Industry Trends – Page 5 – Digital-Lifestyles

Sky Anytime on PC: One Million Films In A Year

Sky Anytime on PC downloaded its one millionth film on the 14 January neatly marking its first year of operation.

The Sky Anytime on TV service is the renamed Sky By Broadband service, which delivers select Sky’s TV content over a broadband connection to a PC.

Sky Anytime: One Million Films In A Year

Figures for the film downloads could have been larger if Sky hadn’t had to pull the service back in September after their chosen DRM-restriction system, by Microsoft, was cracked.

We’re assuming that the million films that have been downloaded have been paid for, making it a pretty big bonanza, given the films are a wallet-emptying £3.95 each. Once subscribers have paid up, they’re given access to it for seven days, but are restricting to 48 hours viewing window after the first viewing.

Dawn Airey, BSkyB’s managing director of channels and services, was keen to say her piece about it … “We’re delighted that customers have taken to Anytime with such enthusiasm. Sky Movies is the UK’s most popular movie service and we’re able to use broadband to give customers more flexibility in how they watch. The fact that in this first year we’ve already seen 1m movie downloads is testament to customers’ willingness to embrace new technologies and get more from Sky.”

Sky report that the service has gained a quarter of a million registered users in its first year of operation.

Brave New Digital World Conference

Salford, Gtr Manchester, UK

Now in its 14th year, the Salford Conference is the most important forum to discuss television from a non-metropolitan perspective.

The 2007 Conference, to be held on 11 January 2007 at the Lowry Centre, Salford Quays, will focus on the opportunities presented by the new digital world for the industry outside London. It will look at the effect on the rest of the country of the BBC’s proposed move to Salford, and as the commercial TV industry changes at bewildering speed it will look at the future of ITV in the Nations and Regions. There will be discussions on the new platforms and interactive media and a chance to meet the experts, The Conference will showcase new platforms and technologies, offer a scriptwriters’ master class, and provide an opportunity over lunch to “Speed Date the Commissioners!”

Brave New Digital World Conference

£180m To Be Spent Online Today In UK

£180m To Be Spent Online Today In UK It’s being predicted that today will be the biggest Internet-based shopping day of the year in the UK. The Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) research points to a massive £180m being spent just on this day, more than double the £82 million average for 2006.

They see most of the e-shopping (as it used to be so sweetly called) being done in peoples lunch hours, between 1-2, when £14 million will be chucked over the line towards various online shops. This far out weighs the average of £4 million-per-hour being spent online in the 10-weeks run up to Christmas.

It’s not just those chomping the lunch sarnies that are clicking-until-they-drop, eDigitalResearch.com’s director, Chris Russell, chimes in with, “The evening Internet shopping peak is a recent phenomenon that has become possible with consumers’ acquisition of broadband at home. The evening peak – between 7 and 9pm – is now 80% as high as lunchtimes, when the highest sales are still recorded, between 1 and 2pm.”

Figures like this point to 38% of the sales taking place outside of traditional shopping hours, either before 9am or after 6pm. IMRG are really keen for you to notice this – differentiating them from ‘normal’ stores.

It’s not just today that is rather large in the sales department – the shopping joy/nightmare will be spread over the whole week. They estimate online sales worth £1.145 billion (!) will be made in the week 4-10 Dec, with the whole of December ringing up £3.55 billion.

IMRG

Love TV In The Living Room, Hate Paying For It

Love TV In The Living Room, Hate Paying For it 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.

Research from the Olswang Convergence Consumer Survey 2006 showed that some 40% of UK consumers are already streaming or downloading audio-visual content onto their PCs, with nearly half of that total settling down to watch the content in their living room.

Of the content watched, it was found that punters preferred to watch full-length feature films and TV programmes on their PCs rather than shorter clips and trailers.

While the growing influence of the PC in the living room should spell good news for content creators and distributors, it seems that punters are definitely not warming to the idea of paying to receive the content on their home PCs.

Love TV In The Living Room, Hate Paying For it 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.

Matthew Phillips, media, communications and technology partner at Olswang, commented, ” As broadcasters, rights holders and service providers continue to negotiate control over media rights, the key challenge is to offer a range of content which is broad enough for consumers to find something they want to watch and are willing to pay for.”

It seems that the battle isn’t just about getting people to pay for the content, but also getting them to actually pay attention.

Love TV In The Living Room, Hate Paying For it 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.

