Mike Slocombe

TVOD: Telewest’s VOD Plans Revealed
Telewest Broadband today announced plans to transform its TV service, giving consumers greater access and control over additional digital programmes.
The UK giant intends to roll out TV on demand – where sofa-lolling users pick programmes from a menu and watch it whenever they want – to all its one million digital TV customers by early 2006.
Telewest are also widening the range of on-demand programming available and boosting the existing movie service, currently offering over 200 current and library titles.
The extended service will include the best of the previous week’s programmes, including 60 hours of BBC content, at a cost of jack-diddly-squat to customers.
There will also be a mix of free and subscription services including popular TV series, music videos and niche content.
Customers can view programmes just like watching a DVD or video, with options to watch it when they want, and then pause, fast forward and rewind to their heart’s content.
Following the initial launch of TVOD in Bristol, Telewest will introduce the service in stages throughout the second half of this year, starting with 26,000 customers in Cheltenham who are set to receive the service in early July.
Telewest Broadband has the highest percentage of TV customers taking digital, currently 87%, of any cable company in Europe and North America.
Eric Tveter, president and chief operating officer at Telewest sunk deeper into his deluxe executive chair and glossed: “We are transforming TV as we know it by giving consumers both a superb choice of programmes and the flexibility to watch them whenever they want. We don’t ever want to hear our customers say there’s nothing on the box or that they have missed their favourite programme.”
“And while digital TV goes from strength to strength,” he cackled triumphantly, “analogue has finally had its day.”
Digital TV, comms and broadband behemoths Telewest are clearly keen to stamp their feet all over digital TV market, investing around £20 million (~US$13.6m ~€29.3m) in the development of TV-on-demand and personal video recorder (PVR) services in 2005.
Telewest
12 May, 2005
Windows Mobile 5.0 Unveiled By Microsoft
Microsoft has unveiled Windows Mobile 5.0, a new version of its Windows operating system for mobile devices.
The new OS includes features to make it easy for device makers to equip phones and handheld computers with typewriter keyboards and iPod-sized hard drives.
The announcement by Chairman Bill Gates at the company’s annual conference for mobile software developers in Las Vegas, marked the end of the distinct Pocket PC and Smartphone brands of the operating system.
Microsoft initially offered a single mobile platform based on Windows CE (short for ‘consumer electronics’) with the platform fragmenting into Pocket PC PDAs, “smart” cell phones, and then Pocket PCs equipped with phones.
By dumping the 5-year-old Pocket PC brand and the ‘Smartphone’ label, Microsoft is elbowing its Windows Mobile platform onto the same table as rival mobile device platforms such as Symbian and BlackBerry.
Although the underlying software code remains 90 percent the same as its predecessors, the new Windows Mobile removes some technological distinctions that gave the phone and PDA platforms different capabilities.
This means that integrated support for Wi-Fi will be available for smart phones rather than just Pocket PCs, and that Pocket PCs will now include “persistent” memory storage.
This preserves basic user information, contacts and personal settings when a device’s battery runs out of juice and was previously only available for smart phones.
The new Windows Mobile platform rather belatedly adds support for internal hard drives, with Microsoft hoping that device makers will design phones and organisers with enough storage capacity to take on the likes of Apple’s iPod
Other feature enhancements in Windows Mobile 5.0 include tools for “push-to-talk” and video conferencing, support for 3G and USB 2.0, and improvements in soft-key operation and landscape display orientation.
Swivel action business folks will appreciate updates to the mobile versions of Microsoft Word and Excel, with the software providing more consistent formatting of documents created on a computer and allowing charts to be created from a spreadsheet.
Windows Mobile currently generates the loose change in Microsoft’s voluminous pockets, with the combined software revenue from mobile and embedded devices totalling US$80 million (~€62.5m ~£43m) in the first three months of 2005.
Although this was up 31 percent from a year earlier, it only amounted to a piffling tenth of Microsoft’s overall revenue for the quarter – but things are likely to change with Microsoft’s forthcoming marketing blitz (rumoured to reach US$100 million [~€78m ~£53.5m]).
Microsoft execs haven’t given out exact figures, but Susan DelBene, a corporate vice-president of marketing for the mobile and embedded devices division at Microsoft said, “You’ll see a bigger marketing effort from us than you’ve ever seen in the past for Windows Mobile.”
