Simon Perry

IPTV Growth To Boost Video Market To $277Bn By 2010: iSupply
Research house iSupply are predicting that IPTV will be boosting the reveneue generated by the premium video services market from its current level of less than $200Bn to a whopping $277Bn by 2010.
Their definition of the premium video services market takes in pay-TV, mobile video, DVD, broadband video and theatre/box office receipts, but when advertising revenues are added, the total market reaches a stunning $370Bn.
iSupply see IPTV growing at frankly amazing rates. In 2005 they saw IPTV worth $681m and, with their estimate of a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 103 percent (!), see it reaching a calculator-busting £23.5Bn in 2010.
It appears that they see the public’s willingness to pay for content expanding significantly. Strange, but we and our other tech-aware pals are finding ourselves just not watching that much mainstream content – even if it is available on-demand.
That aside, iSupply see the battle royal between two big, hairy beasts – the current pay-TV world of direct-to-home satellite and digital and analogue cable TV services – and the telcos who will be pushing quad-play.
On the physical format side, iSupply point out that DVD sales are slowing, and will continue to do so, with the decline over the next 3-4 years being as much as 15 percent to 20 percent.
One very interesting point that is raised by them is
With most movie libraries and television series already on DVD, Hollywood studios are generating more than half of their revenues from DVDs—and are running out of new content to sell, making this an issue of paramount importance to them. One cause of the DVD sales deceleration is the fact that consumers have become more price-sensitive, believing that the average DVD cost of $20 is too expensive, especially compared to renting.
It’s not clear where this leaves Blu-Ray and HD-DVD – both on the price of the media (which is expected to be higher than DVD) and on the material that is available. Given Hollywood’s slow ability to make new material, and that most of it will have been sold on DVD already – it’s not clear if the new formats will help them.
Information on Premium Video Services Market report
1 March, 2007
Kendra Initiative Cross-Media Summit for Content Discovery
The Kendra Initiative is hosting a Cross-Media Summit about Content Delivery next week, on Friday 9th March in London.
The full day event, running at the Frontline Club, is billed as “The Strategy, Technology and Business Case for Content Description, Visibility, Search and Discovery.”
The event is aiming to tackle one of Digital-Lifestyles hobby horses – In a sea of infinite content, how do you, as a willing content consumer, locate the content you want to use? As Peter Buckingham, Head Of Distribution and Exhibition, UK Film Council puts it, “The biggest threat is obscurity.”
The approach of this free-to-attend event is from the content owners perspective, looking at what is the weakness of current metadata standards; if they can be adapted to work better; if not, what is the appetite for more metadata standards for cross-media description?
Metadata standard are all very well, but often live within a bubble of non-implementation. The need for metadata-creation tools and how to persuade the industry to use them will also be covered.
We spoke to Daniel Harris (mug shot above), founder of Kendra, “It’s all about making things work, making the open marketplace work together. We’re really pleased to see how many people are coming along to it, creating a universal meta data.”
“As with all industries that involve connecting people, some people [involved in this] gain from there being a problem, but people are seeing that they can work outside their industry sector. This is a cross-industry problem that we’re trying to solve.”
So far around fifty people have signed up including representatives from important players such as Patrick Attallah, CEO, ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number); Keith Hill, Head of R&D, MCPS-PRS Alliance; Mark Stuart, Principal Engineer, Pioneer Digital Design; Iain McNay, Board Member, AIM (Association of Independent Music) and Chairman, Cherry Red Records; Rich Lappenbusch, Director, Microsoft Entertainment and Board Member, DDEX (Digital Data Exchange).
Being tech driven, those not able to physically attend will be able to hook in via Instant messaging and Skype.
The event will be free and sponsored by Makeni.
Kendra Initiative Cross-Media Summit for Content Discovery
1 March, 2007
Ms Pac Man Hits The iPod
By way of a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the ever-popular Ms Pac-Man video game, Namco are releasing a version of it to run on fifth-generation iPods, made available to punters via the iTunes store.
The download is £3.99 in the UK, which would have got you forty plays of the arcade version when it was first released, in 1982.
