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Live Traffic Information on GPS Devices in Canada

December 9, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Mobility, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

In my recent reflexions about the new potential for hybrid radio based on FM I identified RDS-TMC as an incentive to maintain and even expand the FM (RDS) infrastructure in Canada. While speaking about that at a meeting last week I learned that Corus Entertainment was deploying RDS-TMC traffic for Garmin devices in major cities in Canada. I’m not sure how long it has been there but I think it is quite new. And now that I’m aware of that, I see traffic enabled Garmin devices advertised everywhere… and prices are very reasonable.

So last week I ordered a Garmin model 265WT from Tigerdirect.ca (170$). The “T” at the end of the model number indicates that the FM RDS-TMC is included in the box. With such package, traffic information seems to be included for free for the whole life of the device. I’m not quite clear about that but for some reasons, Garmin also sells lifetime traffic information for 50$ on their website. Maybe some devices have to be activated before traffic information works?

Anyways. I received the device yesterday and was eager to try it. That’s what I did on my way home last night. It was very simple to install. In fact, nothing special has to be done. The lighter power cord must be plugged into the device and the car (the FM RDS receiver is part of that cord) and that’s it. When I launched the device, it took just a few seconds before I could see a little “traffic icon” on the maps.

Pressing on that icon revealed two types of traffic information. I took a picture (shown below) of the traffic situation last night at around 7pm in Ottawa. As we can see, there was heavy traffic on the main highway in Ottawa… and that was no surprise to me… it was perfect timing for my experiment: hockey night! And every time its the same thing: the highway gets jammed at the “Scotiabank Place”. So that’s the red segment on the map here.

IMG_3197.JPG-1.0 (RGB, 1 layer) 3888x2592 – GIMP.png

The other traffic display shows a list of the various problem zones. This is shown on the second photo I took:

IMG_3199.JPG.png

So very positive experience for me. I’m impressed. It works well and is very easy to use. The next step will be to see how real-time navigation and re-routing works considering the traffic. In the meantime, I guess canadians will want a new Garmin for Christmas because they certainly understand that traffic is a major enhancement on a GPS device.

If you wonder where exactly the service is available, have a look at this page on the Navteq website. A quick scan over the list shows following regions: Hamilton-Burlington, Montreal-Laval, Oshawa-Whitby-Clarington, Ottawa-Gatineau, St. Catharines-Niagara Falls-Welland, Toronto-Mississauga and Vancouver-Surrey-Burnaby.

! UPDATE, WARNING: I was told that the service has not been officially launched yet. I guess that this means it may be unstable or could even be stopped anytime. Please consider this if you think of buying yourself a new Garmin for Christmas.

My eComm 2009 Talk Now Available on Video

December 2, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

I’m happy that my eComm talk finally got published online, 8 months after the conference. Events sponsors got published much earlier but hey, that’s fair for a professionally produced clip. I must admit that the AV infrastructure and the team at the event were excellent.

My talk was titled: “Mobile Digital Broadcasting: An Infrastructure for One-to-Many Converged Services”. We took this opportunity to officially release our Openmokast open source software framework. I was happy that my live demo worked as expected!



We had prepared a clip just in case the “demo effect” would hit on me on stage. Luckily this was not the case but the clip (which is more detailed than the live demo) can still be seen on our crcmmb Youtube Channel or here below:




And here are the slides I used for this presentation:

eComm Presentation

View more documents from Francois Lefebvre.

eComm was also for me a great occasion to meet with David Burges who presented his OpenBTS project live using the USRP as well. His demo looked incredibly like mine except he demonstrated live cell phone communications going through his GSM open source base station. There are lots of commonalities between our projects but essentially, both are about democratizing communications technologies to catalyze innovation.

Royalty-Free Public Domain – A path towards Ubiquity

July 8, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

I read this excellent story some time ago in Vanity Fair titled “An oral history of the Internet“. I believe that one of the reasons why the Internet is what it is now comes from the fact that the Web is a royalty-free technology. And that does not happen by itself. To produce RF-tech these days, one has got to fight for it and give up potential revenue streams. That is what the CERN team did. Robert Cailliau says:

“At one point cern was toying with patenting the World Wide Web. I was talking about that with Tim one day, and he looked at me, and I could see that he wasn’t enthusiastic. He said, Robert, do you want to be rich? I thought, Well, it helps, no? He apparently didn’t care about that. What he cared about was to make sure that the thing would work, that it would just be there for everybody. He convinced me of that, and then I worked for about six months, very hard with the legal service, to make sure that cern put the whole thing in the public domain.”

