Apple's Arbitrary Review Process Now Being Used To Stop Competing Pebble Smart Watch

from the lame dept

For many years now, we've been highlighting how Apple appears to arbitrarily ban apps with little to no explanation, even though quite frequently, it appears to be because they are competitive with Apple products.

We haven't heard as much about that lately, leading to at least some hope that perhaps Apple has been opening up and allowing more apps. It's still a walled garden, which is ridiculous, but we'd hoped that the gate was relatively open. So it seems odd to find out that not only has Apple been refusing to allow Pebble's new iOS app, but it appears to be sitting on it for an extended period of time with no explanation (one version has been waiting for 43 days, another version, where "expedited review" was requested has been sitting for a few weeks).

Pebble, of course, is the maker of the first really popular smartwatch, and they're just starting to ship the second generation of that watch after a super successful Kickstarter campaign. As Pebble notes in the email that it sent around to backers, the last time it requested "expedited review" Apple approved that app in 24 hours. Of course, there's a big difference between the last time and this time: now the Apple Watch is on the market, meaning that Apple has a competitor in the marketplace, giving it incentives not to help out Pebble.

Obviously, there's no direct evidence that Apple is purposely blocking Pebble's app because it competes with the Apple Watch, but it does seem notable that the approval went through so much faster prior to Apple entering the space. And, even if that's not why Apple is blocking approval, just the fact that the company has a secretive, non-transparent, arbitrary approval process, at the very least, allows for the appearance of trying to block a competitor.

Update And... of course, just as this post is going out, it comes out that Apple has now finally approved the app, with Pebble claiming that the public pressure from it releasing its story helped push the app across the finish line.

Filed Under: app store, apple watch, arbitrary, pebble, pebble time
Companies: apple, pebble

New Leak Shows NSA's Plans To Hijack App Store Traffic To Implant Malware And Spyware

from the a-spy-in-the-house-of-apps dept

Proving there's nowhere spy agencies won't go to achieve their aims, a new Snowden leak published jointly by The Intercept and Canada's CBC News shows the NSA, GCHQ and other Five Eyes allies looking for ways to insert themselves between Google's app store and end users' phones.

The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals…

The main purpose of the workshops was to find new ways to exploit smartphone technology for surveillance. The agencies used the Internet spying system XKEYSCORE to identify smartphone traffic flowing across Internet cables and then to track down smartphone connections to app marketplace servers operated by Samsung and Google.

Branded "IRRITANT HORN" by the NSA's all-caps random-name-generator, the pilot program looked to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on app store downloads in order to attach malware/spyware payloads -- the same malicious implants detailed in an earlier Snowden leak.


While the document doesn't go into too much detail about the pilot program's successes, it does highlight several vulnerabilities it uncovered in UC Browser, a popular Android internet browser used across much of Asia. Citizen Lab performed an extensive examination of the browser for CBC News, finding a wealth of exploitable data leaks. [PDF link for full Citizen Lab report]

In addition to discovering that phone ID info, along with geolocation data and search queries, was being sent without encryption, the researchers also found that clearing the app cache failed to remove DNS information -- which could allow others to reconstruct internet activity. Citizen Lab has informed the makers of UC Browser of its many vulnerabilities, something the Five Eyes intelligence agencies obviously had no interest in doing.

But IRRITANT HORN went beyond simply delivering malicious implants to unsuspecting users. The Five Eyes agencies also explored the idea of using compromised communication lines to deliver disinformation and counter-propaganda.

[The agencies] were also keen to find ways to hijack them as a way of sending “selective misinformation to the targets’ handsets” as part of so-called “effects” operations that are used to spread propaganda or confuse adversaries. Moreover, the agencies wanted to gain access to companies’ app store servers so they could secretly use them for “harvesting” information about phone users.

As is the case with each new leak, the involved agencies have either declined to comment or have offered the standard defensive talking points about "legal framework" and "oversight," but it's hard to believe any legal mandate or oversight directly OK'ed plans to hijack private companies' servers for the purpose of spreading malware and disinformation. And, as is the case with many other spy programs, IRRITANT HORN involves a lot of data unrelated to these agencies' directives being captured and sifted through in order to find suitable targets for backdoors and implants.

