Media that works across a number of platforms
We know you love it when people port software on to unlikely platforms, so thought you’d like to see this video of the old (pre-osx) Mac operating system running on an Sony PSP.
How real it is, isn’t 100% clear, but it appears to be running a PSP version of Basilisk II, an open-source Macintosh Emulator project, called, unsurprisingly, Basilisk II PSP.
(Video follows) Continue reading Basilisk II PSP: Running PSP Mac 7.5 OS: Video
We know Tech is hitting all media businesses, but how are they currently responding?
Howard Scott went along to a meeting, Talking Tech, organised by the European Sponsorship Association to investigate the current state of play – covering the world of TV, Music and entertainment marketing.
Today’s piece covers North One TV; tomorrow, Sony BMG; and the final piece, Kempster, their work with European football and the conclusion.
Highlighting through italics are ours.
ESA Talking Tech
Another day, another conference. A couple of weeks back I attended the ESA Sponsorship Seminar entitled Talking Tech. Even though the title was “Talking Tech” I didn’t let that put me off.
It was aimed at the Sponsorship industry with a slant to how digital tools (lots of reference to new media, but is it still new?) have/can/will later that side of the marketing business.
The panel of speakers for the event had some interesting people on board, and in my usual style I’ll go through each of them in turn now.
Continue reading TV, Music and Marketing: Their Current Response To Digital Media
Apple has also announced the summer release of Final Cut Server, a cross-platform (Mac+PC) piece of software designed to serve the Final Cut’s 800,000+ users, alongside its announcement of Final Cut Studio 2.
We think that given the Mac OS is based on a form of Unix, and Apples dislike for Microsoft, it’s surprising that Apple hasn’t released a Linux-based server.
The software automatically catalogues large collections of assets and lets editors collaborate and share videos with each other, supported by keyword searching of video clips, access controls and workflow templates.
This is an aggressive move by Apple into the area that has until now been dominated by highly specialised video editing packages.
Final Cut Server will cost $999 (£649) for a 10-user license or $1999 (£1,299) for one server and unlimited concurrent users.
It is expected to be released in Summer 2007.
Joost went ‘off air’ yesterday – ie. no one could use it to access TV programmes.
All was revealed today as to why. The SSL certificates that are used to encrypt all communication between the clients and the Joost servers ran out, as certificates do each year.
Much to their embarrassment, Joost had hard-coded the details of the certificate into their client software. Now they’ve extracted it, they need to release a new build, hence the 0.9.2 release.
Knowing they’d be offline while the software was being rebuilt, they’ve upgraded their Long Term Storage machines replacing them with ones that are four times more efficient. They’re hoping this will straighten out any problems that might have been present with stuttering video delivery.
As Dirk-Willem from Joost says, “this is all part of being a beta.”
The heat on Apple to open up their iTunes/iPod combination went up another notch following an interview with Meglena Kuneva, the European Union’s Consumer Protection Commissioner.
In the interview with German weekly magazine Focus, published today, she poses the following question, “”Do you think it’s fine that a CD plays in all CD players but that an iTunes song only plays in an iPod?” It’s followed by a couple of words that are going to make uncomfortable reading for Apple, “I don’t. Something has to change.”
Music bought on the Apple iTunes online shop cannot be played on any other music player, apart from Apple’s iPod.
Kuneva is carrying out a review of the eight basic laws which govern cross-border consumer rights.
Pressure has been building for quite a while against Apple, with the latest, most significant one being in January as the Norwegian Consumer Watchdog, declaring iTunes to be illegal.
Previous actions have been, the approval of France’s ‘iTunes Law,’ after Apple narrowly avoided the French courts over their FairPlay DRM back in 2004.
Apple leader, Steve Jobs, wrote an open letter at the start of last month, entitled “Thoughts on Music,” where he said he’d drop DRM “in a heartbeat,” but was hamstrung by the content owners not allowing him to do so.
Like hungry puppies with sharp teeth, Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari Web browsers continue to chew and gnaw away at the juicy legs of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE).
According to new figures from Web metrics company, Net Applications, February saw both Firefox and Safari grab a bigger share of the browser market as IE’s share continues to shrink.
Firefox – which comes in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux flavours – increased its share from 13.7 percent in January to 14.2 percent, while the Mac OSX Safari browser had a small but noticeable shimmy upwards, from to 4.7 percent from 4.85 percent.
Despite dropping in the rankings, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still retains the Billy Bunter share of the browser market, devouring 79.1 percent (down from last month’s 79.8 percent.)
“After a minor hiccup in January, Firefox seems to be back on the offensive in February,” said the fabulously named Vincent Vizzaccaro, Net Applications’ executive vice president of marketing and strategic relationships.
“January showed a brief halt to Firefox’s assault on Microsoft Internet Explorer’s market share. Could that have come from new Vista machines?” asked Mr VV.
Before any hands could be raised in answer, the double V man delivered his verdict, “Possibly, but it appears that browser users have gone back to switching to Firefox, Safari and Opera.”
The well liked Opera browser also saw its market share rise a smidgeon, but it’s still deep in the niche territory, registering just 0.79 percent in February, up from 0.73 percent from last month.
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.
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.
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?
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