Business

Changes to business digitisation brings

Scoopt Citizen Journalism Service Snapped Up By Getty
With ‘citizen journalism’ being one of the loudest buzzwords in the bright shiny Web 2.0 world, it’s no surprise to see the big media agencies looking for a slice of the action.
Major news agencies made great use of public camera phone footage after the London 7/7 bombings, with several images making the front page of newspapers.
The citizen journalism photo agency Scoopt currently offers a service that lets users text or email any newsworthy photos and video footage, which the company then endeavours to flog on to the international press on their behalf .
Acquiring the company for an undisclosed sum, Getty Images is looking to fully integrate this service into the output of their pro photographers.
The small print
Camera phone snappers uploading imagery to Scoopt keep their copyright but agree to grant the agency a 12-month exclusive license that lets them re-license the work to one or more publishers, with a 50/50 split on the moolah.
With Getty’s well established media network, amateur snappers should expect increased prospects of shifting their work, although Getty hasn’t commented if the payment share is to remain the same.
The company has also said that it intends to invest in technology upgrades and introduce further enhancements to make the Scoopt site more accessible to punters.
“New technology has made it easier to capture and distribute imagery, leading to citizen photojournalism that is increasingly relevant to the news cycle,” commented Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images.
“While this genre will never replace the award-winning photojournalism for which we’re known, it’s a highly complementary offering that enables us to meet the evolving imagery needs of a broad customer base,” he added.
Via
How to take good camera phone pictures
Scoopt’s site also provides a handy photo taking guide for wannabe citizen journos, and here’s their top ten tips:
1 Hold the camera steady.
2 Concentrate on the subject.
3 Be aware of what is happening around you.
4 Try to connect with your subject but stay slightly detached to look for the best time to take a picture.
5 Go the extra mile to get the picture — but don’t take risks and don’t break the law.
6 Keep looking and snapping even when you think you have the scoop.
7 Don’t be put off by bad light/rain/snow/a duff viewpoint. Sometimes these elements can add to a picture.
8 Be VERY patient.
9 Be single minded. Getting the picture is your objective. Think in terms of images
10 Hold the camera steady! (Did we mention that one already?)
14 March, 2007
Elgato Ends Collaboration with Miglia
We’ve just heard from Elgato that they are terminating their relationship. Although we’ve been told that the contract ended on 7 February, it’s only just being discussed publicly now.
Until then, Miglia has been bundling Elgato’s TVEye software with their digital TV DVB-T/Freeview/TNT tuners.
Wanting further details, we first spoke to Miglia, who told us they could say nothing until a press release is issued tomorrow.
A call to Elgato gave us slightly more information, but they were restrained by the non-disclosure agreement between the two parties.
Elgato said that they were were saddened that the relationship had to come to an end, and that they had “tried [their] best to keep the relationship alive.”
Looking on the bright side, they said that “The OEM business is only one part of our business. The bigger part is selling our own hardware with our software, which we will continue to do.”
The official statement from Elgato is
Elgato Systems announces that it has terminated the licensing agreement for EyeTV software with Miglia Technology, Ltd. Miglia can no longer ship, sell or advertise TV Tuner solutions bundled with Elgato’s EyeTV software.
Customers using EyeTV with a Miglia TV tuner product are not affected by this change. Elgato EyeTV will continue to work with existing Miglia products. Elgato will continue to support existing Miglia/EyeTV customers with software updates and improvements.
We’re waiting to hear back from Miglia which software they will be shipping with their product in the future.
Miglia
Elgato
12 March, 2007
BT Try To Vary Payphone Pricing
In their constant pursuit for higher profits, BT have put a request into the UK uber-regulator Ofcom, to allow them to charge different prices for phone calls depending on where the phonebox is located, claim TelecomTV.
BT is under a legal obligation to provide phone boxes up and down the length of the UK, which they claim numbers 63,795. BT say that 40,500 of these phone boxes are unprofitable.
