BT have been taking people to the Isle of Wight during Cowes week with rather enjoyable sailing events both for press, customers and as team building events. Of course they also sponsor the Island’s sailing wunderkind Dame Ellen Macarthur through, BT Team Ellen.
Well it looks like the Island has really got under their skin, as today they’re officially announcing that they’re the primary sponsors of this year’s Isle of Wight Music Festival.
Retail big boys HMV and Play.com have announced that they will be joining the online party by launching their own film download services in the next six months.
Play is understood to be whipping out its a movie download service within the next few weeks, while HMV’s service is still getting polished up for a launch at the beginning of next year.
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I suspect that you’re not going to be surprised to hear that the local paper for Whitehaven is called the Whitehaven News.
It may surprise you that they’ve has been knocking out news stories since 1852 – making it all the more incredible that it’s now at the leading the charge for digital Switchover in this fair town.
I picked up the paper today and thought it would be worth having a dissection of its Digital TV coverage and advertising.
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The latest results results from Virgin Media, Q2 2007, show that they’ve lost 40,000 cable TV subscribers. The most likely reasons – the loss of Sky TV programming, following their spat with Sky. To rub salt into the wounds, Sky gain 90,000 TV customer over the same period.
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Kudos to BT for putting on an impressive launch for their new range of techie goodies coming out for the winter season.
The launch was 34 floors up near the top of London’s landmark building, the BT Telecom Tower (still known to old folks as the GPO Tower or the Post Office Tower), with the press launch taking place inside the revolving restaurant.
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This morning, BBC boss Mark Thompson announced that the corporation’s long-awaited iPlayer on-demand TV service would launch, as an open public beta, on 27 July this year.
Unveiling details of the peer-to-peer download service, Thompson predicted that the iPlayer (nee iMP) would be “at least as big a redefinition of broadcast TV as colour TV was 40 years ago.”
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Powerline chipset supplier, DS2, has been conducting some speed tests with their 200Mbps product in an attempt to prove how much quicker distributions within households can be using their Powerline Communications (PLC) than rival technologies and products.
As we all know, there’s a (sometimes major) difference between the claimed performance of network products and what it delivers in the real world. Some of this is down to legitimate things like error correction overheads, but lots of it is down to other factors.
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Sky has made the decision to scrap the subscription charge for the Sky+ PVR service starting 1 July 2007.
Since its inception in 2001, Sky has been charging users of the Sky+ service £10 per month to keep using it, this includes receiving the EPG information, required to drive the service.
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The BBC has announced it is running a push-VoD trial in the UK.
Around 300 people, based in and around London, are taking part in the three month trial.
The trialists will get a box with a large hard drive in it, storing up to 100 hours of TV content from the previous seven days. Half of the hours will be automatically recorded by the device, with the rest available for the trialist to select. The content will arrive through a normal TV aerial, via DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) as used by Freeview. Clearly in the future, content would be able to be added via broadband.
Rahul Chakkara, Controller of BBCi said: “As we move further into an on-demand world, where viewers are looking for more opportunities to take control of their viewing schedules, it is imperative that the BBC is at the forefront of exploring new technologies to meet their needs.
Just hearing that, you’d be fully entitled to excuse them that they’re grandly calling it Push-VoD, when in reality it’s a PVR. It appears that there’s more to it than that.
Push-PVR underplays it
The BBC is working with Bristol based UK company Cabot Communications, who will be providing expertise in MHEG (Multimedia and Hypermedia information coding Expert Group).
We think the story on this is actually about the BBC being able to trickle content to these boxes over the air (OTA), primarily overnight.
Translated to English, this means MHEG programs, elaborate graphics, sound files and even additional video can be delivered ready to be used for the interactivity – when the viewer presses the red-button.
With this level of additional assets the interactivity becomes very rich – far more like a broadband computer experience than people are used to with their TVs currently.
The potential for this is huge – both with general interactivity and specifically with games or educational material.
Cabot Communications have supplied the software and they have achieved all of this cleverness by extending MHEG, enabling the program to access the assets locally. It’s the first time this has been done..
The boxes for the trial have been provided by Vestel, the Turkish manufacturer.
Possible impact of the news
Those at BT Vision are probably fretting considerably as this news is likely to put off some people who are targets for the V-box. BT Vision’s approach is to pursue people who are interested in Freeview (the UK FTA DTT service) that going for the V-box will given them all of Freeviews content and functions, but will enhance it by offering a PVR and other content available over a broadband connection.
Many of those in the commercial sector will be shouting “Foul,” at the suggestion that they might be proposing their own device to receive content. The common approach is to say that the BBC should stick with what they’re known for – making great TV and radio programmes, and not spreading their attention to areas where the commercial sector already is.
We think although interesting, people shouldn’t get too excited about this. The BBC has often dangled interesting technology in front of people, only then to have them spoken about but for them to not emerge – see the Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft.
UK Independent broadcaster Channel 4 will today at 12:00 launch their PC-based Video on Demand (VoD) service, 4OD (pronounced four Oh Dee). They claim they’re the first major broadcaster in the World to do it.
Sadly there’s some BT Vision service and their charge to watch the last seven days TV show, we’re not sure that people will pay, given they may well have a PVR that will record the content for free and make it available for ever.
To tempt people into getting hooked on the service, Channel 4 will be giving away two pieces of free content each week – a good touch.
Channel 4 did a deal with PACT, the trade body of the independent production companies, back in June this year to lay the ground for todays service. As far as the details of who makes what money from the sale of the shows, Channel 4 wouldn’t give us details of the breakdown, just leaving it as “the benefits will be split equally between them,” we assume after the Channel 4 have taken out their costs.
Initially the programmes will be delivered ad-free, but Channel 4 tell us that they may well be introducing advert-supported downloaded content in April.
Closer than that a subscription model will be introduced in February. The price is undisclosed as yet, but we’d imagine it will be along the lines of the BT Vision service – beyond the £3 for BT Replay.
Channel 4 have done well in getting this service launched well in advance of the other two major broadcasters in the UK. It is expected that the BBC and ITV equivalent service will be coming out in 4-5 months, by which time Channel 4 will have had a significant head start, having had all of that experience.
It’s unclear if this will hit the DVD sales, previously a great source of income for the broadcaster and production companies.
To use the service, an application will need to be downloaded from the 4OD site. Sadly it will only run on PCs currently due to the use of Microsoft’s DRM, which won’t run on other platforms. To make it easier for you to spend money with them, you can ask the application to store your credit card details so purchasing can be done easily.