Thursday, December 27, 2007

BBC episodes coming to a mobile phone near you

He BBC has announced that classic episodes of Doctor Who and Red Dwarf will be coming to a mobile phone near you.

The deal, arranged by the publicly funded broadcaster's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, has partnered with mobilephone content firm ROK Player to sell special multimedia memory cards called Digital Video Chips (DVC), which
can be inserted into compatible mobile phones to watch movies on the go.The first release is The Five Doctors, a 90-minute special episode that was originally shown in 1983. The second will feature three episodes of Red Dwarf.

The episodes will be available at Nokia stores or via the ROK website and cost £17 each. Carphone Warehouse already offers the first Spiderman movie and Monty Python and the Holy Grail via mini SD cards priced at £25 with plans to launch more films later in the year.Earlier in the month, ROK signed a deal with Nickelodeon to offer full lengh Spongebob Episodes.Both parties have said that they hope to extend the portfolio of classic BBC TV episodes over the coming months.
Source : http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk
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Monday, December 17, 2007

BBC Announces 3G Mobile Syndication Trial

Europe UK : The BBC announced, at the Broadcast Mobile TV Congress, the start of a trial to syndicate a range of its television channels and radio networks via 3G to mobile phones with mobile operators Orange, Vodafone and 3.

The trial, which will last up to 12 months, will allow subscribers to Orange, Vodafone and 3's TV packages to watch BBC One, BBC News 24 and BBC Three (with the exception of some sport and acquired programmes) streamed on their mobiles.

They will also be able to listen to up to eight BBC radio stations including Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music, BBC 7 and Asian Network. The trial will start within the month.

Ashley Highfield, BBC Director of Future Media and Technology, said: "By making a range of television channels and radio networks available to 3G mobile phone subscribers, we hope to test, not only the effectiveness of 3G as a means of distribution, but also how audiences respond to the BBC's linear services on their mobiles.

"The findings, combined with quantitative and qualitative consumer research, will inform the BBC's future mobile strategy."

Richard Halton, BBC Controller of Business Strategy, who was speaking at the Broadcast Mobile TV Congress today, said: "The BBC constantly aims to make its content available to as many people in as many ways as possible.

"The mobile platform is a great opportunity for us to reach existing users in a new way and connect better with people who are not currently big users of the BBC.

"The BBC believes that mobile content is an important part of the broadcasting landscape and is looking at ways in which mobile devices will shape services of the future for licence fee payers.

"To this end, the BBC will be undertaking extensive and unique research into consumer behaviour and experience throughout the 3G mobile syndication trial. To date we have done relatively little consumer research in this area, and it will provide us with a detailed insight into consumer behaviour."

Separately, the BBC has also launched an enhanced version of bbc.co.uk/mobile, which is available to all mobile phones with browsers capable of displaying XHTML pages.

Users will benefit from improved navigation and design, with scope in the future for additional functionality.

The enhanced service also includes a redesigned BBC Weather which features Radio 4's The Shipping Forecast.

BBC over mobile figures:

Internet users accessing the BBC on their mobile phones and other high-tech gadgets racked up almost 90 million page views, according to the latest figures.

Total page views for the WAP and PDA versions of bbc.co.uk were in excess of 84 million in January 2007.

Mobile usage of the BBC's website has grown 100% year-on-year over the last three years and these figures show the trend continuing.

Source : http://www.3g.co.uk/PR/April2007/4514.htm
Posted by martin at 17:23:50 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Orange broadband hit by outages

Orange broadband hit by outagesOrange shop Orange started offering broadband services in May this yearThe broadband service run by mobile firm Orange is experiencing a "major" national outage. The problem occurred on Monday afternoon, affecting 100,000 broadband subscribers at its peak.A spokesperson for the company said the fault on the service, formerly known as Wanadoo, was caused by a "network equipment failure".


Orange said they were working to fix the problem but there is no indication when a normal service will resume.The BBC news website was alerted to the fault by a reader who had been unable to connect to the internet for the last two days.Local failures Orange confirmed that there had been broadband network outage that started at approximately 16:00 yesterday.

The company said the problem only affected customers within their Local Loop Unbundled (LLU) network.This is not the first time this has happened yet orange seem happy to take my £25 a month for a shoddy service and not offer any apologies or compensation for loss of service.Lelee, London


LLUs use equipment installed in a telephone exchange by a third party company, such as Orange,instead of BT.Orange have 2 million internet subscribers, one million of which use the company's broadband service. 10% of its broadband users are on an LLU network.

"By 800 this morning we had restored 30% of that service leaving 7% of our total Broadband customers without connectivity," said an Orange spokesperson.By 1600 today they hope to have restored 50% of connections, leaving 50,000 Broadband customers without connectivity."We are working to restore normal service to all customers as quickly as possible," said the spokesperson. "We apologise to those customers affected."

The latest broadband service status report on the orange traffic website said the service was "up and running at the moment," but the report was dated August 2006. Orange started offering broadband earlier this year after the company absorbed internet service provider Wanadoo - also owned by Orange's parent, France Telecom.






Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk



Posted by martin at 15:24:16 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |