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?

OD2 Allows Users to Pay for Music Through Mobile Bills

Companies offering digital music downloads have long had a problem with getting revenue from their core market – as many music buyers are under 18, they won’t have a credit card. However, a quick glance at the top deck of any bus, or inside a chip shop, will clearly demonstrate that most of them have mobile phones.

On Demand Distribution (OD2) the company that supplies the music service behind sites like Virgin and Freeserve, has come up with a scheme that will allow purchasers to charge the cost of music downloads to their mobile phones. The system, developed by MChex and launched on March 22, is simple: purchasers send an SMS with a code to a premium number and the cost of the message is then charged to their bill.

Paul Smith, OD2’s UK marketing manager, said: “This payment option opens up our services to a much wider demographic. It will allow younger fans to control their own music spend, without having to hijack their parents’ credit card.”

Of course, this wheeze is just moving the payment stage one step further down the ladder and may cause problems for parents who pay their children’s mobile bills, if they’re not on a pay-as-you go plan.

On Demand Distribution

USDTV Launch USA’s First Over-the-Air Digital TV Service

It’s a broadcast model that’s been available in the UK for a while, but US Digital Television (USDTV) have introduced a digital TV service employing unused digital spectrum leased from its broadcast partners.

The subscription to the service is US$19.95 and includes channels from Fox, Disney and ABC. The set-top box to receive the broadcasts are made by Chinese manufacturer Hisense, and will set viewers back a reasonable US$99.

USDTV promise better picture and sound over analogue cable – and many of the broadcasts will be in HDTV too.

The service is currently available in Las Vegas, Albuquerque and the Salt Lake City Metro Area but is set to expand into an additional 30 areas by the end of 2004.

USDTV recently arranged US$8.5 million in private equity funding from NexGen Investments and Stonebridge Capital – and if they deliver on a number of prerequisites investors say they’re in line for an additional $12 million in funding.

USDTV

Hisense tap into digital TV market

BMG License Tracks to P2P Network

Wippit has added to its repertoire with 10,000 tracks licensed from BMG. Interestingly, the tracks will only be available to subscribers in the UK and Ireland for the time being. This could be seen as a stop gap until iTunes launches in the UK and Europe.

Wippit charge US$54 (UK£30) for unlimited downloads, and subscribers are allowed to swap tracks and burn them to CD. With the EMI deal we reported on earlier, Wippit now offer music from over 200 record labels.

Paul Myers, CEO and Founder of Wippit says, “We offer music from 200 great labels already and having BMG join us is fantastic for Wippit and music lovers alike. BMG have made available a wealth of world beating talent for Wippit subscribers to download, with an emphasis on quality.”

Wippit

CeBIT: PSX Will Make its European Debut at CEBIT 2004

The specifications are expected to have changed from the version launched in Japan a few months ago, but Sony are expected to unveil the European version of its exciting PSX media centre.

The Japanese PSX shipped with a few of the key features missing (namely MP3 playback and the ability to play some image formats), but they were later addressed in a firmware upgrade and it is hoped that the European PSX will hit the market with all of the proposed features enabled. We’ll have to wait and see if the box that Sony show at CeBIT is the proper European version, of if they will simply demo a Japanese unit – the later would be deeply disappointing.

The Register

Chrysalis Mobile Offers MP3 Downloads Straight to Mobile Phones

Chrysalis Mobile, a standalone business unit within the Chrysalis group of companies, has launched a service designed to bring music to mobile phone users, in various forms.

Chrysalis are offering the service on a “white label” basis – third parties will be able to contract the service and have it branded with their own identity. The service is comprised of hosting, content creation, billing and even royalty payments.

Available for download will be MP3s of real songs, ringtones, short edits of real songs (for alarms, tones and fun use), and images.

Chrysalis are pushing the CRM aspect of the service to potential customers – they’ll know who bought what and when, allowing effective management of campaigns and promotions.

Chrysalis Mobile

Streaming Patent Claims Thicken as Playboy Licenses Technology

Acacia Media Technologies Group, part of Acacia Research Corporation, has found a new licensee for it patent claim on transmitting media over the web: Playboy.com.

