The Online Reporter articles from September 16 2002

The Online Reporter archives from September 16 2002

Sony Shows New Piece of its Digital Media Strategy.(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... Sony Japan previewed some of its strategy for linking home digital media appliances to each other and the web when it showed a digital video recorder (DVR) called the Channel Server CSV-E77 with a 160GB hard disk, two TV tuners and more...

Melee In LA: RIAA & the File Swappers - Round Three.
September 16, 2002... The third big courtroom battle between the record labels, led by its association the RIAA, and the peer-to-peersters will be held in a Los Angeles federal court in front of Judge Stephen Wilson. Joining the fray for the first time in this suit...

Meow. First Bid For Napster Is XXX-Rated.(Private Media Group)
September 16, 2002... A "premium quality adult" entertainment company, Barcelona, Spain- based Private Media Group (PMG), said Thursday that it had made a bid for Napster's trademarks and the napster.com domain name. It bid 1m shares of its private common stock but...

Meow. The Cool Music Cat May Have One More Life.Judge Gives Napster Until September 13 to Get Organized.
September 16, 2002... US bankruptcy judge Peter Walsh on Monday surprised Napster's creditors by calling a hearing much sooner than expected to move Napster from a Chapter 11 orderly reorganization to a Chapter 7 forced liquidation. Under Chapter 7, a trustee is...

IBM & MovieLink Put Movies on the Net.
September 16, 2002... MovieLink, the joint venture of five of the biggest movie studios, has picked IBM to provide the technology and run the service that'll deliver and protect Hollywood's most valued properties over the Internet. Selected movies will be downloaded...

Analysis: Will People Watch Movies on Their Home PC?
September 16, 2002... A major obstacle to the success of movie services is only being able to play downloaded movies on a PC. PC makers have not innovated enough to offer home entertainment-based PCs that will attract the style-conscious buyer. PCs are still bulky,...

Warner Brothers Offers New & Classic Movies through CinemaNow.
September 16, 2002... CinemaNow said this week that Warner Brothers has agreed to let it put a few dozen films on the Internet to be downloaded. They will include last year's great hit "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" for $3.99 "as well as classics like...

Analysis: Sodapop, Popcorn and a PC? Will Hollywood's Internet Initiative Succeed?
September 16, 2002... Considering that there are 13 million homes and 10 million dorms rooms with broadband access and only 2 million homes with pay-per- view cable, the studios want to find out whether a direct approach to movie fans via the Internet may be more...

Valenti Optimistic about MovieLink.
September 16, 2002... An ever-energetic 81-year-old MPAA chairman Jack Valenti expressed cautious enthusiasm for MovieLink's upcoming launch. The persuasive, but realistic, Valenti said, "Piracy is the one issue that unites all the creative community in the world."...

Senate Bails on Copyright Bill.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Senate support for the proposed Anti-counterfeiting Amendments of 2002 has all but collapsed because of some last-minute changes that were sneaked in just before Congress went on vacation. The bill was originally designed to crack down on...

Streamcast Heads For Bodycast.(Streamcast Networks)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Streamcast Networks Inc, developer of the Morpheus file-swapping client, is catching some heat from the open source community. The latest edition of Morpheus, rev 2.0, relies on an open source library called Jtella. Open source advocates accuse...

Sony Launches Wireless Home PC.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... Sony says that it'll introduce PCs this month that will feature a wireless connection between a user's PC and his TV set. The user will be able to watch TV programs and movies that have been recorded on a PC on their TV set. It will also let...

Streamwaves Adds Warner Music Group License.
September 16, 2002... Streamwaves has signed a non-exclusive deal with Warner Music Group (WMG) that will give Streamwaves' North American subscribers instant access to WMG-controlled music. WMG is the third major music house that Streamwaves has signed up after EMI...

Intel Starts Wireless Digital Media Initiative.
September 16, 2002... Intel this week announced a reference design for a "digital media adapter" that will connect home entertainment appliances like PCs, stereos and TVs wirelessly. It will eventually let people play TV programs or movies stored on a PC on a TV or...

