Category: Content

Content

Let Your Mood Dictate the Music

Biometric feedback as an input device is an idea that’s been floating around for a while, but researchers at MIT’s Media Lab Europe have developed a musical “game” that allows your mood to influence the music, rather than the other way round.

When your mood changes, so does your skin resistance (just ask the CIA), and MIT’s project, called Peace Composed, uses a pair of biometric sensors to measure it. This is then used to compose a piece of music based on seven different layers of instruments, including bass, piano, strings and wind instruments.

The application has obvious stress management uses, provided you’re not to stressed or overworked to actually get round to using it, and makes a fitting companion piece to “Relax to Win”, a program developed to help children with anxiety and stress problems. We don’t know why, but the title really appeals to us.

BBC News

BBCi Launches One-Minute Movies – “It’s not a competition.”

One Minute Movies is a new site from BBCi, and it’s designed to give everyone the chance to show their short film to the world.

The site gives the reason they’re doing it: “There are many websites about making films but we thought they were all a bit too serious, a bit too technical. The spirit behind One-Minute Movies is to just pick up a camera and shoot.”

With strong advice and tips on story, directing, sound and editing the site even has a small collection of classical music you can download and use for your own project. Tips come from professional film makers like David Lynch and Ann Coates and there’s also a facility for sending on your own tips and discussing them on the message board.

The rules are simple – basically it has to be all your own work and not break any laws. It doesn’t even need to be only a minute long.

We like this idea. Although the idea is not unique to the BBC, they are getting high profile exposure for what we feel will become a popular form of content, particularly on mobile devices.

They have made the smart move trying to ensure a certain degree of quality by providing lots of information about the process. The site concentrates on making films with the equipment lots of people would already have, without requiring any additional expense from software or hardware.

Although just about anyone could shoot a short film and host it themselves, having a movie on the BBC site will give it a much larger audience. Be aware though, as with all these things, submitting your film to BBCi gives them the right to do whatever they like with it, forever.

Making something only a minute long might seem simple, but it can be extremely challenging – and rewarding. Perhaps we’ll get round to finishing that stop-motion Lego film that nearly drove us insane at Christmas.

BBCi One Minute Movies

Brand Republic

The Magic Portal – sheer genius (requires DivX)

Gracenote CD Database Raises US$13 Million in Venture Capital Funding

A few years ago, it was just a convenient tool to show what tracks you were playing on your CD – but now Gracenote is an important tool for people who listen to music on their PC or iPod, whether they know it or not.

We can think of few tools which have gone from a nice feature to being absolutely essential – the rise of personal digital music players has made online CD databases absolutely essential if you want to rip your 1000+ collection of disks and still stay sane.

Many users of Gracenote don’t even know they’re accessing the service – most applicatons just nip off and download the data without them realising. More recent changes to Gracenote have meant that applications must be licensed to use the database, and must display the Gracenote logo when they access the service.

The company estimate that 150 million units of Gracenote-capable software were shipped in 2003, and that this will rise to 200 million in 2004.

Gracenote

FreeDB – an open source CD database

Starbucks Offering Customised CDs

Always keen to develop the Starbucks experience, the Seattle-based coffee house has partnered with Hewlett-Packard to give customers an innovative music product – personalised CDs burned to order.

We’ve all seen services offering tailor-made CDs before, where this service is different is in the customer interface. This one uses HP tablet PCs (and thankfully, headphones) so that punters can chose can choose from 250,000 licensed tracks and have a CD or two made up for them from their selection.

This could finally be a success for custom CDs – many initiatives in the past have failed because customers don’t really like standing in front of a kiosk for half an hour choosing tracks from a limited selection. Lounging around in a well-worn sofa drinking coffee and picking favourites from a library of a quarter of a million tunes is much more appealing.

A further benefit will be that customers to Starbucks will get more exposure to legal downloads and may be tempted to try similar services such as iTunes when they get home.

The service will be available in selected US branches from 16th March – if any DigLif readers get a chance to try it out, please drop us an email and let us know how you found it.

