Archive for June, 2009

Netflix Closes Silo (again) – Forces Jinni To Disable Ratings Feature

Jun 29

Posted by Davis in DRM, Netflix, VOD, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments

I love Netflix, but more than once their data policies have forced me to reconsider whether or not I should have a membership with them. You see, I believe that when you rate a movie, the data should belong to you. After all, you were the one that spent the time to input the rating and it’s personal to your tastes. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that once you get past 100 ratings, you can’t even find two rating profiles that are identical.

Netflix on the other hand, seems to feel that they own your ratings data and have guarded it closely. This wouldn’t be so important, if Netflix was the only movie site out there, but because they refuse to implement many web 2.0 features, there are many other movie sites that consumers may prefer.

Because I have memberships with about a dozen of these sites, it has created an awkward and cumbersome situation where I’m forced to to maintain a dozen different sets of ratings, instead of being able to sync them all together.

Since even small differences in how you rate a movie can have a big impact on the recommendations that you receive, whoever is able to get a consumer to input the most ratings is given a powerful moat around their subscribers.

For a long time, Netflix kept their silo closed, but about nine months ago, they opened up their API to outside developers. At the time, I saw this as a watershed event because it marked a change in philosophy from one of control to one allowing for innovation, inside or outside of Netflix’s site.

If you go their developer site, you’ll see that they still encourage people to use ratings data to create cool apps.

“The Netflix API allows developers full access to our catalog of movies and actors, and–when properly authorized–subscriber data, such as queues, ratings, rental history, and reviews.”

Regrettably, after opening up this data to outside developers, Netflix has apparently changed their tune and is now trying to take away this feature from their customers. From an email I received from Jinni.com,

“Hi Davis Freeberg,

Since March, we’ve offered an option to connect your Netflix account with Jinni. Until now, an optional feature has been importing ratings, so Jinni can quickly learn about your taste and recommend only movies you haven’t seen.

Unfortunately, Netflix has demanded that we remove the import ratings feature. If you already imported your ratings, they will stay on Jinni.

We, and many other developers and users, have been asking Netflix to open the ratings data for a while, to give you the choice to import your Netflix ratings as you wish. We’re working with Netflix now to initiate adding an import ratings option to their API – as your ratings actually belong to you.

As always, feel free to get in touch with questions. And stay tuned for new features and improvements that we’re working on now toward our public beta opening!” (Note: Bold added by me)

In the long run, I believe that this will hurt the company. I can understand Netflix’s desire to protect their competitive moat, but as a subscriber this upsets me to no end. Instead of letting me choose the most innovative movie site, they are making it more difficult for other sites to work with their data. This may not seem like a big deal to most, but preventing customers from accessing content in their preferred format, tends to create dissatisfaction. I feel that it also raises questions of anti-trust abuse when you consider Netflix’s market position and the grip that they are maintaining on their subscriber data.

Instead of using their rating silos to stop competition, I’d rather see Netflix forced to compete fairly by creating the best product out there.

I’m not sure that I’ll cancel my account, but taking this kind of a hostile stance against a competitor makes it hard for me to continue to recommend the service to others. I hope that Netflix reconsiders their stance on this issue and allow consumers to take full advantage of the openness of the web.

Update – Netflix responds on their developer forum – “The API Terms of Service don’t allow an application to capture a subscriber’s user name and password, which is required to scrape user data from the site. While we do expose ratings via the API, we do recognized that there isn’t a good way to grab a subscriber’s full rating history. We’re working on the technical and legal details to allow developers to access this info without running afoul of our terms of service nor enabling a unsatisfactory user experience.”

Ask Davis: How Much Did Rim Pay For Dash?

Jun 28

Posted by Davis in Ask Davis, SA | 2 Comments

One of the things that I love about publicly traded companies is the amount of information that they have to publish in their regulatory filings. Combing through the gaboolgook of business speak, legal disclaimers and operating results probably doesn’t sound all that exciting, but it can be fun when you find secrets buried in the tediousness of it all.

The key to unlocking most filings, isn’t so much what they tell you, but what’s missing. If you look at the numbers that they do give you from different perspectives, you can often get a rough outline of the ones that aren’t there.

With this in mind, I decided to dig deeper into Research in Motion’s latest 6K filing, to see if I could find clues to some of the questions that RIM left unanswered when they acquired Dash Navigation. Rim’s purchase of Dash has always been shrouded in a cloud of mystery. Normally, acquisitions make front page news (or at least the front of Techmeme), but Dash and Rim both kept quiet for nearly two weeks, until Boy Genius saw details leaked in an industry publication. Even in their most recent 6k filing, Rim doesn’t mention Dash by name once.

What Rim does mention though, are some hard numbers that can help to fill in the blanks.

In the filing they tell us the following

-During the 1st quarter they purchased two companies. A company named Certicom and “a company, whose proprietary software will be incorporated into the Company’s software.”
-The two businesses cost RIM $124.4 million
-Out of the $124.4 million, $111 million was spent on Certicom
-They also spent $4 million in financing costs as part of the transactions
-Even though they only spent $124.4 million, they actually had to redeem short term investments of $136.4 million in order to complete the transactions.
-Part of the cost of the Certicom transaction was reduced by the $10.9 million in cash that they picked up as part of the transaction.

Since RIM admits to only making 2 acquisitions during the quarter, it is relatively easy to determine the purchase price of the company.

$124.4 million – $111 = $13.4 million
$13.4 million – $4 million = $9.4 million

In order to make sure that we take into account any cash that Dash may have had, you have to look at the difference between what RIM actually paid for both companies and what it actually cost them.

$136.4 – $124.4 = $12 million

Since Certicom had $10.9 million, it would suggest that Dash was left with a mere $1.1 million when they were acquired.

$9.4 – $1.1 = a purchase price of $8.3 million

When you consider that Dash raised $71 million in three rounds of financings, it’s easy to understand why they wanted to keep quiet about an 88% loss for their VC investors.

What is a little surprising though, is how good of a deal RIM seems to have gotten out of the transaction. One of the more interesting figures that caught my eye was an entry for a $26 million dollar tax credit picked up in “one” of their acquisitions. That’s right folks, by buying Dash for $8.3 million, Rim will get a $26 million haircut on their taxes. They actually had to book over $8 million in revenue during the quarter to reflect the immediate gain on their investment. The tax loss alone represents a 300% (overnight) return on the acquisition. No wonder RIM doesn’t want to talk about it, Dash seems to be more of an accounting adjustment then an actual play at their technology.

While I can understand why Dash and Rim wouldn’t necessarily celebrate this transaction, lets hope that they are being honest with us about implementing Dash’s technology into their products. Allowing consumers to share information, in order to better understanding real time traffic could really help to push GPS technology ahead. It would be a shame to see Dash’s legacy relegated to an unnamed footnote in a business filing.

If you’ve ever wondered what my opinion on something might be, here is your chance. Contact me through the tip line and I’ll consider your question for a future column.

Does Dish Have The Antidote?

Jun 15

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, TiVo, TV | 7 Comments

I hate to admit it, but I’m feeling a little foolish right now. Last week, I raised the question of whether or not Dish was researching a hostile takeover of TiVo? In my article, I concluded that they might try, but that they’d never be able to afford the $7.5 billion poison pill that came with it.

Since then, I’ve spent more time researching the pill and realize that I made a terrible mistake. Not only is there an antidote, but Dish may already have it.

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this pill, but could never figure a way around it. It wasn’t until I asked myself a simple question, that the solution became so obvious. What would Charlie do?

Love him or hate him Dish CEO Charlie Ergen has a special kind of brilliance. His reputation as a fearsome litigator is legendary and more than once he has demonstrated his mastery for the fine art of negotiation. Over the years, his decisions have created huge growth for Dish (albeit at great risks.) Unfortunately, his penchant for the legal system may have finally caught up with him and now he finds himself struggling in quicksand with the prospect of having to buy rope from TiVo.

