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Links for June 17th 2008
Interesting links for June 12th 2008 through June 17th 2008:
- Blogger arrests hit record high [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “Since 2003, 64 people have been arrested for publishing their views on a blog, says the University of Washington annual report. In 2007 three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues than in 2006, it revealed.”
- Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network [Tech Crunch] – “April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore … Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.”
- Save Jericho Again: TV Campaign Info – The fan fight to save the now twice-cancelled US TV series Jericho continues, with dedicated Jericho nuts this time raising funds for a series of tv advertisements and billboard trying to save the show and get a new network to pick up the series.
- Sexually Frustrated Superheroes: Superheroes Who Can’t Have Sex [io9] – Which comic-book superheroes can’t have sex? Any why? (And I can’t believe there is an alternative future Spider-Man comic in which Mary-Jane dies after sharing too many bodily fluids with Marvel’s favourite hero!!).
Links for May 27th 2008
Interesting links for May 25th 2008 through May 27th 2008:
- Death knell for television as we know it [The Age] – “Japanese television technology that will give viewers access to high-speed broadcasts over the internet could render conventional television obsolete and transform the media landscape within years, analysts have predicted.”
- Owning the Clouds [how now, brownpau?] – A worrying look at the way Google’s copyright takedown system favours big media over amateur production by letting derivative works (initially) send takedown notices to the original authors!
- HSC students to get Wikipedia course [The Age] – In an Australian first, NSW HSC students will from next year be able to take a course in studying Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia. Wikipedia,… has been listed by the NSW Board of Studies as prescribed text for an elective course…”
- Joss Whedon Fans Jump the Gun [NewTeeVee] – “Perhaps still smarting from their precious Firefly being killed off so soon, Joss Whedon fans are already mobilizing to save his next show, Dollhouse? before the first episode airs.”
Links for May 1st 2008
Interesting links for May 1st 2008:
- Free game hopes to save gorillas [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “Campaigners hoping to preserve Rwanda’s endangered mountain gorilla are attempting to raise awareness of its plight by making a game simulating the lives of the animals free to mobile phone users.”
- Sweet Hollywood hoax with Aussie actors [TV Tonight] – All of the hype built for a supposed new TV show called Scarlet, complete with an over-the-top trailer starring Gary Sweet and Sharni Vinson, turns out to be a viral effort by LG to launch their new Scarlet line of TVs!
- Radiohead says no more music freebies [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “It was a pivotal moment for the music industry which many thought sounded the death knell for recorded music sales, but Radiohead will not be repeating its initiative to let fans pay what they want for their downloads.”
Links for April 14th 2008
Interesting links for April 14th 2008:
- The new digital paparazzi [On Line Opinion – 14/4/2008] – Peter Black discusses “the new digital paparazzi” which are more likely friends, family, or even ourselves, posting photos online with little concern for personal privacy. Black argues that this is evident of a shift in the way privacy is thought about.
- Civil liberties expert slams email spying plans [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “The head of the Australian Council of Civil Liberties, Terry O’Gorman, says tighter laws to protect Australia against cyber terrorism threats are not needed.” (In the wake of proposed laws which would let certain employers read their employee’s email.)
- Study: Pirated Web Video Peaks 12-18 Hours After Broadcast [WatchingTV Online] – “Unauthorized viewing of popular TV shows on video-sharing Web sites like YouTube peaks between 12 and 18 hours after an episode is broadcast, according to a study conducted by Akamai Technologies and content-identification service provider Vobile.”
Nine Promotes Canal Road By Allowing Free Downloading of Episodes
After the recent debacle with Nine’s Underbelly series becoming a star of the peer-to-peer downloading circuit, the network have taken an entirely different approach with their new offering Canal Road, making the initial episodes available as free downloads. From NineMSN:
After battling illegal internet downloads of its hit program Underbelly, the Nine Network will offer up free online access to its new series Canal Road. Viewers will have the opportunity to download the first four episodes of the new Aussie drama for free before it debuts on national television on April 16. […] Ninemsn will make the first two episodes available for download on April 7, with episodes three and four following on April 14. Every other episode will be available to download immediately after it airs on the Nine Network.
Nine said in February it was considering taking legal action after thousands of people started downloading leaked episodes of its controversial gangland drama Underbelly, which was banned in Victoria. This time around the network is keen to stress that viewers will be able to get a preview of Canal Road legally. “All downloaded episodes of Canal Road can also be legally shared with family and friends by saving them onto a DVD or through the existing peer-to-peer file sharing programs,” ninemsn said in a statement.
Kudos to Nine: while streaming video of episodes and the occasional downloadable-but-expires-within-a-week episodes have been tried by Australian broadcasters in the past, Nine’s Canal Road episodes can be downloaded, kept, played offline and won’t “expire”. Indeed, this new ‘Catch-Up TV’ service sports the following message regarding Canal Road:
You can also copy, share and burn each episode to DVD or even distribute the files via file-sharing applications, such as Bit Torrent.
In actually encouraging Australia TV watchers to use Bit Torrent, Nine is finally trying to build on what they know a reasonable segment of their audience are already up to. However, that notice is a little disingenuous: yes, users can download and redistribute the episodes, BUT in order to play the episodes back, you must have the Hiro Video Player Plugin (which works with Windows Media Player on PCs and Quicktime on Macs) and Hiro inserts advertisements into the downloaded episodes. So, in order to play the episode, each computer must have Hiro installed. More to the point, “burn each episode to DVD” sounds like the file can be either converted to a DVD format or can be played in DivX compatible DVD players but this simply isn’t true.
So, while Nine have made leaps and bounds in providing downloadable episodes for their viewers (and certainly Canal Road will be benefiting from the press surrounding such an experiment), they’ve still made claims (such as the episodes being burnable to DVD) which, while not completely untrue, are a little deceptive. That said, if you are willing to put up with a few ads you can’t fast forward to rewind — Hiro doesn’t seem to insert that many ads (I got three single ads, all around 30 seconds in the 45 minutes playback of the first episode of Canal Road) — then the episodes are of a very decent quality (720×576) although for some reason they did play back on my PC in 4:3 when it was clearly shot in 16:9.
A few solid steps in the right direction here, but still a few more steps worth taking to get legal downloads right!
Links for April 1st 2008
Interesting links for March 31st 2008 through April 1st 2008:
- Police take a tip from YouTube [Australian IT] – “Call it BlueTube. Citizen-supplied video evidence of crimes appears set to take off with police forces around Australia.”
- Embracing the torrent of online video [BBC NEWS | Technology] – Very positive piece from Michael Geist on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s decision to make one of their shows available for free, without DRM, via peer to peer Bittorrent networks.
- Decline Of US Newspapers Accelerating [Tech Crunch] – “Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006…”
Beyond Broadcasting: ‘Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance’
I’m very pleased that the ‘Beyond Broadcasting’ issue of Media International Australia is out, not only because it features some excellent articles asking some great questions about the future of television in the era of digital communication, but also because it features an article of mine that I’ve been thinking about on and off for a number of years. My article, ‘Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance‘ has ideas that will already be familiar to readers of this blog (and, indeed, my old blog Ponderance) as the concepts in this paper have slowly built up over time and appeared sporadically in blog form (such as here and here). When I started writing up these fragments into the final paper and posted the abstract in this blog, I was delighted that it provoked a conversation with some of my blog’s readers. A larger number of people seem to have found their way to that post after hitting NBC’s “We’re sorry, but the clip you selected isn’t available from your location” message and punching it into Google, and a few of them offered a comment on this post before heading elsewhere (quite possibly in search of a proxy so they can watch the US-hosted geo-blocked content).
While the article has taken a couple of years to evolve from the initial idea to this published version, the ideas still seem current. Indeed, there was an engaging debate recently in th US between the New York Times Vulture blog (and here, and here) and film and media scholar Michael Newman over the issue of newspapers and blogs posting spoilers about current TV shows when audiences are increasingly time-shifting and either watching their shows a few days later on TiVO, or a few months later on DVD. As I argue in my paper, the problem of avoiding spoilers becomes even harder for viewers in other countries, when the broadcast (or the option to download legally) is often delayed by a number of months – an issue indicative of what I’ve called the tyranny of digital distance.
I’m also pleased that the editors of this themed issue, and the general editor of Media International Australia were kind enough to give me permission to put up a post-print of my article here. (A post-print, for those interested, is the final version of the article submitted to the journal after the peer review process and final changes to the article have been made, but before the article is page-made and the layout done for the journal itself.) So, if you fancy reading the whole paper and you don’t have access to Media International Australia through your library, you can still read the full paper here.
If you can get hold of the journal, there are a number of other papers which are a great read. One of these, Axel Bruns’ ‘Reconfiguring Television for a Networked, Produsage Context’ can be accessed over at his blog.
As always, any comments or thoughts on my paper or the issues it touches on are most welcome!
