Just in case you haven't gotten enough Apple news today, Steve Jobs used the All Things D: conference this afternoon to announce a new feature for the Apple TV: starting in mid-June, it will be able to stream videos from YouTube.

As promised earlier this year, Apple unveiled an "iTunes Plus" section of its virtual music store today. How appropriate -- the song files are extra large! Of course, that's not what it's about. The Plus section contains tracks with significantly less compression (for higher fidelity) and no electronic locks (for wider interoperability). Most of the material is from EMI labels -- including a small portion of Paul McCartney's solo oeuvre, a recent addition to EMI's digital offerings -- although there are scattered offerings from some indie labels.

The RIAA has taken a full ration of abuse for suggesting that local radio stations pay royalties to record labels, too, instead of just to songwriters' performance royalty organizations (e.g., ASCAP). It's probably just an academic debate; I doubt Congress would ever enact something so fiercely opposed by the National Association of Broadcasters (who call it a "performance tax" -- ooooh, a tax -- despite the fact that it would be collected by copyright holders, not government). Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder what the fuss is all about.

Despite the increased bandwidth and improved capabilities of the mobile-phone networks in the U.S., relatively few people use their cell phones to watch video -- according to analyst Mark Donovan of M:Metrics, less than 2 million people watched programmed TV on their mobiles. Donovan offered that stat at the iHollywood Forum's Mobile Entertainment Summit this morning, and several other speakers opined on what's holding up the market. The consensus: advertiser-supported programming is the way to go, but carriers and content providers haven't agreed yet on a way to do it.

SoundExchange, the organization that collects webcasting royalties for labels and performers, just announced that it would extend until 2010 the discounts for small webcasters that expired in 2005. I haven't seen the fine print, but on the surface it looks like good news for the smaller players in the market who can't afford the rates set by a panel of copyright royalty judges. Congress mandated the original discounts in 2002 after small commercial webcasters -- and religious broadcasters, who had a powerful Senate ally in North Carolina's Jesse Helms -- said the initial royalty rates set by the Librarian of Congress would drive them out of business. Under the new proposal, webcasters that met the deal's size limits would pay 10% of the first $250,000 in gross revenue, then 12% of the revenue after that, instead of a fixed fee per song played to each listener. More to come.

The electronic locks on high-definition DVDs have been picked again, prompting a flurry of gleeful posts from the anti-DRM crowd. By my count, this is the fourth program or device to give up its keys to the discs: the first exploits hit two software players, then the Xbox 360's add-on HD DVD drive, and now an as-yet identified player has been cracked. Unlike the previous circumventions, which were developed largely in a collaborative and public way on Doom9 ("The definitive DVD backup resource"), the latest breach was done privately by SlySoft, a company based in Antigua that sells DVD-copying software. So it's anybody's guess at this point as to how SlySoft did it. My favorite bit of speculation comes from Freedom to Tinker's J. Alex Halderman, who suggested that SlySoft found a weakness in an additional player but sat on that knowledge while AACS-LA, the group that licenses much of the encryption software for high-def discs, went through the unpleasant and lengthy process of revoking the compromised versions of CyberLink's PowerDVD and Intervideo's WinDVD. Just as that process was complete, SlySoft trotted out its new exploit, forcing Hollywood to spend several more months tracking and plugging the hole. In the meantime, more high-def titles will be ripped and shared online.

Spider-Man 3 photo courtesy of Sony Pictures

The movie industry's assault on piracy in theaters has intensified in the past couple of years, and the most quantifiable result is a dramatic increase in the number of people stopped in the act of filming a movie. This morning, the MPAA and NATO (the National Association of Theatre Owners, not the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) announced (download release here) that workers and customers at multiplexes around the world had stopped 31 attempts to record Spider-Man 3 in its opening weeks. Three people have been arrested in connection with the nine incidents in the U.S. (and a fourth is expected to be charged, according to NATO's Patrick Corcoran), and 15 arrests have been made in other countries (10 of them in Malaysia, home of a vibrant counterfeit DVD industry). That's a whopping number of incidents and arrests; I could find reports of only one arrest in connection with camcording Spider-Man 2, although I vaguely recall that there may have been two or three efforts foiled.