The least we can say is that the strategy worked. The Web is now ubiquitous.

Is there a lesson here for creating the mobile broadcast system of tomorrow?

Broadcasting the Twittersphere

July 8, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, User Generated Media by Administrator | 3 comments

I think that Twitter and micro-blogging in general have properties that could be exploited along with broadcasting services. I’ll write my thoughts about this later on.

As a first step in this reflexion, I’d like to estimate the total bandwidth of Twitter, that is, how many kilobits per second are being Tweeted on average.

I made a similar exercise some time ago with regards to the blogosphere in a post titled “Broadcasting the Blogosphere: 30 million voices for the price of one!”.

So I found some twitter services that provide relevant data. For example, TweeSpeed is an instant speed meter that shows the current number of tweets per minute. A graph showing the speed per hour during the last week is also available. A quick look at that graph now suggests that 700.000 tweets per hour would be a reasonable approximation for last week’s average, excluding the peek caused by the “Michael Jackson Effect”. Twitpocalypse currently reports 221 tweets per second which results in a similar value (221*60*60 =795.600 tweets per hour ). On another front, the recent HubSpot State of the Twittershpere report provides similar amounts on a daily basis instead of per hour. I suspect that this is a mistake. I’ll be pessimistic and take the largest number. The Hubspot report also informs on the distribution of actual tweet length. I’ll average the tweet length to 110 characters per tweet.

So the math goes like this:

110ch * 1byte/ch * 700k/hour = 77 Mbytes/hour

or

TOTAL TWITTER BANDWIDTH = 170 kbps !

Again, very surprising results! The current Twitter bandwidth is barely higher than a typical Internet or DAB radio station. The whole Twittershpere would only require to sacrifice a couple of off-air DAB stations in every market. I feel that very innovative datacasting/social applications could be built based on this!

Ads worth more on the net than on TV

June 30, 2009 in Applications, Industry, Networked media, Services by Administrator | No comments

PC world reports that for the first time, advertising during a specific “TV” show will cost more on the net than on traditional TV channel:

If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers.

FemtoDAB

June 24, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Services by Administrator | 4 comments

According to this article, Vodafone will be next week the first mobile network operator to launch a femtocell product in Europe:

“Looking like a home router, femtocells give 3G coverage indoors, and use home broadband to connect calls across the Internet to the mobile network.”

“… will be available on different price plans… Essentially, the femto is free to anyone on a £30 contract, and £5 otherwise – including dongle customers”

Femtocells are in fact compact devices (similar to Wi-Fi routers) that act as very low power cell phone base stations that can be installed in end-users premises. Typical cell phones can connect to them instead of the remote “high-power” towers operated by mobile network operators. Femtocells carry the usual communication services through standard Internet connections in homes and offices.

Key benefits to operators (O) and users (U):

  • Better in-building coverage (O, U)
  • Overall network infrastructure can eventually be operated at lower power levels (O)
  • Off-loading cellular networks (O)
  • MNOs can still charge service costs while using end-users resources (Internet) (O)
  • Use the mobile device at home at lower rates (U)
  • Does not need regular phone service at home anymore (O, U)

Could this femtocell approach be exploited in the context of digital broadcasting as well? At CRC, we have developed a compact software transmitter for DAB. This platform could be further integrated as a low-cost personal DAB transmitter or FemtoDAB cell!

Such a FemtoDAB approach could offer interesting benefits:

  • Better in-building coverage (O, U)
  • Overall network infrastructure can eventually be operated at lower power levels (O)
  • Outdoor, indoor roaming with the same device (broadcast enabled handhelds) (U)
  • Transmission of additional Internet radio content in the femtoDAB cell (U)

One of the challenges will be to make FemtoDAB more attractive than the Wi-Fi options.

