Janus Friis on Joost: adult content coming soon!

Joost co-founder Janus Friis has outlined future possibilities for the web TV service including charging users, introducing adult content and never going down the "slippery slope" of splitting ad revenue with ISPs.

Friis, interviewed in the Futureview address at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh TV Festival, was keen for the most part to convince the mostly-TV industry audience of the virtues of the nascent Joost service.

It was tough for Matt Wells, Guardian Unlimited's head of audio, who was conducting the interview, to extract anything other than textbook comments from Friis.

On the BBC iPlayer: "Great product, not as good as it will be".

On ITV, Channel 4 and BBC developing their own platforms for distribution: "It is like the retail category. Companies have a flagship store where they have their own branded experience and only their own products. Then they also distribute products through many other stores".

But a few nuggets emerged nevertheless. One wasn't that one name in the mix for the web TV service was the rather dodgy sounding Mowli (isn't that the name of Carphone Warehouse's animated mobile character?).

Friis did expand to say that Joost was "opening up" in a number of ways. This flexibility meant that it "could add pay-per-view in the future" and would "not rule out" introducing potentially lucrative adult content "sometime in the future".

When confronted with the sticky question of bandwidth issues - the same one the BBC is currently grappling with over potential mass-adoption of the iPlayer - Friis confidently answered that "the reality is the internet can cope. Cisco and ISPs can scale".

"Killer services" - such as TV content - will drive broadband uptake and usage, a good thing for ISPs surely, says Friis. "People don't get it (broadband) to get email".

This wasn't good enough for Magic Lantern's editorial development director Richard Ayers, the former portal director at Tiscali, who took Friis to task in the Q&A session claiming that "ISPs hate Joost".

Friis' response was that "people running ISPs" are in favour but those within the ISP world developing similar products don't like it.

"It is a schism within ISPs," he argued. Mr Ayers followed up by asking if in order to balance the extra costs of delivering TV over ISP networks, would Joost cut off a slice of ad revenue it makes?

"We are not negotiating to give up revenue," said Friis emphatically. "That is a slippery slope".

"If any ISP turned off eBay, Skype or YouTube other ISPs would find themselves with a lot of new users," is how he ended his defence on why ISPs are unlikely to get heavy-handed over the issue.

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German Terrorist Haule Will Be Paroled After 21 Years in Prison

German terrorist Eva Haule, who was convicted for participating in the murder of an American soldier and a bombing attack on a U.S. airbase, will be released on probation after serving 21 years in prison.

The Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt decided to parole Haule, who can leave prison on Aug. 21, the court said in an e- mailed statement today. Haule was a member of Germany's Red Army Faction terrorist movement from 1984 until her arrest in 1986.

``The court has come to the conclusion, together with the federal prosecutor and after hearing several psychological experts, that the convict now no longer poses a danger to the public,'' the court said.

Several members of the terrorist organization have sought early release from prison this year, spurring discussion on the Red Army and its so called Offensive 77. The terrorist campaign 30 years ago led to a series of murders, including that of Dresdner Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Juergen Ponto and the kidnapping and killing of BDI industry lobby chairman Hanns Martin Schleyer.

Haule was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for participating in the murder of U.S. soldier Edward Pimental. Terrorists killed him in August 1985 to obtain his identification card which allowed one of the terrorists entrance to the U.S. Rhine-Main-Airbase with a bomb-loaded car. The explosion killed two Americans and wounded several others.

In April 2006, the court said Haule must serve at least 21 years before being eligible for parole. Since June 2004, Haule was allowed to leave her Berlin prison during the day and started an apprenticeship as a photographer.

The fact that Haule now renounces violence as a means to reach political goals led to the decision, the court said. The judges heard Haule two times before reaching their decision.

In March, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a leader of the Red Army in the 1970s, was released from prison after serving 24 years. In May, German President Horst Koehler rejected a petition by Christian Klar for a pardon. Mohnhaupt and Klar were convicted for the 1977 murders of Ponto and Schleyer.

