At the D9 Conference this morning, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings credited his company with helping to beat piracy — at least in the U.S. Now, he says, the challenge is to outcompete copyright infringement in places like Korea, where it runs rampant.
“One of the things that we’re most proud of is we’re now finally beating BitTorrent,” Hastings told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Thanks to services like Netflix, Hastings said most Internet video is now paid for in the U.S. The hard part for content providers, he said, was coming up with a service good enough that people were willing to pay for, rather than just searching for free content on the Internet. Netflix has been able to provide that service by making its streaming videos available across a vast number of devices, and giving subscribers access to a wide range of library content for a relatively low price.
Netflix has also enabled content owners to make money on shows they previously weren’t monetizing. Hastings offered up Joss Whedon’s Firefly as one example of a series that had a rabid fan base that couldn’t find it under legal means prior to appearing on Netflix. At the same time, he quelled any rumors that the company could bring Firefly back from the dead.
via Netflix CEO: ‘We’re Finally Beating BitTorrent’ — Online Video News.
People don’t necessarily buy Blu-ray players for the discs, but to access Netflix instead. However, once they take the players home, they apparently decide to buy a few discs and see what all the fuss is about. Despite the massive growth of Netflix, Blu-ray users are beginning to buy more discs than they did in the two previous years, according to NPD. This means that Netflix may actually help Hollywood to sell Blu-ray discs by moving away from shipping discs itself.
via Netflix helps boost Blu-ray player and disc sales — Online Video News.
American newspapers are in trouble, but in emerging markets the news industry is roaring ahead
Jul 7th 2011 | from the print edition
“WHO KILLED THE newspaper?” That was the question posed on the cover of The Economist in 2006. It was, perhaps, a little premature. But there is no doubt that newspapers in many parts of the world are having a hard time. In America, where they are in the deepest trouble, the person often blamed is Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, a network of classified-advertising websites that is mostly free to use. Mr Newmark has been called a “newspaper killer” and “the exploder of journalism”, among other things. The popularity of Craigslist, the ninth most popular website in America, has contributed to a sharp decline in newspapers’ classified-advertising revenue (see chart 1)—a business where many newspapers have had comfortable local monopolies for decades. Sitting in a café in San Francisco, Mr Newmark looks an unlikely assassin. Did he kill newspapers? “That would be a considerable exaggeration,” he says with a smile.
 The internet-driven fall in classified-ad revenue is only one of the reasons for the decline of newspapers in America, which started decades ago (see chart 2). The advent of television news, and then cable television, lured readers and advertisers away. Then the internet appeared in the 1990s. A new generation of readers grew up getting their news from television and the web, now the two leading news sources in America (the web overtook newspapers in 2010 and is already the most popular source among the under-30s).
These technological shifts hit American newspapers particularly hard because of their heavy reliance on advertising. According to the OECD, a club of developed countries, in 2008 America’s newspapers collectively relied on advertising for 87% of their total revenue, more than any other country surveyed. The 2008-09 recession made things worse. Between 2007 and 2009 newspaper revenues in France fell by 4%, in Germany by 10% and in Britain by 21%. In America they plummeted by 30%. On top of that, a series of mergers and acquisitions in the American newspaper business left many companies saddled with huge debts and pushed several into bankruptcy.
For American regional and metro-area newspapers, further job cuts, closures and consolidation now seem likely. In retrospect it is clear that the industry became too dependent on local advertising monopolies. “The real trouble that a lot of US news organisations have is that they are defined by geography—by how far trucks could go to deliver papers in the morning,” says Joshua Benton, head of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. The internet has undermined that business model by providing alternatives for both advertisers and readers.
The health of newspapers is particularly important because they tend to set the agenda for other news media and employ the most journalists. In America, for example, the national television networks had around 500 journalists on their staff in 2009, compared with more than 40,000 for daily newspapers (down from 56,000 in 2001). But it would be wrong to conclude from the woes of American newspapers that newspapers and news are in crisis everywhere.
