Europeans seem to be rushing out and buying HDTVs despite the lack of coverage: they bought 70,000 HDTV-capable displays in 2003, yet only one broadcaster, Euro1080, broadcasts a satellite HDTV service, and only for four hours a day.
A report from Strategy Analytics goes on to predict that we’ll be buying 17.4 million HDTV displays in 2008, but by then only 2.6 million homes will have the set-top box and coverage to enable them to watch HDTV programming.
Sony’s Open House event this year covered all the key consumer devices – from HDTV recorders, and new Handycams to extremely desirable PDAs with more bells and whistles than a bus load of Morris dancers crashing into a flute factory.
Sony are going for integration even more than usual – HDTVs have integrated card readers for cable users, Clié PDAs and VAIO notebooks feature even sharper cameras and better wireless access than before, and MP3 support filters into products where there was previously only ATRAC.
Featuring Ati’s NXT2004 Digital Modulator chip, already found in many set-top boxes, ATi’s HDTV Wonder card will include support for analogue, digital and high definition television services. The card will come bundled with PVR software allowing users to fill up their hard drives considerably faster than before: a 250gb disk should store about 30 hours of HDTV content, contrasted with 200 hours of standard definition TV.
With the release of the DirectTV’s HDTV TiVo in the next few weeks, HDTV fans at least in the US will finally be able to record and archive programmes with ease.
It being Friday and we thought we would bring you a light-hearted piece.
UK cable company, Telewest, has suggested that they may release a computer add-on that generates aromas that can be controlled software. Sound like an urban myth/joke, but it is not without precedent. The first time a computer-controlled device was suggest was in 1999 by a start-up called DigiScent. Prior to that it was on the grander scale of whole cinemas, when in the last 50’s two similar ideas, AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision, were introduced to US cinemagoers.
AromaRama used the theatres ventilation system to get their scents out and Smell-O-Vision far more expensive approach was to place units under each cinema seat.
DigiScent was a serious, scientific approach to the subject that was started by two Stanford graduates that had made some serious fortunes from software for genetic databases.
One of the founders, Joel Lloyd Bellenson looked into previous scientific research around the subject to discover how humans perceived smells. His explanation was detailed in an article by Wired at the time.
“The explanation for this proved relatively simple. When odour molecules drift into the nose, each of them binds with a particular protein on the surface of a neuron. There are about 1,000 odour-matching proteins, each with a slightly different configuration, scattered across a human’s 10 million odour-detecting neurons. (By comparison, a mouse has about 1 million neurons of this type, while a pig boasts 100 million.) When the shape of an odour molecule matches the shape of a protein, the molecules lock together, triggering the neuron, which sends a signal that the brain recognizes as a smell. DNA is relevant because its instructions – its genes – tell the body how to build the proteins that receive odour molecules and activate the neurons. ”
Calling on his previous software experience, Bellenson wrote software to simulate the binding of odour molecules with proteins. By using this he felt he could generate billions of odours simply by selecting different proportions of 100-200 “scent primaries.”
DigiScent’s business was to licence its software to the creators of other media, to synchronise aromas with them. Web pages would be able to trigger them, as would TV shows, video games and films. The scent generators would be plugged into the serial port and sit on the desk – Reekers, instead of speakers.
Like many ideas around 1999, sadly DigiScent is not around anymore. One possible reason for that could have been is the name they chose for their product – iSmell.
Telewest say they have tested the idea in their labs, calling email using the device ‘ScentMail’, or on a wider scale, ‘Aromanet’. They plan to bring out a domed device that plugs in to the serial port of a computer or set top box, that takes dispoable cartidges to generate the aromas. They say the intial range of smells will be around 60 by mixing the palette of 20 oringial aromas.
Appearing to be designed to get them a few column inches for their broadband service, it is not clear how serious Telewest are about it. When discussing the cost of the dome they are less than exact, ‘Hardware for a surf & sniff set up might cost around £250 for the basic equipment’. We are sure Telewest is not trying to create news during the time their managing director, Charles Burdick, has left the company to “pursue other opportunities.”
