The store is an open platform, Roku says, providing a route to the TV set for any online video programmer willing to use Roku's software development kit. That's a promising development for content providers looking to bypass cable and satellite operators. Unfortunately, the first 10 channels available through the Roku store do not include Hulu, TV.com, Sling.com or any other source of network TV shows. Instead, they consist of a handful of sites with original online video, such as Revision3; Pandora's customized music webcasts; and sites for posting and sharing photos and home videos, such as Flickr. All are free to use and easy to add to the box's regular channel lineup, although some require viewers to register.

The biggest shortcoming is the lack of a search engine or program guide that would make it easy to browse across all the channels simultaneously. Users have to scroll through what's available channel by channel, which can be tedious.

Viewers looking for something to replace their cable TV won't find it from Roku -- at least not yet. What they'll find is a broader selection of content, a convenient way to display on TV the personal photos and videos they've stored online, and the promise of more to come.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

One other interesting sidelight: Seth Greenstein, outside counsel for the CEA, said the rules would bar many hotels and hospitals from buying televisions because such centrally controlled sets can't meet the new limits on power consumption when they're turned off. Philips Electronics warned the commission about this issue, to no apparent avail.

Read more about the possible unintended consequences of the new rule at the Times' opinion blog, Opinion L.A.

Corrected, 4:31 p.m.: In my haste, I incorrectly identified Seth Greenstein as Seth Greenspan in the original version of this post.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Admittedly, I also liked Uplister, Echo and dozens of other ill-fated online music services. But Guvera, which is expected to announce a licensing deal this morning with Universal Music Group, has at least one thing going for it that SpiralFrog didn't and Qtrax has yet to demonstrate: a model that's friendly not just to consumers, but also to advertisers.

Guvera isn't due to launch in the U.S. until early next year, and its website offers little more than a vague outline of how the service will function. Loberg described it in an interview Tuesday as a tool that matches advertisers with the consumers most receptive to their messages. When users register, they're asked for the usual personal details (location, age, gender), as well as for insights about their tastes (their favorite music, movies, sports, holidays, countries, that sort of thing). They then enter the name of a band, song or genre to search for, and Guvera returns a list of advertiser-sponsored channels that provide the matching tracks. Once they pick a channel, they can stream or download other music paid for by that brand.

Advertisers can sponsor multiple channels, each with a set of tracks chosen to appeal to a different target audience -- for example, women ages 24 to 40 who like outdoor sports and comedies, or men in California who love fast food, computers and video games. Every time a song is streamed or downloaded from their channel, advertisers pay a fee that Guvera shares with the copyright holders. The amount of music played in a channel is limited by the amount the advertiser wants to spend per visitor.

The idea, Loberg said, is to replace the usual approach to advertising -- bombarding people with disruptive commercial pitches -- with a sponsorship model that encourages people to associate a brand with a type of music they like. "The brand becomes like a cool new tool or a way of discovering new content," he said. For example, if a visitor searches for a few tracks and finds they're sponsored by Levi's, the next time he uses Guvera he might skip the search and go straight to the Levi's channel to see what's new there. "They'll think of [that] brand when they're thinking of that type of content."

The matchmaking works in both directions. Guvera's algorhythms also help advertisers identify the songs they should sponsor in order to reach the audience they're targeting. Companies can also use Guvera to reward prized shoppers with extra music, concert tickets and other items.

The benefit for consumers is simple: free music. And unlike SpiralFrog's free tracks, Guvera's downloads are MP3s, untainted by DRM. And for advertisers, Guvera promises a way to connect with consumers who have become adept at skipping or tuning out commercials. "The whole model of ... trying to stick your ad somewhere and hoping someone will notice doesn't make any sense," Loberg said.

The major record companies have long been wary of services that gave away MP3s, fearing that it reduced the perceived value of music. But David Ring, executive vice president of business development & business affairs at Universal Music Group's eLabs, said the hope is that Guvera will attract people who simply won't pay for music online, rather than the ones who are happy to buy songs from iTunes or Amazon. "What I think is incumbent on us in the new world that we're living in is to make sure we try to segment the market," and have something to offer the segment that's getting its music free -- and illegally -- online, Ring said.

But given the track record of advertiser-supported download sites, why would Universal bother with another one? Ring said Universal doesn't try to judge whether a service will succeed, just whether its business plan is reasonable and capable of generating enough money to keep everyone in the value chain happy. "We want to err on the side of empowering new services to go out there and find various market segments to try to serve," he said.

Besides, he added, Guvera "found an innovative and new way of connecting brands with consumers." And there is evidence that consumers are much more receptive to ads when they have a say over what's pitched to them. The ultimate question for Guvera, though, is whether the audience it's trying to reach will find the sponsored free collections more compelling or convenient than the many other sources of free music online. That's assuming they find Guvera at all.

Loberg said the company has deals signed with one other major record company and a large independent label (both of which he declined to name), and that it planned to have all four majors signed by the time it launches in the U.S. Even if it accomplishes that feat, it will take time for Guvera to build up a library as broad as its more established competitors in the free-music market, including MySpace Music, iMeem and Lala.