“The United States is the worst case that we see worldwide, and a lot of media news comes out of the US, so it is exceedingly negative. But the US experience is not being replicated elsewhere,” says Larry Kilman, deputy head of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), an industry body. “There’s an assumption that there’s a single crisis affecting all news organisations, and that’s not the case,” says David Levy, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. “There are different kinds of crisis in different countries, and some countries in the developing world are experiencing expansion rather than decline.”
Newspapers in western Europe are having to manage long-term decline rather than short-term pain. In Germany, the biggest market, a 10% drop in revenue amid the worst recession in a generation “is not a terrible result”, says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a colleague of Mr Levy’s at the Reuters Institute and co-author with him of a recent book, “The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy”. That does not mean the German industry is immune to long-term changes. “But broadly speaking, the German industry has a large and loyal audience, strong brands and editorial resources to manage that transition,” says Mr Nielsen. Many European newspapers are family-owned, which helps to protect them in difficult times.
In Japan, home to the world’s three biggest-selling daily newspapers (the Yomiuri Shimbun alone has a circulation of more than 10m), circulation has held up well, in part because over 94% of newspapers are sold by subscription. But there is trouble on the horizon. Young Japanese do not share their elders’ enthusiasm for newsprint, and advertising revenues are dropping as the population ages.
The number of newspaper titles in Russia increased by 9% in 2009, but it might be no bad thing if a few newspapers died, particularly those “useless” titles that are merely mouthpieces for the local authorities that fund them, says Elena Vartanova, dean of the journalism school at Moscow State University. The Kremlin controls 60% of Russia’s newspapers and owns stakes in all six national television stations. In a country where newspapers were traditionally used as propaganda tools, online news sites offer an opportunity to break with the past. But there is a clear divide between the internet-savvy youth, who get their news online, and the old and rural populations, who depend on state-run television.
Hungry for news
There is certainly no sign of a news crisis in India, now the world’s fastest-growing newspaper market. Between 2005 and 2009 the number of paid-for daily newspapers in the country increased by 44% to 2,700 and the total number of newspapers rose by 23% to more than 74,000, according to the WAN. In 2008 India overtook China to become the leader in paid-for daily circulation, with 110m copies sold each day. Newspaper and magazine advertising expenditure increased by 32% in the year to June 2010, according to Nielsen India, a market-research firm.
Television news is also booming: of more than 500 satellite channels that have been launched in India in the past 20 years, 81 are news channels. The field is dominated by private firms with interests in both news and entertainment media, so the emphasis is on sensationalist, “Bollywoodised” coverage of celebrities, says Daya Thussu at the University of Westminster in London. Most news outlets are openly partisan. Thanks to India’s vast population, there is scope for growth in print media for years to come. “Indian publishers come to newspaper conferences and complain that it’s too focused on digital, not enough on print,” says Mr Kilman. But Mr Levy wonders whether the greater interest in news in fast-growing India and Brazil will prove to be a short-term phenomenon that will be undermined by the spread of internet access.
 China is another market where news media are growing rapidly, but the strict controls on them have intensified in recent months. A private media industry was allowed to develop only in the 1990s. The combination of social change, increasingly savvy readers, a booming advertising market and the need to reconcile credibility among readers with state controls has created a very confusing environment, says David Bandurski at the University of Hong Kong. Media firms must dance skilfully “between the party line and the bottom line”, in the memorable phrase of Zhao Yuezhi, an analyst of the Chinese media scene.
Officially the state permits watchdog journalism, known as “supervision by public opinion”, but in practice news outlets are wary of offending local party officials. One way around this used to be for reporters to expose wrongdoing in other provinces, but a ban on “cross-regional” reporting put an end to that. Journalists must identify areas where muckraking will be permitted by officials, or ensure that their own political connections will provide them with sufficient cover.
