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.

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.

'Two and a Half Men' star Ashton Kutcher promotes start-ups

Ashton Kutcher, who plays a tech investor in real life and on television, used a laptop covered with start-up company logos in the latest episode of CBS' "Two and a Half Men."

One of the start-ups' chief executives, Foursquare's Dennis Crowley, who counts Kutcher as an investor, noticed.

At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco this month, Kutcher talked about playing his TV character, Walden Schmidt, an Internet billionaire who sold his company to Microsoft and now backs other entrepreneurs.

During the interview, Kutcher mentioned that he had covered his character's laptop with stickers of his "dream portfolio" companies but CBS balked at giving exposure to firms that hadn't paid for the privilege.

Guess CBS had a change of heart.

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Photo: Dennis Crowley's screen grab from "Two and a Half Men."

 

Ashton Kutcher talks 'Two and a Half Men' and tech investing

Ashton Kutcher probably gets more pitches in Silicon Valley than Hollywood these days.

The movie actor and technology investor turned up the star power at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference this week in San Francisco, where start-up companies competed for his attention. Michael Arrington, fresh off his own Hollywood worthy drama, interviewed Kutcher on stage Tuesday.

Kutcher plays a tech investor in real life and in CBS' top-rated "Two and a Half Men" on TV. His character, Walden Schmidt, is an Internet billonaire who sold his company to Microsoft and now backs other entrepreneurs.

"There are some parallels to my actual life," Kutcher said.

On the show, Kutcher said he covered his character's laptop with stickers of his "dream portfolio" companies but CBS balked at giving exposure to companies that hadn't paid for the privilege.

Kutcher told Arrington that his investments were a "witch hunt" for the next big thing "that is so magic you can't understand how it works."

"I wonder what would happen if a pilgrim would have seen a computer back in Massachusetts 200 years ago. They would have killed the person as a witch because the computer would look like magic. That's the essence of being a good investor, they're on witch hunts," he said. "That's what I’m trying to do."

Kutcher is not your typical celebrity investor. He was a biochemical engineering major in college so he gets technology but, because he was a model at 19, he says it's nice to be appreciated for "something substantial."

On TV Kutcher is in the funny business. But in technology he's hunting for happiness. Kutcher says he picks technologies that have the greatest potential to create more love, friendship and connectivity in the world.

He has made 40 investments in companies such as AirBNB, Path and Skype but does not disclose many of them.

"I think sometimes for the early-stage companies that I've invested in, disclosing that I'm an investor can be detrimental to the story of the company," Kutcher said.

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Photo: Hollywood actor and Silicon Valley investor Ashton Kutcher and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt. Credit: Araya Diaz / Getty Images

Youku, China's No. 1 video site, signs deal with Warner Bros.

Youku Inc., China’s top online video site, said Tuesday it had signed a deal with Warner Bros. to stream hundreds of the studio’s new and old movies.

The deal follows another first ever venture for a major studio when Warner Bros. said two weeks ago it would offer its content to Chinese cable television users.

Youku will receive up 450 new and old Warner Bros. titles including the “Harry Potter" and “Lord of the Rings” series with Chinese subtitles costing between 77 cents and 46 cents depending on how recent the film is.

The company will be competing against free illegal downloads, but has made its content cheaper than pirated DVDs, which ordinarily cost around $1.50 in China.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen Chinese Internet users become more sophisticated in terms of what they'll spend money on,” said Dele Liu, Youku's CFO. “People are increasingly willing to pay for high quality content.”

Youku said the newest Warner Bros. titles will be available about 100 days after their theatrical release in China. Movies that aren’t shown in theaters will be made accessible the same time their DVDs become available in China. Titles that fail to receive approval from Chinese censors will not be available through the service.

Warner Bros. has been among the forefront of Hollywood’s efforts to gain access to China’s booming movie-going market. China currently limits the number of foreign movies for theatrical release to 20 per year.

Youku, which recorded the highest one-day jump in five years after its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in December, has yet to turn a profit and has seen its stock drop 60% since its peak.

Still, the site is the market leader in Chinese streaming video, commanding 22% market share last year, according to the research firm Analysys International.

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Ashton Kutcher to discuss his role as entrepreneur, investor in Silicon Valley

Hollywood's unofficial ambassador to Silicon Valley will be in New York next week to talk shop.

