instant Watch is only available to Netflix
subscribers, and lets them watch movies on their PC or on a Netflix set-top box.
SELECTION: Amazon’s selection is impressive: It offers more than 40,000
titles. In comparison, Netflix’s Instant Watch has about 12,000 (up from about
1,000 when it launched in early 2007); Apple says its iTunes store has more than 2,000 titles
available (up from 150 titles in January 2008). Neither they — nor Hulu — can compete
with Amazon in terms of sheer volume.
That volume extends to its collection of TV shows: Amazon offers all the episodes from the first
four seasons of The Office. Hulu, meanwhile, has five complete episodes available.
(iTunes doesn’t have any, because The Office is on NBC, and NBC and Apple still
don’t get
along.)
Both Amazon and iTunes have a very good selection of recent titles — both in TV shows and
movies. iTunes recently announced
that it would be offering some movie titles the same day as the DVDs are released, and Amazon
seems to be doing the same thing. Amazon will let you, for example, register to watch Made of
Honor (starring Patrick Dempsey) on Sept. 16 — that’s the same day it will be
available on DVD.
Amazon is lacking a few key titles, though. The service seems to offer almost every show from
Comedy Central — except The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hulu,
meanwhile, offers full
episodes of only two Comedy Central shows: The Daily Show and The Colbert
Report. If those are your favorites, Amazon’s breadth won’t matter.
PRICE: Hulu wins hands-down in this category: It’s free, though
ad-supported. Amazon does offer some content for free, but most of it is priced in line with what
you’ll find on iTunes: single TV episodes cost $1.99 (they’re available for purchase
only) and movies cost $2.99 to $3.99 to rent, and $9.99 to $14.99 to purchase. The Netflix
Instant Watch feature lets you watch an unlimited amount of video, and is included with most
Netflix subscriptions, which start at $9 per month.
PERFORMANCE: Video quality across all four services was very good, and all
loaded videos quickly and smoothly. I noticed the most freezing and buffering when watching video
content from iTunes, and some of the clips on Hulu were not as high-resolution of the majority of
content I found on Amazon and elsewhere. High-definition content viewed on Amazon looked great,
though I did notice when watching some titles that the formatting seemed off. It seemed as though
video that should have been seen in a 16×9 ratio was squished into a 4×3 window.
Both iTunes and Netflix require that you download software to play back video content: iTunes
requires the iTunes client, and Netflix provides a proprietary player. Both Hulu and Amazon play
videos right in your browser window, though they require Adobe Flash.
COMPATIBILITY: None of these services are restricted to your PC, but they vary
in the devices they support. Amazon lets you send videos to a networked TiVo box or to a Sony
BRAVIA TV with a Sony BRAVIA Video Internet link. Content that is rented from the iTunes store
can be transferred to a compatible Apple device, but it cannot be stored in two places at once.
Netflix works with Windows PCs only, but Hulu, iTunes, and Amazon all support both PCs and Macs.
Netflix also works with some set-top boxes, which allow you to view Instant Watch titles on your
TV. The Roku Netflix player is available now; the LG BD300 Network Blu-ray Player is coming
soon, and later this fall the Xbox 360 will be
compatible with the Netflix service as well.
Amazon’s Video on Demand seemed a bit pricey to me — $2 for a 22-minute TV show is
more than I want to spend. But its ease of use and excellent selection impressed me enough that
I’ll be back again.
Liane Cassavoy has been writing about and reviewing technology for the past 10 years. She was
a staff member of PC World magazine and has contributed to Entrepreneur, About.com, and other
publications, and recently authored a book that will be published by Entrepreneur Press later
this year.
Election time is coming in the US, and suddenly your votes are more important than your money. At
least that’s how Michael Moore sees it, whose new movie, titled “Slacker
Uprising”, will premiere on the net for free, on September 23, followed by a DVD which
will be released through Amazon.com and Netflix on October 7. Blip.TV will host the download; hopefully, they’ve upgraded their
servers, because the demand is going to be huge.
Moore doesn’t
hide his intentions. “This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans,” he
said. “The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters
ever at the polls in November. I think Slacker Uprising will inspire million (sic) to get off the
couch and give voting a chance.”
The movie is basically a document of Moore’s tour through 62 US cities swing states during
the 2004 U.S. presidential election; obviously, it didn’t work out as well as Moore
intended it, so now he’s hoping he can recycle it for another go. It’s not a bad
idea, though; his earlier movies, while being amongst the highest grossing documentaries ever,
also sparked an immense interest on social media sites such as Digg and Reddit. This one will be
no exception, as it’s aimed directly at twenty somethings who usually spend their time
doing, well, not that much. Check out the trailer below.
[image credit: newsday.com]
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Category: Entertainment
With
The set-top-box market is slowly but surely building.
Every company seems keen on getting a device out there and in to our living rooms capable of
streaming video from the Internet. And there’s now a new contender on the scene.
Maybe it was the bad economy. Maybe it's the back-to-school season or an
attempt to generate more interest ahead of Christmas shopping period. In any case, Microsoft
(
Moore doesn’t
hide his intentions. “This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans,” he
said. “The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters
ever at the polls in November. I think Slacker Uprising will inspire million (sic) to get off the
couch and give voting a chance.”
Recommandations