A new tactic, which became particularly popular in China during 2010, is the use of microblogging services to release information anonymously in small chunks, notes Ying Chan, dean of the journalism school at Shantou University in China. Twitter is banned in China, so this is done using local clones of the service. Microblogging works well in China because it can be done on mobile phones, which are widespread, and Chinese characters allow an entire paragraph to be packed into a short message. Moreover, microblog posts are difficult to censor because they may not make sense unless they are all read in order.
Ms Chan describes the future for Chinese journalists as “both promising and perilous”. Journalists elsewhere would agree, though for different reasons. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all unhappy in their own way, the news business faces different problems in different countries. To survive, news organisations will have to make the internet part of the solution.
via How newspapers are faring: A little local difficulty | The Economist.
The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan—as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media, says Tom Standage
EVEN IF YOU are not a news junkie, you will have noticed that your daily news has undergone a transformation. Television newscasts now include amateur videos, taken from video-sharing websites such as YouTube, covering events like the Arab spring or the Japanese tsunami. Such videos, with their shaky cameras and people’s unguarded reactions, have much greater immediacy than professional footage. Messages posted on Twitter, the microblogging service, have been woven into coverage of these events and many others. “You have these really intimate man-in-the-street accounts, and you can craft a narrative around them,” says Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. A computer consultant in Pakistan unwittingly described the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in a series of tweets. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, too, were reported on Twitter in real time by people who were there.
The past year has also seen the rise to fame of WikiLeaks, an organisation that publishes leaked documents supplied to it anonymously. WikiLeaks and its media partners have published detailed records of the Afghan and Iraq wars, hundreds of classified American diplomatic cables and records from the Guantánamo Bay detention centre. “We believe that true information does good,” says Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder. “Our goal is not just to have people reading documents, but to achieve political reforms through the release of information.”
 In January this year Al Jazeera, a news organisation based in Qatar, published its own cache of leaked documents, known as the Palestine Papers, which lifted the lid on more than a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. And by broadcasting amateur videos of the Tunisian uprising to its millions of satellite viewers across the Arab world, the channel played an active role in spreading the protests across the region. Among television news organisations it has led the way in integrating social media (such as tweets, Facebook posts and amateur online video) into its operations in order to engage with its increasingly wired audience. “The way we operate has changed because the landscape has changed dramatically,” says Moeed Ahmad, the firm’s head of new media.
Clearly something dramatic has happened to the news business. That something is, of course, the internet, which has disrupted this industry just as it has disrupted so many others. By undermining advertising revenue, making news reports a commodity and blurring the boundaries between previously distinct news organisations, the internet has upended newspapers’ traditional business model. But as well as demolishing old ways of doing things, it has also made new ones possible. As patterns of news consumption shift, much experimentation is under way. The internet may have hurt some newspapers financially, but it has stimulated innovation in journalism.
Reporters all
For consumers, the internet has made the news a far more participatory and social experience. Non-journalists are acting as sources for a growing number of news organisations, either by volunteering information directly or by posting comments, pictures or video that can be picked up and republished. Journalists initially saw this as a threat but are coming to appreciate its benefits, though not without much heart-searching. Some organisations have enlisted volunteers to gather or sift data, creating new kinds of “crowdsourced” journalism. Readers can also share stories with their friends, and the most popular stories cause a flood of traffic as recommendations ripple across social networks. Referrals from social networks are now the fastest-growing source of traffic for many news websites. Readers are being woven into the increasingly complex news ecosystem as sources, participants and distributors. “They don’t just consume news, they share it, develop it, add to it—it’s a very dynamic relationship with news,” says Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, a news website in the vanguard of integrating news with social media.
As well as making Twitter, Facebook and Google part of the news ecosystem, the internet has also made possible entirely new kinds of specialist news organisations. It has allowed WikiLeaks, for example, to accept documents anonymously and publish them to a global audience, while floating in cyberspace above national jurisdictions, operated by a small, nomadic team. Other newcomers include a host of not-for-profit news organisations that rely on philanthropic funding and specialise in particular kinds of journalism. Many of these new outfits collaborate with traditional news organisations, taking advantage of their broad reach and trusted, established brands.
