The thought of having adverts pumping in our ears mid-podcast gives us the trouser shakes, but apparently more than half of our fellow Brits (58%) would be quite happy downloading advertising-funded podcasts.
The figures come from Rajar (Radio Joint Audience Research), the official body in charge of measuring radio audiences in the UK, jointly owned by the BBC and the RadioCentre on behalf of the commercial sector.
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You’ll remember the outcry when Skype forced many of their 0207 SkypeIn subscribers to change their phone numbers late last year, due to Skype changing their suppliers, following an increase in costs.
Many didn’t take up Skype’s offer to use new SkypeIn numbers, opting instead to transfer their SkypeIn number to another VoIP provider (we changed ours to VoIPFone).
We’re getting reports of problems – and have experienced problems ourselves – of calls being incorrectly routed to Skype accounts when these number are called within Skype.
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These are days you can turn around for podcasts, so each person who launches one has to find an angle. One that caught our eye today was from Hampshire police with their Plod-cast.
For our non-UK readers, The Plod, or PC Plod is a slang term referring to the police, with its origins lying with Mr Plod, the policeman in Enid Blyton’s Noddy stories.
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The US public are getting out the popcorn and lapping up Internet video, with over 75 per cent of US Internet users watching a streaming or progressive download video during November, 2007.
In their new report, research firm comScore noted that each user is averaging 3.25 hours of video watching per month, with Google sites – including YouTube – cranking up their video market share by more than two percentage points during October to November, earning them nearly a third (31.3 per cent) of the market.
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Boston Acoustics has announced that it will be launching, nay unleashing, its first DAB/FM radio for good ol’Blighty, the Solo XT in March this year.
Packed in a unit with a “pleasing soft touch” (oo-er), the unit delivers twin DAB and FM functions with support for Band III and L-Band, while Boston claim that the radio will deliver good reception in areas with very low signals.
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The BBC is reporting that their iPlayer is overflowing with win (as da yoot would say), with over 1m users streaming or downloading around 3.5m BBC programmes since the Christmas Day launch.
The on-demand Internet TV service notched up over a million users between Tuesday 25th December and Monday 7th January, downloading or streaming 250,000 programmes each day on average during this period.
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We’re not sure what the residents of humble Ebbsfleet in Kent have done to deserve this, but they’re set to be the first residential location in the UK to be connected to a high speed fibre-optic cable network, serving up the UK’s fastest broadband service.
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The UK National Mobile Phone Crime Unit carried out a number of raids around London last month – under the grandly titled, Operation Prestige – seizing 324 stolen mobile phones and carried out 56 arrests.
The actions were take in Lambeth, Lewisham, Croydon, Brent, Newham, Southwark, Tower Hamlets and Camden. The police believed that many of the handsets were stolen by street gangs and pickpockets.
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Over half of US Households now own at least one digital TV set, claim the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).
In the build up to the trade show mania that is the CES, the CEA is winding up the PR machine and releasing statistics to both boost the TV industry and get the public interested.
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A Vodafone customer in Darlington got the shock of his life before new year, when he learned from Vodafone that he’d racked up a huge mobile data bill.
A ‘friend’ of his had told him that he could wire his mobile phone to his laptop to use it as modem. After signing up for a £41.50/month deal, Ian Simpson from Darlington, thought he could use it without limit.
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