Tag Archives: internet

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October 10 – a big day for virtual releases

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open an orange and a blue portal and travel between the twoYesterday was quite a big day for virtual goods. In addition to Valve releasing the Half Life 2 Orange Box online (which Jeremy blogged about earlier), Radiohead released their new album ‘In Rainbows’ via their website. Both mark a considerable move away from the traditional business model in video games and music, offering their content directly to the user at a lower price than would be available in brick and mortar stores.

Happily as well as being delivered in new formats, both products are very very good. Radiohead’s album sparkles and is more accessible than anything I’ve heard since ‘Kid A’. It feels less jagged than previous work and easier without losing that challenging nature that requires 40 listens before you get it. I still feel like I need to listen more but the alienation I felt listening to some of ‘Hail To The Thief’ is not there – I can enjoy listening to ‘In Rainbows’ even when not concentrating on it. I decided to pay £6 for the album, which charges a 47p transaction fee but otherwise lets you pay whatever you want. When it’s as good as this I can imagine most people paying more than expected.

Valve’s Orange Box was also out yesterday on their ‘Steam’ delivery service. the pack contains Half Life 2 and it’s two additional chapters, Episode 1 and the new Episode 2, as well as multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2 and the incredible Portal. The real trick of Valve’s single player work is how it tells a story without cutscenes by creating events that make the gamer want to look in that direction – a very real rendition of ‘Show Don’t Tell’, as many writers are instructed early in their careers. The sheer joy of messing around with momentum using the portal gun in Portal is worth the entry price by itself.

[photo from Valve’s website]

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The bell tolls for second-hand bookstores

Random shelves in a second-hand bookstore According to an article in Entrepreneur magazine, second-hand books stores are one of a list of businesses that are on their last legs thanks to the all-pervasive interwebs. Amazon, eBay and abebooks have all played their part in the acceleration of this demise – it’s just so much easier to find specific titles online. [Via SFSignal]

Personally, I like to browse, sometimes with no intent of actually buying anything – and I find brick-and-mortar stores far more satisfying for that, as well as the public library. Maybe that luxury will not be available to me for much longer – but it’s fair to assume that the trade of books won’t cease, it’ll just move entirely online. [Image by dweekly]

[tags]internet, business, books, bookstores[/tags]
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Skype founders launch Joost online tv

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Chinatown- Roman Polanski’s classic available for free onlineHaving sold VoIP stalwart Skype to Google Ebay (and being paid more than they should have for it), founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have been quietly working away on Joost, an online television program. This week the program went free to all interested downloaders (previously you had to be invited to the beta). The content available depends on the region but the UK gets a great selection of films from Paramount including Star Trek Insurrection and the absolute classic Chinatown, which I think has one of the best screenplays of all time. There’s also content from Aardman Animation, Happy Tree Friends, CSI and scifi show Lexx, among others.

[via BBC technology, image from Wikipedia, story updated to correct buyer]

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Radiohead change the face of music

Radiohead’s new album is a revolution in distribution

I’ve been saying for a few years now that as soon as a major band started selling their own records on their own website, the music companies were doomed. Today it looks like the revolution has started. Radiohead, the superstar band that finished their contract with EMI following their last album ‘Hail To The Thief’ have announced that their new album ‘In Rainbows’ will be released on October 10th, purely through their website. In a move that’s going to send ripples through the music industry, the album download has no set price. The website literally says ‘Pay what you want’. With Nine Inch Nails pledging to sell all their records direct to fans after their contract ends, it’s looking like the future of music is going to be very different.

Radiohead’s move is a very smart one – bands make the majority of their money by touring under the current economic model. Even if large numbers of people download the album for free, aside from the small cost of recording and the bandwidth for their website, the album has virtually no overheads as a digital download. That means that any money donated by downloaders goes straight into the band’s pockets without going through ten different middle-managers first, exactly as I said in my post about amazon’s DRM free model last week. Even if the average payment for a download is £3, Radiohead will perversely still get a fair bit more money than the 5% -odd royalty cut of a £10 CD sold in HMV or Virgin. It’s reassuring that the move has been made by a band that in my opinion is one of the best in the world.

[via boing boing and music 2.0, picture from Radiohead’s new album site]

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Burmese government turns off internet to stop citizen journalists

A new way to report what’s going on but is it already under threat?Following on from Stephen’s post on Friday about satellite images of the crisis in Burma, I thought I’d talk about another thing that this incident is telling us about our future. As the troubles in Myanmar are continuing, Burmese have been uploading pictures, video and text relating the violence and atrocities to the web. Those outside the country are then spreading these documents to world news and blogs.

Last week, to combat this documentation of their transgressions, the Burmese government shut down many of their internet servers, closing off the pipeline for information to escape the country’s borders. Phones and cameras were smashed on the streets by the military. Although some internet functionality has returned, it’s becoming harder for people to get information out to us looking in, with most journalists refused entry to Burma. One enterprising ABC reporter snuck in to use his mobile phone for reports.

This for me is one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century. The internet has made information and news freer than ever before. For some governments, companies and services this trends towards too much free information, presenting us with a classic conflict of interest between the user that wants content and those that do not. This week for example, AT&T changed its policy to allow users who criticise the company to be banned. The debate over Network Neutrality is a vital one to keep channels of communication open and help prevent future internet users having less functionality than we do today.

[ photo by Film Colourist ]