Where is the Popcorn?

Report on the New Ways of Distributing of A/V content

Compiled by Nenad Puhovski

Chair, Cilect Standing Committee for New Technologies
Beijing, 2008

Index
FOREWORD......................................................................................................................................................... 7 DIGITAL CINEMA AND RELATED TECHNOLOGIES .............................................................................. 9 TECHNOLOGY ...................................................................................................................................................... 9 DIGITAL CAPTURE ............................................................................................................................................. 10 DIGITAL POST-PRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 10 DIGITAL MASTERING ......................................................................................................................................... 10 DIGITAL CINEMA DISTRIBUTORS ........................................................................................................................ 10 DIGITAL PROJECTION ......................................................................................................................................... 10 LIVE BROADCASTING TO MOVIE THEATERS ....................................................................................................... 11 CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS ................................................................................................................................. 11 ECONOMICS ....................................................................................................................................................... 12 Savings in distribution.................................................................................................................................. 12 Alternative content ....................................................................................................................................... 12 Greater protection for content...................................................................................................................... 13 Costs............................................................................................................................................................. 13 HISTORY ............................................................................................................................................................ 13 STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT .............................................................................................................................. 14 CLAIMS TO SIGNIFICANT EVENTS ....................................................................................................................... 14 STEREO D IMAGES ............................................................................................................................................. 15 OR, AS THEY SAY A PICTURE IS ................................................................................................................ 16 DIGITAL CINEMA INITIATIVES ........................................................................................................................... 17 The DCI Specification .................................................................................................................................. 17 Image & Audio Capability Overview ........................................................................................................... 18 Related Information...................................................................................................................................... 18 POV - FILM GOES BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH 3D ........................................................................................... 19 CILECTS VIEW ............................................................................................................................................. 21 Exploring D-Cinema 2 ................................................................................................................................. 21 A CILECT Conference/Workshop 2 years later. .......................................................................................... 21
Distribution................................................................................................................................................................ 22

DIGITAL TELEVISION AND RELATED TECHNOLOGIES .................................................................... 23 TECHNICAL INFORMATION................................................................................................................................. 23 Formats and bandwidth................................................................................................................................ 23 Reception...................................................................................................................................................... 24 Interaction .................................................................................................................................................... 25 Advantages to conversion............................................................................................................................. 25 Disadvantages to conversion........................................................................................................................ 25
Impact on existing analog technology........................................................................................................................ 25 Compression artifacts and allocated bandwidth......................................................................................................... 26 Buffering and preload delay....................................................................................................................................... 26

Effects of poor reception .............................................................................................................................. 26 Limitations.................................................................................................................................................... 27 Conversion ................................................................................................................................................... 27 ATSC - DIGITAL TELEVISION WITH AMERICAN FLAVOR .................................................................................. 28 Resolution..................................................................................................................................................... 28 DVB - DIGITAL TELEVISION WITH EUROPEAN FLAVOR .................................................................................... 29 Transmission ................................................................................................................................................ 29 Content ......................................................................................................................................................... 30 Encryption and metadata ............................................................................................................................. 30 Software platform......................................................................................................................................... 30 Adoption ....................................................................................................................................................... 30 OTHER RELATED TECHNOLOGIES ...................................................................................................................... 31 Interactive television .................................................................................................................................... 31
Definitions of Interactive Television ......................................................................................................................... 31

Case Study - Interactive Television and Storytelling (by Callas)................................................................. 34 Pay-per-view ................................................................................................................................................ 36

Video on demand.......................................................................................................................................... 38
Functionality .............................................................................................................................................................. 38 In-flight entertainment ............................................................................................................................................... 38 History ....................................................................................................................................................................... 38 Near video on demand ............................................................................................................................................... 39 Push video on demand ............................................................................................................................................... 39

DIGITAL MULTIMEDIA BROADCASTING ............................................................................................................ 40 Future? - Scientist: Holographic television to become reality..................................................................... 40 POV - HD IS EVERYWHERE ............................................................................................................................... 42 FIRST SIMPLE BY THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING ............................................................... 45 Then, More Elaborate .................................................................................................................................. 49 BROADBAND ..................................................................................................................................................... 49 In telecommunications.................................................................................................................................. 49 In data communications ............................................................................................................................... 49 In video......................................................................................................................................................... 49 INTERNET TELEVISION ...................................................................................................................................... 50 Implementation............................................................................................................................................. 50 Terminology ................................................................................................................................................. 50
Other names for Internet television............................................................................................................................ 51

IPTV ................................................................................................................................................................. 51 Definition...................................................................................................................................................... 51 History.......................................................................................................................................................... 52 Future........................................................................................................................................................... 52 FILE SHARING .................................................................................................................................................... 52 PEER-TO-PEER (P2P) ......................................................................................................................................... 53 BITTORRENT (PROTOCOL) ................................................................................................................................. 54 P2PTV .............................................................................................................................................................. 55 Technology and use...................................................................................................................................... 55 Issues for broadcasters................................................................................................................................. 55 WEBCAST .......................................................................................................................................................... 56 Origins.......................................................................................................................................................... 56 Examples ...................................................................................................................................................... 57 VIDEO PODCAST ................................................................................................................................................ 58 Technology and history ................................................................................................................................ 58 Timeline........................................................................................................................................................ 58 VIDEO HOSTING SERVICE .................................................................................................................................. 59 Impetus ......................................................................................................................................................... 59 User generated video sharing ...................................................................................................................... 59 Video Sharing Platform / White Label Providers......................................................................................... 59 Open Source Video Sharing Platforms......................................................................................................... 59
Open Access .............................................................................................................................................................. 59 Open Standards.......................................................................................................................................................... 59 Open Source .............................................................................................................................................................. 60

Web based video editing............................................................................................................................... 60 IS REALLY EVERYBODY DISTRIBUTING MOVIES ON THE WEB? ........................................................................ 61 Amazon Video on Demand ........................................................................................................................... 61
Compatibility ............................................................................................................................................................. 61 Video quality ............................................................................................................................................................. 61 Requirements ............................................................................................................................................................. 61

BBC iPlayer ................................................................................................................................................. 62

Key features............................................................................................................................................................... 62 Online service ............................................................................................................................................................ 62 Other Platforms.......................................................................................................................................................... 62

CinemaNow .................................................................................................................................................. 63 Google Video................................................................................................................................................ 63

Video content............................................................................................................................................................. 63

iTunes Store.................................................................................................................................................. 64 Joost ............................................................................................................................................................. 64 Microsoft Mediaroom................................................................................................................................... 65 Movielink...................................................................................................................................................... 66 Xbox Live...................................................................................................................................................... 66

The New Xbox Experience........................................................................................................................................ 66

YouTube........................................................................................................................................................ 67
Content accessibility .................................................................................................................................................. 67 Outside YouTube....................................................................................................................................................... 68 On mobile .................................................................................................................................................................. 68 On TV........................................................................................................................................................................ 68 On Apple TV, iPhone and iPod touch........................................................................................................................ 68

CASE STUDY - CINEQUEST LAUNCHES DOWNLOAD-AND-BURN INDIE MOVIE SERVICE .................................... 69 CASE STUDY - ABC, CBS, FOX & NBC OFFER PROGRAMMING IN HD ON THE ITUNES STORE ...................... 70 WIRELESS HD ................................................................................................................................................... 71 POV - THE REALITY OF STREAMING HD ................................................................................................. 72 Streaming HD content .................................................................................................................................. 72 HD streaming reality check.......................................................................................................................... 72 Media Extenders........................................................................................................................................... 73 Hidden hardware.......................................................................................................................................... 73 PLACE SHIFTING & MOBILE PLATFORMS ............................................................................................. 74 PLACESHIFTING ................................................................................................................................................. 74 How does placeshifting work? ..................................................................................................................... 74 History.......................................................................................................................................................... 74 SOME OF THE CLASSICAL PLACE SHIFTING DEVICES......................................................................................... 76 Slingbox........................................................................................................................................................ 76 TV2Me .......................................................................................................................................................... 76 Sony LocationFree TV.................................................................................................................................. 76 MOBIL PHONES AS PLACE SHIFTING DEVICES ................................................................................................... 77 Mobile content.............................................................................................................................................. 77
Mobile music ............................................................................................................................................................. 77 Mobile images ........................................................................................................................................................... 77 Mobile internet........................................................................................................................................................... 77 Mobile games ............................................................................................................................................................ 78 Mobile video.............................................................................................................................................................. 78 Mobishow .................................................................................................................................................................. 78 Mobisode ................................................................................................................................................................... 78 Streaming TV ............................................................................................................................................................ 79

CASE STUDY - SONY FILMS HEADED TO MOBILE PHONES .................................................................................. 80 CASE STUDY - PARIS TO HONOUR SMALL SCREEN AT MOBILE PHONE FILM FESTIVAL.................................... 81 POV - MOBILE TV SPREADING IN EUROPE AND TO THE U.S. ............................................................................ 82 TIME SHIFTING & RELATED TECHNOLOGIES...................................................................................... 83 TIME SHIFTING .................................................................................................................................................. 83 DEVICES ............................................................................................................................................................ 84 Videorecorder............................................................................................................................................... 84 Digital video recorder .................................................................................................................................. 84
Hard Disk Based ........................................................................................................................................................ 84 DVD recorder ............................................................................................................................................................ 84 PCS........................................................................................................................................................................... 84 Portable media player ................................................................................................................................................ 84

THE NEW CONTENT DISTRIBUTION LANDSCAPE - POV FROM A MAJOR PLAYER.............................................. 85 Motorola's Nick Chakalos discusses home networks, mobility and consumer choices ................................ 85
By Frank Moldstad .................................................................................................................................................... 85

FUTURE..? .......................................................................................................................................................... 89 DESIGNERS DEVELOPING VIRTUAL-REALITY 'COCOON' .................................................................................... 89 CILECT MEMBERS' CONTRIBUTIONS...................................................................................................... 91 TELEPHONE COMPANY AS A DISTRIBUTOR. ....................................................................................................... 91 WEB SERIES AS A NEW CALLING CARD................................................................................................ 100 Introduction: The New Media Landscape .................................................................................................. 100 Web Series and Independent Productions .................................................................................................. 100 New Advertising Models............................................................................................................................. 101 Network Reactions...................................................................................................................................... 101 Moving Beyond Networks........................................................................................................................... 102 The Web Series as a Calling Card ............................................................................................................. 102

New Developments in Storytelling and Distribution Emerge..................................................................... 102 Conclusion: Adapting Our Students to this New Landscape...................................................................... 103 APPENDIX................................................................................................................................................. 103 WIRELESS MOBILE INTERNET AND ONE-MAN BROADCASTERS AT CANDLELIGHT DEMONSTRATION ............. 104 I. WiBro, the Wireless Mobile Internet Service .......................................................................................... 104 II. Afreeca, the Internet Broadcasting Portal............................................................................................. 104 III. One-man Broadcasters at Candlelight Demonstrations....................................................................... 105 IV. Conclusion............................................................................................................................................ 107 MOVIES ON MOBILE PHONES (ABSTRACT) ...................................................................................................... 108 BEJING ABSTRACT........................................................................................................................................... 108

FOREWORD
In so - called good, old times we were just going to the movies! Take a bunch of friends or a girlfriend (if we had one), buy some popcorn, slip into the chair and watch the movies Later, the television came. First black and white, then we started putting some colored plastic follies (green-red-blue) to color the screen, then (o mighty!) real color television came. Years passed. We started to go to special, film-club screenings and then - even shoot our own amateur films, saying to the girls that we are filmmakerswell; they still prefered the athlets, but anyhow I remember that the first roll of double 8mm film I used had a price equal to 15% of my dads salary. And then VCRs came into the shops. We could first record some movies from the TV, exchange them and then, even, go to the video rental stores to rent and watch films we couldnt see in any other way. We started to shoot on video, using a lot (too much) of the tape, which was so cheap. As a professional, I worked on quadruplex tape, one inch, VCR, U matic, M2, Beta, all kind of digital formats Later, we started to use Internet. We communicated more, slowly exchanging more and more complex information, including video files. DVDs came into our lives. First the pirate ones, then we could afford to buy the originals, burn some we borrowed from our friends, download the films from the net, and watch them on our laptops, even mobile phones In not more then thirty years, the way we watch the movies (and, of course, the way we make them) has dramatically changed. To watch a film then, a number of heavy film rolls had to arrive to a big, dark room and a huge, noisy projector was needed. Today all we need is a small flash card, DVD or not even that just log in and its somewhere there in the cyberspace. My mother is still not sure how telephone works. If in cyberspace, do I really know where is the film I want to see is stored? Do I really care? No, not really. I just want to see the story I am interest in. And, have some popcorn! But, please. I still want to be called a filmmaker. Not content provider!

Nenad Puhovski

DIGITAL CINEMA AND RELATED TECHNOLOGIES

Digital cinema refers to the use of digital technology to distribute and project motion pictures. The final movie can be distributed via hard drives, DVDs or satellite and projected using a digital projector instead of a conventional film projector. Digital cinema is distinct from high-definition television and in particular, is not dependent on using television or HDTV standards, aspect ratios, or frame rates. Digital projectors capable of 2K resolution began deploying in 2005, and since 2006, the pace has accelerated. HDTV and pre-recorded HD disks could put pressure on movie theaters to offer something to compete with the home HD experience. In this text, 2K and 4K refer to images with 2048 and 4096 horizontal pixel resolution, respectively.

TECHNOLOGY
To match or improve the theater experience of movie audiences, a digital cinema system must provide high quality image, sound, subtitles, and captions. Theater managers require server controls for managing and displaying content in multiple theaters, and studios want their content encrypted with secure delivery, playback, and reporting of play times to the distribution company. Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a joint venture of the six major studios, published a system specification for digital cinema. Briefly, the specification calls for picture encoding using the ISO/IEC 15441 "JPEG2000" (.jp2) standard and use of the CIE XYZ color space at 12 bits per component encoded with a 2.6 gamma applied at projection, and audio using the "Broadcast Wave" (.wav) format at 24 bits and 48 kHz or 96 kHz sampling, controlled by an XML-format Composition Playlist, into an MXF-compliant file at a maximum data rate of 250 Mbit/s. Details about encryption, key management, and logging are all discussed in the specification as are the minimum specifications for the projectors employed including the color gamut, the contrast ratio and the brightness of the image. While much of the specification codifies work that had already been ongoing in the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), the specification is important in establishing a content owner framework for the distribution and security of first-release motion picture content. Digital cinema conforming to the DCI Standard is referred to within the film industry as D-Cinema while all other forms of digital cinema are referred to as E-Cinema. Thus, while D-Cinema is a defined standard, though one that is still partly being framed by SMPTE as of 2007, E-Cinema may be anything, ranging from a DVD player connected to a consumer projector to something that approaches the quality of D-Cinema without conforming to some of the standards. Even D-Cinema itself has evolved over time before the DCI standards were framed. However, the current DCI standards were made with the intention of standing the test of time, much like 35 mm film which has evolved but still retained compatibility over a substantial part of a century. In addition to DCI's work, the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) released its Digital Cinema System Requirements. The document addresses the requirements of digital cinema systems from the operational needs of the exhibitor, focusing on areas not addressed by DCI, including access for the visually impaired and hearing impaired, workflow inside the cinema, and equipment interoperability. In particular, NATO's document details requirements for the Theatre Management System (TMS), the governing software for digital cinema systems within a theatre complex, and provides di-

rection for the development of security key management systems. As with DCI's document, NATO's document is also important to the SMPTE standards effort.

DIGITAL CAPTURE
As of 2007 the most common acquisition medium for digitally projected features is 35 mm film scanned and processed at 2K or 4K via digital intermediate. Most digital features to date have been shot at 1920x1080 HD resolution using cameras such as the Sony CineAlta, Panavision Genesis or Thomson Viper. New cameras such as the Arriflex D-20 and Silicon Imaging's SI-2K can capture 2K resolution images, and the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company's Red One can record 4k RAW. Thus the future of digital cinema can be expected to have as a standard 4K capture and 4K projection. Currently in development are other cameras capable of recording 4K RAW, such as Dalsa Corporation's Origin, and cameras capable of recording 5k RAW, such as the RED EPIC, and cameras capable of recording 3k RAW (for budget filmmakers) such as the RED SCARLET.

DIGITAL POST-PRODUCTION
Film is scanned from camera-original film negatives into a digital format on a scanner or high-resolution telecine. Data from digital motion picture cameras may be converted to a convenient image file format for work in a facility. All of the files are 'conformed' to match an edit list created by the film editor, and are then color corrected under the direction of the film's staff. The end result of post-production is a digital intermediate used to record the motion picture to film and/or for the digital cinema release.

DIGITAL MASTERING
When all of the sound, picture, and data elements of a production have been completed, they may be assembled into a Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM) which contains all of the digital material needed for a show. The images and sound are then compressed, encrypted, and packaged to form the Digital Cinema Package (DCP).

DIGITAL CINEMA DISTRIBUTORS

Technicolor, Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc., XDC and Access Integrated Technologies are the leading companies in digital distribution. Other companies currently distributing digital cinema include Kodak, DTS, Ascent Media, Dolby, Arts Alliance Media and Motion Picture Solutions.

