Up until now video in Second Life has been run through land media settings, and the few Heads-Up-Display (HUD) video services that existed depended on the tool's creators accepting and streaming your content personally. That may be about to change, as one inventor has found a new way to handle video in the virtual world. The only barrier he's running into at this point comes from Linden Lab itself.
Unmitigated Gall gave a demo yesterday of a potentially revolutionary new video service in Second Life called the "SLiPOD". A simple antenna (the cone in the picture on the right) is pulled out of your inventory, no other setup required, and the service becomes available for all everyone on the server without affecting the media settings of the land. Each video is just an item in your inventory, and as long as you're on a server (or "sim") that has an antenna somewhere on it, you can attach the video to your Heads-Up Display and watch streaming video without affecting anyone around you.
Creation of new videos will be handled automatically in a YouTube-like web interface. (The website mySLiPOD.com is currently under construction, but Gall tells me: "It will be up It should be accepting uploads by tonight. That's my official statement. Come hell or high water.") Users can upload a video and have the video object delivered to themselves automatically in-world. That video can then be handed out or sold in-world just like any other commodity. While a relatively straightforward concept, this has broad implications. Trading media in the virtual world becomes a much more tangible thing at this point, and could spawn an entire industry on its own.
Those few who know about it are very excited about the technology. "For those wanting to get content to individuals, including musicians, product developers, and video distributors, this is great. I don't have to take up my media stream or have it impact the performance of my island," JenzZa Misfit told me today, "but for some who have a primary focus on wanting people to come to view the content they present with the land stream it may be a threat."
Overall it's a potentially game-changing idea, but one that Unmitigated Gall may not have Linden Lab's support for. When he was testing it in the Beta grid, he told Dan Linden about it. Dan Linden told him it wouldn't work and he shouldn't base business plans on bugs in the system. This was, of course, before he saw that it did indeed work, wasn't based on bugs, and operated within the Terms Of Service. At this point, according to Gall, the Linden proposed that Linden Lab simply publish Gall's trade secrets on how this is done so that the company could more directly support it.
That was enough for Gall to run the demo for us now, even before the website was finished construction. He's feeling threatened by the casual proposal of open-sourcing his intellectual property without his permission for "support reasons". The hope is that if he can get the service into wide enough use public support will help mitigate the risk as it has in the past for others.
The potential for Linden Lab to take SLiPOD's design and simply implement their own version has prescendent: the creation of the Lindex was based on Gaming Open Market's (GOM) design, which eventually had to fold as a result. Businesses with remarkable products in virtual worlds need to think ahead on how to best maintain their edge not just over other competing businesses, but over the virtual world itself.
This streaming method has been noted, both by us, by Cruxy and a few others, to be the same video streaming technique used by several individuals already. It is also the technique behind several products demonstrated at First Friday in September by several groups. Our own Silver Stream Server, which has been available for close to 6 months now, performs the same functionality as his antennae, but has a wider capability and options of delivering content, and does not require that the videos always be uploaded or listed with our website depending on your needs.
His idea of having each object hold a single media stream (just holds a URL which is sent to the antennae to play with the avatar's key) is a little different then the video solutions so far, and sending that object once the video is uploaded, is unique. It will be interesting to see if this is the kind of service is something people want, though there are a lot of issues he will have to deal with when hosting the actual content.
As far as being threatened by LL, I don't know the Linden (Dan Linden's user page is empty and he's filed nothing on the JIRA) but our technology with the Silver Stream Servers, and the technology that runs on it (like Cahoots, our collaboration suite) are known by several Lindens at several studios. They know the technique and have made no indication to us that it is a bug/hack, nor that they want to change the functionality.
When the video script that moved URLs for video websites was first put into SL with video capacity through the land menu, quite a number of businesses sprang up making TVs, selling them for $1000 or $2000 Lindens with the script on a few clicks, and with preloaded content.
Oldbies (CrystalShard Foo) who hated the idea of midbies making money off something they felt was a Linden-generated utility immediately made a free, open-sourced TV called Free View to undercut the commercial TV market. The Free View was -- and is -- a clunky, too-geeky interface, requiring several objects to be placed and deeded for group land, and had no content except a few clips. It forced people to figure out how to find and put in their own URLs. In the end, while the Free View spread like kudzu and drove everybody mad with its clunky interface and failures to work much of the time, the TV industry boomed and a number of companies made their fortunes with pre-loaded content. Then a few of these died in a matter of weeks when the adult sites where they were scooping up clips freely began to change the URLs (it's like the radio industry that relied on the free URLs provided by shoutcast.com, which then began to changes those URLs and make them less accessible when they saw people were grabbing them and not ending up subscribing to the paid radio or music sites providing them).
Unmitigated Gall also made a very useful URL changer that you could pre-deed for music and set on group land and gave it to Ravenglass, where he has been a tenant. This was a wonderful boon (and undercut the radio market to some extent) except...two things killed it off. One, it picked up chat at 20 m and undid the URLs, making them annoying. Two, group-deeded objects began to be griefed constantly by v5 and PN griefers who dropped malicious scripts into them to bombard people with particles. Then when the group tools were reformed, it was finally possible to enable a class of people to have the right to do their own deeding when invited to the group. So the need for those radios and URL changers lessened.
