No great surprise to see that Barclay Knapp, who headed up NTL, is to leave the commpany. Many people have been amazed to see that he’s lasted a long as he has after the company emerged from bankruptcy in January. He’ll be replaced by current chief operating officer, Simon Duffy.
Sales for the April to June quarter edged slightly higher to £551m, lifted by subscription revenues from 40,000 new customers. Losses for the quarter have been cut by 38% but still stand at £159m ($254m).
Garry Kasparov will be playing another Man vs Computer chess match at the New York Athletic Club starting 11th November this year.
The unique twist on this match, is that using the X3D Display, the chess board will appear to be “floating in the air between man and computer” and he will use voice commands to move the virtual 3D pieces. 3D viewing has been possible for quite a while, but X3D Technologies are claiming X3D Display is viewable by the naked eye, rather than with the normal synchronised shutter glasses.
Billed as “the most dominant chess program and the most powerful 3D software to challenge the greatest chess brain of all time”, it will be Webcasted at www.X3D.com.
This event is a little different from a lot of their other sponsored entertainment content, which is headlined by Swimsuit models in 3D.
The UK film council is claiming a global first. The new feature film, This is not a Love Song, will be released simultaneously in a number of different formats on Friday 5 September. It will be streamed and digitally projected in selected cinemas across the UK and be made available for streaming and download on the Internet on the same day.
The whole process of film-making has been extremely rapid. Written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) in under two weeks, then shot on PD-150 DV cameras in just 12 days, under the direction of Bille Eltringham (The Darkest Light) and digitally edited on Avid.
Richard Morris of Juggernaut Pictures, the online producer of the event, told us that they wanted to use a mixture of different distribution formats to cinemas around the country. The ‘e-premiere’, as it’s being labelled, will be at the following four cinemas in the
Watershed, Bristol – Live projected streamed video
Cornerhouse, Manchester – 35mm print
Showroom, Sheffield – Digital projection
The Other Cinema, London – Digital projection
The streamed video will be delivered in Microsoft Media 9 format at 700k, giving VHS quality that will then be projected. Both of the digital projections will be driven by Digi Beta tape.
Online viewing will be available, on the same day, from www.thisisnotalovesong.com at a cost “less than renting a video”. As the non-UK film rights have been sold in other territories, the films distributor have insisted that its viewing be restricted to the UK only. To try and ensure this the Internet-delivered versions will be protected by Digital Envoy’s Geo-Targeting technology, which attempts to understand where the viewer is using information such as their source IP address.
The UK film council tells us they are in the process of gathering lottery funds to put low-cost digital projection into 150 cinemas around the UK. Digital distribution makes it far more economic to show non-blockbuster films in smaller venues.
As at 30 June, Sky added 77,000 Sky+ subscribers to reach 105,000, exceeding their 100,000 target. Tony Ball, Chief Executive for Sky said they were planning to “play around” with the pricing of Sky+ as he felt DVR’s offered interesting possibilities.
165,000 Sky subscribers also have the Extra Digibox, enabling the household to watch Sky programming in more than one room. 57% of Sky+ subscribers are also Extra Digibox subscribers.
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.
A Taiwanese company, Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communications, today launched a service enabling subscribers to watch a live video stream of traffic congestion, from an initial forty two cameras, on their mobile phone.
We’re assuming this isn’t for some strange realityTV-type entertainment but to check the density of traffic levels before travelling. Clearly it grabs headlines, but the video alone sound like a bit of a novelty as it’s pretty hard to judge the actual speed of traffic. We think the ideal would be to display the average speed to the traffic at your particular motorway junction on your mobile.
Funnily enough Dan Kemp, lead programmer at Live Information Systems, has created a Quick’n’Dirty system (his own description) to do just that – he’s call it mTraffic. It scrapes the information from the UK Highways Agency site repackages it for PDA/Smartphone, WAP and an XML feed – very neat.
Sony have announced that they will release two new plasma TVs in Japan later this year.
The exciting thing about the uninspiringly named KDE-P50HZ1 and KDE-P42HZ1 is that they come with a remote-control-on-steroids, better described as a web pad.
The multi-function 6-by-3.5-inch display, which gives an 800-by-480-pixel resolution, communicates with the main TV unit using 802.11a giving the ability to use it to view a different TV channel; browse the Web; and be used as a ‘soft’ remote control – the function and display on the remote will change depending on the which operation is being carried out.
Sony are saying the remote will understand gesture-based fingertip strokes – think PalmOS Grafitti for entertainment (They already licience PalmOS for their Clie PDA range). Sony has dubbed this as an “air baton”.
Although not mentioned, there is a possibility that the Web pad coudl be used The opens up the a long held belief – interactivity on the remote.
These products fit within Sony’s project, code-named Altair, designed to make the TV the centre of consumers digital lifestyles.
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.
There’s lots going on in the UK at the moment with the Communication Bill. The blog ofcomwatch is currently providing comprehensive coverage of all of the twists and turns as the Bill travels through the Lords. Well worth a look.
There are many issues that make the inter-connection of Digital Lifestyles devices a pretty big headache. With this is mind a lot of the heavy hitting companies in this area – Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Kenwood, Lenovo, Microsoft, NEC CustomTechnica, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, STMicroelectronics and Thomson – are getting together to try and make this simpler. To this end they’ve formed the Digital Home Working Group after realising that everyone trying to create their own standards isn’t that sensible. Watch the space, it could be promising.