Content – Page 192 – Digital-Lifestyles

Apple Hits 25m Song Downloads

Further success for Apple have been announced as they declare they have now sold 25 million downloaded song through their iTunes music store, which is currently only operating in America. At this rate they are selling at an average of 1.5 million downloads a month.

Appropriately for this time of year the 25th million track was “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” by Frank Sinatra.

One of the new features introduced into iTunes 2.0 was the ability to purchase online gift certificates for others and to give download allowances for children, who do not have their own credit cards. Over $1 million dollars (~€812,420, ~£572,600) worth of these, vary between $20-$200, have been sold since October.

This announcement comes on the heals of US Time magazine naming iTunes Music Store as the Invention of 2003.

Apple iTunes

Time – Invention of 2003

Canada OK’s P2P Music Downloads

The Copyright Board of Canada has decided that the downloading of music for personal user from peer-to-peer networks is legal, but uploading files to them is not. Canada’s copyright law allow making a copy for personal use and does not address the source of that copy or whether the original has to be an authorised or non-infringing version.

Clearly the recording industry does not like or agree with the opinion. Richard Pfohl, general counsel for the Canadian Recording Industry Association said, “This is the opinion of the Copyright Board, but Canadian courts will decide this issue.”

Currently Canadians, and a number of other countries, pay a levy on recordable media; audio tapes (29¢C, ~$0.22, ~€0.18, ~£0.13), MiniDisc (77¢C, ~$0.59, ~€0.48, ~£0.34) and blank data (21¢C, ~$0.16, ~€0.13, ~£0.09) and audio CDs (77¢C, ~$0.59, ~€0.48, ~£0.34). Non-removable memory permanently embedded in MP3 players have now been added to this list, with C$2 (~$1.52, ~€1.24, ~£0.87) up to 1Gb of data, C$15 (~$11.41, ~€9.27, ~£6.54) for between 1Gb – 10Gb and C$25 (~$19.02, ~€15.45, ~£10.89) above 10Gb.

Interestingly, Digital Audio Tape (DAT), micro-cassettes, rewritable DVDs, removable memory cards (such as SmartMedia, CompactFlash and Secure Digital Memory cards) and removable micro hard drives are not currently covered.

The levies will be collected from the manufacturers and distributed to music companies and rights holders via the Canadian Private Copying Collective, a non-profit agency. It is expected that the levies will be passed on to the consumer.

Canadian Private Copying Collective

BT Launch Residential VoIP Service

UK telecom incumbent, BT, have released a Voice over IP (VoIP) service that they have labelled Broadband Voice. Aimed exclusively at residential customers with broadband connections, whether they be ADSL’s supplied or wholesaled by BT or cable connections, and it is designed to take the puff out of the sales of the cable providers triple-play.

The initial offering has been designed to appeal. Until 31 March 2004, customers are given a free telephone adapter, which looks like a Cisco AT-186, free service features and free evening & weekend calls, all for £7.50 (~$13, ~€11) per month, provided that you sign up for a twelve-month contract. We feel the 12-month commitment customer have to give is partially due to paying back the equipment, but is far more likely to be about BT making an early move in VoIP and trying to capture customers before competition starts.

The move to offer VoIP has surprise many observes as well as, it appears, BT themselves. When we contacted the “dedicated” Broadband Voice phone line, we were connected to the normal Broadband support line as the “dedicated line hasn’t been set up yet”. We later learnt that the service was going to be launched a week before, on the 1.Dec.03, but had to be postponed due to it not being ready. When explaining that the Web site wasn’t able to take orders currently, we were told “Problem with the site – it’s chaos here”. Only one person at the call centre had been trained and not exactly thoroughly; 1/2 day yesterday, 2 hrs the day before.

Voice over IP is now commonplace in the corporate sector, but clearly BT aren’t try to assist SME to take advantage of this. Business customers are not able to sign up for the service, but this isn’t exactly clearly signposted, being that it is only mentioned once, as item four in the terms and conditions.

