Streaming Media News Roundup

On Friday, ABCNews.com announced that it was severing its ties with Yahoo! over its streaming clips. Instead, ABCNews.com is choosing to go with RealNetworks, with whom it has had a relationship since last year. This makes sense since ABCNews.com is an exclusive content provider for Real’s RealOne membership service. RealNetworks already streams World News Tonight, Nightline, some breaking live stories, and exclusive web content too. Don’t feel bad for Yahoo!, it still has news video from Reuters, the AP and the BBC, among others.

Here’s the rest of this week’s news.

QuickTime Beats RealNetworks?

On Thursday, Apple put out a release saying that it had surpassed RealNetworks in the number of new users added in 2001. But a closer look at the numbers in Apple’s announcement and a recent release by RealNetworks show that Apple was comparing, well, apples to oranges. Apple claims that its QuickTime player added 80 million new users, in 2001, "exceeding RealNetworks' addition of 75 million new RealOne and RealPlayer users combined". Apple said QuickTime 5, released in April 2001, will reach 100 million downloads by April 2002.

But Apple failed to note that RealNetworks is counting registered users, since it requires people to fill out some demographic information before downloading their software. Apple does not require registration, so it counts downloads.

In a statement RealNetworks, answered back calling Apple’s press release "misleading." "RealNetworks RealOne Player and RealPlayer have 250 million unique registered users," read the statement. "This number counts users with a relationship with RealNetworks, not downloads as the 80 million Apple is touting."

RealNetworks also pointed to third party data, available from Nielson//NetRatings showing that there were "32.0 million US home users of RealNetworks content in December and 7.4 million users of QT that same month".

Apple backtracked a bit on Friday, however. In a call to streamingmedia.com, senior VP Phil Schiller said that he wanted to make clear that Apple was talking about new users in 2001. "We don’t count people who go to our site and download an upgrade," he explained. Schiller said many users also fill out false information in order to get downloads. "We all know that’s phony data."

Frank Casanova, Apple's director of QuickTime product marketing, said Apple stopped requiring registrations for downloads when QT5 came out. "We used to ask for email from people," he said, "but they’re not interested in doing that. We’re not excited about registration."

Schiller said that RealNetworks is doing some nice things, but that it wanted to show people in the industry that Apple was doing "equally well or even better" than RealNetworks. "We’re not trying to put [RealNetworks] down," said Schiller. "They’re doing great, we’re not refuting any numbers." In the end, he said that customers usually get both players anyway.

Meanwhile, Apple is gearing up for next week’s QuickTime Live conference in Beverly Hills. Although Casanova wouldn’t release any details, it’s expected that Tuesday morning’s keynote by Schiller, will show its first major public move into MPEG-4. If that’s the case then perhaps companies won’t care about what media player is more popular — if it’s MPEG-4 it should be playable in any compliant player.

Internet Radio Listenership Growing

According to measurement firm MeasureCast the Internet radio industry is on a roll. "Streaming broadcasters attracted millions of new listeners in 2001," said MeasureCast CEO Ed Hardy, in a statement. "The total time spent listening to stations measured by MeasureCast last year rose nearly 400 percent, and is rapidly closing in on 500 percent as of today."

The company created its Internet Radio Listening Index, which tracks how stations have done since it launched in January 2001. The index rose to as high as 484 for the week of January 20th, but is now at 469.

Taking a look at this week’s numbers you can see that the number one station, London’s Virgin Radio, had a cume of 122,835 with a total of 1,061,430 hours. [See sidebar: "What is cume?"] That means that Virgin Radio listeners averaged 8 hours and 38 minutes of streaming a week. That’s not bad considering most Internet radio listeners are office workers.

The biggest problem with MeasureCast’s cume number is that it’s essentially an estimated guess. Bill Piwonka, VP of marketing for MeasureCast (www.measurecast.com), disagreed saying that it is "much more accurate than any other method of audience measurement including Nielsen and Arbitron in the terrestrial world." He explains those companies poll a small number of users, and extrapolate audience size. Piwonka says that MeasureCast uses the IP address of a user, plus the global unique identification number found on many media players today to come up with a unique user. "However, if someone listens with both a RealPlayer and a Windows player from both home and the office, they could look like 4 people," he cautioned. "I'm not claiming 100 percent accuracy, but compared to any other method, this is the most accurate methodology ever implemented for audience measurement."

In other numbers from MeasureCast, it said that two Internet radio networks streamed over 2 million in January: the WARP Radio network streamed 2,877,453 hours, and StreamAudio streamed 2,213,172. All MeasureCast stations have streamed a total of 22 million hours in January.

Getting Movies Beyond the PC

Streaming movies was a big topic this week. Sigma Designs (www.sigmadesigns.com) announced a new MPEG-4 decoder card called the REALmagic Xcard. It supports DivXNetworks’ content, ISMA compliant streams and DVD playback. In essence, the new $99.95 PCI card lets users playback video either on the computer or onto TV sets. Included with the Xcard is a remote that lets you control player functions. Ken Lowe, VP of business development at Sigma said the card was made for the enthusiast market and was a "niche product", primarily. He said that users can essentially rig up an old, unused PC, and turn it into a digital theater system.

These days, however, most computers can already play back even the most demanding video applications. Encoding is not supported with the Xcard, however. So what benefits can you expect? Lowe said the main advantages to using the Xcard was playback on a television screen, including having the joys of surround sound. The other advantage is better quality video. "Anything that proliferates IP streaming is good," he said.

In other movie news a Taiwanese web site, Movie88.com (www.movie88.com), was discovered to be selling top Hollywood movies for $1 a stream. The site is streaming recent hit movies like "Shrek," "American Pie 2" and "Blow" in RealNetworks in 100K and 300K bitrates. Although you have to sign up and pay to watch a movie, it keeps one free movie on the site, currently "All Dogs Go to Heaven 2." The site’s creators are claiming that what they’re doing is legal in Taiwan, but it’s clear that they didn’t secure licensing for the movies. Representatives for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said it was investigating to see how it can stop Movie88.com from showing the unlicensed movies.

The move by this bold unknown company beats the Hollywood movie studios’ upcoming video on demand service. Disney and News Corp. are backing their Movies.com venture, while Sony, Universal, Warner, MGM and Paramount are starting MovieLink.com. Just last week, MovieLink (formerly MovieFly.com) announced that Jim Ramo was named CEO of the company. Despite months of waiting, neither MovieLink (www.movielink.com) or Movies.com (www.movies.com) have released any details on what technology they will use or when they would launch.

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