Backstory
Forgive me. I forked over money to Channel 4 to become a paying Season Pass sucker for the Celebrity Big Brother live stream.
My dearest, a less-than closet BB fan, persuaded me to watch CBB on the launch night – something made all the more peculilar by the fact that I don’t watch TV anymore (apart from The Simpsons at 6pm on Channel 4, of course).
To be frank, by the end of the program I was grateful to her. The sight of the fantastic disdain of Ken Russell made it worthwhile in itself.
What got me reaching for my credit card was the sheer hilarity of seeing Jade Goody enter the house – post her journey through crowds of frantic screaming BB fans, proceeded by her 50-yard car drive and obligatory press photo pose – to a house with three grumpy, quiet people who didn’t jump up and down when they saw her enter. It couldn’t have been further from her expected truth.
Her face was priceless – well, I thought it was at least worth £5 to see it for a while longer, showing a mixture of confusion and pain.
It appeared that finally Endemol had got a quality production team behind this one, lead by an intelligent director.
Hence my giving money, enabling this rubbish to make huge profits for those concerned.
__Using DRM … it _does_ suck
Once I’d registered and paid for it, the first surprise was not to be sent a direct URL to access the stream. Instead the process is long and painful as you have to drag yourself through the Channel4 site to find the stream.
Here’s a run down of the hoops they get you to jump through …
*Deep breath now* –
Navigating through their home page to the CBB page; click on the “Watch 24/7” link; then the “Already own the pass” link. This pops up a new window with a form requesting sign up detail (despite the link being specific about already owning a pass).
After some searching you’ll notice, at the top of the window, a single word link for Login; which, once clicked, you’ll be asked for your email and password.
Finally the video player appears – hurrah!
Don’t be fooled, the agony isn’t over yet, this is where the DRM pain begins.
Despite having logged in a number of times already, you’re told that you do not have rights to play the content.
Clicking Yes takes you to yet another Web page, grandly entitled License Acquisition. Here you’re requested to login _again_.
Once you’ve bashed the keys in the right order, you’re requested to “wait a moment,” as the licence is “obtained”. Eventually you’re offered to click the Play button.
Finally, finally you get to the steam.
That’s bad enough to do once, but adding insult to injury, the worst of it is that each and everytime you want to watch a stream, you’ve got to go through this bullshit.
Summary – DRM Don’t Work
From the experience above you can see that the current version of DRM – Microsoft’s naturally – just doesn’t work for the consumer.
It’s not from lack of trying on their part either, Microsoft have been plugging away at their DRM solution for many years and, we have to assume, this is their latest as to get to view the streams, there’s a requirement to ‘upgrade’ your Windows Media Player to the latest version.
We also have to assume that Channel4/Endemol and Microsoft worked together to get the Big Brother streaming working. Say what you want about Big Brother, but it’s a high profile TV ‘event’, so important for them to have it working correctly.
Even after all of this effort, the end user experience is truly atrocious, so bad, that you feel anger every time to access the stream, and let’s not forget, people are paying for the privilege of being insulted like this.
With the difficulty of this process, it’s no wonder that people still try to get their content from file sharing networks to avoid DRM.
Still in beta but already a big hit in the Digital Lifestyles office is the Walkit.com website, a mapping site designed for perambulating pedestrians keen to do their bit to fight global warming.
Folks still battling a post-Christmas beast of a belly might find the column displaying how many calories you might expect to burn depending on fast you’re shuffling along useful.
Another thing missing is the ability to plot routes involving multiple points: it would be great to plan an afternoon’s walking and have an instant readout of the miles walked and calories burned – and if there was a version that could be carried around on our Palm Treo, all the better! 
It’s written under a pen name, Obadiah Shoher, as Israeli law criminalizes racism and incitation. With this knowledge you have some sort of idea as to the views that are put across.
Notebooks outsold desktop PCs in Western Europe for the first time, as Acer leapt ahead of Dell to grab second place in PC sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (an area known in da biz as ‘EMEA’).
Laptop sales totalled 8.4 million during the quarter, against 8 million desktops, but corporate refresh cycles are expected to elbow desktop sales skyward in the second half of 2007 with Windows Vista expected to drive consumer – but not business – sales, as IDC’s Andy Brown explains:
Pentax have announced two new slim-line cameras, the T30 and M30, both sporting 7 megapixel sensors and face detection.
With Digital SR you may manage to grab a low light photo without blur, but odds on it’ll look like it’s been taken in a noise snowstorm (which rather sounds like a death metal concert).
Optio M30
Exposure compensation +/- 2EV in 1/3EV steps
Slimmer than a hungry supermodel deprived of her daily slice of crispbread, Samsung’s new Ultra Edition 10.9 slider has proudly grabbed the honours to claim the accolade as the “world’s slimmest” slider phone.
Despite its wisp-like dimensions, Samsung have still managed to squeeze in a fair amount of functionality, with a 3.2-megapixel camera on the back of the phone for grabbing stills.
After all, judging by the way our Treo 650 has been battered about during visits to football games and ale-slopping nights at the pub, we reckon the Ultra Edition 10.9 would soon become the Broken Edition 10.9 within hours. 
Back in our day we lived in an old water tank on a rubbish tip and considered ourselves lucky if we ate two bits of cold gravel for lunch and had a broken pen for our school work. 
The Scottish initiative – costing £25 million – will see all pupils over the age of 10 in selected schools being handed shiny new PDAs, with 6,000 teachers also enjoying the freebie onslaught.
The scheme will also provide free wireless Internet in a move to keep children interested in schoolwork by giving them online access to course material and homework.
The Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation is a charity caring for families with terminally ill babies suffering irreparable brain damage (SDD), and they’ve announced a three week long fundraising campaign in Ireland.
“For the past seven years we’ve collected empty toner and inkjet cartridges. We saw groups in Britain doing something similar with mobile phones. Last year we did a sort of dry run collecting mobiles and managed to raise around €100,000,” said campaign organiser Stephen Bebbington.
With Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Slip Sliding Away’ surely on perpetual loop in the factory, LG have released yet another natty phone that’s big on that super-slidey thang, the 3G LG-SH110.
Rustling though the minimal specs offered thus far, we can tell you that Messrs LG have wedged in a 2.0-megapixel camera coupled with a secondary VGA camera for video calling, with the screen able to show your own face and the caller recoiling in horror at your gurning mug.
HSDPA connectivity offers super nippy 1.8Mbps connectivity with visio-conference functionality hoping to tempt business bods. 
Although the home entertainment industry is more loved up than the Happy Mondays on a bagful of E about Video-on-Demand, a new report suggests there might be a bumpy ride ahead.
The company estimates that the UK market is set to be worth £2.6 million in 2007 (£400,000 up from last year), soaring up to £8.4 million in 2008, and hitting a badger’s nadger under £30 million by 2009.