The landscape is littered with failed online music services, and the recession has been tough on advertiser-supported businesses of all stripes. Yet Loberg is so confident about Guvera's chances -- and its backers, who Loberg said have put $10 million into the firm -- he's already in discussions with television and film studios to do the same thing with their content as he plans to do with music. The reality check starts Dec. 15, when Guvera's music service is scheduled to launch in Australia. It's expected to make its U.S. debut, Loberg said, at the end of January or in early February.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

The DTV channels are extremely valuable, and broadcasters have tried for several years to find ways to use them for more than just high-definition TV signals -- for example, by transmitting a version of their programs that's customized for mobile devices, or leasing part of their channel to data service providers. They've also fiercely resisted the high-tech industry's push to allow unlicensed uses of empty TV channels -- the so-called white spaces -- in areas where it might interfere with local broadcasts. (The FCC sided with the tech firms last year, but the decision is under appeal.) But the FCC is under orders from Congress to develop a national plan for increasing the supply of broadband connectivity, and Chairman Julius Genachowski has said that the demand for wireless broadband will soon be an order of magnitude greater than the supply (a situation that Genachowski has called the "looming spectrum crisis"). So the commission may be unusually receptive to the idea of forcing TV stations to share more of their spectrum wealth.

But then, the National Assn. of Broadcasters has some powerful friends on Capitol Hill. Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and still a formidable player, sent a letter to the FCC yesterday expressing concern about any move to devote digital TV airwaves to other uses. Quoth Dingell: "I believe that a further loss of spectrum by broadcasters may have an adverse effect on consumers by limiting their choice in available broadcast television."

Meanwhile, NAB officials started meeting in the Capitol today with representatives of the Recording Industry Assn. of America and musicians' unions to discuss a compromise approach to performance royalties -- which the NAB refers to as a performance tax on radio stations -- under the auspices of the chairmen and senior members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees. Members of the Democratic leadership are expected to drop by the sessions, raising the heat on the NAB to capitulate. Although the broadcasters' lobby has lined up 252 House members and 27 senators behind resolutions opposing new royalties for performing music publicly (on the air or at a business, such as a bar), both Judiciary committees have passed bills that would have a federal arbitration panel set royalties that local radio stations would have to pay. The bills also would set limits on the annual royalty payments for smaller businesses, public and religious broadcasters.

Looks like the broadcasters' lobbyists will be stuck playing defense for a while.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Sezmi keeps its costs down by relying on other companies' infrastructure -- phone or cable companies' broadband pipes and local broadcasters' digital transmissions -- to deliver programming to people's homes. It's also counting on as-yet-undisclosed retail partners to cover some of the cost of acquiring new customers. And rather than having to send installers out to set up the service, Sezmi asks people to install the two required pieces of equipment themselves -- a task the company says is painless and brief. Those two pieces of equipment are a "smart reception system" the size of a bookshelf speaker that tunes in programming from the air and the Internet and a set-top "digital media player" that delivers that programming to a TV screen or records it for later viewing, à la TiVo. Customers can lease the equipment for an undisclosed monthly fee or buy it for $299 (participants in the L.A. trial will get a 50% discount). At this point, though, Sezmi users will need to obtain a set-top box for each TV in their home, which suggests that most customers will rent equipment instead of buying.

I saw a brief demonstration of Sezmi last week and was impressed by the picture quality and the user interface. The brains of the service reside in the set-top box, which makes aggressive use of its 1-terabyte hard drive to record shows automatically that its users like or might like. The service also expects to have well over 10,000 movies and TV shows available on demand -- some of them on a pay-per-view basis -- when it formally launches. The result is that the "My Shows" section of Sezmi's on-screen guide should have plenty of personalized on-demand programs to offer in addition to whatever happens to be airing live. Among the other nice features: the box integrates programs from the Web into its recommendations, and it can create separate profiles for each user in a household so that Dad's affection for news programs doesn't pollute Junior's lineup of sci-fi fantasies. The company also plans to give networks and advertisers room in the program guide to create expanded lists of content that can be viewed on demand, although that feature won't be included in the local trial.

Now for a few reasons to be skeptical about Sezmi's prospects:

The trial lineup doesn't include any of Disney or Fox's cable networks, or any regional sports networks or premium movie channels. Company co-founder Phil Wiser said the trial offers just a snapshot of what will be available when the company does its official launch, and that it's still in talks with content providers. I have trouble seeing how Sezmi could compete with ESPN and the Disney Channel, Fox's news and sports channels, FX, HBO and Showtime. But I also wonder, if they add those channels, how they could stay at $25 all-inclusive price.

The service transmits cable networks over the air, through digital TV frequencies leased from a few local broadcasters. They can use those airwaves much more efficiently than broadcasters can, enabling them to transmit multiple high-definition streams in a single channel. But Sezmi doesn't have nearly as much bandwidth at its disposal as cable operators do, which means the amount of high-definition programming may be more limited. The company wouldn't say how much HD it would deliver, just that "the most popular content on the most popular networks will be in HD as available."

The reliance on over-the-air transmissions for much of the programming means that homes with poor TV reception may not be able to use Sezmi. Company officials say that the "smart reception system" is the highest- performing over-the-air receiver ever built, using multiple technologies to grab signals more reliably than the typical antenna. In fact, Chief Executive Buno Pati said, the company expects to be able to serve 80% to 85% of the customer base in Los Angeles. That's important because the city is a key market for Sezmi, with the country's highest number of households that do not subscribe to cable or satellite.

