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?

New Sony Products Shown at Open House

Sony’s Open House event this year covered all the key consumer devices – from HDTV recorders, and new Handycams to extremely desirable PDAs with more bells and whistles than a bus load of Morris dancers crashing into a flute factory.

Sony are going for integration even more than usual – HDTVs have integrated card readers for cable users, Clié PDAs and VAIO notebooks feature even sharper cameras and better wireless access than before, and MP3 support filters into products where there was previously only ATRAC.

More details from DVD Format

BT Cuts Broadband Price

It’s about time – BT have always been at the pricier end of broadband pricing, but the communications giant has finally made a significant reduction to the price of its basic broadband service.

Now set at a far more enticing and competitive UK£19.99 per month, the service is limited to one home PC (but if you bridge it, how would they know?) and supplies a full 512kbs. However, there’s one very unattractive condition to this new package – downloads are limited to one measly gigabyte per month. Once you’ve downloaded your equivalent of 200 iTunes tracks or a couple of games, you will be sent a reminder with the option to buy more bandwidth. We applaud the new price point form BT, but think the data limitation is a step backwards. Can’t have it both ways, we suppose.

Remember, some “broadband” packages you see offered for UK£20 and less often just give you 256kbs and less, so always read the terms and conditions.

BT’s new service

The FT’s comment

“Stop Pestering Us About Bandwidth, Concentrate on the Services”: BT CEO

After Dr Jyoti Choudrie of the Brunel University commented that that the UK “needs to sit up and take note of the example Japan is setting”, BT CEO Ben Verwaayen has responded – and has basically said that speed doesn’t matter over 2Mbps. One in four homes in Japan has a 12Mbps connection, used for VoIP.

“All services, with the exception of live TV, are possible with 1.5 to 2Mps” he said at the UK Technology Partnering and Investment Forum. We’ll soon see if BT really believe that when they start marketing domestic connections faster than that.

Verwaayen wants us to concentrate on services – but this seems at odds with what users want. Broadband subscribers are more than capable of finding their own content, and would rather their broadband ISP provided them with a fast, reliable connection than pop videos they can find on other sites.

Silicon.com

October 19: Earthquakes, Car Jacking, Random Shootings, Ice Cream Vans

Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto series will no doubt break sales records and cause outrage in October this year when another instalment, set in San Andreas and featuring an interesting earthquake game mechanic. The Edinburgh-based developer is owned by Take Two Interactive of New York, and with joint sales of 23 million copies for the previous two titles, you’ll no doubt be thoroughly sick of seeing this one by the time Christmas comes.

If you live in the US, the publication date is the 19th October; if you live in Europe it’s the 22nd – either way you might want to stay out of Game until the mobs subside. Expect the usual tabloids to run the same articles on video game violence in the hope of selling more newspapers.

Rockstar North – Sex, Violence, Deep-fried Mars Bars

Google: Ban+this+sick+game

Electronic Frontier Foundation Propose a Licensing Scheme for Filesharers

After a year of research, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging copyright holders to join together to offer blanket licenses to P2P networks.

They are drawing parallels with the copyright problem radio once faced in the US – Performing Rights Organisations (PRO) such as ASCAP and BMI were founded to allow radio stations to play music legally and ensure that artists and publishers were properly compensated.

The EFF also regard music licensing in the internet age as dogged with the same problems that the player piano industry fought though in 1909 with sheet music manufacturers. This early situation was also solved by a blanket license.

The money to be made is attractive – if users paid, for example, US$5 per month, income to the music companies would be more than US$3 billion – and almost in pure profit as no CDs would have to be manufactured or shipped.

The EFF’s proposal (PDF)

Channel 4.5?

Channel 4 and five (formerly Channel 5) in the UK have been looking at the benefits a merger between the two channels would bring, particularly in the face of new competition from ITV plc.

Carlton and Granada merged last year to become ITV plc, placing pressure on the remaining commercial channels to compete for advertising: ITV now has a single huge advertising sales mechanism.

Five is jointly owned by United Business Media and Germany’s RTL – but as Channel 4 is publicly owned, any change of this scale must be approved by an act of parliament.

Naturally both Channel 4 and five dismiss the reports of talks as speculation.

“Channel 4 might be interested in it because they are declining and we are growing” said a five spokesperson. Five claim a 6.5% share of all viewers – three quarters of the UK population watch Channel 4 in the course of a week.
More about Channel 4’s ownership

More about five

ATi’s HDTV Wonder Card

Featuring Ati’s NXT2004 Digital Modulator chip, already found in many set-top boxes, ATi’s HDTV Wonder card will include support for analogue, digital and high definition television services. The card will come bundled with PVR software allowing users to fill up their hard drives considerably faster than before: a 250gb disk should store about 30 hours of HDTV content, contrasted with 200 hours of standard definition TV.

With the release of the DirectTV’s HDTV TiVo in the next few weeks, HDTV fans at least in the US will finally be able to record and archive programmes with ease.

HotHardware’s preview of the card

DirectTV’s HD products

Microsoft Rethinks Japanese Contracts

Microsoft has announced changes to its contracts with PC suppliers in Japan after its Tokyo offices were raided in the middle of the week.

The part of the contract that the Fair Trade Commission was so concerned about related to a clause preventing manufacturers from suing Microsoft over patented technology. If manufacturers did not agree to the clause, then they could not sell PCs with Windows preinstalled.

Microsoft’s statement

New Memory Card Format Aimed at 3G Phones

Motorola will be using a new memory card format in their new phones (the E1000 and A1000, reported here this week), with capacities from 32mb to 512mb. These new cards are about half the size of a SIM, making them slightly smaller than the miniSD format, which was launched less than a year ago.

The cards are intended to be removable so that users can share files or transfer data. The specification for the cards will be open, so other manufacturers will be able to adopt it. No details for performance or electrical characteristics have been released yet.

Chances are then, that your PDA, phone, games console, MP3 player, robot dog and camera will all use entirely different memory cards. If that’s not enough to send you sobbing down to the shops to get a new all-in-one device, then we don’t know what is.

PC World almost seem pleased

AOL Drops Broadband Service in US

With broadband price cuts from telephone operators and ISPs in the US, packaging a DSL service with access to AOL services was rapidly becoming uneconomic for the content giant.

America Online found that it couldn’t offer a price-competitive service: being so far down the value chain meant that the subscription cost of AOL broadband product was often far higher than that of competitors, once subleasing prices had been piled on top.

As the numbers of dial-up subscribers dwindle, AOL is moving towards providing content to users who supply their own access, thus concentrating on their core competencies and not wasting resources trying to be a telco. The market seems to be segregating out a bit: last year, Microsoft also dropped DSL access plans. How long will it be before companies which are more geared to providing access to the internet, such as BT, drop their content offerings?

Broadband without the bandwidth