CES 2012: Rovi lets movie fans convert DVDs to digital files for a fee

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Monday, Rovi Corp. announced what appears to be the first legal tool to convert consumers' DVD collections into digital files that can be played from on online library. It's not exactly iTunes Match for movies, but it's a step in the right direction, with caveats -- lots of them.

One of the main benefits of the digital revolution has been to release music, photos, books and video from their physical bindings, enabling consumers to access their media collections any time, anywhere, on a variety of devices. Those benefits haven't extended to DVDs, however; the discs' anti-piracy software deters people from making functional digital copies of the movies on the discs.

That's "deters," not "stops." It's technically possible to circumvent a DVD's safeguards and copy it, and the software exists to do so. But under federal law, it's illegal to make, sell or distribute such circumvention tools, even if the copy is being made for a legal use. And the Hollywood studios have mounted legal assaults against a series of companies (e.g., 321 Studios and RealNetworks) that have put DVD copying software on the market.

Unlike their ill-fated predecessors, Rovi isn't actually creating copies of DVD movies. Instead, it has created an app for Internet-connected Blu-ray disc players that can read the unique identifier on each DVD or Blu-ray disc, then offer the disc owner the chance to store a copy of that movie online. It won't be free, however; Richard Bullwinkle, Rovi’s chief evangelist, said the studios participating in the service plan to charge a small fee for the stored copy. The fee will be higher for high-definition copies than for standard-definition ones.

The fee is just the first of the caveats. The second is that Rovi's disc identification will work only on Blu-ray players capable of downloading and running a new Rovi application. Bullwinkle wouldn't name the manufacturers that will support Rovi's app, but the possibilities include disc players from Samsung and LG and Microsoft's XBox 360.

The third is that the stored movies will be protected by some form of digital rights management software that limits which devices can stream or download the files. Users won't be able to use the online locker of their choice; instead, they'll have to rely on a service blessed by the studios. Again, Rovi isn't identifying any specific partners yet, but a good bet would be Best Buy's CinemaNow and others that use Rovi's e-commerce technology.

Seeking to copy -- legally-- from Blu-ray discs and online media

One of the criticisms of the digital locks used by broadcasters and Hollywood studios is that, in trying to squelch piracy, they can interfere with fair uses of copyrighted material by other artists. And under federal law, it's illegal to circumvent those locks. Chicago-based Kartemquin Films (the subject of the video at top) and other documentary filmmakers won a temporary exemption from that law a year and a half ago, with the help of students at the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic and lawyers from Donaldson & Callif of Beverly Hills. Now the clinic and the firm are seeking to extend the exemption to all filmmakers and authors of multimedia e-books.

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it illegal to circumvent "technical protection measures" on DVDs and other digital media. That created a dilemma for filmmakers who wanted to use a snippet from an earlier movie on DVD: Even if the use wasn't infringing, they could still be sued for going around the locks. So even though circumvention tools are widely available online (despite the fact that they're illegal to make or distribute), filmmakers used them at their peril.

That's why documentarians sought an exemption from the Copyright Office in 2009. Recognizing the potentially chilling effects of the anti-circumvention provision, lawmakers had included in the 1998 law a requirement that the office consider granting relief every three years to those whose non-infringing uses were adversely affected. The exemption documentarians won in July 2010 applies only to DVDs, and it expires next year.

In seeking a new exemption, the filmmakers are focused on two problems, said Jack Lerner, a law professor at USC who directs the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic.

UltraViolet on eBay? No big deal

The first two Blu-ray discs that support UltraViolet went on sale this month, enabling purchasers to stream or download copies of the films in addition to simply playing the disc. This week, however, reports emerged from GigaOm and the Wall Street Journal that some buyers were selling their UltraViolet rights on eBay for $1 or $2. Oh, the horror! Here's how the Journal's Michelle Kung put it:

It took three years for a consortium of more than 70 movie studios and technology companies to create UltraViolet, the new online storage service that was designed to make buying movies more appealing to tech-savvy consumers.

It’s taken those same consumers less than two weeks to figure out a low-cost work-around.

The situation isn't quite that dramatic. Consumers aren't hacking or circumventing the electronic locks that UV uses to deter unauthorized copying. They're just not using the system in the way it was designed to be used.