The service takes the walled-garden approach to the Internet, providing access only to the sites it chooses. And at this point, the lineup consists only of YouTube, Crackle, OnNetworks and an array of podcasts. That's far too thin a sampling of the bounty available online. Company president Phil Wiser said that, as with Sezmi's selection of cable channels, the lineup of Web programming will be broader at launch.

Finally, the company may emphasize personalized program guides and on-demand viewing, but when it comes to pricing, Sezmi sells channels in bundles that cannot be customized. That's not much of a change from cable or satellite services, although Sezmi's prices are far lower. Pati and Wiser put a more positive spin on the company's approach, saying Sezmi planned to offer only the most popular cable networks in its streamlined bundles. The advantage that Sezmi has TV-over-the-Internet competitors, Wiser said, is that it offers networks "economics that are in line with what they have today" -- a cut of Sezmi's subscription fees, in addition to the revenue the networks generate from advertising. That's something Hulu can't do, at least not yet.

Sezmi's investors don't seem to mind any of these issues. The company just announced that it has raised an additional $25 million from previous funders Morgenthaler Ventures, Omni Capital, TD Fund, Index Ventures and Legend Ventures, as well as one undisclosed new backer.

Images courtesy of Sezmi

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Clicker's focus on full episodes means that its search engine is more likely to turn up what you're looking for than, say, Google's video search would. Another strength is how well Clicker organizes information about the programs in its database. Searching for "NCIS," for example, brings up a list of links to episodes of that CBS program in reverse chronological order, followed by links to "NCIS: Los Angeles" episodes and clips from a variety of talk shows (online and off) that discussed either the TV programs or the real-life Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The results can also be sorted by popularity or date, and can be filtered to show only TV episodes, Web originals, music videos or movies.

It's fast and powerful, and it should grow in utility as visitors use the site's wiki features to elaborate on the programming notes. Another nice feature: In addition to free content, it indexes movies and TV shows that Amazon provides on a pay-per-view basis and Netflix makes available to subscribers. And rather than ignoring shows that aren't available legitimately online, it tells you when content providers are withholding them (that means you, HBO).

By excluding unofficial and unauthorized material (as did Modern Feed, the online guide Clicker acquired when it started its development work in January), Clicker isn't as comprehensive as Google or OVGuide. Lanzone said the company was taking the long-term view, and that means respecting copyrights -- and not irritating content providers. "We want to be the de facto standard source of navigation and discovery for the next generation of television. I just don't see how we could do that if we play with illegal content."

At launch, however, discovery isn't Clicker's strongest suit. It offers a few staff recommendations and some great tools for thumbing through programs, including a Trends page to see what other users have been checking out and the most comprehensive list of categories and subcategories I've ever encountered. (The company has divided its database into more than 1,200 subcategories, including 47 types of comedy, 33 types of documentary and 28 varieties of "health and lifestyle.") But there's no preference engine to suggest shows a user might like. Nor are its social tools as well developed as on sites such as TVLoop and First on Mars. Clicker enables each user to build and share a playlist of programs they find on the site, and to send links to shows via Facebook, Twitter or e-mail. That's about it for now, although Lanzone said that more is on the way, including Topics pages that assemble links to programs related to a hot news item or buzzed-about subject. He also said that social curation is "the next big feature that we're working on," with an announcement likely after Christmas. He offered few details, other than to say the feature was inspired by the way the original Napster enabled users to discover music by browsing through the songs collected by other people with similar tastes.

Because it doesn't host many of the programs in its database, Clicker often sends visitors away from its site to watch the videos they find. Lanzone argued that this approach gave his site an advantage over the likes of Hulu and Sling.com: It indexes (authorized) videos from all across the Internet, rather than trying to push users to the ones it hosts locally. Still, directing people to other online destinations limits Clicker's ad sales, and that's the company's main source of revenue today. Future sources, Lanzone said, may include payments from online services for providing leads to new customers and a paid version of the site that provides access to more features. 

Incidentally, Clicker is developing versions of its guide that will work on other devices and other screens. First up, Lanzone said, are implementations for Boxee, a platform for online video that's designed for living-room TVs, and the iPhone. 

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

With that in mind, Google is rolling out the first upgrade to music search today: semi-exclusive content. I say "semi" because the content is actually being made available by Lala and MySpace and can be found by going to those sites directly. Anyway, the booty includes new material and free MP3s available for a limited time only. Among the artists contributing MP3s are Phoenix, Tim McGraw and Mos Def; exclusive tracks will be available from Snoop Dogg, Kings of Leon, Lady Gaga and Linkin Park. It's not clear whether this will be a regular feature or just a gimmick to get people to try out the new search feature. But if artists and labels really want to draw people into the experiences provided by services such as Lala and MySpace Music, they'll need to keep the freebies and/or extra features coming. Otherwise, what's to keep Google users from clicking on the links from YouTube in lieu of the ones at the top of the page?

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, laid out the case against filters ...