Acacia acquires patents based on broad definitions – and then pursues companies using technologies in similar areas. The company claims to own the patents relating to transmitting compressed video and audio online – a fairly basic component of the internet these days. Acacia don’t actually provide a product for streaming media, or a service – they just claim the patent and will license the right to you.

Playboy.com have been granted the 118th license to use streaming technology – analysts estimate that Acacia are looking to take about 1 or 2% of the income that licensees make from streaming.

The company had recently started action on 39 “adult entertainment” sites, and it seems these businesses seem to be their preferred targets rather than, say, Micorsoft, RealNetworks or Apple. Their reasoning is that content providers have billing systems in place with consumers and so it’s an easier revenue stream to tap into.

Acacia Research

Yahoo Finance

iTunes Sells 50 Million Songs; Hewlett Packard-branded iTunes Launches

Apple announced on Monday that they’d sold 50 million tracks through its iTunes music service. They’re not including free songs redeemed through the Pepsi promotion running at the moment, just tracks which users have paid for and downloaded.

The service is now selling 2.5 million songs per week – that’s an annual rate of 130 million tracks per year, and it’s increasing. Steve Jobs said “It’s increasingly difficult to imagine others ever catching up with iTunes.” He may have a point: there’s no denying that the service has completely changed the face of the music industry, with many other companies are trying to get a slice of the market – though many other offerings (such as myCokeMusic) are considerably inferior. We’re looking forward to iTunes belated launch in Europe in the Summer – and hope that this will prompt Apple to do a bit more work on their slightly shoddy Windows client for the store.

Apple also partnered with Hewlett Packard to offer a special HP-branded copy of iTunes.

Oh – and what was the milestone song sold this time? “The Path of Thorns” by Sarah McLachlan.

Apple on the milestone

HP iTunes

BenQ Launch World’s First 12” High Definition Widescreen Laptop

BenQ are pitching their new Joybook 6000 as part of their “digital hub” – and is the World’s first high definition 12.1” laptop.

The high definition screen runs at a 1280 x 600 resolution (WXGA) – we haven’t seen it yet, but it is by all accounts beautiful. We’ve been looking around and it seems to retail at about US$2640.

The Centrino notebook has the usual WiFi/Bluetooth/IrDA capabilities, so will be able to connect users to data services easily and under a variety of conditions.

Joybook Home – Middle East

The Line between TVs and Displays Blurs Even Further

Is it a display with a TV tuner or is it a TV that you can use as a flat panel monitor? The viewing angle is possibly a bit narrow for living room use, but Iiyama’s new E430T-S display could easily be used as a television when you’re not using it to read DigitalLifestyles. Suspiciously similar to their existing E430T-S but with a PAL/SECAM/NTSC tuner in it, Iiyama are making the leap to multifunction displays as the market grows: flat panels have become enormously popular over the past 18 months, make ideal mid-size television displays, use less power and save space. Home users no longer see the point in having two near-identical pieces of equipment that do the same thing, and the benefits of integrating an tuner into an existing production model are enormous compared to the tiny cost.

The new display even has built-in speakers, but at 1.5w, you’ll definitely need to use something a bit more powerful for watching TV in living room.

Iiyama

Let Your Mood Dictate the Music

Biometric feedback as an input device is an idea that’s been floating around for a while, but researchers at MIT’s Media Lab Europe have developed a musical “game” that allows your mood to influence the music, rather than the other way round.

When your mood changes, so does your skin resistance (just ask the CIA), and MIT’s project, called Peace Composed, uses a pair of biometric sensors to measure it. This is then used to compose a piece of music based on seven different layers of instruments, including bass, piano, strings and wind instruments.

The application has obvious stress management uses, provided you’re not to stressed or overworked to actually get round to using it, and makes a fitting companion piece to “Relax to Win”, a program developed to help children with anxiety and stress problems. We don’t know why, but the title really appeals to us.

BBC News