Week of April 2, 2007

European Anti-trust Probe Of Apple May Shed Light On Music Industry Deals

Friday, April 6, 2007

A European antitrust probe into iTunes pricing promises to shake up the entire music industry, as it could force the music industry to make public the details of its intellectual property agreements. Keep an eye on this one, as it could lead to some startling headlines.

Greening of the Media

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Specific political controversies aside, there's no question that the environment and global change are on the public's mind. Media reflect this in all sorts of ways from the Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth to increased news coverage of the scientific and political issues and long-form programming covering the evidence of global change.

The one thing that many observers agree on is that the public's interest in the subject is high. And besides educating them on the science, one of the most important things that the media can do is provide solutions that are more environmentally friendly. In other words, coverage of the topic should include tips on what consumers can do in their own homes to save energy and live a more environmentally responsible way. The key is not to preach to them, but rather to provide suggestions on how they can make a difference.

Product Placement in Videos

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Television and the movies have already become heavily involved in product placement, for a band, the issue becomes more complicated, as the image of the brands used in the video have to match the image of the band.

Downtime For Largest Sites

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Alexa just released data for the downtime for the largest sites on the Internet, and the big losers were Blogger and YouTube, each with over 4 hours of downtime so far in 2007. Still, considering that this is for over 3 months, even those "worst offenders" weren't too bad. Interestingly, the largest website according to their data, Yahoo!, was also the site with zero downtime, an impressive feat for the Yahoo! IT crew.

EMI To Sell DRM-Less Songs On ITunes

Monday, April 2, 2007

The long-rumored move by EMI has occurred, with two interesting twists:

1) It involves a price increase: Apple will sell songs via iTunes without rights management, and in a format that can work on any device that can play AAC format (which is most of them).

2) The quality will be better. DRM-free songs will be encoded at 256 kbps (current quality is 128 kbps).