Live Internet Television

DRM is broken.

Artificially impeding the ability to share digital content makes as much sense as attempting to keep people from reading used books. Content owners should quit trying to keep people from distributing content at their own cost. Ask any content owner: They would love to have free distribution. Provided, of course, that they can monetize their content.

Copyright owners have been improperly taken down a rabbit hole by technology companies promising to protect their content the wrong way. DRM restricts the user experience which, in turn, drives users to seek pirated or illegally distributed DRM-free content.

Once we agree that DRM is not a viable solution, we’re free to look at the problem through a different lens.

First, let’s state the goal. Content owners want to control the use of their content. Usually, this means they want to be paid for it.

Second, lets discuss how we achieve it. How do we allow people to easily view and distribute content, while ensuring that content owners can control and monetize the use of that content?

Enter ivi’s Streaming Block Encryption, the right way to protect copyright.

Here is the approach:

1) Allow peer sharing

a) Shift distribution cost to consumer
b) Encourage word-of-mouth promotion

2) Support individual subscription, ppv, and rental models

a) Assign an individualized, trackable identification to each player
b) Track content and time based access for each player

3) Make it easy for the consumer

a) Users are able to say the following: “I’ve paid for it, I can view it.”
b) And “I can share it with others, as long as they’ve paid for it.”

ivi’s proprietary protection system encodes and encrypts content into the .ivi format. This format is only viewable on ivi TV, a live TV player application that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Every ivi TV player is uniquely identified and is programmed to securely pull rapidly rotating decoding keys from the ivi trackers over SSL, then decrypt and decode the content to each individual viewer’s screen.

The .ivi format is encrypted data, viewable only in the ivi TV player, so it can be shared, duplicated, and distributed. However, the shared .ivi files are only viewable on ivi TV. Therefore, the ivi TV player will only allow the shared content to be viewed if it is designated as “free” or if the subsequent viewer has paid for access to that particular shared content.

This “downloadable conditional access system” component to the ivi system has elicited the following response from Stephen Dukes, former VP of Technology from TCI Cable: “ivi solved what the cable industry has spent millions of dollars trying to solve.”

Every content owner that uses the ivi system to distribute their channel, content, or programs, gets all this content protection built in. Best of all, the ivi system allows content owners to control and thereby monetize the use of their content online.

ivi is Internet TV done right.

“The trail may be cold, but the stories are hot!”

By ivi blog Guest Contributor Dr. Rob Moore

Thus far in this series, we have discussed several important aspects of preparing for a film or stage career. Chief among them:

A) The need for personal maturity and perspective. Many successful performers have discovered that the journey toward stardom  is more satisfying than stardom itself. That is, many a performer has been surprised at the lack of freedom and privacy an accomplished star enjoys.

B) The importance of developing multiple performance skills (acting,  dancing, singing, playing musical instrument(s), stage combat, stunt acrobatics and others.) The more an unknown has to offer a casting director, the better the chances of being hired.

In this article, we will briefly discuss the roles played by personal managers and agents, relative to a performer’s career.

Definitions:

Managers: Show business managers tend to have few clients, sometimes a single performer. A manager’s role may include discovering opportunities, negotiating contracts, financial planning, favorable publicity, and damage control should that become necessary.

Agents: Show business agents tend to have a stable of clients and function primarily to search out and present offers to them.

Questions:

Why do newcomers find it difficult to obtain representation from managers and agents?

1) Newcomers have little box office following. That is, other than relatives and friends, few persons are likely to purchase tickets to see or hear an unknown perform. Since managers and agents are generally paid as a percentage of their clients’ incomes, representing a newcomer is unattractive financially — unless the newcomer has the personal resources to support such a manager or agent on salary.

2) Within the show business world, some managers, but especially agents, are rated (read: earn respect) based on the clients they represent.

For example, at one time or another, super-agent Sue Mengers’ stable of clients has included Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Ali McGraw, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Tony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Directors Herb Ross, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Fosse and writer Gore Vidal, to name a few.

Of what should a newcomer be wary relative to representation?

1) Newcomers should be wary of anyone claiming to be able to transform an unknown into a star in a short period of time. Scammers understand that newcomers are often in the position of seeing their savings (if any) dwindle rapidly. Such a precarious financial situation encourages scammers to circle.

2) It is not uncommon for a so-called manager or agent to a) Rent a small  office with a smaller waiting area, b) Hang a few touched-up photos on the walls showing the manager or agent in the company of various well-known stars, c) Let the newcomer gape at the photos in the waiting area for awhile, d) Finally, a receptionist (usually the scammer’s spouse or “close” friend) announcing, “Mr. Jones or Ms. Smith will see you now.”

