Digital-Lifestyles

Distribution

The new digital ways content was becoming distributed

  • TI Wins Emmy Award for DLP

    Texas Instruments has won the Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for their Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology. The National Television Academy official title of the award is “Pioneering Development of Mass-Produced Digital Reflective Imaging Technology for Consumer Rear Projection Television.”

    DLP produced very high resolution video images and is used in Digital Cinema projectors, some video projectors and a number of rear-projection TV’s (PJTV). It gives an entirely digital connection between a video source and the screen by using a optical semiconductor known as the Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). The DMD is essentially a chip with many tiny mirrors that manipulates light.

    Peter O. Price, President of the National Television Academy said “The worlds of broadcasting and home entertainment are undergoing a period of significant change that is characterised by the growing choice being offered to increasingly demanding consumers, and DLP technology is playing a significant role in enabling that change to take place. We see it as a considerable innovation in the market.”

    DLP – How it works

    Emmy 2003 Technology & Engineering Awards

  • Apple iTunes v2 – New Features Analysed

    Further details of the second version of the iTunes software and service are becoming clearer and as you would expect with Apple, they are not only interesting, but steps forward in the use of digital audio.

    Audio books and Round Tripping
    Apple have signed an exclusive, multi-year deal with audible.com to sell five thousand of their spoken books, equating to over twenty thousand hours of content.

    Once the audio-books have been downloaded, the listener will be able to listen to it both on their computer and their iPod – features that were available on version one of the service. The clever part is that you can transfer your listen point, an audio bookmark, from computer to iPod and back again. This is best illustrated with an example – you starts listening to the book on your Mac, you then need to leave you computer, so transfer the audio-book to your iPod. The playback will continue from the point you left it at on the computer. When you return from travelling to your computer, hook up your iPod and continue listening from the point reached on your iPod. Apple have called this feature Round Tripping.

    Round tripping is interesting for a number of reasons. Apple have only been able to quickly introduce a new feature like this into the market as they control both the client software on the computer, and the portable playback device, iPod, and can make the required changes to both. It will be interesting to see if Apple declare an open standard on this, to enable other playback devices to take advantage of this feature. We suspect they’ll be keeping this to themselves, at least for the while.

    While Round tripping is nifty when listening to books, it becomes potentially far more interesting when it is applied to music, consumer electronic equipment and wireless connections – giving a listener the ability to have a “Continuous Music Experience” as they move from work, to the car and to home.

    Enabling the “giving” of digital music
    To enable children who do not have their own credit card to use the service, there is a patent-pending online “Allowance” feature which allows parents to automatically deposit funds into their children’s accounts – very smart.

    People will also be able to give someone a gift certificate to spend in the online store. By signing on to their iTunes account, they can gift between $10-$200 to a person, who might not even currently have an iTunes account. The recipient receives an email telling them of the present and by clicking on a link, can start to use it to access content.

    Digital Lifestyles:Apple Adds Windows Support to iTunes

    Apple iTunes

  • Apple Hit 1m Windows Downloads of iTunes in 3.5 Days

    In only three and a half days since Apple released the Windows version of their iTunes software, over one million copies have been downloaded. In the same period, one million songs have also been purchased, halving the time it took to reach same level when the Apple only version was released back in April.

    Although the headline figure of songs downloaded initially sounds very impressive, we would assume the million songs must include ones bought by the current Apple users as well (Apple UK weren’t able to clarify this as they didn’t have this breakdown, Apple US were unreachable) – working out at an average of under one song per Windows user. This shows that people have been downloading the Windows version of the software and possibly not purchasing songs. We think it is likely that this is due to them currently being unable to buy music, as they live outside the USA.

    Apple iTunes

  • Apple Adds Windows support to iTunes

    Following the success of the Apple’s iTunes online music store, after six months and 13m track sales, the second generation version has been released. Version one was restricted to owners of Apple computers who live in the USA, but version two removes one of those restriction by opening it to the Windows users. The USA-only restriction remains.

    iTunes for Windows includes all the same features as the Mac version including tight integrations to the iPod. The first generation of Apple’s iPod, their market-leading portable digital music player, had two seperate version, one that connected to Apple computers, the other for Windows. Its second generation release, launched at the same time as iTunes online music store, united both of these into one machine.

    Over the length of the service, the number of songs available for purchase have been gradually increased, and will reach 400,000 by the end of October.

    Apple also announced a significant deal with AOL, which will offer AOL 25m US users a single-click-to-sign-up option later in this quarter. The intergration will go even further than this, enabling linking to individual iTunes track.

    We feel this feature will be integrated into the AOL Weblogging tool, that has been in development since March, enabling Webloggers to recommend music and receive an affiliate percentage of value of the sale. This is a model for media sales we have long believed in and think it will only expand to include other media such as video.

    Apple iTunes

  • UK Survey Shows Desire for Broadband Service Quality

    In a survey of UK broadband users run by net.com in conjunction with Broadband4Britain and announced at ITU Telecom World, over two third, 69% of the participants respondents expressed dissatisfaction with their current broadband connectivity.

    When asked if they would be prepared to pay extra to receive a better Quality of Service (QoS), 79% said that they would, with 47% saying they would pay up to 5% extra and a surprising 21% said they would be willing to pay a 20% premium.

    QoS is of greatest benefit when the application requires then data to be received in a set order and the respondents said Internet telephony (92%), video streaming (42%), and video conferencing (33%) were of great interest.

    net.com

    Broadband4Britain

  • Sony’s PSX – Full Details and Pricing Revealed

    After a number of months of speculation, Sony have released the full details the PSX. Combining the ability to play PlayStation games with a television tuner, PVR, ATRAC3/MP3 playback and a DVD player/recorder, the box will also be equipped with a 100Mb Ethernet port – opening the door to the delivery of digital media.

    The visually arresting box (312x88x323mm, weighing 5.6kg) will be launching in two guises; the DESR-5000 with a 160GB hard drive (79,800 yen, ~$730, ~£440) and the DESR-7000 with 250GB (~$900); arriving in Japan by the end of year and in Europe and then US in 2004.

    Labelled as PlayStation 2.5 by some, it has already received very positive press reaction, mostly for its styling and features, as they have not had extended use of it. In addition of an Ethernet port, interfaces include USB1.1, Memory Stick slot, digital S/PDIF, PlayStation 2 peripheral connectors, composite AV-in/out.

    Nearly all reaction to the price has been surprise at how expensive it is, but we feel this is a misguided as they are viewing it in the context of the currently low cost games console – which is just part of it. Just adding up the constituent parts; PS2 (~£100), TiVo (second hand eBay UK price ~£200); DVD burner (~£150) – it appears about right – especially as the PSX is one sleek box rather that three bulky boxes the separate approach would give you.

    We feel the Trojan horse feature of the PSX is the combination of a device that connects to the family TV, the Ethernet port and Sony’s significant music and film empires. This would give them total vertical integration enabling the sale of media content direct to the public.

  • Emuzed supply PVR hardware for Microsoft Media Center OEMs

    Following the announcement of Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 (MCE) , Emuzed, who supply video capture and encoding cards, have signed deals with a number of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) that are using MCE.

    Their two products Maui-III PCI PVR and Bali-II USB PVR Beanbag have the ability to encode to MPEG 2 on-board from PAL or NTSC signals, write out the recorded content out to CD or DVD and support an optional FM tuner. The Bali-II connects via USB 1.1 or 2.0

    Two deals that they’ve announced recently are the Samsung MagicStation Q Media Center PC, HP’s new 17-inch widescreen Media Center zd7000 notebook PC which uses the USB version and most recently, the ViewSonic Media Center PC – the M2100.

    A relative new comer, they look like they are taking trade from the previous default supplier, Hauppauge, which is based in Europe.

