Content – Page 196 – Digital-Lifestyles

Greg Dyke – All BBC Radio and TV content to be made available online

It is great to see the BBC leading the world again with Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, announcing at the Edinburgh TV Festival that they plan to make all of their Radio and TV content available on the Internet for public consumption. It will be called the BBC Creative Archive.

Referring to it as a “second phase” for the corporation, he said he felt the new online service was part of the corporation’s future.

He is quoted as saying “I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion.

“In particular, it will be about how public money can be combined with new digital technologies to transform everyone’s lives.”

These comments make the keynote speech by Ashley Highfield, who is in charge of all things digital at the BBC, at the International Broadcast Convention (IBC) this year, all the more compelling.

BBC Link

[Disclosure – Digital-Lifestyles.info’s publisher, Simon Perry, was asked by IBC to be the executive producer of the Digital Lifestyles conference theme this year]

Rio show two interesting portable music players

The market has been waiting to hear what SonicBlue was going to come out with after their assets were purchased by D&M back in April 2003. Two Rio portable music players were shown on CNet , the Nitrus and the Karma.

The Nitrus looks about the size of a box of matches and is the first player to use a 1.5-gigabyte, 1-inch hard drive. Holding around 350 songs, it will play for sixteen hours, has great quality sound with 96Db and will cost $199.

The Karma is a more serious beast with either 20Gb or 40Gb storage and a reported 18 hours battery life and costing from $399. The docking station has audio out for HiFi connection, USB2 and, interestingly, an Ethernet port. The device can be assigned an IP address and be used to reference content held on other devices on the network – an inter feature, and the first to appear on a portable music player.

Music can be stored in four formats, MP3, WMA, and two open source formats, Ogg Vorbis and the lesser known Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC).

Video review

Nokia buy Sega’s Mobile gaming unit

It is a widely known fact that without enough compelling content, a platform will wither and eventually die. Sega know this to their cost – they lost the Dreamcast this way and it’s clear that Nokia understand this too. They are also both big believers in multi-player mobile gaming.

Nokia and Sega have been working together since November 2002, putting Sega content on to the Nokia N-Gage (mobile-gaming-platform-that-happens-to-be-a-phone). It’s clearly been a successful relationship as Nokia have announced that it will buy Sega Mobile business and integrating it into theirs.

Sega have a long history in multi-player gaming. It’s a little discussed fact that Sega’s last games console, the Dreamcast, which was its Japanese released in late 1998, shipped with dialup modem enabling owners to connect to SegaNet. SegaNet provided walled garden Web browsing and importantly enabled people to play games against others around the world. Sega were clearly well ahead of the rest of the console companies – there was even a broadband Ethernet connection available in Japan and the USA.

Following their exit from the hardware gaming business, they have used their undisputed skills in writing games and providing them for other gaming platforms. One of the areas they focused on was mobile gaming.

Understanding that they needed to provide a end-to-end solutions for multi-platform mobile gaming, Sega created the SEGA Network Applications Package, generally called SNAP. Providing both a toolkit that enabled games developers to make their titles network enabled and server hosting, billing, consulting, & QA services they have been successful in attracting users.

It’s this complete development solution that Nokia has bought. SNAP will bring immediate benefits to the Nokia N-Gage game deck and is scheduled to be available to consumers worldwide on 7 October 2003.

SNAP is used on a number of mobile platforms including Palm and other mobile phone manufacturers hardware. It’s not clear is the Nokia purchase will impact of the breadth of platforms supported, or is the manufacturers will be keen to support a software platform that Nokia owns.

Links – Nokia PR; SNAP; Sega Mobile games

“Is 99c too much for online music?” poll shows interesting splits

A recent Billboard poll of just over 9,000 votes has just released its results. When asked if they thought that 99c was too much to pay for a single music track, there responses were –

32% – 99c too much
29% – why pay when I can download for free?
22% – OK if the quality and selection of the tracks is good
17% – fair amount, “based on what you have to pay for an album.”

There are a couple of few ways at looking at this.

There’s a rough three way split between the price being OK (39%), people wanting it for free (29%) and the price is too high (32%).
61% are not being happy to pay 99c because either it’s viewed as too much or they have no intention of paying for it no matter how cheap it is and 39% (22% + 17%) thinking that the cost is reasonable.
Of those prepared to pay for music online, more are willing to the pay the 99c price – 39% vs 32%.

It’s important to remember that this poll isn’t fully representative of the general public as it was taken online, therefore is biased toward people who are already online, are enthused enough to fill out a poll and visit the Billboard site.

Time will tell if UK customer will be prepared to pay more more than 99c per track when the Link

DI Music – multilayered music format

An interesting new electronic music format is being spoken about as an advance on MP3. DI Music, as it’s being labelled, enables the listener to select the sections of the tracks that are played back in real time – effectively live remixing on playback.

