BT has signed a deal with The Walt Disney Company, to deliver their programming over the soon to be launched BT Vision IPTV service.
The good news for BT is that the deal covers not only Disney’s library content, but importantly for BT, new material when it comes available. The new Disney content carries a lot of weight with the UK viewing public (for some reason).
The deal will also cover content from Touchstone Pictures and Miramax Films.
Names of some of the films will be bound to get some people excited with box-office hits ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,’ the Academy Award®-winning ‘Memoirs of a Geisha,’ plus comedies ‘The Shaggy Dog’ and ‘Scary Movie 4.’
Dan Marks, CEO of BT Vision, enthused: “We look forward to working with Disney to develop and use innovative technology to continue providing our customers with choice, convenience and control over their movie-watching.”
BT Vision has been under development for problems with Microsoft’s IPTV service.
New figures from the UK payments association Apacs reveal that online bank fraud losses rose a whopping 55% to £22.5m in the first six months of 2006. 
Another 44% were also guilty of letting the cards out of their sight when paying bills is places like restaurants and bars, with more than half of all online shoppers (51%) never bothering to check that they’re using a secure website address starting with “https” before buying online. 
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Starting 22 November, US Xbox 360 owners will be able to download TV programmes and films to their Xboxes to rent and watch. 
No definite European plans as yet, but it’s expected once they sign the content deals. 
Reality TV programme, Big Brother, is moving to Second Life on 1 December, or “First virtual piglet Brother” as the BabelFish translator put it. 
How do you temp a Second Life player to take part when they’re likely to not like, or possibly hate TV? Give them something they’d love … a tropical island in Second Life. Reuters report the value of it being worth about US$1,675 (£883). 
A new survey has revealed that UK consumers are way down with streaming and downloading audio-visual content into their living room, but they’re not so keen on paying for the stuff. 
The report found that half of those questioned weren’t prepared to pay a single Goddamn bean extra for streamed/downloaded content, with a further 18% only willing to cough up £2 per month for content, and 22% only happy to pay between £2 and £5. 
According to Olswang’s research, easily-distracted, multi-tasking consumers are paying less attention to watching programmes, with 46% of respondents busy emailing and 43% web surfing while watching television. 
You’ve probably seen the news yesterday that 
Being the inquisitive little ferrets that we are, we jumped on to our ever-at-hand mobiles to try the same thing. Not expecting much, as we’re outside the US, you can imagine our surprise when we were given the option of downloading the app – but persisted with the US/Canada only malarky. We were warned that the app might not work correctly. 
Argh .. the handset we used fell at the final hurdle, but we pressed on with some others until success! We checked in with 
Britain’s Information Commissioner has published a study concluding that, within 10 years, surveillance of people living in the UK will be all-pervasive. 
He added: “As ever-more information is collected, shared and used, it intrudes into our private space and leads to decisions which directly influence people’s lives. 
DAB radio pioneers, Pure Technologies, have released information about a forthcoming DAB radio, styled as a Marshall Amp. 
UK sports minister, Richard Caborn, has said that Britain would not protect online gaming executives from extradition requests if they took Internet bets from countries in which they were illegal. These won’t be welcome words to the people running the gambling companies, who have already taken a hit with the arrest of two execs in the US earlier this year. 
The last 18 months have seen a growing crescendo of excitement in the content and mobile phone worlds about the possibilities of delivering TV to mobile phone. The ideas been around a lot longer than that, but it’s the smell of money that has heightened senses.