In the two years since it launched, Muve has attracted more than 1 million subscribers, making it the second-largest music subscription service in the U.S. behind Spotify – that’s despite the fact that Cricket is only a regional carrier mainly serving smaller U.S. cities.

In June, Cricket began packaging Muve into all of its smartphones plans, which explains why subscriptions ballooned by 500,000 in the last six months. But Ingram said that Muve has been a key feature in attracting new subscribers to the Cricket network, and expects between 40 and 50 percent of its customer eventually will sign up for a Muve plan.

Speaking at a Cisco System’s event at MWC, Ingram said the spin-off company would offer the music distribution, discoverability and licensing platform as a managed service, though operators would be free to name it whatever they liked as well as set their own rates. While Cricket includes the Muve subscription in the price of its plans, other operators may choose to make it an add-on service or offer more limited subscription plans.

There are a lot of mobile users that can’t afford or are simply unwilling to pay $1 or more per song, which is the digital music model iTunes established, Ingrams said. Muve’s flexibility would allow operators to start pricing music in much more accessible ways, for instance selling subscription for 10 cents a day or restricted plans for as low as 50 cents a month, Ingram said.

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Let me say that again: a door-to-door salesman.

I think that’s a first, for me at least. While lots of internet services market heavily — television ads, radio spots, billboards, leaflets and print — I have never come across this sort of feet-on-the-street approach before. Trying to prevent customer churn is one thing, but this just has the ring of desperation about it… and comes as another piece of anecdotal evidence that suggests Lovefilm’s feeling incredible pressure from Netflix.

When Netflix launched in the UK and Ireland a year ago, it was a clear who would be in its sights. Reed Hastings and his team may say they are targeting the bigger pay-TV services, such as Rupert Murdoch’s Sky, but their first hurdle was undoubtedly trying to surpass the Amazon-owned rival.

Lovefilm has been competing where it can, particularly in trying to head Netflix off at the pass by signing exclusive content deals with Universal, Fox, and others. But it’s also trying extremely hard to defend itself by stopping customers from fleeing: when I tried to unsubscribe a while back I realized it was one of those irritating services that forces you to phone up to cancel (a surefire sign that I will never go back).

And you can’t blame them: it would take a brave gambler to bet against the American company right now.

Netflix is storming on almost all fronts, from its acclaimed original programming, to its balance sheet: Wall Street loves it again, as it finally recovers from the farcical series of events it inflicted upon itself in 2011.

And that is having an impact on its rivals.

Former Lovefilm boss Adam Valkin told me last year how the company had feared Netflix since 2004. And though Netflix still has some way to go — it’s still unclear whether Netflix is making inroads against its real targets, the broadcasters, and claims almost dubiously high membership numbers across the British Isles — it definitely has some crucial competitors, at least, running scared.

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By broadcast, McAdam was referring to LTE-broadcast, one of the many multicast technologies that’s been kicking around the wireless industry for years. LTE-broadcast would turn cell towers into the equivalent of mini-digital TV towers that could multicast video, audio and even data to multiple users simultaneously.

Right now mobile multimedia works through an on-demand unicast model. Every time you stream a video or a song to your smartphone, you get your own dedicated portion of the cell’s capacity to deliver your content, even if the guy right next to you is watching the same program. That unicast model and video’s intensive bandwidth demands explain why mobile video is such a network hog.

LTE-broadcast, however, would turn a portion of a network’s bandwidth into a multicast network, sending a single video or audio stream to multiple devices similar to the way TV and radio towers broadcast their programming.

If this all sounds familiar, you’re probably recalling Qualcomm’s FLO TV service of the last decade, which shut down in 2010 for lack of subscribers, devices and compelling content. Or perhaps the TV broadcasters’ own Dyle mobile digital TV initiative, which appears to be going nowhere very slowly. But there are some pretty key differences between those efforts and the LTE-broadcast technology that McAdam is talking about.

Qualcomm’s FLO technology required (and Dyle requires) a special receiver and therefore a dedicated TV handset to receive their respective transmissions. That pretty much doomed them from the beginning. But LTE-broadcast is based on the evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) technology being standardized for LTE. Chipmakers like Qualcomm have already committed to supporting eMBMS in their future radio silicon. That means future handsets will be pretty much eMBMS-ready whether carriers chose to use the technology or not.

eMBMS also uses the same LTE radio infrastructure, requiring only upgrades to the network core. So if a carrier decides to get into the broadcast business, the equipment is largely in place. The barriers to entry are much lower for LTE-broadcast, but there’s still one big question: will consumers actually use it?

The age of personalized multimedia

The problem is that an increasingly technically savvy public is moving away from broadcast models completely when it comes to digital content. Consumers are personalizing their radios with Pandora and Spotify. The reason HBO Go rocks is we don’t have to be at home a pre-determined hour –- or set our DVRs –- to watch the next episode of Game of Thrones. We just pull content out of the air whenever we please.

There are still plenty of people consuming broadcast video and audio on their TVs and car stereos, but on smartphones and tablets streaming is king. By imposing a broadcast model, carriers would be going against mobile data trends.

That’s why McAdam highlighted the Super Bowl as the ideal use case for LTE-broadcast. Blockbuster live events would attract hundreds of thousands of simultaneous viewers that would best make use of the technology. Verizon already streams entire NFL games through its NFL Mobile app, so being able to multicast those games would save it enormous amounts of network capacity — or so you might think.

There are a lot of cells out there

The thing about mobile networks is that they’re much denser than TV broadcast networks. Instead of using a single tower to cover a whole city, hundreds if not thousands of towers — each sporting multiple sectors — blanket any given metropolis with mobile broadband. Even if thousands of people in the same city are watching the same game on their phones, chances are few of them are going to be in the same cells at the same time. Multicasting effectively becomes unicasting if there is only one person receiving the transmission.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

What’s more, cells will start shrinking and multiplying as carriers begin deploying small cells and heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures. The more cells in the networks, the less chance you’ll have users simultaneously streaming the same content in any given cell, unless you’re talking about big events. But playoff games and the State of the Union Addresses don’t occur everyday.

According to a new research report from iGR, carriers are weighing those factors, and some of them are leaning towards deploying LTE-broadcast selectively, targeting venues where people are most likely to stream the same content. Airports would be a good example, but so would a sports arena. Ticketholders might be watching the same games live, but they could all view the same replay videos simultaneously.

The iGR report also proposes that LTE-broadcast could turn our phones and tablets into mobile DVRs. We could subscribe to particular TV programs on apps like HBO Go. At set times, the LTE-broadcast network would schedule the download of various shows, beaming them down to thousands if not millions of devices simultaneously and caching them for later consumption. There’s nothing to prevent LTE-broadcast from being used for other types of media or data like digital magazines or device OS updates.

iGR projects that mobile video will account for 71 percent of mobile network data traffic in 2016. By utilizing LTE-broadcast, the study concludes, carriers could reduce capacity demand on their networks by 12.5 percent overall and by 15 percent at peak hours, the study found. The bottom line is unicast on-demand video will remain supreme, but a 15 percent capacity savings when the network needs it most is certainly nothing to scoff at.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Peter Sobolev

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This is why, in 2006, Lakhina founded Guavus, a company that has built a software platform for real-time analysis of streaming data. The company claims its proprietary platform can handle massive amounts of real-time data, but also that it can match that incoming data to existing warehoused data as well. In its latest product, aimed at the telco market, Guavus lets operators process about half a petabyte of data every day and match that real-time data stream against subscribers.

This means your wireless provider can match your YouTube viewing to you while you are viewing it. Lakhina calls this “DPI-level insights.” Subscribers might not see the value but operators do. Lakhina says that a Tier 1 operators in the U.S. used his company’s software to catch a customer who was violating the terms of its contract with the operator and was subsequently flooding the network in New York.

Lakhina says the carrier noticed that during business hours in New York its network traffic had suddenly jumped by 10 percent for no clear reason. By looking at the traffic patterns at an individual level using Guavus’ software it matched that jump in data to a new customer that had sold an M2M payment processing product to taxi cabs. The cab drivers were supposed to use the cellular network for processing payments, but instead were using it to stream video inside their cabs, a violation of the terms between the payment platform provider and the carrier. The operator renegotiated the terms of the agreement.

This has obvious benefits for the carrier, which can now police contracts and can also use the software for planning where it puts capacity. For example, when AT&T got the iPhone it had no idea how it would affect its network, and until things started breaking and calls began dropping it was unable to predict where and when problems would arise. At the time, network engineers dealt with capacity problems in quarterly or monthly reviews, but in today’s world capacity planning isn’t something static enough that a monthly or even weekly adjustment works.