All these new inhabitants of the news ecosystem have brought an unprecedented breadth and diversity of news and opinion to the business. This has cast new light on a long-running debate about the politics of journalism: when there are so many sources, does political objectivity become less important?
This special report will consider all these trends in turn, starting with a look at the state of the industry and the new business models that are emerging. It will argue that as news becomes more social, participatory, diverse and partisan, it is in many ways returning to the more chaotic, freewheeling and politically charged environment of the era before the emergence of mass media in the 19th century. And although the internet has proved hugely disruptive to journalists, for consumers—who now have a wider choice than ever of news sources and ways of accessing them—it has proved an almost unqualified blessing.
via Bulletins from the future | The Economist.
According to Spanish newspaper El País, the investigation is focused on José Luis Rodríguez Neri, the head of an SGAE subsidiary called the Digital Society of Spanish Authors (SDAE). Neri faces charges of “fraud, misappropriation of funds and disloyal administration.” On Monday, a High Court judge grilled him for more than four hours over the charges.
Investigators say Neri made payments for non-existent services to a contractor that then paid kickbacks to Neri and his associates. The contractor’s books show that it received 5 million euros from SDAE, but only reported 3.7 million euros of those funds to tax authorities.
Although Neri is the focus of the investigation, investigators suspect he did not act alone. A total of nine people associated with SGAE, including its chairman Teddy Bautista, were detained on Friday and Saturday. They were released on Sunday without bail, but their passports have been taken and they are barred from leaving Spain.
via Spanish anti-piracy execs busted for ripping off artists – Boing Boing.
The number of illegally downloaded films in the UK has gone up nearly 30% in five years, new figures suggest.
That research, from internet consultancy firm Envisional, indicates that the top five box office movies were illegally downloaded in the UK a total of 1.4 million times last year.
Film industry bosses say it is costing £170m every year and putting thousands of jobs at risk.
The research also shows a big rise in TV shows being pirated online.
Dr David Price led the the team which conducted the research and said there are four main reasons for the increase.
“We’ve seen increases in technology like faster broadband,” he said.
“The methods of piracy have become easier, with quicker downloads and easier to find content.
“We have a generation online now who aren’t really bothered about downloading things illegally.
“Finally it’s an issue of availability – there’s a lot of American content which a lot of people are desperate to download that they can’t get hold of legitimately.”
via BBC – Newsbeat – Illegal UK film downloads up 30%, new figures suggest.
2011 márciusának végén bezárt a Songo.hu, Magyarország utolsó olyan internetes zeneáruháza, mely nemcsak magyar, de nemzetközi kiadók anyagait is árusította. Ezzel beállt abba a sorba, mint a korábban már bezárt, Magyar Telekom által üzemeltetett Track.hu, illetve a CLS kiadó Mp3music.hu zeneáruháza. Ma már csak egyetlen, letöltéses modellen alapuló zeneáruház, a Dalok.hu üzemel, a többiekhez képest sokkal szerényebb kínálattal, hiszen csak magyar előadók zenéit kínálja eladásra. A megszűnés különösen fájó a hazai jogvédő szervezeteknek és zenei tartalomtulajdonosoknak, hiszen a bevezetni tervezett „kalóztörvény” egyik kiindulópontja az volt, hogy létezik olyan legális forrás, ahonnan a zenei tartalmak jelentős része beszerezhető. A most kialakult helyzet viszont komoly munícióval szolgál azoknak, akik az illegális letöltést azzal védik, hogy legális módon nincs lehetőség zenei tartalmak beszerzésére.
Pedig a kezdetek optimizmusra adtak okot.
