Previously heading Avex Asia Limited, a Hong Kong-based subsidiary of Japanese entertainment conglomerate Avex Group, Marini (pictured) will report to Hulu senior VP of international Johannes Larcher.  He’ll lead all strategy and operations for Hulu’s business in Japan, which opened shop in September.

A Hulu representative would not respond to our queries as to how this would change Hulu Japan’s executive infrastructure other than to say he’s reporting to Larcher.

Marini, who oversaw Asian film investment for Avex, started his career in the U.S., working as an agent trainee for Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor and later as a creative executive for Universal Pictures.

So what’s he walking into? Tough to say, since Hulu is reluctant to release usage data on the region.

Last month, the streaming video company announced that it had lowered its subscription price in Japan from ¥1480 (about $18.20) to ¥980 ($12.10).

While not offering an update on its Japanese operations, a Hulu rep said the company has increased its content partnerships to 21 from the six it had in the region at launch. Also, the estimated number of devices in Japan that are “Hulu-enabled” has reached 29 million.

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Russian forensics firm ElcomSoft earlier this week announced that it has discovered a way to easily access iCloud backups of iOS devices, incorporating the functionality into its Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker software. While the Apple ID and password must be known in order to access the iCloud data, once that information has been obtained the software makes it easy for investigators to download full iCloud backups and then follow incremental backups in near real-time to track a device’s use without the knowledge of the user.

ElcomSoft researchers analyzed the communication protocol connecting iPhone users with Apple iCloud, and were able to emulate the correct commands in order to retrieve the content of iOS users’ iCloud storage. It’s important to note that, unlike offline backups that may come encrypted and must be broken into (a time-consuming operation), data retrieved from iCloud is received in plain, unencrypted form . The 5GB of storage space can be retrieved in reasonable time, while receiving incremental updates is even faster.

Obtaining a user’s Apple ID password may not always be trivial, but ElcomSoft tools can also be used to capture that information from offline backups stored in iTunes. And of course if the user disables iCloud syncing on its device or changes the Apple ID password, remote access is lost.

ElcomSoft has been at the forefront of development of password-cracking tools, last year incorporating a tool to bypass hardware encryption included in iOS 4. Such tools are increasingly being used by law enforcement to aid their investigations as smartphones become increasingly common and collect a growing amount of information about users and their activity.

ElcomSoft offers several levels of its software, with the most powerful versions restricted to certain governmental agencies, including law enforcement, intelligence services, and other qualified forensic organizations.

View full post on MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors – Front Page

But as monthly video data released by comScore shows, both companies have managed to significantly increase the amount of time viewers spend watching video on their respective channels.

Also read: TV nets wrap upfront week: “The biz still goes through us”

According to comScore, viewers spent an average of 434.8 minutes in April watching video on Google channels, a grouping the mainly includes the assets of YouTube. That represents an uptick of 55 percent over April 2011.

On Yahoo channels, meanwhile, viewers spent an average of 73.7 minutes in April watching video, nearly double the 37.5 minutes they averaged in April 2011.

While time spent viewing these leading digital channel operators has increased dramatically, total unique viewers watching them has not.

Tabulating 157.7 million unique video users in April, Google sites experienced only an 11 percent increase over April 2011′s tally of 142.7 million.

Yahoo, meanwhile, was virtually flat, counting 53.6 million uniques in April compared to 53.2 million during the same period last year.

These year-over-year benchmarks for the leading internet video providers follow trend lines of the broader online video industry.

For the entire online video universe, comScore tabulated 180.8 million unique viewers in April, up just 5 percent over April 2011. However, total minutes spent watching online video increased 46 percent to an average of 1,307.7 (I know, who are the people with all this time who are top-weighting these averages?).

Even with the uptick in consumption, YouTube and Yahoo’s rise in usage has come at a cost to others.

Vevo traffic continues to slide

Music video giant Vevo, for example, saw its unique viewers plummet 10 percent to 49.5 million over the same period, while its average viewership time declined by 41 percent to 57.9 minutes. (The comScore report doesn’t track mobile usage, so it’s hard to tell how many viewers are migrating to mobile platforms.)

Also, Viacom digital, the leader among traditional media companies in the digital video realm, saw its average viewer time drop 27 percent to 58.9 minutes (unique viewers were flat year over year at 41.2 million).

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On Wednesday, Viacom finally reached an agreement with Time Warner Cable, enabling the pay TV service provider to stream the media conglomerate’s shows on iPads, notebook computers, smart phones and other digital devices.

