Google's bid to save the music industry, one search at a time [UPDATED]

Google's new "music search feature" -- that's the official name, although some folks have been calling it "OneBox" -- is like a relief pitcher arriving in the middle of a game with his team trailing. It can help expose millions of people to legitimate Internet music outlets, which will help those companies compete with free (and, in many cases, unauthorized) sources of music online. Whether consumers will actually spend more on music than they've been doing, however, is a whole 'nother question.

The rap against Google from label executives and online music companies has been that its search results seem indifferent to legality. For example, searching for a legitimate site often yields sponsored results for unlicensed ones; Googling an MP3 will call up dozens of free download sites and probably some unauthorized lyrics outlets, too. The new music search initiative won't scrub the unlicensed sites from the search results, but at least it tries to steer people to sites that compensate copyright holders. The hope, according to Thomas Hesse, president of Sony Music Entertainment's global digital business, is that music fans will have a significantly better experience on a MySpace or a Lala than they would on an illegitimate site.

No doubt they will. Three of the five music services that Google is working with initially -- Lala, Rhapsody and Pandora -- are far easier to use and are much more entertaining than BitTorrent or LimeWire. I'm not a huge fan of the user interfaces at the two others -- MySpace Music and imeem -- but they're far better tools for sampling music and discovering bands than the illegal downloading sites are. And it's certainly true that with the exception of iTunes, which is notably absent from this initiative, legitimate online music services have been woefully undermarketed and underexposed. So the considerable traffic Google is likely to send their way should be a tremendous boon.

Having said that, I think it's still an open question whether the new search function leads the masses to buy more music. It's likely to lead people to listen to more songs -- Google and its streaming partners will enable searchers to play any given song once, in full and for free, right from the search results page. And if they follow up a sample by diving further into MySpace Music or Lala, they'll certainly discover more artists that they like. But if they're accustomed to acquiring music for free online, it's not clear to me why they wouldn't continue to do so after sampling to their heart's content on MySpace or Lala. Alternatively, they may be happy to stick with the free ad-supported streams on MySpace or imeem, or the 10-cent "web songs" on Lala, instead of plunking down 89 cents or more for an MP3. That's fine only if there's enough volume to make up for the lower margins.

At least Google's pushing people in the right direction, or at least some of the right directions. The search sovereign needs to learn how to work more subscription-music services into the mix, too, for the sake of eMusic, Napster and Microsoft's Zune Pass. And you have to wonder how innovative new services will find a way to get a piece of the traffic that Google's search initiative will generate for its short list of partners. R.J. Pittman, who led Google's efforts to develop the new search function, said the company would consider adding partners to the list, but they'll have to be "online, Web-based, easily accessible and offer some interesting approaches to music discovery." Lots of companies fit that bill, so it will be interesting to see how Google decides who's in and who's out.

Updated at 4:43 p.m.: Now that I've played with it a bit, I see that Google still has some work to do on the new feature. The intelligence it applies to search results -- for example, guessing the right band or song name despite errors in the search -- haven't been integrated into music searches. So if, for example, if you search for "Martha Muffins," Google will guess that you were looking for Martha and the Muffins, and return a bunch of links to the band and its work. But it won't trigger a chance to stream songs from the band via MySpace or Lala. Similarly, if you go looking for "the angels want to wear my red shoes," you won't get the chance to stream the song on the search page. But you will get lots of links to the song on other sites. Searching for the song by its correct title -- "Red Shoes" -- won't help, 'cause the new feature doesn't recognize that as a search for a song. It's similarly befuddled by searches for songs covered by multiple artists, such as "Moon River."

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Seeing how they run from the Pirate Bay

Just how big is the Pirate Bay among illegal downloaders? A new report by DtecNet, a Beverly Hills-based firm that tracks online piracy, found that transfers via the Bit Torrent protocol -- the most popular file-sharing application -- fell nearly 80% after TPB's Swedish Internet service provider cut off its bandwidth under pressure from the courts there.

Interestingly, other file-sharing applications didn't gain much traffic in the wake of TPB's cutoff, the report said. Instead, users migrated quickly to other BitTorrent "tracker" sites. Four alternative trackers -- OpenBitTorrent, Denis Stalker, tracker.publicbt.com and pow7.com -- "now comprise nearly 70 percent of all BitTorrent traffic," the report states. It adds that the migration was aided by the Pirate Bay, which altered its software to track files through OpenBitTorrent.

The report's bottom line is gloomy for those who believe file-sharing is killing the entertainment industry:

Though such concentration of traffic would appear to present yet another enforcement opportunity, similar to the Pirate Bay shutdown, it will be more difficult as BitTorrent technologists continue to adapt. Torrent sites now point to multiple trackers, so if one is disconnected or overwhelmed by traffic, pirates can still find the files they seek without stopping to find another tracker.

Meanwhile, TPB continues to jump from Internet provider to Internet provider as more courts try (with no lasting success) to keep it offline. And this week, a Dutch court ordered the company's founders and former spokesman Peter Sunde to remove links to content from the Netherlands, an order that Sunde says they can't comply with because they have no such control.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Grooveshark and virtual music collections

Subscription music services have struggled to persuade consumers to pay for access to unlimited virtual collections of music. But what if the collections were virtual and free?

That's one of the intriguing questions raised by Grooveshark, a streaming music service that offers advertiser-supported music on demand (the ad-free version costs $3 a month). Fresh from its settlement with EMI, the company rolled out a slick new version of its site today, one designed to look and feel something like iTunes (or the much-anticipated Spotify). In addition to a cleaner user interface and more seamless playback, the upgrades include a much easier way to add songs to an online locker without uploading them from your computer -- or paying for them. It's similar to something imeem offers, but I found Grooveshark's version quite a bit easier to use.

You might wonder what's the point in having a personal collection on a site that lets you play any song you wish on demand. For starters, a virtual collection helps manage the huge amount of material available online. Grooveshark relies on users to supply many of the tracks in its library, so it may have multiple versions of a song. Virtual collections also simplify the process of creating playlists. And the fact that it costs nothing to save tracks in an online library encourages people to save tracks they're curious about but not committed to. Sort of like dating. And that's what Grooveshark really is about -- enabling people to sample and discover new artists, then share their discoveries with friends. One shortcoming, though, is that Grooveshark (like imeem) doesn't make it easy to save an entire album to a personal collection. And if you want to save a lot of tracks, you have to upgrade to the paid version.

Still, it's easy to see where these things lead. Throw in a mobile application and you've got a comprehensive service -- one that starts to look like a substitute for a conventional music collection. Why assemble (and pay for) your own stash when you can rely on thousands of other people to share theirs with you? Granted, it's no match today for Napster or Rhapsody, which are more comprehensive (especially when it comes to new releases) and offer an editorial layer (descriptions, bios and the like) that's missing from Grooveshark. And it may never be -- those services keep improving too. Nor does Grooveshark, whose automatic playlisting function is a great alternative to radio, provide much help in the car. But it's free, and that price is hard to beat.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow his intermittent Twitter stream: @jcahealey.

Roku multiplies [UPDATED]

Roku introduced the first set-top box for streaming Netflix movies to the TV set a year and a half ago, and the little $100 device was an instant hit -- as was Netflix's streaming service. Since then, the company has expanded the box's capabilities a bit, adding support for high-definition video and the ability to stream movies from Amazon.com and baseball games from MLB.TV. But all that appears to be table dressing for what Roku plans to do in the near future.

This morning, the company added two variations on the Roku Digital Video Player (now called the Roku HD) to the mix: an $80 standard-definition box, which is designed for smaller or older screens, and the $130 Roku HD-XR, which adds 802.11n capabilities and a USB port. The latter isn't enabled yet, but it suggests that the player will be able to support movie download services such as Roxio's CinemaNow -- a nice solution for people who want better picture quality than their broadband connections currently support. 

I've been playing with an HD-XR on loan from Roku, and like its predecessor it's a breeze to set up -- remarkably so, considering that it's a networked device. The picture quality was very good for Netflix and Amazon, although I was disappointed to find that my 5 mbps broadband connection from AT&T wasn't fast enough to handle either source's high-def streams. The most intriguing thing was the promise of a "Channel Store" where users can go to add more sources of online video. The player's start-up guide gives instructions for using the store, but it's not yet enabled. The company says it will add the store "later this fall" as an automatic update to all its units, but it provided no details about the contents.

Company executives have talked in the past about their ambition to provide a platform for all manner of online video. Unlike some other set-tops, the Roku players support Adobe's Flash video format, which Hulu and many other sources of video online use. Of course, Hulu's owners have been notoriously reluctant to support Internet-on-TV technology for fear of harming the cable TV companies that figure prominently in their business models. But there's intense interest among tech companies in providing a bridge from the Net to the TV, so it's going to happen with or without the networks' support. For example, DivX and Rovi, two software developers with broad partnerships among consumer electronics manufacturers,  also are positioning themselves to provide a platform for online video in set-tops and TVs, as are Boxee, Apple and Microsoft.

One other quick point: I fully expect telephone companies to partner with a set-top maker like Roku. Nothing made me want to upgrade to an even higher tier of DSL more than seeing the admonition on screen that I couldn't play the HD version of an Amazon movie. AT&T and Verizon might not be keenly motivated to team with Roku, given that they're trying to sell their own versions of cable TV, but there are hundreds of other smaller telcos that don't have that kind of conflict. That's fertile ground not just for video-on-demand players like Roku and ZillionTV, but also full-blown cable replacements such as Sezmi, which is expected to begin deploying in Los Angeles soon.

Updated, 10:20 p.m. Oct. 28: Roku informed me that a software bug may have prevented me from watching streams in high definition the first time I used the device. As it happens, the company was right -- having left the box on for a while, it now streams in HD (wirelessly, connected to an 802.11g router) without a flinch. And the picture quality is quite good, although my less-than-acute vision makes me a charitable audience when it comes to HD images.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow his intermittent Twitter stream: @jcahealey.

Lala snips some of the ties that bind Web songs

Lala.com's new deal with Facebook and its rumored partnership with Google could introduce millions of music fans to the "Web song," the cheap but, umm, not universally loved format that Lala pioneered. For the uninitiated, Web songs (which sell for 10 cents each or about a buck for an album's worth), can be played from the Lala site but not downloaded, burned onto CD or otherwise moved. (Lala also sells conventional, full-featured MP3s for 89 cents.) Some might consider 10 cents a fair price for online access to a song; for others, it's a ripoff in comparison to free on-demand services such as iMeem, Grooveshark and the much-anticipated Spotify. The critics' biggest complaint is that people who buy Web songs can't listen to them when they're away from a computer or disconnected from the Net. 

Lala may soon fix that problem, however, with a free iPhone app that enables people to play their Web songs on the road. It works even when stuck in an AT&T dead spot (more on that in a bit). The app, which still has to be submitted to and approved by Apple Inc., can also be loaded onto an iPod Touch. I saw a demo this week and it's quite slick. Users can find tracks or albums from Lala's 8-million-song catalog and play them with minimal delay, view their Lala news feeds to see and hear what their friends are listening to, share songs with Facebook friends, and add web songs easily to their Lala lockers. The app also stores up to 200 of songs on the phone -- for now, it's the ones most recently played by that user, but in the future Lala plans to give people more control over how to fill that cache. Those songs can be played even when you're not online or connected to AT&T's network -- such as when you're on a plane. 

Being able to play Web songs with an iPhone dramatically improves the value proposition, at least for iPhone users. (Lala Chief Executive Bill Nguyen said the company was "excited" about the BlackBerry platform but doesn't have an app available for iPhone rivals yet.) Of course, some people will still object to the notion of paying for music that comes with a diminished set of rights. But then, 10 cents a track is a steeply diminished price.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

The Hollywood plot to turn DVD renters into buyers [UPDATED]

My colleague Ben Fritz reported today that some of the major Hollywood studios are mulling a plan to raise revenue by making people wait longer to rent movies. The goal would be to boost sales by creating a short window for home video sales before titles become available for rent. The strategy wouldn't work unless the big video rental businesses cooperated, obviously, so the studios would have to buy them off by letting them buy discs at a deeper discount than they do today.

Ben's a news reporter, so he couldn't state the obvious problem with this idea. It's crazy.

I understand that the trends aren't encouraging for the studios. DVD sales are dropping, and delaying rentals might -- might -- reduce the momentum enjoyed by lower-margin rental services such as Redbox's $1-a-night kiosks and Netflix's monthly subscriptions. But the studios' plan is based on the idea that consumers are more sensitive to delay than they are to price. It's true that most of the demand for home video titles is exhausted quickly. But it's absurd to assume that buying and renting are interchangeable in consumers' minds, and that people who ordinarily might rent a title would buy it if that meant they could have it sooner. Maybe I'd see the world differently if I were on a Hollywood executive pay scale, but $3 to $5 strikes me as a much different price point than $15 to $25. Think about it. How often do people go to Blockbuster looking to rent a particular movie and, after finding all the rental copies taken, decide to buy a copy rather than rent something else? 

