Digital-Lifestyles

Simon Perry

  • At last, PVR to become popular

    The question that is always raised, when one or more TiVo owners are gathered together is — why doesn’t everyone have one? I know that I couldn’t live without mine. In fact I don’t watch live TV, unless there happens to be a war on. In-Stat/MDR latest report reveals that 83% of their respondents were either “Extremely satisfied” or “Very satisfied” with their PVR.

    After a very slow uptake, annual shipments of units have finally reached 1m Worldwide and In-Stat predicted this will rise to 11m by 2005 as manufacturers include PVR function in their other products, as was signalled by Panasonic when they shipped the PV-SS2710, a 27″ TV with build-in PVR back in Feb.

    This, tragically coming the business day after ReplayTV’s SonicBlue filing for Chapter 11, shows the innovators don’t always reap the rewards.

  • War is good for streaming

    Forbes has a piece covering how streaming media is getting a boost from the public appetite for all things war. This is the same for text news — I know there has also been a considerable spike in usage for Google with their excellent news product.

  • Tragic – SonicBlue file for Chapter 11

    Sad news as SonicBlue file for Chapter 11. In my view they were singularly the most progressive thinking company in the digital media space, with features like Ethernet ports on their PVR, ReplayTV, from the very beginning.

    It’s not all bad news, as D&M Holdings, which in turn owns Denon & Marantz, has bought their ReplayTV and Rio business units for $40 million. One worry is that these products will be taken to the high-end and not remain at their currently generally affordable levels.

    While in the US last week, I was trying to arrange a meeting with Jim Hollingsworth (Vice President of Marketing and Connected Products) to discuss their involvement in IBC. Now I know why he didn’t call me back.

  • Media player for Xbox

    There’s an interesting open-source project on SourceForge called XboxMediaPlayer that gives modded Xboxes the ability to show video/audio/pictures on a TV’s. The development is highly active, which has taken it to the four most active on SF.

    This kind of project will make Microsoft deeply unhappy.

  • Reuters launch “Raw Video”

    In an interesting move, Reuters announced the launch of their “Raw Video” service coverage of the now-current war. After looking at it, it’s not quite the warts-and-all unedited rushes that the service first sounds like, but is certainly a step in an new direction.

  • Yahoo Platinum AV service launches

    Yahoo launch their $9.95/month Platinum audio and video service on Monday. It’s going to be going head-to-head with RealOne SuperPass. Lots of the sports content that Yahoo have is from the purchase of Broadcast.com, who had signed exclusive, opened ended deals with the baseball teams — at a time when the teams hadn’t recognised that there was value in it.

  • Ken Kutaragi – Sony Visionary

    Short bio on Ken Kutaragi is the person that Nobuyuki Idei, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sony Corporation calls “our Steve Jobs”.

  • Microsoft Xbox Live – Now Live

    A significant milestone in broadband gaming today as Microsoft Xbox Live goes live over most of Europe, and enters the shops in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden.

    I’ve been really impressed with the multi-player concept during the UK beta, as have the hardcore gamers I’ve shown it to. I have major reservations about the system poor ability to put together players of a similar skill level, and as a result many people find they get slaughtered, leading to a less than for-filling experience. I’m sure this will be cured in later software titles and the publishers learn lessons from the early trials. Broadband gaming is only going to get better, more immerse and more rewarding.

    [Purchase Xbox Live from Amazon UK]

  • Microsoft and MPEG-4

    Astonishingly, Microsoft appear to be trying to buy another market, in the same way that got them in trouble with the US DOJ. This time it’s video.

    Having effectively dismissed their one time competitor, Real Networks, MS now has bigger fish to fry – the future of digital delivery of media to consumers.

    The current and fairly long-running excitement with MPEG-4 compression as the standard for consumer delivery looks like it might have a challenger and strangely its from a prominent member of its own standards steering committee.

    My understanding from the Gartner research [PDF] is that licensing the MS version of MPEG-4, Microsoft Media 9, is less expensive than licensing the official version. If this is correct, it’s not only strange, it’s madness.

    How can you undercut an open standard? – there’s got to be something wrong with picture (pun intended).

  • RTS London Student Television Awards

    Last Friday I was one of the judges at the Royal Television Society (RTS) London Student Television Awards.

    The nine strong jury was an interesting assortment of people from many areas of the TV industry. Amongst others, there was a live TV producer, an ex-Channel 4 commissioning editor, a senior producer of children’s programming and a former head of education and health at the ITC/IBA.

    The entries came from five of London’s media colleges and were categorised in to animation, factual & non-factual. The highest number of entries came from Ravensbourne.

    Animation I thought that all of the entries in the category were very well drawn, using sophisticated animation techniques to create thought provoking pieces with strong uses of music. Watching it is the easy part, there’s a huge amount of work involved in their production.

    Factual I felt that this was the strongest category, with a very professional finish on some of the pieces.

    Most pieces had clearly received a lot of pre-production and a good depth of research that showed in the depth of information of the best pieces.

    There’s a lot of concern in TV generally about “young people”, currently those under 35, not watching news and many, particularly at the 18 to 25 end of the scale are not really watching TV at all.

    One piece, “Common day”, took an interesting approach of joining factual and fiction. A detailed, informative discussion about a photographic competition was joined to a fictional piece.

    I felt this version didn’t quite gel but it’s interesting approach to TV for people who aren’t used to watching TV – putting across facts/education while entertaining. A good programming idea for the short attention span generation.

    Non-factual This category was a good reminder of how hard it is to create good TV drama, as there are a large number of elements, which all need to be strong and in the correct balance. There were a couple of very good uses of lighting and one excellent set. The winners of the awards will be announced on Monday 24 February at the London Television Centre.