Comcast announced 250 gigabyte caps per month on all its customers.  While the cap is much higher than Time Warner’s 5 gig cap and more than 99 percent of its subscribers use, the precedent is scary for all interest users.

Much of internet innovation has unlimited usage to thank.  Web video, VOIP, online video games, and more have enjoyed years of breathing room to enter people’s homes.  With bandwidth caps, however high, every YouTube video comes with a price tag.

Comcast technically has a right to limit its network. The problem is a lack real competition.  I could only get Comcast in my last apartment. In my new apartment, I can choose between content filtering and slower AT&T DSL or Comcast. No other company is allowed in my building. So Comcast gets away with bandwidth caps. Time Warner gets away with it.  And the tiny few remaining cable providers get away with it too.  It’s a competition to taking away value from customers, not adding value.

Further, should Comcast and Time Warner want customers using more bandwidth? That would make us more reliant on their services. Already I’d pay a premium for speed (if I could find a place that offered FIOS) and as more people find use in online video and services, more people will want faster speeds with more bandwidth. Instead, Comcast wants to offer you less, charge you the same, and ignore the future. Never a good business strategy, unless you have no competition.

I’m starting graduate school and the horror of textbook prices are draining valuable video game money (and playtime). Several stories have commented on the digital future of textbooks which looks bleak.  Publishers have a loyal clientele in students who must buy overpriced books to keep up in class. Universities and professors are complacent, keeping this archaic system going instead of looking for alternatives.

Wired Campus writes about surveyed students demands for digital textbooks, from costing less than the printed versions and allowing them to be printed.  Many digital textbooks cost the same as their print versions, but limit what you can print and expire after 180 days (with no resale value like the book).

The problem is textbook publishers have little incentive to innovate.  Students spend the money, but only universities and professors can sway what books get assigned (and thus sold).  As long as universities keep assigning expensive textbooks, publishers will continue to gouge students without consequence.

Piracy is starting to nip at the textbook market, but students, like me, who like printed versions find piracy a last resort. Pirate Bay and Textbook Torrents offer surprisingly large supplies of required texts that have only recently caught the eye of publishers.  Instead of recognizing an opportunity, textbook publishers are pushing digital supplements to their textbooks, requiring expensive subscriptions to supplement “losses” to piracy.

Textbooks could thrive in the digital space. Some writers and professors are experimenting with free, open-source e-textbooks to letting students write their own textbook on Wikibooks.  To encourage publishers to conduct their own experiments, professors and universities must unite to represent their students. Students can’t do anything (except file-share) as long as professors assign expensive textbooks.  Schools should screen books for pricing and reward publishers that sell books at fair prices.

I just joined Skyfire’s private beta and my response is wow. Skyfire crams a full desktop experience into the tiny mobile screen for Windows Mobile with impressive speed and sleek design.  This includes full Flash support, putting all of YouTube and Hulu on your phone. Even Ajax and Java heavy sites like Google Reader run smoothly.  Many options are lacking in this early version, but the browsing experience is an impressive sign of browsing to come.

Skyfire’s compatibility works better than the iPhone Safari but lacks features needed to be the best.  You can’t change your start page (though the Skyfire homepage conveniently includes your bookmarks and history). There’s no tabbing or fit-to-screen zoom like on Opera meaning I’ll keep Opera around for text heavy sites.  The touch controls take some getting used to - the iPhone still wins on easy-of-use with multi-touch zoom. Most frustrating is the free browser needs to authenticate and closes if you loose your connection.

Unfortunately, Skyfire remains in private beta with no invites, so a lot of this is just me showing off. These many frustrations prevent Skyfire from becoming my default browser, but showing off YouTube and Hulu to my iPhone wielding friends makes it a must have application.  See screenshots after the jump.

Continue reading…

While newspapers, it seems fun to find alternative news outlets.  Twitter gets lots of hype for being the newsroom of tomorrow. The most recent example is Twitter users being the first post about the LA earthquake.

But Twitter is not a newsroom. It’s not meant to be a newsroom. It helps news spread, but so do water coolers and and town criers.  But 140 characters of information doesn’t make a newsroom, but it helps the newsroom find news.

Newspapers are in trouble so looking for the next thing is a popular topic, but trying to anoint something as the “Future of…” is shortsighted. Twitter is still an experiment, one that doesn’t make money and gets crushed by its popularity. Twitter could be replaced by the next-big thing in a few months.

Twitter should, for now, be another tool in a journalists arsenal. A tweet alluding to an LA earthquake should send the journalist to their phone for confirmation.

