Nothing says fun like a videogame explosion. A new physics chip makes it superrealistic.

By Patricia Huang | Jul 24, 2006 | 599 words, 0 images

Nothing says fun like a videogame Humvee blown to shards of glass and steel. A new physics chip makes the carnage superrealistic.

Rebels have attacked a presidential summit in Mexico City, and the President of the United States has been taken hostage. It’s your job to rescue him, as leader of an elite Army squad in the new videogame Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. After lunch one recent day Manju Hegde plays it on his office PC to show off its stunning realism, with drooping utility lines, dank alleyways and weathered buildings.

But Hegde is especially keen on the detritus of destruction: When he lowers his onscreen rifle and fires at a concrete sidewalk, it pulverizes with hundreds of fragments flying; when he hits a stone facade it breaks into chunks of varying sizes. These eerily realistic results come from the rapid-fire calculations of a new chip developed by Hegde’s firm, Ageia.

For years videogame developers have relied on graphics chips and software to spruce up their images, but Ageia has made a "physics chip," devoted solely to ensuring that when things explode, tear and shatter, they do so by the same laws of nature as in the real world.

Artillery battles, car crashes and lava eruptions involve complex calculations of force, acceleration and fluid dynamics. Brawny graphics chips and general-purpose microprocessors can handle the math only so far before the game slows down. So designers fudge it. They use boilerplate explosions–stone chunks tumble in the same scripted ways, and debris vanishes from underfoot.

With Ageia’s PhysX processor, a gun’s recoil knocks you down, and clothing can snag. A grenade tossed into a car can send a chunk of it flying so it destroys the bridge above. Debris remains where you can trip over or kick it and then watch the dust settle.

The PhysX processor debuted in May as a $300 plug-in card or comes inside Dell’s latest XPS gaming PCs. The extra cost may dissuade gaming novices, many of whom have in any case moved on to consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation. But Hegde aspires to push beyond the fiercest gamers. Here he is up against far bigger graphics cardmakers ATI and Nvidia, which are touting improved physics capabilities using new software from gaming effects heavyweight Havok of Ireland. Developers of more than 150 console and PC game titles already use Havok software to enliven their games.

The PhysX processor splits its number-crunching tasks among several dozen processing cores totaling 125 million transistors (fewer than the latest Intel Core Duo microprocessors). One core handles ballistic physics, another fracture mechanics, another clothing simulation. Ageia’s big innovation was to forge extremely fast pathways between the processing cores; data can move around at up to 2 terabits per second, several times the speed of other chips. "It’s more than just graphic eye candy," says Hegde, a former engineering professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. He and Ageia’s four cofounders, all passionate gamers who had worked on a networking chip at Celox Networks in St. Louis, began pursuing a physics chip in 2002.

One hundred games are in development for the chip, including CellFactor, a new PC combat game from Artificial Studios. With a standard graphics card, CellFactor could show only 300 moving objects per frame. The PhysX chip can show more than 3,000 per frame in the game and tens of thousands in other games. "This simply cannot be done without the dedicated processor, unless you freeze all other movement," says Artificial Studios lead developer, Jeremy Stieglitz.

Source: Forbes.com 24-07-2006

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Tags: video games, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Hegde’s firm, Ageia, Ageia’s PhysX processor, , PhysX processor, XPS gaming PCs, ATI, Nvidia, , Intel Core Duo microprocessors, Artificial Studios Jeremy Stieglitz

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If creators of homemade Internet video get tired of producing something for nothing, they can post their work on Lulu.tv.

The Web site, which lets people upload and watch video clips, said last week that it would begin charging a $14.95 monthly fee for a "pro" account and putting 80 percent of that money into a special fund. Each month the money will be distributed among the video creators, with the biggest share going to the person who attracted the most viewers.

Free accounts with fewer features will be available, but those users will not share in the revenue. To get the process moving, the company is priming the pot with $5,000.

Other video sites are trying different approaches to bringing in cash. YouTube, the most popular of the genre, has a deal with NBC to promote its new television shows on a special section of the site.

Revver.com will share 50 percent of its advertising revenue with those who post videos there.

Bob Young, the chief executive of Lulu Enterprises, who also started the open-source software company Red Hat, said Lulu.tv was an experiment inspired by the traditional television broadcasting world, where the networks buy shows from producers and shows succeed or fail based on the ratings.