Motorola Serves Up Three.") What Intel wants is for the PC and the.
September 16, 2002... electronics entertainment appliance makers to standardize on its wireless networking to give it the dominance it has enjoyed in PCs. Burns specifically appealed to Microsoft, the other half of the Wintel duo, and Sony, which increasingly...

Consumers Have Digital Rights Too.
September 16, 2002... On July 17, the Commerce Department's Technology Administration held a Digital Rights Management (DRM) summit in Washington. Called the "Understanding Broadband Demand: Digital Rights Management Workshop," the vested interests of Hollywood, Tin...

RIAA Submits Injunction Wording in Madster Case.(Recording Industry Association of America)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Last week the federal judge in the Madster case overwhelmingly ruled against Madster in a copyright infringement brought against it by the RIAA and the record labels. (See T

RIAA & Record Labels Squash Aimster/Madster.(Recording Industry Association of America)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... The judge gave RIAA attorneys until September 13 to submit proposed wording for a preliminary injunction against Madster that would force Madster to remove all copyrighted files from its network. After submitting the proposed injunction...

Sony Holds PC Sales Forecast While Others Decline.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Sony Japan's mobile products head Kejji Kimura says Sony has no intention of revising its PC forecasts downwards. Market researchers have said that HP, Gateway, Dell and IBM are all suffering from weak consumer PC sales everywhere and Intel...

Audiogalaxy Goes Legit with Rhapsody.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... The former free music-swapping service Audiogalaxy is cleaning up its act. It's licensed the Rhapsody music service from online digital music company Listen.com and is reselling an Audiogalaxy-branded version of it. Its service costs $9.95 a...

Deep: "Can't Shut the Internet Down".
September 16, 2002... A federal judge in Chicago said last week that he intended to enjoin Madster and order it to shut down. Madster founder and CEO Johnny Deep claimed, "There's nothing I can do to shut it down. It's the Internet. I can't shut the Internet...

Intel Makes Innovative PC Awards. Huh?
September 16, 2002... At Intel's Developer Forum this week, it gave out Innovative PC awards for desktops. In making the awards, Intel said, "As part of Intel's PC Ease-of-Use Initiative, the first innovative awards were given at IDF, Fall 1999 to recognize PC...

AOL Deals Covad a Five-Year Agreement.
September 16, 2002... AOL Online will sell DSL broadband services supplied by Covad under a five-year pact the two companies have signed as The Online Reporter Issue 308 predicted. The agreement adds significantly to AOL Online's potential broadband subscribers....

"AOL Online Gets 10.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Million Broadband Prospects.") AOL also has agreements to get DSL broadband access from several Baby Bells. Since acquiring Time Warner, AOL has offered broadband to Time Warner's cable customers. Under the deal AOL made with the...

"AOL To Pay Comcast $38 a Month.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Per Subscriber.") Other Covad resellers include Earthlink and Sprint (see T

Covad Sprints To Sell DSL. More Digital Media Plumbing to the Home).(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Covad has also started selling direct to consumers and businesses. "We're a national DSL provider whereas the other DSL providers, such as the phone companies are regional in nature," said Kimberly Odom, Covad's director of product management.

A Message to Microsoft and Intel.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Three of your four biggest customers, HP, Gateway and IBM, are losing money selling your main product in their PCs. How long do you expect them to do that? Perhaps this quote from the June 24 the New York Times will set you thinking of ways to...

AOL Keyword: Shortfall.
September 16, 2002... AOL Time Warner said it expects the results of its AOL Online unit to be off 6%, or $100 million lower than its most recent forecast. It said better-than-expected results in other of its businesses such as cable TV, HBO and magazine publishing...

Gracenote Raises $9.5m.
September 16, 2002... Gracenote, the company that operates the CD database (CDDB) used to identify CDs in digital media applications, has secured $9.5 million in third-round financing lead by venture firm Sequoia Capital. Sameer Gandhi, a Sequoia partner, has joined...

New Maxtor Hard Disk Holds 230 Movies or 65,000 Songs.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... Maxtor announced new DiamondMax high-speed (7200 rpm) hard disks with up to 160GB capacity. That'll hold about 230 DVD-quality movies, which is more than Hollywood produces in a year. Or music lovers can store about 65,000 songs in MP3 format....