... at a commission workshop in September. Among other things, Sohn said:

Late last week the Motion Picture Assn. of America responded (get the .pdf here) by calling on the FCC to "encourage" ISPs to adopt technological barriers against illegal copying. It also urged the FCC to push Congress to do the same. Blocking the unauthorized bits won't slow down the Net, the MPAA claimed -- on the contrary, it will free up bandwidth for legal uses:

I concede the MPAA's point about the volume of unauthorized content flowing through the Net, but I wonder how ISPs could effectively police encrypted transmissions. I also am troubled by the entertainment industry's enthusiasm for "graduated response" (also known as "three strikes") policies. That's not because it's a bad idea to tell people they've been detected downloading "Astro Boy" and that they need to stop violating the law -- no, that's a great idea. The problem is, it's not possible to know who's sitting at the computer downloading "Bruno." In fact, it may not be possible to know which computer is doing the downloading. The only thing that ISPs may be able to detect with reasonable certainty is whose account is being used for that purpose. Before ISPs impose a penalty, they should have to prove that the customer whose account is targeted really was at fault.

Then there's the question of how the filters would be triggered. How much copyrighted material would be enough to block a transmission? How would fair uses be accommodated? What about uses that copyright holders don't like, but have yet to be found illegal by any court (the Slingbox comes to mind)?

Verizon, AT&T and the major cable operators all have to negotiate with the studios for the programming that powers their pay TV services so that they're motivated to work with Hollywood on the piracy issue. Yet their own engineers have noted how hard it would be to examine all the traffic flowing over their networks, as the studios seem to desire. That may explain why ISPs haven't jumped on the filtering bandwagon despite years of supplication from the entertainment industry. Well, that plus the fear that their customers would rebel if they knew their broadband provider was examining all the bits they were uploading and downloading.

Clearly, these are tough issues. And the better way to resolve them, I think, is to let ISPs and content providers negotiate an approach that's consistent with the FCC's forthcoming Net neutrality rules, rather than shoehorning them into the plan for making broadband services available to more people. Those rules wouldn't stop ISPs from interfering with copyright infringements or other illegal acts, but they would discourage broad-brush approaches that impede legal transmissions alongside unauthorized ones.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

The rap against Google from label executives and online music companies has been that its search results seem indifferent to legality. For example, searching for a legitimate site often yields sponsored results for unlicensed ones; Googling an MP3 will call up dozens of free download sites and probably some unauthorized lyrics outlets, too. The new music search initiative won't scrub the unlicensed sites from the search results, but at least it tries to steer people to sites that compensate copyright holders. The hope, according to Thomas Hesse, president of Sony Music Entertainment's global digital business, is that music fans will have a significantly better experience on a MySpace or a Lala than they would on an illegitimate site.

No doubt they will. Three of the five music services that Google is working with initially -- Lala, Rhapsody and Pandora -- are far easier to use and are much more entertaining than BitTorrent or LimeWire. I'm not a huge fan of the user interfaces at the two others -- MySpace Music and imeem -- but they're far better tools for sampling music and discovering bands than the illegal downloading sites are. And it's certainly true that with the exception of iTunes, which is notably absent from this initiative, legitimate online music services have been woefully undermarketed and underexposed. So the considerable traffic Google is likely to send their way should be a tremendous boon.

Having said that, I think it's still an open question whether the new search function leads the masses to buy more music. It's likely to lead people to listen to more songs -- Google and its streaming partners will enable searchers to play any given song once, in full and for free, right from the search results page. And if they follow up a sample by diving further into MySpace Music or Lala, they'll certainly discover more artists that they like. But if they're accustomed to acquiring music for free online, it's not clear to me why they wouldn't continue to do so after sampling to their heart's content on MySpace or Lala. Alternatively, they may be happy to stick with the free ad-supported streams on MySpace or imeem, or the 10-cent "web songs" on Lala, instead of plunking down 89 cents or more for an MP3. That's fine only if there's enough volume to make up for the lower margins.

At least Google's pushing people in the right direction, or at least some of the right directions. The search sovereign needs to learn how to work more subscription-music services into the mix, too, for the sake of eMusic, Napster and Microsoft's Zune Pass. And you have to wonder how innovative new services will find a way to get a piece of the traffic that Google's search initiative will generate for its short list of partners. R.J. Pittman, who led Google's efforts to develop the new search function, said the company would consider adding partners to the list, but they'll have to be "online, Web-based, easily accessible and offer some interesting approaches to music discovery." Lots of companies fit that bill, so it will be interesting to see how Google decides who's in and who's out.

Updated at 4:43 p.m.: Now that I've played with it a bit, I see that Google still has some work to do on the new feature. The intelligence it applies to search results -- for example, guessing the right band or song name despite errors in the search -- haven't been integrated into music searches. So if, for example, if you search for "Martha Muffins," Google will guess that you were looking for Martha and the Muffins, and return a bunch of links to the band and its work. But it won't trigger a chance to stream songs from the band via MySpace or Lala. Similarly, if you go looking for "the angels want to wear my red shoes," you won't get the chance to stream the song on the search page. But you will get lots of links to the song on other sites. Searching for the song by its correct title -- "Red Shoes" -- won't help, 'cause the new feature doesn't recognize that as a search for a song. It's similarly befuddled by searches for songs covered by multiple artists, such as "Moon River."

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Interestingly, other file-sharing applications didn't gain much traffic in the wake of TPB's cutoff, the report said. Instead, users migrated quickly to other BitTorrent "tracker" sites. Four alternative trackers -- OpenBitTorrent, Denis Stalker, tracker.publicbt.com and pow7.com -- "now comprise nearly 70 percent of all BitTorrent traffic," the report states. It adds that the migration was aided by the Pirate Bay, which altered its software to track files through OpenBitTorrent.

