Wednesday, October 12, 2005



The price is wrong

It's nice to be an enterprise software company. You can start charging your customers for your product long before they actually begin using it, and when (or if) they do get it up and running, you can charge them an ongoing license fee based on a self-serving theory of usage rather than actual usage. Server software, for instance, is typically priced according to the number of processors that the software runs on, regardless of the actual utilization of the software. Applications tend to be priced either per processor or per user, again independent of how intensively the software is actually employed.

But the old pricing model is now crumbling, thanks in large measure to virtualization (as well as the introduction of multicore processors). With virtualization, a company can carve up a single server into a lot of "virtual" servers, each of which can run its own operating system and application. Virtualization can dramatically reduce data-center costs, because it enables servers to be run at much higher levels of utilization (so you need far fewer of them). But the shift to virtualization has been slowed by the old software pricing model. If, for instance, you set up five virtual servers on a single, four-processor machine, you may have to pay for four separate per-CPU licenses for each of the five server operating systems and each of the five applications - after all, they're all theoretically employing the four processors in the underlying server. Those software fees can drastically diminish virtualization's cost savings, reducing companies' incentives to embrace the new technology.

Fortunately, though, the marketplace hates inefficiency and will, in time, force software vendors to change their pricing policies. A step in the right direction was taken yesterday by Microsoft, when it announced changes to the way it prices its server software. Under the new policy, which takes effect December 1, users will be charged according to the number of virtual servers running the software, rather than the number of processors on the underlying physical server. So if you set up a virtual server running Windows Server on a four-processor machine, you'll be charged one license fee rather than four. (Of course, if you set up five virtual Windows servers on that same machine, you'll get hit with five rather than four license fees - there's always a catch.) Microsoft's move will put pressure on other software makers to begin changing their pricing terms as well.

But this is only the beginning. What Microsoft has done is tweak the traditional pricing model, bringing it more in line with the reality of modern computing. It's just a stop-gap measure - a finger in a cracking dyke. In the end, the old pricing model will need to be abandoned. Virtualization won't, after all, be confined to individual servers. Ultimately, large networks (or "farms," or "grids") of physical servers will be virtualized, with their combined capacity allocated to various applications based on moment-by-moment shifts in demand. The usage of every piece of software, moreover, will be able to be tracked precisely. At that point, all the traditional methods of software pricing - whether per-processor or per-server or per-user - go out the window. Software fees will be based not on generic theories of usage but on actual usage. You'll have software meters just as you have electricity and gas meters.

Expect software vendors to continue to drag their feet in changing how they charge for their products. They'll maintain the old pricing model as long as they can - not only because it's lucrative but because it impedes the shift to true virtual computing. (The full-scale virtualization of corporate data centers is a frightening prospect for most traditional IT suppliers.) But eventually the market will demand that they change. And if they still refuse? Well, that's why God invented open source.

- nick (nick@roughtype.com) [Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog]
3:17:43 AM    comment   



ITV Goes Mobile. New Media Age reports that ITV, the UK's largest advertising-supported TV network is extending its reach into mobile. ITV already has an initiative it calls "Beyond the Spot", which aims to sell advertisers and agencies other forms of marketing over... [MobHappy]
1:41:05 AM    comment   



Creating A Mobile Music Ecosystem. I've still got some stuff from CTIA I haven't covered yet that will trickle out for a while. One such topic I've been meaning to write about was based on my meeting with some of Sony Ericsson's developer relations folks.... [MobHappy]
1:40:21 AM    comment   



I Have Seen The Future Of Mobile Content.... ... and it's blue, apparently. Lots of companies are lining up to sell mobile porn -- with unclear results -- and today brings news that sex advice videos from "The Lovers' Guide" will be available on 3 UK. Despite my... [MobHappy]
1:39:53 AM    comment   