DIGITAL PROJECTION
There are currently two types of projectors for digital cinema. Early DLP projectors, which were deployed primarily in the U.S., used limited 12801024 resolution which are still widely used for preshow advertising but not usually for feature presentations. The DCI specification for digital projectors calls for three levels of playback to be supported: 2K (20481080) at 24 frames per second, 4K (40962160) at 24 frames per second, and 2K at 48 frames per second. Three manufacturers have licensed the TI-developed DLP Cinema technology. Barco, Christie Digital Systems and NEC. Barco launched the DP-series of 2K DCI-compliant Digital cinema projectors, next to this Barco designs and develops visualization products for a variety of selected professional markets. Christie is the maker of the CP2000 line of projectors, and long established in traditional film projector technology throughout the U.S. NEC manufactures the Starus NC2500S, NC1500C and NC800C 2K projectors for large, medium and small screen respectively and the Starus Digital Cinema

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Server system, as well as other equipment to connect PCs, analog/digital tape decks and satellite receivers, DVD, and off-air broadcast, etc. for pre-show and special presentations. While NEC is a relative newcomer to Digital Cinema, Christie is the main player in the U.S. and Barco takes the lead in Europe and Asia. In addition Digital Projection Incorporated (DPI) designed and sold a few DLP Cinema units when TI's 2K technology first debuted but then abandoned the D-Cinema market while continuing to offer DLP-based projectors for non-cinema purposes. Although based on the same 2K TI "light engine" as those of the major players they are so rare as to be virtually unknown in the industry. The other technology is from Sony and is labeled "SXRD" technology. Their projector provides 4096x2160 4K resolution and is priced very competitively with the lower resolution 2K 2048x1080 DLP projectors. Other manufacturers have been developing digital projector technology, but these have not yet been deployed into motion picture theaters and are not commercially available in versions that conform to the DCI specification. As of July 2007, there are some cinemas in Singapore showing digital 4K films to public using Sony's CineAlta 4K digital projector. They are located at Golden Village Cinema in Vivocity (Hall 11), Eng Wah Cinema in Suntec (Hall 3), Shaw Cinema in Bugis (Hall 1 & 3) and at Cathay Cineplex (Hall 7). In September 2007, Muvico Theaters Rosemont 18 in Rosemont, Illinois became the first theater in North America to have Sony's CineAlta 4K digital projectors for all 18 screens. Muvico Theaters intends on opening more theaters in the last quarter of 2008 and well into 2009 all utilizing Sony's CineAlta 4K digital projector.

LIVE BROADCASTING TO MOVIE THEATERS

Digital cinemas can deliver live broadcasts from performances or events. For example, there are regular live broadcasts to movie theaters of Metropolitan Opera performances.

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS
As of October 2007, there are over 5000 DLP-based Digital Cinema Systems installed. By October 2007, DG2L Technologies was reported to have supplied 1500 Digital Cinema Systems to UFO Moviez Ltd. in India and Europe. As of July, 2007, 1400 screens in the U.S. have been equipped with digital cinema projectors including a dozen theaters where the Sony 4K projector has been installed. In continental Europe, XDC is servicing over 300 screens in 10 countries, where Germany has the leading territory with over 100 installations. The UK is home to Europe's first DCI compliant fully digital multiplex cinemas, Odeon Hatfield and Odeon Surrey Quays (London) have a total of 18 digital screens and were both launched on Friday 9 February 2007. In June 2007, Arts Alliance Media announced the first European commercial digital cinema VPF agreements (with Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Pictures). As of March 2007, with the release of Disney's Meet the Robinsons, about 600 screens have been equipped with 2K digital projectors that are equipped with Real D Cinema's stereoscopic 3D technology, marketed under the Disney Digital D brand.

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In mid 2006, about 400 theaters have been equipped with 2K digital projectors with the number increasing every month. In February 2005, Arts Alliance Media was selected to roll out the UK Film Councils Digital Screen Network (DSN), a $20M contract to install and operate Europes largest 2K digital cinema network. By March 2007, 230 of the 241 screens had been installed on schedule, with the remaining 11 to be installed later in 2007 when cinemas have completed building works or construction. Chicken Little from Disney, with its experimental release of the film in digital 3D, increased the number of projectors using the 2K format. Several digital 3D films will surface in 2006 and several prominent filmmakers have committed to making their next productions in stereo 3D. By early 2006, Access Integrated Technologies (AccessIT) had announced agreements with nearly all of the major film studios and several exhibitors that enable the company to roll-out its end-to-end digital cinema systems. In August 2006, the Malayalam digital movie Moonnamathoral was distributed via satellite to cinemas; thus becoming the first Malayalam digital film to be so distributed. This was done using the endto-end digital cinema system developed by Singapore based DG2L Technologies. On May 1, 2008, Public Radio International (PRI) spearheaded the first-ever digital cinema event in public media by working with Ira Glass and Chicago Public Radio on This American Life Live!6-. The event was presented exclusively in select theatres by National CineMedia's (NCM) Fathom, in partnership with BY Experience and Chicago Public Radio, and in association with Public Radio International.7-

ECONOMICS
SAVINGS IN DISTRIBUTION Digital distribution of movies has the potential to save money for film distributors. A single film print can cost around US$1200 (or $30,000 for a time print of an 80-minute feature8-), so making 4000 prints for a wide-release movie might cost $5 million. In contrast, at the maximum 250 megabit-per-second maximum data rate defined by DCI for digital cinema, a typical feature-length movie could fit comfortably on an off the shelf 300 GB hard drivewhich cost as low as $70which could even be returned to the distributor for reuse after a movie's run. With several hundred movies distributed every year, industry savings could potentially reach $1 billion or more. ALTERNATIVE CONTENT An added incentive for exhibitors is the ability to show alternative content such as live special events, sports, pre-show advertising and other digital or video content. Some low-budget films that would normally not have a theatrical release because of distribution costs might be shown in smaller engagements than the typical large release studio pictures. The cost of duplicating a digital "print" is very low, so adding more theaters to a release has a small additional cost to the distributor. Movies that start with a small release could scale to a much larger release quickly if they were sufficiently successful, opening up the possibility that smaller movies could achieve box office success previously out of their reach.

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GREATER PROTECTION FOR CONTENT A last incentive for digital distribution is the possibility of greater protection against piracy. With traditional film prints, distributors typically stagger the film's release in various markets, shipping the film prints around the globe. In the subsequent markets, pirated copies of a film (i.e. a cam) may be available before the movie is released in that market. A simultaneous worldwide release would mitigate this problem to some degree. Simultaneous worldwide releases on film have been used on The Da Vinci Code, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Mission: Impossible III amongst others. With digital distribution, a simultaneous worldwide release would not cost significantly more than a staggered release. COSTS On the downside, the initial costs for converting theaters to digital are high: up to $150,000 per screen or more. Theaters have been reluctant to switch without a cost-sharing arrangement with film distributors. Recent negotiations have involved the development of a Virtual Print License fee which the studios will pay for their products which allows financiers and system developers to pay for deployment of digital systems to the theaters, thus providing investors a certain payback. While a theater can purchase a film projector for US$50,000 and expect an average life of 3040 years, a digital cinema playback system including server/media block/and projector can cost 34 times as much, and is at higher risk for component failures and technological obsolescence. Experience with computer-based media systems show that average economic lifetimes are only on the order of 5 years with some units lasting until about 10 years before they are replaced. Archiving digital material is also turning out to be both tricky and costly. In a 2007 study, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences found the cost of storing 4K digital masters to be "enormously higher - 1100% higher - than the cost of storing film masters." Furthermore, digital archiving faces challenges due to the insufficient temporal qualities of today's digital storage: no current media, be it optical discs, magnetic hard drives or digital tape, can reliably store a film for a hundred years, something that properly stored and handled film can do.9-

HISTORY
Digital media playback of hi-resolution 2K files has at least a twenty year history with early RAIDs feeding custom frame buffer systems with large memories. Content was usually restricted to several minutes of material. Transfer of content between remote locations was slow and had limited capacity. It wasn't until the late 1990s that feature length projects could be sent over the 'wire' (Internet or dedicated fiber links). There were many prototype systems developed that claim a first in some form of digital presentation. However, few of these had a significant impact on the advance of the industry. Key highlights in the development of digital cinema would likely include: demonstrations by TI of their DMD technology, real-time playback of compressed hi-resolution files by various vendors, and early HD presentations from D5 tape to digital projectors.

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STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers began work on standards for digital cinema in 2001. It was clear by that point in time that HDTV did not provide a sufficient technological basis for the foundation of digital cinema playback. (In Europe and Japan however, there is still a significant presence of HDTV for theatrical presentations. Agreements within the ISO standards body have led to these systems being referred to as Electronic Cinema Systems (E-Cinema).) Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) was formed in March 2002 as a joint project of the motion picture studios (Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios) to develop a system specification for digital cinema. In cooperation with the American Society of Cinematographers, DCI created standard evaluation material (the ASC/DCI StEM material) and developed tests of 2K and 4K playback and compression technologies. DCI published their specification in 2005.

CLAIMS TO SIGNIFICANT EVENTS

One claim for the first digital cinema demonstration comes from JVC. On March 19, 1998, they collaborated on a digital presentation at a cinema in London. Several clips from popular films were encoded onto a remote server, and sent via fibre optic for display to a collection of interested Industry parties. The Last Broadcast made cinematic history on October 23, 1998, when it became the first feature to be theatrically released digitally, via satellite download to theaters across the United States. An effort headed by Wavelength Releasing, Texas Instruments, Digital Projection Inc. and Loral Space, it successfully demonstrated what would become a template for future releases. In 1999, it was repeated utilizing QuVIS technology across Europe, including the Cannes Film Festival, making The Last Broadcast the first feature to be screened digitally at the Cannes Film Festival. Several feature films were shown in 1999 using DLP prototype projectors and early wavelet based servers. For example, Walt Disney Pictures Bicentennial Man was presented using a Qubit server manufactured by QuVIS of Topeka, Kansas. DVD ROM was used to store the compressed data file. The DVD ROMs were loaded into the QuBit server hard drives for playout. The file size for Bicentennial Man was 42 GB with an average data rate of 43 Mbit/s. In 2000, Walt Disney, Texas Instruments and Technicolor with the cooperation of several U.S. and international exhibitors, began to deploy prototype Digital Cinema systems in commercial theatres. The systems were assembled and installed by Technicolor using the TI mark V prototype projector, a special Christie lamphouse, and the QuBit server with custom designed automation interfaces. Technicolor manufactured the DVDs for uploading on these test systems and was responsible for sending technicians out to the locations for every new feature film that was played. The technicians would typically spend ten or so hours to load the files from the DVD to the QuBit, set up the server to play the files, and then set up the projector. A full rehearsal screening of the feature was mandatory as was the requirement to have back up DVDs and backup QuBits available should something fail. The systems were eventually replaced or upgraded after TI made improvements to the projectors and Technicolor developed a purpose-built digital cinema server in a venture with Qualcomm, the engineering giant from San Diego best known for advanced mobile phone technology. The new systems were called AMS for Auditorium Management Systems and were the first digital cinema servers designed to be user friendly and operate reliably in a computer-hostile environment such as a projection booth. Most importantly, they provided a complete solution for content security.

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The AMS used removable hard disk drives as the transport mechanism for the files. This eliminated the time required to upload the DVD ROMs to the local hard drives and provided the ability to switch programs quickly. For security, the AMS used a media block type system that placed a sealed electronics package within the projector housing. The server output only 3DES encrypted data and the media block did the decryption at the point just before playout. The first secure encrypted digital cinema feature was Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. The system functioned well but was eventually replaced because of the need to create a standard data package for D-cinema distribution. Universal Pictures used their film Serenity as the first DCI-compliant DCP to be delivered shown to an audience at a remote theater, although it was not distributed this way to the public. Inside Man was their first DCP cinema release, and was transmitted to 20 theatres in the United States along with two trailers. In April 2005, DG2L Technologies announced that it had been awarded the multi-million dollar contract for the world's largest satellite based MPEG4 digital cinema deployment to be done in India, which encompassed 2000 theaters for UFO (United Film Organizers), a subsidiary of the Valuable Media Group. In Mar 2006, United Film Organizers Moviez (UFO Moviez), had reached a significant milestonesurpassing 30,000 shows using the DG2L Cinema System platform. This figure increased to 100,000 shows in August 2006. In September 2006, UFO Moviez acquired 51% stake in DG2L Technologies in a deal estimated at around $50 million.

STEREO D IMAGES
In late 2005, interest in digital D stereoscopic projection has led to a new willingness on the part of theaters to co-operate in installing a limited number of 2K stereo installations to show Disney's Chicken Little in D film. Six more digital D movies are slated for 2006 or 2007 release (including Beowulf, Monster House and Meet the Robinsons). The technology combines two digital projectors fitted with polarizing filters with the use of polarized glasses and silver screens. A single projector can also be used in conjunction with a simple adapter in the front (a single-cell LCD screen that acts as a quarter-wave retarder, also known as a zscreen) that rotates the polarity of projector's light output several times per second to alternate quickly the left-and-right-eye views. Another system used by DOLBY makes use of a special color filter and glasses and has the advantage that doesn't require a silver screen. Also, some theaters use a system that requires no modification on the screen or the projector but uses active liquid crystal shutter glasses that quickly block the views of each eye alternatively.

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OR, AS THEY SAY A PICTURE IS

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DIGITAL CINEMA INITIATIVES

Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC or DCI is a joint venture of major motion picture studios, formed to establish a standard architecture for digital cinema systems. The organization was formed in March 2002 by the following studios: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Paramount Pictures Sony Pictures Entertainment 20th Century Fox Universal Studios The Walt Disney Company Warner Bros. Pictures

The primary purpose of DCI is to establish and document specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that ensures a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability and quality. By establishing a common set of content requirements, distributors, studios, exhibitors, d-cinema manufacturers and vendors can be assured of interoperability and compatibility. Because of the relationship of DCI to many of Hollywood's key studios, conformance to DCI's specifications is considered a requirement by software developers or equipment manufacturers targeting the digital cinema market. THE DCI SPECIFICATION On July 20, 2005, DCI released Version 1.0 of its "Digital Cinema System Specification", commonly referred to as the "DCI Specification". The document describes overall system requirements and specifications for digital cinema. Between March 28, 2006, and March 21, 2007, DCI issued 148 errata to Version 1.0. DCI released Version 1.1 of the DCI Specification on April 12, 2007, incorporating the previous 148 errata into the DCI Specification. On April 15, 2007, at the annual NAB Digital Cinema Summit, DCI announced the new version, as well as some future plans. They released a "Stereoscopic Digital Cinema Addendum", available on dcimovies.com, to begin to establish D technical specifications in response to the popularity of D stereoscopic films. It was also announced "which studios would take over the leadership roles in DCI after the current leadership term expires at the end of September." Subsequently, between August 27, 2007, and February 1, 2008, DCI issued 100 errata to Version 1.1. So, DCI released the current Version 1.2 of the DCI Specification on March 7, 2008, again incorporating the previous 100 errata into the specification document. Version 1.2 can be downloaded from the DCI web site. The previous versions are also archived on the DCI web site. Based on many SMPTE and ISO standards, such as JPEG 2000-compressed image and "broadcast wave" PCM/WAV sound, it explains the route to create an entire Digital Cinema Package (DCP) from a raw collection of files known as the Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM), as well as the specifics of its content protection, encryption, and forensic marking.

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The specification also establishes standards for the decoder requirements and the presentation environment itself, such as ambient light levels, pixel aspect and shape, image luminance, white point chromaticity, and those tolerances to be kept. Even though it specifies what kind of information is required, the DCI Specification does not include specific information about how data within a distribution package is to be formatted. Formatting of this information is defined by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) digital cinema standards. IMAGE & AUDIO CAPABILITY OVERVIEW Image: 2048x1080 (2K) at 24 fps or 48 fps, or 4096x2160 (4K) at 24 fps; 312 bits per pixel, XYZ color space JPEG 2000 compression from 0 to 5 or from 1 to 6 wavelet decomposition levels for 2K or 4K resolutions, respectively Compression rate of 4.71 bits/pixel (2K @ 24 fps), 2.35 bits/pixel (2K @ 48 fps), 1.17 bits/pixel (4K @ 24 fps) 250 Mbit/s maximum image bit rate

Audio: 24 bits per sample, 48 kHz or 96 kHz uncompressed PCM Up to 16 channels

RELATED INFORMATION The idea for DCI was originally mooted in late 1999 by Tom McGrath, then COO of Paramount Pictures, who applied to the U.S. Department of Justice for anti-trust waivers to allow the joint cooperation of all seven major motion picture studios. Universal Pictures made one of the first feature-length DCPs created to DCI specifications, using their film Serenity.5- Although it was not distributed theatrically, it had one public screening on November 7, 2005, at the USC Entertainment Technology Center's Digital Cinema Laboratory in the Pacific Theatre, Hollywood. Inside Man was Universal's first DCP commercial release, and, in addition to 35mm film distribution, was delivered via hard drive to 20 theatres in the United States along with two trailers.

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POV - FILM GOES BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH 3D

(CNN, September the 15th, 2008)
In the future, viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses may not just be the prerogative of the naive. Movie audiences will soon find themselves donning a pair of 3D glasses that will enable them to see animation films in higher definition. But these aren't like the ordinary red and green cardboard glasses of old. 3D experience provider RealD , for example, has already begun production of very hi-tech lightweight 3D specs that look just like a pair of sunglasses. Since Disney released "Chicken Little" entirely in 3D in 2005, the number of Tinseltown's biggest studios and directors making 3D animation films has risen significantly. Also, the success of "Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour," released this year in 3D, has only served to increase Hollywood's appetite for the technology. "Kung Fu Panda," another one of this year's biggest hits got a huge thumbs up during a 3D screening at an industry event. DreamWorks, the studio behind the animated film, has said that come 2009, most of its animated movies will be produced in the third dimension. Directors James Cameron and Peter Jackson also have climbed aboard the 3D band wagon - Cameron's "Avatar" is due out in 2009, while Jackson will produce "The Hobbit," with Guillermo del Toro directing. Techno pundits and industry experts at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), held in August were hailing 3D films as the next big thing. At the forum, animation supremo and CEO of DreamWorks Jeffery Katzenberg, said 3D filmmaking was the "greatest innovation to occur in the movie business in 70 years." So, what's all the fuss about? And for those who remember 3D the first time around, is it really anything to get excited about? For RealD CEO Michael Lewis, likening the new-generation 3D to its old counterpart is like "comparing the space shuttle with the Wright brothers." While MG Siegler, who writes on technology and digital media for California-based "Venture Beat," believes we will be able to live the experience. He is impressed with what Katzenberg had to show at IDF and believes 3D is here to stay. Siegler, who is also behind Elite Tech on Reddit, told CNN: "I think for animation, it will be an important part. Companies like DreamWorks finally feel that technology is advanced enough to make it viable to make films from scratch in 3D. "I was in the crowd at IDF and even sitting near the back in a room filled with thousands of people, the clip Katzenberg showed of 'Kung Fu Panda' in 3D was pretty amazing. It looked great, but the new 'Monsters vs Aliens' film trailer they showed off looked arguably better." Siegler believes that the technology could advance so much over the next 10 years that glasses will not even be required to view 3D elements on screen.