The reality is that BT doesn’t really want this to be popular, as it will take away large amount of income for them; it’s a defensive move.

BT Broadband Voice

Coke To Sell Music Online in the UK

Soft Drinks company, Coca Cola, will be launching a pay-for legal music download service in the UK in January 2004. They are teaming up with OD2, who provide the technology, and will be offering more than a quarter of a million of tracks.

It is thought that this will be a major boost to the profile of downloadable music given their recent controversial deal to sponsor the BBC’s Top Of The Pops TV pop show and the BBC Radio 1’s weekly top 40 countdown show. Given the target of these shows it is strange that the system will only be usable by people over 18, as a credit card is needed to purchase tracks.

A spokesperson for HMV, high street music sellers, was clearly deluded in their comments, “From a retailer’s point of view, we feel confident that people will stick to established retailers that have a lot of experience in the area. They can offer expertise and depth of knowledge and we feel the vast majority of record buyers would want to continue buying from these sources,” but they would say that wouldn’t they.

MyCokeMusic.com

Mobile Phone Ringtones Reach Realism

News reaches us that Oki Electric Industry have launched a new range of chips for mobile phones that plays 64 polyphonies simultaneously with eight octaves. If you are slightly lost with this, let us translate; a mobile phone equipped with one of these will be able to have a ringtone capable of playing music with up to 64 musical notes sounding at once, from a range of notes far greater than the human voice (as high as five octave is rare).

This is the third generation of Oki’s Swing’nRinger sound generators and doubles the number of notes that can play simultaneously. As with previous generations ships they will be programmable using MIDI files. Samples will be shipping from December this year and volume shipping will start in March 2004

It is interesting that the technology appears to be catching up with the views of the industry. In our discussions with people taking music in to the digital world, they have been muttering about the next stage in ringtones being complete music track singles being used as ringtones. This technology will bring the rendition of the music to a more familiar sound.

Oki Swing’nRinger Press release

British Film Institute Open Archives Online

The British Film Institute (bfi) have announced a Website, screenonline, that provides access to a selection of their extensive archive of film and television footage. Each item is categorised and cross referenced, presenting an impressive extensive depth of information; including synopsis, cast listing, biographies, photographs; such as production stills and scripts.

The bfi have secured licensing for many video and audio clips from the productions, which will be accessible to every UK school, further education college and public library.

The bfi will continue to expand the material as it becomes available and as rights for clips are cleared.

screenonline site

3 Launch Cartoon Service

Three UK, the 3G mobile phone operator, has launched a cartoon messaging service today, a first in Europe.

US-based company FunMail will provide licenced cartoons such as Dilbert, South Park, Garfield and Peanuts. There are two parts to the FunMail Toons offering; enhanced messaging, aimed at Three customers who want to message friends, effectively with SMS on steroids; and Dilbert cartoons, delivered direct to handsets, selected from the best available.

The animated cartoons will be delivered using MMS and will arrive complete with music and sound. Given the flat colours and simple line drawing used, cartoons are easy to compress, ensuring they will be quick to download, while retaining their original look.

3 UK

FunMail

Thomson Announce Portable Multimedia Player

Giant media group, Thomson, has announced the launch of a portable multimedia player that has 20Gb of hard drive storage and a built in colour screen which plays videos, show photographs and plays music. Sold in two guises, Europe (THOMSON LYRA Audio/Video Jukebox PDP 2860 – €749, ~£520) and USA (RCA RD2780 – $499.99), it will play back both MPEG-1 & MPEG-4 video and mp3, Windows Media Audio. It can also be upgraded to mp3PRO.

Depending on the compression used, Thomson claim the unit can hold up to eighty hours of video, which can either be played on its own screen (3.5-inch Thin Film Transistor (TFT) LCD ) or displayed on a television set using analog composite leads. Alternatively the unit can either be used as portable computer storage, store up to 5,000 music tracks or 100,000 JPEG images. Images can be organized into slideshows to accompany the playback of music.