LL and the exigencies of SL are always breaking products. Sometimes this is mindless and stupid. Other times, it is simply progress (why make everybody buy or use a free URL changer when they now can do their own deeding?).
I cite this history just by way of saying that there is always pressure by opensourceniks and the Lindens (and not always for altruistic reasons) to put whatever script ads simpler and better functionality to the platform in the public domain, always a scramble by commercial product users to bypass the "information wants to be free" crowd and actually provide service along with their product, which is much more golden, and for which people will *pay* than the indifferent freebie makers who won't provide service.
I think we have to face this stark realization. As I said in the podcast, Facebook's makers designed to forego selling out to Yahoo to grow (like Flickr) and instead, enabled thousands of widget-makers to access the platform to make APIs (please suspend your judgement of flowers and vampire bites for a minute and grasp the analogy here).
The Lindens, instead of really enabling legions of small businesses and entrepreneurs to make widgets/APIs (as they once did) have decided to sell out to big corporate media to grow.
We'll see the results soon.
Wow. A flag that is documented in the wiki's for LSL is "Intellectual Property"? Gah, I hate that term with a passion as there IS NO SUCH THING unto itself as IP. It is an umbrella term used by people looking to scare people off. "Don't think about doing that, we have IP!" Might was well say "Don't think about doing that, we have A BOOGYMAN!"
In the US (where I am) there are the following "IP" components that actually mean something:
1. Copyright:
2. Patent
3. Trade Secret
4. Trademark.
Now, which of these apply to a flag? Copyright on his specific code, sure, but not the flag. Patent? Considering the flag was implemented in LSL's client and all that was done was calling a function using it, doubtful. Trade Secret? Not much of a secret if I found how to reproduce the functionality in 5 minutes via publicly available documents. Finally, he can have a trademark on the name without encumbering anyone's use of the flag.
Stupid boogy man.
I am a bit surprised to see an alarmist article like this here. It might have been useful to get a more balanced kind of view before publishing it.
While this HUD is certainly a nice product and interesting for some, I very much doubt that this will revolutionize video in SL. Second Life is about a SHARED experience. If I want to watch a video on my PC I certainly have more and better options available than using a HUD in SL - no disrespect intended.
The underlying technology is no rocket science either and - although I am not an expert in IP law - I can hardly believe this technology to be patentable. John Lopez listed the reasons.
Additionally, if you check out the current roadmap for integrating web based content into the SL client, you will see that attaching web content (replacing textures) to objects -- including HUDs - already is on the roadmap. Actually this will probably a first step coming before we get full HTML on a prim. This includes streaming content. So it seems a bit far fetched to accuse Linden Lab of stealing IP or hampering a resident business, when all they do is improving the clients capabilities and have announced those plans even before this product was created ...
Pham, there's nothing alarmist about this article; it's one case history out of many stories of people who made products and whose scripts were either broken by how the Lindens manage each download version of the client, or broken because the Lindens "GOM'd" them or discouraged them from using what they had invented.
I can tell you a dozen other ways the Lindens are killing off inworld business as well -- these things may be opaque to you at your level of meta-business renting hundreds of islands; they are more keenly felt by smaller businesses.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/10/whats-wrong-wi...
The beauty of Second Life is that you haven't had to have a RL patent or RL trademark to set up and sell products in Second Life. It's good if you reach that stage, but the whole point is to encourage smaller entrepreneurs entering an economy with micropayments. If the Lindens break or discourage everything that appears like that, or skews it in favour of things they want, it really is destructive.
Since when does something on the Linden roadmap mean a thing?! And why should we wait until LL brings "HTML on a prim" -- something they've promised for 2 years or longer -- and suppress all innovation by residents and prohibit something like what Unmitigated has made?!
Many have chimed in here and elsewhere since Unmitigated Gall announced his product taking strongly polarized stances on both sides. Some of those supporting him, it could be argued, have been alarmist at times, but just as many are voicing legitimate concerns.
Those against have making comments revolving around two central points: 1) There are similar services. 2) The code is easy to figure out. While I would hardly deny either of these statements, it's important not to get simplistic about this either. Remember:
1) This is the first service of its kind to allow individual users to hand out "copies" of their video in-world, playable through media controls, without having to coax some coder, landlord, or hosting company into cooperating.
2) Maybe the code is easy, but few seem to be implementing it. None are implementing it in this way. They say that they can, or say that they will, but they aren't.
Encouraging people specifically to re-create a unique product with the goal of eliminating that product's edge is, at the very least, inhospitable to entrepreneurship... all legal and bureaucratic issues aside.
