IDTV

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?

Grauniad predicts death of rooftop TV aerial?

Strange caption above the picture on the front page of the Media Guardian this week, which leads on the views of various TV luminaries about the possible death of broadcasting as we know it. The picture (just visible on this link) shows an urban skyline, with an accompanying caption stating that, eventually, the spread of digital TV will mean the end of the rooftop aerial.

Errr, shome mishtake, surely? Freeview - which, notoriously, only currently offers reliable reception from a rooftop aerial (as opposed to a portable one) - is the fastest-growing digital TV platform, and there are now more homes with DTT equipment than there are Sky ones. We'll be stuck with rooftop aerials (and lots of them) even when digital TV penetration reaches 95% and analogue is switched off.

Oddly enough, no reference to the caption's rather intriguing prediction in the story. Did a sub cut it out to spare the blushes of one of our leading TV industry titans?

Now it's my fault my computer's crashed (yes, more Guardianballs)

OK, I admit it - this has turned into a blog almost totally devoted to the Guardian's technology coverage.

For those of you who want to savour the almost complete detachment from the real world of some of their writing in this regard, savour this statement (actually in yesterday's Technology section: usually the stuff that makes me want to howl at the moon is in the rest of the paper):

"Don't curse your computer for crashing - curse yourself for bad housekeeping."

This is an excerpt from a piece by one Jamil Shehadeh, and it enraged me, not just for its smugness, and its assumption that PCs in general (and Windows in particular) are blame-free, but because it implied that the various solutions proposed for ‘housekeeping’ (backing up, anti-virus and anti-spyware programs, firewalls, etc.) were somehow simple and straightforward to use, with minimal cost implications. I did find myself momentarily wondering if the writer actually used a PC, but even on the Guardian I would guess it's actually compulsory these days.

Just to pick a few recent examples from my own experience: the only sure way of securely backing up content on your hard drive is to do it to a remote location online. But broadband speeds and the cost make that prohibitive for most people. I have a 200GB drive of which 70GB is currently occupied. But it costs me £14 a month just to back up 4GB of it!

As for the local storage backup option, even DVD-RW drives can’t cope. My Microsoft Outlook file is over 1GB – if I were to back it up every day, I would have to insert a new DVD every 5 days – and that’s not mentioning all the other stuff in the My Documents folder. Hazard a guess as to how long it took me to restore all my files from my DVDs when my hard drive did fail a few weeks ago – 14 hours. That time didn’t include how long it took the engineer to arrive and replace the drive, or the hours I spent with tech support when it turned out that the (encrypted) restored files no longer recognized me as a user with the correct security permissions, or the time taken to re-install all my software programs. At my current hourly rates, the total cost exceeded that of a new PC.

As for virus programs, they frequently turn out to be incompatible with other programs resident on your system: there’s a well-known conflict between Google Desktop and EZ AntiVirus, for example; and they also routinely interfere with email programs such as Outlook. Just scroll through the user groups of the most popular anti-virus brands for an insight into the havoc these types of software can often wreak on unsuspecting and well-meaning users.

Finally, to suggest that firewalls are also unproblematic to run is ludicrous. Until recently, I ran BT’s Broadband Voice VoIP product through one of their wireless ADSL router products. After numerous problems, BT told me the only thing to do was to disable the firewall in the router. I installed Zone Alarm instead – but it turned out (see previous posting) that one of the recent versions had a bug in it which blocked my Internet access – even after I had de-installed it!

Zone Alarm was apparently so used to dealing with this bug that it hijacked my (by then inoperative) browser with a message on how to edit my registry. Now, I rely on the basic Windows Firewall product bundled with XP – it’s the only one that I don’t have endlessly to fiddle with to make work properly. But, again, I have lost count of the number of hours it took me to find that simple fact out.

To sum up, for people who use IT to maximise productivity, configuring and dealing with the vagaries of the imperfect ‘housekeeping’ methods described is – in reality – a horrendous waste of time and money. To blame PC users for shying away from such solutions is a bit like blaming cancer patients for not wanting to go through chemotherapy! And, to pursue the analogy, just who's responsible for the cancer in the first place?

Look, you don't have to replace your co-ax, OK?