Do you see any use cases for FemtoDAB?

RDS Enabled Handhelds

April 24, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, Mobility, Services by Administrator | 1 comment

The current financial context is not optimal for deploying new broadcast networks. Some will tend to think twice on how to maximize the use of the current infrastructure.

Isn’t that the case with FM radio? Will it truly benefit from going digital?

One of the compromise I find attractive is starting to emerge: enabling mobile phone handsets to receive FM AND RDS. Such an effort led by GSS and Silicon Laboratiroes is reported here at RadioWorld.

GSS believes that cell phones that can receive FM without cumbersome headphone antennas will not only be more popular with consumers but can then put RDS capabilities into the hands of many more consumers, which in turn will better support the penetration of emergency alerting systems like its Alert FM.

App Stores Everywhere but in Broadcast Handsets

February 18, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Application Stores are the big thing at the Mobile World Congress this week. Few stories here and here and here. While Apple’s AppStore and Google’s Android marketplace have been known for some time now, we hear that Nokia, Microsoft and RIM have similar plans.

As we mention in our recent EBU paper, new functionality in handsets will be done in software. This is quite new in the mobile world but we are definitely used to this principle with our personal computers. We buy software for them. That’s what makes them extremely flexible, evolutive and thus useful. This paradigm emerges on mobile phone platforms now because they are evolving as generic and powerful computing platforms too.

This trend was identified early on by Apple (as usual) who created the AppStore as part of the iPhone ecosystem. The AppStore creates a marketplace for developers and end-users. Developers offer their new creations through the system, typically for a small fee, while end-users shop for applications through iTunes. The whole process of purchasing, installing and removing applications has been streamlined to provide a “frictionless” end-user experience, apart from the few dollars that one has to leave on the table!

I believe that the key benefit from these new marketplaces for applications is innovation. A democratized marketplace for innovation.

Before, application innovation was limited to MNOs and key partners of the mobility value chain. Now, anybody can create new applications. New applications will come from the masses, like Google, Wikipedia, Flickr, Youtube came from new players and non-incumbents.

Also, with more open marketplaces comes increased competition. That is good for consumers. End-users are only one click away from competing applications.

And what if the competing application is free? Such platforms will make “free” and “pay for” applications equally accessible. Could this lead to the erosion of the software market? Many think so. In order to sell their apps, developers will have no other choice but to offer leading edge products with truly exclusive features.

What does this mean for broadcasting? At the moment not so much I guess. The perspective is attractive though. What if moving from DAB to DAB+ could simply be achieved through a new software app. A broadcaster would announce the move and asks its listeners to go buy the 2$ piece of software on the app store. In exchange, end users get more channels. Click, pay, download, … voila! What if all new broadcast applications could be offered this way? EPG, Slideshow, TPEG traffic overlay for google maps,… and so on. In fact, we don’t know what the mobile broadcast applications of the future will be. But we know it will be in software. We just need broadcast receivers in those handsets.

Google Ends Radio AdSense

February 14, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Last summer at Broadcast Asia, I discovered that Google planned to extend its AdSense Internet advertising program to Radio. I ran into a very modest Google booth that displayed their new radio automation software acquired from dMarc, a market leader I was told. When I saw that, I thought it was an obvious business for Google.

Well, it looks like this project was killed. May I suggest a strategy: Google, release your automation software to the open source community like you did with Android. This could attract new developers that support your AdSense program for free… and some competing options, of course!

Coopers

December 9, 2008 in Applications, Infrastructures, Services by Administrator | No comments

COOPERS is an EU funded project that was created to develop innovative telematics applications. TPEG is used to transmit traffic information via DAB:

The goal of the project is the enhancement of road safety by direct and up to date traffic information communication between infrastructure and motorised vehicles on a motorway section. COOPERS started in February 2006 with the duration of 48 months and a total Budget of more than 16.800.000 €.

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P2P Superbowl 2007

February 5, 2007 in Applications, Infrastructures, Networked media, P2P by Administrator | 1 comment

Last year I reported that the Superbowl was not available off the Net. After my positive experiment last summer with the soccer WorldCup 2006, I knew I should be able to access a live peer-to-peer stream of the Superbowl somehow. Well, thanks to Technorati and this post at The Frog Blog, I was watching the show live within a minute.

