Business News Holding

Tag: content

  • Dial2Do Making Hands-free Mobile Tasks Simple


    Irish start-up Dial2Do are creating quite a stir at this year’s Mobile World Congress.

    The Dublin-based company lets you do various tasks on your mobile simply by calling a number and speaking.

    So you can send email or text messages, record reminders, post updates to Twitter or Jaiku stream or even listen to internet content – all while driving your car.

    Ivan MacDonald, Dial2Do’s CEO, told smartphone.biz-news that the service was designed to be easy and handsfree.

    He said typical users were commuters who wanted to make the most of the their drive time to get get tasks done.

    Currently available in 20 countries around the world it so far only comes in an English language version, but MacDonald said a Spanish service was coming shortly.

  • Vudu Halves Cost Of Basic Player


    The cost of VUDU’s basic 250GB VUDU HD player has been halved to USD $150.

    According to the on-demand internet provider the move is not a sign of looming financial problems.

    It stresses that the dramatic price cut is due to positive factors.

    These are cited as a combination of lower component prices, higher movie revenues and increased content demand following strong holiday sales.

    In October, VUDU launched a new video format to rival Blu-ray called HDX.

    It delivers full 1080p at 24 fps to screens 40 inches and up via web distribution using VUDU’s TruFilm compression technology.

    As well as the VUDU HD, the company is reducing the price of its home theater, VUDU XL, to USD $499 and adding in a connectivity pack that previously cost more than $100.

    VUDU’s content library now runs to more than 13,000 movies and TV shows – including what it claims is the world’s largest HD library of more than 1,300 titles.

  • Young Lead Shift Towards Internet TV Viewing


    Internet television viewership is increasing rapidly in the US due to better content and improved viewing quality, according to Move Networks.

    The Internet TV service provider has released figures showing it streamed more than 100 million hours of high definition content and over 180 million total hours of content in 2008.

    It experienced 100 per cent growth in the number of people watching Internet television delivered via Move’s adaptive streaming technology – up from 25 million unique viewers in 2007 to 55 million unique viewers in 2008.

    Not surprisingly the shift to Internet viewing is even more dramatic among younger viewers.

    According to Move, 70 per cent of the college-age demographic have watched television online and 55 per cent watch more than half of their television programming via the Internet.

    Move Networks streams 60 per cent of the US’s most popular television shows and 11 of the top 20 primetime TV shows, including Fringe, Lost, Gossip Girls and Ugly Betty.

    The company also streams an average of 600 live events every month, including concerts, political conventions, educational series, sporting events with Fox Sports, the NFL, ESPN and more.

  • YouTube HD Videos Now In Widescreen


    After weeks of trialling its new HD capabilities YouTube has officially launched its high-def channel.

    Users clicking on the newly added "watch in HD" option will automatically see the videos play in widescreen (16:9 aspect).

    YouTube originally announced its intention to go widescreen in November following the video sharing giant’s recent decision to start hosting full-length Hollywood movies.

    As well as boosting HD content, YouTube plans to add filtering options, including the ability to search HD videos.

    The Google-owned company will also be adding three new landing pages – youtube.com/music, youtube.com/news and youtube.com/movies – with a view to simplifying categorization and search.

    With competition intensifying as the likes of Hulu showing high definition videos, the improvements suggest YouTube is responding well to the challenge.

    The changes come just as Warner Music is pulling all its music videos off YouTube because of Google’s refusal to pay more money.

  • Flood Of Content Predicted For Real-time HDTV Video Streaming

    While more operators are beginning to offer HD video-on-demand services, live streaming video continues to pose infrastructure and bandwidth problems.

    HDTV.biz-news.com spoke to Alex Mashinsky, CEO of DigiMeld, about the challenges of streaming video – and developments that could open-up the service to millions of viewers.

    Alex Mashinsky, CEO of DigiMeld, was one of the first people to realise the internet’s great potential for voice, now he is just as excited about the possibilities it offers for video.