Filed Under: app stores, google play, irritant horn, man in the middle, nsa, surveillance
Companies: apple, google

Pretty Much Anyone With Any Understanding Of Crypto Tells President Obama That Backdooring Crypto Is Monumentally Stupid

from the basic-understanding dept

Nearly 150 tech companies (including us via the Copia Institute), non-profits and computer security experts have all teamed up to send a letter to President Obama telling him to stop these stupid ideas about backdooring encryption that keeping coming out of his administration. The press headlines will note that big companies -- like Google, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook -- are signing the letter. But significantly more interesting is the signatures from a huge list of computer security experts, all putting their names down on paper to make it clear what a ridiculously bad idea it is to even think about backdooring encryption. Among those signing on are Phil Zimmermann (who lived through this sort of thing before), Whitfield Diffie (guy who invented public key cryptography), Brian Behlendorf, Ron Rivest, Peter Neumann, Gene Spafford, Bruce Schneier, Matt Blaze, Richard Clarke (long-time counterterrorism guy in the White House), Hal Abelson and many, many more. Basically a who's who of people who actually know what they're talking about.

We urge you to reject any proposal that U.S. companies deliberately weaken the security of their products. We request that the White House instead focus on developing policies that will promote rather than undermine the wide adoption of strong encryption technology. Such policies will in turn help to promote and protect cybersecurity, economic growth, and human rights, both here and abroad.

Strong encryption is the cornerstone of the modern information economy’s security. Encryption protects billions of people every day against countless threats—be they street criminals trying to steal our phones and laptops, computer criminals trying to defraud us, corporate spies trying to obtain our companies’ most valuable trade secrets, repressive governments trying to stifle dissent, or foreign intelligence agencies trying to compromise our and our allies’ most sensitive national security secrets.

Encryption thereby protects us from innumerable criminal and national security threats. This protection would be undermined by the mandatory insertion of any new vulnerabilities into encrypted devices and services. Whether you call them “front doors” or “back doors”, introducing intentional vulnerabilities into secure products for the government’s use will make those products less secure against other attackers. Every computer security expert that has spoken publicly on this issue agrees on this point, including the government’s own experts.

There's much more in the full letter which I highly recommend reading. It very nicely summarizes why this is a completely insane idea, and highlights why anyone raising it should be immediately told to move on to some other project instead:

The Administration faces a critical choice: will it adopt policies that foster a global digital ecosystem that is more secure, or less? That choice may well define the future of the Internet in the 21st century. When faced with a similar choice at the end of the last century, during the so-called “Crypto Wars”, U.S. policymakers weighed many of the same concerns and arguments that have been raised in the current debate, and correctly concluded that the serious costs of undermining encryption technology outweighed the purported benefits. So too did the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, who unanimously recommended in their December 2013 report that the US Government should “(1) fully support and not undermine efforts to create encryption standards; (2) not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial software; and (3) increase the use of encryption and urge US companies to do so, in order to better protect data in transit, at rest, in the cloud, and in other storage.”

The Washington Post quotes another surprising signatory: Paul Rosenzweig, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at Homeland Security. If that name sounds familiar, it's because we've quoted his defense of the NSA, once arguing that "too much transparency defeats the very purpose of democracy." If even he is arguing against backdooring encryption, you know it's an idea that should be killed off. In his case, it's because he recognizes the simple reality that seems to have eluded the FBI director:

The signatories include policy experts who normally side with national-security hawks. Paul Rosenzweig, a former Bush administration senior policy official at the Department of Homeland Security, said: “If I actually thought there was a way to build a U.S.-government-only backdoor, then I might be persuaded. But that’s just not reality.”

That's just not reality. And neither should be any policy effort that involves pushing for more backdoors in encryption. It's bad economic policy. It's bad security policy. It's bad crypto policy. It's bad privacy policy. It's just bad policy all around.