At stake is a lorra lorra loly, as smart phones are one of the fastest-growing segments of the tech industry, with sales expected to increase 67 per cent this year (32.2 million units). Compare that to the single digit growth of the PC market and you can understand Microsoft’s enthusiasm to get their sticky fingers in the smartphone jam jar.
Windows Mobile 5.0
12 May, 2005
Oxford DVB-H Trial: Content Partners Announced
NTL Broadcast and O2 have revealed the first batch of channels to be part of their forthcoming mobile TV trial in the Oxford area, announcing an initial 16 channels including Cartoon Network, CNN, Discovery Channel, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel.
The six-month trial will roll out to 350 O2 customers using the new trialled in Finland.
Dave Williams, O2’s chief technology officer, saw the mic and clicked into action: “We believe that mobile broadcast TV has the potential to sit alongside our existing customer services based on GPRS (2.5G) and 3G mobile data networks. Mobile broadcast TV aims to be a cost effective method for transmitting high quality content from one source to multiple customers whereas 3G is ideal for providing bespoke content to users.”
Terry Howard, head of media business development at NTL Broadcast, also fancied a bit of quote action: “This trial will give a useful insight into how the new technology performs, and we intend to use that information to inform the broadcasters, mobile operators and Ofcom about the consumer appeal of the service. We look forward to welcoming other channel providers and terrestrial broadcasters on board for the trial.”
To support the trial, NTL Broadcast is building a new broadcast network of eight DVB-H transmitters to cover 120 square km around Oxford that will enable the lucky participants to receive digital television on the move. To enable a commercial service to be launched in the UK, Ofcom will need to license spectrum and O2 is already lobbying the UK regulator to bring forward plans to distribute radio frequencies for mobile TV services.
O2 will soon begin the process of recruiting triallists from the Oxford catchment area: but young ‘uns, silver surfers, crumblies and grannies need not apply: O2 is restricting insisting that participants be between 18 and 45 years of age. The ageists!
NTL
O2
12 May, 2005
Mobile Web Initiative Launched By The W3C
If you’ve ever accessed the Web through a mobile phone or PDA, you may be familiar with the annoyance of finding some sites inaccessible, hard to read or just a right royal pain in the Bluetooth.
Hopefully, such experiences will soon become a distant nightmare thanks to the good folks at W3C, who have just launched their Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), designed to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a much happier experience.
The problem has traditionally been that content providers have difficulties building Web sites that work well on all types and configurations of mobile phones, so two working groups have been formed by the W3C to push the adoption of its standards for browsing on mobile devices
“Mobile access to the Web has been a second-class experience for far too long,” Web founding father and W3C director Tim Berners-Lee said in a statement. “MWI recognizes the mobile device as a first-class participant, and will produce materials to help developers make the mobile Web experience worthwhile.”
The MWI, first proposed late last year, is composed of two working groups: The Best Practices Working Group – who will publish guidelines and best practices for Web content authors – and The Device Description Working Group, tasked with publishing a database with descriptions that content authors can use for tailoring their pages to various devices.
It’s not the first time that the W3C has focused on the actual application of its recommendations rather than their design, with their 1997 Web Accessibility Initiative focusing on education, advocacy and technical development to make the Web more accessible to people with disabilities.
“Web access today is so fundamental, that it shouldn’t be hampered by wires,” table-thumped Philipp Hoschka, W3C’s deputy director for Europe.
“Through this initiative, we’re committed to improving the state of the art in mobile Web content production and mobile access,” he added.
W3c
12 May, 2005
Nokia Sensor, A ‘Social Bluetooth Application’
Going up to people and actually introducing yourself has become, like, so uncool with the introduction of the Nokia Sensor Bluetooth widget.
No longer will you have to fumble for those awkward opening lines – instead you can let your phone do the introducing for you, as prospective partners wandering into range are automatically forwarded your profile.
Described as a “social Bluetooth smartphone application”, the free-to-download Nokia Sensor program runs on Series 2.0+ phones.
Here’s how it works: after downloading the software, you must set up a personal homepage (dubbed a folio) which can be shared with other Sensor users.
This folio includes your profile (pictures, snappy bon mot etc.), a file sharing page (where you can put mugshots, amusing photos, video and audio) and a Guestbook.
As lustful lotharios enter a nightclub, their phones can be set to automatically start scanning for other Sensor users over Bluetooth.
