Free Radicals appear to be Bi-Peds.

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Around the world, (almost everywhere apart from Australia) Television content is now available on the web. Sometimes for free, [catch-up TV] and sometimes for a couple of dollars from iTunes.

In Europe and the Americas [err, Canada and the USA] the resulting drop in P2P has been nothing short of miraculous.

Concurrency (Day/Date release globally) in Australian Television is staring to occur. Unfortunately, probably five years too late to save free to air.

In Australia, whilst we get the occasional older Television show popping up on the various Free to Air channels websites, we still can’t buy the current (last nights episode) of the Big Bang Theory.

An analysis of just who is still using the ED2K networks shows that it is those countries that are the poor cousins to the USA’s content distribution and pricing policies.

South America, China, Australia, Hungary

Unfortunately, catch-up TV at $1.99 per episode is still a little unrealistic with programs that disappear after being watched.

The horse has bolted, it is time for the content industry to man up and remove all DRM, including the sixties mission impossible leftover,  “Mr. Phelps, this tape will self destruct in thirty seconds”.

All that this achieves is to encourage technically competent persons to find ways around the encoding.

Amazon self publishing e-Book authors have set the future. Cutting out the middle man to ensure that clients and Author are both satisfied after each transaction.

Budding authors (yep you) should click here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html?topic=200260520

Kindle offers 30% of the sale price to each and every self publisher:

With Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) you can self-publish your books on the Amazon Kindle Store. It’s free, fast, and easy. Books self-published through KDP can participate in the 70% royalty program and are available for purchase on Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and Android-based devices. With KDP, you can self-publish books in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian and specify pricing in US Dollars, Pounds Sterling, and Euros. You will also find useful information on our active community forum. 

So Amazon allows authors to self publish their works.

CD-Baby allows Singer/composers/bands to self publish their music digitally (via iTunes) or via CD-Rom

You-Tube allows film makers to self publish.

iPhone and Android allow phone owners to become miniature Rabbit ISP’s by setting up miniature hot-spots for their mates…

Could someone please tell me, what are the various companies and organisations that depend on being able to stuff up your entertainment with DRM, advertising interruptus, and suing dead grandmothers going to do for a living when all of humanity is so busy having a good time creating new content that the big business content becomes totally irrelevent ?

Could it be that organisations like the RIAA, the IPFI (et al) have passed by their “Best Before” dates but no-one told them?

How can big brother regain control of all those free Internet Radicals ?

Microsoft have decided that they will issue a lockdown Operating System that precludes users from loading alternative Boot options (e.g.: Linux).

Obviously MS aren’t aware of the new “openness meme currently sweeping the world.

Shame about that. Because of course, this means that Microsoft have elected to join the group of self euthanising conglomerates.

Must be that Japanese influence… save face at all costs. Even if the ship sinks.

 

We Need SOPA/PIPA/ACTA, When Do We Want it ?

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Globally, Governments are enacting much needed legislative ammmendments to the original laws and constitution of the land.

Online Piracy Top Ten Sites - Chart of the Day

Online Piracy Top Ten Sites - Chart of the Day by Infogafik Statista

 

These legislative imperatives are urgently needed by global commercial interests to insure the criminalisation of everyone over eight years old that either uses or attempts to do any business on the Internet.

I came across a great quote today:

It is so powerful in it’s simplicity that it could even form the basis of an amendment to the constitution of any country.

“So, while big business can afford to pay for you to promote broken copyright regulations… I, the modern consumer, don’t have to pay for movements like anonymous to defend my right to get entertainment the way I want it.

What do I want?

  1. I want to download movies; all of them, even the old ones that will
    no longer make a buck for corporates to sell so don’t get
    re-released.

  2.  I want to be able to read and make comments about the
    movie/music/books/whatever at the source of the download.

  3.  I want to NOT pay for unnecessary and un-environmental plastic
    packaging of entertainment.

  4.  I want NEVER to be denied an option to watch a movie, read a book,
    listen to music that is available in other countries, but not in
    my country because of broken copyright laws and regulations that
    you are trying to protect.

I feel sorry for you Neil. You are like a galant captain, going down with his sinking ship. Don’t trick yourself. The copyright laws you are trying to protect are losing. They deserve to as they refuse to evolve and change with the environment around it. Swap teams Neil. Help bring about the much needed change that the Australian public is demanding.” Anonymous Location The internet Date and time February 27, 2012, 7:54AM

A quote from the Comments section of the following Article:

http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/business-it/preventing-online-theft-benefits-all-20120226-1tw39.html

Another comment linked this great explanation of the topic:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

So when do we want SOPA/PIPA and ACTA ?

Err, Straight after the industry fix the little problem they’ve got delineated by the above comments which will amazingly make the need for SOPA, PIPA and ACTA immediately disappear.

Trying to the right thing with content...

Dear Reader, want to make a change ?

Send the above four items with the Oatmeal Link to every politician you know.

Suggested letter to your local politician:

Cut Here:  ——————————————————————————————————————–

Dear [Insert your local members name here]

 

We the tax paying people of this nation, who elected you to into office so that you could serve our needs, require  that you give consideration to the following items …

The Content Manifesto: (items 1-4 above)

  1. I want to download movies; all of them, even the old ones that will
    no longer make a buck for corporates to sell so don’t get
    re-released.
  2.  I want to be able to read and make comments about the
    movie/music/books/whatever at the source of the download.
  3.  I want to NOT pay for unnecessary and un-environmental plastic
    packaging of entertainment.
  4.  I want NEVER to be denied an option to watch a movie, read a book,
    listen to music that is available in other countries, but not in
    my country because of broken copyright laws and regulations that
    you are trying to protect.

Should you fail to give heed to our requests, then please either reduce our taxes by 38% [hereafter to be known as the discretionary entertainment budget allowance - May also be referred to as the Hollywood Bail-out] so that we the people can afford to be entertained so that we the people will continue to be motivated to work for the taxes, [where jobs are available,] that you need from us or please update your Resume, because we the people won’t be voting for you again.

Of course “we the people” now have cameras on all our phones and are creating enough content on Youtube every eleven days to completely replace all of Hollywoods last 100 years of content creation so if you pass SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, we the people will still have our peer created content, but you won’t have Hollywood lobbyists buying you lunch any more, nor will you have a job.

 Signed

[Insert your name here]

John Q. Citizen.

 

Vandalism Terror in the Suburbs

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The Western Suburbs of Sydney is considered the breadbasket of the “Clubs” revenue stream.

It is populated by a diverse range of people across many nationalities, occupations and religious persuasions.

The councils in the Western Suburbs have done an excellent job of attempting to make the West a friendly and pleasant place to live with a proactive beautification expansion to amenities by the planting of trees, gaily decorated bus shelters and expansion to sporting venues and public parks and reserves.

 

Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates the Local Government efforts.

 

There is an element that like to ride un-silenced motorcycles through the back streets, paint graffiti on buildings, walls and signs and let off very loud fireworks.

The Explosive Act 2003 and Explosives Regulation 2005 govern the use of explosives and fireworks in NSW. The Explosives Regulation 2005 requires all activities involving the handling of explosives and fireworks be carried out in accordance with the:

Unfortunately I could find nothing about the limitations and controls for fireworks being delivered by remote control flying objects.

Which makes the following grouping of photographs almost terrifying.

(The Helicopter parts, widely scattered were assembled for the photo – without me applying too many of my fingerprints to the parts… in case the local gendarmes would be following this up.)

Industrial Fireworks, a couple of slabs and remote control helicopters don’t to me seem like a very good combination.

I don’t necessarily wish to spell out what appears rather obvious, but the reader should consider the payload capabilities of low cost remote control devices. The result is concerning.

The question that councils should be asking, is who has the necessary licences to be able to purchase this kind of very loud firepower. The fireworks in the photos below are not everyday consumer grade fireworks.

The question the gendarmes should be asking, is who can afford to let off this many fireworks and destroy perfectly good Radio Control  toys ?

Probably not a couple of unemployed kids having a lark.

The people of Abbotsbury are asking, what are the police doing about it and who will clean up the glass from the broken beer bottles and all the exploded firework components.  Probably the local council, having to divert resources from making our environment a friendlier and happier place to live.

 

The Year that Christmas Died.

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Or Why the fourth Quarter Retail Figures Will Not Reflect the Real State of the Economy.


Last year, my partner purchased a new tree. It was one of those fibre optic light changing plastic monstrosities. It took a minute to put up and thirty seconds to plug in. It came with  a number of decorations “built in” – in other words, pre-trimmed.

No more untangling strings of Christmas tree lights. YaY!!!

Last night (Christmas Eve I asked her (my partner) where we had put the tree. It used to be in the garden shed, but I knew that she had put it carefully somewhere in her office. Her response came as a surprise, “Why bother? It doesn’t really feel like Christmas… and I’m not sure where I put the tree. I think it’s behind some boxes and I couldn’t be bothered digging it out.”

There was a part of her comment that struck a logical chord within my childlike “Oi where’s the chrissie tree” contemplative navel gazing reverie.

She was being logical, after all, older generations without screaming bundles of joy don’t really need Christmas trees.

Australia has now entered the baby-boomer retirement phase.

As a country, our principle bandaid solution is the increase of migration from overseas.

The following suggests a possible barrier to long term financial recovery, not understood  by the average person aghast at this countries apparent cavalier attitude to illegal migrants.

 

Christmas.

Every year from the age of two or three I awoke on Christmas morning to the delight of a flashing, shiny Christmas tree decorated with szalonna cukor [a Hungarian traditional mashup of toffee and marzipan wrapped in coloured shiny foil that reflect all of the lights on the tree].

My Hungarian origins meant that I was actually waiting for St. Mikulas, and not Santa Claus and he came earlier in the month, yet my Judeo-Christian parents, in accordance with their proud new New Zealand citizenship modified the Hungarian Traditions moving the entire celebration to Christmas eve.

By the age of five, I had figured out that the miracle of the tree and presents appearance and the simultaneous disappearance of my father appeared  to coincide. My mothers role was to distract my brother and I by retiring to our bedroom and singing Menybol az Angyal and other Hungarian Christmas carols, whilst we eagerly awaited the little bell jangling from the direction of the lounge room to indicate that St. Mikulas had been and gone.

Of course, Hungarian tradition still differs in that St. Mikulas brings the entire tree (fully decorated). Which of course dictates that the family doesn’t get to trim the tree together as is western custom in other parts of the world.

Notwithstanding differing tree sourcing traditions, every years Christmas since, has been memorable in the annual mad shopping dash to ensure the duck/goose, ham, colbasz as an annually growing list of appetizing imperitives were collected and prepared for the great day.  

Christmas was a target for the entire family, “Thanks be to God, we made it, another year.”

For my Jewish friends,  it was  “Happy Hanukah time, we made it, another year.”

I received a link from a friend and colleague in the USA this morning, to the “Charlie Brown “Meaning of Christmas”. A great skit of the meaning of Christmas. However, it is the meaning of Christmas for less than one seventh of today’s rapidly growing emerging nation dominated, global population explosion.  

 

The Origins of Christmas Financial Reporting

Christmas only became about the religious aspects as a justification for the boost that merchants and traders needed on what, for the Northern Hemisphere was the first day of Winter, which for the northern agronomic based societies of Europe, meant no fresh greens for the next three months.

The Roman Emperor Aurelian, declared the 25th of December a celebratory holiday [day of the God, Invincible Sun, Sol Invictus] in recognition of the first day (longer day) after the three [shortest] days period of the Winter Solstice. Therefore, the Northern Hemisphere solstice Celebration day, was the last day of the market where souls would deign to travel to the markets to buy up large before the worst of the winter snows and blizzards arrived.

History has turned that historical survival necessity into a market driving annual event.

Industries globally strived to create goods that could be sold at market for the best price possible to allow craftsmen and tradesman to better provide for their families during a time when the only central heating consisted of yesterdays burnt wood, relit and boosted with some fallen tree branches and such dried dung as could be scraped from barn dung pile.

We have a lot to be grateful for since Aurelian’s declaration, the world has developed additional capabilities. Plastic and credit cards were invented, we discovered oil and “climate control air-conditioning arrived to make the Christmas period and the ensuing winter more bearable.

No longer do we need the smell of fresh pine needles in our home to banish the stale smell of humans locked up for months on end in an environment where all the windows are closed against the cold.

With a global fertility rate of over 2, the need to continue production at all levels to be able to meet manufacturing quotas so that Christmas bonuses could be paid and the recipients could provide for their families those luxuries that usually only arrived once per year.

Japan, that country of innovative  consumer engineering excellence, showed us what happens to an economy as the fertility rate stalls and then starts to decline.

Whilst Australia has maintained it’s fertility rate, it has done so by ignoring the Judeo-Christian Winter Solstice written history ingrained imperative.

The majority driver of fertility in Australia is now via persons of the Muslim faith, who of course don’t observe and consequently fail to “commercially” practice Christmas.

