Digital-Lifestyles

Content

Content in its shift to become digital

  • Sales in Virtual Goods Surpasses $100m

    Real-world trading based on virtual items is at least three years old, but it’s only now that researchers have estimated that online trading already rivals the gross domestic product of some small countries. According to an article publishing on NewScientist.com, the real figures are likely to be much higher, where virtual worlds are booming in China and Japan

    The technology of real-world economies is based on the value of persistent world game characters and items. For example, you can buy Ultima Online and EverQuest characters on eBay, exchanging actual money for ‘imaginary’ game items, such as clothing and weaponry. Nevertheless, trade in these digital goods continues to grow, and it has already gone from being a pastime pursued only by a handful of hardcore gamers, to being a fledgling industry in its own right.

    There’s even an online service to help players of online games trade their commodities more easily and freely. The Gaming Online Market (GOM) is a Canada-based online venture founded by Jamie Hale and Tom Merrall that aims to be the first true stock brokerage for online worlds. GOM currently allows players of online games to pay in US dollars, or exchange currency from one game to another at the current going rate. Before now, these have been trades restricted mainly to eBay auctions, along with all the risks associated with such transactions. Having said that, eBay facilitated the selling of $9 million in trades for Internet games last year (excluding Sony’s Everquest).

    The coming together of real and online worlds has a far more widespread reach than games. For instance, virtual spaces will increasingly be used as assembly points to carry out business meetings and as physics simulators to experiment with building physical objects. Some companies are also using virtual worlds to try out design products, such as clothes, before attempting to market them in the real world.

  • Vodafone’s betting heavily on 3G this Christmas

    Vodafone live! with 3G enhances Vodafone live! by providing customers with faster access to content and the ability to see more and share more with the use of video. The company’s 3G services will further add video calling, video messaging, a richer music experience, new games, as well as video clips.

    A return on investment is critical for Vodafone, who has spent some £8 billion on top of the £14 billion it had to fork out for 3G licenses (Vodafone and its four UK rivals paid around £22.5 billion for the 3G licences). Of this investment, The Observer newspaper reckons that £8 billion has been spent on network infrastructure, with a little more going on R&D, and some £100 million earmarked for advertising. David Beckham will feature prominently as the mobile giant launches a pre-Christmas advertising blitz, promoting video downloads and other bandwidth-hungry services made possible by advanced colour-screen handsets and the higher connection speeds of 3G networks.

    The new high-speed service uses a completely different network to the standard Vodafone live! service. The company has built it so that whenever you are outside a 3G service area, you will continue to access all the services, but the speed to access will be reduced. Video calling or streaming content will not be possible and the service will stop if moving off the 3G network. You should know when you’re in a 3G service area because a small 3G symbol will appear on the screen of your handset.

    As well as content, 3G service providers will have to distinguish themselves with coverage. For instance, Vodafone claims about 60 per cent population coverage, but much of that will be in London and a few other metropolitan areas. Orange, which also plans to launch its 3G offering before Christmas, said its initial network deployment would be more extensive. Alexis Dormandy, Orange’s chief marketing officer, told The Sunday Times:: “We have a much larger, broader network because it’s supposed to be a mobile network rather than a ‘stay-in-one-place’ network.”

    With such a big financial commitment to 3G, it’s vital that Vodafone has to get its 3G marketing right. Thankfully, it will be launching its service with no fewer than 10 mobile handsets (as we’ve covered), a problem Hutchison encountered when it launched its ‘3’ service a year or so ago.

    Vodafone

  • VoIP Threatens Traditional Telcos Revenue

    It comes as little surprise that a new report from Analysys, global advisers on telecoms, IT and media, reports that over 50 million broadband users in Western Europe could potentially be using private Voice over Internet Protocol Applications (PVAs) by 2008. As a result, the impact on traditional telephony providers’ revenues could reach 6.4 billion euros (~$8.23Bn, ~£4.47Bn) in 2008, representing 13 per cent of the residential fixed-line voice market.

    VoIP technology – used in excellent applications such as Skype – works by digitising voice in data packets, sending them over the Internet using TCP/IP networks, and then reconverting them into voice at the destination. As well as offering a ‘free’ alternative for voice conversations compared to traditional fixed lines, you can also compress voice packets, route them, convert them to a new better format, and so on – bypassing the existing PSTN network.

    Digital signals are also more noise tolerant than analogue ones – a feature appreciated by users communicating overseas. With VoIP, you can also talk all the time with every person you want (as long as the other person is also connected to Internet at the same time) for no call charges. And, in addition, you can talk with multiple people (conference call) at the same time.

    Analysys advises that incumbent public switched telephone network (PSTN) operators are highly vulnerable and should assess the weaker segments of their market and create targeted packages to retain valuable customers. They also advise that service providers should also make subscriptions the core of their service packages.

    “The recent rapid take-up of Private Voice Applications (PVAs) using free downloadable software from providers such as Skype raises the possibility of the appearance of a critical mass of PVA users that could unleash a significant structural change in the voice market by the removal of a large proportion of PSTN revenues,” says report co-author Stephen Sale. “In the residential market, PVAs are typically used to make longer calls to friends and family, the core telephony business of fixed-line incumbents. In combination with increased mobile usage, this could render the PSTN subscription worthless for many broadband users. Fixed-line voice would face not only mobile substitution, but PVA substitution as well.”

    The report, Voice Communications: From Public Service to Private Application, examines the potential impact of these applications on the residential voice market. It uses new market models to show that, given favourable future regulatory and other conditions, the rapid adoption of PVAs could generate direct revenues of over 3.5 billion euros (~$4.5Bn, ~£2.44Bn), the bulk (about 85 per cent) stemming from subscriptions, not call charges.

    This emphasises the huge importance that the subscription element will have in a future multiservice mix and in establishing PVAs in the mass market. Further research from consultancy firm Mercer has suggested that Internet-based phone services could be in use by up to 30 per cent of homes in the UK and the US in the next three years.

    The report is available to purchase online at http://research.analysys.com/stor, priced at £1,700 (approximately 2,500 euros).

  • Hantro Claim Better Mobile Video Compression

    Finland-based Hantro has made further advances in the mobile video market with its new H.264 hardware accelerated video decoder. The technology can be implemented into regular consumer mobile handsets and promises to enable a dramatic improvement in the quality of video clips.

    Hantro’s H.264 player runs on Series 60-powered handsets and is based on the 6100 software decoder and PlayEngine middleware. Running on a Nokia 7610 handset, full-screen video is capable of being played back at a resolution of 208×176 pixels (supports resolutions up to 720×576 pixels) at up to 15 frames-per-second. Unfortunately, the frame rate is still half of that of standard video playback, but it provides an important step forward in the development cycle of technology that will soon become standard on all phones.

    H.264 is the latest video coding standard for improved compression over existing standards, such as MPEG-4 and H.263. With comparable bitrates, the increase in visual quality is significant, according to the company, which also means that you can maintain acceptable video quality (comparable to MPEG-4) with up to a 50 per cent reduction in file size. This makes the application ideally suited for wireless transmissions as it expands the potential of applications such as streaming video to mobile over GPRS, video downloads and mobile TV.

    For instance, with improved transmission speed and playback quality, businesses could leverage their marketing to potential customers by sending short video clips instead of SMS alerts. By adhering to the existing file size limitations for MMS, the improved compression ratios should allow for approximately twice the length of video clip at the same visual quality to that of MPEG-4.

    The software’s multimedia engine provides a high level API for fast application development, a completely modular design, support for both hardware and software MPEG-4/H.263 video codecs, as well as GSM-AMR speech and AAC audio encoding/decoding. Compatible with 3GPP streaming protocols (RTP/RTCP/RTSP/SDP), its core modules and application logic are OS independent, and are therefore easily ported to numerous operating systems and devices, if multimedia APIs are available. It can also encode 4-megapixel JPEG still images, which will further appeal to manufacturers of battery-operated handheld devices.

    “We are very pleased with the performance that we have achieved with this product”, said Sami Niska, Product Manager, Hantro. “This software implementation clearly demonstrates the capability of H.264. By providing a short time-to-market, the 6100 software decoder is an ideal solution for device manufacturers and network operators looking to leverage the immediate potential of applications made possible by this new coding standard.”