ATI Technologies have announced they will be releasing a card capable of receiving and storing US-standard HDTV. Called the HDTV Wonder, the add-on card will receive standard NTSC cable as well as free-to-air HDTV broadcasts enabling content to be saved to the computers hard drive. Full PVR functionality will available, as will the ability to burn recordings direct to DVD.
They plan bundle it with a selection of their All-in-Wonder graphics cards and make it available as a standalone product when they release it in the spring. The price hasn’t been disclosed.
No word has been received from them as to whether the card will comply with the FCC Broadcast flag requirements.
Hy-Tek are getting to free publicity, by announcing their will be releasing two wide-screen all-in-one multimedia computers, Tekpanel 300HD and the Tekpanel 370HD which will incorporate the card.
Akimbo Systems launched their television-via-Internet service yesterday at Demo2004. They are claiming the service will start with over 10,000 hours of video content, organised in to 50 categories, will be pulled from a variety of sources. The number of hours available will grow to 20,000.
The $199 player, which is expected to be in US retail stores in late 2004, receives content via a broadband connection and can hold 200 hours of video, in Microsoft’s WM9 DRM-controlled format on it’s 80Gb drive. Subscription to the service is $9.99 per month.
This product is the first of released example of the long spoken about idea of distributing content by passing previously used broadcast structures. Akimbo claim a number of factors have now come together to enable the services to become realistic; the cost of transporting a gigabyte of video over the Internet has dropped to around $1 from $20 a few years ago; video compression has improved to the point that DVD-quality video can fit into a 1.5 megabit per second stream; broadband has grown to an audience of 50m people.
Given it is initially a dedicated box, that we assume will be closed to customer enhancements, it will live or die by the content they can secure for the service. We suspect the service may well morph in to a content channel when more PC’s are connected to the TV in the lounge.
Akimbo are canvassing for new content from video rights owners and are giving the option for subscription, rental, purchase, or advertising supported model. Their big pitch is niche content direct to the consumer and they will handle transactions, delivering the due fees to the rights holders.
We feel the other vital component for them to get right is the navigation of the content, enabling consumers to actually find the programmes that they want to watch.
By Paul Hosford, partner, New Media Law
The fifth MidemNet 2004 opened the week long international music industry’s conference in Cannes. In heavily attended sessions this year, it appears, at least on the surface, that the industry is at last grasping on-demand digital distribution of music – the legal variety that is.
MidemNet is the music industry’s international forum that attracts players from every corner of the business to get together and discuss the issues confronting an industry severely impacted by the illegal distribution of millions of copies of its product.
Ted Cohen, EMI Music’ s senior VP of digital development and distribution, opened with the positive pro-industry message – commercial downloads represent the ultimate way forward for music consumers. He feels that it will come of age in 2004, and when legal battles are overcome and the consumer is empowered by commercialised P2P delivery, the industry’s bad reputation will begin to improve.
Keynote interviewee Eddy Cue of Apple’s Internet services announced what everyone suspected, the iTunes Music Store would launch in Europe at some point. iTunes throws into relief these challenges for the music business. Launched in April 2003 as a proprietary platform download service, the Music Store leverages Apple’s existing back-end infrastructure to offer a flat fee of 99 cents per track, and now offering 0.5 million tracks, made available by the Major record labels under recent licensing, but only available to US consumers. The delay in the European launch has been put down to resolving licensing across countries.
Setting out to develop “a better Kazaa” by 5 January 2004, iTunes has sold more than 30 million tracks in all kinds of genres, predominantly to an over-21 demographic. This has moved the Majors on from a proposition that only 2 and a half years ago was not on their list of potential licensing opportunities.
Whilst we all know and covet that beautifully packaged piece of must-have hardware that is the iPod, the reality is that Apples share of the 99 cents may not, in isolation, be sufficient to rev-up their share price. What is clear is that sales of iPod are going through the roof.