If Hollywood wants to encourage buying instead of renting, it has to make purchased product significantly more valuable than the rented one. This isn't a particularly easy problem to solve, given that video rental stores have access to the same discs that everyone else has. Some studios have been selling the major rental chains (presumably cheaper) versions of their movie discs stripped of the extra features, but the implication is that the missing features weren't all that compelling to start with -- otherwise, renters would demand them and the rental stores would comply. Nevertheless, the advent of connected disc players opens up a range of possibilities for the studios to provide more content and a better experience to buyers than to renters.

Such an approach would focus on generating consumer demand rather than frustrating it. In an era of expanding entertainment choices and intense competition for consumers' time and money, any move to make it harder for people to get content on the terms they prefer seems self-defeating at best.

Corrected, 1:27 p.m.: The original post said that, "with rare exceptions, there's no differentiation between the copies Blockbuster rents and the ones it sells." In fact, Blockbuster and other video chains have been buying stripped-down versions of DVDs for their rental services, as the corrected post now states.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

New adventures in pay walls

Disconcerting news, Hulu users: Broadcasting and Cable reports that new board member (and News Corp. Deputy Chairman) Chase Carey says Hulu must start charging for at least some of its content. The change could come as soon as next year, he told B&C's Claire Atkinson, although he also said that the pay wall might be limited only to special or advance programming. Said Carey, "Hulu concurs with that, it needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business." (Hat tip to Gizmodo and TV Week.)

This isn't a huge surprise; my colleagues Dawn Chmielewski and Meg James reported back in May that Hulu was considering tiers of programming -- some free and some paid -- to attract some cable networks that had been reluctant to share content with the site. (They explored the idea further earlier this month, in the wake of Comcast's talks to buy Hulu co-founder NBC Universal.) But it reflects how eager broadcasters are to collect money from distributors to supplement what they take in from advertisers. And if the fees were limited to programming that wasn't otherwise available online, or to features that Hulu hadn't previously offered, then they wouldn't seem inherently unreasonable. That doesn't mean people would pay them, of course -- they have plenty of other ways to be entertained online for free. But at least Hulu could make the case for the fees with a straight face.

Meanwhile, out in Long Island, Newsday -- a tabloid that Cablevision bought last year from the struggling Tribune Co. for $650 million -- announced that it would charge non-subscribers $5 a week to read the paper online. Pricey! But the paper will be free to Cablevision's broadband subscribers too. Given that Cablevision says 75% of the Long Island market subscribes to Newsday or its broadband service, if not both, there aren't many local readers left to alienate. Still, you have to wonder why any company thinks it can increase the price of a product without increasing its value to customers. Oh, wait -- Cablevision is a cable company.... Never mind.

(Full disclosure: Tribune Co. owns the Los Angeles Times.)

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Net neutrality: Let the wild rumpus start

As expected, the Federal Communications Commission agreed today to propose a set of Net neutrality rules based on the six principles that Chairman Julius Genachowski laid out in a speech last month. (For more background, see the FCC staff's presentation on the proposal.) Those principles would bar broadband providers from blocking customers from the content, applications or services of their choice; preventing them from connecting with the devices of their choice; discriminating unreasonably against any specific content, application or service; and concealing network management techniques in a way that prevents Web users from operating freely. There are at least four notable caveats, In a win for Hollywood, the protections would apply only to legal content and services, and Internet service providers would still be able to block the exchange of infringing material. ISPs would still be able to conduct "reasonable network management," including weeding out spam. The new rules wouldn't trump ISPs' obligations to cooperate with public safety officials. And the commission would permit ISPs to dedicate a portion of their bandwidth to "managed" services, such as pay TV channels or Internet phone calls. What services would qualify and how much bandwidth could be reserved remain to be determined, in what may be the most fiercely debated part of the new rules.

