| Thursday, November 3, 2005 |
17:26 - iPorn
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9896401/
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Many have been the mocked-up claimants to that moniker over the years, but this time it seems it's for real: a company that's about to jump on the video iPod bandwagon in the same manner that the really astute have jumped onto the bandwagon of every new art form and medium since the cave painting:
LONDON - It may not be quite what Steve Jobs had in mind, but an online search engine called Guba is set to offer vast amounts of pornography and other video files, specifically tailored for Apple's new iPods.
Guba is a subscription-only search engine that culls video files from the Usenet newsgroups, a huge repository of online content — much of it adult, pirated, or both.
Beginning this month, Guba will convert video files from Usenet into the format used by the iPod, known as H.264. Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched the video-enabled iPod last month along with deals to sell downloadable music videos and TV shows.
What I find interesting about this, in all seriousness, is that the company is doing this without any DRM, from what I can tell. The video content isn't copyrighted, apparently—it's just what's already available on Usenet—and the company just charges a subscription fee so you can download these unencrypted files as much as you want, with nothing tying them to a single person's authorized computers (as with the iTunes DRM for both audio and video).
This wasn't possible with music—a company that offered to let you download MP3s for a monthly subscription fee would have met a swift and unmerciful end, largely because there's hardly any such thing as an MP3 file of anything but copyrighted music. But the video medium works differently. Watchable video files of copyrighted content are too large to trade comfortably, and files that are small enough to hoard are usually ad-hoc affairs—home movies, Internet memes, that sort of thing. There's plenty of video out there that isn't jealously guarded by copyright holders; and all it has to be in order to play on the video iPod is a QuickTime file.
If this company's business plan catches on, it'll do for QuickTime what the same sort of content did for VHS versus Betamax.
Via Steven Den Beste.
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Brian Tiemann