Once connected, the user can look through other people’s folios, and if they like the look of what they find, they can message them and possibly consider doing something really radical – like putting down the bloody phone and talking, like normal people.
The Sensor app comes with the usual yoof-tastic features, like Buddy Alerts, which tells you if someone you know is nearby (isn’t that what eyes are for?) and ‘Group Codes’ which bleep when someone with similar interests is lurking in the area.
We can see mischievous users running wild with the Guestbook feature – which lets people leave messages and comments on other people’s phones – and can only imagine the fragile teenage egos that will be crushed by an empty ‘popularity measure’ (which tells users how many times their Folio has been viewed).
The Nokia program is very similar to the existing Mobiluck application and reflects how the increasing sophistication of smartphone technology is creating new ways for mobile interaction.
With the Series 60 phones growing in the mass market it looks like this kind of social networking is going to have a significant impact amongst its target demographic (i.e. young).
Be kinda handy for people plying nefarious trades, when you think about it.
Nokia Sensor
MobiLuck
11 May, 2005
BBC Opens Up RSS News Feeds
The BBC has opened up its RSS news feeds to commercial Websites for the first time, with a new set of terms and conditions letting other sites integrate the BBC feeds for free, and free from offline contractual negotiation.
Previously, RSS feeds for BBC new stories have only been available to individuals via RSS Readers, but this move will put the UK broadcasting giant in direct competition with heavyweight news agencies in the RSS market, such as Reuters and the New York Times.
Opening up the service to other sites means that Webmasters can utilise BBC content on their own sites, with available feeds being marked by an orange RSS button on BBC pages.
A comprehensive range of feeds will let users subscribe to specific sections and not just the homepages, so that connoisseurs of real football could just subscribe to the white knuckle excitement of the BBC’s Cardiff City FC homepage.
Pete Clifton, editor of the BBC News Website said: “Liberating the availability of our content for re-use is an important step for the BBC. We’ve been a bit cautious about it up to now but there’s a real demand for us to provide this service. If we are to build public value it’s important that we respond to this demand.”
BBC News and Sport headlines will initially be offered as RSS feeds, with other parts of the BBC expected to be rolling out feeds over the coming months, possibly including the latest film reviews or updates from the Top of the Pops Website.
The BBC’s site – a firm favourite in the office – remains one of the world’s busiest Websites, with figures for April 2005 showing 18 million click-throughs generated by the feeds to the bbc.co.uk/news and bbc.co.uk/sport Websites for the month.
BBC RSS
11 May, 2005
Yahoo Music Unlimited Launched: Price Shock
Yahoo has slapped a king-sized gauntlet on the floor as it announced plans to roll out an aggressively-priced online music service.
The new service, unsurprisingly dubbed Yahoo Music Unlimited, will give downloaders unlimited access to over a million music tracks for US$6.99 (~£3.70 ~€5.42) a month, or, alternatively, for US$60 (~£31.86 ~€36.58) a year.
The service, which also lets users transfer the songs to compatible portable music players, massively undercuts its rival’s services.
RealNetworks, for example, charge a comparatively hefty US$179 (~£95 ~€139) a year for a near-identical service while Napster charging US$14.95 (~£7.95 ~€11.60) a month for a portable music subscription service and US$9.95 (~£5.25 ~€7.72) a month without the portability option.
“We look at subscriptions as a way to get people to pay as little something for digital music as opposed to ripping their own CDs or stealing music.” Yahoo Music General Manager David Goldberg said.
Yahoo hopes that the low, low, low price is designed to get users hip to the subscription music model, which allows consumers to play downloaded music and “streamed” tracks whenever they want — as long as they keep shelling out for the privilege.
Just like Napster’s similar service – which offers a similarly vast online music library – the second a customer’s cash flow stops, their opulent oasis of a record collection will rapidly turns into a tune-free desert.
Yahoo’s price pruning bonanza looks set to spur further expansion of the online music business, which despite huge growth still only accounts for about 2% or less of total music sales, according to analyst estimates.
Yahoo’s hugely popular Website – visited by 100 million US users every month – should give their music service a big head start, with the company being able to let rip with the kind of massive marketing muscle that few online music rivals can match.
“It’s a hugely aggressive move, a shot in the arm to the subscription notion,” says David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Research, predicting subscription revenue will be larger than downloads within a few years, from roughly equal shares today.
iTunes, the current online music market leader, provides a different service, preferring to charge users on a song or album download basis, with Apple previously being critical of the subscription model.
Some suspect that they may be pressured into adopting a similar offering once Yahoo’s PR machine rolls into action.
Although it’s generally accepted that subscription services are more lucrative than charging per download, some analysts are wondering whether Yahoo will actually be able to make any dosh at the US$60 (~£31 ~€46) annual subscription level.
Yahoo’s David Goldberg has expressed confidence that the service will be profitable, although conceded that the company could eventually raise its fees. He’s been a bit sketchy with the small-print details too, but says Yahoo will pay music labels royalties linked to its revenue and subscriber numbers for the service.
Yahoo’s subscription service will work with selected portable MP3 players that use Microsoft’s digital-music format – there’s currently around compatible 10 devices available, including Dell’s DJ player and Creative Technology’s Zen Micro.
Owners of compatible devices will have to install new software on them to be able to use the service, with newer models offering built-in compatibility.
Apple may be slightly perturbed to learn that the Yahoo’s service will not work with their iPod, despite it being the biggest selling digital music player on the planet and probably elsewhere.
Yahoo’s testosterone-charged move reflects their determination to grab a Brobdingnagian chunk of the online music pie, with the company splashing out US$160 million (~£85m ~€124m) last year to acquire MusicMatch, a company already offering a song/album download deal with a non-portable subscription service.
MusicMatch’s subscription charges have now come down to match the new service with Yahoo expected to merge the two services shortly.
The new service will include free software a la Apple’s iTunes jukebox, with the bonus of letting subscribers rummage around in their friends computers for songs, and then listen to their tracks if the music is part of Yahoo’s catalogue.
To further entice subscribers, Yahoo is looking to incorporate the social aspects of listening to and discovering music through tie-ins with other Yahoo services -like gamers on Yahoo’s site being able to listen to the same music as friends they are playing with.
Yahoo Music users not ‘down’ with this subscription thang will still be able to buy tracks under the traditional download model, with fees of 79 cents (~£0.42 ~€0.62) per song for Music Unlimited subscribers and 99 cents (~£0.53 ~€0.77) for nonsubscribers.
Yahoo
MusicMatch
11 May, 2005
100 Million Cellular/VoWi-Fi Phones By 2010:ABI Research
Figures from a new study by ABI Research reveal that annual global sales of “dual-mode” mobile phones – clever-clogs handsets that can connect to either a conventional cellular service or a Wi-Fi network – are likely to exceed 100 million during the final year of this decade.
Currently, such dual mode devices are as familiar to the public as the five headed Dongo Worm, with most of the enterprise sector equally clueless.
But according to ABI Research senior analyst Philip Solis, some of the King Dongs of global telecommunications – notably British Telecom and Korea Telecom – plan to roll out dual-mode services as soon as the end of 2005.
“The advantages of dual mode handsets and services, when they arrive, can be summed up in two words: seamless and economical,” he said.
In the wonderful future world of dual mode phones, seamless network switching between networks is promised, although all the groovy stuff is unlikely to appear in the first generation of products.
When the technology is mature, users should be able to ring up a chum and start rabbiting at home, with the phone connecting via the residential Wi-Fi network, in turn connected to a broadband VoIP phone service.
The nattering can continue uninterrupted in the car to work, with the phone automatically switching to a cellular network, and there’d be no need for the marathon chinwag to come to an end upon arrival at work, as the phone could switch to the company’s 802.11 LAN, and VoIP.
Despite all the travelling through different locations, the smartypants handset would sense the available signals and switch automatically from one network mode to another, keeping the user connected at the lowest cost.
With the Digital Lifestyle office currently sporting a desk-hogging, charger-needing collection of mobile phones, DECT phones and Skype phones, we can’t wait for the telecoms convergence revolution to happen.
Elsewhere, Infonetics Research has predicted that VoIP service revenues will jump from 2004’s US$1.3 billion (~€1.01bn~£690m) to US$19.9 billion (~€15.5bn~£10.5bn) in 2009 – a 1,431% jump.
Infonetics directing analyst Kevin Mitchell commented that part of this growth can be attributed to the technology’s newness, noting that with VoIP services representing less than 1% of wireline carrier revenue in North America last year, the market can’t really go anywhere but up.