The report's bottom line is gloomy for those who believe file-sharing is killing the entertainment industry:

Meanwhile, TPB continues to jump from Internet provider to Internet provider as more courts try (with no lasting success) to keep it offline. And this week, a Dutch court ordered the company's founders and former spokesman Peter Sunde to remove links to content from the Netherlands, an order that Sunde says they can't comply with because they have no such control.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

That's one of the intriguing questions raised by Grooveshark, a streaming music service that offers advertiser-supported music on demand (the ad-free version costs $3 a month). Fresh from its settlement with EMI, the company rolled out a slick new version of its site today, one designed to look and feel something like iTunes (or the much-anticipated Spotify). In addition to a cleaner user interface and more seamless playback, the upgrades include a much easier way to add songs to an online locker without uploading them from your computer -- or paying for them. It's similar to something imeem offers, but I found Grooveshark's version quite a bit easier to use.

You might wonder what's the point in having a personal collection on a site that lets you play any song you wish on demand. For starters, a virtual collection helps manage the huge amount of material available online. Grooveshark relies on users to supply many of the tracks in its library, so it may have multiple versions of a song. Virtual collections also simplify the process of creating playlists. And the fact that it costs nothing to save tracks in an online library encourages people to save tracks they're curious about but not committed to. Sort of like dating. And that's what Grooveshark really is about -- enabling people to sample and discover new artists, then share their discoveries with friends. One shortcoming, though, is that Grooveshark (like imeem) doesn't make it easy to save an entire album to a personal collection. And if you want to save a lot of tracks, you have to upgrade to the paid version.

Still, it's easy to see where these things lead. Throw in a mobile application and you've got a comprehensive service -- one that starts to look like a substitute for a conventional music collection. Why assemble (and pay for) your own stash when you can rely on thousands of other people to share theirs with you? Granted, it's no match today for Napster or Rhapsody, which are more comprehensive (especially when it comes to new releases) and offer an editorial layer (descriptions, bios and the like) that's missing from Grooveshark. And it may never be -- those services keep improving too. Nor does Grooveshark, whose automatic playlisting function is a great alternative to radio, provide much help in the car. But it's free, and that price is hard to beat.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow his intermittent Twitter stream: @jcahealey.

This morning, the company added two variations on the Roku Digital Video Player (now called the Roku HD) to the mix: an $80 standard-definition box, which is designed for smaller or older screens, and the $130 Roku HD-XR, which adds 802.11n capabilities and a USB port. The latter isn't enabled yet, but it suggests that the player will be able to support movie download services such as Roxio's CinemaNow -- a nice solution for people who want better picture quality than their broadband connections currently support. 

I've been playing with an HD-XR on loan from Roku, and like its predecessor it's a breeze to set up -- remarkably so, considering that it's a networked device. The picture quality was very good for Netflix and Amazon, although I was disappointed to find that my 5 mbps broadband connection from AT&T wasn't fast enough to handle either source's high-def streams. The most intriguing thing was the promise of a "Channel Store" where users can go to add more sources of online video. The player's start-up guide gives instructions for using the store, but it's not yet enabled. The company says it will add the store "later this fall" as an automatic update to all its units, but it provided no details about the contents.

Company executives have talked in the past about their ambition to provide a platform for all manner of online video. Unlike some other set-tops, the Roku players support Adobe's Flash video format, which Hulu and many other sources of video online use. Of course, Hulu's owners have been notoriously reluctant to support Internet-on-TV technology for fear of harming the cable TV companies that figure prominently in their business models. But there's intense interest among tech companies in providing a bridge from the Net to the TV, so it's going to happen with or without the networks' support. For example, DivX and Rovi, two software developers with broad partnerships among consumer electronics manufacturers,  also are positioning themselves to provide a platform for online video in set-tops and TVs, as are Boxee, Apple and Microsoft.

One other quick point: I fully expect telephone companies to partner with a set-top maker like Roku. Nothing made me want to upgrade to an even higher tier of DSL more than seeing the admonition on screen that I couldn't play the HD version of an Amazon movie. AT&T and Verizon might not be keenly motivated to team with Roku, given that they're trying to sell their own versions of cable TV, but there are hundreds of other smaller telcos that don't have that kind of conflict. That's fertile ground not just for video-on-demand players like Roku and ZillionTV, but also full-blown cable replacements such as Sezmi, which is expected to begin deploying in Los Angeles soon.

Updated, 10:20 p.m. Oct. 28: Roku informed me that a software bug may have prevented me from watching streams in high definition the first time I used the device. As it happens, the company was right -- having left the box on for a while, it now streams in HD (wirelessly, connected to an 802.11g router) without a flinch. And the picture quality is quite good, although my less-than-acute vision makes me a charitable audience when it comes to HD images.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow his intermittent Twitter stream: @jcahealey.

Lala may soon fix that problem, however, with a free iPhone app that enables people to play their Web songs on the road. It works even when stuck in an AT&T dead spot (more on that in a bit). The app, which still has to be submitted to and approved by Apple Inc., can also be loaded onto an iPod Touch. I saw a demo this week and it's quite slick. Users can find tracks or albums from Lala's 8-million-song catalog and play them with minimal delay, view their Lala news feeds to see and hear what their friends are listening to, share songs with Facebook friends, and add web songs easily to their Lala lockers. The app also stores up to 200 of songs on the phone -- for now, it's the ones most recently played by that user, but in the future Lala plans to give people more control over how to fill that cache. Those songs can be played even when you're not online or connected to AT&T's network -- such as when you're on a plane. 

