Networking

YouTube To Share Ad Revenue With Uploaders
Filmmakers who upload their own movies on to the video-sharing website YouTube will soon be able to enjoy some financial rewards for their efforts.
In an interview with the BBC, YouTube founder Chad Hurley announced that the company was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism designed to “reward creativity”.
Set to start rolling out in a couple of months, the deal would raise revenue to reward creative camcorder types via a mixture of adverts and short clips slipped in at the beginning of a clip.

Only folks who own the full copyright of the videos can expect to receive a wedge of the moolah, with YouTube introducing the advertising technology incrementally.
Somerfield Staff Antics on YouTube
Elsewhere, UK supermarket chain Somerfield has launched an inquiry after video clips of their staff mucking about turned up on YouTube.
Various staff members are seen larking about while wearing the store’s uniform, including a break dancing shelf stacker, an “extreme floor cleaner” crashing into a wall and a nutter hurtling down a car park slope on a shopping trolley.

Somerfield has said that they are looking into the incidents, sternly adding that they will, “take any necessary action where appropriate.”
Of course, all they’ve really done is helped publicise the clips for everyone else to enjoy – and reminded us of our equally daft antics in previous crap jobs.
Somerfield YouTube videos
29 January, 2007
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.
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.
24 January, 2007
Joost: The Venice Project Renamed
The next-market-to-disrupt target of the Skype/Kazaa founders – TV – has it’s latest news. The Venice Project’s working name has been changed to Joost, continuing their penchant for picking weird names – always a benefit when you want the domains(!).
As to the source/root of the name … ? Well it could be that their massive fans of ’80s video game Joust or perhaps it’s a reference to the German for a friendly ‘goodbye’, Tschüss. Who knows? FYI – It’s actually pronounced Juiced.
We’ve been fiddling with the ~~Venice Project~~, sorry, Joost for a couple of weeks now, since Christopher Wood very kindly sent us an invite to join up.
We whacked it on an older (1.5GHz) machine and found that it really didn’t have the horsepower to run it properly. It’s a pretty greedy little number, even running out of steam on a 2.5GHz. The buzz around us beta testers is that currently, it _loves_ taking power/resources.
Clearly the Joost crew are seeing this as a product for the future (not a bad assumption), that will need to have a current processor to run it on. Queue computer and chip makers cheering and clapping.
A couple of beta testers are pointing and declaring that Joost will be the first failure of the founders. We think that it’s waaaaay to early to be calling that. Be patient my headline grabbing-friend and see how it turns out.
Let’s not forget 1) this is still in Beta, 2) Windows Media Centre was a total dog throughout many of its incarnation, taking years to get to the point where it was even usable.
Joost
17 January, 2007
Nintendo Rake In Record Sales
The Nintendo DS has emerged as the top selling gaming device in both the US and the UK during 2006.
According to figures from the NPD Group, the DS outsold the Wii and PlayStation 3 (PS3) over the bumper Christmas holiday period in the US, with 1.6 million Nintendo DS’s flying off the shelves during December, adding to a total sales figure of 9.2 million units.
By comparison, Sony’s much hyped PS3 only managed to sell 490,700 units in December, hindered by supply and production problems.
Americans certainly went waheey for the Wii, with 604,200 consoles shifted in December, backed up by brisk business for extra games.
NPD found that Wii owners bought three extra titles on average, with a huge 86 percent forking out for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
Nintendo Owns Europe
Across the pond in Europe, Nintendo managed to shift 500,000 Wiis during December, while in the UK a hefty 200,000 of the next-gen consoles found themselves in the clammy excited hands of game-crazy Brits.
Despite the bumper sales, Wii’s still remain as rare as a Cardiff City away win, with Nintendo Europe MD Laurent Fischer admitting that the company is still “facing stock shortages.”
Record sales
According to UK market monitor Chart Track, UK consumers also bought more than 500,000 Nintendo DS handheld consoles, making it the UK’s biggest games machine last year.
With the Wii whipping up a sales storm and the DS registering record sales on both sides of the Atlantic, Nintendo look set to notch up their most successful financial year ever.
[From PC Advisor and Reg Hardware]
17 January, 2007
Sky Surf, Speak, See Triple Play Package Announced
Sky has rolled out a combined TV, broadband and telephony package, regaling under the snappy moniker of Surf, Speak and See.
The deal serves up the usual “up to” 8Mbps connection, and comes with a free bundled wireless Sky router and a fairly generous 40GB monthly usage allowance, which should be enough to keep most multimedia fans happily gorging on new content.
