The idea of putting kiosks in retailers to burn music or movie discs on demand is one whose time may never come. I've heard a number of pitches for them over the years, almost all of which sounded far more promising than they proved to be in the marketplace. Still, companies keep trying. The latest is Nero, maker of a leading brand of disc-burning software, which expects to be powering movie-burning kiosks in major retailers this summer.

If Warner Music Group hired Jim Griffin just to provoke discussion about new business models, it's already gotten its money's worth. Portfolio.com started things off with a piece about Warner signing Griffin, a vocal critic of the major record labels' approach to file-sharing, to a three-year contract. He'll be the guy drawing up and selling Warner's plan to create the ultimate subscription-music service: for about $5 a month per subscriber, ISPs could enable their customers to download and share an unlimited number of MP3s. It's an idea Griffin has been floating for several years, and it meshes nicely with former Warner new-media guru Paul Vidich's unsuccessful campaign to include some form of free music in the price of Internet service. Among other observers, Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng liked the idea; TechCrunch's Michael Arrington did not. No, really. TechDirt's Mike Masnick gave it a thumbs down as well.

The ink was still drying on Comcast's press release this morning announcing a collaboration with BitTorrent Inc. on the touchy subject of network management when various groups for and against Net neutrality regulations started weighing in. The ones opposed to such rules typically said the collaboration proved government action was unnecessary; the ones who favored them argued that Comcast acted only because the FCC had launched an investigation into the cable company's interference with BitTorrent traffic.

BitTorrent President Ashwin Navin was asked his views on the need for neutrality rules this afternoon, but he refused to take the bait. Speaking at the Technology Policy Summit conference in Hollywood, Navin noted that Comcast wasn't the only ISP using that particular technique to interfere with BitTorrent uploads. "I feel good about our relationship with Comcast," he said. "The FCC has several other ISPs that it needs to be vigilent about.... It would be appropriate, responsible for the FCC to do what it needs to do to make sure the U.S. is a leader in broadband, not only in broadband technology but also broadband regulation."

Here's one for the "Who Knew?" files: the news media's attention to the sub-prime fiasco rises and falls in step with its fascination with Britney Spears. Coincidence? I think not! I would not have noticed this linkage had it not been for Trendrr, a fascinating site that recently went live. An offshoot of Wiredset, a New York agency that specializes in promoting media through the Web, social networks and mobile carriers, Trendrr lets users assemble and compare data from a dozen sources (more to come soon), including Google News, Bit Torrent, eBay and YouTube. It also invites users to request new sources or submit their own. For example, you might want to gauge interest in a particular band by seeing how often people were posting videos of that act on YouTube. Or, if you were a studio, you could graf how often the trailer for your summer blockbuster was being played on MySpace.com vs. YouTube vs. DailyMotion. My examples don't do Trendrr justice, so click here to check out the site's most popular trend-mapping exercises. Then try creating some of your own. Depending on how embarrassing the results are, I may update this post later this week with the results of something I'm tracking on Trendrr: the number of times my newspaper, the NY Times and the Washington Post are cited on blogs, as measured by Google Blog Search. 

So much for the easy part. The Justice Department announced today that it would not seek to block the merger between satellite radio providers XM and Sirius. That leaves the deal's fate in the hands of the FCC, which has a decade-old rule prohibiting one company from owning both satellite-radio licenses. Opponents of media mergers will probably point to today's news as another instance of a Republican Justice Department giving short shrift to antitrust enforcement. To me, though, the decision was inescapable. I just can't see an antitrust problem here, no matter how many times the National Association of Broadcasters invites me to do the math. 

The folks at DivX and D-Link recently loaned me two pieces of hardware to help bridge the gap between the Internet and my TV set: a DivX Connected box and a pair of powerline adapters to turn my electrical wires into a branch of my home network. All the gear worked well and was surprisingly easy to set up (especially the powerline adapters, which were literally plug-and-play -- a first for any networking gear I've used). Yet as much as I enjoyed using the DivX device, it reminded me that closing the PC-TV gap isn't as simple as hooking up a smart set-top box. It's about finding a way to make computers and websites speak TV.

I have a column on latimes.com today about Jango and its effort to monetize what people do while listening to music (as opposed to selling the music itself). The company interested me because its approach strikes me as one of the foundations of the new music-industry business model. I skipped over one aspect of Jango's strategy, though, and that's its widget, which can be posted on blogs or MySpace pages (and, before too long, Facebook profiles). You can inspect the one I created after the jump. Although I recognize that it's a customer-acquisition tool, I have to confess that I don't understand why companies do stuff like this. In essence, Jango is paying to provide entertainment to other sites, rather than using entertainment to draw people to its own pages (where they can generate revenue). And the widget, which is just a jukebox, doesn't really sell the highly social Jango experience. Maybe it's just about getting some name recognition....

Any auction that brings in almost twice as much money as expected isn't likely to be considered a failure. That's the case with the FCC's recently completed auction of the 700 MHz airwaves, which raised about $19 billion. But the auction of these frequencies, which have been used for UHF TV signals, didn't live up to the hopes of many who make their living off teh Interwebs. That's because the sell-off apparently will not produce a new, national provider of broadband Internet access, even though the frequencies would be up to the task, technically speaking.

It's poor form to criticize a competitor's scoop, but I won't let that stop me. The Financial Times ran an attention-grabbing piece today about a "radical new business model" Apple was floating with the record labels: letting buyers of premium-priced iPods and iPhones download an unlimited amount of music from the iTunes store. Radical for Apple, perhaps, but not for the music industry, which (as the story points out) is already talking to Nokia about the very same approach.

The speech MPAA chief Dan Glickman gave last week at ShoWest is like the gift that keeps on giving. In case you missed my two earlier posts on this topic, Glickman declared the MPAA's unambiguous opposition to Net neutrality regulations. Among other things, he warned that such rules would "impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways" and interfere with ISPs' anti-piracy efforts. Today the Digital Freedom Campaign -- a lobbying group backed by the Consumer Electronics Assn., several consumer advocates and other groups that often oppose Hollywood on copyright issues -- issued a statement inviting Glickman to take the same deregulatory approach to the rest of the MPAA's policy agenda in Washington. The studios, after all, have a history of pressing Congress and the FCC for regulations that would impede hardware and software makers' ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways, particularly when copyrighted programming was involved. For example, the "broadcast flag" rules sought by Hollywood would require home networks to include government-approved content-protection technology, and its approach to closing the "analog hole" would dictate how long a TiVo could store some of the programs it recorded. Here's the money graf from Digital Freedom spokeswoman Maura Corbett:

We suspect the big studios are rolling the Trojan Horse of “copyright enforcement” to Congress to protect their business models from openness offered by the Internet. But for now, let’s take them at their word – given MPAA’s newfound aversion “government regulation”, we eagerly look forward to them standing down on broadcast flag legislation, the analog hole bill, and other initiatives to restrict consumers and limit new technologies.

Don't hold your breath, Maura!

MPAA chief Dan Glickman doesn't speak for the movie industry, technically. His clients are the MPAA's dues-paying members, the major Hollywood studios. And the interests of those studios -- all owned by giant conglomerates -- don't necessarily align with their smaller brethren, just as the RIAA often parts ways on policy matters with the indie labels. A good illustration of this is a letter to Glickman released today by Jean Prewitt, president of the Independent Film and Television Alliance. She blasted Glickman for coming out against Net neutrality regulations earlier this week in a speech to theater owners. You can download the letter here, or just check out the money line:

The issue is not whether the government should regulate the Internet but whether there will be effective oversight to prevent a handful of corporate giants from imposing their own version of private regulation to the public's detriment.

Not that the indies particularly mind the use of government regulatory power: last year IFTA called on the FCC to require networks to devote at least 25% of their programming lineups to shows from unaffiliated producers (Download here). Nevertheless, independent studios have a clear interest in Net neutrality rules that would prevent larger players from buying preferential treatment for their websites and online services, particularly with the opportunities dimming on cable, satellite and broadcast TV for smaller programmers. As Prewitt put it, "Allowing the Internet to become the exclusive province of a small number of large companies would inevitably harm the future of independent art and commerce."

If Glickman releases a reply, I'll update this post to include it.

Mixwit lets you create and share playlists using music culled from the Web via Seeqpod. So I ask you, is this legal? Right? Fair? One thing's certain: it's really fun. And although there's no evident business model, if I were a label exec I'd be helping these guys to find one.... (If an image of an old-school BASF tape doesn't appear below, click here -- I haven't had much luck getting the embedded player to work with IE.)

Verizon, a leading provider of broadband services in the U.S., is the belle of the blogs today thanks to its work with a p2p trade group on a technology to speed p2p downloads. The technique, developed by researchers from Yale and the University of Washington, enables p2p software and broadband networks to work together to select the most efficient way to deliver a requested file.

For ISPs, this "P4P" approach offers a way to cut the amount of bandwidth hoovered by file-sharing applications -- in particular, the costly bandwidth between the ISP's local network and the rest of the Internet. That's because it would help downloaders obtain as much as possible from the shortest possible electronic paths.

TiVo's deal to bring YouTube videos to its subscribers might give YouTube another way to reach TV sets, but it doesn't solve the bigger issue for online video aggregators: how do you make your service as appealing on a TV set as you do on a PC? It's a user-interface problem, really. Rather than force viewers to use a keyboard, set-top box makers assume their customers will try to navigate through a site like YouTube with just a TV remote and its up, down, left and right keys. That leads them to present the site's inventory of videos as a list of folders and screenshots that viewers have to scroll through vertically. It gets old in a hurry. TiVo's YouTube rollout won't happen until later this year, so perhaps the company will come up with a better UI than its predecessors -- something that apes the look of YouTube.com, enabling people to choose among multiple related videos on a single screen.

After more than four months in an invitation-only Beta, Hulu opened to the public today with full-length episodes from about 200 current and classic TV shows, as well as a smattering of full-length movies. If you're interested in the Hulu inventory, the site is a nice way to experience it. The programming is all available on demand (albeit after lengthy loading times), the player's controls are great, and the commercial interruptions are less frequent than they are on TV (and in some cases, viewers get to choose between a long pre-roll and shorter interstitials). The video quality is high, even when blown up to full screen. And programs can be linked into playlists, although they don't function particularly well (the waits between clips are unforgivable). Still, Hulu is missing too many pieces to make it a truly compelling entertainment experience, which it will have to be if it wants to make a dent in online piracy.

For the third year in a row, CBS will make its broadcasts of NCAA basketball tournament games available free on the Web. The biggest difference this year, though, is that it will make *all* the tournament games available online (except for one opening-round game on March 18). There will be no local blackouts, and every round will be online, even the finals. The move acknowledges something that seems obvious: the Net doesn't cannibalize the broadcast TV audience. No one who could watch the game on a TV set would choose to watch it on a PC -- there's no interactive feature compelling enough to drive viewers out of the living room (or sports bar). As CBS chief Les Moonves told financial analysts last month, according to Online Media Daily, the "Internet audience is additive to our core audience."

Access Integrated Technologies announced yesterday that four major Hollywood studios (Disney, Fox, Paramount and Universal) had committed to provide digital versions of their films to up to 10,000 theaters in the U.S. and Canada. That's close to a fourth of all the screens in those two countries (about 39,000 here, 2,800 up north) The announcement came on the heels of a trio of releases about deployments by Thomson's Technicolor Digital Systems, which has agreements with four major Hollywood studios (Fox, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.) and DreamWorks SKG to distribute digital movies to up to 5,000 theaters. Meanwhile, Sony announced Monday that it plans to offer a competing digital-cinema package to exhibitors.

MPAA chief Dan Glickman made it official today: Hollywood will fight Net neutrality regulations being considered by Congress and the FCC. Glickman's comments, which were in his annual "state of the industry" speech at ShoWest, weren't exactly surprising, given that the MPAA had urged the FCC last year not to adopt neutrality rules that would hurt anti-piracy efforts. Today, though, the nuance was gone. Said Glickman:

Government regulation of the Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways, and it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today.

Here's a link to my column today about MMCast's intriguing approach to advertiser-supported content on wireless networks. The company, which has offices in Beverly Hills and London, believes its targeted approach to commercials can generate enough revenue to enable content companies to give away music, ringtones, games, and videos. Its secret sauce is technology to cache video ads on handsets, rather than embedding them into the content. Included is one interesting data point about a test that Vodafone did to measure the price elasticity of downloadable games. Not surprisingly, people really, really like free content....

Ezmo, a music locker service that let users share their collections with friends, bit the dust today. The service alerted users in an email and blog post, saying it couldn't raise the money it needed to keep going. I spoke briefly this afternoon with David Leibowitz, who was Ezmo's chairman, and he still thinks Ezmo had a workable business model: encouraging people to buy music by letting them play for free the songs that friends own. It's much like Lala.com's approach, at least conceptually. I'll confess to being more than a little skeptical about the latter, largely because of the royalty payments it had agreed to make. But at least Lala.com has deals with the labels; Ezmo never got that far.