Chinese Internet censorship is hardly something new, but lately it seems the country has targeted BitTorrent sites. Last week, users in China reported that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, Pirate Bay and isoHunt were redirecting to Chinese search site Baidu.com. China recently started to ban 10 video sharing sites for “regulations violations” and the eDonkey indexing site VeryCD received warnings shortly before being re-directed to Baidu.com.
The domain hijacks continued for a few days until they were seemingly lifted. Official explanation for the outage is a “DNS error”, yet that is very improbable as it seemed to affect the P2P sites exclusively which are hosted all across the world. DNS errors wouldn’t explain why they were all linked to another (the same) site either.
Of course, its far more likely that the block was intentional. The only question is whether it was because of piracy or because of some content that could be gotten from any of the sites was specifically targeted by the government.
Result for: internet
According to ABI Research, prices for older model Blu-ray players should drop to $150 USD for the holiday season, a steep price drop over their current average $200-250 USD price tags.
The analyst group says the price drops will be necessary to fight off pressures from emerging HD movie download services. The group also believes the studios will need strong Blu-ray sales for the holiday following the current economic downturn.
The sales prices will most likely be on older Profile 1.0 and 1.1 players that lack BD-Live Internet capabilities.
“Blu-ray vendors and dealers are starting to realize that for Blu-ray to become the next DVD, they need to lower player prices in order to generate interest and build volumes,” notes ABI Research’s principal analyst Steve Wilson.
HD download services, especially those rolled out recently by Netflix, TiVo and Amazon, will be Blu-ray’s biggest competition for the time being, noted ABI.
Result for: internet
Warner Bros. is attempting to curb piracy of its products in China by offering a legal alternative to the country’s 1.3 billion population. In co-operation with a Beijing-based media company called Voole, Warner Bros. will offer new titles from its vaults as digital rentals for a significantly reduced price compared to the street pirates. Bootlegged disks typically go for (GBP)£1 or less on the street.
Warner’s plan is to offer the digital alternative rental service at a price of around 30p - 70p per download (based on the movie in question, one could only assume). The level of pirate products sold in China is in the area of 90%, but Warner and other concerned content companies cannot ignore the fact that China has one of the world’s fastest growing economies.
Of course, the downloads will be protected by DRM, and the users will be able to download them and watch them from their computer or stream them over the Internet. Warner recently announced a similar plan to curb growing piracy in Korea.
