It’s a great time to be a gamer. There have never been so many different ways to indulge in fun. Gamers now include everyone from soccer moms to celebrities, and this broadening audience has helped create new genres and gameplay options. While the gaming community has grown over the past three decades, so have the pirates; the Internet has made it easy to make unauthorized copies of games and share them with others. To prevent piracy, many game publishers have introduced steadily more rigorous copy protection mechanisms called DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management depending on your perspective.

DRM in games has evolved over time. In the 1980s, you might be asked to type in a word from a random page in the game manual to verify that you owned a legitimate copy. In more recent years, DRM required that you insert the original CD every time you started a game, activate the game online before you could play, or install verification software. None of these measures really worked, though, and so the focus of copy protection has gradually shifted from preventing casual copying to making the game tamper-proof. Last month, Ubisoft upped the ante with the introduction of several PC games (Assassin’s Creed 2, in particular) that require a constant connection to its company servers while you play. Because there is no benefit to players to being connected, the requirement met with a lot of skepticism before the games’ releases.

The Ubisoft case illustrates one of the biggest problems with DRM: locking your games down tends to inconvenience actual customers more than the pirates. Ubisoft’s gamble brought the company bad press. First, the DRM on Assassin’s Creed 2 was partially cracked with two days of its release, suggesting the new restrictions were ineffective. Then  the company’s online authentication servers went offline during the first week, leaving many legitimate users unable to play. After initially claiming that the outage was due to “exceptional demand,” Ubisoft blamed the downtime on a denial-of-service attack. Because there are so many different ways to mitigate those attacks, the downtime suggests that Ubisoft did not want to bother with investing in a robust infrastructure to maintain its game authentication service. The company is sticking to its guns, however, and showed no contrition on either its Twitter feed or any of the posts on its official forums.

Outside of the obvious suggestion—don’t patronize companies who treat customers like this—it’s hard to see real solutions. Buying the game and then downloading a pirated copy to support the company but avoid personal inconvenience doesn’t tell the company you object to its protection mechanisms. Similarly, pirating the game only gives the company further grounds on which to claim the need for more restrictions. So, what’s a gamer to do?

The Politico newsroom inside News Channel 8

Every time that I step into a newsroom, I remember what it was like to live off of that electricity in the air when I was at NBC News.  It was the human buzz of stressful inquiry as events incessantly unfolded before our journalistic eyes.

We’ve come to believe that this buzz is much diminished in the waning days of traditional journalism.  But I’m seeing some signs of life as I travel around the northeast this month.

Local TV (Americans’ number source for news) has long been criticized for considering their web presence as an afterthought.  At Washington D.C.’s Newschannel 8, they’re launching a new website in June that will merge their cable news channel with their local station.  And rather than having TV feed the web, the station manager, Bill Lord, told me that the web will feed TV.  It will be text plus video plus citizen journalism all in one place,” he said.  They’ll also be hiring 100 local bloggers.  “We’re flipping the model.”

Read more…

On April 16, 2010, the Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) program will be hosting TEDx Seattle at the Pacific Science Center. This regional event, independent from but endorsed by TED, aims to “bring together great minds in creativity, scholarship, and entrepreneurship to discuss the possibilities and prospects of social development enhanced through information technologies.” The theme of the conference is “Convening Community Through Social Technologies: Stories from Puget Sound to Cape Town.”

A limited number of tickets are now available. To apply for one, go to http://tedxseattle.com/attend/. Attendees will be selected by lottery and notified on or about March 24.

Confirmed speakers at TEDx Seattle include award-winning science fiction author Greg Bear, Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh, acclaimed photographer Amanda Koster, and Fiona Lee, the Africa Project Manager for Google.

“My passion is to create visuals and sound scenes that take you on the spot with a band or an era.”—Michele Myers

MCDM’s Emerging series continues with an interview with Michele Myers, Producer of KEXP documentaries. KEXP’s current ten-part radio documentary, Blues For Hard Times, features UW Music History professor Larry Starr. Past documentary series, from Portraits of Post-Punk to Pop Goes Electronic to Civil Rights Songs, have covered a wide range of musical genres.

The interview with Michele Myers will be streamed on the MCDM Livestream Channel. Tune in on Friday, March 12, 2010 at 12:00 P.M. (PST).

About KEXP

KEXP Documentaries

The money quote from Hal Varian’s presentation to the Federal Trade Commission, according to TechCrunch, was this: “newspapers have never made much money from news.”

But for me, the kicker is this data point from slide #3:

Subscriptions account for 3% of revenue on average

Read more…

The other day I received an email appeal from Free Press, “a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to reform the media,” to urge the FCC to end unreasonable penalties for switching cell phone providers or cancelling service.

Free Press’ mobile phone campaigns fly under a “Free My Phone” banner and feature a cell phone angelically equipped with white wings. For this specific campaign, though, the phone has been retouched with an angry facial expression and the indecorous exclamation “ETF, WTF?” The ETF stands for the “early termination fees” charged by cell phone carriers. And you know what the WTF stands for.

Free Press is fuming that “carriers still force us to pay outrageous penalties — up to $350 — if we cancel our phone service or switch carriers. There’s one question on everyone’s mind: WTF?” (Not everyone may phrase it that way, but it’s certainly a good question why termination fees are so high. After all, if you want to cancel your cable service, providers don’t hit you with exorbitant fees.)

Apparently, the FCC is asking the same question (though, perhaps, without the “WTF?”) Read more…

To support disaster relief efforts after this morning’s magnitude-8.8 earthquake in Chile, the Mobile Giving Foundation has announced the following text donation campaigns:

Text the word “CHILE” to 25383 to donate $10 (Habitat for Humanity)

Text the word “CHILE”  to 20222 to donate $10 (World Vision)

Text the word “CHILE” to 52000 to donate $10 (Salvation Army)

Text the word “YOUTH” to 20222 to donate $10 (UNICEF)

100% of your donation goes to the recipient charity, and the donation appears as a charge on your carrier bill, standard rates may apply. Additional campaigns will be announced here.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/todosnuestrosmuertos/

Related on Flipthemedia.com: Startup City: Mobile Giving Foundation

I’ve been thinking about business models for online content (text and images), given Apple’s introduction of the iPad and Amazon’s infamous battle with Macmillan. I’ve argued that digital subscriptions should be less than their analog counterparts, basing my argument in large part on the fact that traditional print is vastly more expensive than digital distribution.

I’ve been wrong. At least in the short run. Read more…