September 2003 – Page 6 – Digital-Lifestyles

Mass Market Self-destructing DVDs Get Closer

Amongst protestations from environmental groups, the Walt Disney Co is testing out new rental disks which become unreadable after 48 hours.

The trial is this week in Austin, Texas; Peoria/Bloomington, Illinois; Charleston, South Carolina; and Kansas City, Missouri.

Intended for convenience stores rather than Blockbuster, the “EZ-D” discs are intended as impulse purchases. Developed by Flexplay Technologies Inc, the discs start off red, but turn black as they are oxidized. The system doesn’t make DVDs any more secure against piracy, as they can still be copied in the first 48 hours.

To appease environmentalists, such as the Alliance for Safe Alternatives, concerned at the needless landfill this will create, Disney are offering a recycling programme – and as an incentive, customers will get a new disk for every six used ones they return.

Flexplay: http://www.flexplay.com/

AOL Opens Up its Instant Messaging Service to Brokerage Firms

AOL and Reuters are forming a partnership to provide a secure, encrypted instant messaging (IM) service for commercial banks, investment firms, mutual funds and other financial organisations. Another feature of the service is that messages can be stored, as regulators require.

This is the first time that AOL has opened up its IM service to another network. The guts of it comes down to translating to and from AOL’s OSCAR protocol and Reuter’s own SIMPLE schema.

Michael Osterman, and industry analyst makes the point: “Email no longer offers a competitive advantage since everyone has it. If you offer instant messaging and the ability to communicate with customers and partners, that can provide you with a competitive advantage.”

Washington Post

AtNewYork

New Captioning System Makes Live Theatre Accesible to the Deaf

Sound Associates’ Personal Captioning System (PCS) is a wireless handheld device featuring a colour LCD that deaf patrons can take to their seat. Captions are sent to the device synchronised to the show’s lighting cues, so the text is always in sync. The handheld uses a light polarising filter so theatregoers sitting nearby are not distracted.

The system is currently being used for the musical Big River at the American Airline Theatre in New York.

Sound Associates
American Broadcasting Corporation on Personal Captioning in Chicago

ZVUE! $100 Personal Video Player Causes a Stir

At a price point that is sure to create interest, HandHeld Entertainment are going after the Christmas “tween” market with the $100 ZVUE! Player.

Long suspected to be vapourware, until it was actually seen in an interview. The device is based around Secure Digital/MultiMedia Cards and an ultra bright 2.5 inch full-colour screen (still TFT based, not OLED). About the size of an iPod, the ZVUE! will play full motion videos, MP3s and display digital images. The media cards are being branded as ZCARDS! and will be priced from $5.99 upwards, depending on capacity and content. The player has no inbuilt user memory and needs a media card to function.

Connectivity is provided via a USB1.1 socket and it features, a rather sociable, two headphone sockets. The battery life of around eight to ten hours is provided through standard AA batteries.

Nathan Schulhof, president and chief executive officer of HandHeld Entertainment said: “The ZVUE! has the right combination of features, price and content to make it the ultimate, ‘must-have’ and ‘must-give’ device for the 2003 Holiday Season.” The device certainly sounds interesting, but we’re worried about the proprietary format – though since Schulhof is credited as the inventor of the portable MP3 player, he may just know what he’s doing.

The ZVUE only plays files encoded in the proprietary HHe format – so you won’t be able to play just any old media files on it. This system will live or die based on the quality of the content available for it.

Retail content packages are to include cartoons, music videos and extreme sports.

HandHeld Entertainment

CNet PVP Roundup

RealOne Rhapsody Streaming 500,000 tracks per day

Coming just a day after Apple’s landmark of 10 million iTunes sold, RealNetworks have announced that they are serving up to 500,000 songs per day on their Rhapsody service.

Relaunched in May 2003, Rhapsody has a different business model to iTunes – for $9.95 per month, a subscriber can choose as much as they want from the 25,000 albums available on the service. 265,000 of the tracks are available for burning onto CD, at an additional cost of 79c each – the lowest in the market. Only subscribers to the service are able to burn tracks.

The Rhapsody service has music from all five major companies, and more than 175 labels – and features exclusives such as the Rolling Stones.