And the world would be much better off if all of these security experts and companies could focus on better protecting us from harm, rather than having to join in ridiculous debates about what a bunch of clueless bureaucrats think might be some sort of mythical magic unicorn encryption breaker.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, backdoors, bruce schneier, crypto, encryption, paul rosenzweig, phil zimmermann, privacy, richard clarke, ron rivest, security, vulnerabilitities, whitfield diffie
Companies: apple, cisco, facebook, google, microsoft, twitter

Apple Trying To Kill Off Spotify's Free Tier; DOJ Now Investigating For Antitrust

from the tempting-the-anti-trust-gods dept

Remember a few years ago when Apple got in trouble for conspiring with book publishers to raise ebook prices to hurt Amazon and the public? Apparently the company hasn't learned very much. Today comes a report from the Verge, claiming that the DOJ is now investigating Apple for conspiring with the major record labels to get them to kill off Spotify's free tier, in an effort to better promote its own Beats Music service, which has no free tier.

Apple has been using its considerable power in the music industry to stop the music labels from renewing Spotify’s license to stream music through its free tier. Spotify currently has 60 million listeners, but only 15 million of them are paid users. Getting the music labels to kill the freemium tiers from Spotify and others could put Apple in prime position to grab a large swath of new users when it launches its own streaming service, which is widely expected to feature a considerable amount of exclusive content. "All the way up to Tim Cook, these guys are cutthroat," one music industry source said.

And it's not just Spotify. Apparently, Apple was trying to get labels to pull music from YouTube too:

Sources also indicated that Apple offered to pay YouTube’s music licensing fee to Universal Music Group if the label stopped allowing its songs on YouTube. Apple is seemingly trying to clear a path before its streaming service launches, which is expected to debut at WWDC in June. If Apple convinces the labels to stop licensing freemium services from Spotify and YouTube, it could take out a significant portion of business from its two largest music competitors.

This is fascinating for a few reasons, even beyond Apple's antitrust troubles over ebooks. In fact, there's some history here as well. A few years ago, there was an investigation, after Apple tried to pressure the labels into killing off daily deals that they were offering to Amazon, as it harmed Apple's iTunes business.

And, of course, there's the long history of the labels' relationship with Apple for much of the first decade of the millennium. Almost exactly a decade ago, we wrote about how the music labels all resented Apple because it had become such a dominant force in music with iTunes and the iPod (this was pre-iPhone) and had (for a while, at least) blocked the labels from trying to raise the price of single tracks beyond the original $0.99 price point. Of course, it's quite a sign of how the online music industry has shifted from downloads to streaming that those labels are apparently now working with Apple to focus on trying to stop competitors like Spotify and YouTube.

Just a month or so ago, we noted that there had been a series of articles claiming that the labels themselves were conspiring to put an end to free tiers on Spotify and other services, and we pointed out how stupid this was (mainly in the context of Jay-Z's new "Tidal" service). Bringing Apple into the game as well just makes the whole thing that much more ridiculous.

Rather than trying to build a better experience for users and give them more value, it appears that the labels and Apples are looking to decrease the value of competitors through coordinated action. It really says something -- and not something good -- when a company thinks the only way to compete in the market place is to kneecap competitors rather than build a better service itself. Competition has shown that great services can be built when they actually do focus on what consumers want. And there's still a long way to go. Spotify still has significant problems, but it's pretty good right now. It's astounding that Apple and the labels think that the right solution is not to build an even better product, but rather to make everyone else's products worse. Once again, it makes you wonder if they actually want to drive consumers back to completely unauthorized services.

And here's the thing that's really bizarre: why should Apple care about this at all? Apple is a hardware business. Even when iTunes was dominant, people at Apple would quietly admit that it was considered a "loss leader" or maybe a "breakeven leader" with the focus on selling more hardware. The same should be true of a streaming music service. Beats can make iPhones even more valuable -- and one way to do that is by offering a free streaming tier. Why Apple wants to take away its own value seems like a strategic error all around -- not just for consumers and competitors, but for itself as well.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, doj, free tier, music, music streaming, value
Companies: apple, riaa, spotify, youtube

Fanboy Fight: How One Apple/Android Argument Ended In A Stabbing

from the stop-it dept

Every one of us has already had this fight at some point: Apple or Android? The two dominant players in the mobile space carry with them very loyal fanbases who, for some reason, like to spar off with one another over whose tech-daddy could beat up the other. The companies compete with the same level of petty at times, which doesn't help. Apple screws around with text messages from Android users, Android pokes back at Apple over the controlling hand it has in its app store, and the two companies spend a great deal of time in legal battles because of course they do. C'mon, guys, can't we all just spend our time pointing and laughing at Windows Mobile?