To get a better picture of his frame of mind, I turned to his own testimony from last February. (Via Mainer’s Law Library)

Q: Is the following an accurate statement, that Echostar would lose $90 million per month if it had to comply full with the terms of the injunction, assuming it’s properlty interpreted as requiring you to disable DVR functionality in the specified product lines?
Ergen: There would have been a time fame that, that would have been an accurate statement. Today that,
Q: Ninety –-
Ergen: Today it would be more than that. Today would be more than $90 million dollars
Q: And how much would it be a month today?
Ergen: Would be probably several hundred — It would be over several hundred million dollars, I don’t know exactly, I don’t have the figures in front of me, but it would be more today.
Q: Several hundred million dollars a month?
Ergen: It may be as much as several hundred million dollars a month.

I don’t know about you, but if I spent the last 30 years of my life building a business and all of a sudden was faced with the prospect of losing several hundred million dollars a month, it’s a good bet that I’d be willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that this doesn’t happen. I don’t care how big you are, after a few months, hundreds of millions turns into billions and after billions in losses vultures have a tendency to sweep in and pick off your carcass.

Even before we see how this plays out, S&P is already circling. From their June 10th assessment of Dish’s credit rating.

“With nearly $1.2 billion in cash and marketable securities and very moderate leverage for the current ‘BB-’ rating, Dish could easily fund the $103 million of new judgments and penalties without a ratings impact, it said. However, the longer term effect on the company’s credit profile would depend on the strategic path Dish takes to resolve the DVR issues, S&P said. If Dish were to enter into a licensing arrangement with TiVo, which S&P said was the most likely scenario, there would be no effect on Dish’s BB- corporate credit rating” [Note: Bold added by me]

If Mr. Ergen believes his own testimony, then his only frame of mind has to be one of desperation. He is left with only two solutions.

He can try and negotiate a settlement with an empty gun or he can go for an all-in bluff and try to buy TiVo in a dangerous gamble.

Now I don’t know whether or not TiVo has actually refused to settle with Dish, but if they really are serious about enforcing their right to NOT license their technology, then Charlie really only has one option. In my opinion, I see TiVo digging further into the trenches. Take a look at Tom Roger’s comments from the Q3 2009 conference call as a good example,

“We will pursue with great aggressiveness the resolution of these issues in a way that hopefully will lead to the imposition of the injunction but I just wanted to make clear that the right to appeal is not one without the ability of the court to handle this situation and bring it to ultimate resolution.”

Or if you want to get a closer glimpse into how TiVo feels about the injunction, take a look at TiVo’s most recent argument for why Dish doesn’t deserve a stay of execution,

“The right to exclude conferred by TiVo’s patent is empty if it can never be enforced. Since this Court entered its previous stay, TiVo has lost 25% of its DVR subscribers, while EchoStar’s have nearly doubled. Ex. 1 (Brunelle Decl. Ex. A). That harm can never be fully redressed through damages. Entry of yet another stay will undermine respect for district court process and severely prejudice TiVo.”

further in their response,

“EchoStar is a large, aggressive competitor, more than willing to pay damages (and face contempt charges) so long as it can continue to do as it likes Granting a stay here will distort the patent system by encouraging other infringers to make minor changes to their adjudicated products and then seek further stays in order to keep operating even after they are held in contempt. With deep-pocketed infringers, endless cycles of purported change and ensuing litigation will reduce the right to exclude to little more than a compulsory license—and one enforceable only through rounds of litigation that not only drain a patentee’s resources but allow rapidly-evolving modern markets to be shaped by infringing competition in ways that go far beyond monetary harm.” [Note: Bold added by me]

The more that I look at things from Charlie’s perspective, the more it becomes clear that he doesn’t have a choice in this scenario. He must buy TiVo. The future of his business would depend upon it.

This leaves just two questions, how much can he spend and how does he do it? If Dish currently has $1.2 billion in cash and short term securities, it would give them enough firepower to easily get 50% at recent market prices, but it wouldn’t be enough to pay for the poison pill.

Dish could probably raise another $2.5 billion before their debt would start to get too expensive, so for the sake of argument, let’s say that their budget is around $3.5 billion. When you consider TiVo’s tax losses, their cash on hand, and what Dish actually owes them in licensing fees (plus punitive damages ), they’d probably really only end up paying $2.5 billion to make this acquisition happen.

So if Charlie came to me and said, Davis here’s a pile of money I want you to engineer a hostile takeover, here’s how I’d do it

Since making a tender offer would trigger the pill, my only option would be to try and acquire more than 50% of TiVo’s stock on the open market before anyone found out about it. One problem I would face with this strategy is that as soon as I purchased more than 5%, I’d have a mere ten days to complete my acquisition before I’d be forced to tell the world about it (11 or 12 days if the deadline falls on a weekend).

Since this would make this strategy very dangerous, I’d want to wait as long as I could before trying to pounce. Once the judgment was final though, I’d move as quickly as I could to mask the accumulation with publicity from the verdict.

On day 2, I’d continue to buy heavy shares to try and simulate the appearance of quick profit taking. By the time day 3 rolled around, I’d slow things down so the market wouldn’t catch on to the significance of what was happening. Days 4 – 9, I’d continue to add, but in a very controlled and deliberate manner. It wouldn’t be until day 10 that I’d go bonkers and buy anything on the market because at that point every share I purchased would be one that I didn’t have to pay an extra $60 for.

Where my math was flawed when I was originally calculated the cost of TiVo’s poison, was that I didn’t consider the shares Dish wouldn’t have to pay a $60 dividend on (their own.) If they could accumulate 50% of the company for $1 billion, then they’d owe $3.5 billion to the remaining TiVo shareholders. If they grabbed 60% for a billion, they’d only be on the hook for another $3 billion in poison. If they could actually buy 70% of TiVo’s shares, they’d get away with a $3.2 billion total acquisition (the equivalent of $28 per share even after paying $71 to the shareholders who hold out.)

A price that seems reasonable given the gravity of their situation.

The danger in using this strategy is that just like a snake, Echostar would be most vulnerable when it was feeding. If the market (or TiVo) somehow got wind of this it could very well threaten Charlie’s ownership stake in Dish.

You see, TiVo has a provision in their pill that says if someone triggers the pill, but then can’t pay for it, they have to pay in stock worth .50 cents on the dollar. Based on Dish Network and TiVo’s current market caps, this would mean that if TiVo managed to choke Dish on an acquisition, they’d end up owning roughly 65% of Dish’s stock.

While there is no way for me to know whether or not Echostar really is in the process of a hostile takeover, there is evidence to suggest that this scenario is possible.

I don’t want to read too much into technical indicators, but if you look at TiVo’s money flow index, you’ll see that it spiked from a score of 50 to 90 following TiVo’s latest win. In 2006, TiVo’s money index hit 80 following the initial verdict, but it was already at 80 going into it. The money flow index measures the eagerness of buyers for a particular security. It looks at the high mid and low points that a stock trades at and takes into account the volume that buyers and sellers are trading at. Anything over 80 is usually considered over bought, but it would be impossible for anyone to achieve a hostile takeover without tripping this index off the charts. To put the significance of this score in perspective, you have to go back to the wild days of 2001 to find a time where TiVo’s money index was at a higher level.

The day after TiVo’s most recent court victory, their stock traded a record 38 million shares. They very next day TiVo saw 12.5 million shares change hands. To the man on the street, this may not mean anything, but for a stock that normally sees 1.5 million shares of action, this is extremely significant. Two days alone represented nearly 50% of TiVo’s total shares outstanding. The mainstream media never picked up on this story, but Bloomberg’s reporters knew enough to be incredulous when they found out how much volume TiVo was seeing post judgement.

