Satellite Broadband for Ethiopian Including its Schools

Ethiopia Telecom, the now-private incumbent telco in Ethiopia, has signed a $25m deal with Hughes Network Systems to deliver broadband data services countrywide. This deal follows closely on the heals of a similar deal with ChinaCast, to provide the same, Direcway broadband satellite network service.

As wireline communications around the country are far from comprehensive, Tesfaye Biru, managing director of Ethiopia Telecommunications Corporation commented, “Satellite is the only solution that allows us to provide digital, always-on, reliable service no matter where our customers are”.

One of the first Ethiopian projects is the creation of a national distance learning network, SchoolNet, connecting schools across Ethiopia. Biru says “The DIRECWAY broadband satellite solution allows Ethiopia to expand its national commitment to provide quality education to all our students by reaching our 28.7 million school age children nationwide with the latest in educational tools.”

A valiant pursuit, but given their low level of funding and lack on consistent electricity supply, it is not clear what equipment will be at the receiving end of the signals at the schools. But with the right backing and support, this method of providing widespread education could potentially change a countries future.

They plan to begin network installation in June and are scheduled to complete by year end 2004.

Nokia N-Gage Games Possibly Cracked

The world of introducing convergent devices is a tricky one. Following on the heals of their combined music player/mobile phone, Nokia launched their mobile phone/music player/games machine, the N-Gage, in October and its has been a shaky start. Before its launch, lots of people were less than positive, and following it, the reviews have not been great.

Despite Nokia claiming to have shipped 400,000 units to retailers, the number of customer sales is thought to be low. This has lead to some discounting, to the point where it was available for 1 pence in the UK, if you took a particular service contract out with it.

Nokia will be following the business model for other games platforms, sell the box for a minimum margin (or try to minimise your losses), then make your money in the medium to long term on licensing games for the platform. The same theory as razors and razor blades. Clearly this model only works if you sell the games as well.

Nokia will not like the latest news. A Swedish hacking group claim that they have got around the protection system that ensures that N-Gage games only play on the N-Gage. They have showed photos of the some N-Gage games running on a Siemens SX1, it’s not clear if these are mock-ups or real.

If true, the impact is far reaching. Games written for the N-Gage will run on any phone running the Symbian operating system and according to Symbian, over 2.68 million handsets were shipped with their OS in the first half of 2003.

The damage does not stop with them only losing sales of the N-Gage hardware, but that once the games have been extracted from the N-Gage and are stored digitally unprotected, people will be able to download them – not have to buy them for between $35-$40 each.

SX1 playing N-Gage games – Screen shots

Samsung Two Hours-capable Video Camera Phone

Samsung are releasing a new phone in South Korea next week, the SCH-V410 camcorder phone, that is able to record video, play music, and control some consumer electronics products, giving control over volume and channel selection of many video and audio devices, like TV’s.

The selection and control over the music playback, is achievable without having to open the flip phone.

Out of the box, the phone is able to store thirty songs, of around 3Mb. They are planning a PCS version called the SPV-V4300 that will be able to hold up to two hours of video.

Manual for the SCH-V4100 (Korean PDF)

BT to Sell Content Through Street-located Kiosks

BT have joined up with a partner, Ringtones Online, to offer ringtones, graphics and games for mobile phones. Potential customers will be able to freely browse a dedicated website on the street using the BT Internet Kiosks, then select, preview and purchase their choices. Payment can either be by inserting cash directly into the machine or electronically using credit card, text or by calling a premium rate phone number. Customer will pay £2 for the content, expect for games, which will be £4.50. By offering them from the street they are hoping to encourage the impulse purchasing.

BT has been spending lots of money installing these electronic kiosks in to high street around the UK. Providing a small-form colour screen, trackball and a keyboard, the blue-coloured phoneboxes, which are unusual in the UK, have so far reached over 1,400, with over 90% of them having broadband access.

They see them as a way to offering Internet-based services and products to people who don’t have Internet access at home or at work.

We think this is an interesting distribution point that has been gradually adding services, both physical, such DVD rental via lastminute.com and electronic, such as photo & video services, enabling friends to send more animated messages.

BT Internet kiosk

Napster Sell 300k Tracks in 1st Week, 20% of Apple

Following the launch of Napster 2.0 last week, Roxio have announced the services activity after the first week. They sold over 300,000 individual songs and have signed up undefined “thousands” of subscribers to their $9.95/month Premium service.

Elliot Carpenter, Roxio’s Chief Financial Officer commented,

“From a financial perspective, the first week’s performance of Napster provides a strong indication of the size of our opportunity. Both the growth rate of premium subscribers and the volume of individual track sales support our financial objectives and should bode well for the future.”

Reading between the lines, it doesn’t look like they have been overjoyed. Phrases like “bode well for the future” and “indication” somewhat give it away.

As a spoiling tactic, Apple announced that over the same period, they have sold 1.5 million tracks on iTunes, bringing the total number of tracks sold to 17 million. Apple reported selling over one million tracks in their first week.

Napster also announced a deal with Penn State University, which, from January 2004, will provide access to the Napster Premium service to all of their students. The offer will also extended to their 150,000 strong alumni association.

Penn State received a lot of press back in May this year when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) incorrectly sent them letters accusing some of their students holding illegal MP3’s. Apparently the Record Industry’s legal department confused the works of pop star “Usher” with retired faculty member Peter Usher’s work on radio-selected quasars (the server also hosted a legal MP3). The RIAA later apologised for the mix up.

Analysis: The FCC Rules to Adopt the Broadcast Flag

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has elected to adopt the ATSC flag, otherwise known as the Broadcast flag – a digital code that can be embedded into a digital broadcasting stream to mark content as protected. All equipment capable of receiving a Digital TV (DTV) signal, be that TV or computer, sold after 1 July, 2005 in the US must comply with the ruling.

Content owners have been lobbying hard to try and get it brought into law, as they felt the broadcasting of their content in a digital format without the flag would lead to widespread piracy. Others, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), raised a number of objections to the most stringent of restrictions and were particularly concerned with the protection of consumers current “fair use” rights. It appears that the FCC has listened to all sides of the debate and have accounted for their views.

The FCC announced ruling is that only equipment that is capable of receiving Digital TV (DTV) signals over the air will be affected and must “recognize and give effect to the broadcast flag”. The recording equipment and possible content protections schemes they employ will be addressed at a later date and are described below.

Alternative protection schemes had been proposed to the FCC. The considered the encryption of content at the broadcaster and the use of watermarking or fingerprinting technologies. Both of these were rejected at this stage as it was felt that the technologies were currently not mature enough and, in the case of encryption the burden on the broadcaster would be too great.

The FCC state the main aim of the ruling is to stop the wide distribution of the recorded content over the Internet. Many parties will be pleased that consumers will still be able to make personal digital copies. In the FCC words “redistribution control is a more appropriate form of content protection for digital broadcast television than copy restrictions”.

While the FCC is at pains to point out that that they feel it is important that consumers are able to move recorded content around, what they call, the Personal Digital Network Environment (PDNE), they have declined to define where the edges of this lay.

Although currently there are no detail given about the mechanism to stop personal copies be distributed wider a field, more detail on this are expected later.

One fear of consumers, who have already spent large amounts of money on DTV capable equipment, was that they would be forced to discard their current euipment and buy new, compliant equipment. They will be pleased to discover that this will not be the case; “All existing equipment in use by consumers today will remain fully functional”.

New DTV equipment, “Demodulator Products” sold after 1 July, 2005 in the US must comply with the ruling;

“If the flag is present, the content can be sent in one of several permissible ways, including (1) over an analog output, e.g. to existing analog equipment; or (2) over a digital output associated with an approved content protection or recording technology”

It is not clear if the quality that the digital broadcast brings will remain in the analogue output, or if it will be forcefully degraded to discourage the digital distribution of possible analogue recordings.

Changes to DVD
While it has been stated that current TV equipment will remain useable,  the future for current DVD players is far less secure. Hidden in footnote 47 the FCC states:

“We recognize that currently, content recorded onto a DVD with a flag-compliant device will only be able to be viewed on other flag compliant devices and not on legacy DVD players.  While we are sensitive to any potential incompatibilities between new and legacy devices, we believe that this single, narrow example presented to us is not unique to a flag system and is outweighed by the overall benefits gained in terms of consumer access to high value content.  Changes in DVD technology, such as the transition to high definition DVD devices, will present other unrelated format incompatibilities.”

The briefly translates to DVD players currently on the market will not be able to play DVDs which have been marked with a Broadcast Flag.

Given that DVD is famously the fastest ever growing consumer technology, it is not clear what the public views will be on the fact they will need to replace them.

Affect on the broadcaster
As covered above, the broadcaster will avoid the burden of having to encrypt content prior to broadcast.

The FCC has given individual broadcasters the freedom to make their own decisions as to whether they attach the Flag to their broadcast stream, but points out that they may not have content licensed to them, if they do not implement it.

Some groups urged that the broadcast of certain types of programming, such as news and current affairs, would be prohibited from use of the Flag – in effect during their transmission, they would be forced to turn the Flag off. The FCC has ruled to decline this.

Further discussion on recordings
As we have touched on, while the current ruling only covers the receiving equipment, the FCC is now seeking guidance on creating policy for recording equipment and content protection schemes.

This is the area that will prove most controversial, as it will effectively lock the content. Consumer groups fear that it will also lock the content to a particular company, leading to competing systems not allowing the playing of one companies protected content on another’s platform – the inability to exchange material between formats. This has been labelled the “interoperability” issue.

To address this whole subject, there will be an interim policy for approving digital content protection and recording technologies to enable the FCC to certify multiple compliant technologies in time for manufacturers to include flag technology in television receivers by 2005.

The policy details have been laid out and include the public publishing of proposals, followed by a twenty day period where any objection can be raised. The proposer is then given ten days to provide their response.

The FCC will take all input and make their judgement, which they hope to deliver within ninety days of filing.

The interim policy will in turn be replaced by a permanent policy and the FCC initiated a “Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” to examine this issue in greater detail.

FCC Order and Report (Word doc)

Microsoft: Voice Command your PDA

Microsoft have been researching voice recognition and synthesis for a long time and for a long while there was very little public evidence of its results. Then they brought out some voice functions for Office XP and around a year ago came Voice Command for Media player, as part of Windows XP Plus pack. This week they have released Voice Command for mobile devices (PDA, mobile phones, etc) that runs on Windows Mobile 2003 which gives you control over a subset of the functions.

One advance that they claim for the newest version is speaker independence, meaning that you do not need to train the software to recognise your voice. This has been a major barrier to previous, as it didn’t work “out of the box”. We imagine that this has probably been helped by the fact that the available commands are limited, and may have been selected for unique sounds or patterns.

The mobile version adds functionality to the address book and calendar. Contacts can be dialled from the address book by voice commands alone; “Call Harry Perkins Mobile”, will work, as well as just saying the number to be called. Contact details can also be recalled and displayed “Show William Wonker”.

The calendar can be interrogated; “What is my next appointment?”, will respond with the time, date and all of the text associated with the entry. When a calendar reminder alarm appears, its details are also read out.

For us, the most interesting part is the voice control of the media player, which works both on the PDA version and the XP Plus pack. Not only is there the expected track controls; “Pause”, “Play”, “Previous track, “Next track”, but music can be select by Artist, Album, or Genre at the first level, then by the music started by speaking the chosen detail.

An interesting addition is ability to ask “What song is this?” and have the synthesised voice read it back to you. We feel it is a short step for this to also work with radio content, with the obvious follow-on question from the computer, “Do you want to buy it?/add this to your music collection?”, which then connected you to a music download service.

The list of voice commands on the XP version is considerably longer that the Mobile version, numbering over forty, so they have provided as useful “What can I say?” command, that will read out all of the possible commands available at that point.

Some downsides

The voice that speaks back to you is still a bit too computer like. We have heard much better quality, in fact near human-sounding voices from other companies, but the processing power they need is greater than is currently offered on mobile devices.

