October 2006

NEC’s Chip To Play Blu-Ray And HD-DVD
The almighty ruck between Blu-ray and HD-DVD could have found a bridge for the consumer.
The clever sticks at NEC have come up with a chip that will play both HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks.
A smart move for NEC, this could save the consumer having to make a choice between the two formats they have little or no knowledge of, but are being told that they simply must have.
The difference between the two standards is pretty considerable, not just in the capacity of the disks that Blu-ray has tried to make much of – as they saw it as a competitive advantage. One of the major differences is the interactivity, with Blu-ray going the route of Java, giving them both a considerable processing overhead in the machines that need to play it and huge flexibility in the depth of interactivity that can be achieved.
It’s not the first time that bringing together the two formats has been suggested. Over a year ago Samsung said that they’d produce a dual format player. Mysteriously they’ve dropped this idea, and gave a serious amount of umm-ing and ahh-ing when asked about it at IFA this year.
NEC is telling all those who will listen that the chips should be shipping from April 2007 onwards.
12 October, 2006
Ofcom Should Force Sky To Open Its Platform: Opinion
In an ideal world, waiting near the top of the new OFCOM boss Ed Richards’ in-tray, there should be a folder marked ‘Sky Monopoly’ and on it a brightly coloured post-it with the words anti competitive clearly inscribed.
Digital Television is a standards based system with the majority of the world using a system called DVB (the Americans have something called ATSC but that’s a story for another day), the UK’s Sky TV uses the DVB standard in most respects.
Pay TV operations rely on a system of Conditional Access (CA) where channels are encrypted, viewers with a suitable viewing card can decrypt the services they subscribe to, those who don’t subscribe don’t get.
To enable the pay services to operate with the use of ‘viewing cards’ the DVB system has a standard, the standard allows for different viewing cards to co-exist and for TV services to be encrypted by more than one encryption method at a time, the so called Simulcrypt (Simultaneous encryption, get it?).
The area where Sky has decided not to use DVB is for its Conditional Access encryption.
Sky TV which is controlled by News Corporation, the large multinational media company with Rupert Murdoch at the helm, uses a special tailored version of Conditional Access a variant of Videoguard which is produced by a company called NDS that is in turn, majority owned by News Corporation.
Now you might be curious to know why this matters, well as the majority of UK householders who watch digital TV, watch via a Sky TV satellite ‘digibox’ and to have a channel that can be easily received via Sky TV the channel must contract with Sky TV to appear on the Sky Electronic Programme Guide, commonly referred to as the EPG.
If that TV service then wants to charge the subscribers to their service they have to use that special version of Videoguard CA.
So what can be done about it? Well OFCOM can and should mandate Sky TV to open up its platform to other DVB CA systems and new entrants can then offer smaller niche services and a new competitive platform to Sky should emerge.
The BBC has for some time been promising a Freeview alternative to the UK’s dominant pay TV operation Sky Digital, but with it’s struggle with the government to secure a long term above inflation licence fee settlement and its desire to start a High Definition TV service, this cause has been relegated to the back burner.
As the government ordained switchover date looms ever closer, viewers who can only receive digital TV by satellite should be able to choose a non Sky alternative even at the risk of upsetting a powerful media mogul.
11 October, 2006
Microsoft Vista Reaches Final Beta
It’s been a long, long wait, but it looks like the release of Microsoft’s new operating system, of Windows Vista is finally set to happen soon.
The company has just released Release Candidate 2 (RC2) – or build number 5744 if you’re counting – and the Redwood boys are sounding chirpy that this will be the last beta version of Windows Vista before the product is unleashed for manufacturing.
The previous test release of Vista, RC1 was tested by no less than three million users, with the company claiming that it received “excellent feedback.”
With Microsoft now saying that just has to add the finishing touches to the overall quality and performance of the eagerly awaited operating system, the company looks set to meet it targets.
Vista has a scheduled roll out date for business customers next month, with consumers getting to play with the new desktop in January 2007.
Microsoft has already missed several release deadlines, although leading financial analysts like Rick Sherlund of the Goldman Sachs Group reckon that things are looking good for an on-time release:
“We had been sceptical of the launch schedule after Beta 2 shipped with problems in May, but the team seems to be making great progress in addressing issues of performance, reliability and compatibility,” he wrote in a research note.
Sherlund also noted that he expects Microsoft to start dishing out Vista discount coupons to customers who buy new PCs capable of running the OS in the run-up to the release.
