Freeview HD services to launch next year

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/03/digitaltvradio.television

The article above was published on Thursday April 03 2008. It stated that media regulator Ofcom said that, Freeview viewers in some parts of the country will be able to watch high definition TV channels as early as next year.
This shows that for the future, the UK residents should expect a better quality picture.
New technology and a reorganisation of the way channels are allocated on digital terrestrial television spectrum will free up space for four Freeview HD TV services. One of them will be reserved for the BBC with the three others open to a competitive bidding process overseen by Ofcom among the commercial public service broadcasters, including ITV, Channel 4, Channel Five and Welsh language channel S4C.
This article shows that the technology is advancing quickly. It is allowing the UK residents a better quality of viewing. This is a very promising sign for the future as there are many more possible advancements which could be made.

Eight in 10 homes have digital TV

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/sep/20/digitaltvradio.television

This article above from September 2007 shows that the preparations are taking place all over the UK; the public are getting ready before the switchover to avoid later hassle and confusion. Almost 85% of UK homes now have digital television on their main set as Freeview continues to attract converts from analogue TV. As said by Ofcom, this is up 13 percentage points over the year, the strongest 12 months' growth to date.
"More than four in five UK households are now enjoying the benefits of digital television," said Ofcom's chief executive Ed Richards.
"It's extremely encouraging that we are continuing to see the market grow strongly with less than a month until Whitehaven becomes the first place to fully switch to digital television."

The technology – chosen technology

My chosen technology is the digital TV switchover. It’s the process in which the UK’s old television broadcast signal (known as “analogue”) is being switched off and replaced with a “digital” signal. Any TV set that’s not converted to digital when the switchover takes place will no longer receive any TV programmes. Instead of the traditional five UK channels (BBC One, BBC Two, ITV, Channel 4 and Five) – or only some of them. Every TV set wanted to keep watching in your home will need to be converted or upgraded to digital.

The technology – how it is marketed

The technology is marketed nationwide. The switchover is a massive operation that will effect all residents in the UK. This means it has to be marketed into every home in the UK and must get the attention of all the residents too. The companies use adverts (TV and radio), billboards, papers, magazines and any other ways to reach all residents.

The technology – companies providing and cost

The companies that will provide digital programming for the switchover are Tiscali, Smallworld, Freeview, Virgin Media, Sky, Wight Cable, Top up TV, Freesat from Sky and BT Vision. The costs vary greatly from company to company and depending on the amount of channels the customer wants. There are one of payments as well as monthly subscriptions. The prices vary from £20 to £250.

The technology – push/pull technology

The switchover is very much a push/pull technology. The manufactures are pushing the technology out into the nation, and the public are happily pulling in the technology. There are very few down sides to this technology, so there is not much resistance on either side.

The technology – new or old media

The digital swithover is very much moving on from old media into new media. It’s a chance to improve and modernise everyday technology. Technology is getting increasingly more safisticated, quicker and smaller in every area, this swithover is an example of this. It will benefit millions of people worldwide (UK is not the only digital switchover country!) and provide a luxury to all TV owners that people with this modern age technology are able to have.

The technology – who developed it

There is no one person responsible for this switchover as is simply the result of improved technology. The view has been taken that if the technology is there to be used, then we might as well make the most of it.

The institutions involved – increased profit

At the end of this switchover, there will be a massive profit for the companies providing the digital channels. Whether it’s a one of payment of £20 for freeview or a monthly subscription of £45 for Sky, there will be a hugely increased profit as it will be a necessity in all TV homes.

The institutions involved – marketing campaigns

The marketing campaigns for the switchover are increasing more and more as increasing areas of the country start the switch. The campaigns are very much used to show the massive rewards by the switchover for the customer, as well as simplicity involved in the switch. The campaigns are also used in order to explain the dates of the switch in different regions to give the important in formation to the public in order for them to prepare themselves.
As the switchover is such a large scale event, and it affects everyone, there is a huge amount of market campaigns. Seeing that the switchover is not in fall flow yet, the marketing will increase. The switchover has just begun so people are still finding out about it.

The institutions involved – audience demands / educate users

As this technology is affecting all people of all ages across the country, the organisers have to educate users as well as set up help lines for those finding it difficult. Help is given by all forms of media, such as TV, phone lines, internet etc.

The audience experience – how is it consumed

The digital programming can be received in many ways,
Ø through an ariel (either a digital box or digital TV),
Ø a satellite dish,
Ø a cable,
Ø telephone lines,
Ø an ariel and phone line.
It simply depends on the location of the consumer to decide what option to take, for example, some location are not able to sustain cable, so they would have to use a satelite dish or an ariel.

