Thoughts from the Shelf

As regular readers of The Shelf will know, we are firm supporters of the Playstaion 3 over the Xbox and Blu-ray over HD DVD for a variety of reasons, of which Sony sponsorship is not one of them, having access to the latest gadgets before they hit the market would have its benefits.

However, recent rumours have started to concern us here, and although they are unfounded according to Sony there has been increasing talk of the PS3 manufacturer taking steps to cut down on the second hand games trade that has been o popular retail model for high street stores such as game.

The plans that have led to an explosion of opinion in forums, blogs and journals online include the insertion of code on game discs that binds it to the machine it is first played on, thus eradicating the second hand sales market overnight.

“The technology would allow an authentication code to be read and then rendered unreadable; making the software unplayable on any machine but the one which first read it.”

The supporting argument here is that second hand game revenue is not shared with the manufacturer of the original game. Although they have clearly already been paid once for the game title, the argument is that often resold games use server resources in the form of tech support. A significant number of people calling up saying “I don’t have my serial number” are quite likely to be from second hand sales and this cost manufactures money.

I personally believe that this is a bit far fetched, when you pay near £50 for a title are you not paying for technical support for the games life – whether it was you who paid that is by the by – the fee for this support has been received.

The other point is that second hand game stores will often promote second hand titles over new ones, and as companies do receive revenue from second hand titles they are loosing revenue. As such manufactures would like to see an official refurbished games policy where both the shop and game manufacturer gets paid.

I see a problem in this. Games manufactures have already been paid once for a title and as such the most successful games are those that sell the greatest volume, and in reality this is a fair assessment. Would implementing the aforementioned policy simply encourage game making to aggressively advertise mediocre games?

After initial sales disappointment in the product would be encouraged so that the game title is sold onto the next person, with the manufactures taking a slice of the re-sale profit. We would the be left with manufactures measuring the success of games by the amount the game is circulated second hand, not by initial sales encouraging lower quality games to be released.

From a user perspective I think this would severely restrict the offering of any console implementing this technology, not to mention an incredibly bad business idea. As a result

1. Users could not sell a game after you’ve played it
2. Users could not buy or play any second-hand games

So what happens when I’ve bought round to a mate’s house to play, even if it’s to encourage him to get a copy so we can play online? I can’t bottom line.

Secondly if you invest in a bad game you are stuck with it, which would mean make people more reluctant to buy game titles.

Thirdly all games that a consumer has invested in throughout the years (for instance PS1 and PS2 console games) would be unplayable on the new PS3 with this technology.

Lastly I don’t know what would happen if like many first generation consoles they needed replacing under the manufacturers warranty. The new console would make the games bought to date redundant, meaning a customer has a lot of expensive drink coasters on their hands.

A quote from Sony has said

“I would like to clarify that this is false speculation and that PlayStation 3 software will not be copy protected to a single machine but will be playable on any PlayStation 3 console. “

But there is often no smoke without fire. Could it be such plans were in the pipeline only to be shelved because of the consumer reaction? Either that or a very clever marketing trick from Microsoft.

Mobile phone operator T-Mobile has recently announced plans with internet search provider Yahoo to place adverts onto its Web’n’walk mobile internet service, with the first adverts expected to be served before the third quarter of the year.

Mobile internet advertising has grown rapidly in recent years and Yahoo has been taking aggressive steps to sell and manage adverts, possibly making amends for the setbacks seen in its core web search and advertising business against competitors such as Google.

Yahoo also secured a similar deal with Vodafone in November 2006, and this deal with T-Mobile secure two of the big four networks in the UK.

The Web’n’walk service from T-Mobile allows users to have unlimited browsing and email facilities on their mobile handsets, with a contracted minutes and text allowance.

What Yahoo intends to do as part of the agreement is implement banner advertising through the internet onto Web’n’walk mobile handsets. The adverts served as part of the agreement will be exclusively sold and served by Yahoo.

The agreement is part of Yahoos plans to bring the ‘rich web experience’ it provides online, to the mobile handset. Other initiatives for enhancing web content on wireless devices include a mobile widget program aimed at bringing in more content and Web applications from third parties.