Some will dismiss this spike in volume as speculators and day trading following a well publicized judgment, but I’m concerned that something much more sinister is happening. While TiVo did see 30 million shares trade hands following their 2006 verdict, the situation leading up to that spike in volume was very different. In the week prior to their 2006 verdict, they averaged 6 million shares per day as speculators clearly bet on the result of the trial. After the victory, there was heavy volume, but there was also heavy volatility as people cashed in their winning tickets. Over the course of two days, TiVo shareholders watched their shares jump from $8.05 to $9.80 and back down to $8.20 a share. Over the course of 8 days, investors traded an average of 6.6 million shares a day.

This time around has been very different. TiVo’s stock has been steadily increasing and continues to set higher highs and higher lows in most of their trading sessions. In the five days prior to their latest court win, TiVo averaged 2 million shares per day, but in the 8 trading days that have followed, they’ve averaged almost 10 million shares a day. To get a sense of the difference in volume between now and 2006, see the following graph.

We don’t know whether or not it was Dish or market forces that caused 50% of TiVo’s stock to trade on June 3rd and 4th, but we do know that these transactions took place. If Dish was in fact the buyer, I would guess that over the last 8 trading days, Dish probably has picked up a 45% stake in TiVo for about a half a billion. If this is the case, it would mean that they are still on the hook for another $4 billion.

Even if they were to pay $20 per share for the remaining 25%, they could easily hit a 70% target, assuming that they were willing to spend the half a billion that would be left in their bank account.

How could TiVo defend against this? They would need to poison the snake with more venom. Currently, they are authorized to conduct a secondary offering for up to 170 million additional shares. I wouldn’t recommend trying to go to market with all of those, but for every dollar TiVo raises, it would cost Dish $7 to make an acquisition.

If TiVo was to do a 10 – 30 million share offering in a secondary, it would add $700 million to $2.1 billion more to the cost of an acquisition. If they actually managed to catch Charlie while he’s feeding, they’d seize control over Dish Networks.

While this conspiracy theory is based on speculation and is admitedly a long shot, it’s possible that this could be going on. If TiVo sees the type of crazy volume it would take for Dish to get to the final 70%, I would hope that TiVo management would be cunning enough to contact their bankers and get those extra shares out into the market.

Either way though, it won’t take long to find out whether I’m looking like a goat or a genius on this one. If Echostar really is in the midst of a hostile takeover, we’ll find out today (June 15th), after the market closes. If we don’t see a 13-D filing, you can chalk this one up to crazy Uncle Freeberg chasing aliens again, but if by some wild chance I’m actually right, then David will have figured out a way to slay Goliath with little more than their wits and a pebble aimed squarely at Dish’s forehead.

Update – A hostile takeover may have been possible when I published my post this morning, but as of today’s filing deadline, Dish hasn’t disclosed a position in TiVo. This would make a takeover at this point highly unlikely unless we see volume spike again. I’d still like to see TiVo issue a few more shares to beef up the pill, but for now they should be out of the woods. Sorry for getting everybody excited, but it looks like I’m going to end up looking like a goat on this one. At least it was fun to think about the what if’s of trying to break the pill. Since I was wrong about the filing, I probably should go back and reconsider the health benefits of the tin-foil suit . . .

Dish Researching Hostile TiVo Takeover?

Jun 9

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Technology, TiVo, TV | 26 Comments

It’s been over 5 years since TiVo filed their patent lawsuit against Dish, but we’re finally reaching the endgame of what has been an epic chess match between the two companies. Between the he said/she said arguments that have played out in the press to the endless legal maneuvers by both camps, it has been a long and brutal battle for both. As a TiVo shareholder, I know that I’ve found the long delays especially frustrating.

In the latest development in this high stakes game though, TiVo has managed to pin Dish into a dangerous checkmate situation. With appeals quickly running out, Dish’s options are becoming increasingly limited. While things look pretty dire for Dish, I believe that they may try to play one more dangerous gambit before this game is up.

I think they might try to buy TiVo.

While looking through my traffic logs, I came across a very interesting visitor In 2006, I wrote an article referencing a poison pill TiVo implemented in 2001. Since Google loves bloggers so much, my story somehow ended up near the top of the page for the search term TiVo poison pill. Given recent analyst chatter that TiVo could be an M&A target, I’m not surprised that people would be interested in taking a closer look at the nuts and bolts behind the agreement, but I was surprised at where my visitor was coming from.

While there is no way for me to know who it was, someone at Echostar’s corporate HQ’s spent 25 minutes researching an article that I wrote on the topic. Their outclick took them to the legal document that contains all of the nitty gritty details on how the pill actually works.

Now, there could be any number of explanations for why someone at Echostar would be interested in TiVo’s anti-takeover provisions, but the most likely one is that they’re interested in making some kind of play at TiVo.

On June 4th, the Eastern District of Texas District Court announced that they were holding Dish in contempt for continuing to infringe on TiVo’s timewarp patent. (via Mainers’ Law Library) Dish may have been able to get a temporary stay on the injunction, but the eventual impact of the ruling could end up being devastating.

The order against them contains two crucial components, the first is a requirement to disable all infringing DVRs. For Dish to comply with this portion of the injunction, it will probably cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 – $400 million. This type of expense would hurt, but it wouldn’t necessarily put them behind the 8-ball.

The far more damaging portion of Folsom’s order is the infringement provision. This prevents Echostar from replacing these DVRs with other DVR set top boxes.

“The DVR functionality, storage to and playback from a hard disk drive, shall not be enabled in any new placements of the Infringing Products.” (bold added by me)

The inability to offer a DVR to their customers would put Dish at a severe competitive disadvantage. Furthermore, because Dish has now been caught trying to sneak a “replacement” DVR in through a redesigned back door, they now must seek court approval prior to deploying any new DVR solutions.

Now I realize that there are still a lot of people who haven’t adopted DVR technology yet, but for those who have, you know that once you get a sweet taste for time shifted entertainment, there’s no going back.

Survey after survey after survey has confirmed that people LOVE their DVRs and while I can’t speak for others, I know that if my television provider disabled my ability to record television, it would take less than a week before I found a replacement.

Dish doesn’t breakdown their current number of DVR subscribers, but during their most recent earnings call, Dish CEO Charlie Ergen acknowledged that the “majority” of their customers buy advanced DVRs and/or HD services. This would suggest that that as many as 8 million Dish subscribers could potentially lose access to DVR technology.

While the cost of replacing the set top boxes could hurt Dish’s earnings, the loss of even 10% of their subscriber base would do terrible things to their stock price. Customer defections and the inability to remain competitive could easily cost Dish shareholders, $3 – 4 billion in lost market cap.

Given the strength of TiVo’s position, several analysts have suggested that Dish may finally be ready to enter into a settlement agreement with TiVo and while forfeiting the game at this late stage would help to prevent an unmitigated disaster for Dish, I don’t believe that TiVo is willing to accept such a forfeit.

Instead I think TiVo is planning a North Korea strategy. For years, they’ve been unable to command respect in their industry and as more and more generic DVRs have hit the market, TiVo has seen their market share eaten away by larger competitors. Now that TiVo possesses a nuclear DVR patent, it opens up new avenues for “conversations” between them and their competitors.

A fat royalty check from Dish would be good for TiVo shareholders, but having the ability to strike fear into the heart of the MSO industry is worth considerably more in increased pricing power. Some may believe that a settlement is inevitable, but I believe that TiVo would have already entered into an agreement long ago, if they weren’t crazy enough to actually push the red button.

Even before TiVo’s latest legal victory, this bargaining power has enabled them to forge agreements with Cox, Comcast and DirecTV. Once companies like Time Warner and AT&T realize that TiVo is both ready and willing to put this kind of hurt on a business, it makes it a lot more palpable to swallow the carrot that TiVo offers through DVR partnerships.

If you assume that TiVo will eventually win this case and that they have no intention of settling with Dish, the only logical move left for Dish to try and make is an expensive acquisition.

After five years of litigation, I would hate to see Dish win this by seizing control of a company that they’ve done everything to squash. Fortunately for TiVo they should have a lot of leverage to negotiate. Their pill wouldn’t prevent an outright acquisition, but it would make it extremely expensive for someone to buy TiVo without the board of Director’s approval.

