Coming to a screen near you

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No — not a multiplex but the screen on your desk.

Netflix Inc. will start showing movies and TV episodes over the Internet this week, providing its subscribers with more instant gratification as the DVD-by-mail service prepares for a looming technology shift threatening its survival. The Los Gatos-based company plans to unveil the new ‘Watch Now’ feature Tuesday, but only a small number of its more than 6 million subscribers will get immediate access to the service, which is being offered at no additional charge.

Netflix expects to introduce the instant viewing system to about 250,000 more subscribers each week through June to ensure its computers can cope with the increased demand. After accepting a computer applet that takes less than a minute to install, subscribers will be able to watch anywhere from six hours to 48 hours of material per month on an Internet streaming service that is supposed to prevent piracy.

The allotted viewing time will be tied to how much customers already pay for their DVD rentals. Under Netflix’s most popular $17.99 monthly package, subscribers will receive 18 hours of Internet viewing time. The company has budgeted about $40 million this year to expand its data centers and cover the licensing fees for the roughly 1,000 movies and TV shows that will be initially available for online delivery.

Netflix’s DVD library, by comparison, spans more than 70,000 titles, one of the main reasons why the mail is expected to remain the preferred delivery option for most subscribers…

But wait, there’s more:

Another major drawback: the instant viewing system only works on personal computers and laptops equipped with a high-speed Internet connection and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system. That means the movies can’t be watched on cell phones, TVs or video iPods, let alone computers that run on Apple Inc.’s operating system.

My mother had a saying “It never rains but it pours”, and she was right. Hot on the heels of the Netflix announcement comes a similar initiative — Joost — from the guys who founded Skype. According to this report,

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – The co-founders of the Internet telephone service Skype unveiled the brand name and details of their latest project Tuesday: a new Internet-based television service called Joost.

Entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold Skype for $2.6 billion to eBay Inc. in 2005, said the new project combines aspects of file-sharing software and regular broadcast television.

Joost – pronounced “juiced” – may eventually try to move onto television sets, but it will initially focus on making it easier and more fun to watch TV on a computer.

Joost, like Skype, requires users to download free software. In this case, the program will help them browse the Internet for channels and clips they’re interested in, rather than make phone calls.

“We’re currently in a test phase with a limited ‘beta’ release, so we have content matching our base,” Chief Executive Fredrik de Wahl said in a telephone interview. “Comedy, sports, music, documentaries.”

He said the company has deals with Warner Music, “Bridezillas” producer September Films and “Big Brother” creator Endemol NV, among others, but plans to make content deals globally as the service grows…

HP breaks Moore’s Law

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From MercuryNews.com…

Today, HP scientists intend to announce they have created a new computer-chip design enabling an eightfold increase in the number of transistors on a chip, without making the transistors smaller.

The scientists said their advance would equal a leap of three generations of Moore’s Law, a prediction formulated in 1964 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that forecast chip makers could double the number of transistors on a chip every couple of years.

“This is three generations of Moore’s Law, without having to do all the research and development to shrink the transistors,” said Stan Williams, a senior fellow at HP in Palo Alto. “If in some sense we can leapfrog three generations, that is something like five years of R&D. That is the potential of this breakthrough.”

The scientists have published their work in the current issue of Nanotechnology, a publication of the British Institute of Physics. Nanotechnology is the study and engineering of materials so tiny they are measured at the level of atoms…

Famous Seamus

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Seamus Heaney won the T.S. Eliot Prize with his new collection, District and Circle, but that’s not the really good news. The best thing is that he was interviewed live on the Today programme this morning and he was as sharp as ever. He talked about the stroke he suffered a few months ago, said that he had made a good recovery but was taking nine months off the gruelling round of engagements that comes with winning a Nobel prize. (He didn’t attend the prizegiving ceremony last night and was interviewed by telephone.) The awful thought that his wonderful gravelly, erudite, civilising voice might have been stilled has been banished. Hooray!

Who owns the company intranet?

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Interesting findings from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox…

Intranets tend to have one of three homes in the organization. Of the 2005-2007 winners:

* 35% were in Corporate Communications
* 27% were in Information Technology or Information Systems (IT/IS)
* 19% were in Human Resources (HR)

The remaining 19% of award-winning intranets were based in a variety of other departments, including Web Marketing and Public Affairs.

If you had to select a single organizational placement for all the world’s intranets, statistics imply that Corporate Communications is the best place. But in reality, we won’t make that recommendation, since most great intranets are based elsewhere. The only recommendation we can make is to consider the history and culture of your own company and consider Corporate Communications, IT, and HR as the three most likely candidates.

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Administration of justice, Bush style

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From the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of government employees.

The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.”

Stimson — who, incredibly, is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided [under a FOIA application], describing them as “the major law firms in this country.”

He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Karen J. Mathis, a Denver lawyer who is president of the American Bar Association, said: “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.”

iPod crippleware

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Nice column by Randall Stross…

STEVE JOBS, Apple’s showman nonpareil, provided the first public glimpse of the iPhone last week — gorgeous, feature-laden and pricey. While following the master magician’s gestures, it was easy to overlook a most disappointing aspect: like its slimmer iPod siblings, the iPhone’s music-playing function will be limited by factory-installed “crippleware.”

If “crippleware” seems an unduly harsh description, it balances the euphemistic names that the industry uses for copy protection. Apple officially calls its own standard “FairPlay,” but fair it is not.

The term “crippleware” comes from the plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit, Melanie Tucker v. Apple Computer Inc., that is making its way through Federal District Court in Northern California. The suit contends that Apple unfairly restricts consumer choice because it does not load onto the iPod the software needed to play music that uses Microsoft’s copy-protection standard, in addition to Apple’s own. Ms. Tucker’s core argument is that the absence of another company’s software on the iPod constitutes “crippleware.”

I disagree. It is Apple’s own copy-protection software itself that cripples the device…