Bricks and mortar video rental chain Blockbuster were a decade ahead of the competition in terms of the move from physical media to digital. That lead, however, “never materialized into any real online video strategy over the next ten years”, writes industry veteran and EVP of StreamingMedia.com, Dan Rayburn.
“Without a doubt, Blockbuster should have been in the position Netflix is in today as they were the first movers in the market.”
Rayburn then goes on to paint Blockbuster as a digital headless chicken.
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I’ve only owned an Android OS-based phone for a few weeks – the HTC Magic (
The big news this week, of course, is that Google is developing its own Operating System dubbed Chrome OS. Cue the headlines about the search giant, once again, taking aim at Microsoft. And of course, on one level that’s absolutely correct. Just like any other newly launched OS needs to take market share away from Redmond in order to succeed. But it won’t be easy.
It’s now official: The Palm Pre will launch exclusively on Telefonica-owned O2 here in the UK.
It goes by many names. The HTC Magic on Vodafone here in the UK, Google Ion, when handed out as a freebie at the search giant’s developer conference, and the myTouch 3G on T-Mobile in the states. But, whichever way you slice it, the second Android-powered Google phone, manufactured by HTC, is an improvement over the original T-Mobile G1 in almost every way.
After rumors of a third change in direction, Joost, the Internet TV startup that just won’t seem to die, has announced plans to focus less on its own online video portal and instead tout the company’s newly launched white label service to “media companies, including cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators.”
When the Pirate Bay four were convicted of “assisting in making copyright content available” and sentenced to a one year prison term and a fine of $3.6 million, the site’s co-founder Peter Sunde played down the verdict, claiming that it was business as usual. The argument being that the site itself was never on trial, only the four individuals named in the law suit.
When news first hit that three of the leading mobile phone industry organizations had agreed on micro-USB as a mobile phone charging standard, Apple was notably absent. The iPhone maker is particularly fond of its proprietary Universal Dock Connector, you know the one that enables all sorts of third-party after market device goodness and also generates the company a nice little revenue stream through its ‘Made for iPod’ program. Today, however, the European Union (EU), after applying pressure to the industry, announced that Apple had joined competitors, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Research in Motion, Samsung and others, in agreeing to switch to the micro-USB standard from next year.
It was just over two years ago that I posted a brief note on a daring side project from Pirate Bay, the organization best know for its law-evading BitTorrent filesharing site. The project was to build a kind of YouTube-esque video streaming site, but one that operates outside of mainstream copyright law. Today we learn that the project, dubbed “The Video Bay”, lives on.