Technology360

GAO Issues Report on German DTV Transition

On July 21, the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) released a report on its research into the DTV transition in Germany. ¶ ... The report concludes that certain aspects of the DTV transition in Berlin and other regions of Germany are relevant to the ongoing transition in the United States because, even though the television market and the transition are structured differently in the two countries, government officials face similar key challenges. The GAO found that much of the focus of government officials leading up to and during the brief simulcast in Berlin was on ensuring households who rely on terrestrial television received the necessary consumer equipment. The report also states that the challenge facing the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, as was the case in Berlin, is encouraging households to purchase set-top boxes or digital televisions. The GAO observed that the key components of the Berlin DTV transition that enabled the rapid deployment of set-top boxes included (1) implementing an extensive consumer education effort; (2) providing subsidies to low-income households for set-top boxes; and (3) setting a relatively near-term, date certain that all stakeholders understood would be the shutoff date for analog television.... NAB TV TechCheck link.

Here comes the MP3 revolution

... While the record companies battled Napster and so-called music piracy in court, tech companies saw a different future in other statistics: namely, that at least 33 percent of obtainable music will be delivered digitally within five years. Voila -- along comes the MP3 player and the current benchmark, the iPod, bypassing CD burning and eliminating the CD. Users instead download music onto a handheld computer that, essentially, acts like a mini jukebox without the physical records. ... ContraCostaTimes.com link

Media Rights Technologies Launches, Powers Streaming Music Service

The DRM and music distribution vendor Music Public Broadcasting relaunched itself as Media Rights Technologies (MRT) today. The company offers some proprietary DRM technologies, including one for audio called X1 Recording Control, which it claims works with any file format and playback technology, protects against several different forms of transcoding and stream capture, and supports Superdistribution, thereby allowing files to be shared on a P2P network with compensation to rights holders at each step. ¶ X1 Recording Control is used in the company's BlueBeat music service, which was also relaunched. BlueBeat is a paid subscription streaming radio service that offers over 300 different channels and very high sampling rates of 160 or 320 kbps, which approach CD quality sound. ... DRM Watch link

Peter Gabriel on the digital revolution

Four years ago, former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel co-founded UK online music distributor On Demand Distribution (OD2). It was sold to U.S. company Loudeye in June for $38.6m (£21.1m). ¶ The new company offers everything from 30-second snippets of songs to anti-piracy measures for music labels. ... ¶ Here, CNN's Becky Anderson talks to Gabriel about OD2 and the future of digital music downloading. ... CNN.com link

Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News

Recently U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attested to the revolutionary power of the wireless uploading of digital images to the Internet. Testifying in Congress about the sudden widespread appearance of photographs and video of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he did not address this subject as a technological optimist. ... Rather, he stuck to the brutal reality, explaining that the combination of cheap digital cameras and the Internet had fundamentally changed the dynamics of news making during wartime. ... PlaNetwork Journal link. Very interesting and strongly recommended. --Dennis

Hard-date Makes Pols Equivocate

Three important revelations came out of Wednesday's House subcommittee hearing on the DTV transition: estimating spectrum auction proceeds is a waste of time, the United States of America is not Berlin, and grandmas have clout on Capitol Hill. ¶ Just how much money the remaining chunk of Channels 52-69 will generate is anyone's guess, but empirical calculations and wild estimations put it somewhere between $680 million and $50 billion. The low end comes from the sale of licenses in Channels 54, 55 and 59, auctioned off in mid-2002 for $145,467,590. At those prices, the remaining analog TV spectrum in 52-69 would bring in around $680 million. While such a straight-forward calculation doesn't account for certain geographic, economic and political factors, (like a hard date for the eviction of broadcasters), the government's own estimate has fluctuated from $27 billion to $70 billion and recently settled at around $50 billion. ... TVTechnology link

Got Those DVD Blues

In a future world of video-on-demand, the stakes in the blue-laser DVD battle may not be as high as they now seem. ¶ Here we go again: another battle for the hearts and minds of the TV-viewing public. This time it’s ... Blue vs. Blue in a conflict between two high-capacity “blue-laser” DVD standards: Blu-Ray Disc and HD-DVD (HD stands for high definition). At stake is the ownership of an optical storage standard for movie distribution, TV recording, computers and games. ... ¶ ... In a decade, however, widespread deployment of HDTV video-on-demand services and hard drive video recorders (e.g., TiVo) could slow uptake. "Most people just want to time-shift TV programming,” says Levitas. “If my cable provider gives me video on demand and a hard-drive recorder, why do I need a blue-laser recorder? If there’s a competitive library of on-demand high-def content, do I really need to own a disc anymore? I don’t think blue-laser will be as popular as VCRs were or as red-laser DVD is likely to be.” ... Technology Review link

3G data services for the home?

As 3G services finally begin to appear, [infoSync World editor] Larry Garfield sees a future for 3G data services not just for mobile devices, but for the home, too. ¶ In the past several weeks, 3G data services have finally begun to crop up from various mobile carriers around the world. Billed as the future of mobile communication, 3G services in theory can scale all the way to the megabit range while stationary, and the current generation of networks are advertising 300-500 kbps just to start. That's a huge jump from the 30 kbps or so one can expect from conventional "2.5G" services like GPRS and 1xRTT, and proponents and marketers alike love to talk about all the wonderful new mobile applications it will enable. But just as importantly, it can enable new fixed-point applications as well. ... infoSync World link

"My Beef With Big Media" by Ted Turner

In the late 1960s, when Turner Communications was a business of billboards and radio stations and I was spending much of my energy ocean racing, a UHF-TV station came up for sale in Atlanta. It was losing $50,000 a month and its programs were viewed by fewer than 5 percent of the market. ¶ I acquired it. ¶ When I moved to buy a second station in Charlotte--this one worse than the first--my accountant quit in protest, and the company's board vetoed the deal. So I mortgaged my house and bought it myself. The Atlanta purchase turned into the Superstation; the Charlotte purchase--when I sold it 10 years later--gave me the capital to launch CNN. ¶ Both purchases played a role in revolutionizing television. Both required a streak of independence and a taste for risk. And neither could happen today. ... Washington Monthly link

TiVo Battles Hollywood Over Copyrights

A plan by TiVo ... to let its users transfer recorded TV shows to other devices is running into opposition from Hollywood studios and the National Football League, which fear their copyrighted content could get loose on the Internet. ¶ The studios and the NFL filed papers with the Federal Communications Commission ... last week seeking to block the agency's approval of TiVo's proposed new service. ... Yahoo! News links