Skype Handset, Siemens M34/S440 Competition Winner

At last, (if not a little behind schedule) …

Bernard HerbertCongratulations to Bernard Herbert of Belgium, as he has won the Skype-friendly Siemens USB adaptor and Handset combo in our recent readers competition. When we spoke to Bernard, via Skype of course, he was delighted, “It’s going to be of help every day,” he enthused. It’s currently not available in Belgium, so Bernard will have a one-off.

You may remember that we also got quite excited about it in our exclusive review. We’re going to miss this baby at the Digital-Lifestyles offices. It’s become part of our daily tech toolkit.

Many thanks to everyone who filled out the survey. We really appreciate the feedback.

We’ve had a lot of people contact us asking when the Siemens kit will be available in their country. The official word from them is they’re “in discussions”>If you’re interested in the combo, drop us a quick note to Siemens.Skype(at)Digital-Lifestyles.info. We’d be happy to pass them on to Siemens, with the vague possibility that it might hasten their introduction in your country.

Simon Perry

Brightcove: Allaire Launches Broadband Indie Film/TV Service

Jeremy Allaire Launches Broadband Indie Film Service, BrightcoveJeremy Allaire, co-founder of Allaire Corp and one of the big shakers behind the successful ColdFusion Web technology, is unveiling a company that he hopes will make Internet movie/TV downloads a standard feature on home TV sets.

The new IP video startup, called Brightcove, has been formed to encourage the “democratisation of video production and distribution” with the Cambridge-based company having a hand in all facets of IP video or Internet TV – creation, delivery and monetisation (that’s making money to you and I).

Brightcove has already raised US$5.5 million (£2.86m/€4.16) of first-round venture funding from General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners and boasts a management team including executives from Allaire, ATG, BSkyB, Comcast, Macromedia and News Corp.

“We’re going to build a service that marries what the Internet does really well, with television,” said Allaire about his new venture, Brightcove Inc., which launches today.

Jeremy Allaire Launches Broadband Indie Film Service, BrightcoveAllaire explained his plans: “The online service will operate with a consumer-facing service that provides access to programming and content published in the service, and will also provide a very rich service to publishers and rights-holders interested in a direct-to-consumer distribution path for video products. The service will also provide tools to Web site operators generally, who are interested in economically participating in the online video revolution.”

The company intends to offer an Internet service, for use by consumers with computers or set-top boxes, that can store hours of video programming on their hard drives.

Users will be able to order programs online and have them automatically sent to their hard drives, ready to view whenever they choose.

The compelling difference between the business models of rivals like Akimbo Systems and Dave Networks is that the users aren’t tied to proprietary set-top devices for capturing and playing back the videos – any TV-compatible Internet device will do.

Brightcove is banking on public acceptance of new computers based on Microsoft’s Windows Media Center PC software. This is a ‘front room’ friendly version of the Windows XP operating system is designed to work with multimedia devices like TV sets and stereo systems.

Allaire predicted that the Media Center standard will soon become common in home computers. “When you go to buy a consumer edition of a Microsoft product next year, it will be a TV device,” he said.

The system will let users with compatible hardware and a high-speed Internet connection to rent or purchase videos that are then downloaded onto the device.

Purchased videos could be copied onto a computer’s DVD burner to produce a disk that could be watched on any DVD player.

Jeremy Allaire Launches Broadband Indie Film Service, BrightcoveUnlike the Movielink/Blinkx service we covered earlier, Allaire doesn’t plan to offer big-time Hollywood films on Brightcove.

Instead, Brightcove will tap in to the huge, embryonic market offer independent films and videos that cater to specialised tastes and aren’t readily available through other channels. A very smart move in our book.

Allaire hopes his service will create a new way for film producers to deliver their work to the public – check out his introductory flash movie where he describes his vision of a future where “we’ll see as many video channels as Web sites”.

Thanks to Peter Ferne for the story lead.

Brightcove

Frontier Silicon Raises $28m For DAB And Mobile TV Chip Tech

 Frontier Silicon, the British company that makes chips for mobile digital television and digital radio products, has completed it US$28 million (€21m/£14.5m) investment round funding.

Irish venture capital firm ACT led the US$28 million investment in Frontier Silicon, with other participants in the venture funding round being Apax Partners, AltaBerkeley Venture Partners, Quilvest and Bluerun Ventures (formerly known as Nokia Venture Partners).

Frontier Silicon has developed two new products, the Apollo chip and Kino chip, which allow mobile phones to receive and record television programmes on their mobile phones, electronic organisers or MP3 players.

Anthony Sethill, founder and chief executive of Frontier Silicon, said that the money raised would be used for product development and marketing purposes.

He boldly predicted that half of all mobile phones would be capable of receiving television programmes within a year or so at an additional cost to the user of under $50 (€37/£26).

Frontier Silicon currently employs 60 people between its English, Hong Kong and Chinese operations and boasted a turnover of more than $30 million (€22.7m/£15.6m) in 2004.

 “This latest investment allows us to aggressively target and drive market share in the emerging mobile digital television market in the same way that we have established our chips in over 70 percent of DAB digital radios,” said Anthony Sethill.

