The National Consumers League is out with the results of a new study conducted by Opinion Research showing that 90% of consumers believe they should be able to back up their DVDs to a hard drive or copy them to a portable device, and they'd be willing to pay about $61 for a piece of software that helped them back up their collections. Sounds like a good business opportunity for someone like a RealNetworks...oh wait.

New York - Fascinating keynote at the Digital Music Forum East this morning from Jim Griffin, an advisor to Warner Music Group and head of the Choruss initiative. I'm getting a text of his speech and will post. But suffice to say he delivered a smackdown to Rick Carnes and Chris Castle over their criticisms of Choruss which ran in op-ed that appeared in Content Agenda and other publications.

Well that was a downer from Disney yesterday in its fiscal Q1 earnings call. The DVD business is tanking, nothing else is taking up the slack and we have to spend less money making movies. The "conversion rate" for new releases (i.e. the ratio of DVDs sold per million dollars of box-office gross) is falling, consumers are buying fewer catalog titles, shelf-space is disappearing and prices are plummeting. And oh, yeah: the rest of businesses pretty much suck right now, too. It sure didn't sound like the happiest place on earth.

Warner Bros. just became the latest studio to announce cut backs, unveiling plans to eliminate 800 jobs, about 10% of its global workforce, through layoffs, attrition and outsourcing. The move follows similar cut backs at Paramount Pictures and NBC Universal, as well as earlier downsizing moves by Warner Bros. parent Time Warner. In a memo to staffers announcing the cuts, Warner Bros. toppers Barry Meyer and Alan Horn called the decision painful but necessary.

Any lingering doubts as to where the incoming Obama administration will be coming from on telecom policy were more or less erased Friday when the president elect named Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach to lead the transition team at the Federal Communications Commission. Both Crawford and Werbach are industry experts and proponents of "broadband everywhere." Crawford, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and author of a widely read blog on communications issues, in particular has been critical of the telecom industry and has endorsed treating broadband connectivity like a regulated or municipally provided utility, similar to water, sewage and electricity service. Werbach is a professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and organizer of the annual Supernova technology conference. During the Clinton administration, he served as counsel for new technology policy at the FCC.

In an appearance on CNBC Friday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took himself out of the running to be the Obama Administration’s promised chief technology officer, so we can stick in fork in that really bad idea. Asked by host Jim Cramer if he’s interested in the job Schmidt said, “I love working at Google and I'm very happy to stay at Google, so the answer is no.” Thank goodness for that.

Sony didn't include Blu-ray players or PlayStation 3 consoles among the product lines expected to take a hit this fourth quarter from the global economic slowdown. Instead, it blamed the 38% cut in its earnings forecast for the holiday season on slowing sales of LCD TVs, digital cameras and video camcorders, along with the rise of the yen against the dollar and euro. But given the overall outlook--including the company's indication that further cuts to its forecast are possible--it's probably only corporate pride that keeps Sony from lumping its two flagship products in with the rest of the disaster.

Is scarcity still a viable foundation for a business model for content owners? For most of their histories, movie and TV studios relied on a strategy of limited distribution to extract maximum value from their works. Movies were released through a carefully ordered sequence of exclusive windows defined by distribution channel (theaters, DVD, pay-TV, broadcast); network TV series didn't enter the broader syndication market for three or four years after their debut, assuming the series lasted that long. In each case, the relative scarcity of the content provided the content owner with maximum pricing power. Since the advent of digital platforms, however, ubiquity has become the name of the game, challenging content owners' pricing power and business models.

Google posted a 39% increase in revenue for the second quarter Thursday compared to the same period last year, but it whiffed on EPS, missing analysts' consensus target by more than a dime. That sent shares of GOOG down hard in after hours trading, at one point dropping more than 10% from its closing price. On the analyst call, Google officials acknowledged that the weak economy is starting to bite, particularly recession-sensitive ad categories like autos, real estate, finance and travel. Major capex spending as well as higher G&A--driven by all the lawyers and lobbyists Google has had to hire recently--undercut EPS.

Busy week coming up for Google's lawyers. On Tuesday, Google's senior legal office Dave Drummond will be on Capitol Hill to answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on his company's proposed search ad partnership with Yahoo. Although Congressional hearings are mostly for tourists, Drummond will need to be careful in answering the committee's questions as the deal is also under investigation by the Department of Justice, which probably isn't just doing it for show and will likely regard anything Drummond says as part of the record. Drummond will be joined at the witness table by Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan and his counterpart at Microsoft, Brad Smith.

It's hardly an original insight to note that traditional media companies are trapped in their legacy business models at a time of rapid change in technology and consumer behavior. But rarely do you see the old and the new in such stark tension as in the case of NBC Universal's plans for presenting the upcoming Summer Olympics in Beijing. According to this AP story, NBC will offer an unprecedented 1,400 hours of TV coverage across its six networks--more than all previous Summer Olympics combined--as well as 2,200 hours of live coverage on the Web and over 3,000 hours of highlights available on-demand from NBCOlympics.com.