Hot on the heels of last week’s offer by Private Media to buy Napster, California’s own VS Media also threw their hat into the fray by signing an agreement to use the AltNet’s TopSearch service to distribute the legendary Pam and Tommy Sex Video via Kazaa.
Our testers took the few minutes necessary to perform a quick search in Kazaa using the common key words “Pam and Tommy” only to have three nice gold emblazoned logos appear at the top of our search identifying three different WindowsMedia files which appeared to have been injected into Kazaa by VS Media from a variety of servers at Cogent communications instead of via the FastTrack network.
Once we had the files to our local machines we took a look at them. From first glance they look to be normal WindowsMedia files that you find in Kazaa daily, however as we opened them up we were surprised to see them open as protected content and immediately reach out to the http://ts.altnet.com/drm/drm.aspx and http://ts.sexbroadcaster.com/drm/drm.aspx urls to acquire licenses.
Immediately following we were presented with a pop up for the VS Media content with an AltNet branding at the top.
The player then went off to fetch the license and we were given an option to play the file.
However upon buffering, we began to watch the worst video we have seen in a long time in terms of quality, frame size, CODEC etc. The video was like smaller than our cell phone LED and it looks as though VS Media used the 4 year old WindowsMedia MPEG-2 CODECs for audio and video which would explain why no-one is probably buying this. You would think that with as much effort as it appears was put into this offering, someone would have spent a little time cleaning up the video and using some more current CODECS which Microsoft has had in the marketplace for three years now. Like something part of modern digital video on the internet like the WMT V7, WMT V8 or GOD FORBID the new WMT V9 CODECS.
Once the video was done playing, again we were surprised to see a pop-up to the Pam and Tommy Video Collector’s Edition from VS Media. There we were given the option to buy access to the website where supposedly most of these videos were.
Unfortunately we were not that impressed and would have much rather preferred to see the WindowsMedia Player License Window pop-up to a buy through page where we could have just bought the movie in its entirety. At minimum it would have been nice to get some better previews on the site.
Once we killed the join windows this is where it got ugly. VS Media hit us with 9 different exit consoles making them as much of a spammer as a dot.com business can be and still be IN business. We could have really done without the pop-ups for their other products that looked as lame as the Pam and Tommy video. We would have really liked to have seen some better content here as well or at least a broader range of sites other than the WEGCash offerings.
We got bored and decided to poke around a little more and took a look at the license server urls where AltNet is clearing the licenses only to find a really ugly spit up.
Looks like AltNet is a bit new to the DRM game and it may take some time before they really get the processing and DRM apps down. The lack of integration between AltNet’s DRM including VS Media’s processing gateway would have made us feel better about having less secure info moving around from server to server.
All in all this is clearly an early attempt by AltNet that will need some work before it converts. Not a big blip on the radar for current Kazaa users but it looks like there’s more to come.
Stay tuned.
File Sharing SOLDIER Labs.
