Hard News by Russell Brown

7

Unflattering stereotypes about the record industry

One advantage of travelling for stories is that you get to focus on a few things. The downside is that you can totally miss things like this. Simon Grigg has a thrilling summary of Andrew Dubber's run-in with a board member of the global record industry body, the IFPI.

Once you've absorbed the story, you can download Andrew's fascinating new e-book The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online as a PDF or, if you prefer, read the 20 original blog posts that make up the book.

And on his other blog, The Wireless, Andrew notes a nice new music marketing idea that treats the consumer as a grown-up and can be used on any blog or website.

Meanwhile, as I suspected, TVNZ's announcement that it has negotiated its own YouTube channel - with revenue-sharing deal - is only half the story. In three months' time, YouTube will extend its new regionalisation strategy to this part of the world. The company would have preferred that TVNZ hold its channel announcement till then, but the lure of being the first broadcaster in Australasia to do a deal with YouTube was just too great.

The channel is at www.youtube.com/tvnz, by the way. There was already a tvnz username held by a member of the public, which is why the username for the TVNZ channel is TVNewZealand, but the broadcaster decided not to sweat it.

Happily, it appears there may eventually be potential for sites like ours to embed video and share revenue from pre-roll advertising (which fetches a most appealing rate) as part of TVNZ ondemand's phase two. I'm impressed. And keen.

Meanwhile, the Open Source Consortium is threatening to take the BBC to the regulators over its choice of Windows Media (for the DRM) for its long-awaited iPlayer on-demand application. (Apparently, there's a Mac solution, but I don't know if that's some third-party DRM perching on Windows Media.)

This isn't just theoretical. A conversation I had at ComunicAsia suggests that the BBC service is intended as a global one. You'll be able to watch those BBC 4 documentaries, for a fee. Any such service will be pressed to match the performance of the Friends in Britain services though: the fastest download speeds I ever get are all via BitTorrent.

Meanwhile, some more TV legitimately on YouTube: the Attitude TV item on our family has been uploaded by the producers. I've put it in OurTube.

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