A 2000-es évek első évtizedének derekára a hazai szélessávú internetes hálózatfejlesztés eredményeképpen a fogyasztói oldalon megjelent az igény arra, hogy az interneten már ne csak szöveges tartalmat lehessen fogyasztani, hanem egyéb audiovizuálisakat is. Több oka is van annak, hogy első körben a zenei tartalmat kínáló online áruházak jelentek meg. Egy cd-nyi tömörített zenei tartalom letöltése maximum tíz percet vett igénybe, míg egy film esetében ez meghaladta volna az egy órát is az akkori sávszélességek mellett. További előny volt az is, hogy a zenei tartalmak jogtulajdonosai relatív koncentráltak voltak (a négy nemzetközi zenei kiadó és a korábbi állami monopóliumból átalakult Hungaroton). Optimizmusra adott okot az is, hogy 2005 közepére már félmilliárd zeneszámot töltöttek le az Apple Itunes Store-jából.
Eleinte biztatóan alakultak a forgalmi adatok, azonban 2008-ra a növekedés megállt, majd ugyanazzal a dinamikával csökkenésbe váltott. A legális online zeneletöltés sikertelenségének okait vizsgálva láthatjuk, hogy a kudarcban az értéklánc összes szereplője szerepet vállalt. A nemzetközi kiadók anyagaik átadásakor ragaszkodtak a másolásvédelmi technológiák bevezetéséhez. A digitális jogvédelmi (DRM) rendszereknek azonban megvan az a hátrányuk, hogy erősen korlátozzák a fogyasztó szabad választását a zenehallgatás tekintetében. A DRM rendszer platformfüggetlenségének hiánya a nem Windows-alapú számítógépek és különösen az okostelefonok piaci részesedésének robbanásszerű növekedésével jelentősen csökkentette a potenciális vásárlók számát, hiszen ezekkel már nem lehetett meghallgatni a megvásárolt zenéket. Nem segítette a piac fejlődését az a tény sem, hogy a nemzetközi kiadók nagyon szigorú területi korlátozással adták át anyagaikat, így a felvevőpiac Magyarországra korlátozódott. Ez viszont a méretgazdaságosság elérését akadályozta meg, hiszen nincsenek nagyságrendbeli különbségek fejlesztés, üzemeltetés és beruházás tekintetében egy 10 milliós vagy egy 100 milliós piac kiszolgálása esetén. Viszont egy tízszer akkora piac esetén tízszer gyorsabb megtérüléssel lehet számolni.
A kudarc egy másik oka az árban keresendő. Sajnos a nagykereskedelmi árak és a jogdíjak megállapítását követően kialakuló végfelhasználói ár sok esetben megegyezett a hagyományos cd-ével, sőt néha még meg is haladta azt. Mindezt úgy, hogy a megvásárolt virtuális zene – a digitális tömörítés miatt – rosszabb minőségű, mint a cd, illetve a hagyományos lemezekkel ellentétben nem adja meg a vásárlóknak a fizikai birtoklás érzetét. A közös jogkezelők piacromboló hatású, magas minimumdíjú jogdíjszámításának következtében az eladott zenék jelentős hányadánál a fizetendő jogdíj önmaga elérte a bruttó 70 forintot. Tovább drágította a végfelhasználói árakat a fizetési szolgáltatók magas tranzakciódíja is.
 Az árak nem vették figyelembe a fogyasztási attitűd változását sem. Húsz-harminc évvel ezelőtt egy átlagos zenehallgató jellemzően 3-500 dalt tartalmazó kazetta- vagy lemezgyűjteménnyel rendelkezett, addig a mai zenefogyasztó akár tízezres repertoárt is hallgathat. Ez pedig azt jelenti, hogy az egy dalra jutó fajlagos szabadidő töredékére csökkent, így annak értéke is töredékére esett. Emellett pedig az átlag magyar internetfelhasználó az évek során úgy szocializálódott, hogy az interneten található tartalmak a szabad jószág kategóriájába esnek, így nem érez belső késztetést arra, hogy azokért fizessen.Mindezen körülmények miatt egyre szélesebb körben terjednek el azok a nézetek, melyek szerint a zenei kiadók már elvesztették a harcot, és csak idő kérdése, hogy mikorra válnak teljesen ingyenessé a zenei tartalmak. Egy biztos, a hagyományos üzleti modell az internetes zenefogyasztásban halott, ha már eleve nem halva született. Ma nincs a világon olyan fizetős, internetes zenei szolgáltatás, amely önmagában nyereséges lenne. Az oly sokszor példaként felhozott Apple zeneáruház is csak a magas fedezeti hányaddal rendelkező hardvereladás nyereségességéből keresztfinanszírozott, önmagában nem lenne életképes.
