UK Cable provider Telewest launched a 2Mb Internet service today, in addition to their current blueyonder 1/2Mb and 1Mb services. The pricing is very competitive at £50.
This comes on the back of the recent news that the UK now has one million broadband cable customers.
There’s been a lot of speculation over the price that Microsoft will charge for the Xbox Live service after it’s all inclusive trial price comes to an end. They’ve now announced it at just short of $50/year or just short of $6/month. Whether the offering is strong enough to demand that kind of money isn’t obvious, but what is clear is that it will face stiff competition from the Sony’s zero cost service.
VIA and Niveus have announced a digital lifestyle product, the Niveus Media ONEbox. The 1GHz machine runs Windows XP and is based on VIA mainboard and chippery, providing the functionality you would have imagined,
Niveus Media have developed their own software, ONEbox Media Center, to control all functions and have integrated the TitanTV‘s Electronic Program Guide (EPG), which will mean it will only cover US TV programming.
It has a reasonable, non-PC looking case but doesn’t appear to have native support for WiFi and, as its single PCI slot is taken up with an ATI All-In-Wonder VE TV tuner card, it doesn’t look can unless it’s via USB. The expected price is $999 US and they plan to ship it in June 2003.
There is a growing number of these lounge-ready Media Hub/Digital Lifestyles devices appearing, which is further testament to realisation of media/computer convergence.
I got to use the Apple Music Store and iTunes 4 on Friday last week and was hugely impressed. Clearly I’m not the only one who’s keen on it as Apple has officially announced that they’ve sold more than one million songs in the first week. Along with this they’ve had 110,000 new iPod’s ordered and retailed 20k in the first weekend.
A huge success by any judgement.
The BBC News site has a story about how UK Gymnasts are becoming broadband connected to help their training. This has to be the strangest piece I’ve seen on the subject so far.
TiVo has named Martin Yudkovitz as president. Previously he was at NBC for twenty years and leaves there as an executive vice president, so they’re clearly hoping that his address book will help them gain further acceptance with the US broadcasters.
“Yudkovitz will be responsible for driving deployment of TiVo through satellite, cable and advertising partnerships. Tivo said he will also focus on helping television networks and other content makers develop paid programming for its DVR service.”
As previously rumoured, Apple announced two music-related products yesterday – the new iPod‘s and their iTunes Music Store service. The iPod is essentially an upgraded, thinner version of the current machine that holds up to 30GB. It comes with a new docking cradle and the same unit will work on both Mac and Windows (later in the year).
The iTunes Music Store is the really exciting part. It sounds like it’s simplicity itself, as they provide 30 second, full quality previews of each track and buying is easy as they’ve licenced the Amazon 1-click system. The initially 200,000 tracks available provided by the big five record companies (BMG, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal and Warner) and are individually purchasable prices at 99 cents a track. They’re stored in AAC format but users will be able to burn unlimited CD’s for personal use and will be able to copy to unlimited iPods Old and New, and to three different Macs. Interestingly downloaded music is sharable between machines on the same wired or wireless network – and by using streaming rather than copying they will placate the music industry. Sadly, due to the licencing restrictions from the music companies, the service will only be available in the US – at least initially.
Video: Steve Jobs launches new iPod’s and Music Store service – watch it
Apple secrecy on unreleased products is legendary, so it was amazing to see that all of the details of todays announcements were disclosed on slashdot back in December. I wonder if the poster is still working at Apple?
Real Networks have announced its intention to acquire Listen.com for around $36m in cash ($17.3m) and stock. They’re gaining the music assets (they have around 320k tracks on their service), their technology, subscribers (however there may be) and openings to their distribution agreements with a network of more than fifteen companies.
Listen has been around a long time and I’ve always been impressed with their virtual radio station service. There can’t be huge amounts of subscribers as in the statement they detail the level of Listen losses at $1-2m per quarter. It looks like Real is strengthening itself for a fight and on that front …
There’s further talk about the Apple online music service that is slated to launch on 28th April which will only be open, initially at least, to users of Apple computers. Apple only has 3% of the computer market but this worked in their favour when try to get access to the big five record companies content for the service. The music companies felt they weren’t exposing themselves and their content to the whole World, allowing them to “dip their toes in the water” of a different, non-subscription model.
I think it’s interesting that the proposed launch date is just one day before the Vivendi meeting, where they were rumoured to be making their intention to bid for Universal. Possibly co-incidence — potentially a great way of getting free press for the service.
It’s been a little over a month since Microsoft launched Xbox Live in Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and they have now reached 50,000 units.
The North America service was launched in November 2002 and they make up the vast majority of the current 350,000 Global users, who are playing more than three million game sessions per week. Amazingly the US users are spending an average of 2.5 hours per day Live gaming with the peak gaming times being during television prime time.
There are currently 11 Xbox Live-compatible games and 2003 will see the launch of more than 50 Xbox Live-enabled games, but it isn’t clear if the games will be including online playing or just the less interesting, but popular, content download. A while back “MechAssault“, from Microsoft Game Studios, had more than 172,000 downloads during the first week of availability — more than half of the registered users.
The new Xbox Live games for release over the next two months are as follows:-May 2003
June 2003
D&M Holdings Inc. who are Denon and Marantz have been successful in their purchase of both the ReplayTV and Rio business units from SonicBlue.