"The problem with that model is that it’s very capital-intensive and it’s so limited," he said. "On the Internet, there’s an infinite number of channels. There’s no reason why there can’t be several hundreds of different ‘Friends’-like shows because the market is so vast."

Lulu Enterprises also runs a print-on- demand bookstore, www.lulu.com, that pays 80 percent royalties to authors after they pay a binding fee and small per-page charge. Authors are responsible for their own editing and publicity.

Young said he wanted to find the most efficient way to get money directly into the hands of the people who created the most interesting videos while working to block people who inflated their ratings with fake clicks.

Fred Vanderpoel, a creator of television commercials based in Hawaii, has posted lyrical videos on Lulu.tv in his off hours, documenting a triathlon and people like Calvin Keys, a musician. He said the promise of payment would be a welcome incentive. "I’m interested in anything that will make money," he said.

But he said he was not yet sold on setting up a pro account. "I don’t know if I would spend money to make money," he said.

Source: www.iht.com  06-07-2006

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A Path to Profitability

By KEVIN J. DELANEY
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal.

From The Wall Street Journal Online

Over the past decade, large media and tech companies have tried to build mass-market services offering video over the Internet. Someone has finally succeeded big: a startup with 35 employees and an office over a pizza restaurant.

Through YouTube Inc.’s Web service, consumers view short videos more than 70 million times a day, ranging from clips of unicycling jugglers and aspiring musicians to vintage Bugs Bunny cartoons and World Cup soccer highlights recorded from TV. Users post more than 60,000 videos daily, with a limit of 10 minutes for most clips.

The big question for YouTube now: Can it turn this loose bazaar of videos into an enduring business?

It took a step in that direction this week with a big endorsement from General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal. NBC announced that it will make available on YouTube promotional video clips for some of its popular shows, such as "The Office," "Saturday Night Live" and "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." NBC plans to market its new fall lineup using clips on YouTube, and is holding a contest for consumers to submit their own promotional videos for "The Office." It will also buy ads on the site and promote YouTube with mentions on television. That’s a significant step for NBC, which earlier had demanded that YouTube take down clips of its programming. (Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. has made a deal to distribute movies and TV shows via Guba.com.)

YouTube is a classic Silicon Valley garage-to-glory tale. Two friends, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, started a company in a garage to tackle an issue they were grappling with personally: how to share home videos online. They maxed out Mr. Chen’s credit card on business expenses before a financier bankrolled them. They built a huge consumer following under the noses of richer, better-known companies with vastly larger payrolls. The young company burst forth as the dominant player.

But for every Apple Computer Inc. or Google Inc., Silicon Valley’s history is filled with dozens of hot startups that gained 15 minutes of fame but couldn’t sustain their brief success. YouTube’s executives, including some alumni of Internet flameouts, are now furiously planning strategy and making deals to sustain their upward arc.

YouTube’s 29-year-old chief executive, Mr. Hurley, and its 27-year-old chief technology officer, Mr. Chen, see two big challenges. The first is to figure out how to make money. The second is to address concerns of copyright holders that many of their TV and movie clips, music videos and songs are available through YouTube without permission.

Messrs. Hurley and Chen, who worked together at eBay Inc.’s PayPal electronic-payment unit, are trying to tackle both issues with a major stroke. They’re quietly building an online-ad system with Google-scale ambitions, which they intend to use to entice producers to post their best videos on YouTube. When the system rolls out later this year, YouTube will share revenue from ads that appear alongside some videos with the producers of those videos. Messrs. Hurley and Chen hope that Hollywood will come to see YouTube much as it now views network TV: a legitimate means of distributing content with revenue and promotional payoff.

With stepped-up ad sales, YouTube could become a bigger target for lawsuits. While much of its content consists of home-shot videos, critics say the most-viewed items often involve some type of copyright infringement. On a recent day, top-viewed videos included clips from "Today" and "The Daily Show," a shaky "Radiohead" concert video and World Cup soccer highlights recorded from TV.

YouTube says it removes clips when content owners request it, under a procedure outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. In some cases, copyright owners such as TV producers put the clips on its site themselves in order to generate buzz or to test ideas.

