I went all Encyclopedia Brown yesterday after I and many others had been led astray by an account — @wendi_deng — that Twitter had verified with its famous blue check mark over the holiday weekend as that of Wendi Deng Murdoch, the wife of News Corp. head honcho Rupert Murdoch.

(Yes, the Murdoch who bought Dow Jones, which owns this site!)

As it turned out, it was not Wendi Deng Murdoch’s real account, but a fake one created by another person — unlike the one her husband recently opened, which is indeed that of the media mogul.

In the wake of the revelation — which got the kind of attention usually reserved for a major hurricane’s landfall — Twitter was not forthcoming about how that snafu occurred in its verification process or how that process even works now.

So, because I am obsessive complusive about having to make corrections after being told something is true when it is not, I got to sleuthing for the Bugs Meany of the situation.

As it turns out, according to sources close to the situation, it was a crime of punctuation — specifically an underscore that should not have been there.

Let’s back up first: Sources confirm that Wendi Deng Murdoch has indeed had a Twitter account — @wendideng — that was opened last summer. It was mostly used in connection with a movie she was a producer of, “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.” She tweeted from the account, which had the screen name Wendi Murdoch, less than a dozen times.

When her husband recently decided to take up tweeting himself, with some amount of gusto, Twitter co-founder, creator and product guru Jack Dorsey personally helped make sure Rupert Murdoch’s account was verified.

Even though Twitter’s public “verified” program beta — to help battle fake accounts — was phased out, the communications company still does it for high-profile people, mostly celebrities or other brand names.

Murdoch certainly qualified as a famous personage and Dorsey even confirmed the News Corp. head’s arrival in the Twitterverse with his own tweet last Saturday.

As a courtesy, Twitter also moved to verify Murdoch’s spouse’s account and that is when an apparent Internet copy-editing scandal was born.

Since the information exchange was done over a hurried holiday weekend, several sources on both sides said there was a miscommunication and the company mangled the @ address it was told by Deng’s assistant. Mistakenly, Twitter apparently thought that the correct account was the one with the underscore and not the one with no space at all.

Unfortunately, the underscore Wendi account was the faux one created by a British man having some fun spoofing the famous Deng, who still had the no-space one for reals.

It’s kind of like a digital version of one of those switched-at-birth plots, except sillier and even more entertaining.

Thus, carrying the distinctive blue check mark, everyone assumed Twitter had verified the right one, until it was soon pointed out by News Corp. and even the fake Deng that it had not.

Can’t resist this tweet, but all Iowans think about Rick Santorum.Only candidate with genuine big vision for country.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 3, 2012

Awkward!

Twitter then released a statement admitting the obvious, the fake Deng enjoyed basking in the worldwide attention and the still-verified Rupert Murdoch had lobbed some much-noticed tweets (as you can see here, in case you are not one of his more than 101,000 followers).

As for the real Deng? She suspended her account.

For now, at least. Sources said she is likely to come back to Twitter and is still a big fan of Dorsey and the service.

Case, um, closed. (I hope.)

We’ll see more of this over time, as the overstuffed ad network industry consolidates, and this one makes some sense on paper: BBE, formerly known as Broadband Enterprises, specializes in video ads, and Specific doesn’t have any video business at all.

I don’t have a price for the deal, though industry observers guesstimate that BBE might go for something in the $65 million to $85 million range.

I’ve asked officials at both companies for comment, but the best I’ve been able to do is get Specific Media co-founder and SVP Russell Vanderhook on the phone. He told me he was “not the one to speak to about that” and promised to pass my message on to his brother Tim Vanderhook, who is CEO. (There’s a third Vanderhook at Specific, too: Chris, who is COO).

BBE is one of the biggest ad networks in the world, at least by comScore’s measurement: It says the company’s ads reach 192.8 million unique visitors per month, enough to earn it the No. 6 slot.

By comparison, comScore pegs Yahoo’s ad network at 185 million, AOL at 183.6 million and Google at 181.5 million. And the measurement company says Specific Media reaches 158.6 million, which puts it in 22nd place. [UPDATE: The BBE number that comScore provides is for "potential reach," which is awfully theoretical, while the other network data represents a "real" audience. Thanks to Tod M. Sacerdoti, who runs BBE competitor BrightRoll, for catching my mistake.]

Specific is getting more than an ad network with BBE. The company runs its own video ad-serving arm, which industry observers tell me has been performing quite well.

BBE raised $10 million in 2008 from Velocity Interactive Group, now known as Fuse Capital. Specific has raised a reported $110 million since 2006.

