Geographic – Page 63 – Digital-Lifestyles

SCH-V960: Samsung ‘Optical Joystick’ Phone Launched

Samsung 'Optical Joystick' SCH-V960 Phone Launched Samsung has launched what it claims is the first mobile phone in the known universe to come with an optical joystick.

You may be wondering why you’d want one of those in the first place, but Samsung clearly thinks it’s on to a winner with its new SCH-V960 ‘Optical Joystick’ Phone.

As ever, Samsung have thoughtfully included a photo of some hotty demonstrating the joys of the optical interface, showing her little digit poised over the handset’s control.

Moving your digit over this control moves a cursor around the screen, just like a mouse about on a grown up PC.

The boffins at Samsung reckon that this will give users nippier access to frequently used menus and make it easy to skip through music track listings.

Weighing a pocket-pleasing 102g, the V960 is a fully fledged phone too, coming with a 2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, GPS, microSD memory slot and a sizeable 2.12-inch 240×320 262K colour TFT screen.

Samsung 'Optical Joystick' SCH-V960 Phone Launched The slide-open phone also comes with an illumination sensor which automatically controls the brightness of the LCD screen and keypad, so you won’t be dazzled if the phone goes off in the middle of the night.

Kitae Lee, President of Samsung’s Telecommunication and Network Business was well chuffed with the new interface, “As the importance of user-friendly interface increases, Samsung is researching and developing methods that enhances intuitive use of mobile phones. Samsung will continue to combine innovative ideas and the latest technology that will benefit our end users.”

Coming in black and white versions, the V960 will be launched in the Korean market at the end of this year but – as ever- there’s ne’er a hint from Messrs and Missuses Samsung as to whether us Limeys will be getting a slice of the optical action.

Samsung SCH V960 Optical Joystick phone. How does it work? [unwired]

The Venice Project: Overview

The Venice Project: Overview The rumours of Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark next project have been whirling around for about six months since sold Skype to eBay for $2.6Bn, the two are focusing their talents on TV with The Venice Project.

To date, the pair and their team have had a lot of success in disrupting industries. They’ve had a pop at the music business with Kazaa, the telephone business via Skype and now the television business. Time for the TV world to take note.

This weekend, the Financial Times has picked up on the story, re-igniting the media interest.

The Venice Project (TVP) employed their first programmer on 1 January 2006, so have had nearly a year to get the software to the point where it’s ready to be noticed. The beta release came out on 12 December and since then they have a reported 6,000 on the beta program.

The Venice Project: Overview

We suspect the FT piece was part of a carefully-managed media campaign, as TVP will need to start attracting the advertisers that will support the content being show for free to the users of TVP.

What does TVP do?
On their blog, the TVP team outline their desires/drivers for the project. The founding idea – TV isn’t good, so it needs fixing.

It’s not Skype TV as some publications have reported.

TVP is headquartered in Leiden in The Netherlands it also has other offices in Toulouse, France; London and New York. Its CEO is Fredrik de Wahl, and it looks like they’ve built up quite a few employees.

The Venice Project: Overview

The FT are reporting it will carry “near high-definition” programmes, while TVP speak about TV-quality.

We’ve seen some screenshots of the service and, even despite its early beta-stage, it looks pretty slick. The video runs in full screen, with a high quality image being shown. Additional content and EPG features are laid on top, with the video still viewable underneath.

Content for the beta-trial is coming from some pretty big names in the media business including Warner Brothers.

The adverts that are shown on the service, allow it be free. We understand from one of the beta testers that the adverts are not too intrusive and pretty short.

The Venice Project: Overview

It’s not just the P2P
On a simple level, TVP is software that enables the delivery of video content to individuals using P2P to ease the distribution, while radically reducing the price of getting it out there. Indeed most of the mainstream media are focusing their attention on TVP using P2P.

We think this misses the biggest change the TVP could bring about. Recommendation and tagging of content will make the content findable – one of the biggest headaches when the worlds content is available to a viewer.

Once programmes have been selected to watch, we understand that there will be tools to let people discuss the shows as they are going on – thus bringing a community around the TV shows. There are add on services that offer this, but its inclusion as an integral part of the system will make it second nature to contribute to.