    Decoding H.264 with general purpose microprocessors and digital signal processors (DSPs) is much more complex than that of existing video standards, which can lead to trade-offs in supported image sizes and power management. To overcome this problem, Hantro has also developed silicon designs which, once integrated into a chip, support higher resolutions and will reduce power consumption considerably when compared to software implementations.

    Hantro

  • Opera browser is about to get even faster

    Oslo-based Opera Software, best known for its Opera Web browser, has announced that it plans to integrate SlipStream Data’s Web and e-mail acceleration technology into the next release of its desktop Web browser. Set to integrate into Opera 7.60, Opera claims that it will enable users up to six times faster browsing on dial-up and wireless connections, a particularly neat feature for those with limited bandwidth.

    SlipStream Data’s Web Accelerator technology only accelerates certain text and graphics on Web pages, so it won’t speed up everything you do on the Internet. However, both companies claim that with Web Accelerator you will notice a significantly faster experience when you visit Web sites, send and receive e-mail, and perform other Web-based activities. To achieve this speed up, proprietary lossless compression is applied to text, HTML, XML, JavaScript and style sheets. Proprietary image compression is applied to GIF and JPEG images, as well as to Flash content.

    SlipStream also accelerates e-mail traffic (POP3 and SMTP) using lossless compression, but does not speed up file downloads (over FTP or file sharing programs), streaming audio/video and HTTPS (secure Web sites). If you have a slow Internet connection (such as a dial-up or wireless connection) with a bandwidth of less than 300Kbit/s, you should experience a significant degree of acceleration using SlipStream, boldly claims the company.

    However, SlipStream Web Accelerator does not increase the speed of file downloads such as music files, or streaming video or audio media. Opera 7.60 is set to usher in more innovative browsing features – something we’ve come to expect from its developers. The public release of v7.60 is planned for the end of 2004.

    SlipStream is currently supported by over 900 ISPs worldwide, according to the company, with its popularity due to that way that it allows service providers to offer a faster and more flexible way of rolling out value-added services. SlipStream SE (Secure Enterprise) further optimises bandwidth and improves the performance of Web-based applications, accelerating secure access to e-mails, FTP and other critical business data.

    “SlipStream is the dominant acceleration solution provider for ISPs in North America, South America, and Europe,” says Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “Their innovation and reputation for service, makes them an ideal partner. We are eager to work together to deliver an improved experience in installation, operation, and support to enterprises and users wanting more Web speed and performance.”

    “As Opera is known as the fastest browser on earth, the decision to consider the browser for this integration was simple,” says Ron Neumann, President, SlipStream Data. “Our goal is to offer a superior accelerated browsing experience on any platform and Opera’s multiplatform support helps achieve this. This integration gives ISPs increased support and speed for their users, and will also significantly increase the productivity of mobile workers. Such a partnership helps us continue to expand and embed our technology into new markets.”

    As well as its speed, another key factor in Opera’s success that the browser is cross-platform and modular, and currently available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, BREW, QNX, TRON, FreeBSD, Solaris and Mediahighway platforms.

  • Yahoo Hires Former ABC TV Exec

    What better person to appoint to head your media and entertainment division than a Hollywood executive with shows like ‘The Sopranos’, ‘Lost’, ‘Desperate Housewives’, ‘Wife Swap’ and ‘Boston Legal’ under his belt? Prior to this, he served as co-chairman of the division with responsibility for all creative, programming and business areas of the division, which encompassed Touchstone Television and ABC Entertainment.

    The man in question is former ABC Entertainment Television chairman Lloyd Braum, and he will oversee Yahoo’s movies, TV, entertainment, music, games, finance, news and weather, sports, health and kids businesses. He will also do the negotiating with Hollywood to release exclusive content on Yahoo, as well as developing original new content within the company. It has been reported that he was fired from his ABC post in April following disagreements over the direction and management of the network, which had fallen to fourth place in the ratings.

    His main task will be to convince movie, TV and music companies to distribute more content exclusively on Yahoo. His impressive pre-ABC resume reads like he is tailor-made to do some convincing – chairman of Disney’s Buena Vista Television Productions, president of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, and partner at the law firm of Silverberg, Katz, Thompson & Braun.

