Digital-Lifestyles

Simon Perry

  • CinemaNow Signs separate Content and Distribution deals

    CinemaNow, an Internet video-on-demand service, has announced a couple of deals recently. They have brought Sony Pictures Television International (SPTI) in to their portfolio of content that they can distribute. As part of the agreement, CinemaNow will offer Sony’s new release films the same day they become available in their traditional pay-per-view window along with previously released movies from Sony’s vast film library. All movies are offered on a 24 hour rental basis and priced at $3.99 for first-run films and $2.99 for library titles. Sony is the latest addition to the current roster of 20th Century Fox, Disney, Lions Gate, MGM, Miramax, Sony and Warner Bros.

    They have also signed their first European distribution deal with Tiscali, giving users in the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy streaming and downloading access to CinemaNow’s content.

    CinemaNow

  • Q17+ from Hyundai targets gamers with LCD

    Hyundai Q171+ gamers LCD monitorHyundai, well known Korean makers of displays (and much else), has released a 17″ LCD TFT screen aimed specifically at video game players.

    To provider the player with a feeling of smoothness when playing, video games redisplay the graphics on the screen many times a second (known as the refresh rate). LCD screen have, up to recently, found it difficult to keep up with the demands of modern games and graphic cards, with games like Doom 3 being particularly testing. When the screens don’t refresh quickly enough the moving objects create ghosting.

    The Hyundai ImageQuest Q17+ has a refresh rate of 12ms, current the industries fastest reaction speed. While it is not the first 12ms screen on the market, it’s the first that we’ve been aware of that is marketed specifically at game players.

    Hyundai are claiming the UK the street price is expected to be £340 (~$607, ~€499) including VAT.

    Hyundai ImageQuest


     

  • 3G Radio Networks

    Endorsed by ETSI and the UMTS Forum, IIR’s 3G Radio Networks conference aims to support operators during the WCDMA planning, testing, optimisation and deployment decision making processes. Speakers will address all of the key radio network technical issues and provide examples of how they have overcome these problems. Mariott Hotel Lisbon Portugal [email protected]

  • UK GBA SP price will drop to £69

    Nintendo have just announced they will be dropping the UK price of the Gameboy Advanced SP (GBA) by £20 to £69. There will be a price drop in Europe, which is expected to be 99 Euros, this follows the US drop to $79 that happened at the start of the month.

    Clearly designed to make the most of gamers friends and relatives who are stuck for Christmas present ideas, they will be boosting its uptake with two special edition versions. Zelda Limited Edition Pak which will include Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap and launches on 12th November 2004; Mario Limited Edition Pak containing Mario vs. Donkey Kong along with a unique Mario themed GBA SP will launch a week later on 19th November 2004. Both promotional packs are expected to sell for £89.

    To date over 4 million GBA SP have sold Worldwide.

  • Now 55% of UK Homes are Digital: Ofcom

    Ofcom, the UK super regulator, has just announced that as at 30 June 2004, Digital Television penetration had reached 55% of UK households, up 2% from the previous quarter. The total figure now stands at 13,704,459 households.

    The Free To Air (FTA) service, Freeview, usage increased 12.1% to nearly 4m households. This percentage increase dwarfs the growth from the dominant digital TV delivery service, the satellite service Sky, which increased at around 1% over the same quarter adding 76,000 to reach 7,032,000. We note that Ofcom doesn’t give the Sky growth as a percentage, perhaps as it sounds small.

    Ofcom estimate that the total number of free-to-view digital homes is now almost 4.2 million, an increase of 13.4% from the previous quarter. Taking the information from various sources, they say the figure comprises the number of viewers using Freeview, those using satellite ‘Solus’ cards and ex-Sky subscribers, who continue to use their satellite box for viewing free-to-view channels. Digital Cable accounts for nearly 2.47 million households.

    While these figures will be encouraging to all, they measure households, not the number of TV related sets (TV, video, etc) in the UK. The biggest outstanding issue for household that need to change to digital receive will be replacing the non-primary TV (the UK has an average of 2.5 sets per households) and VCR. It is thought that the replacement of VCR’s could be the big boost for Personal Video Recorders (PVR) that would change the market.