NBC has been among the media companies most actively requesting YouTube to take down videos that users have uploaded without permission. With today’s agreement, NBC seeks to promote its shows to YouTube’s audience while getting assurances that material it doesn’t want on the site will be removed. "YouTube has done their work on protecting copyright and we have assurances from them they will continue to do so," says NBC Universal Television Group Chief Marketing Officer John Miller. "They are a bright light, they have a lot of traffic," he adds.

Based in San Mateo, Calif., YouTube got its start in February 2005, after a dinner party attended by Mr. Hurley, who studied design in college and sports shoulder-length hair, and Mr. Chen, a Taiwan-born engineer with small hoops in each ear. They took videos of the party, but grew frustrated when they tried to share the footage with friends. They set out to build an online service that would let them do just that. At the time, Mr. Chen was still working at PayPal. Mr. Hurley, who had designed PayPal’s current logo during his 1999 job interview there, was doing consulting work.

They set up shop in Mr. Hurley’s Menlo Park garage. In May 2005, they released a test version of the site on the Web with no marketing. Early videos available prominently featured Mr. Chen’s cat, PJ.

Building a Following

The site quickly built up a following. It stood out from the growing corps of online video services, including an offering from Google, for its simplicity. YouTube serves up videos from its Web site directly or from other sites where people insert them, generally not requiring users to download any special software. To accomplish this technical feat, YouTube drew on open-source software and wrote its own code. The service can handle about 110 video formats and 64 audio formats used by digital photo and video cameras and cellphones.

It also let consumers display its videos on other sites, such as blogs or personal pages on News Corp.’s popular MySpace social networking service. Users could easily upload the video and email links to YouTube videos to each other. The influential techie site Slashdot’s mention of YouTube helped boost traffic.

After seeing Mr. Chen at a party last summer, former PayPal Chief Financial Officer Roelof Botha put some clips from his honeymoon in Italy on the site. Now a partner at venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital — known for backing Apple, Cisco, Google and Yahoo, among others — Mr. Botha invited the YouTube co-founders to his office in mid-August. Mr. Botha says that their project shares a key attribute with some of those tech legends: "building something for a personal need that winds up being universally useful."

By September, users were viewing YouTube videos more than a million times a day. Plotting strategy with Mr. Botha in October, the YouTube founders still believed their main business opportunity involved individuals sharing home videos. The next month, they announced Sequoia had injected $3.5 million to help finance the company.

But it started becoming clear to YouTube that users were sharing more than just their own videos, and viewership stretched far beyond circles of friends. By the time of the site’s official public release on Dec. 15, consumers were viewing YouTube videos more than three million times daily. Millions of users had watched clips starring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho posted by sneaker giant Nike Inc. A few days later, someone posted to YouTube a skit from NBC’s "Saturday Night Live" dubbed "Lazy Sunday," featuring two grown men rapping about cupcakes, red licorice candy and "The Chronicles of Narnia" film.

After it turned up among user favorites on the site, Mr. Hurley on Dec. 28 emailed a contact at NBC. He asked whether NBC had provided the clip itself, and volunteered to remove it from YouTube if the video had been shared without NBC’s permission. The NBC staffer replied that he didn’t know the answer, but would look into it, Mr. Hurley says.

Consumers viewed "Lazy Sunday" six million times before NBC on Feb. 3 contacted YouTube to request that it be removed, along with hundreds of other clips including Jay Leno monologues and video from the Winter Olympics.

Run-In With MySpace

YouTube’s rising popularity led to run-ins with others. In December, MySpace blocked users from playing YouTube videos on their MySpace pages. Consumer outcry followed and MySpace activated the YouTube feature again. A News Corp. executive later said MySpace was concerned that the YouTube videos contained porn, and only reactivated them once YouTube had given it assurances about porn filtering. (YouTube says it removes any pornography after users point it out.) Shortly after the incident, MySpace released its own video service to compete with YouTube.

As YouTube users began complaining that the system was slowing, the company spent more on technology. In January, it began displaying limited advertising to help offset its rising costs for computer equipment and telecom lines. Mr. Chen predicts YouTube will open one new data center with computers to run its service each month this year.

Thanks partly to its use on MySpace and the Saturday Night Live clip, YouTube quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Amateur video enthusiasts created their own video tributes to "Lazy Sunday" that they titled "Lazy Monday" and "Lazy Muncie." Videos of young people, including two Chinese students, hamming it up in front of Webcams while lip synching to popular songs were viewed millions of times.

