Blue Screen Of Duds

YouTube has secured an agreement with the UK societies that collect royalties for 50,000 composers, songwriters and publishers to legitimise the use of recorded music on Google’s popular video-sharing website. From FT, via PaidContent.

This is a fairly significant bit of news that was missed by most outlets. It is no great secret that along with print publications, the music industry is the next big player who is undergoing major existential pains because of the online revolution and till date they have reacted to it by going the ‘profits-by-means-of-litigation’ route. The move by the UK societies is the first major indication of a wake up call that has been heeded by the industry.

Till about a year and a half ago, when any of my friends wanted me to listen to a song they liked that I was unaware of, they would send me the MP3 file via email or some other means so that I could take a swipe at it. In the past year or so, almost nobody has been doing that. Instead, they send me links to Youtube. Now, I am not your typical music consumer (I am listening to Karnatic classical set to a jazz arrangement in massive rotation right now), and for people to be sending me links of Youtube pretty consistently (from obscure Japanese pop to more mainstream stuff) would mean that there is a fair volume of music in the sytem there.

Now, if Youtube were to give the record companies a fixed amount of money (they had set apart $500 million for copyright litigation-related costs in escrow), for legally playing out music/music videos and if that fixed amount of money is higher by even a cent, compared to what the industry might make legally a few years down the line, who can honestly complain about it? They get to offload the price of distribution to the Youtubes and unlike a standard distribution deal, this is in all probability a non-exclusive deal; meaning that they can reap multiples of the same deal, depending on how good their negotiation skills are.

I do not think this is the final word in the saga called music distribution, but this certainly is the first step towards recognizing ground realities and let us wait and watch to see to where the story will progress eventually.

Peter Cranstone, while pondering how the Google phone will deliver ads to its users, says that Google will have to do something similar to what Opera does with Opera Mini — transcoding web pages — for the Google phone. He adds that once Google gets around to doing this it will beat the crap out of Opera Mini, which probably won’t find much agreement with Russell Beattie, who argues that someone should buy Opera just for the traffic that is now routed through Opera Mini.

What both gentlemen are probably not aware of is that Google already has a transcoder that converts pages into mobile-formatted on the fly. Now, rather strangely, the interface is not available anywhere as a start page as far as I know. Google does serve you a mobile-specific Google.com page depending on your User Agent, but the links that are delivered in the results page do not use the transcoder.

The only place where you can see it is if you use the mobile version of the Google Reader. In the entry-level screen on Google Reader, there is a link that says “see original,” which can also be accessed by pressing ‘0′ on your mobile phone. To access any normal page on your desktop browser via this transcoder, all you have to do is to append the URL you want to browse to the following URL: http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=. For example this blog can be accessed this way: http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://fatalerror.wordpress.com.

Currently, the transcoder supports most standard HTML, including forms, which means that you get to access things like email on the go even on a very low-fi handset, and also that Google gets another bit of your personal information (did I hear the privacy paranoid let out a collective gasp there?) for it to index and profile. The good part of the story is that it refuses to transcode secure URLs, which I remember was not the case with Opera Mini.

Now, here I also have to admit here that Opera Mini does a stellar job, but it also has a problem that you need to have J2ME support to be able to use it. Besides, the Google transcoder seems to be considerably faster while transcoding and rendering pages. For all you know, Google maybe licensing Opera’s technology to do this (imagine: Opera Mini kills Opera Mini. What a headline!), but from what I remember Opera is running a mightily hacked up version of the Opera browser as middleware to make Opera Mini possible, while Google’s approach seems to be in line with the more standard HTML Tidy/HTML Cleaner/HTML Parser/Tagsoup approach to de-mucking web pages, albeit a monstrously hacked version of it.