To maximise your feeling of getting good value, not only do you get four maze designs and 256 maze levels, you also get retro art from the original arcade cabinet and a tutorial level. There’s also the four intermissions, or Acts, between the maze changes.
As ever, Wikipedia provides huge amount of info on Ms Pac Man including giving the Official Succession of Verified Ms. Pac-Man World Champions. These start in the year of the game arrival, with Rick Greenwasser of Kirksville, Missouri getting an impressive 130,300 and end with an amazing 933,580 racked up by Abdner Ashman at Apollo Amusements, Pompano Beach, FL on 6 April 6, 2006.
The straight Pac Man has been available on iTunes since last year.
Ms Pac Man on iTunes
1 March, 2007
BBC Say Yes (Probably) to FreeSat
The BBC have been talking about launching a free satellite service since before 2004. Very cleverly they labelled it Freesat.
Since then, we’ve returned to it a number of times, as it appeared to drop from the general BBC conversation.
Well it’s back in the news now, as the BBC Trust has reached a provisional decision on Freesat. Their view is one of support and have opened a 28 day public consultation prior to making its final decision in April 2007.
They foresee the satellite being shared among the UK broadcasters and guarantee that it will remain free after a one-off initial payment to cover the cost of equipment and installation.
There are problems with the much-trumpeted digital switch-over in the UK. Many areas are not covered by the digital transmitters because they are located in a remote area or that the geography of the area blocks the transmissions – in fact over half of those yet to switch (3.5 million homes) fall outside the Freeview coverage area. Satellite-delivered services do not suffer from these problems.
To date BSkyB has been the only company offering satellite delivery in the UK, indeed the BBC is carried on it. The proposal of FreeSat isn’t without impact.
As Acting BBC Chairman Chitra Bharucha put it, “We have considered the market impact and whilst there may be some negative effects, in our view these should be balanced against the potential positive market impact of greater choice. Overall, we believe a “Freesat” service to be in the public interest and we hope that other public service broadcasters would join the BBC in a joint venture.”
There’s additional benefits beyond coverage, that of delivery of HD signals, which currently it isn’t practical to do countrywide over Freeview.
Those wishing to comment should get over to the public consultation.
28 February, 2007
SPV M700 Launches on Orange UK: Also In Black
The latest model in the SPV range has arrived on the UK Orange mobile phone network.
There’s been shots of the SPV M700 floating around for a while, but as of today it’s been confirmed that there will be a black version in the UK to partner the White.
As well as all of the goodies detailed below, the SPV M700 has Sat Nav built-in – one of the early phone to have this. The handset will be able to take advantage of Sat-Nav from Orange.
The Sat-Nav is powered by Webraska with all maps and live traffic updates are held on a central server and are downloadable from the Internet via WiFi, 3G, GPRS or the Orange EDGE network onto the mobile device. Initially only available to business users, it’s now open to all.
The M700 has a 2.8in, 240 x 320, 65,53-colour display, a 2.1 megapixel camera and secondary, VGA camera for video calls and runs Windows Mobile 5.0, so offers Microsoft Office applications including Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
With all of this on board Orange is billing it as helping “you work faster and more efficiently when you’re away from your desk.”
This 3G handset can offer data rates of up to 1.8Mbps (network allowing) There’s quite a few wireless networks supported including EDGE networks as well as UMTS, GPRS and WiFi.
You can get the SPV M700 from Orange shops and online at orange.co.uk. It’s free on contracts over £35.
Sat-Nav from Orange
28 February, 2007
Apple TV Delayed Until March
Apple has announced that their Apple TV product will be ‘a few weeks late.’
Observers aren’t that surprised by this as it was originally intended to be released in February and that’s pretty much run out. The new date is quoted as mid-March.
Apple TV will have a similar interface to their Front Row software and will play downloaded music and videos on a home stereo or television, playing it directly from an Internet connection or networked computer, either by wired or wireless networking, with 802.11n supported.
When it was launched at the start of January, Jobs described it as such, “Apple TV is like a DVD player for the 21st century—you connect it to your entertainment system just like a DVD player, but it plays digital content you get from the Internet rather than DVDs you get from a physical store.”
Apple hope to do the same for TV as they’ve done for digital music, although there’s been quite a lot of backlash against this idea.