Along the way, the entertainment world began exploring how it might benefit from YouTube’s audience. The Weinstein Co., a movie company run by producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, in April premiered the first eight minutes of the film "Lucky Number Slevin" on YouTube. Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Vantage movie unit last Friday posted exclusively on YouTube an 83-second animated clip poking fun at Al Gore to promote its "An Inconvenient Truth" film. By midday yesterday, it had been viewed nearly 600,000 times. "As a marketer you almost can’t find a better place than YouTube to promote your movie," says Andrew Lin, vice president for interactive marketing at Paramount Vantage. Viacom owns YouTube rival ifilm.

Still, there were bumps. C-SPAN asked YouTube to take down popular clips of an appearance by television personality Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April. C-SPAN distributed the clips free through Google’s video service.

Some top tech and entertainment executives have lambasted the company — while others have showed grudging admiration. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates in May told attendees of The Wall Street Journal’s "D" technology conference that, given the copyright issues and the lack of a clear path to profitability, his company would be "in a lot of trouble" if it did what YouTube has. But he also acknowledged spending time on the site. "I saw a bunch of old Harlem Globetrotters movies up there the other night, it’s great," he said.

Google and other YouTube competitors also stepped up their games. Google simplified its video-upload interface to match what YouTube had been offering. Yahoo this month upgraded its video service to allow consumers to submit videos directly to it, competing more squarely with YouTube.

Rumors have circulated in recent months that some major media companies have expressed interest in buying YouTube. In response Mr. Hurley says the company is not for sale. He says an initial public offering in the future is a possibility.

The YouTube co-founders decline to provide many specific details of the ad system they expect to gradually begin rolling out next month. But they say they’re not fond of commercials that play before a user can watch a video, known in the industry as "prerolls." YouTube recently hired Yahoo sales executive Tony Nethercutt to build its sales team.

Submission by Cellphone

Consumers can now submit videos from their mobile phones, and Messrs. Chen and Hurley say they one day should be able to view YouTube clips on phones and other devices. They say they’ll potentially expand beyond video to audio and other content.

For now, YouTube remains by far the most-visited video site on the Web. It attracted more than 20 million U.S. users in May, compared with 11.1 million for Microsoft’s MSN Video and around seven million for both MySpace’s video site and Google Video, according to research firm NetRatings Inc. YouTube says behavior indicates that users are most interested in viewing clips three minutes or shorter.

"We’re at the fork in the road where Google was at maybe four or five years ago before they rolled out" their current ad model, says Mr. Chen.

A big question is whether more advertising and promotions will drive away some users who like the site’s edgy feeling. Consumers spoke up earlier this year when YouTube’s home page began to highlight in yellow links to videos from official content partners, questioning the preferential treatment. In response, YouTube quickly removed the yellow highlighting from the page.

Email your comments to sjeditor@dowjones.com.

Source: www.startupjournal.com  29-06-2006

Tags: videos, youtube, youtube.com, mass-market services, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, myspace

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Source: www.publications.mediapost.com  19-06-2006

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) is making it easier for Web surfers to find videos by upgrading its search system to become more like saving favorite TV channels with a remote control, the company said on Wednesday.

The Internet media giant aims to recapture share in the fast-emerging market for viewing videos online — the year’s hottest Internet trend — where Yahoo has lost ground over the past six months to upstart video search company YouTube.

"Instead of having to discover individual videos one by one, once you have found a source you like, you can keep coming back," Jason Zajac, general manager of social media at Yahoo, said in a phone interview.

YouTube, a San Mateo, California-based company with only 30 employees which was founded by two former developers at online payments company PayPal, surged from nowhere earlier this year and now attracts tens of millions of monthly users.

That is five times the U.S. audience of former market leader Yahoo Video Search, according to data from Internet measurement firm Hitwise. MySpace ranks second, Yahoo third and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN is fourth, data shows. Other rapid gainers are start-ups Grouper and Daily Motion.

Among the changes Yahoo is introducing to its video search service at http://video.yahoo.com is a simple way for users to subscribe to and watch "channels," or groups of videos related by videomaker, programmer or keyword topic.

Yahoo now allows subscribers to specific channels to tag, or categorize, videos to make it easier for viewers with similar tastes to find the video later. Users can browse for featured videos, popular videos or by category or "tag."