Yahoo is hoping by adding mobile adverts to its offerings it will be able to secure a larger stake of the whole internet based advertising market.

“Advertisers are fast recognising the value of mobile advertising as a core part of their digital campaigns.” - Yahoo’s Geraldine Wilson

Mobile deals are not restricted to advertising either for Yahoo, and dubbed the ‘portal king’ Yahoo has also signed agreements with wireless carriers in Europe, South America and Asia to make its OneSearch the default home page for subscribers who surf using a handset.

Yahoo does not currently have exclusive advertising or content partnerships with any wireless carrier in the United States, but the company has been working actively with all major providers to stake a claim in the US market.

Virgin Galactic has released final designs of the launch system that is to be used in its commercial venture to put fare paying passengers into space. When the project is completed in 2010 passengers will be able to experience up to six minutes of weightlessness for a cost of around £100,000.

Unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History, the model of SpaceShipTwo is the vehicle that will take passengers 62 miles above the earth, with test flights already scheduled for later this year.

The main aim of designers in test flights is to ensure the safety of the system after three people were killed when a tank of nitrous oxide exploded in a test of SpaceShipTwo’s propellant system.

Will Whitehorn, president of Branson’s space-tourism company, Virgin Galactic, said “construction on the White Knight Two is more than 70 percent complete.”

When completed SpaceShipTwo will be carried by its carrier WhiteKnightTwo, where it will be launched mid-flight carrying six passengers and two crew. The craft will drop from the twin cabin high altitude jet which can also double as a space tourist training craft.

WhiteKnightTwo itself has a wingspan of 140ft and is built to handle unmanned rockets, and is capable of launching small payloads such as satellites into orbit. The SpaceShipTwo itself is based upon the X-Prize winning SpacShipOne concept, a rocket ship that was launched in flight before blasting skywards.

“I think it’s very important that we make a genuine commercial success of this project, if we do, I believe we’ll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology” Richard Branson said on his latest commercial venture

So far Virgin Galactic has already taken 200 prospective bookings from 30 countries accounting for millions of dollars already being on the books.

Virgin Galactic is just one of several companies aiming to offer space trips in the near future. Competitors include the entrepreneur of Amazon.com Jeff Bezos who has his own scheme, as does the Paypal founder, Elon Musk. Even Europe’s EADS Astrium, the company that coordinates the manufacture of the Ariane 5 rocket, is developing a commercial suborbital ship.

Last week on The Shelf we posted about the HD DVD and Blu-ray format, and how the format backed by Sony has now cemented deals ensuring 70% of Hollywood productions are released in Blu-ray. But for Blu-ray consumer’s trouble could be in store before the war is even declared over.

Owners of Blu-ray players have found that for there troubles of supporting the format and purchasing the next generation DVD player early on, they could be frozen out of future developments in the technology because the players are not upgradeable.

The Blu-ray format has recently rolled out a series of new developments, including a picture in picture feature, but the majority of players that have been sold to date do not have the necessary hardware to offer such features.

Some of the discs that are currently being released in the format are coming with notices that some users made have to upgrade the software in their machine, adding confusion to an already divided market place.

The issues raised by the development of new features have come about as the Sony format tries to compete with the interactivity of HD DVD, the one specialised area the format has failed to convince in.

As a result of these unplanned developments manufacturing specifications do not support the new features, all machines built prior to November 2007 are billed as profile 1.0, where as the new features require a profile 1.1 machine. In 2008 profile 2.0 will also be released called BD Live, which will support internet downloads of related content.

The only Blu-ray player which can upgraded to use all the features is Sony’s PlayStation 3, because it comes with the right hardware built-in and online access.

I for one am pleased to see the increase of free on demand services that are being offered online as part of terrestrial TV’s catch up to digital services. With services such as sky plus losing there appeal thanks to these freely accessible achieves, I find myself looking more toward buying a new PC compatible flat screen TV than a 12 month sky plus package. In all honesty I would mainly use such a facility to record programmes produced by the BBC and Channel Four and there digital counterparts, and with all this content now available online for free I ask myself what’s the point?