Based on my understanding of the complex agreement, in the event that Dish (or another acquirer) were to accumulate more than 15% of TiVo’s shares (or even announce the intention to acquire more than 15% of the shares), it would trip a provision that would entitle the other TiVo shareholders to a special $60 per share dividend This means that if Dish were to forcibly acquire TiVo, it would cost them $71 per share or close to $7.5 billion (more than Dish’s entire market cap.) If Dish tried to pay for the transaction in stock, TiVo shareholders would be entitled to $13.5 billion ($131 per share) in the buyout.

With TiVo’s stock currently trading at $1.15 billion ($11 per share), this type of premium would be too bitter of a pill for Dish to swallow.

While it’s possible that we could see Dish challenge the poison pill legally (I hear that they have an attorney or two working for them), the only other option that I can see around this restriction would be for Dish to somehow convince TiVo shareholders to get rid of the pill at next month’s annual shareholder meeting.

This would be a long shot in and of itself (and one that I’m not even sure would be allowed per TiVo’s bylaws), but this feat is made even more difficult when you consider the fact that you would have had to have been a TiVo shareholder prior to the most recent judgment, in order to be eligible to vote on this kind of initiative.

While I’m doubtful that Echostar would succeed in an attempt to acquire TiVo, at the very least it’s interesting to see them thinking about it.

Fear Of A MiKrosVft Planet

Jun 2

Posted by Davis in DivX, Matroska, Media, Microsoft, SA, Technology, VOD | 1 Comment

“I need not fear my enemies because the most they can do is attack me. I need not fear my friends because the most they can do is betray me. But I have much to fear from people who are indifferent.” – Russian Proverb

Now I know that most people don’t really care about the mechanics behind playing video files and I can’t say that I blame you for caring more about your content than the technology behind it, but while this post will get into some of the more mundane mechanics of the codec industry, I ask that you stick with me because behind the scenes a war is being fought for control of your very television.

This particular battle has been going on for over 10 years now and centers around something called a codec.

When J.D. Rockefeller set out to monopolize the oil industry, there were several crucial areas where he attacked. He knew that he couldn’t control all of the oil fields because it was literally bubbling out of the ground, but what he could control was the distribution method for getting oil to the end customer.

In building his monopoly he seized assets used to transport oil from raw material to the end consumer. Whether it was owning all of the oil pipelines, so that he could control what oil cost him, owning the railroads so he could dictate how far his competitors could reach or owning the distribution points where consumers bought kerosene to light their homes, he made sure that he had control over every aspect of it. This was good for Standard Oil investors, but wasn’t very good for competitors or consumers.

Online video may not seem like it has a lot to do with the oil industry, but if you look at it’s early development, there are many similarities. So much content is bubbling up that the real challenge isn’t finding video oil, it’s getting it to consumers. Instead of pipes, now we have internet access, instead of railroads there are CDN networks, instead of gas stations, there are operating systems ready to serve us 24 hours a day.

In all of these industries, competition has been limited to a handful of big companies, but the industry that I’m most interested is much smaller than any of these. In the grand scheme of things, codecs (and the filters that go along with them) are the refineries of the video world. They take digital signals and convert them into the flickering magic that appears on our screens. Consumers may not understand the technical details behind it, but they are a crucial chokepoint in your digital video experience.

This battle has been fought on many fronts, but in the end it always comes down to one issue. Those who think consumers should have a choice and those who think they know better. It’s about control over your entertainment experience. Who, What, Where, When, and How you are allowed to consume YOUR media. On one side, well funded corporations with huge financial stakes, on the other, an unorganized patchwork of misfit companies and an army of guerrilla volunteers desperately fighting for a better entertainment experience for all of us.

The war over how video is transmitted may not make it to the front pages, but how it turns out will be important for the success of digital video. In order to better understand how this battle is going, I reached out to interview one of the Colonels in this digital revolution.

Dan Marlin is the CEO and Co-Founder of CoreCodec. His company has built many of the tools necessary to play video files. Before starting his company, he worked for DivX and over the years has contributed extensively to the open source codec movement. He also sits on the board of the Matroska Foundation, an organization dedicated to enabling high definition digital video support for as many consumers as they can.

In our interview, we discussed the growing momentum behind the MKV format, his thoughts on DivX and the competitive landscape of the codec industry and had a passionate discussion around a controversial decision by Microsoft to prevent outside developers from using alternative filters in Window’s Media Player.

In regards to MKV, Marlin had many positives things to say about the momentum that they are seeing. When I asked him about interest in the format, he said that over the last 8 months, they’ve seen a “20 fold increase in the inquiries in regards to more details, about usage about enhancing the current feature set.”

This interest should mean good news for consumers. As more and more customers ask “where’s the MKV?“, hardware companies are starting to respond. When I asked Marlin about how long it would take before we see MKV reach critical mass he said,

“If you look at the adoption scale, you’d probably have to say that we’re at the Ubber Geek stage right now. It will probably take 2 – 3 years. We’re just starting to see the penetration now and it’s been three years since our last release. I would probably have to say two years. Not this Christmas, but the following Christmas you’ll probably start to see more devices.”

One of the more interesting things that came up during our conversations was some of the trends that Marlin is seeing in the MKV adoption curve. It’s no surprise that the anime community was one of the first ones to start using the technology, but I was surprised to learn that countries in Asia and Europe have been more enthusiastic in adopting MKV then in North America. In fact, the trends for MKV adoption mirror the original DivX adoption curve exactly. It’s almost as if the people who’ve been long time DivX users are the first ones to upgrade to an HD experience.

“Absolutely, as a matter of fact it’s mirrored exactly. You could look at DivX in the early days when I was there going back to 2001 and you can actually see the same adoption happening, the anime, the ripped releases from the AV heads, it’s mirroring it, but you have to ask why they are doing it? They are doing it because of the flexibility that it brings to what they’re doing. They can add, especially when it comes to some of the guys that rip DVD and the like and Blu-Ray, they kind of make it their own. They can add menus, there are menus out there that even though they are text, they do very basic things, but there can also be a ton of files inside the container itself, there are info files and pictures you can group.”

While Matroska was technically created by CoreCodec, Marlin told me that he has plans to spin it off into a foundation similar to Mozilla. They plan to offer sponsorships to companies that want to tap into their early adopter customer base. One of the things that I found fascinating throughout the interview was the openness behind such a transformative piece of technology. Instead of monetizing their creation, CoreCodec is building a business around the open source eco-system. Big media companies that believe you can’t build a business around “free”, would be well served in looking at how Core Codec has been able to position themselves by giving a good portion of their technology away.

“we looked at it not looking to make money and that wasn’t really the intention, but even what has been proven now and maybe not so much back then, open source and the ecosystem around open source, there can be profit. Even in a non-profit foundation or a not for profit foundation I should say, which the Matroska Foundation will eventually become, you know is pretty much the same thing. You still can be profitable and make money to support what you developed.”

When I ask Marlin about his thoughts on DivX and how they are positioned in the codec industry, his thoughts were bittersweet, “it’s a love-hate thing.” On one hand, having DivX adopt the MKV container does a lot towards making it a standard. It also helps to speed up the amount of time it will take to get into hardware devices. On the other hand, not a lot has changed since DivX and XviD split paths and now that the open source movement has taken the upper hand, he doesn’t like to see confusion between X.264/MKV and DivXHD.

“Obviously they’ve rethought what they had to do with H.264 which is a migration, but they’re not providing anything of value to what’s already out there. As a matter of fact, it brings more confusion than anything else and that’s the frustrating part because they have their own eco-system with certification and us as a solution provider like with CorePlayer or the CorePlayer platform itself is working with third party OEMs and they are asking questions in regards to DivX and DivXHD and we say the same thing we’ve been saying all along. DivX is Mpeg video and DivXHD is AVC video.”