Apparently not, considering the report that one recent Android/Apple argument concluded with both combatants stabbing the hell out of each other with broken glasses.

Tulsa’s Channel 8 reports that police were called to a local apartment complex at around 1:00am on the morning of April 17 to investigate at least one report of a bloody person wandering around the parking lot. According to the Tulsa World, police found roommates Jiro Mendez and Elias Ecevo each in some distress—Mendez was the man in the parking lot and was covered in scratches and wounds, while Ecevo, similarly wounded, apparently had stayed inside their apartment.

The World indicates that Mendez told police that the wounds resulted from an argument between the roommates, which started over which roommate had the better smartphone—Apple or Android—and ended with both roommates allegedly stabbing each other with broken glass bottles, and Ecevo allegedly stealing Mendez’s car (police found the car near the apartment, with blood in the interior). Perhaps unsurprisingly, alcohol appears to have been a factor in the fight.

Yeah, no kidding. I have my brand loyalty, too, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't feel so offended at a roommate's opinion of my phone that I felt I had to avenge the inanimate object by getting all stabby. Both men ended up getting arrested and were sent to the hospital to have their wounds treated. In a perfect world, they would be laid up next to each other, Instagram-selfying from their beds with comments about how awesome the pictures from their respective phones looked.

Either way, I'm guessing there might be changes to their lease coming shortly.

Filed Under: android, fanboys, fights, ios, stabbing
Companies: apple, google

A Gronking To Remember Is Immortalized In Lawsuit Against Apple/Amazon/Author

from the gronk-gronk-gronk dept

Turns out I owe the NFL an apology. Yes, at the beginning of the year, we discussed how an erotic novel that includes Patriots tight-end (heh) Rob Gronkowski had been taken off the Amazon eBook store, with heavy speculation that it was due to the cover imagery.

Much of that speculation, including my own, focused on the fact that a portion of the Patriots trademarked uniforms, as well as a commemorative team patch, appeared on the cover and wouldn't it just be so NFL of the league to get the book taken down over the images being used. Turns out that wasn't the case. A lawsuit filed by two anonymous folks from Ohio likely had it removed and have followed that up with a lawsuit against the author, Amazon, and Apple over the use of their images on the cover. Yes, I'm talking about the two people appearing in the foreground. Those are apparently two people from Ohio who had no idea that an engagement photo of them was being used on the cover of a novella about a housewife banging Gronk.

"The cover of the book contains a photograph of the Plaintiffs which was taken as part of their engagement journey leading toward their wedding," states the complaint. "The photograph was appropriated by the Defendants for commercial gain without the permission of the Plaintiffs nor with the permission of any lawful copyright holder."

The lawsuit targets Noonan, and also Apple, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble for allowing readers to access the work in iBooks, Kindle and Nook digital formats. The plaintiffs — captioned as "John Roe" and "Jane Roe" — are asserting violations of their rights of publicity under Ohio law.

And the inclusion of the service providers is where this lawsuit gets fun, because Amazon has already replied asserting section 230 protections, and I can't imagine that Apple and Barnes & Noble will be terribly far behind them in doing the same. Including the companies in the suit would obviously be advantageous from a monetary award standpoint, but that would rely on those companies being considered publishers of A Gronking To Remember. Are they?

No, I don't think so. In the context of books such as this, those companies do two things: they assist authors in self-publishing and they provide a platform where self-published works can be purchased. Neither of those actions are consistent with what a book-publisher does and have more in common with websites that allow readers to publish their own comments, which obviously falls under section 230 protections. The platform-providers, or service providers, didn't choose the cover images or create them, so I'm not sure where their culpability would lie. The inclusion of the service providers sounds like an attempt at a money-grab.

In any case, it looks like A Gronking To Remember will be remembered at the very least in court documents.

Filed Under: copyright, ebooks, gronking to remember, parody, photographs, rob gronkowskit, section 230
Companies: amazon, apple

LA School District's iPad Farce Reaches Nadir As Officials Demand Refunds From Apple, Answer Questions From The SEC

from the all-aboard-the-USS-Not-Our-Fault! dept

The Los Angeles school district's headfirst leap into technological waters has turned into the ultimate cautionary tale. Rather than ensure everything was up to spec, the district chose to distribute 90,000 iPads bundled with Pearson software and hand them over to its students… who cracked the minimal built-in protections within a week and turned the devices into something they wanted to use, rather than something they had to use.