    He said the demand for real-time streaming of video was going to grow rapidly as high quality internet content was increasingly watched on HDTVs rather than PCs.

    “We are moving to a world where services from the internet do not look any different from cable TV,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge flood of content flowing to this environment, moving away from watching video on a laptop for five minutes at a time.”

    Alex Mashinsky, CEO DigiMeld


    Mashinsky said that while it was easy to get 16 million Americans to watch the same TV channel at the same time, it was impossible to do that with half-a-million viewers on the internet.

    “Voice was the first wave on the web. The second wave is video,” he told HDTV.biz-news.com from DigiMeld’s mid-town Manhattan headquarters. “But while everyone is focussed on it, we have not really solved the scaleability issue.

    Challenges Remain


    Video demands a lot of bandwidth and Mashinsky said traditional unicast and CDN solutions were limited in meeting the challenges on efficiency and scalability.

    He used the example of Oprah Winfrey’s attempt to stream live on her website, a move which caused the site to crash when more than 300,000 viewers logged-on.

    “We believe the only reason why we don’t have live TV on the internet is because no-one can really solve the scaleability and pricing issue,” said Mashinsky.

    “If you can address those two things, you would have linear streaming and on-demand streaming of movies and other things on a much larger scale than today.

    “Amazon, Netflix and Blockbuster have all launched streaming services but they are not launching new movies and having one million people watching at the same time. They rely on many people watching different things.”

    China Forging Ahead

    Mashinsky said China was way ahead of the US in live streaming technology, something it demonstrated during the Olympic Games when PP Live streamed live to 1.6 million concurrent online viewers.

    He said DigiMeld had used a team of former PP Live programmers to develop its grid-streaming technology that enabled massive numbers of viewers to watch content concurrently.

    It has tested the intelligent streaming solution with NASA Television, including a live internet broadcast trial of a shuttle launch to more than 100,000 live concurrent video streams.

    Essentially, the software harvests viewers’ unused uplink bandwidth to relay stream data and offload the stream traffic from the media servers. The company says this optimizes the overall load balance of the network.

    Unlike traditional CDNs or multicast network solutions, the DigiMeld solution allows each viewer in the grid-streaming network to simultaneously retrieve, view, and share streaming video data with other viewers within a safe and encrypted network.

    This approach differs from P2P file-sharing firms such as BitTorrent, which downloads an entire video file to a viewer’s hard drive.

    Mashinsky said DigiMeld only stores a portion of the streamed content in a viewer’s evanescent memory during viewing.

    This slice of video is continuously overwritten by newly-arriving streams, enhancing efficiency of network bandwidth and increasing copyright protection, including digital rights management (DRM).

    He believes grid-streaming is much more scalable because when the number of concurrent viewers explodes, the viewers will offload most data.


    Bandwidth Congestion Reduced


    Mashinsky said grid-streaming also puts less strain on media servers, while enhancing the QoS (quality of service) when the number of concurrent viewers is huge since more viewers can share data with each other.

    “Unlike BitTorrent, if you are not watching stuff, people are not using your bandwidth,” he said. “We are not over-loading the network with our requirements. It’s the opposite as we are balancing the upstream with the downstream.”

    Mashinsky said the software enabled adaptive streaming which sensed the customer’s bandwidth capacity.

    “It decides if it’s going to use HD or lower quality and links into other streams of people watching the same thing.”

    Opportunities For Content Producers

    Mashinsky stressed that DigiMeld’s grid-streaming was not a replacement for CDNs but could be leveraged within existing infrastructure to create greater benefits.

    DigiMeld was offering services ranging from those for customers that wanted to self-launch, self-publicize and self-monetize to those that relied on DigiMeld for hosting and distribution – or any mix in-between.

    The company has a self-publishing video portal, DigiMeld.tv that allows publishers to create live and on-demand video channels easily and monetize the content through subscription, paid and advertising based services.

    Mashinsky said the service was intended for clients that fell between large media companies, which typically used a CDN service such as Akamai, and peer-to-peer video typically found on YouTube.