Notebook vs TV

Here you see the two live scenes I could watch simultaneously earlier tonight; a wifi notebook with the P2P TVUPlayer software and my plain old 36″ tube. I observed a one minute latency on the notebook.
Like the WorldCup on TVAnts, the stream robustness was impressive. Once it got started, the stream simply never stopped. Its data rate fluctuated between 350 and 400 kbps. This is not great video quality but when that’s the only signal you have access to, it’s far better than nothing. For myself, I was happy to see the original CBS Superbowl commercials live for the first time. Here in Canada, the original commercials are always “Canadianized” by the local networks except on some pricy pay TV services.

TVU Player

So overall, it looks like P2P streaming works well. However, TVU Networks statistics would be required in order to really be able to assess what’s going on here. Also, I don’t know at this point if TVU is a pure P2P solution of if they rely on additional servers or CDNs to provide critical capacity.

Although I find these new P2P developpments very exciting, the real new trend in the States this year was certainly HD TV. With their new HD wide screens, sports fans got closer to mother nature this year; they could enjoy and observe each and every raindrop that fell on the field in Miami Gardens!

Tags: P2P+streaming, networked+media, Superbowl, peer-to-peer

EBU recommends P2P

June 5, 2006 in Applications, Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

In his EBU seminar report titled "From P2P to Broadcasting", Franc Kozamernik concludes:

Broadcasters have no choice but to adopt P2P technology and adjust it to their needs. In so doing, broadcasters should coordinate their activities closely with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and P2P service/technology providers.
Thanks to P2P, the Internet (both wired and wireless) may become not just a complementary delivery channel (as it is today), but indeed a primary channel for niche content and on-demand services.

I strongly agree with this and as I probably mentioned here already, P2P is good for broadcasters but also for the the whole user generated media (UGM) community. With P2P, anyone can afford "large coverage": the distribution network is free. That’s why broadcasters have to do the same.

However, I would argue that P2P networks would be good for the head of the Longtail as well as for niche and on-demand content. In fact, P2P networks are much more efficient for content that is popular. In this case, many more seeds provide a much better and faster access to the desired content.

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Podcast Transcripts and the Mechanical Turk

March 15, 2006 in Applications, Media formats by Administrator | 1 comment

One of the recurring theme at ETECH last week was the “mechanical Turk”. In his introductory Keynote, Bruce Sterling first suggested that the artificial intelligence (AI) dream had slowed down the development of computer science in general. Because of this, research has been focused on emulating humans with machines, instead of complementing humans. Tim O’reilly talked about IA (intelligence augmentation) as opposed to AI. According to Wikipedia:

The Turk was a famous hoax which purported to be a chess-playing automaton first constructed and unveiled in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804)

Mechanical Turk

In other words, the mechanical Turk is about putting a human intelligence inside the machine.

New web services are now implementing this very simple principle for applications where humans are much better than computers. In fact, amazon.com is offering a new open platform for the development of third party web services. It’s called… guess what? The “amazon mechanical turk” on the theme “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”.

More interesting to you, dear readers of Broadcasting 2.0, is that some people have built a podcasting transcription service called castingwords.com and it is actually based on amazon’s Turk system. In fact, for 42 cents a minute, castingwords.com will transcribe almost any podcast (in English) within 24 hours with the help of amazon’s “tested” transcription Turks.

And why would prodcast transcripts be useful? I think that they would mainly help increase the overall “granularity” of the “podcastsphere”. This, in turn, would drive much better finding, remixing and sharing capabilities.

Most of the time right now, search results lead to full podcast files with variable durations ranging from some minutes up to over an hour. These searches normally operate on podcast names or short descriptions. As a consequence, a search for interviews with a specific politician (for example) would result in many hours of listening because there is no good mechanism to locate specific content inside a podcast itself.