Being able to play Web songs with an iPhone dramatically improves the value proposition, at least for iPhone users. (Lala Chief Executive Bill Nguyen said the company was "excited" about the BlackBerry platform but doesn't have an app available for iPhone rivals yet.) Of course, some people will still object to the notion of paying for music that comes with a diminished set of rights. But then, 10 cents a track is a steeply diminished price.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Ben's a news reporter, so he couldn't state the obvious problem with this idea. It's crazy.

I understand that the trends aren't encouraging for the studios. DVD sales are dropping, and delaying rentals might -- might -- reduce the momentum enjoyed by lower-margin rental services such as Redbox's $1-a-night kiosks and Netflix's monthly subscriptions. But the studios' plan is based on the idea that consumers are more sensitive to delay than they are to price. It's true that most of the demand for home video titles is exhausted quickly. But it's absurd to assume that buying and renting are interchangeable in consumers' minds, and that people who ordinarily might rent a title would buy it if that meant they could have it sooner. Maybe I'd see the world differently if I were on a Hollywood executive pay scale, but $3 to $5 strikes me as a much different price point than $15 to $25. Think about it. How often do people go to Blockbuster looking to rent a particular movie and, after finding all the rental copies taken, decide to buy a copy rather than rent something else? 

If Hollywood wants to encourage buying instead of renting, it has to make purchased product significantly more valuable than the rented one. This isn't a particularly easy problem to solve, given that video rental stores have access to the same discs that everyone else has. Some studios have been selling the major rental chains (presumably cheaper) versions of their movie discs stripped of the extra features, but the implication is that the missing features weren't all that compelling to start with -- otherwise, renters would demand them and the rental stores would comply. Nevertheless, the advent of connected disc players opens up a range of possibilities for the studios to provide more content and a better experience to buyers than to renters.

Such an approach would focus on generating consumer demand rather than frustrating it. In an era of expanding entertainment choices and intense competition for consumers' time and money, any move to make it harder for people to get content on the terms they prefer seems self-defeating at best.

Corrected, 1:27 p.m.: The original post said that, "with rare exceptions, there's no differentiation between the copies Blockbuster rents and the ones it sells." In fact, Blockbuster and other video chains have been buying stripped-down versions of DVDs for their rental services, as the corrected post now states.

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

This isn't a huge surprise; my colleagues Dawn Chmielewski and Meg James reported back in May that Hulu was considering tiers of programming -- some free and some paid -- to attract some cable networks that had been reluctant to share content with the site. (They explored the idea further earlier this month, in the wake of Comcast's talks to buy Hulu co-founder NBC Universal.) But it reflects how eager broadcasters are to collect money from distributors to supplement what they take in from advertisers. And if the fees were limited to programming that wasn't otherwise available online, or to features that Hulu hadn't previously offered, then they wouldn't seem inherently unreasonable. That doesn't mean people would pay them, of course -- they have plenty of other ways to be entertained online for free. But at least Hulu could make the case for the fees with a straight face.

Meanwhile, out in Long Island, Newsday -- a tabloid that Cablevision bought last year from the struggling Tribune Co. for $650 million -- announced that it would charge non-subscribers $5 a week to read the paper online. Pricey! But the paper will be free to Cablevision's broadband subscribers too. Given that Cablevision says 75% of the Long Island market subscribes to Newsday or its broadband service, if not both, there aren't many local readers left to alienate. Still, you have to wonder why any company thinks it can increase the price of a product without increasing its value to customers. Oh, wait -- Cablevision is a cable company.... Never mind.

(Full disclosure: Tribune Co. owns the Los Angeles Times.)

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Some of the biggest broadband providers and their allies in Congress question whether the commission should adopt any rules, period -- and whether the FCC even has the authority to do so. For example, AT&T tried to derail the proposed rules in advance of the meeting, and its opposition isn't likely to diminish as the formal rule-making process goes forward. These opponents have found a sympathetic audience in the commission's two Republicans, Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker, who gave only partial support to the notice of proposed rule-making. McDowell and Baker said they welcomed the chance for a thorough public discourse on how best to maintain an open Internet but doubted that government regulations were the right course. They also questioned whether there is a problem here for the FCC to fix, noting that the commission has found only a handful of incidents of ISPs behaving in an anti-competitive way.

In McDowell's view, having more competition among broadband ISPs is the solution, and that competition is rapidly emerging. But the wireless providers he's counting on can't match the ever-increasing speeds deployed by cable TV operators and wired telephone companies. Given that there is virtually no competition within each market -- not many people have more than one cable provider or more than one local telco to choose from -- a duopoly will continue to reign over truly high-speed Internet services for years to come.

One other point emphasized by McDowell is that Internet users want ISPs to prioritize some bits (e.g., video streams) over others (e.g., e-mail). That gets to the question of what constitutes "reasonable" network management, and McDowell offers a useful way of thinking about this issue: what the commission should be concerned about is management techniques that are anti-competitive, rather than those that simply treat one type of traffic differently than another.

