12.Oct.06 The Parliament and the Internet Conference will bring together leading figures from Government, Parliament, academia and industry to discuss and debate the most pressing policy issues facing the internet The Conference will centre on a keynote speech from William Dutton, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute and six workshops which will each consider a major policy issue facing the internet. Topics for discussion will include consumer protection issues, UK competitiveness in the digital age and next generation services. Each session will be led by an MP or senior industry figure. Portcullis House, London http://www.parliamentandinternet.org.uk/
Simon Perry
Sony NW-S700 Walkman: Noise Cancelling
Sony have released the latest of their Walkmans – with the added bonus of having noise cancellation built in. It’s the first for a portable music player.Over recent years Bose has done very well from their noise cancelling headphone, particularly from regular plan travellers attempting to negate the horrid din.
The headphone that comes with the NW-S700 Walkman, named 13.5φEX, have built-in microphones that capture, examine and then neutralises the surrounding noise. They call it Clear Audio technology.
The neat little player comes in 1Gb, 2Gb and 4Gb capacity and has a stunning charge to playback ratio. For all of you with soooper busy lives, a 3 minute charge will give 3 hours of playback. Those who are more relaxed, a maxed out charge will give 50 hours of playback.
There’s built-in audio encoding, letting you record for an analog source directly and it comes in violet, black and pink.
One of the options that you’ll be able to get for it, is a Bluetooth Audio Transmitter, letting you send the music via stereo bluetooth to your ears. Expect to see lots of this feature soon.
It’s going to sell for £189 starting in November – just in time for you little cousin’s xmas present.
It sounds like a great idea, that we can’t wait to get our hands on.
NEC’s Chip To Play Blu-Ray And HD-DVD
The almighty ruck between Blu-ray and HD-DVD could have found a bridge for the consumer.The clever sticks at NEC have come up with a chip that will play both HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks.
A smart move for NEC, this could save the consumer having to make a choice between the two formats they have little or no knowledge of, but are being told that they simply must have.
The difference between the two standards is pretty considerable, not just in the capacity of the disks that Blu-ray has tried to make much of – as they saw it as a competitive advantage. One of the major differences is the interactivity, with Blu-ray going the route of Java, giving them both a considerable processing overhead in the machines that need to play it and huge flexibility in the depth of interactivity that can be achieved.
It’s not the first time that bringing together the two formats has been suggested. Over a year ago Samsung said that they’d produce a dual format player. Mysteriously they’ve dropped this idea, and gave a serious amount of umm-ing and ahh-ing when asked about it at IFA this year.
NEC is telling all those who will listen that the chips should be shipping from April 2007 onwards.
BBC Use Digital To Pressure Government
BBC Director-General Mark Thompson is back on again trying to justify to the British government why the BBC should be allowed to increase their licence fee above the Retail Price Index (RPI).Thompson’s main thrust for the increase is the cost of going digital. It’s a clever approach as the UK government has publicly committed itself to switching off analogue TV in favour of digital. Thompson also knows that once the analogue spectrum is freed up, the government may make bucket loads of cash from making that spectrum available.
Thompson ratcheted up the pressure on the Government to comply, by reminding them the risks of digital transition, “If it is under resourced it will fail. It’s as simple as that – and the failure will impact on many millions of households.”
The UK public has for a long time been told, primarily by the BBC, that Digital will be amazing and their lives will somehow become increasingly glorious once they get a Digital TV. Only now are they starting to understand that it’s going to cost them more to have.
Until today, Thompson was asking for an increase in the licence fee of RPI plus 2.3%. today it’s dropped to +1.8%. Under the adjusted figures, the license fee would be £149 in 2013/14 by today’s prices. The reduction has been helped by Ofcom making the decision to no longer charge the BBC a spectrum tax.
Being publicly funded, this kind of
argumentdiscussion is very important to the BBCs future ambitions – digital and otherwise. The license fee is payable by all UK residents who have a TV.Yes, Google Buying YouTube: YouGleTube? GoogleTube?
As we\\’d previously as conjecture, Google has announced that it will be buying YouTube. The price is slightly above the rumours at $1.65Bn (€1.31Bn, £0.88Bn). It\\’s an all stock deal, with no money changing hands.YouTube has been a fast-growing phenomenon that only started in February 2005, a mere 19 months ago.