Australia’s Peer-to-Peer TV Underbelly
While Australians have long been noted as some of the most voracious downloaders of television, using bittorrent-based peer-to-peer sources has generally been focused on accessing UK and US shows which don’t screen in Australia until some time (from weeks to years) after the original airdates. However, the recent case of the Australian production Underbelly is a little bit different.
Underbelly dramatises the infamous events in Melbourne, Victoria between 1995 and 2004 which encompassed a gangland war and a series of murders. However, at least one criminal trial from these events is still underway, and so just prior to the screening of the first episode of Underbelly, a court injunction prevented the Nine Network from screening the tv series in Melbourne, on the grounds it could prejudice any potential Victorian jury. So, on February 13, every other Australian state except Victoria could view the show, while Victorians could not. Also, as it’s pretty much impossible to limit websites on a state-by-state basis, the ban also prevents promotional material, trailers and episodes of Underbelly being hosted online. Thus, the official website currently sports a great many “This functionality is not available due to current legal restrictions” (screenshot) signs and not that much else.
Yet in the era of bittorent and peer-to-peer networks, that’s far from the end of the story. As soon as the ban was issued, media reports appeared highlighting the fact that Underbelly was sure to be available as a download in Victoria within hours of its screening in every other state. As the Herald Sun reported:
… the explosion of video on the internet, through websites and through file sharing, may allow Victorians to see the drama within hours of its broadcast interstate. A scan of one site today revealed several copies of the promotional clips from the series on the website, despite their removal from Nine’s site. “This is a great problem on the internet,” University of NSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre executive director David Vaile said. “Legal jurisdiction is typically limited by geography, and by its nature the internet doesn’t place much regard to geography.”
Mr Vaile believed the judge may have taken into consideration the possibility that copies of the drama would appear on the internet, but that it would have limited impact on potential jurors. “(The judge) may well have decided that something that is not the official publisher’s website will not have the same sort of impact,” he said. However watching illegal versions of the underworld drama will not be without risk. Mr Vaile said people caught uploading clips from Underbelly could face copyright and contempt of court charges.
Subsequent reports noted that it took less than half an hour for Underbelly to hit bittorrent networks and a quick search on isohunt this morning revealed more than a dozen active bittorrent sources for the first two episodes of Underbelly still available almost a week later. Vaile’s comments do note a new potential avenue for prosecuting uploaders in this case, namely contempt of court, but as Alex Malik notes, it seems unlikely that option will be pursued:
While it is probably illegal for viewers to upload Underbelly to these [peer-to-peer] services, it is unlikely that the Nine Network and other rights owners will undertake any enforcement activity to stop them. They may be too busy enjoying the viral marketing buzz associated with internet TV show access. Or they may be thinking about DVD sales down the road. In short, this ban by the Supreme Court may result in Underbelly being one of the internet events of the year. And of course once the TV show hits the internet, it’s fame can then become international fame.
Strangely enough, the only mainstream article which suggests that Australian filesharers are in any way worried about potential court action is on the NineMSN website (co-owned by Microsoft and the Nine Network), while most other reports simply note that a lot of Victorians were accessing peer-to-peer networks in the past week!
Underbelly has certainly focused the spotlight on the wide use of peer-to-peer networks in Australia. The hype and attention that the banned show has received may very well work in the producers’ favour in the long run, ensuring that the people who do see the show in Victoria keep the buzz alive, even if the ban does last the entire 13 episodes. Such buzz should make any DVD sales which are eventually allowed a huge success.
Overall, though, the attempt to ban any sort of digital media on a state by state basis in Australia is clearly impossible, and the attempt to restrict this series in Australia may very well have led a number of Victorians to avail themselves of bittorrent files for the first time. It seems unlikely that once Pandora’s peer-to-peer networks are opened that Victorians will simply put this newfound resource back in the box.
Update (26 March 08): Despite an appeal by Channel 9, the ban on Underbelly screening in Victoria has been upheld. In at least once Victorian town, though, unusual weather conditions have allowed Victorians to watch an episode that was being broadcast in Tasmania!
The Simpsons Go Viral … Almost
In a wonderful parody of the viral YouTube hit that was Noah’s photo ever day for six years, The Simpsons have included this clip in the latest episode in the US:
If that doesn’t amuse you, then perhaps edutainment is more to your taste, so you might want to check out the updated stats in Did You Know 2.0.
Update: Sadly the clip has been removed from YouTube due to a Fox copyright infringement claim.