As at 30 June, Sky added 77,000 Sky+ subscribers to reach 105,000, exceeding their 100,000 target. Tony Ball, Chief Executive for Sky said they were planning to “play around” with the pricing of Sky+ as he felt DVR’s offered interesting possibilities.
165,000 Sky subscribers also have the Extra Digibox, enabling the household to watch Sky programming in more than one room. 57% of Sky+ subscribers are also Extra Digibox subscribers.
A new service has been launched in the UK to enable willing participant to have the position of their mobile phone tracked. mapAmobile is currently working on the Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile networks.
It works by monitoring the strength of signal from aerials and triangulating between them. They claim accuracy within 50 metres but this will vary depending on the density of aerial, so rural locations will be less accurate.
Priced as ~£30 for a year for one phone, there is a charge of 30p each time the service is used, which is slightly strange given they’re selling it as an alternative to texting or phoning the person. Registration is either online or a voucher can be bought at Carphone Warehouse.
On signup, the target-tracked phone is sent an SMS asking for approval to be tracked, as well as regular reminders. The location can be interograted either online, via SMS or telephone and will be given as ‘Fred is in the vicinity of Bow Street, London WC2’ together with the date, time and accuracy of the location. You will also have the option to see a map showing street names and points of interest.
A Taiwanese company, Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communications, today launched a service enabling subscribers to watch a live video stream of traffic congestion, from an initial forty two cameras, on their mobile phone.
We’re assuming this isn’t for some strange realityTV-type entertainment but to check the density of traffic levels before travelling. Clearly it grabs headlines, but the video alone sound like a bit of a novelty as it’s pretty hard to judge the actual speed of traffic. We think the ideal would be to display the average speed to the traffic at your particular motorway junction on your mobile.
Funnily enough Dan Kemp, lead programmer at Live Information Systems, has created a Quick’n’Dirty system (his own description) to do just that – he’s call it mTraffic. It scrapes the information from the UK Highways Agency site repackages it for PDA/Smartphone, WAP and an XML feed – very neat.
Sony have announced that they will release two new plasma TVs in Japan later this year.
The exciting thing about the uninspiringly named KDE-P50HZ1 and KDE-P42HZ1 is that they come with a remote-control-on-steroids, better described as a web pad.
The multi-function 6-by-3.5-inch display, which gives an 800-by-480-pixel resolution, communicates with the main TV unit using 802.11a giving the ability to use it to view a different TV channel; browse the Web; and be used as a ‘soft’ remote control – the function and display on the remote will change depending on the which operation is being carried out.
Sony are saying the remote will understand gesture-based fingertip strokes – think PalmOS Grafitti for entertainment (They already licience PalmOS for their Clie PDA range). Sony has dubbed this as an “air baton”.
Although not mentioned, there is a possibility that the Web pad coudl be used The opens up the a long held belief – interactivity on the remote.
These products fit within Sony’s project, code-named Altair, designed to make the TV the centre of consumers digital lifestyles.