Posts Categorized: Media Business

First Newspapers, now Broadcast TV?

Posted | Category: Media Business.

You’ve probably read how many local newspapers are in deep financial doo-doo recently. Some have even closed, like the Rocky Mountain Daily News.

Now, the same thing appears to be happening to Broadcast TV. This article shows the writing on the wall.

The problems with the newspaper and broadcast TV businesses are similar: people prefer on-demand content. Why huddle around your TV at 8 PM Thursday to watch your favorite show, when you can watch tons of great stuff from sites like Hulu whenever you like? Why read the newspaper (which may be 12 hours out-of-date – god forbid!) when you can get the latest breaking news online?

We’re moving to an on-demand world, and any businesses that fail to adapt to that mindset are doomed to fail.

CBS boldly going where no one has gone before

Posted | Category: Media Business.

There’s a new iPhone app out from CBS that lets you watch full episodes of some TV shows on your iPhone. Some old Star Trek episodes are available, but not everything. It looks like they are giving this a test run to see what happens.
If this sort of thing becomes prevalent, will it bring all 3G traffic to it’s knees? Beware the wrath of AT&T.

Cable TV – Coming soon to a PC near you!

Posted | Category: Media Business.

This is an interesting article relating to Comcast’s plans to move into the video space.

It seems the Cable companies are scared to death about being bypassed by online video delivery, so rather than sit idly by and watch their business evaporate, they will be trying to make a compelling offering, with the hopes that their subscribers will stay.

You don’t suppose a recording option will be a part of their offering, do you???

YouTube cracking down on download sites

Posted | Category: Media Business, Replay Media Catcher.

Looks like programs like Replay Media Catcher will soon be the only way to download videos from YouTube. TechCrunch’s video download tool has recently been blocked by YouTube, and it’s likely they will start to block other sites.

Here’s the story:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/13/youtube-kills-our-video-download-tool

What do YOU do about this? Use a PC-based download tool like Replay Media Catcher, which works free with YouTube. If you want the technical meat of why this will continue to work read on…

The way TechCrunch (and likely other sites) are being blocked is via the IP address of their servers. The server goes directly to the YouTube site, and pretends to be a web browser, and then figures out the download link. It’s easy for YouTube to write a script to block certain IP addresses.

The “client” approach (like Replay Media Catcher) cannot be foiled in this way, since the IP address for the download request comes from an individual user’s PC, and not a server. YouTube cannot tell the difference between your web browser, or a client running on your PC, since the IP address of the request is the same.

It will be interesting to see if YouTube continues to crack down on other sites.

Article on Downloading Amazon VOD Videos

Posted | Category: Media Business, Replay Media Catcher, Replay Video Capture.

Technology often moves faster than the news! Here’s an example:

We were featured in an article done by Reuters on September 26, mentioning how Replay Media Catcher was able to download movies from Amazon’s new VOD (Video on Demand) service.

Apparently, Amazon was asked for comment, and shortly before the article hit the wires, they had updated their system, making Replay Media Catcher (for now anyway) unable to record. Other aspects in the article are still valid though, but Amazon was a particularly big part of the story.

Nevertheless, there are other ways to record from Amazon — we recommend WM Capture. As this is a real-time high-quality recorder that works by capturing videos directly off of your PC’s screen, there’s no way it can be blocked.
The other interesting thing is how the story got going in the first place, which we’re still trying to figure out. Stay tuned!

Pandora may be going dark

Posted | Category: Media Business.

This article in Ars Technica does a nice job illustrating the demise of Pandora may be just days away. The problem is with the royalty fees they are being asked to pay, in contrast to what broadcast radio pays (nothing) and satellite radio pays (about half). The music business needs a big restructuring, as it’s a sad day when cool services like Pandora go belly up, especially when they have revenues of $25 million(!).
Read the entire article to learn more.

We’ve been Slashdotted!

Posted | Category: Media Business.

An article about Applian, Replay Media Catcher and RTMPE protocol recently was posted on Slashdot. While much of it is a spirited debate about DRM, there is an inaccuracy that we need to clear up. Some of the posters seem to think that we are breaking Adobe’s encryption in this latest version, which is false. The content we download is actually unencrypted.
It looks like this was a stopgap solution by Adobe. It appears Adobe made a technical tradeoff between continuing to support their existing ad insertion technology, and fully encrypting their content. There are a lot of really talented engineers at Adobe – I just don’t think they have yet built a DMCA compatible system due to time constraints. Their Flash Video server technology is really well done, and after a major re-architecting, they will probably discover a better balance between ad serving and encryption.
As far as the DRM issue goes: never, ever redistribute anything you’ve recorded without the express written consent of the content owner. Recordings are always for your personal use only. Applian’s intent is not to encourage customers to violate copyright laws.

iPhone and Remote iTunes

Posted | Category: Media Business.

Apple Insider has an article about a new Apple (AAPL) patent filing regarding iPhones accessing iTunes libraries from anywhere. The gist is that your desktop PC can have all your media (songs, videos, Podcasts, and more) on it, and your phone would be able to download and play anything from your desktop PC.
This would be a huge bonus for Replay A/V users. Imagine having your favorite radio shows recorded on a PC at home, imported to iTunes automatically, and available for listening wherever you are. This can be done now with the YouSendIt plug-in we provide (as you can email yourself recorded files automatically), but this mechanism would be much slicker.
Go Apple!

Recording the Olympics, Part II

Posted | Category: Media Business, Replay Media Catcher, Replay Video Capture.

Alex has looked into more of the technical details behind how NBC is streaming the Olympics, and has made an interesting discovery. Apparently the stream formats are different for live streams vs. pre-recorded streams. This means that you can make digital recordings of live events, and record from the screen for “rewind” or cached events. Below is his technical summary.

The Silverlight NBC Olympics server uses Windows Media Player for live streams and VP7 for prerecorded videos. VP7 is the format used by web sites like abc.com or fox.com and can provide very high quality (lossless) video compression including HD. The problem with this format is that it cannot be reliably streamed for longer periods of time like the live broadcasts. The math used to compress the video and the audio does not allow recovery when packets are lost which results in out of sync audio. Currently Windows Media Player is the only format that can do this. The live stream Olympics can be recorded with WM Recorder or Replay Media Catcher but the prerecorded clips can only be recorded with WM Capture.

Recording The Olympics Online

Posted | Category: Media Business, Replay Video Capture.

This year NBC has teamed up with Microsoft (MSFT) to provide a wealth of Olympics footage at NBCOlympics.com. If you’re really into specific events that aren’t shown over your broadcast TV station, then you can likely watch them online. Very cool.

The Microsoft contribution is via the Silverlight video player, which you must install in order to watch video. Few video providers use Silverlight, which is why there are no programs (yet) that can record those feeds via stream capture.
If you’re looking to record some of these events and save them forever, the best program to use is WM Capture. This on-screen recorder makes great quality videos from the Olympic feeds.

To burn these recordings to DVD, try the new Replay Converter 3.0, which is currently in beta. You can also make iPod format videos, or AVI files to import them into your favorite video editor.

Oh yeah – Go Team USA!

UPDATE: I noticed that you need to enter a zip code and your Cable provider to watch some online feeds. Try 94118 and ComCast Digital if you’re disallowed access.

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