Category: UK

HomeChoice now Quad-play, Adding Phones

Video Networks Ltd. (VNL) is upping their game with their HomeChoice service. It has announced the addition of a home phone service to its already rather ample HomeChoice bundle of broadband Internet, digital TV and video-on-demand, making it a serious contender for both home entertainment and communications. The service will be delivered using Carrier Pre-Selection, and VNL also plans to offer line rental in 2005. Carrier Pre-Selection entails them using BT lines to carry the phone traffic to VNL networks for delivery.

Currently the service isn’t using VoIP, but we understand from them that they may move to this in the New Year. They certainly have the equipment and bandwidth available to provide it.

HomeChoice customers can opt for either ‘Free Evening and Weekend’ calls at no additional cost, or have the option to upgrade to the ‘Anytime’ talk plan from £5 (~$9) per month. Both offering lower rates to UK mobiles and overseas numbers than similar plans from BT, TalkTalk, One.Tel, NTL and Telewest.

The ‘Free Evenings and Weekends’ talk plan offers, the obvious, free evening and weekend calls to all local and national numbers starting with 01 & 02, and a daytime rate of 2.5p to those numbers.

‘Anytime’ talk plan includes calls to all local and national numbers starting 01 & 02. It costs £9 (~$16) per month for 512Kb broadband customers, £7 (~$12) per month for 1Mb broadband customers, and £5 (~$9) per month for 2Mb broadband customers.

You don’t need a special box or a prefix code. You can use your existing phone and phone number, and the existing standard BT line in your house, for which you will still pay rental. But you have to take VNL’s broadband and digital TV services to avail of the free calls.

The first to offer four services in the UK, VNL geared itself up for this expansion earlier in the year by appointing Vijay Sodiwala, former managing director at Broadsystem Ventures, a News Corporation company, to develop the home phone services.

The service faces stiff competition from rival fixed line offerings such as Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk brand, One.Tel, BT, NTL and Telewest, but no doubt the £1 million (~$1,841,100) marketing push will give it a kick start, and hopefully (pardon the pun) ringing endorsements.

HomeChoice

Premier 3G Concert Broadcast

U2 special edition iPods, ‘phone cast’ Rooster concerts on 3G mobile phones, Robbie Williams new video premiered on 3 mobile phones – is rock becoming virtual?

Avoid the crowds, the heat, the general mayhem, (but sadly also the atmosphere) and virtually experience live gigs on your 3G mobile phone wherever you are, and make as many calls as you want during the intermission.

Yesterday in London, rock band, Rooster played the first ever concert broadcast by 3G mobile phone. Rooster was chosen because 3 is already in partnership with their record label, BMG. The 45-minute gig was really a trial run by 3 to discover more about how people use their video phones. 3, which already provides 1.2 million customers with 3G services in the UK, has already planned a series of gigs to happen throughout 2005, and is hoping that the move will lure more people into buying video phones.

The broadcast was trailed on Rooster’s Web site and on 3’s own phone-based news and entertainment channel, and about 10,000 people signed up for a free pre-gig reminder. Ten minutes before start-up, these 10,000 users were sent an SMS inviting them to visit a “virtual box office” where they could pay £5 to view the gig, and the first 1,000 were admitted.

Another world first was the release of Robbie Williams’ new video ‘Misunderstood’, exclusive for a week on 3 video mobiles before being premiered on the TV or the Web. The deal between EMI and 3 allows fans to either stream or download the video straight to their mobiles. This is a clever choice since the video for ‘Misunderstood’ – which features in the Bridget Jones sequel, ‘The Edge of Reason’ – includes clips from the forthcoming film.

Staying in the digital arena, Robbie Williams also recently announced the release of his greatest hits album on memory-card format for mobile phones, which will be released this month.

Some commentators might say these developments let fans get closer to artists, and if you were selling the equipment you would say that, wouldn’t you?

“It sounds exactly as you would expect a live band playing down a telephone line to sound”, says Alexis Petridis today in his Guardian review of the Rooster event – “a Library Of Congress field recording from the 1930s.”

http://www.roosterofficial.com http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1342211,00.html

BT Offer Public WiFi for £1/month

It’s just bargain after bargain, as companies keep pushing out the barriers to attract new customers or hang on to existing ones, using every technological and communications innovation available. Now BT is offering its new and existing, business and consumer broadband customers, public wireless broadband for just £1 a month. Remember that BT already have a Bluephone in the offing – a mobile phone that will provide cheap Web-based phone calls from Wi-Fi hot spots anywhere in the world.

The service is called BT Openzone and there are two introductory discount deals of £1 per month for up to 500 minutes available to BT Business Broadband customers and BT Broadband and BT Yahoo! 500 minutes is only eight hours a month though, and this may not be enough for some people. It is offered to BT customers, who sign up before December 31, 2004. After the first three months, customers can continue using the exact same service for a further 12 months for £5 a month.

