The Original Sims

Belfast Telegraph Saturday, January 27, 2007

Two of Northern Ireland’s leading radio stations are facing significant job cuts, the Belfast Telegraph can reveal.

Yesterday, EMAP Radio told staff at Downtown Radio and Cool FM that it was making up to 15 full time positions redundant.

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FT.com January 28 2007 22:12

Downloads of television programmes and films from websites are expected to grow 10-fold to be worth $6.3bn in 2012, although some content companies have not learned from the music industry’s experiences with internet piracy, says a report….

The arrival of legal peer-to-peer services, where computer users share files are also expected to boost internet protocol TV.

However, in spite of the growing popularity of online TV, the audiovisual sector is in danger of repeating the mistakes of the music industry by hoping that piracy will somehow sort itself out, says the report by Informa, the business information group.

“Instead of grasping the nettle and embracing online television, they are burying their heads in the sand and hoping it will go away. This will not happen,” said Adam Thomas, media research manager at Informa Telecoms and Media.

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Old friend Owem McFadden spoke to me this morning about a radio programme he is producing about Blogging.  William Crawley is presenting it, and mentions it in his own blog.  I’ve suggested some Northern Ireland Bloggers who he might like to hook up with.  Any suggestions?

Thanks to Louise Gallagher for this …

Here someone has uploaded part of a Tube Special about Belfast Music- the guy interviewing Henry Cluney from Stiff Little Fingers and Bap and Bradso from Ten Past Seven - is ermmmm your genial host.

(For some reason can’t embed the video …)

All went well on the night.  Ronnie and Simon from BBC eTV in London ran the interactive show (even though they say they don’t these guys are the experts) and Rory clicked the clicker to put the multi choice on screen and Paul and Nigel (who pulled all the interactivity together) kept an eye on the mobile phone entries.  And that’s just in our room.  Somewhere else was someone else doing something else - and there was another at the pogramme site getting the info fed to them.

And that’s not even the programme - that’s the interactivity.

And for those watching tonight in Northern Ireland (or in UK on a platform where you can see BBC Northern Ireland) …

 Tonight from W5 at the Oddessy in Belfast The Big Bumper Science Quiz.

You can play here online from today, where you can print off a Big Bumper Science Quiz certificate with your score and grade.

We’ll be breaking your results down into counties and gender to see who and where the top scientists are in Northern Ireland.

Hosted by Eamon Holmes and Christine Bleakley, The Big Bumper Science Quiz will be broadcast live from W5 at the Odyssey complex in Belfast tonight beginning at 9.00pm.

On the night of the quiz you can play along at home via the red button or use your mobile phone to send us your answers.

The programme is produced by Wild Rover and the interactivity by the guys from BBC’s eTV in London and the new Media team here.

If they let me into the playout, there might be photos tomorow.

The BBC has set up a £350m war chest for expansion into social networking on the internet and international acquisitions, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.
The BBC is to increase its presence in the social networking world with a series of new and improved websites, based around its favourite brands such as the car programme Top Gear.

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More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.  (See PDF of Report)

The survey also finds that older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends.

85% have a profile on MySpace

Up dated 13 August 2007 GET LINKS TO ITV, BBC, CHANNEL 4 AND FIVE DOWNLOADS HERE

From Broadcast

ITV has decided viewers will not pay for archive and on-demand online content and is moving into the market with an advertising-based model.

Launching on 31 March, the broadcaster’s broadband media player on its revamped ITV.com website will allow consumers to catch up on shows such as Coronation Street within a 30-day window, and access more than 1,000 hours of archive content.

Viewers will also have the option of watching live streamed content from all of ITV’s channels, including its digital portfolio. All content will be available free of charge, with the exception of a few premium events, such as sports, with prices yet to be set.

The site will also feature user-generated content, with consumers’ content eventually being incorporated into forthcoming programmes, such as Trinny and Susannah Undressed.

The revamped website will also change the way ITV commissions programmes and future commissions would be made with the site in mind.

The website’s player will be embedded in the website and available as soon as a consumer logs on, rather than needing to be downloaded like C4’s 4oD media player.

With the announcement speech on Tessa Jowels desk following reports of a bumpy round of final negotiatations with the Chancellor, the BBC is about to be told that the annual fee will be less than they had asked for.  The Economist says: "The BBC is set to get another ten years of public money. Technology is undermining the case for much more after that"

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BBC

Economist

TV Lisence

Public Service Broadcasting

This from Wired

Yesterday, TorrentFreak alerted [wired] to a new BitTorrent client with a "selfish" anti-social streak. BitTyrant, a project of the University of Washington’s computer science department, is based on the code for Azureus 2.5. So, it’s a cross-platform Java application — that’s good. What makes BitTyrant bad is that prioritizes your upload connections, favoring the peers that provide the best download speeds. You end up sharing more of the torrent with only the peers that give you the biggest chunks. The slower peers that aren’t giving you as much data are choked and relegated to the bottom of the list.

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Net Imperitive reports

Broadcast firm markettiers4dc has launched a Web TV site in a bid to capitalise on the lucrative post Christmas holiday booking period.

The site, at www.Holiday07.tv website launches in advance of its series premiere on 18 January.
The first phase of the travel themed Web television series is planned to run until the end of March with live shows airing at pre-determined times and dates but remaining on the site to view subsequently on-demand.

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New Media Age reports:

The first time Alan Bleasdale’s GBH was broadcast on Channel 4, I missed several episodes. When it was repeated last year I missed them all. So when I went to the 4oD site I decided that was where I was going to testing the service. to cut to the end of the story - I was very satisfied.

The range of programmes was good, rather than impressive. The speed for Download was very impressive - this is a 75 minute programme and took around about that time to download. I’m used to torrents which can take hours and hours to download 45 minutes. I was also probably lucky that no one else was using the wireless hub at home.

£0.99p per programme (to rent) isn’t bad, really. When the BBC’s i-Player is released, programmes will be free but available only for a limited time. But there are free programmes; Celeb Big Brother, some early Desperate Housewives and some Documentaries but nothing to send my heart racing - or my connection downloading.

At £1.99 there are channel 4 movies to download, Now I don’t think these can be burned on to CD and played on TV, so the viewing experience is limited to PC - is it worth while? Not for me - but perhaps for you.

This is a great start. I remember soon after iTunes was released you didn’t get access to every album you might like, but it improved day by day and I expect 4oD will progress in a similar fashion.

What’s important is it has already begun the conversation at home; "Do we really need Sky?"

Tags:

4oD Channel 4 SkyTV

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From The World in 2007 print edition of The Economist

After a bout of silliness, Web 2.0 will in 2007 begin to change mainstream society, says Andreas Kluth

… "As we head into 2007, there are by some counts more than 400 social-networking sites, all trying to become the next MySpace; more than 200 web-video sites, all trying to become another YouTube; more than 300 “social-bookmarking” sites, and hundreds of “meta-sites” that “aggregate” the other sites by spitting out computer-generated lists of hyperlinks. Rhetorically, the entrepreneurs behind these sites usually claim that they will make money from “advertising”. In reality, most hope to sell themselves to Google, Yahoo!, News Corporation or one of the other “new” or “old” media giants long before they have to prove any revenue model. "

 

Plus A discussion on the future of the internet with Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google with Eric Schmidt, <here>  CEO, Google “It is clear that over the next few years people will have access to more information than they can ever handle, and that is a good thing. That information crowds out bad ideas, bad governments, bad behaviour and knowing what people are doing produces a better, more profitable, faster-growing and safer world.”