We heard first from Bart Myers of Guba. Bart talked about how Guba, which has been around for years as a front-end for usenet binary archives, has been actively working with movie studios to provide legitimate (and DRM'ed) movie downloads. Guba made headway with the MPAA after agreeing to scrub their extensive repository of archives and user uploaded videos for copyrighted material (a list of some 6000 titles). Bart demoed a recent movie, which could be purchased for $9.99, or rented for 24 hours for $0.99. Advertising alongside free content pushes the company into profitability, and one of the biggest challenges in getting TV and movie content online is waiting for the studios to renegotiate the rights for the music.
Next we heard from Gary Lerhaupt of Move Digital. Move Digital provides a value-added digital media store, where one can upload content (not just media) and use their services to distribute it. One distinguishing feature is that they charge only for completed downloads, not simply by-the-byte. Currently they can convert video into 3GP for you, and indicated that other formats conversion tools could follow in the future. They can automatically create BitTorrent tracker files for each download and seed BitTorrent feeds for you, intelligently shutting off the seed to save you bandwidth. (I later spoke with some of the engineers, as Move Digital seems like a natural fit for a hosted storage backend like Amazon's S3. I wonder how the economics of managing your own infrastructure work out for this type of application.)
And finally Travis Kalanick of Red Swoosh talked about their ambitious plans to change the way media is delivered. Using a proxying mechanism for content URLs (just prepend "http://edn.redswoosh.net/" to each URL), RedSwoosh will act as an intermediary to negotiate an efficient content distribution process. Each recipient will be prompted to install the RedSwoosh client (Windows only for now, Mac to come "soon"), which will then run in the background and use P2P swarming techniques to move the data to the desktop. Highly efficient on the server end (costing literally just pennies per gigabyte), the trick being that each client will continue to serve up the content long after it has completed downloading. Travis says that they are making every effort to minimize the impact of the client application on the desktop and on the network. There were many skeptics in the audience, realizing how hard it is to get market share with client applications, to which Travis noted that Flash is a client side application that has wide adoption. (My own thought is that one would need to open source the client and open the protocol and encourage a developer community to build it into the browser, though one would have to wonder what that would do to their business advantage...)
The crowd was fun, even if we were a little excitable at times. Here's a shot of, left to right, Kevin Burton (TailRank), Om Malik (GigaOM), Veronica Belmont (CNET), and Eric Lin (Phone Scoop):
And here is a shot of Dave liveblogging from his BlackBerry for Om:
