A new royalty structure approved by the federal Copyright Royalty Board has webcasters quaking. Formerly they paid the music industry's SoundExchange between 6 and 12 percent of their revenue. But under the new royalty structure, they'll pay $0.0008 to stream one song to one listener, rising to $0.0019 in 2010. That may not sound like much, but it would amount to 1.28 cents per listener per hour, more than estimated current ad revenue of 1.1 to 1.2 pennies per hour. And that's just for starters. Rates would continue to rise every year. More bad news for small webcasters: There would also be a minimum charge of $500 per year per channel. And the new rules don't apply to songwriter publishing royalties, potentially an additional expense. Whether all this will kill web radio as widely predicted remains to be seen. But the fledgling medium will certainly have to find a more lucrative business model if it wants to survive. So, a speculative question: Just how much would you be willing to pay for Internet radio?
After Nielsen Videoscan sales numbers showed Blu-ray outselling HD DVD by a two-to-one margin in January, Sony up and declared the format war as over. February's sales data probably isn't going to do much to reign in the confidence of the Blu-ray camp. A Video Business article cited industry sources claiming that the Sony-backed format outsold HD DVD by two-to-one again in February: 250,000 units to 125,000 units.
In the past few months we've seen a revolution in the video projection business. A revolution no one expected. The prices of home theater front projectors have been dropping nearly as fast as flat panel displays.
I predicted years ago that we would be downloading music over the Internet long before <I>high quality</I> downloads were possible. That's the state we're in at present. Downloads that offer genuine CD-quality sound (forget about downloads up to SACD or DVD-Audio standards) are still more a promise than a reality.
