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While browsing DivX’s website, we’ve noticed a posting on their ‘DivX Labs’ section along the lines of “Want to beta test some super-secret DivX stuff?”. The post was accompanied by a blurred logo … playing hard to get are we? Never one to turn down an indirect challenge of intellect, we put on our cyber-detective hats and hacked into their system and obtained the unblurred logo. By hacking, we mean checking the source code, and noticing:

A couple of days ago I received a notice from Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren who broke the news - Pandora will no longer be accessible outside US. This is terrible news to me as a fan of their service.

Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music - we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world. Other than in the U.K., we have not yet been able to make significant progress in our efforts to obtain a sufficient number of international licenses at terms that would enable us to run a viable business. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play.

Until now, we have not been able to tell where a listener is based, relying only on zip code information provided upon registration. We are now able to recognize a listener’s country of origin based on the IP address from which they are accessing the service. Consequently, on May 3rd, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from your country. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

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