The Christmas retail imperitive fails when:

  • Christmas becomes irrelevant due to the ageing population
  • economic divers evaporate due to differences in religious observation
  • the cost of consumer targeted goods lowers to the point when one doesn’t have to save all year to be able to afford it. and;

The manufacturing cycle, that used to reward handsomely for increased production levels has been moved offshore by industrialists keen to regime shop labour costs to increase profit margins to reward shareholders.

In other words, it is difficult to have continually increasing fourth quarter numbers if a company lays off all its’ employees in favour of cheaper offshore labour.

Especially if the companies that pay the employees to enable them to shop at each others emporiums all emulate each others labour regime shopping initiative and lay off all their staff. Who is left to shop and with what Christmas bonuses ?

The catch up and bite you period appears to be five years. Companies playing in this short term gain arena are learning that they are unable to remain industry leaders for more then a five year period, regardless of how strong their balance sheet was at the beginning of the game.


Political Ramifications

  • The population fertility rate for almost all developed nations are in serious decline.
  • Some nations like the USA are offering 10 year visas to Judeo Christians females, hoping to harvest their offspring’s long term economic benefits.
  • Australia has since the eighties had a generous non-secular approach to immigration.

 

                                   NATURAL INCREASE AND NET OVERSEAS MIGRATION

ABS 3101.0 Components of Annual Pop Growth - Australia

Source: ABS Australian Demographic Statistics (cat. no. 3101.0)

As can be seen from the above ABS graph, that policy has paid handsomely in the natural population increase making it’s effects obvious in 2004. Yet the results will be increasingly obvious this year at the cash registers.

The Western suburb shopping centres yesterday were just like any other shopping day.

No traffic jams, no teeming throngs of people all trying to squeeze through the entrance gate simultaneously. In fact it appeared to me that one would be hard pressed putting together an all male first fifteen.

Christmas of the future ?

Unless we make some basic alterations to how we prepare for and celebrate Christmas, the following scenario, will become a reality.  

December 25, 2020:  Kids ordering goods from the $1 eBay shop being delivered direct to their bedroom windows by autonomous flying UAV delivery vehicles all year round whilst watching videos of Miracle on 34 St and asking their mothers, “Beeyatch, what was all that teary shit about ? Who in the hell is dat fat Klaus character, was he another one of them famous pedophiles ?”

Our only alternative to ensure survival when the copper and iron ore stop being needed is to dramatically re-skill our nation to become home based artisans, tradesmen and craftsmen, enabling a return to former years when the ability to make something with ones hands was a revered skill and not one that was shamefully labeled by today’s XY&Z generations as Dat Dere Blue Collar Worker.

We need to retask our populations skillset, taking advantage of of the different commercial opportunities presented by increasingly cosmopolitan population.

References:

Charlie Browns Christmas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKk9rv2hUfA

COMPONENTS OF ANNUAL POPULATION GROWTH Australian ABS Graph – ABS 3101.0

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/95553f4ed9b60a374a2568030012e707/2dcec62e1995fc03ca2577ac00157d70/Body/0.3818!OpenElement&FieldElemFormat=gif

The Grapes of Recycling or Wrath in the Burbs

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When I was a kid my dad used to take great pleasure in wrapping two bottles of Lion Brown beer in Christmas wrapping paper and sitting the result atop our galvanized steel rubbish bin for the hard working rubbish men,(whom I wasn’t allowed to talk too, because they were the rubbish men,) which made me rather curious about why they got beer, yet couldn’t benefit from the privilege of a hello from myself.

Anything that didn’t fit in our twenty gallon galvanized drum set (when it was empty, it made a great drum upside down…) was taken to the (smelly) Johnsonville rubbish tip by my dad and I on the weekend.

These days, there are no athletic rubbish men running along the street waking us at dawn to the sound of the clanging bin boot scoot. Just the big Truck with the Wheelie bin grab ‘n hoist that growls along the street at 5:00 am.

Leaving two bottles of Lion Brown in a Christmas wrapping on top of the wheelie bin would result in a mess to clean up the next morning.

One thing I have learnt over the last fifty years, rubbish men no longer run along the footpaths, in fact they wont even get out of their truck if the bin falls over…

There’s no smelly rubbish tip either. There are now only “recycling centres” and… bi-annual rubbish collections.

These are instigated by the local council [city hall] by sending us a letter detailing the dates that they will collect rubbish placed on the median strip in our area.

Householders then clean-up their yards, sheds and spare rooms and place the haul at the edge of the street.

The affluence of the entire nation can be measured by analyzing the replacement value of the quality of the rubbish being tossed.

Walking the dog each afternoon [3-6 kilometres through the neighbouring suburban region],  has allowed me twice a year to meander through the debris of other peoples domestic lives and resulted in the following observations.

 

Five years ago rusty garden implements, old chipboard cabinets falling to pieces, refrigerators, old stoves, aging push button dishwashers with a liberal sprinkling of broken and outworn children’s toys littered the kerbs.

The council would then arrive promptly as advertised with a large tipper with some likely lads running along the side of the lorry and throwing rubbish into it.  

At least that rubbish that didn’t contain any metal, copper or brass as that had been picked up already by the scavenging obviously commercial Steptoe and son [Scrap merchant] trucks circling the block for the entire week of rubbish pickup.

Four years ago, as the price of 42 inch LCD screens crashed through the $1,000 barrier, televisions started piling up. The council sent a memo to all householders for the next pick-up that ordered that all mains leads had to be cut off electrical items before anything was dumped.

The Steptoe and son Trucks had been added to by utes  [truck if you’re American] with mesh cages.

Three years ago the council mechanized and used a grab, which unfortunately wasn’t all that popular with the citizenry as it took most of the turf with it and managed to smash a lot of the glass in the televisions and litter the nature strip with silicon fragments that glitter even today..

The trucks and utes now had competition from persons towing trailers behind four wheel drives..

This year I noticed three items worthy of note.

  • The Television screens and old CRT computer screens had all their insides removed by the householder prior to dumping. (Presumably not for canibalisation by little Johnny for nine life  electrical experiments on the family cat with the high voltage transformer.)
  • I noticed cars were stopping with elderly people getting out and examining each pile (rather than a cursory glance slow drive past).
  • Neighbours who as late as last year would never have been seen dead poking trough a trash pile, were poking through our trash pile in broad daylight.

….AND, the council guys were two weeks late in their pickup (almost like they already knew that there would be nothing left of any value except for the garden cuttings).

The moral to the story is that apart from mining, there is another industry in Australia that is growing obviously growing rapidly.

The home based recycling industry is forging ahead in leaps and bounds, and it would appear that is has many thousands of Australians as stakeholders.

As a country we are being becoming less wasteful. The only question we should be asking, is this evolution from choice or necessity.

 

P.S.  For those that were wondering, my dad made similar Christmas relief packages for both the postie and the milkman in addition to the rubbish chappies.

P2P -v- Akamai.

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In 1994, as CEO of Australia’s fastest growing ISP,  (Ausnet Services), I insisted that we install W3c cache servers at each dial-in pop around Australia.

And we cached the “J” server from Palo Alto to our Portland Oregon offices and then replicated that in Sydney.

All DNS queries on the Ausnet network stayed in Australia saving overseas bandwidth.

Every morning (2:00 am), we analyzed what overseas content the users read yesterday and cached today’s version of that content to make sure that our users had the maximum possible enjoyable online experience.

We were charging by the minute/hour so in effect we were (apparently) working against our own interests by making sure that users had rapid access to their content. So would argue the Telco’s. Nevertheless, in reality, the word of our “network” speed got out to Australians and we were deluged with daily sign-ups. After all APC magazine voted Ausnet as Australia’s best value and fastest ISP several months running.

For a long time – at least until the “Optik Surfer” hacking episode, Ausnet developed the trust of its users.

When we built OGN, the meme continued with the development and construction of the world’s first Terabyte internet cache. We constructed the AUIX and allowed other ISP’s to access the Terabyte cache through the Sydney Internet AUIX facility.

OGN_AUIX_Network_Schematic

However, the Koltai caching concept was only targeted at decreasing internet “lag”, packet loss and increasing the user online experience.

I had not considered the concept of Web 2.0 or Google to increase the user experience by scraping cached content to deliver it in a new format.

This idea was the business model of the Newspapers, Television and radio news.

i.e.: Grab the content from Reuters/AP – add a couple of opinions apply the current editors’ editorial guidelines and publish – charging for the result.

In other words, News organisations were in the aggregation and arbitrage opportunity business.

The internet caching “meme” continued to expand through the nineties until a firm called Akamai utilized young Adrian Chadd’s Squid software and rolled out a worldwide implementation.

Suddenly all ISP’s had the benefits of Akamai caching. Unfortunately, for Akamai, P2P started to become popular about the time they were rolling out.

Akamai’s IPO in November 1999 at $174 per share must have put a smile on quite a few stag investors over the following six months as the share priced grew to nearly $300.00.

As P2P utilisation increases Akamai shares decrease in value to where in the last twelve months the Akamai share price has been trading in the $12.29 – $23.58 range.

Why is that?

Akamai was the big white hope only a few years ago. It would “decongest” the internet – particularly in a country like Australia where the lag time of the pacific fibre transit added an inordinately unacceptable delay to the delivery of each packet of content.

But the Akamai model is based on the concept of server client distribution.

If that model is nullified by:

a)  every ISP installing their own CDN for content distribution (e.g.: TPG Internet – IPTV, Internode TIVO content – Which together if you think about is a winning combination, the old FTA via TCP and the newer Netflix Video on Demand model…),

b)  P2P illegal file sharing,

c)  Mobile Carrier backhaul infrastructure lack or failure,

What then is the winning combination?

Well, one winning combination is the concept of the content cache as the delivery model – theoretically, whoever owns Akamai also owns the world largest Internet Filter and automatically the  largest amount of content. (No, I don’t  own any Akamai shares.)

Is uncle Rupert looking at a triple play with Yahoo and Akamai with a couple of ISP’s in every country thrown in for good measure?

Well possibly not, but if I were he – then that is what I would be looking it.

But, like always, I left out the best part.

The above triple play would only come into it’s own as a Goggle killer with the inclusion of P2P.

After all, today the media lacks consumer trust.

P2P has consumer trust plus it’s edgy, a little bit naughty and currently free.

Gee if you added ubiquitous caching (with appropriate editorial control), added the worlds dominant financial services search engine to the front end and delivered it via P2P, who wouldn’t love it?

Ummmm Google?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Super Corps are Coming.

Hot:

Apple
Google/Motorola
Microsoft/Nokia/Skype
Baidu/QQ

And possibly Facebook if it buys Ebay, imagine your friends being notified when that rare African war mask that they have all admired on your lounge room wall get a status update with an Ebay buy it now link…

Hmmm, every consumer a store owner…

What a great way to commercialise an entity that was originally about meet/greet/cheat.

And Jerry Harvey thinks he has problems now – Oi Vey!!! (Sound of forehead being slapped with palm of hand).

Then again, Facebook may have competition for the little shop that could sell.

If I was DHL, it would make sense to tie up with the worlds biggest shipping company.

Global Delivery  – any article,  24 hour guarantee, only ten bucks…

So add DHL/Ebay to the mix and scratch Facebook.

 

The questions that politicians should be asking themselves is that with the lowering cost of telecommunications, (free) – how long will it be before consumers control their own communications networks without being answerable to filters or consumerism based censorship.

Cisco claims that 25% will do so by 2015.

With Motorola ceding it’s technical chip forming capabilities to Google, we now have an advertising broadcasting (YouTube) company becoming a hardware manufacturer.

Sarah Connor warned us about Cyberdyne. Until now, I always thought the TV series was SciFi fiction.

The question then remains, if Politicians depend on the Large Corporations for election campaign contributions,  will the large corporations continue to donate to politicians when country borders and individual currencies become irrelevant ?

When will that happen.  Well boys and girls,  it’s happening now.

So be nice.

Is Amazon the New MTV ?

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Last week Nilay Patel, former Engadget super blogger,  wrote about the Amazon Cloud player [1].

In case you missed his article, here are some of the highlights.

Amazon Cloud Player and how bandwidth killed the copyright star

If you’re reading this you probably don’t need much background on Amazon Cloud Player — suffice it to say that Amazon launched a new “freemium” cloud storage service that’s tied into their music store. You get 5GB of online storage for free and 20GB if you buy an MP3 album from Amazon, and subsequent MP3 purchases don’t count against the cap. There’s also a Cloud Player app for Android that can play music files stored on your account — it doesn’t matter if they’re files you purchased from Amazon or elsewhere, and Amazon has tools that’ll upload your DRM-free iTunes purchases to make a switch easy. None of this is particularly earth-shattering — as a loyal Amazon MP3 customer who’s almost wholly switched to the subscription-based Radio, I actually think most of these features are a couple years too late.