The audience experience – who consumes

The technology is consumed by all people living in the UK who want to watch TV. This is why it is such a massive operation because it effects millions of people. It is not just the Uk however, other countries are also carrying out the digital switchover, France are expecting to be finished by 2011.

The audience experience – advantages

This form of media is a huge market, with nearly every household containing at least one TV, with many containg more. As it efects such a large amount of people, there are many advantages from the switchover that all consumers will gain. The quality and choice will improve greatly. The choice, is the channels offered to the consumers, and due to the switchover this choice will expand massively. The quality is the quality of the picture received. Due to the change in technology, from analogue to digital, it allows a better picture to be received by TV owners. The interactivity will also be improved due to the switch, the interactive button (not used on traditional tv) will be available for the consumer to use. This gives them a wider choice in what to watch, for example, the different football games.

The audience experience – disadvantages

There are disadvantages though. Such as the cost will rise, there are chances of one off payments, however this is still extra payment that is only brought on by the switchover.

The issues / debates surrounding your technology – illegal activity

The new technology does not encourage any illegal activity, as it is only really increasing the amount of TV channels received. Due to the increase of channels, it does provide better advertising abilities and amount of TV shows.

The issues / debates surrounding your technology - jobs

If anything the new technology will increase the amount of jobs, however there is little change in that area. That is because there is no change in channels or companies; all the channels already exist, there just being distributed to all TV’s. That is the same for the companies such as Sky and Virgin Media, they already exist, they are just being offered to all TV owners.

The issues / debates surrounding your technology - new media technology

The new technology has not created a new form of media; it has simply modernized it and improved the form. The technology has expanded the form of the media and made it more available. This has now made this media form a more reliable and accessible form of media. The increased channels and interactive option allows more advertising and marketing to go in this form of media.

The Future - what will happen

The future is variable for this technology. As technology is always improving the digital signal will be replaced one day. However there are other variables effecting the future. For example, there maybe portable TV’s, in mobile phones or something similar, the distribution maybe very different in years to come. However, the technology will always improve, so I would expect more channels made available in the future, with more HD available channels.

How has digital technology changed the film industry?

Production - Digital technology has changed the way films are shot, mainly with the use of special effects. The illusions used in the film, television, and entertainment industries to simulate the imagined events in a story. Another technology is CGI ‘Computer Generated Imagery. CGI is the application of computer graphics to special effects. CGI is used for visual effects. As this makes the scenes more controllable, for example, instead of using thousands of extras in a scene, it would be simpler and easier to control using CGI.

Distribution - There are many new technologies that now effect the distribution of films. People can now view films on portable devices anywhere in the world. Films can be uploaded onto small devices and watched at the user’s discretion. The use of internet has now made it easier to view films, both legally and illegally. The public can pay for films and download them or have them delivered. There is also the opportunity to download pirate copies illegally, free of cost. The cinema is still a major market, it is the most popular way o see a new film, prices are rising, but the public is still choosing to use the cinema.

Exhibition - Digital technologies have changed the exhibition and popularity of film, especially special effects. Special effects have created a new motive for audiences to go and view films because of their special effects and extensive use of CGI. For example, King Kong was a popular film because of the publicised special effects and how the film revolved around it. Digital technology has also helped exhibition of the film industry because it has allowed film producers and directors to make bigger and better films with more scenes that create visceral pleasure for the audience.

The State of the Fourth Estate

What is 'the Fourth Estate'?
The fourth estate is the press; it was the most important estate. It acted as a check on abuses of power by the other three estates, by holding them accountable to the electorate and providing information to ensure democracy is allowed to operate efficiently.
Is new media technology responsible for the decline in newspapers?
Yes it is, with new media technology, there are easier ways and cheaper ways to read the papers and the information they give. Such as the internet, people can go onto the internet form anywhere and read papers online, which is free of charge. As well as 24 hour news TV, which constantly.
What does it mean "maybe the internet is already the cyberspace of the fourth estate"?
It is said the internet is now the main power in media technology, providing us with whatever we want whenever we want it. This means that although the internet has caused the decline in newspapers by providing faster, cheaper access (anywhere in the world) to stories developing around the world, the original purpose of the fourth estate can still be carried out by these new media technologies.

Evaluation of the course so far

I am very happy with my final coursework grade, as this was what I was originally hoping for. My strengths at this time of the year are more with the designing and ideas side of media. (i.e. the coursework). I feel that I need more practice in analysing the video scenes, as I feel I do not use enough detail or write enough for the analysis. This will need to be improved by the final exam.

O2 wins Apple iPhone deal - at a hefty price

The UK's four main networks are O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone. All of them, at one stage, believed they had an exclusive deal for the British market
Mobile operator O2 is preparing to unveil Apple's much anticipated iPhone in the UK tomorrow. But serious questions are being raised in the City about how much ground it has had to give away to Apple in order to clinch the deal.
The UK's largest mobile operator came from behind at the last minute to seal an agreement with Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, to market the iPhone in the UK, but one other operator described the deal as "madly money-losing".
O2 is understood to have agreed a margin on the retail price - to be confirmed tomorrow - but will return to Apple as much as 40% of any revenues it makes from customers' use of the device.
Out of O2's share also comes a commission and further revenue share with Carphone Warehouse, which is understood to have secured the right to be the sole independent retailer of the device on behalf of O2.
Carphone appears to have been drafted in because of Apple's fears that O2 did not have a big enough presence in the UK even with its sizeable store portfolio which was enlarged by last year's acquisition of The Link stores.
The rush to secure an exclusive iPhone deal has also been called into question by the arrival of the iPod Touch device, which does everything the iPhone does except make phone calls. This was not expected by any of the operators involved in negotiations with Apple over the phone.
The current generation iPhone cannot receive music from the iTunes store over the air and is expected to appeal mostly to existing iPod users who want to upgrade their device and have been "wowed" by the touch screen on the iPhone. The iPod Touch, however, has that touch screen and twice the capacity of the iPhone. It can also connect to the internet using short-range Wi-Fi technology.

Copying music legally in the digital age

Owners of digital music players will be acting lawfully when they transfer music from their computer to a digital player or copy a CD for their own use, under proposed amendments to bring copyright law into the digital age.
· Consumers, who have been technically breaking the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 by copying tracks from CDs to their PC or digital player, or making an extra copy to play in the car, will now be able to do so for private use. Record labels accept that consumers should not be punished for shifting music from one format to another.
· The minister for intellectual property, Lord Triesman, said: "In an increasingly digital world we need to be sure that our copyright system keeps up with the times and works effectively. This consultation explores where the boundaries lie between strong protection for rights-holders and appropriate levels of access for users." Last year's Gowers review of intellectual property recommended the law be relaxed to reflect the march of technology, but also suggested that punishments for large scale piracy be toughened.
· The proposals suggest a new exemption for parodies of copyrighted works, while changes for libraries would allow for the copying of broadcasts for preservation purposes. Consumers would not be allowed to sell or give away the original once they had copied it.
· The National Consumer Council's director of policy, Jill Johnstone, said the current situation was "confusing for consumers and it brings the law into disrepute". She said the council supported the changes, but said they needed to be easily understood by consumers. Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the music industry trade body the BPI, said: "We look forward to working with government throughout the consultation; the key thing for us is that any changes to the law achieve the stated aim of clarifying the law for consumers, while not doing harm to rights-holders."
· British Music Rights, which represents composers and songwriters, said any changes to the law must be "tightly drawn". Legal experts said it made sense to tidy up a law that had been proved impractical and unworkable, but said it could have harmful consequences for a record industry that has been brought to its knees by digital piracy in recent years.

Digital Technology

Digital describes electronic technology that generates, stores, and processes data in terms of two states: positive and non-positive. Positive is expressed or represented by the number 1 and non-positive by the number 0. So data is transmitted or stored with digital technology is expressed as a string of 0's and 1's. Each of these state digits is referred to as a bit (and a string of bits that a computer can address individually as a group is a byte).
For example, a typical CD audio track is sampled at 44.1 KHz (44,100 samples per second) with a bit depth of 16 bits. This provides a high-quality estimation of an analog audio signal that sounds realistic the human ear. However, a higher-quality audio format, such as a DVD-Audio disc, may be sampled at 96 KHz and have a bit depth of 24 bits. The same song played on both discs will sound more smooth and dynamic on the DVD-Audio disc.
Prior to digital technology, electronic transmission was limited to analogue technology, which conveys data as electronic signals of varying frequency or amplitude that are added to carrier waves of a given frequency. Broadcast and phone transmission has conventionally used analog technology.
Digital technology is primarily used with new physical communications media, such as satellite and fibre optic transmission. A modem is used to convert the digital information in your computer to analog signals for your phone line and to convert analog phone signals to digital information for your computer.