Today's LA Times had a quartet of stories devoted to online TV and advertising issues. In no particular order:

Meg James holds forth on The CW's entertaining approach to commercials, which garnered higher ratings than the shows they supported (umm, not a great sign for the network's programming). The inevitable result: a show that is, itself, a commercial for several products. Hmmm... sounds like the average kids show....

Michelle Quinn writes about the marketing alliance between HP and DreamWorks Animation, which begat the YeTube channel on YouTube. (Click here to see a YeTube video that conveys what it's like to interview someone from Apple.)

Dawn Chmielewski tells of the impending rise of Stevie Ryan (a.k.a. Little Loca) from YouTube star to reality TV host. That is a move up, right? Right?

And Alana Semuels reports on Web advertising agency 24/7 Real Media getting snapped up by the world's second-largest advertising firm, WPP Group.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling today in Perfect 10 vs. Google and Amazon is a clear victory for search engines and tech companies -- and a clear defeat for copyright holders -- on a couple of fronts. But it also includes some language that could conceivably spell trouble for YouTube, MySpace and other user-generated content sites in their legal battles with the entertainment industry.

It's about time! Amazon.com, which has been selling downloadable movies since September, announced this morning that it plans to sell downloadable music later this year. Though late to the party, Amazon isn't simply following in the footsteps of Apple, Napster, Sony and RealNetworks: it plans to sell songs only in the MP3 format, free from digital rights management restraints. That's moving an important step further than Apple, which plans to offer DRM-free music at a premium price only from EMI and selected independent labels. Going MP3-only is probably the only approach Amazon could take, given that a big part of its business is selling digital music players that don't share a common approach to DRM. If Amazon wants to duplicate the hardware-content synergies that made the iTunes Store the market's Godzilla, it can't afford to have customers confused or frustrated by DRM incompatibilities.

The Consumer Electronics Association unveiled a proposed standard today for connecting portable media players to home and car entertainment systems. I'm probably reading way too much into it, but this strikes me as an attempt by Apple's rivals to undermine the iPod's dominance in the field.

Here's a quick roundup of today's offerings from the LA Times:
A column by yours virtually about price elasticity and the music industry;
Alex Pham and Bruce Wallace weigh in on Sony's unexpectedly slow start with the PlayStation 3;
Meg James and Dawn Chmielewski report on ABC's digital strategy, including its plans to stream shows online in high definition;
Richard Verrier writes about Michael Bay's bid to do for video games what he's done for feature films (and I mean that in a good way, honest); and
Michelle Quinn provides a view of Stanford University's "Entrepreneur Idol."

Leave it to a News Corp. subsidiary to offer a middle ground between YouTube and Viacom. Today, MySpace announced that it would use technology from Audible Magic to stop users from uploading videos that had previously been taken down at the request of the copyright holder. This is a major boost to the power that copyright owners wield, and who knows? Maybe it will be enough to shift their attention from the courts to the marketplace.

Why is it that entertainment executives can't talk about DRM without putting a foot in their mouth? This week it was HBO's chief technical officer, Bob Zitter, who generated headlines by saying DRM was a misnomer. To Zitter, "rights management" connotes restrictions, while DRM is really about allowing consumers "to use content in ways they haven't before" (quote courtesy of Broadcasting & Cable's Glen Dickson). This is coming from the same company that uses DRM technologies to ... stop consumers from using content in familiar ways. Zitter's already been thoroughly mocked online, so I'll try not to pile on. Instead, I'll give him points for being right -- kinda sorta.

Yahoo! Music, home of the most popular online radio service (LAUNCHcast), announced a deal today with NBC Universal's USA Network to provide music from selected indie-label and unsigned bands for use in the network's TV shows (e.g., "Monk" and "Psych") and promotions. The point is to take lesser-known artists who've gotten traction among LAUNCH listeners and give them an extra pop on cable. USA Network gets music from (relatively inexpensive) artists vetted in advance by LAUNCH's audience, and Yahoo earns points among artists and labels as a promotional vehicle -- something traditionally associated with big over-the-air broadcasters, not online stations.