Also bundled in the ‘triple play’ deal – for that’s how we industry types describe these all-in packages – is over 100 digital subscription-only TV channels (plus over 200 other free to air digital radio and TV channels) and free UK evening and weekend landline calls.
The whole caboodle comes as a minimum one year deal priced at £26 monthly (with a one-off £20 connection fee) but punters will still have to shell out £11 a month to BT for the line rental
Before you get too excited and start flicking your cash in the direction of that lovely Mr Murdoch, bear in mind that the service is only available to customers close to exchanges already unbundled by Sky.
This currently works out at around 50 percent of the UK population, although Sky hopes to crank this up to 70 percent by July.
Commenting on their new offer, Sky boss James Murdoch shrugged off the growing competition from NTL and BT boasting, “I would say we are more confident every day with our short, medium and long term prospects.”
Sky
15 January, 2007
Broadband-Enabled Televisions to Reach 162 Million by 2011
Slotting in nicely with Microsoft’s Xbox/IPTV Announcement (You’ll be able to watch IPTV through your Xbox toward the end of the year), Just the Beginning, says The Diffusion Group.
A surge in the availability of high-quality web-based video content and the proliferation of solutions that network-enabled TVs will usher in a ‘new wave’ of television viewing, one defined less by ‘walled garden’ PayTV operators and more by open access and a variety of highly-specialized niche content.
According to Broadband Video: Redefining the Television Experience, The Diffusion Group’s latest report on IP media, the number of broadband-enabled TVs – those capable of directly or indirectly receiving broadband video content – is expected to exceed 162 million households globally by 2011.
“It is fair to say that the democratization of video delivery is officially underway,” noted Colin Dixon, senior analyst and author of the report. “As the Internet finds its way to the primary home TV – and it will – incumbent PayTV operators and established broadcasters will gradually lose control over the types of video consumers can watch. In the next few years, a growing number of consumers will look to the Internet as means of expanding the variety of content to which they have access, much of which will be available on-demand and specifically suited to their tastes.”
Dixon mentions five factors which in combination are creating a ‘tipping point’ for broadband TV including:
- The widespread adoption of broadband Internet service;
- The expanding variety of video content available on the Internet;
- The introduction and push of solutions intended to enable Internet video viewing on the TV (such as Microsoft’s Xbox/IPTV platform and Apple’s pending iTV adapter);
- The entry of top-tier content producers into the Internet marketplace, many of which are now pushing high-value franchise content onto the web; and
- The move from short-form ‘snack’ Internet video content to full-length TV programming and movies.
- The impact of these trends remains lost on the vast majority of video entities. As Dixon states, “While the subject of Internet video is on everyone’s tongue, very few have a full understanding of how Internet-based video will impact the traditional TV business.”
In many cases, consumers will simply use a proxy to enable an Internet-to-TV connection – that is, instead of having a modem embedded in the TV which connects directly to a broadband service, consumers will use an Internet television adapter, or iTVA, such as a Internet-enabled game console, media-centric PC, digital media adapter, or hybrid set-top box to access web-based video content.
Dixon notes that for those with a broadband Internet connection, it is becoming quite simple to both provide and access Internet-based video on the living room TV. “Not only is it now technologically feasible for most consumers, but economically attractive for content providers.” In other words, the value proposition is both supply- and demand-driven.
As well, the Internet video space is undergoing a shift away from short ‘video snacks’ and toward longer form narrative content more characteristic of TV in terms of production quality, video quality, and length.
Broadband Video: Redefining the Television Experience is TDG’s latest report on the digital home and IP media. In addition to expanding greatly on the themes illuminated in TDG’s free white paper, The Emergence of Broadband Television, the full report explores in detail how many broadband-enabled televisions will actually be connected to the Internet and used to receive broadband video. Further, the report discusses the types of video services that will be launched from the Internet targeting the television and includes specific revenue estimates for these servic es. The report also looks at the barriers to open access to Internet from the television and how these barriers will be overcome.
The Diffusion Group
11 January, 2007
BT Broadband Hits 10m Connections
It may only be a few days after the New Year, but the party poppers and drinks cabinet have been rolled out at Chez BT as the company is poised to rack up its 10 millionth broadband connection this week.