BBC Seeks Funding Boost For New Digital Services. : This will not go down too well with the commercial and political spectrum in UK: The BBC, Britain's publicly funded broadcaster,wants more than 1.6 billion pounds ($2.8 billion) in increased funding to pay for a slew of new online services and the switchover to digital TV. The license fee would be increased annually by 2.3 percentage points above the rate of inflation for the seven-year period from April 2007.
BBC plans to use the extra funds over the next 8 years to roll out "on-demand" TV, build infrastructure to support digital TV, a free satellite service and HDTV, as well as creating more original programing with fewer repeats.
It is also considering charging money for BBC online content that is accessed abroad.
MediaGuardian I: The requirements for BBC per year: Digital services - [radical]Ǭ£1.2bn (On-demand; navigation and search; active engagement); Digital infrastructure - [radical]Ǭ£0.7bn (DTT/DAB build out; free satellite; Internet distribution; HDTV)
MediaGuardian II: The inflation-busting funding deal the BBC has asked for today could push the annual licence fee over [radical]Ǭ£200 within a decade - but the charge for owning a TV set could end up rising even more steeply, once the full cost of subsidising digital switchover is included.
BBC News lays out details on the proposed increase and why it needs it. [PaidContent.org]
1:39:19 AM    comment   



What Will RealNetworks Do With The Money?. : With this $460 million cash bounty, RealNetworks now has about $820 million in cash on its balance sheet. What does it plan to do? One, as this WSJ story says, would be to price and market Rhapsody music service aggressively and compete against Apple and Yahoo.
Secondly, acquisitions. The company has already done some good acquisition in the gaming (especially mobile) space over the last year or so, and I expect them to do some more soon.
Third, related to the second, I expect them to make some heavy investments on the mobile content side, both on technology and on content development. [PaidContent.org]
1:38:22 AM    comment   



Mobile Intelligence Japan Wrap!. Mobile Intelligence Japan Wrap!by Daniel Scuka, 10 October 2005
On Friday, the MIJ team wrapped up the October mission to Tokyo and headed home to the Heartland for happy hour and some relaxed networking; everyone was pooped but delighted with the program (so said the team, not me the organiser!).

After a full day Wednesday at CEATEC to view fuel-cell mobile batteries, digital-TV handsets and a super new satellite pocket rocket from DoCoMo, we spent Thursday and Friday back on the MIJ agenda, meeting with, respectively, an LBS application developer, a major content aggregator, an alternative mobile payment provider (to find out what to do when your content is just too pricey for the official menus), a mobile marketing manager and a 3G carrier, among others. Thursday evening was another highlight as we met with Andrew Shuttleworth, one of Tokyo's most knowledgeable and opinionated mobile application usability gurus, and a trio of young, female, non-tech Japanese college students who utterly tore apart preconceived notions of why Japanese use mobile like they do. (What? You mean you don't like to pay for content??)

I think Big D's FOMA satellite keitai, by the way, will rock. Due for release in the near future, the Mitsubishi "Music Porter X" handset has 1GB of memory and will stream Mobile Broadcast Corp.'s "Mobaho" digital audio channels, finally giving the come-from-behind 3G carrier a music service that can conceivably compete with KDDI/au's "Chaku Uta Full" full-track downloads.

With a couple of cold ones and -- for some -- a smooth "awamori" cocktail, yet another MIJ is over. The report, the lessons learned and the summary of sessions will be on distribution to participants as soon as your E-in-C gets over jet lag. Want to know more? Mark off April 2006 in your calendar and check the MIJ site for the outline spring agenda (should be up within a week or so). Thanks to all the intrepid and now even more mobile-savvy pros from Germany, Austria, the US and Japan who enthusiastically took part in MIJ. Kampai!

Listen to WWJ's Lawrence Cosh-Ishii and Daniel Scuka on Dave Graveline's "Into Tomorrow" live from CEATEC via MP3 (Hour 1 @ the 11:30 mark). [Wireless Watch Japan]
1:36:58 AM    comment   




Vodafone Announces 'Love Flat-rate'. WWJ Editors, 11 October 2005
Vodafone K.K. have just announced that on 1 November 2005 the company will introduce "Love Flat-rate," Japan's first mobile service that allows customers to call and send mail to a designated party as much as they like, according to a press release. The service name stands for the ability to call and mail the person 'one loves most' without worrying about the cost. The service lets a customer call and mail a designated party (one Vodafone K.K. phone number) without limitations, and discounts video calls by 50% for a monthly fixed charge of 300 yen (315 yen including tax). [Wireless Watch Japan]
1:28:01 AM    comment   



Email 2.0. "The reason we are building Web 2.0 is because we were not able to build Email 2.0. The first web didn't support our social needs, so we used email for everything. But we couldn't really hack it. Most social software has by now adapted to email, but email [del.icio.us/nivi]
1:22:33 AM    comment   



The Seed of Apple's Innovation. Steve Jobs: "Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly." [del.icio.us/nivi]
1:21:48 AM    comment   



Future of 3G Bleak DownUnder.