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But not all films will get the 3D treatment in future, just as only a few blockbusters, like "The Dark Knight," get the IMAX treatment, largely because of the high production costs, he argues. The film industry is clearly banking on the technology to lure back moviegoers to the cinema screens as they shun it for computer screens. Industry analyst Anthony Kaufman recently wrote on filmcatcher.com that "more people have seen eccentric YouTube celebrity Chris Cocker's 'Leave Britney Alone' video than went to see the Coen Brothers' recent Oscar winner 'No Country for Old Men' (18,434,049 views at last count)." As the options for bringing movies over the Internet into the living room grow bigger with devices like Apple TV, Vudu, Roku and the Xbox 360, Kaufman argues that "consumers will watch movies more and more using sites (like Netflix,) downloading films to desktops." Experts say that eventually the disc formats (DVD and Blu-ray) will give way to fully digital distribution, similar to the way music is now downloaded via iTunes. But theater owners are fighting back against the technological onslaught that threatens their trade. Industry journals say three of North America's biggest theatre chains, AMC Entertainment, Regal Entertainment Group and Cinemark USA, have begun the process of bringing digital equipment to 14,000 screens. This means 35mm film reels will ultimately disappear and pictures will become sharper. Digital projectors will be able to produce images that trick the eye into perceiving depth. Similarly, cinemas are reinventing themselves as entertainment hubs, with gourmet dining, live entertainment and even pampering sessions. Perhaps with this evolution in mind, Hollywood digital set designer Tino Schaedler has developed Cinema 2010 - a steel and pneumatic skin auditorium that takes inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's futuristic vision. Easily transportable, it combines "cutting-edge technology and deluxe comfort and creates a new melange of bar, restaurant and theater." Audiences will be seated on a bed lounge of sorts, and as the lights dim after a gourmet dinner, the viewer can either watch the film seated, or horizontal, in which case a second "view horizon" is activated. A version of this idea is already being implemented by the U.S.-based National Amusements, which has theaters across America, the UK, Latin America and Russia. Last year, they introduced "Cinema de Lux" by bringing to the cinema hall luxury dining, an exclusive Lux Level VIP lounge, a bar, and in the auditorium, cushioned love-seats with moveable armrests and swivel dining trays. Looks like the days of sitting in a darkened room, munching on popcorn, are definitely over.

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CILECTS VIEW
EXPLORING D-CINEMA 2 A CILECT CONFERENCE/WORKSHOP 2 YEARS LATER. by Joost Hunningher In my report two years ago (CILECT News 45 page 21) I quoted David Monks saying Going to a cinema where the image is always focused and always has the right colours and contrast would be a great improvement. The effect of electronic projection has to be similar to the best film projection: digital projectors need to show film natively at a speed of 24 frames per second and have colours and details as good as you would get in the best film print. The quality of the film has to be the same in every cinema wherever you show it. These were guiding goals to developing D-Cinema. We saw that things were moving very quickly. One morning soon wed wake up and the film reel will be gone. Well two year later we can say the reel is still here? Although we can certainly say that the film industry is substantially digital in the middle. At the front and at the end there are variations in the origination and distribution of films which uses either or both traditional analogue film or digital files for capture and distribution. On the Digital Capture front, the digital cinematography cameras leaders are Panavision Genesis (for rental only), The Arriflex D20 & D21(for 175,000 euros or rental) or the more recent 4K RED One (starting around 50,000 euros). For those film-makers who want a shallow depth of field, these cameras use a full 35mm frame sensor and allow oyu to create that cinematic look we couldnt find in our first workshop four years ago. But if the price is too high, some interesting digital cinematography experiments have been done on the Canon EOS 5D Mark 11 which has a movie recording mode of 30fps and comes with a 2000 euros price tag. An attractive digital cinematography camera (with a 2/3 sensor ) capable of using 16mm lenses is the Silicon Imaging camera SI-2k from P+S Technik and should be interesting to CILECT schools thinking about dipping their toe in the water. The Norwegian Film School has bought one and their experience will be of interest. What are some of the films these cameras originated? Over the last 3 years there are easily several hundred` titles that have been shot on digital formats . Some examples: The Genesis: Apocalypto, Before the Devil Knows your Dead, Forbidden Kingdom The Red: Ch, Informant, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead Silicon Imaging SI-2K: Blood:A Butchers Tale, Slumdog Millionaire Arriflex D-21: Captain Abu Raed, RockRolla Sony HDW-F750 and Panasonic AG-DVX1000: A Mighty Heart

I include A Might Heart in the list only to emphasis what we found in Exploring D-Cinema 2 workshop, when postproduced properly HD formats can give good results appropriate for cinema release. Like film originated material, the workflow and postproduction of digital originated material tends to go through a Digital Intermediate. However, here is where the discipline of the shooting and data management really is important. Everything may be possible in the digital world of postproduction, but the costs and time can shoot up and a very clear understanding of the workflow is essential. This may be much more important than the rental costs of the camera. Certainly the film society and home cinema markets are constantly reminded of the power of digital postproduction with wonderful restored films on DVD like Orfeu Negro, Touch of Evil, The Red Shoes, etc.

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Distribution Two years ago we discussed the recommendations of the Digital Cinema Initiatives, a force behind digital cinema, which was created by six major motion picture studios: Disney, Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. who were trying to establish universally agreed standards in mastering so that producers and studios could send their films as files on hard drives or data tapes or by satellite or internet to any of corner of the world. Last year the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) published a comprehensive set of industry standards SMPTE DC-28 to make it a reality.This October the three largest cinema chains in America signed a deal to convert of their cinemas to digital. In Britain the Digital Screen Network has set up 211 digital cinemas out of 3300 screens. The Odeon chain has committed itself to replace in time all traditional film equipment with digital projection. Digital distribution and exhibition is also taking hold in China, Brazil and in Europe. The advantages are obvious - a traditional 35mm print costs 1500 euros (or twice that with subtitles) and comes in 5/6 reels weighing 25 kilos. They also have to be shipped. In comparison a digital film file is cheap and copies are of a low cost., maybe 150 euros. The logistics and speed of delivery allows distributors much more flexibility both for blockbusters and single performances. The most important point in the recent development is that the 2k or 4k projectors now becoming the standard certainly can project an image that is similar to the best film projection and have colours and details as good as you would get in the best film print. In the future digital projection will be much less expensive and as a bonus digital projectors can also deal with 3D productions. Every paradise has its serpent and the one in digital cinemas is the installation costs of the digital projectors and servers. This comes to 80,000 euros per screen. Cinema chains (which in Britain covers 85% of the box office revenue) will be able to afford these changes. It is small independent art house cinemas and university and town hall cinema clubs which will struggle especially now in the global credit crunch. Some experts estimate that up to 400 cinemas in Britain may close. It is possible that this will be a global pattern. But the film digital process may shake down in another way. Distributors are increasingly using the cinema theatre campaign to market the subsequent release of the DVD. The DVD is frequently the most profitable part of marketing the film and with the constant improvements in midrange projection equipment and Blu-ray DVDs, there may be a flowering of home cinemas and local cinema clubs. But in the meantime, I am off to The London Film Festival where at least half the film programme has been loaded onto digital servers. The 2k or 4k projectors can make files look as good as any 35mm distribution film print. When I realise I am not seeing any scratches or sparkle, I know its digital cinema! Long Live Cinema!

Joost Hunningher

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DIGITAL TELEVISION AND RELATED TECHNOLOGIES

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Digital television (DTV) is the sending and receiving of moving images and sound by discrete (digital) signals, in contrast to the analog signals used by analog TV. Introduced in the late 1990s, this technology appealed to the television broadcasting business and consumer electronics industries because it offers new financial opportunities. Digital television is more flexible and efficient than analog television. When properly used by broadcasters, digital television can allow higher-quality images, sound, and more programming choices than analog does. However, a digital signal does not necessarily carry a higher-quality image or sound than an analog signal. After February 19, 2009, full-power television stations in the USA will broadcast in digital only. While the majority of the viewed TV broadcast stations are full-power stations, about 1800 in number, there are three other categories of TV stations that exist:low-power stations, Class A stations, and TV translator stations. There is presently no deadline for these stations, about 7100 in number, to convert to digital broadcasting.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION
FORMATS AND BANDWIDTH With digital television, two formats-HDTV and SDTV-of TV programs are broadcast. High-definition television (HDTV), which is usually used over DTV, uses one of two formats: 1280 720 pixels in progressive scan mode (abbreviated 720p) or 1920 1080 pixels in interlace mode (1080i). Each of these utilizes a 16:9 aspect ratio. (Some televisions are capable of receiving an HD resolution of 1920 1080 at a 60 Hz progressive scan frame rate known as 1080p60 but this format is not standard and no broadcaster is able to transmit these signals over the air at acceptable quality yet.) Standard definition TV(SDTV), by comparison, may use one of several different formats taking the form of various aspect ratios depending on the technology used in the country of broadcast. For 4:3 aspect-ratio broadcasts, the 640 480 format is used in NTSC countries, while 720 576 (rescaled to 768 576) is used in PAL countries. For 16:9 broadcasts, the 704 480 (rescaled to 848 480) format is used in NTSC countries, while 720 576 (rescaled to 1024 576) is used in PAL countries. However, broadcasters may choose to reduce these resolutions to save bandwidth (e.g., many DVB-T channels in the United Kingdom use a horizontal resolution of 544 or 704 pixels per line). The perceived quality of such programming is surprisingly acceptable because of interlacingthe effective vertical resolution is halved to 288 lines. Each DTV channel is permitted to be broadcast at a data rate up to 19 megabits per second, or 2.375 megabytes per second. However, the broadcaster does not need to use this entire bandwidth for just

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one broadcast channel. Instead the broadcast can be subdivided across several video subchannels of varying quality and compression rates, including non-video datacasting services that allow one-way high-bandwidth streaming of data to computers. A broadcaster may opt to use a standard-definition digital signal instead of an HDTV signal, because current convention allows the bandwidth of a DTV channel (or "multiplex") to be subdivided into multiple subchannels (similar to what most FM stations offer with HD Radio), providing multiple feeds of entirely different programming on the same channel. This ability to provide either a single HDTV feed or multiple lower-resolution feeds are often referred to as distributing one's "bit budget" or multicasting. This can sometimes be arranged automatically, using a statistical multiplexer (or "statmux"). With some implementations, image resolution may be less directly limited by bandwidth; for example in DVB-T, broadcasters can choose from several different modulation schemes, giving them the option to reduce the transmission bitrate and make reception easier for more distant or mobile viewers. RECEPTION There are a number of different ways to receive digital television. One of the oldest means of receiving DTV (and TV in general) is using an antenna (known as an aerial in some countries). This way is known as Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT). With DTT, viewers are limited to whatever channels the antenna picks up. Signal quality will also vary. Other ways have been devised to receive digital television. Among the most familiar to people are digital cable and digital satellite. In some countries where transmissions of TV signals are normally achieved by microwaves, digital MMDS is used. Other standards, such as DMB and DVB-H, have been devised to allow handheld devices such as mobile phones to receive TV signals. Another way is IPTV, that is receiving TV via Internet Protocol, relying on DSL or optical cable line. Finally, an alternative way is to receive digital TV signals via the open Internet. For example, there is a lot of P2P Internet Television software that can be used to watch TV on your computer. Some signals carry encryption and specify use conditions (such as "may not be recorded" or "may not be viewed on displays larger than 1 m in diagonal measure") backed up with the force of law under the WIPO Copyright Treaty and national legislation implementing it, such as the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Access to encrypted channels can be controlled by a removable smart card, for example via the Common Interface (DVB-CI) standard for Europe and via Point Of Deployment (POD) for IS or named differently CableCard. Protection parameters for terrestrial DTV broadcasting In order for digital television to be broadcast, it must initially interoperate with analog television. When analog television ceases to exist, digital television signals must not interfere with each other. Propagation research carried out by several important digital television regulators has derived a table

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of acceptable parameters for tolerable interference margins. This table below provides all the important acceptable interference margins.

System Parameters (protection ratios) C/N for AWGN Channel Co-Channel DTV into Analog TV Co-Channel Analog TV into DTV Co-Channel DTV into DTV

Canada 1 USA 5-

EBU 9, 1 Japan & Brazil 36, 37ITU-mode M3 +19.2 dB +38 dB +4 dB +19 dB 6 dB 5 dB

+19.5 dB +15.19 dB +19.3 dB (16.5 dB) +33.8 dB +34.44 dB +34 ~ 37 dB +7.2 dB +1.81 dB +4 dB +19.5 dB +15.27 dB +19 dB (16.5 dB) 17.43 dB 5 ~ 11 dB 11.95 dB 1 ~ 10

Lower Adjacent Channel DTV into Analog TV 16 dB Upper Adjacent Channel DTV into Analog TV 12 dB Lower Adjacent Channel Analog TV into DTV 48 dB Upper Adjacent Channel Analog TV into DTV 49 dB Lower Adjacent Channel DTV into DTV Upper Adjacent Channel DTV into DTV 27 dB 27 dB

47.33 dB 34 ~ 37 dB 35 dB 48.71 dB 38 ~ 36 dB 37 dB 28 dB 26 dB 30 dB 30 dB 28 dB 29 dB

INTERACTION Interaction happens between the TV watcher and the DTV system. It can be understood in different ways, depending on which part of the DTV system is concerned. It can also be an interaction with the STB only (to tune to another TV channel or to browse the EPG). Modern DTV systems are able to provide interaction between the end-user and the broadcaster through the use of a return path. With the exceptions of coaxial and fiber optic cable, which can be bidirectional, a dialup modem, Internet connection, or other method is typically used for the return path with unidirectional networks such as satellite or antenna broadcast. In addition to not needing a separate return path, cable also has the advantage of a communication channel localized to a neighborhood rather than a city (terrestrial) or an even larger area (satellite). This provides enough customizable bandwidth to allow true video on demand. ADVANTAGES TO CONVERSION DTV has several advantages over analog TV, the most significant being that digital channels take up less bandwidth (and the bandwidth needs are continuously variable, at a corresponding cost in image quality depending on the level of compression). This means that digital broadcasters can provide more digital channels in the same space, provide high-definition television service, or provide other nontelevision services such as multimedia or interactivity. DTV also permits special services such as multiplexing (more than one program on the same channel), electronic program guides and additional languages, spoken or subtitled. The sale of non-television services may provide an additional revenue source. In many cases, viewers perceive DTV to have superior picture quality, improved audio quality, and easier reception than analog. DISADVANTAGES TO CONVERSION Impact on existing analog technology The analog switch-off ruling, which so far has met with little opposition from consumers or manufacturers, would render all non-digital televisions obsolete on the switch-off date unless connected to an external off-the-air tuner, analog or digital cable, or a satellite system. An external converter box can be added to non-digital televisions to lengthen their useful lifespan. Several of these devices have already been shown and, while few were initially available, they are becoming more available by the 25

day. In the United States, a government-sponsored coupon is available to offset the cost of an external converter box. Once connected to the converter unit, operation of non-digital units is achievable and, in most cases, rich in new features (in comparison to previous analog reception operation). At present, analog switchoff is scheduled for February 17, 2009 in the United States and August 31, 2011 in Canada. Some existing analog equipment will be less functional with the use of a converter box. For example, television remote controls will no longer be effective at changing channels, because that function will instead be handled by the converter box. Similarly, video recorders for analog signals (including both tape-based VCRs and hard-drive-based DVRs) will not be able to select channels, limiting their ability to automatically record programs via a timer or based on downloaded program information. ATSCcapable VCRs are likely to be far less common than their NTSC counterparts, with most current offerings being VCR/DVD combo units. Also, older handheld televisions, which rely primarily on overthe-air signals and battery operation, will be rendered impractical since the proposed converter boxes are not portable nor powered with batteries, except one: The Artec T3A. Compression artifacts and allocated bandwidth DTV images have some picture defects that are not present on analog television or motion picture cinema, because of present-day limitations of bandwidth and compression algorithms such as MPEG2. When a compressed digital image is compared with the original program source, some hard-tocompress image sequences may have digital distortion or degradation. For example: quantization noise, incorrect color, blockiness, a blurred, shimmering hazes.

Broadcasters attempt to balance their needs to show high quality pictures and to generate revenue by using a fixed bandwidth allocation for more services. Buffering and preload delay Unlike analog televisions, digital televisions have a significant delay when changing channels, making "channel surfing" more difficult. Different devices need different amounts of preload time to begin showing the broadcast stream, resulting in an audio echo effect when two televisions in adjacent rooms of a house are tuned to the same channel. EFFECTS OF POOR RECEPTION Changes in signal reception from factors such as degrading antenna connections or worsening weather conditions may gradually reduce the quality of analog TV. The nature of digital TV results in a perfect picture initially, until the receiving equipment starts picking up noise or losing signal. Some equipment will show a picture even with significant damage, while other devices may go directly from perfect to no picture at all (and thus not show even a slightly damaged picture). This latter effect is known as the digital cliff or cliff effect. For remote locations, distant analog channels that were previously acceptable in a snowy and degraded state may be anything from perfect to completely unavailable. In areas where transmitting antennas are located on mountains, viewers who are too close to the transmitter may find reception difficult or impossible because the strongest part of the broadcast signals pass above them. The use of higher frequencies will add to these problems, especially in cases where a clear line-of-sight from the receiving antenna to the transmitter is not available. Many intermittent signal fading conditions, such as the rapid-fade effect caused by reflections of UHF television signals from passing aircraft, will not produce intermittently-snowy video, but potential intermittent loss of the entire signal.