Why the full-on dive? Well, it appears at least part of it may have been motivated by low-level corruption -- the sort of thing you'd expect to be present in a $500 million project, one that ballooned to $1.3 billion, even as most students went without new iPads or laptops. (Only 91,000 of the 650,000 iPads had been purchased by the point the program was shut down.)

Now, the district is facing an inquiry by the SEC -- to go with its ongoing investigation by the FBI for some pre-contractual irregularities (i.e., wining and dining with eventual contract winners Apple and Pearson) by the then-superintendent overseeing the program.

The federal Securities and Exchange Commission recently opened an informal inquiry into whether Los Angeles school officials complied with legal guidelines in the use of bond funds for the now-abandoned $1.3-billion iPads-for-all project.

In particular, the agency was concerned with whether the L.A. Unified School District properly disclosed to investors and others how the bonds would be used, according to documents provided to The Times.

Now that the program is effectively dead and under intense scrutiny, the ineptness of the district's rollout is under discussion. The district is claiming this debacle really isn't its fault.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is seeking to recoup millions of dollars from technology giant Apple over a problem-plagued curriculum that was provided with iPads intended to be given to every student, teacher and administrator.

Apple may be in the headline and leading paragraph, but district officials seem more irritated with software provider Pearson. Under the terms of the agreement, Pearson was allowed to half-ass its way through the first year, providing only "partial curriculum." It was expected to be at least as prepared as the students by the beginning of the following school year. It wasn't, despite receiving $200 per iPad in licensing fees.

“Only two schools of 69 in the Instructional Technology Initiative ... use Pearson regularly,” according to an internal March report from project director Bernadette Lucas. “Any given class typically experiences one problem or more daily. Teachers report that the students enjoy the interactive content — when it’s available. When it’s not, teachers and students try to roll with the interruptions to teaching and learning as best they can.”

The remaining schools, she said, with more than 35,000 students, “have given up on attempting regular use of the app.”

Pearson, despite having received millions of dollars (and possibly some preferential treatment during the bidding process), is flunking. It hasn't created bilingual versions of its software -- something of a necessity in Los Angeles. The analytic software it promised to the district (as part of the justification for the software premiums) has yet to arrive. It hasn't even provided online versions of periodic achievement tests.

How much Apple and other device makers are really at fault is up for debate. As the device makers, they only needed to provide a device and operating system. The rest seems to be on Pearson, which at this point, should really be doing better at providing functional educational software. The LA school district may have erred in its decision to roll this out before ensuring everything worked properly, but the future's not just going to sit around waiting for giants like Pearson to get their end of the equation in order. The field is ripe for disruption. Or, it would be... if entrenched interests (government entities) weren't so set on bedding down with equally entrenched interests (textbook publishers).

But what comes across here is something more than just ensuring government contractors live up to the terms of their agreements. Above the better-late-than-never attempt at fiscal responsibility (always save your receipts!), you can hear the faint whinging noise of the district arguing that it shouldn't be responsible for its own botched rollout, financial impropriety or inability to respond to problems with more agility. As much as I'd like to bash Pearson (and I really, really would), there's definitely a hint of buck-passing in the air.

The district could have handled this better, but there was just too much money at stake. Hundreds of millions of dollars in expeditures can't guarantee working tech, but it goes a long way towards ensuring a certain level of mismanagement. Large contracts tend to bring out the worst in people. Not only will there almost always be some level of impropriety, but there will also be a compulsion to do everything fast and hard so the public can see where its money's being spent. Doing something, even if it's clumsy and questionable, is almost always preferable to doing it the right way. The LA school district wanted to win the race to the future, but only managed to knock over every hurdle before collapsing several hundred iPads short of the finish line. And now it wants the same companies it allegedly allowed to seduce it into handing over more that $500 million to give some of it back.