Already, fanboy websites are buzzing with screen shots of the shiny, sleek new OS and we have to say the new desktop looks mighty purdy to our eyes…
You can check to see if your system wil be able to handle all the whizz bang glitz here: windowsvista.com/getready
11 October, 2006
BBC Use Digital To Pressure Government
BBC Director-General Mark Thompson is back on again trying to justify to the British government why the BBC should be allowed to increase their licence fee above the Retail Price Index (RPI).
Thompson’s main thrust for the increase is the cost of going digital. It’s a clever approach as the UK government has publicly committed itself to switching off analogue TV in favour of digital. Thompson also knows that once the analogue spectrum is freed up, the government may make bucket loads of cash from making that spectrum available.
Thompson ratcheted up the pressure on the Government to comply, by reminding them the risks of digital transition, “If it is under resourced it will fail. It’s as simple as that – and the failure will impact on many millions of households.”
The UK public has for a long time been told, primarily by the BBC, that Digital will be amazing and their lives will somehow become increasingly glorious once they get a Digital TV. Only now are they starting to understand that it’s going to cost them more to have.
Until today, Thompson was asking for an increase in the licence fee of RPI plus 2.3%. today it’s dropped to +1.8%. Under the adjusted figures, the license fee would be £149 in 2013/14 by today’s prices. The reduction has been helped by Ofcom making the decision to no longer charge the BBC a spectrum tax.
Being publicly funded, this kind of ~~argument~~ discussion is very important to the BBCs future ambitions – digital and otherwise. The license fee is payable by all UK residents who have a TV.
Mark Thompson speech today
11 October, 2006
Carphone Warehouse Scoops Up AOL UK
Carphone Warehouse have jumped into the big boy broadband rankings with its acquisition of the UK’s third-largest Internet provider, AOL UK.
Shelling out a cool £370m for the operation, Carphone Warehouse will inherit AOL’s 2.1 million UK customers, of which 600,000 are on dial-up, with the remaining 1.5 million using broadband connections. It’s four years ago that AOL announced their broadband pricing.
Under the deal, AOL will be keeping its (somewhat inappropriate) name – short for ‘America On Line’ – with the new owners retaining the US firm’s pricing policies.
(When AOL first hit the shores of Blighty, we did wonder if they’d change their name for the UK market, but we figured that UK On Line (UOL) sounds like someone being sick, and Britain On Line (BOL) would just invite the addition of ‘LOCKS.’)
Retaining AOL UK’s management and infrastructure, Carphone Warehouse said that it’s funding the acquisition of its shiny new toy through an extension of its existing debt facilities.
Although AOL UK is being sold by its American parent company Time Warner, the deal will see AOL continuing to provide co-branded portal, content and other audience services, as well as taking care of online advertising sales through a revenue-sharing agreement.
Carphone Warehouse head honcho Charles Dunstone announced that the deal was “transformational for our broadband business,” adding that they had “accelerated their customer service recruitment plans and incurred additional wholesale broadband costs.”
“The joint development of AOL’s already successful audience platform will bring us new advertising and content revenues in a proven and low risk manner,” he added.
Ol’Charlie boy’s been getting in the neck recently, after Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk service was the subject of a damning expose on the BBC’s Watchdog programme.
The show had been inundated with complaints after the company failed to deliver on its promise on ‘free’ broadband, and Dunstone has claimed that the strong demand has cost the company £20m more than originally expected.
The AOL deal sees the Carphone Warehouse crew slip into third place in the UK league table of residential Internet providers, with NTL the current leaders with 2.9 million home customers, followed by BT on 2.2 million.
Carphone Warehouse
AOL UK
Time Warner
11 October, 2006
Microsoft Vista Upgrade Advisor:Our Experience
With Windows Vista steaming over the horizon at a rate of knots, users are being encouraged to see if their steam-powered Windows machines will be capable of running the new bells’n’whistle bonanza of the new OS.
We thought we’d check out how our three year old Athlon XP2800+ PC loaded with a once-impressive 1GB of RAM would fare under the new OS, so headed off to the Vista Upgrade Advisor website.
The page told us to plug in any regularly used USB or other attachable peripheral devices (like printers, external hard drives, or scanners) before clicking on the ‘download Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor RC’ link.
No .Net, no chuffin’ install
Our first attempt to run the install program was greeted by a curt insistence that we had to first install Microsoft Net framework before the program would play ball.