I think the commission should also be concerned about management techniques designed to make content, application or service providers pay more for the ability to reach their customers online. It's worth remembering that Web-based companies started lobbying for Net neutrality rules after executives at broadband companies complained about the bandwidth consumed by online video services. They warned that they would need to spend heavily to increase the capacity of their networks, and said that companies like YouTube (now a part of Google) should bear some of those costs. But YouTube isn't a "free rider" -- it has invested heavily in the servers and bandwidth needed to deliver its bits to its customers' ISPs. The problem for those ISPs is that their customers happen to demand a lot of bits from YouTube and other online content providers. In other words, the issue isn't what YouTube is supplying; it's what broadband customers are demanding. Is it really YouTube's or Netflix's or Sling's fault that ISPs are having trouble keeping their bandwidth promises to their customers?

The effect of these rules may very well be that ISPs look for solutions on the demand side of the equation, not the supply side. That could mean higher monthly fees or surcharges for those who are the heaviest users. And with so little competition among ISPs, it's reasonable to worry about gouging. On the other hand, having ISPs deploy a "fast lane" for content providers willing to pay extra for higher priority could be powerfully anti-competitive. Google can afford to pay extra, but can the start-up that wants to be the next YouTube? Universal Music Group could pay extra, but could an indie band? That's why focusing on the companies supplying bandwidth-intensive apps is more problematic than on the consumers demanding them. It's also why the commission's exploration of the "managed services" issue will be so contentious. These services are the ones that would be allowed into the fast lane, making them the exceptions that could swallow the rule.

Photo: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, announcing his Net neutrality principles in September. Credit: Mark Wilson / Getty Images

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Two pieces of news today suggested that the industry may soon turn more of that burgeoning consumption into revenue, although neither one is a sure thing. TechCrunch, among others, reported that Google -- the site that millions of music lovers use to find bands and songs online -- is poised to launch a music service. The venture, which is set to be unveiled next week, reportedly will combine Google's search capabilities with streaming and purchasing functions from Lala.com and MySpace's iLike. Meanwhile, Facebook -- the planet's most popular social network -- has chosen Lala to power a new music-gifting service. Starting Thursday, users will be able to send their pals MP3s or Lala "websongs" (streamable songs from an online locker) in addition to the usual array of virtual gifts.

By putting the ability to hear and buy music where the masses spend time online, Google and Facebook could help convert more of the Internet's free music consumption into revenue. In both cases, users won't have to pull out their wallets to generate royalties for labels and artists -- Google would presumably share revenue from the ads it sells around its music service, and Facebook would automatically ding its users' credit cards for the music gifts they send. According to Lala CEO Bill Nguyen, Facebook users already spend $50 million or more annually on such gifts as virtual plants and pictures of birthday cakes, which sell for about $1 apiece. So it's reasonable to assume that they'll spend 10 cents to a $1 sending people songs. (Note to the Beatles: Now's the time to license "Birthday" and "Yesterday" to Lala.) Nguyen is so bullish on Facebook's music gifts that he said it could bring in "an order of magnitude" more revenue for the company. He added, "This may be the most significant thing since the ringtone." (He declined to comment on the Google reports.)

That's hyperbolic, but Facebook certainly is taking a lot of the friction out of buying music for a pal. Not only does it tell users about their friends' birthdays and other significant events, it also makes it easy to search through Lala's catalog of 8 million songs for just the right sentiment. And the 10-cent charge for streamable tracks is practically painless, especially when it's added to the user's tab automatically, Google's advantage, meanwhile, is that it's extremely well positioned to serve music fans and the advertisers who want to reach them.

Still, it remains to be seen whether Google pursues a pure advertiser-supported model, à la MySpace Music and the much-hyped Spotify, or if it is more focused on driving sales through social-based discovery and low prices, à la Lala. As NPD analyst Russ Crupnick pointed out recently, free advertiser-supported services are cannibalizing digital music sales. That's true in part because advertisers won't pay much for banner or display ads on a music service that people use as background music. So if Google goes the unlimited-free-music route, it's an open question whether it would be able to generate enough revenue from advertisers to make its service a net plus for copyright holders.

My guess is that it won't. At a panel discussion today about new music formats at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica, iLike CEO Ali Partovi spoke highly of Lala's model of one free listen. But he also said it was important to go beyond mere 30-second samples, which has been one of iLike's limitations. Said Partovi, "If you let them listen to the full song, they're more likely to buy."

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

According to PaidContent.org, the additional programming includes fare from HBO, TNT and TBS, which have kept most of their shows off of Hulu and other online TV sites. The move might dissuade a subset of Comcast's customers from dumping cable in favor of free online TV but won't charm the ones who get their broadband from a phone company.

Granted, the masses still prefer to get their TV shows from cable and satellite operators rather than Hulu because they bring it to the TV, not the PC. But the momentum behind free online TV is unmistakable -- there are new devices, such as Netgear's Digital Entertainer Live, that make it easy to bring online video to the big screen in the living room, older devices such as the Roku Video Player with ever-expanding capabilities and services including Hulu and Netflix that are continually expanding their libraries of free content. 

So here's the second announcement. 1Cast, a self-styled Hulu for news videos, unveiled a new partnership with Boxee, a program that provides a user interface for online video streams that's optimized for a TV set. The deal adds an important element to Boxee's entertainment-heavy lineup, while giving 1Cast a route to TV screens.

