Content

Content in its shift to become digital

BBC And Need For A Chairman Of Trust
Developments in the last week at ITV have brought into focus the challenges the BBC faces in keeping alive Mark Thomson’s view of a 360 degree future where the BBC can dominate the UK media scene.
Grade will be a formidable figure, who can question the right the BBC has to be in on every new development and we can expect the issues around the BBC’s desire to launch British equivalents to Google and MySpace to be aired in sections of the UK press.
Following the double headed departure of Dyke and Davies after controversial reporting on the Government’s policy on Iraq, it was essential to restore normality to the ‘much loved institution’ and Michael Grade was the reassuring figure who became Chairman, but over two years have elapsed and the times have changed. To prove the BBC Trust is at arms length from the BBC management, a change of focus is expected.
The BBC is not in the position it was and having sold what some consider as key assets, its IT and engineering is now managed by the German company Siemens and its presentation is serviced by Red Bee owned by Australian investors; the move towards the publisher broadcaster model has gone far further than many expected.
Thomson and Grade made the case that it was vital to the BBC’s continuance as a independent voice that a strong licence fee settlement was agreed to ensure the BBC’s vision was maintained. The Problem though, is that one of the few things Blair and Brown are in absolute agreement on, is that there is a strong case for limiting the BBC’s licence fee and exercising stronger financial discipline on the ever extending ambitions. Thomson’s high risk strategy of calling so strongly for a five year above inflation settlement is now looking a little like he may have overplayed his hand.
The BBC continues to fight to maintain its involvement in all areas of media and its ambitions to provide a free 7 day window for its on demand ‘catch up TV’ may not be the BBC Trust nod through that the Governors would have provided in the past, both Five and Channel 4 are giving their viewers the chance for online downloads at a price and a free version of a similar type could be considered to affect the business of commercial operations. HD too is a service the BBC considers it must offer to viewers but the cost of super serving a large screen owning elite could be costly and politically questionable.
Leading favourite to be the head the BBC trust is David Dimbelby, but some observers say he is too much associated with the old regime to offer the independence that the government would like to see in the new body. Chancellor Brown is sure to favour someone who he feels will limit the BBC’s ever widening ambitions and offer a prudent steer on the corporations finances.
4 December, 2006
£180m To Be Spent Online Today In UK
It’s being predicted that today will be the biggest Internet-based shopping day of the year in the UK. The Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) research points to a massive £180m being spent just on this day, more than double the £82 million average for 2006.
They see most of the e-shopping (as it used to be so sweetly called) being done in peoples lunch hours, between 1-2, when £14 million will be chucked over the line towards various online shops. This far out weighs the average of £4 million-per-hour being spent online in the 10-weeks run up to Christmas.
It’s not just those chomping the lunch sarnies that are clicking-until-they-drop, eDigitalResearch.com’s director, Chris Russell, chimes in with, “The evening Internet shopping peak is a recent phenomenon that has become possible with consumers’ acquisition of broadband at home. The evening peak – between 7 and 9pm – is now 80% as high as lunchtimes, when the highest sales are still recorded, between 1 and 2pm.”
Figures like this point to 38% of the sales taking place outside of traditional shopping hours, either before 9am or after 6pm. IMRG are really keen for you to notice this – differentiating them from ‘normal’ stores.
It’s not just today that is rather large in the sales department – the shopping joy/nightmare will be spread over the whole week. They estimate online sales worth £1.145 billion (!) will be made in the week 4-10 Dec, with the whole of December ringing up £3.55 billion.
IMRG
4 December, 2006
BT Text Aid Track With Tom Baker
It’s good to see people aren’t forgetting charity at this time of year. In the UK BT are doing their bit by offering a track for sale, whose proceeds will go to the homeless charity, Shelter.They’ve got two offerings.
The first, Text Aid, as BT are labelling it, uses the dulcet tones of actor Tom Baker (he of Dr Who fame) to read text messages that are sent from mobiles to land-lines. The service will run from today (1.Dec) until 8 January 2007.