    “We are trying to capture the middle of the tail to enable these content people to monetize their content in an easy way,” he said.

    Earlier this week, DigiMeld demonstrated grid-streaming’s worth as a video delivery platform by conducting the first feature-film broadcast over the internet simultaneously with the theatrical release of PublicScope Film’s The Third Jihad.

    Gregory Ross, of PublicScope Film, said DigiMeld TV enabled them to reach worldwide audiences with a television broadcast experience at greatly reduced costs.

    If DigiMeld can achieve that desired combination of quality and cost, there will be a lot more producers knocking on its door.

  • App 'market' for Google's Android mobile platform

    Google has opened up about its plans for Android content – only don’t call it an app store


    Google is to offer an applications “market” for its Android open mobile platform but has sought to distance itself from Apple’s iPhone app store.

    Eric Chu, a member of the Android team, said on his Android Developers’ Blog that they would be offering “an open content distribution system that will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered devices”.

    Stressing that it was to be the Android Market, he added: “We chose the term ‘market’ rather than ‘store’ because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available.”

    Describing the Market, Chu drew camparisions with YouTube. “Content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it,” he said.

    “We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.”

    Earlier this month, Google announced that it was expanding the Android team, with openings for designers, engineers, and developers.

    Due out in the US this fall, the first Android handsets are to offer a beta version of the new Market.

    “At a minimum you can expect support for free (unpaid) applications, “ said Chu. “Soon after launch an update will be provided that supports download of paid content and more features such as versioning, multiple device profile support, analytics, etc.”

    Chu promised to share more details in the coming months as they become available.

  • Report says HDTV will not become the new "normal" television until around 2015


    The uptake of HD technology in Europe is accelerating rapidly but there remains a “significant” content gap caused by the lack of HD programming on free-to-air platforms across the region.
    That’s the conclusion of the latest report from media analysts Screen Digest which says that by the end of 2007, 18 per cent of the 165 million European TV households were equipped with HD displays.
    But less than one per cent of these (approximately one million) were fully “HD enabled” – that is equipped with an HD set-top box and an HD subscription enabling them to watch HD broadcasts.
    The report forecasts that by 2012 the situation will have improved little – only 20 per cent of the 85 per cent of European households with HD displays will actually be watching in HD.
    It says that ultimately HD will become the default choice of TV viewers but in the most part they will have to wait at least until 2015 to enjoy the content for free.
    This will be driven by the availability of HD across all free platforms, channels upgrading to HD making other formats unwatchable and next-generation TV’s coming with MPEG4 capability.
    Vincent Létang , senior analyst with Screen Digest and author of the report, said that in the next five years, HDTV will remain little more than a pay TV product in Europe – primarily on satellite.
    He said analogue switch-off, which will happen between 2010 and 2012 will free-up bandwidth capacity on the digital terrestrial platform and will kick-start the next phase of growth in high definition TV.
    “HDTV will become the mainstream and ultimately the standard form of free television around the middle of the next decade,” he said.
    “In ten years time, nobody will ever refer to “high definition” because HD will be everywhere.”
    The report, entitled “HDTV 2008: Global Uptake, Strategies and Business Models”, identifies three critical success factors that will support the successful expansion of HDTV: penetration of HD displays; supply of HD content and the availability of HD broadcast platforms.
    It identifies the lack of access to free-to-air HD channels as a key reason behind the low take-up of HD.
    “In Europe there are currently approximately 100 HD channels, with the vast majority on satellite and only a handful available on cable,” the report states.
    “As of today, only Sweden has launched HD on free-to-air digital terrestrial TV and only France and the UK are likely to follow suit in the short term.”

