Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Perhaps the company wants Apple to disable the playback of all DRM-free videos on iPods? Such a move would be outrageous, as it would make life difficult for individuals and organisations to publish DRM-free content if they so choose. Why should you have to mess with DRM just to take your latest home movie of the kids over to Grandma's when you visit?
But you can see why NBC is concerned, as it is widely known that most popular TV shows can be downloaded via BitTorrent, notwithstanding any legal issues. If finding a torrent for each episode is too hard, the open source TVShows will automatically locate a torrent for each new episode and instruct your chosen BitTorrent client to fetch it.
TVShows lets you specify your preferred quality (normal, high or very high), and then fetches the right version, if necessary waiting for higher quality versions to appear.
While the program is Mac-specific and still in alpha form, it seems to have some enthusiastic users.
Tools like this make as easy to use BitTorrent as it is to set up a PVR to record a series of shows. What's more, Australian users aren't faced with waiting for episodes to be broadcast (though some of our networks are wising up and scheduling programs shortly after they air in the US), subscribing to a program guide (there's no free EPG in Australia), or worrying whether the promised in-band EPG will be encrypted or not (our stations currently only provide details of the current and next programs).
So what's the answer? I don't have a fully-worked plan, but I'm sure it involves changing business models - as painful as that can be - rather than hoping for technological measures and draconian laws to shore up existing structures indefinitely. As an interim measure, paid-for downloads need to remain at least as cheap and easy as they currently are with iTunes.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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