Persze az élet nem áll meg, a jogtulajdonosok, szolgáltatók újabb és újabb üzleti modelleket húznak elő a cilinderből. Pár éve a reklámalapú streamingszolgáltatások tűntek befutónak. Azonban az egyik legkomolyabb szolgáltatónak, a Spotifynak az a lépése, hogy megszünteti az ingyenes szolgáltatást (pontosabban annyira lekorlátozza, hogy az gyakorlatilag felér a megszüntetéssel), és havidíjassá teszi azt, mutatja, hogy ez a modell sem vált sikeressé. Hasonló alapon működik a pár hete Magyarországon elindított Superbox.hu, amely havidíjas konstrukcióban kínál korlátlanul zenét. Komoly hibája, hogy csak egyetlen nemzetközi kiadó anyagát tartalmazza, valamint a felhasznált technológia következtében mobileszközökön nem élvezhető. A korábbi hasonló hazai szolgáltatások tapasztalatait figyelembe véve sajnos ettől a szolgáltatástól sem várható komolyabb áttörés.
Végül pedig azoknak, akik lemaradtak a fizetős online zenei piac vesszőfutásáról, és szeretnék ugyanezeket a problémákat valós időben megfigyelni: „kapcsoljanak át” az ebookok piacára! Érdemes.
(forrás: Kreatív )
BE Broadband surveyed a few hundred customers and asked them whether they are aware of the Digital Economy Act, and how they think their file-sharing habits would change under the new law. The results are intriguing.
Of all the respondents who use file-sharing networks (85% of the total sample) more than 94 percent say they will not share less when the Digital Economy Act gets into full swing. Instead, the majority of the file-sharers say they will simply take measures to hide their IP-address, by using VPN and proxy services for example.
via ISP Survey: Three Strikes Won’t Deter Pirates | TorrentFreak.
Signing a deal that makes anyone a net profit participant in a Hollywood movie deal has always been a sucker’s bet. In an era where studios have all but eliminated first dollar gross and invited talent to share the risk and potential rewards, guess what? Net profit deals are still a sucker’s bet. I was slipped a net profit statement below for Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, the 2007 Warner Bros sequel. Though the film grossed $938.2 million worldwide, the accounting statement below conveys that the film is still over $167 million in the red. Text continues below…harry potter net profits
via STUDIO SHAME! Even Harry Potter Pic Loses Money Because Of Warner Bros’ Phony Baloney Net Profit Accounting – Deadline.com.
Now on sale in some online marketplaces: cheap, illegal access to SciFinder, an extensive database of scholarly articles and information about chemical compounds run by a division of the American Chemical Society. The sellers are pirates, hawking stolen or leaked SciFinder account information from college students and professors.”There are reseller Web sites in China where we’ve purchased access to our own products for pennies on the dollar,” says Michael Dennis, vice president for legal administration and applied research at the Chemical Abstracts Service, the division that publishes SciFinder. “We’re shutting down hundreds of these every couple of months,” he says, though in some cases the publisher has trouble taking effective action against sites in other countries.