Filed Under: corruption, ipads, la school district, los angeles, sec
Companies: apple

DailyDirt: Will This Problem Ever Go Away?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

A common complaint for closed source software-as-a-service is that it can just go away almost any minute -- leaving users abandoned without any immediate backup solutions. There might be alternatives to switch to, but the alternatives are not exactly the same, and this is why people complained so much when [GeoCities, Google Reader, FormsCentral, etc.] shut down. Users get accustomed to certain features that may be unique. Some companies are better at handling service shutdowns than others, but in the end, it's still really annoying.

• Apple acquired FoundationDB, and the support of its distributed database software will abruptly end. Users can still continue to use the software they've downloaded already, but there won't be much help if there's a problem. [url]
• Xeround suddenly shut down its database as a service business in 2013, giving paying customers just 2 weeks notice to migrate their data. At least Xeround's service was based on scaling MySQL, but no one likes to have to move large scale databases in just a couple of weeks. [url]
• A really easy-to-use database service called Dabble DB shut down after the team behind it was hired by Twitter. They gave users 60 days notice before shutting down, but nothing exactly like it seems to exist anymore. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, if you have some spare change (or more) and would like to support Techdirt, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: database software, mysql, nosql, open source, saas, software
Companies: apple, dabbledb, foundationdb, twitter, xeround

Competition In The Music Space Is Great: Fragmentation In The Music Space Is Dangerous

from the don't-screw-this-up dept

As you may have heard, Jay-Z bought himself a music streaming service, called Tidal, which is now being relaunched with lots of high profile musicians onboard -- in fact as partial equity owners:

The plan was unveiled on Monday at a brief but highly choreographed news conference in Manhattan, where Jay Z stood alongside more than a dozen musicians identified as Tidal’s owners. They included Rihanna, Kanye West, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Jack White, Alicia Keys, the country singer Jason Aldean, the French dance duo Daft Punk (in signature robot costumes), members of Arcade Fire, and Beyonce, Jay Z’s wife.

So, we have all of these artists, taking on Dr. Dre and Trent Reznor who were the keys to Beats Music, which Apple is getting set to relaunch. Jay-Z is positioning Tidal as more friendly to artists -- though that was also the marketing claim behind Beats, and then it failed to attract too many users, in large part because there was no free, ad-supported tier. Of course, it's one thing if you're one of those megastars listed above, who get some equity stake in Tidal, but what about every other musician? Is it really going to be that good of a deal for them? Jay-Z and crew insist they'll be paying better rates than competitors, but considering competitors still can't get anywhere near profitability, it seems reasonable to question if Tidal can actually make any money at all. It's one thing to say you're going to pay artists more. It's another to defy basic economics.

Tidal also has no free, ad-supported tier, but does have a more expensive $20 tier for higher quality sound, which may attract random audiophiles, but not much more than that. Indeed, the recording industry (and many artists) have been pushing back against the free tiers that already exist. Universal Music has been demanding Spotify cut back on its free tier. And Universal's CEO Lucian Grange has been using every opportunity to complain about "freemium" music plans. Now owned by Apple, Beats wanted to offer service cheaper than the standard $10/month and the record labels said no.

And, of course, now Jay-Z is bashing free music tiers as well:

“The challenge is to get everyone to respect music again, to recognize its value,” said Jay Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter. “Water is free. Music is $6 but no one wants to pay for music. You should drink free water from the tap — it’s a beautiful thing. And if you want to hear the most beautiful song, then support the artist.”

That's kind of nonsensical in a variety of ways. Every time we've heard people talking about getting people to "respect music again" or "recognize its value," the projects have failed (often miserably), because they're not at all focused on what music fans actually want. Rather they're focused on trying to change the behavior of music fans and that's really, really, really difficult -- especially when you're not really offering that much that's different.

But Jay-Z has a plan to get around that: exclusive deals.

Over the weekend, the Swedish blog Breakit reported — citing sources close to the deal — that Tidal’s plan of attack will be to ink first-window deals with the artists, where Tidal would get first releases of tracks from big-name artists ahead of any other digital streaming services. This would be exclusive, but only for a period: Spotify, Deezer and others would eventually also get these tracks, but only later.

At least they'll go up on other services later, but this seems like a dangerous path to go down. Again, rather than focusing on providing more value the focus seems to be on taking away value from other services: ending free streaming deals and doing exclusives to fragment the market and make it harder for fans to actually listen to what they want, when they want it and how they want it.

