No, not everything beginning with the letter “i” is from the mighty Apple. This little “i” is from the iPlayer, on demand service that the BBC plans to offer. Again. Yes, the iPlayer has been released by the BBC before, for trial purposes of course, allowing broadband connected, viewers to catch up on their favourite soap from the East End. News has remained available in this way for some time since, such as the news bites and the BBC’s Click programme. And now it’s back and bigger than before. Well at least it’s been approved to make a return just before summer.
The BBC have also been busy negotiating with YouTube’s new oweners Google to place content on the video sharing site. Taking a slice of the revenue from advertising on YouTube, the BBC can boost their income to keep the licence down right? The deal hasn’t gone through just yet though but they need to be able to appeal to the younger generation (that probably means you and me then) who spend more time at their computer than their TV. But this will let people in other countries view the BBC’s ‘quality’ programming for free whilst we continue to pay ever increasing TV licence fees.
The iPlayer will need to appeal to as many people as possible. Since the number of Apple computers bought last year, apparently they count to and the iPlayer will have to be compatible with Mac OSX as well as the planned Windows XP. Compatibility issues are becoming a thing of the past, oh but there are still way more fancy freeware apps for Windows and since Windows is turning into a Mac, there’ll be little difference between the two some time soon. But then Apple’s about the release its Leopard with some new features such as Spaces, a tool to create more than one virtual desktops that can be customised for work or play. It’s all about the user you know.
Back to the BBC then. iPlayer will be more like the catchup service that you can already get on ntl:Telewest/Virgin Media (whatever they want to be called this week) allowing users to watch back the past week/months TV and selected episodes from series. They wanted longer but this was refused as it might affect their sales of DVD material. Oh but not just any series. It has to have an end and can’t be a repeat. So if you’re a fan of EastEnders, Horizon, Top Gear and Blue Peter then you’re out of luck but they should still appear on the catchup service. This seems a little backwards to me, these are the types of series that won’t end up on a commercial DVD whereas titles such as Bleak House, Planet Earth, Doctor Who and Strictly Come Dancing will be made available. Most of which are already showing constantly on BBCHD and UKTV History. Currently it’s unknown whether or not the service will include third party content (think Family Guy – Fox as an example of one show that’s not a BBC production).
March 28 is the deadline for final considerations ready to be implemented a month later on May 2. Costing around £20m-£30m per year, the BBC is managing to cover all bases but at the cost of the TV licence payer. It is an investment after all, even if you don’t want to listen to the BBC Asian Network or know how to watch TV over IP. TV isn’t dead, it’s just morphing into a new skin to fit the lifestyle of the modern viewer. I still want a completely VoD system, at least we’re getting there. Just very, very slowly.
Archive for January, 2007
iPlayer
January 31, 2007Digital Restrictions Management
January 30, 2007DRM = Digital Rights Management or should that be Digital Restrictions Management?
I read yesterday about Fox suing a YouTube user several months ago for uploading entire episodes of Family Guy. This came to light as unaired episodes of The Simpsons had been spotted by Fox and were subsequently removed. Now Fox aim to do the same again to this perpetrator. Although the offending user probably shouldn’t have uploaded the videos, I can’t help but think that YouTube should share some of the blame as videos are reviewed before being made available. This is the reason why explicit material doesn’t end up on the site and some other copy protected material. Also, movie companies claim that P2P sharing of content is harming them, but in what way? OK we’re not talking about movies which create revenue by people buying tickets at the cinema and eventually on disc and on demand. TV shows are primarily aired on TV with funding coming from commercials. I guess it’s because if people are watching them on YouTube, fewer people are watching them on TV and commercials aren’t helping companies to sell products.
Then why not follow suit and air more TV over the net where most people spend most of their free time anyway? TV shows like Lost air on the East coast of America and are available to download before they’re aired on the West coast, air them at the same time and it might reduce the number of people illegally downloading content. Unlike YouTube, Torrent sites don’t require a user account making it difficult to track people down. It is possible but most feel safe as the problem is so big that it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Making things worse is that ISPs are often reluctant to give away customer details as they see it as an invasion of privacy. They’ll soon give the details away when they are faced with the fine though I think.
So what about the innocent people who don’t want to go down to their local seaside market and sell hundreds of copies from the back of a three wheeled van? Well DRM protection on DVD is difficult to manipulate so that you can transfer your content to portable media players for your own fair use. This is because of the copy protection built into the discs to stop you making copies, DVD rippers can be downloaded or bought for you to make your own copies to backup your collection but these are technically illegal and now HD-DVD copy protection has been “hacked” though future releases should be protected as a different code is used on each release. Archos makes this much easier by using the docking station that connects their products directly to a DVD spinner.