Of all the topics that we discussed though, the most controversial was the decision by Microsoft to restrict how third party filters work within Windows media player.

To fully understand the issue, you need to know how your computer reads media files. When you click on your file, filters take a look at that data and tries to figure out what to do with it. If it’s audio, they’ll send the data to an audio decoder so your soundboard can play it. If it’s video, then it gets sent to a splitter where the audio stream and video stream are separated. From there a decoder looks at the video data, decodes it and sends it to a renderer for display on your screen.

The controversy revolves around how Microsoft prioritizes filters when you play back content. Currently, if you have several filters installed that can all handle the same job, WMP will look at the merit value of each filter and give preference to the highest one. Since you have the ability to prioritize which filters you want your computer to use, it allows you to create the ideal settings based on your hardware.

This comes in handy if you’re trying to play H.264 video in WMP and it happens to conflict with your video card. Since the user has control over the priorities, you’re able to create a better (more credible) configuration.

With the Windows 7 RC, Microsoft has taken away your ability to prioritize which filter you can use. From their perspective, they get a ton of complaints about filter problems and by making it a closed system it improves the experience for their customers. For the codec industry though, it will reduce the incentive for engineers to continue to work on filters because Microsoft has just essentially seized the entire filter market.

Microsoft will argue that because they allow people to install whatever filters they want on their own media players, that this restriction is somehow reasonable. After all, they’re not preventing customers from downloading another media player and configuring the settings anyway you like, they’re controlling their own product.

The problem with this argument though, is that while consumers have shown that they’re willing to download a codec, by and large, they’ve been very reluctant to download an entire media player. It’s a big commitment to mess with the default settings on Windows and because Microsoft bundles a copy of Window’s media player into every operating system they sell, it drastically minimizes the potential market that companies like CoreCodec, DivX and Nero can serve. This ultimately leads to less investment in codec technology and lower quality video for consumers in the long run.

Take a look for yourself at a real life comparison between video played using Media Foundation’s preferred filters and an open source combination. While the differences may be subtle, there is clearly better focus and definition in the open source solution. It might not be much, but it makes a huge difference when you put it on a 60″ screen. Today, you’d have the option of recreating the ideal settings in WMP, but with Windows 7 Microsoft is now in control.

While Marlin wouldn’t go as far as to accuse Microsoft of using their dominance over the operating system as a way of stifle third party codec competition, he did agree with me when I suggested that this may have more to do with preventing competition then securing their media player for consumers.

“You said it I didn’t, but essentially when it comes down to it, that’s what it is. It’s just frustrating that we all have to go through what we have to do and they could have provided an integrated solution without having to lock out third parties. Period.”

Now we can argue over whether or not Microsoft had an evil intent when they choose to shut down part of the codec industry, but regardless of the motives, competition is hurt by their decision to close media player to third party vendors. When I asked Marlin whether this would hurt his company or whether it was a dam in the river that would fork around the issue, he had conflicting thoughts.

““I think it’s going to be both. Microsoft will probably tell you that there is no problem and then the Core people will fork around it, but you’ve got to question the value of it though. You could still have embedded DirectShow filters, why have them under media foundation?”

Later on in the interview he extrapolates,

“I would say that as long as the default decoders are not set as the default and can be overwritten, I think we’re OK. The question is what steps will you have to go through and will Microsoft allow those steps. Right now you can edit it, they posted the solution online, but Microsoft could bypass that solution with the next RC. So that’s kind of like a wait and see thing. It does affect our business though, it does affect DivX’s business, it affects everyone’s business. “

Now Microsoft is free to run their business in anyway that they see fit and while the issue over filter compatibility within WMP may be an inch in the grand scheme of things, with each inch consumers lose a little bit more control. What’s so surprising to me about Microsoft’s behavior though, is how bold their actions are given the current regulatory climate.

Someone should nominate them for Alpha Dog of the Week because it takes giant brass balls to use your ability to bundle software, in order to shut down an entire industry, while you’re being accused accused of abusing your monopoly by bundling software within the operating system. If the EU understands even a little bit about codecs, I would expect them to be up in arms over this issue because it essentially proves the argument that they’ve been trying to make. Microsoft’s dominance in the operating system is having a detrimental effect on competition in other areas of the software industry.

It could very well be that Microsoft has good intentions here, but given their long history of doing whatever it takes to gain control of the codec industry, I can’t believe that this is by happy accident. This is a company that just spent a ton of money to exclusively webcast the Olympics in their Silverlight codec. The lack of MKV support in Windows 7 prompted the Hack 7 MC blog to write that “Microsoft’s support of the format is borderline neglectful.”

The decision to interfere with the priority filter settings is so Machiavellian I still don’t know what to make of it. My cold banker heart says yes! yes! yes!, but the consumer in me says dear God no. While I understand that these issues are hard to figure out and that there are many ways to look at them, I hope, for the sake of the entire codec community, that Microsoft will rethink their decision to exclude third parties from Windows media player.

For a complete transcript of my interview with Dan Marlin, please click here.

A Conversation With Dan Marlin

Jun 2

Posted by Davis in DivX, Matroska, Technology, VOD | 18 Comments

The following is a transcript of an interview I had with Dan Marlin, the CEO and Co-Founder of CoreCodec. For my thoughts and a recap on the review, please click here. My comments during the interview are in bold.

What exactly is CoreCodec and how does it relate to what you are doing with Matroska?

“Matroska is a container that our engineers developed some years ago. It is part of CoreCodec, I mean CoreCodec technically owns the rights to the trademarks and the like for Matroska. We have begun to form a separate Matroska foundation which will pretty much takeover from what we’ve begun to more of an independent, something along the lines of the Mozilla foundation, where they independently control the source code, but for right now CoreCodec is maintaining and helping to startup the Matroska foundation itself.”

CoreCodec also does for-profit work as well is that right?

“Absolutely”

Why did you go with such a radical open source license for Matroska then? Was that the only way you saw it coming together and competing or is it a reflection of your core fundamentals?

“Really it goes back to what our roots were. If you go back to even from when I started with multimedia when I was originally with DivX, I was one of the original people in DivX and we had what was called the OpenDivX decore, that was pretty much under an open source type of derivative license that I think was called the DivX open license or something along those lines.

It didn’t come out, it didn’t really pan out very well for them because I thought that the eco-system that they were trying, which they eventually came to realize, that the eco-system they were trying to go for just wouldn’t work with that license.

so in a lot of ways at Matroska we saw, well we saw a lot of opportunities in that AVI itself was an outdated technology. At the time, MP4 the container wasn’t very well defined. You’re going back again to about six or seven years ago now, so we looked at it not looking to make money and that wasn’t really the intention, but even what has been proven now and maybe not so much back then, open source and the ecosystem around open source, there can be profit. Even in a non-profit foundation or a not for profit foundation I should say, which the Matroska Foundation will eventually become, you know is pretty much the same thing. You still can be profitable and make money to support what you developed. It’s no different than Redhat, though they are more at the corporate level trying to support their customers or their derivative works of the Red Hat OS on Linux.

With the CoreCodec side of the business how are you helping other companies? Who would be an ideal customer for you and how are you helping them?

“With regards to Matroska, it would have to be implementation. While Matroska is open source, we also have a free BSD style license version of our library for playback. What that means is that you can still playback the content even though you may have a closed eco-system. We still allow you to integrate the technology into your closed eco-system, so that’s the difference there. We help third party solution providers integrate Matroska into their solutions. Some examples that are currently out there implementing would be LG, Panasonic, Toshiba and the like, more recently Western Digital with their hardware that they just released for multi-media playback.”

Over the last 12 months it seems like we’ve seen awareness of MKV really start to take off. Even some of the more mainstream technology writers are starting to make it a check list feature, has that surprised you? What are you seeing in terms of the interest around the container? Has there been a ramp up over the last 12 months?

“Oh absolutely, as a matter of fact we’ve probably seen a 20 fold increase in the inquiries in regards to more details, about usage about enhancing the current feature set. It was really designed from the very beginning and if I can go back to the conversation that some of us had here in the early days, it was designed for the next 25 years, in that no matter what the MPEG consortium came up with in regards to the spec for whatever might be the next gen including Mp4 as a container, it was really designed to go beyond that, it was designed to let the spec grow as the technology kind of grew at the same time and again that’s the whole point of it.

Part of the early days, going back to DivX, one of the biggest things that held DivX back was the AVI container. It’s really why DivX right now is adopting Matroska in what their efforts are, and we’re all for that, even though, I’m no longer with DivX, I wish any third party that wishes to adopt a technology like Matroska the best of luck.

I really think it’s only going to enhance what has been in the past, a frustrating experience for end users. In that Matroska, once adoption has come and the tools are there, people start to understand more about the difference between a codec and a container, the experience will be much smoother because there won’t be hacked flavors of AVI or this or that, they’ll just be standards. No difference than what MP4 is, but the difference I think is about control.

People feel that they have no input whereas we listen to all third parties. We adjust and adapt as needed, but the core code itself has not needed to change itself in three and a half years, so we have not needed to touch the container itself in well over three years now and again that’s a testament to the flexibility of what is in place. Now in the future, that’s going to grow obviously with 2.0, but we’re actually going to slow our development for 2.0 because of the adoption curve of 1.0 right now. Which will allow us to be a little more meticulous and listen to the customers, listen to the consumers, the OEMs and the integration providers and see what their needs are and then we’ll kind of adapt to it, so we’ve kind of slowed down a little bit in what will be the future version of Matroska just so that people can start to enjoy what’s already out there.”

With Matroska, because it’s a container it allows you to put various codecs in it. Does that create problems when you go to try and certify MKV with a CES company, where maybe it could play some MKV files, but not all of them?

It’s setup so that the structure within it is the codebase with the exception of only one or two formats which are only recent formats and I think one of them wouldn’t actually be seen at all. It’s pretty much setup, I don’t think you’re really going to see problems.

Now certification, that’s something that we’re just getting into now. We’ve put out there I think in our specs, we actually put out levels of certification what a mobile and desktop platform are going to need. We put that out there for comment and later on we will have some form of certification, but it’s more so for sponsors and things down that line where we’ll certify their hardware against a certain profile and allow them to use logos and the like for distribution on the device itself or on the box and things like that, so it’s more so the flexibility and the updates hasn’t needed it for awhile and I don’t think any existing formats, even the ones I briefly mentioned, their not pressing. I think one is E-AC3, but I think even the guys that discuss their current code will still support it.”

Given the momentum that you’ve been gathering, what do you feel the next step is? What needs to happen for the next stage of MKV’s growth?

“Well probably, more hardware. That’s where we see it. The growth in the past 8 months, I won’t even say 6 months, prior to Christmas 2008, we saw big growth and we see this year that the growth even will be much more explosive going into this year’s holiday season. So I think that would probably be the biggest thing that we would want and we’re also expanding out from the services we’re providing within CoreCodec. People are starting to look more closely at what we have with our other technologies with CoreAVC, CorePlayer and even next year with CoreMVC which is based on H.264 and CoreAVC. So we’re excited about doing that, helping others as an alternative to what is currently out there right now. Again, no different from what we’ve done in the past.

How do Core services work within an open source eco-system? You’re working on creating these filters for private customers right?

Yes, it depends, both You’ve got to take it two different ways or at least we look at it two different ways. One as a consumer and one more from the OEM/consumer electronics side. Each one is supported in different facets. On the consumer side you have our codecs themselves outside of the container, the Matroska container, we have all of our decoders CoreAVC, CoreAAC, we support Mpeg2, Mp3, etc. We pretty much have our own codecs very similar to Ffmpeg, except it’s closed source.

Now later on at some point, we do plan to open source pretty much our entire eco-system, if the business warrants it and right now it looks like does and that is because of the popularity of the CoreAVC as it is. We can still open source it and monetize it and also release our encoder as well, but at the same time we’re very cautious about what we do. We take steps appropriately. We do, again going back to the core of what we’ve always done, we open source a lot of our technology. Like Matroska, the Haali media splitter may not be open source, but it is free and we put it out there for everybody to use. Most of our other directional filters from CoreVorbis to our original CoreAAC is all open source and available on our website.”

Help me understand some of the terms out there that can be a bit confusing, for me at least. What’s the difference between a codec, a splitter and a filter?

“You can throw renderer in there as well. Each one plays a certain role in playback. Consider a container like Matroska a ball. Inside of that ball you can put anything. You can put pictures, you can put video, you can put audio, you can put text files, you can put pretty much, even executibles in there if you support it with your parser. It gives you unlimited possibilities to put stuff in that ball. Then you have the codec which allows playback. They are the physical means for playing back the audio or video. Now in between the playback and the file itself, you’re going to have to have a player that supports it and to be able to do so, you need a splitter and a renderer and that’s where the Haali media splitter comes in.

Technically what it does, it puts pin outputs to the audio and video and connects the playback to the physical software itself within the operating system and that’s on Windows, Linux is something different and CorePlayer is something different as well. CorePlayer has it’s own built in filters. It’s not DirectShow, it’s pretty much has it’s own internal decoder, renderer and splitter.

Each playback means is going to have it’s own and Mplayer does it by mimicing DirectShow where you physically take the Windows .dll and you’re able to take it over to Linux and kind of emulate DirectShow within Linux. It’s hard to understand, but once you start to use it a little bit more and you start hearing the terminology you become much more familiar with it, but just know that each part plays a very key role in processing the playback of audio and video.”

Looking at the step forward to Window’s 7 that is coming out, there’s been a lot of positive press in terms of native codec support and the h.264 and AAC support. A lot of people would say this is a good thing, that this is going to make the codec experience more seemless for consumers. Why should anyone care about Windows locking down their filters and is Window’s 7 really bad for the codec industry or is this something where the good outweighs the bad?

“It really depends on how you look at it. If you’re a consumer, absolutely. It’s a controlled eco-system, it’s no different than what Apple does with the iPod or even the iPhone where they’re trying to control the experience for the end consumer. For technology companies, however that has a very large investment in what they’re doing as a service provider for their individual solutions, it’s bad.

Going back to our case with CoreAVC, our H.264 filter, we have people that have purchased it, consumers, OEMs that have purchased it and to have to shut out what is something that people have come to expect, ie. the flexibility of being able to add filters or add playback filters on their own, I think is bad.

You should always give them the choice.

I understand the point of trying to control the environment. I’m sure that one of the largest problems that Microsoft deals with when it comes to Window’s media player is people complaining that their multimedia doesn’t play. They’re trying to integrate that, it does make sense from a business case, but to have to shut out, under the guise, maybe of saying that it is a matter of controlling it, I think we can pretty much say that, or guess here, I don’t want to overstep myself, that it may be a guise and that may be in lieu of control.

It has to do with DRM and if you think about the formats that have been shut out, it’s AVC or H.264 and it has to do with AC3, this is what’s in Media Foundation itself. Now Media Foundation is a higher class replacement for DirectShow, in all honesty, it’s DirectShow, that’s all it is.

So they basically used their own filter and are now saying that we’re going to control the codec at the filter level and anybody who wants to use a different filter, you can do that, but you can’t do it on our player, you have to build your own application?”

“Right and there are some work arounds where people are hacking the registry and are trying to come up with bypasses where it overwrites the priorities for media foundation so when somebody clicks an h.264 file, that it actually will open up with a third party filter, DirectShow. The point is, there’s no documentation, or very limited documentation and there’s not even clarification.

Even Microsoft is confused in this case.