In addition to the amount of memory that the program itself takes up, additional device memory (RAM) is required depending on the number of contacts or songs you want to be able to request. A hefty 7 MB of RAM is required for every 500 contacts and 100 songs you want to be able to use.

Selling for just short of $40, it sounds like reasonable value. It is slightly surprising that Microsoft is charging money for these features, as it would normally integrate them into the operating system, and it may well do in the future, but they have to try and claw back all of those millions of R&D dollars that they have spent.

We imagine that they working away at additional country packs but currently it is only be available in the US, and their press office tells us there are no dates for anywhere else yet.

For the future

When the XP Plus pack was released, it was not well received, with nearly all of reviews dismissing the value in being able control your media player with voice commands. We think they missed the significance of this first step.

The potential for this is not talking to the PC sitting on the desk in front of you, but navigating music or indeed, video content, in the rooms of your house or within the car simply by speaking to it. It eliminates the need to have a touch screen/keyboard/mouse in each location.

Microsoft information on Voice Command – mobile edition

Plus! Voice Command for Windows Media Player

Buy the XP Plus pack from Amazon US | UK

3G Streaming Video First Offered by 3 Sweden & Denmark

Three, the 3G mobile phone service provider backed by Hutchison Whampoa, are offering the first commercial delivery of streaming video to the 3G mobile-owning public of Sweden and Denmark.

Their customers have been able to watch the news streamed headlines by their nationa broadcasters Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT – in Sweden) and TV2 (Denmark). Video clips have been available on mobile phone handsets before, but previously the clips have been downloaded to the handsets and then played, a subtle but important difference.

Tre, as they are know in Sweden, say this is due to their strength of their network and its ability to deliver significant amounts of bandwidth. Currently they charge five Swedish Kronor (0.38 UKP, 0.64 USD) for a video of thirty seconds to two minutes.

Three (Tre) Sweden announcement

BBC uses 3G video phones in broadcast TV

Part of UK broadcaster, the BBC, is experimenting with using video phones to collect content for use on TV and radio. Where 3G mobile video phones have been used to capture still images for a while, this is the first time we have heard of them being used for moving pictures.

In a reprint of article in the BBC in-house magazine, Ariel, that has been made available for public consumption, they explain that as the original video shot on the camera is very small, the broadcast version needs to be magnified, leading to a fuzzy and distorted picture. Clearly the quality of this will improve as the cameras become more advanced.

So far, it has been used to shoot video for a BBC Bristol local news show and they are discussing the possibilities of using it for the undercover reporting of underage drinking.

Interestingly, they feel that 3G phones may be of most use on radio, where “Quality is so good that reporters or members of the public will be able to use phones to broadcast without need of a radio car or ISDN line.”

Program makers are also finding that people are being far more candid when interviewed by members of the public using video phones.

“Bristol has already set up a live discussion with the head of the local education authority and the editors were struck by the engagement he showed. ‘It was amazing how he came to life and spoke candidly to pupils at what is considered a problem school,’ says Stephanie Marshall. ‘There was something about the informality of the equipment that was so different from a normal studio discussion.’ ”

This has been recognised for some time by documentary makers, realising that subjects speak more freely and are less intimidated when shot by a small crew on handheld cameras rather than a full broadcast crew.

Ariel reprint

Microsoft Announce Partners for Portable Media Centers (nee Media2Go)

Microsoft has been talking about portable devices for a while that would enable owners to watch videos, view photos, play music, labelling them as Media2Go.

This week they have announced not only a new official name, but two companies that will help them create designs. AboCom Systems Inc and Tatung Co. will be the original design manufacturers (ODMs) of the now re-christened Portable Media Centers.

These designs will then be passed on the manufacturers, who are already lining up to get involved. So far Creative, iRiver International, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., SANYO Electric Co. Ltd. and ViewSonic Corp have thrown their hats in to the ring – others are expected to follow.

Intel has had this type of device, labelled a Personal Video Player (PVP), in development for a long time ($100 ZVUE!.

We imagine that Microsoft will hope to win the consumer, via strong integration of these devices with their operating system and the content owners, by highlighting their Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Archos Video AV320 information

Buy Archos Video AV320 at Amazon US and UK