"It is really worthwhile to create something that people can go back to and not have to find all over again," said IDC analyst Josh Martin, who was briefed on Yahoo’s plans. "Searching for video kind of sucks right now."

USER-GENERATED CONTENT

Taking advantage of the growing availability of broadband Internet connections, YouTube has made its name as the playground of quirky short-form videos contributed by users. It has yet to figure out how to make money off its service, through some form of advertising or other money-making effort.

To date, Yahoo had taken a cautious approach to serving up user-created video that is suddenly all the rage on the Web, focusing instead on acting as a showcase for professionally produced videos available across the Web or sports, news and entertainment programming licensed or created by Yahoo itself.

Zajac said Yahoo is applying an editorial process to its video search home page that balances high-quality programming against the popularity contest for the latest joke videos.

"Of course, users have access to all the content across the Yahoo network," Zajac said. "What we are adding to that is user-generated content."

The changes Yahoo is introducing to its video search service combine an uncluttered design look with linkages to its wider network of other Internet properties.

Videomakers both amateur and pro can now upload a video to Yahoo. Users can then post a version of their favorite videos onto their own Web sites using an embedded Yahoo video player.

"This is a good step for Yahoo," Martin said. The next move for the Sunnyvale, California-based company is to connect together video content across its network of sites ranging from news to travel to sports fantasy leagues. "Yahoo has stuff that others like Google or YouTube don’t," he said.

Source: www.news.yahoo.com

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Industry searching for solution to relieve Internet congestion

CONCORD, Mass. - With more and more video surging across the Internet not just to computers but also televisions and handheld devices, something that could relieve the congestion or improve the quality would be a huge breakthrough.

That is inspiring multiple efforts to chase a long-sought — and often unachieved — goal of better compression, the trick of shrinking a movie, song, picture or other large file so that it can be whisked over the Internet without anyone noticing a difference.

Some compression companies are making some eyebrow-raising promises, such as the ability to squeeze a video file tight enough to facilitate high-definition television over the Internet. Others say their compression schemes will enhance existing video applications such as medical imaging.

“We stand a tremendous chance of becoming a de facto standard,” boasts Daniel Kilbank, who founded Bethesda, Md.-based compression-technology vendor Qbit LLC with former Apple Computer Inc. CEO John Sculley in 2003.

Qbit’s compression system is considered “loss-less,” meaning it can shrink a file without losing a detail from the original file. It uses pattern-recognition algorithms to spot recurring aspects of a scene rather than sending them multiple times.

In contrast, today’s top method of video compression, MPEG-4, is considered “lossy” because some quality is sacrificed in shrinking the file. If you see fuzzy or pixelated images online, the faults could lie in the compression.

Consequently, even if Qbit merely matches MPEG-4’s ability to shrink files but can do so losslessly, Kilbank argues that his technology “really creates a business argument” for new kinds of portable devices and Internet services with high-definition content.

Qbit figures to find its best success in “professional imaging fields” that generate huge files, such as medicine, defense, movie production and oil exploration, In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold believes. Eventually, however, Qbit expects to be able to shrink files that already have been compressed with MPEG — potentially a boon to cable, satellite and phone-companies pumping out video content.

A different compression approach is in the works at Euclid Discoveries LLC, based in this proudly historic Revolutionary War town.

Euclid recently announced that it can dramatically improve on MPEG-4’s ability to render faces, while also shrinking files up to 10 times more efficiently. By focusing on faces first, Euclid hopes to spur “talking head” services, such as news broadcasts or videoconferences, on portable devices.

The compression is not lossless, but Euclid founder Richard Wingard argues that mathematical tricks will make the loss essentially unnoticeable.

For now, it appears Euclid still has far to go. In an April demonstration for The Associated Press, the system presented clearer facial images than files compressed with MPEG-4. But the edges weren’t smoothly integrated into the picture, as if the face had been glued on the background for a collage.

Wingard said those problems will soon be fixed. And he said rendering faces is one of the hardest aspects of image manipulation, so having already solved that puts Euclid close to essentially removing bandwidth constraints for high-quality video. Euclid pledges to eventually get a two-hour movie down to 50 megabytes — small enough to fit 20 on a portable USB drive, for example.

Indeed, In-Stat’s Kaufhold believes that Euclid has “something valuable at its core” that might lead to delivering HDTV over the Internet.