    Emuzed

    HP zd7000 notebook

    ViewSonic Media Center PC – the M2100

    Hauppauge

  • US Triple-Play-Operator to Offer 5Mb Connection to Homes

    The RCN Corporation, a US company that offers television, telephone and Internet services delivered over cable, today announced that it will be raising its current 3Mb Internet delivery speed to 5Mb. Their already fast sounding 3Mb service came in a year ago under the tragically named MegaModem. Sadly the new service will be called MegaModem Mach5, but if you’re getting a 5Mb service delivered, you’re not going to argue about the naming.

    RCN, who focus on supplying services to densely populated markets in the US and currently service one million connections, say the speed upgrades will happen, at no extra costs, on 15 October.

    Significantly, when IP connections are offering this kind of bandwidth, it starts to become realistic for households to have a number of people watching different video streams or listen on different devices around the home.

    RCN

  • Nintendo to Launch Wireless Game Boy Adaptor

    In a move to try and balance the efforts that Nokia are putting in to the N-Gage portable gaming platform, Nintendo has been working closely with Motorola to create a wireless adaptor for the Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Advance SP. The reasonably sized add-on uses the already crowded 2.4GHz band to enable up to five gamers to play against each other.

    Motorola say they have applied considerable effort to make the unit consumer as little power as possible, while using the TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) communication protocol to provide game users a fast receive-and-respond capability similar to a wired experience.

    The wireless adapter with the new Game Boy Advance software “Pokemon FireRed” and “Pokemon LeafGreen” will be launched in Japan first half of 2004.

  • Marc Cuban and Todd Wagner Buy US Art-house Cinema Chain

    It is with great interesting that we see that Marc Cuban and Todd Wagner have bought Landmark Theatres, America’s largest chain of 54 art-house cinemas which are scattered over fourteen states.
    They both came into the public eye when they sold an innovative webcasting company, broadcast.com, that they had founded in 1995, to Yahoo! in 1999 for $5.7 billion. Following that avalanche of cash, Cuban went to buy the NBA team Dallas Mavericks, found High Definition TV specialist HDNet and co-found 2929 Entertainment with Wagner.

    HDNet two 24/7 networks, HDNet and HDNet Movies, produces and televises more hours of original HDTV entertainment, news and sports programming than any other network.

    2929 Entertainment is a vehicle for movie production and, following its November 2001 purchase of Rysher Entertainment, holds substantial film and television programming library, including various rights to shows including “Sex and the City”. It is also currently in post-production on two films including “Godsend” staring Robert DeNiro.

    The Landmark Theatres chain has been for sale since 2001, languishing as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The financial terms of the purchase, which is scheduled to close in October, have not been disclosed.

    Why does this make an interesting deal?

    Digital cinema has held promise for a long time, but has effectively stalled.

    The cinema theatre owners are not willing to pay for the digital projectors, as they say the margin that the make on showing films is so slim (the reasons the cite for the necessity for popcorn sales) that they are not able to invest in the equipment. They also point out that it is the film distributors that will gain most benefit from the drastically reduced film distribution costs – physical copies of the film, at a cost of around $3000 each, do not have to be made, nor to they have to be transported to each of the cinemas.

    The film distributes say it is not for them to pay for the equipment, as this is the responsibility of the theatre owners. It is also widely believed that they have very little will to digitally distribute their content, as content protection schemes haven’t been decided upon.

    The excitement of d-cinema is not just about showing blockbuster films, but the ability to economically distribute small, independent film and other video content that would not normally be shown at as cinema, such as music or sporting events – enabling cinema to become something different.

    Now they have the theatre chain, Wagner said they can now take movies from production to the screen with no outside interference – “We think this acquisition provides a unique opportunity to make a significant impact in the art and independent film, HDTV production and digital exhibition communities.”

    Together this collection of companies not only have the content, technical savvy, strategic vision and the money to make this possible, but they are run by people who are keen to shake things up. This could be the kind of competition that the film companies need to make them sit up, stop the current stalemate and move up a gear or two in realising digital cinema. We wait with baited breath.

    Landmark Theatres

    HDNet

    2929 Entertainment