“Growth is driven by carrier footprint and solution expansion, marketing, and service bundling, leading to more adoption by new business/government/education and residential/SOHO customers and increased usage at more sites,” Mitchell said in a statement. “Our forecast also assumes that revenue growth is due to incremental revenue from add-on VoIP applications, such as conferencing, remote office integration, presence/location-based services, and collaboration.”
Infonetics also expects the number of residential and small office/home office VoIP subscribers to rocket from 1.1 million in the last year to 20.8 million in 2008.
ABI Research
Infonetics Research
10 May, 2005
iTunes 4.8 Gains Video, Speculation Starts
With ne’er a whisper or a parp on the PR trumpets, Apple has quietly released an updated version of the iTunes software as a free download from its Web site.
Described as including “new Music Store features and support for transferring contacts and calendars from your computer to your iPod,” iTunes 4.8 has a big surprise lurking in its bag – the capacity to play movies within it.
With all the stealth of a Dickensian pick-pocket, Apple has also added some short promotional music videos to the service, supplementing the music videos and movie trailers hosted through iTunes.
The short .mp4 format promos may not exactly be Hollywood blockbusters, but it’s an effective ‘proof of concept’, illustrating how Apple could easily offer full-length video through its store.
Mindful of the marketing value, Apple has made music videos available initially on purchase of albums or tracks from the Dave Matthews Band, Morcheeba, Gorillaz and The Shins.
For example, fans shelling out for the Dad-friendly Dave Matthews Band album, ‘Stand Up’, can also download a digital booklet containing the album artwork, a five minute video (55MB download) showing the making of the album, with the all the usual bundled extras like interview clips etc.
Downloaded video clips can only be played in iTunes, with an option to watch the video in full-screen mode.
The updated software also lets iPod owners manage contact and calendar information, with the choice of synchronising all or some of the contacts in Apple’s Address Book, as well as all or some of their iCal calendars.
The new version also includes a security fix to patch up a vulnerability relating to MPEG4 file buffer overflows (they sound rather painful).
By bolting on video functionality, Apple seems to be shimmying ever closer to the full integration of iTunes and Quicktime (iQuick? TuneTimes? Quines?), with the iTunes music store now offering videos and movie trailers for free viewing – just like the QuickTime homepage.
Apple
Apple iTunes
10 May, 2005
Taiwan NFC Scheme Moves On, BenQ Supplies Handsets
According to industry insiders, trials of mobile phones doubling as payment tools will be taking place in Taiwan shortly, marking a big step for the nation’s contactless technology development.
They’re using Near Field Communication (NFC), a close-range wireless technology that operates over a few centimeters, enabling the simple transfer of information. Created by Nokia Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics and Sony Corporation, it uses a restricted version of RFID and we’ve been last 18 months, or so.
Taiwanese cardholders can already make payments at contracted petrol stations, coffee shops, video rental stores, train stations etc by simply waving their NFC-enabled device in front of sensor devices.
BenQ, one of the 12 partners in the NFC consortium, is expected to deliver 100 new mobile phones embedded with smart chips for the trial program next month.
Stage one of the trials will be conducted by Taipei Smart Card Corp, who will start testing the BenQ phones as a means of payment for services on bus lines, the MRT and public parking lots in the capital.
If that all goes tickety-boo, developers will look to strike deals with mobile service providers to integrate chips with Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards in handsets, giving access to mobile banking functions and even debit or credit card functionality.
The merging of cell phones and IC-chips is part of the government’s M-Taiwan (mobile-Taiwan) scheme, which put together a (NFC) consortium in November last year.
Taiwan’s alliance pooled the resources of BenQ, Taipei Smart Card, the Institute for Information Industry, five cellphone service providers, MasterCard International and Visa International.
NFC handset payment services are already tickling the public’s imagination in Japan and South Korea.
In Japan, Sony has been conducting contactless payment services with a mobile phone operator and train company, and in South Korea, SK Telecom has launched the Moneta card program with a circulation of 100,000 Visa-enabled mobile handsets.
According to Peter Manners, regional head of Visa International Asia-Pacific, the next phase is to promote the use of Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) cards in 3G handsets.
Addressing besuited execs at the Smart Card Expo at the Taipei International Convention Center, Manners said Taiwan is second only to Malaysia in the Asia-Pacific in terms of chip-embedded card penetration.
Nokia 3220 Brings Contactless Payment and Ticketing
BenQ
NFC Forum
10 May, 2005