Business Week

What Starbucks did next

Sky Launch Virtual Horse Racing Channel

With CGI horses and a live studio commentary, Sky have launched a virtual racing channel for subscribers. Broadcasting from 6pm to 2am on Sky Digital channel 295, the channel will also allow punters to bet on the Super Keno draw, with a jackpot of £1 million.

Pete Ward, Executive Producer of Sky Vegas Live, said: “Sky Vegas Live gives viewers everything to play for – a slick and attractive channel with high pay-outs. The virtual TV studio will be the first of its kind and will give viewers the Vegas buzz in their living room and attract viewers who will enjoy a new betting experience.”

Presenting the channel will be National Lottery Live’s Gigi Morley and former Blue Peter host Stuart Miles.

Sky Vegas Live

School Bans Camera Phones

West Lothian Council has banned mobile camera phones from all 11 secondary schools and 66 primary schools in its area. The council stated misuse of the cameras as its motivation for the ruling – images can be used for bullying or more sinister purposes, though the council has yet to receive any complaints involving the phones.

The Gartner Group estimate that soon 80% of phones sold will feature cameras, and this is causing security problems in companies, as well as personal security issues. Many companies simply do not have the infrastructure, staff or budget to protect their business and employees from misuse of digital camera phones.

Information Week reports on Gartner

BBC News

Universal Music’s Entire Back Catalogue Ready for Download

Universal Music has digitised its back catalogue and signed a deal with OD2, currently Europe’s largest digital music distributor. We say currently, because iTunes and Napster have yet to launch in Europe – and Universal has deals in place with Apple and Roxio for when those music sites open up later this year. OD2 operates MyCokeMusic and MediaMarkt, amongst others.

The 300,000 tracks will not be available as MP3s – Universal is keen to use DRM to protect the tracks which are extremely popular and bound to appeal to music copiers, though customers will be able to burn tracks to CD and transfer them to audio players. Artists in the deal include Rob Zombie, The Orb and, of course, the talentlessly unpleasant ex-Soviet sock puppets T.A.T.U.

Universal Music on music downloads

OD2

BSkyB Announces Next Stage for Sky+

The Sky+ personal video recorder is set to evolve under new plans from BSkyB: they want to transform the PVR into a video and audio jukebox that subscribers can download films and music to.

Other plans include integrating five separate tuners – a move which will allow subscribers to record four channels simultaneously whilst watching a fifth.

Sky are also working on a technology that will allow Sky+ users to download content from their set top box to their portable video player so they can watch recorded programming whilst out an about.

Sky hopes to make £400 from each subscriber per year by the end of 2005. By building new functionality into their Sky+ product and then charging on a service by service basis, they should be able to earn significantly more revenue per customer, on top of the basic £15 subscription fee.

Since most domestic users are unlikely to ever want to record four separate programmes whilst watching a fifth, it seems to Digital Lifestyles that BSkyB will probably use this new capability to download films and programming to the PVR automatically, to a dedicated area of the hard disk. This will then allow Sky to promote the programming and offer it to to subscribers on an impulse buy, pay-per-view basis.

Media Guardian on Sky’s plans

Napster Will Launch in UK by “End of Summer”

Coming after shares in parent company Roxio surged last week (on a rumour that Microsoft will be integrating support for the music download service), Napster has announced that it will be launching in the UK at the end of the Summer. This coincides with the approximate time that Apple have publicised for their eagerly awaited UK debut of iTunes – and by then iTunes will have served well over 100 million tracks.

After iTunes, Napster is the most recognised music download brand – no pricing has been announced but it’s likely that subscribers will be able to burn tracks at the usual US$0.99 price point offered by competing services.

Coming Soon

New Sony Products Shown at Open House

Sony’s Open House event this year covered all the key consumer devices – from HDTV recorders, and new Handycams to extremely desirable PDAs with more bells and whistles than a bus load of Morris dancers crashing into a flute factory.

Sony are going for integration even more than usual – HDTVs have integrated card readers for cable users, Clié PDAs and VAIO notebooks feature even sharper cameras and better wireless access than before, and MP3 support filters into products where there was previously only ATRAC.

More details from DVD Format