The agreement ends a 13-month court dispute between the two companies, which started after Time Warner Cable began streaming Viacom cable channels including Nickelodeon, MTV, Spike TV and Comedy Central to its nearly 12 million customers.

In suing the No. 2 cable provider in the U.S., Viacom claimed that Time Warner needed to pay for the right to stream its content. The cable company claimed that its ongoing carriage deal with the conglomerate gave it those rights.

Separately, Time Warner fought Cablevision over the same issue last year. These disputes have caused many to wonder if TV Everywhere — the broad-reaching pay-TV industry initiative that seeks to broaden the reach of bundled subscription television into the digital realm — will ever get done.

With consumers expanding their video usage well beyond the living-room TV screen, the multi-channel industry sees TV Everywhere as the weapon needed to ward off new, so-called “over-the-top” competition from on-demand program distributors like Netflix.

TV Everywhere requires each program supplier to make individual deals with each multi-channel operator. At the time Viacom and Time Warner Cable entered the courtroom, there was a lack of clarity on some very basic and necessary dealmaking infrastructure — i.e. what should the ability to stream video be worth on top of already agreed-upon carriage fees?

So with a streaming deal in place between a top cable programmer and leading cable provider, are we closer to having established those basic terms?

Tough to say yes on that one.

Notably, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision settled their dispute all the way back in August, but that doesn’t seem to have created the kind of template that would spur a sudden flurry of TV Everywhere dealmaking And in the joint statement announcing their agreement Wednesday, Viacom and Time Warner included the following coda: “Neither side is conceding its original legal position or will have further comment.”

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Comcast Tower

Comcast plans to raise its broadband cap to 300 GB per month as it trials two new ways to deal with managing traffic on its network, the nation’s largest cable operator said in a blog post today. The move is a welcome one for those who have hit the existing 250 GB cap, but it neglects to address some of the earlier complaints that have arisen in the last few weeks about Comcast exempting some of its own video on-demand trafficand allegations that the company is prioritizing that traffic in violation of federal rules implemented when it bought NBC-Universal.

What Comcast plans to offer

Comcast says it plans to trial two types of plans in unnamed markets. The first will offer customers a higher cap at higher tiers of service. So the Internet Essentials, Economy, and Performance Tier customers will have a 300 GB cap while those getting higher speeds (and Comcast offers some pretty high speeds at 100 MBps) will have some undetermined, higher cap. Customers under this plan will also be allowed to buy additional gigabytes for a certain amount. Comcast gave the example of $10 per 50 GB block.

The second trial will offer customers a 300 GB cap across all product lines and will offer customers a chance to buy more bytes for the same price. What’s key in both of these situations is that Comcast is allowing customers to buy more gigabytes after they hit the cap. Previously, it cut customers off. In this way it’s closer to capped plans such as those offered by AT&T, which stops users at a 250 or 150 GB per month cap and then charges them $10 for 50 more gigabytes.

The second approach will increase data usage thresholds for all tiers to 300 GB per month and also offer the option to buy more gigabytes. Comcast will also suspend the enforcement of its caps across all of its markets while it tests the new caps and plans.

While Comcast’s decision to expand its caps is good, it’s also sticking to the idea that unlimited broadband is detrimental to the quality of its network. In its blog post and on a conference call discussing the new plans, Comcast repeatedly tied these caps to better network management, but Comcast already has a network management plan that it filed with the FCC after it was caught blocking P2P packets on its network. In that plan, the company noted that when its network became congested it would temporarily slow traffic to customers requiring the most bandwidth. So why does it need the cap?

What Comcast doesn’t talk about.

Many argue that the cap is less about network management and more about protecting Comcast’s pay TV business as customers spend more time watching television via web-based subscription services including Netflix and Hulu. As I said, I’m glad Comcast has raised its cap, but conspicuously missing from the Comcast post is an admission that the cap is problematic when Comcast still offers to exempt some of its services from the cap.

When asked about this, David Cohen, Executive Vice President of Comcast, shut down the discussion, saying, “It is a real stretch to create a discrimination argument here.” He went on to say that the concern over any exempted services should be dramatically reduced because of the increased data threshold. “We’re relieving a hypothetical pressure on usage, here,” he said.

While the cap’s size has created some controversy as more and more customers hit it, the issue is less the size and more the existence of the cap if Comcast continues to offer services that will be exempt from that cap. Even at 300 GB per month, if certain types of traffic don’t count against that cap, then the cap still offers Comcast a competitive advantage over Netflix, YouTube and other over-the-top video services. Cohen repeatedly, however, mentioned a comment from the Netflix earnings call where the CEO of the streaming video provider said that a 250GB cap wasn’t affecting its business.