Or at least, that’s the pitch from Guavus. For the end user the use of big data and real-time analysis by operators is less compelling. Lakhina says that operators could use it to help reduce the number of customer care calls. For example, instead of being surprised by an overage charge or being unaware of where such a change came from, an operator might proactively notify a subscriber or could at a minimum explain to them after the fact what behavior caused them to go over their current data cap.

Guavus has two of the top carriers in the U.S. as customers of its NetReflex software, and plans to take its underlying data platform to other industries that could benefit from the mix of real-time data analysis.

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“The new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.’s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees. All previously announced products and services, including those in the works, will continue and there is no expected interruption of any OnLive services,” the company said.

OnLive said initial reports on the situation at the company were “way overstated,” but the company could not respond until the transaction was completed. The management team remains intact, but no further details were released. (original story continues below)

OnLive, a cloud gaming startup that promised big-budget game titles streamed to a TV or computer, is now denying rumors that it is shutting down and laying off its workers. It all started following an email reportedly sent by an OnLive employee who told veteran video game developer Brian Fargo that the staff was being laid off and the OnLive service would be shut down with a new company formed. The employee, however, then tried to recall his sent email.

Mashable quoted a source close to the situation who said the staff was fired at a company meeting, with some of the employees potentially rehired as the company transitions to something new.

UPDATE: Joystiq is reporting that the company has been sold to a third-party and that at least 50 percent of the staff was laid off. A former employee told Joystiq that employees were not getting severance and that OnLive was dealing with operating costs of $5 million a month. There’s at least one report of OnLive employees leaving the office with moving boxes.

I reached out to OnLive PR and was told by spokesman Brian Jacquet in an email that: “My comment is no comment on the news other than to say the OnLive service is not shutting down.”

That still leaves a lot of wiggle room including the potential that the service has been bought by another company. OnLive has been rumored to be an acquisition target of Microsoft or Sony in the past. Sony eventually bought OnLive rival Gaikai.

Some citics and competitors have wondered whether OnLive’s business model was sustainable. TransGaming CEO Vikas Gupta questioned whether’s OnLive’s fluctuating operating expenditure and performance concerns would be able to hold up over time. That’s a key question because the company is required to make big investments in data centers to support its streaming service.

Mashable said the company has turned down acquisition offers in the past and now may be only viable as an intellectual property play based on its cloud patents.

The company has been inking deals lately including with Ouya, the TV game console Kickstarter project. The company’s Twitter account is still pushing out updates on product news.

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We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

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A chart from the report “The six business models for copyright infringement.” Click to expand.

A new Google study entitled “The six business models for copyright infringement,” just released with the UK’s PRS (Performing Right Society) for Music, finds that live TV is the fastest-growing segment of copyright infringement. (To see the others, click on the image at right.) Global pageviews of live TV sites were up 61 percent for the year ending May 2012.

Live TV sites link to illegal streams of network and paid TV. The study looked at 51 live TV sites — it doesn’t mention any of them by name, but a couple of popular ones are Sidereel.com and TVDuck.com, which feature a mixture of legal and illegal content — and found that a third of them are based in the United States.

Two-thirds of the sites are funded by advertisers, and “compared to the other segments Live TV Gateway has very high levels of direct access and referrals from social networks.” Live TV sites are more likely than the other business models to have mobile sites and social network presence “in the form of a social networking ‘action’ icon, for example Facebook ‘like’ buttons, Twitter ‘tweet’ button or similar.”

P2P sites still get the most visitors

Researchers looked at 29 P2P sites; again, while they are not mentioned by name, the largest gets 2.1 million unique UK visitors per month (compared to 1.1 million unique UK visitors at the most popular live TV site). The UK-based study didn’t track monthly U.S. visitors by site, but did look at global page views across categories, using data provided by Google.

P2P sites are the most dependent on advertising of any of the business models looked at: 86 percent of them are funded by advertising.

Overall, “both Live TV Gateway and P2P Community sites, the two largest  and fastest growing segments, tended to link to content on other sites or services rather than host the content,” the researchers found.