BT is attempting to negotiate a three-year deal that would let BT “determine the acceptable pricing of pay-phone calls.”
Try to get out of their obligations is not really playing the game is it? It’s not like their obligation to payphones is news to them.
It’s got the ring about it along the lines of charging for directory enquiries. When BT was allowed to start charging for calls to directory enquiries, it was only ‘normal’ landlines that were effected. Calls to find out phone numbers were free from Payphone, as BT removed the printed telephone directories from them. A few years later BT had the rules changed and started charging from payphone, despite not returning the printed directories.
BT claim that calls from payphones have dropped off by 40% in the last four years, no doubt due to the considerable rise in uptake of mobile phones.
Digital-Lifestyles thinks this doesn’t make it right that people who live in remote locations should have to pay inflated prices for using the same payphone and connecting to the same phone network as everyone else, just because BT wants to make more profit.
(via)
12 March, 2007
Who Owns YouTube/BBCWorld?
When an important deal like the YouTube/BBC one comes around, we feel we want to find out that little bit extra about it. Sadly neither of the press departments have been given the go ahead to provide journalists any further clues as to how the deal went down.
Given that frustration, we thought we’d apply a little lateral thinking to the situation and have a sniff around in a few places online to see if we can dig up some more.
Lots of investigation drew a blank, but realising that the address of the BBCWorld YouTube Channel hadn’t been given when the press information had been distributed at the announcement, we made a couple of guesses what it might be and it ended up being the obvious one.
One of the questions that we had was how long the deal had taken to negotiate. As mentioned there was no official word on it, but YouTube.com/BBCWorld reveals that a channel has been previously setup. The question is, is this an official BBC channel – setup over 9 months ago, or is there a 24 year old Australian squatting the BBC’s channel name.
If it is a BBC channel, it shows that there’s been a very long period of negotiation – 9 months – between the BBC and YouTube to get to the point of them announcing the deal.
If it isn’t, it will be interesting to see what YouTube’s approach will be to an individual registering a name that their largest content partner owns.
Keep your eyes on YouTube.com/BBCWorld to find out the answer.
7 March, 2007
BBC and YouTube Partner
Another day, another content deal as the UK National broadcaster, the BBC, sign a deal with YouTube/Google to make a selection of their content available on YouTube on an non-exclusive basis.
Two deals have been done, one with the BBC, the other BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC. Financial terms of the deal aren’t being discussed at all.
There will be three YouTube ‘channels’ under the deal. Two of them are live already, BBC and BBCWorldwide, with BBCWorld to follow ‘shortly.’
BBC is very much in the YouTube model, full of rough camcorder diary pieces, and behind the scenes shots giving an ‘insight’ into the workings of the BBC. Currently there are 31 pieces going back one month.
BBCWorldwide is labelled as “The best of British TV” and currently has 78 video pieces on it and contains a ton on Top Gear, Attenborough and a smattering of comedy shows like The Mighty Boosh and Catherine Tate. Will also “include a limited amount of advertising.”
BBCWorld isn’t up and running yet, but when it is, will only be available to YouTube viewers outside the UK. It will be advertising-funded.
Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, likes the project, “The partnership provides both a creative outlet for a range of short-form content from BBC programme makers and the opportunity to learn about new forms of audience behaviour.
What’s it like?
Surprisingly for the BBC the quality of the video isn’t what it could be. Quite a change from the days when quality was everything.
Interestingly, fans of BBC content are barred from showing their fav ditties on any other sites as “Embedding disabled by request.” If the BBC has requested this, or YouTube isn’t clear. It’s more likely given they’ve paid the BBC for their content, and we imagine that they damn well want viewers visiting their site to see the videos.
This is great for the BBC as they get to distribute their content widely (fitting their remit) while not having to spend any money on distribution of the content, in fact receiving payment for the privilege.
2 March, 2007
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
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
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
Viacom Joost Deal Struck
US media giant, Viacom, have struck a deal with Joost, the VOD TV to computer previously known as The Venice Project.