Some of the biggest broadband providers and their allies in Congress question whether the commission should adopt any rules, period -- and whether the FCC even has the authority to do so. For example, AT&T tried to derail the proposed rules in advance of the meeting, and its opposition isn't likely to diminish as the formal rule-making process goes forward. These opponents have found a sympathetic audience in the commission's two Republicans, Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker, who gave only partial support to the notice of proposed rule-making. McDowell and Baker said they welcomed the chance for a thorough public discourse on how best to maintain an open Internet but doubted that government regulations were the right course. They also questioned whether there is a problem here for the FCC to fix, noting that the commission has found only a handful of incidents of ISPs behaving in an anti-competitive way.

In McDowell's view, having more competition among broadband ISPs is the solution, and that competition is rapidly emerging. But the wireless providers he's counting on can't match the ever-increasing speeds deployed by cable TV operators and wired telephone companies. Given that there is virtually no competition within each market -- not many people have more than one cable provider or more than one local telco to choose from -- a duopoly will continue to reign over truly high-speed Internet services for years to come.

One other point emphasized by McDowell is that Internet users want ISPs to prioritize some bits (e.g., video streams) over others (e.g., e-mail). That gets to the question of what constitutes "reasonable" network management, and McDowell offers a useful way of thinking about this issue: what the commission should be concerned about is management techniques that are anti-competitive, rather than those that simply treat one type of traffic differently than another.

I think the commission should also be concerned about management techniques designed to make content, application or service providers pay more for the ability to reach their customers online. It's worth remembering that Web-based companies started lobbying for Net neutrality rules after executives at broadband companies complained about the bandwidth consumed by online video services. They warned that they would need to spend heavily to increase the capacity of their networks, and said that companies like YouTube (now a part of Google) should bear some of those costs. But YouTube isn't a "free rider" -- it has invested heavily in the servers and bandwidth needed to deliver its bits to its customers' ISPs. The problem for those ISPs is that their customers happen to demand a lot of bits from YouTube and other online content providers. In other words, the issue isn't what YouTube is supplying; it's what broadband customers are demanding. Is it really YouTube's or Netflix's or Sling's fault that ISPs are having trouble keeping their bandwidth promises to their customers?

The effect of these rules may very well be that ISPs look for solutions on the demand side of the equation, not the supply side. That could mean higher monthly fees or surcharges for those who are the heaviest users. And with so little competition among ISPs, it's reasonable to worry about gouging. On the other hand, having ISPs deploy a "fast lane" for content providers willing to pay extra for higher priority could be powerfully anti-competitive. Google can afford to pay extra, but can the start-up that wants to be the next YouTube? Universal Music Group could pay extra, but could an indie band? That's why focusing on the companies supplying bandwidth-intensive apps is more problematic than on the consumers demanding them. It's also why the commission's exploration of the "managed services" issue will be so contentious. These services are the ones that would be allowed into the fast lane, making them the exceptions that could swallow the rule.

Photo: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, announcing his Net neutrality principles in September. Credit: Mark Wilson / Getty Images

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

The Internet: a place to pay for music?

The Internet has been a decidedly mixed blessing for the music industry, encouraging people to listen to more songs and discover more bands but also to buy fewer recordings. One reason is that there's been a disconnect between where people go online to find and hear music, and where they can pay for it.

Two pieces of news today suggested that the industry may soon turn more of that burgeoning consumption into revenue, although neither one is a sure thing. TechCrunch, among others, reported that Google -- the site that millions of music lovers use to find bands and songs online -- is poised to launch a music service. The venture, which is set to be unveiled next week, reportedly will combine Google's search capabilities with streaming and purchasing functions from Lala.com and MySpace's iLike. Meanwhile, Facebook -- the planet's most popular social network -- has chosen Lala to power a new music-gifting service. Starting Thursday, users will be able to send their pals MP3s or Lala "websongs" (streamable songs from an online locker) in addition to the usual array of virtual gifts.

By putting the ability to hear and buy music where the masses spend time online, Google and Facebook could help convert more of the Internet's free music consumption into revenue. In both cases, users won't have to pull out their wallets to generate royalties for labels and artists -- Google would presumably share revenue from the ads it sells around its music service, and Facebook would automatically ding its users' credit cards for the music gifts they send. According to Lala CEO Bill Nguyen, Facebook users already spend $50 million or more annually on such gifts as virtual plants and pictures of birthday cakes, which sell for about $1 apiece. So it's reasonable to assume that they'll spend 10 cents to a $1 sending people songs. (Note to the Beatles: Now's the time to license "Birthday" and "Yesterday" to Lala.) Nguyen is so bullish on Facebook's music gifts that he said it could bring in "an order of magnitude" more revenue for the company. He added, "This may be the most significant thing since the ringtone." (He declined to comment on the Google reports.)

