Monthly Archives: December 2002

Sony bets big on XrML digital rights markup language

Posted on by

Sony is definitely getting all of its DRM ducks in order. First there was the recent co-purchase (with Philips) of InterTrust. Now, Sony has licensed all current and future patents of ContentGuard.

ContentGuard is a subsidiary of Xerox, with Microsoft as a minority stakeholder. They have several key patents covering DRM systems and digital rights languages, and a DRML (my obvious shorthand for Digital Rights Markup Language) called XrML.

DRMLs allow you to specifiy digital rights for content and services, and are generally implemented in XML. There are lots of DRMLs, including XMCL (eXtensible Media Commerce Language, currently used by RealNetworks), MPEG REL (Rights Expression Language) and RDD (Rights Data Dictionary), 2RDD (Rights Data Dictionary, backed by the MPAA and RIAA) and ODRL (Open Digital Rights Language).

This development supports the prediction I made during my DV Expo presentation at a year ago — that XrML is going to be the most popular DRML by far, and possibly the only one that will matter by 2005. I think that the most interesting thing I realized while preparing that presentation was that DRMLs make the DRM irrelevant, as long as the DRM supports the rights specified in the DRML. | InformationWeek story | ContentGuard press release | XrML

First 3G call made in live U.S. network

Posted on by

Yesterday, AT&T Wireless and Ericsson completed the first WCDMA/UMTS call in a live network environment. The new 1900 MHz WCDMA/UMTS network they used for the test will have more than 100 cell sites in Dallas by the end of this year.

All I want for Christmas is 802.11x most everywhere, 3G everywhere else, and phones and computers that can switch between them automagically. (Next Christmas, maybe?) | Ericsson press release

Winner of "NerdTV" MPEG-4 encoder showdown

Posted on by

Ben Waggoner has been helping Robert X. Cringely with an MPEG-4 encoder evaluation for NerdTV. Ben did all of the encoding, and then stepped out of the way to let Robert and his team pick the best.

Sorenson’s forthcoming Squeeze 3, a $199 MPEG-4 encoder, was unanimously (all viewers determined it did best on all of the samples) chosen as the best.

QuickTime’s MPEG-4 encoder came in dead last. Clearly, avoid QuickTime’s MPEG-4 encoder for professional work. | Post announcing encoder showdown | Post announcing winner | Sorenson Squeeze 3 for MPEG-4 announcement

Sony's new set-top boxes

Posted on by

At the BroadbandPlus show, Sony introduced four new set-top boxes (STBs). All but the low-end model support DVR functionality (which can’t be good news for TiVo), and HDTV. They look interesting, but I won’t be buying until I know I can get to media I’ve recorded for personal use.

All four STBs incorporate Sony’s new “Passage” technology. Sony’s Passage site and whitepaper are shallow, but I believe that Passage is just Sony’s name for the OpenCable STB specifications. In other words, Sony is pulling an “i.Link” and co-opting a standard in order to confuse the press and consumers. The stories I’ve seen so far suggest that it’s working — the mainstream press thinks that Sony invented the standard, rather than just implemented it.

The OpenCable STB specifications mean that you can theoretically use STBs from any vendor on your digital cable system, meaning that you’re not stuck with the one that your cable provider offers. Why would cable companies want this? They don’t, probalby but the FCC Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandates that they do. | Passage site | Passage whitepaper | CableLabs OpenCable STB specifications press release

Knowing your tools

Posted on by

Ars Technica is running the first part of a series called Understanding the Microprocessor. Although it may sound a bit esoteric for less-technical readers, the article is well-written and does a nice job of easing into the details.

…the purpose of computers isn’t to just “compute” in the abstract, but to produce usable results from a given data set. In other words, what matters in computing applications is not that you did some math, but that you started with a body of numbers, applied a sequence of operations to it, and got a list of results. Those results could, again, represent pixel values for a rendered scene or an environmental snapshot in a weather simulation. Indeed, the idea that a computer is a device that transforms one set of numbers into another should be intuitively obvious to anyone who’s ever used a Photoshop filter.

I’m a firm believer in the benefits of understanding your tools from both a Understanding the Microsoprocessor: Part 1

The five stages of coping with P2P file sharing

Posted on by

Robert X. Cringely recently posted an interesting article called Resistance is Futile: How Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Is Likely to Change Big Media. In it, he refers to a recent Microsoft Research paper (The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution, which I pointed to in an article I posted on 11/7) that notes that P2P file sharing basically cannot be stopped.

Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren’t going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won’t be enough. That’s when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think. That’s when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.

This immediately brought to mind the Kubler-Ross theory of the five stages of coping with death — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I believe that the music industry is in the transition from anger (hacking P2P systems) to bargaining (offering 99¢ downloads, but in fringe proprietary formats). I expect that 2003 will probably be a depressing year to be in the music business. | Robert X. Cringely article

RealNetworks offers two-day SuperPass preview

Posted on by

Taking a cue from cable, RealNetworks is offering a free preview of their SuperPass. Except that they call it a “trial”, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “a state of pain or anguish that tests patience, endurance, or belief”, and “a trying, troublesome, or annoying person or thing”.