    These figures come in the same week that Ofcom annouced analogue switch off to occur in 2012.

    Ofcom Digital Television Update Q2 2004

  • Games For Health 2004

    Games For Health, The Academic ADL Co-Lab, and Room 130, announce the First Annual Games for Health Conference which will take place September 16-17, 2004 in Madison, Wisconsin.

    This first ever gathering of game developers, researchers, and healthcare experts will spend two-days discussing applications of games, and game technologies to a variety of healthcare fields.

    Applications for direct patient care, therapy, will be shown as well as health education, policy, and management ideas.
    Madison, Wisconsin, USA http://www.gamesforhealth.org/events.html

  • Vodafone Launch BlackBerry 7100v – With New Form

    Vodafone BlackBerry 7100vVodafone have today announced a new form of BlackBerry, the 7100v. It has been designed with the BlackBerries creator, RIM (Research In Motion) and will be the first release of a new form factor.

    I’d seen BlackBerries around but had dismissed them as a suits tool, and frankly had looked down on them a little. I saw them as used by people who didn’t know better, just getting them out to show off.

    While I was in Amsterdam for IBC, there were a couple of occasions where a BlackBerry saved the day. In one, a speaker arrived in Amsterdam without knowing where his hotel was, fortunately I had sent him an email as he landed at the airport – he picked it up on his BlackBerry and we were able to sort things out quickly.

    Now having studied them in detail, I can see they are about the most efficient use of space a text input device could have – a thumb-able keyboard and compact screen.

    The new model from Vodafone differs from the ‘normal’ BlackBerry approach of full QWERTY keyboard and large screen. Vodafone’s new 7100v takes its design cue from a mobile phone handset. It has a slightly expanded numeric keyboard, taking it from three keys across to five.

    To maintain the ease of input of text, the 7100v uses the RIM-developed SureType. It appears to be very similar in function to T9, but it has only two possible characters on each key, rather than up to four with T9. Paul Stonadge, Data Solutions Executive at Vodafone UK, told us the best way to get acclimatised to it is to “get into the mind set that it is a QWERTY keyboard”

    It has a built in library of 35,000 words that can be user-expanded. Another smart feature is the automatic reading in of the contact address book, leading to all your contact names being included in the typing dictionary – very smart.

    Vodafone have also taken the opportunity of heavily branding both the handset and the interface – it will be clear to the user that they’re using a Vodafone.

    Vodafone previously released BlackBerries, the 7230 and slightly larger screened 7730 were aimed at medium to large enterprises. They are aiming this at the SME and SoHo market – a smart move considering how often small business people are away from their desk and how vital it is form them to stay in touch.

    One of the winning features of the BlackBerries has been that email was pushed to the handset rather than the normal method of repeatedly asking the mail server if it had anything new. To use the push feature, the BlackBerries originally needed to run in conjunction with MS Exchange and Lotus Domino servers – the Enterprise solution, as they labelled it. This changed a while back to allow mail to be picked up for the widely spread POP servers.

    It is due for release on 1 Oct in the UK and will vary in cost depending on the call plan, ranging from free on the higher call plans to £82 (~$146.56, ~€120.60) on the Anytime 100. The email charge will be on top, varying from £8.51 (~$15.21, ~€12.51) for a heavy voice plan to £15.74 (~$28.13, ~€23.15) if it is only used for email.

    We’ll be testing in October, so stand by for a review.

    BlackBerry 7100

  • CLIE PEG-VZ90 marks Sony’s start of Mass Production of Full Colour Organic LED’s

    Sony has announced that they will start the mass production of full-colour Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays. They see the OLED displays as a possible replacement for LCD screens, but with the added advantages of not needing a back-light, giving quicker screen response times and providing wider viewing angles. Response times will drop from 16mil sec on current Sony LED’s to a stunning 0.01mil sec and viewing angles will improve from around 130 degrees on LCD to 180 degrees in both horizontal and vertical planes.

    By adding their own magic ingredient to OLED’s, called Super Top Emission technology, Sony claims they will get significant improved brightness (1000:1 vs 100:1 LCD) and a great range of colours (gamut) (~100% vs ~40% LCD). They claim it will rival the performance of Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT).

