News for Friday, 31 August 2007

As one would have expected it after the recent announcement of Hulu.com, the ads-based video portal to compete with YouTube, and set up by NBC and News Corporation, NBC will not renew its iTunes contract with Apple. While discussion are not closed, and might be related to other type of collaboration between both companies, iTunes will lose its number 1 supplier of digital video.
Apple might have to soften its position to avoid loosing all media companies from the iTunes Store, and maybe start by providing videos with higher resolution allowing to play them on TV (via AppleTV), and not limited to iPod display.

Pier sent us this photo showing an advertising poster from the Euro Millions Lottery displayed in Lugano, Switzerland.

Lugano being in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, the translation would be:
"Did not get your iPod yet?
Acquire Apple!"
Quite funny, to see a European Lottery organization using the buzz around the iPhone, and also the frustration of many European consumers for not being able to purchase the Apple-branded mobile yet. Of course, while winning several dozen of millions Euros will help you to buy an iPhone on eBay, it will be for sure not enough to take control of Apple...

The buzz around potential application for SIM unlocking the iPhone remains important while nothing is coming out yet. Everybody is speaking about it while nobody could really widely test it. Beside their claims, iphoneunlocking.com/ released a video supposed to convince potential future consumers that they have the true solution for hacking iPhone SIM lock:

We looked at this video intensively, and we could not really see any proof that it is indeed the expected hacking solution, beside the fact that it is a poor quality video.
We are still waiting for iphonesimfree to release their own unlocking solution. We contacted them but could get any answer back... You can read the FAQ on their website, but that's all so far.
So, is this all story true, or just one big hoax?

We could not believe it when we received the press release yesterday. SONY decided to drop its proprietary music file format, aka ATRAC, and to support from now on MP3, WMA and AAC (non protected). This is a revolution, but probably the only way for SONY to better compete with Apple on the music player market. For years, ATRAC has been seen as a major brake to SONY mobile player development; future models from the Japanese giant will not support ATRAC anymore.
By adding support for non DRM-loaded AAC music file, SONY offer consumers the possibility to play music file legally purchased DRM-free tracks from iTunes Plus store. SONY is probably betting that in a near future all music Majors will offer DRM-free catalogue via online stores, making SONY players a good alternative to iPods. For once, we hope SONY is right with its expectation for a global DRM free online music offer.

After being offline for about two days, the free online music streaming service, Deezer.com is back. The maintenance has been used to protect music tracks for being captured and downloaded. Now, if you attempt to run some of the procedures to capture streaming music tracks, you will receive the following message:

Nous vous informons que votre adresse ip : xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx a été détectée en France et a été enregistrée dans notre base de données.
Nous vous rappellons que cette pratique est interdite et répréhensible par la loi.
La société BLOGMUSIK SAS se réserve le droit d'alerter les autorités compétentes en cas d'abus.

You've tried to access a protected content.
We inform you that your IP address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx localized in France has been recorder in our data base.
We recall you that this behaviour is totally forbidden and reprehensible by the law.
BLOGMUSIK SAS Company will inform all competent authority in case of abuse.
www.deezer.com

We are not sure that this could be used as the basis for a legal action, however, it demonstrates Deezer.com's commitments to fight against piracy, mostly to convince other players in the online music business, and especially for Music Majors.