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Rory Cellan-Jones

YouTube - the music returns

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 3 Sep 09, 08:40 GMT

So peace has broken out at last in the titanic battle between YouTube and Britain's songwriters.

Alesha Dixon video on YouTubeProfessional music videos will now be available to UK users again - though many may not have noticed their absence, given the proliferation of music content put on the site by its users.

So what's the deal - and who's won this battle? And more importantly, will Pete Waterman get a lot more than £11 for all those views of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up? My answers to those questions - not sure, a score draw, and probably not.

Both sides are citing confidentiality in their refusal to give any details about the deal they've struck. All we know is that a lump sum has been handed over by YouTube to the Performing Right Society.

It will then share it out with its members between now and 2012, using its own formula to decide who gets what.

But so coy was the PRS about the details of the deal that at one stage it was not even prepared to say that it was better than what was on the table before - though finally a spokesman told me "we do think it's a better deal," before warning that songwriters were not going to be earning fortunes from YouTube.

Still, it's clear that both sides needed this deal - and are happy to have sorted things out. Google, YouTube's owner, needed it for two reasons - PR and profits.

The search giant, once seen as the chippy but smart upstart of the tech world, is now being accused of bullying everyone from smaller software businesses, to songwriters, to authors who are unhappy about its plan to digitise their books.

But peace with the PRS not only deals with that particular PR problem, its part of the process which is turning YouTube from a costly diversion to a big moneyspinner.

If content owners start to see the video site as just another useful platform rather than a threat, then everyone can start making money from advertising.

As for the PRS, it's smart enough to know that its members' future income depends on recognising the potential of new digital services - and then striking the right deal with them.

It's already reached licensing agreements with the likes of Spotify and last.fm, and is now pleased that its relationship with YouTube has been repaired.

But what about Pete Waterman?

It turns out that there was just a little spin behind his claim that Google only paid him £11 after the Rickrolling craze which saw the song he co-wrote for Rick Astley go viral on YouTube.

"If 154 million plays means £11," he told one paper:

"I get more from Radio Stoke playing Never Gonna Give You Up than I do from YouTube."

The truth is that all of that £11 came from the UK - the only place where the PRS has a deal with YouTube - and only a small minority of those 154 million viewers were UK-based.

He may now get a little more from those people - if the craze takes off again - but nothing from the rest of the world. Poor old Pete.

Maggie Shiels

Next step in gaming revolution

  • Maggie Shiels
  • 3 Sep 09, 08:14 GMT

OnLive burst onto the scene at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this year to a lot of fanfare and just as much derision.

OnLive screenshotAt GDC, the company announced its aim to revolutionise the way games are distributed and played by streaming on-demand games over the internet from servers as much as 1,500 miles away.

The hope is to provide high quality gaming on low-end machines. The end result will only be affected by the user's internet bandwidth.

The company's secret sauce involves a video compression algorithm designed specifically for video games that can encode and compress video into data in about one millisecond.

When I spoke to inventor Steve Perlman at GDC earlier this year, he told me "video games are the last media sold as packaged goods and, yes, OnLive disrupts that retail model."

Lots of demos at GDC went according to the script in a controlled environment but now there is the chance for gamers to test things more in the wild and get involved in what Mr Perlman views as 'the brave new world.'

After months of "evolving the technology and installing lots of servers in our data centres," the company has just announced it is opening up its internal Beta to outside gamers.

OnLive says it's planning to set up a series of different test groups to put the system through its paces and use the data to improve the product.

"If OnLive is able to scale and meet the demand, it could pose a significant challenge to a game console industry that's weathered the storm of multiple hardware cycles, but might face an uphill battle against a truly great on demand service," said Barb Dybwad of Mashable.com.

While there are a thousand differing viewpoints about the future success or otherwise of OnLive, one notable voice out there is Trip Hawkins. As the founder of Electronic Arts, he is often dubbed the Godfather of the gaming industry.

In a piece in PCmag.com, he told the interviewer that he felt that cloud-based games will gain a great acceptance and that games delivered by, and played through, the cloud will eventually drive a lot of the innovation in both desktop and mobile games.

Mr Hawkins also said that the cloud might become the most disruptive, as well as the most efficient, way to play and deliver games.

One of the most important factors in the success of OnLive, and other types of services like this, will be what and how it charges customers whose wallets are no doubt feeling weary in these straightened times.

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