It appears that TVP will avoid the need to apply DRM to the content as “the bits and bytes being collected on your computer are fragments of a stream,” as Fredrik de Wahl, the project’s chief executive told the FT. We can see that there is logic behind this, but doesn’t address the fact that, for the programme to be shown, they need to reside on the machine while they are being shown. In truth, all that needs to be achieved with the technology is to pursue the content owner to put their content on it.

The Venice Project: Overview

The Venice Project is definitely one to watch. We hope to get on the beta program soon, to give you a more in-depth view and understanding of its impact.

The Venice Project TVP

Images courtesy of Choose Chris

Skype Offers US Unlimited Calling Plan

Skype US Unlimited Calling Plan Announced While announcing the release 3.0 of their VoIP software, Skype have unveiled the US Unlimited Calling Plan.

Don’t panic – this doesn’t affect Skype to Skype calls, but calls to US landlines and mobile.

The offer to US Skype users is $29.95 per year. Those who sign up for the new plan before 31 January 2007 will get it for half price – $14.95 per year. Pay per call SkypeOut will continue.

Skype will be sweetening the deal further by giving 100 minutes of SkypeOut credit for making International calls and over $50 in discount coupons for purchasing Skype-certified hardware products.

Skype Zones Offers Wi-Fi Access On The Move Those Europeans who are surprised that calls to mobiles are included, should know that in the US owners of mobile pay to receive calls, so callers don’t pay extra to make them.

Until now, calls to landlines from Skype have been paid on a per calls basis, whenthey’re not offering free calls for a limited period which ends at the end of this year.

Skype are really doing rather well, with claims of over 11m Skype users, way in excess of any other VoIP services.

Ofcom Proposed Spectrum Auction: Analysis

Ofcom Consulting On The Auction Of Spectrum In The 2GHz Band There’s a fair chunk of spectrum that’s sitting there not being used in the 2GHz band. The various bits are 2500-2690 MHz, 2010-2025 MHz and 2290-2300 MHz.

Ofcom has a duty to ensure spectrum isn’t wasted and as a consequence of the auction will end up driving revenue for the Government. Previously, and famously they did very well when they auctioned the 3G licenses, raising £21bn for the Treasury.

They recently auctioned some GSM spectrum and that only raised £3.8m, but it was much less than the 3G lot with many more restrictions.

Under its new face, and following EU directives, Ofcom likes to offer technology neutral licenses, which means the licensee can use the spectrum for whatever they want – as long as they meet the radio restrictions on that band (power, spectral masks, etc). They hope this will stimulate innovative services which is good for the economy.

There’s a lot of interest in the spectrum, as it could be used for lots of services including 3G and WiMAX, but that’s where the problems start.

Possible European Interference
There are various blocks of spectrum which are coordinated at a European level and each EU country uses the spectrum for the same things. That’s pretty much what happens for GSM and 3G, as well as some TV and radio bands.

It’s all organised by CEPT (European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications) and the Radio Spectrum Committee (RSC), CEPT is represented by 47 countries and the RSC by 25 EU states. They ensure that radio usage is coordinated. Unfortunately radio waves don’t abide by national borders, so it would be no good if one country was using spectrum for say TV and another for radio as they’d interfere with each other.

Ofcom Consulting On The Auction Of Spectrum In The 2GHz Band

Though the UK is an island, interference issues are quite common, especially in the south east with France and the north east with the Dutch and even the Nordic countries. The west has to worry about Ireland (and of course Northern Ireland abides by UK policy).

These particular bands are already allocated for 3G, 10MHz in 2010 – 2020 MHz, is already designed for license-exempt self-provided, self-coordinated IMT-2000 use. In the UK none of the 3G networks have actually utilised it, though in other parts of Europe it has been used for this purpose.

2500 – 2690 MHz is currently mainly used for video broadcast systems, all licensees have been given notice to vacate by 31st December 2006. This is a significant amount of spectrum (190MHz) which is greater than is currently allocated to the whole of 3G use (140MHz). It was reserved for a “new” entrant if the current 5th 3G operator failed or for existing 3G expansion.