The expected cost of Apple TV hasn’t changed £199 or $299.
28 February, 2007
Mobile Use In UK Cars: Penalty Points And Fines Await
As of today, drivers using their mobile phone while driving in the UK will be hit with increased fines.
The previous fixed-penalty fine of £30 is increased to £60 with the courts having a possible maximum fine of £1,000.
The real disincentive to drivers will, however, be the three penalty points that will be added to their driving license. If UK license holders have over 12 points on their license they are banned from driving for three years.
If those caught are driving anything bigger than a car, say a bus, coach or goods vehicle, the maximum fine is considerably higher, rising to £2,500.
Peter Rodger, the Institute of Advanced Motorists’ chief examiner, said: ‘Inevitably some drivers will think that they should buy a hands-free kit and the problem will go away.
“That would certainly suit the manufacturers. But drivers should be aware that they are potentially buying trouble – even when you are hands-free, research has shown that you are four times more likely to crash because your concentration is split.
“The best advice is to switch off before you drive off – and if you really can’t do that, be prepared to stop and find somewhere legal and convenient to return that missed call or check your messages.”
Some of the rules that do confuse are that the rules still apply, even when people are sitting in traffic jams.
27 February, 2007
BitTorrent Launches Legal Download Service
Once the biggest, baddest, mean mo’fo name in the world of web piracy, BitTorrent is going legit today with the launch of a digital store backed by a string of big name content partners.
The deal sees BitTorrent able to offer films, TV shows and videogames from heavyweights such as Fox, Lionsgate, Paramount, MGM, and MTV Networks, as well as content from indie distributors like First Look, Palm Pictures and Kadokawa and several video game distributors
After announcing its intention to give up a life of crime and go straight over a year ago, BitTorrent has been in prolonged negotiations with a string of studio big boys but failed to secure enough partners for their proposed autumn 2006 launch.
Although the company were keen to get all the big studios ticked off the list, they took a look around an increasingly crowded marketplace and realised that they’d better get their arses in gear before they became associated with the words, “ship” and “sailed”.
“We have been ready to go for a while,” insisted company CEO Ashwin Navin.
“There comes a point in time where you say we’ve got 10,000 titles ready to go and we shouldn’t wait anymore. We’re confident that we’ll be adding more studios soon,” he added.
BitTorrent technology
The peer-to-peer protocol developed by BitTorrent has proved massively popular on the internet, although mainly with people sporting an eye patch, a parrot on their shoulder and a propensity for saying, “oooo arrrr!”

Despite its dodgy background, BitTorrent enjoys a high ‘brand’ profile which it’s going to need when going head to head with rivals like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Wal-Mart.
With its Premium TV and movie content looking much the same as everyone else’s and pricing pegged in a similar ballpark, we’re looking hard to find an exciting USP here for BitTorrent.
All of the movies offered will only be available for digital rental, with the content going kaput 30 days after being downloaded (or a day after you start watching it), with DRM being taken care of by Microsoft’s Windows Media Player.
We can’t see punters getting too excited by having to fork out for a time-limited, use-limited movie that offers a far worse deal than owning a DVD. Can you?
source
26 February, 2007
European PS3: No Emotion Engine: PS2 Compatibility ‘Limited’
Sony has just let it be know that it will be redesigning the internals for the EuropeanPS3, removing the Emotion Engine, which gives compatibility with PS2 games.
The Emotion Engine will instead be handled in what they call, “a new combination of hardware and software emulation which will enable PS3 to be compatible with a broad range of original PlayStation (PS) titles and a limited range of PlayStation2 (PS2) titles.”
Much fuss was made by Sony of the Emotion Engine when they were building up to the initial release of the first PlayStation. CNN even went as far as asking if the PS2 will replace the PC, with claims like, it was “two times faster than a 733-MHz Pentium III and 15 times faster than a 400-MHz Celeron at handling tasks like full-motion video.”
Now we know that Sony are keen to ~~make the maximum amount of money~~ reduce the amount of money that they are losing from selling PS3s. According to iSupply’s estimate on the Bill Of Material of the PS3, they’ll save $27 on this.
Many UK gamers were angered when they felt that they were paying over the odds for the UK PS3 when the price of £425 was made official. This news will do nothing to make them feel better.