BT will donate 2p for each text sent – they say this is the money they make after costs have been removed.
Given behaviour in previous years, Xmas and New Year are the busiest time of the year for people texting festive ditties to each other.
We await the many quotes from Dr Who fans, probably featuring references to K9 and Sarah Jane, to be delivered to our landline.
The other offering also uses the velvety voice of Tom Baker, but this time as part of an updated version of the Kinks track, “You’ve really got me.” Tom speaks the words while a disco’d version of the track bumps along in the background.
It might not be our normal listening habits, but it’s for charridy for goodness sakes. The track was made by Mark Murphy, 34, a self-employed IT consultant and Dr Who fanatic.
With his typical humour Tom Baker said: “I’m delighted to have been asked back by BT as the voice of text-to-landline. It’s rather like being Santa Claus, delivering all your festive greetings – I only wish I could hear what I’m saying!
It can be pre-ordered from today on 7Digital and will generally be avilable on services like eMusic and iTunes from 18 December. Cost? A mere 79p.
This time all money will go to Shelter. They’re hoping to raise £100,000 from the whole jolly affair.
As you’d expect Shelter are planning to use the money raised wisely as Adam Sampson, chief executive of Shelter explained, “The £100,000 donation will allow us to fund an awareness-raising campaign in primary and secondary schools during 2007 as well as supporting frontline services to help vulnerable children and young people cope with housing problems.”
Do some good over xmas and pop over to Text Aid or place your order for the track at the Indie store.
1 December, 2006
BitTorrent Ups Its Game: Funding And Content
The one-time force for evil (in the eyes of the film industry), Bit Torrent has had a good couple of days, first they sign a distribution deal with some of the major film and TV companies, then today they announce that they’ve closed another funding round.
Content deal
The content deals add to those they signed back in May this year and will provide films with a Download-to-Own (DTO) basis or for rent on a Video-on-Demand (VOD) basis.
Pricing for them hasn’t been announced, as they plan to disclose pricing details closer to the time of the launch of their online retail marketplace, which is set for February 2007.
It’s not just the old junk that the studios don’t care about anymore that will be available. The majority of the deals include new film releases day-and-date with the DVD release, popular TV series, deep catalogue titles and cult classics.
The exception is Palm Pictures, as they plan to be the first studio to utilize the BitTorrent platform to release full-length feature films before the theatrical and DVD release dates.
The most recent partnerships are with 20th Century Fox, G4, Kadokawa Pictures USA, Lionsgate, MTV Networks, Palm Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Starz Media, which build on the previous deals with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Egami Media, Hart Sharp, Koch Entertainment and The Orchard.
What about the money!
Today the series B funding has been announced (although TechCrunch scooped it a couple of days ago). They’ve raised $20m from new investor Accel Partners leading the round, with participation from initial investor DCM.
Given Bram Cohen wrote the majority of the code for BitTorrent himself, what, you may ask do they need the money for?
Almost to prove how corporate they’ve become, BitTorrent (BT) use the cut and paste phrase that it will “support the company’s growth, building on its leadership in high-performance content distribution on the Internet.” So more jobs for people will large salaries it sounds like.
What is more interesting is the longer terms plans for BT. They intend taking the technology, using it to “power other websites with the performance and efficiency of BitTorrent’s content delivery service.” It’s words like these that will get companies in the content delivery game worried.
Not just to the PC
BitTorrent signed a deal with a number of consumer electronics companies back in the end of October. ASUS, Planex and QNAP are among the first CE manufacturers to implement the BitTorrent download manager into digital home devices. ASUS and Palnex will build it into a number of their routers, QNAP into their NAS Servers.
This alone is a major change for the once-feared BitTorrent – it takes them away from the computer and closer to the TV in the lounge, while eliminating the need for the user to get involved with setting up and running it.
Bittorrent
1 December, 2006
Constant Contact: Problems Galore
We’ve had it with Constant Contact, the service that offers to manage your newsletter mailing.
We’ve been using it for the Digital-Lifestyles newsletter for the last 18 months and initially found it good to use. Over time its performance has dropped lower and lower, to the point that we now feel we have no alternative but to find another solution.