News can be an bit of information, but a newsroom provides more. A newsroom needs to provide relevant information, context, what has happened, is happening, and will happen next. A tweet can’t provide that.  Even rapid fire wire services like AP and Reuters churn out several hundred words on events that happened minutes or hours before. Tweets might help cut that response time down.

The key difference is journalists should read Twitter. Everyone else will still read the journalists.

NBC is planning to saturate August will more hours of Olympics coverage than all Olympics TV before combined. 2,000 hours will be featured online and the rest spread across NBC and its assortment of cable stations. But the big numbers cloud NBC’s flawed new media strategy that still focuses on limited, controlled content, missing the perfect opportunity to build new business models.

NBC is limited the popular events to its networks and leaving fencing and kayaking online along will lots of behind the scenes footages only the most die-hard will watch. Other news organizations are banned from using any videos of the events and even have to take down footage of the Olympic trials once the games start.  NBC is also hyping its anti-piracy efforts to keep footage off other video sites with China promising to “attack” websites hosting unlicensed footage.

Ironically, with all this effort, NBC plans to loose money on the Olympics.  Spending $800 million to air the games lets the network publicize its own shows and fall line-up.  If the Olympics are all about promotion, then why doesn’t NBC want it promoted?

By limiting how and when and where people can watch the games only means people won’t watch them or will go behind NBC’s back to get what they want.  If pirated copies of the games meet consumers needs, then that’s what consumers will find.

NBC had a gold mine here where they could flood the web with all the Olympics footage possible.  Provide some embedding code and let the steaming video spread. People could then watch the videos where they want when they want with streamed ads in tacked.  Providing the same content on demand brings more people to Olympics websites, where they can be exposed to more information on events, merchandise, and shows, even if the video isn’t found on an NBC affiliated site.

The fact that NBC already plans on taking a loss should encourage them to take risks with their online strategy.  Instead NBC is pushing leftovers on the internet and keeping the fresh meat for the networks. If its online strategy fails to meet expectations, NBC will unlikely consider the poor choice in content.  If it successful, whatever that means, then I’ll wonder how much better it could have done with real, shareable content.

After Google Video and Microsoft’s PlayForSure showed what not to do, Yahoo Music decided it wanted to be an example for what not to do in digital media.  Yahoo announced it will discontinue support for its DRM at the end of September, locking DRMed tracks to a single computer.

Microsoft tried to discontinue its PlayForSure DRM a few months ago, but has agreed to leave it up for a few more years.  Google Video discontinued its DRM, offering refunds for all purchases.  Only after some outcry did Yahoo agree to refund customers or provide DRM-free tracks.

All this ends up being expensive for everyone involved, whether its maintaining servers or refunding every customer you’ve ever had. Soon consumers will realize DRM deprives them of value they expect, like owning the music tracks they paid for.  Of course, consumers can always go to file-sharing networks which are free and DRM-free. That’s the competition, remember.

Shameless plug: I’ll be at the Flow Conference Oct. 9th in Austin, Tex. speaking on a roundtable about music and DRM in case anyone’s in the area.

The Dark Knight hit theaters two weeks ago to monumental hype, an unmatched marketing budget, and rave reviews from critics and fans. But according to Warner Bros., the Dark Knight’s record $158 million opening weekend came all thanks to the movie company’s anti-piracy efforts.

The LA Times decided to regurgitate corporate spin profiling Warner Bros. “painstaking care to thwart pirates” preventing the movie from hitting file-sharing networks.  The six month anti-piracy bonanza kept camcorder versions of the film off the web for a whole 38 hours, by Friday night.

Warner Bros. is once again missing the point.  Dark Knight did this well because it’s an amazing movie people wanted to see.  That’s why IMAX theaters were sold out into August before the movie opened.  A theater experience, especially IMAX, is a different experience than a person can get at home, whether its a social outing or better quality facilities with surround sound and bigger screens. Word-of-mouth likely helped Dark Knight break the record for second weekend gross, a week after pirated copies surfaced.

The LA Times tries to support Warner Bros. theory, but ends up proving otherwise.  It cites Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk got leaked two weeks before the movie opened leading to terrible reviews from fans.  The movie wasn’t that good, though it still made $62 million its opening weekend, even with pirated DVDs having a two week head start.

The LA Times also points out Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith had DVD-quality screeners leaked online days before the movie opened.  But good reviews and word of mouth led the movie to gross $380 million domestically.

What the LA Times left out was how much money and man power Warner Bros. wasted on its anti-piracy efforts and how much of that could have been shifted to marketing or merchandising or just saved.  Pirates will get copies of movies and they will share them.  Movies succeed when they are quality pictures offered in compelling ways so people want to see them.  Maybe Warner Bros. should lessen its six month anti-piracy efforts and think up ways to make the movie experience even more compelling.