But other observers are far more skeptical. For one thing, innumerable compression claims have been made over the years only to fizzle.

And while there have been notable compression advancements over the years from such players as Divx Inc. and On2 Technologies Inc., those technologies power niche applications.

One reason is that existing, lossy compression — such as the MPEG-2 format that encodes DVDs — is usually good enough for entertainment purposes, said Predrag Filipovic, an analyst with The Diffusion Group.

He also notes that a startup compression scheme always faces an uphill fight. It must attract the interest of equipment makers who are reluctant to stray from industry standards, and it has to overcome rival offerings from full-service providers such as Microsoft Corp.

“Is there a need for yet-better compression? Yes, you can argue that there is,” Filipovic said. “The question is how much better somebody has to be in order to justify the huge cost of marketing this thing and the huge cost to the provider. Those equations usually do not end up in a revolution.”

Source: www.msnbc.msn.com  14-05-2006

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ISPs see TV-quality, high-def programming choking the Web

NEW YORK - Every day, it seems, a new service pops up offering to send you video over the Internet. “Desperate Housewives,” Stephen Colbert heckling the president, clips of bad dancers at wedding parties: It’s all there.

You may be up for it, but is the Internet?

The answer from the major Internet service providers, the telephone and cable companies, is “no.” Small clips are fine, but TV-quality and especially high-definition programming could make the Internet choke.

Most home Internet use is in brief bursts — an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV — for hours at a time — that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn’t designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet’s capacity to prevent that will be expensive.

To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example.

Internet activists and consumer groups are vehemently against those plans, saying they amount to tilting the Internet’s level playing field, one of the things that encourages innovation. They want legislation to guarantee a “neutral” Internet, but prospects appear slim.

At the heart of the debate is a key question: How much would it really cost the Internet carriers to provide a couple of hours of prime-time TV over their networks every day?

The carriers are playing their cards fairly close to their chest, but there are ways to get close to an answer.

One data point: As a rough estimate, an always-on, 1 megabit-per-second tap into the Internet backbone in downtown Atlanta, bought wholesale, costs an ISP $10 to $20 a month, according to the research firm TeleGeography Inc. An ISP’s business is carrying data from that tap to the customer.

One megabit per second doesn’t sound like that much, but ISPs spread that bandwidth out over their subscribers. Analysts estimate that ISPs sell around 30 times more bandwidth to their end users than they can connect simultaneously to the Internet (the figure probably varies widely from provider to provider).

In this sense, broadband is like old-fashioned telephone service, where there are always more lines leading from homes to the local switching station than there are going from the station out of the neighborhood. If everyone in a neighborhood picks up the phone at once, some calls won’t go through because there aren’t enough outgoing lines. But that rarely happens, so the system works.

On the broadband network, the oversubscription means that one megabit-per-second connection to the Internet is enough to serve 40 DSL accounts, each at a maximum speed of 768 kilobits per second, typical for low-end DSL. So the cost of providing data to each DSL is about 25 cents to 50 cents a month per customer.

Of course, the carrier also needs to pay for the equipment that brings data from the Internet connection point to the subscriber, first through fiber-optic lines and then through DSL or cable.

Oversubscription doesn’t present a problem as long as people are using the Internet for Web surfing, e-mail and the occasional file download. But if everyone in a neighborhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time, it’s not going to work.

“The plain truth is that today’s access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect,” according to Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications Inc.’s top lobbyist.

The solution, of course, is to make the pipes connecting to the Internet fatter. To illustrate what that would mean, BellSouth Corp.’s chief architect, Henry Kafka, uses the assumption that the cost of providing a month’s worth of data to the average user, about 2 gigabytes, costs the company $1. That’s a fairly small amount compared to the $25 to $47 a month BellSouth charges for DSL, but then the company has to pay for sales, support, maintenance and a host of other costs.

If that same user were to start downloading five TV-quality movies per month, BellSouth’s data cost, not including the cost of maintaining the DSL line, would go up to $4.50 a month. Higher, but perhaps not high enough to break BellSouth’s business model.

But if the customer starts watching Internet TV like the average household watches regular TV, 8 hours a day, BellSouth’s cost would go up to $112 a month, according to Kafka.

