Now there’s been much talk of the death of traditional linear TV and it appears that the demise of the traditional broadcasters in the UK is taking a little longer than some expected. Perhaps hidden behind the excitement of Google buying YouTube and the UK start of two further channels on the Freeview platform; Five US and Five Life is a channel that could be the harbinger of how TV channels in the future will launch.
So what is 18 Doughty Street? Well it’s both the name of a new Internet TV channel and the address where it’s produced. It’s target audience appears to be a group of right leaning Political Anoraks and the content is unfettered by the UK broadcasting regulator OFCOMs requirement for broadcasters to show political even-handedness across the left/right spectrum. To be fair it is upfront about it’s partiality, declaiming others for not coming quite so clean about what it sees as their undeclared biases.
One of the guiding lights and also taking presenting duties is Iain Dale, Ian is well known both for standing as an unsuccessful Conservative candidate at the last UK general election and as one of the bloggers who exposed details of Labour’s deputy leader John Prescott’s extra marital affairs on his blog.
The channel is starting with a four hour per night Monday to Thursday schedule, the programmes, once broadcast are available for download to the politically fixated.
The relatively innocuous content is lodged somewhere between the fashionable haphazard Zeitgeist of UGC (User generated Content) and the bland professionalism of the big broadcasters, time will tell if there’s a hole there that this will fill.
It might be that this sort of channel will appeal to viewers who shy away from subscribing to video Podcasts via iTunes but it again exposes the need for a simple method of getting TV type content from the home PC to the traditional TV.
There’s no guarantee that future examples will be quite so innocuous and this new channel exposes the issues around how Europe’s TV without frontiers may need to be revised to include what is effectively TV delivered by the Internet.
Google is converting its Californian headquarters to run partly on solar power, creating the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the United States.
Google haven’t disclosed the costs of the project, but it’s unlikely to cause much of a dent in the pockets of a company reputed to have nearly $10 billion in the corporate coffers.
Orange and Microsoft have joined together to offer Instant Messaging (IM) connectivity between computers and mobile phones, claiming it’s a first.
We’re a little puzzled by their uniqueness claim, “Orange and Microsoft today announced their first convergent Instant Messaging offering for PCs and mobile.” Given IM clients have been running on mobile phones for a while, how is this the first time?
Sony and Sky are tying up to show the UK’s first HD advert tonight.
Shot over 10 days and with a crew of 250 people, the paint was mixed on site by 20 people. The clear up took 5 days and 60 people.
The launch of this first HD ad follows a major marketing agreement between Sky and Sony to promote HD.
Pure Digital Technologies has announced a cheapo camcorder that can upload movies to video sharing Web sites like Google Video with a single click.
Allen Weiner, an analyst with market tracker Gartner, reckoned Pure Digital were on to a winner, describing the pint-size camcorder as “simple, but also revolutionary.”
Unhappy with the inaccuracies of the online encyclopaedia he set up, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has announced that he will be launching an alternative to the free online reference this week.
Such is the explosive growth of the site, this figure represents a whopping 162 percent rise from the same period last year.
Sling is developing software to play their video on Symbian mobile phones.
The current Pocket PC version of the SlingPlayer Mobile software application is currently available only in the U.S. and Canada. The Symbian OS version will be made available in select European and Asian countries during Q4 and will extend availability to the US shortly thereafter.
Yahoo execs have pressed the flesh and struck up a deal with CBS owned-and-operated television stations to exclusively broadcast local news videos online.
“Local news has become one of the most important pieces of a user’s online news experience, and this agreement brings some of the best local TV journalism to the millions of Yahoo News users,” said Scott Moore, head of news and information, Yahoo Media Group.
There’s bound to be lots of these stories floating around the Valley, as companies started getting bought for large sums of money. It’s going to be the equivalent of being/claiming to be the fifth Beatle.
Living what he was building, “Armed with a video camera, Mr. Karim documented much of YouTube’s early life.”