[Image credit: Steve aka Crispin Swan]

To work on a mysterious cloud-computing project, which has something to do with mobility and entertainment. That’s per TechFlash, which reported on the deal Sunday.

Probably best not to make too much of this one. Given that Real didn’t announce the deal (let alone report it to the Securities and Exchange Commission), it can’t be for much money (note that the last purchase Real bothered to announce was for $4 million). And the Lala deal aside, you can “acqhire” a group of engineers without laying out a lot of cash these days.

But it is a good reminder that RealNetworks (RNWK) wants to make itself a player in the next phase of entertainment–the one where you buy or rent the stuff over the Web and consume it wherever you want.

That’s at least partly why CEO Rob Glaser is still wrangling with Hollywood over his “RealDVD” system, which is supposed to let you rip copies of DVDs you already own. Because once you’ve done that, the next logical step is moving the file to your iPod or your tablet or just to different rooms in your house.

The problem, of course, is that everyone else wants to play there, too. And many already are in some form.

There are the hardware guys like Sony (SNE), who are selling TV sets and game consoles with Web connections, and cable guys like Comcast (CMCSA), who already control the pipe that brings the stuff to your living room. And telcos like Verizon (VZ), which want to do the same thing. And, of course, retailers like Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix (NFLX), which are already selling digital entertainment. Etc.

During the first Web boom, it seemed Real would be in this list as well, since its back-end technology and its RealPlayer were commonly used to move entertainment around the Internet. Now the company is best known for its Rhapsody music service and its collection of casual games, but it doesn’t have pole position in either sector.

You’ll hear plenty more about this stuff over the next week at the Consumer Electronics Show, which kicks off Wednesday. But Real will probably be mum.

The company doesn’t have any announcements planned and isn’t renting space at the convention’s main show floor. Not a terrible idea to lie low at CES, where lots of people make a lot of noise about stuff that never comes to pass. But at some point, it will be interesting to see how Real plans to compete.

Enter RealPlayer SP beta (realplayer.com), the latest in RealNetworks Inc.’s (RNWK) long line of media players that the company has churned out since 1995. RealPlayer SP—the SP stands for social and portable—is a free download that, once installed, grabs videos from the Web, converts them to the right format and transfers them to over a dozen portable devices. While other software programs perform two or just one of these tasks, the RealPlayer SP’s trio of talent makes it like a digital Swiss army knife.

After using the RealPlayer for moving several videos of all kinds to an iPhone, BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Palm Pre, I felt like I had more control over my portable devices and the media they held. And the freedom of knowing that this player is compatible with almost anything—including Apple (AAPL) and Palm (PALM) devices, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerrys, T-Mobile’s G1 and Sidekick, Nokia’s (NOK) N97 and certain basic cellphones—is a major plus.

Behavior Problem

My biggest problem with using the RealPlayer SP has to do with my own behavior. Most of the videos I watch online and share with friends are less than five minutes long. This means that grabbing, converting and transferring videos to a portable device using the RealPlayer SP—albeit a relatively quick process—could easily take more time than the length of the video, itself. And many of the longer videos that I would want to move to a BlackBerry or iPhone are copyright-protected and thus can’t be downloaded by the RealPlayer SP.

Another factor is that more devices now have their own built-in app stores for downloading content to the device, without plugging into a computer for transfers like with the RealPlayer SP. The iPod touch, for example, can now download movies, music videos and TV shows over Wi-Fi thanks to a recent $10 software upgrade.

Mac Version Coming Soon

The RealPlayer SP works only on Windows PCs right now; a Mac version is due out by the end of this year. Likewise, it doesn’t work on Apple’s Safari browser but does work on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google’s (GOOG) Chrome browser; I used all three with success.

If you’re not interested in using the RealPlayer SP for transferring videos to portable devices, you can still use it for downloading videos, saving them onto your computer and sharing them with friends via Twitter, Facebook or email. Tiny icons representing each of these sharing options appear in-line beside freshly downloaded videos. I shared videos of last week’s Congressional Luau at the White House via Facebook and Twitter, but the icon to share videos via Twitter doesn’t automatically shrink URLs to fit into a tweet. I shrunk the URLs myself, but this took an extra step¹.

And though I’ve mostly focused on the RealPlayer SP’s ability to grab, convert and transfer (RealNetworks calls these tools the Downloader feature in the player), it also works as its own media player or helps you discover new content.

RealPlayer SP Beta downloads, converts and transfers videos from the Web to a variety of portable devices.