via Academic Publisher Steps Up Efforts to Stop Piracy of Its Online Products – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Friday nights in Romania under the Communist regime which came to an end in December 1989, friends and family would gather in front of their television sets, trying to guess what they were actually watching. Telephone calls would be made, film reference and theory books consulted. Such detective skills were required due to the government’s censorship tactics, which included screening foreign films both on television and in cinemas with their titles altered beyond recognition, their credit sequences removed, entire scenes eliminated, and dialogue ideologically “cleansed” through the subtitling process. 1 Coauthor and Romanian national Ioana Uricaru recalls that “God” was invariably translated as Cel-de-Sus, or “the one above,” and “church” as edificiu, or “edifice.” 2 Sometimes films playing in cinemas would differ dramatically at the beginning and end of their run as elements requiring excision came to the attention of officials. 3Subtitling was the translation method associated with government media channels. As such, it was considered official, professional, and proper—both “ideologically correct” and the industry standard. With subtitles, interference of the “original” is kept at a minimum. 4 As lines of text superimposed onto the film image, subtitles neither erase nor noisily intrude upon the foreign soundtrack. Consequently, they are often viewed as a clean technique that respects the source material by enabling it to remain intact. However, in Romania the identification of subtitling with “quality” translation was compromised by its close link to adjacent practices of content deletion and paraphrasing for the sake of ideological alteration. The role that subtitling played in making meaning palatable for the “party line” meant that this technique was, concurrently, subject to suspicion and distrust
via Project MUSE – The Velvet Light Trap – Slashings and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship, and Translation.
As TorrentFreak, one of the first blogs to report on the Locker case, points out: If only 10,000 of the alleged infringers pay a $2,000 settlement, it would net $20 million for Voltage and USCG. In comparison, The Hurt Locker grossed $17 million at the U.S. box office.
via Hurt Locker lawsuit: 50,000 sued for BitTorrent downloads – Jun. 10, 2011.
A Hamisítás Elleni Nemzeti Testület publikálta honlapján annak a felmérésnek eredményeit, amelyet 2011. március-április hónapban végeztek. Az online kérdőívre az ország 241 középiskolájának 17435 diákja válaszolt.
via A középiskolások többsége szerint jár pénz a dalokért – eszerint.blog.hu.
The explosive growth of ereading is creating the biggest change to the publishing industry since Gutenberg. Bricks-and-mortar sales are declining as digital distribution and self-publishing rise. The rapid proliferation and adoption of ereading devices by tens of millions of US consumers are accelerating these trends.
As ebooks reshape the industry, publishers, booksellers, and device manufacturers need to understand trends and changes in consumption patterns quicker than ever before. Our latest survey uncovers consumer behaviors and attitudes towards ebooks that can help industry players face challenges and exploit opportunities in the brave new world of publishing.
Elastic Path's consumer research report on ebooks reveals:
Why and how consumers read digital content
How much they spend on ebooks versus print books
How they discover books and where they buy
And more….
via Brave New Publishing World: Assessing the Impact of Ebooks on Consumers | Elastic Path Software.
The year 2010 was similar to 2009 in that the domestic box office hit a record high, once again, while the domestic video retail market was continuing its steady decline as consumers alter their home video viewing habits.Consumers are now opting to sign up for streaming and/or rental services, such as Netflix Inc. They are using video-on-demand services more and more, as they discover these services can be cost-effective.Unfortunately for studios, the revenue from VOD has not yet offset the resulting drop in DVD sale revenue, which was their top earner for more than a decade now.We tracked 415 titles in our database that were released on DVD in 2010, and among those titles, wholesale revenue dropped by 43.9% from $7.97 billion in 2009 to $4.47 billion in 2010. It is important to note that this does not include Blu-ray revenue, which grew significantly in 2010. It should also be noted that this sample of the video market does not include library titles, direct-to-video titles and TV on DVD, as well. When looking at the video retail market as a whole, consumer spending only declined 10.8% to $11.86 billion in 2010.The average wholesale price was relatively flat when compared with 2009, but there were significantly fewer units shipped, down 43.8% to nearly 226.0 million.On average, films shipped 545,000 units and made $10.8 million in wholesale revenue, off 52.4% from the $22.6 million average in 2009. In the past five years, average wholesale revenue posted a negative 13.7% CAGR.
via SNL: Article.