A bit like us then. Whoops!

Olswang

Expanded Euro Regulation Repudiation By UK’s OFCOM: TWF

The UK’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator OFCOM last week made clear its opposition to potential EU regulation. It fears it will straight-jacket the emerging new wave industries aiming to propel high tech growth in the EU zone over the coming years.

Currently regulation of broadcasting in the EU lies within sovereign states but the overriding policy is subject to the famous 1989, Television Without Frontiers Directive which is likely to be updated and widened in 2007. At the time of the drafting of this legislation, TV was considered as a linear broadcasting method of distribution. The danger is that now the bureaucrats have an inkling of what convergence means, they want to manage its development.

OFCOM commissioned the respected Rand Corporation to look at how the proposed changes would affect Europe’s emerging IPTV networks alongside new-fangled mobile multimedia and online games. The findings mirror the concerns of OFCOM.

The report, “Assessing Indirect Impacts of the EC Proposals for Video Regulation” makes a powerful case for the online games industry to be excluded from the new legislation, seeing a risk of the development of fresh gaming, moving to countries unfettered by cumbersome legislation, ie. Outside the EU.

The study also makes clear its’ worries that excessive regulation could mean that countries outside of the EU would benefit from the expected growth in non traditional delivery of multimedia content, before it has established itself in Europe.

The model of broadcast intervention could impact much of the new wave Internet traffic; judging Youtube and Myspace by similar criteria to traditional linear broadcasters

Lobbying is expected to continue with the entrenched traditional media industry hoping to protect dwindling revenues and state players keen to politicize the situation. Some solace can be taken that the UK regulator has at least identified the danger of over regulation.

Vodafone Casa Fastweb Comes To Life

Vodafone Casa Fastweb Comes To Life In the general rush of all mobile phone companies desperately try not to get sidelined, Vodafone Italy have just announced a tie-up with Italian broadband provider, FastWeb.

Customers will be be able to use their normal Vodafone services on their mobiles, make mobile voice calls to fixed line phones at fixed rates whilst at home and have access to Fastweb’s broadband network, which covers approximately half the population of Italy at speeds of up to 20Mbps.

Vodafone Casa Fastweb Comes To Life FastWeb bill themselves as “Italy’s leading alternative broadband provider,” and with under a million customers (874,300), they’ll benefit from having Vodafone selling their services from Vodafone shops around Italy as well as to their current 24m cellular customers.

If mobile companies don’t start offering fixed line services, they feel they’ll lose customers to people who do, with the single bill for all communications being the strongest pull.

We recently reported that O2 Germany has gone the same route offering DSL, Vodafone UK tied up with BT and Vodafone Germany launched similar services on 1 Sept.

Vodafone Italy
FastWeb

Sun To Join Blu-ray Board: IFA News Blip

Sun To Join Blue-ray Board: IFA News Blip The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has just announced that Sun Microsystems will join their board.

Why Sun? The interactivity of Blu-ray is powered by Sun’s Java, so in someways it’s pretty surprising that they weren’t there already.

Here at IFA, there’s a pretty strong feeling that the battle for the Next Generation of video disc has been won, with stronger and stronger support for Blu-ray being shown over it’s rival HD-DVD.

Sun To Join Blue-ray Board: IFA News Blip Mike Dunn, President of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment announced a roster of 8 films that will be released on Blu-ray, with the first being Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (Director’s cut). This title has extensive use of Java-driven interactivity, including a video game that uses scenes from the film.

The BDA board already contains some of the largest names in consumer electronics; computing and film companies.

MySpace To Hit 100 Million Accounts

MySpace Set To Hit 100m Users Currently listed as the fourth most popular English-language Website on the planet and the sixth most popular in any language, MySpace has become a social networking phenomenon, and looks set to notch up an amazing 100 million accounts in the next few days. As we publish, it’s sitting on 99,677,398 after being on 99.4m yesterday.

A little bit of history
The Website first started life back in 1998, offering a small amount of online storage space to members, which increased as they referred new members to the site.

The idea failed to generate enough revenue, and closed down in May 2001, with a senior analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings commenting that online storage sites were “having a hard time surviving.” How times have changed.

The return of MySpace
The MySpace service we all know and (possibly) love now was launched in July 2003 with Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe at the helm, backed by a small team of programmers.