Rovi brings security to DivX streams

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Online movie rental sites have long been handicapped by the poor portability of their movie files in comparison to DVDs. Those files could play only on certain devices, or they couldn't be burned onto discs, or the discs weren't compatible with many DVD players. The restrictions stemmed from the limits of the digital rights management technology that Hollywood insists the sites use to deter piracy.

DRM has been steadily improving, however, evolving from an electronic glue binding a file to a computer or a disc into more of an electronic fence that allows files to be shared by a limited number of devices. The latest example of this evolution is the DivX Plus Streaming technology that Rovi Corp. announced Thursday at a trade show in Berlin.

The previous version of DivX's DRM allowed consumers to store downloadable movies onto a flash drive or a disc and play them on DivX-certified devices. (In the case of rented movies, the files would play only until the rental expired.) This was a sneakerware approach to portability -- if you wanted to shift a movie from a computer to a TV set, you burned it onto a disc and walked it over to your living room.

The new version is designed to let cloud-based movie services, such as BestBuy's CinemaNow and other sites powered by the Rovi Entertainment Store, stream movies securely to any compatible DivX device. It also will enable consumers to start watching a rented movie on one device, hit the pause button, then resume on another compatible device from the point where they left off, seamlessly and automatically.

Other content-protection companies, such as Google's Widevine subsidiary, offer some similar capabilities to service providers, so Rovi is playing catch-up to a degree. And not every Hollywood studio allows its movies to be distributed in the DivX format. Rovi executives insist, however, that they've leapfrogged the competition with some features, including the near-Blu-Ray-quality images and the ability to support multiple alternate-language soundtracks and subtitles in the same stream.

Rovi announced just the availability of the technology on Thursday, not its integration into any specific products or services. But Richard Bulwinkle, the company's chief evangelist, said consumers will be able to add streaming technology to many DivX-compatible devices already in homes through a firmware update.

-- Jon Healey

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

Credit: Rovi Corp.

Harry Potter partners with Google, snubs Apple and PayPal

Google has joined forces with the most famous wizard in the world, Harry Potter, which could mean a big boost for two of its services while also resulting in a huge missed opportunity for Apple and PayPal.

The partnership with the new Pottermore website by Harry Potter author JK Rowling will make the e-book version of the seven Harry Potter books available on Google's eBooks reader. The deal also makes Google's payment service Google Checkout the official third-party form of payment for Pottermore.

By partnering with Google eBooks, Rowling has found a way to put her seven highly-in-demand books on smartphones, tablets, e-readers and computers without having to split the sales with companies such as Apple or Amazon, who typically keep about 30% of sales.

Rowling's distribution method gives publisher's more leverage when it comes to selling e-books, said Craig Vodnik, chief blogger for BuildingKeystones.com, a blog about digital product e-commerce.

"It could be a really, really big deal if this works out based off the titles she's written and she's just so well-known," he said. "From the publisher's perspective it's a big deal because it could give them some control over how they distribute their products."

Vodnik said Google landing Rowling is similar to when Apple finally got the Beatles on their iTunes catalog.

"The Beatles sold so many albums and had so many songs," he said. "Rowling is the same in that perspective, but she is much more current and she could put out more titles. She could actually be more influential over the next 20 years."

In what must have been the trade-off in the deal, Google's payment service Google Checkout appears to be the only way besides debit or credit cards to purchases the books from Pottermore. The inclusion of Google Checkout is a huge snub for PayPal, the original and most used third-party payment service online. Instead, Google Checkout will be exposed to millions of Harry Potter fans looking to buy digital versions of the wizard stories.

In the last few months, Google has been strengthening its push into the e-commerce and mobile payment fields, announcing recently it had begun testing a service called Google Wallet, which allows consumers to pay using their Android phones using a technology called NFC.

The Harry Potter books could become the most purchased e-books upon their release if the franchise's performance at the box office and at book stores are any indication. The final Harry Potter film had the best opening of all time, scoring $168.6 million in the U.S. and Canada in three days. Four years ago, the last Harry Potter book had a similar release, selling 8.3 million copies in its first day, according to Guinness World Records.