Netflix knocked over a new milestone Monday: It now has more subscribers than the largest cable TV operator in the U.S.
Netflix's global subscriber base grew almost 70% over the past year, to 23.6 million users. With that audience, it dethroned Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500) as the country's biggest provider of subscription video content. More than 7% of Americans now subscribe to Netflix.
Those details came out Monday in Netflix's (NFLX) first-quarter report, in which the company reported earnings of of $60.2 million, or $1.11 a share. That's up from $32 million, or 59 cents a share, a year ago.
Revenue rose 46% to $719 million. Both figures topped Wall Street estimates, but shares fell 2.5% in after-hours trade on light forecasts for the second quarter.
via Netflix tops Comcast as largest video subscription service – Apr. 25, 2011.
Creative Destruction and Copyright Protection, a paper by the London School of Economics' Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng, is an eye-opening look at the economics of file-sharing and music. The authors argue that an overall decline in consumer entertainment spending is to blame for the music industry's downturn, supporting their assertion with (for example), research showing that entertainment spending declined by 40 percent in households that didn't own computers (who probably weren't downloading!) over the period of overall decline for the industry.
via Boing Boing.
The injunction was the result of a lengthy and ongoing litigation process which dates back to 2006, and soon after it was awarded the record labels filed a claim to recoup damages said to have been caused by LimeWire. The labels calculated that the company behind the popular file-sharing client owes them up to a billion dollars.
The case dragged on and in recent weeks dozens of documents were submitted to the court in a noteworthy side-battle. To get to the bottom of how the music industry sets up licensing deals with other Internet companies, LimeWire subpoenaed internal emails from Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and others.
Thus far a quarter million pages of emails have been collected, leading LimeWire to draw some interesting conclusions. Among other things, they found that unauthorized downloads actually boosted the revenue of music labels, and that their income took a dive when LimeWire shut down.
via LimeWire Settles With Record Labels, Still Faces $1 Billion Claim | TorrentFreak.
http://www.itworld.com/%5Bprimary-term%5D/138187/music-execs-stressed-over-free-streaming
Free streaming services are replacing piracy as the chief culprit of music industry revenue loss in the minds of fiscally frustrated executives, if a number of panel discussions at a New York digital music conference are any indication.
People are listening to more music than ever before, but they are paying less for it, noted Russ Crupnick, a president at the analyst firm NPD Group, speaking at the Digital Music Forum East conference, held Thursday in New York.
Crupnick noted that the average consumer listened to music 19.7 hours a week in 2010, up from 18.5 hours per week in 2009. But at the same time, consumers have been buying less music. In 2010, only 50 percent of consumers purchased music, by either buying a CD or paying for a downloadable music track, down from 70 percent in 2006.
“We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years,” Crupnick said. Moreover, only about 14 percent of buyers account for 56 percent of revenue for the recording industry.
“Consumers have flipped us the bird,” Crupnick concluded, adding that the lost sales has thus far not been made up yet by other forms of revenue, such as concerts or merchandise sales.
The music industry has long expected that sales of music CDs would decline, as consumers move their libraries to computers and portable listening devices. Digital sales, however, have not made up for the shortfall on CD sales over the past decade. Last year, digital sales accounted for about 23 percent of all music sales, which is up only modestly from 14 percent in 2006, Crupnick said.
“We never really made the digital transformation,” he said.
The reasons behind this sales decline have been routinely debated at this conference over the past decade, the panelists noted. In years past, music executives put the blame on digital music piracy — the easy and free sharing of music with Internet software like BitTorrent — for eroding sales of recorded music.
At this year's conference, however, concern centered on the growing influence of free streaming Internet services, such as Pandora, MySpace, Spotify and even YouTube. Music listeners deploy YouTube as a streaming service, picking the songs they want to hear and minimizing the browser window, noted Eric Garland, who is the CEO and founder of BigChampagne, a media tracking company.
via Music execs stressed over free streaming | ITworld.
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