There has been a lot of discussion here about iTunes downloads not being platform-independent and that ultimately this may become a sticking point for the device-rich consumer who wants the flexibility to listen to their paid-for music on any device they own. In the meantime, iTunes sales still represent small numbers when compared to the world of illegal P2P sharing.
The European iTunes delay has highlighted a major problem. What will remain firmly as the principal challenge for any pan-European initiative is an industry with differing product release dates, differing licensing and rights collection mechanisms across the European territories – and differing price models. The message is clear – the industry must push through change in these licensing and publishing practices across the major markets.
In the panel sessions representatives of OD2, EMI Music, RealNetworks, French ISP Wanadoo and mmO2, debated the very real technical problems of delivering to consumers a single product where the industry’s marketplace and accounting mechanisms are territorially divergent and a very long way from uniformity. Whilst EMI’s goal is obviously, to sell more music by making it available in multiple formats on any platform, corralling all the various rights holders that share in recorded music remains the Major Labels most immediate challenge.
For the content aggregators, the ISP’s mobile networks and digital music intermediaries, the problems are different, but equally complex. They must deal with multiple payment mechanisms, differing pricing regimes and a complex value chain that makes it very challenging to deliver cost effective alternatives to paying consumers demanding of quality content. What will be critical to delivering a successful consumer experience is cross-platform transferability of the downloaded track that is paid for once.
In the meantime, the disc media formats are very much alive and kicking representing over 90 percent of music bought today. Your correspondent for one is looking forward to experiencing SACD recordings – real surround sound.
Philips have announced two wireless digital media adaptors that enables the playing of computer-stored content, be that films, photos or music, to be played on TV or in a traditional HiFi system.
The SL300i and SL400i have both been labelled by Philips as a Wireless Multimedia Link can be used with a supplied remote control. Only the SL400i comes with an LCD display, so users can select music without having to have the TV on, and includes the 802.11b USB wireless adaptor.
We feel with year will be the year of the Digital Media Adaptor (DMA) with products expected from many of the major players as well as new entrants.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has elected to adopt the ATSC flag, otherwise known as the Broadcast flag – a digital code that can be embedded into a digital broadcasting stream to mark content as protected. All equipment capable of receiving a Digital TV (DTV) signal, be that TV or computer, sold after 1 July, 2005 in the US must comply with the ruling.
Content owners have been lobbying hard to try and get it brought into law, as they felt the broadcasting of their content in a digital format without the flag would lead to widespread piracy. Others, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), raised a number of objections to the most stringent of restrictions and were particularly concerned with the protection of consumers current “fair use” rights. It appears that the FCC has listened to all sides of the debate and have accounted for their views.
The FCC announced ruling is that only equipment that is capable of receiving Digital TV (DTV) signals over the air will be affected and must “recognize and give effect to the broadcast flag”. The recording equipment and possible content protections schemes they employ will be addressed at a later date and are described below.
Alternative protection schemes had been proposed to the FCC. The considered the encryption of content at the broadcaster and the use of watermarking or fingerprinting technologies. Both of these were rejected at this stage as it was felt that the technologies were currently not mature enough and, in the case of encryption the burden on the broadcaster would be too great.
The FCC state the main aim of the ruling is to stop the wide distribution of the recorded content over the Internet. Many parties will be pleased that consumers will still be able to make personal digital copies. In the FCC words “redistribution control is a more appropriate form of content protection for digital broadcast television than copy restrictions”.
While the FCC is at pains to point out that that they feel it is important that consumers are able to move recorded content around, what they call, the Personal Digital Network Environment (PDNE), they have declined to define where the edges of this lay.
Although currently there are no detail given about the mechanism to stop personal copies be distributed wider a field, more detail on this are expected later.
One fear of consumers, who have already spent large amounts of money on DTV capable equipment, was that they would be forced to discard their current euipment and buy new, compliant equipment. They will be pleased to discover that this will not be the case; “All existing equipment in use by consumers today will remain fully functional”.