Several weeks or months (and several hundreds of dollars later), after the manager or agent collects tens of thousands of dollars from dozens of unsuspecting stars-to-be, the office is vacated without notice, the photos gone. The scammer then turns up in another part of town or another community entirely under another name to start the process all over again. (Convictions for this type of representation are hard to come-by because newcomers are embarrassed they have been so easily taken, cannot afford to remain in the area to testify in court cases, and usually haven’t been swindled out of enough money to make aggressive prosecution worthwhile. In addition, a court might ask how much work the star-to-be expected for $500-$1,000 in the first place.) Read the rest of this entry »

“The trail may be cold, but the stories are hot!”

By ivi blog Guest Contributor Dr. Rob Moore

For anyone with a personal and professional commitment to compete in Hollywood or Manhattan for upcoming stage and/or screen productions roles, it is always an advantage to have developed many performance-related skills. An actor or actress in waiting never knows when an opportunity will present itself and require one of his or her talents.

Odds for success are always improved when a performer can respond to a variety of casting calls. That is to say, if one cannot dance well, any film calling for that skill is out of reach. The same holds true for singing, playing a musical instrument, acrobatics and any other area that allows a performer to add versatility to the cast of a production.

For example, John Travolta comes from a stage family. All the members of his family were trained from an early age in dance, song and acting. Having developed all those skills, Travolta was ready for just about any role offered him, short of one that required he actually leap from the 20th floor of a burning building.

He was able to fill roles requiring expert modern dance movement, as in Saturday Night Fever and Staying Alive; entertain us with expert singing in Grease, and, of course, act well. Said differently, a casting director could not ask for much more of a single performer.

As a result, in head-to-head competition with other actors, casting directors understood that, if a script needed a re-write, or an unanticipated new skill was required, Travolta could answer the challenge without the need for the directors revisiting the casting process, which entails additional time and, in most instances, lots of money.

Having multi-skilled personnel “on the lot” also allows writers to add scenes to productions that make it much more alive for audiences. Multi-skilled performers allow writers to exercise their imagination to the fullest, rather than being limited to the “spoken word” in a medium demanding lots of visual and auditory stimuli as well.

As with a sports team, the more talented each segment of a production’s membership is, the more management can count on a final product that will translate into box office revenue. As we said earlier, it is not called “show business” for nothing.

What is true of John Travolta is also true of Madonna. She has shown in the past to be a great modern dancer, but Madonna also is an accomplished ballerina, guitarist and drummer. And, oh yes, she is able to add acting and singing skills to a cast as well.

Bruce Willis made many contacts via his skills, even though many of his particular talents were not directly related to performing in a film production. Willis was an excellent private investigator, bartender and security expert before hitting it big in film. Imagine how those skills might have allowed Willis to connect with many people in Hollywood! (If a star or director is grateful for a service performed by an individual, it is not unheard of for that gratitude to translate into screen opportunity.) Read the rest of this entry »

If you put video content online, it’s interesting to look at how viewers vary from site to site. Male vs. female, skewing younger vs. skewing older, each video sharing site has a unique  audience. Read about the Top video sites at the Smart Market blog and Adobe’s Layers Magazine. I think this info is just as important to content creators as it is to advertisers.

Pew Internet Research

Back in September, we took a reader poll of who we think watches the most online video, by age. Voters favored  “People & young parents 25-34″ over other age ranges. Before we dig into that answer, let’s recognize the fact that video watching online is growing rapidly among all age ranges. Pew Internet breaks it down:

9 in 10 internet users ages 18-29 use video sharing sites. 36% of young adult internet users watched video on these sites.

Online adults ages 30-49 also showed big gains over the past year; 67% now use video sharing sites.

Among internet users ages 50-64, 41% now say they watch video on sites like YouTube

27% of wired seniors ages 65 and older now access video on these sites

Regarding who watches the most online video, a teaser from Nielsenwire:

People have a hard time believing 60% of online video viewers are over the age of 35. Initially, it is a bit shocking: we expect that new media like online video would be more heavily composed of younger people. But the truth of the matter is that video has already reached popularity to the point that the video universe, in broad terms, looks much like the overall Internet audience.

Cutting to the chase…

Here’s how you voted on the categories being the largest (still more apologies for my attempt a dry wit with “fogies”):

It looks like we skewed young by a few years, and underestimated older viewers. Here’s what recent research indicates is the breakdown by age for online video watching: