Does more broadband mean more piracy?

In the $787-billion economic stimulus package enacted in February, Congress told the Federal Communications Commission to create a plan for extending broadband service to all Americans and increasing broadband speeds. It's an apple-pie, chicken-in-every-pot goal -- at least until people see the price tag. Nevertheless, there are plenty of disagreements over the details of the plan. One is a battle between copyright holders and consumer advocates over what to do about all the content that broadband users download or stream illegally. The former want Internet service providers to use technology to filter out unauthorized content flowing over their networks; the latter argue that filters won't work as advertised and will inflict an unacceptable amount of collateral damage on lawful Internet uses. I sympathize with the copyright holders' concerns about rampant unauthorized copying, but I'm not persuaded that filtering is the solution -- or that this proceeding is the place to have that debate.

Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, laid out the case against filters ...

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.

Microsoft dumps 'Family Guy' variety show

Seth MacFarlane. Credit: FOX One.

It was pretty exciting and edgy when Microsoft Corp. said it would team with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane on a variety show airing next month.

The software giant was going to be the only advertiser on the show and would collaborate with MacFarlane and his partner in laughs, Alex Borstein. The pair would write jokes and skits into the show that would promote Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 7, which came out last week.

Now comes word that Microsoft has pulled out. Apparently "the content was not a good fit," according to a statement the company e-mailed out this afternoon:

We initially chose to participate in the Seth and Alex variety show based on the audience composition and creative humor of Family Guy, but after reviewing an early version of the variety show it became clear that the content was not a fit with the Windows brand.  We continue to have a good partnership with FOX, Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein and are working with them in other areas.  We continue to believe in the value of brand integrations and partnerships between brands, media companies and talent.

The show will go on, Microsoft said, but without help from Redmond. Maybe Jerry Seinfeld is as edgy as Bill Gates wants to get.

-- Dan Fost

NameDrop, a celebrity social network, wants to sell the real thing

In Hollywood, we've all been trained to salivate at the sight of that red velvet rope that separates the A-listers from, well, everyone else.

Today, a celebrity social media site called NameDrop launched its own version of the velvet rope. For $2.99 a month, subscribers get access to celebrity status updates, blog posts and photos.

The site's owner, Ted Foxman, in November sold his company, Eagle Test Systems, to Teradyne for $360 million. The Chicago entrepreneur poured some of that money into creating NameDrop.

The site currently features content from a dozen celebrities, including Cat Cora, the first female Iron Chef, music producer David Foster, and Matthew Stafford of the Detroit Lions. See the full list here.

Why pay money when you can find out Demi Moore's views on slavery for free on Twitter? NameDrop believes fans will pay good money to know what the celebrities are really thinking as opposed to what their impostors are saying. Working in NameDrop's favor is an insatiable thirst for celebrity news.

But as most content sites know, it's hard to compete with free -- even when you are dangling the velvet rope.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Timberlake signs on to co-star in Facebook movie, "The Social Network"

Justin Timberlake. Credit: Chris Pizzello / AP

Did Facebook just get somewhat cooler?   

Variety is reporting that the latest addition to "The Social Network," the early-stage Hollywood movie project that will tell Facebook's origin story, has signed Justin Timberlake to play a principal character.

The actor-singer-Emmy winner is slated to play Sean Parker, a co-founder of Napster (not to be confused with Sean Fanning, the music site's creator) and Facebook's first president. Timberlake will play alongside Jesse Eisenberg ("Adventureland", "The Squid and the Whale"), who will portray Facebook's founding father Mark Zuckerberg, who was 19 when he famously created "The Facebook" in his Harvard dorm room.

The film will apparently concentrate on the vicissitudes of fame and fortune encountered by the young founders, whose meteoric ascent into wealth and pop culture was not always without its hitches. 

The script was written by Aaron Sorkin, a specialist in spinning drama out of often prosaic reality. Facebook's origin story comes with its share of Hollywood's classic elements involved -- money, power, and even betrayal -- but Sorkin and director David Fincher may have to take some liberties with the sex.

-- David Sarno

Netgear offers a networked hard drive for the masses, with a caveat

The tech industry is gradually persuading Americans to set up home networks, but it's had a tougher time selling consumers on the idea of storing all their data on a single device within their homes. The appeal of "network-attached storage" boxes and "home media servers" has largely been confined to the earliest of early adopters, even as the software to centralize and back up data has become increasingly user friendly. Today, Netgear makes a new bid to sell NAS to the masses, offering the $229 Stora. Its features and price are impressive, but I'm not sure Netgear has come up with a compelling new argument for consumers to go this route. That's because Hollywood isn't ready to play along.

The idea behind a NAS is that it makes all of your digital photos, music and documents available to any device in the home that's capable of displaying them. The emergence of networked TV sets and Blu-ray players means that a NAS can serve content into your home entertainment center, not just the computers scattered around your home. Granted, putting all of those files in one place could have disastrous consequences in the event of a disc failure, but it also makes it easier to back up all that data.

The Stora comes with a 1 terabyte drive ...

YouTube to show Sony's "Ghostbusters" this week for film's 25th anniversary

"Ghostbusters" from 1984: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. Credit: Sony Pictures

YouTube and Sony are crossing the streams.

YouTube is now hosting a weeklong showing of Sony's comedy classic "Ghostbusters" in honor of the film's 25th anniversary.

Oddly, when the film plays for seven days on the world's No. 1 online video site, it will be not be in a YouTube player. It will instead be piped in through Sony's Crackle player, which will be embedded on the site.

That's a considerable departure* for YouTube, whose brand has for years been synonymous with its trademark square video player, with big buttons and a small screen.

That YouTube is allowing a major Hollywood studio to plop down a foreign video player in the middle of its site is the latest sign that the platform has become more receptive to the entertainment industry's advances. For some time, YouTube has been keen on moving away from its early reputation for amateur content and unauthorized clips from TV shows -- in part because there's no money in those areas.

Sony is currently developing Ghostbusters 3. L.A. Times Hero Complex blogger Geoff Boucher spoke with Dan Aykroyd about the film in May. 

The showing, which will appear in a 16x9 aspect ratio at "high quality" resolution (as opposed to YouTube's league-leading jumbo HD player) will feature seven or eight in-stream commercials. The revenue will be shared between partners Sony and YouTube, with the studio taking the majority of the proceeds.

-- David Sarno

*Corrected, 10:26 p.m.: YouTube has been featuring Crackle-powered videos for several months, so the departure happened a while ago while the Tech Blog wasn't looking.

Follow my variable-rate stream of tech and culture-related musings on Twitter: @dsarno

Now it's Kaleidescape's turn to cry [UPDATED]

In back-to-back rulings this week, a federal judge in San Francisco and a California appeals court in San Jose have blocked or threatened two products that let movie buffs shift their collections from plastic discs to hard drives. The MPAA hailed the rulings against RealNetworks' RealDVD software and Kaleidescape's home movie servers as victories for the rule of law, but what was really at stake was the studios' influence over how their products are consumed. By defeating Real and Kaleidescape in court, the studios and the DVD Copy Control Assn. (the inter-industry group that sued Kaleidescape) have made it harder for companies to develop new ways for people to watch Hollywood fare at home. And in doing so, Hollywood is attacking the perceived value of its products and cutting off potential outlets for growth.

The concurring opinion by Judge P.J. Rushing in the Kaleidescape case outlined the pointlessness of the DVD CCA's insistence on enforcing the letter, rather than the spirit, of its contract with the company.

DivX lands two more Hollywood studios

Continuing its slow march to acceptance in Hollywood, DivX Inc. has persuaded two more studios -- Paramount and Lionsgate -- to use its compression and antipiracy technologies on the movies they make available for downloading. The deals announced this morning aren't exclusive, so the studios will continue to support other companies' codecs and DRMs as well. DivX has two other nonexclusive deals with major Hollywood studios -- it revealed alliances with Sony Pictures in January 2008 and Warner Bros. in October. At its current pace, it should have another deal or two to announce in June 2010.

I'm not criticizing DivX. The studios are the ones moving at a snail's pace. They should have embraced DivX's technology years ago, as some independent film outlets did.

One in four U.S. Internet users 'snacked' on entertainment news in May

 

Snacking on celebrity gossip online is on the rise. Credit: swanksalot via Flickr.

Skip the vending machines. More Americans are grazing online for entertainment news at work than last year, according to a report released today from Web research firm comScore.

About 55 million people in the U.S., or roughly one in four Internet users, visited at least one entertainment news site in May, up 7% from a year earlier, the report said. Half of the time spent on such sites occur at work.

"Americans are feeding their hunger for celebrity gossip by ‘snacking’ on these news updates throughout the workday," said Jack Flanagan, comScore's executive vice president.

Top sites benefiting from this fascination with Hollywood stars include Yahoo's omg!, TMZ, People, USMagazine and Entertainment Weekly.

In all, Americans spent 15 million hours online stargazing. Impressive as that may be, the number for June is likely to skyrocket, after millions of fans surged online to read news about Michael Jackson's death, nearly crippling some online services, such as AOL's Instant Messaging, and flooding sites such as Facebook and Twitter with traffic.

-- Alex Pham