To fight piracy, “follow the money”

Theo Bertram, Google’s UK policy manager, said in a statement:

Our research shows there are many different business models for online infringement which can be tackled if we work together. The evidence suggests that one of the most effective ways to do this is to follow the money, targeting the advertisers who choose to make money from these sites and working with payment providers to ensure they know where their services are being used.

The research was conducted by BAE Systems Detica, and you can view the full report here.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Mehmet Dilsiz

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Showcased Monday at the Cable Show in Boston, TiVo Stream enables users of TiVo Premiere or Premiere Q digital video recorders to view video from their multichannel subscription on devices including the iPad on iPhone.

The transcoding product is similar to EchoStar’s Slingbox, but differs in that it streams or downloads programs to multiple mobile devices without disrupting living-room viewing.

In addition, TiVo also unveiled a new IP set-top box that allows Premiere Q users to view live or recorded TV from any room in the house.

TiVo will debut both products at retail, or through partnerships with multichannel TV service providers including DirecTV, Charter Communications, Suddenlink and the UK’s Virgin Media, later this year.

The offerings come as TiVo has finally re-captured some of its long-lost momentum. Infused by its Virgin deal, the company posted a net gain of 387,000 subscribers using its boxes and DVR interface in 2011, its first usage uptick in several years.

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“This is going after some FiOS customers, but this is really meant for the launch across the United States to the Redbox population and their 30 million customers,” said Verizon chief financial officer Fran Shammo Thursday morning, speaking in Boston at the 40th annual J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.

Also read: A new ‘stream team’: Verizon and Redbox take on Netflix

Shammo said Verizon’s impetus for the joint venture was not so much to transition video content licensed for the fiber-optic-fueled FiOS’ roughly 4.4 million subscribers, a la TV Everywhere, “but to expand our capability outside FiOS’ footprint.”

As for the Redbox footprint, it’s actually much bigger than 30 million. With Coinstar conducting a separate financially oriented event Thursday, “analyst’s day,” its Redbox unit tallied nearly 39 million customers at the end of the first quarter.

It’s about to take over the 10,000 Blockbuster Express kiosk locations it acquired in February. And the company has plans to expand into Cananda, the third biggest disc-rental market in the world.

As for the streaming venture, Shammo said it will showcase Verizon’s new proprietary digital distribution platform, Verizon Digital Media Services (VDSM), which he believes has advantages over the content delivery networks utilized by Netflix and Hulu.

“Utilizing that backbone, we’re able to deliver content at a much cheaper rate than people out there today,” Shammo said.

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Anyone expecting to see a radical change in listening habits may be disappointed.

The first ever weekly top 100 chart of streamed plays, released by the UK’s Official Charts Company on Monday, is broadly similar to the chart of downloads purchases and, therefore, the overall singles chart.

The big news is, the UK’s current number-one single, by Rita Ora featuring Tinie Tempah, is merely #44 in the streaming chart. Instead, top spot goes to Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe, number four in the downloads counterpart.

But, despite only two tracks occupying the same position in both charts’ top 40, streaming appears to give more of a boost to current hits than to older songs.

• Seventeen hit songs present in the downloads top 40 place even higher in the streaming chart, suggesting some popular current songs spin even more online.
• Nine positions in the streaming top 40 are occupied by songs which don’t figure in the equivalent downloads chart at all. That means ongoing plays for Ed Sheeran (x3), Lana Del Rey (x3), Coldplay’s Paradise, Rihanna, Script and Usher tracks which are now selling less.
• Tulisa is amongst the eight artists to be less popular in streaming’s top 40 than via downloads – in streaming, she is 14 places below her #2 downloads chart spot.

The chart is compiled using data from both free and ad-funded services including Spotify, We7, Napster, Deezer, Zune and ChartsNow.

“It shows the true longevity of a track in the life of a music fan beyond a track purchase,” an Official Charts Company spokesperson told paidContent, discussing Carly Rae Jepsen’s streaming chart-topper, which has falling in the counterpart downloads chart after spending four weeks at the top.

“It will be interesting to track what happens to the Rita track over the coming weeks as different forces come in to play. Will the added exposure that Rita will get in the media off the back of her number one single, and additional TV and radio airplay, for example, prompt people to look this track up on Spotify, Deezer etc?”

The spokesperson also revealed: “This chart is purely audio streaming, we are in advanced talks with video streaming services to create a separate standalone video streaming chart.” YouTube is the most-consumed music service.

sss

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