Apple--Not Piracy--Is the Real Problem for the Movie Industry, Says Exec

Piracy is less of an issue for the movie industry than is the dominance of the digital distribution channel by a single company, such as Apple.

That's what the CEO of Miramax told a movie industry crowd Monday at the annual MIPCOM event in Cannes, a sort of bazaar for entertainment content. While the audience listening to the executive's message was made up of industry insiders, the message has some interesting implications for consumers--namely, that when it comes to streaming video they should have more choice.

This is exactly the opposite stance that the music industry initially adopted toward digital media.

According to reports in Rapid TVNews and Music Ally, Miramax CEO Mike Lang argued that while some in the industry fear digital distribution of content because they believe it facilitates piracy, the real problem is distribution.

“Piracy really is not the bigger issue for our company or for our library," he said. "It’s been lack of exploitation, just not getting it out there."

Lang has obviously seen what happens when sources of legitimate content proliferate: piracy decreases. It took the music industry many years and many lawsuits to learn that. Of course, by the time the music industry learned this, it had lost something it can no longer get back: it allowed Apple to get a lock on distribution, which has stifled true competition in the market.

According to Lang, this is something the movie industry needs to keep in mind when it begins introducing its digital business models.

"As the movie business we have to be very cognizant of that," Lang said. "That’s why we did our deal with Netflix, and why we also did our deal with Hulu. We want multiple players to be successful."

"It’s really important as an industry that we try to allow multiple players in markets around the world,” he added.

Miramax cut a deal with Netflix in May allowing "several hundred" of the studio's movies to be streamed over the service, including titles such as Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, Bad Santa, and Kill Bill.

In June, Miramax inked an agreement with Hulu that allowed the streaming service to show hundreds of Miramax movies on Hulu Plus, without commercials, and to rotate 15 movies a month, with commercials, through Hulu.com.

Streaming video enthusiasts can only hope that more Hollywood execs start thinking like Lang and realize that choice is a better antidote to piracy than restrictions, police raids, and lawsuits.

Follow freelance technology writer John P. Mello Jr. and Today@PCWorld on Twitter.

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Microsoft Cracks Live Migration Problem

With the next release of Windows Server operating system, Microsoft has conquered one of the thorniest problems in virtualization: moving an operational virtual machine (VM) across a wide area network (WAN).

Microsoft unveiled this new feature at the Microsoft BUILD conference, being held this week in Anaheim, California. It will be available in Microsoft's Hyper-V version 3 hypervisor, included in Microsoft's next server operating system, Windows Server 8.

The capability, while viable in only a handful of use cases, nonetheless shows Microsoft's growing expertise in virtualization, analysts said.

With live migration, a working VM is moved from one computer to another without any disruption of the services offered by applications within the VM.

Most server virtualization software providers, including Microsoft, have long offered live migration within a local network. A far harder problem has been to offer the ability to move a live VM across different subnets, or separate WAN sub-networks. Network latencies and network addressing complexities have made this task a challenging one.

At the BUILD conference, Microsoft program manager Ross Ortega explained how the new technology worked. Essentially, each virtual machine gets two IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.

One address is the home address for the VM itself, which it uses to communicate with the rest of the network or, if accessed publicly, the Internet. The second IP address will be available for the local data center.

"The trick is to keep these mappings between the two address spaces," said Bill Laing, Microsoft corporate vice president for the server and cloud division, in a subsequent interview.

Microsoft is not alone in offering this capability. VMware, in its VXLAN offering, also offers the ability. This solution, however, requires Cisco networking gear using the Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) technology.

Long-distance live migration has been a research topic in the virtualization community for several years, though it is useful only in a limited number of situations, said Chris Wolf, a Gartner research vice president covering virtualization.

Replicating a VM memory state over long distances can take a considerable amount of time, Wolf noted. It could be handy for emergency situations, such as when a data center is threatened by an upcoming flood or hurricane, and its contents must be moved to another facility. But, given the sizes of most data center-run systems, it is likely that only a handful of VMs would be moved in time.

During another presentation at BUILD, Brian Dewey, Microsoft group program manager for Hyper-V noted one way around this problem. Administrators could also save VMs on thumb drives or optical disks, and then ship them to the new location, where the VMs could then be incrementally updated with the latest changes.

Another possible application of the technology would be in permanently migrating systems from one data center to the next without incurring any downtime, Wolf said. Such work would be necessary in data center consolidation projects, for instance.

Beyond the practical uses, the new capability carries symbolic importance for the company as well, Wolf said. It shows Microsoft is knowledgeable enough with this emerging technology to stay on the frontier of its developments.

The technology "marks a point where Microsoft will ship the first real formidable challenger to VMware vSphere," Wolf said.

At BUILD, Microsoft touted a number of other new features to make Hyper-V and Windows Server more competitive with VMware as well. The company debuted the ability to do live migration of the VM's virtual hard disk. Scalability was also touted: the new software will able to support up to 32 virtual processors for each VM, and each VM can now appropriate 512 GB of memory. A new virtual file system, VHDX, can be used to create virtual storage disks up to 16 TB in size.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

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