Fast forward

So what’s new for Amazon? Bandwidth, and tons of it. We’ve reached the point where uploading 5 or 15 or 20GB of data to a cloud service is a feasible task for most broadband-connected consumers, and that changes the nature of the argument entirely. If you’re a Cloud Player customer, you get a defined 5GB or 20GB of storage, and the music that lives in that storage is your copy. Your copy that you’re allowed to make. It’s not “functionally equivalent” to a fair use copy anymore — it is a fair use copy. I’d even bet that additional purchased songs that don’t count against your cap are actually transferred to your storage and given extra space that doesn’t show up on the meter, because that way each user still has their own copy.

This is going to completely fuck the labels, since they can’t argue that Amazon is making unauthorized copies of songs. In order to stop Cloud Player, they’re going to have to completely switch tactics and argue that it’s actually the content that matters, and that Amazon doesn’t have the rights to enable streaming content from their platform. But that’s a ridiculous argument, since Amazon is just going to say that it’s not actually doing much of anything — it’s just giving users some storage space and publishing an app that can play those files over the network. The labels will have to somehow argue that the content of the music files is protected, since they can’t really touch what the users are doing to their own copies.

I wrote my opinion on this topic recently to the Link Institute mailing list.

I actually think that this time the Amazon guys have leap frogged iTunes by two country miles.

So next we will see Amazon Radio ….
What are people listening to right now ?
22% are listening to …..      Click here to listen to a ten second clip…
16% are listening to …..      Click here to listen to a ten second clip…

Click here to buy a copy…

The power of marketing.
If the labels leave it alone, it has the capacity to create enormous global sales for recording artists and for the first time ever, a World Top Twenty…. Which of course will result in the emergence of the “Superstar….”

Interesting, this might actually revitalise the music industry that has been locked into iPod/iTunes mania (which of course is only available to one sixth of the worlds population.) [2]

one sixth of the worlds population or 14.9%

iTunes Availability Date Population Cumulative Pop. World %
United States 24-Jun-03 306126000 306126000 0.0454
France Germany United Kingdom 15-Jun-04 208747982 514873982 0.0311
Austria Belgium Finland Greece Italy Luxembourg Netherlands Portugal Spain 26-Oct-04 169244311 684118293 0.0251
Canada 3-Dec-04 33519000 717637293 0.50%
Republic of Ireland 6-Jan-05 4517800 722155093 0.07%
Denmark Norway Sweden Switzerland 10-May-05 27249000 749404093 0.00401
apan 4-Aug-05 127704000 877108093 1.90%
Australia 25-Oct-05 21557700 898665793 0.32%
New Zealand 6-Dec-06 4294350 902960143 0.06%
Mexico 4-Aug-09 106682500 1009642643 1.58%
Totals 1009642643 0.14994

Coloured version of this table available at [2]

Now all we have to do is remove the Caps that countries like Australia, New Zealand and the UK enforce on their Internet users.

Internet Caps are a barrier to commerce and unless the carrier is also the content publisher (e.g.: Warner/UMG/Comcast) or a cable TV company with a V.O.D. service (e.g.: Telstra/Foxtel) there would appear to be little justification in Capping the bandwidth.

In this regard, our Government have got it right with the rollout of the NBN and Amazon have got it right with the Music Cloud.

It would be a shame if this brilliant opportunity for the Music industry to get back on top is spoiled by the short-sighted carrier walled and throttled gardens.

Memo to Amazon:  Can you please switch on Australia please.

 

 

Hat tip to Kim Holburn

References:

[1] http://nilaypatel.co/post/4239083697/amazon-cloud-player-and-how-bandwidth-killed-the

[2] Reason Number 5 For the Loss of Music Sales – iTunes is too Good.

http://kovtr.com/wordpress/?p=514

 

 

 

The “B” Plan

Hot:

Throughout my life I have had the privilege to work with some very clever people and from them I have learned a lot.

I have also worked with some very dumb and greedy people.

DUMB & DUMBERER

There was the investor who really thought the Internet was about how much money one could make from providing dial up modem access to other persons content.

 

As any CEO, I was charged with the growth and the success of the company.

And grow it I did.

In less than twelve months we had an Australia wide Frame Relay network that extended into New Zealand and across the pond to Portland, up to Seattle and down to Palo Alto.

We had a magazine, Internet Australasia that was selling 72% through sales (which was 8% better than Woman’s Weekly) and we were  adding about hundred new customers every day.

I negotiated to acquire the name world.net.

I negotiated a “B” class of IP numbers….

I negotiated an IPO with Phil Rudd from Ernst & Young in Seattle, sitting downstairs in the IRS building in a little “yet to be famous” coffee shop called Starbucks…

But the investor was a disbeliever.

I had allowed the company to be hacked.

There was no value to the “B” class IP numbers.

The domain name was just a name and as for the NASDAQ listing… his exact words were:

“Ahhhh, you have to be joking… no-one in America will buy shares in an Australian ISP”

So we parted Ways and he replaced me with a highly qualified tomato grower. (His “B” Plan.)

(Nine Months later Ozemail raised 55 million on the Nasdaq, considerably less than the 250 Million that Phil had suggested that we could raise.).

Had the shareholder believed me in September 1995, his personal net worth would have increased by a conservative 131 million dollars.

So how does he feel now ?

I have no idea. He was always right back then, so I’m sure that whatever he is doing, he is probably still right about.

But I know one thing for sure, he didn’t make that 131 million dollar equity out of the tomato farmer – but his ego won, and he was right! (The Tomato farmer ? I think he went back to growing tomatoes.)

DOWNRIGHT GREEDY

Then there was the next investor.

The next guy was a little bit more adventurous, he understood that for big bucks, there had to be some bigger risk.

Unfortunately for me I didn’t understand that I was the risk.

As part of the deal, I had to agree to be insured as a Key Man for several million dollars.

A few months later, after the business had grown from zero billing to a million per month, we were having a board meeting to discuss the details of the NYSE reverse listing of a NYSE cashbox with five million dollars in the bank.. Basically, I was being offered the deal of a century…  If I gave the investors the five million, they would give me a proxy to vote their shares in any way I wanted too.

Gee, seemed like a great deal to me.  (Scratches head…)

I left the boardroom to grab some papers from my office.

The door was ajar a few millimeters and open plan office outside was empty. As I was coming back from my office, I overheard the following conversation in hushed tones:

A Big six Accountant:      “It seems to be going well”.

A Lawyer: “What do we do if it goes pear shaped?”

Shareholder 2: “We turn to the “B” plan and shoot Tom.”

I stopped and waited for the laughter.

There was none.

The next day I asked my solicitor to look into canceling the insurance policy.

-         What happened to that company ?

Well about eight months later the company announced how well it was doing in the Australian Financial Review after the restructure (after I left). Two months later, the

investor did a private deal for shares with the company’s largest Debtor…(yep the reason the company entered liquidation in the first place) and the company went into liquidation with of course, the investors personal accountant appointed as the liquidator.

What happened to the technology ?

Well,  the staff all wandered off and took the technology with them. You might have heard of a little Tech company called Akamai…

And that’s the story of the “B” plan.

Suddenly it’s almost easy to understand why Australia doesn’t have too many Billionaires. Every financier, politician and Big Six accounting firm is happy to execute the “B” plan.

There are very  few that have “the Vision”.

Those  that do are tall poppies that  obviously need to be taught a lesson.

The Lesson ?

In Australia there is very little incentive to be an entrepreneur.

 

 

 

Journalists are Gods. (DayTink!)

Hot:

Rupert Murdoch has told us that the content from News Limited is valuable. It costs money to produce and disseminate that content.

In fact, I stopped blogging because I didn’t have the money to hire fact checkers or editors.

I also stopped blogging because I didn’t want my unedited work influencing the predominantly young population of readers that KOVTR was receiving.

In other words, I didn’t think I was qualified to be a blogger or a person of influence that other persons might take part of their formational educational constructs from.

Recent events have led me to believe that Journalists have not become any more credible than some of those that I had the misfortune to meet in the nineties.

…and if Rupert claims that those Journalists output is valuable, ergo sum, my output also has a value.

So, here I am, eight months after my final blog piece, with a new blog article.

Journalists are Gods! Daytink!

I have recently had the distressing experience of dealing with a Journalist.

You know the type, I’m a technology journo, have been for twenty years, I’ve seen everything, know everything and you can’t possibly know more than me.

It matters not one iota that the journalist has never

  • set-up a global Frame Relay network, or
  • created a BBS,or
  • built an ISP, or
  • argued with Telecom about what constitutes a connected device (modem) on the PSTN network,  or
  • written a billing program, or
  • worked RF globally, or
  • taken Telstra to Federal court three times over billing issues, or
  • bounced a laser beam off the moon, (and received it back again) or
  • built anInternet Exchange, or
  • argued the merits of BSD memory utilisation with Kirk McKusick, or
  • went bug hunting with Toni Li (C-ios 2.1) for 34 hours straight with no sleep, or
  • designed the Blueprint for the worlds largest CDN network (Akamai), or
  • argued with banks about online credit card billing and why it should be allowed, or
  • redesigned the numbers of FR ports on a BSTDX Lucent switch.

No Journalists don’t actually have hands on experience at anything really except they have a way with words.  This understanding comes from years of being edited by other journalists (usually their editors) on how to use words sharply with efficiency.

Subsequently, they are extremely proficient at character assassination.

Unfortunately, the worlds second oldest profession, don’t understand the collateral damage of their 800 words @ 55 cents per articles trashing some poor entrepreneur. They don’t realise that their measly $200 story actually was the straw nail in the coffin for the ASIC investigator scalp hunter to quantify the banning of the Entrepreneur.

Others, married to or living with stock brokers arn’t above bending the real facts all to benefit their partners ambitions of picking up a cheap public company…

Nobody in the past dared take on Journos for fear of the global Reuters/Knight (et al) associated reprisals.

Today, thanks to one small minded individual, I am declaring war on all Journalists that believe they know more than even one entrepreneur that they would write about.

My Name is Tom Koltai and I am an Entrepreneur.

The death knell for Nokia, Motorola and iPhone is spelt Chinese Android.

Hot:

A few weeks ago we ran an article about Microsoft being the most pirated software in the world as being an indicator for the success of the company.

ACTA was drafted to ensure that cheap “clone” copies of the world’s leading brands are not made by the East and dumped on the west undercutting the local manufacturers investment in their brand.

Chinese mobile phones were developed for the Chinese people in the first instance. The aim was to put a handset into the hands of every person in China.

With the average manufacturing price coming out at $17-$24, the Chinese “clone” handsets were affordable and subscriber numbers boomed.

To the extent, where on a worldwide basis, last year, Internet access via Mobile phones exceeded that of dial-up, ADSL and Cable subscribers.

The problem of course only arose when the “clones” were offered to the West complete with Windows mobile as the operating system.

Microsoft jumped up and down about their software being used for free on the Chinese “clones”.

A year is a lifetime in the technology world.

Windows mobile is no longer the OS of choice.

Google may have abandoned China, but the Chinese think-tanks have certainly not abandoned Google and Android is now available on a whole plethora of new phone offerings from the East.

Traditional phone manufacturers have to be careful how they implement “features” copied from other phone manufacturers.

Intellectual property is ignored largely by these manufacturers who use lawyers to draft the feature list to ensure that no patent claims are lodged.

Chinese manufacturers on the other hand haven’t quite bothered with this nicety.

They merely take the best of the features of all phones and churn out the new “clone”.

Which, surprise, surprise, surprise, is a clone no longer.

Want two standby Sims? Analogue TV ? Two earphone jacks for togetherness listening …. A real 3” screen, front and back cameras, video and still photography?

The Odyssey AU$120.88 or for 20 or more for AU$104.52 each

Chinese Odyssey Mobile Phone

At that price, you could afford to lose half a dozen before equaling the current cost of comparable leading “brandname” phones.

This particular phone runs the Nucleus [pdf file] RTOS OS from Oregon (USA) based Mentor Graphics.

Which according to Wikipedia,  boasts a Nucleus install base of over 1.6 billion mobile devices, as of mid-February, 2010.  (Our story on MS-Dos/win-95, XP etc quoted Microsoft as selling only 1,5-2 billion operating systems all up.).

That certainly puts Mentor Graphics in the top three of mobile operating systems.

However, we have been informed that Chinese vendors are readying the next generation Odyssey and it [and it's cousins] will all be loaded with Android.

DIGITAL DIVIDE

per capita

 Industrialized

World

 Emerging

World

 Total
Banking account unique holders 950,000,000 79% 1,250,000,000 22% 2.2 B
Internet users incl PC, shared & mobile 775,000,000 63% 925,000,000 17% 1.7 B
Mobile phone subscriptions 1,600,000,000 3,000,000,000 4.6 B

Source: Tomi Ahonnen’s 2010 Phone Almanac

According to Comscore in the USA, the most popular phone in February this year was the Blackberry, followed by the iPhone with Android near the bottom but growing fast.