Formed by some of the people who were in another similarly sale-price company, PayPal, which went for $1.5Bn to eBay, including Roelof Botha the former CFO of PayPal, who fortunately became a partner at VC company, Sequoia Capital partner. The other two were Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Not much has been heard about them, so it\\’s worthwhile watching the Charlie Rose interview with them.
History (short)
In the early days, many people couldn\\’t understand how they would survive long-term given the speed that they were burning through money.Back in November last year, long before their explosion to playing 100m videos a day, YouTube was shifting 8 terabytes a day. That kind of bandwidth is very expensive.
The founders have a fair few quid in their pockets after the PayPal sale, but in November 2005 they raised $3.5m from Sequoia Capital, which was followed up in April 2006 by further funding of $8m was also supplied by Sequoia.
See how Chad and Steve break the news to their users.
Given the sale price (don\\’t forget $1.65Bn), the return for the investors is tremendous. As the company is closely-held, ie it\\’s shares aren\\’t publicly available, we don\\’t know how much was put in by the funders, but taken at face value, the $13.5m that was put in by Sequoia returned upto 100 times their investment. Not bad for 19 months.
Copyright issues
There\\’s been much controversy within media companies as they\\’ve objected to their content being uploaded to YouTube. Given that video has been uploaded at the rate of 65,000 a day, the only way that YouTube has been able to stay on top of new copyrighted material is by removing it when complaints have objected.Google Video has been less concerned with similar pieces of video, probably due to their financial muscle and less need to feel threatened by the media companies legal departments. Expect a long list of deals like Warner Music\\’s
Of course, most of the material on YouTube is people making their own videos and uploading it, a few of which have become stars on the service and a couple mega-stars being signed by Hollywood agents.
For the latest (brief) views on the deal of Hurley and Chen have just hit Reuters.
DiddyTV: YouTube Gains A Paying Partner
In true online video blog style, the announcement was made by Mr Diddy (not one of Ken Dodd’s little friends), but differing from the norm, he’s filmed walking in to a Burger King and happens to drop their catch phrase a couple of times while order his burger to “have it his way”.Interestingly Mr Diddy says that he’s going to “Buy a channel on YouTube,” so we’re assuming that there’s money involved, especially as Mr Diddy refers to “The Contract” in his video piece.
Also of note, is that Mr Diddy has his own URL on YouTube – YouTube.com/diddyTV – certainly the first that we’ve seen that uses such a short form.
There’s also a great spoof of Mr Diddy’s video by Lisa Nova.
Details of the deal between Mr Diddy and Burger King haven’t been disclosed, but we’d imagine that it’s going to be worth more that a couple of orders at their stores, even if his entourage are ordering large.Of course, this big step up by Mr Diddy has absolutely nothing to do with the new album that he’s releasing this month and is cunningly blip-cut into his video pieces.
We attribute much of Mr Diddy’s knowledge and acceptance of YouTube down to Ryan Leslie, who is part of Mr Diddy’s posse (which we believe is the common parlance). Ryan has been using MySpace and YouTube for a long time to promote himself, his label Next Selection (for life) and his artists like Cassie. We’ve spoken about his work in many consultancy sessions that we’ve done with media companies – and frankly have great regard for the way he’s used the medium, such as his idea to get people to post their own lip-sync video on YouTube.The absolute proof of this is Mr Diddy’s message to Ryan saying that he’d “finally talked him into it,” asking him to send over some of his friends to Mr Diddy’s Myspace. To show how these things roll, you’ll note that Mr Diddy doesn’t have Ryan in his Top 16 friends on his MySpace. You may also note that Mr Diddy has had over 10m plays of his tracks – some 4m of which for Come To Me, that was produced by Ryan Leslie. Where’s the friendship?
Google interested in buying YouTube?
Over the weekend there has been much chatter about YouTube being bought by Google, after it was rumoured by the WSJ. The figure banded around was $1.6Bn.This would be the most expensive purchase that Google has made. Up until now they’ve been very smart and picked up other compaies at early stages for relative small change. The rumored figure for Blogger was $30m.