This week, Emily Bell has been pursuing her obsession with the need to replace co-axial cables when upgrading to Freeview, and added a new twist - you'll have to replace your TV, too. All in a discussion of why the government is handing the task of switching over to the BBC:

"The government, which is in general less popular than the BBC, would rather Huw Edwards and Barbara Windsor tell viewers they have to change their co-axial cables and TV sets than have John Prescott and Tessa Jowell do it."

Just to clarify the point again, Emily: you'll be extremely unlucky if your co-ax needs replacing, and if it does, your installer will do it for you. And, no, you won't need to change your TV set, either - you can just attach a Freeview box to it (using the same bit of co-ax you've already got).

And just for the record, I've never heard of anyone being charged £2000 to have their aerial (and yes, their co-axial cables, if it comes to that), replaced for a Freeview upgrade. I live in a dip which requires a dirty great big pole to be put on the top of my roof, and I have a TV outlet in every room. The price I was quoted for upgrading the lot came to £250. For £2000, you could lay fibre, for God's sake!

More Guardianballs - this time on analogue switchover

The Guardian makes such an easy target when its non-specialist staff turn their hand to writing about tech-rich topics that it seems almost cruel to expose their ignorance, sometimes.

But one example stuck out like a sore thumb this week. It occurred in a piece penned by the Media Guardian’s Emily Bell about analogue switchoff in the UK for Digital News, the house magazine of the UK’s Digital Television Group, an industry association for digital TV. Bell wisely stuck to a discussion of the political issues involved, but then risked a quip about it being a massive job-creation scheme “for the installers and call-centre operatives who will be talking us all through the tricky business of replacing co-axial cable.”

Now it could well be the case that a small minority of homes might have to have the co-axial cable leading from the aerial to the TV replaced, but that’s hardly the central problem- and no-one’s proposing that consumers should somehow be coaxed out on to the roof with a telephone in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other.

The major issues where advice will be needed will be with respect to connecting up the set-top box to the TV using a SCART cable, what to do about the VCR or DVD, and how to get Freeview on your portable.

These are all major problems which remain significant headaches, and Bell could have mentioned any of them to make her point. Instead, she chose the one issue least likely to be faced by the average household – viz swapping out the co-ax – and one where the likelihood of consumer involvement is in any case close to zero. It was quite clear, in other words, that she really had no technical understanding of what the upgrade procedure involved and what the actual potential difficulties were. Which, in my book, makes her pretty ill-equipped to comment on how consumers are likely to react to analogue switchoff.

The Guardian looks at the future of telephony (oh dear.....)

Jack Schofield, the Guardian's tech guru, noted in passing in one of his recent Guardian Online columns that no-one had yet set up a website or blog specifically dedicated to attacking the Guardian's news coverage.

Don't tempt me. While Jack is the shining exception that proves the rule, when it comes to coverage of tech issues by non-tech-literate reporters, there's more than enough material to fuel a whole cottage industry devoted to GuardianBalls.

Take today's item in the Shortcuts section of G2, in which Michael Hann muses on the future of mobile phones in the wake of all the hype about Apple's mooted 'iPhone'. He quotes a breathless Northern academic's prediction that the next innovation is [gasp!] the inclusion of GPS navigation technology in cellphones.

Puleeeze! Can either Hann or said prof be unaware that GPS is already included by default in a sizeable proportion of cellphones in the Far East? By April last year, 10% of Japanese mobiles included GPS functionality. This isn't news, it's ancient history. And in a column straplined 'Innovations', yet.

Meanwhile, John Naughton's been musing on VoIP in the Grauniad's Sunday stablemate, The Observer, ending his piece with the question: "Where does BT fit in all this?" He answers: "Good question. What it will do in future isn't yet known, but for now it has teamed up with Yahoo to offer a VoIP service."

In fact, long before BT hooked up with Yahoo to offer its Communicator product, it was offering a VoIP product of its own, called Broadband Voice. I know, because I signed up for it a year ago, and I've been using it ever since.

And if you want to know what BT intends to do about voice in the future, it's all there, in its public-domain information on its '21st Century Network.'

Somewhat amusingly, Naughton's article was aimed at taking other newspapers down a peg or two for over-hyping Google's bid to enter the VoIP space. On balance, best to find out what the UK's major incumbent is up to before casting the first stone, methinks.