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Multi-path interference is a much more significant problem for DTV than for analog TV and affects reception, particularly when using simple antennas such as rabbit ears. This is perceived as "ghosting" in the analog domain, but this same problem manifests itself in a much more insidious way with DTV. Unlike the problems of the preceding paragraph, multi path can in fact be worse for DTV under high signal conditions. It is perceived by the viewer as a spotty loss of audio or picture freezing and pixelation as people move about in the vicnity of the antenna and is often worse in wet weather due to increased reflection re-polarization of the DTV signal arriving from multiple paths. In extreme cases the signal is lost completely. The cure is to employ a directional antenna outdoors, aligned with the transmitting location. LIMITATIONS The greatest DTV detail level currently available is 1080i, which is a 1920x1080 interlaced widescreen format. Interlacing is done to reduce the image bandwidth to one-half of full-frame quality, which gives better frame update speed for quick-changing scenes such as sports, but at the same time reduces the overall image quality and introduces image flickering and "crawling scanlines" because of the alternating field refresh. Full-frame progressive-scan 1920x1080 (1080p) is not part of the ATSC specification5-. High framerate 1080p may become an option in the near future, as a result of recent technology advances such as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding, allowing more detail to be sent via the same channel bandwidth allocations that are used now. The limitations of interlacing can be partially overcome through the use of advanced image processors in the consumer display device, such as the use of Faroudja DCDi and using internal frame buffers to eliminate scanline crawling. CONVERSION As of late 2007, six countries had completed the process of turning off analog terrestrial broadcasting. Many other countries had plans to do so or were in the process of a staged conversion. IEEE in Jamaica also decided to switch over the same time as the US.

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ATSC - DIGITAL TELEVISION WITH AMERICAN FLAVOR

ATSC Standards document a digital television format that will have replaced the analog NTSC television system by February 17, 2009 in the United States, and August 31, 2011 in Canada. It was developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee. The high definition television standards defined by the ATSC produce wide screen 16:9 images up to 19201080 pixels in size more than six times the display resolution of the earlier standard. However, many different image sizes are also supported, so that up to six standarddefinition "virtual channels" can be broadcast on a single 6 MHz TV channel. ATSC also boasts "theater quality" audio because it uses the Dolby Digital AC-3 format to provide 5.channel surround sound. Numerous auxiliary datacasting services can also be provided. Broadcasters who use ATSC and want to retain an analog signal must broadcast on two separate channels, as the ATSC system requires the use of an entire channel. Virtual channels allow channel numbers to be remapped from their physical RF channel to any other number 1 to 99, so that ATSC stations can either be associated with the related NTSC channel numbers, or all stations on a network can use the same number. There is also a standard for distributed transmission (DTx) which allows for booster stations. Many aspects of ATSC are patented, including elements of the MPEG video coding, the AC-3 audio coding, and the 8VSB modulation. As with other systems, ATSC depends on numerous interwoven standards, e.g. the EIA-708 standard for digital closed captioning, leading to variations in implementation. RESOLUTION The ATSC system supports a number of different display resolutions, aspect ratios, and frame rates. The formats are listed here by resolution, form of scanning (progressive or interlaced), and number of frames (or fields) per second (see also the TV resolution overview at the end of this article). The table includes formats from both A/53 Part 4 (MPEG-2 Video System Characteristics) and A/63 (Standard for Coding 25/50 Hz Video). The different resolutions can operate in progressive scan or interlaced mode, although the highest 1080-line system cannot display progressive images at the rate of 59.94 or 60 frames per second. (Such technology was seen as too advanced at the time, plus the image quality was deemed to be too poor considering the amount of data that can be transmitted.) A terrestrial (over-the-air) transmission carries 19.39 megabits of data per second, compared to a maximum possible bitrate of 10.08 Mbit/s allowed in the DVD standard. "EDTV" displays can reproduce progressive scan content and frequently have a 16:9 wide screen format. Such resolutions are 720480 in NTSC or 720576 in PAL, allowing 60 progressive frames per second in NTSC or 50 in PAL. There are three basic display sizes for ATSC. Basic and enhanced NTSC and PAL image sizes are at the bottom level at 480 or 576 lines. Medium-sized images have 720 scanlines and are 1280 pixels wide. The top tier has 1080 lines 1920 pixels wide. 1080-line video is actually encoded with 19201088 pixel frames, but the last eight lines are discarded prior to display. This is due to a restriction of the MPEG-2 video format, which requires the number of coded luma samples (i.e., pixels) to be divisible by 16.

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DVB - DIGITAL TELEVISION WITH EUROPEAN FLAVOR

Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a suite of internationally accepted open standards for digital television. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an industry consortium with more than 270 members, and they are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) of European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and European Broadcasting Union (EBU). The interaction of the DVB sub-standards is described in the DVB Cookbook. Many aspects of DVB are patented, including elements of the MPEG video coding and audio coding. TRANSMISSION DVB systems distribute data using a variety of approaches, including by satellite (DVB-S, DVB-S2 and DVB-SH; also DVB-SMATV for distribution via SMATV); cable (DVB-C); terrestrial television (DVB-T, DVB-T2) and digital terrestrial television for handhelds (DVB-H,DVB-SH); and via microwave using DTT (DVB-MT), the MMDS (DVB-MC), and/or MVDS standards (DVB-MS). These standards define the physical layer and data link layer of the distribution system. Devices interact with the physical layer via a synchronous parallel interface (SPI), synchronous serial interface (SSI), or asynchronous serial interface (ASI). All data is transmitted in MPEG-2 transport streams with some additional constraints (DVB-MPEG). A standard for temporally-compressed distribution to mobile devices (DVB-H) was published in November 2004.

These distribution systems differ mainly in the modulation schemes used and error correcting codes used, due to the different technical constraints. DVB-S (SHF) uses QPSK, 8PSK or 16-QAM. DVBS2 uses QPSK, 8PSK, 16APSK or 32APSK, at the broadcasters decision. QPSK and 8PSK are the only versions regularly used. DVB-C (VHF/UHF) uses QAM: 16-QAM, 3QAM, 6QAM, 128-QAM or 256-QAM. Lastly, DVB-T (VHF/UHF) uses 16-QAM or 6QAM (or QPSK) in combination with COFDM and can support hierarchical modulation. The DVB-T2 standard will give more-robust TV reception and increase the possible bit-rate by over 30% for single transmitters (as in the UK) and is expected to increase the max bit-rate by over 50% in large single-frequency networks (as in Germany, Sweden).

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CONTENT Besides audio and video transmission, DVB also defines data connections (DVB-DATA - EN 301 192) with return channels (DVB-RC) for several media (DECT, GSM, PSTN/ISDN, satellite etc.) and protocols (DVB-IPTV: Internet Protocol; DVB-NPI: network protocol independent). Older technologies such as teletext (DVB-TXT) and vertical blanking interval data (DVB-VBI) are also supported by the standards to ease conversion. However for many applications more advanced alternatives like DVB-SUB for sub-titling are available. ENCRYPTION AND METADATA The conditional access system (DVB-CA) defines a Common Scrambling Algorithm (DVB-CSA) and a physical Common Interface (DVB-CI) for accessing scrambled content. DVB-CA providers develop their wholly proprietary conditional access systems with reference to these specifications. Multiple simultaneous CA systems can be assigned to a scrambled DVB program stream providing operational and commercial flexibility for the service provider. DVB is also developing a Content Protection and Copy Management system for protecting content after it has been received (DVB-CPCM), which is intended to allow flexible use of recorded content on a home network or beyond, while preventing unconstrained sharing on the Internet. DVB-CPCM has been the source of much controversy in the popular press and it's said that CPCM is the DVB's answer to the failed American Broadcast Flag. DVB transports include metadata called Service Information (DVB-SI, ETSI EN 300 468, ETSI TR 101 211) that links the various elementary streams into coherent programs and provides humanreadable descriptions for electronic program guides as well as for automatic searching and filtering. Recently, DVB has adopted a profile of the metadata defined by the TV-Anytime Forum (DVB-TVA, ETSI TS 102323). This is an XML Schema based technology and the DVB profile is tailored for enhanced Personal Digital Recorders. DVB lately also started an activity to develop a service for IPTV (DVB-IPI, ETSI TR 102033, ETSI TS 102034, ETSI TS 102814) which also includes metadata definitions for a broadband content guide (DVB-BCG, ETSI TS 102 539). SOFTWARE PLATFORM The DVB Multimedia Home Platform (DVB-MHP) defines a Java-based platform for the development of consumer video system applications. In addition to providing abstractions for many DVB and MPEG-2 concepts, it provides interfaces for other features like network card control, application download, and layered graphics. ADOPTION DVB-S and DVB-C were ratified in 1994. DVB-T was ratified in early 1997. The first commercial DVB-T broadcasts were performed by the United Kingdom's Digital TV Group in late 1998. In 2003 Berlin, Germany was the first area to completely stop broadcasting analog TV signals. Many European countries aim to be fully covered with digital television by 2010 and switch off PAL/SECAM services by then. As of 2005, DVB-T television sets are not significantly more expensive than analog television sets. Most popular in Europe are the set-top boxes that enable DVB-T to be received through an ordinary analogue television, with the price dropping remarkably in 2007. In its origin Europe, in Australia, South Africa and India DVB is used throughout the areas it covers or is at least decided to be. This also holds true for cable and satellite in most Asian, African and many South American countries. Many of these have not yet selected a format for digital terrestrial broadcasts (DTTV) and a few (Canada, Mexico and South Korea) chose ATSC instead of DVB-T.

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OTHER RELATED TECHNOLOGIES

INTERACTIVE TELEVISION Interactive television (generally known as iTV) describes a number of techniques that allow viewers to interact with television content as they view it. Definitions of Interactive Television Interactive television represents a continuum from low interactivity (TV on/off, volume, changing channels) to moderate interactivity (simple movies on demand without player controls) and high interactivity in which, for example, an audience member affects the program being watched. The most obvious example of this would be any kind of real-time voting on the screen, in which audience votes create decisions that are reflected in how the show continues. A return path to the program provider is not necessary to have an interactive program experience. Once a movie is downloaded for example, controls may all be local. The link was needed to download the program, but texts and software which can be executed locally at the set-top box or IRD (Integrated Receiver Decoder) may occur automatically, once the viewer enters the channel. Return path To be truly interactive, the viewer must be able to alter the viewing experience (eg choose which angle to watch a football match), or return information to the broadcaster. This "return path" or "back channel" can be by telephone, mobile SMS (text messages), radio, digital subscriber lines (ADSL) or cable. Cable TV viewers receive their programs via a cable, and in the integrated cable return path enabled platforms, they use the same cable as a return path. Satellite viewers (mostly) return information to the broadcaster via their regular telephone lines. They are charged for this service on their regular telephone bill. An Internet connection via ADSL, or other, data communications technology, is also being increasingly used. Interactive TV can also be delivered via a terrestrial aerial (Digital Terrestrial TV such as 'Freeview' in the UK). In this case, there is often no 'return path' as such - so data cannot be sent back to the broadcaster (so you could not, for instance, vote on a TV show, or order a product sample) . However, interactivity is still possible as there is still the opportunity to interact with an application which is broadcast and downloaded to the set-top box (so you could still choose camera angles, play games etc). Increasingly the return path is becoming a broadband IP connection, and some hybrid receivers are now capable of displaying video from either the IP connection or from traditional tuners. Some devices are now dedicated to displaying video only from the IP channel, which has given rise to IPTV Internet Protocol Television. The rise of the "broadband return path" has given new relevance to Interactive TV, as it opens up the need to interact with Video on Demand servers, advertisers, and web site operators.

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Forms of interaction The term "interactive television" is used to refer to a variety of rather different kinds of interactivity (both as to usage and as to technology), and this can lead to considerable misunderstanding. At least three very different levels are important (see also the instructional video literature which has described levels of interactivity in computer-based instruction which will look very much like tomorrow's interactive television): Interactivity with a TV set The simplest, Interactivity with a TV set is the one that is already very successful. This got its first big jump with the use of the remote control to enable channel surfing behaviours, and has evolved to include video-on-demand, VCR-like pause, rewind, and fast forward, and DVRs, commercial skipping and the like. It does not change any content or its inherent linearity, only how we control the viewing of that content. DVRs allow users to time shift content in a way that most VCR owners never learned to do. This is a kind of interactive TV, and not insignificant, but it is not what is meant in any full sense of the term. It is already taking place in many homes Interactivity with TV program content In its deepest sense, Interactivity with TV program content is the one that is "interactive TV", but it is also the most challenging to produce. This is the idea that the program, itself, might change based on viewer input. Advanced forms, which still have uncertain prospect for becoming mainstream, include dramas where viewers get to choose or influence plot details and endings.

As an example, in Accidental Lovers viewers can send mobile text messages to the broadcast and the plot transforms on the basis of the keywords picked from the messages. Global Television Network offers a Two-Screen Solutions interactive game for Big Brother 8 (US) "'In The House'" which allows viewers to predict who will win each competition, who's going home, as well as answering trivia questions and instant recall challenges throughout the live show. Viewers login to the Global website to play, with no

downloads required. Another kind of example of interactive content is the Hugo game on Television where viewers called the production studio, and were allowed to control the game character in real time using telephone buttons by studio personnel, similar to The Price is Right. Another example is the Clickvision Interactive Perception Panel used on news programmes in Britain, a kind of instant clapometer run over the telephone.

Simpler forms, which are enjoying some success, include programs that directly incorporate polls, questions, comments, and other forms of (virtual) audience response back into the show. There is much debate as to how effective and popular this kind of truly interactive TV can be. It seems likely that some forms of it will be popular, but that viewing of pre-defined content, with a scripted narrative arc, will remain a major part of the TV experience indefinitely. The United States lags far behind the rest of the developed world in its deployment of interactive television. This is a direct response to the fact that commercial television in the U.S. is not controlled by the government, whereas the vast majority of other countries' television systems are controlled by the government. These "centrally planned" television systems are made interactive by fiat, whereas in the U.S., only some members of the Public Broadcasting System has this capability.

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Commercial broadcasters and other content providers serving the US market are constrained from adopting advanced interactive technologies because they must serve the desires of their customers, earn a level of return on investment for their investors, and are dependent on the penetration of interactive technology into viewers' homes. In association with many factors such as

requirements for backward compatibility of TV content formats, form factors and Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) the 'cable monopoly' laws that are in force in many communities served by cable TV operators consumer acceptance of the pricing structure for new TV-delivered services. Over the air (broadcasted) TV is FREE in the US, free of taxes, usage fees. proprietary coding of set top boxes by cable operators and box manufacturers the ability to implement 'return path' interaction in rural areas that have low, or no technology infrastructure the competition from Internet-based content and service providers for the consumers' attention and budget and many other technical and business road blocks,

American television content providers and operators must contend with the existing infrastructure and business models. Satellite and cable will force broadcasters to adopt interactivity or the broadcasters will become less competitive than they already are.

Interactivity with TV-related content The least understood, Interactivity with TV related content may have most promise to alter how we watch TV over the next decade. Examples include getting more information about what is on the TV, whether sports, movies, news, or the like. Similar (and most likely to pay the bills), is getting more information about what is being advertised, and the ability to buy it - this is called "tcommerce" (short for "television commerce"). Partial steps in this direction are already becoming a mass phenomenon, as Web sites and mobile phone services coordinate with TV programs (note: this type of interactive TV is currently being called "participation TV" and GSN and TBS are proponents of it). This kind of multitasking is already happening on large scale - but there is currently little or no automated support for relating that secondary interaction to what is on the TV compared to other forms of interactive TV. Others argue that this is more a "web-enhanced" television viewing than interactive TV. In the coming months and years, there will be no need to have both a computer and a TV set for interactive television as the interactive content will be built into the system via the next generation of set-top boxes. However, set-top-boxes have yet to get a strong foothold in American households as price (pay per service pricing model) and lack of interactive content have failed to justify their cost. Many think of interactive TV primarily in terms of "one-screen" forms that involve interaction on the TV screen, using the remote control, but there is another significant form of interactive TV that makes use of Two-Screen Solutions, such as NanoGaming -. In this case, the second screen is typically a PC (personal computer) connected to a Web site application. Web applications may be synchronized with the TV broadcast, or be regular websites that provide supplementary content to the live broadcast, either in the form of information, or as interactive game or program. Some two-screen applications allow for interaction from a mobile device (phone or PDA), that run "in synch" with the show. Such services are sometimes called "Enhanced TV," but this term is in decline, being seen as anachronistic and misused occasionally. (Note: "Enhanced TV" originated in the mid-late 1990s as a term that some hoped would replace the umbrella term of "interactive TV" due to the negative associations "interactive TV" carried because of the way companies and the news media over-hyped its potential in the early 90's.)

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Notable Two-Screen Solutions have been offered for specific popular programs by many US broadcast TV networks. Today, two-screen interactive TV is called either screen (for short) or "Synchronized TV" and is widely deployed around the US by national broadcasters with the help of technology offerings from certain companies. One-screen interactive TV generally requires special support in the set-top box, but Two-Screen Solutions, synchronized interactive TV applications generally do not, relying instead on Internet or mobile phone servers to coordinate with the TV and are most often free to the user. Developments from 2006 onwards indicate that the mobile phone can be used for seamless authentication through Bluetooth, explicit authentication through Near Field Communication. Through such an authentication it will be possible to provide personalised services to the mobile phone.

CASE STUDY - INTERACTIVE TELEVISION AND STORYTELLING (BY CALLAS) Interactive TV is characterised by adaptive media content responding to user feedback considering high-end Interactive TV with a horizon of 5+ years. This will include new forms of media content (enhanced media, non-linear storytelling, etc.) and Multimodal Interfaces for user interaction. A story is often conveyed in such a way so as to allow the audience to experience the journey from the mind's eye of one of the story characters: The audience, to a greater or lesser extent, experiences the sequence of affective states that are felt by the character over the course of the various relationships within the story. The skill of a storyteller to convey the felt experience is therefore highly crucial. In live oral storytelling (ie of the oral traditions), the storyteller is able to read the affective state of the audience.The storyteller is thus able to improvise accordingly to bring the audience through the desired sequence of affective states.