Toshiba Intros 1GB Flash Card.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... Toshiba has introduced a 1GB CompactFlash card that it boasts has the highest density of any card of its kind. Measuring a mere 1.4 by 1.66 inches, the thing is roughly half the size of a business card. With 1GB on board, it makes exchanging...

Brilliant Digital Scores $1.07m.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc, the online advertising agency with a controlling stake in the Altnet P2P network, raised $1.07 million after selling some stock to MarKev Services LLC, a venture firm co-owned by Brilliant chairman and CEO...

Companies To Test Coax Home Networking.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Comcast, the cable firm, Broadcom, the networking chipmaker, and Ucentric Systems, an ISV, have partnered to test a home networking system that uses existing coax. Similar to the HomePNA networks that use ordinary phone lines, the venture is...

Intel To Embed Certificates into Next-Gen CPUs.
September 16, 2002... Intel says its next generation of processors will have embedded electronic certificates in them, a feature that Microsoft and other software makers can use to build stronger security and anti-piracy software. Code named LaGrande, the...

Sonicblue Develops First Intel-based Portable Video Player.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Consumer electronics house Sonicblue says it's developing a portable video player (PVP) called the ReplayTV PVR based on an Intel reference design. The player is basically a miniature version of Sonicblue's ReplayTV digital video recorder...

Sonicblue's PVP.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Sonicblue's PVP isn't the first device of its kind. French consumer electronics maker Archos already has a PVP on the shelf, retailing for $400. The Archos player has a 1.5-inch (3.5cm) screen, a 20-gig hard disk that consumers can load with...

"France's Archos To Ship Personal Video Player Months.
September 16, 2002... Ahead of Intel" and 313-05 "Archos Ships First Divx Handheld")

Hello PC Makers! Consumers Are Buying, But Not PCs.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Retail electronics chain Circuit City reported that same store sales increased 10% in its second fiscal quarter ending August 31 but that the increases did not include sales of PCs. People are buying more electronic gear for the home while PC...

How Risky Is Investing in High Tech?
September 16, 2002... "To say 'tech investing involves risks' is an understatement. During the last 12 months, 31% of the tech stocks globally experienced single-day drops of at least 20%. In contrast, only 13% of the non- tech stocks fit this description. Moreover,...

The Million Users Club: Napster, Kazaa and WinMX.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Of all the peer-to-peer networks, only Napster, Kazaa and WinMX have had over 1 million users. Morpheus had over a million when it used the Kazaa protocol but its Gnutella implementation has not reached anywhere near the million mark. Imesh,...

EBay Faces Potentially Crippling Patent Suit.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Auctioning is right up there with messaging, e-mail, browsing and music downloading as the most popular uses for home PCs. EBay has certainly been an amazing Internet success standing tall above all the dot.bombs. Now its software and business...

Microsoft Learns about Depending on Sole-Source Suppliers.
September 16, 2002... Manufacturing hardware is more complicated than it looks especially if you are dependent on a single supplier for an important component as Microsoft is learning with its Xbox venture. Microsoft had to call in arbitrators to force Nvidia to...

Wall Street Analyst Says PC Consumers Won't Pay for.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Incremental Features and Functions. Duh! Brokerage Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) said in a research report that consumers won't pay for incremental increases in a PC's features and functionality. CSFB said things Intel said at its...

Kazaa Is Number One Searched for Site at Lycos.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Lycos, which claims to be the world's largest "global Internet network," says that Kazaa was the number one searched for site the week ending September 7. NFL football was second and a PC game was third. Hmmm. Music, sports and PC games. What...

11.3 Billion Pop-up Ads So Far This Year.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Nielsen/NetRatings estimates that 11.3 billion pop-up and pop-under ads were launched in the first seven months of this year. (Yeah, but why all on my PC?) One company, X10 Wireless Technology, launched almost 10% of them. Pop-Up Stopper and...

Broadband Booms Down Under.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... During May, June and July, 150,000 Australian households signed up for broadband Internet access according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That makes a total of 500,000 broadband-connected homes Down Under. At the current growth rate, 50% of Australia's...

Preserve Us from Blank Checks From VCs.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... "If I had [had] a blank check from a VC...things might have gone much worse." - Pierre Omidyar, eBay chairman and founder.