Google Video hasn’t been the boon that they had hoped it was going to be. Buying YouTube will take Google into the forefront of serving video online and with the $10Bn they’ve got in the bank, not an unfeasible amount for them to pay for it. When put into historical context, it appears a pretty cheap price – don’t forget that Yahoo paid $7.5Bn for broadcast.com back in the Web 1.0 days.
Perspectives of London: Nokia’s New Films
Nokia has unveiled their latest move to bring themselves ever closer to being associated with video content and its creation.They’ve sponsored four prominent UK people known for design and style (what a virtuous circle this sponsorship deal turned out to be – video & style) to make short films, using the short shot by Gary Oldman.
BTPodshow: The How and Why (Pt 2/2)
The conclusion of yesterdays piece on BTPodshow: The How and Why. If you’re looking for the podcasts, they’re at the end of this piece.
Delivering the content
Another major advantage for PodShow is the delivery of their content to consumers. PodShow majors on audio content, which is not too difficult to deliver over the average broadband connection. The story changes when many people are watching on-demand video content. Getting this type of content delivered smoothly across the network has always been a headache. This only multiplies when the majority of the content moves from predominately audio to video.When I put this forward to BT’s Patterson, his answer was revealing, “Increasingly you’ll see the QoS (Quality of Service) layer being important.”
BT will be able to make sure that the content on BTPodShow will be able to be delivered without a hitch. Content from other sites without a close relationship with the network owner might not be so fortunate, and the viewers/listeners of their content might get bumpier delivery.
Don’t Bloggers and Podcasters hate big brands?
While there will be many of the current podcasters that will reject the idea of posting their content on something as corporate as a site with a BT moniker, they only make up about 5% of the population of the potential customers for this.BT understand and acknowledge this. BT is a generalist, so they aren’t interested in the 5%, it’s the 95% of the remaining population that interests them.
Will it succeed?
With BT huge reach, it’s hard to imagine that this service won’t become familiar to the UK public, especially as we understand there’s a considerable advertising budget assigned to it. As to whether they’ll take it to their hearts and use it as they repository of choice is quite another matter.The call for UK content has gone out – they call it the ‘UnDition’ and they say that they’ve “been inundated with great content, and some really crappy stuff too that is simply hilarious.”
Looking at the site as we publish this piece, there’s very little content on the UK site. The four pieces that are currently publicly viewable … how shall we put it … leave room for the UK talent to shine.
The deal with BT can’t have hindred Podshow raising $15m dollars from VCs at the end of September.
We assume the big advertising push won’t hit the UK public until there’s quality to show.
Recorded podcast interviews
Gavin Patterson, group managing director, consumer division and group marketing, BT
Adam Curry, President and Co-founder, PodShow
Ron Bloom, CEO and Co-founder, PodShowVonage V-phone Gets To The UK
Vonage have launched a new means of making VoIP calls on you PC – a USB stick with headphone socket.The invite to Vonage’s event to launch the V-phone billed it as ‘The World’s smallest phone.” Whether you feel that is a marketing spin or correct is personal interpretation.
It’s not a phone in old understanding of it … but frankly, what is? The USB stick has Vonage Talk software pre-loaded on it, with a detachable stereo earpiece/microphone and you’ll be left with 250Mb of usable memory. You also get a new Vonage phone number. All for £20.
With it, you can use any PC as a way to send and receive phone calls on a Vonage – even PCs without the Vonage software installed. To use it, just plug the neat USB stick in with the the headphone, the software temporarily runs and you’re ready to go. When you’ve finished chatting, simply software-eject the USB stick and remove it. There’s nothing left on the machine.
Skype has done a similar thing through a deal with SanDisk to have their software on their Cruizer USB stick. We’ve used it and found it pretty impressive. The only thing missing is the headphone socket.
We think this kind of approach – temporary software – will become more common as computing become ubiquitous and more a utility than rarity.
BTPodshow: The How and Why
A few week back, BT confirmed that they have closely tied themselves with US podcast aggregator, PodShow, so closely in fact, that they’ve stuck BT at the front of PodShow domain to form BTPodShow.We were at the launch of the service a few weeks ago and chatted to Gavin Patterson, group managing director, consumer division and group marketing, BT; Adam Curry, President and Co-founder, PodShow and Ron Bloom, CEO and Co-founder, PodShow. Strangely for the launch of a podcast network, we were the only ones there recording interviews.
Looking for the podcast interviews? They’ll be available in part two tomorrow.