Now though, Streamburst are about to let you download content, legally, without DRM. So you can do pretty much what the hell you like with it. As long as its legal that is. And since there isn’t any DRM protection, who exactly is going to stop you. Well no-one, technically. But the fact that an invisible watermark with all of your details might just put you off lending it to your dodgy mates down the pub. Especially as if they uploaded it to the net, it’d still be your details that are discovered as the source. Landing you with any possible penalties.
Vista also launched today but early reports suggest that playback of HD content will look worse with legal content than using copied HD content. This is to prevent the potential to copy HD-DVDs but if copied ones look better, won’t this just encourage people to get illegal content that will even look better?
No Nationwide free wi-fi after all
January 24, 2007FREE 
?
The pusuit of free nationwide wi-fi sadly remains the dream of many a tech lover since the government are concerned of the distortion of the commercial sector. So free wi-fi is restricted to the inner city area of Norwrich but obviously whoever made this claim, they didn’t consider that the reason the Norwich one is free is because the bandwidth is restrcted so that it can’t compete with paid for services. I think that they’re more concerned over the cost (around a million to create the one in Norwich) but they seem to be also forgetting that its the countries money and it should be the county’s main interest that counts. The Internet is a right not a privilige. We should be able to roam across vast areas without worrying about the charge of the next provider when we haven’t used the full hour at the last hotspot.
So while children in the far east are making robots and configuring PS2 control pads with Bluetooth, ours are getting more and more stuck in the medieval ages of learning about pointless things in school like Pythagoras theorem, now where am I gonna need to use that?
When will we ever catch up? Hopefully soon.
BluOnyx
January 24, 2007
Could this be the best device ever?
Well I like it. You may be wondering what it is. It’s a shiny little box of tricks. But to be more precise it is a portable storage device. Hold on, come back. It does more than simply store between 1 and 40GB of your lovely data. It can connect to TVs, PCs and even mobile phones to share the content either wirelessly using bluetooth or the slightly faster wi-fi or good old fashoined cable. Still not interested? How about sharing content on the same device to another portable device. Say you’re in the car with someone else who wants to watch a movie on their PSP whilst you want to listen to your favourite U2 album on your mobile phone. No worries it’ll accomodate both of you. How many phones have up to 40GB of storage? If yours has then you could leave now. But hold on one more moment, does it have wi-fi? It does, oh alright you’re dismissed. But for those of you who don’t have a wi-fi mobile then it’ll let you connect to any wi-fi hotspot. Pretty good if you live in Norwich then. It has no screen, instead using the device of your choice to display its wares. Should be good for battery life then. Oh and it glows a lovely shade of blue to let you know that its working.
I want one. No I need one.
iPhony
January 19, 2007I spotted this on the video for the Apple keynote a couple of weeks ago and its making me wonder how much worse the iPhone actually is. Jobs showed a working version of the phone, how could a room full of journalists and bloggers not notice the flaws such as lack of 3G, HSDPA, support for third party apps etc… Well mainly because Jobs made an excellent job at dressing it up and brainwashing his adoring audience of macheads. It was right in front of you on a stonking great screen saying a widescreen iPhone right, well I grant the fact that the screen is wider than it is tall but that doesn’t make it a widescreen in the true sense. Remember that Pirates of the Caribean short clip that he showed us and how he had to zoom in for it to fill the screen? To show the whole image, the edges had to be cropped and when you could see all of the image, it was in a letter box format. Like you saw on standard TV screens before widescreen. This is a flaw that won’t stop the iPhone from selling but surely should be fixed in a future generation maybe?
HD-DVD Ripped
January 19, 2007So HD-DVD has a high level of DRM making it impossible for people to rip the content of. Make that a had a high level of DRM. The first copy of a high definition movie has been made available on torrent sites. Serenity, weighs in at a mighty 19.6GB though, that’d put a strain on even the most capable connection so it makes me wonder, who will spend the best part of the next month downloading it? Well anyone with PowerDVD might as the .EVO file can be played back using that and the hacker has made the process a whole lot easier for those wannabe movie pirates by creating an automated application that can rip and copy HD-DVDs. For backup purposes of course.
It didn’t take that long did it? Now the question is, will this be resolved or will torrent sites quickly develop a growing library of glorious high def content to be served up to users for the cost of their bandwidth.
HD-DVD don’t play nice
January 17, 2007VHS was poorer quality than beta max yet it won out, how, well dirty, filthy, porn. That’s right, porn. And history is repeating itself as the same has happened in the current format war. Sony hasn’t learnt its history lesson and is about to take a dive with yet another proprietary format. XXX content won’t be available on the mighty Blu Ray format as Sony refused the smutty material and left its leftovers for the HD-DVD collection. Maybe it was a little full after providing a format for around 6/7 of the 8 major movie distributors.
It just gets worse as a new HD-DVD disc has been developed that can squeeze two extra gigabytes onto each of the three layers making a triple layer disc consist of 51GB. 1 whole gig more than the most capacious blu ray. But this is still a prototype and lets not forget the 75GB Blu-ray that supposedly exists in prototype. The war ain’t over yet though as the 51GB HD-DVD won’t be compatible with existing spinners. That’s not going to affect that many people though as few people rushed out to their local electrical retailer to snap up either format playback device in the whole month that each were available last year.
I’ve always backed Blu-ray and now its getting more and more confusing, even I don’t know which to back. Another failure of Sony’s proprietary formats or HD-DVD which is built on stale technology. I can only imagine what it feels like for the regular consumer who decides which TV to buy based on the in store, poorly configured setup and the nice silver strip and blue standby lights.
iPhone Sucks
January 12, 2007OK the hype is over now and I’ve grabbed hold of my sense of practicality. What does the iPhone offer that others don’t well a touch screen and rich HTML web browsing and email. It also has an improved theretical battery life compared to other smart phones but hold on, how many other smart phones would you also use to listen to music or watch videos? With heavy usage the claimed battery life is meant to be 5 hours but if you actually used it to its full capability, I guess you’d be lucky to be able to listen to music on the way home. The storage is only 4 or 8GB which is hardly enough to store music let alone all of the other stuff. I’m not sure exactly how detailed Mac OSX is but I would like to know where it’s stored as if it was the fully featured OSX then it’d take up most of the 4GB so I assume it packs a little storage for a little of the OS. What else? It has wi-fi but no HSDPA nor 3G so when you’re out of a hotspot then you’re basically screwed and compelled to use sloooooooow GSM data speeds.
So what do I still like about the iPhone? It has to be the looks (obviously) and the way that you can interact with it. The touch screen interface and the coverflow for album artwork appeared to look really well in the keynote but this is only useful if the battery life will hold out. Maybe they should have stuck with what they knew how to do and stuck a touch screen onto a iPod which would have had better battery life, it wouldn’t have saved any room in your crowded man bag but it would work. I’m never a fan of convergence at the cost of the function as they never seem to do what they’re designed to do in the same way that separate devices would do.
>> Updated January 14th 2007
An iPod, a phone, an Internet communicator, an iPod, a phone, an Internet communicator….you got it?
iPhone (the Apple one) is being heralded as such a brilliant device but hold on, haven’t we seen those features somewhere before?
The way that Steve Jobs presented the iPhone made it look awesome and lightyears ahead of anything else but really they’ve taken their cues from other things and incorporated them into one device; that being the iPhone. The touch screen for example is by no means new, go to any public information terminal and you can use a touch screen, all that’s happened is that it’s been put into a small mobile phone without the need for a stylus. Admittedly taking away small buttoned keypads is a good idea but its not new. Visual voicemail can already be achieved in other mobile phones such as Samsung ones that record messages directly into the phone memory to be played back in any order later. This also reduces the cost of retrieving voicemail, which if you’ve ever tried it, you’ll know what a ripoff it is.
By making something seem better than it actually is and not allowing people to challenge the products weaknesses is like brainwashing people into thinking that the device is revolutionary when it actually isn’t. The product will sell, not because it’s the best phone, Internet Communicator or iPod but like the iPod it will sell because of the branding, marketing and general convergence and looks of a smaller device that can do three things at once.
I for one think that it would have been better if Apple had launched a true widescreen video iPod that could compete in the portable entertainment market. Perhaps with more storage it could easily compete with the likes of the Archos range but with the phone as well, it makes it feel like too much is being shoehorned in. They seem to have leapfrogged from portable entertainment to the already overcrowded phone market. By doing all of the things that it claims to do, the battery surely will suffer. Other mobile phones have media players but that isn’t a key feature and isn’t generally used by anyone other than chavs walking down the street playing distorted music through the inbuilt speaker. Those that do use Walkman phones for example have limited storage to store any music but they’d be lucky to use the audio features for very long before the battery died, then they don’t have a phone. Similarly hard drive phones have more storage but the battery can’t handle heavy usage to be able to play all of the tracks anyway.
The good thing about this is that it easily cuts the music as you get a call but this is already done with the media phones and even with the iPod using the Belkin Blueeye. It might make it less convenient but at least the battery life for both separate devices will be adequate for both to be used. If the iPhone can do all this then surely you’ll want to use it and with the 14hour listening time or 5hrs heavy usage I don’t think it’ll do either really well without being at least charged daily or even regular top ups throughout the day.
Having said all of this, I’m about to back peddle as the iPhone is a first generation device that might not have all of the features that you’d expect but it is a really good device that looks good, might reduce the number of gadgets you need to carry round each day and uses a “revolutionary” form of interaction, just imagine controlling your PC with your fingers. But hold on, the UMPC tried that and failed terribly using on screen keyboards and trying to do more than it should. Could this be the biggest screw up for Apple Inc.?
I seriously doubt it. Maybe not everyone will have one but it will be big.
CES: Big Screen
January 12, 2007How big is your TV? 14, 32, 60 inches? How about 102? No that was last years record, this year it’s 108. It’s the world’s biggest TV, what’s more it’s LCD. Impressed? Probably not, considering that people decline the store delivery option and struggle to fit a new 42 inch TV into the back of their Vauxhall Corsa’s. Sharp make the monster but I have to ask, who are they marketing this at? The rich and famous of course, but not the Queen as it recently transpired that she commissioned Samsung to install one of their lovely TVs in nearly every room in Buck House. I admit the Samsung TVs are nice, in fact I’d consider them to be number two only to the Sony one that I saw (incidentally costing £4,500), but every room? How can she need one in every room? I guess Samsung wll be fairly smug with their next bank statement but probably more so, the ability to carry the royal warrant.
So, 108 inch TV. It’s good for a world record but how many of these monsters will be produced? I don’t know how much it will cost and am mildly reluctant of trying to find out, as if you need to ask, then you probably can’t afford one. Imagine it in your local electrical chain store, gone will be the days of showing the same output across 30 separate TVs, just put in the 108 inch and they’ll be no room for anything inferior. If you want a 108 inch then surely it would be easier to get a projector but then you wouldn’t be helping to break any records would you?
CES 3DTV
January 12, 2007So CES is over now and it was vastly overshadowed by the big, no massive keynote launch over at Macworld of the Apple iPhone. Which they’re now being sued for as they asked permission to use the name from Cisco but then forgot to wait for their response. Does this mean that it will be renamed the iPod Phone. Apple’s response was “that’s silly” and to some extent I agree, the name must have been used in lots of other products but Cisco did release their iPhone VoIP phone just months before and surely Apple could have come up with a more sophisticated response.
Anyway two types of 3DTV were on display at the biggest tech showcase in the universe. One from Philips and another from LG. They each produce 3D imagery from a flat panel screen without the need for the viewer to wear any headache-inducing dorky glasses. Each produce the illusion of the third dimension in different ways. The LG model requires source material to be encoded whilst the Philips converts regular content magically. Prepare to see the LG model displaying advetisements in the street rather than the average consumer though as it will take longer and cost more to program the content especially for 3D. Maybe this will achieve actual effects like the Jaws 3D ad in Back to the Future part II and even before 2015, I think someone should get to work on developing the hoverboard now for a 2015 launch. Philips is on the side of the consumer by converting standard content into 3D. Obviously at a lower cost (as you don’t need to buy new content and the producers don’t have to spend ages encoding the 3D information) but lower quality.
The viewing angle is something that is usually one of those things that people don’t really take into account when buying a flat screen TV (most people that I see simply go for the prettiest or the one that they saw round their auntie’s best friends neighbour’s house) but with 3DTV, the viewing angle has to be considered. As anyone who uses a flat panel will know, the viewing angle is limited to a section of the area in front of the scren. This has slowly improved in later screens with viewing angles nearing the 179 degree (its out of 180 as 180 covers the whole of the area in front of the TV) but with lesser viewing angles the on screen content doesn’t look how it should. 3DTV has a very small area that is best to view the content in otherwise it looks like a terrible 2D picture. Like when you took your glasses off in that IMAX theatre as your eyes and head were hurting so badly. 3DTV has another feature to add to the bag of specs that you should consider when getting one, the distance from the screen. We all know that you shouldn’t be sat right in front of the TV but with 3DTV, if you don’t get the distance right, agian the image will look terrible. The latter is another difference between the LG and Philips models. The LG requires you to position yourself serveral metres back to view the picture optimally whilst the Philips is much less making it better for home viewing.
This is certainly going to be something to watch out for in 2007/08, advertising certainly needs to be good to attract my attention so maybe 3D imagery is a good way to luring me into buy a Big Mac.
