Intertainer — a broadband on-demand movie service — is calling it quits for now, and has filed suit again AOL Time Warner, Sony and Vivendi Universal. Jonathan Taplin, Intertainer’s Chairman and CEO, writes:

We promise to return when there is an environment in which the independent company such as ours is allowed to compete for your business. Whether the current environment of increasing media concentration is good for our Democracy is of course, the ultimate question.

Intertainer is alleging that the defendents are out to destroy them with Movielink (formerly Moviefly), a service that is owned in part by the defendents. They specifically accuse Sony of violating its position as investor and board observer to help build Movielink, and stealing Intertainer employees to do the same. Link Link

I love portable gadgets, and I love the iPod. One thing that’s surprised me is how long it’s taken for vendors to introduce iPod clones. Creative recently introduced the first significant challenger to the iPod throne with their Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen. (It’s cruel when parents give their children silly names, isn’t it?)

The Zen supports FireWire and USB (not USB 2.0, sadly). The design is fine, if unimaginative. For $300 including rebate, you get 20 GB of storage vs. 5 GB for an iPod at the same price.

One of the reasons it’s cheaper is because it uses a 2.5-inch hard drive (the iPod uses a 1.8-inch hard drive). Because of this, the Zen has a Buddha-like weight and size issues — it’s 25% heaver, 20% wider, 10% taller and 13% deeper than the larger 20 GB iPod (which I find myself wishing was just a bit lighter and smaller as I pet it lovingly in my local Apple Store).

If you’re wondering how big a business this is, Apple sold 140,000 iPods this quarter (54,000 of them for Windows).

Has it really been two years since Cleaner 5 was introduced? Cleaner 6 merges in MPEG Charger, is a little faster at MPEG encoding and preprocessing in general, and adds support for Kinoma (Peter Hoddie’s Palm OS media format).

There are caveats, though — it’s for Macintosh only, doesn’t support RealSystem or Windows Media 9 encoding on Mac OS X, and apparently takes a step backwards by moving codec-specific compression options out of the main Cleaner interface, which means that they can’t be scripted/automated. Hrmmm. Upgrades are $179 according to their press release, but $159 according to the Discreet site. Link Demo

So far, DRM has focused on selling restricted content to consumers. However, an InfoWorld article by Jon Udell reminds us that DRM has always existed — most companies don’t give their marketing folks read/write permissions to shares containing their companies’ source code, for example — and that DRM has other uses, such as helping a business make sure that only their executive staff has access to sensitive content. His best point is that management will be the main challenge for DRM in the enterprise.

The real bottlenecks will be where they always have been: asserting identities, managing cryptographic keys, administering access controls. The critical issue within the enterprise is ease of use. Without breakthrough advances on that front, the technologies that spin out of the DRM war — secure hardware, trustworthy operating systems, XML rights-management languages — won’t find much traction.

(Hrmmm. I wonder how long it will be until we see an episode about DRM in the Enterprise?) Link

At O’Reilly’s recent Mac OS X conference, there was an interesting keynote session on DRM which included Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, Cory Doctorow of the EFF, Victor Nemechek of El Gato Software (developer of EyeTV) and others. This session is now available for your viewing and listening pleasure.

When I introduced a beta of this site on 10/1, one of the technology decisions I had to make was whether I could make the leap to XHTML and CSS. XHTML is just HTML cleaned up and recast as an XML “application”. (Don’t let the word “application” put you off. If you look at the source of this page, it’ll look very familiar.) CSS is Cascading Style Sheets, a much better way of handling formatting and layout than FONT and TABLE. Using XHTML and CSS would make the site more accessible, allow me to to do my tiny part to move the web to modern standards, and save myself a lot of work. So, I made the leap.

On 10/11, Wired News unveiled a redesign that uses XHTML and CSS. Although Wired News attacts a tiny fraction of the readers that sites like Yahoo! and Amazon do, its adoption of modern web standards is an important milestone.

This site has attracted several hundred regular readers in its first two weeks — I’m happy to report that so far, the use of XHTML and CSS has been a non-issue. With the Wired News news it certainly feels like the inflection point for XHTML and CSS is here, and I recommend investigating it for your sites and the sites you create.

Even respected news sources are reporting that Apple will be switching to the PowerPC 970 — a 1.8 GHz, 32/64-bit PowerPC processor that IBM is announcing today. This is welcome news if you’re a Macintosh-using digital media creator.

Today, the fastest Motorola PowerPC processor runs at a pathetic 1.25 GHz while Intel’s fastest Pentium 4 runs at 2.8 GHz. Although there’s truth to the megahertz myth, things are pretty sad when even the fastest dual-proccessor Mac can’t trounce the fastest single-processor PC. The PowerPC 970 will be available in quantity in the second half of 2003. Link Link

To the MPAA and the RIAA, you — their customer — are a criminal.

You were presumed a criminal when VCRs and cassette recorders were introduced, no matter that these new recordable medias opened up huge markets to them them. You are presumed a criminal now with your general-purpose computer, no matter that this new medium opens up huge markets to them that they again don’t understand.

These entertainment cartels claim to represent artists. Mainstream and non-maintream artists alike know that this isn’t true, and that they really represent (1) themselves, and (2) a tiny herd of cash cows like “artist” Britney Spears, who are basically under their thumb.

If they get their way, general purpose computers will be a memory, replaced by entertainment players that enforce copyright not with the law, but with hardware and software. Fair use will require you to be a criminal. Inevitably, you will find that your ability to distribute content that you’ve created will also be impacted.

Oh, and they also want to be able to search your computer, however and whenever they want, for potentially illegal content. (Oh sure — it looks like a Quicken file…)

The Senate Judiciary Committee is soliciting public comments on DRM legislation. The MPAA and RIAA have their lobbyists, but all we have are ourselves. Now would be a very good time to share your thoughts on this with the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Link