Rather than just rattle off the news, we felt it was worthwhile digging a bit deeper and understand the How and Why of the deal.
What makes this interesting?
Quite a few reasons really. Not the least being that, showing a change of approach, BT aren’t making the service exclusive to only their network – their normal approach to try and encourage people to subscribe to their DSL service. BTPodShow will in fact be open to anyone in the UK.This alone shows a major shift within BT that shouldn’t be underestimated. It demonstrates an understanding that, although they dominate broadband provision in the UK (with nearly 3m accounts of their own, without all of the BT Wholesale lines sold via other UK broadband providers), they can’t own the whole market.
Having acknowledged this, they’ve clearly decided that they just as well make some income from the people who don’t buy broadband from them.
Where does the income come from?
While the financials of the deals haven’t been disclosed. We understand that there will be a revenue share between the two parties, expected to mostly come from advertising income.The PodShow side of the business is responsible for finding, maintaining and managing the relationships with the advertiser. At launch they reported that they had 40 global brands lined up to advertise on the network. If these are unique to the UK version, or are extension of relationship they already have with their previous site isn’t clear.
Why this deal. Why now? BTVision
We think a major reason is BT Vision, their soon to be launched ipTV service.BT have recognised that the current fodder broadcast on TV, will not continue to satisfy the wants and desires of the public in the future. In the words of BT’s consumer division group managing director, Gavin Patterson’s words, “The trend to user-generated content, and social media networks is clear cut. We see ourselves as a distributor of content. What we anticipate is more people wanting get involved with creating content.”
To fill the gap left by the dissatisfaction with ‘normal TV’, they have to open a collection channel for the content to flow to them and then build a collection of User Generated Content (UCG). While they could build PodShow’s technology themselves, it’s clear that BT don’t want to miss out on this, wanting to get into this area quickly, as confirmed by the speed at which they put this deal together.
We wondered if the higher resolution video might not be put out on the Website, but reserved for BTVision, to which Patterson said, “The experience that people have over the Internet will not be sufficient for the TV space. I anticipate it will happen.”The advantages for PodShow are obvious. If they export this idea to any other country, they’ll be able to hold BT up as their first partner, something that really can’t be beaten.
As BT have a near monopoly on broadband and land line provision in the UK they can expose BTPodShow to the 17m ‘customer relationships’ they have, not just to encourage people to go to BTPodShow to watch the content, where they’ll make income from advertising, but to encourage those same people to produce and upload content.
Moves like this cannot help but strengthen BT as a media brand in the mind of the public – especially the youth. Vital for their service growing in the future.
Continued in the concluding piece, covering the advantages for PodShow and the chances of success of the service.
Sony have released the latest of their Walkmans – with the added bonus of having noise cancellation built in. It’s the first for a portable music player.
The almighty ruck between Blu-ray and HD-DVD could have found a bridge for the consumer.
BBC Director-General Mark Thompson is back on again trying to justify to the British government why the BBC should be allowed to increase their licence fee above the Retail Price Index (
As we\\’d 
In true online video blog style, the announcement was made by Mr Diddy (not one of 
Details of the deal between Mr Diddy and Burger King haven’t been disclosed, but we’d imagine that it’s going to be worth more that a couple of orders at their stores, even if his entourage are ordering large.
We attribute much of Mr Diddy’s knowledge and acceptance of YouTube down to 
Nokia has unveiled their latest move to bring themselves ever closer to being associated with video content and its creation.
Another major advantage for PodShow is the delivery of their content to consumers. PodShow majors on audio content, which is not too difficult to deliver over the average broadband connection. The story changes when many people are watching on-demand video content. Getting this type of content delivered smoothly across the network has always been a headache. This only multiplies when the majority of the content moves from predominately audio to video.
Will it succeed?
Vonage have launched a new means of making VoIP calls on you PC – a USB stick with headphone socket.
A few week back, BT confirmed that they have closely tied themselves with US podcast aggregator, PodShow, so closely in fact, that they’ve stuck BT at the front of PodShow domain to form BTPodShow.
Where does the income come from?
We wondered if the higher resolution video might not be put out on the Website, but reserved for BTVision, to which Patterson said, “The experience that people have over the Internet will not be sufficient for the TV space. I anticipate it will happen.”