Technology360

Shifting Places

Sitting in a Starbucks in San Mateo, Calif., Blake Krikorian...fires up an iPAQ handheld and, with a few clicks on a menu, pulls up live television. The screen is small, but the Fox channel's Judge Hatchett is smooth; no delays, no frozen frames. Krikorian switches to his laptop, and moments later Clifford the Big Red Dog is nosing around at a birthday party, courtesy of PBS. He then apologizes:He could download TV to his cell phone if only there were higher-speed service. "It's coming," he promises. ¶ Krikorian's little company, Sling Media, is about to launch the SlingBox Personal Broadcaster, an amazing little box that can redirect any video--such as a cable or broadcast feed--from your home to any screen you carry, as long as it has a wireless Internet connection. ... Yahoo! News - Shifting Places

U.S. Broadband Growth Slows - Analyst

U.S. telephone and cable companies saw the growth of high-speed Internet services slow in the second quarter to the lowest rate in a year, an industry research firm said on Tuesday. ¶ While broadband growth typically slumps in the second quarter as college students disconnect for summer break, analysts have said overall sales of high-speed Internet connections were less than expected. ¶ "There are now close to 30 million households with broadband, and that's a pretty robust number," said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research. "It's not that the market is saturated, but clearly we've gone well past the low-hanging fruit." ... Reuters.com link

Study: Broadband leaps past dial-up

For the first time ever, more Americans are using broadband to access the Internet than dial-up, according to a study released Wednesday. ¶ As of July, there were 63 million people using broadband at home, making up 51 percent of the total U.S. Internet population, according to market research company Nielsen/NetRatings. That's a 47 percent jump from last year, when broadband totaled only 38 percent of all U.S. online households. ... CNET News.com link

KRON-DT San Francisco to Carry HDNet

... HDNet, the Mark Cuban all HDTV network previously carried only by home satellite providers and some cable systems, has signed a deal with KRON-DT in San Francisco to carry the network on its UHF digital channel 57 and Bay Area Comcast cable systems. ... BENX.US link

TV project aims to kick-start 3G

An ambitious project is under way to find a way to send TV broadcast signals to mobiles by 2010. ¶ Dubbed Instinct, (IP-based Networks, Services and Terminals for Converging Systems), the project is being led by west London's Brunel University. ¶ ... The technology will be much cheaper for end users because it is being delivered via a one-to-many broadcast signal rather than a one-to-one phone call. ... BBC News link

Va. Tech finds soft radio's missing link

Riding a wave of innovation, software-defined radio may finally be on track to deliver on its promise as the future of wireless communications. But even as software breakthroughs ignite fresh hopes for SDR, the hardware side is still a hard case. ¶ There are three traditional barriers to SDR: a low-cost, low-power, frequency-agile front end; portable software that can be implemented on any platform; and low-power processors on which to perform that processing. While the last requirement remains elusive, help is on the way for software portability. Researchers at Virginia Tech say they have developed a software framework that will be the foundation for all future military radios — and could serve as the missing link for commercial SDR. ... CommsDesign link

Intel restrains Radio Free vision

It is almost two years since Intel’s chief technology officer, Pat Gelsinger, first coined the slogan ‘Radio Free Intel’ for his vision of a world where wireless connectivity is in every device down to the wristwatch and where these devices run on adaptive radios that move intelligently between available networks according to requirements. It was a big idea, but one that has been taken up all around the industry. It was an even bigger idea that Intel – a company with virtually no RF experience - should be the provider of those ubiquitous radios. ¶ While the general concept may have become common wisdom, the jury is still out on whether Intel can implement the vision in silicon ahead of established experts like Motorola and Texas Instruments. In the past few months, the chip giant has suffered from a string of uncharacteristic delays that have led some to speculate that it has bitten off more than it can chew in its wireless strategy. And last week, Sean Maloney, head of the communications division..., seemed keen to damp down expectations around the adaptive radio, which only a year ago was seen as the company’s most important project as well as Gelsinger’s personal crusade. ... The Register link

13% Of Households Do Not Subscribe To Cable

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) submitted comments [Aug. 11] in response to the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Public Notice requesting information on television viewers who rely exclusively on over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting, such as why they do not subscribe to a pay television service such as cable or satellite. The FCC also sought comment on options for minimizing the impact on OTA viewers when analog broadcasts cease. ¶ In its filing, CEA provided research showing that about 13 percent of households do not subscribe to cable and/or satellite services. The majority of non-subscribing households are making a conscious decision not to subscribe for reasons other than economic limitations. In addition, those same households are making a conscious decision not to connect additional television sets to these services. Such additional sets may be reserved for use with a VCR or DVD player, or with a video game system. ... Designtechnica News link

The CEA press release: Majority of Households That Do Not Subscribe to Pay Television Services do so for Reasons Other Than Economic Limitations. --Dennis

Downloading Television, Legal or Otherwise

Salon’s tech reporter Farhad Marjoo recently posted a thoughtful discussion of the current state of television downloads. The center piece of the article is a discussion of a recent FCC decision which cleared the way for TiVo, the digital recorder folks, to offer a new service-TiVoToGo-which allows one to transfer digitally recorded content from your TiVo machine across the internet to your PC or to another TiVo. The service comes with plenty of hardware to make it difficult for the content to be shared with family or friends, let alone the general public, but it does represent a real convenience for folks like me who travel and want to catch up with their favorite shows. What I also want is a simple way to tell my TiVo from the road to tape shows I discover, say, reading a newspaper or magazine on the flight. ¶ From here, the story goes on to look at a variety of strategies being adopted to share television content on the Web-which is as legal or illegal as downloading any other copyrighted content. ... Technology Review link

Protecting free OTA service

The NAB and the Association for Maximum Service Television say there are 280.5 million analog television sets in service in the United States, and 73 million of them receive only over-the-air signals (OTA). ¶ That means that 18.9 percent of the U.S. population consists of households that receive only OTA signals, the TV trade organizations said in a report to the FCC. In those 20.5 million homes, there are more than 45 million broadcast-only television sets in use. ¶ More than 20 percent of television sets in cable and satellite households are broadcast-only (meaning those homes have second, third, or fourth television sets that have widely-used receivers not hooked up to cable or satellite). ... Broadcast Engineering link