The site quickly became a hit with new bands trying to make a splash, and with music fans looking for new sounds, as well as teenagers looking for a bit of social interaction and networking.

MySpace Set To Hit 100m Users To the chagrin of many of its users, Rupert Murdoch whipped out his fat wallet in July 2005 to the tune of $580 million and added MySpace to his News Corporation empire.

News that he’s signed a deal with Google and extracted a minimum of $900m from them, will be one in the eye for those were asking how he was going to make his money back. He’s nearly doubled his money with that one deal.

MySpace becomes part of pop culture
MySpace’s compelling mix of user-submitted blogs, profiles, bands, photos, MP3s, videos backed up by an internal e-mail system has seen the site become an integral tool for new bands and filmmakers, making it an increasingly influential part of modern pop culture.

In July 2006, MySpace was the most popular site in the United States, accounting for 4.5% of all Website visits and 80 percent of all visits to online social networking Websites.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, MySpace enjoyed a hefty 45.7 million unique visitors in June 2006, with users spending an average of nearly two hours on the site at a time.

Now boasting 300 employees, MySpace claims 500,000 new members each week.

MySpace Set To Hit 100m Users Commercial synergy ahoy!
With such a high profile, it’s not surprising to see marketing types crawling all over the site, with a popular ruse being to create real-looking profiles for fictional characters in commercial TV and film offerings.

Ricky Bobby’s profile on MySpace has 47,000 “friends” and has a profile listing his favourite music and movies.

Users looking to hook up with Ricky might be in for a disappointment though as he’s a made-up character, with the MySpace profile being used as a marketing tool to promote the movie he appears in.

To further increase the popularity of the page and increase the movie’s profile, Ricky’s page also offers inducements (badges, comps) to get users to add him as a ‘friend.’

Ricky isn’t alone either, with the lady-charming John Tucker character from the “John Tucker Must Die” film also boasting his own MySpace page (as do each of his equally fictional four girlfriends).

All these fake pages bring in extra income for News Corp, who let marketers add extras like longer videos, more pictures and movie trailers for a fee.

Other media outlets have chosen to create profiles to promote themselves, including the new Murdoch-owned television broadcast networks The CW and My Network also looking to get hip with the kids via their own MySpace pages.

It’s also getting quite popular with call girls and purveyors of porn. Surprising that they were so slow on the uptake really – they normally lead the industry in developments.

The future
Although we can’t see MySpace disappearing any time soon, in the fickle world of online social networking things can change every quickly indeed.

Last month, Web measurement site Hitwise were reporting that the fast-growing new boys YouTube had already overtaken MySpace – a site that was virtually unknown this time last year.

With YouTube fast becoming the new place to hang out, recent reliability issues haven’t helped MySpace either.

MySpace

Europeans Love IM, Americans Not So Chatty

Europeans Love IM, Americans Not So Chatty According to a new study by comScore Networks, 82 million people – that’s nearly half of the European online population – used IM applications to chat online during February.

Although impressive, Europe’s IM usage is dwarfed by messaging-crazy Latin America, where a massive 64 percent of the online population used IM during the same period.

Unusually, North Americans – a nation of people not exactly noted for their reluctance to chat incessantly – only registered 37 percent of the online population using IM.

Majestic Messenger
MSN Messenger was revealed to be the king of the IM applications, scooping up 61 percent of worldwide IM users.

Europeans Love IM, Americans Not So Chatty In Latin America and Europe, Messenger ruled supreme, registering usage rates of 90 percent and 70 percent (respectively) of IM users.

Messenger also scored highly in Asia Pacific, grabbing 70 percent of IM users.

Things are a lot tighter in the highly competitive North American market, where MSN Messenger, AOL/Aim and Yahoo! Messenger battled it out to each grab between 27 percent and 37 percent of IM users in February.

Skype surges
Skype is seen as a growing contender (it’s our IM tool of choice), with the program now being used by 14 percent of IM users worldwide.

Europeans Love IM, Americans Not So Chatty The VoIP/IM client application is proving to be a real hit in the Asia Pacific, where it has already garnered 26 percent of IM users, although it’s a different story in North America, where Skype can only claim 3 percent of the online population.

We love messaging
The study suggests that instant messaging has now become an integral part of people’s lives, with the 313 million worldwide users ~~wasting away precious work hours~~ increasing their productivity by staying online an average of about 6.3 hours a day.

comScore Networks