With books, film, and other traditional broadcast media, the story is invariant and cannot be improvised. The same is true for present-day 'interactive TV'. However, with the use of the CALLAS Shelf technologies, we can change this. By so doing, we aim to appeal to the audience's innate, almost unconscious need to participate in the storytelling experience, bringing back the live elements of the oral traditions. A first prototype of affective interactivity in iTV was shown on 223/Jan/2008 BBC Festival of Technology, reflecting an environment where user reactions are captured using emotional speech recognition and multi-keyword spotting and an ECA (expressive conversational agent) is introduced as a co-spectator, whose own emotional reactions to the story act as a catalyst to elicit user reactions.

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An additional Interactive Storyteller showcase is now studiying an ECA coupled with an image display, where the ECA has the role of storyteller. The image display shows images that are associated with the story content being presented. The story is broken down into scenes, with an image associated to each scene.When the application begins, the user is presented with the image for the first scene. The ECA invites the user to comment about the image, and the user (hopefully) says some words about the scene. Then the ECA conveys the story of the scene to the user. At the beginning of the next scene, the image for that scene is presented. Once again, the ECA invites the user to say some words about the scene. This turn-based interaction continues through to the end of the story. Investigation includes how can those agents be connected to content. The content inputs are the 'story script', 'story arc' (referring to the sequence of ideal affective states), and story pictures. The real-time user inputs come from a mic (for the EmoVoice and MKS shelf components) and a camera (for Gesture Expressivity Recognition). We have selected two story genres:

News specifically making use of user generated images and narratives. Historical making use of very old true stories.

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PAY-PER-VIEW Pay-per-view (often abbreviated PPV) is the system in which television viewers can purchase events to be seen on TV and pay for the private telecast of that event to their homes. The event is shown at the same time to everyone ordering it, as opposed to video on demand systems, which allow viewers to see the event at any time. Events can be purchased using an on-screen guide, an automated telephone system, or through a live customer service representative. Events include feature films, sporting events, and pornographic movies.

Pay Per View October 1947 The pay-per-view industry is generally regarded as a separate industry from television, even though they are fundamentally connected. Pay-per-view began becoming popular when the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers began using the system after winning the championship in the 1977 season. During that time, it was operated on a few pay-TV services such as Z Channel, SelecTV, and ON-TV in select markets throughout the 1980s. The first major pay-per-view event occurred on September 16, 1981, when Sugar Ray Leonard fought Thomas "Hitman" Hearns for the Welterweight Championship. Viacom Cablevision in Nashville, Tennessee, was the first system to offer the event and sold over fifty percent of its subscribers for the

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fight. Leonard visited Nashville to promote the fight, the event was such a success that Viacom's Annual Report that year was themed around the fight. Viacom's Marketing Director was Pat Thompson who put together the fight and subsequently put together additional PPV fights, wrestling matches, and even a Broadway play. After leaving Viacom, Thompson became head of Sports View and produced the first pay-per-view football game on October 16, 1983, Tennessee versus Alabama from Birmingham, Alabama. Sports View was instrumental in building pay-per-view networks and was the early pioneer in developing TigerVision for LSU, TideVision for Alabama, and UT Vol Seat for Tennessee. Sports View also produced the Ohio State-Michigan Football game on PPV in November 1983. In 1985, the first U.S. cable channels devoted to pay-per-view, Viewers Choice, Cable Video Store, and Request TV began operation within days of each other. Viewers Choice was available to both home satellite dish and cable customers, while Request TV was available to cable viewers but would not be available to dish owners until the 1990s. However, the term "pay-perview" wasn't widely used until the 1990s, when companies like iN DEMAND, HBO, and Showtime started using the system to show movies and some of their productions. In Demand would show movies, concerts, and other events, with prices ranging from $3.99 to $49.99, while HBO and Showtime, with their legs TVKO and SET Pay Per View, would offer championship boxing, with prices ranging from $14.99 to $54.99. ESPN has shown college football and basketball games on pay-per-view. The boxing undercard Latin Fury, shown on June 28, 2003, became ESPN's first boxing pay-per-view card and also the first pay-per-view boxing card held in Puerto Rico.-citation needed- Pay-per-view is also a very important revenue stream for professional wrestling companies like World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) , Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) , Ring of Honor (ROH) and Asistencia Asesora y Administracin.

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VIDEO ON DEMAND Video on demand (VOD) or Audio video on demand (AVOD) systems allow users to select and watch/listen to video or audio content on demand. VOD systems either stream content through a set-top box, allowing viewing in real time, or download it to a device such as a computer, digital video recorder, personal video recorder or portable media player for viewing at any time. The majority of cable and telco based television providers offer both VOD streaming, such as pay-per-view, whereby a user buys or selects a movie or television program and it begins to play on the television set almost instantaneously, or downloading to a DVR rented from the provider, for viewing in the future. Functionality Download and streaming video on demand systems provide the user with a large subset of VCR functionality including pause, fast forward, fast rewind, slow forward, slow rewind, jump to previous/future frame etc. These functions are called trick modes. For disk-based streaming systems which store and stream programs from hard disk drive, trick modes require additional processing and storage on the part of the server, because separate files for fast forward and rewind must be stored. Memory-based VOD streaming systems have the advantage of being able to perform trick modes directly from RAM, which requires no additional storage or CPU cycles on the part of the processor. It is possible to put video servers on LANs, in which case they can provide very rapid response to users. Streaming video servers can also serve a wider community via a WAN, in which case the responsiveness may be reduced. Download VOD services are practical to homes equipped with cable modems or DSL connections. Servers for traditional cable and telco VOD services are usually placed at the cable head-end serving a particular market as well as cable hubs in larger markets. In the telco world, they are placed in either the central office, or a newly created location called a Video Head-End Office (VHO). In-flight entertainment Some airlines offer AVOD as in-flight entertainment to passengers through individually-controlled video screens embedded in seatbacks or armrests or offered via portable media players. Airline AVOD systems offer passengers the opportunity to select specific stored video or audio content and play it on demand including pause, fast forward, and rewind. History From September 1994, a VOD service formed a major part of the Cambridge Interactive TV trial. This provided video and data to 250 homes and schools connected to the Cambridge Cable network (later part of NTL, now Virgin Media). The MPEG-1 encoded video was streamed over an ATM network from an ICL media server to set top boxes designed by Acorn Online Media. The trial commenced at a speed of 2 Mbit/s to the home, subsequently increased to 25 Mbit/s. The content was provided by the BBC and Anglia Television. Although a technical success, difficulty in sourcing content was a major issue, and the project closed in 1996.

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In 1998, Kingston Communications became the first UK company to launch a fully commercial VOD service and the first to integrate broadcast TV and Internet access through a single set-top box using IP delivery over ADSL. By 2001, Kingston Interactive TV had attracted 15,000 subscribers. After a number of trials, HomeChoice followed in 1999, but were restricted to London. After attracting 40,000 customers, they were bought by Tiscali in 2006. Cable TV providers Telewest and NTL (now Virgin Media) launched their VOD services in the United Kingdom in 2005, competing with the leading traditional pay TV distributor BSkyB. BSkyB responded by launching Sky by broadband, later renamed Sky Anytime on PC. The service went live on 2 January 2006. Sky Anytime on PC uses a legal peerto-peer approach, based on Kontiki technology, to provide very high capacity multi-point downloads of the video content. Instead of the video content all being downloaded from Sky's servers, the content comes from multiple users of the system who have already downloaded the same content. Other UK TV broadcasters have implemented their own versions of the same technology, such as the BBC's iPlayer, which launched on 25 December 2007, and Channel 4's 4oD (4 On Demand) which launched in late 2006. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 plan to launch a joint platform provisionally called Kangaroo in 2008. VOD services were first offered in Hawaii by Oceanic Cable in January 2000, but are now available in all parts of the United States. Streaming VOD systems are available from cable providers (in tandem with cable modem technology) who use the large downstream bandwidth present on cable systems to deliver movies and television shows to end users, who can typically pause, fast-forward, and rewind VOD movies due to the low latency and random-access nature of cable technology. The large distribution of a single signal makes streaming VOD impractical for most satellite TV systems; however, EchoStar recently announced a plan to offer video on demand programming to PVR-owning subscribers of its Dish Network satellite TV service. After the programs are automatically recorded on a user's PVR, he or she can watch, play, pause, and seek at their convenience. VOD is also quite common in more expensive hotels. VOD systems that store and provide a user interface for content downloaded directly from the Internet are widely available. According to the European Audiovisual Observatory, 142 paying VoD services were operational in Europe at the end of 2006. Near video on demand Near video on demand (NVOD) is a pay-per-view consumer video technique used by multi-channel broadcasters using high-bandwidth distribution mechanisms such as satellite and cable television. Multiple copies of a program are broadcast at short time intervals (typically 1020 minutes) providing convenience for viewers, who can watch the program without needing to tune in at a scheduled point in time. This form is bandwidth intensive and is generally provided only by large operators with a great deal of redundant capacity and has been reduced in popularity as video on demand is implemented. Pay-per-view provider In Demand provided up to 40 channels in 2002, with several films receiving up to four channels on the staggered schedule to provide the NVOD experience; however the service now provides only six channels of content. Push video on demand Push video on demand is a technique used by a number of broadcasters on systems that lack the interactivity to provide true video on demand, to simulate a true video on demand system. A push VOD system uses a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) to automatically record a selection of programming, often transmitted in spare capacity overnight. Users can then watch the downloaded programming at times of their choosing. As content occupies space on the PVR hard drive, downloaded content is usually deleted after a week to make way for new programs. The limited space on a typical PVR hard drive means that the flexibility and selection of programs available on such systems is more restricted than true VOD systems.

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DIGITAL MULTIMEDIA BROADCASTING

Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) is a digital radio transmission system for sending multimedia (radio, TV, and datacasting) to mobile devices such as mobile phones. This technology, sometimes known as "mobile TV", is an offshoot of Digital Audio Broadcasting which was originally developed as a research project for the European Union (Eureka project number EU147). DMB was developed in South Korea under the national IT project, originally as the next generation digital technology to replace the FM radio.The world's first official mobile TV service started in South Korea in May 2005, although trials were available much earlier. It can operate via satellite (S-DMB) or terrestrial (TDMB) transmission. DMB is based on the Eureka 147 Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) standard, and has some similarities with the main competing mobile TV standard, DVB-H T-DMB works flawlessly in vehicles traveling up to 120km/h. n tunnels or underground areas, both TV and Radio broadcast is still available, though DMB may skip occasionally. Fortunately, the broadcast recovers quickly.

FUTURE? - SCIENTIST: HOLOGRAPHIC TELEVISION TO BECOME REALITY By Mike Steere For CNN Picture this: you're sat down for the Football World Cup final, or a long-awaited sequel to the "Sex and the City" movie and you're watching all the action unfold in D on your coffee table It sounds a lot like a wacky dream, but don't be surprised if within our lifetime you find yourself discarding your plasma and LCD sets in exchange for a holographic D television that can put Cristiano Ronaldo in your living room or bring you face-to-face with life-sized versions of your gaming heroes. The reason for renewed optimism in threedimensional technology is a breakthrough in rewritable and erasable holographic systems made earlier this year by researchers at the University of Arizona. Dr Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the university's Optical Sciences department, told CNN that scientists have broken a barrier by making the first updatable threedimensional displays with memory. "This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for D images," he said. The researchers produced displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes. To create television sets the images would need to be changing multiple times each second - but Peyghambarian is very optimistic this can happen. He said the University of Arizona team, which is now ten-strong, has been working on advancing hologram technology since 1990 - so this is a major step forward. He believes that much of the difficulty in creating a holographic set has now been overcome.

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"It took us a while to make that first breakthrough, but as soon as you have the first element of it working the rest often comes more rapidly," he said. "What we are doing now is trying to make the model better. What we showed is just one color, what we are doing now is trying to use three colors. The original display was four inches by four inches and now we're going for something at least as big as a computer screen." There are no more great barriers to overcome now, he said. The breakthrough has made some long-time researchers of the technology believe that it could now come to fruition. Tung H. Jeong, a retired physics professor at Lake Forest College outside Chicago who had studied holography since the 1960s told NJ.com; "When we start talking about erasable and rewritable holograms, we are moving toward the possibility of holographic TV ... It has now been shown that physically, it's possible." And what might these holographic televisions look like? According to Peyghambarian, they could be constructed as a screen on the wall (like flat panel displays) that shows D images, with all the image writing lasers behind the wall; or it could be like a horizontal panel on a table with holographic writing apparatus underneath. So, if this project is realized, you really could have a football match on your coffee table, or horrormovie villains jumping out of your wall. Peyghambarian is also optimistic that the technology could reach the market within five to ten years. He said progress towards a final product should be made much more quickly now that a rewriting method had been found. However, it is fair to say not everyone is as positive about this prospect as Peyghambarian. Justin Lawrence, a lecturer in Electronic Engineering at Bangor University in Wales, told CNN that small steps are being made on technology like D holograms, but, he can't see it being ready for the market in the next ten years. "It's one thing to demonstrate something in a lab but it's another thing to be able to produce it cheaply and efficiently enough to distribute it to the mass market," Lawrence said. Yet, there are reasons to be optimistic that more resources will be channeled into developing this technology more quickly. The Japanese Government is pushing huge financial and technical weight into the development of three-dimensional, virtual-reality television, and the country's Communications Ministry is aiming at having such technology available by 2020. Peyghambarian said there are no major sponsors of the technology at present, but as the breakthroughs continued, he hopes that will change. Even if no major electronics company commit themselves, there is hope that backers could come from outside of the consumer electronics industry, he said. "It could have some other applications. In training it's useful to show people three-dimensional displays. Also it would be good to show things in D for defense command and control and for surgery," he said.

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POV - HD IS EVERYWHERE
Screen Options Becoming Aggressive - Delivery Battle Could Be Bruta By Miles Weston (http://dvdcreation.digitalmedianet.com)
The day I made that statement, about inventing the Internet, I was tired because I'd been up all night inventing the camcorder" Al Gore Al Gore was quick to admit he slightly overstated his role in developing the Internet. But in joking at his own expense, he probably didn't realize how prophetic his statement would be by linking video with the Internet. All of the professional level products - hardware and software - at this year's IFA and IBC conferences focused on producing and delivering high definition content - movies, television, music. Now that Gore's Current TV is a growing cable network he's probably watching the rapidly developing IPTV arena and keeping his Internet options open. Thanks largely to government regulations, HDTV content development and delivery have moved fairly rapidly in the U.S. since 1994. Europe on the other hand chose to let the market set the pace for conversion and there was only one channel delivering digital content in Europe in 2004. Service expansion has been painfully slow so the need for HD TV sets has been mired in high cost and lack of interest. England's BBC has been one of the early adopters so European broadcasters are watching their progress before they jump in with breathtaking content. High Def TV set sales are experiencing considerable growth in the Pacific Basin (Figure 1) but for a change sales in the area lag behind those in the U.S. Europeans are certainly interested in high-def big screen viewing and the set manufacturers and European retailers are convinced that the soccer World Cup will be the key decision point for many households. Then European consumers will face the same challenge U.S. buyers face - a dizzying array of sets and techie points that will totally blow your mind.

"Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn't have in your home." David Frost Even though our rear projection "HDTV-ready" set isn't that old, we decided it was time to replace the huge piece of family room furniture with one of the sleek flat panel sets you see "everywhere." Trouble is, what self-respecting American family sits down and watches TV together anymore? So multiple idiot screens meant we could: move the big set into one of the kids rooms which would mean they couldn't have anything else in the room (like a bed) buy a flat panel set for each of them (like that ain't gonna happen). That was an easy decision because they already have powerful InstantON entertainment notebooks. Kids were raised by TV and they entertain themselves with their computers, the Internet and cellphones. When we were growing up and happened to say we were bored the old man solved the problem - he sent us outside to work and you did?or else. But in

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today's civilized Wi-Fi homes, kids fill their time watching videos and movies on their systems in their rooms, by the pool and probably even in class. In addition, our kids have ADS Tech TV tuner cards to prerecord shows when they left their systems at home and attached to our media center PC. According to In-Stat (Figure 2) they are in the majority since the sale of entertainment-ready notebooks has surpassed the sale of "plain old" PCs. So simply by adding 2inch LCD monitors they had everything they needed for IM-ing, Web research, streaming video/audio, email, digital surround music and, oh yes?schoolwork. That was easy and the picture looked better than that large screen set in the family room ?and they had room for furniture!

"Television has proven that people will look at anything rather than each other." Ann Landers Picking a new flat screen HDTV sounds easy enough?look at the picture, ask the price, take delivery?yeah, right! First you have to decide if you are going to go with plasma or LCD flat screens. Worldwide LCD sets outsell plasma systems three to one (Figure 3) but we were going to keep an open mind. Until recently the flat panel displays have been extremely pricey. But with everyone entering the market including Dell and HP, prices are plummeting. By mid-next year when several Asian plasma and LCD plants come on line, prices will get brutal. But when your wife wants to remodel the room and have the FCC's version of HDTV to watch HGTV, you do what is required. While that part of the population makes the decision, most of the purchases are made because of intellectually-stimulating HD programming like Nascar, football, golf, tennis, baseball and boxing. Next you have to decide if you are going to buy on-line, from a storefront or a home theater provider. If you don't know enough to be dangerous, on-line is a tough road. If you like the idea of a home theater solution you realize you are abandoning your room to something terribly expensive and unless you are really serious about TV it will be used as much as a formal dining room. The home theater room may be cool but most of the movies you watch over the next year or two will be ? plain old DVDs! Going to a storefront - Best Buy, CompUSA, Good Guys, Target, Costco, Wal-Mart, Fryes (oh heck anywhere!) is not a task for the faint of heart. It's worse than buying a used car. At least those folks know they are lying! While prices are in free fall for large flat screens (anything over 40-in is considered large), they definitely aren't an impulse buy. What sold for $25,000 a couple of years ago now sells for $2K so they are low and getting lower?fast! When the multi-billion dollar LCD facilities come on line pricing competition between plasma and LCD will be brutal. Price erosion is something you learn to live with. All you have to do is make a few choices: technology, size, aspect ratio, resolution, brand, channel, tuner, and so forth. With all of your content going digital (Figure 4) the set isn't just a boob tube anymore. It's a part of your total entertainment experience.