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Image: A screenshot of Pottermore. Credit: Pottermore

Verimatrix gives studios another reason to offer movies earlier to homes

The major Hollywood studios persuaded the Federal Communications Commission last year to allow them to offer movies through pay-TV services several weeks earlier, before they're released on disc. They didn't start testing the service until mid-April, however, and have made it available only through DirecTV.

On Tuesday, San Diego-based Verimatrix announced a watermarking technology that studios could use to help combat piracy on streamed movies, potentially encouraging them to offer more early-release films. The watermarks won't make the offer more appealing to consumers or the studios' other distribution partners, though, and those hurdles are at least as big for the early releases as the technological limitations.

Consumer Electronics Show: Moving your DVD collection to the cloud?

The ability to rip CDs helped transform music consumption (and, some would argue, hasten the demise of CD sales) by making songs more portable and accessible. That revolution hasn't come to DVDs -- it takes more technical savvy to convert a movie disc into an easily playable file, and it's illegal in the U.S. to make software or devices to help people do that. Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show, at least one device maker demonstrates a new way to get around that hurdle (this year's entry: Moovida), but stiff opposition from the studios (and their lawyers) has stopped most of those products from reaching the masses.

At this year's show, though, studio executives opened the door to retailers converting their customers' DVD collections into movie files stored online. Such conversion services are a likely part of Ultraviolet, the online video distribution initiative by a consortium of studios, tech companies, retailers and service providers. The first UV products and services are expected to hit the market later this year.

The catch is that the files stored online would be confined to Ultraviolet's walled garden, playable only on devices compatible with UV's standards. So it's not clear at this point what compatibility problems might emerge. But with companies expected to develop UV-compliant applications and players for a wide variety of computers, mobile devices and set-top boxes, the disc-to-cloud conversion is likely to appeal to at least some movie collectors.

It's those consumers -- the ones willing to spend the extra dollars to buy a movie instead of just renting it -- who are critical to the success of UV. The consortium's platform is designed to promote movie sales by eliminating many of the off-putting restrictions that the studios impose on downloadable movies without abandoning the limits on copying and sharing that Hollywood demands.

UV-certified downloads can be shared between UV-certified devices and streamed to Internet-connected PCs, TVs and mobile devices running software that meets UV's specifications. And UV-branded Blu-ray discs and DVDs will come with "a copy in the cloud" that can be streamed, downloaded or burned to a disc, said Thomas Gewecke, president of digital distribution for Warner Bros.

But what about all the discs people already own? Several UV backers said they expected to see retailers offer consumer the chance to convert existing discs into UV files stored online. But "we don't know what form yet that's going to take," said John D. Calkins, executive vice president of global digital and commercial innovation for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. "Nobody's figured out ... how you go at that opportunity."

Among the unknowns are what price, if any, consumers might be willing to pay for such a service and what compensation, if any, the studios would demand for the right to make a copy in the cloud. Nor is it clear how hard it would be to verify that the DVDs being converted were ones that had been bought. Ultimately, the lower the bar that studios and retailers set for converting DVDs, the more likely they'll be to draw movie collectors into the UV fold.

The prospect of converting DVDs opens up all sorts of new opportunities for retailers -- for example, the ability to sell UV-compliant digital storage units pre-loaded with the customer's entire movie collection. So retailers can be expected to push to make DVD conversion a reality. Whether consumers respond to the offer remains to be seen.

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-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for the Los Angeles Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

 

 

Consumer Electronics Show: Ultraviolet here, BitTorrent there

This week's Consumer Electronics Show has been a coming-out party for Ultraviolet, the online video-distribution platform backed by a consortium of major Hollywood studios, device makers, retailers and service providers. But while leaders of the consortium -- the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem -- were outlining their plans in a packed conference room at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Thursday afternoon, Bram Cohen was privately demonstrating a new streaming technology based on the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol in a Vegas hotel suite.

The company Cohen co-founded, BitTorrent Inc., also announced Thursday a partnership with Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute, an influential tech R&D center, to develop standards for playing back BitTorrent downloads on a wide range of consumer electronics. It's conceivable that when Ultraviolet-compatible devices hit the market (probably in 2012), some will also bear the logo, "BitTorrent Certified."

That, in a nutshell, is the challenge faced by backers of Ultraviolet. The platform, which the studios hope will breathe life into sluggish sales of downloadable films and TV shows, has to compete with file-sharing software and hosting sites that let people download or stream unauthorized copies of just about anything for free.