Frontier Silicon produces chips for DAB digital radios, with its customers including such industry heavyweights as Bang & Olufsen, Grundig, Hitachi, Philips and Samsung.

The company also delivered the world’s first complete system-on-chip designs for DAB digital radio as well as the world’s first Combined Digital TV and Radio Chip.

Frontier Silicon

Blinkx, Movielink Provide Dialogue Searchable Movies

Film Site Lets Users Search For Downloadable Movies To Buy Or RentA deal between a search technology company and an online film distributor could be a further step towards the next Big Thing on the Web: search engines that let you find movies and TV episodes by what is said within them – and then buy or rent them.

The tie-up between Santa Monica-based Movielink and Blinkx from London/San Francisco, has got some excited analysts declaring it to be a key development in bringing together television and movies with the world of Internet search. We’re inclined to agree and have touched on Blinkx TV search before.

The two companies plan to announce that Movielink, a downloading service owned by five major studios, will make its pictures available through the Blinkx search engine.

There’s no cash involved in this deal, as the synergetic partnership will give Movielink additional exposure and Blinkx access to movies that other search engines lack.

Blinkx uses speech-recognition and other technologies (licensed from Autonomy) to make a searchable index of trailers for the movie service’s nearly 1,000 titles.

So far, it has permission from Movielink to index only film trailers, but the company hopes to expand the index to include dialogue from the movies themselves allowing users to type in key phrases to find the required film and immediately download it for a set fee.

So an amnesiac Monty Python fan wanting a side-splitting night of sacrilegious entertainment could simply type in “he’s a naughty boy!” into the search engine and be offered “The Life of Brian” to immediately buy or rent and then download it to his media centre.

Not surprisingly, there’s a veritable minefield of technical, legal and DRM issues to be overcome before legal downloading of films and TV shows hits the mainstream, but Movielink’s willingness to work with Blinkx may open the door to Web big boys like Google, Yahoo and AOL etc.

“It is the next frontier,” said Allen Weiner, an analyst with research firm Gartner, “What we’ve been working with until now, is one-dimensional content on the Web that is advertiser supported. The next level, which will really change the economics of the Web, is searching and indexing premium content that does not live on the Web.”

“It’s kind of a small deal, but I think it will be a forerunner to the types of deals that you’ll see,” said Yair Landau, vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, a unit of Sony Corp. and one of Movielink’s owners. “We’ve been waiting for Yahoo, MSN and Google to get serious about video distribution.”

The big search engines are already starting to index video content: Yahoo’s Video Search program already crawls the Internet looking for video files and Google has been recording thousands of hours of programming and indexing the closed-captioning text.

Film Site Lets Users Search For Downloadable Movies To Buy Or RentWith TV networks starting to distribute more of their productions on the Web and the growth of broadband-enabled, home media PCs there’s clearly a growing demand for consumers to be able to access and download content legally.

This partnership between Blinkx and Movielink appears to be the first tentative steps into what may turn out to be a stampede of Web-based movie distribution deals.

Film Download, Search Firms to Link Services (LA Times)

Movielink
Blinkx
Sony Pictures Entertainment
Gartner Inc
Yahoo Video Search

Sony Ericsson W800: Walkman Phone Launched

Sony Ericsson W800 Announces First Walkman Branded Mobile PhoneWhen Sony start slapping the world famous Walkman mobile music brand on their products, you know that they mean business, and their new Sony Ericsson W800 has been proudly trumpeted as the first mobile phone to combine a high-quality digital music player and a 2 Megapixel camera.

The W800 will come equipped with a two-megapixel camera, GPRS data access and a digital music player compatible with MP3 and AAC music file formats. As is the case with several comparable music phones, song playback can be paused as users take phone calls.

The music player is operated with a Direct Music button that plays, pauses and stops tracks. Conveniently, the player and phone can be used independently of each other, so that users can still playback tunes when on a flight, for example.

Some music fans may be dismayed to see Sony resolutely sticking to their proprietary Memory Stick Duo, with the phone being supplied with a 512MB memory card, enough storage for around 150 music tracks, or 10-12 full length CDs.

Pundits expect the initial focus being on consumers shifting their CDs onto the device, with Sony expected to announce the ability for consumers to download tracks from “open standards music services” later in the year.

Steve Walker, Sony Ericsson head of product marketing has described the move to the phone-as-music-player as “a new lifestyle behaviour” (whatever that means) and suggested vendors will have to start finding new ways of describing multimedia mobiles.

Sony Ericsson W800 Announces First Walkman Branded Mobile PhoneSadly, we’re going to have to wait a while before we can start adjusting our lifestyle behaviour – the release of the Sony Ericsson W800 is not scheduled until the third quarter of 2005

The mobile music market is growing exponentially, with Juniper Research calculating the music download and ring tones market to generate a whopping great US$9.3bn (€7.05bn/£4.8bn) globally by 2009.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the Sony Ericsson W800 is another step in the accelerating convergence between phones and multimedia devices, and we wonder how long it will be before someone brings out an iPod-type device integrated with a phone, video player and high res camera (an ‘iPodPictureVideoPhone, if you will!).

We’d like one just as soon as you’re ready, techies!

Sony Ericsson