Category: Video

Video paper project

Apple’s Neutrality Runaround

It recently occurred to me that Apple’s name was noticeably absent from the list of companies supporting Internet neutrality (or perhaps I’ve just missed it). As a provider of iTunes music and videos, as well as software updates, it seemed to me as though their bandwidth needs would be a prime candidate for higher tiered service.

A few days ago, the Apple rumor mill turned out a theory that Apple would bundle bittorrent in the next version of their operating system. Users would get credit (perhaps on iTunes) for sharing their harddrive space and bandwidth to serve tiny bits of Apple content, like music, videos, and updates.

This would essentially remove the need for them to sign up for a higher tier of service, because their serving needs would be completely distributed in terms of time, space, and bandwidth. While this has been around for years in the linux world, building a commercial model on this technology would be a fascinating innovation.

You Tube caps video length

I got a surprise when trying to upload my first video to YouTube last night (which was reported today): YouTube has set a maximum video length of 10 minutes. Their statement says that they found most videos over this amount of time were obviously infringing copyright, and offered a “premium content program” for content owners to upload videos longer than the limit.

When you think about it, this was a smart length of time to choose for a lot of reasons:

  • Most TV shows run about 23 minutes without commercials, had they made the maximum 15 minutes a half hour sitcom would have been easy to split.
  • Splitting longer material (especially movies) will be nearly unworkable.
  • It might also be easier for someone to make a fair-use argument for uploading such a short segment of copyrighted material. Ars pointed out that YouTube has many funny clips from movies like Napoleon Dynamite (and says “a good portion of which are not examples of fair use”)…yet perhaps a short clip with a comment/criticism in the text may pass. We’ll see if YouTube would go along with a challenge.

There is no word yet on whether material longer than 10 minutes is going to be deleted.  If so, it will be sad to see a lot of difficult to find material (international or out of print) go away.

Does video have a Napster problem?

C-Net is continuing their great coverage of the net video issue, today with an analysis of the copyright status of online video sharing. Although the law might not support them on this, they’re quite right in distinguishing between video downloads (through BitTorrent or eDonkey) and streaming services like Google Video and YouTube. Essentially, all of these services (including the BitTorrent creators) have gotten the message that it’s about control: if you can and do control what appears on your network (and respond to complaints), you’re in better shape under the law.

I would say that this gets at a crucial “common sense” issue in copyright law. Downloading a file that you can keep and listen to forever is significantly “more wrong” than viewing a clip which is streamed online. An arguable copyright analysis of this issue might be that downloading breaks the “copy” part of copyright, where streaming essentially only breaks the “distribution” right.
On a related note, one of the most popular illegal video downloads (the Daily Show and Colbert Report) have now been made for sale on the iTunes music store. This seems to me to be insane business sense: who will pay for news video which will be out of date tomorrow? I don’t think I would pay $2 for a video to watch only once. We will see if this brings a crack-down on Daily Show sharing (perhaps they can make their video streams a bit more accessible, if they do).

Times on Net TV

Today’s Times has an article about the new phenomenon of “slivercasting,” or narrow-interest Internet-only broadcasts. They give an interesting overview of how all sorts of narrow interests can potentially find an audience for video content on the net.

However, as with Wired’s September 05 issue on “The TV of Tomorrow,” the Times article focuses too heavily on centralized content creators. One broadcaster laments that:

The site has had as many as 200,000 visitors in a month, he said, but only if he buys advertising to attract them.

Net video is entirely different from television in that there’s no “push” or guarantee that your content will find its way into an audience’s home. On the net, content and community are king. Some of the most successful video efforts on the net that I have seen start as a community of interest and then grow into a collaboration (including video). Unless there is a name, or incredible material, on a site without a preexisting community, I doubt that efforts such as these can be successful. Video takes time to watch, and without a push like broadcast, one needs a good reason to devote the effort.