Further details on the Starbucks shops in London that currently have the T-Mobile WiFi access. They are 32 Fleet Street, EC4Y 1AA (020 7583 4163) and 90-94 Old Broad Street, EC2M 1PR (020 7588 4882). First report stated that access would be free for a trail period, as it does on the t-mobile site but the StarBucks site say you can get a free day pass – I’m not sure which is correct. There are another 1,200 shop Worldwide with WiFi access.
Simon Perry
RealNetworks stream Big 12 Conference exclusively
RealNetworks and one of their content partners, FoxSports.com are going to be offering subscribers to RealOne SuperPass the opportunity to watch something called the Big 12 Conference. I’ve no idea of what this means but it looks like it might be college games, which I assume is great for watching for the ‘next big thing’ in US football.
The content is highlighted as exclusive as it won’t actually be shown on TV – I don’t know if this is because if no one would be interested in watching it, or it really is a scoop. The SuperPass is priced at about $10 a month with a $5 discount if three months are bought in advance and will give access to their other content as well as the games.
It’s good to see Real expanding their content to their service, which they say now has 3/4 million subscribers now.
Final Draft to include interactivity
One of the things we had to do early on at LemonTV was to create a standard for scripting interactive TV programmes. Unfortunately for us, no one had done it at that time, mid-2000, and we found to make the interactive productions cohesive, it was vital that the shooting crew knew what interactive programming was happening around the piece and vice versa.
When I read the press release from GoldPocket about their work with Final Draft, the scripting-worlds standard editing software, I was very excited, but having read through the spec I’m less so. It appears that they only currently support what I feel is pretty dull interactivity, Leaderboard, Poll, Questions, Statistics and TextBlock. Where GoldPocket win is that the interactive commands can be exported direct from the Final Draft script into their iTV software.
It’s a good deal for GoldPocket and a small step in the right direction with, I hope, much to follow.
BBC releases Interactive producer guidelines
The BBC has now officially released their Interactive producer guidelines which were announced by BBC Director of New Media & Technology, Ashley Highfield at this years Edinburgh TV festival.
They’ve been a while in the coming but the BBC hope it will encourage independent productions companies to work with them.
Starbucks to offer WiFi
Public news is seeping out about Starbucks putting WiFi into their shops (or lifestyle venues – depending on your take). Excitingly the JV with T-Mobile and HP, called T-Mobile Hotspot will initially be free, so get yourselves down to the London Fleet Street or Broad Street branches.
MS announces US Xbox Live start
Microsoft has announced the finalised US release date of its new “online, broadband, multi-player” service for Xbox – Xbox Live, to be 15 Nov. It will retail in shops for around $50 including a years worth of subscription, a headset (enabling players to talk/insult fellow players) and a mini-game.
At launch there will be a minimum of seven Xbox live enabled games with at least sixty publishers working on new titles.
There’s only a small paragraph on how the Xbox will be able to receive and store additional content via the service. I think this is the area that holds some of the most exciting potential but I think they still concerned about highlighting this fact to people, in case people think MS is taking over their lounge – which I’m sure has crossed MS’s minds.
More 3G delays in the UK
More delays in 3G roll-out as Vodaphone duck announcing the launch date for the UK.
PressPlay try to entice online music fans
In a Napster-like world, people had been used to totally unrestricted access to whatever music they wanted and the freedom to do what they wanted with it away from their PC’s. You can obviously argue that the general public shouldn’t have ever been exposed to such freedom, but nothing can change the fact that some of them were.
The new services that grew up, Pressplay, MusicNet, etc that were backed by the major music labels placed pretty heavy restrictions on the amount of music subscribers could listen to and to what non-PC devices (normal CD players, MP3 players, etc) they could listen to it on.
Many people who were exposed to music P2P services wanted to go legitimate, but the choice that was presented to them was like going back to the day when there were two TV channels available.
What a shock – people didn’t like this idea and subscriptions didn’t set the world alight.
An interesting change of heart appears to have taken place at Pressplay. They’ve brought out version 2.0 of their service, that more or less gives Napster users all of the features they’re used to.
There are three main subscription packages and encouragingly all of them give unlimited streaming and unlimited downloads. The difference between them is the more you pay, the more you’re able to listen to the music when you’re not at your PC. Their chosen moniker for this is ‘portable downloads’.
To persuade you to give it a go there is a free unlimited access three-day trial of the PC-based service – so go on, give it a go, go legit.
Sky firm up BT relationship
Sky are firming up their relationship with BT by expanding their offer to customers to include an ADSL package. For me, the interesting part of the story is that they have demonstrated a broadband-ready set top box to select analysts, following the rumours that have been circulating about it for quite a while.