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"I'm beginning to believe that it won't be terribly long before it will be quite commonplace for people to use the Internet to pull up real-time video, or video-ondemand." Vinton Cerf The TV set in a growing number of homes is not just for couch potatoes. It's part of the pretty complete, pretty good and pretty challenging home network and entertainment solution. According to the Diffusion Group (Figure 5) more than 17 percent of the U.S. households have home networks followed by Japan and the U.K. respectively. As UPnP connectivity becomes reality rather than wishful thinking that number will increase dramatically. It's no wonder that home entertainment PCs and notebook sales are increasingly so significantly this year since people are connecting everything to their systems and networks (Figure 6).

"The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life."- Andrew Brown With the growing availability and use of broadband households seem to be expanding their multitasking. According to Forrester Research we are using DVRs to control how and when we watch TV. As long as you can avoid Macrovision and content management solutions you'll be able to not only extend that viewing time and even archive the shows. The rest of the time people are on-line doing almost everything web surfing, listening to digital music, banking, shopping and streaming video. In fact, with video over IP gaining so rapidly most of the Telcos are looking closely at Korea's IPTV model which is extremely successful. The interest and support for IPTV by Microsoft hasn't gone unnoticed by the cable and satellite companies. Or for that matter your local electrical utility that also has a pipe into your home. We didn't have any say in the court's decision to bust up Ma Bell years ago in the name of "competition." The idea of one phone company and one bill was easy to understand, easy to manage. So the revolutionary concept of one service provider, one bill has been reborn but this time with competitors (Figure 7). We'll give you a hint as to our leaning. We never did like Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy. Granted, we did cheer when George Seigel and Jane Fonda took on the phone company in Fun With Dick and Jane. But given a choice between dealing with the cable company or phone company?we'll vote for the good old days! But the fight for our voice, music, TV, video-ondemand, phone and internet connectivity is going to be aggressive over the next few years. Suddenly we'll have competitive offerings. Then all we'll have to figure out is how to get around the digital rights management solutions that Hollywood and the networks want in place before they release their super stimulating content and expand our NAS storage system. By the time that is worked out we'll be trying to store and enjoy our High Def video content. Either the Xbox or PS3 game playing systems will be in use to entice Hollywood to share their content with us on disc. Or maybe the question may just be moot and we'll be downloading our movies when we want, where we want. Then you'll be able to remember how rough you used to have it when you were growing up?having torun to the store to return the movie on time or waiting for the postal person to arrive with your new selection!

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INTERNET DISTRIBUTION AND RELATED TECHNOLOGIES

FIRST SIMPLE BY THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING

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THEN, MORE ELABORATE

BROADBAND
The term broadband can have different meanings in different contexts. The term's meaning has undergone substantial shifts. IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS Broadband in telecommunications refers to a signaling method that includes or handles a relatively wide range of frequencies, which may be divided into channels or frequency bins. Broadband is always a relative term, understood according to its context. The wider the bandwidth, the greater the information-carrying capacity. In radio, for example, a very narrow-band signal will carry Morse code; a broader band will carry speech; a still broader band is required to carry music without losing the high audio frequencies required for realistic sound reproduction. A television antenna described as "normal" may be capable of receiving a certain range of channels; one described as "broadband" will receive more channels. In data communications a modem will transmit a bandwidth of 56 kilobits per seconds (kbit/s) over a telephone line; over the same telephone line a bandwidth of several megabits per second can be handled by ADSL, which is described as broadband (relative to a modem over a telephone line, although much less than can be achieved over a fiber optic circuit, for example). IN DATA COMMUNICATIONS Broadband in data communications can refer to broadband networks or broadband Internet and may have the same meaning as above, so that data transmission over a fiber optic cable would be referred to as broadband as compared to a telephone modem operating at 56,000 bits per second. However, broadband in data communications is frequently used in a more technical sense to refer to data transmission where multiple pieces of data are sent simultaneously to increase the effective rate of transmission, regardless of actual data rate. In network engineering this term is used for methods where two or more signals share a medium. IN VIDEO Broadband in analog video distribution is traditionally used to refer to systems such as cable television, where the individual channels are modulated on carriers at fixed frequencies. In this context, baseband is the term's antonym, referring to a single channel of analog video, typically in composite form with an audio subcarrier. The act of demodulating converts broadband video to baseband video. However, broadband video in the context of streaming Internet video has come to mean video files that have bitrates high enough to require broadband Internet access in order to view them. Broadband video is also sometimes used to describe IPTV Video on demand.

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INTERNET TELEVISION
Internet television (Internet TV or iTV) is television distributed through the Internet. Internet television allows viewers to choose the show they want to watch from a library of shows. The primary models for Internet television are streaming Internet TV or selectable video on an Internet location, typically a website. The video can also be broadcast with a peer-to-peer network (P2PTV),which doesn't rely on single website's streaming. It differs from IPTV in that IPTV offerings are typically offered on discrete service provider networks, requiring a special IPTV set-top-box. Internet TV is a quick-to-market and relatively low investment service. Internet TV rides on existing infrastructure including broadband, ADSL, Wi-Fi, cable and satellite which makes it a valuable tool for a wide variety of service providers and content owners looking for new revenue streams. IMPLEMENTATION Many programmers are streaming their content live on the internet today to increase viewership (which in turn increases ad revenue) and protect market share. This model is efficient due to the relatively inexpensive multicasting protocol. Viewers may simply request access to the live feed and join into the live stream. This free model has been used in over-the-air broadcasting for years and still works because of the low cost of reaching viewers via multicast. Any viewer with a broadband connection and the correct free media player can watch live television from around the world. Many internet television "portals" are available which include links to live feeds as well as built-in viewers. Although the live television streams are free, most portals are supported by advertising revenue as well. Those that create valued and interesting video products now have the opportunity to distribute them directly to a large audience something impossible with the previous television distributing models (closed software, closed hardware, closed network). The free model has been used around the globe by local and independent television channels aiming for niche target audiences, or to build a collaborative environment for media production, a platform for citizens' media. It isn't strictly a citizen's format either as the broadcast model used in television for decades will begin to find competition in Internet television supported by advertising. TERMINOLOGY There are many ways to deliver video over an IP network and many buzzwords have been applied to these various ways and are sometimes used interchangeably. IPTV is commonly referred to those services operated and controlled by the same company that operates and controls the "Last Mile" to the consumers' premises. An IPTV service is usually delivered over a complex and investment heavy walled garden network, which is carefully engineered to ensure bandwidth efficient delivery of vast amounts of multicast video traffic. The higher network quality also enables easy delivery of high quality SD or HD TV content to subscribers homes. Internet TV, by definition, is created, managed and distributed via the open Internet. It rides on existing infrastructure and normally refers to those services sourced over the Internet by service providers that cannot control the final delivery. Again, transport streams in IP packets are used with one or more services per transport stream.

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Other TV-like services are available on the Internet but these send the video and the audio in separate streams over the IP network and do not use transport streams. Whilst the differences may seem irrelevant to the consumer, the underlying technology employed is quite different and directly affect the range and quality of service that can be achieved. IPTV users are limited to a relatively small range of programs but at high quality, whereas an Internet TV user may have access to many thousands of channels from literally all over the world but without any guarantee of being able to watch them. Streaming services such as YouTube generally offer User Generated Content UGC as individual short clips rather than professionally produced programs or films grouped as a channel. Other names for Internet television

Television on the desktop (TOD) TV over IP - Television over Internet Protocol Vlog For video web logging. Vodcast For video on demand.

IPTV
IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) is a system where a digital television service is delivered using Internet Protocol over a network infrastructure, which may include delivery by a broadband connection. A general definition of IPTV is television content that, instead of being delivered through traditional broadcast and cable formats, is received by the viewer through the technologies used for computer networks. For residential users, IPTV is often provided in conjunction with Video on Demand and may be bundled with Internet services such as Web access and VoIP. The commercial bundling of IPTV, VoIP and Internet access is referred to as "Triple Play" service (adding mobility is called "Quadruple Play"). IPTV is typically supplied by a service provider using a closed network infrastructure. This closed network approach is in competition with the delivery of TV content over the public Internet, called Internet Television. In businesses, IPTV may be used to deliver television content over corporate LANs. DEFINITION It is important to note that historically there have been many different definitions of "IPTV" including elementary streams over IP networks, transport streams over IP networks and a number of proprietary systems. Although it is premature to say that there is a full consensus of exactly what IPTV should mean, there is no doubt that the most widely used definition today is for single or multiple program transport streams (MPTS) which are sourced by the same network operator that owns or directly controls the "Final Mile" to the consumer's premises. This control over delivery enables a guaranteed quality of service, and also allows the service provider to offer an enhanced user experience such as better program guide, interactive services etc.

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HISTORY In 1994, ABC's World News Now was the first television show to be broadcast over the Internet, using the CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software. The term IPTV first appeared in 1995 with the founding of Precept Software by Judith Estrin and Bill Carrico. Precept designed and built an internet video product named "IP/TV". IP/TV was an MBONE compatible Windows and Unix based application that moved single and multi-source audio/video traffic, ranging from low to DVD quality, using both unicast and IP multicast RTP/RTCP. The software was written primarily by Steve Casner, Karl Auerbach, and Cha Chee Kuan. Precept was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1998. Cisco retains the "IP/TV" trademark. Internet radio company AudioNet started the first continuous live webcasts with content from WFAATV in January, 1998 and KCTU-LP on January 10, 1998. Kingston Communications, a regional telecommunications operator in UK, launched KIT (Kingston Interactive Television), an IPTV over DSL broadband interactive TV service in September 1999 after conducting various TV and VoD trials. The operator added additional VoD service in October 2001 with Yes TV, a provider VoD content. Kingston was one of the first companies in the world to introduce IPTV and IP VoD over ADSL. In 2006, AT&T launched its U-Verse IPTV service, comprising a national head end and regional video-serving offices. AT&T offered over 300 channels in 11 cities with more to be added in 2007 and beyond. While using FUTURE In the past, this technology has been restricted by low broadband penetration. In the coming years, however, residential IPTV is expected to grow at a brisk pace as broadband was available to more than 200 million households worldwide in the year 2005, projected to grow to 400 million by the year 2010. Many of the world's major telecommunications providers are exploring IPTV as a new revenue opportunity from their existing markets and as a defensive measure against encroachment from more conventional Cable Television services. Also, there is a growing number of IPTV installations within schools, universities, corporations and local institutions.

FILE SHARING
File sharing refers to the providing and receiving of digital files over a network, usually following the peer-to-peer (P2P) model, where the files are stored on and served by personal computers of the users. Most people who engage in file sharing on the Internet both provide (upload) files and receive files (download). P2P file sharing is distinct from file trading in that downloading files from a P2P network does not require uploading, although some networks either provide incentives for uploading such as credits or force the sharing of files being currently downloaded.

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PEER-TO-PEER (P2P)
A peer to peer (or P2P) computer network uses diverse connectivity between participants in a network and the cumulative bandwidth of network participants rather than conventional centralized resources where a relatively low number of servers provide the core value to a service or application. P2P networks are typically used for connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections. Such networks are useful for many purposes. Sharing content files (see file sharing) containing audio, video, data or anything in digital format is very common, and realtime data, such as telephony traffic, is also passed using P2P technology. A pure P2P network does not have the notion of clients or servers but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example of a file transfer that is not P2P is an FTP server where the client and server programs are quite distinct, the clients initiate the download/uploads, and the servers react to and satisfy these requests. The earliest P2P network in widespread use was the Usenet news server system, in which peers communicated with one another to propagate Usenet news articles over the entire Usenet network. Particularly in the earlier days of Usenet, UUCP was used to extend even beyond the Internet. However, the news server system also acted in a client-server form when individual users accessed a local news server to read and post articles. The same consideration applies to SMTP email in the sense that the core email relaying network of Mail transfer agents is a P2P network while the periphery of Mail user agents and their direct connections is client server. Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the World Wide Web, as evidenced by his WorldWideWeb editor/browser, was close to a P2P network in that it assumed each user of the web would be an active editor and contributor creating and linking content to form an interlinked "web" of links. This contrasts to the more broadcasting-like structure of the web as it has developed over the years. Some networks and channels such as Napster, OpenNAP and IRC server channels use a client-server structure for some tasks (e.g. searching) and a P2P structure for others. Networks such as Gnutella or Freenet use a P2P structure for all purposes, and are sometimes referred to as true P2P networks, although Gnutella is greatly facilitated by directory servers that inform peers of the network addresses of other peers. P2P architecture embodies one of the key technical concepts of the Internet, described in the first Internet Request for Comments, RFC 1, "Host Software" dated 7 April 1969. More recently, the concept has achieved recognition in the general public in the context of the absence of central indexing servers in architectures used for exchanging multimedia files. The concept of P2P is increasingly evolving to an expanded usage as the relational dynamic active in distributed networks, i.e. not just computer to computer, but human to human. Yochai Benkler has coined the term "commons-based peer production" to denote collaborative projects such as free software. Associated with peer production are the concept of peer governance (referring to the manner in which peer production projects are managed) and peer property (referring to the new type of licenses which recognize individual authorship but not exclusive property rights, such as the GNU General Public License and the Creative Commons licenses).

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BITTORRENT (PROTOCOL)
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. The initial distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first seed. Each peer who downloads the data also uploads them to other peers. Relative to standard internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor's hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor. Programmer Bram Cohen designed the protocol in April 2001 and released a first implementation on 2 July 2001. It is now maintained by Cohen's company BitTorrent, Inc. Usage of the protocol accounts for significant Internet traffic, though the precise amount has proven difficult to measure. There are numerous BitTorrent clients available for a variety of computing platforms.

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P2PTV
The term P2PTV refers to peer-to-peer (P2P) software applications designed to redistribute video streams in real time on a P2P network; the distributed video streams are typically TV channels from all over the world but may also come from other sources. The draw to these applications is significant because they have the potential to make any TV channel globally available. TECHNOLOGY AND USE In a P2PTV system, each user, while downloading a video stream, is simultaneously also uploading that stream to other users, thus contributing to the overall available bandwidth. The arriving streams are typically a few minutes time-delayed compared to the original sources. The video quality of the channels usually depends on how many users are watching; the video quality is better if there are more users. The architecture of many P2PTV networks can be thought of as real-time versions of BitTorrent: if a user wishes to view a certain channel, the P2PTV software contacts a "tracker server" for that channel in order to obtain addresses of peers who distribute that channel; it then contacts these peers to receive the feed. The tracker records the user's address, so that it can be given to other users who wish to view the same channel. In effect, this creates an overlay network on top of the regular internet for the distribution of real-time video content. Some applications allow users to broadcast their own streams, whether self-produced, obtained from a video file, or through a TV tuner card or video capture card. Many of the commercial P2PTV applications were developed in China (TVants, TVUPlayer, PPLive, QQLive,Feidian,PPStream, SopCast). The majority of available applications broadcast mainly Asian TV stations, with the exception of TVUPlayer, which carries a number of North American stations including CBS, Spike TV, and Fox News. Some applications distribute TV channels without a legal license to do so; this utilization of P2P technology is particularly popular to view channels that are either not available locally, or only available by paid subscription, as is the case for some sports channels.ISSUES FOR BROADCASTERS
Broadcasting via a P2PTV system is usually much cheaper than the alternatives and can be done by private individuals. No quality of service (QoS). Compared to unicasting (the standard server-client architecture used in streaming media) no one can guarantee a reliable stream, since every user is a rebroadcaster. Each viewer is a part of a chain of viewers which all can have a negative influence on the reliability of the stream (by having a slow PC, a filled downlink or uplink or an unreliable consumer grade DSL or cable connection). Less control. If a broadcaster prefers to limit access to their content based on regions, and would like good data on viewer behaviour, such as volume, trends and viewing time, then a traditional broadcasting solution offers more control. Professional broadcasters and distributors have used a hybrid solution for many years. Distribution servers are not centrally installed, but are rolled out in a smart, decentralized way. A central management facility manages content distribution over multiple peer servers (also known as Edge servers, or Caches), strategically located near user swarms (generally popular access ISP networks), manages load balancing, redirection of users, view reporting and QoS. Examples are Akamai.

