Author: Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?

Music Store Update: Sony Connect Launches This Monday; US iTunes Counts Down to 100 million

Robert Ashcroft, Sony’s VP for European Network services has commented that the company’s online music offering, Connect, will be launching in Europe this Monday.

All five of the major labels, along with 150 independents, have signed up for the service.

Tracks will be encoded in Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format, not MP3, so you’ll need Sony’s Sonic Stage software to make use of the music store. And forget about using your iPod too.

Meanwhile, Apple are getting the champagne ready for the 100,000,000th iTunes track sold. To mark the event, Apple are giving away 50 new iPods, a gift certificate for 10,000 iTunes downloads (!) and 1 17” Powerbook. iTunes customers around the world are eligible.

“As we approach the unprecedented milestone of 100 million legally downloaded songs, we want to thank our customers who have made the iTunes Music Store such a stunning success,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iTunes is pulling even further ahead of its competitors, and it’s all due to the wonderful customers we have.” That’s right Steve, don’t you forget it.

Jobs originally predicted that 100 million milestone would be reached within the first year of iTunes – but that would have been the end of April. This celebration is coming a little later than expected, but nevertheless iTunes has been an incredible success and its monthly totals are now far in excess of previous expectations.

Sony Connect

iTunes

Crown Castle Sell UK Broadcasting Business to National Grid

National Grid Transco have had their eyes on Crown Castle’s UK broadcasting and mast operation for some time – and they are about to hand over $2.035 billion (€1.67 billion) for it. The deal is still subject to approvals, but is expected to be finalised on or before September 30th.

Crown Castle’s reason for the sale is that the need US$1.3 billion (€1.06 billion) of the money to pay off a credit facility from CC Operating Company.

“The sale of our UK subsidiary is expected to provide us with significant financial and operational flexibility to pursue opportunities in the larger and faster growing US market,” stated John P. Kelly, CEO of Crown Castle. “While our UK operations have been a solid contributor to our business, we believe there is substantially greater growth potential for our US business given the lower penetration of wireless services and the earlier stage of 3G deployments in the US market. This transaction also substantially improves our balance sheet, which we believe will provide flexibility to capitalize on this growth.”

“As a result of this transaction, we will significantly reduce our net debt, exposure to currency fluctuations and floating interest rate exposure,” said W. Benjamin Moreland, the company’s CFO, in a statement.

The other US$740 million (€608 million) will be invested in new business opportunities in the US and to pay off some other debts.

Crown Castle

National Grid Transco

Portable Music Watch: Dell’s Cheeky iPod Deal; New Sony Players

The Sony Vaio Pocket - yes, yes, we know you want one...Dell have come up with a slightly controversial deal to attract customers who are disgruntled with the iPod’s less than impressive battery life: tempt them to buy a Dell DJ as a replacement by offering them US$100 (€82) for their dud iPod. With the rebate, this makes the 15gb music player half-price.

Dell are clearly capitalising on the iPod’s “dirty secret” – that promised eight-hour battery life doesn’t stay eight hours for very long. Battery inefficiency and memory effects mean that after a year or so, some users are lucky to get two or three hours of tunes out of their player, with some reporting batteries that have completely given up.

Apple have recently introduced a US$99 replacement service for players that are more than a year old, but Dell’s promotion is aimed at enticing iPod owners to jump ship by offering a shiny new (though less capacity) player, with 25 free downloads, for the same price.

“Is your iPod battery starting to fade? Before you pay for a replacement battery for your same old device, consider upgrading to a brand new Dell 15GB1 DJ with more than double the battery life”, yells the website.

In other portable music player news, Sony have unveiled two new portable players – the Network Walkman Player NW-HD1 and the Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1L. Sony don’t make cars because you wouldn’t know if you were looking at the model name or the registration number.

The NW-HD1 is a 20gb player for US$400, and is claimed by Sony to be the smallest in its class. It also incorporates 256mb of Flash memory too.

The VGF-AP1L is a 40gb player with a 2.2 inch colour screen for displaying photos and album artwork and is US$500. The player also can store photos from Cybershot cameras, rather like the iPod’s picture storage function, with the upside that the Vaio player can actually display them.

To put further pressure on Apple, both devices will work seamlessly with Sony’s new music download service, Connect. Supported formats are MP3, WAV and WMA, but no AAC – so Sony Walkman owners won’t be doing much business with iTunes. Given that they invented the entire portable music player market with the Walkman, if anyone can compete with the iPod, it’s Sony.

Dell’s Deal

Sony

Home Technology Monitor: 4% US Homes Have a PVR

The 2004 Ownership and Trend Report from the Home Technology Monitor shows that advanced video devices are becoming more and more popular in home entertainment.