With good podcasts, “chapters” are very handy here but if you’re like me, your favorite podcast has no chapters. In my case, it’s a 2.5 hours French speaking CBC daily podcast called “Indicatif Présent“. Can you imagine? 12.5 listening hours per week. Do I have time to listen to all this? No. Would I like to be able to locate stuff more precisely here? Absolutely. Why? Because I NEED to be able to skip what’s not interesting to me.

Along with podcast tagging and content “markers”, transcripts would also support very important functions like remixing and sharing.

To me, remixing is the capability that I need to aggregate my personal podcast stream based on podcast segments that I get from different sources. Remixing here is the ability to collate 10 minutes from one show here with 2 minutes from another one there with 15 minutes of music with…, and so on. Again, I can’t do that easily with my favorite CBC show right now. Podcast users, and probably most of us in the future, will want that flexibility. There is too much good content out there.

Finally, transcripts alone may not be the solution but we need mechanisms to annotate (or tag) media content like we do for photos (Flickr.com) or bookmarks (del.icio.us.com). Good annotation allows for better retrieving as well as sharing possibilities. Very often, I find myself having to write down podcasts timing information in order to retrieve specific segments or share them with friends. That’s not convenient at all.

Coming back to our mechanical Turk and my favorite CBC podcast. With castingwords.com, the whole transcript of a single show would amount to roughly 75$ (46cents/min. x 150 min.). So is there a reason why CBC can’t do it right away (they could do it themselves if they wished). What is 75$ in a 2.5 hours public radio show budget?

Observations of my own behavior make me think that it all comes down to this: either they do it or they won’t get my attention!

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Broadcasting the Blogosphere: 30 million voices for the price of one!

March 13, 2006 in Applications, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | 2 comments

What is the size of the whole blogosphere? What capacity would be required to transmit it over a broadcast channel? Let’s see…
 
Blogging is still exploding. In his “state of the blogosphere” speech last week at ETECH, David Sifry, CEO of the blog indexing web service Technorati, presented the latest statistics:
  • 30.000.000 blogs worldwide
  • 100.000 new blogs are created daily
  • the blogosphere is 60 times larger than 3 years ago
  • there are 1.5 million legitimate posts(by humans for humans) per day

Let’s assume that each post contains 500 characters, no pictures, and that they are posted regularly over time. This would produce a constant bandwidth of:

500ch * 1byte/ch *1.5 million = 750 Mbytes / day

or

70 kbps !

What? The most massive conversation of the world requires only 70 kbps? That’s less than a single digital broadcasting audio channel! That’s 30 million voices for the price of one! Let’s turn the numbers around once again: with 70 kbps we could have each and every Canadian (30 million, all ages!) broadcast one 500 characters message to all other Canadians every 20 days?!?

That’s impressive. Does that make sense? I think I would agree to trade a local FM station in my area for this new “Whole Blogosphere Channel”. Would you?

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Consumer-Generated Media

March 8, 2006 in Applications by Administrator | No comments

Consumer-generated media (CGM) is a relatively new expression that refers to content that is produced by… well… consumers (Wikipedia definition). This is really taking off now with blogs, podcasts, video blogs and so on. I used to refer to it as grass root or bottom-up media. This type of content could probably also be called Citizen Media or User Generated Media. I found this paper that describes CGM and other acronyms such as EGM (enterprise …) and CGM2 (consuber-generated multimedia).
 
Anyway, this is really happening. A web service like YouTube.com gets 20.000 uploads per day! How much of this is really CGM? Well… many files now are TV recordings. Because of this, YouTube can be seen as a huge collective PVR that “stimulates” a direct competition for attention between corporate TV and CGM.
 
So I’ll start using these acronyms… until new ones emerge!
 
Technorati Tags : , , , , grass root, CGM, EGM
 

Attention Economy at ETECH 2006

March 6, 2006 in Applications by Administrator | No comments

This year again I have the opportunity to attend this “alpha geek” brainstorming session. The theme this year: The Attention Economy :
 
…bandwidth continues to broaden, storage grows ever larger and cheaper, and content keeps pouring from the firehose. How do we visualize all of this digital data, filter it, remix it, and access it in meaningful ways? The coming technical challenge is not about generating digital content-we have more than enough already. It’s time to do something with that data. It’s time to build The Attention Economy.
 
