Digital-Lifestyles

Simon Perry

  • TiVo hits 2m subscribers

    TiVo has announced to Reuters that it has doubled its number of subscribers in the past year to 2 million. The majority of their income comes from subscriptions, now they sell significantly less PVR’s (Personal Video Recorders) direct to the public as they did originally.

    Many people have questioning TiVo’s long term viability with their apparent business model, especially as they are expected to lose their current exclusive deal to supply DirecTV with PVR’s.

    We understand that they have set aside $50m to market hard to the in the build up to christmas, when they hope to gain another million subscribers – aiming for 3 million subscribers by January 2005.

    TiVo

  • PassAlong Networks Launch Innovative Music Referral Service

    PassAlong MyShowcasePassAlong Networks have launched what should not be dismissed as YAMS (Yet Another Music Store). They are starting with a 200,000 track catalogue and increasing to 500,000 by the end of the month.

    There are two interesting parts to this one. Firstly, they actually encourage people to pass music around, and secondly they’re using multiple sales channels for the music they are representing, including eBay. While they’re not the first company to sell via eBay, they are the first to offer eBay-ers tracks from the major labels. They will also be selling via their own site at PassAlong.com.

    The passing of tracks is very exciting and something that we’ve been enthused about for a long time. Our logic – what is the most ideal sales person? A passionate one, and you don’t get much more enthused than a band’s fan.

    PassAlong allows links to songs to be passed to others via email, instant messaging (IM) or Web sites/blogs and to thank them for the viral spread of tracks, each track that is passed on and purchased by the receiver earns credit for the initiator of the transfer.

    The content that they launch with, is protected and they are initially using Windows Media DRM (WME) but are keen to point out that they have (wisely) designed their systems to work with any DRM system or music format.

    In October, the company will launch its Discover Music service, which will allow users to publish playlists for others to view, and in turn purchase. Following this, their future plans include offering white-label digital music stores.

    PassAlong Networks are a Nashville, Tennessee-based company who were founded in 2002 and are now a 60-person startup. Dave Jaworski, who entered the world of technology at a pre-public Microsoft, after some time spent in radio, heads them.

    It is very refreshing to see a company that appears to really understand the music consumers’ drivers and natural enthusiasm. We’ll be watching them with interest.

    PassAlongNetworks

    PassAlong.com

  • Sony Shift to Support MP3

    Those super sharp cookies at CNet news.com are reporting that Sony has confirmed that it is working on support for MP3’s on its portable music players. Until now Sony has steadfastly refused to support any other format apart from their own Atrac music format on their portable music player. This is despite their Clie PDA’s have MP3 support.

    “We’re discussing plans to bring flash players to the United States that support MP3 files, but we have nothing to announce at this time,” Gretchen Griswold, a representative of Sony Electronics, told ZDNet France, a CNet affiliate. There is no official word on whether this will shift to hard disc players as well.

    Having established the portable music market with the original Sony Walkman, Sony has failed seriously behind with digital media players, to the point that they aren’t even in the top five suppliers.

    Sony

    CNet news.com – Sony to support MP3

  • UK Football League sue legal advisors re ITV Digital

    The UK Football League is preparing to sue the law firm that acted as their legal advisors in the now-collapsed ITV Digital deal.

    Hammonds Solicitors, which at the time of the deal traded as Edge Ellison, have been accused by the Football League of failing to protect their interests, being negligent and being in breach of contract. Hammonds tell us “The proceedings are without merit and will be vigorously contested.”

    The Football League is not disclosing the size of the claim beyond saying it is looking for “substantial damages”. The Guardian Newpaper estimates that they are out of pocket by £119m (~$214m, ~€174m)

    “The league ended up £119m out of pocket after agreeing a £6m settlement with ITV and selling its rights to Sky for a vastly reduced figure of £95m over four years”

    ITV Digital, or OnDigital as it was originally known, was an attempt by Carlton and Granada to take on Sky’s dominance. It failed and ended up cost them £1.1Bn (~$1.98Bn, ~€1.61Bn).