Ofcom’s suggestions summarised

Ofcom are currently holding UK consultations to see what stakeholders think should happen. They are proposing the following: –

2500-2690 MHz Packaged on the basis of blocks of 5 MHz as lots of paired spectrum (2×5 MHz, 120 MHz duplex spacing) and unpaired spectrum (5 MHz), with the eventual amount of lots in each category to be determined in the auction. The reference point is as per the CEPT band plan: 14 lots of paired channels (14x2x5 MHz with uplink in 2500-2570 MHz and downlink in 2620-2690 MHz) and 9 lots of unpaired channels (9×5 MHz in 2570-2615 MHz).

One guard channel will be necessary at adjacencies between paired and unpaired spectrum, at 2615-2620 MHz, and possibly another in the top part of the band.

There is a possibility to allow paired lots to be converted into the equivalent of two unpaired lots in the event that demand for unpaired lots exceeds that for paired lots at a given lot price.

Each bidder should receive contiguous lots in each category, except potentially one assignment of unpaired spectrum which could need to be split into two blocks of contiguous lots.

2010-2025 MHz Package for award as a single 15 MHz lot.

2290-2302 MHz Package for award as a single 10 MHz lot and retain 2300-2302 MHz for possible inclusion as part of a future award together with 2302-2310 MHz.

What might the response be?
The consultation will close in March 2007 and it’s likely the 3G operators will be extremely vocal in their claim to this spectrum, as they paid so much for their original licenses.

Once Ofcom digest the responses, they’ll then have to argue the case at the European level to ensure it can be licensed off in a technology neutral manner without upsetting our neighbours, however getting agreement from at least 47 countries tends to be a time consuming process.

Luckily CEPT are already discussing the issues and are expecting to make a statement in July next year. RSC will follow shortly after.

Although there’s no guarantee that discussions will go in Ofcom’s favour, they are hoping an award process can start in the Autumn of 2007, though it may well be delayed until 2008.

Potential Cash
With 16 national licenses available, there’s a fair amount of cash the government can expect to raise. Even if Ofcom set the minimum price at £50,000 then that’s £800,000 – they are likely to reach much higher values, although not the silly pricing that the original 3G licenses fetched.

Ofcom
CEPT (European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications)
Radio Spectrum Committee (RSC)

Napster Mobile: O2 Ireland Is First

O2 Ireland has become the first European mobile operator to offer Napster Mobile.

Napster Mobile lets people search, browse, preview and purchase content from Napster’s 2.2m+ track music catalogue.

The service is launching on O2’s 3G i-mode handsets with the hope that non i-mode handsets should be available by March 2007 on O2 Active.

From the beginning of next year O2 Ireland customers will also be able to access a copy of their mobile downloads on their personal computers giving them the flexibility of having their music downloads both on the go and at the PC, all from one universally recognised music brand.

One of the difficulties with moving a service like Napster from the large PC screen to a mobile handset could be the restrictions of the screen size. To alleviate the problems of navigating such a large number of tracks, the new Napster Mobile service also features a recommendation engine which makes content recommendations based on each customer’s personal taste in music. Nice.

Waking up to consumers demands, users of the service will also be able to access tracks that they purchase on the mobiles, on their PCs, from the beginning of next year.

Ericsson is powering the backend of the service – an interesting change from Nokia, who normally provide the technology to do this.

Napster Mobile: O2 Ireland Is First O2 has spend a considerable amount of money tying themselves to music, attempting to benefit from all of the ‘cool’ that it can bring. You only have to witness the party they threw at IFA last year to understand how successfully they’ve been with it – it was definitely the best party at IFA, rammed full of young things gyrating.

The service is already running at NTT DoCoMo in Japan (also i-mode), SunCom Wireless and Cingular in the US. Plans for further European operator are being finalised, with Portugal expecting to be the next.

O2 Ireland
Napster UK

OverBoard Pro-Sports Waterproof MP3 Case Review (65%)

OverBoard Pro-Sports Waterproof MP3 Case Review (65%) Waterproof gadgets aren’t just for the lounging by the pool in the summer. Despite its rather alarming name (“Stop the ferry! iPod overboard!”), this case promises to protect your tunes from the worst the winter weather can throw at you, as well as providing full waterproofing to a depth of six metres for summertime use.

