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The pirates are losing, don’t hand them weapons

All in all it has been a good year for content protection. This time last year, the Pirate Party (an off shoot of Pirate Bay) was the ‘talk of the town’ with its’ high-profile stand for piracy and its’ success in Euro elections. This year the party fell well short of the threshold for the […]

September 22, 2010 Nick Snow

The long tail losers

Go with the flow or fight your way upstream against the tide? It’s a question that challenges us all at various times, and one that is always relevant in digital media. In the September 2010 issue of Euromedia we focus on an area where maximising the flow is the aim – multiple screens means multiple […]

September 7, 2010 Nick Snow

Nothing neutral about Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is, ironically, a matter on which nearly no one is neutral. When the Web was young the idea of equal access for all content and service providers was logical and easily accommodated. Then came video, which was magnitudes more bandwidth hungry than what had gone before. But there was still no question of […]

August 27, 2010 Nick Snow

Do STBs have a future at all?

There is much talk these days of ‘The Cloud’ and its connection to consumer devices, specifically Connected TVs. The case against STBs is pretty straightforward; if you can have effective content management (and storage) in the cloud, if consumer devices can be connected to commoditized high speed broadband, and if content providers (or dedicated third […]

August 23, 2010 Nick Snow

Rupert Murdoch needs a sense of humour

I wonder if Rupert Murdoch allows himself an ironic chuckle that while the UK government (in common with virtually all its counterparts) is preparing legislation to punish consumers and distributors for stealing content rights, its regulator is forcing Sky to handover those rights (or the product of them) for a discounted price. I imagine Murdoch […]

August 9, 2010 Nick Snow

Can companies learn from disaster?

Management gurus and journalists have a habit of ascribing human characteristics to corporations: ‘the sleeping giant,’ ‘the agile start up,’ ‘the strong brand.’ But you hardly ever hear companies described as ‘nerveless,’ or ‘calm’ or ‘wise’. The reason is that they are none of the above and particularly not in the hot house of the […]

August 7, 2010 Nick Snow