All this week we’re out in Mayrhofen, Austria, producing a real-time stream of news content for the official Snowbombing festival iPhone app by Eristoff – Vodka from the Land of the Wolf.

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch, download it for free while the event is taking place and let us know what you think. You’ll find news, gossip and interviews direct from the week-long festival, which sees artists like The Enemy, Editors, 2ManyDJs, De La Soul, Fatboy Slim, Vitalic, Doves and Friendly Fires playing to 6000 fancy dressed loons high up the Tyrolean alps.

Live Feeds

The app makes use of Alchemy Content’s specialist experience of developing and running mobile applications that go beyond the gimmicks; providing a useful, always up-to-date information service that’s constantly available in a user’s pocket.

Live feeds of high-quality custom content give people a reason to refer to the branded application repeatedly throughout their time at the event. For Snowbombing, we’ve devised an additional Eristoff Secrets feed, offering exclusive calls to action on things like VIP party access, ticket competitions and insider tips for getting the most from the resort.

Intense Usage

Mobile apps based around intense periods of usage, like major events or holiday locations work particularly well, so the Eristoff Snowbombing app is an ideal use of the technology and Alchemy Content’s editorial and project management services. See our Clubber’s Guide to Ibiza app for more.

GPS maps pinpointing and recommending local businesses, a fully searchable events schedule including artist profiles, plus user generated community feeds from YouTube, Flickr and Twitter all add to the application being an essential download for anyone – whether out at Snowbombing or not – with an interest in the artists or wanting an interactive guide to the best of Mayrhofen’s après ski.

Download the Eristoff Snowbombing app for iPhone or iPod Touch.

Proving in a big way that User Generated Content (UGC) videos need not all be tarnished by the ’sub-You’ve Been Framed clips of funny family cats’ brush, this student-made ‘lipdub’ video to the Black Eye Peas ‘I Gotta Feeling’ is nothing short of fantastic. 172 students from the University of Quebec in Montreal shot it in a single take and it sums up perfectly what can be done now digital technology is so advanced, easy to use and affordable that the focus of film-makers can be on the creative concept rather than how to afford/work the kit.

I actually meant to post this a couple of weeks ago after spotting a tweet from none other than the original track’s producer @DavidGuettaLife and it has since gone seriously viral with over 2m YouTube views.

The track is a great slice of optimistic pop anyway, and combined with the enthusiastic performances from the students (most of whom had only just started college and hardly knew each other) it produces a video that is joyous and life affirming from start to finish. Wrapped up in it all is very positive message about what can be achieved with today’s media and its platforms.

So with the Guardian now reporting that MySpace could follow YouTube’s lead in blocking all ‘premium music video content’ in protest at the financial demands of PRS, it looks like we may have reached an important point in online content history all of a sudden.

It’s quite a twist that now it is YouTube themselves pulling content over a copyright dispute instead of being forced to do so by scary lawyers representing livid major record labels.

Blocking the most popular music videos in the UK is clearly not a long-term plan by parent company Google since it really doesn’t benefit anyone in this (except their direct competitors – say hello MUZU.tv!) In fact, the whole escapade rather smacks of Russia’s little trick of turning off the gas supply to Ukraine when they fancy some more cash for warming European homes during an icy winter. I’m sure Google, with their ‘Do No Evil’ motto wouldn’t be too pleased at that analogy, but I can’t see a better parallel right now to be honest.

Clearly Google/YouTube feel that their service is vital enough to the music industry for them to be able to throw their weight around. Whether that is actually true will be revealed in the next few days (I can’t see us being in for a dispute of Virgin v Sky proportions anyway).

Yet PRS hardly look any better in all this either. Demanding too much payback from services that have yet to sort out a viable funding model is an equally rubbish policy. Making real money from music online is going to be about a lot more than screwing platforms for fees. Google may have earned $5.7bn in the last quarter of 2008, as today’s PRS press statement happily points out, but are PRS also guilty of inflating the actual importance of YouTube when setting out their demands?

In the hurry to try and find the ‘answer’ to making the traditional pots of cash that have dried up for the music industry in the digital era, perhaps both YouTube and PRS (and most other people, to be honest) have overinflated their expectations of what a free video service is actually capable of supporting?

Meanwhile, the artists PRS are supposed to be fighting for are immediately starting to suffer, as the embedded videos on their websites go blank, and their promotional campaigns are left in disarray.

As with the saga of DRM, attempts to block the march of free digital content are messy, costly and ultimately prove futile. Let’s hope this potentially dramatic moment in the development of the new media landscape doesn’t get too nasty. No company, even Google, can afford to make too big a mistake when the fans are in charge.