We only use it once a week while we’re editing the content of the newsletter, which we’re pretty quick at doing these days. Even in this short amount of time we’re exposed to it, we’ve found in the last few months that the service simply stops responding, with the server just timing out.
We’ve been taking this up with Constant Contact over the last month. Over a lot of emails, their approach is to simply refuse to accept that they have a problem with the service, trying to tie us up with question of unrequited detail, which we felt was an attempt distract us from answering our questions.
For us, it appears that they’ve grown so large that their servers are falling over with their attempt to keep up with demand.
The long and the short of it? – We’d suggest that you steer clear of it. Watch these pages for our quest to find an alternative, hopefully from the open source world.
We’d be really interested to hear from you if you have had problems with Constant Contact too.
1 December, 2006
WorldSIM Targets British Muslims For Low Cost Mobile Calls
WorldSIM is offering a reduced-price phone service aimed at British Muslims who may be travelling to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj, their annual pilgrimage.
During the next month it’s estimated that 25,000 British Muslims will be making pilgrimage which falls over xmas and New Year this year.
As anyone who has travelled knows, roaming rates in foreign countries can be pretty horrendous – with charges being levied to _receive_ calls as well as significantly increased prices to make calls back home.
The WorldSIM offering is offering free receipt of calls with calls back to the UK costing ‘as little as’ 45p/min.
Using the Pay As You Go global roaming SIM card, users of the service are given a UK landline number to give out to be contacted on. We suspect WorldSIM has hooked up a VoIP service to transfer the calls Internationally.
Contacting the pilgrims is of particular value given the huge loss of life at last years gathering when over 345 Hajj pilgrims were killed in a stampede in Mina as they sought to complete a farewell stone-throwing ritual before sunset.
WorldSIM
Hajj images courtesy of Space and Culture
30 November, 2006
Interview With Barry Hitchens About Game On (Podcast)
I had a fascinating conversation with Barry Hitchens, the exhibition consultant of the excellent Game On exhibition, which is currently at the Science Museum, it’s eleventh venue in a world tour that started in the Barbican in 2002.
You can listen in to Barry’s vast knowledge of video games and hear about the trials and tribulations of touring the show around the world.
The show has changed over the years, and Barry gives a lowdown on what has worked and what hasn’t, while outlining the history of significant stages of video gaming.
If you like video games, you’re going to love this.
Interview with Barry Hitchens – Exhibition consultant Game On
30 November, 2006
AutoRama Makes Panoramic Phone Photos Easy
Some clever-types at a Swedish company called Scalado have launched add-on software for mobile camera-phones that they say makes taking panoramic photos on a mobile a doddle.
The fantastically-named AutoRama takes up to 10 high-resolution images in succession and features eight different stitching mode. The photo stitching process is automatic.
The way it works does sound remarkably cool – “It’s made so simple, you don’t need to be an expert as you just point and shoot as the phone automatically does the rest for you, vibrating to tell you when to take the next shot to create the perfect high-resolution multi mega pixel panorama,” explained Mats Jacobson, CEO of Scalado.
Scalado don’t claim to be the first to do this, but they say theirs is the first to do it simply and at high resolution – but they would, wouldn’t they.
The self-declared secret of AutoRama is its patented RAJPEG technology that they say reduces memory requirements by up to 25 times. It’s also claimed that it increases performance and the speed for image manipulation by a factor of up to 10x.
We’re looking forward to getting our hands on it and testing it out.
Andrew Ball, PR for Scalado tells us “The images shown were taken by AutoRama installed on a Nokia N70 (1.3 mpix) phone. The images were created by pressing a button and the camera shoots 3 frames and stitches them together. The examples here also shows a Clearshot filter applied for improving backlight, which is another of Scalado’s new CAPS features.”
Scalado
30 November, 2006
BT Vision To Launch (Finally)
As we’ve covered extensively, BT has been working on BT Vision for yonks now, perhaps struggling with some of the technical issues with the Microsoft system that they’re running.
