Napster Lives, and Video's Next

Cable World, March 12, 2001 by Richard Cole

Cable should get ready

Napster is dead. Long live Napster.

U.S. District Judge Marilyn Paters decision in San Francisco may ultimately end Napster as we have come to know and love -- or hate -- the music file swapping service, although she stopped short of draconian measures that would have shut down the site immediately.

Her preliminary ruling placed a large share of the burden on the recording industry, rather than Napster, to determine which song copyrights were being violated and inform the Web site.

Some grumble that the ruling, in effect, forces the victim to tell the thief what not to steal, but it also recognizes that Napster and its 50 million fans exist and cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Don't forget the videocassette recorder was once banned by the very same 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld Patel's initial order, only to be reversed later. If Napster could have legitimately claimed it had no knowledge of what was being swapped, Patel might well have concluded that peer-to-peer file swapping was no more illegal than exchanging videocassettes of The Sopranos with a neighbor.

Clearly the music industry isn't convinced file swapping is dead. Napster has its deal with Bertelsmann and has negotiated with other recording companies to come up with a model that will work. Some artists are fighting to get their music on Napster, and others are using the service to promote their albums, with some evidence of success.

The television and cable industries may not care about Dr. Dre and Metallica, but they have seen Napster as a disturbing preview of video swapping services that are already springing up on the Internet, Video, of course, is far more bandwidth hungry than MP3 and other audio files, but the rise of broadband and the prospect of fiber-to-the-home will drastically change that equation.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said a two-hour movie that takes 587 minutes to download on an ISDN line needs only 35 seconds on a high-speed fiber-to-the-home connection -- faster than it now takes to download a Britney Spears cut from Napster.

So what to do? It's impossible to ignore the phenomenon -- or the market. Big Champagne, which monitors Napster and the peer-to-peer market, estimates each person using the service has 500 MP3s on his or her computer hard drive. That's a lot of dedicated downloading, even with a high-speed connection, and most of Napster's participants are dial-up surfers. In other words, if you offer it, they will come.

In the hours after Patel's latest decision, U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., chairman of the House Commerce Committee, urged the music industry to work with Napster to concentrate on harnessing its obvious attractions. The Napster show has given cable operators a glimpse of video's potential future, and they should be designing just such a harness themselves.