After years of attack from everyone from privacy advocates to consumer rights groups to so-called “freetards”, it looks like DRM’d music may finally get killed off by Wal-Mart & Pepsi.

And it’s not because they care about your rights as a consumer. It’s because they want onto your iPod.

According to an article in Billboard, Warner Music Group (WMG) and Sony BMG Music Entertainment are making plans to follow EMI and Universal Music Group’s lead in distributing music in the MP3 format, under pressure from Pepsi and Wal-Mart.

Pepsi’s MP3 Promotion

Pepsi plans to feature a download promotion on the inside of 5 billion of its soda bottlecaps. Sources say Pepsi customers will need to collect five caps in order to exchange them for a download; this yields the potential for 1 billion redeemable tracks.

In the new Pepsi promotion, sources say, Amazon will serve as the supplier for the downloads, and customers will need to visit a specific redemption store on the Amazon site to access music from participating labels.

If the major labels want to ride on Pepsi’s publicity, they’re going to have to offer MP3s through Amazon.

Wal-Mart Throws Its Weight Around

Meanwhile, the world’s largest retailer can’t get its online music store off the ground because of the limited selection of un-DRM’d MP3’s it can sell.

Because of this, Wal-Mart is reportedly plans to pull WMG and Sony BMG’s music files in the Windows Media Audio format from Walmart.com some time between mid-December and mid-January, if the labels haven’t yet provided the music in MP3 format.

While Wal-Mart has about 22% of the physical CD market, it’s a minor player online.

Flux, a social media startup funded in part by media conglomerage Viacom, has introduced two new services designed to let you leverage the company’s social media platform, Flux Lite and Flux Custom. The services are designed to make it easy for you to set up a media community.

This gives Flux three social media options:

• fShare (Beta) allows visitors to distribute your content to popular web locations like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Blogger, as well as all of the Flux-powered communities.
• Flux Lite is a way to add social tools to your website to engage visitors, increase time spent on your site, and convert visitors to community members with Flux Profiles. It’s easy and requires no technical expertise.
• Flux Custom (Beta) lets you add a full community offering with categories of user-generated content, featured members, discussions, and community pages. For existing sites, you can create a Flux community in a matter of minutes, using widgets and hosted pages that are fully customizable. Flux Custom lets you choose from various integration methods, while taking the social tools you need and leaving the ones you don’t.

Here’s a video demo of how fShare works:

According to Flux, “This release is in response to the demand we are seeing from media companies of all sizes, to create an engaging community and make their content portable. We encourage anyone with an existing media business (or an idea for one) to sign up, grab our tools, and create their own community.”

Partners own all of their data – if you decide to leave the platform, you take that data with you. You control your monetization strategy as well. There are no restrictions on legitimate third-party applications – for instance, you can use Flux’s video player or integrate with popular video players like YouTube and Brightcove, or even use your own.

Update: More at paidContent.

The vloggers at Common Craft have another winner with their Blogs In Plain English:

The ideas apply just as well to podcasting & vlogging.

Compete has published their latest stats for Total Time Spent Online – and they make clear that people are rapidly moving their attention from traditional media to online media. Time spent online is up by nearly 25% since last August.

Here’s how Compete’s Jay Meattle characterizes the trend:

“We are spending more and more time consuming information online. Logically, since time is finite online advertising spend should follow a similar trajectory with marketers allocating their ad budgets in proportion to where people are spending their time.

Needless to say, this is a time of considerable opportunity for online media properties and online marketers!”

Here are the details:

Dave Winer, creator of the RSS 2.0 standard on which podcasting is based, offers some interesting comments on the state of podcasting at his blog:

“What if the energy that went into Chumby, for example, went into designing a podcast player? The player might actually look more like Chumby than it does an iPod. The interesting thing about the Chumby is that it is connected but not tethered to the network. The ideal podcast player would be even more loosely connected.

1. It would directly read its feeds over wifi, it would not have to synch through a desktop or laptop computer. The iPhone has enough connectivity to do this. The iPod Touch does. A Nokia N800 does as well. Most cell phones do.
2. You could use it to create a podcast. We’re basically there with Twittergram and BlogTalkRadio. Just call a number, and we not only shoot your minicast at Twitter but we also maintain an RSS 2.0 with enclosures feed. In other words, in every way, it’s a podcast.
3. It must be open, so users can have a range of choices of catcher software. I don’t think a one-vendor approach has a chance of working.

When we get this device, podcasting will work better.”

He also responds to people suggesting that podcasting hasn’t achieved its promise:

“A lot of people hoped they could make podcasts and quit their day jobs. I wasn’t one of those people, and I never encouraged people to believe that. I see podcasting, for bloggers, as just another way to communicate with a few people who are interested in what they know and think. I also see it as a way for professional news organizations, esp non-profits, to flow reports to people in a very convenient and powerful way. As a consumer of podcasts, I am in heaven. I am a regular listener of: Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Fresh Air, Nightline, NYT Tech Talk, and numerous NPR shows. I have far more content than I have time to listen. Thanks to podcasting I am a much better informed person, and it gives my mind something to do as I get my exercise.”