Broadcasting has to deal with attention a lot. All these new information and entertainment sources segment users attention. There is a lot of new content out there but the total attention pool is not necessarily increasing.
 
I’m sure I’ll get away with new ideas.

Videobomb

February 15, 2006 in Applications, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Videobomb is a good example of the power of adding "social" features to video clips viewing services. Here, viewers "bomb" (vote) for clips of their choice:

Video Bomb filters up the hottest videos on the Internet: people submit links to the ‘Incoming!’ page and you bomb the best ones. If a video gets a lot of bombs quickly, it makes it to the front page.

Last week I spent at least one hour watching front page entries and I must admit I was laughing to tears. After that I called my friend (over Skype) and I told him to have a look at the best clips. As I expected, I heard him laugh a lot but I was missing the possiblity for us to view the clips simultaneously.

It becomes also clear with such a service that It will be essential to be able to "bomb" media content on-the-go somehow with the portable media player. This information could be uploaded to the network at the next PC sync. opportunity.

Rivendell GPL radio automation software suite

February 9, 2006 in Applications, Industry, Infrastructures, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Three weeks ago I reported about LiveSupport, an open radio automation software. Well, here is another platform I found: Rivendell. Doc Searls reports about it in his recent Linux Journal column:
 
Rivendell aims to be a complete radio broadcast automation solution, with facilities for the acquisition, management, scheduling and playout of audio content. As a robust, functionally complete digital audio system for broadcast radio applications, Rivendell uses industry standard components like the GNU/Linux Operating System, the AudioScience HPI Driver Architecture and the MySQL Database Engine. Rivendell is being developed under the GNU Public License.
 
2006_02_09_salem_rivendell.gif
 
This looks like a very professionnal an complete radio automation suite that’s already being used in commercial ventures. Intersetingly, Rivendell can be used as the basis for internet radio as well.

Satellite services to mobile phones

February 8, 2006 in Applications, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

After radio, with Sirius and XM, PanAmSat plans to provide mobile video to consumers:
 
PanAmSat Holding Corp. is starting a new business that will sell and distribute ethnic programming for television in the United States, a move that the company hopes will pave the way for other new initiatives that get the satellite company into more consumer businesses such as Internet video and mobile phones.
 
This approach could be similar to the Korean DMB-S system.
 

Superbowl Commercials

February 6, 2006 in Applications, Services by Administrator | No comments

Watch the full 20 minutes of Super Bowl commercials back-to-back on Google video or download them as video podcasts here.
 
This is intersting in particular for those of us who only see a local remix and never get to see them live!

Super Bowl and Broadcasting

February 5, 2006 in Applications, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | 1 comment

The 40th Super Bowl is currently live on TV. Either through cable, satellite, IPTV or off air, it requires a capacity that we can’t have off the Net today. With its extremely high Nielsen ratings, it shows the best features of broadcasting: Live, high capacity bitstream, one-to-many-many-many. The broadcast infrastructure is at its best here. It’s currently the only channel that supports the dissimination of the head of the longtail live, in HD, to the largest audience of the year.
 
2006_02_05_SuperBowlXL.png
 
By the way, wikipedia provides a good description of the event. There could be as much as 100 millions viewers this year, mostly in the U.S. (1 billion is an urban legend) . As a comparison, there were 3.8 billion viewers of the 2000 olympic games in Sydney.
 
Well, now I have to leave you. Mick Jagger is singing his “I can’t get no satisfaction”. I’ll be one of 100 millions with you…

IP Wireless and TDtv

January 31, 2006 in Applications, Industry, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

The 3GSM world congress is coming in two weeks and that is probably the reason why we see so many press releases these days. Mobile TV will definitely be a hot topic this year.
 
Well recently, the TDtv technolgy was anounced:
 
IPWireless Mobile Broadband technology is a packet data implementation of the international 3GPP Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) standard. Time-division-duplex (TDD) is used, according to the 3GPP UMTS UTRA UMTS TD-CDMA standard, allowing operation on unpaired spectrum anywhere in these bands. Chip rates of 3.84 and 7.68 megachips/sec (Mcps) are supported, for operation in channelization of 5 and10 MHz (6 and 12 MHz in the MMDS band).
 