And we don't mean his new gig replacing Charlie Sheen on CBS' "Two and a Half Men."

Ashton Kutcher, who has 7 million followers on Twitter, will be interviewed onstage Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt by Charlie Rose, who will delve into the actor's role as a prolific entrepreneur and investor.

Three tidbits courtesy of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington on the famous actor's tech cred:

-- Kutcher invested in Skype alongside Silverlake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz in 2009.

-- His portfolio as an angel investor includes high-profile bets such as Flipboard and Kevin Rose's Milk.

-- He has helped companies he has backed with their products, for example by advising Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta on Blekko's mobile offering.

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Photo: Actor Ashton Kutcher speaks during a news conference at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on Nov. 4, 2010.Credit: Brendan McDermid/File/Reuters

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

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Animated Facebook movie based on Mark Zuckerberg comic may be on its way

Following in the footsteps of "The Social Network," another film project about Mark Zuckerberg starting Facebook may be on its way.

But the proposed film, "Mark Zuckerberg and The Found," could lay claim to being the first Facebook movie based on a comic book. A comic book that isn't in stores yet.

The one-shot comic, "Mark Zuckerberg: Creator of Facebook," is being published by Bluewater Productions and is set to hit stores in late December for about $7.

Hayden 5 Media, a New York company that has produced music videos, commercials and documentaries, announced Friday that it had purchased the rights to turn the upcoming comic book into a film.

Another difference between "The Social Network" and "Mark Zuckerberg and The Found," if it gets made, is that the film would be animated, Hayden 5 and Bluewater said in a statement.

“This will not be the last retelling of the Marc Zuckerberg story,” said Milos Silber, an executive producer at Hayden 5, in the statement. “We’re just aware of the profound impact of Facebook, and with over 500 million users, we’re bound to have an audience."

Hayden 5 is looking to produce the film using animation drawn over live-action performances, a technique used in the 2006 film "A Scanner Darkly."

The goal, Hayden 5 said, is to give the movie a comic book feel.

The comic, written by Jerome Maida and drawn by Fritz Saalfeld, isn't the first biographical book from Bluewater. The company has publishedd comics about Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Betty White and Justin Bieber.

Bluewater described the comic as depicting how Zuckerberg has been "tempted with unimaginable amounts of money" and had to "deal harshly with people along the way -- many of whom would later feel betrayed."

Also covered in the comic: Zuckerberg's "frustration with women" which "helped spark an idea that would have him dating Victoria's secret models" on his way to being one of the world's youngest billionaires.

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Image: The cover of the comic "Mark Zuckerberg: Creator of Facebook." Credit: Bluewater Productions

Twitter terminates agreement with controversial celebrity spotting website JustSpotted

Twitter said it has terminated its relationship with JustSpotted.com, a controversial new celebrity spotting website that is slated to launch next week.

But JustSpotted quickly replied Thursday that it would continue to use Twitter to update celebrity locations.

JustSpotted plans to use a combination of Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Foursquare posts and blog updates to plot a celebrity's location anywhere around the world in near real-time. A celebrity's position is plotted on a map of the world, with information about the restaurant or other venue where they'd been spotted -- but not the actual address.

Co-founder and Chief Executive AJ Asver said the celebrity gawking website, which launches Oct. 19, is intended to indulge fans' desire to get the latest updates about the stars they love, using publicly available information volunteered by celebrities.

But JustSpotted raised alarms among privacy advocates, who say it represents a new kind of intrusion on people's lives.

"Once a celebrity might have worried about someone with a camera and a flash," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based advocacy group, Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Now they have to worry about someone with a cellphone and a Twitter account."

JustSpotted is a new service from Scoopler, a start-up that got funding from Y Combinator in 2008. It had licensed Twitter's "firehose" data feed of all public updates for its real-time search engine, Scoopler.com.

"JustSpotted.com is not the product we licensed, and we have terminated their agreement," Twitter spokesman Matt Graves said in an e-mailed statement.

The website's Asver said in an e-mail response that its relationship with Twitter relates to Scoopler and not to JustSpotted, which would continue to aggregate updates from multiple sources including Twitter.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski and Jessica Guynn