Aimed at people on the move who need to keep in touch, customers can log on to BT Openzone with their Wi-Fi enabled laptop or PDA when within range of over 7,000 hotspot locations across the UK, including hotels, airports, railway stations and coffee shops. With cable companies, mobile operators and VoIP providers always offering trendy alternatives, Telcos have to keep going back to the drawing board.

But (she asked, scratching her head), why would you bother paying £5 or even £1 per month if all you have to do is hawk your laptop down to the nearest café, and get the whole lot for free, plus a really well-made cup of coffee?

Thousands of BT Openzone hotspots can be found in the UK and Republic of Ireland, in motorway service stations, airports, conference centres, hotels and cafés. Also, a Wi-Fi roaming agreement with BT Openzone, has increased the number of T-Mobile UK hotspots to 1,900, and customers of BT Openzone will now also have access to T-Mobile’s 600 UK Wi-Fi hotspots, as well as thousands more across Europe and the US. Now all we have to worry about is wireless security!

BT Group plc

ShowCenter 1000g Gets UK Launch from Pinnacle

Pinnacle ShowCenter is by no means a new kid on the block but its latest version, ShowCenter v1.7 has some new features that make it worth revisiting since it has just been released in the UK.

For starters, Pinnacle ShowCenter is now 802.11g wireless network ready, and includes a compatible wireless module, making it easy to set up ShowCenter on a wired Ethernet, 802.11b or 802.11g home network, and giving it a realistic chance of supporting wireless delivery of audio and video.

Funky new features include the ability to listen to music without turning on the television – users can now assign radio stations or play lists to individual buttons on the ShowCenter remote control. But coolest of all, you can now pause live TV and schedule recordings on your PC.

For the uninitiated, Pinnacle ShowCenter is a set-top device that connects to wireless and wired home local area networks (LAN) allowing streaming of multimedia files from any PC on the network to any television or home entertainment system in the house. It’s really a complete media management software suite for organising and managing media files. Unknown file formats are automatically converted and streamed to the ShowCenter in a recognisable format, while you can control the PVR features on your PCTV tuner from the ShowCenter unit – if you have Pinnacle PCTV Pro, PCTV Stereo, PCTV USB2 or PCTV MediaCenter products.

The ShowCenter software has now been updated with audio and media management enhancements and from early 2005 users in the UK will have online music access via RealNetworks Rhapsody Internet jukebox service.

Pinnacle ShowCenter 1000g carries a suggested retail price of £199.99, while current ShowCenter owners can download v1.7 software-only features for free. Existing customers who wish to add 802.11g functionality to their units, can return them for retooling at a cost of £69.

“Digital media receivers such as Pinnacle ShowCenter are allowing customers to enjoy their PC-based digital music, photos and movies to the fullest extent — throughout the home,” said William Chien, director of product management, digital home products, Pinnacle Systems. “Customers have tremendous flexibility with the option to browse and use the ShowCenter media manager on the PC or from the comfort of their sofa on the television monitor with a remote control.”

http://shop.pinnaclesys.com
www.pinnaclesys.com

UK Gov Opens Door to Open Source

Gerald M. Weinberg, author of The Psychology of Computer Programming, came to an interesting conclusion back in 1971 – “If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilisation.” So who do government departments trust when it comes to creating software? The proprietary software giants or the open source software alternative?
The UK government’s central procurement agency, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), recently field-tested open-source software in the public sector with results that will please Tux lovers everywhere. The open-source pilots were run at various government agencies using software from IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. The subsequent report cites progress in desktop products, such as OpenOffice and Sun Microsystems Inc.’s StarOffice, for routine, low level work, but not for “knowledge” or “power users” who require more advanced capabilities.

The softening in attitude towards open source comes not only from an acceptance of its maturing functionality on the desktop – it’s been around a while now, it also comes down to cost. Open-source software requires less memory and a slower processor speed for the same functionality offered by the proprietary applications that are always demanding hardware upgrades to work to their full potential. So, if open source were taken on board soon it would delay expensive hardware replacement.

The report comes just as the OGC is finalising a three-year extension to its memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Microsoft Corp., which has basked in the warmth of a long and cosy partnership with the UK government. Now that cash strapped government departments all over the world start taking a closer look at open-source alternatives, companies like Microsoft have to be a little worried.

Could OGC have just been hoping that Microsoft would cut its licensing costs? Hardly, you wouldn’t conduct a major study just for that. Although Microsoft did recently launch a major advertising campaign, ‘Get the Facts’, to repudiate the idea that open source has a lower TCO (total cost of ownership) than proprietary software.

UK Telco, BT Group Move Towards TV

There were two pieces of news today about the UK incumbent telecom provider, BT, getting closer to broadcast television. One, an official announcement that they will joint market UK Freeview (UK Free-to-Air Digital TV) receivers, the other in today’s Financial Times, that they are set to announce plans to enter the pay-per-view TV market with the launch of a new BT-branded digital TV and Internet service. It is possible that they are both the same story.

