Michael Jackson's death opens door to malware spread via online video

Be forewarned. Those videos on YouTube claiming to be the "last work of Michael Jackson" are actually fronts for a malware program that infects the viewers computer and steals their passwords. The spam messages claiming you can view the "latest unpublished photos" of The King of Pop takes you to a similar malware infection.

Security experts say it happens every time a celebrity dies or a calamitous event occurs. Spammers and Internet pirates play on fans' curiosity by building malicious campaigns around the death, claiming to have some "last" or "unpublished" work. Other wide-scale malware infections occurred due to campaigns linked to the swine flu outbreak and Saddam Hussein's execution.

Some campaigns use e-mail with spoofed addresses of legitimate news sites, while others use domain names related to the celebrity's name. These scam sites may claim the viewer needs to download a video player or other piece of software to enjoy the video or audio that's really malware. Other campaigns go the direct route, uploading videos with malicious software attached to sites like YouTube.

Following a few simple steps will keep your computer from becoming infected:

• If the e-mail isn't from someone you know personally, click on any of the links or even open it.
• If it looks like it's from someone you know, but isn't something you think they'd normally send, check the full headers (the To/From/Subject area) of the e-mail. You can reach this by clicking on the link in your Web mail or e-mail software that says "Full Headers" (Yahoo Mail) or "Show Original" (Gmail). Check the headers titled "Received" and "From" to ensure that the domains in them match. If they don't, it's likely a spoof e-mail.
• If you use video sites, keep your firewall enabled, your virus protection software on and updated, install an ad blocker add-on to your browser, and keep it on at all times.
• Only watch videos from known sources, such as respected news outlets using YouTube or users which are already in your YT favorites.
• If you own a business, familiarize your employees of these guidelines, too, to protect your network. Once one computer on a network is infected, the infection can easily spread to every other computer interconnected to that network.

Short Takes

• HTC's Android-based Hero phone will come with Adobe Flash Player 9 built in. The phone should hit European shelves in July and Asian and North American shelves later this year. Android also offers the Qik mobile video streaming/sharing application which iPhone has yet to offer.
• Google reports YouTube uploads spiked 400 percent since the iPhone 3G S has come out. It isn't just the iPhone making a difference though - during the past six months uploads to YouTube from all cellular devices surged by 1,700 percent. Google attribute the spikes to the number of video-enabled phones available, improvements in mobile to YouTube posting, and a new feature that lets users connect their YouTube account to their social networks.
• An Italian court postponed the trial of four Google executives due to the illness of an interpreter. It will commence in September. The trial relates to a video posted on the Italian YouTube site in 2006 in which four teenagers teased and mocked a disabled classmate.
• Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora covered Ben E. King's "Stand By Me" with exiled Iranian singer Andy Madadian to create what the song's co-producer Don Was calls "a musical message of worldwide solidarity" for the Iranian people. The video of the recording session, in which Bon Jovi and Madadian duet in Farsi, originated on Was' show on My Damn Channel on Saturday, but was later uploaded to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, among other sites.
  
  "It is not for sale," Was said. "It wasn't intended to be on the Billboard charts, wasn't meant to be a hit record or even pressed on a CD. It's intended to be downloaded and shared by the Iranian people. The whole idea was to get it into Iran and tell them... to carry on, that the world is watching and we're with you."
• Bloomberg reports online video sites like Hulu and TV.com have begun delivering ad rates greater than the televised networks pull. For example, ad time during The Simpsons on Hulu costs about $60/CPM but the same TV prime-time ad costs about $20-$40/CPM.
• Time Warner and Comcast have hit a wall, or rather a few, in their bid to force online video viewers to prove they subscribe to a televised video delivery service. First, they have yet to come up with an workable encryption system. Second, they have to develop something an easy to use system that doesn't turn off the users. Third, they must face the almost certain possibility that viewers will consider it an attempt to pull free content.
• YouTube now offers training for citizens journalists at The YouTube Reporters' Center. The channel provides short instructional videos from The New York Times, Washington Post and National Public Radio that teach the public skills to better report on events they witness.

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The references for this article include: Adobe's Flash to ship on new Android phone, Stephen Shankland, June 24, 2009; June 23rd, 2009; Qik rolls out live video streaming for Google Android, Matthew Miller; mocoNews - YouTube Sees 400 Percent Jump In Mobile Video Uploads Since New iPhone Launch, Dianne See Morrison,mocoNews.net, June 25, 2009; Online video sharing future still uncertain as Google trial delayed, Warwick Ashford June 2009; Jackson's death unleashes barrage of online scams, Jordan Robertson, June 28, 2009; Bon Jovi makes "Stand" with Iranian protest video, Gary Graff, June 29, 2009; Hulu, TV.com Getting Higher Ad Rates Than Their Network Counterparts, Tameka Kee , June 25, 2009;Time Warner and Comcast's online video plan faces hurdles, Joe Flint, June 25, 2009; YouTube opens online 'school' for citizen journalists, Matt Hartley, Financial Post, June 29, 2009.

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This post blogged by Carlie Lawson. She is a hazards consultant, freelance writer, and weather nerd living in Norman, OK, also known as the weather capital of the United States.

From film to e-video: the history and the future (Part 2)

Continuing our look at how the industry and viewers got where they are today, essentially on opposing sides of the online video innovation, we'll look at the introduction of television and cable. Both created competition for the growing movie industry, but TV also saw cable as a rival. Film, fresh from the fall out of the introduction of sound in the mid- to late- 1920s, faced a new challenge in the 1930s.

Television
The next innovation for film to stress over was the development of television. The medium was introduced in 1936 in London, England, but experienced a slow uptake with consumers due to high cost of a set and the relative rarity of broadcasting stations. By 1945, there were still only 7,000 sets in the U.S. and nine TV stations, but the film industry saw competition coming. After years of developing various color processes, but not making the change over, the film industry switched to color after the end of World War II, seeing it as a necessary switch to draw audiences away from television. Advertisers had begun to pour money into the infant medium and that draws the film industry's attention. In 1948, 933 sponsors buy TV advertisements, a rise of 515 percent from the prior year. By 1952, the number of TV sets hit 20 million, up 33 percent from the previous year, and U.S. advertisers spend $288 million (the equivalent of about $2.3 billion in 2008 dollars) on TV spots. With so much money to be made, TV must compete with film. In 1953 the FCC approves color broadcasting and by the mid-1960s TV goes completely color while film finishes its slower transition to color by the end of the 1960s. It isn't until 1977 though that the majority (more than 75 percent) of TV households have a color TV set, but what they want to watch isn't on it. A TV Guide poll conducted in May 1979 shows 44 percent of Americans were unhappy with existing TV content and 49 percent watched TV less than they did a few years earlier.

Cable
No sooner than there were TV sets and TV stations, there was cable. And no sooner than there was cable, the movie and network TV industries declared it enemy number one. Developed in 1948, early cable systems were developed to bring TV signals to remote areas of Pennsylvania and Oregon. A decade later, 525 cable TV systems existed, serving 450,000 U.S. subscribers. In February 1958, CBS, one of the then three free networks, took out a two-page ad in TV Guide claiming that, "Free television as we know it cannot survive alongside pay television." Concern grows further when a 1967 National Association of Broadcasters survey shows a high level of public dissatisfaction with TV commercials and programs - 63 percent prefer commercial free TV. By 1987 more than 50 percent of U.S. households subscribe to cable which is largely commercial-free at the time. Film's growing concern is that as subscribers grow, consumers will stop attending theaters to view movies and instead wait for them to air on movie channels such as Showtime and HBO.

The references for this article include: Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI Inflation Calculator, 2008; Sound Film, Wikipedia, December 23, 2008; Film, Wikipedia, December 30, 2008; and History of Television, 2008.

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This post blogged by Carlie Lawson. She is a hazards consultant, freelance writer, and weather nerd living in Norman, OK, also known as the weather capital of the United States.

Iran's citizens turn to mobile video to tell their stories

When we say all the world's a stage, we likely hope for comedy and laughter, but since Iran's controversial election on June 12, the world stage has hosted a horror show of riots, police killings, and protests. The election results returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power and subsequently unleashed the greatest violence and unrest the country has experienced since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.Ahmadinejad's opponent, Mir Hussein Mousavi and protesters have called for an annulment of the election.

Iran's leaders shut down most avenues of communication with the outside world including cutting access of reporters and forcing some to leave the country, but its citizens have continued to find ways to transmit news to those outside its borders. There have been 17 confirmed deaths so far during the protests following the election results, including the shooting death of a young woman known as Neda ("the call" or "the voice" in Farsi). Iranian citizens have become the journalists, reporting the eventsoccurring in their country by recording quick mobile videos that are then posted on YouTube including videos of protesters being beaten by riot police and of the wreckage of a military raid on a University of Tehran dormitory. Their access to YouTube has been blocked by the government since the elections, but the defiant citizens havetransmitted videos to friends in other countries who then post the materials for them on the site.

"YouTube has been and remains a critical platform for citizens in Iran to convey their messages to the world, despite the apparent block of YouTube and the limitations placed on mainstream media reporting," YouTube spokesman Scott Rubin said in an interview withAFP.

Mainstream U.S. media outlets such as CNN, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times have picked up the videos to use in telecasts and in online reports. Until that time, the events in Iran were going largely uncovered in the American media due to Iran's limitations on reporters.

Short Takes
* Net neutrality groups called foul last week when AT&T decided to let Major League Baseball fans using the At Bat application stream games live on theiriPhones via 3-G or WiFi, but limited video streaming via the SlingPlayer application to WiFi only. AT&T said it limited SlingPlayer to Wi -Fi because streaming live broadcast TV via its 3G wireless network "violated the company's terms of use." But At Bat does the same thing withtelevisied baseball games and that's what's upset advocacy groups like Free Press.

* Wikipedia will soon feature online video. The onilne encyclopedia is working with Kaltura to develop tools for importing videos. Users will be able to add media to encyclopedia entries drawing from three repositories: the Internet Archive,Wikimedia Commons, and Metavid.

* Online network Ripe Digital Entertainment closed and is looking for a buyer for its assests. The five year old company developed entertainment content for men, rather like an online SpikeTV.

* Nielsen's latest numbers revealed further growth in online video viewing. In May, 133,797,000 viewers watched an average of 188.7 minutes of online video, that up by 48.9 percent from the same time last year. YouTube held the eyes and ears of the majority of viewers with 95.4 million watching videos on the Web site, followed by Yahoo with 25.2 million viewers and Fox Interactive 16 million viewers.

* Content for smart phones seems a smart investment. Consulting firm SNL Kagan predicts revenue generated by content programming for smart phones will increase 17 percent this year as companies such as Walt Disney's ESPN and MobiTV respond to mobile viewers' request for more choices. U.S. mobile-video revenue is expected to reach $350 million in 2009 up from last year's $300 million.

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The references for this article include: "Defiant, Iran's Mousavi urges more protests," Jon Boyle, June 21, 2009; "Iran: Videos of protests and vigils," Hamid Tehrani, June 22, 2009; "YouTube an online stage for Iran protest videos," AFP, June 16, 2009; "Is AT&T playing gatekeeper to the Wireless Web?," Marguerite Reardon, CNET, June 18, 2009; Wikipedia Getting Video within Months," Sarah Perez, ReadWriteWeb, June 19, 2009; "Video Usage Online Spiking," David Weir, BNET, June 19th, 2009; "Ripe Digital Shuts Down", Chris Albrecht, NewTeeVee, June 16, 2009; "In Iran, one woman - Neda - becomes a symbol," Glenna DeRoy, USA Today, June 21, 2009; "Mobile-video sales to jump 17% this year, Mobile:Revenue will grow to $350 million," Danny King, Video Business, June 18, 2009.

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This post blogged by Carlie Lawson. She is a hazards consultant, freelance writer, and weather nerd living in Norman, OK, also known as the weather capital of the United States.

Analog to digital conversion heats up mobile TV battle

Last Thursday, June 11, ended the era of analog television in the U.S. and the beginning of all digital TV. It also marked the first day stations had the freed up broadcast spectrum to transmit live TV to mobile devices. There's a huge competition for your viewing eyes and now it heats up.

In the first quarter of this year, 13 million people watched video on their cellular devices, according to Nielsen. That only amounts to about 6 percent of all mobile subscribers, but it's a 50 percent increase from the first quarter of 2008. A number of services want to capture that growing mobile video audience.

Leading the way, the Open Mobile Video Coalition, the free service introduced earlier this year joins together more than 28 U.S. station groups and will broadcast local TV to mobile devices. It doesn't require the bandwidth and has the potential to reach everyone within range of a TV tower, but it's young, and so far, can't run on any currently released cell phones although that's expected to change by the end of the year. A TV station needs only to spend $50,000 to $150,000 to install the mobile transmitters necessary to broadcast its television feed to mobile devices. OMVC also doesn't have to hunt for content or cut deals. It's members are the broadcasters already providing the TV content. It's biggest plus is it's free while most of its competitors offer only subscription services.

One of it's main competitors, Qualcomm's Flo TV, established in 2003, picked up additional bandwidth that will let it double the number of mobile customers it can service. With $800 million invested in the Flo TV network and deals with Verizon and AT&T, it's a leader in mobile TV development. It currently offers 12 channels and later this year will offer its subscription service directly to consumers, cutting out the need for deals with wireless carriers. That may or may not be a positive move for Flo TV which can only be accessed on nine cellphone model because it requires a chip not installed on most devices.

MobiTV, a service providing on-demand video and live TV over wireless carriers' data networks boasts about 7 million subscribers, more than half the cell phone video viewers. It offers more than 40 channels in some areas and doesn't require a specific chip for mobile devices. The downsides are its somewhat choppy playback and subscription fees. The move to 3G promises to help address the choppiness and deals with wireless carriers that include them in their all inclusive plans have helped them rack in the subscribers. For instance, Sprint bundles the service into its Simply Everything plan.

Add to that independent offerings from networks like CBS and MTV using platforms like Transpera and the competition really heats up. Although Transpera has less content than its competitors, like OMVC, its videos are free. All content is advertising supported.

Although the change won't be instant, the switch to digital will cause an imminent change in mobile video. Increased available bandwidth enables growth and expansion of some mobile networks while spurring necessary growth in their competitors to keep up, and that means more choices for viewers.

Short Takes

• Livestream reports an increasing number of news organizations moving to live online video services using its recently released Procaster application. For instance, New York affiliate WNYW/Fox 5 uses it to broadcast an extra hour of morning show content after its Good Day New York morning show ends.
• A new, free service, Ashampoo ClipFinder HD, lets you search multiple sites simultaneously for videos like YouTube, Yahoo, Vimeo, Spike, and more. But, wait, there's more... you can view any video, save its location, and/or save it to your hard drive. The only hitch is the program will work for only 10 days unless you share your e-mail address. That gets you a software key to permanently unlock the program.
• Survey results from a Bernstein Research study show a mere 10 percent of online video viewers use P2P services and a small fraction of those viewers download illegal video content. Other results of the survey include that though 54 percent of respondents watch TV or movies online, they'd rather watch it on their TV (from the PC) and that 35 percent of respondents have considered ending their cable subscription to view online instead.
• Apple announced that the mobile version of iTunes will begin offering audio book and video download and rental options for download direct to iPhone or Touch. Currently, users must purchase and download iTunes videos on a computer, then transfer it to their mobile device via USB.
• YouTube is offering viewers the ability to choose which ads they view on some premium content. So far, it's a limited choice between two ads, but viewers can also choose between pre-rolls and interspersed ads.

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The references for this article include: "Broadcasters compete to put TV on cellphones," Alana Semuels, June 9, 2009; "Qualcomm to sell FLO TV directly to consumers," Kevin Fitchard, June 5, 2009; "Livestream Gains Local News Traction," Ryan Lawler, June 11, 2009; "Locate and Watch High-Def Video With Ashampoo ClipFinder HD," Preston Gralla, PC World, June 11, 2009; "Online video watchers don't pirate content frequently," Pete Wylie, June 10, 2009; "Video download comes to iPhone and Touch," Donald Bell, June 8, 2009; and "YouTube Tries Choose-Your-Own Ads," Jared Newman, June 15, 2009.

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Carlie Lawson is a hazards consultant, freelance writer, and weather nerd living in Norman, OK, also known as the weather capital of the United States.

From film to e-video: the history and the future (Part 1)

The Back Story
To know where you're going, you have to know where you've been, so to understand how the industry and viewers got where they are today, we need to look at where they both came from first. In the beginning, the movie industry embraced innovation, largely because it had to in order to create and maintain an industry, while consumers set the rabid pace of ready adoption of new entertainment mediums from the beginning and never slowed down.

The birth of film
In the late 1800s many scientists and inventors throughout the world dreamed of making motion pictures and worked hard to make dreams a reality. The first success occurred in 1888 when Frenchman Louis Le PrincA still from Georges Méliès' 1902 "A Trip to the Moon".e patented a machine to shoot and project film. Three years later Thomas Edison patented a separate stationary camera and projection system in the U.S. and in 1893 England's William Friese-Greene patented a combination camera/projector. Quickly following him, in 1895, after a year of studying Edison's design, French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere build a portable camera/projector which would become the predecessor to modern equipment. Only short form content was produced in this manner, usually 30 to 90 seconds in length. In the U.S. Edison produced stilted historical stage plays such as The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, similar to the networks' first attempts at Web shows, while the Lumiere's produced life vignettes or actualities, such as Feeding Baby or Boat Leaving the Port, both which mirror much of YouTube's early user-generated content.

Edison's movies were generally shown on his invention, the Kinetoscope, in theaters called "peep-show parlors". For twenty five cents one could watch a series of short movies while standing in front of a small kiosk. The Lumiere brothers' movies were first shown at public exhibitions, then in "store theaters" and Nickelodeons. It was the shared viewing experience of the Nickelodeon theaters which seated 100 that took off, and by 1906 about a thousand such theaters sprang up over the U.S. Syndicates quickly formed in the burgeoning industry to market projectors and promote film programs, while film production companies sprang up throughout the world. It wasn't long before the Hollywood we've come to know developed.

And that is where the trouble began. Once the money making mechanism took hold and a standardized business model developed, Hollywood became paralyzed with fear at the mere hint of innovation, fearing any change would cut profits. Hollywood history tends to repeat itself and other world film centers tend to follow Hollywood's non-lead. The trouble started with a vital innovation that actually served to further popularize film, but scared everyone industry-wide at first, from studio executives to actors. The innovation? Sync sound.

Silent to sound
Many scientists and engineers played with adding sound to film, but didn't find success with true sync sound until the mid-1920s. It's introduction was met with fear and loathing for years. In fact in the fall of 1926, Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros. claimed talkies wouldn't take off, saying "They fail to take into account the international language of the silent pictures, and the unconscious share of each onlooker in creating the play, the action, the plot, and the imagined dialogue for himself." Warner was wrong. In fiscal year 1927-28 with sound still new and yet introduced into each release, Warner Bros. took in $2 million, but the following fiscal year, with sound now integrated, the studio took in $14 million (in 2008 dollars that's a growth of $24.4 million to $170.9 million).

While sound did have far-reaching effects. Rather than using movie house orchestras, "talkies" used pre-recorded musical tracks. That put 22,000 moviehouse orchestra musicians out of work, but gave birth to the soundtrack industry, providing a new venue for song writers, as well as increasing the need for session musicians. Not to mention that soundtrack sales eventually provided a new revenue source for studios, artists, and record labels. But at the time, one Pittsburgh Press article claimed, "If the theatre-going public accepts this vitiation of its entertainment program a deplorable decline in the Art of Music is inevitable."

Nor was it a short-lived scare sound's advent produced. The December 1929 cover of Photoplay magazine featured silent film star Norma Talmadge, one of the actors fired for having a voice that didn't resound well with the movie going public. The headline, "The Microphone - Terror of the Studios," summed up the movie industry's fears. The public's excitement over and acceptance of the new technology encouraged its integration, as it would continue to do with other technologies during the next 80 years of innovations.

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The references for this article include: "Online Video Draws Mixed Reviews From Media Execs, Discovery CEO David Zaslav says company's content won't be online in near future," Alex Weprin, Broadcasting & Cable, December 10, 2008; "A Short History of Movies," Gerald Mast; "On Film: A History of the Motion Picture," Frank E. Beaver; Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI Inflation Calculator, 2008; Sound Film, Wikipedia, December 23, 2008; Film, Wikipedia, December 30, 2008.

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This post blogged by Carlie Lawson. She is a hazards consultant, freelance writer, and weather nerd living in Norman, OK, also known as the weather capital of the United States.