What Reed Hastings actually said was this:

It’s not a near-term issue with the 250 gigabyte cap. But the core principle [of network neutrality] is important anyway, which is the cap should be applied equally or not at all.

The larger cap also doesn’t address the question of whether or not Comcast is prioritizing its own traffic over other Internet traffic as was alleged earlier this week in a blog post by Bryan Berg, the CTO of MixMedia Labs. Comcast has explained why it believes it is not prioritizing its traffic in a manner that would draw government ire, but in a close reading of its post, what Comcast is describing is highly technical. Essentially it is saying that it is creating a logical as opposed to a physical separation in the traffic, and that it why it is marking packets.

Comcast wants you to feel free to use the web

So while Comcast is trumpeting its forward-thinking behavior on caps, there are a lot of questions about the timing of its announcement. Reporters on the call repeatedly asked Cohen about the rationale for increasing the cap. Cohen said its median usage is between 8-10 GB per month or about four percent of the cap and that the “vast, vast majority of users aren’t hitting the cap,” which does beg the question: why change the cap now?

Cohen’s response was, “It’s a matter of messaging way more than it’s a question of capacity.” He reiterated the idea that this is about encouraging users to use and download lawful content on their Comcast service without worrying about the cap. This implies that customers might find the cap inhibiting their behavior or that people questioning the cap are making some headway. So for now, customers get 20 percent more head room on their Comcast cap, and we’ll have to wait and see when and where Comcast rolls out its new plans.

Meanwhile I’ll leave you with Cohen’s suggested headline for this piece: “The headline today should be, we’re out of the cap business.”

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Bloomberg reports that Steve Jobs was intimately involved in the design work for the next-generation iPhone scheduled for release later this year, reiterating claims that the device will be a substantial change from previous designs in part because of a larger display.

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, has placed orders from suppliers in Asia for screens that are bigger than the 3.5- inch size now on the smartphone, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had worked closely on the redesigned phone before his death in October, one person said. [...]

Apple has been working on the new device since before the current iPhone 4S model was introduced last October, said one person with knowledge of the project. Jobs, who had gone on medical leave from Apple starting last January, played a key role in developing the phone, this person said.

Bloomberg becomes the third major publication to offer an independent report this week regarding a larger display for the next iPhone, following The Wall Street Journal and Reuters yesterday.

View full post on MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors – Front Page

“This is going after some FiOS customers, but this is really meant for the launch across the United States to the Redbox population and their 30 million customers,” said Verizon chief financial officer Fran Shammo Thursday morning, speaking in Boston at the 40th annual J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.

Also read: A new ‘stream team’: Verizon and Redbox take on Netflix

Shammo said Verizon’s impetus for the joint venture was not so much to transition video content licensed for the fiber-optic-fueled FiOS’ roughly 4.4 million subscribers, a la TV Everywhere, “but to expand our capability outside FiOS’ footprint.”

As for the Redbox footprint, it’s actually much bigger than 30 million. With Coinstar conducting a separate financially oriented event Thursday, “analyst’s day,” its Redbox unit tallied nearly 39 million customers at the end of the first quarter.

It’s about to take over the 10,000 Blockbuster Express kiosk locations it acquired in February. And the company has plans to expand into Cananda, the third biggest disc-rental market in the world.

As for the streaming venture, Shammo said it will showcase Verizon’s new proprietary digital distribution platform, Verizon Digital Media Services (VDSM), which he believes has advantages over the content delivery networks utilized by Netflix and Hulu.

“Utilizing that backbone, we’re able to deliver content at a much cheaper rate than people out there today,” Shammo said.

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Here’s the statement a Netflix spokesperson sent me via email:

“Increasing the data cap is a small step in the right direction, but unfortunately Comcast continues to treat its own Internet delivered video different under the cap than other Internet delivered video. We continue to stand by the principle that ISPs should treat all providers of video services equally.”

In other words: The key issue of how Comcast treats its own Xfinity.tv on demand traffic hasn’t been resolved. Comcast said earlier today in a statement that it adheres to FCC principles that bind it to treat all IP traffic equally, but also repeated its assertion that Xfinity simply isn’t part of the Internet – something that our own Stacey Higginbotham has called dodging the net neutrality issue. Read her excellent analysis of today’s Comcast announcement here.

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