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WEBCAST
A webcast is a media file distributed over the Internet using streaming media technology. As a broadcast may either be live or recorded, similarly, a webcast may either be distributed live or recorded. Essentially, webcasting is broadcasting over the Internet. The generally accepted use of the term webcast is the "transmission of linear audio or video content over the Internet". A webcast uses streaming media technology to take a single content source and distribute it to many simultaneous listeners/viewers. The largest "webcasters" include existing radio and TV stations who "simulcast" their output, as well as a multitude of Internet only "stations". The term webcasting is usually reserved for referring to non-interactive linear streams or events. Rights and licensing bodies offer specific "webcasting licenses" to those wishing to carry out Internet broadcasting using copyright material. Webcasting is also used extensively in the commercial sector for investor relations presentations (such as Annual General Meetings), in E-learning (to transmit seminars), and for related communications activities. However, webcasting does not bear much, if any, relationship to the idea of web conferencing which is designed for many-to-many interaction. The ability to webcast using cheap/accessible technology has allowed independent media to flourish. There are many notable independent shows that broadcast regularly online. Often produced by average citizens in their homes they cover many interests and topics; from the mundane to the bizarre. Webcasts relating to computers, technology, and news are particularly popular and many new shows are added regularly. ORIGINS "Webcasting" was first publicly described and presented by Brian Raila of GTE Laboratories at InterTainment '89, 1989, held in New York City, USA. Raila recognized that a viewer/listener need not download the entirety of a program to view/listen to a portion thereof, so long as the receiving device ("client computer") could, over time, receive and present data more rapidly than the user could digest same. Raila used the term "buffered media" to describe this concept. Raila was joined by James Paschetto of GTE Laboratories to further demonstrate the concept. Paschetto was singularly responsible for the first workable prototype of streaming media, which Raila presented and demonstrated at the Voice Mail Association of Europe 1995 Fall Meeting of October, 1995, in Montreux, Switzerland. Alan Saperstein (Visual Data, now known as Onstream Media (Nasdaq:ONSM), was the first company to feature streaming video in June 1993 with HotelView, a travel library of 2 minute videos featuring thousands of hotel properties worldwide. On November 7, 1994, WXYC, the college radio station of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill became the first radio station in the world to broadcast its signal over the internet. The term webcasting was coined (in the early/mid 1990s) when webcast/streaming pioneers Mark Cuban (Audionet), Howard Gordon (Xing Technologies), William Mutual (ITV.net) and Peggy Miles (InterVox Communications) got together with a community of webcasters to pick a term to describe the technology of sending audio and video on the Net...that might make sense to people. The term netcasting was a consideration, but one of the early webcast community members owned a company

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called NetCast, so that term was not used, seeking a name that would not be branded to one company. Discussions were also conducted about the term with the National Association of Broadcasters for their books - Internet Age Broadcaster I and II, written by Peggy Miles and Dean Sakai. The actual word "webcast" was coined by Daniel Keys Moran in his 1988 novel The Armageddon Blues.: "... DataWeb News had done an in-depth on it not two weeks ago, and tourists had been trekking up into the New York hills ever since the webcast." - page 191 of the Bantam paperback. Translated versions including Subtitling are now possible using SMIL Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. EXAMPLES Virtually all the major broadcasters have a webcast of their output, from the BBC to CNN to Al Jazeera to UNTV Webcast in television to Radio China, Vatican Radio, United Nations Radio and the World Service in radio. A notable webcast took place in September 1999 to launch NetAid, a project to promote Internet use in the world's poorest countries. Three high profile concerts were to be broadcast simultaneously on the BBC, MTV and over the Internet; a London concert at Wembley Stadium featuring the likes of Robbie Williams, George Michael; a New York concert featuring Bono of U2 and Wyclef Jean; a Geneva concert. More recently, Live8 (AOL) claimed around 170,000 concurrent viewers (up to 400 Kbit/s) and the BBC received about the same (10 Gbit/s) on the day of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. The growth of webcast traffic has roughly doubled, year on year, since 1995 and is directly linked to broadband penetration. Connecting Media was one of the first companies to do live webcasting using a special IFP Van (Internet Field Production) dedicated to webcasting. Today, webcasts are being used more frequently and by novice users. Live webcasts are allowing viewing of presentations, business meetings, and seminars etc. for those that telecommute rather than attend. Such sites offer live broadcasting as an affordable solution to public speaking events that expands the viewing audience to anyone that has an internet connection. Live sporting events, both local and national, have also quickly become frequent webcast subjects. With regard to smaller events such as Little League, amateur sports, small college sports, and high school sports, webcasting allows these events to have full audio or video coverage online when they may not be able to book standard radio or TV time. Websites like Meridix Webcast Network, Texas Sports Radio Network, SportsJuice, and others allow local schools, teams, and broadcasters to produce their own webcasts, which also have the advantage of being accessible to anyone with an internet connection (i.e. relatives several states away), unlike the range and market limitations of terrestrial radio and TV.

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VIDEO PODCAST
Video podcast (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures. The term is an evolution specialized for video, coming from the generally audio-based podcast and referring to the distribution of video where the RSS feed is used as a non-linear TV channel to which consumers can subscribe using a PC, TV, set-top box, media center or mobile multimedia device. TECHNOLOGY AND HISTORY From a web server, a video podcast can be distributed as a file or as a stream. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. Downloading complete video podcasts in advance gives the user the ability to play the video podcasts offline on, for example, a portable media player. A downloaded version can be watched many times with only one download, reducing bandwidth costs in this case. Streaming allows seeking (skipping portions of the file) without downloading the full video podcast, better statistics and lower bandwidth costs for the servers; however, users may have to face pauses in playback caused by slow transfer speeds. A podcast client may work with a separate, or integrated player. One such example of the latter is iTunes, which is an unusual case of a web feed aggregator being added to a media player rather than vice versa. TIMELINE On 31 October 2003 Canadian film collective Rocket Ace Moving Pictures launches the serialized web-based video zombie comedy project Dead End Days at DeadEndDays.com while referred to by its creators as a "web-serial" throughout 2003 and 2004, it is adopted by the podcast community as a progenitor. The creators retroactively add RSS features to the site. On 1 January 2004 Steve Garfield launches his video blog and declares that 2004 would be the year of the video blog. On October 1 2005 Terra: The Nature of Our World launched making it the first Natural History video podcast. It is produced in conjunction with the MFA program in Science & Natural History Filmmaking at Montana State University, Filmmakers for Conservation, and PBS. On June 8 2006, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, launched her video podcast via the Chancellor's website, making her the first head of government to issue a regular video podcast. On December 16, 2006, Time magazine named its Person of the Year as "You", referring to independent content creators on the web and video podcasters in particular. Crash Test Kitchen, a video podcast begun in April 2005 by home cooks Waz and Lenny, was featured in the magazine as an example of this phenomenon. The magazine itself was a distinctive issue that featured a flexible mirror on the cover. On April 13, 2007, the British panel game Have I Got News for You started to broadcast a vodcast called Have I Got News for You: The Inevitable Internet Spin-off. The first HIGNFY vodcast was presented by Jeremy Clarkson. Another British panel game, QI, also announced that it would create a vodcast, starting in Series E. However, this was changed into a set of "Quickies", not downloadable and only viewable from the BBC website. On November 25, 2007, Neil Fairbrother was featured in the Sunday Observer's Courvoisier Future 500 for creating pod3.tv, a web TV channel that creates and distributes TV shows as video podcasts.

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VIDEO HOSTING SERVICE

A video sharing service allows individuals to upload video clips to an Internet website. The video host will then store the video on its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view this video. The website, mainly used as the video hosting service, is usually called the video sharing website. IMPETUS Because many users do not have personal web space, either as a paid service, or through an ISP offering, video hosting services are becoming increasingly popular, especially with the explosion in popularity of blogs, forums, and other interactive pages. The mass market for camera phones has increased the supply of user-generated video. Traditional methods of personal video distribution, such as making a DVD to show to friends at home, are unsuited to the low resolution and high volume of camera phone clips. In contrast, current broadband Internet connections are well suited to serving the quality of video shot on mobile phones. Most people do not own web servers, and this has created demand for user-generated video content hosting, which the likes of YouTube are catering to. USER GENERATED VIDEO SHARING User generated sites mostly offer free services whereby users can upload video clips and share it with the masses. Many sites place restrictions on the file size, duration, subject matter and format of the uploaded video file. Most sites don't allow nudity, though each site makes judgement calls on what qualifies as inappropriate content. Some sites also flag adult material to keep it out of their public pool of content. Some sites screen all their content before it is published and others approve first and use community features to filter out inappropriate content "after-the-fact." VIDEO SHARING PLATFORM / WHITE LABEL PROVIDERS Platform and White Label Providers sell the technology to various parties that allow them to create the services of the aforementioned "User Generated Video Sharing" websites with the client's brand. Just as Akamai and other companies host and manage video/image/audio for many companies, these whitelabels "host video content". Many of these companies also offer their own user-generated video sharing website both for commercial purposes and to show off their platform. Websites in this category include (in alphabetical order): Enterprise video sharing sites are aimed at businesses wanting to share video content internally. Features may include limiting access to authenticated users, integration with single sign-on services and a lack of the advertisements normally present on public sites. OPEN SOURCE VIDEO SHARING PLATFORMS A truly open and accessible online video system depends on the following. Open Access Anyone who wants to create, should be able to create. With the decentralized structure of the internet, there is no reason to have gatekeepers that limit who gets to show their videos to the world. Miro is built to connect with any online publisher that has video RSS feeds, whether they are individuals or video hosting companies. If a creator isn't being well served by their video publishing system, they can switch to another and still reach their audience in Miro. Open Standards Any web browser can view any website because the web was designed with specific standards that are open for anyone to use. This openness is what makes the web so much more vibrant than the 'online'

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systems that it replaced (Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, etc.). Miro is built on several open standards, including HTTP, HTML, BitTorrent, and RSS. Open Source The source code that makes Miro work is open for anyone to read, change, and build upon. Just as the open-source Firefox has revolutionized web browsing, we hope that Miro will move online video in a better direction. Anyone who wants to make Miro better can do so. WEB BASED VIDEO EDITING Web based video editing sites generally offer the "user generated video sharing" website in addition to some form of editing application. Some of these applications simply allow the user to crop a video into a smaller clip. Other services have invested much time and effort into replicating the same functionality that has previously only been available via Windows Movie Maker, iMovie and other client-side applications that run outside of a web page. Some of these applications are based in AJAX and others in Flash. Some websites also offer downloadable editors but they will not be listed here due to the number of pre-existing video editors.

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IS REALLY EVERYBODY DISTRIBUTING MOVIES ON THE WEB?

AMAZON VIDEO ON DEMAND Amazon Video on Demand (VOD) is an Internet video on demand service, only available in the United States, offered by Amazon.com which offers television shows and films for rental and purchase. The service became available on September 7, 2006 as Amazon Unbox. On September 4, 2008, the service was rebranded as "Amazon Video on Demand." The Unbox name still refers to the locally-installed player, which is now optional. Compatibility By default, VOD programs play in Flash Video in all web browsers with the Adobe Flash plugin installed. This feature was launched in public beta July 17, 2008 and was released September 4, 2008. Customers may also download videos to TiVo Series 2 and Series 3 DVRs, except those made for use with DirecTV (DirecTiVo). Sony BRAVIA TVs equipped with an Internet Video Link device can also use Amazon VOD directly through the TV's menu system. The optional Amazon Unbox player lets users download higher-quality copies of videos. The Unbox player is compatible only with the Windows XP family of operating systems and Windows Vista. Downloaded films include a full-resolution video file and a lower-resolution copy for portable devices. The content can be viewed using the Amazon Unbox Video Player, Windows Media Player, a Windows Media Center Extender such as an Xbox 360, a PlaysForSure portable device. Downloaded videos may be burned to a DVD for storage purposes, but the resulting DVD will not play on a DVD player. Video quality The content is purported by Amazon.com to be of "DVD quality". The average video bit-rate of an Amazon Unbox download equals 2500 kbit/s; this means that a two hour movie consumes roughly two gigabytes (2 GB) of storage space. In comparison, a typical DVD averages 5600 kbit/s, which makes a hour movie about 4.7 GB. However, Amazon uses the VC1 codec, a more modern codec than MPEG2, which is used on DVDs. VC1 achieves a higher quality picture at a smaller file size. Due to the large size of the files being downloaded, the service requires a broadband internet connection capable of sustaining transfer speeds of 800 kbit/s. A hour movie may take 7 hours and 20 minutes to download using a 750 kbit/s DSL/cable connection or 1 hour and 50 minutes with a 3.0 Mbit/s DSL/cable connection. Amazon asserts that for customers with an internet connection of 3 Mbit/s or more, any Unbox file will start playing within 5 minutes. In November 2007, TiVo enabled "progressive download" for Unbox content so that users may watch downloaded files before the download is complete. Requirements Users of the streaming video on demand service need only a web browser with the Adobe Flash plugin to stream videos For transfer to portable device, the service requires the installation of a client application which manages playback and the transfer of video to portable devices that bear the Microsoft PlaysForSure certification, such as the Creative Zen or a Portable Media Center.

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BBC IPLAYER BBC iPlayer (formerly known as Integrated Media Player (iMP), Interactive Media Player, and MyBBCPlayer) is a service available via website, P2P, cable television, iPhone and iPod Touch developed by the BBC to extend its existing RealPlayer-based "Radio Player" and other streamed video clip content. BBC iPlayer left Beta and went live on December 25, 2007. On June 25, 2008, it was announced that a new-look iPlayer would be launched. Key features One of the key features of the iPlayer download service is the use of peer-to-peer technology to enable the distribution of large video files (i.e. TV programmes) to scale effectively. Once downloaded, the content is only playable within the iPlayer itself or Windows Media Player 10 or 11, and digital rights management (DRM) software will prevent it being directly copied to another medium (e.g. another computer or CD-ROM). Additionally, the DRM allows the BBC to decide how long the programmes remain watchable. Programmes will be available for download for seven days following broadcast. Once a programme is downloaded a user will have thirty days to start watching it. Once a user starts to watch a programme, it will continue to be available for the next seven days. These limitations do not apply to viewers using the online streaming service. Online service The BBC's streaming version of iPlayer, which makes use of Adobe Flash software, launched on 13 December 2007. The streaming version of iPlayer offers replays of BBC shows screened on British BBC TV channels in the last seven days. Programmes available are those from BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC News and BBC Parliament. Due to licensing agreements, international and some privately-produced shows or movies are not available on iPlayer. Other Platforms On 30 April 2008 the iPlayer seven-day catch-up service was pumped direct to Virgin Media's 3.4m digital cable TV customers as part of the company's video-on-demand service. Pressing the 'red button' while watching a BBC channel on TV will bring up the iPlayer service without the user having to access the web. BT has announced plans to charge its customers 3 per month for watching BBC Replay, a cut down version of iPlayer offering a more limited 30 hours of BBC programming per week. On 7 March 2008, a beta version for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch was released. The version marked the first time the service became available on portable devices, allowing streaming over a wi-fi connection. The EDGE connectivity on the iPhone, however, is not supported, as it is too slow for streaming video. On 9 April 2008 the BBC iPlayer was made available to stream video content on the Wii video game console via the Internet Channel (only available to UK residents). This was enabled by a recoding of the iPlayer to use Flash 7 rather than Flash 9. On 18 September 2008, the BBC announced that a version will become available to the Nokia N96 mobile phone as a download service to allow viewers to watch programmes even when they are out of reach of Wifi or 3G networks.Shortly after on 9 September 2008, even before the BBC Nokia N96 download service had gone live, a method for independently downloading and playing the iPlayer N96 3GP stream on other mobiles, Linux and MacOS was published.

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CINEMANOW CinemaNow is a World Wide Web-based digital video distribution company. The company was founded in 1999. The CinemaNow library contains approximately 10,000 feature-length films, shorts, music concerts and television programs from more than 250 licensors, including 20th Century Fox, ABC News, Disney, Endemol, MGM, Miramax, NBC Universal, Sony, Warner Bros., Sundance Channel, Koch Entertainment, and Lions Gate Entertainment.

GOOGLE VIDEO Google Video is a free video sharing website and also a video service from Google that allows anyone to upload video clips to Google's web servers as well as make their own media available free of charge; some videos are also offered for sale through the Google Video Store. Uploaded videos were saved as a .gvi files under the "Google Videos" folder in "My Videos" and reports of the video(s) details are logged and stored in the user account. The report sorts and lists the number of times that each of the users videos have been viewed and downloaded within a specific time frame. These range from the previous day, week, month or the entire time that the videos have been there for. Totals are calculated and displayed and the information can be downloaded into a spreadsheet format or printed out. On October 9, 2006 Google agreed to buy former competitor YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, but YouTube will remain a separate service under its own identity for the near future, though Google video searches include YouTube results as well. Video content Google Video is geared towards providing a large archive of freely searchable videos. Besides amateur media, Internet videos, viral ads, and movie trailers, the service also aims to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies. A number of educational discourses by Google employees have been recorded and made available for viewing via Google Video. The lectures have been done mainly at the employees' former universities. The topics cover Google technologies and software engineering but also include other pioneering efforts by major players in the software engineering field. Various media companies offered content on Google Video for purchase, including CBS programs, NBA, music videos, and independent film. Initially, the content of a number of broadcasting companies (such as ABC, NBC, CNN) was available as free streaming content or stills with closed captioning. In addition, the U.S. National Archive uses Google Video to make historic films available online. Google Video also searches other non-affiliated video sites from web crawls. Sites searched by Google Video in addition to their own videos and YouTube include GoFish, ExposureRoom, Vimeo, MySpace, Biku, and Yahoo! Video. It appears that Google Video is moving away from an online video archive and towards a search engine for videos, similar to their web and image searches.

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ITUNES STORE The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple Inc. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, it proved the viability of online music sales and is now the number-one music vendor in the United States. As of June 2008, the store has sold 5 billion songs, accounting for more than 70% of worldwide online digital music sales and making the service the largest legal music retailer. Most downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by FairPlay, Apple's version of digital rights management. However, iTunes has begun a retroactive shift into selling DRM-free music. In October 2005, Apple announced the latest iPod would be capable of playing video files, which would be sold online through the iTunes Store in the U.S. These videos included 2000 music videos and episodes of popular television programs. Apple made a deal with Disney to be the first supplier of TV shows, the first shows available included episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives with each episode becoming available the day after it originally aired on broadcast TV. Several short animated films by Pixar are also available. The selling of videos on iTunes sparked considerable debate as to whether there was a paying audience for programming available for free on TV. As MP3 Newswire pointed out, users are not so much paying for the TV programs themselves. Instead they are really paying for a service that offers the convenience of someone else digitizing free broadcast episodes for them for their portable device, each episode in commercial-free form, and a convenient place to select and download individual shows. Through an updated version of QuickTime Pro, users can create their own videos for the iPod, including digitized versions of programs recorded on their VCR if they wish to take the time and effort to save the cost. JOOST Joost is a system for distributing recorded TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennstrm and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa). Joost began development in 2006. Working under the code name "The Venice Project", Zennstrm and Friis assembled teams of some 150 software developers in about six cities around the world, including New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse. According to Zennstrm at a 25 July 2007 press conference about Skype held in Tallinn, Estonia, Joost had signed up more than a million beta testers, and its launch was scheduled for the end of 2007. The teams are in negotiations with FOX networks. It has signed up with Warner Music, Indianapolis Motor Speedway Productions (Indianapolis 500, IndyCar Series) and production company Endemol for

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the beta. In February 2007, Viacom entered into a deal with the company to distribute content from its media properties, including MTV Networks, BET and film studio Paramount Pictures. The program is based on P2PTV technology and is expected to deliver (relaying) near-TV resolution images. It turns a PC into an instant on-demand TV without any need for additional set top box. News updates, discussion forums, show ratings, and multi-user chat sessions (often linked to the active stream/channel) are made possible through the use of semi-transparent widget overlays. The current version of the software is based on XULRunner and the audio management re-uses the ZAP Media Kit. The peer to peer layer comes from the Joltid company, which also provided the peer to peer layer of Skype. The video playback utilizes the CoreCodec, CoreAVC H.264 video decoder. Joost soft launched its Widget API on August 29th 2007 under a non-copyleft open source license and encourages third party developers to create tools for its TV 2.0 platform. The Joost service is ad-supported, with advertising analogous to that shown on traditional TV. Joost has 40 advertisers, including Sony Pictures, BMW, and Sprite. Aside from injected videoadvertisements, it serves additional interactive advertisements via overlays and short pop-ups that are clickable. As this is visible related to the content shown, it is not a surprise that Joost sends regular data back to ad-servers via port 11208, a fact that is disclosed in legalese to users in the end-user license agreement.