Tracks need to be specifically prepared for this format using software from digimpro and when mixing the track, the recording artist is able include multiple versions of sections of the track eg. different drum tracks could be included. This will obviously take a lot of extra thought and consideration in preparing tracks for release.

We feel this is a very interesting idea as to what may be possible with many different medias, but with no demonstration publicly available to date, it’s hard to judge whether this is something that consumers will be interested in taking advantage of. While a hardcore of music enthusiasts are bound to be interested in this, we suspect that most listeners will find it hard to grab the concept and perhaps even fewer will be interested enough to be actively involved in mixing the tracks they are listening to.

Microsoft to launch European single music track download service

Microsoft will be partnering with On Demand Distribution (OD2) to launch a European rival to the US-only Apple iTunes service. OD2 currently has 200,000 tracks available from five major record companies, which they hope to expand to 300,000 in the next few weeks.The proposed pricing of single tracks is 75 pence (Euro 1.06, $1.21) with albums being £7.99 (Euro 11.37, $12.86). The Apple service pound equivalent is about 62p and £6.20.The higher pricing of the proposed UK service will re-ignite the debate over the pricing of electronically delivered good compared with their physical CD equivalent. The argument from those that say the download versions are priced to highly is that these aren’t physical good that need to be manufactured, packaged, shipped and justify their place on a retailers shelf – they’re electrons, that once encoded take up a tiny amount of low cost disk space and then have a low cost of distribution. The companies justify the prices saying they have large investments in server hardware. As more providers enter the market, competition lowers prices – in the US, rival pay-and-download services have started dropping their prices, with some offering tracks at 79 cents.It’s widely acknowledged that the Apple iTunes service has been a great success. The problem for the world at-large is that currently it only runs on Apple hardware, which only accounts for around 5% of all computers, and it is currently only available in the USA. Among the reasons that the Apple service has been embraced so heartily, is that is it fantastically easy to use, it recommends related music to you and the licensing terms gives the purchaser a lot of freedom to move their purchased music to different computers and portable music players. Details have yet to emerge as to what the Microsoft/OD2 offering will be like.

Garry Kasparov vs 3d Virtual Reality

Garry Kasparov will be playing another Man vs Computer chess match at the New York Athletic Club starting 11th November this year.

The unique twist on this match, is that using the X3D Display, the chess board will appear to be “floating in the air between man and computer” and he will use voice commands to move the virtual 3D pieces. 3D viewing has been possible for quite a while, but X3D Technologies are claiming X3D Display is viewable by the naked eye, rather than with the normal synchronised shutter glasses.

Billed as “the most dominant chess program and the most powerful 3D software to challenge the greatest chess brain of all time”, it will be Webcasted at www.X3D.com.

This event is a little different from a lot of their other sponsored entertainment content, which is headlined by Swimsuit models in 3D.

Link

Service to locate UK mobile phones

A new service has been launched in the UK to enable willing participant to have the position of their mobile phone tracked. mapAmobile is currently working on the Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile networks.

It works by monitoring the strength of signal from aerials and triangulating between them. They claim accuracy within 50 metres but this will vary depending on the density of aerial, so rural locations will be less accurate.

Priced as ~£30 for a year for one phone, there is a charge of 30p each time the service is used, which is slightly strange given they’re selling it as an alternative to texting or phoning the person. Registration is either online or a voucher can be bought at Carphone Warehouse.

On signup, the target-tracked phone is sent an SMS asking for approval to be tracked, as well as regular reminders. The location can be interograted either online, via SMS or telephone and will be given as ‘Fred is in the vicinity of Bow Street, London WC2’ together with the date, time and accuracy of the location. You will also have the option to see a map showing street names and points of interest.

mapAmobile

Traffic reports (video and text) on your mobile

A Taiwanese company, Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communications, today launched a service enabling subscribers to watch a live video stream of traffic congestion, from an initial forty two cameras, on their mobile phone.

We’re assuming this isn’t for some strange realityTV-type entertainment but to check the density of traffic levels before travelling. Clearly it grabs headlines, but the video alone sound like a bit of a novelty as it’s pretty hard to judge the actual speed of traffic. We think the ideal would be to display the average speed to the traffic at your particular motorway junction on your mobile.

Funnily enough Dan Kemp, lead programmer at Live Information Systems, has created a Quick’n’Dirty system (his own description) to do just that – he’s call it mTraffic. It scrapes the information from the UK Highways Agency site repackages it for PDA/Smartphone, WAP and an XML feed – very neat.

Apple iTunes – 5m tracks sold

The latest update on sales figures from the online Apple iTunes music store have emerged. Five million track have now been bought in the first two months of the US Mac only service. While the initial purchasing frenzy of the first couple of weeks has slowed, when one million was sold in the first week and two million in the first sixteen days, it’s still doing very well.Interestingly, 46% of the songs have been purchased as albums.