Joost is currently in beta, and it’s understood that the Viacom material will be available for the yet-undefined launch date of Joost. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Joost users will have financially-free access to the content. Joost users will ‘pay’ by being shown brief adverts, that we call blip-verts. They only last a couple of seconds and aren’t _that_ offensive, if the video pieces that are being watched aren’t too short.
The Viacom channels covered by the deal are MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Spike TV, Logo and BET.
Clearly Philippe Dauman, Viacom President and Chief Executive Officer, is showing his excitement at being involved, “We’re extremely pleased to be working with Joost, and couldn’t be prouder to be a key partner in the launch of the next generation in broadband video technology.” He’s not looking at the Joost deal as an exclusive though, “we’re determined to keep pushing and growing our digital presence and bring our programming to audiences on every platform and device that they want. In addition to strong partnerships we have with traditional distributors, we will continue to seek out partners like Joost, which has created an exciting breakthrough platform that represents not only a fantastic user experience, but one that is built on a compelling and sustainable business model that respects both content creators and consumers.”
All of this comes only a couple of week after Viacom threw their legal department at YouTube, insisting that they remove their content from the video sharing site and accused Google-owned YouTube of knowingly profiting from material stolen from them.
Joost recently introduced a version of Joost to run on Apple’s Mac. Version 0.8.0.1 for Mac came out on Monday, following a brief period in Alpha test. They describe it as looking “very much like Joost for Windows, while behaving very much like a Mac application.” A growing number of Mac Beta testers are complaining that the software only works on Intel-based Macs.
Joost
21 February, 2007
Wikipedia To Run Out Of Money?
Last week at the LIFT07 conference in Geneva, Florence Devouard, chairwoman of Wikimedia, the organisation behind the ubiquitous, editable-by-all online encyclopedia warned that Wikipedia was facing a serious financial crisis if it did not receive more funding soon.
Whilst there have been sensationalist reports that Wikipedia would be forced to close in three to four months if the current financial situation continued, this has shown not to be the case by an interview of Devouard. She does stress, however, that Wikipedia cannot continue growing at the current pace if it does not find ways to raise money.
Currently Wikimedia (which is a non-profit organisation) is funded almost entirely from donations, with the occasional content license deal. There can be little doubt that if Wikipedia were to run advertising, it could instantly become self sufficient, as Jason Calacanis, web media entrepreneur, has been advocating. They point to the success of the Mozilla Foundation (the makers of Firefox), another non-profit organisation, who are in a very good financial position thanks to an advertising deal with Google.
However, Wikimedia has not been keen to accept such advertising, in part due to the fear that it would taint the non-commercial nature of Wikipedia, and in part due to opposition from some users.
It would seem that Wikimedia has two options for the future of its funding; continue with the current approach of soliciting donations as the main source of income or accept advertising, with all the negative consequences that may follow.
There may, however, be a third way. I would like to see Wikipedia commercialised; there can be little doubt that it would be of enormous commercial value to a purchaser, and that its status as a revenue generating business would help to guarantee its future. Wikipedia’s objectivity as an organisation is sacrosanct, but so are Google’s search results. Google recognised when it was founded that it would cease to be of any value to its users the day that it accepted money for placement within its search results. The result is clearly labeled advertising which in no way detracts from a useful product, and an emphatically revenue positive company.
I see no reason why Wikipedia cannot experience the same kind of success that Google has enjoyed; a rich Wikipedia could afford to pay experts to review its articles, improving style and accuracy (and thereby removing a major concern which is a barrier to its mass adoption as a trusted source of information). A rich Wikipedia would ensure that this resource which has become crucial to our information age will remain for as long as it is needed.

Don’t forget that you can support Wikipedia by sending donations to support Wikipedia. (Thanks Mikker)

Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz, and the co-founder of technology blog network Oratos Media. His personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!
12 February, 2007