Month: March 2004

BT Cuts Broadband Price

It’s about time – BT have always been at the pricier end of broadband pricing, but the communications giant has finally made a significant reduction to the price of its basic broadband service.

Now set at a far more enticing and competitive UK£19.99 per month, the service is limited to one home PC (but if you bridge it, how would they know?) and supplies a full 512kbs. However, there’s one very unattractive condition to this new package – downloads are limited to one measly gigabyte per month. Once you’ve downloaded your equivalent of 200 iTunes tracks or a couple of games, you will be sent a reminder with the option to buy more bandwidth. We applaud the new price point form BT, but think the data limitation is a step backwards. Can’t have it both ways, we suppose.

Remember, some “broadband” packages you see offered for UK£20 and less often just give you 256kbs and less, so always read the terms and conditions.

BT’s new service

The FT’s comment

“Stop Pestering Us About Bandwidth, Concentrate on the Services”: BT CEO

After Dr Jyoti Choudrie of the Brunel University commented that that the UK “needs to sit up and take note of the example Japan is setting”, BT CEO Ben Verwaayen has responded – and has basically said that speed doesn’t matter over 2Mbps. One in four homes in Japan has a 12Mbps connection, used for VoIP.

“All services, with the exception of live TV, are possible with 1.5 to 2Mps” he said at the UK Technology Partnering and Investment Forum. We’ll soon see if BT really believe that when they start marketing domestic connections faster than that.

Verwaayen wants us to concentrate on services – but this seems at odds with what users want. Broadband subscribers are more than capable of finding their own content, and would rather their broadband ISP provided them with a fast, reliable connection than pop videos they can find on other sites.

Silicon.com

October 19: Earthquakes, Car Jacking, Random Shootings, Ice Cream Vans

Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto series will no doubt break sales records and cause outrage in October this year when another instalment, set in San Andreas and featuring an interesting earthquake game mechanic. The Edinburgh-based developer is owned by Take Two Interactive of New York, and with joint sales of 23 million copies for the previous two titles, you’ll no doubt be thoroughly sick of seeing this one by the time Christmas comes.

If you live in the US, the publication date is the 19th October; if you live in Europe it’s the 22nd – either way you might want to stay out of Game until the mobs subside. Expect the usual tabloids to run the same articles on video game violence in the hope of selling more newspapers.

Rockstar North – Sex, Violence, Deep-fried Mars Bars

Google: Ban+this+sick+game

Electronic Frontier Foundation Propose a Licensing Scheme for Filesharers

After a year of research, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging copyright holders to join together to offer blanket licenses to P2P networks.

They are drawing parallels with the copyright problem radio once faced in the US – Performing Rights Organisations (PRO) such as ASCAP and BMI were founded to allow radio stations to play music legally and ensure that artists and publishers were properly compensated.

The EFF also regard music licensing in the internet age as dogged with the same problems that the player piano industry fought though in 1909 with sheet music manufacturers. This early situation was also solved by a blanket license.

The money to be made is attractive – if users paid, for example, US$5 per month, income to the music companies would be more than US$3 billion – and almost in pure profit as no CDs would have to be manufactured or shipped.

The EFF’s proposal (PDF)

Channel 4.5?

Channel 4 and five (formerly Channel 5) in the UK have been looking at the benefits a merger between the two channels would bring, particularly in the face of new competition from ITV plc.

Carlton and Granada merged last year to become ITV plc, placing pressure on the remaining commercial channels to compete for advertising: ITV now has a single huge advertising sales mechanism.

Five is jointly owned by United Business Media and Germany’s RTL – but as Channel 4 is publicly owned, any change of this scale must be approved by an act of parliament.

Naturally both Channel 4 and five dismiss the reports of talks as speculation.

“Channel 4 might be interested in it because they are declining and we are growing” said a five spokesperson. Five claim a 6.5% share of all viewers – three quarters of the UK population watch Channel 4 in the course of a week.
More about Channel 4’s ownership

More about five

ATi’s HDTV Wonder Card

Featuring Ati’s NXT2004 Digital Modulator chip, already found in many set-top boxes, ATi’s HDTV Wonder card will include support for analogue, digital and high definition television services. The card will come bundled with PVR software allowing users to fill up their hard drives considerably faster than before: a 250gb disk should store about 30 hours of HDTV content, contrasted with 200 hours of standard definition TV.

With the release of the DirectTV’s HDTV TiVo in the next few weeks, HDTV fans at least in the US will finally be able to record and archive programmes with ease.

HotHardware’s preview of the card

DirectTV’s HD products