Having a swipe at the Australian version of freeview but there’s more than a ring of truth against the UK implementation.

An interesting use of the web tonight following the latest FA Cup game of Man U vs Spurs. ITV were keen to get onto the next programme and so moved on to Harry Hill only 5 minutes after the match ended.

In theory this gives them 2 advantages; viewers are more likely to stay tuned rather than channel hop as well as driving traffic to the website. Done well, this could work well, complementing the broadcast. However, anyone visiting the website straight after the match was left with a video stream saying the “post match analysis would start shortly”. This stayed on for several minutes before the programme started, losing any kind of continuity you might expect. To add to that, the website stated the coverage was “exclusive”, but it was also available via the red button on Sky, surely exclusive means a single outlet?

By contrast, before the match they showed highlights on an interview, stating the interview was available in full online. This was a much better use, as it will drive only the most dedicated fans onto the website, providing them with exclusive content, and providing the advertisers with a very clearly defined set of people. In addition, its unlikely to antagonise the existing audience.

And talking of antagonising the audience, having a reliable satellite feed wouldn’t go amiss either

Come on down people!

The Acting Chief Executive of Digital One, Glyn Jones, commented: “We’re turning the ideas set out in the DRWG’s report into actions. That includes looking hard at how Digital One can offer lower carriage costs. In turn we’re expecting that stakeholders involved in the Working Group, and other companies with the ambition to launch new national radio stations in 2009, will step up and engage with a view to adding compelling new choice for consumers.”

In other words, noone has been interested in buying the space and now we’re in recession nobody is going to be interested in buying the space at the uneconomic rates DAB costs. And we couldn’t monetarise the bird song station (Bird Song HD 2 anyone?)…

Capacity is available for mainstream stations as well as more specialist channels. For example, proposals based on Plays/Books/Comedy content would be welcome as well as other speech or music formats with consumer appeal.

Oh, that’s just funny! You might as well just say “come back Oneword!”

Digital One confirmed that it is reviewing its charges for capacity. Glyn Jones commented: “We’re expecting that prices will initially be set below Digital One’s 2008 rate card. One reason for that is to help provide an incentive for people to invest in high quality services. But, over time, companies providing new services will be expected to contribute to the costs of a transmitter roll-out plan which was something also identified by the DRWG as important.

Sounds like buy now pay later. But given the slow growth of DAB, if a station can barely afford to stay on air now is a really going to have loads of money towards transmission costs a few years down the line? Doubtful. Upstarts in particular are going to find it hard to raise capital for any new station in these markets.

That leaves the major media companies as the only ones are still likely to be interested. GCap certainly wasn’t, pulling out Core, Life, thejazz and flogging off Planet Rock, leading to most of the vacant space which now exists on the national DAB multiplex. Potentially, their new owners, Global could take some capacity. However, in the midsts of extensive cost cutting they’re performing, rolling out the Heart network and cutting back office staff, it could prove hard to justify. Pulling out of the local DAB licenses in favour of a national platform would cause Ofcom to readvertise their local FM licenses, and although it would probably have a good chance of regaining them, it would be a risky strategy.

So, who else? Perhaps the big TV companies could diversify into radio as occurs in America. However, that’s unlikely to roll here either, particularly as channel 4 and sky have already pulled out of the planned second national multiplex; which lets face is not going to go ahead any time soon, particularly as the first multiplex is still half empty. Papers? No, they’re struggling to survive too.

Radio porn perhaps? “Radio X”; now that would be truly creative

So ITV has finally gone HD. Kinda. If you meet ALL OF the following conditions

- You happen to have freesat, one of the many types of multichannel TV in the UK.

- You happen to be watching one of the few times they actually simultcast a show in HD. There aren’t many.

- You happen to have the right postcode. Who ever though the postcode lottery would extend to TV?

- You bother to press the red button.

All in all, bit of a mess. You’d have thought that after the ITV Digital debacle, whereby ITV held back ITV1 from Sky Digital to support Ondigital; its ill-fated digital terrestrial service which suffered from buggy software and a lack of channels, that it might not rush to do the same with ITV HD. But alas, no, they just haven’t learned, and despite Sky HD and Virgin V+ offering hundreds of thousands of HD ready viewers eager to watch new HD channels, they launched it on freesat, beset with……can you guess? Yes, buggy software and a lack of channels. There isn’t even a single Freesat PVR on the market yet and the first one isn’t due until Xmas.