Any web 2.0 business model must, by law, include five or more buzz words from user-generated content to API to social networking to get venture funding.  Companies are desperately trying to use social media like Facebook, Second Life, and even the iPhone to manufacture marketing and attention. The result is start-ups and established companies focusing resources because that’s where the hype is rather than where the smart business is.

Hype is the keyword here.  An already popular company like Facebook or Apple launch something new and obviously there’s hype.  But this hype is not contagious.  A former boss of mine said the reason we were developing an iPhone app before we had a mobile site was to “Get some attention when the app store launches.”

For start-ups limited in resources, jumping on the internet bandwagon is more often a waste and at best a distraction.  It’s best to focus on building your own features and worth to make sure once people find you, they want to stay.  Building applications for other platforms fragments your audience and time - what you build on Facebook needs to be rebuilt for the iPhone and rebuilt for Netvibes.

Second Life has become a prime example of hype overblowing marketing potential.  Last year, just as another company I worked for wanted to build a Second Life presence, Wired wrote about the marketing waste the virtual world had become. Coca-Cola, Reebok, IBM, Sears, and dozens more build huge islands with style and zazz, paying high-profile Second Life consultants and expecting the viral marketing to take off.  But no one visited.  The hype came from companies trying out Second Life, but no one ever posting resulting.  Since Second Life accounts are free, the 4 million users it boasts is misleading.  Only 1 million had logged on in the past 30 days and only a third of that in the past week.  Only 100,000 of those live in the U.S.  Those who do sign on spend most of their time in sex shops or gambling, not looking at marketing campaigns.

Facebook is likely to follow. Facebook itself is having trouble monetizing its massive user base, how do third parties expect to do better?  iPhone applications can be sold for money, which makes them less viral.  And working with any closed platform like Facebook or Apple puts the platform in control of your future.  Facebook suddenly blocked some of its most popular applications, Top Friends, Super Wall, and Social Me, with little notice and challenges to get back in the platforms good graces.

The opposite strategy of releasing your own API is more worth the time (if it makes sense for your product and not just a buzz word for investors) but has its own risks.  Twitter’s success and constant downtime are both due to their API.  Without the API, much of the sites usefulness wouldn’t have happened leading so many to join.  But because of the API’s popularity, the site can barely keep basic features operational.

So this is a lot of don’t.  The dos, unfortunately, are the hardest because it needs to be case-by-case.  Because there are so many platforms and APIs and doodads to try and sync up with, it’s impossible to say everyone should do this.  The key is when deciding how you want your product to integrate with the greater web world, think about your own strength and goals rather than bullet list features.  Everyone is pushing the same bullet lists.  You’ll stand out more by not.

The Economist has two articles showing the lighter side of piracy, reveal how media and software companies are using file-sharing systems to help their businesses.

Music companies find out which bands are popular using file-sharing statistics tracked by companies like BigChampagne.  These statistics help decide tour locations and target advertising dollars.

Movie and TV companies are using file-sharing statistics from BigChampagne to set advertising rates for online video sites like Hulu.

Software also benefits, as Bill Gates says “It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.”  90 percent of PCs in China use Windows from mostly pirated sources. Gates recognizes long term revenue increases from loyal Microsoft users than if the company fought piracy, pushing companies to free alternatives.

While admitting piracy helps their businesses, these companies continue to fight file-sharing in every possible way.  Piracy needs to stop being scapegoated, but rather embraced as a competitor - something to learn from and beat at its own game.

[Via Against Monopoly]

Jon and Al Kaplan continue telling Prodigeek about their unique musical talents.  Click here to read part 1 of the interview with creators of Silence: The Musical and 24 Season 2 Musical.

Prodigeek: What can you tell me about the 24 Season 2 Musical? How did that come together?

Kaplans: Our mother kept bothering us to follow up Silence with this “the musical” or that “the musical” and we just couldn’t stand it anymore so we decided to adapt our favorite season of 24. We also liked the idea of doing a musical that was so weirdly specific and even more impossible to stage than Silence was.

Prodigeek: Haha, very true I’m sure

Kaplans: So we wouldn’t have to worry about other people taking it and staging it

Prodigeek: What musicals did your mother suggest?

Kaplans: Our mom would suggest literally anything she saw on cable. She even suggested a musical about her new husband. Which actually would have been funny but only to us.

Prodigeek: I think the 24 musical is funny, even though I prefer season 4 mostly due to my hatred of Kim Bauer and the killer cougar.

Kaplans: That Kim story is the reason we had to do season 2. And Kevin Dillon. As straight seasons, 4 and 5 were our favorite. 2 had more to offer musically.

Continue reading…