Unchuffedly (or perhaps that would read better as, “in a less than chuffed manner”), we dutifully shuffled back to the Microsoft site and downloaded the user-unfriendly sounding “Microsoft .NET Framework Version 1.1 Redistributable Package” installation – all 22 meg of it – and tried again.
This time the program deigned to install itself and after a little hard drive grinding, presented a ‘scanning system’ interface, resplendent in a shiny faux Vista look.
The Advisor quickly set about rifling through our PC, with the interface offering a set of five info pages, all telling us how great Vista was (huzzah!) and outlining the differences between the various versions (Vista Ultimate, Home Premium, Business and Home Basic)
The program insisted that it “might take a few minutes” to complete the scan, but time must have stood for a bit because it sure seemed more like 7-8 minutes had drifted by before the hard drive finally stopped grinding .
Computer says yes
However, it was good news at the end with the Advisor telling us that the PC was all ship-shape to run Windows Vista, and even went as far as recommending that we use the Business edition.
But it wasn’t all good news as we caught sight of some yellow warning triangles further down the page.
The first told us that we needed to create a ton more hard drive space as the great bloated beastie that is Vista demanded 15 GB of hard drive space (yes, 15GB!) before it would flop its elephantine ass on our system.
It went on to suggest alternative system drives that we could install the OS onto – if only they had acres of free space too.
Vista also got sniffy about our graphics card, warning us that the “current video card will not support the Windows Aero™ user experience.”
Drivers
The second warning tab banged on about missing drivers, instructing us to scuttle off to the Windows Update website for new drivers for two listed items once we’d upgraded.
There then followed a list of seven items it claimed to know nothing about, and these included our Epson Perfection 1200 scanner (a fairly mainstream component, we would have thought), our UltraMon display drivers and NetDisk XIMETA external network drive.
For these items it seems we were out on our own or, more accurately, at the mercy of the software developers.
Happily, Vista liked the cut of our ViewSonic VP191s monitors – good job too because they’re quite new.
Looking down to the final warning tab entitled ‘programs,’ we were presented with a refreshingly short list considering that our machine is stuffed to the brim with programs old and new.
Despite the huge popularity of the Norton Systemworks utilities suite, the Advisor reported the likelihood of running into problems when running the program on Vista and it didn’t like WinZip 8.0 much either.
It also disliked Adobe Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC 1.0 so much that it simply wouldn’t allow it to run under Vista.
Task list
Finally, the Upgrade Advisor wrote out a ‘Task List’ of things we needed to attend to before, and after, installing Windows Vista.
At the final tally, this amounted to forking out for a new graphics card, freeing up more hard drive space (or, more realistically, buying a new drive), downloading some new drivers and dumping Norton if they’re not forthcoming with a fix.
All in all, we expected to find a lot more problems so we’re kind of impressed this far, but the real test will come when we get to (finally) install Vista.
With Vista still in beta, we’ll be sure to run the Advisor again when we’re closer to the OS release date.
Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor RC
11 October, 2006
Airis Releases Bargain Basement PDAs With GPS
Although PDAs may be a dying breed, they clearly ain’t dead yet, with the lesser known Spanish electrics company releasing no less than two spanking new GPS-enabled PDAs.
Running on Windows Mobile 2005, it has to be said that the Airis units aren’t exactly lookers, but at a retail price of €220 (£148) and €289 (£195) respectively, they look like chuffing great value.
The new T610 and T620 models both include the well respected SiRFStar III GPS chipset.
Lurking inside is a nippy Samsung 2440 400MHz processor, backed up by a healthy 64MB RAM and 128MB ROM.
The T610 and T620 are cosmetically identical, with both being enclosed in a bland, grey plastic case offering the usual four navigation buttons supplemented by a mini joystick.
Both PDAs come with a 3.5 inch TFT 320 x 240 pixels/65k colours touch screen with anti-reflective coating, with the units offering WAV, WMA, MP3, WMV, MPEG4, DivX4 and DivX5 support.
A SD/MMC card slot takes care of expansion options, with connectivity coming in the form of a MiniUSB socket , Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (T620 only)
A Lithium-Ion 200 mAh battery should keep the thing purring along for hours, with the T610/T620 weighing in at 170g and measuring 15.6 x 72 x 17.8 mm.
A mounting kit, car charger, and a smart leather case round off the feature set, with the units being available from this French site.
We couldn’t find any UK distributors.
[From Navigadget]
10 October, 2006
Yes, Google Buying YouTube: YouGleTube? GoogleTube?