1Cast's approach is novel for an online news aggregator -- it strikes revenue-sharing deals with networks, rather than just monetizing the feeds that are freely available online. CEO Anthony Bontrager said his company gets clips directly from the networks in "near real time" -- typically within minutes of their appearance on air. Visitors to the 1Cast site can browse through thumbnails of the most recently added clips, or they can use the site's search function to gather all the clips related to a given topic. They also can create virtual newscasts on the topics of their choice that are dynamically updated whenever new material arrives. Or they can watch what other users have been watching or saving.

In other words, it's the Internet's remix power brought to bear on the TV news industry. It's not for people who like having someone else decide what the most important developments of the day are or who the most credible speakers might be. Instead, it's for those who want to be their own news directors or tap the collective judgment of the crowd and who like the idea of being able to view multiple perspectives on the same story. 1Cast draws from more than a dozen sources, including CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, the BBC and MarketWatch. It's also expanding into entertainment news -- it just added clips from E! Entertainment and Style. What's in it for them? In addition to the shared revenue -- 1Cast adds post-roll advertising and some interactive overlays to the clips -- Bontrager said networks like the idea of getting their material in front of viewers who might otherwise be wedded to a competitor's channel. 

One interesting tidbit about 1Cast's users: The big screen doesn't appear to be as important to them as the mobile one. Bontrager said viewers typically spend 12 to 15 minutes watching 1Cast on a PC, but the average session time on mobile (iPhone or Android phones) is 36 minutes. Sure hope they're not watching while they drive. ...

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Start-ups frequently change CEOs in mid-stream, often because the person with the original vision isn't the one with the managerial chops to make it happen. Those are two different skills, after all. But the change at Zillion of Sunnyvale, Calif., is sure to raise eyebrows because of extensive recent layoffs that had one former-employee-turned-blogger suggesting that the company was on its last legs. (The blogger, Brandon Wirtz, offered a similarly dismal spin on the news about Lawrence.)

Berman said the switch in roles was his idea. He wanted to hand the reins to Lawrence -- a longtime veteran of the satellite, cable TV and telecommunications industry -- because the "constant running around and raising money" had been taking too great a toll on his quality of life and his company's momentum. Lawrence will take over the fundraising duties, leaving Berman to strike the deals with content providers, advertisers and commercial partners that are crucial to Zillion's survival.

Unfortunately, Zillion isn't disclosing much to reassure people about its prospects, at least not yet. Berman wouldn't say how much money the company had raised (although Multichannel News reported that Zillion had collected more than $18 million by the end of last year), who its distribution partners were, how many titles it had in its library or what content deals it had signed (granted, the company counts five Hollywood studios among its investors). As for the layoffs, Berman said the company has morphed from a technology developer into a media and marketing operation, and so there was no work left for some employees to do.

He said more confidence-building announcements were soon to come. The company launched last month in communities where it doesn't have an ISP partner, offering the service to anyone who agrees to pay the one-time equipment fee of $99. But Berman wouldn't say where those were, nor did he disclose how many customers had signed up. So there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical about Zillion. Nevertheless, I'm paying attention to the company because I'm intrigued by its business model. Offering a subscription-free twist on online video-on-demand, Zillion says its customers will be able to buy, rent or watch movie and TV programming for free in exchange for viewing personalized commercials. It's not exactly a replacement for cable TV, nor is it a gateway to all the video riches the Web has to offer. And the most innovative aspect of the business model -- free viewing with targeted ads -- still has to be proven before Zillion is likely to get the studios' most compelling content. Yet its user interface is great, and the picture quality it demonstrated this year was impressive. So stay tuned.

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Of course, that's not exactly what FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has in mind.

Cicconi's note was published by the Actuarial Outpost blog. Here's my favorite part:

That's a bit like saying that any new equal-opportunity rules should apply not just to employers, but to the people they hire. Or that fair-housing laws need to be extended to renters....

The point here is to provide rules to prevent gatekeepers from emerging online, limiting the applications or services that people can use. The only companies with the power to do that are broadband ISPs, which provide the 21st century equivalent of a dial tone. Google can't stop people from using Yahoo's search engine or Skype's voice-over-IP services. An ISP can. Not that it would do something so brazen (OK, some wireless phone companies have blocked Skype from their data networks), but it might manage its network in a way that gives its partners' customers a better experience than their rivals can.

Another snippet from Cicconi's note:

In other words, Google is trying to kill your grandmother! Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt: the new death panel. Ahh, we kid because we love. Here's what Genachowski had to say on this topic last month, in his speech outlining his six proposed Net neutrality principles:

That's cautious bureaucratese for "I don't want to bar managed services, but I don't want to create a loophole that undermines the rule, either."

Here's a final bit from Cicconi's note:

Drive up consumer prices how? By enabling the commission to stop broadband providers from discriminating against legal applications or content online? Bear in mind that the rules wouldn't stop ISPs from managing their networks to combat congestion. They would simply say the management techniques couldn't pick winners and losers -- they'd have to be content- and application-neutral. 

Oh and by the way, Google isn't a broadband ISP (even on April Fool's Day). Should it become one, it would no longer be exempt. But for some reason, Cicconi thinks Google is a compelling villain in this drama. You would think a company that encourages people to use the Internet for just about everything in life would be a powerful ally to a company trying to sell wired and wireless connectivity (and iPhones). But that would clearly be wrong. I guess AT&T won't be bringing out an Android phone any time soon.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.