IDTV

250,000 Mobile TV customers in Italy

Arguably the first hard evidence that there appears to be some demand for mobile TV in Italy. 250,000 subs in October, and 3 Italia reckon it will double by year-end.

Link: Agenzia Giornalistica Italia - News In English.

Where have these guys been?

I find myself increasingly irritated by the Grauniad’s propensity to accord substantial amounts of coverage to technology innovations which are anything but. The latest one causing me to sharpen my quill was in today’s financial pages, which announced BT’s decision to offer “an online ‘vault’ for digital valuables.”

“Analysts” apparently told the Grauniad’s scribe that “the new service signalled a further development in the digital age, whereby consumers store more and more of their virtual valuables online, and less and less on their PC.”

Of course, it does nothing of the sort. What it means is that BT – rather belatedly - is entering an already well-established market for online storage. There are already thousands of such secure online back-up solutions available to consumers (try Googling 'online backup'), and they began to take off at the same time as broadband did.

I’ve been using one myself for several years now, and, yes, just like the BT one, it carries out my backups automatically using a (gosh!) “back-up manager.”

If there is anything new in this story, it is that BT appears to have substantially undercut everyone else in this market, by offering 20GBytes for just under a fiver a month.

The BT story followed another one last week (to which most of a page was devoted) about a band deciding to release a single on “a computer memory stick the size of a cigarette lighter”. The new “gizmo” (“You just plug it into your PC or Mac and that's it," one over-excited music industry executive was reported as saying), turned out to be an ordinary USB key.

Forgive me for being underwhelmed by a ‘new’ music transport device which has been in common use among teenagers for over five years.

On the same day, and in much the same vein, another Guardian reporter breathlessly reported that “Now you can go shopping with your mobile phone. Forget about the Oyster card - soon you'll be able to travel on the Tube using your phone as a ticket.”

Sorry guys, that’s not news, either. Like most mobile handset innovations, this one began out East. When I visited Tokyo in Spring 2004, mobile phones were already routinely being used to shop with there (using their infra-red interface), and NTT Docomo and Sony began embedding contactless IC technology in mobile phones that same summer.

Two things are happening here, I think. First, Grauniad hacks are too often taking a cleverly-written press release as their cue for coverage. They are, in effect, acting as passive rather than active news-gatherers, and not bothering to look too deeply at the PR line they are being sold.

Second (and rather worse, in my view), they are being appallingly parochial, behaving as if any technology development new to the UK is new to the world. The sad truth is that new technology trends tend to hit us long after they’ve emerged either in the US or the Far East. We are, on the whole, a bunch of technological Johnny-come-latelies.

The future passes Liddiment by

Guardian columnist David Liddiment, former ITV director of programming, reveals perhaps more than he intended about the blinkered outlook of his generation of UK TV execs in his final column today.

Looking back to when he began writing his column in October 2002, he remarks that, way back then, "broadband was still something BT boffins talked about at Royal Television Society conventions, and no one had ever heard of user-generated content."

In fact, of course, fast Internet access was a well-established reality by then, although penetration was rather higher outside the UK. At the time, I had just returned from a field-trip to the US, where broadband take-up stood at 10%.

All the talk there, in fact, was of the coming boom in user-generated content, and my subsequent presentation to the clients who had funded the research contained this phrase: "As bandwidth becomes available, many forecast an explosion of material in this space. [...] The cultural imperative to document your life is taking root in the US."

This wasn't a particularly original observation, and anyone taking an interest in technologically-related consumer developments outside these shores would have said as much. Rather startling that Liddiment appears to have been blithely oblivious to all of this at the time. Then again, given the downwards trajectory ITV has followed over the last four years, perhaps not?

Warner to pursue Google over You Tube

It didn't take long, did it?

As I commented here a couple of days ago, You Tube's business model is open to legal challenge - and Warner has just entered the fray, saying it will pursue Google for copyright contraventions on the video-sharing site. Universal's said to be unhappy, too.

YouTube and Google: it ain't about video

Given all the noise about Google's acquisition of You Tube, highlighting a few basic propositions may be in order.

1) This isn't about video: Google Video has few premium video assets, and You Tube doesn't have many more
2) You Tube doesn't make money from user-generated videos - it makes ad revenues from traffic (and so far, not enough to break even)
3) Online consumers have so far been largely unwilling to pay for user-generated content of any kind, video or otherwise
4) It's not clear that You Tube's business model (which relies partly on the posting of clips of copyrighted content) is immune from legal challenge - and look at what's just happened to online gambling
5) This is about one company with a large amount of advertising inventory (Google) buying another company with a rather smaller amount of advertising inventory (You Tube)
6) Yes, it's significant - but probably more for the size of the gamble Google is prepared to take than anything else...

Implications of Ofcom revision

What does Ofcom's 'loss' of 700,000-odd Freeview-only homes signify for forecasts about DTT penetration, I wonder?

1.2 million boxes were sold in the last quarter, so sales aren't flagging; it's just that most are going to second and third TV sets. That means penetration of the Freeview platform - in the sense of the platform used for the main TV set - is slowing down.

Since Sky Digital growth is also decreasing, cable remains moribund, and IPTV has yet to take off, that suggests a hole could open up in digital TV coverage in the run-up to analogue switchover, since Freeview was supposed to be the platform that delivered the 95% digital TV penetration threshold.

Any gap could conceivably be filled by a re-invigorated NTL/Telewest cable offering under its new Virgin branding, or even IPTV, if BT ever gets its act together.

But I bet the Excel spreadsheets are humming at DCMS and the DTI in a frenetic effort to figure out what this latest mid-course correction might mean for the government's 2012 analogue switchoff plans.

'Freeview is a failure' - revisited

My thoughts on why Freeview might not be the runaway success everyone is saying it is have prompted a number of comments, some of them abusive. I am well aware that I am in a minority here - but happily, not a minority of one.

Sony U.K. Managing Director Steve Dowdle told a conference in London recently that the government's digital switchoff plans - which depend heavily on the 'success' of the Freeview platform - were akin to a sinking ship. According to Dowdle's calculations, 72 million analogue TV products need to be replaced - i.e. 12 million a year for 6 years through the process of analogue switchover. He's sceptical that can happen, for much the same reasons as me, and predicts that many a government official is going to go down with the ship.

Whether you're worried about e-government and the 'digital divide' or not, it's worth pointing out that the lack of a return-path in the Freeview spec runs directly counter to stated government and BBC policy, which is that digital TV is a key enabler for connecting up the digitally-deprived (also EC policy, as it happens, but that's another issue).

There is progress here, in the shape of a proposed new return-path-enabled version of the UK interactive TV standard, MHEG, for IPTV set-top boxes, which looks as if they're increasingly going to come with a Freeview tuner by default. There was an interesting demo of this at IBC 2006 in Amsterdam, which showed the BBC's interactive multi-screen application behaving pretty much the same in a terrestrial environment as it does on BSkyB.

Reuters misses the story

Whoever filed this Reuters snap (Digital TV sales top 1 mln per quarter -Ofcom | Technology | Internet | Reuters.co.uk) failed to read down to the bottom of Ofcom's release.

The real story is that Ofcom knocked 700,000 households off its figure for Freeview-only homes in the first quarter of the year, because it decided it had grossly under-estimated the number of already-digital homes buying Freeview boxes for second TV sets. Quite a mid-course correction, and the third major 'adjustment' Ofcom has had to make in its estimates since the platform launched.

For the real story, read what I posted on my website! Or, if you have the time, go to the source...