At least with ITV Digital, they owned the system and given the more limited number of channels that the system could carry, knew that ITV would also do disproportionately better if the platform succeeded vs sky or cable (fewer rivals channels equalling less competition equalling higher audience share for the ITV channels). With Freesat, they don’t even have that advantage. Any TV channel wanting to broadcast just has to pay for satellite transponder space (which they probably have since the channels on there generally already exist on Sky and the same feed goes through to Freesat boxes) and an EPG fee to show up on the Freesat system. So if the system takes off like Freeview did, then, unlike Freeview, lots of channels will line up to join and ITV will be in the same boat, a few channels amongst hundreds. Freesat have even stated that they expect to have 200 channels by 2009, and given the number of free to air channels which already exist on Sky, it doesn’t seem like an unrealistic target.

The selection available right now isn’t even that great. Freeview had a side benefit that as the capacity filled up, the costs of carriage soared to the point where only the biggest media players could afford to hold slots, leading them to launch higher quality channels which made the investment worthwhile. Freesat on the other hand doesn’t have a whole variety of channels, notably Channel 5 but also Virgin 1, Five US, Dave and so on. Whilst Freesat’s unique selling point remains a few episodes of Harley Street in HD it’s never going to compete.

This made me laugh:

possibly the most exciting web development from a UK company this century

What can this amazing innovation be? Why, its none other than flogging jewellery over an internet auction; oh yes! And what better time to kick off than in the middle of rising inflation, unemployment and the credit crunch, when other jewellery retailers are going tits up. More ‘on the rocks.tv’?

And it gets better!

Wow, really?

It will be possible to get jewellery for free, as there will be no reserve price or starting bid on rocks.tv. Think Sotheby’s and Christie’s online, but without the reserve!

Eager with anticipation, I visited the Sotherby’s site to get a feel for the experience. Judging by what I saw I take it rocks.tv will be flogging high class jewellery averaging around £5k a piece then. It’s not quite clear who’s behind the venture, but judging by the frequent references on their twitter page (yes, they’re down with the kids) it looks like Coloured Rocks are behind it. Couldn’t see any £5k jewellery on their website but I’m sure its just an oversight.

Update: apparently there is a genuine ontherocks.tv; lots of bearded men driving jeeps over rocks!

Another year, another discount deal struck by Setanta. Almost a year to the day since Virgin Media struck a deal with Setanta to provide most of their channnels to customers with all basic channels paying £19.50/month, now they’ve gone and struck a deal with BT Vision, the IPTV/freeview hybrid, giving the flagship Setanta Sports 1 to anyone on a £14/month package or more. Considering the basic channel costs £9.99/month on its own on BT Vision that’s quite a change. They’ve also struck a new deal for DTT customers, offering 3 months free (or effectively £5/month for free 3 months factoring in the connection charge). Somewhat surprisingly, they haven’t struck a deal with Top Up TV, particularly when you consider that some of Balderton, one of the main backers of Setanta also has an interest in the company.

Rather like the Virgin deal, in the short term the BT Vision tieup should suit both parties. BT Vision desperately needs more customers to avoid joining ITV Digital in the digital graveyard; it had 214,000 the last time it reported figures as of March 31 2008, up 94,000 from the previous quarter but from a very low base. Setanta needs more subscribers; its content costs are steadily rising with the renewal of the SPL deal and acquisition of international friendlies recently and customers at any price reduce the losses it is making. The more customers it has the more likely its backers will also be prepared to fund a bid next year for further premier league rights from 2010/11, likely to increase from the £392m paid last time.

The only problem is that these tie-ins bring in far less per customer than the standard subscribers, rumour on the Virgin deal was that Virgin paid around £2.50/month/subscriber; more lucrative in the early days when only a small proportion of their subscriber base are likely to subscribe seperately as they receive the revenue even for customers not watching, but in the long run? Assuming BT Vision is paying the same, and it doubles its subscribers that’s under £13m a year that Setanta will be getting from the deal, less than a tenth of what it currently pays from the premier league alone.

Is the setanta brand of ‘premium sport’ going to be tarnished if most of their viewers are just watching it within basic TV packages? The image isn’t helped either by the lack of a Setanta HD channel, when Sky has been broadcasting all its football in HD for sometime and even Eurosport has now got in on the act.

News that Play TV UK are about to launch their IPTV service. Curious as to their channel offering, I headed over to their site.

Play Sports will offer live streaming of all the greatest, global, sporting events

All? That’s funny because Sky Sports doesn’t seem to be there. Must be an oversight.

18 Doughty Street is Britain’s first internet-based political TV station producing hours of political content every week on a wide range of topics.

How you manage that given that it ceased broadcasting in December 2007?

