Vobile: financial difficulties?
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- We had an interesting email, today. It centers on Vobile founded in 2005, “to help content owners — including movie studios, television networks, music labels, and independent content producers — track their valuable content and prevent unauthorized use, while enabling them to collaborate with and help monetize emerging digital distribution channels,” it says on its site.
A paidContent report says Vobile received a, “sub-$10 million investment round from AT&T and Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, according to the WSJ.”
But according to the email, which says it’s from a Vobile employee, it, “Cries up wine” but, “sells vinegar” and moreover, may in fact be struggling.
‘Crushing illegal streaming’
“Although videos distributed via peer-to-peer file sharing networks is focused on downloaded content, piracy is going to shift from downloads to streaming content in 2009,” forecasts Michael Hatamoto in CD Freaks.
Quoting Forrester Research’s James McQuivey, it goes on »»»
Streaming piracy allows viewers to watch copyrighted content immediately without the need of installing a program to download and play the content. As an example, McQuivey points out he used Megavideo.com to watch the first few minutes of Madagascar 2, though he didn’t watch the entire film due to personal ethics.
The industry needs to make legitimate viewing a reality users are willing to adopt in the future. McQuivey’s report ended with the following statement:
“Crushing illegal streaming will be even harder than crushing P2P sites. We don’t recommend that the industry give up, however. Instead, we think automated content identification systems from companies like auditude and Vobile, Inc. do an increasingly reliable job of finding infringing content, making it easier for studios and broadcasters to respond quickly to pirated streams around the world.”
The Federation Against Copyright Theft’s Eddy Leviten would agree.
During Stopping Digital piracy: Strategy and Tactics, a pep talk for industry executives sponsored by Fact and Warner Brothers Entertainment, Europe, “the entertainment cartels have now moved far beyond simply accusing their own customers of being criminals and thieves, claiming sharing a movie or music online is exactly the same as stealing it from a retailer,” p2pnet reported, going on »»»
“Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney [read Hollywood] and Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG [read the Big 4] are, unbelievably, now even folding borrowed and viewed movies and music into their statistics.”
That figure, “has gone up dramatically,” he stated, declaring, “We can safely say that people in the UK are engaging in piracy more, much more, than they were previously.”
Fact will also be, “looking a lot more at streaming when we do the research for next year” said Leviten, because, “Certainly, the proliferation of those sites has caused us anguish,” he said.
Vobile’s name comes up in this context in a post in The Inquirer, which says:
“The movie Mafia is lobbying US President-Elect Obama’s transition team to make Internet filtering a priority in the next administration to block illegal file-sharing of films and television shows,” it says, observing, “If that proceeds, it will be a costly boondoggle that won’t even work.”
Further down, “To support its campaign for Internet filtering, the MPAA requested views and information from academia and technology companies,” it says, naming 11 universities and companies which responded.
Among them was Vobile.
But according to the email, which quotes an employee at its China operation, Vobile’s vaunted search technologies are somewhat exaggerated and in fact, “the company found a set of people to search by manpower, though they dare compare themselves to google”.
A ‘pile of people’
“Hey folks, Vobile isn’t dead yet, which means I still have a job for the time being, but we’re running on vapors,” says the email cited earlier, going on:
“Yangbin ( Yangbin Wang - CEO, upper right) is on the money hunt but I keep hearing he’s not having any luck. So I’m job hunting.”
It includes a number of quotes from the Chinese employee who among other things is highly critical of working conditions, there, stating emphatically, “it shows no respects to human rights”.
The email says Vobile, “related” to the Zhejiang province government and Zhejiang University, “still depend on a pile
of people searching with manpower. the technology is bad, so be it. but they solemnly vow themselves to exceed google.”
It also has the Chinese employee stating , “overtime hardly in the company. and they call it free will overtime.”
Stay tuned.
paidContent - Anti-Piracy Firm Vobile Raises Sub-$10 Million First Round From AT&T, Disney’s Steamboat, November 13, 2007
CD Freaks - Piracy to shift from downloads to streaming content, December 19, 2008
p2pnet reported - FACT: a third of all Britons are online pirates, November 14, 2008
The Inquirer - MPAA lobbies Obama for Internet filtering, December 11, 2008
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