If you take Silverlight for example, Ok lets do a comparison with Adobe. Adobe has the Adobe media player and the like. They all share the same architecture essentially. Whether it’s Adobe Air, they all interangle amongst each other, whereas Microsoft’s Silverlight has it’s own collection of decoders within it and does not share the embedded ones that are on the OS. It’s kind of confusing and goes against what they should be doing.

If they’re truly trying to control it, meaning yeah that’s OK that Silverlight is a stand alone product, but if they’re going for the largest control then why aren’t they sharing the Media Foundation codec within Windows 7, within Silverlight? Maybe I could see stuff like XP, Vista making sense, but it doesn’t in Window’s 7, they should be sharing the same architecture and again, I don’t know I would probably say that the argument is going to come for control for their users experience, but I would probably have to lean towards it being more in line with DRM.

It’s about control for secured content.

Do you think DRM is the reason why Silverlight hasn’t been made portable? I mean isn’t the solution that Matroska is solving partly because there isn’t a high def portable format out there?

“You know, I’ve heard people talk about that, but I don’t really know about that. I just think that it’s almost about staying the course, but trying to migrate to something new at the same time and I just don’t know if the flexibility of being able to get things like Matroska into what they have, would work. How would you even get Matroska into Silverlight?

I don’t know

“I don’t know either and we have some of the top guys over at some of the forums like Doom9 and you have some of the engineers from Microsoft kind of chatting about it and as long as we’re putting the thought in their head, I’m hoping that it’s going to play a role in their future decisions. Not just for Matroska, but even for third party decoders like CoreAVC or DivX or PowerDVD or Nero or any of those other third parties.”

Looking at that piece of the eco-system, it seems like there are a lot of MKV files out there and now that we’re beginning to see more hardware devices support it, how far away are we from software solutions where you can start editing files or is that not even related to your goals with MKV?

No, it absolutely is, in fact that was one of the keys of what we’ve always done. You have AVIMux or MKVtoolnix which, is probably one of the most advanced tools, it is THE authority when it comes to mixing and creating Matroska files. That was a very key part of Matroska from the very beginning. We wanted to unify, or mirror some of the stuff that we’re doing with CorePlayer. Even CoreAVC is a single unified core for every operating system and Mosu with what’s he’s done and even Steve or some of our lead engineers, what they designed from the very beginning, is to be able to do that for adoption purposes. That way there were no restrictions, Linux OSS, Windows Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, even though it doesn’t really matter, it will create outputted formats supported on all operating systems and the tools for creating Matroska and editing Matroska is no different.

They’ve evolved over the last five years as much as the format has not evolved. The tools are the complete opposite I should say. They’ve evolved with at least a dozen versions every single year whereas the container hasn’t really needed to change. That’s a key to our success. Again, all under the same type BSD license where they can take the source code and integrate into the product, whatever that product might be.

They’re not required to pay royalties or licensing, all we want is for people to adopt the format itself, that’s the key to the success of it.

It seems like there are going to be three standards for downloadable media. The Silverlight solution, The Apple solution and the open solution that people can go towards. Recently, it seems like a lot of the hardware providers are partnering with studios to do streaming deals and the hardware is more about incorporating YouTube and Netflix into the devices then full portability for consumers. How long do you think it will take for mass adoption of MKV and having a serious penetration level where most of the devices out there have to support to?

If you look at the adoption scale, you’d probably have to say that we’re at the Ubber Geek stage right now. It will probably take 2 – 3 years. We’re just starting to see the penetration now and it’s been three years since our last release. I would probably have to say two years. Not this Christmas, but the following Christmas you’ll probably start to see more devices.

Even with companies like DivX putting DivXHD and the like, but we’re not convinced that DivXHD is going to succeed at all. It really is just a rehack of H.264. It’s no longer DivX. DivX was a file format and they’ve done nothing different with this, they just have the eco-system with their hardware partners for when they upgrade. I don’t know, I’d probably have to say within the next year and a half, we’ll be at a more critical mass.”

DivX adoption of MKV helped to solidify support in creating it as a standard, but as far as what DivX is trying to do with it, do you see a solution there or do you think that they have to reinvent their business as DivX SD becomes less popular? Where do you feel that they are positioned in the codec space?

“Well they have. Obviously they’ve rethought what they had to do with H.264 which is a migration, but they’re not providing anything of value to what’s already out there. As a matter of fact, it brings more confusion than anything else and that’s the frustrating part because they have their own eco-system with certification and us as a solution provider like with CorePlayer or the CorePlayer platform itself is working with third party OEMs and they are asking questions in regards to DivX and DivXHD and we say the same thing we’ve been saying all along.

DivX is Mpeg video and DivXHD is AVC video.

You can still say DivX name, just put a disclaimer saying blah blah blah, there’s no difference. Now DivX would probably argue with that and say they have file specific format stuff, and they do if you talk about the DMX menus, which they do have or they have Sub-X, which is their subtitle format and yeah that’s proprietary to their decoder and for them to be able to playback those file formats, but do they really bring anything of value to the table? No.

We support sub-titles in Matroska in .KF, so any kind of SSA or other sub-title formats we already support and the menu system is already out there for the 1.0 menus. You can create menu overlays right now within Matroska.

In a lot of ways, it almost seems like they’re back at the Xvid/DivX split where you have something where there is now this open source solution and correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re Toshiba and want to support MKV in your products does that cost them anything at all?

“With DivX sure”

No, no, no, recently JVC had an MKV box without DivX, did it cost them anything at all to include Matroska support?

“Zero.”

So that’s very disruptive when you look at the eco-system and it goes back to the question of you’ve got these closed sourced solutions where you’re building a business and making money, but then you’ve created this open source solution. Is that because the only way to take on Microsoft and Apple is to keep it open and you need that help or is it more that you wanted to future proof your own container?”

“It wasn’t so much container it was more or less a need. The limitations on AVI as a container were very frustrating for engineers to be able to do things that they wanted very easily, you could not. Lets say you wanted to add or remove elements from within the container, for example an audio track where you wanted to be able to add an additional audio track. You couldn’t do that with AVI easily, you could hack it, but there weren’t tools to be able to extract.

With our tools you can extract or remove or replace very easily, so it wasn’t a move against Microsoft by any means, it was more of a necessity of what we wanted and then once we found out what we wanted, we tried to look at the future and see what we can do to extend the adoption for that 20 – 25 year period and we feel right now considering the feedback that everybody’s provided over the past few years and the fact that we haven’t changed for the past few years that we’ve kind of accomplished that.

Now to monetize it? The whole point wasn’t really to monetize it. We will with some of the stuff we’re doing, we have contractors that go out and help out and integrate within CoreCodec by helping third parties and that’s great and with the Foundation that will change a little bit because of the sponsors, but it’ll be no different than XMPP or Mozilla where you have sponsorship levels.

It gives you funding to do marketing, so that you can get people interested

Yeah, you want to be able to advertise. We also want to be able to further our eco-system, not only with Matroska, but also with CoreCodec and some of the stuff around other technology that we’re doing and we want to be able to provide that so having that will help us continue to stay in business and continue to further evolve the technology.

Providing the logos and the certification for those levels will definitely help to that point and cause less confusion in the marketplace, which again I feel that DivX is and will continue to cause. Again we’re not sold, they’re going against everything that we have tried to put out there, but again I understand it.

What’s to differentiate an MKV file that was created with DivX tools vs. Us? The only thing we can do is warn the user. We can detect it in the header of the file that was created and we can say you’re trying to play back a DivXHD file and this file may not be supported. We’ll continue to play it back in our eco-system with CorePlayer. With the filter we can do the same thing, we can warn the user that it was created with the DivX tools and it may not be supported because it may not be and DivX will try to tell you that everything is compliant with Matroska and I’m sure that it is, but that’s just what they’re saying. We’ve already identified stuff that’s not compliant and we’re reporting back to them and it’s good to have a type of relationship with them.

There’s a bit of a dichotomy there. It sounds like one hand you’re competitors, but on the other hand they’re ability to get this out into their ecosystem could really benefit the container as well?