“We don’t expect to get to the point where we’re charging anyone those kinds of prices for Internet service, but it does reflect the kind of impact that high-quality video could have on the network and business models for providing the Internet,” Kafka said.

To deal with that, Kafka said says BellSouth might put caps on the amount of data that a residential user gets for free, and charge extra if the user goes over, much like cell phone users pay overages. Other options include charging content providers extra for guaranteed delivery, the kind of model that has raised the hackles of Internet content providers and activists.

However, Kafka’s estimates for these costs aren’t really BellSouth’s. Like other telephone companies, they don’t disclose their actual costs. Instead, Kafka’s base figure of $1 for 2 gigabytes of data per month is based on an estimate by Dave Burstein, editor of the DSL Prime newsletter, and Burstein thinks Kafka has it wrong.

“Traffic just isn’t moving up that fast,” Burstein said. “It will go up and it will go up faster, but not fast enough to be dollars and cents that really matter.”

Internet video is still just a small fraction of the total amount of video people watch, and that’s unlikely to change overnight, in Burstein’s opinion.

In fact, he said, Internet traffic has increased much more slowly than the prices of Internet-carrying equipment like switches and routers have fallen, and that trend is likely to continue.

Burstein believes the danger of letting the carriers charge extra for guaranteed delivery is that they’ll put the spending for upgrades into creating that extra “toll lane,” and won’t reduce oversubscription in the rest of the network even though it would be cheap to do so.

Both Verizon and AT&T Inc. have said they won’t degrade or block anyone’s Internet traffic. But it’s impossible to tell what goes on inside their networks.

The message: Stay tuned, and watch your download speeds.

Source: www.msnbc.msn.com  14-05-2006

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If you want to buy content for Apple’s iPod, you have to go through iTunes. Navio Systems is hoping to change that.

By Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine senior writer
May 22, 2006: 7:07 PM EDT

In an ideal digital world, we’d be able to buy copyrighted music and videos wherever we wanted, not just on a designated store. But that’s been the fate of iPod users, who can only buy content off of Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

Even iTunes competitors, like Napster and Microsoft’s (Research) MSN Music, have a limited set of devices that play the content they sell. And eMusic, which sells unprotected MP3 files, has a limited selection. (Sure, sure, you can buy physical CDs and rip the songs off them to any MP3 player, but that hardly seems like a digital-age solution to the problem.)

But Navio Systems, a startup based in Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, Calif., is hoping to change that situation - and let anyone sell music, videos, games, and other content that stays protected wherever it goes.

Hollywood, which has seen Apple (Research) rapidly seize control of the paid music-download business, is especially eager for an alternative to iTunes. In fact, they’d like to run their own stores. And that’s what Navio’s software lets them do.

Navio has built a system that stores the rights associated with a piece of music, a game or a movie in the file itself. When you buy a song or video from a Navio-powered website, information about your purchase is stored in a "digital locker" that tracks your rights. The key difference from iTunes: Navio doesn’t care where you get the content. And that opens up any number of websites to the possibility of selling digital content.

Already, early Navio customers like Fox (Research), Sony (Research) BMG Music Entertainment, Walt Disney Internet, Cingular and Verizon Wireless have been experimenting with Navio’s software to sell digital content. Disney (Research), for example, will be using Navio to power content sales on its website promoting the Pixar/Disney animated blockbuster Cars.

By the end of June, Navio plans to include software that lets its customers offer copy-protected videos that will play on iPods. (Apple, which has not widely licensed its own copy-protection system, wouldn’t comment on Navio’s move, but we would love to be in a board meeting where former Pixar CEO and current Disney board member Steve Jobs discussed the decision to go with Navio.)

For music labels and movie studios, Navio provides an opportunity to reach consumers through a huge number of outlets, and experiment with selling and bundling content in a way that isn’t restricted by the rules of a particular service or online store. (Music labels, for example, have chafed at Apple’s insistence that music tracks sell for 99 cents on iTunes.)

For consumers, it gets them closer to a world where they can play digital music and movies how and where they want.

"Navio is an important alternative to the systems that are out there now," says Mike McGuire, a vice president for research at Gartner. "The key for its success is to develop the technology and experience so that it is as good or better than what is out there right now. If not, it’s back to the services that already exist."

And aside from the challenges of reverse-engineering the iPod’s copy-protection system, technology is not the limiting factor preventing Navio, or any other company, from creating a seamless content experience where users can buy content anywhere on the Web.