Top Smartphone Platforms
3 Month Avg. Ending Jan. 2010 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Oct. 2009
Total U.S. Age 13+
Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers
Oct-09 Jan-10 Point Change
Total Smartphone Subscribers 100.0% 100.0% N/A
RIM 41.3% 43.0% 1.7
Apple 24.8% 25.1% 0.3

Source: ComScore MobiLens

American coverage is still spruiking the Blackberry RIM OS.

The Blackberry holds the lead because of it’s adoption across the business world. Instant emails, wherever is an important business tool – fifteen years late, but nevertheless, a handy option if your business life depends on rapid communications in writing.

However the nextgen phone users may be changing all that, with facebook updates, Tweets, and simple SMS taking over from email as the preferred method of what passes these days as deep and meaningful conversation.

“Wanna hook-up l8tr?”  does not require the RIM operating system.

And – have you seen this yet ? http://bit.ly?someaddress will work on any phone OS browser. Very Gay!

Twitter and sms have supplanted normal communications and created a windfall for the telecommunication companies.

Developers though are choosing sides and whilst application developer’s currently prefer the iPhone OS, unilaterally there is a move towards the Android platform for longer term projects.

Major name manufactuers are also following suite…

Android Smartphones

According to a recent international study by British Telecom, “Western business is not fully prepared for the imminent impact of emerging markets.  While more than six out of ten (64 per cent) directors of large American, British, French and German corporations accept that emerging economies will “reshape” the global business landscape, many seem to have only a rudimentary knowledge of their business environments.

Even though a clear majority (61 per cent) of respondents admit it is “crucial” their business is able to work with the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – the so-called ‘BRICS’ nations – to succeed in the long term, many of them demonstrate worrying ignorance of the realities of those countries

http://www.itu.int/ituweblogs/treg/ct.ashx?id=e595ae2f-02fb-4f19-b95f-33a55bbe2e95&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.bt.com%2fglobal%2fcollaboration%2fBRICS%2f

With Chinese phone factories (preferring the FREE Android operating system) churning out an estimated 400,000 phones per month, it will not be long before there will be two types of non-business related (RIM) phones in the world.

iPhones (24% of the population) and everyone else with Android. As iPhone users learn what the Android users can do with their “unlocked” non-proprietary operating system phones, the iPhone population will decrement accordingly.

References:

Comscore Phone Platforms Data

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/3/comScore_Reports_January_2010_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

Growth in North America key for RIM as Apple, Android phones appeal to consumers

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/life/sci_tech/international-growth-expected-for-rim-but-north-american-consumer-growth-key-97003369.html

Building Business With BRICS,  http://www.globalservices.bt.com/static/assets/pdf/white_papers/builiding_a_business_with_brics_new_en.pdf

The Value of Copyrighted Content – Or Why the Content Creation Industries Have a Budgetary Problem

Hot:

I saw a quote recently from IFPI (DMR 2010) that claimed the global content industry was worth around 1.4 trillion dollars per annum.

At the time, I remember scoffing and haw hawing.

Yet, dear reader, I am about to show you how John Kennedy vastly underestimated the value of the Content Industry.

Copyright owners have consistently pushed for longer copyright terms.

Yet in itself, we have discovered that copyright is not a catalyst to spur innovation. It is merely the justification for litigation.

Interestingly, Copyright is designed to return to the owner (not the creator) a fee, which as well as allowing one to pay the bills, is also a form of approval rating. The more fees collected, the higher the audience approval.

Yet today, the only persons collecting fees from 57% of all audio-visual content on the internet are the carriers who charge for each byte that transits their network.

The charges range on a global basis from a few cents per gigabyte in the information rich countries like the USA and Japan, where bandwidth is plentiful and essentially uncapped; through to dollars per gigabyte in information poor countries like Australia.

On the Internet, in those countries where data is not restricted by duopoly Telco agreements and all ISP’s and carriers peer their local
content, consumer choice is driven by crowd sourcing.

Curiously, no-one has analysed the entertainment value of these P2P sourced files.

On TVU, there are the links to 356,775 television show episodes being added to at the rate of 142 new shows per day.

The ratings vary from 4.5 (very good) down to .5 or 1 (not so good).

The number of clicks next to each episode shows the popularity. (I call this TVU Ratings…:-))

A number of company’s like Vquence analyse YouTube memes and patterns.

Neilsens tell us what is popular today on free to air and cable, yet Neilsens do not measure the content that the majority of the world is watching.

Personally, I find myself chuckling with mirth equally at Public Domain episodes of “I love Lucy” and the “Big Bang Theory”, however, this may be because of my advancing years. (I actually know who Lyndon Johnston was.)

As entertainment fodder, each program in it’s own way has fed my hedonistic appetite for content that entertains.

Therefore the value of the content has a value to me as an individual. The value is the dollar amount I am prepared to commit to to be
entertained.

We calculated the value of personal leisure-time last year. For a moment we will disregard that and estimate the value of life earnings
against total life expectancy.

Earnings

Years

Days

Hours

Minutes

Lifetime

75

365

24

60

$ 1,000,000.00

$13,333.33

$ 36.53

$ 1.52

$ 0.03

If my life earnings are a million dollars, then I should spend no more than three cents per minute if I expect not to go into debt.

If we take into account unemployment numbers, discretionary entertainment is down to around 11%. However, for the purposes of this blog article,
let us consider that it could be as high as 33%.

If we accept that Food, Housing, Medical, Transport and Clothing represents 66% of every dollar earned, then we have a discretionary budget of
one cent per minute for our entertainment content.

That means that a song on iTunes is worth 5 cents.

A movie (90 minute) 90 cents.

A half hour TV show (22 minutes without the advertising) is worth 22 cents.)

(These fees of course need to include the download cost….)

It can be argued that items of intense interest qualify for a premium viewing fee.

However, any increase in the 1 cent per minute means that I need to forgo Food, Clothing, Housing Transport or medical.

Let us assume that I pay one dollar for a song form iTunes. I now have to listen to that song 20 times before I have broken even on my
purchase. For a popular music item, 20 replays is easy to imagine.

Let us now consider an episode of “I Love Lucy”. Assuming I paid $1.99 (Amazon episode price) I would need to watch that episode of “I
love Lucy” nine times during my lifetime to stay on budget.
Highly unlikely.

However I could “share it” with eight other people and stay financially viable.

OR…
I could purchase the content on my credit card and go into debt.

When entertainment costs mean that people are unable to eat, pay their electricity [For New South Wales people that has a whole new meaning on your electricity bill starting today….], buy clothing, keep the roof over one’s head or afford to get medical care, then one needs to reanalyze ones spending habits.

Purchasing a $75.00 Blueray DVD is just not a realistic expenditure possibility for 93% of the worlds population. Mainly because of the 125 hours (@$0.60 per) of no content viewed required to pay for the credit card debt.

Consumers have started to realise that plastic without a job is not a viable option.

The pricing of discretionary entertainment options have not yet reached realistic pricing levels.  I foresee a future where the Telephone Companies distribute all content for free and collect the transit fees.

The current choices for consumers are to:

  1. Go into credit card debt to be entertained;

  2. Not be entertained;

  3. Download from the Internet for just the bandwidth costs;

  4. Borrow DVD’s from better heeled peers and family;

  5. Find a cheaper entertainment alternative;

Obviously, regardless of the legislative activities being forced on our parliamentarians by industry paid lobbyists, most will elect option 3.

Not because they are pirates and not because they don’t want to pay for the content.

But because the content is not priced within their budgetary allowances.

So what is the budgetary allowance of the average person on planet earth ?

The average salary (globally) is around $(USD) 9000.00 per annum.

Earnings

Years

Days

Hours

Minutes

Lifetime

75

365

24

60

$ 675,000.00

$ 9,000.00

$ 24.66

$ 1.03

$ 0.02

Down 33%. I now have only .675 of a cent to spend on non essentials. (that’s nearly one seventh of a cent, not 67 cents.)

If we accept that audio visual entertainment takes up an average of four hours and eleven minutes of our daily lives, then .675 equals 166.05
per day, ($1.66), or; $1,095,930,000,000 per day.

What is the real total value of sustainable Global spend on discretionary expenditure?

$59,400,000,000,000

A valid reason to put the prices of content DOWN.

Rob Wells of UMG (Vivendi) summed it up very nicely in the DMR2010 Report;

“ We’re much closer to the utopia, where we’re extracting €1 out of a million consumers as opposed to €10 out of a thousand.”

Well Rob, very soon, all content will be on the phones. How about a buck a day from everyone on planet earth for all content ?

Great idea… before those YouTube people take-over plant earth…. 25 hours a minute of newly created content. Wow!

Fig 1. – YouTube Video Uploads

Koltai Left and Right Brain conversation:

Who gets the money from that ?

Oh, Google and the Telephone companies.

Do the Telephone companies own any content ?

Apart from Vivendi ?

Yes, apart from Vivendi.

And Apart from Time Warner ?

Yes, Apart from them also.

Does iTunes owning part of Disney count ?

Are they a Telephone company ?

No.

Then they don’t count.

So is this something that Jobs overlooked ?

It would appear so.

So with all this content, who gets the most number of viewers ?

According to Comscore….

* by Videos Viewed

Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations                                                 Apr-10

Property

Videos
(000)

Share of
Videos (%)

Total Internet : Total
Audience

30,317,131

100

Google Sites

13,087,462

Hulu

958,176

3.2

Microsoft Sites

643,711

2.1

Viacom Digital

383,776

1.3

Yahoo! Sites

370,947

1.2

Vevo

331,730

1.1

Fox Interactive Media

320,372

1.1

CBS Interactive

316,930

1

Turner Network

304,729

1

AOL LLC

237,356

0.8

And what do they watch ?

According to the recent Pew Internet Report, [N=750] the average audio-visual content consumed is…

%
Online Video Watchers viewing:

Aged

18-29

Aged

30-49

Aged

50+

%

%

%

Comedy or Humourous Videos

93

74

52

News Videos

56

72

59

Educational (How-to ) videos

49

64

52

Movies or TV Shows

62

49

30

Music Videos

56

52

29

Political Videos

46

45

37

Animation or Cartoons

46

34

15

Sports Videos

34

37

16

Commercials or advertisements

26

23

16

Adult

16

11

6

We posted this chart last month. We include it here for ease of reference.

Youtube Videos
Watched

2,000,000,000

Per Day

83,333,333

Per Hour

1,388,889

Per Minute

730,000,000,000

Per Year

8 Minutes

Average Length

97,333,333,333

Hours

64,888,888,889

Equivalent

Movie Attendances (over 9 attendances per person on the whole planet vs 1.2 actual cinema attendances)

We explained that over twenty-five hours of video content was being uploaded to Youtube, twenty four hours per day.

If we compare that to all Television episodes; (we blogged this last month, chart according to IMDB here),
and;

if we allow that each Television Episode is between 22 minutes and 44 minutes average length, we could say arbitrarily that all TV episodes are 32 minutes long. On that basis, we have 27,375,488 minutes of entertainment representing 456,258.13 hours which if created by YouTube fans would be created and uploaded in 18,250.32 minutes which is only 304.17 hours or 12.67 days.

In other words, what took the various content creators globally, seventy years to create, is replicated every 12.7 days on YouTube and from the
looks of the YouTube growth curve, it is just at the beginning of its hockey stick.

If you ask me, I would say that the content horse for traditional forms of content, has bolted.

Content Creators will need to now compete with funny shorts created by the guy or girl next door.

3D as an industry innovation, is an excellent commencement. I look forward to seeing what the industry will think up next to compete with:

YouTube, Computer Games and exacerbated by a lower willingness to commit to high levels of personal debt.

Conclusion:

The future of the worlds economy is in the hands mainly of persons of whom 93% prefer short humorous videos.

YouTube is at the Genesis of a new Industry – dominated by amateur videos. Which is shaping up very similar to the earlierst days of the motion picture industry.

Koltai Prediction:

  • All content will be streamed for free by 2020 chosen by crowd sourcing friends views.
  • Revenues will be from advertising opt-in pop-overs.

Question to Ponder…

Who will run the Amateur Video Industry ?

Either a very large cheque book, or a brilliant new Technology.

References:

Value of the Entertainment Business – IFPI

http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/DMR2010.pdf

The State of Online Video | Pew Internet & American Life Project

http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP-The-State-of-Online-Video.pdf

The disconnect between the Legislature, The Technology, The Consumer and the Industrialists

Hot:

This article is Part one of a three part series and presents the case that even P2P can become legitimate if the right organisation starts to use it.

Preface:

The following article is a much simplified technical discussion about the Australian HFC networks delivery of content.

Certain liberties for ease of understanding have been taken by the author.  For example, I quote 5 Mbps bandwidth on cable, when most people have seen much higher speeds.  This is justified with the explanation that the number of users on a cable segment and their interactive useage habits contribute greatly to the amount of available bandwidth (download speed) available at any one time to any one user.

—————————————————————————————————–

Many of the articles penned here appear to knock the denizens of our content and legislative peers.

Yet, if no-one ever complains about anything, then how will anything ever improve.

