AfterDawn: News

Phew, it's last day of the year 2001 and now all the newspapers and news sites are full of stories that go through this year's most important news and events. So I thought maybe we should also do the same. As we're not a news agency, I'm not going to go through the Sept 11th and all the related stuff, but let's focus on our area of expertise.

In July we saw when Napster finally shut down as a free P2P service and finally gave way to new breed of P2P networks, most notably for FastTrack. FastTrack's success has also squeezed numbers of users in once-mighty Gnutella network; according to some Gnutella developers, the traffic has dropped over 60% since spring 2001, mostly because of FastTrack.



Also, DivX finally matured into a commercial product this year when DivXNetworks released the first "official" DivX codec, DivX4. Whole year can be easily dubbed as the year of digital video revolution, even that authorities and "big news sources" don't realize it yet -- the DivX phenomenom finally reached the levels of MP3 craze in late 1990s when virtually everybody knew what MP3 meant (well, not literally, most of the people don't know, even not today, that MP3 stands for MPEG-1 audio layer III). DeCSS lost its second round in court and European Union is pushing through a new legislation called EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive), which is pretty much similiar to American DMCA. Also, major record labels finally managed to pull their online plans together and launched Pressplay and MusicNet in December.

For AfterDawn.com, this was a year of enormous growth and also stability (in 1999 we built our site and in 2000 we changed totally our layout and pretty much our focus from music to video). We also span off our artist promotion program to its own domain and ceased our web-based MP3 search engine in January 2001. Our number of page impressions per month almost tripled from January 2001 to December 2001, we hit our millionth software download during 2001 and got our 10,000th registered member.

Ok, enough :-) Have a very happy end of the year and see you in 2002!

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 31 Dec 2001 9:44