I have been a huge fan of Metaversed since the beginning, because of your responsible and informative coverage of business and technology in Second Life. This article is unfortunately not. Here is why:
1) A day before you even posted this article, I spoke with Unmitigated Gall via voice in SL and he informed me the Linden with whom he had the initial conversation had already gotten back to him on this topic. "Dan" Linden apparently did not understand how the LSL media controls worked, and was surprised by what Unmitigated showed him. Unfortunately Dan's reaction was to assume that it was a bug, and reacted accordingly. That was clarified within a day or so with Unmitigated by the Lindens, according to Unmitigated. The "threat" to publish his trade secrets ... LOL. The technique is documented in the LSL wiki.
2) We(i3D) currently offer a vHUD that allows you to watch videos on a HUD (and many other things) on a SilverStream enabled sim "without having to coax some coder, landlord, or hosting company into cooperating." From our website you can set urls for others to watch, and you can manager individual screen playlists as well. In fact, the Metaversed sim itself is SilverStream enabled, because we showed this tech off at your last First Friday Geek Meet and you guys use our screens for the Metanomics slide shows. There are also several Lindens who have seen our products, and a few who even use it on a regular basis.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for news coverage that keeps the companies, including the Lindens, in line. Let me tell you, the Prokofy Neva podcasts with Nick keep me on the straight and narrow. (Best segment you guys have, BTW) But this story is being blown into something it is not, and my concern is that the majority of readers who have come to trust Metaversed as an authoritative source, and will never read the comments, will not hear the truth.
Have you clarified any of this with Unmitigated Gall since posting? Have you spoken with Dan Linden? I think a story update, not just a comment reply, should be considered.
Navillus,
Here's the problem. The Lindens are busy destroying inworld business -- i.e. inworld business or virtual business that is not real-life business using SL as augmentation -- in a hundred ways. This story is only the tip of the iceberg. I am drafting a blog post of my own on this on my own blog so I can be as sharp and candid as I wish -- because people just aren't grasping that the economic slump of not just "the summer" (when it began in May and continues for some into October) is caused by a) the Lindens moving to a Grid model and abandoning the World model for business b) corporate welcome areas sucking away customers from the interactive shared econonomy into cul-de-sac economies; b) real-life companies and their metaversal sherpas not caring about any inworld economy and sucking away its best creators and undermining the inworld economy's integrity with freebies, land giveaways, corporate towns.
Add to that the fact that every patch always breaks a product somewhere. Whether it's a phone or a vendor or a scripted rental box -- every patch breaks a product. This is a given in Second Life and always has been.
The question to ask *you* is -- are you sure your method for the HUD viewing is the same as Unmitigateds?
Also, I do want to point out that nobody has to depend on a landlord to watch a video. That's some old story of more than a year ago. Since the reform of the group tools, anyone can be checked off when invited to the group to do their own deeding without being dependent on any landlord. I don't know of any rental agents that wouldn't use this feature -- it would be insane to create work for themselves going around deedingt TVs. I'm someone who has a Ph.D. in TV deeding, let me tell you, and I can't emphasize strongly enough: there is no landlord holding up media watching in SL anymore.
Actually, I'm surprised that we haven't heard from Unmitigated Gall here in the comments. Has he responded somewhere else?
[edit] I did a little looking and found responses from Unmitigated in the comments on Dizzy Banjo's blog here
and see some reference that I think are made by him on the SL's Music Development mailing list here under the topic [MUSICDEV] Multi Streams per parcel, in fact SIM wide media regardless of parcel settings and authorities.
Also, @Prok - It's not the landowner's holding up media streams that these solutions are aimed at, it's allowing different streams to be seen by different avatars on the same parcel without requiring anyone having to mess with the land settings (whether they are landowner or allowed by landowner) at all.
I am not disagreeing with you on that issue Prokofy Neva. My personal opinion is that everyone should stand-up and shout their heads off protecting the community and in-world economy that has been built in SL. We have to realize that RL companies will continue to come into SL, that it can be a good thing for the community, but that the community should be given the tools and capability to fend for themselves in the rapidly changing landscape. The Lindens need to understand that by giving IP rights to the residents in the first place, that makes all of us very invested in any changes, updates, "bug" fixes, etc. And I think that you do a great job reminding them they need to closely involve the community first, rather then inform us of changes after the fact.
My whole point was that I do not think this article cites a valid example of what you are talking about, for the reasons I described previously. My concern is that if we use honest mistakes, that the Lindens quickly clarified, it will be a disservice.
Quite honestly, this topic is central to what I have been doing in Second Life, and after talking with Unmitigated Gall, we are using the same scripting technique. I was irritated that Metaversed was announcing a "revolutionary technology" that I thought we had already unveiled at a Metaversed First Friday. :-) That very likely emotionally clouded my previous responses. Perhaps my comments concerning the responsible and informative coverage offered by Metaversed was too strongly worded. I apologize if anyone took them the wrong way. This is still the first blog roll on my RSS reader, and I always try to make it in world for the Metaversed events.
Our business is certainly built around more then a scripting technique, and our relationships with our users in the community and other companies in SL is the most important thing to us.
Thanks for the interesting discussion everyone.