Today’s article will at first appear as if I have lost my mind. [For those convinced that I have already achieved that milestone, I need not
deliberate any further, for those whom consider my humble pearls of wisdom of interest, I regret I am about to apparently disappoint.]

This article is the first article that I have penned that lauds the technical advances that Telstra have made in content delivery.

Sometimes revolutions are noisy affairs with lots of publicity, shooting of ministers, generals and other perceived enemies of the state.

Occasionally, the new order is announced, installed and hardly anyone notices.

Last month a new global technology revolution was announced in Sydney, and it was greeted with nary a whimper.

Yet the technology that Telstra announced for the delivery of their Video on Demand content stream has been the contention of industry vs the
consumer since Napster was announced.

Yet as usual I get ahead of myself.

Each new technology disrupts the forerunner.

Table 1 Transportation Methods

Transport Method

Ox and cart

Horse drawn wagon

Horse

Bicycle

Bicycle

motorcycle

Horse drawn buggy

Car

Horse drawn tram

Electrified trams

Steam ship passenger liner

Airplane

Each “upgrade” created more traffic and paths turned to lanes, roads, highways and eventually motorways.

…and more traffic…

Table 2 Communications

Person to Person (P2P)

Broadcast

Person to Person (P2P)

Runner/messenger

Newspaper

Pony express

Telegraph

Radio

Wireless

Telephone

Television

Satellite/Cable

Internet

Web (Directory Services)

Email, Payments

Email

Twitter

Facebook

With communications, each level of upgrade increased consumer knowledge, participatory commerce and consequently, individual nations economies. i.e.: the countries with the liveliest and lowest cost communications infrastructure became the highest standard of living “industrialized nations”.

Quite often the elements of each of the above tables are utilized together to deliver an item of communication to the recipient.

For example, A telegram circa 1910 would have been delivered via a bicycle, but by 1920, via motorcycle.

Did the telegram delivery persons get upset ? Of course not, they had been given shiny new motorcycles.

The telephone is an interesting analogy for the lack of resources that the internet is about to experience. [I’ll explain that statement shortly…]

In the 1930’s, it was common to deliver a single pair of copper wires to a street and then run extension lines from that first installation.

In this manner, connectivity was achieved a lot quicker than running separate copper pairs from the exchange to each individual house.

Technically it was feasible, but the cost would have been prohibitive.

This system of sharing a single copper between multiple houses was called “party-line”.

One ring was for house number 1, two rings was for house number 2 and three rings for house number three (etc). In some areas, there were 15-20
houses on a single circuit, in which case there was a code implemented, one short and two long was for house 15, two short and one long was for house 11 etc.

It was clumsy, annoying, but much better than not having a telephone.

The major problem was, one never knew, which neighbour was listening into the call.

Line sharing was not restricted to just houses in the same street. If one wanted to make an international phone call, one rang the operator and “booked” the call.

This was because until 1984, Australia only had a total capacity of eighty [80] simultaneous overseas phone line circuits. [i]

Again, one never knew if the operator stayed on the call after connecting you to your overseas party. [I’m sure they didn’t….]

The upside of course, was that good gossip was spread quickly via the “party-line” system, therefore, this was undoubtedly the first form of spoken “broadcast advertising”.

Today on the internet, we go about our browsing, emailing, and the three P’s, (peeking, poking and prying), believing that we are safe from harmful intent; yet hundreds of commercial (NGO) and Government web sites peer back when we visit their www public personae.

Every-time we search for an item on Google, a little flag is filed away about our “preferences”… “ahh, likes electric golf carts….”

Our media choices are similarly filed away by iTunes and other vendors, ostensibly to assist us in making choices in the future.

Email from point A to Point O has to pass through numerous routers, switches and “other” devices to be delivered at the other end.

(Other devices in this instance could be, for example, a computer with Ethernet in and out ports, looking like a router but designed to collect all packets and reassemble them. In other words a sniffer that collects emails.)

The public doesn’t realise it but their communications on the Internet are about as secure as the old “party-lines” from all those decades ago.

Flashback.

1994, Ausnet Services, Sydney Australia with a 64 Kb connection to Portland Oregon, with 9 GB W3C cache servers located in each of Sydney,
Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide delivered (comparatively) high speed Internet to Australians. Provided… they asked for something that our AI cache engine had calculated they would likely ask for.

Whenever sufficient persons asked for content not in the cache…. Of course the service slowed down to a crawl.

This is a basic bottleneck function of all networks. For Australians, the main bottleneck is the “Pond”.

Ignoring for the moment, the other ingress/egress cable points in Australia)

In 1994 Australians shared 256 Kbps [the AARNET service] for their Internet feeds. Estimates of the time, placed the number of users at around 180,000 [ii]

If each user was connected at 14,400 kbps dial-up modem speed, (the majority were, I assure you), then for those users not on Ausnet services “superior 64 Kb connection, each would have had 1.42 bits per second.

Fortunately, not all users could get online simultaneously, so the average user had at least 12 bits per second. Based on an estimated count of 680 modems servicing Australian Internet in December 1994 and deducting the usage component of Australia’s 36 Universities.

So for early internet adopters who were not at a university, or had their own ISP, getting online in the mid-nineties was was a frustating – redial – engaged – redial – engaged – redial – affair.

Of course in 1994, Australia relied heavily on Tasman 2 to New Zealand, and from thence to Hawaii.

In 1994, Pacrim East and West gave additional bandwidth, but only to Indonesia and Hawaii again with lots of satellite connectivity to take up the slack.

Southern Cross was switched on in 2000 and from their web site…..

“Like its predecessors, Southern Cross Cable Network has aimed to provide
the most advanced and innovative service available in our time. We
have learned from the configuration issues of the TASMAN 2 and PacRim
systems – which missed Fiji and only built as far as Hawaii and Guam
- and ensured that we built a network which is fully integrated and
covers all of the key markets in our region.”

So as can be seen, even the “experts” get it wrong. Telstra controlled access by pricing it at astronomical figures. In 1994, Ausnet was quoted $88,000 per month for a 2 Mb (half circuit) across the pond.

Half Circuit ? Well, that means that the Australian half was connected. Now the other half circuit had to be purchased form a US carrier as well.

Today, the average home ADSL connection is anywhere from 256 Kb to 6 Mbits and for cable customers, quite a bit faster (e.g. A user from Sydney
measured 13762kbps @ Broadband Speedtest.) [although if the head-end is full of cable subscribers, then most users would be better off on ADSL].

This is where the problem was first discovered.

Any system that requires distribution suffers degradation if all users turn on the taps at once.

Which is where it gets rather interesting.

Several months ago, I wrote an article that stipulated that multi-media content (MPEG movies) via cable on an individualized basis was an impossibility on the current bandwidth capabilities of the carriers.

Since then Telstra has upgraded parts of their network (Melbourne to Docsis 3.0)

Docsis 1, 2 & 3? Isn’t that where the user gets more bandwidth?

Not quite. It’s where the cable company get to switch on more users onto the same cable segment. Although early consumer use of enhanced Docsis upgraded services may seem to obtain a net speed and throughput increase.

(The following examples are making allowances for increased Net usage i.e: non-broadcast content)).

Docsis 1 Less than 3 Mbps (average)

Docsis 2 less than 5 Mbps

Docsis 3 less than 5 Mbps

Each of these solutions in itself is of benefit to the Telecommunications service provider. The Speed enhancements are eventually soaked up by the additional users.

More customers are able to be delivered on each platform without replacing all the cables.

However, for an always on service, where users are utilizing the maximum bandwidth constantly during peak periods, e.g.: 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm., even DOCSIS 3 is insufficient to guarantee service levels to all users for non-broadcast type content service delivery.

For example, if everyone in Toowoomba, Queensland decided on a Friday night to download a different HD movie on the BigPond Video on Demand
service, how many of them would be able to stream and watch the movie in real-time ?

Less than 41%.

In our next article we will examine how Telstra since 2005 have been working on a way around the bottleneck problem.

References:

i Farewell to ANZCAN Segment E

http://www.southerncrosscables.com/public/News/newsdetail.cfm?StoryID=54

ii Internet Australasia Magazine, Issue 1 Volume 1[Dec 1994], Internet Providers Guide

Wikipedia Entry on DOCSIS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS

Australian HFC Network

http://www.accc.gov.au/content/item.phtml?itemId=690305&nodeId=e6d85a5da5875697ff0b57c2ff03a63e&fn=Chap+6+Hybrid+Fibre+Coax+(HFC)+Network.pdf

For History Buffs:

The Magic Wire – THE STORY OF SUBMARINE CABLES

http://p38arover.com/INT/magic.htm

(This is a marvelous site and has multiple links about Telecom/Telstra cable installation experiences.)

A Short History of Submarine Cables

http://www.iscpc.org/information/History_of_Cables.htm

The Couch Potatoes Guide to the Total Number of Movies in the World.

Hot:

 

A few hundred blog articles ago, I estimated the number of movies that the average human might attempt to watch in their lifetime.

Assuming the first movie is watched at age 5 and we accept an additional 70 years of movie watching at two movies per day, with no repeats… [so these stats are for non-Foxtel viewers] then the average person on planet earth can watch:

Years

70

Movies per day

2

Days in a year

365.25

Total Movies in a Lifetime

51135

Fig. 1 Total Movies viewed per lifetime.

We started with IMDB being the largest film and other content database in existence, globally. Unfortunately, as expected, we  obtained
mixed results.

First we walked the IMDB database for the content types.

Fig. 2 All Content – All languages – all years.

Feaure Films

247,053

15.7%

TV Movie

 54,942

3.5%

TV Series

59,430

3.8%
TV Episode

855,484

 54.4%

TV Special

2,381

0.2%

Mini Series

 5,801

0.4%

Documentary

95,847

6.1
Video Game

7,037

 0.4%

Short Film

171,654

10.9%

Videos

 74,396

4.7%

Total

1,574,025

Source: IMDB Database

Then we analysed a subset of the data to determine accuracy.

The quality of data in the IMDB database as a historical resource is excellent.

Unfortunately, from a statistical viewpoint, there are data entry anomalies that detract from its accuracy due to the untrained publicus input.

e.g.: According to IMDB  there are 1284 Feature films from amongst 9,872 pieces of content filmed inclusive of 1906. [Search used]

IMDB lists a “Romance” film “Miss Jerry” as the first feature film ever created in 1894. However, in the absence of the length of the movie, we will consider it to be a movie short, i.e. most probably 20-50 seconds in duration and not really a candidate for inclusion in the feature film classification.

Miss Jerry (1894) The adventures of a female reporter in the 1890s. Romance 6.9/10
(Although, how five people managed to view an 1890 film, who also happen to be IMDB visitors, so that it could be rated, is beyond me…..)

Most content of a similar nature has been inserted into the “Video” classification of IMDB.

Of these 1284 “feature films, only one movie qualifies as a feature film in that it consisted of multiple, reels of film.

The first multi-reel film was the “Kelly Gang” produced in Australia in 1906 and shown to audiences in London in 1907. -

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000574/.

Therefore we know that from 1891 to 1906, there are 1283 incorrect classifications (out of 1284). This gives us an unacceptable error
percentage which unfortunately disqualifies the database from providing a determinative result.

Therefore we need to look at alternative methods for calculating  only multi-reel feature films from 1907 till today…..

We already have the numbers for total films produced by the worldwide industry

Fig 3. Screen Digest Totals (Plus Nigeria for 2006)

Number of feature films produced Globally
2004

2005

 2006

2007

 2008

4019

4441

5583

5018

5085

Sources: Screen Digest, June 2005, June 2006, July 2007, July 2008 and July 2009. Nollywood – 2006 – UNESCO

N.B. 2006 includes 800+ movies from Nollywood, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 do not include any Nollywood movie numbers.

There is no complete list of all movies, therefore we “fudged” a result. (Counting only English Language Movies.)

We extrapolated from a known base the first year and the number of films last year and got to approximately 116,142 which is based on a smooth growth curve of 4.95% per annum increase in the number of movies produced.

Fig 4. Our initial smoothed extrapolated calculation

Year

1907

2009

%

Film Production

38

5516

4.95%

The average YoY growth – for all visual medium content – in the IMDB database equals 6% – exactly – (from 1891 till the present).

However we omitted :

1894

83

65

3250%

1896

667

504

630%

As being too outside the norm… (and we adjusted for “Dubbed” versions – explanation below.)

Of course, some years 1916-1946 numbers were down and others, 1946-1949, 1958-59 were up.

If we look at Documentaries and shorts…..

Which ones do we count? … In about circa 1895, early film attendees thought the following list (totalling 7.5 minutes with a reel change
in-between each “short” and with no sound) was great….