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Hitler's record collection

Hitler’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ turn up in a dead Russian soldier’s attic.

Adolf Hitler, the most notorious champion of Richard Wagner and “racially pure” German music, banished Jewish and Russian musicians from the concert halls of the Third Reich — but apparently listened secretly to their work.

New light has been shed on the Nazi leader’s musical tastes by the discovery of what are said to be a hundred of his gramophone records found in the attic of a former Soviet intelligence officer, Lev Besymenski.

“There were classical recordings, performed by the best orchestras of Europe and Germany with the best soloists of the age,” Mr Besymenski said in a document explaining how the records came into his possession.

The 86-year-old, who helped to interrogate captured Nazi generals, died this summer. The document and the record collection have now been made available to Der Spiegel magazine.

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A cultivated taste that went for very best
“I was astonished that Russian musicians were among the collection,” Mr Besymenski wrote. Hitler dismissed Russians as ‘Untermenschen’, sub-humans, and was contemptuous of their contribution to world culture. Yet the records included works by Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rachmaninov — scratched from frequent playing and all clearly labelled ‘Föhrerhauptquartier’, the Föhrer’s headquarters.”

The Soviet intelligence officer had found them in Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin in May 1945, still packed in crates. Hitler’s staff were counting on an evacuation to the Nazi leader’s Alpine hideaway on the Obersalzberg and it was known that he could only relax with his music.

Mr Besymenski, then a captain in military intelligence, kept quiet about the records during his lifetime for fear that he would be accused of looting.

The most astonishing fact about the records — essentially Hitler’s “Best of . . .” collections — is the presence of Jewish performers. Among the recordings is a Tchaikovsky concerto performed by the virtuoso Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman. Hitler would have been aware, while listening to Huberman’s playing, that he had founded the Palestine Orchestra in 1936 (which went on to be the foundation of today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) and that he was living in enforced exile. The Austrian Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel, whose mother was killed by the Nazis, also had his work included in Hitler’s personal collection. It is not known which records in the collection were listened to most frequently, nor have they been formally catalogued.

“I’m not terribly surprised by Hitler’s record choices,” said James Kennaway, of Stanford University. “Nazi music policy was pretty incoherent. Stravinsky was played in the Third Reich because he was known to have right-wing views, Bartok because Hungary was a German ally.” Dr Kennaway, a leading musicologist who specialises in the Nazi period, added: “The only real point of consistency in Nazi policy was antiSemitism, so the Schnabel and Huberman recordings do stand out.”

Hitler had spelt out his view of Jewish culture in Mein Kampf. “There was never a Jewish art and there is none today,” he wrote, adding that the “two queens of the arts, architecture and music, gained nothing original from the Jews”.

Roger Moorhouse, a historian and the author of Killing Hitler, said that the record collection, if authentic, suggested a contradiction between the Föhrer’s aesthetic and political values. He said: “It is interesting that being Russian or Jewish did not disqualify a musician from a place in Hitler’s record collection. There was probably a separation in his world view between the political and the artistic.”

Although Hitler took piano lessons as a child, he displayed no personal musical talent. His surgeon, Hanskarl von Hasselbach, noted that “Hitler always whistled out of tune”.

His former radio operator, Rochus Misch, the last survivor of Hitler’s bunker, recently recalled how he had summoned his manservant to put on a record after a row with army commanders. “He just sat there, completely sunk in the music. The Föhrer needed distraction.”

Fuhrer’s favourites

Five discs that Hitler wanted to take with him

1 Piano sonatas, Opus 78 and 90, Beethoven
2 Wagner’s overture to The Flying Dutchman by the Bayreuth Orchestra, conducted by Heinz Tietjen
3 Russian arias, including the death in Boris Godunov, by Mussorgsky, sung by the Russian bass Fyodor Shalyapin
4 Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, soloist Bronislaw Huberman
5 Mozart Piano Sonata No 8 in A minor with Artur Schnabel

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