A government review looking into how convergence will affect the media industry has just finished accepting submissions on what it should investigate, and unsurprisingly the existing free-to-air networks are pushing for a reduction in their licence fees, given the range of competition they now face. But is the problem as bad as the networks make out?
iiNet has added a second bundle to its FetchTV TV-over-the-Internet offering. It’s only half the price of the original FetchTV package and doesn’t require an ADSL2 connection, but you miss out on monthly access to 30 free movies and the “on command” library of watch-on-demand shows..
Foxtel today launched its Foxtel on Xbox 360 service, which lets you access the pay TV channel via an Xbox 360 console without needing a set-top box. While the basic $20 a month price might sound appealing compared to full-blown pay TV, there’s a big risk involved, as Foxtel doesn’t have any unmetered partnerships with ISPs.
If you like watching music videos online, but the poor quality of YouTube makes you sad, you may want to check out newly launched site Movideo. They’re advertising “near DVD” quality (PC Authority’s writeup said you can get full-screen full-screen 16:9 playback up to 720×405 and audio bitrates up to 192K) putting it below HD quality but a fair whack better than YouTube.
You’ll see from the screenshot under the cut that they’ve got links at the bottom of the screen if you want to buy a download of the song from Telstra, or a hard copy version through J B Hi-Fi (or ringtones, although we don’t encourage that). They do show ads in a separate screen, but not before each song – looks like you’ll get an ad for every three songs or so.
Yesterday the ABC announced a swag of new digital services including online TV channels and the addition of digital downloads to the ABC store – but unfortunately it has confirmed that ABC Shop video downloads will have DRM, and they’ll be confined to the Windows Media Format.While its downloadable audio books and music will be in Mp3 format, with no DRM attached, a PR person for the ABC has confirmed it’s a different story for the ABC Shop’s video downloads. Video will be in Windows Media format, playable either through the ABC’s Media Player or in normal versions of Windows Media Player.Video will also have DRM, she confirmed:
"The DRM license will vary according to what the customer purchases but for launch we are 'renting' download titles for a period of 7 days after which they will not be playable."<br /><br />This is disappointing news – surely our national broadcaster should be aiming for accessibility, so why lock their downloads to Windows users only? Sorry Mac and Linux users, no love for you! And as for DRM – it might be understandable if the ABC had to use DRM as part of licensing agreements with content producers, but if the it is using DRM on content it owns, that is a real shame.
<br />Our national broadcaster the ABC has announced four new digital services today including an IPTV station called “ABC Playback” which will allow viewers to stream shows that were broadcast by the ABC in the previous week. It will also launch paid downloads from the ABC shop on 18 March.
The online service is in beta at the moment, showing three channels – ABC Catch-up, which will show a mix of popular and specialist shows which had been screened during the previous week on ABC1 or ABC2. ABC Real will show natural history programs and general documentaries, while there will also be an ABC Shop channel. An ABC news channel is also on the cards one the service goes live.
If you have an ADSL2+ broadband connection you can apply to join the beta here.
The ABC shop is also introducing a paid download service which will offer DVD, CD and download products for rent or purchase. These are accessed by an ABC Commercial integrated media player and download manager. It wasn’t clear what format the downloads come in, if they’re tied to any particular player or if they use DRM – hopefully we’ll have more information from the ABC on that soon.
Livestation is a free TV player application which lets you watch live news (or sport) from anywhere in the world. It’s based on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. You can sign up for the technical trial on their website – I just got accepted into the beta myself.Available channels include French and English language news channels including Al Jazeera, BBC News 24 and BBC World, as well as a couple of BBC radio stations.It requires XP SP2 or Vista and IE 6 or later to play – although they say there’s a Mac version on the way. It also requires a broadband network of at least 640 kbps – and, as with any streaming video, you’ll want to keep an eye on your download limits.