· La Sortie des Ouviers de L’Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895) (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory) (46 seconds)
 
· La Voltige (1895) (Horse Trick Riders) (46 seconds)
 
· La Pêche aux Poissons Rouges (1895) (Fishing for Goldfish) (42 seconds)
 
· Le Débarquement du Congrès de Photographie à Lyon (1895) (The Disembarkment of the Congress of Photographers in Lyon) (48 seconds)
 
· Les Forgerons (1895) (Blacksmiths) (49 seconds)
 
· Le Jardinier (l’Arroseur Arrosé) (The Gardener or The Sprinkler Sprinkled) (1895) (49 seconds)
 
· Le Repas (de Bébé) (1895) (Baby’s Meal) (41 seconds)
 
· Le Saut à la Couverture (1895) (Jumping onto the Blanket) (41 seconds)
 
· La Place des Cordeliers à Lyon (1895) (Cordeliers Square in Lyon) (44 seconds)
 
· La Mer (Baignade en Mer) (1895) (Bathing in the Sea) (38 seconds)
 
Fig 5. Table of Early Movie Shorts

Source: http://www.filmsite.org/pre20sintro2.html

So if we count these “shorts”  and all known [non Government or Commercial] documentaries, then the  total would equal over 446,000 or approximately 170,966 hours of video entertainment.

Of course, this doesn’t include foreign language films, or the IMDB “video” category [euphemistically referred to as the “Romance” videos],nor does it include TV series, Mini series et al as in the above table, and if we then break it down by years, we get something that looks like this….

Source: Various Databases inc. Unesco Library, CITWF, IMDB NFSA  (Dataset is incomplete – several countries archive collections not included – e.g. Nigeria – Specifically, an estimated  19,000+ movies.)

Other errors and omissions are attributable to the thousands of lost movies as companies went out of business and private archive collections were lost to natural disasters and war.

We estimate [from a cursory shallow analysis] that there could be as many as an additional 61,000 items of historical content not listed in any of the databases that we accessed to compile these numbers. e.g.: According to [Brown, 1997]; “One of the most exciting recent events in Britain to affect early cinema studies has been the discovery of the film copyright collection at the Public Record Office, Kew. Hidden among the tens of thousands of copyright records for photographs that exist between 1862 and 1911 are a few hundred records for motion picture films.” [Guestimate based on number of “finds” over the last decade – approx. 55 movies found per year.]

The above graph would tend to suggest that technology drives creation and demand.

Source: IMDB only

N.B.: Dataset is incomplete – several countries archive collections not included.

Persons reviewing the above graph and noting the drop off from 2005, need to consider other A/V publishing environments [e.g. [YouTube, Metacafe] before jumping to conclusions about industry reversals.

(Alternative new technology often generates disruptive influences on established technologies.)

These charts are about production and not consumption. They are indicative of economic conditions enabling creation rather than ticket sales.

Additionally, the IMDB database contains 7,000+ video games from around 1990 and this should be taken into account.

Further we note that the IMDB Database considers that dubbed movies are equal to original movies.

e.g.:

Most Popular Chinese-Language Feature Films/Videos Released No Later Than 2010

49 titles.

1.

6.5/10

Remember Me (2010) A romantic drama centered on two new lovers:
Tyler, whose parents have split in the wake of his brother’s suicide, and Ally, who lives each day to the fullest since
witnessing her mother’s murder. Dir: Allen Coulter With: Robert
Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin Drama | Romance

113 mins.

2.

7.7/10

Spider-Man 2 (2004) Peter Parker is beset with troubles in his failing personal life as he battles a brilliant scientist named
Doctor Otto Octavius, who becomes Doctor Octopus (aka Doc Ock), after an accident causes him to bond psychically with mechanical
tentacles that do his bidding. Dir: Sam Raimi With: Tobey
Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Alfred Molina Action | Fantasy | Sci-Fi | Thriller
127 mins.

3.

6.8/10

Australia (2008) Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by Japanese forces firsthand. Dir: Baz Luhrmann With: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman Adventure | Drama | History | Romance | War
165 mins.

4.

7.4/10

Gangs of New York (2002) In 1863, Amsterdam Vallon returns to the Five Points area of New York City seeking revenge against Bill the Butcher, his father’s killer. Dir: Martin Scorsese With: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Daniel Day-Lewis Crime | Drama | History
167 mins.

5.

7.9/10

Goldfinger (1964) Investigating a gold magnate’s smuggling, James Bond uncovers a plot to contaminate the Fort Knox gold reserve. Dir: Guy Hamilton With: Sean Connery, Gert Fröbe, Honor Blackman Action | Adventure | Thriller United States-GP 110 mins.

If I search on Chinese Language and Chinese Origin

Most Popular Chinese-Language Feature Films/Videos Released No Later Than 2010 With Country of Origin China


22 titles.

1.

6.3/10

Baiyin diguo (2009) In 1899, a carefree young man must prepare to take over his family’s Chinese banking empire. Dir: Christina Yao Biography | Drama | Family | History | Romance

113 mins.

2.

Single Man (2010) The story is originated in Gujiagou Village, 150km from Beijing, the Capital of China. The wife of the… Dir: Jie Hao Comedy

94 mins.

We only get to, all up, 22 titles.

Yet we know that the Chinese people make approximately 250-300 films per annum. (We published the 2005 stats in a previous article.

“The statistics on Chinese film production in 2005 was:
Number     Type
3           Blockbusters (over 100 million RMB Production budgets. E.g.: The Promise)
10         10-50 million RMB
240       1.5-3 million RMB (These films are restricted to TV and/or DVD release only because of budget constraints)”.

Yet nobody bothers to upload that data onto the IMDB database.

If we look at Germany as the country of origin, we find in position one, “Inglorious bastards” …

Most Popular German-Language Feature Films/Videos Released No Later Than 2010 With Country of Origin Germany

1-50 of 7,634 titles.

1.

8.4/10

Inglourious Basterds (2009) In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as “The
Basterds” are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. Dir:
Quentin Tarantino With: Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Eli Roth Drama | Thriller | War 153
mins.

Yet it is listed as number 45 on the American Universal Pictures “About Us” listing. http://www.imdb.com/company/co0005073/

· (45)  Inglourious Basterds (2009) … Production Company (presents)

We mentioned Nollywood above.

Most Popular Titles With Country of Origin Nigeria

1-50 of 2,972 titles.

1.

7.4/10

Things Fall Apart (1971) Dir: Hans Jürgen Pohland Drama
90 mins.

2.

5.9/10

Legacy (2010) Black Ops operative Malcolm Gray returns home after a botched mission in Eastern Europe. Holed up in a Brooklyn motel room… Dir: Thomas Ikimi Thriller
95 mins.

3.

9.3/10

Atonement (2005 Video) Dir: Fos Nwaokike

We already know that they are making approximately 30 new titles every week available for sale, that adds up to an astonishing 1500 movies per year for a country with around 24 million households.

With DVD’s priced at between one and two dollars each, it’s easy to understand why the industry is doing so well.

Also, with such a reasonable pricing model, the concept of Commercial Piracy and non-commercial file-sharing, cannot afford to exist.

But this article is not about the most innovative and successful business story of the content creation world, it is about the total number of films that exist.

So given that we do not have an accurate representation of the “emerging economies” film manufacturing totals, we can hardly be accurate with the “Total number of movies”.

Therefore our control is as per the following total for 2006.

Bollywood

Nollywood

USA

Hollywood

Japan

China

France

Germany

Spain

Canada

Russia
Fed

Italy

Sth
Korea

UK

Other
1091

872

 673

485

 417

312

 203

174

 150

133

 120

116

 137

104

 1123

(Due to space limitations we listed only those countries with a total above 100)

Now totalling 6110 movies for 2006 and starting with 38 as per Fig 4 above.

As an anecdotal “AP”, discounting dubbed movies, using the above control year (2006) , we would place the total number of feature films Globally at approximately 172,000.

Feel free to disagree and nominate a different method of calculating the quantum.

However – we removed Dupes (dubbed into foreign languages – approximately -1.2%)

We added Nigerian and several European and Asian country movies. (+1.034%)

Back to our Couch Potatoes….

No of awake hours in an average lifetime? 404,217

So for all you couch potatoes out there…. If you want to view all the content…. You better get started….

P.S.:  The Bad News…..

Youtube users are now uploading 24.5 hours of video content every minute.

We will review and chart YouTube on another day…. However, as an indicator, the total YouTube videos uploaded already exceed all previous commercial content created from 1889 to the present.

Youtube Videos Watched

2,000,000,000

Per Day

83,333,333

Per Hour

1,388,889

Per Minute

730,000,000,000

Per Year

8 Minutes

Average Length

97,333,333,333

Hours

64,888,888,889

Equivalent
Movie Attendances

Sorry couch potatoes… You’re too late. Unless of course,  you’re a sci-fi fan, in which case…. If you can find an Atlantean chair and fast-forward all the content at 3000 frames a second… and it doesn’t overload your synapses… then… maybe…

Postcript…..

We leave you with a thought – as always…

Does anyone see any similarity between the following Picture and the shorts in Fig. 5 above ?

The First four Youtube Videos with Running Time Shown

Seems like when persons are trying something out for the first time, they make only short versions to ensure they can master the technology.

Might be an indication of where the world is going….

References:

As always – this is a blog – therefore Bib is slightly disorganised.

(We have cut back the Bibliography as just the UNESCO references ran to three pages – we have supplied a cross section of the relevant
references as an indication of the quality of the numbers.)

The History of Film The Pre-1920s Early Cinematic Origins and the Infancy of Film

Dirk T. http://www.filmsite.org/pre20sintro.html

History of the Czechoslovakian cinema

http://www.learnaboutmovieposters.com/newsite/INDEX/COUNTRIES/Czech/CzechFilmHistory.asp

Czech Republic – Národní filmový archiv, Knihovna
http://www.nfa.cz/knihovna/

The National Film Archive in Prague has largest library of film literature in the Czech Republic containing a collection of film
scripts (more than 9,000), a collection of some 65,000 books, film magazines from all over the world, a reference library, etc.

CITWF  - The Complete Index to World Film since 1895

http://www.citwf.com/listFilms.asp?filmName=1907

Alan Goble

COPYRIGHT RESOURCES PROJECT:
Working with Copyright–Protected Materials in a Digital Environment

http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/copyright_project/

Creative Commons Project

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Directories

France – Bibliothèque du Film (BIFI)

La BiFi a pour vocation de diffuser et de mettre à la disposition d’un large public ce patrimoine constitué d’éléments documentaires sur le cinéma français et étranger. Catalogue complet de la médiathèque contenant les références d’ouvrages, de films (vidéo), de dossiers de presse, de photos, d’affiches… Pour de nombreux films, acteurs ou réalisateurs, une fiche détaillée est disponible directement en ligne.

http://www.bifi.fr/

The Public-Domain Movie Database

http://www.pdmdb.org/content.asp?CatId=264&ContentType=PDMDB

Prelinger Archives

http://www.pdmdb.org/content.asp?contentid=427

Israel – Film Database

http://www.amalnet.k12.il/sites/commun/library/tikshsratim.htm

In Hebrew only. Israeli film article database providing information about international and Israeli films.

Turner Classic Movies

With outstanding films from all genres, tailor made documentaries and
exclusive interviews with the biggest stars, TCM is the home of film.

http://www.tcmonline.co.uk

Sundance Channel : Home Page

Find the best in independent film, original series, blogs and original web content focusing on indie culture.

http://www.sundancechannel.com

Lost film archive reveals life on northern streets of 100 years ago

Ian Burrell, Thursday, 29 July 2004

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/lost-film-archive-reveals-life-on-northern-streets-of-100-years-ago-554818.html

Home page at filmsandtv.com

Filmsandtv contains a large movie database you can search by movie title, actor, genre, and Oscars. Read and search celebrity news and show the top ten boxoffice movies. Show TV series and TV episode descriptions along with TV schedules. Play movie trivia.

http://www.filmsandtv.com

FilmKatalogus.hu – Mozi, Filmek, Színészek, TV és minden, ami film!

FilmKatalogus – Mozi, Filmek, Szinészek. Az egyik legnagyobb magyar filmes portál.

http://www.filmkatalogus.hu

Australian National Film and Sound Archive

http://www.nfsa.gov.au/

The images and sounds of film, television, radio and recording are a reflection of our creativity – a window onto our life and
times, our dreams and stories, our place in the world.

The National Film and Sound Archive is Australia’s audiovisual archive, collecting, preserving and sharing this rich heritage.

Film in Australia

http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/film/

The Australian film industry got off to a flying start, producing what was probably the world’s first full length feature film in 1906. The
film was the Tait brothers production The Story of the Kelly Gang, a success in both Australian and British theatres

Harvard Film Archive

http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/

UK - British Pathe
http://www.britishpathe.com/

First digital news archive allowing a preview of items from the entire 3500 hour British Pathe Film Archive. Items cover news, sport, social
history and entertainment from 1896 to 1970.

[Brown 1997] The British Film Copyright Collection

Brown Richard – Journal of Film Preservation Volume XXVI N° 54 • [Apr. / avr. 1997]

Australian File Sharing Drives Musical Instrument Sales – An Anecdote.

Hot:

Last year we blogged about Torrents in Australia being mainly downloaded by Victorians with Craigieburn and Cranbourne in Melbourne being the
hottest Torrent locations in the country.