The £15 case is made from padded vinyl, with a clear window to let you see what your player is up to. It’s been designed for market-leading Apples, and an 8th-gen 80Gb iPod does indeed slide in extremely snugly. A close fit is important to avoid excessive motion, which can damage miniature hard drives. However, if you’re planning to use the OverBoard for vigorous jogging or skiing, a totally solid state player such as a Nano will always be more resilient than a hard drive unit.

Despite being designed for full-size iPods, which have the headphone socket on the top right corner, the internal headphone jack is centrally mounted, so there’s a degree of awkwardness in marrying the plugs. Once it’s in, though, it feels quite secure and shows no sign of working itself loose.

The most important part of any waterproof case is the seal and this has a familiar self-tightening sliding design. You need to pull both switches outwards to open the seal. Unfortunately, the seal lacks a safety interlock of any kind and the pressure needed to release it is worryingly light. I would definitely be concerned about accidentally opening the unit while mucking about in a swimming pool or snorkelling in the surf. The seal proved effective in basic waterproofing, although a very small amount of water did find it way into the seal. This could leak into the case when you subsequently open the seal.

OverBoard Pro-Sports Waterproof MP3 Case Review (65%) The case comes with a small eyelet for a lanyard (supplied) and a large Velcro armband. This is tougher and more comfortable than the standard Apple armband, for example, and closes very firmly – a quality piece of kit. Assuming you want to read your iPod’s display and have the headphone jack upward, that means the seal faces downward – another potential concern if the seal were to accidentally open while you’re running.

The good news is that the Apple clickwheel works perfectly well through the plastic window, and the screen is clearly visible – you could easily watch downloaded video clips while bobbing on a lilo. Sound quality is not noticeably affected by the intervening jacks. Even with an 80Gb iPod (the heaviest Apple currently available) inside, the case floats in fresh water.

Conclusion

The OverBoard has clearly had some thought go into it. It’s well padded, easy to use the player inside and has an excellent armband. But the seal system is neither secure enough nor convincingly impenetrable for the most active users. The warning on the package that ‘contents should be insured separately’ seems like very sensible advice.

A good solution for casual use near snow, rain, water and dust, then, but athletes and divers should definitely spend a little more on protection.

Score: 65%

4oD Review: Geo-Blocking Problems

4oD Review: Geo-Blocking Fails Channel 4 are having problems delivering their 4OD, Geo-restricted content to their UK-based consumers.

Following the launch of 4oD on wednesday, we were really keen to try the service out. It became available a little after the expected mid-day launch, but frankly who’s counting.

We got the software down and were really impressed with the way it looked. Channel 4 really know how to design stuff that looks good and is easy to interact with. Bold use of large graphics and well executed example pieces of video viewable, just my mousing over. A really good job.

We thought we’d initially test out service by using the freely available porgrammes, two of which are given away each week. Plumbing for Trigger Happy, we clicked with some excitement.

Disappointment hit when we found that Channel 4, or at least their geo-sensing service thought we were outside the UK, and therefore refused to deliver the content to us (see image).

4oD Review: Geo-Blocking Fails

Geo-sensing is used by a growing number of Web-based service, as it gives them knowledge of where users are coming from. By looking up the originating IP address, the theory is that they can tell which country you’re in, or in even more detail than that sometimes.

It’s features are all the more important to distributers of content that has a restricted license, like video content. If the content is licensed for UK use, the rights holds want assurance that it can only get to people in the UK.

This is all fine and dandy – if the geo-sensing is correct. We’re with Metronet, now part of Plus.net. They’re a significant player in the ISP game, so much so that BT has made a cash bid for them.

We reported the problem to Channel 4 a couple of hours after launch, providing various pieces of helpful information over a number of emails. We understood that they’d be getting right on to it. While we know that these things take a little time, we pretty surprised that it hasn’t been fixed two days later

We’re sure that other people with different ISP’s are able to view the content, just surprised that companies who are selling geo-sensing service are not correct as to what is in the UK and what’s outside.

We hope that Channel-4 and their geo-sensing provider can get their wrinkles ironed out – they’re missing income here.

