Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC, has revealed that the broadcaster is currently at work in bringing its popular BBC iPlayer to licence payers while they are abroad and also creating a commercial version for worldwide audiences via BBC Worldwide, the broadcaster’s commercial division.
Talking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival organised by MediaGuardian, Thompson has said that the broadcaster will release the commercial version of BBC iPlayer “within a year”.
After striking deals with a number of Hollywood studios including Lionsgate, MGM and Sony Pictures and British company Blinkbox, YouTube is set to relaunch its movies section of the site to the UK.
According to UK newspaper The Guardian, the service is to offer 400 movie titles from these studios, and most likely to include classics and mainstream titles from a couple of years ago.
ABC News 24 has officially launched on the Freeview platform today, with the first program broadcasting at 7:30PM. The program was simulcast on ABC1, replacing the 7:30 Report.
The new channel, which replaces ABC HD, is the first free-to-air 24 hour news channel. However, because of government regulations, the channel will be broadcasting in HD in order to meet with HD quota requirements. This, however, will be reviewed once the digital switchover finishes in 2013.
Looks like those problems seems to be fixed as the ABC has now announced a launch date for its new 24-hour news channel dubbed ABC News 24.
It will launch on digital boxes on July 22 on 7:30pm, with a simulcast on ABC1 – taking over from The 7:30 Report.
While the channel will be in HD, ABC HD (which simulcasted ABC1 programming from NSW) has been dropped in order to place this channel on digital television, causing controversy as the second broadcaster to ditch their HD feed of their main station in order to create a brand new channel, and many of the shows imported to the ABC, like The Bill and Doctor Who, were recorded in HD.
Thought 1080p was big in terms of pixel size, well get ready to see something bigger. There is another resolution that is bigger than that, and that is called 4K. While 1080p has a video resolution size of 1920 x 1080 pixels, 4K has a video resolution size of 4096 x 3072 pixels.
As the YouTube guys explained in their blog, it is even bigger than IMAX films.
“We always want videos on YouTube to be available in the highest quality possible, as creators intend,” YouTube engineer Ramesh Sarukkai, said.
There are a couple of downsides. Ramesh explains that 4K cameras aren’t cheap so you are most likely not going to encounter such films until the price – whenever that happens – gets cheap. As well, it requires very fast internet speeds – so Australia, don’t expect to see any of this any time soon. (I’ve only seen a few seconds worth and it was all jittery for me).
However, if you want to see this, YouTube has offered a couple of films that utilise 4K, and you can see them on a special playlist. In order to activate this, just go to the option where it states “360p” and change it to the “Original” selection.
The Swedish Pirate Party has announced that it will be moving the servers of the Pirate Bay into the Swedish Parliament, or Riksdag, if the site’s operators – as the Pirate Party is not affiliated with the Pirate Bay – agree to this and if they win a place in the Riksdag when the elections happen on September 19.
But why? Well, there is a little thing in its constitution that states that members of the Riksdag cannot be sued or prosecuted for something that is part of their political mandate. This obviously means that the site, or the party, cannot be sued for holding copyrighted material by the copyright owners.
There are plenty of cloud services available for a range of different purposes. For example, if you want to use Office applications you could use Google Docs, or Windows Live Docs. If you wanted file storage you could use Dropbox or Mobile Me’s iDisk. But there hasn’t really been a good way to listen and store music in the cloud and have it easily accessible. mSpot is going to try to fill that void with their free cloud music service now open for everybody.
Columbia Pictures has released the very first teaser trailer for the upcoming film about the popular social-networking website, Facebook, that is being written by Aaron Sorkin, of The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip fame. Titled “The Social Network” – though many have referred it as the Facebook Movie – it depicts the founding of Facebook and the conflict between ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Mark Zuckerberg.
You can see the trailer after the jump.
A leaked document from the President of the European Union has revealed the European Union’s secret push for criminal prosecution in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an agreement that has been negotiated in secret.
The document, leaked by French citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net (similar to Get Up! in Australia), reveals that the President wants criminal sanctions in one of the tougher parts of the treaty, Article 2.14 – which deals with criminal offences.
