I was interviewed this afternoon by Matt Cooper of Today FM’s The Last Word in a follow-up piece to the Irish Blog Awards.
Matt raised the recent proposal in France to make it legal to crack DRM – this was reported by Reuters yesterday:
France is pushing through a law that would force Apple Computer Inc to open its iTunes online music store and enable consumers to download songs onto devices other than the computer maker’s popular iPod player.
Under a draft law expected to be voted in parliament on Thursday, consumers would be able to legally use software that converts digital content into any format.
It would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management — the codes that protect music, films and other content — if it is to enable to the conversion from one format to another, said Christian Vanneste, Rapporteur, a senior parliamentarian who helps guide law in France.
“It will force some proprietary systems to be opened up … You have to be able to download content and play it on any device,” Vanneste told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday.
What I should have said in the interview is that Apple may be forced to close the iTunes Store if this law is passed. My understanding is that Apple are required by their agreements with the recording industry to put DRM on the music. Of course if they did have to close their store, I imagine the sales of music for allofmp3.com in France would soar!
I muddled through the interview but if any of you want to hear what I sound like when the interview mike is pointed the other direction (it isn’t pretty!) – I’ll be on sometime between 6pm and 6:30pm I was told.
IT@Cork is a not-for-profit organisation which facilitates networking amongst IT Professionals – by the holding of evening events, mini-conferences and the annual conference. IT@Cork has 220+ member companies drawn from fmcg, to banks, to pharmas to IT companies.
I have been working with IT@Cork to set-up a members podcast and we published the first podcast yesterday. The most time consuming part of the process was sourcing a sponsor for the podcasts – thanksfully Microsoft Ireland stepped in and offered to sponsor the first five of the podcasts (if anyone would like to sponsor the next five, feel free to drop me a line at tom@tomrafteryit.net).
The first podcast was an interview with Shemas Eivers – Shemas is the MD of Client Solutions and an engineer by training. Shemas has some interesting views on software development (”software development hasn’t changed very much in the last 5 years”) and he reckoned that one of Client Solutions recipies for success is by avoiding the bleeding edge!
I changed my podcast production strategy fot this podcast – I wanted to try out GarageBand 3! I should have listened to Shemas and avoided the bleeding edge right there! Editing of sound files is painful in GarageBand 3 – I quickly reverted to editing in Audacity. I then imported the edited file into GarageBand to take advantage of its easy music integration – I added the jingle at the start and finish using GarageBand.
One real pain factor in GarageBand is that the Export function exports to .m4a, not mp3. It is possible to import the m4a files into iTunes and convert to mp3 (which is what I did) but what is the point in forcing that extra step on podcasters? Why not have an export to mp3 natively in GarageBand, as it is in Audacity?
I’ll have to play a little more with Garageband to see if it is worth keeping but right now, I am thinking the extra time involved isn’t worth it – anyone think the sound in the IT@Cork interview is superior enough that I should stick with Garageband?
Steve Jobs has managed to sell Pixar Animation Studios to Disney for $7.4 billion in stock. As part of the deal, Pixar shareholders will receive 2.3 Disney shares for every Pixar share they own. Steve Jobs currently owns 50.6% of Pixar so this deal will mean that Steve jobs is going to become the single largest share holder in Disney!
I guess that means Steve has a lot more content for his iTunes Store!
I see CBS and NBC are following ABC’s lead and are now offering some of their shows on-demand – but unlike ABC and iTunes combo, CBS and NBC are offering the shows for 99c an episode (as opposed to $1.99 for ABC) and the shows will include ads (ABC’s are without ads).
CBS are offering the service through cable operator ComCast, while NBC are going with DirectTV, a satellite broadcaster.
In his blog, Thomas Hawk asks the very pertinent question:
if you have a DirecTV DVR why not just record the show yourself and skip the commercials and not pay 99 cents. I suppose there always may be the case where you accidently didn’t record your favorite show, but it would seem to me like an unlikely service to be used
By the sounds of it, these guys have the right idea but the wrong business model – I can’t help but think that this will hinder the long-term take up of on-demand TV.
Yahoo! have posted a nice instruction set on their blog, detailing how to subscribe your copy of iTunes to video searches of interest so that you are constantly fed relevant updated video casts!
Basically, to do it you simply use the RSS url generator to generate the RSS feed for your video search, add that to iTunes and watch the videos as they arrive in iTunes (or if you have one of the new Video iPods, you can watch them on that!).
I will be talking about other uses for RSS tomorrow evening at the IT@Cork RSS event – hope to see you there!
At the San Jose event today Steve jobs also announced a new iMac G5. See here for more
The new iMac is thinner than its predecessors, it has a built-in iSight camera for video conferencing, and it has a new application called Front Row. Front Row is a program which allows imac owners to use their iMac like a media centre – playing music, photos, videos and DVD’s from the comfort of the sofa, using the iMacs 6 button, iPod-like remote.
As Tom Dunmore of Stuff Magazine says:
Obviously, Front Row will be the perfect way to enjoy music video bought from the iTunes Music Store 6. But is it too much to ask for a TV link? Oh, ok, we’ll be happy with what we’ve got. For now…
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