To me, the future of music is really simple. It's cloud-based servers that have all of the music, TV, movies -- whatever it might be. Very rich application-driven PDAs, whether it's the iPhone or whatever else comes up, that has applications that I have yet to see. Like digital maids or valets, which go out and knows what your musical tastes are and your 20 friends, and finds that music and organizes it -- not the actual music but the metadata so you can pull it when and how you want it. ...I call it the "hassle factor" -- for $5 to $10 you get all the music you want without the pain of having to find it. So you get the new Killers album without even knowing the new Killers album is out, and it's automatically in your weekend listening folder because your digital valet got it for you. And if you want to know what your buddy Ken's listening to, then the valet checks out his playlist and copies it over for you.

It has been almost a year since the launch of the iPlayer (an online TV-on-demand service run by the publicly funded broadcaster, the BBC).  This has prompted much discussion and debate.  Here's a sample ;

The BBC iPlayer on-demand online TV catch-up service is a year old, but it cannot rest on its laurels...Such has been its impact on the media landscape, it’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since the BBC’s online TV catch-up service, iPlayer, was launched. It has even won over technophobes with its simple premise of “making the unmissable unmissable”

Plus then the BBC talked of offering the technology to its rivals as the BBC director general said "[The BBC should] share the benefits of its scale and security with the rest of the industry". However Channel 4 shot back calling these plans 'inaccurate'.

P2P applications continues to evolve and get more interesting.  Introducing LittleShoot - an in-browser p2p application...

Littleshoot is in short a browser-based P2P service that is based on the open source SIP protocol. The service also offers search and download capability for various other media services, such as Youtube, Yahoo's video search and Limewire / Gnutella.

It features a nifty integration of Yahoo's Flash media player, making it possible to play back MP3s you download right in your browser. One interesting technical aspect about it is that it making substantial use of Google's App engine. Fisk is also working on a Twitter integration right now that will make it possible to share media files through Twitter in your browser.

 There is more here too..

But one group of people is loving Blu-ray: Asian movie pirates. The pirates rip Blu-ray movies, then burn them onto DVDs using the AVCHD format, at a resolution that's lower than Blu-ray, but still higher than standard DVDs. The lower resolution means the pirates can burn onto regular blank DVDs, not blank Blu-ray discs, holding their costs down and creating fat profit margins on the $7 bootlegs.

I see news about the health of the music industry as defined by the stock price of WMG or quarterly earnings of UMG, Sony, and EMI every day. What I don’t see, apart from a few articles on Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, is an update on how the world is changing from the artist point of view.

So YouTube and Hollywood may be finally getting it's act together to offer full films for free from the site ;

The video website YouTube is preparing to link up with Hollywood to show full-length films for free over the internet, it has emerged....Free films, running with advertising, would mark a radical advance for the video-sharing website as it looks to profit from its massive popularity. It is not clear which Hollywood studios are involved in the discussions. But one report from the CNET news website suggested a YouTube movie service could arrive within 90 days.

Far from being a radical move, this makes the site a bit of an also-ran.  Users of YouTube have been chopping up longer videos (especially TV shows) and posting them online for some time to get around the 10 minutes limit.  In addition sites like Veoh allow posting of full length films and then there has been the growth of link-aggregation sites like QuickSliverScreen and allUC where links to full films and TV shows are posted.