Posts Tagged with ‘bbc’

Today, the British television network, BBC, launched its online television service (known as iPlayer), which will be competing with similar offerings that have already been available from Channel 4 and ITV. The service will not allow viewers to save programs, but instead will utilize a temporary-viewing period. Users will have a period of no longer than 30 days to view programming, after which the video content will be automatically deleted. Expect copy-protection solutions to be thrown into the mix too.
Initially, [...]

Malaysia isn’t the hottest spot on the Web. Naturally, that title is reserved for Silicon Valley. Nonetheless, the government of the Southeast Asian country is raising a fit over what it feels is a dangerous insurgency in the form of a blogger complex that is attacking the nation’s king and the religion of Islam.
And it’s threatening to use “tough anti-terrorism laws” to combat commentators who the governing party believes to be a threat security. Etcetera, etcetera.
Already, the ruling party has [...]

The members of Last.fm, on average, really like Last.fm. It’s a 20-million-strong network of music fans that spans the globe, and there’s no reason at all to think it’s going anywhere but up. Sure, it’s now owned by CBS, so it really can’t be seen an “indie” favorite (not in the musical sense of the term, but the corporate sense) anymore, but no matter. It’s still a fantastic piece of kit in its members' view - and ours as well.
Sony, [...]

The BBC recently announced their upcoming iPlayer, an on-demand video player that will allow users to watch BBC television broadcasts seven days after they are aired. iPlayer has been in development since 2003, and you'd think that with that kind of development cycle, they could have clued in to see that times were changing.
The problem? The iPlayer relies on Microsoft's DRM technology, which means if you aren't running a Microsoft operating system, you are out of luck. No Linux or [...]

In the news yesterday YouTube announced they plan to test new fingerprinting technology that will address the copyright issues that are causing them huge legal woes. This new software will identify unique attributes in video clips that may allow for the prevention of uploading copyrighted clips without permission.
YouTube executive Chris Macy told Reuters that the tool would be tested in about a month according to a story via the BBC. Breach of copyright has been a thorn in Google's and [...]

One of my favorite Web 2.0 initiatives has been the "One Laptop per Child" project. News today that Intel has developed its own version of an inexpensive laptop galvanized my opinion that big business would kill "Flipper" for a tuna sandwich.
Professor Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the OLPC initiative accused Intel of selling its own version in an attempt to drive the XO laptop out of markets. Intel's Chairman Craig Barrett responded to the allegation by claiming that Intel is only trying to [...]

Would you like to know how safe the Web is? Statistically speaking, it’s pretty darn clean. That doesn’t mean all is well, however. Far from it, in fact.
How do I know this? Google told me. Well, actually, Google told everyone.
The search giant spent a few extra clock cycles looking at some of the webpages it has catalogued thus far (4.5 million, for the study), and it seems that the majority have eluded the virtual baddies. 9 out of 10 [...]

One million hours of television and radio programming provided on-demand via the Web. That?s the BBC?s plan. The media colossus intends for an archive which will include many of its new and old recordings to be opened to the public if a trial to selected 20,000 UK-based individuals proves successful.
?Successful? can mean a lot of things, of course, but we presume they?re looking to see if such a catalogue is something even desired by the population (the trial is similar [...]

What does it mean when a venerated Web 2.0 concoction such as Wikipedia ventures goes offline? Nothing, really. But that’s what the organization begun by Jimmy Wales is doing. For a price.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which is the body behind Wikipedia (and similar projects under the same umbrella), stated that it would offer just short of 2,000 articles, stored on a single CD, for $13.99, which amounts to just a small portion of the entire span of articles that form the [...]