Taipanway’s Weblog

Motion Picture Industry Touts Shutdown of Pirate Bay (borrowed from Digital Media Wire)

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has just trumpeted the shutdown of The Pirate Bay, a massive source of unauthorized digital content. The BitTorrent tracker previously commanded an immense level of traffic and interest, and regularly thumbed its nose at agencies like the MPAA and RIAA. But recently, the MPAA tied with Swedish authorities to raid several

Pirate Bay facilities, resulting in the seizure of multiple servers and various individuals. "Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and US government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal site down," the MPAA noted in a Wednesday announcement. "Over 50 Swedish law enforcement officials executed search warrants and raids at 10 different locations which resulted in three arrests and the preclusion of millions of users trading up to 2 million illegal files simultaneously."

The PirateBay website, at piratebay.org, is currently down, though anti-copyright organization Piratbyran has posted an update on a separate blog. "The Pirate Bay and Piratbyran is down after a raid on our ISP…we will post more info as soon as we know it," the group stated. Just prior to its shutdown, The Pirate Bay reportedly offered a total of 157,000 illegal files, including blockbuster releases Da Vinci Code, Mission Impossible:

II, and The Poseidon Adventure. It was also ranked as the 479th most visited internet destination in the world according to Alexa.com.

I meant to write about this a long time ago – but who has time…  I find this almost comical, especially married against statements that P2P is under control (made by the RIAA this past week).  Since this statement, about 36 hours later, Pirate Bay was back up.  When the UK started making noice against allofmp3 – they moved from 1000 on Alexa to 200 almost overnight.  When will these jackasses learn that publicity does not help their case.  They just don’t get it. 

We had a situation, about 18 months ago, when xingtone software was hacked.  We went through all our options, what should we do:  We knew a lot about the hacker – we even had his cell phone number – should we call him, tell him to stop, hire him, make a loud statement, panic.

We chose to slowly, methodically, change some arcitechture so that this would not continue.  We did not take an aggressive stance – not because we did not want to, and certainly not because our Tech team was not angry – but we were 10 people at the time, did we really want to piss off the hacker community?  Did we really want to poke at what are basically anarchists? Just seemed like a bad strategy.  I am not saying the RIAA should not take steps, I am saying going public a) publisizes P2P and theft as being available and b) pisses off hackers, giving them fuel to a fire that already exists. 

"JupiterResearch Puts MySpace Above Rivals on Music Discovery MySpace Music is one of the most effective ways to generate community and spark discovery around an artist, according to a recent report from JupiterResearch. According to the finding, published Wednesday, MySpace generates far more community-related music activity than rival destinations Yahoo Music, AOL Music, and MTV.com. "Music marketers should leverage community sites, such as MySpace, to recreate the feel of personal recommendations of friends," said David Card, vice president and senior analyst at JupiterResearch and author of the report. The study noted that 48 percent of music discovery happens between friends.

As part of the study, JupiterResearch tracked promotional activity on pop group Black Eyed Peas across MySpace, Yahoo, AOL and MTV online. The research group noted that MySpace generated hundreds of thousands of friends, and profile views and song plays in the millions. In contrast, the more mainstream music destinations generated far smaller communities.

Meanwhile, the study also found that 53 percent of those surveyed also discover music through videos, while 87 percent find new music through the radio."

Some of my friends in the music industry have said that if myspace.com disappeared tomorrow, they would have no online marketing strategy.  Currently myspace has over 80 million members.  Does it really take a full study by Jupiter to concolude that one of the most heavily trafficed websites in the world in the perfect demographic, is the best place to market music?  (on a seperate note - I believe there is a point of diminishing return here - that I may go into on a seperate blog).  I hope that Jupiter is just giving this data away and no one commissioned this.  If my company ever commissioned a study like this I would quit on the spot for wasting time and money.

“Virgin Mobile USA, the MVNO pioneer which is seeing a flatline-to-decreasing growth in its business, is starting a new service inspired in part by others: the service, called SugarMama, lets people earn one minute of talking time by watching 30-second commercials on a computer or receiving SMS on their phones, then answering questions to prove they were, in fact, paying attention. The subscribers can earn a maximum of 75 minutes per month, by watching these ads from the likes of Pepsi, Microsoft’s Xbox game console and a youth antismoking campaign called Truth.”

I don’t know if this will work ultimately – there are major problems with this – not the least of which, do you really want to market goods to people who can’t afford them.  Pepsi yes, X-Box no.  What I love about this is that this follows a principal I have been filtering through that deals with the have and have nots.  In today’s world, it is my belief that high end goods and low end goods will do very well, where as mid-tier will struggle.For example, in Los angeles, we have the Arclight movie theater.  The Arc-light is $14 to see a movie, which is about 30%+ more then you can see it elsewhere.  Now though I am far from rich, if I have my druthers, I go OUT of my way to see the movie at the Arc-Light.  They have a restaurant, bar, assigned stadium seating, etc.. Most importantly, they have NO commercials and only three previews before the movie gets started.  They even have an usher announce the movie who stays in the theatre for 10 minutes to ensure the picture and sound quality are up to snuff.

The service described above is for the have not’s, kids, etc.. I don’t know if THIS will succeed, but based on my analysis it is a market that makes sense.

The internet/web 2.0 is blowing up primarily because of social networking and social media.  10’s of thousands of video files a day of user generated videos are uploaded and viewed by millions of people.  As is always the case, we are now seeing the conversation to mobile – but this is NOT an easy transition.  Why?  Lots of reasons:

1)       File formats – online you have 1 or 2 file formats that you might be working with – and typically if you have Windows Media or Quicktime (maybe Real or Divx) installed on your computer, it will work – in mobile this is not the case

2)       Handsets – out of 207 million mobile subscribers in this country, about 5 million can do video

3)       Carrier networks – 1) they can not maintain, at this point, the bandwidth necessary for users sending the amount of data moving on sites like youtube/myspace

4)       Carrier interopability – if I send a piece of content to my phone, I want my friends to be able to see it, even if they are on a different carrier.  Walls, tangible or intangible, screw up this process.

But there are much bigger reasons, for example, Xingtone could solve the first two, with on the fly encoding and carrier networks will eventually get up to snuff.  The real issue comes around the philosophy and the legal liability around user generated content.  User generated content works because it is real, raw and unedited.  It is a voice for ‘kids’ everywhere.  There are illegal things (music videos, or music in the background), there are jack-ass type videos, there is porn type videos, etc.. All of these ultimately are what the consumer wants.  The user also wants things in real time.  They do not want to upload a video today and have their friends watch it in a week – that want it now.  If they cant have it now, they will move on to the next thing.  Additionally, the cost in verifying the veracity and legality of every piece of content is too much for virtually any company to absorb, let alone most of the companies focused on mobile user generated content (saying nothing of just user generated content).

Carriers claim that they are worried about the FCC, worried about legal liability, about an angry consumer who downloaded a video and saw a penis by accident.  I call bullshit and believe it ultimately comes down to control.  Carriers continue to focus on their ability to market, distribute and sell mobile content.  If the world of mobile moves to free content, especially P2P user generated content, carriers are worried that they are just dumb pipes.  This issue begs the question of net neutrality, which is for a different time….

The solution, which I am not going to give away here, is relatively simple.  The value chain must focus on delivering what CONSUMERS want, NOT want the ecosystem needs for self preservation.