The financial markets response to BT previous discussion of getting involved with broadcast back in January 2003 was not positive, with their shares price dropping.

The FT Telecoms Correspondent, Robert Budden, reported that BT are in discussion with two companies that currently make Freeview boxes, SetPal and NetGem, with an aim to retail the STB’s for £129 when the service formally launches in the summer of next year. The exact details of the services are not know, but Time Shifted, PVR-type functions are expected as a minimum. It should also be noted that BT was granted a licence to broadcast back in March this year.

BT have realised that providing just the DSL connectivity to peoples houses will become a commodity – a utility in effect. With this area only become more competitive, it is not where the money will be made.
BT shares rose 1.62% today.

FT – BT piece

SetPal

NetGem

Service to locate UK mobile phones

A new service has been launched in the UK to enable willing participant to have the position of their mobile phone tracked. mapAmobile is currently working on the Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile networks.

It works by monitoring the strength of signal from aerials and triangulating between them. They claim accuracy within 50 metres but this will vary depending on the density of aerial, so rural locations will be less accurate.

Priced as ~£30 for a year for one phone, there is a charge of 30p each time the service is used, which is slightly strange given they’re selling it as an alternative to texting or phoning the person. Registration is either online or a voucher can be bought at Carphone Warehouse.

On signup, the target-tracked phone is sent an SMS asking for approval to be tracked, as well as regular reminders. The location can be interograted either online, via SMS or telephone and will be given as ‘Fred is in the vicinity of Bow Street, London WC2’ together with the date, time and accuracy of the location. You will also have the option to see a map showing street names and points of interest.

mapAmobile

Autonomy to buy Virage

Autonomy have announced that they will be buying video and audio search company, Virage. They plan to pay $1.10 per share, valuing Virage at around $24.8 million, but given Virage’s expected cash balance of $11.5m, Autonomy are only really paying $13.5m – around $0.60/share. It’s not surprisingly this is a far cry from the head days of Jul 2000 when they peaked at $26 a share.

Virage has been around since 1995 when they starting off by offering the indexing of video content. Users were initially able to search for words spoken during a video, which was later expanded to include close captions text, and later on, even the ability to find instances of a person from a library of user-defined faces. They went on to expanded their offering to include streaming encoding and Webcasting services.

Their offering was always thought of as a bit hollow, but their profile always remained high, backed up with a huge spend on marketing. It appears that this formula has continued as total year revenues to March 2003 were $12.9 million and its net loss was $18.1 million.

Autonomy say their are primarily buying them for their customer base.

RTS London Student Television Awards

Last Friday I was one of the judges at the Royal Television Society (RTS) London Student Television Awards.

The nine strong jury was an interesting assortment of people from many areas of the TV industry. Amongst others, there was a live TV producer, an ex-Channel 4 commissioning editor, a senior producer of children’s programming and a former head of education and health at the ITC/IBA.

The entries came from five of London’s media colleges and were categorised in to animation, factual & non-factual. The highest number of entries came from Ravensbourne.

Animation I thought that all of the entries in the category were very well drawn, using sophisticated animation techniques to create thought provoking pieces with strong uses of music. Watching it is the easy part, there’s a huge amount of work involved in their production.

Factual I felt that this was the strongest category, with a very professional finish on some of the pieces.

Most pieces had clearly received a lot of pre-production and a good depth of research that showed in the depth of information of the best pieces.

There’s a lot of concern in TV generally about “young people”, currently those under 35, not watching news and many, particularly at the 18 to 25 end of the scale are not really watching TV at all.

One piece, “Common day”, took an interesting approach of joining factual and fiction. A detailed, informative discussion about a photographic competition was joined to a fictional piece.

I felt this version didn’t quite gel but it’s interesting approach to TV for people who aren’t used to watching TV – putting across facts/education while entertaining. A good programming idea for the short attention span generation.

Non-factual This category was a good reminder of how hard it is to create good TV drama, as there are a large number of elements, which all need to be strong and in the correct balance. There were a couple of very good uses of lighting and one excellent set. The winners of the awards will be announced on Monday 24 February at the London Television Centre.

UK Ofcom starts to take shape

This autumn (fall) Ofcom, the UK media and telecoms super-regulator, will replaces the five existing media and telecoms regulators. It recently announced that Stephen Carter will be its Chief Executive. In his previous professional life he has been the UK chief executive of ad agency J Walter Thompson, and most recently, managing director for UK cable company NTL.

His initial comments on the current state of the UK market are mostly pretty refreshing, and it will be interesting to see how they start to implement them. He argues that Ofcom must “embrace converged thinking and converged decision making”.

It’s also interesting to see that there is talk from Ofcom’s Chair about “co-regulating” TV advertising, following sustained lobbying from the industry. This will be seen as controversial by viewer groups, as they will fear that TV advertising will run amuck. The regulation of UK TV is currently handled by the Independent Television Commission, ITC.

Media Guardian supply a gallery of current Ofcom execs.