TDtv is a Sprint Nextel effort to keep Mobile TV within the 3G ecosystem. It is based on the multimedia broadcast and multicast service (MBMS) specification.
 

A solution for the Long Tail in P2P systems

January 30, 2006 in Applications, Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

Peer to peer systems have properties that are very similar to those of broadcasting. Very often, the availability of content is strongly related to its popularity. For this reason, P2P is good for the distribution of the head of the long tail.
 
Here is an interesting paper that presents a methodology to maintain the availability of long tail content on P2P systems:
 
We describe an efficient incentive mechanism for P2P systems that gen- erates a wide diversity of content offerings while responding adaptively to customer demand. Files are served and paid for through a parimutuel market similar to that commonly used for betting in horse races. An analysis of the performance of such a system shows that there exists an equilibrium with a long tail in the distribution of content offerings, which guarantees the real time provision of any content regardless of its popu- larity.

Blast Podcast

January 25, 2006 in Applications, Industry, Services by Administrator | No comments

Blast Podcast is a web service that matches advertisers and podcasters by inserting relevant ads. They now offer video ads insertion.
 
Fruitcast seems to have a similar product.
 
This matching of products with cunsumers and content is the traditional function of broadcasters. Maybe it’s the only function that’s left for them in the future although these guys here already grab a piece of the market.

A new mobile TV alliance

January 23, 2006 in Applications, Industry, Mobility, Services by Administrator | No comments

Nokia announced the following today:
 

… Other firms in the alliance include Intel Corp., Motorola, Texas Instruments and Modeo, owned by Crown Castle International Corp., it said in a statement. The tie-up, called the Mobile DTV Alliance, aims to encourage open standards for TV broadcasts to mobiles, focusing on the North American market.

DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld) technology bypasses mobile networks and broadcasts directly to handsets from TV masts, allowing millions of phone users to access the service at the same time.

2006_01_23_nokia.jpg
 
This seems to build a united DVB-H front against Qualcomm’s MediaFLO in the US.
 

Godzilla PVR

January 20, 2006 in Applications, Consumer devices by Administrator | No comments

The geeks at Snapstream have build another Monster PVR:
 
This system is an ultra high end HTPC showcasing Beyond TV 4 and capable of recording 11 shows, 4 high definition and 7 standard definition, at once. With Beyond TV 4’s HDTV support and with its unlimited tuners, you can create your own monster system.
 

MIPTV – MILIA digital pitching competition

January 19, 2006 in Applications, Media formats by Administrator | No comments

I was at the Milia conference for the first time in Cannes, France, in 1993. Back then it was very well attended and presented great speakers (Nocholas Negroponte and others). Over the years they kept their focus on “content”. I was there three years ago again and even tough it was much smaller, great stuff was discussed as they started to introduce “mobile content”.
 
Last year Milia merged with MIPTV, a much larger event. This year again will have its deal of great “content” sessions.
 
For those of you who have innovative ideas for multimedia content and applications, BBC and KBC (Korean Broadcsating Corporation) are organising a “pitching competion”. As you see here, they’ve got it all:
If you have concepts that push the boundaries for Interactive mobile content and formats, creative solutions for user-generated content, ideas that will help web users navigate the ‘long tail’ of a broadcaster’s rich archives, innovative content or applications for DMB Mobile TV, then you should enter Content 360 – Digital Pitching Competition at MIPTV featuring MILIA 2006.
 
A total of 75.000 Euros will be awarded to the best 5 pitches.
 
Good luck!
 

My audio setup for the Christmas Holidays

January 9, 2006 in Applications by Administrator | No comments

I am happy to be back on Broadcasting 2.0 after two weeks of silence.
 
I would like to relate here my recent experiments with streaming audio as part of my home network.
 
The system I configured (late at night on december 23!) was base on four major technologies:
  • the squeezebox music network player made by Slim Devices
  • the SlimServer, provided by the same company
  • the Apple Mac mini
  • a WRT54G Linksys Wifi access point

The client side looked quite funny with the slim device feeding an old amplifier from the 70s (note the 8-track cartridge player):

2005_12_slimdevice.JPG

On the Mac I also installed a VNC server so that I could control it without a keybord and a monitor connected to it:

2005_12_macmini.JPG

All I can say is that the setup ran flawlessly throughout my two weeks at home. The quality of service was also very impressive even while the microwave oven was on (I have had some bad experience with that in the past). The slimdevice is also impressively well thought in terms of user friendliness.