In an additional sign that RealNetworks is being forced to retreat from the Mac and Linux/UNIX markets, only the Windows player supports this preview.

The press release is all sex (“sizzling Anna Kournikova video from her swimsuit calendar shoot”, “travel to the sexiest destinations with exclusive Wild On adventures”, “video footage of the Sports Illustrated Ultimate Swimsuit edition”), drugs (Whitney Houston), and rock’n'roll (Jennifer Lopez, The Osbournes). With some and some news and sports to keep us well-rounded, naturally.

Merrill Brown, Senior VP of RealOne Services, says that they’ve doubled their SuperPass subscribers in a year, but they neglects to note that they’ve doubled them to (or from).

In a show of sanity, you don’t need to give RealNetworks your credit card number in order to experience this, erm, trial. | RealNetworks press release

Universal unveils misguided 99¢ music download effort

Posted on by

Today Universal Music Group (UMG) accounced 99¢ music downloads for more than 43,000 tracks. In Liquid Audio and Windows Media formats.

I could go get those tracks, right now, and without UMG getting a cent if that whole “stealing is bad” thing wasn’t ingrained in me as deeply as it is. But I’d gladly give them 99¢s a track if they provided them in the obvious, standards-based and universal format for doing so — MP3. Why won’t they let me? Because they don’t get it. They don’t understand their customers.

Either showing off his ignorance of the marketplace or his capacity for spin, UMG ELabs President Larry Kenswil declared:

This is a watershed moment. Universal is committed to making every recording it controls available for Internet distribution.

Yeah, but in formats that early adopters won’t buy because they don’t work with anything. Larry is counting his watershed before it’s hatched. PC World story

Via Licensing chosen as administrator for MPEG-4 audio patent pool

Posted on by

The MPEG-4 Audio Licensing Committee (ALC) have selected Via Licensing as the licensing administrator for the MPEG-4 Audio patent pool. This is a good thing, I suppose, but it’s troubling that MPEG-4 technology and content developers will have at least two “one-stop shops” for MPEG-4 patent portfolio licensing — MPEG LA for video and Via Licensing for audio.

The M4IF (MPEG-4 Industry Forum) asked the ALC to develop licensing terms for three audio profiles: High Quality Audio Profile, Speech Audio Profile and Mobile Audio Internetworking (“MAUI”) Profile. Additionally, the ALC will be working with Via Licensing to develop terms for other audio technologies that fall outside the three standard profiles.

The Speech Audio Profile will cover CELP (“Code Excited Linear Prediction”, a speech codec), HVXC (“Harmonic Vector Excitation Coding”, a speech codec) and TTSI (“Text-to-Speech Interface”, a standard way to control text-to-speech functionality).

The High Quality Audio Profile will cover AAC LC, AAC LTP, AAC Scalable, CELP, ER AAC LC, ER AAC LTP, ER AAC Scalable, ER CELP. AAC is an audio codec that works great for music, and CELP is a speech codec. (To deciper the notation tacked on before and after the codec names, see the paragraph after next.)

The Mobile Audio Internetworking Profile will cover these technologies: ER AAC LC, ER AAC Scalable, ER TwinVQ, ER BSAC, ER AAC LD. AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), TwinVQ and BSAC (Bit Sliced Arithmetic Coding) are audio/music codecs. (To deciper the notation tacked on before and after the codec names, see the next paragraph.)

The notation tacked on before and after the codec names are “tools”, which is an MPEG-ism for “features”. The LC tool is “low complexity”, which significantly reduces decoding complexity (say, for low-power devices) at the cost of a small quality hit. The LTP tool is “long-term prediction”, which provides significant quality improvements at the cost of being somewhta more complex to decode. The ER tool is “error resiliant”, and allows you to stream over lossy transports (like RTSP). The LD tool is “low delay”, which is handy for live streaming and other less-latency-is-better applications. The Scalability tool effciently encodes multiple audio bitrates into a single audio bitstream.

The ALC plans to deliver the MPEG-4 Audio Profile license agreements in Q1’03. | Dolby press release

Sorenson Media announces MPEG-4 support for Squeeze 3

Posted on by

Sorenson Media, best known as the company behind QuickTime’s Sorenson Video, has announced that the next major release of Squeeze will support ISMA-compliant MPEG-4 encoding.

Squeeze is available in single-format versions for $199. Their “Compression Suite” version is $199, and supports Flash, MPEG-4 and QuickTime output. Caution: The Windows version also supports RealSystem and Windows Media, so Sorenson has apparently started down the slippery slope of offering Mac content creators less functionality for the same price. | Sorenson Media press release