Category: Internet

Pandora Internet Radio to shutter their service soon?

A pretty interesting tech article in the Post today about the 900lb gorilla in the room for Internet radio. Despite some of the best traffic numbers in their company’s short history (thank you to the iPhone) the start-up company Pandora may soon have to shutter their service.

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

At issue is the onerous rate that Internet radio stations have to pay for their services.

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.

As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.

I’ve always said the short term greed of the existing content players could kill the medium of Internet radio before it really got its start. No where in the computations are the added per listener cost of Internet radio–it costs more to have more people listen, unlike traditional radio which has a one off broadcasting hardware cost no matter if 1 or 1000 people listen to their station.

Sen. Jesse Helms brokered the last Internet radio survival package but he has passed away. Some on Capitol Hill are trying to find a solution, but the recording industry’s deep pockets full of cash going into the re-election campaigns of many members is hard to ignore. This is one issue in which money talks far more than Republican or Democrat (one of the worst on this issue is the Democrat John Conyers but one of the ones trying to save Internet radio is the Democrat Howard Berman)

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How the iPhone is changing radio forever.

Steve Jobs doesn't need an anti-satellite missile to knock out XM & Sirius

I’ve already written a bit about my thoughts on the iPhone and how it will kill Satellite radio and a review of the iPhone radio applications, but Doc Searls is writing today about his similar experiences using the iPhone as the radio interface in his car. He raises a number of interesting points including:

4) The cell phone system will become a data system that carries telephony, rather than the vice versa we have now. The same goes for the Net at home as well. What we still have in both cases is dial-up: data piggy-backing on telephony or cable TV. In terms of provider priorities, that’s the way it’s been for awhile, but the flip is going to come, and the sooner we all adjust to that, the better.

5) The iPhone is less a phone than a platform for mobile Internet applications that start with telephony. Voice will always be the primary personal mobile communications activity; but it will be one application, or set of applications, among many. Radio is another of those applications.

Radio has had a decade of on again off again experience with the Internet and streaming, but it’s just never caught on due in large part to the ‘tethered to the computer’ experience that was required. People simply weren’t about to replace their clock radios with a PC and Internet radio devices just never could get a hold into the market (despite a lot of us trying). And on top of that, it didn’t work in the car (where many people do their radio listening). In short, the radio stations had it easy because it was so hard to listen to the competition.

But that’s over. The iPhone changes EVERYTHING. Yea it’s not the first to do streaming, nor is it the fastest of cheapest platform, but it is the first MASS MARKET adaptation of Internet radio to the car and other places that we’ve seen. You take all the Internet radio devices sold from when I came up with the idea nearly 10 years ago to now and you have less than the number of people who downloaded the Pandora radio application for the iPhone in the first six days. There are now nearly 4 million iPhones out there in the last year, with some of the free radio applications being the top downloads. It took XM six years to get to that number of subscribers. Who do you think is going to win the race for a listeners’ ears?

Quite simply, radio stations who are not paying attention will be radio stations who are out of business in the next five to ten years.

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Best Buy to start selling iPhones

Figured folks are tired of talking about the Olympics and Russia, so a bit of tech news.

The lines I saw at the Apple store this weekend are an indication demand is still pretty high, so Apple is now looking to find some additional retailers to carry the hyper-popular iPhone 3G. Today it was announced that Best Buy is going to start carrying the iPhone starting in September. Analysts are now projecting 4.7 million iPhones to be sold this quarter.

I’m still loving my phone. I’ve added a few more applications including Phone Saber and the Paper Football lite games. Pandora continues to be my number one used application.

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Estonian network engineers rush to Georgia to help fight Russian cyberwar attacks

Computer engineers from another former Soviet republic are rushing to the aid of Georgia, armed not with weapons but with computers. Russia and Georgia are engaged in a ‘cyberwar’ of sorts attacking each others networks and websites, and now some computer networking engineers from Estonia are rushing to aid their Georgian colleagues who are dealing with hacking, Denial of Service attacks and other networking issues.

Two of the four experts that staff Estonia’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) were waiting Tuesday morning in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, seeking permission to drive into Georgia, said Katrin Pärgmäe, communication manager for the Estonian Informatics Center. The two officials are also bringing humanitarian aid, she said.

Estonia is also now hosting Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site, which has been under sustained attack over the last few days.

Russia was accused of hacking Estonian computer systems in response to that country removing statues of former Soviet leaders.

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Verizon's FIOS finally coming to Washington DC

Despite being surrounded by some of the first communities in the country to get FIOS, and a relatively dense population core crying out for FIOS to be rolled out in the District proper, Verizon was dragging their feet for the last few years about rolling out the high speed service to DC residents. Well that wait is no more.

The District and Verizon Communications have reached an agreement to bring the company’s FiOS high-speed Internet service to the city.

Eric Richardson, director of D.C. Office of Cable Television, said the agreement requires approval by the mayor’s office and the D.C. Council, a process he said could be completed by the end of the year. Richardson said negotiations took nine months, less time than it has taken the District to work out previous cable franchise agreements.

As FIOS is a tv delivery platform, it often runs afoul of monopolistic cable tv agreements that cities have established with ‘cable’ companies. Whether or not these rollouts are done within the franchise agreements that exist (likely) or the result of total deregulation of the cable / Internet providing rules (ha) is yet to be established, but it doesn’t seem likely Verizon is going in anyplace where they don’t have a few regulatory barriers to entry in place already to prevent competitors.

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How to watch the Olympics online.

This year will see far more streams and other resources for folks wanting to catch the Olympics online. Some are legal, and many many more are not.

The first and easiest way, for an American, is to logon to NBC or MSNBC’s Olympic site and simply click the ‘Video’ section. NBC is showing 2,400 hours of coverage online (starting today with Women’s Soccer, eventhough the opening ceremony is still 48 hours away). To watch online will require the Microsoft program Silverlight (free) which works on Windows and Mac (not sure about the LINUX version just yet).

Youtube will have some Olympic coverage for folks in Africa and South America.

Then there is the option of http://www.myp2p.eu. These are peer to peer TV program links, requiring you to download Sopcast or TVAnts. It will be interesting to see how long these sites stay online and whether their feeds get interfered with by the authorities.

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Will you be able to watch the Olympics on the Internet with P2P / Internet TV?

Well that’s something we’ll probably have to wait until Friday to find out. Rumors abound that sites like myp2p.eu will have tons of links that work with TVAnts and Sopcast, but ‘officially’ all Internet streams are supposed to be ‘region locked’ to specific areas.

FTA (Free to Air) satellite might also yield a few stations that have streams. CCTV 4 and CCTV 9 are not going to have live coverage apparently as only CCTV stations within China will be allowed to show the games. Of course CCTV 1-10 are the most popular stations on most Internet TV p2p programs.

There are lots of hints of ‘destructive efforts’ to prevent pirated feeds from going out on the net, and with the Chinese government sitting on some massive computer power and a certain less than ‘live and let live’ attitude, I suspect we’ll see some interesting jamming activities.

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WINAMP remote for the iPhone now released

A remote control program for WinAmp fans is now available on the iPhone. It connects by wifi to your computer playing WinAmp and lets you move around your library, see what is playing, along with the bouncing visualization layout.

Of course, the $4.99 price tag might turn some off, but those who are wedded to winamp as a platform (instead of say iTunes) may find this of value. Itunes has its own remote (free) which lets you control the content in much the same manner.

Itunes Store –> App Store –> Music –>

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