    Back in early 2002 the ITV companies were taken to court by the Football League in an attempt to extract the money they felt had been promised to them. The Judge found in favour of the ITV companies, as the signed contact between them did not have a crucial “parent guarantee” clause.

    Many in the legal profession see the recent action as a last resort action by the Football League. Negligence and breach of duty of care requires a clear basis of proof. It would appear that the quantifiable loss that would also required in such a case, shouldn’t be too hard to prove.

    It will be a bean feast for lawyers as Hammonds insurance company calls in another set of lawyers to act in its defence. Hammonds tell us that London-based Barlow Lyde & Gilbert have been instructed to act on its behalf.

    “There will be a lot of people running around looking back at their notes, advice and busy preparing affidavits” said Paul Hosford, partner New Media Law, “It will definitely be one to watch.”

    The Football League

    Hammonds

    New Media Law

  • Verizon Wireless Rolls out EV-DO to 14 US Areas

    Verizon Wireless are to start to provide higher-speed wireless Internet access in an additional eleven areas of America, reports the WSJ.

    The carrier has said it plans to spend $1 billion this year and next upgrading its cellular network to support EV-DO. EV-DO, which stands for “Evolution, Data Only”, is a 3G standard with a theoretical bandwidth of up to 2.4 mbps, but under normal working conditions provides an average of 300-600 kbps.

    Verizon is planning to charge business users $80/month (~€65, ~£45) to access the service. The datacards are currently around $400 (~€326, ~£222).

    As of Monday, markets covered by Verizon Wireless’s new network include Baltimore; Philadelphia; Wilmington, Del.; Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Tampa, Fla.; Milwaukee; Kansas City, Mo.; Austin, Texas, and cities in New Jersey.

    The cellular companies clearly feel they have to do something to counter the threat that WiFi networks combined VoIP bring, potential decimating their highly profitable business.

    WSJ (reg. req.)

  • Vodafone announce 10 3G handsets

    Nintendo DSVodafone is launching their 3G voice services in Europe and Japan with a big splash by announcing 10 handsets at the outset.

    The range of handsets, which Vodafone is excited to tell us contains some models and designs that are exclusive to them, contains Europe’s first 2 mega pixel camera phone, CD quality music and stereo speakers. The Sharp 802, 902 and the NEC 802N are exclusive to Vodafone and a further three will be exclusive at launch. The launch features the handset that we are particularly excited about, the Motorola E1000, that includes has all of the desirable features including A-GPS for location based services.

    Vodafone Live!, their content play, is also heavily featured as this is the great hope in trying to gain back some of the billions they have spend to 3G licenses around the world.

    Following our calls to Vodafone, they confirmed that no further details on the handsets or services would be released before November.

    Vodafone

  • Opera Mobile Browser Hits 1m Downloads

    Opera Mobile browserOpera Software ASA, who are headquartered in Oslo, Norway and make the web browsers of choice of the technical stalwart, has had one million downloads from the Web site of their mobile phone-based browser. This is in addition to the browsers that they have provided to many mobile phone makers including Nokia, IBM, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, Sharp and Psion.

    Browsing Web pages designed for PC screens has been a problem as many web sites fix their column widths, primarily to ensure their advertising banners are displayed, leading to a lot of horizontal scrolling when viewed on a small screen, such as those on a mobile phone.

    Opera’s Small-Screen Rendering™ (SSR) technology intelligently reformats Web sites to fit inside the mobile devices limited screen width, thereby eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling. All the content and functionality remain available; it is only the layout of the page that is changed.

    It has been running for some time on the Sony Ericsson P800/P900 and Symbian OS-based phones. Adding to these platforms, at the end of August, they launched a browser product for Windows-based mobile devices.

