X-Men Origins: Wolverine is premiering this weekend, and Hollywood insiders are even more infatuated with ticket sales than usual. The movie is expected to make anywhere from $75 million to $100 million, with early reports putting last night’s midnight earnings at $4.4 million, a number that […] Read more »
The verdict against The Pirate Bay could turn out to be something of a game changer for P2P file sharing. Granted, the four defendants have already filed their appeals, and the site is currently up and running. In fact, there are 22 million peers connected as […] Read more »
Want to watch something on YouTube? Get ready to show your ID first — if you live in Germany, that is. Politicians from the conservative German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) are proposing a bill that would force online video sites to institute strict registration requirements for […] Read more »
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Hollywood and the major record labels have always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with new media, alternating between roses and lawsuits for online entrepreneurs, if you will. Lately, it was looking a little like love was going to win. Hulu, after all, had convinced its detractors that […] Read more »
The makers of the popular file-sharing client Limewire have started to develop a podcast directory called LimeCast. The company is currently in the process of gathering content as well as building the actual platform, which is already online as a work-in-progress, open-source project. There hasn’t been […] Read more »
Amazon looks set to start selling HD video downloads any day now, hot on the heels of Apple’s iTunes HD movie offering, which was unveiled yesterday. Amazon’s web site already contains links to HD versions of TV show downloads, but while the actual show detail pages […] Read more »
And you thought Simon Cowell was mean: American Idol head honcho Tony Cohen wants to cut off your Internet access if you’re downloading his show. Cohen, CEO of the UK-based Idol production company FremantleMedia, told the audience of the Changing Media Summit in London today that […] Read more »
Tim O’Reilly had a simple message for the tech community earlier this week at the Emerging Technology conference: Support Obama! Wait, isn’t the campaign over? It may be, but the next presidential contest is already around the corner, and O’Reilly believes that there’s only a short […] Read more »
MIT researcher Nathan Eagle regaled the audience at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference yesterday with tales of technical innovation from East Africa. “Kenya has some mobile phone services that are years ahead of what we have right now,” he said. Eagle was at ETech to present […] Read more »
Ars Technica published an intriguing piece by Nate Anderson today predicting that file-sharing programs like the new version of Lime Wire will lead to users just swapping files among friends. These private sharing networks are oftentimes called darknets, and Anderson believes that entertainment companies should be […] Read more »
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Hacked web sites. Angry ABBA singers. Charges of media bias. Hundreds of flower bouquets for an expert who testified on behalf of the defense. The Swedish Pirate Bay trial has largely been an entertaining spectacle, especially for anyone who doesn’t speak Swedish. Both sides have been […] Read more »
If someone told you he’d pay for your FiOS Internet connection in exchange for you putting a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server full of Russian movies in your living room, would you do it? And if someone told you that a network of residential NAS drives […] Read more »
Hulu caused quite a stir this week when, at the request of rights holders, it shut down Boxee’s access to its streaming video platform. While many discussed the business implications of this move, some are ready to do more than just talk about it. One reader […] Read more »
The makers of the freely available file-sharing documentaries Steal This Film and Steal This Film II have released a new movie just in time for the lawsuit against the Pirate Bay. The 51-minute film features interviews with the three administrators-turned-defendants as well as Electronic Frontier Foundation […] Read more »
The trial against the Pirate Bay will start in Sweden on Monday, and file sharers and P2P journalists alike can hardly contain themselves. The Times of London has dubbed it the “Internet piracy trial of the decade,” and the Pirate Bay’s staff and supporters have planed […] Read more »
The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) unveiled version 2.0 of its open-source video player, Miro, yesterday. The new version features a revamped UI, a smaller memory footprint and the ability to access streaming video sites like Hulu.com from right within the client. We covered those changes in […] Read more »
Sometimes it’s tough to be the winner. CNN attracted by far the largest online audience for its web stream of President Obama’s inauguration, delivering a total of 25 million streams on Jan. 20th. It did so by utilizing Octoshape’s P2P plug-in for Adobe’s Flash player, a […] Read more »
The folks at the Pirate Bay released a Google Maps mash-up Wednesday that illustrates its worldwide user base, with exact percentages by country. It’s a pretty fascinating project in that it helps to dispel certain myths about BitTorrent, namely that while piracy may be a global […] Read more »
Johan Pouwelse is a busy man. The P2P researcher based in the city of Delft, in the Netherlands, is heading up development of the social BitTorrent client Tribler; he’s also deeply involved with the EU’s P2P Next project, which aims to use P2P streaming for an […] Read more »
Will the kangaroo ever jump? That’s the question observers of the UK’s online media market are asking these days, where the BBC and the public broadcasters ITV and Channel 4 are planing to jointly launch a Hulu-like, video-on-demand web site code-named Project Kangaroo. The site was […] Read more »