As we\\’d previously as conjecture, Google has announced that it will be buying YouTube. The price is slightly above the rumours at $1.65Bn (€1.31Bn, £0.88Bn). It\\’s an all stock deal, with no money changing hands.
YouTube has been a fast-growing phenomenon that only started in February 2005, a mere 19 months ago.
Formed by some of the people who were in another similarly sale-price company, PayPal, which went for $1.5Bn to eBay, including Roelof Botha the former CFO of PayPal, who fortunately became a partner at VC company, Sequoia Capital partner. The other two were Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Not much has been heard about them, so it\\’s worthwhile watching the Charlie Rose interview with them.
History (short)
In the early days, many people couldn\\’t understand how they would survive long-term given the speed that they were burning through money.
Back in November last year, long before their explosion to playing 100m videos a day, YouTube was shifting 8 terabytes a day. That kind of bandwidth is very expensive.
The founders have a fair few quid in their pockets after the PayPal sale, but in November 2005 they raised $3.5m from Sequoia Capital, which was followed up in April 2006 by further funding of $8m was also supplied by Sequoia.
See how Chad and Steve break the news to their users.
Given the sale price (don\\’t forget $1.65Bn), the return for the investors is tremendous. As the company is closely-held, ie it\\’s shares aren\\’t publicly available, we don\\’t know how much was put in by the funders, but taken at face value, the $13.5m that was put in by Sequoia returned upto 100 times their investment. Not bad for 19 months.
Copyright issues
There\\’s been much controversy within media companies as they\\’ve objected to their content being uploaded to YouTube. Given that video has been uploaded at the rate of 65,000 a day, the only way that YouTube has been able to stay on top of new copyrighted material is by removing it when complaints have objected.
Google Video has been less concerned with similar pieces of video, probably due to their financial muscle and less need to feel threatened by the media companies legal departments. Expect a long list of deals like Warner Music\\’s
Of course, most of the material on YouTube is people making their own videos and uploading it, a few of which have become stars on the service and a couple mega-stars being signed by Hollywood agents.
For the latest (brief) views on the deal of Hurley and Chen have just hit Reuters.
10 October, 2006
O2 Jet Phone Promises Stratospheric Battery Life
Primed and ready for take off, O2’s own-brand Jet supersonic mobile boasts that it can deliver 67% more talk time than its nearest comparable rival.
Created for heavy-yakking business users, the O2 Jet comes with a battery life that would see off an amphetamine-fuelled Duracell Bunny, claiming a mighty 540 hours on standby and 9.9 hours of talk time – adding up to double the talk time of O2’s most popular phone, the Nokia 6230i.
The phone’s business-like styling reflects its targeted demographic, with an austere black casing and ne’er a whiff of any fun stuff to be found – this grumpy old handset hasn’t even got a camera or an MP3 player.
However, stern-faced business users may grow to love the simple user interface, dedicated volume and profile switches, quad band GPRS and full POP3 and IMAP4 email connectivity.
There’s also a dedicated Bluetooth button on the candybar shaped 117 x 47 x 20mm phone, 56MB of internal memory and a macho little metal speaker grill, perhaps suggesting that the owner might be a bit of a tiger in the boardroom.
The O2 Jet will be ready for slipping into pin striped suit pockets from 19th October, with prices varying according to monthly tariffs. There will also be a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) version available for sixty quid.
O2 Jet
10 October, 2006
Google Signs Up With Sony & Warners To Offer Free Music Videos
Google will soon be offering free music videos on its Google video Web site after striking a deal with industry bigwigs, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.
The deal will see the search engine giant – which has just scooped up the video sharing sensation, YouTube for $1.65bn – offering users the ability to stream content from Warner Music and Sony BMG music video collections for nowt.
There will also be behind-the-sceens footage and other artist-related content made available through two separate revenue-sharing arrangements.
Google’s advertisers will sponsor the music video offerings, with the resulting booty being split between Google and its content partners.
“Our partnership with Google is rooted in the pioneering approach we’ve used to offer fans more music, while benefiting artists and protecting copyrights,” gushed Warner Music in a press release.
As well as the freebie video content, Google will also be flogging Warner music video downloads for US$1.99 a pop.
Google has said that it will be offering further access to Sony and Warner’s hefty audio-visual catalogues in the coming months through partner Web sites in its AdSense network.
The Sony/Warner deal comes hot on the heels of several content partnership deals announced by YouTube, including one with – wouldyabelieve it! – Sony BMG.
Google
10 October, 2006