Blu-ray to win HD war?

Toshiba set to pull plug on HD-DVD

By Mariko Sanchanta in Tokyo and Paul Taylor in New York

Published: February 17 2008 19:18 | Last updated: February 17 2008 19:18

The two-year battle over which technology will become the industry standard for the next generation of high-definition DVDs looks set finally to end this week after Toshiba gave the strongest sign yet it would exit its HD-DVD business.

The move follows Friday’s announcement by Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, that it would no longer stock Toshiba’s HD-DVD discs and players and was instead committing itself exclusively to the rival Blu-ray format backed by Sony.

Warner Brothers, Hollywood’s largest player in the home video market, made a similar decision last month, putting strong pressure on Toshiba, which has been the driving force behind the HD-DVD format that is also backed by Microsoft.

Early on Sunday, Toshiba said “no decision has been made”, but added the company was “making various considerations about its business policy after Warner’s decision and the announcements by Best Buy and Wal-Mart”.

But the Japanese electronics and energy group is keen to stem its losses from its HD-DVD investment and people familiar with the situation say it is likely to pull out, particularly following Wal-Mart’s announcement.

Such a move would not surprise US analysts, most of whom viewed Warner Bros’ announcement early in January that it was abandoning HD-DVD in favour of Blu-ray as signalling the end for HD-DVD.

Nevertheless, HD-DVD’s fate looks as if it will ultimately be sealed by retailers rather than technology companies. As Andy Parsons, chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association US promotions committee, said at the weekend, “retailers have a tremendous impact on consumer preferences, and as the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart’s reach and leadership are unparalleled”.

The emergence of the Sony-backed Blu-ray as the definitive next-generation DVD format is expected to spur sales. Most consumers had been sitting on the sidelines over the past two years, unwilling to be stuck with an obsolete format while the battle raged.

Toshiba’s mooted decision is not expected to be met by opposition from members of its camp. Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD-DVD backers that would allow it to switch sides.

In a last-ditch effort to save the HD-DVD format, Toshiba last month slashed prices on its players by as much as $50, but sales remained sluggish. Last year, according to Home Media Research, Blu-ray outsold HD-DVD players by three to one in the US. In Europe, the ratio was 10 to one in Blu-ray’s favour and in Japan the ratio was 100 to one.

Wal-Mart, which has long reigned as the biggest seller of DVDs, said its decision to carry only Blu-ray discs and players was a response to customer preference. It follows similar moves by other large retailers, including Target, Best Buy, Netflix and Blockbuster.

Archos TV+ In UK

Archos TV+ launched in the UK

A European (OK, French) company reckons it has a product that beats Apple's

February 7, 2008 11:40 AM

Archos is taking on Apple with a Wi-Fi-enabled digital set-top box, the Archos TV+, which UK boss Tony Limrick unveiled yesterday in London. It starts as a simple PVR or DVR (Personal or Digital Video Recorder) that can record TV programmes. It also lets you stream files to your TV from your PC. Add the Opera browser (at extra cost) and you can surf the web on your TV screen, using the little Qwerty remote supplied. You can also sync your TV programmes with your Archos PMP (Portable Media Player) and take them away with you.Limrick describes it as "the missing link" between your TV and the net (no PC is required), and reckons Archos has succeeded where other companies (cough*Apple TV*cough) have tried and failed.

He's certainly undercutting Apple on price: in the UK, the Archos TV+ costs £179.99 for the 80GB version and £249.99 for 250GB. But you may also have to add £19.95 for the Opera browser. The MPEG2 and H.264 codecs are also extra-cost plug-ins. This probably isn't going to go down too well with buyers, but Limrick says that this way, users don't have to pay for them if they don't want them. (US prices are $249 and $349.)TV programmes are recorded in VGA format (640 x 480), and there's no HD support at the moment. Archos does support DRM-protected WMV and WMA audio and video files, so you can use most music libraries, except Apple DRM-protected iTunes.The TV+ also has a USB port so you can transfer photos from a PC or digital camera and show them on your TV screen.The TV+ is based on Linux, like the TiVo.There are, obviously, other things on the market.

The Microsoft Xbox 360 is another way to get PC content on a TV set, though it doesn't record TV programmes (unless you get them from an IPTV supplier such as BT, I think). You can roll your own media center with Linux and MythTV, and so on. But Archos could succeed by providing a small, smart-looking box that makes it simple, at a reasonable price.This whole market has been a bit of a flop so far. Are people simply not interested, or are they just waiting for the right product to come along at the right price? If so, has Archos nailed it?