According to the study of US homes:

  • 4% own a PVR – double the number six months ago
  • 6% own a HDTV – against 4% six months ago
  • 18% now own a dual DVD/VCR deck
  • 5% have a PC TV tuner
  • “The proliferation of video technology in the past 10 years is transforming the media use habits of mainstream consumers,” said David Tice, Vice President, Knowledge Networks/SRI. “Though the options for reaching consumers with marketing messages are multiplying, viewers are also exerting greater control over their entertainment options. To maintain an informed marketplace, measurement systems must keep pace with these changes; but current approaches can exclude the very households that advertisers need to understand most. This is troubling news, because these consumers are disproportionately affluent and heavy media users.”

    • Knowledge Networks

    Google, Orkut and Affinity Engines’ Social Networking Suit

    Google is facing legal action after Affinity Engines (AE) accused them of using their code in their Orkut social networking site.  This is all splendid timing for a company that is planning a major IPO.

    They claim that the code was taken to Google by Orkut Buyukkokten, who had also promised Affinity Engines that he wouldn’t develop a competing social network product.

    It’s not looking good for Google – nine bugs present is Orkut are also present in Affinity Engines’ inCircle product. In addition to the bugs, AE claim that there are textual similarities between the two sets of source code.

    Google refuted the claims in a statement to Wired News: “Affinity Engines has not provided any evidence to Google that their source code was used in the development of orkut.com. We have repeatedly offered to allow a neutral expert to compare the codes in the two programs and evaluate Affinity’s claims, but Affinity has rejected that offer.”

    Orkut is a Turkish citizen and was working on inCircle when he ran into some visa problems. Taking a job at Google was a way to get round this, but he kept working on inCircle – though signed agreements not to develop any further social-networking technology and confirming that any code he developed belonged to AE.

    The name of Google’s new social networking site couldn’t be a more obvious indicator of who has been working on it.

    Orkut

    About inCircle

    MSN Search’s Revamp

    Moogle? Goomsn? The news MSN Search service is out of the stables today, and despite what might be under the hood, Microsoft have obviously been inspired by Google’s clean, easy to use interface. Basically, they’ve taken most of the ads off.

    After a year in development and US$100 million (€82 million), Microsoft’s MSN Search tool is still just a front end for Yahoo’s technology. For the time being.

    To catch up with Google and Yahoo, Microsoft are gearing up to launch their very own, in-house developed, search tool this year. Webmasters will get a chance to vet its performance and accuracy before it goes live, baring in mind that MSN Search has had a odd and unfortunate habit in the past of dropping results from some sites competing with MS. Hope they manage to track that bug down and fix it.

    In an interview on this week Yusuf Mehdi, head of MSN Search said, bafflingly “If this is a next-generation airplane, this is only the inside of the engine.” The first person to tell me what that means gets the usual prize – a bad CD from my collection. Come on people, I’ve still got a few left.

    Microsoft’s MSN Search engine is currently third place in the US – Google deals with 35% of all internet searches, Yahoo takes a healthy 30% and MSN has 15%. They have a lot of catching up to do, but a strong band, new search engine and integration with MS’s operating systems (if they’re allowed to!) might just put them at the front of the field.

    MSN Search

    Macintosh gets its First HDTV PVR

    Macintosh OS X users now have their first HDTV PVR – and it’s digital too. Elgato Systems have released the EyeTV 500, a Firewire-powered box that sits next to your mac and can be used to record, rewind and edit over-the-air digital TV. Elgato have had a range of digital tuners for the mac, but this is the first HD offering to the market.

    Digital television is gaining popularity in the US after a slow start, with more than 1200 DTV stations now reaching almost 100% of the population. HD television has been popular there for some time, with broadcasters boasting four times the picture quality of DVD.

    Elgato are hoping to capitalise in the new interest in that DTV is attracting with this new HD product. “We have designed EyeTV 500 in line with the growth and success of free over-the-air HDTV services in North America,” said Freddie Geier, Elgato’s CEO in a statement. “Mac users can now enjoy free prime-time programming from the major U.S. broadcasters (including ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, UPN, and WB) – and all in TV image quality never seen before on the Mac.”

    Users will have access to more than 20 HDTV and SDTV channels, and will be able to archive programmes directly to their Macintosh’s hard disk. The box can even be programmed directly over the internet with TitansTV’s electronic programme guide.

    The EyeTV 500 costs US$349 (€288) and is available now.

    Elgato Systems

    UPDATED: BT Cuts Broadband Prices By Up to 25%, but caps downloads.