Great story here from The Age in Melbourne, Australia, about Hew Griffiths, a purported leader of Drink or Die, which used to be one of the best known warez groups. (Among DoD's claims to fame: it developed and distributed the first program to copy movies on DVD, called DVD Speed Ripper.) After four years of trying, U.S. authorities finally succeeded in extraditing Griffiths from his native land to face trial in Virginia. He pleaded guilty last month to violating copyright law and is awaiting sentencing; he faces a maximum prison term of 10 years. He's already spent about three years behind bars in Australia, as he unsuccessfully fought extradition.

Twisted Pictures, the production company responsible for the "Saw" movie series, and Break.com announced a deal Monday to create a movie whose first distribution window will be the Internet. The deal was put together by Ubiquity Partners, one of those only-in-LA firms that acts as a matchmaker for content creators, advertisers and websites. So far, so good. Break.com was launched during the dot-com bubble as a time-wasting haven for young men, offering short videos that tried to be racy, funny, outrageous or all of the above. Eclipsed by YouTube as a place to watch (or post) user-generated video, it has been striking deals with TV networks and other content providers for more professional-grade content to mix in with clips of kids kicking vending machines. Hence the partnership with Twisted Pix. The catch is, the movie won't be streamed in its entirety on Break.com. Instead, it will be chopped into three-minute segments and distributed as a serial. The approach may be time-honored, but seriously, three-minute segments? Is that any way to tell a story?

Ashwin Navin, president of BitTorrent (the company, not the protocol), writes a column today for News.com decrying the decision by Ohio University to block all peer-to-peer traffic. He makes good points about the importance of p2p as a communications technology, but pays little attention to the elephant in the room: the no. 1 use for p2p networks is illegal downloading. I'm fascinated by the problem this presents. It's far better to punish bad behavior than ban technology, particularly when the latter has potentially great applications. But what do you do when the public is interested only in the illegal ones? (And to answer a question Navin asks in his essay, this usage pattern is what makes p2p technologies different from e-mail, instant messaging, FTP and other tools that can be used for piracy, but are mainly used for legitimate purposes.)

More on this in a second, but first: Bit Player sticks another toe into the 21st Century by activating its Technorati Profile.

The latest blow-up over efforts by AACS LA, the group that supplies anti-copying technology for Hollywood's high-definition movie discs, to suppress information about how to circumvent that technology reflects how much the debate over rights management has become a religious war. The sides are highly polarized, with Hollywood insisting that DRM is an essential element of its home video releases and movie hackers arguing that consumers are being treated like criminals. But as the weaknesses in AACS mount -- I'm particularly intrigued by the conversion of the XBox HD DVD drive into a machine that converts high-def movie discs into unlocked movie files -- it makes me wonder what happens to the rental market.

No company crystallizes the changing nature of the music business better than TuneCore, which launched today after about a year of beta testing. The company offers just one of the services provided by a record label -- it distributes its clients' songs to online retailers like iTunes, Napster and eMusic, then manages the receipts -- but its business model is orders of magnitude more artist-friendly than the typical label's. Rather than keeping most or all of the sales revenue, TuneCore charges artists one-time fees of 99 cents per song and 99 cents per retailer, plus $10 a year to store and monitor each album offered for sale. In effect, artists have to sell three albums to break even, after which the entire wholesale revenue stream is theirs to keep. With the customary major-label deal, most artists never collect any money from album sales.

Forgive me for posting a bit late on this one -- we editorial writers had a long confab this morning on Iraq (our new boss suggested it was time to figure out exactly where we were on the issue) (and no, I'm not going to tell you now, so you'll have to keep watching this space). Anyway, Hollywood the group that provides anti-copying technology for high-definition discs triggered an online rebellion this week when it tried to stop websites from publicizing a way to circumvent the copy controls on HD DVD discs. The episode recalled the movie industry's efforts in 1999-2000 to stop sites from publishing or linking to a software program to circumvent the locks on DVDs. Then, as now, the crackdown on the offending code sparked a fight at the grass roots that caused the code to proliferate -- the opposite result of what the industry had sought.

I have a web-only column running today on three developments last week in the world of online music services -- a court ruling for Yahoo in its long-running battle with BMG over personalized webcasts; a new bill to cut webcasting royalty rates; and a court ruling for Yahoo, RealNetworks and AOL in their fight with ASCAP over "double dip" royalties. Warning: much of the ground covered will be familiar to regular Bit Player readers, so the three of you might want to read just the section about the Yahoo-BMG fight.