Way back in the distant dial-up days of 2002, BT had set what seemed liked a wildly ambitious target of 5 million connections by the end of 2006, so with the target doubled we reckon there’ll be a fair bit of a-whooping at the top of the BT Tower (and, no doubt, some fattening pay cheques).
The 10 million wholesale connections are split between BT Wholesale and BT Openreach, with 8.7 million customers connecting through BT Wholesale.
The remaining 1.3 million lines are supplied to big names like Carphone Warehouse and BSkyB via BT Openreach.
When the 5 million target was set back in April 2002, less than 150,000 DSL connections existed in the UK, with broadband availability in the UK pegged at just 66 per cent – a figure now standing at a near-complete 99.8 per cent.
Purring with delight, Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of BT Group, claimed that the UK is now the most competitive broadband market in the world, offering customers a choice of over 200 service providers
“That means fantastic choice and value for consumers, and a constant stream of new and innovative applications,” he enthused.
“There are still many, many areas in the market where you can see people really looking for new applications and it’s the applications that drive people to broadband. Look for example at the way people want to make and share their own content, on a narrowband basis that’s almost impossible,” he continued.
“As social networking becomes more and more a thing of today, this presents fantastic opportunities for broadband.”
It wasn’t all backslapping and cigar-puffing at BT though as their rival BSkyB passed the 2 million subscriber milestone, with sales of the Sky+ box increasing by more than 50% last year.
BT
Sky
3 January, 2007
Xbox 360 outsells Wii And PS3 in US Over Xmas
It truly was a battle of the consoles this Christmas, with big-hitters Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony all looking to set the Yuletide cash tills ringing.

According to analysts at the US research firm NPD, Santa’s bags were mostly straining with Xbox 360’s over the festive period, closely followed by the Nintendo Wii, with the PS3 trailing in third place.
Preliminary findings from NPD revealed that the Xbox 360 outsold both the Wii and the PS3 in the US, with around 2 million Xbox 360s shifted between the start of November 2006 and Christmas.

Not far behind was the eagerly awaited Nintendo Wii which registered 1.8 million sales, while the PS3 could only muster a mere 750,000 Stateside sales.
According to NPD, these figures represent a huge leap from November’s figures which saw 511,000 Xbox 360s, 476,000 Wiis and 197,000 PS3s flying out of the stores.
It’s worth noting that Nintendo’s Wii didn’t launch in the US until 19th November – nearly three weeks behind the Xbox 360 – with the first batch of stock reported as selling out in hours.
It was a similar situation in the UK, with Nintendo Wii’s near-impossible to find in the shops (yes, we were looking too and someone’s still waiting for their Christmas present!).
One of PC World’s flagship stores in the West End told Digital Lifestyles that their consignment of Wii consoles went almost as soon as they came through the door, although we noted no shortage of XBox 360s in the store.
NPD is expected to release the complete figures for December later this month.
NPD
3 January, 2007
Ofcom Proposed Spectrum Auction: Analysis
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.
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)
14 December, 2006
Digital Hollywood Europe:Next Generation P2P: Synopsis: (pt 3/3)
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.
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.
8 December, 2006