Despite all the buzz around 3G Wireless, a research note from the Australian Parliament paints a rather bleak and dismal future for 3G services and the entire mobile sector. The note warns that four of the major wireless players including Vodafone will have to first recover their $1.17 billion investment in spectrum, before they can even start thinking about their mega-billion dollar capital expenditures. There are only 500,000 3G users in that country. As the carriers push 3G, they are also at the risk of cannibalizing their 2G services which for now are footing the bill for everything. The researchers note that instead of fancy services like DVB-H, aka Mobile TV, the future of 3G might be in simpler more easier services. Like GPS, photo taking, stereo sound and music. “Cheaper alternatives such as free Internet, for real time or deferred content downloads, may challenge the use of 3G by consumers,” they say. How does this correlate to US? I think we are going to follow the same patterns here in the US as well. I think the $25 unlimited high-speed access on our phones will be enough for carriers to boost their ARPU from around $50 a month to $75 a month. After that it will be simpler services like photo blogs, GPS, and SMS-based search that will drive incremental dollars. Multimedia content on the phone is far from a slam-dunk. What do you think?

Link: Australian Parliament Research Note. via Resource Shelf.

[Om Malik's Broadband Blog]
1:20:31 AM    comment   



IPTV versus TV-over-IP.

In the battle for video over broadband, the odds might just be stacked against IPTV, a complex and expensive technology. Instead, the fortunes might be favoring the more simplistic, television over IP.

In past few months, IPTV has gone from being an obscure acronym to a mass media phenomenon, that if you read the papers is going to solve all of world’s problems, usher a brand new television experience, and well, while its at it, help the Yankees win another dozen World Series. The coverage would make you believe that IPTV is here and now. Reality is proving to be something else.

IPTV, is the technology that is being deployed by phone companies either over copper or fiber networks to replicate (and perhaps enhance) a television experience normally available on cable networks. (Light Reading has a more indepth description for those interested.) In other words, an always on television stream (and hundreds of channels) just is available at the flick of the switch of a set-top box. This is a business that needs billions of dollars in investment. SBC, for instance is spending over $6 billion on Project LightSpeed, that will bring TV over next generation DSL connections. BellSouth is not too far behind. Verizon has similar plans and a bigger budget, for its fiber based network, called FIOS. (Thanks Karl for clarifications!)

Even with these apparently significant investments, “the Bells are five years behind the cable companies,” says Scott Cleland, founder and CEO of research company Precursor Group. “We have a cable industry that’s fully built out,” Cleland says. “Bells are a fourth entrant with three formidable players” in video entertainment.

Regardless of the underlying pipe - copper or fiber - one this is clear: the deployment of these IPTV networks is slow, laborious process. In addition, it is hard to find evidence of profits and scale. For example, Hong Kong-based PCCW is the world’s largest IPTV service and it has 441,000 subscribers in Hong Kong. The evidence of slow nature of the rollouts is evident in pre-announcements from two companies - UT Starcom and ADC Telecommunications. UTS was hit by slow ramp at Softbank Broadband in Japan, and ADC’s troubles lie at the Verizon’s feet.

Multimedia Research Group in its most recent forecast says that the total number of IPTV subscribers will grow from 3.7 million in 2005 to 36.9 million in 2009, with revenues going from $880 million to $9.9 billion in 2005-2009 time frame. That works out to about $267 a year per subscriber or roughly $22 a month. That doesn’t sound like too much money per subscriber per month, but hey that’s me. (Interestingly, IP video services in Asia Pacific will be a $4.2 billion market by 2010 as per In-Stat, a market research firm.) Bob Larribeau, MRG Senior Analyst in the press release says that Bells are “still lagging, due to issues that SBC and BellSouth are facing, waiting for low-cost MPEG-4 set-top boxes and Microsoft’s software, and dealing with the complexity of the system integration required.”

Now compare this with Television over IP, or broadband video. Television over IP, on the other hand is the high quality streaming video, that is made available over the fast pipes, without a set-top box. This is a (comparatively) fairly low cost, and perhaps a simpler model. This simplicity is one of the reasons, it might actually gain traction in the market. While I am not willing to put a lot in the “long tail” video efforts like video blogs and efforts of start-ups such as Bright Cove, I do think there is a lot of hope for branded content online, especially if content owners can create a superior experience. I have seen some of the video-over-broadband efforts of folks like Comcast and News Corp., and that looks promising. Other content owners are also cooking up broadband channels.

Today launch of mtvU Über, a network that allows aspiring student broadband creators to create broadband content is a step in the right direction, but not the final answer. The bottom line is that, the television over broadband needs some sizzling new kind of content in order for folks to go back and click. My feeling is that MTV should have done their MTV Desi channel over broadband, and perhaps used it as a learning experience for other niche channels over broadband. If done right, television over broadband has the potential to pip IPTV to the post.

The impact of Bit Torrent, RSS, and Networked Video Recorders will be covered in the part 2 and 3 of this series, which will also look into Google TV, Yahoo’s media efforts and why really the networks should not be fearful of peer 2 peer networks.

[Om Malik's Broadband Blog]
1:17:37 AM    comment   



OPINION://Shoot the messenger.

There’s been a lot of press in the last year or so about port blocking, open access, Net Freedoms, and so on. I won’t provide the links, you go find ‘em. Every forum, mailing list, conference, and discussion panel seems to have a lot of heated opinion about it. Although I couldn’t attend the VON sessions, there was heated debate there between the “Freeloader!” and the “Freedom fighter!” factions.

But why I should, emotively, care at all?

Stop for a moment. Why do you, personally, care about this issue? Telecom isn’t the only industry with distribution bottlenecks, significant market power, and cross-subsidy between the stages of production. Just look at how baked beans are positioned in supermarket shelves. Manufacturers in the UK pay the supermarkets to buy prime positions. Yet telecom incites such great passion in intelligent people. Baked beans don’t. What’s going on?

I think I’ve finally worked out why. It’s David Isenberg’s elephant in the corner — what he ambiguously calls Freedom to Connect. Most of these arguments attempt to build a logical economic thesis about why we do or don’t have the correct balance between price discrimination, competition and common carriage. But it increasingly misses the point. We sense there’s a deeper, more troubling, aspect to getting cut off from part of the conversation.

Whilst nebulous and fluffy, it’s all about democracy. The rest is post hoc rationalization of our more fundamental beliefs about how a 21st century society needs to be wired up to work. And my thesis is that we are underestimating the importance of this political (as opposed to economic) side of the debate.

The sense of indignation you feel inside you when you hear about port blocking is because you sense the loss that those customer are enduring. You and I have come to realize that if you don’t have access, you aren’t able to fully participate in society any more in some non-trivial way. You can still do the old analogue things, have a protest at the street corner. But the crowds have moved online. Nobody can hear you.

Not only that, but when someone else gets the chop, you’ve lost a member of the demos from your democracy. Your conversation is impaired by others no longer being able to participate.

Why don’t we feel so upset about the closed, walled gardens of wireless networks? There are several reasons, I believe. Firstly, the very nature of the medium lends itself to competition (through multiple overlapping networks), which ensures some degree of openness. The low cost of wireless telephony is also in itself a great democratising force. Going from zero phones to one closed one is a great step forward. Participation is everything. We also have lower expectations based on the natural capacity limits the technology has had until recently. Our tolerance of “co-operative bottlenecks” has been greater in order to share the resource better.

On the other hand, when someone’s Net connections to their home come under pressure of restriction, we react differently. I think this is partly a psychological issue of how we view these spaces differently. We are defensive of our homes. Somewhat tenuously, the family still is the organising unit of society. We aspire for every household to have at least some form of unfettered access to all forms of information discourse. That’s why it hurts when we fall short.

Which brings me to my real point. This conversational chatty democracy stuff all sounds fine. But that’s hardly going to energize society into fits of fiber laying and open access regulation. Where’s the beef? Well, here’s my outrageous suggestion:

The ability to access Internet content and services is the new Right to Bear Arms.

Wow. I’ve said it. So what does it mean? The founders of the United States of America in their wisdom saw the seizure of excessive power by government as a central risk. To counteract this, they ensured the general populace would always be sufficiently armed. This gives any putative dictator or tyrant pause for thought before exercising the machinery of government violence for undemocratic ends. The price is a certain undercurrent of everyday violence, but the experiment has by and large succeeded. The USA is one of the longest-standing constitutional democracies, and has withstood extraordinary change in demographics and fortune during that period.

We’re moving from a society where physical force was the prime means of coercion to one where ideas have ascendancy. Physical force doesn’t scale well as a means of subjugation. It’s one thing to take a man’s posessions; quite another to persuade him to make your dinner every night for nothing. The hardest part of the civil rights movement wasn’t undoing the yoke of the white man, but persuading the everyday black man that it was his inalienable right to have that yoke removed. Once that was achieved, the outcome was largely a foregone conclusion.

Building tyranny is harder when the populace is armed with good information. It’s not impossible; indeed, a tyranny of the majority is still a major risk. But when I can have a cheap encrypted Skype conversation with Iranians, Syrians, and Mexicans, something qualitative has changed. For example, when I visited Syria a few years ago, we went to Hama. This town was largely razed in 1982 (with the loss of tens of thousands of lives) when its own army shelled the city to put down an Islamic uprising against the Baathist government. I pass no comment on the politics of it, but merely note that this is a little-known episode of history. You certainly don’t see it mentioned on the official tourist website. Can you imagine keeping such news under wraps in the era of video cameraphones, satellite Internet and Skype?

Consider a populace that wants to rise up against its political masters. We’re already at the point where the government response isn’t to take away the populace’s arms, but to take away its means of communication. Militias don’t congregate in the woods and more, they start their own Yahoo! group and MoveOn and Meetup from there.

There’s no point in demanding universal access if you don’t have the economic means to deliver. Much of the debate is about means, not ends. But those ends deserve greater exposure and reflection. If we are serious about transformation of society through information technology it means sweeping away many of the special protections the telecom industry has managed to accrue, enforcement of competition law, and greater collective effort to deploy connectivity and open up wireless and fixed rights of way.

There’s more at stake here than cheap phone calls and unlimited TV channels. Cheap airlines have done more for European cohesion and understanding than decades of political exhortation. Cheap, ubiquitous and unfiltered communications are becoming a prerequisite of a pluralist participative democracy. Societies that fail to encourage the free flow of information will suffer because ingrained interest groups will ensure the rules are set up to perpetuate their privileges. When you can’t make a Skype call, you’re losing something more than money.

You might believe that your political system is a stable one delivering endless contended freedom and openness. But your average American feels a lot more secure in that knowledge with a rifle in the basement. I’d want the same feeling of security, just with symmetric gigabit fibre so I can host my own subversive content if necessary.

Next time someone is vigorously defending the existence of filters on the Net, dig deeper. Don’t ask them for the logic of their argument. Rather, try to find out why it excites them so much. Perhaps they aren’t aware of what animates their own passions.

[Telepocalypse]
1:09:20 AM    comment   



Digital Cellphone TV Broadcasts to Begin April 1. By David Jacobson: Japan is gearing up for the roll out of digital cellphone TV. A consortium of major public and private broadcasters announced Tuesday that service over much of the country would start April 1 and would be called [base "]One Seg(u).[per thou]

The Tuesday event, which included presentations delivered by female anchors from each of the major broadcasters, marked the start of a publicity campaign introducing [base "]One Seg(u).[per thou]

[base "]One Seg(u)[per thou] gets its name from the fact that one of the 13 segments of the 6 Megahertz of spectrum allocated to terrestrial broadcasting of digital television in Japan will be directed to cellular telephones.

The service will be offered without charge to anyone with a special tuner-equipped cell phone, personal computer or car navigation system. Programming will match what is offered on the other 12 digital TV stations.

Along with the announcement, NTT Docomo and KDDI also demonstrated prototypes of handsets that can be used to receive One Seg(u) Tuesday. Docomo[base ']s P901iTV, for instance, will come with a rectangular screen that can be turned horizontally so that one can view the screen as a normal TV screen, while allowing simultaneous access to the keyboard to change channels or use the Internet. A special feature of One Seg(u) is that it allows users to view receive video and audio in the upper part of the screen, while receiving data in the lower half.

As digital TV does not consume much power, viewers can use the Docomo handset for two and a half hours continuously. However, those who wish to view analog stations instead will only be able to watch for an hour and a half.

According to a report in Forbes, the Docomo model is expected to cost some 10,000 yen ($89) more than a standard cell phone.

Terrestrial broadcasting of digital TV began in December 2003. By the end of this year, 90 percent of the Tokyo metropolitan region [^] which is home to nearly a third of Japan[base ']s total population [^] will be able to receive the broadcasts, according to TV Asahi's Tamayo Marukawa, as quoted in the trade publication Keitai Watch. [Japan Media Review]
12:42:32 AM    comment   




Useit.Com: R.I.P. WYSIWYG. For the last twenty-five years, one user interface style has reigned supreme: the Macintosh-style graphical user interface. It's now reached its limits, however, and will be replaced by a style that partly reverses some of its most treasured interaction principles. [Tomalak's Realm]
12:37:56 AM    comment   



50 million GSM users in India.

The gross cellular subcriber base in India is now at 50.87 million, according to the latest figures released by COAI.

Bharti led the pack by adding 6.5 lakh new subscribers in September taking its gross cellular user base to 1.40 crore and a marketshare of 27.65%.

BSNL comes second with the addition of 4.9 lakh users, and its user base touched 1.19 crore in September. The company now has a marketshare of 23.39%.

[Mobile Pundit]
12:33:32 AM    comment   



TiVo-ish LG Phone.

tivo_cell.JPGLG has unveiled plans for a phone that has a live video pausing and rewinding feature. Apparently they are labeling this technology as the ever-so-creative "time machine" function. The phone actually looks pretty cool but the newly hyped feature, not so much. I think I would like to see the whole "live television on mobile phone" feature develop some more before manufacturers worry about stopping and rewinding said live television.

LG Launches TiVo-Style… [RealTechNews]

[Gizmodo]
12:33:13 AM    comment   



Samsung's Satellite Receiver Does Everything But The Laundry.

dmb-t450_01.jpgLooks like it's time for the Koreans to show their tailfeathers at the Korea Electronics Show, from today through Oct. 15. Obviously, we can expect lots of new, cool stuff from LG and Samsung, who are both headquartered there. And believe it or not, this will be the KEA's 37th year. (Ah, those were the days—when all you'd see were tube TVs and kimchee makers.)

Something cool to look out for this year is the Samsung DMB-T450 portable satellite TV receiver. I had to translate the press release from Korean, but it looks like it not only provides portable satellite TV broadcast reception, but also MP3 playback, a digital camera and video recording. We'll see if the translation was way off when the show gets underway, but for now, that sounds pretty good to me.

Samsung Introduces New DMB-T450 Multi-function Device [SamsungHQ]

[Gizmodo]
12:32:45 AM    comment   



Airtime.

dmbairtimetop.jpg

Get The Picture


By Carlo Longino

Lots of mobile operators and content providers are convinced that mobile television is the next big thing for cell phones. While the phone isn't likely to dislodge the plasma screen as anyone's TV set of choice soon, the anytime, anywhere access mobile television promises has a lot of people excited. And while there are already early efforts to broadcast programming to mobile phones, a number of issues—both in terms of content and technology—still need to be worked out.

A company called MobiTV made some of the furtive first steps toward mobile TV when it launched on Sprint nearly two years ago, with about a dozen channels at a pretty low frame rate. It's just recently launched the second version of its product, and now has about 25 channels available on Sprint and Cingular in the US, and a number of other carriers around the world—at rates as high as 15-20 frames per second.

mediaflo2.jpgThe channels MobiTV offers are a mix of live simulcasts of networks like MSNBC and CNBC, as well as others with prerecorded video, and still more with mobile-specific content. Ben Feinman, MobiTV's director of product management, says some of its most popular content is 3-5 minute videos of things like cartoons, comedy clips or music videos—bite-sized content.

The content mix is something mobile TV providers are trying to figure out, as they realize people don't watch TV on their mobiles the same way they do at home. "Our average session is five to ten minutes," Feinman says, adding that users tend to turn to the service to fill a few spare minutes in their day, rather than sit and watch for an hour. As content providers better understand this, "the application of this medium will evolve like any other," he says. He points out how NBC now has a crew dedicated to creating short news updates specifically for mobile users.

With the rise of DVRs and 500-channel TV services, people don't necessarily watch TV like they used to, falling at the mercy of whatever happens to be on. It's the same with mobile—people want control over what they're watching. Feinman says that MobiTV sees peak usage during breaking news events, and that live sports "is at the top of the list" of what users are asking for. He adds, though, that content tastes are as varied as the audience, and it's getting harder and harder to develop a basic package of channels that caters to everyone. So, just like you might add HBO to your existing cable package, MobiTV now also features niche premium channels.

dmb2.jpgOf course, there has to be some technology to make all of this possible. Current mobile TV providers in the US and Europe stream their content, typically over high-speed WCDMA or EV-DO networks (though some also work on GPRS and 1xRTT networks at lower quality). Streaming video over mobile networks follows essentially the same model as on the Internet, using unicast technology, meaning every subscriber gets a dedicated stream. This isn't a problem for operators right now, while their 3G networks are new and fairly empty. But as the networks become more popular and fill with traffic, streaming could become a problem since bandwidth is a much more finite resource on mobile networks than on wired ones.

To this end, there are a few different broadcast technologies that are being implemented. In South Korea, operators are using satellite digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) to transmit 11 video and 25 audio channels to mobile phones, while in several European locations, systems using the digital video broadcasting-handhelds (DVB-H) standard are being tested. Crown Castle, which owns a network of cellular base station sites in the US, has plans to build a DVB-H network here, and is currently testing it in Pittsburgh.

mediaflo1.jpgBoth DMB and DVB-H do essentially the same thing—broadcast video to receivers in mobile phones—and both are variants on digital TV technologies being implemented for standard broadcasts. And what would anything in electronics be without a standards battle? Given its support from Western vendors, DVB-H will likely come in to use in Europe and the US—although American users might find themselves using a third type of network, Qualcomm's MediaFLO. It's a proprietary system that, again, does basically the same thing, but Qualcomm has bought wireless licenses in the US so it can operate the MediaFLO network as well as sell the technology.

There's a big trade-off between broadcast and unicast systems, though, where interactivity and personalization are traded out for spectral efficiency. When programming is being streamed to individuals, that stream can be personalized for each user. When it's broadcasted, everyone receives the same content. People are so used to being able to customize their viewing experience at home, whether it's just being able to flip through 300 channels, or skipping ads with their TiVo that they won't expect much less from the mobile TV experience. This means providers will probably have to call on a mixture of both broadcast and streaming technologies to provide both technically feasible access to the most popular channels, but also the personalized experience users want.

The pipe dream? The ultimate personalization—being able to access the content of your TiVo from your phone, so you can watch just the programs you want, exactly when and where you want. The sticking point isn't the technology, Feinman says, with MobiTV looking at a few different implementations, whether it's accessing TiVo content, having the ability to select and record programs on the phone, or to simply cache a day's worth of content on the device.

"It's not a lot of bits," he says. "It's a question of working through it with the content providers." Rights issues holding back technology? That's almost as surprising as standards battles.

Carlo Longino is a writer and analyst that follows the mobile industry. He's co-editor of MobHappy, and also an analyst for Techdirt. He can be reached at carlo@mobhappy.com.

Read more Airtime. The column appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo.

dvbh1.jpg

[Gizmodo]
12:27:29 AM    comment   



Mike Gauba: why convergence leads to value dilution. Interview, Mike Gauba. iCF: Why do you believe so strongly that driving for convergent devices is a mistake for 3G success? Gauba: It is important for all those associated with mobile voice to realize that anything bundled with it is likely to struggle through out its lifecycle unless a very special focus is brought on to it. [i-mode Business Strategy]
12:24:38 AM    comment   



DoCoMo Has World's Highest Data ARPU. 3G_newsIt's probably not surprising to the casual observer that Japan's NTT DoCoMo has the highest data ARPU of any carrier in the world, given the amount of play its i-mode service gets as the poster child for mobile data. DoCoMo earns $17.60 per month per user from data, with all but 70 cents of that from i-mode, and says 90 percent of its subscribers are active i-mode users -- which is slightly surprising...
Tag: | Posted in:
Our 3G Support Service - 3G Assistance-at-a-Distance[base ']Ñ¢ [Daily 3G News]
12:23:44 AM    comment   



3G to Arrive in Egypt. 3G_newsEgypt is set to launch a tender for a third national mobile licence later this month. A senior advisor to the government's Communications and Information Technology Minister, was quoted by Reuters this morning as saying that the sale of the government owned, fixed line operator Telecom Egypt is also on schedule to go ahead this year.
Tag: | Posted in:
Our 3G Support Service - 3G Country Studies [Daily 3G News]
12:23:11 AM    comment   



Why havent they done this ?.

Sometimes I wish i could just sit down and chill. But I cant. Unless my daughter and wife are around, I wont even try. My wife would tell you that even then...

[Blog Maverick]
12:21:21 AM    comment   



Anil Ambani's DTH Venture Is Renamed Reliance Bluemagic. Indiantelevision.com: Anil Ambani has changed the name of his direct-to-home (DTH) venture to Reliance Bluemagic, following objections by the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp to the word 'Sky.'
Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Enterprise (ADAE) had applied for a DTH licence under the name 'Reliance Skymagic.' News Corp had issued a caution notice, claiming 'Sky' was its registered trademark. News Corp runs its DTH operations in UK under the name of BSkyB. Besides, it has Sky News, Sky Sports and Sky Radio. The trademark Sky was also registered in India.
"We have renamed the venture as Reliance Bluemagic. We wanted to have a different identity from T-Sky, the brand name of Tata Sky," ADAE business head for DTH project Arvind Kumar Narang told Indiantelevision.com. Tata Sky is the 80:20 joint venture between Tatas and the Star Group. [ContentSutra]
12:19:04 AM    comment   



Low Cost Technology And Rural India. SiliconIndia.com: If you have no idea what is Warana or Akshaya or DakNe, then you should read this piece. All three are e-governance or technology projects for rural India. Warana is a project in Maharashtra, Akshaya project is in Kerala or DakNet in Central India and they are making waves when it comes to rural communication.
Then there are others like n-Logue which relies on corDECT, a fixed wireless local loop (WLL) technology, to offer connectivity in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh; The Gyandoot project, launched five years ago, now has expanded to 31 kiosks covering 311 panchayats over 600 villages and a population of around half a million. Each kiosk is expected to earn a gross income of $100 per month. [ContentSutra]
12:13:47 AM    comment   



"India Offers Immense Potential For Innovative Voice-based Mobile Applications". But why aren't Indian laboratories churning out any, asks HTK in his occasional Guest Blog Mobile Musings.


HTK: I thought I would bring up one of my favourite mobile topics, voice. In this multilingual country (India), it is startling to see how much we have ignored voice as a killer app for so long. We all know how well OnMobile is doing and the hard work they had put in over the last few years is of course one of the greatest things to have happened. But I am afraid we are still not seeing enough happening. We need more OnMobiles and go well beyond that. We have not seen the rise of any cutting edge, path-breaking voice application in recent times.
I suspect that data has proven to be far easier to implement and a lot of us have gone along that path. But we need to look ahead. Skype has proven to us that voice is a concept whose frontiers are defined by the human mind. We are still very much scratching the surface out here and from all evidence, not doing terribly well at it. For instance, voice based interactivity is not happening. Secondly, a lot of news organizations that service the heartland, are not finding a place in the mobile scheme of things. The moment you bring out voice, you need to address the aspirations of the larger masses, the bypassed people.
I remember Spice doing a feed of Gurbani (a Sikh religious prayer) from the Golden Temple many years ago - that was a simple but a startingly relevant idea. I recently saw the fusion of Intel with Dolby on a PC and the impact that quality voice can have on a digital experience is pretty astonishing. We need to see how that can be translated into numbers- and numbers in India mean and will mean mobile phones. Voice has the ease of adaptability, if we look ahead at the opening up of rural markets. There is an explosion waiting to happen - we need to go and light the fuse. As I have always maintained, a lot of people need to get together and do a lot of talking- operators, aggregators, developers and content owners need to work together as much as possible to grow the industry.
I believe one of the fundamental problems we are facing - and which is not possibly the case elsewhere - is the disconnect between industry and academia. Some of our brightest brains and imaginative minds are in college campuses - very little is happening in terms of helping them create new knowledge and imagination based enterprises. Instead, digital smokestacks are being created with mind-numbing regularity. This needs to change. The mundane is essential - but the riches created from plodding must fund the chariots of fire.


Read HTK's Previous Columns:
About Pricing, Triple Play And Tremors: Guest Blog By HTK
[ContentSutra]
12:13:16 AM    comment   




How Steve Jobs snookered the entire cell phone industry. "And then about a year from now Steve once again calls up Cingular and says "Hey, remember how that iTunes phone from Motorola sold fairly well last year, despite the fact that it was mediocre? Well, we've gone and created our own phone in-house, and it's [del.icio.us/nivi]
12:12:23 AM    comment