All in all, looks like a pretty poor offering, with lots of lots of unknown, web only operations launching TV channels. Even Tiscali got a reasonable spread before launch. I give it a year.

Nice bit of viral marketing for the new series of Dexter on FX, you can create your own video, upload an image of the suspect and name your target here.

So, Virgin has started sending out letters to a few hundred file sharers who the BPI believes have been downloading illegal tracks. One such guy who received such a letter, Will McGree, seems rather aggrieved at the situation.

We’re baffled as to where they’ve got their information from.

Really? Someone’s who planning to complete a masters in computing doesn’t realise that the BPI might trace an IP address?

I was under the impression that I paid Virgin Media money to keep my internet connection protected and safe.

Oooh, what’s that sticker on your laptop, GPL free software. Anybody would think you were quite tech savvy and had at least a basic idea that people can leech your connection. Oh, but then there’s more, what’s this on your twitter page?

Am I in Starbucks drinking Starbucks coffee but using the McDonald’s free Wi-Fi? You bet your *ass* I am.

So you seem quite happy to steal other people’s connections, but hey when the balls on the other foot…..

And finally, it seems he plans to encrypt his traffic shortly, according to his blog.

In September, we’re building a home server in our flat. It’ll be a Tor node so that finally Virgin Media don’t need to worry themselves with what’s flowing through their routers. It’s just data. Like I paid for.

Anybody would think you had something to hide……

Update 11/07/08: “My updates are protected”; he’s now hidden his status, definitely hiding something!

Update 12/07/08: The guys over at football365 have done a Sterling job picking apart what a loser Will McGree is, but its almost too easy, a quick google search reveals a whole wealth of stuff:

915resolution was something MCNLive Cherbourg (two versions back) kept offering me upon loading KDE. (source)

Yeah, you know they kept offering me 915 too but I’m more a 1028 man myself.

Oh yeah, that’s Will’s girlfriend; what a stunning example of the female of the species. And just to comply with the attribution requirement, that’s from the ‘Laura and Will’s photostream‘ everybody.

Why give me a crappy 48kbps MONO(!) RealAudio file when I have plenty of bandwidth to download a high-quality Ogg Vorbis file. Heck, make it a torrent seed (source)

So you do use P2P downloading, but only for legal downloads, of course

Looks like he also went crying to Twitter over a fake account. Mummy, mummy, he took my lollipop………

Will has no friends (source)

Why doesn’t that surprise me?

I’ve often had moments like this where I wonder how wide a profit margin is.

Example: Subway – Two Can Dine For £5.99
- My 6” teriyaki – £3.10
- Laura’s Melt – £2.80
- Two cookies – £0.50 each (ish)
- Two large drinks – £1.29 ish each

So how in hell’s breakfast are they able to offer me all that for £5.99? (source)

I’d stop worrying if I were you, I suspect it’s the only time Laura ever gets something as big as a 6″ from you

So, several years on, Chris Tarrant is returning to radio, earning £1m a year on the GMG stations. Makes sense really, as he’ll still be able to continue with his TV work (which has had mixed success in recent times). He’s one of only a handful of DJ’s who actually have a real name for themselves. Most people know the music on stations, but how many people would know the names of more than a handful of DJ’s on their favourite station?

The real interesting development is the GMG isn’t paying jack shit for him, his salary is being paid by Nissan who will be sponsoring the show. Interesting development in a number of ways.

Firstly, what sort of knock-on effect will it have on the stations advertisers of competing products? I can’t imagine Honda adverts being allowed during a Nissan sponsored show. In that respect, it may actually hit revenues, although the guess is that GMG have factored this in and expect increased revenue for higher audiences to offset the loss of a couple of advertisers.

Secondly, will it boost the stations audience beyond the single show? Tarrant is able to set his own playlist, unlike the tighly programmed selections on most of the remaining shows. Can’t really see it; in this respect the station is just acting as an outlet for the talent, there would be nothing to stop him heading to Virgin name TBC or Planet Rock in a year’s time, and when he heads, the listeners will follow. And what if he slates Duffy’s new single (understandable), only for it to follow a couple of songs in on the next show, it hardly adds credibility to the station.

Thirdly, could it start to shift the balance of power away from the actual stations and towards the individual DJ’s? I can’t see this happening on a widescale basis; most of the time people tune to a station because they know what they’re getting; most people aren’t going to keep switching stations from show to show.

I imagine the show will have the ‘Take That’ effect. People who used to hear him on Capital many years ago will feel a sense of nostalgia and tune in. Still, interesting times…