In a new move, customers will be able to sign up for a free 14 day trial in Best Buy stores across the US – this should increase the Rhapsody profile as well as increasing “footfall” in the stores, where users may come in to sign up for the service, but buy something else during their visit.

Linksys Launch Wireless Network Adaptor Aimed at Gamers

Linksys intend to simplify the process of getting a games console online with their new wireless adaptors. The new WGA11B (11Mbps) and WGA54G (54Mbps) adaptors are easy to set up, driver-less, should be popular: in some homes the console is shared between a couple of locations in the house, and anything that can reduce the tangle of wired down behind the television is welcome.

Using the 802.11b standard, the adaptors work with all three major consoles: GameCube, Playstation 2 and the Xbox, and are available now, priced around $65 and $105 respectively.

Link

Apple Launches More New iPods, Sells Ten Millionth Song

Apple have proven their mastery of the portable MP3 player market with the announcement of two new iPods – even before the buzz has died down from the launch, less than six months ago, of their hugely popular 3rd generation players.

And there’s more: the iTunes site, now selling 500,000 songs per week has just sold it ten millionth song. Thanks to the wonder of modern transaction processing we even know what and when it was: Complicated, by Avril Lavigne at 11.34pm (PST) on the 3rd of September. We wonder how much that commemorative file would fetch on eBay.

iTunes is immensely popular, despite being a US and Macintosh only platform – it demonstrates that there is a real market out there for properly licensed music downloads and the 99c price point seems ideal. Windows users and non-US customers look forward to enjoying the service later this year – we can’t wait to see how many units it’s going to shift then.

Steve Jobs said: “Legally selling ten million songs online in just four months is a historic milestone for the music industry, musicians and music lovers everywhere.”

Despite our shiny 30gb iPod being only four months old, it’s no longer the top of the range: the new 40gb iPod will hold 10,000 tracks (or as many songs as the iTunes store sells in three hours) for $499. Together with the 20gb ($399) model, they provide a more comprehensive range for people who like to carry a lot of music with them.

The iTunes Store: http://www.apple.com/itunes/

The iPod Lounge: http://www.ipodlounge.com

New PVR Sets Storage Benchmark

Sony are releasing a new personal video recorder in Japan with enough disk space to store more than two weeks of video at its lowest quality setting.

Going on sale in Japan only, the $1400 personal video recorder doesn’t feature a DVD drive, but can be connected via Ethernet to the Vaio PC range, using “Sony’s Click To DVD” software.

Users can edit the footage stored on the PVR and then make their own DVDs, or store programmes off line permanently.

The EX11 has three quality setting which equate to High Quality (114 hours, 9Mbps), Standard (171 hours, 6Mbps) and Extended Play (3Mbps). The recorder makes use of an EPG for automatic recording and is equipped with two tuners and two MPEG2 encoders, allowing users to record two programmes simultaneously. Also useful is the inclusion of a memory stick slot for displaying photographs.

The PVR features two analogue and one D1 digital video output. Interestingly, Sony have chose Linux as the PVR’s OS. This seems to be increasingly common on this type of platform – TiVo recorders use an older Linux kernel.

PC World link

Slashdot link

New Epson Widescreen Projector for Home Use

The Epson PowerLite Home 10 projector, priced at $1300 (£820), is designed to appeal to home users by getting the best out of widescreen DVDs and HDTVs. It has a native resolution of 854 x 480, and can switch aspect ratios as necessary.

Previous “budget” projectors have suffered from washed out colours (think how your PowerPoint slides can appear in presentations sometimes) but the newly designed 3-LCD elements that make up the projection technology have a reported contrast ratio of 700:1. These 0.5 inch LCDs were seen earlier in the year in Epson’s EMP-S1 business projector.

Epson are really going after the home market with the new PowerLite – the casing is styled to look good in a domestic setting, and it’s designed to sit easily on your coffee table without all that fiddling with getting the feet at the right angle by propping your annual report under them.

If you’re lucky enough to have a 25 foot living room, you can enjoy a 300 inch picture whilst watching Legally Blonde.

MacWorld review link