Thursday, July 25, 2002
TIMING
Two big news items are in front of me this morning, and I wish I were writing about them one day later so I could tell you more about how they turn out.
One is the negotiations going on between Bill Goldsmith (of KPIG and Radio Paradise) and other parties (government folks and copyright holders) that hold the promise of releasing Internet radio from the death sentence imposed by the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright office. <http://www.copyright.gov/carp/webcast_regs.html>
All I know from Bill at this point is that he's "optimistic". That's saying a lot, since KPIG recently made big news by ceasing its webcast after seven years, blaming the extreme costs imposed by the new copyright royalty regime. KPIG was the first commercial station on the Web, and its departure signaled the likely die-off of the whole fledgeling industry.
It has been interesting to me that, among all the broadcasters on the Web, the only ones that even begin to come close to meeting the letter and spirit of the new rules' demands are KPIG <http://www.kpig.com>, Radio Paradise <http://www.radioparadise.com> and SmoothJazz <http://www.smoothjazz.com>, all three of which run on Linux, open source software and Bill's own creative hacks. All three do extensive record-keeping (which the rules require), support the record industry (with links directly from musical selections to sites that sell records), and have real revenue models (listener donations, but by a much more efficient system than the beg-a-thons that characterize public radio).
I've been writing about Bill's work often since interviewing him for the January Linux Journal <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5571>, and I hope he gets somewhere with his current negotiations. If he does, it will be a triumphant story -- not only for Bill and his industry, but for the resourcefulness that Linux and open source uniquely support. Watch LinuxJournal.com <http://www.linuxjournal.com> for more developments on that front. And keep up the pressure on Congress to change the insane laws that really will kill Internet radio (and countless Linux success stories) if nothing happens to change them. Here's the URL for a fax campaign : <http://www.voiceofwebcasters.org/fax/carp/smallweb/>
The other news item is RealNetworks sudden announcement <http://www.realnetworks.com/info/helix/index.html> that they are open-sourcing all kinds of stuff, and changing their development strategy radically in the process.
The new initiative is called Helix, and it consists of several pieces. One is the Helix DNA Platform: a raft of products and applications that will support "any format, operating system or device". It is "composed of the software engines that have powered RealNetworks' popular and proven server and player products for several years, as well as a set of more than 1,000 application programming interfaces for building media applications." The second is the Helix Community, which consists roughly of the whole open source effort involved in developing the DNA Platform. The third is the Helix Universal Server, a bit pump for every conceivable form of media stream, from a single server.
The announcement and much of the immediate coverage that followed was centered around the Real vs. Microsoft story, which has been going on for many years. Rob Glaser, RealNetworks' founder and CEO, is a former high-level Microsoft executive. Real's engineers apparently found a way to reverse-engineer the Microsoft Media Player codecs, and to stream them from a Linux server at a rate they claim is four times faster than Microsoft's own server. That one grabbed a lot of attention.
But the bigger story is Real's whole new development strategy. It involves a new open source license developed with the help of Eric S. Raymond, head of the Open Source Initiative. And Rob Glaser has been careful to invite input from the open source community not only about the license, but about the rest of the strategy as well.
One sticky point for a number of commentators, including me, is Real's codecs, which are apparently going to remain closed. That leaves Ogg Vorbis <http://www.vorbis.com/> alone in the world as the only codec that is unencumbered by pantenting or licensing issues, and therefore the one in the best position to become true Internet infrastructure in the long run.
But if one extrapolates from the vectors of Real's open source announcements, the world could easily become filled with servers and clients that play many different kinds of streams, including Ogg, QuickTime, Real, MP3, Windows Media and countless others. Which will mean that owning a codec won't have much market leverage -- and that Ogg, the only one that's a true commodity, will win in the marketplace.
I'll be meeting with Rob Glaser at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego this week. Watch Linux Journal for reports on my conversations with him, and with other folks, about where Real's initiative might lead.