The real danger is that if people think they’re going to get less of a machine that their-cousins in the US and Japan have, that may well be the last straw in deciding which ‘Next-Gen’ console they’ll buy – even if they never end up playing any of their old PS2 games.
Sony is on a knife-edge with this one. We’ve already postulated that the PS3 might not be bought in the way that was once thought, before the Wii caught peoples imaginations.
What is strange is that in an interview at the start of February, SCE UK managing director, Ray Maguire, said that the machines were being built at that point, but omitted to mention that they would be fundamentally different.
Full release follows …
23/02/2007 10:00
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Announces Hardware Specification of PLAYSTATION®3 for Europe
London, 23 February 2007 – Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) today announced that PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) to be launched in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Australasia on 23rd March 2007 would utilise a new hardware specification.
The European PS3 will feature the Cell Broadband Engine™, 60 GB hard disc drive, Blu-ray Disc player, built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, SIXAXIS™ wireless controller. It also embodies a new combination of hardware and software emulation which will enable PS3 to be compatible with a broad range of original PlayStation® (PS) titles and a limited range of PlayStation®2 (PS2) titles.
“PS3 is first and foremost a system that excels in playing games specifically designed to exploit the power and potential of the PS3 system,” said David Reeves, President of SCEE. “Games designed for PS3 offer incredible graphics quality, stunning gameplay and massively improved audio and video fidelity that is simply not achievable with PS and PS2 games. Rather than concentrate on PS2 backwards compatibility, in the future, company resources will be increasingly focused on developing new games and entertainment features exclusively for PS3, truly taking advantage of this exciting technology.”
Some additional PS2 titles will become compatible on the PS3 system through regular downloadable firmware updates, which will be made available through the PLAYSTATION®Network, from http://www.playstation.com or via PS3 game discs, with the first update planned for the launch date of the 23rd March 2007.
Users will be able to check whether their titles are compatible with PS3 at http://faq.eu.playstation.com/bc. This site will be available on 23rd March to meet launch day.
1. A device compatible with Linear PCM 7.1 Ch is required to output 7.1 ch audio, supported by Dolby TrueHD or a similar format, from the HDMI OUT connector.
2. This system does not support output from the DTS-HD 7.1 Ch. DTS-HD 7.1 Ch audio is output from a 5.1 or lower channel.
3. Usability of all storage media types is not guaranteed.
4. Certain PlayStation 2 format software titles may not perform properly on this system. Visit faq.eu.playstation.com/bc for the latest information regarding compatible titles

23 February, 2007
Sky To Pull Channels From Virgin Media: Offering Discounts
The spat between Virgin Media and Mr Murdoch’s Sky TV is getting uglier as Sky threatens to pull its Sky One, Two, Three, News and Sports News channels from Virgin Media at the end of the month.
The frost started back in November last year when Virgin’s Richard Branson complained about Sky buying a £940m holding in the UK broadcaster, ITV. Branson jumped up and down and generally said how unfair it was.
A week ago Sky said it was considering a formal complaint against Virgin Media’s latest advertising campaign, which stated, “The cheapest place to get Sky Sports isn’t Sky.” Sky refuted Virgin’s claims, saying they were misleading.
Today sees the latest round. Virgin put out a statement this morning saying that they anticipated “a withdrawal of these channels by Sky at the end of February.”
Clearly angry, the statement continued,
“The nature of these negotiations leads us to believe that this outcome has been deliberately engineered by Sky in order to suppress competition and coerce Virgin Media’s customers into switching to its service by denying them access to the basic channels. (These negotiations do not impact Sky’s premium sports and movies channels which will continue to be available to Virgin Media customers.)
This view is reinforced by Sky’s decision to broadcast, at the height of negotiations on 12th February, a series of promotions claiming that the channels were about to disappear from Virgin Media’s network. This was nothing more than a heavy-handed attempt to exert undue influence on the negotiating process.”
Virgin Media claim that Sky has been asking for “a carriage fee more than double the existing arrangement.”
Julian Closer is reporting that Virgin will be offering up to £9.75 in compensation for the loss of Sky-branded channels.
23 February, 2007