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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.

Challenges for GPRS and 3G Radio

July 24, 2009 in Infrastructures, Mobility, Networked media, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

There is a nice post on the Public Radio Player (PRP) blog about some challenges for Internet radio when distributed over mobile wireless networks and some strategies used in the PRP.

“A dropped stream is the nemesis of any regular Public Radio Tuner user. Nothing is worse than being caught up in a great public radio program and have it suddenly cut out….”

Some challenges can be expected:

  • loss of signal while roaming from cell to cell. Networks are optimized for voice calls but not for data yet.
  • minimal bitrate like 32 kbps is desirable but connection is still not guaranteed and sound quality is no great
  • buffers have to be implemented in receiver to mitigate signal loss.

Results of a survey made by PC World suggest that 3G coverage may not be adequate for the delivery of sustained bitrates in major cities in USA. Like this table shows, networks speeds can be impressive but their reliability vary greatly so that live radio transmissions may be hard to achieve.

There is certainly a lot of room for experimentation here in this new area but I tend to believe that it could take a while before we see 3G replace true “physical layer” broadcast networks for live transmissions.

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!

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?

In-car Wi-Fi Internet Radio

June 24, 2009 in Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Mobility, Networked media by Administrator | 1 comment

As Internet radio appliances are becoming available, there is still the issue that they can’t be used in your car.

This could change thanks to so-called “in-car WiFi routers” which are designed to provide Internet access through 3G mobile telephony networks.

AutoNet Mobile offers such device and service combination:

we create a Wi-Fi hot spot that allows everyone in the car to connect multiple devices to the internet, in and around the car! it’s the next step in in-car entertainment and productvity. we make internet in your car easier than ever because we provide both the in-car router and the monthly service. our affordable monthly service plans start at only $29 per month.

This still represent an expensive proposition for radio though. One hour daily consumption of good quality Internet radio content could easily reach the 29$ 1Gb limit.

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.

Radio on Mobile Devices

February 15, 2009 in Industry, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Mobility and radio go hand in hand. James Cridland reports on a current positive trend:

“RAJAR’s recent figures were upbeat about listening to the radio on mobile devices. (They only monitor ‘listening via mobile phones’, despite many MP3 players also having FM radios built-in)”

Competing business models between mobile network operators and broadcasters prevent broadcast receivers from being integrated into mobile phones. At CRC, we work on a project that would allow broadcasters to sponsor and eventually develop their own receivers. The project is called Openmokast. We published our thoughts and results about this in a paper released as part of last month’s EBU Technical Review.

We suggest that innovation in mobile digital broadcasting (including digital radio) will happen with the event of open source platforms like Android and Openmoko.

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!

iPlayer Reach

February 2, 2009 in Infrastructures, Networked media, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Some important numbers about the use of iPlayer can be seen here in this TIMESONLINE story:

Before that, they appear on iPlayer, the free service which notched up 41m programme requests in December and 271m during the whole of 2008.

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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Canada to Go All GSM

October 15, 2008 in Consumer devices, Industry, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Bell and Telus, the two wireless operators in Canada that are based on Qualcomm’s CDMA technology, announced last week their plans to deploy GSM technology jointly. CBC reports:

“BCE unit Bell and Telus both announced Friday they would be making a significant investment in upgrading their networks, adding high speed packet access, or HSPA, cellular technology to their third-generation networks.”

This could have an impact on the mobile broadcasting technology that will be deployed in Canada. The natural link between CDMA and MediaFLO is quite strong since both technologies belong to Qualcomm. Could this mean less chances for MediaFLO to establish in Canada?

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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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Beyond Broadcast 2006

May 12, 2006 in Industry, Infrastructures, Legislation, public broadcasting by Administrator | 1 comment

So I’m sitting right there, waiting for the event to begin.

Beyond Broadcast 2006 is loaded with great, experienced speakers with all possible backgrounds: braodcasters, journalists, technologists and so on. The theme is important:

We will explore the thesis that traditional public media — public broadcasting, cable access television, etc — face a unique opportunity to embrace new participatory web-based media models — podcasting, video blogs, social software, etc — and create a stronger and more vital public service.

And if I’ m lucky, my MMB demo will work fine this afternoon! I’ll try to report later.

Technorati Tags: beyondbroadcast, broadcasting+2.0, public+media, public+broadcasting

Net Neutrality in Broadcasting

March 23, 2006 in Industry, Infrastructures, Legislation by Administrator | 1 comment

Within some hours after its publication, Michael Geist already posted a first glance analysis of the final report of the canadian “Telecommunications Policy Review Panel”. To a certain extent, it looks like that Panel has recognized the need to protect network neutrality principles. To me, this sounds like good news.
 
Net neutrality is one of the important topics in telecommunications this year. To give you an idea, net neutrality guarantees that all IP packets get the same treatment whoever sent them, whatever they carry and whatever the path they travel. Without net neutrality, your ISP could “slow down” or even block a VOIP service that’s provided by a competitor. In the wireless world, net neutrality will allow you to make Skype calls with your cell phone over your data plan (and thus avoiding the usual premium fees for voice services). Net neutrality should consequently allow for a more competitive and innovative market.
 
With this in mind, I’ve been wondering if net neutrality principles could also somehow be defined for terrestrial broadcasting. Do current broadcast regulations guarantee content diversity and fair access to braodcast networks? Would they support the new “user generated media” trend?
 
First, let’s not forget that broadcasting IS telecommunications. Broadcasting is a particular form of telecommunications specialized in one-to-many messages. It is unidirectional but has a very high data transfer capacity (because we’ve allocated large spectrum chunks to it!). Digital broadcasting will be a component (if we ever get it) of the global communications infrastructure.
 
Considering these great properties, could we imagine a flexible, Internet-like broadcast context where content and applications would dynamically and fairly get their chance to “hold the mike” for some time?
 
To take an example, I could imagine a “Top 100 YouTube” off-air mobile video channel. In such a service, nobody would be in control… or actually everybody since popularity, derived form real Internet consumption statistics, would be the content selection criteria. So in the end, the people would decide, implicitly, what content they want to “promote” to the broadcast level. Because again, in an pre-WiMax era (?), terrestrial broadcasting is still an extremely powerful delivery network.
 
In other words, I realize that this would suggest a reversed broadcast system. Before, content got popular BECAUSE it aired on broadcast networks. Today, the actual popularity could be derived from the Internet and used as the principal criteria to decide how to populate the broadcast spectrum. This would probably allow for a more natural emergence of content.
 
Would this be a way to support network neutrality principles in braodcasting? Your comments please.
 
Will we consider concepts like these in the current canadian Review of the Commercial Radio Policy? I think I would not bet on this one!
 
 

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.
 

CBC Technology Review

February 7, 2006 in Infrastructures, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Our canadian public broadcast engineers from CBC/SRC published in January the first issue of their new bi-annual  Technology Review . As Ray Carnovale (VP and CTO) puts it in his editorial :

This semi-annual electronic publication will give an opportunity for us at CBC/Radio-Canada to describe and promote the significance of our activities in the Technology group, and to share our ideas both inside and outside the Corporation. As a service group, our role is to bring our collective knowledge and expertise to enable the infrastructure for our media partners to create the highest quality programming for the Canadian public.

 

I like the WEB/PDF format that we also enjoy from the very famous EBU Technical Review .

I think it’s a great initiative and I’m looking forward to read about CBC’s views on the future of broadcasting…. or, well, broadcasting 2.0!

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.

Open source automation software for radio stations

January 19, 2006 in Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

LiveSupport looks like a promising open platform for small public radio operators:
 
LiveSupport is the first free and open radio management software that provides live studio broadcast capabilities as well as remote automation in one integrated system.
 
2006_01_19_livesupport_logo_side_by_side.jpeg
 

A NYT story about Internet media

January 16, 2006 in Industry, Infrastructures, Services by Administrator | No comments

A short review at the NYT about the new Internet content dissemination models:
 
“At one level it’s clear that the dam has broken,” said Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel. “There’s an inevitable move to use the Internet as a distribution medium, and that’s not going to stop.”

Mobile TV at CES 2006

January 10, 2006 in Infrastructures, Mobility, Services by Administrator | No comments

Mobile TV made the news last week at CES 2006 with announcments and product demonstrations. From now on, one of the two major ventures will be called Modeo (formerly known as Crown Castle Mobile Media) while the other one has been known under the name of  MediaFLO (Qualcomm) for a while now.
 
Both services will be very similar with, of course, some variations. This paper  at C|Net provides a very good comparative overview of the two technologies.
 
This Nokia device was presented running a Modeo demo last week. Here is another device by Motorola .

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)

WiBro demo in Turin

December 22, 2005 in Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Telecom Italia and Samsung will demonstrate the WiBro system (the Corean flavor of WiMax) at the 2006 winter olympics in Turin, Italy. After that, we will have the DMB system in demonstration in Germany, presenting the FiFa Worldcup 2006. We have an interesting year for broadcasting ahead of us.
 

Mobile WiMAX Standard Finalized

December 20, 2005 in Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

I’m a little bit late on the news but I just noticed that the IEEE 802.16e has been finalized two weeks ago. As Om Malik puts it, that was the easiest part:
 
… now companies have to get onboard with the concept, start developing silicon and equipment. But more than that, money has to be found, to essentially (and eventually) replicate the cellular mobile infrastructure. It is going to be a very costly and long drawn out process. It might be easy to get caught in the euphoria surrounding the news, but we all need to take a deep breath and get prepared for a long haul.
 
The Register has a short story about this announcement.
 
I have not had the time to look into the specification but WiMAX could be seen as a threat to mobile broadcasting systems such as DMB, DVB-H or MediaFLO. And since WiMAX’s mother tongue is “Internet”,  it could be seen as the long awaited and open platform for disruptive mobile applications. Broadcasting 2.0 believers will have to dig into WiMAX broadcasting capabilities.
 

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

Media roundtrip

December 14, 2005 in Industry, Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

A popular radio show goes to Sirius then cable tv and now, video streaming on the Internet. 50% of its 100.000 audience listens to it through podcasting. That’s Broadcasting 2.0.