The content can either loaded via a computer (PC or Mac), using a USB 2.0 connection, or the unit can either record video; using it built in MPEG-4 encoder, and audio directly. When the unit encodes video content, forty hours of content can be stored.

Battery life is reported to last up to twelve hours when playing music but only four when playing back video.

The unit is pretty compact (5.31″ x 3.15″ x 1.06″, 13.5cm x 8.00cm x 2.70cm) and light (10.5 ounces, under 300g) and we suspect will seduce many enough to add it to their xmas list.

RCA RD2780

VoIP Provider, Vonage, Raises $35m

Voice over IP (VoIP) has been discussed for a long time, but has now reached a point where the quality of voice calls rival traditional phone networks. By converting the spoken voice in to data packets and transferring them over an IP network, phone calls to anywhere in the world can be made at a near-zero cost. A number of companies have packaged the equipment and infrastructure required in to easy to use and understand monthly-charge bundles. One of the highest profile is Vonage Inc, based in Edison, New Jersey, USA.

Today they announced that they had raised $35m in Series B Venture Capital funding, raising the total amount they have raised to $65.3m. This round was lead by New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

They currently have 70,000 lines in service and say they are adding 10,000 extra a month and plan to use the newly raised money to expanding their service, increase their marketing. Chief financial officer John Rego said he expects the company to become profitable by mid-2004.

Traditional telco’s will have a major problem with revenue, particularly on high margin International calls, if VoIP becomes the norm, as they will only be able to gain revenue by supplying the broadband connection that VoIP requires to function. Mobile phone operator income could also be threatened if VoIP phones, like Vocera that we reported on in October 2002, that work on wireless (WiFi) networks become widespread.

While bundling companies like Vonage currently make VoIP easy to adopt, their income is not guaranteed either. It is possible to connect directly to another VoIP user and other organisations such as Free World Dialup (FWD) provide interconnection services free of charge. Interestingly FWD has 75,000 users, exceeding the 70,000 that Vonage currently has.

Vonage

New Enterprise Associates (NEA)

Free World Dialup

First European “Over the Air” Music Download Service Launched

mm02, UK cellular provider, have launched the first European “over the air” music download service.

To use the service, prospective customers must buy a separate music player, the “O2 Digital Music Player” (O2 DMP), which connects to the online service through their mobile phone, either via an Infra-red port or a short cable. Once connected via GPRS, they are able to browse the selection of music, preview tracks and then purchase them. Previews are not charged for and take around 20 seconds to start to play, but when a track is bought, it is downloaded to the device, which takes around 3.5 minutes, the customer will be charged £1.50 (~$2.55, ~€2.15). While it does not look like good value when compared with what is the current industry standard of 99c, mm02’s Kent Thexton claimed the price “fantastic value for money, for less than the cost of most ring-tones customers can purchase and own an entire chart track”.

Siemens designed the DMP on behalf of mm02 and will also run the DRM-protected content aggregation and platform hosting.

The music is encoded using a CODEC called aacPlus, a combination of MPEG AAC and Coding Technologies’ SBR (Spectral Band Replication) technology developed by the German company, Coding Technologies. They claim the compression can reduce the size of audio files by up to half. Given the limited bandwidth available on cellular networks, it is important that the files are as small as possible.

A wide range of handsets are compatible with the service, meaning that at launch, more than 1.2 million O2 customers can access this service.

The music content is being supplied by BMG, Universal, AIM and Warner Music and it is hoped that up to 100,000 tracks will become available.

Once downloaded, the music is stored on a 64MB SD Memory Card that slots into the device. Tracks can be played back on the O2 DMP or transferred to a PC using the Memory Card but will remain locked with their DRM. The DMP can also play back MP3’s

mm02 are hoping for a good take up as in a previous trial of 300 UK and German customers, an average of five tracks per user per week were downloaded.

mm02

Coding Technologies – aacPlus