Waxy.org’s Andy Baio has once again published an extensive collection of data about this year’s Oscar nominations and their availability on P2P networks. He’s been doing this for the last seven years, during which the overall picture has remained pretty much the same; almost all Oscar […] Read more »
The folks from the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) have just published a beta preview to Miro 2.0. The upcoming version of the video client is going to have a more streamlined interface that will make it possible to integrate streaming video sites like Hulu, and the […] Read more »
Some 95 percent of all digital music downloads continue to be pirated, according to estimates released today by music industry trade group IFPI. Those numbers don’t translate well for online video, especially as streaming sites like Hulu start to see significant traction, but a quick look […] Read more »
Al Jazeera has started to share some of its footage of the military conflict in Gaza under a liberal Creative Commons license that allows commercial reuse and remixing. The clips are made available as broadcast-quality MPEG1 downloads as well as blip.tv streams. Al Jazeera’s Gaza footage […] Read more »
Nine Inch Nails (NIN) fans were caught by surprise this week when NIN mastermind Trent Reznor dropped by the band’s web site to announce that 405 GB of HD live footage somehow found its way online. The raw HD recordings, which document three of the band’s […] Read more »
YouTube has almost become a synonym for online video in recent years, but professional online video platforms like Hulu.com are dominating YouTube’s dancing babies, according to a new Cisco study. The company just announced the results of its Visual Networking Index Survey (PDF), which compared TV […] Read more »
MacWorld Expo is going down starting Monday in San Francisco, and Apple fans have been speculating about new products for months. Will there be a new Mac Mini? An iPhone Nano? Or maybe even an Apple Netbook ? Answers to all these question will be given […] Read more »
2008 should have been a good year for P2P startups. The FCC ruled that ISPs can’t block BitTorrent and other distributed protocols, the growing importance of HD was increasingly making P2P look like a viable solution, and the P4P folks even came up with a way […] Read more »
Imagine this: You’re an independent filmmaker and your first animated feature is getting rave reviews. It’s being shown at dozens of festivals around the world, and is taking home prestigious awards, such as that of Germany’s Berlinale festival. But unless you can come up with the […] Read more »
The BBC has just rolled out a new desktop version of its popular iPlayer service based on Adobe’s AIR platform. The new client is available for UK residents as part of the BBC iPlayer Labs beta test, and it will be released to the public some […] Read more »
The Recording Industry Association of America has decided to end its five-year-long lawsuit campaign against music file sharers, the Wall Street Journal reported today, with the major record labels opting to instead work with ISPs to combat the practice. Some major ISPs have apparently already agreed […] Read more »
Joost has informed its users via email that it will discontinue the support of its desktop client today and instead completely concentrate on its new web site. This is a big step for a company that once aimed to revolutionize online video with P2P technology, and […] Read more »
Joost has announced that it will discontinue support of its P2P TV application by the end of this week, essentially admitting that distributed content delivery for video streams isn’t worth the effort. But if 2008 taught us anything, then it’s that P2P TV is alive and […] Read more »
In 2008, ISPs started to really feel the heat when it comes to video file-sharing. Comcast got reprimanded by the FCC for blocking BitTorrent transfers and consumers rebbelled against P2PÂ throttling. Meanwhile the entertainment industry has been demanding harsher enforcement and HD-swapping users have been eating up […] Read more »
2008 was supposed to be the year when Internet video finally reached the living room, thanks to a whole bunch of set-top boxes. Part of that mix was supposed to be P2P, either in the form of distributed streaming, or good old BitTorrent downloads. Well, guess […] Read more »
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) this week published its annual prison census, which puts the spotlight on imprisoned journalists from around the world. 2008 marks the first year in which the report is dominated by online journalists, with 45 percent of those jailed bloggers, online […] Read more »
Adobe officially unveiled the P2P video streaming capabilities of Flash 10 to developers this week. The technology itself is still in its infancy, but the mere fact that Adobe decided to embrace P2P for Flash 10 made a lot of headlines earlier this year. Many people, […] Read more »
The Internet is close to a meltdown, according to The Register. The culprit, according to author Richard Bennett, is the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, which introduced a new type of file transfer with its most recent alpha version. BitTorrent clients have long been using the TCP […] Read more »
Apple continues to find itself in hot water over its decision to support strict copy protection standards with its new line of Macbooks. Owners of the new generation of Macbooks and Macbook Pros were up in arms last week about the fact that HD movies bought […] Read more »
The Pirate Bay is celebrating its fifth birthday this week, complete with a special anniversary logo and a blog post that makes fun of Swedish and U.S. anti-piracy efforts and claims that even George Bush knows the founder’s names. Humility was never really one of their […] Read more »
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