“The ACTA agreement, by its opacity and undemocratic nature, allows criminal sanctions to be simply negotiated,” Jeremie Zimmermann, spokesperson for La Quadrature du Net, said.
First movies, then sporting events and now music videos? Sony has shown their commitment in pushing 3D to our eyes, despite the numerous risks outlined by some medical professionals, by creating 3D music video and premiering it in Australia.
The first video honours have been given to the Rouge Traders with their new single, and theme anthem for the Socceroos, Hearts Beat as One – which most likely ties with the 3D plans of the FIFA World Cup in South Africa this year with the help of Sony. The 3D matches will also be played in Australia by SBS.
It’s not the only event that will be broadcasting in 3D, with Nine set to trial the 3D technology with the State of Origin. The trials will be on Channel 40 and will feature both Nine and SBS’s 3D trials. However, SBS will be broadcasting it for Sydney, Adelaide and Perth; while Nine will broadcast it for Melbourne and Brisbane. Nine’s regional affiliates, NBN and WIN will broadcast it for Newcastle and Wollongong respectively.
The video premieres in June, again most likely because of the FIFA World Cup.
Despite AOL’s recent success in editorial content – ranging from Engadget, Download Squad, TUAW, Politics Daily and Autoblog – after acquiring Blogsmith and Weblogs, Inc, Yahoo is trying yet again to build more original content across its network after a recent report on Media Week said that Yahoo might be looking to get journalists in order to “beef up” its sites – including Shine and Yahoo News – most likely in the form of blogs.
Sounds similar to AOL? Hmm.
“Yahoo is on the verge of hiring more traditional journalists as it plans to aggressively beef up original content for its top verticals, including news, business and entertainment,” Mike Shields wrote.
Perth-based internet service provider iiNet has announced a new partnership with FetchTV to allow customers to watch a range of free and subscription television channels with their broadband connection.
This effectively meaning that customers on iiNet will now have one single provider for internet, telephone and television services.
The Ten Network has confirmed that it will be launching a new general entertainment channel on its second multichannel in the second half of the year, joining ONE HD and the main network on digital television. It has also been confirmed that the station will have a new brand, unlike the public broadcaster ABC and SBS – referring to their channels as ABC1, ABC2, SBS One or SBS Two.
David Mott, Ten’s Chief Programmer, confirmed the channel’s existence and that the channel will not feature repeats of Ten shows or spin-off content. He also confirmed that the channel will not be treated as as bastard child of Ten.
“It will have equal weighting with Ten. In the digital environment, why wouldn’t you?” he told the Australian.
The ABC has announced that it will be providing subtitles to all of its primetime programs on ABC1 and ABC2 from tomorrow, assisting those who need a text-based version of the audio. The new service will combine pre-crafted captioning (those already embedded in the file) and live captioning, and users will be able to select if they want this feature or not by pressing the CC button.
The new service brings it even more in line with the BBC iPlayer, which has provided this for some of its programming, while also being the first on-demand service in Australia to provide such an option.
In other news, it has also release some stats about the iView. In February, more than 188 shows were offered and had attracted 411,000 visitors – which streamed 2.954 million videos altogether. Top programs included Doctor Who (ABC2 when it offered), The IT Crowd (ABC1), The Colbert Report (ABC2) and Silent Witness (ABC1).
Doctor Who fans will be able to watch the first episode of the new series, starring the Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith, on ABC’s iView service when the clock strikes at midnight on April 16 before it makes its debut two days later on ABC1 – and all this within two weeks of the BBC’s debut of the new series.
“View is a fantastic offering, an additional way for Australian audiences to watch ABC TV’s content – generally after, but in this special case before, its television broadcast,” Kim Dalton, Director of Television said.
“We hope the lure of Doctor Who – and what a fun and exciting lure it is – will provide incentive for more viewers to discover iView, and experience how convenient and easy-to-use it is.”
However, don’t get all too excited in seeing the series online before TV, because the subsequent episodes all air after their TV premiere. It returns to the ABC on Sunday 18 April at 7:30PM.