  • DirectTV says high definition content is helping attract new subscribers

    The US’s leading provider of HDTV has credited its 95 channels of HD content as one of the main reason for increasing subscribers even as the economy falters.
    Paul Guyardo, DirecTV’s chief marketing officer, said the company had not been greatly affected by the US economic slowdown.
    DirecTV added 275,000 subscribers in the first quarter, compared to just 35,000 for rival Dish Network.
    He attributed the satcaster’s market-leading HD offering as a major factor in the increase.
    “I don’t want to say that we are recession-proof, but I will say that we have not been dramatically affected by the recession,” Guyardo told Advertising Age.
    “Right now is a time when people don’t necessarily have those discretionary dollars to go out to entertainment outside of the house.
    “And so now more than ever, they’re turning to their television as a source of entertainment. And at the end of the day, DirecTV is an exceptional value.”
    Guyardo said that DirecTV launched an aggressive marketing campaign last year to promote its expanded HD lineup, at a time when many consumers were starting to tighten their belts.
    The satcaster expanded its high-def channel total from nine to more than 70 last Autumn.
    “All of our awareness studies would suggest that people clearly do understand that DirecTV is the undisputed leader in HD,” he said.
    Despite adding only a small number of new high-def channels this year DirecTV is currently the leading US provider of high definition TV programming.
    With a new satellite due to come on-stream, it is unlikely to lose the top spot in the near future and is expected to expand its current offering of 96 national HD channels.
    Dish Network lies in second place, with approximately 80 channels, while the cable operators Comcast, Cablevision and Time Warner offer 40-60 high-def channels in some markets.
    In other markets, this figure drops to less than 30 HD channels.
    Verizon currently has fewer than 40 HD channels but says it will up this to150 by the end of 2008.
    AT&T’s U-Verse TV service also offers around 40 HD channels and hasn’t announced any expansion plans.
    Guyardo said that DirecTV was well positioned to attract future HD subscribers.
    “People are still investing a ton of money in big, flat-screen TVs – HDTVs,” he said.
    “The growth has definitely levelled off, but the growth is still there. And I think they want a quality picture on their 50-inch Plasma.”

  • More HD titles needed to boost up-take of Blu-ray players


    With Blu-ray sales still not setting the heather alight much has been made of the high cost of HD players and continued viewer satisfaction with standard-definition DVD.
    Paul Erickson, director of DVD and HD Market Research at DisplaySearch, is in no doubt these are big factors contributing to Blu-ray’s slow shift into the living room.
    Adding to the picture is the emergence of online content delivery as a viable source of HD programming, something that is seen as posing a real threat to Blu-ray’s long-term survival.
    “As online delivery services from Netflix, Microsoft and other players continue to evolve and mature over these next few years, and consumer bandwidth increases, there is considerable pressure for Blu-ray to make its mark on the mainstream,” said Erickson.
    “Price-based accessibility has remained a significant constraint. Therefore, the recent introduction of a sub-$300 Blu-ray player (by Wal-Mart) is a step in the right direction.”
    But what is also needed, according to Erickson, is for more HD programming to be made.
    “Should the collective companies and studios with a stake in Blu-ray Disc engage in price aggression on both hardware and software over 2008 and 2009, it will greatly increase the format’s representation in the eventual mix of video content delivery options being utilized by the consumer of the future.”

  • European broadcasters expand HD capacity in advance of summer of sport


    The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has taken delivery of HDTV MPEG-2 encoder equipment in order to expand capacity on its contribution network.
    Supplied by NTT Electronics Corporation, the Encoder HE5100 will allow the organisation’s members to cope with the rising demand for HD content.
    This is expected to increase further over the summer with the expansion of HD broadcasts for various major sporting events.
    These include the Beijing Olympics, Euro 2008, the Tour de France, and tennis events at Paris’ Roland Garros and Wimbledon.
    The HDTV MPEG-2 Encoder HE5100 delivered to the EBU, the largest association of national broadcasters in the world, incorporates the internally-developed single-chip MPEG-2 codec LSI.
    As well as allowing the EBU to meet the increasing demand for HD content, the encoder provides high image quality in a compact unit.
    It supports both HDTV signals (1080p/1080i/720p) and SDTV signals (576i/512i/480i).
    NTT Electronics has developed a variety of video compression technologies.