Slingbox

December 22, 2005 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures by Administrator | 1 comment

The slingbox is certainly a Broadcasting 2.0 device. It sits on top of your home TV and streams the remotely selected channel to you, anywhere you are in the world, through the Internet.
 

2005_12_22_slingbox.jpg

Jeff Pulver relates his very positive experience with this device.

I recall that around year 2000 we have seen many such disruptive devices that were to change the broadcast experience forever (Kerbango was one of the most expected ones). Then the bubble…. Today, iPods and Co. show that we’re back on track.

Link (via pulverblog)

411-Song

December 21, 2005 in Applications, Mobility by Administrator | 2 comments

Another new cell phone pay service in the US. It identifies the song that you’re currently hearing on radio… or anywhere else actually. Simple system:
 
“How many times have you heard a song and wished you knew who it was or wished you could get it before you forget it? Now you can, just call (866) 411-SONG, here’s how: * Hear a song you love; * Call (866) 411-SONG; * Wait for the beep and hold your cell near the music for just 15 seconds; * We identify the song and send you a text with all the song info (artist and song name) and a link to GET it.”
 
See the demo. At 3.99$ a month it’s not cheap though.
 
 

European “MI FRIENDS” DMB Project

December 19, 2005 in Applications, Services by Administrator | No comments

This looks like another huge project under the Celtic Eureka umbrella. MI FRIENDS will be a two years project for the 75 official participants.
 
The project aimes at a new architecture of inter-working media services based on infrastructures of broadcasting and telecommunications for the media needs of a mobile information society. 
The project goal is to develop and test new mobile media technologies from an economic point of view paying particular regard to social and cultural aspects with media consumer in its centre.  
 
This looks quite interesting since it will give particular attention to DMB technologies as well as to social and cultural aspects.
 

Satellite Radio arrives in Canada

December 19, 2005 in Applications, Industry, Infrastructures by Administrator | 1 comment

I’m quite impressed to see that this becomes real so quickly. I went shopping tonight and took this shot:
 

bestbuysat19dec2005.jpg

 
It’s not just available. It’s on the storefront in big letters. The marketing forces behind XM and Sirius will give them a lead over DAB for a while… maybe a very long while!
 
Satellite Radio is Broadcasting 2.0. It’s pay radio. DAB is also Broadcasting 2.0. It’s free digital broadcasting.

BBC Integrated Media Player (iMP)

December 19, 2005 in Applications, Infrastructures, Media formats, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

The BBC iMP is a great Broadcasting 2.0 software application. Since September, some lucky folks in the UK are actually testing it.
 
The software builds a peer to peer (P2P) network to support the distribution of BBC content. Each file is DRM protected and stays accessible for 7 days after its “transmission”. In other words, it’s a BBC only PVR with a one week memory. That’s quite limitative but hey, that’s just a trial. Let’s hope they get positive feedback from their community.
 
And in the meantime, the trial period has been extended until the end of February 2006.
 

Tony Ageh, BBC Controller, Internet says: “We really want to understand the benefits that iMP can bring to our audiences.

We know that there is likely to be a ‘honeymoon’ period of a few weeks, when our participants are likely to use iMP more often than normal. The data from the extra two months should really help us to comprehend what users want from the service and how they are using it.

“This will be invaluable for us in making our case to the BBC Board of Governors for a full roll out of iMP.”

 

Link

I stumbled upon “StumbleUpon”

December 8, 2005 in Applications by Administrator | No comments

Needless to say I am no native english speaker (nor writer!). In my previous post I used the expression “stumbled upon”. Since I had some doubts about the validity of the expression I googled it.
 
I learned three things:
  • There is a great social Web application called StumbleUpon
  • On the Web you can stumble upon everything (including StumbleUpon.com)
  • “to stumble upon” is a valid english expression