"A lot of it is already technically possible," McGuire says. "The limitations are almost all related to mundane issues like licensing and rights agreements."

That’s what makes Navio’s approach so smart. Hollywood studios and record labels already have the rights to their libraries of movies and songs. Rather than haggle with them over rights, why not just let them sell their libraries themselves?

Source: www.money.cnn.com

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Content counts for kids! Baby video pioneer, Dennis Fedoruk, reminds parents of the benefits of educational videos for young children and urges parents to teach healthy media habits at early age.

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) May 22, 2005 — Does the content of what children watch matter? Research says yes and the originator of videos for young children wants to encourage parents to use media wisely with pre-school children.

“Not all videos are created equal, especially when it comes to those for young children,” states Dennis Fedoruk, President of The Brainy Baby Company in Atlanta, Georgia. Studies show that age appropriate content and educational television programs help children develop language skills, pro-social behavior and school readiness.

According to University of Texas research in 2003 from the Center for Research on Interactive Technology, Television & Children (CRITC), “There was a positive relationship between the viewing of educational programs, especially those with cognitive curriculum and children’s reading ability(ages 0-5)."

Robert Doman Jr., Child Developmentalist agrees, “If the television did not already exist, we would need to create it as an educational and therapeutic tool.” Doman is the President/Founder of the National Association for Child Development (NACD) in Ogden, Utah. “Appropriate, specific input and stimulation are never more vital than in the first years of life, and among the best vehicles for supplying that input are well-developed educational video programs.”

“Parents should be encouraging educational television viewing for their young child,” states a University of Texas study (Vandewater, Bickham 2004), which found that reading skills improved in children, ages 2-5, who had a media diet of educational programming.

“We believe that education is a gift that parents give their children and our job is to provide the tools that make a difference, such as curriculum based DVDS/videos and Learning Systems,” adds Fedoruk. “Parents need to help children develop a healthy media diet that is balanced with physical activity, reading and parental interaction.”

In the 60’s the guru of communication believed the medium was the message. But as the late John C. Wright, co-founder of CRITC, pointed out, when it comes to children and television, “Marshal McLuhan appears to have been wrong. The medium is not the message. The message is the message!”    

Since 1995, Dennis Fedoruk and Brainy Baby® DVDs have received over 40 awards (Dr. Toy, Parent’s Choice, Parenting Publications, KIDS FIRST!) and have an extensive line of educational products (DVDS, books, toys, games) that help children develop the Love of Learning for a Lifetime. Visit www.BrainyBaby.com.

Source: www.prweb.com

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 NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Palo Alto, CA, United States, 05/22/2006 - Str8Up.com users can now enjoy the newly released footage of Ashlee Simpson climbing over the countertop to order a Big Mac, proving to fans worldwide that Ashlee is just a normal teen.

Str8Up.com, a major player in online video sharing community, allows users to easily and freely watch, share, upload and tag video clips, home videos, and popular footage, via Str8Up.com.

“When Ashlee Simpson stumbled into MacDonalds at 1:30 am in the morning, we asked ourselves, if Ashlee’s fans knew about her insatiable appetite for Big Macs, then would they still think she is an anorexic teen? The answer was no. They would no longer think that Ashlee lived on caffeine pills day to day. Now viewers worldwide can visit Str8Up.com to find out why Ashlee is just a normal teen," says Str8Up.com CEO.

"I searched for ‘Ashlee’ on Str8Up and found the Ashlee Simpson video as the first hit. I found the video I was looking so that I could learn about my favorite pop star. Now fans worldwide can find the Ashlee Simpson video easily at Str8Up.com."

Pop fans around the world can now enjoy the video on their small screens, on their big screens, and in their local MacDonalds at Str8Up.com.

One of the most important aspects of video sharing is to be able to upload, share, and discover new videos quickly and easily. Str8Up’s video sharing service gives anyone who can use a mouse the ability to watch and discover new videos online.

In addition to videos related to Ashlee Simpson, users can also watch funny and entertaining videos created by other users at Str8Up.com.

Different from any other online video sharing service, Str8Up is completely advertising free.

Using Str8Up’s comprehensive video sharing feature, video creators can take full advantage of the ability to upload, invite friends, and distribute their videos free of charge.

Source: www.newswiretoday.com

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