I even got to the stage where I almost invested in BT’s offering of BT vision, at £30 for a set top box which recorded preset programmes I thought it was a good deal. This until I realised I need a new 12 month BT broadband contract, and as I have 6 months left I refuse to pay the “otherwise £199” fee.

For these reasons I was quite pleased when I read that over 3.5 million programmes have now been watched by more than a million people on BBC iPlayer – the catch up online service launched by the BBC.

According to an article on the BBC, on average over 250,000 programmes were either streamed or downloaded each day following its launch the day after Christmas day, and nearly half of all programmes streamed or downloaded were otherwise placed outside the top 50 most popular shows.

I took part in the trial for this service in the summer of 2007 and thought it was a fantastic service, a great chance to watch quality programming free online. I have not been so happy to pay my license fee for a long time, and if it supports more projects like this then I am even more willing to pay it.

Sky, Channel 4 and ITV, have also launched rival online video services in the last 12 months, and on the back of the BBC iPlayer I am currently foraging around in Channel 4’s 4OD service which also looks good.

This week Blu-ray technology took a major step towards winning the format war when Warner Bros. announced that it will start to exclusively release its products on Blu-ray disks from June 1st this year.

Coupled with the announcement of exclusive backing from one of Holloywood’s major studios, a further dent was put in rival format HD DVD’s plans to become the industry standard format when both Paramont and Dreamworks studios altered their existing contracts with HD DVD makers to allow them to terminate their partnership if rival Warner Bros. supported Blu-ray.

After Microsoft and Intel gave their backing to HD DVD, and a host of European studios making the format their preferred choice, HD DVD had a larger catalogue of films and looked to be the favourite to come out as the dominant format. Since then however Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and now Warner have already fixed their choice on Blu-ray, bringing 70% of Holloywood productions to Blu-ray discs.

About 60 percent of Warner’s sales of U.S. high-definition discs were Blu-ray titles and the other 40 percent were HD DVS, said Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group.

Outside the U.S., the divide was far wider, with Warner’s Blu-ray discs outselling titles in HD DVD in Britain and Japan, among other markets, Tsujihara said.

Warner Bros., owned by Time Warner Inc., was the only remaining studio releasing high-definition DVDs in both formats.

“The window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could be missed if format confusion continues to linger,” Warner Bros. chairman and Chief Executive Barry Meyer said in a statement.

In yet another blow to HD DVD, Microsoft has also retracted the exclusivity of to plans to make an HD DVD add on for its Xbox consoles by considering including Blu-ray technology within the consoles themselves. The rival Sony’s PlayStation 3 console already uses the Blu-ray technology.

Concluding The Shelf’s five part series featuring technology that could make it big it 2008 The Shelf examines mobile VOIP.

VoIP is a Voice Over Internet Protocol service that enables users to make voice calls across the internet. VoIP involves sending voice information in digital form in discrete packets rather than by using the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The major advantage of VoIP is that by using the internet telephony users can avoid the charges existing telephone networks already have in place.

In addition to IP, VoIP uses the real-time protocol (RTP) to help ensure that packets get delivered in a timely way.

VoIP has already taken of in a huge way with the help of increasing numbers of domestic broadband connections, and users are already seeing the savings VoIP can provide, especially with international calling. Big names like BT are now even incorporating VoIP calling into their broadband and call packages.

With savings already being made in the home through VoIP, challenging existing domestic telephone networks, it is only a matter of time until VoIP services trickle into mobile phone networks too. Thanks to the increasing number of handsets fitted with 3G this look a certain development in 2008.

All that is technically required for mobile VoIP is a 3G speed mobile data service, a technology is readily available in handsets currently on the market. The next stumbling block is preventing mobile networks from prohibiting VoIP mobile communication, after all they want to protect their revenue stream. The only additional hold up for mobile VoIP after this is the requirement for a soft client on the mobile handset that a customer wishes to use. Skype is one example, and recently teamed up with 3 to release the first VoIP handset.

The catch here is the VoIP calls still have to travel over a mobile network, (unless made through wireless hot-spots or the like) so whether this remains true VoIP is a question the pessimists among us may like to ask. Truephone is a good example here.