New DTV equipment, “Demodulator Products” sold after 1 July, 2005 in the US must comply with the ruling;
“If the flag is present, the content can be sent in one of several permissible ways, including (1) over an analog output, e.g. to existing analog equipment; or (2) over a digital output associated with an approved content protection or recording technology”
It is not clear if the quality that the digital broadcast brings will remain in the analogue output, or if it will be forcefully degraded to discourage the digital distribution of possible analogue recordings.
Changes to DVD
While it has been stated that current TV equipment will remain useable, the future for current DVD players is far less secure. Hidden in footnote 47 the FCC states:
“We recognize that currently, content recorded onto a DVD with a flag-compliant device will only be able to be viewed on other flag compliant devices and not on legacy DVD players. While we are sensitive to any potential incompatibilities between new and legacy devices, we believe that this single, narrow example presented to us is not unique to a flag system and is outweighed by the overall benefits gained in terms of consumer access to high value content. Changes in DVD technology, such as the transition to high definition DVD devices, will present other unrelated format incompatibilities.”
The briefly translates to DVD players currently on the market will not be able to play DVDs which have been marked with a Broadcast Flag.
Given that DVD is famously the fastest ever growing consumer technology, it is not clear what the public views will be on the fact they will need to replace them.
Affect on the broadcaster
As covered above, the broadcaster will avoid the burden of having to encrypt content prior to broadcast.
The FCC has given individual broadcasters the freedom to make their own decisions as to whether they attach the Flag to their broadcast stream, but points out that they may not have content licensed to them, if they do not implement it.
Some groups urged that the broadcast of certain types of programming, such as news and current affairs, would be prohibited from use of the Flag – in effect during their transmission, they would be forced to turn the Flag off. The FCC has ruled to decline this.
Further discussion on recordings
As we have touched on, while the current ruling only covers the receiving equipment, the FCC is now seeking guidance on creating policy for recording equipment and content protection schemes.
This is the area that will prove most controversial, as it will effectively lock the content. Consumer groups fear that it will also lock the content to a particular company, leading to competing systems not allowing the playing of one companies protected content on another’s platform – the inability to exchange material between formats. This has been labelled the “interoperability” issue.
To address this whole subject, there will be an interim policy for approving digital content protection and recording technologies to enable the FCC to certify multiple compliant technologies in time for manufacturers to include flag technology in television receivers by 2005.
The policy details have been laid out and include the public publishing of proposals, followed by a twenty day period where any objection can be raised. The proposer is then given ten days to provide their response.
The FCC will take all input and make their judgement, which they hope to deliver within ninety days of filing.
The interim policy will in turn be replaced by a permanent policy and the FCC initiated a “Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” to examine this issue in greater detail.
FCC Order and Report (Word doc)
The US regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), whose remit covers the regulation of American TV, has ruled that by 2007 all TV sets sold in the US, bar the smallest (under 13″ screens), must be equipped to receive both digital and analogue signals.
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), who represents the manufacturers of US TVs, took legal action against the FCC, claiming that they had acted illegally. Yesterday, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals, for the DC Circuit, rejected their appeal.
President and CEO Gary Shapiro responded, “We obviously are disappointed by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, which we are still studying. We will be reviewing the full opinion and consulting with our member companies, but of course will be compliant with any final court order.” So, no clear conclusion as to whether they will appeal the decision.
The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) supported the outcome. President and CEO, Edwards O. Fritts, said “The court’s decision today upholding the FCC’s DTV tuner requirement is a milestone towards completing the DTV transition. Consumers buying TV sets will know that the receivers they buy will continue to receive all broadcast signals, even as broadcasting changes to digital. Chairman Powell and the FCC deserve congratulations for their strong leadership in advancing the digital transition.”
The FCC had originally wanted to broadcasters to make the switch by 2006 but was extended when it became clear that this wasn’t going to be reached. Starting in 2004, larger sets must be equipped to receive digital signals.