Read me first Apple users are special: they're happy to pay for their software

Read me first Apple users are special: they're happy to pay for their software

Andrew Brown
The Guardian,


I had to help a friend buy a new computer the other day, which meant escorting her around the Apple store. Since she is on broadband and knows nothing about internet security, it was the obvious thing to do. It's perfectly possible to run Windows securely and reliably and I do so myself, but if you don't want to bother with security at all, a Mac is undoubtedly less trouble.
For one thing, it comes without any of the expensive and inefficient "security" programs that clutter up most mass-market PCs.

Whether it is in any other way better than a modern PC is a question with an unobvious answer. It's very hard to think of anything that is possible only on a Mac, and the idea that one interface is more intuitive than the other seems to me palpable nonsense. Both are reasonably consistent, and both rely on conventions that have to be learned.

But there is one difference that has me tempted to move over myself, and that is the existence of a real software market on the Mac. On Windows, this hardly exists. I know that sounds an outrageous statement, since there are hundreds of thousands of programs available for PCs. But almost all of these sell in tiny quantities: all the stuff you actually need to run your life on a Windows computer is either free or compulsory.

Web browsers are free, obviously. The same is true of most communications programs, whether messengers or email. The office software market consists almost entirely of Microsoft Office, which is either bundled or bought by your employer. If you are not using that, there is OpenOffice, which is free, and about which I've written previously (If this suite's such a success, why is it so buggy).

With the exception of some copy-protected music and graphics programs and some high-end programming tools, there's no more need to spend money on modern Windows software than there is on Linux; the cynic might say there was even less need, since I would pay happily for Linux software that was responsive to users' needs and not programmers'.
But Mac users do pay for the software they use. They even pay for their operating system upgrades. There is much less of a tradition of cost- bundling on Macs than on Windows, and the result has been that software is built to appeal to people spending their own money.
There are real alternatives to Microsoft Word, not just from Apple, such as (Mellel), a word processor for people who write books. There is an abundance of notetaking programs: this is also an area where there is a market on the PC, but it seems much less vigorous and innovative than on the Mac, partly because everything that grows sufficiently complex to be useful withers under the shadow of Outlook.

I know that Apple, just like Microsoft, has crushed utility programs by incorporating their functions into the operating system; but it has not been as strong, and so its malevolence has done less harm.

Perhaps the smaller size of the Mac marketplace explains its vigour and diversity. Most of the really interesting and useful programs in the world seem to have been produced by five people or fewer. There is no substitute for a programmer who talks with his customers directly, and they will only exist in a market where the customers are the users, and not the people running the users' employers' IT departments.
Beyond that, there is the imponderable factor of snobbery. Mac users so sincerely believe themselves superior to the rest of us that it's possible that this makes them pay more attention to style and finish.

Style isn't a superficial characteristic that can be changed like an overcoat. It is something much more like skin, organically connected to the deep structures within. And in the best programs, there is a sense that what you see is directly related to what the program does; and this seems to me more common among Mac programs than PC ones.
It is the kind of design that is so good it disappears that might be worth paying for.

Second Life - A Virtual World

http://secondlife.com/

Second Life, established in 2003, is a social netwoking universe in which people create a character representhing themselves and socialise in a virtual world. There are over 9.8 million accounts, and many people spend real-life money on buying in-game products and improvements.

Second Life is living without actually living. The 'game' allows people to live a life through their computer instead of in the real world. It can cause huge obessession problems as people play on it for many hours a day instead of developing a real social life, and can cause many issues for people. It is also quite an easy breeding ground for paedophilia, and one of its competitors Red Light Center makes it easy for paedophiles to contact young people sexually.

This site is social networking at its most extreme as people live a life that is not real. Sites such as MySpace represent real life, yet this site has no resemblence to it, and as such is a waste of time for anyone that uses it.

My Exam Paper - Facebook

From The Sunday Times

October 28, 2007

Advertisers leap into Facebook

Leading brands are realising that social networking sites mean serious business

Dominic Rushe, New York

ANY day soon, rumour has it, Apple, Coca-Cola, Condé Nast, General Motors, Nike and a host of other world-famous brand names will sign an advertising deal with the hottest company on the planet.

It’s likely to be one of the most talked-about ad deals of the year. The company they are jockeying to sign up with is attracting 200,000 new users a day. Last week it was valued at $15 billion (£7.3 billion), though it has yet to make a profit.

Facebook is a three-and-a-half year old “social network” site that offers people a way of communicating with their friends online. So far, some 50m people have signed up to it. The company says it expects to break even this year.

Last week, Microsoft beat Google to buy a small stake in the firm, valuing it at $15 billion — more than twice as much as British Airways, a company that made a profit of $602m last year.

Facebook is the latest in a series of ever-bigger deals for a new generation of so-called web 2.0 companies.

Once again, internet start-ups with lots of buzz — but next-to-no profits — are being snapped up for huge sums by the world’s big media and technology firms.

For others, including Microsoft, the prices are not irrational but a concrete sign of the value of online advertising.

In recent years, internet advertising has soared as advertisers have shifted more and more of their spending from television, newspapers and other traditional media to a host of websites.

Online advertising is now a $16.5 billion business in America, according to Jupiter Research. Shoppers spend 10% of their money online. Compared with mature advertising markets such as TV (worth $74 billion in America), online advertising spending remains small, but it is growing by about 14% a year, and by 2011 it will be worth $32.1 billion.

Only a small slice of this goes to “social network” sites like Facebook and its larger rival MySpace (owned by Sunday Times parent News Corporation).

This year, according to eMarketer, $900m will be spent advertising on social-networking sites in America and $335m elsewhere. The growth of these sites is phenomenal. Facebook believes with Microsoft’s help it can reach 300m users worldwide in the next few years.

“It’s anybody’s guess how big Facebook will get,” said John Delaney, an analyst with the Ovum consultancy. “But 300m doesn’t sound completely ridiculous.”

Other sites with similar features to Facebook and MySpace have failed to take off — the British site Friendsreunited and America’s Friendster have both been left behind. But the success of Facebook and MySpace shows “there is a market for people to interact on the net in a similar way to the way they interact in real life”, said Delaney.

Advertisers, too, are increasingly enamoured of the sites.

Carlton Cribb, the digital buying director at Zed Media, a London ad agency, said clients now see online sites as an intrinsic part of their advertising strategy.

“In the past couple of years there has been a major change from the clients’ perspective,” he said. “Online was kept very separate from the rest of the budget. Now online is another viable medium for reaching their audience — it’s part of the media mix.” A part of the mix that is growing swiftly.

Cribb said these were problems to which the sites and advertisers were now finding solutions in what are still early days for a rapidly changing medium.

When Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg started the site it offered simple web pages for college students to list information about themselves and send messages to friends. Increasingly the site and its rivals offer an array of services, from e-mail to online photo galleries, that have historically existed independently.

The aim is to make Facebook the first port of call for internet users in the way that many people now have Google as their home page.

It’s not a new strategy — AOL tried something similar and failed and Yahoo, which also courted Facebook, has a similar approach. But Facebook has the buzz and the momentum to more than rattle its rivals. As it adds new services, advertisers will be watching developments as closely as Facebook’s users, Google, MySpace and Yahoo.

Unlike the first internet boom, “big media” has in the main fought shy of paying huge prices for online firms. News Corp bought MySpace in 2005 for $649m and more than recouped its investment with an ad deal with Google worth $900m over three years.

For Microsoft the $240m investment is chump change. But it marks a significant evolution for the software giant as it increasingly moves its muscle online. Whether or not Facebook lives up to its $15 billion promise remains to be seen.

1.

(a) Name four companies listed in the passage that are looking to advertise with Facebook. [6]

(b) From the passage, state the expenditure on online advertising currently and prediction for 2011, and the investment into social-networking in 2008. [8]

(c) Explain what is meant in the passage by:

(i) ‘social network’ and [3]

(ii) ‘big media’. [3]

2.

(a) In what ways does the passage suggest the usage of social-networking? [5]

(b) Using your wider knowledge of new media technologies, discuss the importance of social-networking to young people today. [20]

Answer either question 3 or question 4.

You should make detailed references to examples from your case study material to support points made in your answer.

3. How important to companies is advertising on the Internet?

[45]

4. To what extent do new media technologies cause a computer culture for youngsters today? [45]

Easy.

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