    Yahoo already took the Hollywood route a few years ago when it appointed former Warner Bros. chairman Terry Semel as its CEO in 2001. In recent months, the company has signed several deals to provide related Web content for popular television shows such as NBC’s “The Apprentice” and CBS’ “Survivor”.

    It’s all about getting exclusive content. In September, Yahoo announced that it would produce, host and sell advertising for the official Web site of reality TV show, “The Apprentice,” in which contestants battle to win a job working for real-estate mogul Donald Trump.

  • HomeChoice now Quad-play, Adding Phones

    Video Networks Ltd. (VNL) is upping their game with their HomeChoice service. It has announced the addition of a home phone service to its already rather ample HomeChoice bundle of broadband Internet, digital TV and video-on-demand, making it a serious contender for both home entertainment and communications. The service will be delivered using Carrier Pre-Selection, and VNL also plans to offer line rental in 2005. Carrier Pre-Selection entails them using BT lines to carry the phone traffic to VNL networks for delivery.

    Currently the service isn’t using VoIP, but we understand from them that they may move to this in the New Year. They certainly have the equipment and bandwidth available to provide it.

    HomeChoice customers can opt for either ‘Free Evening and Weekend’ calls at no additional cost, or have the option to upgrade to the ‘Anytime’ talk plan from £5 (~$9) per month. Both offering lower rates to UK mobiles and overseas numbers than similar plans from BT, TalkTalk, One.Tel, NTL and Telewest.

    The ‘Free Evenings and Weekends’ talk plan offers, the obvious, free evening and weekend calls to all local and national numbers starting with 01 & 02, and a daytime rate of 2.5p to those numbers.

    ‘Anytime’ talk plan includes calls to all local and national numbers starting 01 & 02. It costs £9 (~$16) per month for 512Kb broadband customers, £7 (~$12) per month for 1Mb broadband customers, and £5 (~$9) per month for 2Mb broadband customers.

    You don’t need a special box or a prefix code. You can use your existing phone and phone number, and the existing standard BT line in your house, for which you will still pay rental. But you have to take VNL’s broadband and digital TV services to avail of the free calls.

    The first to offer four services in the UK, VNL geared itself up for this expansion earlier in the year by appointing Vijay Sodiwala, former managing director at Broadsystem Ventures, a News Corporation company, to develop the home phone services.

    The service faces stiff competition from rival fixed line offerings such as Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk brand, One.Tel, BT, NTL and Telewest, but no doubt the £1 million (~$1,841,100) marketing push will give it a kick start, and hopefully (pardon the pun) ringing endorsements.

    HomeChoice

  • Premier 3G Concert Broadcast

    U2 special edition iPods, ‘phone cast’ Rooster concerts on 3G mobile phones, Robbie Williams new video premiered on 3 mobile phones – is rock becoming virtual?

    Avoid the crowds, the heat, the general mayhem, (but sadly also the atmosphere) and virtually experience live gigs on your 3G mobile phone wherever you are, and make as many calls as you want during the intermission.

    Yesterday in London, rock band, Rooster played the first ever concert broadcast by 3G mobile phone. Rooster was chosen because 3 is already in partnership with their record label, BMG. The 45-minute gig was really a trial run by 3 to discover more about how people use their video phones. 3, which already provides 1.2 million customers with 3G services in the UK, has already planned a series of gigs to happen throughout 2005, and is hoping that the move will lure more people into buying video phones.

    The broadcast was trailed on Rooster’s Web site and on 3’s own phone-based news and entertainment channel, and about 10,000 people signed up for a free pre-gig reminder. Ten minutes before start-up, these 10,000 users were sent an SMS inviting them to visit a “virtual box office” where they could pay £5 to view the gig, and the first 1,000 were admitted.

    Another world first was the release of Robbie Williams’ new video ‘Misunderstood’, exclusive for a week on 3 video mobiles before being premiered on the TV or the Web. The deal between EMI and 3 allows fans to either stream or download the video straight to their mobiles. This is a clever choice since the video for ‘Misunderstood’ – which features in the Bridget Jones sequel, ‘The Edge of Reason’ – includes clips from the forthcoming film.

    Staying in the digital arena, Robbie Williams also recently announced the release of his greatest hits album on memory-card format for mobile phones, which will be released this month.

    Some commentators might say these developments let fans get closer to artists, and if you were selling the equipment you would say that, wouldn’t you?

    “It sounds exactly as you would expect a live band playing down a telephone line to sound”, says Alexis Petridis today in his Guardian review of the Rooster event – “a Library Of Congress field recording from the 1930s.”

    http://www.roosterofficial.com http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1342211,00.html

  • Nokia: Crown Castle joins to pilot DVB-H technology

    Yet another chapter is unfolding in the battle to bring the TV screen and its contents to the mobile masses. And it’s all being made possible with global digital technology, as the first US pilot of DVB-H takes place. DVB-H is a standard specified by the Digital Video Broadcasting Organization specifically for the transmission of TV-like content and data to handheld devices, such as mobile phones. Nokia and Crown Castle have joined ranks to pilot DVB-H technology in the United States. Crown Castle already offers significant wireless communications coverage to 68 of the top 100 United States markets, and owns, operates and manages over 10,600 wireless communication sites in the U.S. The whole point of the exercise is to bring TV-like services to mobile devices. The pilot commenced in October, and aims to prove and test the feasibility of DVB-H technology and related service systems in this market space. The next step will be to expand the pilot to test consumer experiences and acceptance of a mobile phone TV service. Spokespeople from Nokia and Crown Castle aired their views in yesterday’s press release. “We believe this may be an important new technology for our company and our industry. We look forward to partnering with content providers and wireless service providers to introduce commercial services utilising the nation-wide spectrum that we acquired in 2003 and our extensive portfolio of US towers”, said Michael Schueppert, Senior Vice President – Business Development for Crown Castle. On the Nokia side, Seppo Sutela, Director, Rich Media, Nokia said, “Piloting with Crown Castle is a major milestone for Nokia. It will expand mobile phone TV services to United States, giving DVB-H standard a truly global reach. Mobile phone TV, based on DVB-H, will provide new attractive consumer services as well as business opportunities for all parties in the business system. Our pilot with Crown Castle is an important step towards that.” www.nokia.com
    www.crowncastle.com

  • VoD, NVoD & DVR All to Grow In Europe – Yankee

    Combined Annual VoD and NVoD revenue will increase fivefold to Euro 2.2 Billion by 2008, while DVR service penetration will also increase to 20% of Western European Digital TV Homes by 2008, says Yankee Group.

    Video on demand (VoD) and digital video recording (DVR) are phrases that service providers are getting very used to – because that is where their business is heading, and both will “coexist as complementary options for digital TV customers,” says Jonathan Doran, Yankee Group Broadband & Media Europe senior analyst, in yesterday’s news release.

    Yankee predicts that Video-on-demand (VoD) and its variants will account for an increasing proportion of digital TV revenue in Western Europe, with products like FastWeb and arrivo accounting for a growing proportion of European pay-TV revenue in the next 3 to 5 years.

    Two reports, On-Demand TV, Part 1: VoD Will Grow Europe’s Pay-TV Markets, but Not Much, and On-Demand TV, Part 2: Operators Must Move Fast to Add DVR to Their Digital Proposition, mention some challenges that VoD must face. Cable operators, for example, will have to fork out for digital upgrade costs and provision of customer-premises equipment, while satellite operators won’t be able to provide true VoD services if they don’t have a return path. Furthermore, while services such as Sky+ and PILOTIME are showing strong initial appeal among early adopters, high subscription fees will deter many users.

    But most importantly, Yankee says platform operators will have to recognise that VoD represents an enhancement of the digital TV value proposition rather than a core application, so that although VoD will become an intrinsic part of digital TV, it will only account for a modest share of overall service revenue.

    Operator-provided DVR service faces numerous challenges, Yankee warns, like competition from standalone retail DVR and DVD-R units. However, as equipment prices continue to fall and platform operators increase their marketing push, consumer adoption of DVR service is increasing. “DVR services will be more widely and frequently used by digital TV subscribers than regular VoD offerings that are limited to the less ubiquitous cable and broadband platforms,” says Jonathan Doran.

    It’s still more theoretical than practical at the moment, so many cable operators will have to play it safe and offer both VoD and DVR until a demand pattern is established.