CONTENT & Delivery
The BBC ran test transmission all last year for the free HD channel… and, as all worked well in the final analysis, the BBC has now launched, officially, their free HD channel on both satellite and cable. Currently, four hours of programming is offered each day. Eventually, this will reach nine hours of programming between 3:00 p.m. and midnight. And, for the first time this year, the Queen’s Christmas message will be broadcast in HiDef.
CONTENT
Something new from the social networking site MySpace—it’s called Transmissions and is MySpace’s nod to Apple‘s iTunes, only this time, MySpace is inviting those with musical talents to select a studio and then perform their selectes songs, on camera. The website will then run that performance and sell videos of the concerts. Their performance becomes immediately available to consumers. Also rather unique is the fact that MySpace will allow the video distributors to set their own pricing for the videos.
DELIVERY
Watch out, iPhone… the upcoming BlackBerry 9000 specs have been drizzled onto the web and the unit will look a lot like Apple’s comm appliance. Diffs include the BB9K will run on HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, also referred to as 3.5G, or 3-1/2G, the 3rdgen UMTS mobile comm technology) and will be poewred by a more powerful processor. Included will be Wi-FI and GPS support, 1GB of memory and a 2-megapixel camera. There’s a wee bit more info about the BB9K at The Boy Genius Report Website. No street release date has been determined, but expect this puppy’s appearance sometime during Q1 or Q2 of next year.
CONTENT
Despite rumors and blogging and other reports that Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation is going to acquire LinkedIn, a source close to the matter reports such is not going to occur. Yes, both firms had, at one time, been in chats regarding such a move, but chat of a definite deal is not cemented with fact. After all, News Corp. paid some $580 million for MySpace back in 2005—and Linkedin is the six largest social net in the U.S., with some 5 million visitors visiting the site in October of this year. And then there’s the published report in Fortune magazine that has Dan Nye, the CEO of LinkedIn, stating it would require more than $1 billion for him to sell the company. Perhaps an IPO at some point in the future??
DELIVERY
ViewCast Corporation [OTCBB: VCST] has announced Real Broadcast Networks (RBN) is using ViewCast’s Niagara PowerStream Pro encoders to deliver state-of-the-art video streaming solutions to RBN customers. Niagara encoders provided high-quality and high-availability online streaming for the “24/7 Live Feed” feature of the popular “Big Brother” reality TV series as well as the Labor Day weekend’s Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) Telethon, establishing a new benchmark for image quality of the production’s live streaming video. A division of RealNetworks, Inc., RBN offers a wide range of online content distribution solutions that allow customers to stream content over the Internet. RBN has installed the Niagara encoders at its network operations center in Seattle, where it acquires content from the Internet, fiber, and satellite and streams via the Internet to worldwide locations. For example, “Big Brother” came from Los Angeles via fiber and the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon came via satellite from Las Vegas, and both were made available to viewers worldwide over the Internet.
DELIVERY
Verizon Wireless has decided to fully support the new software platform from Google for mobile devices, including cell phones. Called the Android initiative, Verizon is one of the last cell carriers to do “sign on” and the move is totally inline with Verizon’s plans to support other devices, services and applications on their networks. Most of the development costs for external handsets will be borne by the makers themselves under the company’s new open environment, which also reduces Verizon’s subsidies for phone purchases… the buyers will be purchasing the phones from the makers. Overall, customers will be added to the Verizon network regardless of the brand of mobile device, and Verizon will not have to spend as much as they have in the past to obtain new customers. As an added bit of info, Google has now announced the firm does intend to bid in the 700MHz spectrum auction. The auction is scheduled to occur in January and the winner bidder will receive a dole out of some portion of the upper C-block spectrum, enabling any device and any application on their network.
DELIVERY
Volicon reports the Defense Media Center (DMC) of the American Forces Network (AFN) has purchased the company’s Observer® desktop monitoring system to log and monitor all of the facility’s broadcasts. Observer will be the first broadcast system linked into the DMC’s local area network (LAN). The system will allow the center to review logging content over its IT infrastructure for the first time. Operated by the Department of Defense (DoD), the DMC is located in Riverside, Calif., and manages the AFN Broadcast Center (AFN-BC), which provides stateside radio and television programming—”a touch of home”—to approximately 800,000 U.S. service men and women as well as DoD civilians and their families serving outside the United States in 177 countries and aboard Navy ships at sea. The DMC’s Observer system includes 40 SD-SDI channels for monitoring the outbound transmission integrity of all AFN radio and television broadcasts. The Observer system will automatically ingest, reference, and recall all as-run traffic data and correlate that data against logged media. In addition, Observer will log and proactively alert operators to transmission defects such as loss of audio and video, static or black video, and loss of closed captions. By logging onto the LAN via their own PCs, DMC operators will be able to search for and retrieve video clips by closed caption data, channel, date and time, as-run logs, and custom data sources. Along with proactively diagnosing and correcting transmission faults, operators will also be able to easily extract clips for quality control review and equipment failure analysis. In addition, a local quality control station will allow technicians to review content for the accurate placement of cue tones channel-by-channel and system-wide using a tone decoder—Burlington, Massachusetts