    Since their introduction, one of the big problems for LCD-equipped portable media players has been the impossibility of seeing their displays outdoors when the sun is strong. It sounds like Sony’s approach could not only save the batteries of portable devices, but also fix the sunlight problem.

    The CLIE ‘PEG-VZ90’ will be the first Sony device to benefit from the production run.

    Sony

  • APTN and Arkemedia to Build Leading Online Video Sales Structure

    By grabbing the nettle and deciding what is important, APTN and Arkemedia are building what we think will be a model for the future of content sales.

    The Associated Press Television News (APTN) have started a bold project with high ambitions, to become the world’s largest digital commercial library, making thousands of hours of footage available for viewing. To help them archive this they have called on Arkemedia.

    When completed, this system will reach the ideals that we at Digital Lifestyles believe will become the norm for organisation holding video content available to other interested parties.

    When an APTN Library client requires some of the APTN footage for inclusion in piece they are creating, they will be able to review and select from all digitised material online. Nothing ground breaking up to here, but this is where is gets interesting, they will be able to complete their own edits using a browser-based editing tool, remotely. Upon completion, they will be able to request footage using online ordering and payment. The video material is stored at full broadcast quality, enabling the client to have it delivered any format the they select, be that encoded or physical tape, or at a later date full-quality IP delivery.

    While we have been speaking about this kind of access to video material as the way forward it is encouraging to they are starting this project now, and plan to complete it by 3rd quarter next year, 2005.

    As with all of these projects, the mechanism to access the material is just one segment of the project. The other significant challenge is the initial digitisation of the material, and on an ongoing basis, its refreshment. At launch they will have 1,000 hours of content that they plan to supplement with an extra 2,000 hours on a yearly basis taken from their content that they generate over that year.

    In an unusual, but we think thoughtful move, they will not be digitising their extensive archive in the hope that someone will buy or use it, but will digitise on-demand, as it is ordered by their clients.

    APTN

    Arkemedia

  • UK Apple iTunes Too Expensive says Consumers’ Association

    Ever since Apple iTunes Music Store and Napster 2.0 launched in the UK, we at Digital Lifestyles have been thinking that the UK pricing has been unreasonably high, being out of step both with the US and Europe. The UK Consumers’ Association (CA) has today mounted a campaign to increase the public understanding of the problem.

    The CA has written to the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) explaining the situation and highlighting that the current position is possibly in breach of European law. Under Euro law all consumers in all member states should enjoy the same benefits that the single market brings – it’s like if citizens in Seattle had to pay more for their iTunes music than the rest of America. Clearly with a differential between iTunes UK (79p, 1.15 Eu) and Germany & France (0.99 Eu, 67.7p UK) there is not a level playing field. Those UK citizens who understand that they can use either the French or German sites to order directly on find they are charged the UK price if they are not able to supply as an address in either of these countries.

    Although the CA campaign is focused on iTunes, perhaps because of the mainstream press attention it has attracted, Apple are not the only service where UK consumers are overcharged. The differential on Napster UK is even greater when comparing their UK pricing at 99p (1.44 Eu) against Apple European iTunes at 99c Eu (67.7p UK). This becomes even more distorted when US prices are used as a comparison 99c US = (55.4p). Clearly albums bought on the any of the services multiply the differential by a factor of 10, as most of the albums cost ten times a much as single tracks.

    When we queried the UK Napster price back on 1 June 2004, Adam Howorth, Communications director at Napter UK told us: “it’s simply down to the higher wholesale price we get from the record companies in the UK. If they would reduce their prices, so would we.”

    Overcharging UK citizens had always been the way business has been done, but most had imagined that this discrepancy would evaporate with digital goods. The old arguments that were always given; it’s a small market; goods are hard to distribute; it’s more expensive to support, all fall away with digital distribution. It is to Apple’s great shame that they have continued the overcharging, while clearly understanding all of the advantages that digital distribution brings.

    We will be watching with interest the reaction of the British public to this. It may give an indication to their reaction when they start to realise that the DRM-protected goods that they are beginning to buy do not work on all of their various devices.

    Consumers’ Association