Yeah, it’s a love-hate thing, same thing with Microsoft really. I wish them luck. I think that what they’re doing is great for the container. It shows that we were right all along. Hacking AVI was not good and Matroska was built for the future and I’m glad for that, but at the same time I don’t want them to ruin something for the consumers or confuse consumers anymore.

That’s my only concern. I wish them luck. When I left DivX, I left them wishing that they could have done better and I’m glad to see that they made something of a good move, but the question is how will it hurt in the long run.”

They made a splash, but where they’re going is what everyone is trying to figure out right now?

“What they have going for them is the current partnerships with the companies that they have and that’s a great great thing and again I just feel that under the guise of saying that it’s DivX and DivX only is what the third parties need to realize. Most of them aren’t stupid please, the third parties whatever companies you mention, they all know.

They have to see some value in the certification in order to spend the money so if it’s not there it won’t shake out that way.

“Absolutely and again you have to question the true certification and the cost for that certification. I’m not going to sit here and spit out numbers that they charge to certify, but the value is about control. They’re looking to control the experience for the customer, for that third party. That’s going to become less and less of an issue over time, especially with faster hardware coming into play and even TVs and the like, I’m not sure if you saw the latest TV reviews from Google?”

I saw that you have an LG TV coming out, but that’s thru USB stick right, not thru an ethernet connection?

“Yeah, but the speed of the menu system is horrible, it’s bad.”

So there is this trade off where you need the chips to be a certain speed in order to support your format?

“Yeah, but like with anything that will become less of an issue. In the mobile market CorePlayer excels because of the speed of the player and that’s because it’s written for 386, we write at a very low level, so when you start taking bloated code and start applying that to something that doesn’t have a lot of CPUs or dedicated CPU cycles, that’s when you start to realize the same performance. Going in it’s favor though, you do have hardware catching up especially when they have to upgrade to H.264. With TVs, it’s no different from some of the stuff they’re doing. Even with CorePlayer it’s already integrated with some third parties for TV usage, so that’s great for us and what we’re doing, but all we’re doing is providing the multimedia framework for playback on the TV itself and the user interface with CoreUI.

Going back to the Window’s 7 issue real quickly, do you think the decision to freeze out the outside filters, is that going to hurt the codec industry, is that going to result in less competition or will this be another case where there’s a dam in the river and the river forks around it?

“I think it’s going to be both. Microsoft will probably tell you that there is no problem and then the Core people will fork around it, but you got to question the value of it though. You could still have embedded DirectShow filters, why have them under media foundation?

Because you can lock competition out, people won’t download other media players they will download codecs.

That’s the most frustrating thing. Then to not provide the information needed in order to overwrite, obviously we can now the hacks are out there, guys have already posted the registry key that we can kind of use, but what we’re doing here is we’re waiting. They’re not providing us with any of the information that we need now, so we’re in a wait and see mode. We’re in RC-1 right now with Windows 7 we’ll have to see with RC. Maybe they’ll post more information.

It sounds like this isn’t so much a threat to your ability to do business, but rather a lot more man hours, a lot more work to get this worked out?

“Yeah, I would say that as long as the default decoders are not set as the default and can be overwritten, I think we’re OK. The question is what steps will you have to go through and will Microsoft allow those steps. Right now you can edit it, they posted the solution online, but Microsoft could bypass that solution with the next RC. So that’s kind of like a wait and see thing.

It does affect our business though, it does affect DivX’s business, it affects everyone’s business.

When you can’t have filters within your application work properly . . . whether anybody realizes it or not, there’s mass adoption going for Windows 7. I can tell you that the demographics from our website, the ubbergeeks that are early adopters, I can tell you right now that the people running XP and Vista jumped to Windows 7. A huge percentage of them, probably 75% of them are all on Windows 7 and this is just since the RC came out.

It’s going to become an issue very fast, much more so than anybody thought. We need some kind of answers and I guess you’re not really going to get them right now from Microsoft. They are on our forums talking a little bit chatting back and forth with Haali, Steve and myself, so it’s good to see some dialog, but we’re still not getting any answers and I don’t expect that to change.

It seems like it’s an issue that affects your industry quite a bit, but it’s hard for people to see past that just because it’s not as visible.

“It’s definitely not as visible, but when people start screaming . . . . we’ll probably see that, if they are planning on releasing Windows 7 by Christmas . . . It’s going to be ‘great’ fall.”

I know that when DivX first came out, it was released in Europe and there was big adoption in France and to a certain extent spread geographically from there. Have you seen similar trends with MKV?

“Absolutely, as a matter of fact it’s mirrored exactly. You could look at DivX in the early days when I was there going back to 2001 and you can actually see the same adoption happening, the anime, the ripped releases from the AV heads, it’s mirroring it, but you have to ask why they are doing it?

They are doing it because of the flexibility that it brings to what they’re doing. They can add, especially when it comes to some of the guys that rip DVD and the like and Blu-Ray, they kind of make it their own. They can add menus, there are menus out there that even though they are text, they do very basic things, but there can also be a ton of files inside the container itself, there are info files and pictures you can group.

It’s creates a more interactive experience for consumers?

“Yeah and is that different than .divx? it is, but again, it is what it is. They’re looking for something that has a hacker edge to it and not that Matroska was really created for that, but we’re glad to see adoption no matter where it occurs and that kind of pushes hardware companies to do the same. They’re getting their customers asking why isn’t MKV support in there? Look at Sony, why isn’t there MKV support in the PS3? It’s free, they should add it, same thing with the Xbox 360.

Why do you think that the hacker community choose MKV for the Blu-Ray rips?

“Probably because of rips support, we started to see it right off the bat really. A huge Japanese following with Matroska back in probably 2004, somewhere right around there. We saw that right off the bat, the anime people jumped right on it.”

Do you have any sense as to why anime seems to be so far ahead of the curve when it comes to online video?

“We’ve actually had this discussion internally. I wish I could answer that, you could say it’s geographic and that the Asian market is faster to adopt cutting edge technologies, but at the same time why is China still using Real video? It could be argued both ways.

I would tend to think that they just look for something that’s flexible to their needs and I think that’s what Matroska is providing just like DivX did back in the early days with quality video. It was night and day vs. anything that was prior to that. I think Matroska brings the same thing to the table, but we do it with a little bit more flexibility than what they can do with the files themselves, being able to attach multiple files within the container.

What do Matroska fans have to look forward to next? In the next 3 – 6 months, are we going to see more hardware coming out?

“Oh Yeah!”

Is 2.0 going to be rolling out or is that further down the road?

2.0 like I said, we’ve definitely pushed it out for awhile because were going to hang back and let 1.0 get the adoption. You’ll probably see things finalized with MKS/MKV/MKA so there’s support within the web browser itself by default. Within all web browsers, Safari and the like. The application type will be set. That will be coming in setting us up for maybe tweaking it for some more menus.

We’re also talking about adding a bit more menu work into 1.0 and we’ve already done some work prior to 2.0 which is a major part of Matroska technology called EBML. We’ve already completed EBML 2.0, as a matter of fact EBML 2.0 is a complete rewrite of 1.0 which is in Matroska 1.0. It really provides us greater flexibility for what we will be doing for Matroska 2.0. At the same time, it uses the technologies that we created here at CoreCodec and utilizes those technologies within EBML which is CoreC which is our AVC library language. Going along those lines is what we’re planning for 2.0.

It’s exciting, you guys are at the heart of something pretty big here I think and to be part of that is neat. Since this is your 2nd go around is there anything that you think you’ll do differently from when you were at DivX?

“Yeah, it has to do with playback. While Matroska for us is great, we’re obsessed with fluid playback no matter what it is, including Matroska, so right now our main goals are to extend the eco-system, the CorePlayer eco-system even further and then be cutting edge with Matroska as we roll out our 1.x version and also 2.0 and that’s pretty much it. We’re excited to be able to provide that for the consumers and our OEM customers.”

Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection