Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

25-08-2006

by Damien Mulley

Tales from the Blogosphere this week looks mainly at video but also takes a look at initiatives by the large technology companies to protect children online and to help fight cancer using games consoles.

Video may have killed the radio star but these days online video is killing the MTV star. With broadband becoming cheap and ubiquitous it is no longer the TV networks and movie theatre owners that dictate when a TV episode or a movie can be watched but the end-user.

Om Malik blogged this week that AOL signed a major deal with almost all of the Hollywood studios to offer their movies for download with prices ranging from USD19.99 to USD9.99. Unlike most of the other studio-approved downloads these digital movies can be moved from one PC to another. The AOL deal might be the most significant yet but there are many other services coming online in this area.

Amazon is also about to launch a TV and movie download section to its website, according to Techcrunch who managed to get a sneak preview of the service. TV shows will be offered for USD1.99 per episode and DVD movies for between USD9.99 and USD14.99.

Other smaller fish have gotten into the video game too, DivX, a company which helped create the compression technology that enabled DVDs to be compressed and sent over the net have created a YouTube clone for high-quality videos. Videos hosted on their "Stage 6" site have better quality than all their rivals. The days of creating your own high definition TV show are upon us.

Also this week Sony announced the purchase of video site Grouper for USD65 million. The Grouper technology will allow Sony to share Sony content on websites, to distribute DVD quality content via peer-to-peer technology and to allow customers to mix their own content with Sony content. This will allow amateurs to produce professional content while using the net as the distribution network.

Local blogger Piaras Kelly reports that this is already happening without Sony's help; Piaras blogged about an Irish video hosted on YouTube that is a re-enactment of an episode of the Late Late Show using Lego.

Meanwhile in other online media news, the oft-sued founder of mp3.com, Michael Robertson reports on his blog about his next venture called Oboe, which allows you to store up to 1GB of your music online and allows you to synch the files with your computer and music devices from anywhere with a net connection.

Another recurring theme this week is that the world wide web is becoming less of a wild wild west. News from the Smart Mobs blog is that Microsoft in the UK will add a "report abuse" icon to Messenger that will link any users worried about their anonymous internet buddies directly to online police services.

While Microsoft does this, Google announced on its blog that it and other providers have joined an initiative to prevent the exploitation of children online.

Staying on the altruistic theme, Endgadget reports that Sony is going to allow its PS3 consoles to be used by the Folding@ Home project, which uses spare processor time on machines to find potential cures for genetic disorders and cancer.

Lastly, who would have thought eBay could be a place to study zoology? Jason Kottke blogs that a new species of sea urchin was discovered on eBay when a collector spotted a shell that was being auctioned. Maybe those unicorns for sale are real after all?

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and works as a technical writer in Cork.