Ultraviolet promises a dramatic improvement over the first generation of download-to-own services. But the developments at BitTorrent Inc. show that file-sharing applications are advancing too. And while UV starts from an installed base of zero, more than 20 million people around the world use BitTorrent daily, and more than 100 million use it monthly, BitTorrent Inc. announced earlier this week.

It's important to note that BitTorrent Inc. -- one of several companies that distributes software based on the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol Cohen developed years ago -- doesn't actively encourage piracy, even though that's what most people use the technology for. In fact, the new version of its software, due this spring, will promote more prominently the content that some (typically non-Hollywood) filmmakers and recording artists are distributing via BitTorrent.

CES: Intel's effort to lure Hollywood to PCs with new chips

Intel showed off its second-generation Core chips at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on Wednesday. Or rather, the company showed off what the chips could do, particularly the graphics capabilities that aim to make separate graphics chips redundant.  The most impressive thing to me was the ability to render photorealistic, 3-D images in real time. Oh and yes, the images move -- for example, mimicking the expression of whoever's facing the computer's webcam. One can imagine all sorts of gaming applications, as well as some not-so-welcome capabilities to assume someone else's (virtual) persona.

The company also unveiled Intel Insider, a new security feature on the chips designed to enable more circumvention-resistent electronic locks. The technology -- essentially, the ability to embed into the chip itself part of the security protecting a piece of content, so that the content can be unlocked only by the chip -- was good enough that at least one major studio,  Warner Bros., was persuaded to make high-definition versions of its movies available for downloading.

Of course, consumers may not welcome the ability to download a movie that's locked to their PC. Intel addresses part of that shortcoming through its WiDi (wireless display) technology, which can beam a movie securely in high definition from a PC to a WiDi-equipped television. But such TVs don't make up a significant percentage of the sets in homes today. Instead, Intel Insider seems more like one part of an overall solution that also involves online storage, streaming to a range of devices and some sharing of content within a household -- in other words, like what Sonic Solutions does with its RoxioNow platform, and what the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem plans to do with UltraViolet.

Kevin Tsujihara, head of Warner Bros.' home entertainment group, acknowledged that his company no longer had excuses for withholding high-definition content from PCs. But he added, "Now have to make this a service instead of a product."

Sonic announced Wednesday that it was supporting Intel Insider. At the Intel press event, Intel executives demonstrated how Sonic's technology recognized when a computer had one of the new chips and automatically made high-definition versions of selected movies available for downloading.

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-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Photo: Intel

Amazon announces Web-based answer to Google e-books, scheduled to be ready in 'months'

Amazon.com Inc. didn't let Google enjoy the e-book spotlight for very long.

One day after Google announced its new e-book store, its new rival in electronic reading announced a 'read anywhere' function of its own, available "in the coming months." (That's corporate-speak for "it's not ready yet and we're not quite sure when it will be.") But when it finally is, Amazon's Kindle for the Web feature will allow, as the company says, "anyone with access to a Web browser to buy and read full Kindle books -- no download or installation required."

It's no surprise that the announcement takes sharp aim at the one feature that distinguished Google from the other electronic booksellers: the ability to read in a browser. 

Amazon is clearly looking to take some of the shine off of Google's new bookstore. The heart of Google's claim Monday was that its e-book platform was not tied to any device: Its books can be read on a variety of smart phones, e-ink readers, tablets and PCs. But Amazon's books can already be read on most of those devices, including Apple's iPhone, iPod and iPad and Google-powered Android tablets and phones. Now that Amazon is about to have a Web interface, it's just about caught up to Google in terms of the spectrum of devices with which it works.

The main difference now is the Kindle: Amazon's e-books work on the company's league-leading e-reader, but Google books don't. According to a November report from Forrester, about 32% of the electronic reading public read on a Kindle, only slightly behind the 35% that read on a laptop. All other devices are far behind.

In a way, the still nascent e-book landscape is caught in a VHS versus Betamax war of standards, in which major sellers are vying for market share, while consumers are left with a choice between copy-protected book 'formats' that are tied to a particular company.

Almost makes one nostalgic for old-fashioned paper books -- almost!

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Photo: Amazon. Credit: Joshua Lott / Bloomberg

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