ISP Tiscali have launched a Movies Now service, giving their customers access to over 500 films and entertainment programs without a subscription fee.
There’s a choice to either rent the content or download to own, with prices starting at 99p for TV content or for older films.
They’re working with Arts Alliance Media, who are providing the content and the technology behind the serving and content protection.
We put out a NIB (News in Brief) earlier today about Skype offering half price SMS’s.
It struck us that dear old Blighty (UK) _wasn’t_ included in the list of countries that people could half price SMS to.
Jeepers, Creepers, what’s going on, went the cry!
We got in touch with those who know (Skype-types) and after a short pause came the confirmation that, yes, the UK wasn’t included.
The reason?
“We’re looking at all markets and have started with those that we think will take advantage of the promotion the fastest. Everything is evolutionary at Skype – we rely on early adopter/usage feedback to make sure we get it right for other countries yet to benefit from the promotion.”
Doesn’t make a great deal of sense given the UK’s global reputation of madly texting at every opportunity.
Clearly Skype had to say something and while this might be the official reason, we wondered if it was something to do with the famously-inflexible UK mobile companies, and their unwillingness to show love (or enough of a discount) to dear Skype?
Next week is the second annual Takeaway Festival at the Dana Centre at the Science Museum in London.
The event organisers at the Science Museum have a natty skill of organising some great events, so we’re hoping this one will be up to their normally high standards.
It’s a three day event (9-11 May) which sounds like it could just about start a revolution. They’ll “explore how emerging technologies are transforming creative possibilities, social structures and communication networks.”
By the structure of it doesn’t sound like it will give you a chance to get bored – even if you wanted to.
Continue reading Takeaway Festival: DIY Media Next Week
New research has revealed that seven out of ten old folks aren’t down with this new fangled keyboard- compu- interwebby thing, and Age Concern is worried that their lack of PC skills is making them miss out on workplace opportunities.
Age Concern’s figures have been released to tie in with the launch of their UK-wide Digital Inclusion Network which is tasked with “plugging the gap in opportunities” for crumblies and getting them up to speed with Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
Continue reading Age Concern Launches Digital Inclusion Network
Developed by academics at the University of Portsmouth, a new mobile phone game aims to help international students deal with the ‘culture shock’ of arriving in bonkers Blighty and cope with the rigours of university life in Britain.
Dubbed ‘C-Shock,’ the game was developed by the University of Portsmouth’s academic and games technology expert Nipan Maniar, an ex-overseas student who arrived in the UK from India five years ago.
The BBC Trust has given the go ahead for the BBC’s iPlayer service (iMP).
Expected to launch later this year, the iPlayer service lets punters watch TV shows online seven days after the initial broadcast, with viewers also able to download and store programmes on their PCs for up to 30 days.
Continue reading BBC iPlayer On-Demand Service Gets Green Light
Grace Borrelli is Managing Partner of the TMT Practice for Europe at CTPartners. She gives us her view of the diversity, or lack of it, in senior management in the TMT (Technology, Media & Telecommunications) companies that deliver services and products to us.
One of the key issues in TMT currently is whether executive teams have the right skill mix. As head-hunters, we were concerned by the apparent lack of diversity on both European and US Boards and decided to undertake research to look into this issue more thoroughly.
Continue reading TMT Companies: Lacking Diversity At The Top? (Exclusive)
Netlog, who claim to be “the first truly pan-European social networking site,” have had a couple of changes recently.
Firstly they’ve rebranded themselves from FaceBox (perhaps the fear of legal action from FaceBook or confusion between the two might have been behind it), to a more relevant Netlog.
Continue reading NetLog Euro Social Network Gets €5m For Future Expansion
Wired have a slightly gushing piece about a new niche video site in the YouTube mold – FunnyOrDie.
The central premise – take ‘celebrities’, add user generated content and a large dollop of VC funding from Sequoia Capital – mix up and hope to get a huge money-making success on your hands.
So far, the runaway success, in terms of video views, is a piece called The Landlord, (warning – spoiler follows) where the landlord is two years old and the tenant is US comedian, Will Ferrell. The joke is two fold – a child is the landlord and it swears.
Many of the commentors obviously find it funny, but many do not. We’re in the second category.
Once you’ve got the idea, for us it failed to make us laugh. Have a watch and tell us what you think (probably NWS) …
We would have used the video on FunnyOrDie, but they don’t honour the AutoStart=false flag and it would have played as soon as you opened this Web page – which is most tedious.
It obviously works in the US as it is supposed to have had 7 million views in the first 24 hours of release and is now sitting on over 12.5 million views.
Watching some of the other videos on the site proves one thing to us – comedy writing and the results it produces are rarely international.
Plenty of the videos featured just weren’t funny to us as UK viewers – they didn’t even raise a titter. One reaction was even more strident “I never want to see that site again.”
What will this lead to? We think a further fragmentation of comedy video sites along geographic lines? Or, as we suspect, the rise of sites that will gather country-focused comedy and point to videos on the myriad of video hosting sites that are springing up on a near-daily basis.
The sites making the advertising money will be the meta-referring sites, and the people paying the bills will be the hosting sites
FunnyOrDie – the latter.
Bebo have signed the team behind YouTube LonelyGirl.
YouTube watchers will be well aware of LonelyGirl 15 and her eventual unveiling as the product a small drama-writing team, rather than a troubled fifteen year old.
When that all came out (as it was eventually bound to), many thought LonleyGirl15, or Bree as she’s named would fade away, but the pretense of the story was kept up and ‘her’ video pieces have continued, in fact her channel remains the most subscribed channel of all time on YouTube.
Well, the 31 million member strong social networking site Bebo, have got the LonelyGirl team onboard now to create Kate Modern for them – an English LonelyGirl.
This time they’re being upfront from the start that Kate Modern isn’t real. There will be video pieces and posts made to her Bebo profile.
Mashable reported that it will all be going live in July with the episodes will be aired multiple times per week on Bebo.
The Times spoke to Miles Beckett, a San Diego medical studies drop-out who co-created Bree, to get the background, “Kate Modern is a 19-year-old university student in London. She wants to fit in with her friends and has problems with her parents — but yes, Kate is fictional and will be played by an actress.”
As The Times points out in their coverage
the innocence of LonelyGirl has been replaced by hard-nosed commerce. Joanna Shields, Bebo’s international president, said: “Kate Modern is a great proposition for advertisers and brands. Bebo users average 41 minutes per session and that can’t be ignored.”