A premium version called RealPlayer Plus SP is available for $40. Premium features include DVD burning, DVD playback (if your computer can’t play DVDs) and video conversion to a special format called h.264—though the free version performs these conversions for videos being moved to Apple devices.

I jumped around the Web visiting sites and playing videos, which prompted the RealPlayer SP to display a small “Download This Video” message above videos that aren’t copyright-protected. Downloading videos worked on most sites, including AllThingsD.com, Slate, YouTube, Salon and CNET. As expected, I wasn’t so lucky with videos from the New York Times, BBC and Hulu, which hosts loads of TV shows and music videos. That’s because videos from these sites were copyright-protected and didn’t allow for downloading.

A Glitch

In one instance with a WSJ.com video, only the short ad that played before the video was downloaded, even though the download prompt indicated that the WSJ video was obtainable using RealPlayer SP. RealNetworks says this is a glitch it knows about and plans to correct.

The RealPlayer SP’s ability to download videos and transfer them to devices, rather than just copying them onto computers, forced me to be choosier about the videos that I downloaded due to the limited memory of the devices. Because of this, I wished the RealPlayer SP Downloader had a better built-in way to discover downloadable content. Currently, a link to something called the RealGuide pulls up suggestions, but I had a hard time finding clips there that I wanted to download. RealNetworks says it plans to improve the video-discovery process in the future, including adding things like YouTube keyword searches built right into the Downloader.

The Downloader Window

When I did find videos I liked, I clicked on the prompt to download the clip, found the clip in a tiny Downloader window, and chose to move the clip to a device (there’s a list of all available devices) or share it via Twitter, Facebook or email. Transfer times depend on the length of the video.

RealNetworks provides simple instructions on making sure your device is set to transfer when plugged in. For example, BlackBerrys must be set to mass-storage mode, Palm Pres should be set to USB mode and Apple devices synchronize with the iTunes library, where RealPlayer’s converted videos are sent for transferring to iPhones and iPods.

RealPlayer SP can be a real help when it comes to putting the content that you want on your portable device. Its ability to assist from start to finish—finding videos, converting and transferring them—saves time and avoids confusion. To succeed, RealPlayer SP needs to do a better job of helping people find worthwhile videos to transfer, or they’ll stop using it after just a few tries.

Corrections and Amplifications

¹ Real Networks says its RealPlayer SP Beta’s Twitter video sharing capability has an automatic URL-shortening tool built in. This week’s Mossberg Solution product said the product lacked such a feature, because it never activated itself in our tests.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090630/the-swiss-army-knife-of-portable-videos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090522/will-carriers-save-the-subscription-music-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20090522/will-carriers-save-the-subscription-music-business/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 19:41:42 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=12049 The news this week that Napster is relaunching with a $5-a-month subscription plan that includes 5 free MP3 downloads would appear to be a troubling development for RealNetworks’ (RNWK) rival Rhapsody service, which will set you back $13 a month for a streaming service that lacks the free MP3s. It is also no doubt irritating to Real that it comes from a company that is now a unit of Best Buy (BBY): in the past, the Best Buy digital music store was a re-branded version of Rhapsody, which came pre-loaded on non-Zune, non-iPod music players sold by the retailer.

Earlier this week, I chatted about the situation with Neil Smith, VP of business management for Rhapsody America. His spin on the Napster story is that what they’re really doing is going head-to-head with Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store–that Napster is “all about the downloads.” He says Napster basically wants to use the new approach to get into the pre-paid music gift card market, using the free downloads as a driver to steal share from Apple. He thinks selling tracks is more their goal than “turning the tide toward subscription from purchase,” which is where Real is focused.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090522/will-carriers-save-the-subscription-music-business/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081008/realdvd-launch-buffering-buffering/ http://allthingsd.com/20081008/realdvd-launch-buffering-buffering/#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:47:36 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=6399 Looks like RealNetworks’ RealDVD, the company’s new “legal” DVD ripper, is off the market for the foreseeable future. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel on Tuesday renewed the temporary restraining order barring RealNetworks (RNWK) from distributing the software, paying little mind to the company’s claim that the order has already caused it significant harm and would “devastate Real’s ability to ever launch RealDVD successfully or to capitalize on its lead over competitors.”

“I am extending the temporary restraining order because I’m not satisfied in the fact that this technology is not in violation,” Patel explained. “There are serious questions about copyright violations. There are questions about violations of the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and violations of these companies’ agreement.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Rent. Rip. Restraining Order.
• StealDVD? Well, You Were Asking for It…
• Sue. Rent. Rip. Return.
• Rent. Rip. Return.

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