Channel 4oD

Digital Hollywood Europe:Next Generation P2P: Synopsis: (pt 3/3)

Synopsis: Next Generation P2P: Digital Hollywood Europe (Pt Three) Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) concludes his synopsis of the Next Generation P2P sessions at the recent Digital Hollywood Europe conference held in London’s docklands.
Guido Ciburski (pictured right) announced that CyberSky-TV’s streaming video P2P software was declared legal in Germany two months ago, after protracted court proceedings, and that now the questions are how to put it to best commercial use and how to advertise it so that it stays that way. He said the attractiveness of the software is its higher quality online video experience, which takes advantage of higher upload speeds available to broadband users. The US Supreme court decision has been misinterpreted by many, but in the final analysis has not changed much in terms of consumer behavior. P2P usage has continued its steady expansion, notwithstanding market share shifts among applications, basically regardless of related cases and settlements.

Major record labels and movie studios need to take time at this point in their migration to a digital distribution marketplace to listen more to consumers. There has been too little feedback from users factored into digital distribution strategies. There needs to be more interaction with the community of P2P users, and an effort to maximize the satisfaction of consumers with new business models. Going forward, the increase in broadband penetration will drive more growth of P2P, and local storage capabilities and content consumption patterns will change as a function of more speed and capacity.

Dr. Nimrod Koslowski articulated a new vision by stating that content being redistributed via P2P networks can be both controlled and accelerated. Oversi’s patent-pending caching system enables ISPs to monetize P2P and deal with network imbalances arising from the widespread adoption of P2P. It should indeed be experimentation time in this channel. Major content companies can participate at very little risk by putting some of their deeply archived, least monetized, long-tail content into P2P trials. Let material that is not the highest value content travel freely and find new ways to monetize it. There are many new interactive advertising and value-adding layers and payment mechanisms. Experiment and then scale what works.

The Grokster decision should be a clear green light that P2P is legal; inducement to infringe copyright is not. Going after end-users for enforcement purposes is a failed proposition, however. Encouraging content to be redistributed with new forms of monetization will be the winner. We need to get away from proprietary formats and embrace P2P in intuitive ways and couple it with operating systems. The industry needs to relate to the way content actually is being redistributed in terms of developmental priorities and not fight it. Don’t block applications. P2P will become much more integrated into the online environment in the future; not just files, but also acceptable levels of security integrated into our digital-social fabric.

Bruce Benson concluded with his observation that the entertainment industry is indeed evolving to digital distribution – and that such iconoclastic developments as music companies learning to market MP3s rather than DRM’d content may be coming, as well as movie companies adopting new approaches to market their entire libraries online despite legacy sequential-distribution windows. What’s working in P2P is free content. What’s not working is paid content. We need to take a lesson from the video/DVD market, which learned that it could more than makeup with high volume lower-unit-cost transactions (rentals) what it lost from relying exclusively on sales.

Synopsis: Next Generation P2P: Digital Hollywood Europe (Pt Three) FTI Consulting believes it could generate sixty cents per view in ad-supported P2P movies for example. There is the opportunity to put whole libraries to work in this channel. The problems are rights complications, executive bandwidth, etc. – business issues rather than technology issues. Copyright laws are outdated and the US Congress writing tuck ‘n fixes for what has become too complex is no longer going to be effective – copyright laws can’t deal with mash-ups for instance. Rights holders should digitize everything and clear the rights to be able to monetize their works as new P2P models become clarified. We will see the completion of a cable by-pass online, and content elasticity will continue to expand as YouTube has so aptly demonstrated.

Audience questions ranged from how to get tech savvy kids to pay for content to how to convince ISPs that P2P can provide desired quality of service (QoS) levels. Answers confirmed that people will pay for convenience, value, and reliability; and enhanced hybrid P2P systems can do this better than alternatives.

All affected parties need to participate actively in developing a new commerce engine, which is different from just putting up toll-booths. It’s time for more resources to be directed towards creators and innovators. This is a uniquely open environment with the lowest barrier to entry of any channel and enormous possibilities. Share wisely, and take care.

Part one of the coverage – Next Generation P2P: Digital Hollywood Europe.
Part two of the coverage – Next Generation P2P – Digital Hollywood Europe.

Reproduced with permission of the DCIA. For more information, plan to attend the day-long P2P MEDIA SUMMIT NY on February 6, 2007.