Our penultimate technology in The Shelf’s predictions list, tipped to make it big in 2008, is a wireless technology that is aimed at providing high speed broadband over vast distances.

Already big in the US with Spirit and with the backing of Intel, WIMAX is also being trialled in countries including Nigeria, but is yet to take off in Europe and 2008 could be the year that situation changes.

Standing for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, the WIMAX name was created from the WIMAX Forum which was created in 2001.

In Milton Keynes the first commercial WIMAX service has just been launched with the aim of making the city the first WIMAX -powered wireless internet city.

The WIMAX project was first trialled in the city in 2006, and unlike wi-fi technology, WIMAX offers multi-megabit speeds over areas many kilometres in size instead of a few meters.

The two driving forces of internet modems are broadband, and wireless. WIMAX aims to combine the two by delivering high speed broadband internet access over a wireless connection. Because of its ability to be used over long distances, it is an effective “last mile” solution for delivering broadband to the home, and for creating wireless “hot spots” in places like airports, college campuses, and small communities.

WIMAX is based on the IEEE 802.16 Air Interface Standard, delivering point-to-multipoint architecture, making it an ideal technology to deliver broadband to locations that would traditionally be to difficult or costly to provide for with cables or wi-fi.

‘The so-called “last mile” of broadband is the most expensive and most difficult for broadband providers, and WiMax provides an easy solution.’ - wisegeek

The technology requires a tower much like cell phones and instead of delivering a tr4aditional ISP connection dividing the bandwidth between customers, WIMAX uses microwaves to establish each individual connection.

WIMAX provides a greater range and more bandwidth than wi-fi and so will become an increasingly big player in providing end user broadband connection as investment is finally being made in the infrastructure of the technology in the UK.

The next product featured on The Shelf as part of a five part series for technologies that will make it big in 2008 is internet TV.

In the past home internet speeds have hampered internet TV, as connections have not been fast enough to deliver a reliable service.

This trend is however beginning to change, with half of all UK homes now having a broadband with an average speed of 4 megabits a second. These internet speeds are also increasing, and in 2008 ADSL2+ comes online, offering internet connection speeds of up to 24 megabits a second.

Because of the developments in broadband speed we are also seeing more and more internet protocol television services, and it is not just the big players like BT vision and Virgin Media who are gunning for this market, plenty of smaller operators are also offering a range of services.

Mobile phone operator O2 has launched a successful service in the Czech Republic, and plans to launch in the UK in 2008. Orange is also tipped to enter the market soon too.

iplayer was launched in Beta in 2007 as part of the BBC’s offering, a service that allows people to catch up on the corporation’s output over the web. In November a partnership was also drawn up with ITV and Channel 4 to launch a joint on-demand service.

In terms of domestic broadband sign ups Tiscali recently stated it is signing up broadband customers at a rate of 250 a day, showing the desire UK customers have to get broadband connections in the home.

The next technology that The Shelf will feature as part of our array for technologies that will have an impact in 2008 are Ultra-Mobile PC devices or UMPCs.

There are many devices that have tried to fill the void between PDA and laptop but as yet none have become hugely popular. Having seen a range of devices attempt to break into this market since 2006, improving battery life and lowering costs are playing in favour of UMPCs, two things that have previously stiffled their growth. 2008 could therefore finally be their year this technology begins to really take of.

Coming to mass market in late 2007 we saw a new generation of devices attempt to enter this market, of which the Asus EEE was the most promising costing around £200. The Asus has been tipped by its Taiwanese manufacturers to sell over five million units in 2008.

Run on Linux open source software, this low cost laptop weighs less than a kilogram at 0.92kg, and is smaller than a hardback book at 7″. To save weigh the Asus EEE has no hard drive and instead opts for a 4GB flash memory drive, highlighting the trend for, although much smaller capacity, much lighter data storage devices.

Flash memory drives have been gradually increasing in power, and Samsung recently demonstrated chips that could be used to make 128GB memory cards.

As a result of advancements such as this, flash drive technology is now starting to challenge hard drives as the default storage choice for laptops being more lightweight and portable than their counterparts.

On the back of developments in storage drives Apple are also rumoured to be launching ultra thin Macbooks using flash drives in 2008.