Launching on Monday, BT Vision, BT’s new combined television and Internet service, will let customers view Freeview channels and catch up with TV shows over the past week with no monthly subscription fees.
We’ll be at the launch cover it live, so tune in on Monday.
BT will also offer “on-demand” content (films, music, TV programmes etc) for viewing on home TVs, downloadable over a broadband connection.
With BT and BSkyB enjoying joint rights to show Premiership matches, BT will provide paid access on a per-game and “season ticket” subscription basis.
Other one-off and subscription Pay TV content will be available via “add-ons,” with the service using BT Vision’s set-top, a programmable Sky+ style PVR unit capable of storing up to 80 hours of TV and set to retail for less than £100.
Viewers will be able to pause and rewind live TV and enjoy access to around 30 Freeview channels.
BT’s new TV service echoes moves made by France Telecom and Telecom Italia in Europe, and should help the UK broadband giants fend off competition from rivals such as TalkTalk who are reeling in punters with their ‘free’ broadband service.
It’s also a smart piece of a manoeuvring to counter Sky, who recently launched their own residential broadband service, as well as cable network NTL who are mustard keen to start delivering content over phone lines.
BT is set to start rolling out the service early next year, although it’s going to be a bit of a half-cocked launch with only Channel Four currently signed up for the seven-day “catch-up” service (behind the scenes, BT’s legal team are busy battling with BBC and ITV producers to negotiate a path through the minefield of rights.)
BT Vision’s Download Store will also include music content, with deals already struck with Sony BMG, MTV, Video Performance Ltd and BTPodshow.
BT Vision
29 November, 2006
Play PS3 and Wii Now At The Science Museum (Podcast)
The organisers of Game On, clearly have amazing contacts with the games industry having been running the exhibition for the last four years around 11 venues around the world. It’s contacts like this that has led to them getting hold of Sony’s PS3 and Nintendo before it’s launched in the UK – four months in the case of the PS3.
The Science Museum is currently the only place in the UK where Joe Public can play the PS3. There’s a couple of places around where the PS3 can be seen, but like the venue off Brick Lane, they’re invite only.
Even if you could get to see the PS3, not other venue has the PS3 right next to the Wii, so you can compare them.
So what are they like?
The PS3 is playing Motor Storm and it looks stunning, with amazing photo realism. The action is intense and it’s very clear that this is a major leap forward in gaming. The controller can be set in a mode where its physical movements control the action of the onscreen action. Being used to playing the PS controller without this, it take a little while to get used to the sensitivity on the movements needed to control it.
The Wii clearly has the movement sensors built-in (it’s the big selling point of the whole console). Playing with them is near-instantly understandable – feeling natural to wave your arms around to control a tennis racket or box the hell out of your opponent. The graphics are far simpler, delivered in the normal Nintendo cartoon style.
It is of note that the PS3 has a significant number of venting holes in its casing and a large fan under nearth to cool it – it draws 350w. The Wii doesn’t have any venting.
Who’s going to win?
If sales are going to reflect the public interest here at the Science Museum today, Sony need to look out, because the Interest in the Wii far outweighed that in the PS3. This could be down to the affordable price of the Wii, or indeed that the public actually have a chance of own it this side of xmas.
Speaking to the punters here, the feeling was that the Wii would give far more of a gaming experience, not just the gloss that the PS3 gives.
It’s no exaggeration to say that some people were literally running into the exhibition hall, shouting, “is it here, is it here?” as the made their way to the Wii. I had thought it would have been the other way around, with the PS3 being the big draw.
The rest of the exhibition is well worth the visit alone – charting the history of video games from the start, and put together with a lot of intelligence. With the Wii and PS3 added to it, you can expect large queues at the weekend.
We had a chat to the event organiser, Gaetan Lee to get an overview of how he got the hold of the Wii and PS3 before their UK release and the background to the Game On exhibition.
Click below to play the interview …
[audio:https://digital-lifestyles.info/media/audio/Wii-PS3-game-on.mp3]
Game On – Science Museum
29 November, 2006