Next Generation P2P: Digital Hollywood Europe: Synopsis (pt 2/3)

Synopsis: Next Generation P2P: Digital Hollywood Europe (Pt Two) Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) gives us a synopsis of the Next Generation P2P sessions at the recent Digital Hollywood Europe conference held in London’s docklands.

Ingjerd Jevnaker (pictured right) distinguished the use of P2P for live streaming as separate from file sharing. P2P essentially means interconnecting users computer-to-computer on the same level, and this can be to share bandwidth as well as content. There should be no contradiction between P2P and protecting content. Because of legacy issues tainting P2P’s image, however, some successful P2P applications don’t advertise that they use P2P – and users don’t care. Meanwhile, other P2P networks have increased their popularity with almost a revolutionary appeal to consumers by emphasizing P2P. The biggest emerging failures are digital services that use DRM in too draconian a manner. Flexibility is needed.

P2P companies now are either going open source and in some ways underground and non-commercial, or working to get consumers to sign onto licensed models. We need to encourage the technology sector to support and advance legitimate uses of P2P on multiple networks; and we need to encourage the entertainment sector to think about alternative business models, such as adopting RawFlow streaming and integrating ad-supported commercial content with user-generated content (UGC). In the coming future, there will be no more TVs – PCs will become the video appliance.

Les Ottolenghi explained how P2P is a superior delivery method for rich media content, with INTENT MediaWorks now delivering 370,000 licensed files per day up from 10K/day a year ago and participating in such groundbreaking efforts as the recent Coca-Cola sponsored Jay-Z P2P-exclusive promotion. INTENT uses DRM to track content, converting the open P2P universe into an ecosystem for legitimate business, which is emerging as primarily ad-supported. Licensed content is provided free, giving instant gratification to end-users, with the result that 84% of discovered files are retained. Unified file-discovery across all P2P and social networks has also emerged as an important attribute for success; hence INTENT has just launched its DelveDown service to provide that functionality.

Fostering the community nature of the channel is also very important, and P2P is uniquely configured for social networking. Post-Grokster, major entertainment companies are showing more interest in working with INTENT and, globally, copyright court cases have reduced the reluctance of majors to move forward and embrace P2P. It is critical not to let telecom firms dictate what happens regarding further innovation by eliminating net neutrality. We also need to work to make files smarter – so that content packages themselves have intelligence – plus continue to improve interoperability and attract higher quality content to be licensed for P2P.

Synopsis: Next Generation P2P: Digital Hollywood Europe (Pt Two) Daniel Harris (pictured right) provided Kendra’s perspective on P2P from its alliance of content owners and software makers. Daniel’s vision is that any application on any device should be able to browse any catalog, and there should be universal interoperability. Record labels have had different ways of managing their catalogs, historically; now we need to show them that with P2P it is possible to aggregate databases and achieve across-the-board content monetization. P2P can bring benefits of non-centralized search and publishing to all sorts of content databases.

P2P can be used for information transfer – not just file transfer. Standardization will help make this a commercially viable consumer medium. It is increasingly futile to pursue legal strategies when open standards are proliferating. Huge advancements could be made in commercial development by simply bolting payment systems onto traditional P2Ps and letting developers earn money by working to make this happen. It is time to embrace, support, and extend P2P with open standards to build a market that has enormous potential. Let’s empower developers to make this succeed with the reality of more open standards.

Trevor Albery cited Warner Bros.’ recent development of new business initiatives in the P2P sphere, while also continuing a strong focus on anti-piracy activities. Examples include licensing BitTorrent and the joint venture announced earlier this year with DCIA Member arvato mobile using its GNAB platform for the In2Movies service in Germany. So far, these approaches have involved offering filmed content in traditional business models, but with a P2P delivery aspect. It is still the very early days for the P2P distribution channel, and now is the time for experimentation in what is a nascent industry in order to learn what will work best.

There should be no apologies for the Grokster case, which was about profiting from inducement to infringe copyright, not about P2P technology. Today’s challenge is to build good services that will excite consumers and compete with unlicensed online content. There may well be more litigation, as the channel continues its legitimization. We need to bring all stakeholders together to make DRM work better so that P2P can safely monetize content. P2P will find its place among distribution channels, while DVDs will continue and other electronic distribution will as well.

