[MLB-WIRELESS] Cloudification of entertainment content

Fri Aug 29 23:09:16 EST 2008

This is an article going into Digital Media Net magazine next month. I'm
not quite happy with it yet so I thought I'd circulate it here first to
see if I get any interesting feedback that I can use to 'reform' the
article.

I picked you guys because 

1; You probably understand the technical concepts even if you aren't the
target audience of the magazine

2; You probably already place shift your content anyway.

Think of it as group editing process and let me know what you think.

Regards,

Dean Collins
dean at cognation.net 

+1-212-203-4357 (New York) 
+61-2-9016-5642 (Sydney)
http://www.Cognation.net <http://www.Cognation.net/profile> 

Potential 'Cloud'ification of Your Entertainment Content

By Dean Collins

Managing Consultant

Cognation LLC.

A recent win for Cablevision, a New York cable television provider, in
the Southern District Appeals Court marks a pivotal change for the
'physical location requirements' of your entertainment content.

Does this affect Australian consumers..... I'll leave it to more learned
people than 'I' who are more familiar with the byzantine rules of the
Australian-USA Free Trade Agreement and just concentrate on the
technology and what this may mean for you but somehow I think one or two
people reading this ruling will be consulting with FTA lawyers and
coming up with ways to compete against Foxtel and Optus for a new form
of pay tv solution for the Australian market.

There are three critical legs as to why the entertainment consumption
market shifted this month. 

Without the preceding rulings like a two legged stool this new business
model would not be possible, but with the third leg, anyone prepared to
strike out on a new business model will be breaking ground on a radical
change about content ownership.

The first leg was implemented in 1984 during the pivotal Sony Betamax
time shifting court case, which ruled that "the making on individual
copies of television shows for the purposes of time-shifting does not
constitute copyright infringement but is ruled as fair use", fair use
doctrine was enshrined and an ongoing war for Consumer v's Hollywoods
rights has been ongoing ever since.

The second (and most informal leg) where with the introduction of DVD's
and the inevitable hacking of the DRM code using DeCSS in 1999 another
battle over 'device-shifting', or the ability to watch legally purchased
DVD's on a Linux laptop or some other type of iPod style mobile display
device has also been waging.

Here in the USA a content provider MLB (Major League Baseball) actively
'dogged' but did not follow through with their verbiage about suing a
device manufacturer SlingBox which is an Ethernet enabled device you
connect to your TV that allows you to view content remotely on laptops,
cell phones and blackberry's.

With these two legs in place it was inevitable that the physical
location of your content would be the next issue challenged in the
courts.

I believe the 'third leg' which will result in the complete
'Cloud'ification of your content has been forged by this ruling 
http://www.publicknowledge.org/pdf/cablevision-judgement-20070322.pdf  

The background of the case is this; 

Video tape based VCR's have been replaced with a proliferation of hard
drive based Digital Video Recording devices (DVR's) both privately owned
Tivo's and cable tv provider owned/leased devices.

These hard drive based DVR's have grown in both capacity, and the number
of simultaneous channels they could record. For example the new Foxtel
IQ2 announced last month from NDS will now feature quad tuners with a
320gb hard drive.

In March 2006 Cablevision proposed to place these 'hard drives' not
inside the set-top box that physically sits underneath your tv but
instead to move these hard drives to a central location within their
data center.

By centrally locating these hard drives within their network they would
not only reduce truck roll repairs and deployment issues but also make
massive gains in the use of centralized large scale storage.

Content providers sued in 2006 and won an injunction preventing
deployment but this injunction has now been overturned which will allow
for the deployment of 'cloud based content delivery'.

Cablevision intend to launch in the 4th Qtr of 2008 a diskless set top
box that will reside in your home on top of your TV, but your ability to
'record to disk' will be directly linked to content being stored on hard
drives at the Cablevision data center. 

I would also speculate that shortly thereafter Cablevision would be
offering their customers the ability to 'store more' for additional fees
per month thereby increasing the ARPU per client.

With this ruling now in place I'm not sure why the wider press hasn't
reported the potential ramifications of this. 

I guess the press isn't necessarily there to 'speculate on the news' or
maybe I'm totally wrong but if I'm right this could be the biggest thing
since the introduction of consumer recordable media.

With these three 'legs' of content consumption in place; time shifting,
device shifting, location shifting I think we are finally moving into a
golden age of entertainment content consumption that will finally allow
'anywhere anytime' consumption of entertainment content.

Extrapolating this ruling out, for the first time clear precedent now
exists that I can 'logically control  content' and not need 'physical
control' of the media - it is there available for me to access when and
where I want - with the limitation that I'm the only person who is able
to access it (limiting public performance).

So if I purchase a MP3, does it no longer does it need to be stored on
my iPod but I might choose to listen to it on my desktop pc, or I might
I also choose to stream it to my cell phone or even a laptop when I'm
working remotely from my hotel room while on the road.

Does this 'Cloud'ification of entertainment content open the possibility
of a major competitor to the Apple dominance in music sales? 

Will Destra implement a new version of their MP3 sales where I
'purchase' content but it is stored centrally allowing me to access it
when or how I chose to from multiple devices as long as only a 'single
copy' resides centrally.

Or even more exciting does this finally pave the way for a wifi/wimax
'device company' for a new class of 'anywhere anytime' content delivery
hardware box?

Can I pay for a piece of content and own that content for life, allowing
it to be streamed to me at a time, location and format of my choosing
via an 'uber' connected always on device? Possibly even allowing
retransmission to the TV I 'happen' to choose to view the content on it
would certainly make a great use of the new UWB standards.

(Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is a short-range, low power radio technology that
was developed to complements other longer range radio technologies such
as Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and cellular wide area communications. It is used to
relay data from a host device to other devices in the immediate area (up
to 10 meters, or 30 feet). Learn more about UWB at the WiMedia alliance
website. http://www.wimedia.org/en/index.asp)

Geeks in Australia and around the world have been running their own
music servers and Myth-TV video servers have been streaming content
around their homes or to laptops and remote locations for a number of
years. 

Is there finally an opportunity for a new type of 'Cloud'ification
Service Provider to emerge that removes the need for the hardware and
allows the rest of us to do the same? 

Lets hope so.

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