    With many companies getting in on the cheap broadband bandwagon, BT has been losing customers to upstarts like Wanadoo and Tiscali. In a effort to attract more customers, and keep the ones that it has, the British telco has announced cuts across their range of consumer broadband packages. And about time too, as they were the most expensive provider out there.

    The standard BT Broadband package is down from UK£27 to UK£25 (€40 down to €37.30) for a 512k connection, whilst the BT Yahoo! Broadband 1mb product gets cut down to £30 from £41 (€44.75 down to €61.16) – more than a 25% reduction.

    No doubt BT’s broadband competitors will react almost immediately with price cuts of their own, in order to keep winning business, but the question is: how low can it go?

    UPDATE: The bad news is, that bandwidth is now capped.

    BT have written to their customers to explain:

    “So that we can continue to offer our best possible price to customers, we’ll be introducing a usage allowance of 15GB of data a month. This is more than enough for the vast majority of our customers – for example, you can still download up to 3,000 music tracks every month. ”

    “You’ve absolutely no need to worry: the usage allowance will only be applied from early 2005 and, based on your current usage levels, you won’t be affected by this change to your Terms & Conditions.”

    The danger here is – what happens when you want to view video on demand on your PC? At 2 megabits per second, a 2hr film will use up 1.9 gigbytes of storage, so you’d get just under nine films a month and no browsing or music. We’ll be coming back to this and exploring it in greater depth in the next few days.

    BT’s broadband pricing

    The BBC’s Digital Future

    With the BBC’s Royal Charter up for renewal in 2006, the corporation has outlined its vision for the future in a new paper “Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for the Digital World”. Apart from the two ‘the’s and that ‘for’, you can tell every word in the title was chosen in a focus group for maximum effect.

    Top of the list are the BBC’s suggestions for regulation – much like BT, the corporation sees that it is better to regulate yourself than have regulation thrust upon you. Obviously, BBC management has been under criticism by the government for recent editorial decisions, and so the corporation is suggesting a reformed board of governors, independent of the BBC and open to scrutiny.

    Programmes and BBC services will have to pass a ‘public value test’ before they are approved, and will be tested on quality, impact, value for money and reach. If a programme fails the value test, then the governors will hold the managers responsible to account.

    The BBC is also planning to make the complaints process easier and faster, with a more open attitude and active right to reply.

    As the UK government is keen to free up the analogue spectrum, the BBC is pushing access to digital services, aiming for a switchover by 2012. The corporation wants to involve the public more in the process, and indeed greater openness and public participation is a common theme throughout the entire document.

    Local news, services and properties are also high on the agenda as the BBC is often criticised, often unfairly, of being too London-centric. To combat this, staff are being moved out of London and ultra-local news services are planned for up to 60 British cities.

    Finally, the BBC is looking towards more successes with interactive projects – meaning more events like the Big Read, and the launch of a digital curriculum for schools coupled with enhanced learning facilities on BBC Online.

    BBC

    FindLaw: 56% of Americans Oppose RIAA Lawsuits

    A survey by legal website FindLaw has found that 56% of those polled were opposed to the legal actions currently being undertaken by the music industry. With the Recording Industry Association of America stepping up its action and the new Pirate Act coming into effect, then this dissatisfaction can only increase.

    3,400 people have been sued since last September – more than 600 of those cases have been settled for an average of US$3000 (€2,473) each, netting the RIAA at least US$1.8 million (€1.48 million). No case has gone to court, no artists, ostensibly the victims of file trading, have received any of this money. Recent figures suggest that CD sales are up 10% on last year, legal music download sites are doing such good business that the market is rapidly becoming crowded.

    FindLaw surveyed 1000 participants and found that 56% were against the lawsuits, 37% supported the action, and 7% had no opinion. Opposition is higher amongst younger people, with nearly two thirds of those between 18 and 34 objecting.

    Quoted on the FindLaw site, Professor Sharon Sandeen,intellectual property law tutor at the Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota said: “Although the RIAA’s lawsuits are unsettling to many, they are based upon sound law because it is a clear violation of copyright law to make a verbatim copy of a protected sound recording,” says “The underlying public policy at work is the notion that without copyright laws, musical artists would be less inclined to create music and, as a result, there would be fewer sound recordings. So the individuals who complain about the lawsuits should ask themselves: ‘Would I rather live in a world with freely distributed but less music, or pay for the music I enjoy so that there will be more of it?'”
    “I suspect that many people, when educated about the purpose of copyright law, support the law,” Sandeen continued. “Public opposition to the lawsuits may be due, in part, to what some people consider hard-handed tactics by the RIAA.”

    FindLaw, legal news and commentary