BBC Project Canvas given go ahead to provide internet TV | Mail Online

via dailymail.co.uk

No I don't read the Daily Mail - this was just the top hit from Google's news aggregator.

I think this is a great sign of maturity of thinking in the UK which I applaud - it creates a consolidated platform for internet programme delivery for a number of content producers.

If the mainstream competitive VOD platforms (Virgin, BT Vision, Playstation and Xbox460) are able to delivery the canvass platform as an alternative delivery mechanism, this could be a game-changing agreement.

If Microsoft and Virgin can't get their act together on their platforms, this could be a bust though - the content providers need to be able to demonstrate the monetary value to the delivery partners to make it attractive to move outside the walled content gardens.

WYT?

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Ten Predictions for 2010: IT Recovery and the Apple Tablet

Article Index
Ten Predictions for 2010: IT Recovery and the Apple Tablet
A Modest Recovery
Telecom Transformation
Emerging Markets Drive Growth
The Cloud Expands and Matures
Androids and iPads
Pressure on Public Networks
Socialytic Apps
Green Pressures Return
Smart Meters and EMR
Mergers and Acquisitions

Page 1 of 11

Recovery and transformation will be the big themes in 2010, says IDC in its annual predictions for the IT and telecommunications industries. Spending will return to pre-recession levels, says the research firm, and "transformation will impact every corner of the industry."

What kind of changes can we expect? From the cloud to sustainability to mobility (think iPad), here's a roundup of what IDC sees transpiring in 2010.

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via ciozone.com

Hmmm, some interesting predictions here, though I'm not entirely sure that smart-meters make my top-ten for 2010. I think next year will be one where we see the rise of medium-priced application centric 'phones that increasingly unchain users from the shackles of their laptops.

So this means increased wifi penetration and 4th gen mobile networks to drive connectivity. The networks better be prepared as this is going to be a tsunami of new connections to their networks.

Additionally, I predict there will be a revolt on the UKs Digital Economy bill - we've already seen the start of this with the TalkTalk head Andrew Heaney raising a petition (http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/dontdisconnectus/) with 28k signatures already.

As I've previously indicated, I don't necessarily have an issue with the copyright legislation, I have a concern that the production companies lack of initiative in learning how to monetise access to programming (and there are plenty of solutions out there, just ask Apple and Sky to start with) will lead to legal action that actually stifles digital distribution more and more.

C'mon distributors, get your act together! Where's the unified platform that lets me download what I want, when I want it for a fair price (BT do it for 79p an episode of just about anything on BT Vision) and lets me watch it whenever, wherever and on whatever device ('phone, PC, TV). I'm a tech savvy consumer who just barely manages to keep my head above water, what chance has my mum got?!

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What to Do About Cloud Lock-In?

Article Index
What to Do About Cloud Lock-In?
Leverage

Page 1 of 2

By Michael Eggebrecht

Cloud vendor lock-in is a problem without a villain, according to Tom Hughes-Croucher, a technical evangelist at Yahoo. "Nobody planned this," he said. "There's no evil intention." But the lack of interoperability between cloud computing vendors is a very real -- and growing -- problem all the same.

"These aren't clouds, they're bubbles," asserted Hughes-Croucher at the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this month. At the New York conference, he gave a presentation on the subject with Carlos Bueno, a user interface specialist for Yahoo Mail, who summed up the issue: "If you stay inside one vendor, everything is cheap and wonderful. If you go outside, everything becomes expensive."

Thanks to latency and bandwidth metering, switching vendors, or using one provider for a task it does better -- or more cheaply -- than others, is so difficult that it can be nearly impossible.

Lock-in has been getting increased attention as cloud services providers continue to nab customers at a rapid clip. In a recent report, the European Network and Information Security Agency highlighted lock-in as one the biggest risks involved with cloud computing. "There is currently little on offer in the way of tools, procedures or standard data formats or services interfaces that could guarantee data and service portability," said the report. That makes it very difficult to move data from provider to provider, or to and from internal servers.

Hughes-Croucher and Bueno, who worked for Xoopit, an e-mail indexing and photo sharing startup that Yahoo acquired in July, have taken on the issue as a sort of side project to their work at Yahoo. Lock-in, which they compare to the sorry state of international mail before infrastructure improvements and an 1890 treaty, is limiting freedom of choice for cloud customers, they say, and will come back to bite vendors.

But for cloud providers right now, "it's just not on their radar," said Bueno in an interview. "The market is so untrammeled that they're focused on new features and competing and getting new customers. There are so many new potential customers out there, it's not an issue yet."

Cloud Peering

The two Yahoo employees want to help draw attention to the problem before it magnifies, and thousands of cloud customers are forced to find work-arounds. In addition to supporting open APIs and formats, it's time, they say, for cloud vendors to look into establishing peering agreements to reduce latency and make it faster and cheaper for customers to use multiple providers.

Data centers tend to flock together, a fact that Hughes-Croucher and Bueno demonstrate graphically at cloud-peering.com, a Web site they operate to show that cloud companies like Amazon, 3tera and Rackspace have clusters of data centers in the same areas -- Texas, the New York metropolitan area, Silicon Valley. "We're not asking cloud vendors to go all the way around the world to make this work," said Hughes-Croucher. "We're asking them to go across town."

And while this might not be a priority for the vendors, it will -- in the long run -- open up new opportunities for them. Instead of fighting for a little piece of the pie, said Hughes-Croucher, they can make the whole pie much bigger.

It also opens up new possibilities, like a spot market for storage, an idea Bueno credited to Toby Negrin, a product manager in cloud management solutions at Yahoo. "If storage becomes fungible," said Bueno, "you can transfer it fairly quickly, even if it's just backups. You could feasibly trade it with somebody else: 'I have servers in Hong Kong, you have servers in Atlanta? OK, let's agree to store each other's backups, so that neither of us have to have two data centers somewhere.'"

Prev - Next >>

via ciozone.com

Cracking article about the future dangers of lock-in to cloud services.

I think there's another area that's been missed though, as software licensing is a key area that lacks transparency in moving between service providers.

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3D cinema

So, we went to the cinema at the weekend to see UP! I won’t labour the positive review (it has an IMDB score of 8.5!), suffice it to say that both Mrs Mac and I were moved at all the right bits and my wee boy (7) got all the bits that were intended for him.

The 3D tech used to deliver the movie and the clever use of depth perception cues, combined with the excellent cinema surround experience, made this a particularly memorable experience – one well worth the £2 premium/head for the privilege of wearing silly glasses.

But the movie got me thinking about the supposed upcoming arrival of this kind of experience into the home. According to many techie websites, this year’s CES tech demonstrations of 3D are the pre-cursor to consumer 3D arriving in 2010/11.

As well as being sceptical, I’m confused by the big push into yet another content technology. Most consumers still have SD sources feeding their ‘big’ panels (average size is 37”) with stereo speakers attached to the telly being the main soundsystem (checkout this article for some real stats).

I just can’t see Joe Punter (err, me included) forking out for a new telly when most don’t understand that the reason they don’t get a good picture on their ‘HD ready’ telly is because they don’t have an HD Source – my mum thought this was something you put on chips, along with salt and vinegar.

Personally I think this’ll only happen when it’s an incremental service added to an existing platform (Sky HD, Playstation 3) rather than a replacement technology.

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On the road again...

I'm zooming down the country from Glasgow to London in prep for a meeting with a client. After a couple of trips to-and-fro to the wee on-board shop, I've an interesting split showing what people are doing...

30% of people are sleeping (it's 1710 and pitch black outside!)

30% of people are reading (books/mags/papers)

30% of people are fiddling around with laptops

I dunno/haven't worked out yet what the remaining 10% are up to.

About 50% of everyone has a pair of cans/'phones on.

So, of the 30% of people using laptops, many of them are watching TV shows or movies. Where are they all coming from? I've seen more than one or two external hard-drives attached, so are these legally downloaded or torrents from 'illegal' netspace? How does that work if the files are (say) TV programmes that have been 'timeshifted'? Is there a stature of what is or is not allowable? If (for example) I started watching Die Hard 4 on broadcast telly last night but decided to download it from the net as I couldn't stay up late enough but knew I could watch it on the train today if the file was available in a portable form, does that make me a criminal?

OK this might be a moot point if I'm using a torrent client (which by default uploads chunks as well as downloads), but say I download the file(s) from a non-legitimate source (a newsgroup say) that doesn't use my compute and network connection to redistribute?

In my opinion, there's a trick being missed here, one that is likely to be increasingly filled by instantly-available micropayment services that return the revenue on a per-use basis to the content providers. I should be able to download (legitimately) Die Hard 4 from the Channel 4 website in exchange for bandwidth fees and an understanding that I may be forced to sit through ads or pay to avoid them.

And, I believe, this should be transparent. The recent decision by the BBC trust to limit the expansion and potential of BBC's iPlayer platform as a cross provider content portal was extremely short sighted. There's no reason that the service could not be split into 'free' and 'non-free' content with some limited amount of money going to maintain the core infrastructure at the centre. Then I could legitimately torrent what I wanted to watch, help other users doing the same and be watching *paid for* content on my laptop on the train - just like the other 50-60 people on this train!

BT/Tiscali/Virgin (in the UK) have woken up to this with content aggregation services as part of their VOD offerings, but they're missing a trick too as these rights only exist within the context of the walled garden of the STB device. I should be able to take my identity with me (banks let me do it with tokens already) and have access to my paid for content from wherever.

Stretching this point to cover convergence thinking, if the delivery content/portal platform is available on a number of form factors I could increase the penetration and have content being delivered to iPhones and gPhones.

Content providers need to make access to their data easy and legitimate or all the legal controls and 3 strikes rules just add layers of complexity and obfuscation to a system that is already deeply outdated and outclassed.

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James Fallows: Boiled-frog Archives

via jamesfallows.theatlantic.com

A whole collection of treatises on the boiledfrog myth. I just saw the picture and loved it.

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