Today I discovered that there was a musical instrument seller in Cranbourne.

Surprisingly, they are doing extremely well. The Cranbourne shop is doing better than the city shop.

With sales of guitars increasing at the rate of about 10% per year…..

Coincidence?

We don’t think so.

File sharing drives innovation. At least in Cranbourne Victoria there is a strong anecdotal correlation between the two.

McDonald’s place their restaurants deliberately near in high traffic roads.

It would seem that Michael Coleman accidentally did the same thing with his music business.

So is Cranbourne still in the top two Australian cities today? No, it would appear that Torrenting has moved West and South… Adelaide, Hobart Perth followed by Melbourne.

Wouldnt it be interesting if we found that Torrenting was a result of reduced legitimate viewing options in those cities.

Which city has the most FTA, video stores per capita and lowest prices in the suburban discount DVD barrows at the malls ? Hmmm, would it be Sydney ?

An Update on my formal Report.

Hot:

Boys and girls, my humblest apologies, yet again I have set myself an unrealistic deadline for presenting my completed formal report on how file-sharing doesnt damage the music, movie or book industry.

Mea Culpa,  with only the barest of excuses… it’s a big job and unfortunately, other work of the comercial variety has distracted me from my self-imposed deadline.  So rather than offer a new date, please stop waiting. When it’s complete I will tweet it’s delivery.

Although it is down to 81 pages at the moment… (from 280 odd at the outset.)

Thank-you for your understanding and continuing patience.

Tom

Public Domain is Beginning to Encroach on the Province of the File Sharing Community.

Hot:

TVU.org is a large filebase of Television programs.

Want to catch up with an old program that you saw as a kid?

  • Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
  • Dad’s Army
  • Green Acres
  • Hogan’s Heroes
  • I love Lucy
  • Mr. Ed (The talking Horse)
  • Petticoat Junction
  • Roger Ramjet

It’s on TVU.

Koltai some of those programs are over fifty years old.

Yep, I know. So am I, that’s why I know the names.

Isn’t Buck Rogers now in the Public Domain and I love Lucy… wasn’t her show on air in the fifties?

Yes, it was.

In fact, any Television broadcasts or radio broadcasts prior to 1st of May 1969, are not protected by copyright.

And after that date ? Fifty years from the date made.

What about movies?  Fifty years from the date made (even if before the 1st of May 1969).

But some of those programs are on Foxtel.

Well, that means that Foxtel don’t have to pay to use them. But it also means that you can do what you like with them.

So the rules about Broadcasting are fifty years from the broadcast ?

Yep, that’s it.

Television started n Australia in 1956, so anything that was broadcast in 1956, came out of copyright on the 1st of January, 2007.

And every year on the first of January, another year of Australian Television and Radio Broadcasts become public domain.

So all those files on TVU are Public Domain ?

No. A few of them are public domain.

How do they get there ?

They are uploaded by users from around the world.

Which country uploads the most ?

Surely, they would be the country that needs the strictest sanctions passed immediately.

Well TVU doesn’t give statistics on uploads. However in an upcoming article we will discuss the results of file sharing and see which country is the biggest uploader.

For the moment, we will just concern ourselves with languages.

We collected some stats for a 48 hour period. (Excel Spreadsheet of Stats)

Over two days there were 220 files uploaded or an average of one file every twelve minutes.

In toto, there were 8205 minutes of content uploaded in 2828 minutes meaning that there is a 2.9 to 1 real-time playback ratio (if you speak multiple languages.

The winner is…..

English with second being French closely followed by the Spanish speaking population and the Italians running a distant fourth.

Language

Subtitles

%

Polish

2

0.007

German

3

0.010

Italian

9

7

0.055

Spanish

33

35

0.233

Engish

122

3

0.428

French

43

23

0.226

Japanese

9

1

0.034

Turkish

1

0.003

Finnish

1

0.003

Totals

222

70

1.00

We are constantly told by industry bodies that the emerging countries are doing most of the file sharing.

If we analyse the language of the majority of the shared files, we see that English uploads are dominant. Someone has to record the content off television, rip out the advertisements and upload the hash file to the TVU (or affiliated) server.

That’s a lot of work for no financial return.

As the majority of the English programs are first aired in the USA or the UK, it would be  a safe assumption to assume that the uploaders are Americans and Englishmen.

Not the people of Spain. Or the people of Italy.  But persons residing predominantly on the east coast of the USA (from the upload times of programs compared to the what time they were aired) and in the UK.

Actually from the growing number of Australian programs, it would appear that Aussies are also uploading (patriotic plug forthcoming) – AND people are downloading the Aussie content in growing numbers – let’s see how that plays out next year when the content creators do the sales rounds with the serials.

The problem is the content industry doesnt like the fact that they are going to start losing revenues from fifty year old content that is about to turn into public domain, so they’re fighting it tooth and nail.

If they win with our legislators, it is only a matter of time that you will be charged for copyright infringement if your Television faces the street and is on so that passers by can see and hear Lucy and Desi arguing about subjects that we no longer remember anything about.

References:

Duration of Copyright (Australia)

http://www.copyright.org.au/pdf/acc/infosheets_pdf/g023.pdf

Why the Cable TV Industry is almost Finished

http://kovtr.com/wordpress/?p=876

The Alexa Experiment – Report 2 – KOVTR user Engagement vs Facebook Myspace Youtube and Hulu

Hot:

Having achieved the first twenty million “easy points” in the Alexa rankings race, May was a little slower paced with only an incredible 19466 “points”.

(This article continues our monthly reports on the progress of kovtr on the web. The series started with last months report. )


KOVTR Alexa Rating May 29 2010

Our monthly rating spent the entire month pegging up and down between 327,000 and 440,000 and our three monthly rose from 961,627 to 533,227.

Of course the Spetnatz commando incident early in the month didn’t help and put me off my groove. I had to batten down the hatches, move KOVTR, double the back-ups and institute multiple blog sites in case the attacks became better executed.

That not withstanding, it is something of an achievement to be ranked as the worlds 386,683rd most popular website. (Not much of an achievement, but to be fair, the KOVTR blog started on March 29th 2010.)

(Ignore the spider count above, I turned spiders off for a few days until I could get a handle on incursion methods by badly behaving spiders that ignored ‘robots.txt’. Surprise surprise, hackers don’t honour robot.txt no access instructions.)

Unfortunately this means that all those pages that you thought were not cached somewhere you would rather they weren’t, probably in fact are.

Considering we worked out last year that there are approximately 37 internet users for every web site, (of course it’s changed by now, but it takes too long to do redo the numbers, sorry) we think we are doing okay.

Our unique ip’s didn’t double (note RSS feeds did), but we do seem to be engaging users for longer as they seem to be reading 145% more than they did last month.

At the speed we are traveling, (providing the black hats stay away…) our estimate is that we should be overtaking Google in the number one
slot in about three hundred and forty-seven years time.

Seriously? The competition from other Internet content at this level is quite serious. There appear to be a lot one author blog sites out there….. (I wonder if that says something about our society.)

Last year I calculated that one needs 10-25 new articles per day to enjoy a smooth growth curve. With KOVTR only having a solitary author, I
need to differentiate the content by having a high level of alternative references available.

This appears to provide KOVTR with a niche of readers that are different to Hulu, Youtube, Myspace or Facebook users.

The spike in May was probably the whitehats and blackhats each checking our what I had to say about them and is not a normal traffic pattern
so should be disregarded. I consider that my average time on site is about 25 minutes and daily pageviews per user should be only about 15.

In my opinion (and I’m not an SEO), one of the principle sources of new readership comes from well annotated graphs and accurately labeled tables. (In this regard I’m a bit lackadaisical and occasionally forget to properly reference graphics and graphs.) However, interest from search engines is static with bounce decreasing

Which I think means that my Tag references are growing more accurate.

The increased readership could be due to the laid back non-technical nature or it could just be the humour I provide readers in my attempts to debunk the content creation industries excuses for tampering with international relations and politics.

Either way, as the readership is not coming from search engines, it must be coming from, peer reference (links).

My Summary of the KOVTR blog over the last thirty days.

  • Two lost days.

  • Five days spent anti-Hacking Proofing and redundancy planning

  • Grammar, style and spelling – atrocious (as usual)

  • Content – it’s a Blog…. please go to the library and do serious research if this is the subject of a thesis.

  • Logical construct = (same as last month) illogical requiring quantum thought process from the reader.

  • 22 Posts of which 7 have Graphs

  • 13 have pictures

  • 10 contain tables

  • Average time to prepare and publish an article – 4 hours.

  • Average article length: 1381 words (+graphs, pictures and tables)

Table of Articles – most recent to oldest order.

Article

Words

Graphs

Pictures

Table

The difference between Anecdotal and Empirical.

1273

4

1

1

So how hard is it to do business in Australia?

1471

1

1

The Myth and Fallacy of Intellectual Property and a Couple of Numbers

2901

1

2

CPI Versus Communism – Or – Importers (Capitalists)
margins are getting tighter.

1493

3

Viruses, Hackers, The White Hats The Black Hats and the Grey Hats.

1346

1

6

Inept Hackers Still Sneaking Around…..

360

1

1

The Stereo is Dead Long Live the Game Console

467

4

The Music Industry, The Horrible ISP’s and the Unpaid Music Transit Bill

1389

2

2

1

Google Doesn’t Really Want to Know.

212

The Art of DoubleThink (1984) – is not Restricted to Fantasy
SCi-FI Novels.

1248

4

Summary of our progress in disproving the claims of the Tera Report & US Gov Agrees

1080

The Week that Wasn’t and the Zork Conundrum

1345

UK Corporate Hacking a Growing Business – The Conclusion.

1886

2

PUBLIC NOTICE To the Operators and owners of AS8912 NETBENEFIT Group NBT plc (formerly NetBenefit) London, UK

533

The Hacking at KOVTR – interim update.

1386

3

1

Stephen, The Filter and Why it’s not about the Porn or the Kids.

502

1

Cyberwarfare arrives on the Blogsphere – An update on the Hacking of KOVTR.

339

1

KOVTR is being attacked for telling the Truth.

540

From Sharing and Caring to Piracy in less than thirty years

4390

2

9

5

Reason Number 5 For the Loss of Music Sales – iTunes is too Good.

2626

10

1

4

The NBN The Quill Pen and Fear of Change

1078

Reason Number 5 why Music Sales might be/are down Let’s Talk about Second hand Games.

1677

5

4

Just the Facts please Ma’am and Don’t give me no Bull.

847

Totals 22 Articles

30389

27

33

24

Number of articles down for the month = 4

Damage from uninvited guests… an estimated thirty thousand minus Alexa “points”.

Prediction – next month we’ll be at 330,000.

References:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fkovtr.com%2Fwordpress#

The difference between Anecdotal and Empirical.

Hot:

It’s hard to speak up when someone who’s work you admired has seemingly lost the plot.

I read a statement the other day by an eminent Economist who suggested that

Sampling (Exposure Effect)

–         Empirical evidence that sampling doesn’t increase sales.

  • Superior choices of Cable TV generally doesn’t increase viewing hours

    Red and Yellow and Bolding are our enhancements

  • Radio doesn’t appear to  increase record sales.

Unfortunately, although he used the word Empirical, his power-point presentation failed to cite any references.

Which is probably why he didn’t offer the other side of the “Empirical” sampling argument;

Superior choices of Cable TV generally increased subscription numbers to the service which in turn did increase the total exposure to that networks total viewed hours and;

Superior viewing choices lead to higher ratings which in turn result in additional advertising revenues for the network, and;

Increased the number of persons that purchased DVR/TiVo/etc or large screen home Cinema systems.

And as for Radio not increasing record sales…. I am curious how far back in History this particularly economists empirical data runs.

In 1936,  as the great depression was in it’s final throws, public performances of songs were at the local diners and other youth recreation centres.

In the fifties, town councils were shutting down local radio stations that insisted on playing the Devil’s Rock & Roll music.

The entire Top forty Chart system was designed to build the hype of popular record sales and is the basis of today’s record industry.

Who can forget Casey Kasem (Coast to Coast) and the Wolfman Jack counting down the American Top forty…..

Possibly some persons didn’t listen to radio or the Top forty, anecdotally, I used to and purchased 45’s, L.P.s and CD’s on the basis of music heard on the Radio, as I am sure many others did.

Unfortunately, we have empirical evidence that sampling does in fact increase record sales and cultural event concert attendance which in turn has been empirically proven to increase record sales even further.

Economists shouldn’t be attempting to brainwash the next batch of up and coming world leaders with incorrect thought processes.

Just because an Economist says that something is so, does not mean that his “empirical” findings are from an empirical data result.

We offer a dictionary explanation of the difference between Empirical and Anecdotal.

Empiric \Em*pir”ic\, Empirical \Em*pir”ic*al\, a.

  1. Pertaining to, or founded upon, experiment or experience; depending upon the observation of phenomena; versed in experiments.