    In June Opera displayed that they understood that browsing many web pages at their original created resolution would not only take a considerable time to download, but that phone users would be paying high mobile data charges to bring down large graphics that wouldn’t even be able to be displayed on portable handsets. Their approach – the Opera Mobile Accelerator – a subscription service, which via a proxy server run by Opera, compresses Web pages and eliminates unnecessary content before it is downloaded to the mobile phones. The net effect is a reduction in the size of download of between 50%-70% and also in the data charge. Popular with mobile phone users but, we imagine, not very popular with mobile phone service providers who will be losing income.

    Opera

    Opera – How SSR works

    Opera Mobile Accelerator

  • Colour Technology For Digital Cinema

    Digital technology has recently become an alternative to film for the origination of motion pictures, for colour grading (in the form of the digital intermediate) and for display in exhibition. Each of these developments is advancing independent of the others, leading to hybrid film-digital workflows. However, film and electronic media capture and reproduce images in fundamentally different ways. Film uses subtractive colorants (CMY),but digital cinema uses additive primaries (RGB). Film is characterised using logarithms, but digital video and computer graphics is characterised using power functions. Film and digital cinema have different colour gamuts and are optimized for different contrast ratios. Digital Cinema Testbed at
    the National FIlm Theatre,
    South Bank,London,
    http://www.bksts.com/poynton.dwt

  • BT Broadband Delivered TV – This Month it’s on

    The rumours of UK incumbent teleco BT considering a broadband-delivered video service have been circulating again.

    It is often said that you can tell if it is an odd or even numbered month by seeing if BT is saying it is launching a broadband service or not.

    The latest rumours are that BT would work with Sky. BT has been getting cosy with Sky over many years. It started when Sky wanted to ensure a return path from their Set Top Boxes (STB’s) and had BT install a phone line specifically for this purpose each time a new Sky customer signed up. This relationship continued to grew to include BT offering their customers pricing bundles.

    It has been known for some time that BT has been in discussions with makers of Freeview boxes. They are exploring the idea of combining this with downloaded content, distributed to the consumer via broadband.

    ZDNet UK reports a currently running 100-household trial with London-based BT employees. They proffer the commercial rollout could be achieved as early as Summer 2005.

    There are two broadband-TV services in the UK; HomeChoice, with operates in London; and KIT running in Kingston-upon-Hull. Both have been delivering service for many years over their own networks.

    There is a fly in ointment. One of the major problems with delivering broadcast-quality video to households was introduced by BT when, while trumpeting their price reductions, they set limits on the amount of data that could be downloaded in a month. With video being the most data hungry application, this could preclude the delivery of video to the home without an additional charge being incurred. Unless of course BT lift those limits for their own video service …

  • Microsoft ’emulate’ Local US Radio Stations online

    Wired News has an interesting piece by Randy Dotinga about a new Internet radio service that Microsoft has launched into beta. So far, so what. The interesting twist is that these radio stations mimic real-world Radio radio-stations by providing the online listener with a near identical music track playlists. One of the examples given was listed as “like” New York City’s Z100. While offering the same music, they also promise “fewer ads, no DJ chatter and less repetition.”

    All of the 978 US and Canadian radio stations that they are emulating are only available under the Radio Plus service which will become a pay-for service. It is understood that the yearly $30 paid by listeners to Microsoft will not be divided with the radio stations that are emulated.

    While listening to the Radio Plus stations, each track is listed with an options to pay for the download fo the track.

    It appears that Microsoft is able to get away with this by using the “Monitored” playlists that have been available since 1990.

    We are going to be watching this one with interest.

    It is notable that since the story was published on Friday, and we assume has attracted attention, Microsoft appears to have modified the way it lists the radio stations. No longer do they use the words “like” New York City’s Z100, but instead like 100.3 FM, New York, NY. Clearly a frequency is not trade markable.

    Original Wired article – Attack of the Radio Clones

    MSN local station emulation via Radio Plus