All this online sharing has to stop

· International Federation of Phonographic Industries published its digital music report for 2008, which boldly said that "the spread of unlicensed music on ISP networks is choking revenues to record companies and investment in artists, despite a healthy increase in digital sales in 2007, up approximately 40% on the previous year". (If you're wondering, those sales were $2.9bn (£1.45bn) for the year, including ringtones.)
· IFPI's solution is to sort it out at the internet service provider level. "ISP cooperation, via systematic disconnection of infringers and the use of filtering technologies, is the most effective way copyright theft can be controlled. Independent estimates say up to 80 per cent of ISP traffic comprises distribution of copyright-infringing files."
Article sharing:
· People now copy-and-paste entire articles from online newspapers to blog sites or to their own computer and they don't pay a thing. Then they read them or "share" them with other people.
· Pornography used to make a comfortable living for many of the top-shelf magazines. But now there are loads of internet sites where you can get free amateur porn - exactly the same sort of stuff that people used to pay for!

· So before the IFPI gets ISPs to start inspecting the packets passing through their routers for music, they'd better sort it out first so that ISPs can see and stop it when someone is copying newspaper articles, or pornographic content, or reading suspiciously helpful newsgroups, or downloading a ROM sequence for a now-outdated console. Then we'll be ready to listen to the music industry.

Task 2 - What is the future for online technology?

1. Who is Chris De Wolfe and what does he say is the future for social networking? What impact will portable hardware have on this area of technology?

Chris De Wolfe is the CEO, co-founder of MySpace. He believes social networks have become a staple in the internet landscape as the social networking phenomenon allowed people to "put their lives online". We expect aspects of all socially-based sites to become increasingly portable. In terms of mobile, we expect to have relationships with every carrier and device-maker in the world and we expect that half of our future traffic will come from non-PC users.
Social activity is happening everywhere and we expect applications and features to be more fluid, based on the online population that want content where they want it, when they want it, and how they want it. Social activity should be portable and we expect the industry will continue to move in that direction.

2. Who is Chad Hurley and what does he say is his company's goal? Is he a positive or negative technological determinist?

Chad Hurley is the CEO, co-founder of YouTube. His companies goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate with YouTube by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call. In the next five years, users will be at the centre of their video experience, you will have more access to more information, and the world will be a smaller place. Chad Hurley is very positive about the technological future. He believes in five years, video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication and users will be at the centre of their video experience, you will have more access to more information, and the world will be a smaller place. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. People will have the opportunity to record and share video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.

3. What does Maurice Levy say is the challenge for advertisers and what is 'liquid media' compared to 'linear media'?

Maurice Levy believes the challenge for advertisers will be online advertising. Advertising will depend more than ever on the one element which has always been at the heart of impact advertising, both analogue and digital: creativity. The explosion of media channels means this is a glorious time to think and act creatively. People are no longer willing to put up with interruptions for a commercial break during their entertainment experience, and so we have to find incredibly creative solutions to interact with them and engage them in genuine and honest ways.
Linear media is fast giving way to liquid media, where you can move seamlessly in and out of different settings.

4. What parallels does Norvig draw between Edison inventing electricity and the development of online technology in terms of searching for information?

Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, said today, nobody says "I need to connect to a megawatt power station" - instead we assume that electricity will be available on demand in almost every room of every building we visit. Edison could see that this would be useful, but could not foresee the range of appliances, from food processors to mp3 players, that this availability would enable. So too will information flow freely to us in the future, and be transformed by as-yet-unforeseen information appliances.

5. What are the issues for the developing world? How is this evidence of a 'digital divide'? (Socio-economic divides due to access to technology)

Consumer broadband services via DSL are becoming available in an increasing number of countries; however, service costs depend greatly on the pervasiveness and reliability of local infrastructure. Wireless solutions will continue to evolve as the dominant service for "last kilometer" access due to the lack of local infrastructure.

Key terms

Digitality:
New way of encoding information in a series of 0’s and 1’s. How a computer works, electrical pulse on / off. Huge amount of info delt with when in this code

Interactivity:
New ways of streaming info, compressed. So can go through the air, for satellite. Through ‘isdn’ cable, broadband. Telephone cables and cable cable system. The way its compressed means more width is given. Before only able to send one pulse down one wire. Now multiple strands of info can be sent via one feed.
Can interact with it, feed that goes both ways.

Hypertextuality:
Organisation in text. No longer linear (ABC). Can access it anyway you like (jump from A to C). Able to jump from one text to another.

Dispersal:
Sharing size of market. Produces target users.

Vertuality:
Iconography, how it’s read. Real representation.

Convergence:
New technologies are converging. For example, the mobile phone can access the web, and the mp3 players can store and view photos. The size to data comparison is improving. Things are getting smaller but holding more data.

Other areas:
Audience:
How do audience use it? Why do they use it? Who use it?

Regulation and control:
Who owns the product? How is it controlled, and used.