In philosophical language, the term empirical means simply what belongs to or is the product of experience or observation. –Sir W. Hamilton.

The village carpenter . . . lays out his work by empirical rules learnt in his apprenticeship. –H. Spencer.

  1. Depending upon experience or observation alone, without due regard to science and theory; — said especially of medical practice, remedies, etc.; wanting in science and deep insight; as, empiric skill, remedies.

Empirical formula. (Chem.) See under Formula.

Syn: See Transcendental

Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

 Anecdotal \An”ec*do`tal\, a.

Pertaining to, or abounding with, anecdotes; as, anecdotal conversation.

Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
anecdotal adj
1: having the character of an anecdote; “anecdotal evidence”
2: characterized by or given to telling anecdotes; “anecdotal conversation”; “an anectodal history of jazz”; “he was at his anecdotic best”

[syn: anecdotic, anecdotical]

Source: WordNet (r) 2.0

We think the argument should have been;

–         Anecdotal evidence that sampling doesn’t increase sales.

Superior choices of Cable TV generally doesn’t increase individual consumers viewing hours

  • Radio in my opinion in the last ten years doesn’t appear to  increase record sales.

Empirical evidence from a number of industry and non-profit surveys shows that;

Radio has been supplanted to a certain extent by additional music media choices,

  • Computer games
  • iPods
  • Mobile Phones

There appears a strong correlation between the efforts of the music industry attempted to lock down music via DRM and legal actions against file sharing, music sales and the listening to music by 8-18 year olds declined. (1999-2004)

As technical alternatives to radio evolved (iPods, Phones, Games – iTunes Music Store 2004)  evolved and digital music sales were legitimized, both the music listening and sales of music increased. (2004-2009)

Media Engagement time appears to have a strong correlation to media purchases

UK Music Sales (Singles 1998-–2009) vs Kaiser Report – Music Listening Media Generation

And whilst traditional broadcast radio being listened to maybe reducing in the younger generations, the alternative technology “radios” streams are increasing….

  • Digital Streaming Internet Radio (Last.fm – Spotify))
  • Digital Broadcast & Satellite Radio
  • Mobile Phone “FM Radio”

Today there are 3 different types of Radio, Cellphones, iPods and Radios

These revelations are clearly confirmed by the Japanese music sales showing

The dominance of Mobile phone digital sales versus Internet sales.

Japanese Smartphone Music listeners are outbuying PC-based Internet Music users 10-1

As the Kaiser Foundation report found “that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth.”

Therefore media playback devices, including four different types of “Radio” have enabled music fans to once again tune into their music and demonstrate their interest financially through purchases.

Pure Music listening declined from 1999-2004 but was resuscitated with legal Digital downloads from iTMS

The sales above clearly reflect the increased media time listening to music – of which Radio plus Radio replacement technology advances plays a big role.

Anecdotally, for the converse argument, we could analyse what happened to the recording industry in the USA when ASCAP banned the playing of the music it represented on radio stations of the era.

ASCAP’s rival, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), offered Radio stations it’s collection of music that had not been turned down b y ASCAP, predominantly consisting of African American  composers and artists, Blues and Soul from unknown artists. The result was another wave of decentralization within the industry, as previously scorned artists, styles, and companies gained access to the airwaves and recording studios. The shift opened the door for African American styles to be the guiding force behind the industry’s postwar expansion.

(I’m sure there are elements of the Recording industry that are still walking around and mumbling dark thoughts about indie music labels getting a foot in the door…..)

Lee, Boatwright & Kamakura suggest that the number of plays a record receives on commercial radio stations is a strong primary indication of successful pre sales promotional effort on  behalf of the record publisher.

They cite (Blake, 1992 & Fink 1996) – Record companies consider radio airplay to be the most direct way of exposing a record to the buying public with the main tools being special promotional copies of the record, called “promo” records, which are placed in the hands of broadcasters and programming consultants.

All in all, we would suggest that lecturers in economics that would argue :

–         Empirical evidence that sampling doesn’t increase sales.

  • Superior choices of Cable TV generally doesn’t increase viewing hours
  • Radio doesn’t appear to  increase record sales.

Without citing hard data, are actual either mixing metaphors or possibly suffering a form of Alzheimer’s that we will call will call politely, Dyslexia….

Conclusion:

Empirical is not spelt anecdotal.

References:

Illegal Music Downloading and its Impact on Legitimate Sales: Australian Empirical Evidence Jordi Mckenzie August 13, 2009

https://editorialexpress.com/cgi-bin/conference/download.cgi?db_name=ACE09&paper_id=205

Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds – Report

http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/Generation-M-Media-in-the-Lives-of-8-18-Year-olds-Report.pdf

A Bayesian model for prelaunch sales forecasting of recorded music

Jonathan Lee • Peter Boatwright • Wagner A. Kamakura

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.80.3242&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Music Industry Answers.com

http://www.answers.com/topic/music-industry

Japan as a Control Statistic for File Sharing Analysis Studies.

http://kovtr.com/wordpress/?p=168

So how hard is it to do business in Australia?

Hot:

The Australian Government prides itself on being forward thinking and helpful to small business.

So the big question is, why don’t we have more small business success stories in the manufacturing sector in Australia?

Here is an email that I recently received from a highly qualified Australian Electrical and Mechanical  Engineer that “used” to be an Australian small business manufacturer about why he doesn’t want to be an Australian industrial Entrepreneur anymore..

“You asked me about the red tape that Australian business have to go through etc, and why my companies as an Australian manufacturer chose to close the doors and go off shore to China…

Well, here is a typical red tape event. To comply with certain government licensing, paperwork etc you need to comply with “Australian Standard [AS]abc123 etc. To do this, you first must buy copies ( protected by copyright) each person must have a their own personal copy of the standard or it violates their copyright claim.

With some standards well over $500+ ea, and the many sub parts, and then the copious references within each to other expensive 1 page standards, before you know it, you can easily spend $10K++ just to get reference copies needed to fulfil obligations. Then if more than one person in the office needs a copy, well, then rinse repeat with another $10K. All that money for electronic pdf ***COPIES*** ? bah.

That’s not  to mention all the extra costs of getting equipment tested and certified. There is some electronics equipment in China I was look at. Very nice, well designed, best on the market available today, certified to European & various world standards, but not AS. To get it checked (its already been tested) to AS standards, the price was $100,000.00 USD by a certified test lab !!!

So, a great product, nothing like it **MADE IN AUSTRALIA**, but to be able to use it in Australia, Mr Government decree’s it needs to be compliant with [AS]abc123, sure, ok, but how many products do you have to sell in a tiny population to cover the effort?

Multiply the above machine by ten different tasked machines to set-up a reasonable manufacturing plant with twenty employees and suddenly  instead of $500K startup, you have to find $1.5 million to start the same business with most of that going to the Government approved test labs.

Ok, here’s another gripe about test labs. A specific made Chinese product has already been tested certified, passed with flying colours and is being sold in Australia. ok, to OEM rebrand the product and sell under another name, you need to get the exact same product recertified. ok, some test labs will ‘fill in paperwork only’ and do nothing more than create a new entry in a database, only add in the name of OEM licensee, print a new certificate with the new name and number on it, then charge over $14,000.00 USD for it !!!! So, in effect a REPRINT of a PIECE OF PAPER is $14K !!

You want to blog about something ? blog about “Why Australia cant do business”, why we cant manufacture here…

I’m more than happy now put on my ‘Chinese safety boots’ and do business overseas, where I can actually get things done.”

So how hard is it to do business in Australia?

We thought we would check the claims in the above email from a gentleman located in Australia that used to have a operational business that manufactured electrical items in Australia for use in Australia and export overseas.

The first item we found is that if you expect to buy an Australian Standard from an Australian organisation, that role is farmed out to a middleman.

So in effect Australian tax-payers pay taxation for a system that can no longer afford to provide them the services they are paying for.

What is that Koltai?

Information on how to set-up a manufacturing company in Australia that will employ Australians to work in Australia.

For example, just to run the office you will need the following basics:

PDF Hardcopy Published: Australian Standards Description
$219.29 $243.65 2/3/04 AS 8000 Premium (Set)-2004 Premium Corporate Governance Set
AS 8000-2003 Corporate governance – Good governance principles
AS 8001-2008 Fraud and corruption control
AS 8002-2003 Corporate governance – Organizational codes of conduct
AS 8003-2003 Corporate governance – Corporate social responsibility
AS 8004-2003 Corporate governance – Whistleblower protection programs for entities
HB 400-2004 Introduction to Corporate Governance
HB 401-2004 Applications of Corporate Governance
$279.01 $310.02 1/12/09 ISO/IEC 31010:2009 Risk management – Risk assessment techniques
$124.01 $137.78 13/11/09 AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009 Risk management – Principles and guidelines
$104.45 $116.05 30/12/08 AS/NZS ISO 9001:2008 Quality management systems – Requirements
$73.58 $81.75 9/3/06 AS 3806-2006 Compliance programs

Total for the PDF’s $800.34.

Here, you haven’t actually built anything or sold anything, you’ve just set-up the office.

So if you buy those and institute ISO 9001 standards throughout the organisation, will that save your business from going bust?

Well, that depends on who your accountant is.

If your accountant is one of the big six firms and does the books and then becomes the Administrator for the company when the ASX filing that it completes is queried by the ASX resulting in a stop trading and subsequent query by the ASX and ASIC, well then you have no chance at all.

So did that happen to you Koltai?

It would appear so…

So in other words, even if you buy all the Australian standards available (39,000 approx.) and follow the guidance there-in, it won’t save your butt.

Nope – although I didn’t buy all the Australian Standards, just the ones needed for being a Telecommunications company.

How much did that cost ?

From memory…. About $2500.

Just to be an ISP?

Yep, just to be an ISP.

I thought the barrier for entry was low in Australia….

Well it is… Australia is ranked number 2 on ease to start up a business and 9 worldwide on the ease of running a business. (Although they don’t include items like the overly expensive Australian Standards…)

Wikipedia explains the methodology

Methodology

The index is based on the study of laws and regulations, with the input and verification by more than 5,000 government officials, lawyers, business consultants, accountants and other professionals who routinely advise on or administer legal and regulatory requirements.

The Ease of Doing Business index is meant to measure regulations directly affecting businesses and does not directly measure more general conditions such as a nation’s proximity to large markets, quality of infrastructure, inflation, or crime. A nation’s ranking on the index is based on the average of 10 subindices:

  • Starting a business – Procedures, time, cost and minimum capital to open a new business
  • Dealing with licenses – Procedures, time and cost of business inspections and licensing (construction industry)
  • Hiring and firing workers – Difficulty of hiring index, rigidity of hours of index, difficulty of firing index, hiring cost and firing cost
  • Registering property – Procedures, time and cost to register commercial real estate
  • Getting credit – Strength of legal rights index, depth of credit information index
  • Protecting investors – Indices on the extent of disclosure, extent of director liability and ease of shareholder suits
  • Paying taxes – Number of taxes paid, hours per year spent preparing tax returns and total tax payable as share of gross profit
  • Trading across borders – Number of documents, number of signatures and time necessary to export and import
  • Enforcing contracts – Procedures, time and cost to enforce a debt contract
  • Closing a business – Time and cost to close down a business, and recovery rate

For example Australia ranked third on the first subindex “Starting a business” behind only New Zealand and Canada. In Australia there are 2 procedures required to start a business which take on average 2 days to complete. The official cost is 0.8% of the Gross National Income per capita. There is no minimum capital requirement. By contrast, in Guinea-Bissau which ranked worst (181st) on this same subindex, there are 17 procedures required to start a business taking 233 days to complete. The official cost is 255.5% of the gross national income per capita. A minimum capital investment of 1006.6% of the gross national income per capita is required.

While fewer and simpler regulations often imply higher rankings, this is not always the case. Protecting the rights of creditors and investors, as well as establishing or upgrading property and credit registries, may mean that more regulation is needed.

Isn’t ISO 9001 the highest grade of quality control for an organisation in Australia?

Yep it is.

But compliance with the standard doesn’t stop you from being found unfit to be a Director.

As I said, it really depends on who your accountant is and what they need to cover up during the Administration.

Also what they don’t take into account is the eight years of advertising that occurs after you are banned as a Director.

Well you must have deserved it Koltai.

I expect, I must have.

It would appear that Australia has a few hidden facets to being in business in Australia.

Most would seem to be regulatory and regulatory cost related barriers.

References:

http://www.abr.business.gov.au/%28ez4onf455u2qm2vfcp0zaa45%29/abnDetails.aspx?History=True&abn=59005482904&ResultListURL=&PrintFriendly=1

http://www.asic.gov.au/asic/asic.nsf/byheadline/08-08+Sydney+liquidator+suspended?openDocument

http://www.asic.gov.au/asic/asic.nsf/byheadline/02%2F201+ASIC+bans+Sydney+director+Thomas+Koltai?openDocument

Ease of Doing Business Index

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_Doing_Business_Index