Anthony Rose outlined Altnet’s experience from 2001, when, in retrospect, its approach was ahead of its time. Altnet pioneered DRM-protected content distribution through open P2Ps, but major entertainment content rights holders initially resisted. Now that legal settlements are complete, however, Altnet is finally obtaining licenses. Its newest offering, the Global File Registry (GFR), connects people who own content with people who use content. Five years ago, there was much innovation in the P2P space, but then Web 2.0 became more innovative as P2Ps faced litigation. Now we are at a stage where the transport layer for P2P works quite well, but how people use it is still not working as a business. We need renewed innovation here – for example, with better indexing technologies – so that users will not be polarized.

Of concern is the fact that dispute settlements have bi-furcated the development community into those who want licensed distribution and those who are trying to anonymize usage. What should be obvious is that value will be generated by large-volume licensed-content distribution. Social wrapping in P2P is also an area of high potential. Consumers are more empowered than ever and, therefore, trying to dictate their behavior harshly will fail and drive them to the waiting darknets. The desire for control must be tempered; the winning play will be one based on equilibrium. The future will bring an increase in hybrid systems with a mix of centralized and distributed servers.

Part one of the coverage – Next Generation P2P: Digital Hollywood Europe.
Part three of the coverage – Next Generation P2P – Digital Hollywood Europe.

Reproduced with permission of the DCIA. For more information, plan to attend the day-long P2P MEDIA SUMMIT NY on February 6, 2007.

1 In 3 Euro Homes To Have AV/IT Network By 2010

1 In 3 Euro Homes To Have AV/IT Network By 2010 More than 1 in 3 European households will have an integrated home network by 2010, according to a new industry report from Understanding & Solutions.

Until recently, home networking – the ability to connect digital devices together around the home – has largely been confined to Broadband and PC networking. However, linking multiple computers, telephones, televisions, Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), games consoles, home security systems and other digital devices into a home network is slowly beginning to generate a groundswell of activity.

Understanding & Solutions predicts that within 2-3 years IP crossover networking (bridging the gap between PC/Broadband and AV/Broadcast) will gradually increase as a result of consumer demand, coupled with a growing online content supply from the entertainment, photo services and consumer electronics industries.

“We’re all becoming more demanding, craving access to up-to-the-minute entertainment and information – however, wherever and whenever we want it,” says John Bird, Principal Analyst at Understanding & Solutions. “Home networking is the new gateway that manages, transports and stores our information across multiple devices within the home: it’s the great content enabler and by 2010 at least 30-50% of all consumer electronics devices on sale will be network-enabled.”

There are two key factors driving the home networking revolution, each with its own respective service provider ‘push’: namely, the wide availability of Broadband and the increase of digital multi-room TV networking.

1 In 3 Euro Homes To Have AV/IT Network By 2010

Consumers want to access Web content on a range of devices, including PCs, laptops (accounting for over 50% of the consumer PC market), games consoles and handheld devices. Additionally, PCs are increasingly being used to store entertainment content, which consumers now want to access and view on other consumer electronics products around the home, including TVs, PVRs and home audio equipment.

In parallel with this Broadband-driven trend, multi-room TV networking will move from analogue to the digital domain over the next 3 years, using Wi-Fi and a variety of ‘no new wires’ technologies. For example, coax, powerline and phone line communication signals can now carry a digital network signal around the home: simply plug in and you are connected.

A significant cultural change over recent years is that many consumers are using the PC as a mainstream TV viewing platform. Indeed, a quarter of European homes now have PCs and TVs co-located in the living room.

“Another key factor,” says Bird, “is the MP3 boom. With more than 200 million player owners worldwide, consumer focus is moving towards the PC as a music access device, storage platform and media library. This is resulting in a small, but growing number of users networking PC-based content and direct Broadband connectivity across to other audio devices such as home music systems.”

Networking of AV/Broadcast-centric and PC/Broadband-centric ‘clusters’ will not happen overnight, but the ingredients for market growth are there. As Broadband architectures and mass storage evolve towards fully-networked distribution systems, a new breed of consumer is demanding its own home entertainment and communications hub in a rapidly converging marketplace.

Understanding & Solutions