Companies – Page 53 – Digital-Lifestyles

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.

BBC and YouTube Partner 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.

Sky Remote Record Via The Internet

Sky Remote Record Via The Internal Sky has gradually been increasing the number of ways to program your Sky+ and HD boxes to record. The latest, via the Internet, joins interactive via mobile phone and the rather convoluted mobile text message services.

In those situations where Sky subscribers find they haven’t set their boxes to record the latest episode of Celebrity Trouser Press, and can’t live without seeing it, relief will now be at hand.

By grabbing the closest (compatible) Web browser, Sky subscribers bring up the Sky site, login and take themselves to TV Listings. The next seven days of TV programming will be brought up, and, when Celebrity Trouser Press is found, by clicking on the title, the description of the programme and its options are brought up.

Sky Remote Record Via The Internal

All that is needed to program the box is a click on Remote Record, and a subsequent confirmation to send the request to the box nestled under the TV at home.

Sky tell us that it can take up to 30 mins for the programming request to reach its destination, but it’s highly likely to be significantly quicker than that.

Sky Remote Record Via The Internal Strangely they have decided to impose a limit of 10 recording request a day via the Internet – but, in our view, anyone who need to remotely programme their box more than that needs help anyway. Those afflicted can reach for their mobile to carry on programming until their thumbs bleed.

Well that’s it. The remote programming circle is now complete. All ways to program your Sky+ box are now available … err, except the direct brain method. We await the call from Sky on that one.

Sky Remote Record

Ms Pac Man Hits The iPod

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.

Ms Pac Man Hits The iPod 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

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.

BBC Say Yes (Probably) to 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.

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.

SPV M700 Launches on Orange UK: Also In Black 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

Apple TV Delayed Until March

Apple Fans Are Nuts 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.

Sony DSC-H7 And DSC-H9 Cameras Announced

With dSLRs plummeting in price, upmarket bridge cameras are having to up the feature set to keep punters interested, and Sony are hoping that their replacements to last year’s DSC-H2 and DSC-H5 cameras have got what it takes.

Sony DSC-H7 And DSC-H9 Cameras Announced Sony’s new DSC-H7 and DSC-H9 cameras come with an immense 15x optical Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar zoom, which translates into a whopping 31-465mm range (35mm equiv) – perfect for wannabe paparazzi and lurking stalkers.

(The one advantage that the small sensors of digital compacts have over their dSLR rivals is that they can facilitate huge zooms that won’t end up challenging a Northern mill chimney in size.)

The two 8.1-megapixel cameras are more or less identical, except the higher priced DSC-H9 comes with a larger LCD monitor (3″ screen with 230k colours compared to the DSC-H7’s 2.5″/115k screen) and a natty fold out screen. We like them.

Sony DSC-H7 And DSC-H9 Cameras Announced Both cameras sport face detection technology, HDTV output, red-eye reduction and an action-freezing shutter speed up to 1/4000 of a second, backed by a slew of auto, manual and scene modes.

The same Bionz processing engine that lurks inside the excellent Alpha dSLR camera is onboard, as well as Super Steady Shot optical image stabilisation and a high sensitivity ISO 3200 rating for low light shots.

Sony has also included their NightShot technology, which is a whole load of fun if you’re snapping away in a coal mine, but we reckon Sony’s design team must have been chewing on the crazy dust when they decided to leave out any movie modes.

Sony DSC-H7 And DSC-H9 Cameras Announced There’s no RAW image capture either, an omission that will surely push keen photographers further in the direction of cut price dSLRs like Nikon’s fine D40

They’re still both fine looking cameras, mind, and priced at around $400 (DSC-H7) and $480 (DSC-H9), we reckon they should do well when they beam down from Planet Sony sometime in April.

Via

YouTube Traffic Surges

It may have suffered more law suits than slippery Jeffrey Archer, but new figures reveal continuing growth for the video sharing site, with many visitors seeking out user-generated content.

YouTube Traffic Surges Research firm Hitwise reported that online traffic to YouTube soared past rival US TV websites, with the site recording more visits than all the television network Web sites combined during the week of Feb. 3rd.

Whipping out their big calculators and pulling out a few pencils from their white coat top pockets, Hitwise calculated that YouTube’s share of internet visits leapt to 0.6031% during the week of February 3.

By comparison, traffic to the whole bloomin’ lot of US TV network websites could only muster a measly 0.4865% share.

Remarkably, YouTube’s US market share actually jumped 13.9% in the two weeks after MTV and Comedy Central parent Viacom had made the company remove 100,000 of its clips.

YouTube Traffic Surges Hitwise researcher LeAnn Prescott, commented, “This is a landmark event in the changing face of web traffic and entertainment consumption, now that entertainment seekers are now more likely to go to YouTube than any other television network or gaming website.”

The Hitwise research looked at the words and phrases used in Internet search engine queries that led surfers to YouTube videos.

Although amateur videos remain popular, the number one online video search in the four weeks up to February 17 was for television commercials shown during the recent US Superbowl game – something that will, no doubt, warm the cold steely hearts of their marketing dept.

According to Hitwise’s figures, the second most common video search was for “white and nerdy” while “Charlie the unicorn” came in at third.

We didn’t have a clue who the chuffin’ Nora Charlie the unicorn was so we looked it up. And boy, was it rubbish.

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.

European PS3: No Emotion Engine: PS2 Compatibility Limited 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

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.

Sky To Pull Channels From Virgin Media: Offering Discounts 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.