That's hyperbolic, but Facebook certainly is taking a lot of the friction out of buying music for a pal. Not only does it tell users about their friends' birthdays and other significant events, it also makes it easy to search through Lala's catalog of 8 million songs for just the right sentiment. And the 10-cent charge for streamable tracks is practically painless, especially when it's added to the user's tab automatically, Google's advantage, meanwhile, is that it's extremely well positioned to serve music fans and the advertisers who want to reach them.

Still, it remains to be seen whether Google pursues a pure advertiser-supported model, à la MySpace Music and the much-hyped Spotify, or if it is more focused on driving sales through social-based discovery and low prices, à la Lala. As NPD analyst Russ Crupnick pointed out recently, free advertiser-supported services are cannibalizing digital music sales. That's true in part because advertisers won't pay much for banner or display ads on a music service that people use as background music. So if Google goes the unlimited-free-music route, it's an open question whether it would be able to generate enough revenue from advertisers to make its service a net plus for copyright holders.

My guess is that it won't. At a panel discussion today about new music formats at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica, iLike CEO Ali Partovi spoke highly of Lala's model of one free listen. But he also said it was important to go beyond mere 30-second samples, which has been one of iLike's limitations. Said Partovi, "If you let them listen to the full song, they're more likely to buy."

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Comcast, 1Cast and Boxee

Two seemingly unrelated announcements this week illustrate the intensifying pressure on cable TV's business model. Comcast announced this week that it would make more cable-TV programming available free through the Internet by the end of the year but only to people who get broadband and cable service from Comcast.

According to PaidContent.org, the additional programming includes fare from HBO, TNT and TBS, which have kept most of their shows off of Hulu and other online TV sites. The move might dissuade a subset of Comcast's customers from dumping cable in favor of free online TV but won't charm the ones who get their broadband from a phone company.

Granted, the masses still prefer to get their TV shows from cable and satellite operators rather than Hulu because they bring it to the TV, not the PC. But the momentum behind free online TV is unmistakable -- there are new devices, such as Netgear's Digital Entertainer Live, that make it easy to bring online video to the big screen in the living room, older devices such as the Roku Video Player with ever-expanding capabilities and services including Hulu and Netflix that are continually expanding their libraries of free content. 

So here's the second announcement. 1Cast, a self-styled Hulu for news videos, unveiled a new partnership with Boxee, a program that provides a user interface for online video streams that's optimized for a TV set. The deal adds an important element to Boxee's entertainment-heavy lineup, while giving 1Cast a route to TV screens.

1Cast's approach is novel for an online news aggregator -- it strikes revenue-sharing deals with networks, rather than just monetizing the feeds that are freely available online. CEO Anthony Bontrager said his company gets clips directly from the networks in "near real time" -- typically within minutes of their appearance on air. Visitors to the 1Cast site can browse through thumbnails of the most recently added clips, or they can use the site's search function to gather all the clips related to a given topic. They also can create virtual newscasts on the topics of their choice that are dynamically updated whenever new material arrives. Or they can watch what other users have been watching or saving.

In other words, it's the Internet's remix power brought to bear on the TV news industry. It's not for people who like having someone else decide what the most important developments of the day are or who the most credible speakers might be. Instead, it's for those who want to be their own news directors or tap the collective judgment of the crowd and who like the idea of being able to view multiple perspectives on the same story. 1Cast draws from more than a dozen sources, including CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, the BBC and MarketWatch. It's also expanding into entertainment news -- it just added clips from E! Entertainment and Style. What's in it for them? In addition to the shared revenue -- 1Cast adds post-roll advertising and some interactive overlays to the clips -- Bontrager said networks like the idea of getting their material in front of viewers who might otherwise be wedded to a competitor's channel. 

One interesting tidbit about 1Cast's users: The big screen doesn't appear to be as important to them as the mobile one. Bontrager said viewers typically spend 12 to 15 minutes watching 1Cast on a PC, but the average session time on mobile (iPhone or Android phones) is 36 minutes. Sure hope they're not watching while they drive. ...

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.