That's the wrong lesson to get at this stage of the game. We've gone through nearly two decades of the recording industry fighting the internet at every turn, and now that we're finally starting to see some services that actually cater to what people want, the old industry players are jumping in and trying to kill the golden goose yet again. Any time any service shows that it can attract a lot of users, the recording industry tries to figure out a way to bleed it dry as quickly as possible, rather than helping it grow and building out more value for users.

More competition in the online music space is a great thing. But the trend towards locking stuff up, and taking away the value to music fans, while similarly jacking up the prices, doesn't seem like a productive path. It seems like one that is just going to annoy fans and push them back towards unauthorized alternatives.

Filed Under: copyright, exclusives, freemium, jay-z, lucian grange, music, music streaming, recording industry, subscriptions, tiers
Companies: apple, beats music, spotify, tidal

Apple's Attempt At A TV Revolution Runs Face First Into Comcast Corporation

from the the-TV-revolution-will-not-be-televised dept

For years now, media reports have suggested that Apple has dreamed of offering a disruptive broadband TV streaming service that rattles the status quo. The problem for Apple (and countless companies before it) has been that the broadcasters in charge of said status quo haven't historically been willing to budge on the kind of flexible licensing needed to make this dream a reality. That has resulted in year after year of Apple TV service rumors that never materialize as Apple repeatedly ran face first into licensing negotiations. Similarly, cable operators, wary of Apple getting the same kind of power it now wields in the music industry and losing set top revenues, haven't been keen on Apple's proposals for Apple-made set top boxes.

Just about a year ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a story stating that Apple was in negotiations with Comcast regarding an internet TV service that would get priority over Comcast's network. One year later, and a new Wall Street Journal report notes that while a new Apple TV service is finally slated to launch this fall (and the Apple rumor gods really, really mean it this time), it's going to likely be without Comcast/NBC Universal content. Why? Apple insiders claim Comcast is stringing the company along to delay Apple while it focuses on its own efforts:

"For now, the talks don’t involve NBCUniversal, owner of the NBC broadcast network and cable channels like USA and Bravo, because of a falling-out between Apple and NBCUniversal parent company Comcast Corp., the people familiar with the matter said. Apple and Comcast were in talks as recently as last year about working together on a streaming television platform that would combine Apple’s expertise in user interfaces with Comcast’s strength in broadband delivery. Apple came to believe that Comcast was stringing it along while the cable giant focused on its own X1 Web-enabled set-top box, the people said."

While what business arrangements Comcast engages in is of course the company's prerogative, this sort of thing is certainly fodder for those worried about Comcast's growing power post Time Warner Cable merger. Whether it's raising rates on Netflix via interconnection, using NBC to withhold licensing agreements, imposing broadband usage caps or refusing to authenticate HBO Go on the Playstation 4, there are plenty of ways Comcast can constrict internet video's growth -- without running afoul of our new net neutrality rules.

Meanwhile, Apple's pretty clearly realizing the company needs to ease off of its own (often draconian and bizarre) control demands if it's going to get a foothold in the broadcast and TV industry, as the sort of success and control Apple enjoys in wireless simply isn't going to be replicated in cable without some major concessions. Insiders suggest Apple's willing to go the extra mile to get cable operators and broadcasters on board, including sharing more viewer data than Netflix traditionally does:

"The company is willing to share details on who its viewers are, what they watch and when they watch it to entice broadcast networks and others to go along with the service, sources said...Apple, which is known for tightly controlling its ecosystem, is taking a more hands-off approach with programmers, such as letting them decide whether they want to air ads. "They’re allowing a lot more decision-making by the content owner," said one source familiar with the talks, adding that Apple has told potential partners, "It’s up to you, whatever you guys want to do."

Despite a decade of the cable and broadcast industry fighting internet video tooth and nail, 2015 actually appears to be the year internet video gains meaningful traction anyway. Whether that's through Dish's Sling TV, HBO Now or Sony's Playstation Vue, we're finally starting to see some broader choices when it comes to TV packages and pricing. As for Comcast getting in the way of this progress, it's very possible the FCC and DOJ may approve their merger but impose some conditions that they play nice. Of course whether those conditions are intelligent, meaningful or actually enforced is another question entirely.

Filed Under: apple tv, control, internet, streaming, streaming video, tv
Companies: apple, comcast