While Winer hasn’t hyped the idea that podcasters would be able to quit their day jobs, it’s happening anyway. Just like a small percentage of the people blogging have been able to turn their blogs into careers, a small percentage of the people podcasting have been able to turn their podcasts into careers.

For a few examples, check out the article Secrets of Viral Video Hits, or listen to Elisabeth’s interview with the Ask A Ninja guys. People are beginning to make their livings from podcasting – it just takes talent, a great idea and a lot of hard work.

When we talked with Rocketboom’s Andrew Baron recently, he cited the idea of creating a spectacle as one of the ways to create great viral video.

“Videos of spectacle translate on the net,” notes Baron, “An idea that is very original and unique, while extreme, can be videotaped and put up on YouTube to get a lot of hits pretty easily.”

As an example, Baron mentioned Improv Anywhere, a NYC flash mob improv troupe that has staged over 70 missions, “creating scenes of chaos and joy in public places.”

“We‚Äôre out to prove that a prank doesn‚Äôt have to involve humiliation or embarrassment,” says Improv Anywhere creator Charlie Todd, “it can simply be about making someone laugh, smile, or stop to notice the world around them.”

Improv Anywhere documents their events, and the videos routinely get tens of thousand, hundreds of thousands and even millions of views at YouTube.

Here’s one of their recent spectacles , 101 Shirtless Men At Abercrombie & Fitch:

Remember when NBC yanked its shows off of iTunes because it couldn’t come to an agreement with Apple on pricing?

Now they’ve entered into an out-of-left-field agreement with Netflix that will let Netflix subscribers watch current episodes of NBC’s top-rated show, Heroes, the day after their network airing.

In addition, Netflix offers prior season episodes of other popular NBC shows, including 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights and The Office. For these shows, Netflix subscribers will have the option of getting them on DVD or watching them instantly on their PCs.

While NBC has proven itself to be open to experimenting with Internet video options in the last year, deals like this leave us scratching our heads.

The future of television is on-demand ad-supported Internet video. Viacom, with its on-demand video sites for Jon Stewart and South Park, is moving ahead of the pack, and putting its content where its viewers are. NBC, on the other hand, is cutting deals with Netflix and letting you play catch-up if you missed a show.

Who are you going to be watching?

Independent reviews are starting to come in on the Amazon Kindle, and it looks like the ebook reader is going to be this year’s Zunetanic, an over-hyped iPod-wannabee.

While mainstream fluffer reviews, like Steven Levy’s Newsweek article on the new gadget, make the Kindle out to be the iPod of ebook readers, you can’t sneak a proprietary, closed system and Commodore 64-era hardware design past end users.

Here’s what people are saying about the Kindle after a week:

• “I can’t really recommend this,” says tech blogger Robert Scoble. “Whoever designed this should be fired and the team should start over.”
• WSJ’s Walt Mossberg says “I’ve been testing the Kindle for about a week, and I love the shopping and downloading experience. But the Kindle device itself is just mediocre.”
• “It’s just too damn expensive,” says Boing Boing, “Worse, the $400 premium just to get the Kindle reader isn’t the last fee you’ll pay.”
• “Don’t let some of the hype fool you though: this is not the iPod of books, and e-books are not the equivalent of a book,” says Ars Technica. “Anyone who is considering the Kindle in part due to its ability to handle content aside from books should spend some time pondering how much they’d enjoy reading that material within the device’s limitations.”

While most many reviewers are disappointed with the Kindle hardware and its usability, there’s a more basic problem with the device: it doesn’t embrace the world of Internet media.

Internet media, in all its random, open, messy glory, is where people’s attention is moving to. It’s where it’s at, in both technology and media.

The Kindle doesn’t make it easy for you to get Internet content; it isn’t a new platform that you can easily publish content for; and it doesn’t play well with the Web.

It looks like the iPod of ebooks may have to come from Apple.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a comprehensive account of Comcast’s packet-forging activities and has released software and documentation instructing Internet users on how to test for packet forgery or other forms of interference by their own ISPs.Separate tests in October from EFF, the Associated Press, and others showed that Comcast was forging small parcels of digital data, known as packets, in order to interfere with its subscribers’ and other Internet users’ ability to use file-sharing applications, like BitTorrent and Gnutella. Despite having been confronted by this evidence, Comcast continues to issue incomplete and misleading statements about their practices and their impact on its customers.

“Comcast is discriminating among different kinds of Internet traffic based on the protocols being used by its customers,” said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “When confronted, Comcast has been evasive and misleading in its responses, so we decided to start gathering the facts ourselves.”

File-sharing protocols like torrent, though best known for sharing pirated content, are used by some podcasters as a way to distribute very large media files, such as video podcasts, efficiently.

EFF is also developing information and software tools intended to help Internet subscribers test their own broadband connections.

MTV Networks is planning to make every clip from every episode of South Park available online for free next year.

The decision follows the recent introduction of an all-you-can-eat Web 2.0-style video site for fellow Viacom media property The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The Daily Show site offers 13,000 high-quality clips, from episodes dating back to 1999. Plans are in place to include the show’s entire video history.

MTV sees offline benefits to giving Web surfers the videos they want. “One does not diminish the other by any stretch of the imagination. That is kind of our hat trick,” said MTV Networks Chairman and Chief Executive Judy McGrath.