MICROSOFT MEDIAROOM Microsoft Mediaroom is the latest update of the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition platform software, intended for use in a set-top box to access on-demand as well as live television programming on an Microsoft IPTV network. It was announced on June 18, 2007 at the NXTcomm conference. Microsoft Mediaroom has been adopted by BT (UK), SingTel (Singapore), T-Home (Germany), Portugal Telecom (Portugal), Swisscom (Switzerland), AT&T (United States) and Reliance (India) as their IPTV delivery platform. The software is slated to be ported to the Xbox 360 platform in select markets. Microsoft Mediaroom includes all the features of Microsoft TV IPTV Edition, including support for on-demand and live video, video recording and time shifting, and interactive program guide with integrated search and scheduled recording. It includes the ability to record two HD streams while watching two SD streams simultaneously. In addition, it adds several other features including media sharing and Multiview. Personal Media Sharing allows media content to be streamed from an Windows Media Connect enabled system to the Mediaroom set top box. Multiview is an implementation of picture-in-picture that allows multiple channels or multiple camera angles of the same program to be seen on the screen simultaneously. Microsoft aims to supplement Digital Terrestrial Television with this platform. It also integrates with Xbox 360 console. Microsoft Mediaroom also includes Microsoft Mediaroom Application Development toolkit which can be used to author applications that run on the Microsoft Mediaroom platform. The Mediaroom Personal Server can be used by developers to simulate the Mediroom environment for testing purposes. It is currently available only to Mediaroom content-providers.

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MOVIELINK Movielink is a web-based video on demand (VOD) and electronic sell-through (EST) service offering movies, TV shows and other videos for rental or purchase. The service is a subsidiary of Blockbuster Inc. Movielink draws its content offerings from the libraries of Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal Studios, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Buena Vista Pictures (including Miramax), Twentieth Century Fox, Koch Entertainment and others on a nonexclusive basis. While it is only available to users in the United States, it was the first company in the world to offer legally downloadable movies. In general, movies obtained through Movielink can only be viewed on a computer or a TV connected to a computer. However, consumer electronics devices such as the Xbox 360 game console also allow users to more easily view these digital media on a traditional TV screen. Also, Movielink has deals with certain set top box companies to offer its movies downloaded directly to people's TV's (including AT&T's Homezone product). Experimentation with other business models is underway, including a feature which would allow users to purchase, download, and burn a DVD of a selected film. Movielink uses digital rights management software from Microsoft and RealNetworks to protect their content. Consequently, compatibility is limited to Intel-based computers running Microsoft Windows 2000, XP,or Vista and Windows Media Player version 9 or later. Also, the service is currently available only to residents of the United States.

XBOX LIVE Xbox Live is an online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service created and operated by Microsoft Corporation. It was first made available to the Xbox video game console. An updated version of the service became available for the Xbox 360 console at that system's launch. The Windows Equivalent is Games for Windows - Live that makes certain aspects of the system available on Windows PCs, with plans to extend Live to other platforms such as handhelds and mobile phones as part of the Live Anywhere initiative. The New Xbox Experience At E3 2008, Microsoft announced that all Xbox Live users, Gold and Silver, will be receiving a new dashboard update this holiday that will add many new features. One new feature is the ability to watch streaming movies and TV shows from Netflix onto the Xbox 360. This feature will be free to Xbox Live Gold members with Netflix Unlimited, and once enabled, users will be able to watch with their friends in a party with up to 8 players. Xbox Live members will have the ability to pick from over 10,000 movies and episodes, as if they were to choose on the website. But, when a player parties up with a group, they would also have the ability to join games together or view a slideshow of photos. Another feature will give players an option to create avatars. This is similar to the Mii avatars used for the Wii console. Players would be able to customize from changing body shape, facial features, hair and clothes, as being able to download more clothing from the Xbox Live Marketplace.

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YOUTUBE YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006. Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older (e.g. videos containing potentially offensive content). The uploading of videos containing pornography, nudity, defamation, harassment, commercial advertisements and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited. Related videos, determined by title and tags, appear onscreen to the right of a given video. In YouTube's second year, functions were added to enhance user ability to post video 'responses' and subscribe to content feeds. Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day, and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos were being added per day in May 2006, and this increased to 65,000 by July. In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users had made over 3 billion video views. In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos (requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had about 500,000 user accounts. As of April 9, 2008, a YouTube search returns about 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels. It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000, and that around 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute. In March 2008, its bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately $1 million a day. Before the launch of YouTube in 2005, there were few simple methods available for ordinary computer users who wanted to post videos online. With its easy to use interface, YouTube made it possible for anyone who could use a computer to post a video that millions of people could watch within a few minutes. The wide range of topics covered by YouTube has turned video sharing into one of the most important parts of Internet culture. An early example of the social impact of YouTube was the success of the Bus Uncle video in 2006. It shows an animated conversation between a youth and an older man on a bus in Hong Kong, and was discussed widely in the mainstream media. Another YouTube video to receive extensive coverage is guitar, which features a performance of Pachelbel's Canon on an electric guitar. The name of the performer is not given in the video, and after it received millions of views the New York Times revealed the identity of the guitarist as Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 2year-old from South Korea who had recorded the track in his bedroom. Content accessibility YouTube accepts common video file formats and converts them to Flash Video in order to make them available for online viewing. Since June 2007, newly uploaded videos have also been encoded using the H.264 video standard to enable streaming of YouTube videos on devices that support H.264 streaming. 67

Outside YouTube Each YouTube video is accompanied by a piece of HTML markup which can be used to link to the video or embed it on a page outside the YouTube website, unless the submitter of a video chooses to disable the feature. A small addition to the markup allows the video to play automatically when the webpage loads. These options are especially popular with users of social networking sites. YouTube videos can also be accessed via a gadget which is available for the iGoogle homepage. On mobile YouTube launched its mobile site, YouTube Mobile on June 15, 2007. It is based on xHTML and uses 3GP videos with H.263/AMR codec and RTSP streaming. It is available via a web interface at m.youtube.com or via YouTube's Mobile Java Application. On TV The YouTube TV Channel is on Information TV 2, and it started January 7, 2008. The channel is airing video sharing content from the YouTube website. On Apple TV, iPhone and iPod touch Apple Inc. announced on June 20, 2007 that YouTube is accessible on the Apple TV after installation of a free software update. Functionality includes browsing by category, searching videos, and the ability for members to log onto their YouTube accounts directly on Apple TV. Apple announced Wednesday, June 20, 2007 that YouTube would be available on the iPhone at launch. Streaming is over Wi-Fi or EDGE.

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CASE STUDY - CINEQUEST LAUNCHES DOWNLOAD-AND-BURN INDIE MOVIE SERVICE

By Anders Bylund
Indie film festival Cinequest is trying to grow out of its festival breeches, and the latest move involves selling its catalog of arthouse films in download formats. Of course, they're doing it while trawling for new material at the Cannes Film Festival. Cinequest already has distribution deals in place with Netflix, Palm, and Intel Viiv, and has been selling physical DVDs alongside a few free downloads on its own site since launching its own DVD label last fall. The PlaysForSure-protected files are available with three-day rental licenses for US$1.99 per movie or $4.99 if you want to burn your own DVD, and are taking up a unique position in the non-pr0n movie industry of today: "Other companies are working on it (the idea), but at the moment they are too expensive, and the rights protection is too strict. We are also building a community feature into the site, and I think we are going to be the first out of the gate," said Dave Le, Jaman's senior designer. Jens Michael Hussey, a company director, added: "This is a distribution platform which bypasses Hollywood. There are a lot of films that just don't get the audiences they deserve, and then I see all the crapola that's in the theatres and it's so unfair. This is a chance to take back control of what you see." The founders are hoping to get its audience involved in some community action around its movies. Online chats linked to the movies you are currently holding a license for are intended to bring back a little piece of that oldtime "going to the movies" feel, even though you're sitting in your own living room: "This is like a global movie theatre, like when you go to movies and come out and talk about what you've just seen. With home movies you are kinda disconnected from that. Here we are bringing your home into the cinema," said Jens Michael Hussey. Viewers will be able to chat on line, while they are watching the movie or afterwards, to discuss the film. Cinequest's stated mission isn't to make a lot of money, but rather to help independent filmmakers reach a wider audience and hopefully even make a living. 30 percent of the download fees go directly to the filmmaker, and similar revenue-sharing agreements are in place for other media channels as well. "Some films will have theatrical releases and we definitely support that, but the majority of them won't," says Kathleen Powell, Cinequest President and CoFounder. The new-media online distribution model seems like a perfect fit for independent film houses, and conversely, indies provide great guinea pig material for testing out new methods so the big studios can point to actual results when making their own decisions.

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CASE STUDY - ABC, CBS, FOX & NBC OFFER PROGRAMMING IN HD ON THE ITUNES STORE
CUPERTINO, Calif., Oct. 16 - Apple today announced that all four of the major networks are offering primetime programs in high definition on the iTunes Store, including viewer favorites "Grey's Anatomy" and "Lost" from ABC, "CSI" and "CSI: Miami" from CBS, "Bones" and "Prison Break" airing on FOX, and "Heroes" and "The Office" from NBC Universal. The iTunes Store is the world's most popular online TV store with over 200 million TV episodes sold, including more than one million HD episodes purchased since the launch of HD programming on iTunes last month. "We've got an incredible Fall 2008 TV lineup with over 70 primetime comedies and dramas, including many of the most popular shows on TV in stunning HD," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of Internet Services. "With over 200 million episodes sold, iTunes customers have proven they love watching television on their computer, iPod, iPhone and TV with Apple TV." The list of HD programs now available on the iTunes Store includes ABC's "Brothers & Sisters," "Desperate Housewives," "Dirty Sexy Money," "Eli Stone," "Grey's Anatomy," "Life on Mars," "Lost," "Private Practice," "Samantha Who?" and "Ugly Betty." CBS programming includes "CSI," "CSI: Miami," "CSI: New York," "NCIS" and "Numb3rs." FOX shows include "Bones," "House," "Prison Break" and "Sons of Anarchy," which airs on FX. NBC shows include "30 Rock," "Heroes," "Kath & Kim," "Knight Rider," "Law & Order: SVU," "Life," "Lipstick Jungle," "My Own Worst Enemy" and "The Office," and SCI FI Channel's "Battlestar Galactica" and "Eureka," and USA Network's "In Plain Sight," "Monk," "Psych" and "The Starter Wife."

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WIRELESS HD
WirelessHD is an industry-led effort to define a specification for the next generation wireless digital network interface specification for wireless high-definition signal transmission for consumer electronics products. The consortium behind the standard includes among others Intel, LG, Matsushita, NEC, Samsung, SiBEAM, Sony and Toshiba, and have finalized the specification in January 2008. The WirelessHD (WiHD) standard will allow for uncompressed, digital transmission of HD video and audio and data signals, essentially making it equivalent, in theory, to wireless HDMI. The specification has been designed and optimized for wireless display connectivity, achieving in its first generation implementation highspeed rates from 4 Gbit/s for the CE, PC, and portable device segments. Its core technology promotes theoretical data rates as high as 25 Gbit/s (compared to 10.2-Gbit/s for HDMI 1.3), permitting it to scale to higher resolutions, color depth, and range. The signal will operate on the 60 GHz Extremely High Frequency band and apparently will support the bandwidth required to support both current and future HD signals. The 60 GHz band requires line of sight between transmitter and receiver, and the WiHD standard overcomes this limitation through the use of beam forming at the receiver and transmitter antennas. The goal range for the first products will be in-room, point-to-point, non line-of-sight (NLOS) at up to 10 meters. The atmospheric absorption of 60 GHz energy by oxygen molecules will limit undesired propagation over long distances and help control intersystem interference and long distance reception of concern to video copyright owners. A ubiquitous wireless HD standard would do much to improve interoperability among devices, and would also expand the capabilities of personal video players, PDAs, and other handheld devices.

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POV - THE REALITY OF STREAMING HD

Gordon Laing;Personal Computer World , October 2, 2008 STREAMING HD CONTENT
PCW reader Charles Sinclair wrote to the Hardware column with several interesting questions concerning streaming HD content in the home. "When planning a new Windows Media Center Edition PC, I realised there are lots of points I'm not sure on. Can a Media Center PC stream live content, as well as recorded programmes? Can both live and recorded content be streamed in HD? (These streams will come from two Freesat HD cards.) "Can one 100Mbit Ethernet network handle two simultaneous live HD streams? Finally, what would you need at the TV end to convert a stream coming over Ethernet into an HDMI output the TV can understand? Ultimately, can I watch live HDTV and any programmes I may have recorded from any TV in my home?" Recording HD content from Freesat, let alone streaming it, is in its infancy at the moment, but much of the above is possible or at least on the cusp of being possible. But first a disclaimer: much of what's required involves considerable tweaking and isn't officially supported, so look for a less ambitious solution if you want an easy 'out-of-box' experience. Second, the software and tricks required are in a constant state of evolution, so by the time you read this, the goalposts for cutting-edge enthusiasts may have changed. There are several forums where you can read about the experiences of early adopters. Taking this enquiry one step at a time though, it is possible to stream content, including live broadcasts, from a Windows Media Center Edition PC. The easiest way to do this is using one or more Media Center Extenders. These are like set-top boxes, connecting to your TV (and hi-fi or surround system if desired), and communicating with your PC over a network. The latest Version 2 models can stream HD content and have the HDMI outputs required. Streaming a live broadcast will, however, tie up one of your Media PC's TV tuners, preventing it from doing anything else. Since most Media PCs have two TV tuners, this would mean only one was available for recording a different channel. If both tuners were occupied streaming live content to two Extenders, then recording anything would be impossible. Next the network. A 100Mbit Ethernet network may only deliver around 60Mbits/sec, in practice, once various overheads have been taken into consideration. The bit rate of high-definition content can vary enormously, with highly compressed bitstreams coming in at less than 10Mbits/sec, but higher-end content could exceed 40Mbits/sec. In terms of Freesat HD, it depends on the broadcaster (and often even the show) in question, but early BBC material has typically used above average bit rates. So it all depends on the content in question, but we'd say unless you're dealing with very high bit rate streams, you should be able to support the desired two with your 100Mbit network. As a side note, upgrading to Gigabit networking may not suffice, as none of the Extenders currently supports wired networks over 100Mbit.

HD STREAMING REALITY CHECK

A Media Center PC equipped with HD tuners and one or more Version 2 Extenders should in theory do what you're after. Indeed if you were based in the US and dealing with US HD broadcasts, I'm confident it would work in practice too, but UK-based enthusiasts have a number of additional hurdles to overcome. Falling at the first gate is Media Center itself, which at the time of writing didn't officially support satellite TV tuner cards. An earlier workaround was to use a special driver that made them appear to the operating system as terrestrial tuner cards, but the 'Fiji' update to Vista Media Center, which will hopefully be available by the time you read this, should provide official support for DVB-S satellite tuners. What's less certain, though is its support for high-definition satellite broadcasts in the UK. HD works in the US with Media Center because they broadcast in the older Mpeg2 format, which Media Center has always been able to understand. In the UK though, high-definition broadcasts are using the newer H.264 format, which isn't supported properly within Media Center not yet anyway. Early adopters reported that a beta version of the Fiji Vista Media Center update worked with BBC highdefinition satellite broadcasts, but it was using a file that would expire by the time the final version was released. This proves Microsoft is at least working on it, but it may not be ready in time for the official update.

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The other issue is whether the Version 2 Media Center Extenders would stream Freesat HD content, even if the Media Center PC was playing ball. They claim to support H.264, but until we get to try it out with Freesat HD content recorded with a Media Center PC, it's an unknown. So if you'd like to stick with the Microsoft solution of a Windows Media Center Edition PC streaming to a number of Media Center Extenders, then you'll need to scale back your expectations a little for now. At the time of writing you could officially stream standard-definition terrestrial TV, and high-definition files from other sources to Extenders, while the Fiji update should add support for standard-definition UK satellite broadcasts. We may need to wait a little longer for high-definition UK satellite broadcasts.

MEDIA EXTENDERS
If you're happy with the current official situation though, you may be ready to commit to one or more Media Extenders. There are several on sale in the US, but over here the only models that are commonly available are a pair from Linksys: the DMA2100 and DMA2200. Both will stream live TV, recordings and compatible highdefinition files, along with providing HD outputs; the DMA2200 model also has a built-in DVD player. At the time of writing, online retailers like Amazon were selling both from around 150. Alternatively, you could go for an Xbox 360 games console, which comes with Media Center Extender functionality, although you'd need to go for one of the higher-end models such as the Elite to have HDMI output. The 360 has the advantage of also being able to play games along with having a built-in DVD player, but the downside is its cooling fans, which are noisier than dedicated Extenders. Another option is to forget Microsoft altogether and opt for alternative Media Center software. Cyberlink's Powercinema 5 is already happy to talk to satellite tuner cards and record high-definition content; see www.cyberlink.com for more details. Likewise, the DVB Viewer software can receive, record and timeshift DVB-S broadcasts; see www.dvbviewer.com for details. Streaming live broadcasts to additional devices may not be possible though. The Extenders discussed will only work with Windows Media Center, although alternative hardware exists for other platforms. It's very early days for Freesat HD on PCs, let alone trying to push the envelope and stream it to multiple devices. It will happen, but if you want to do it today, you'll be tweaking existing solutions and very probably working beyond their official capacity. If you're feeling brave, keep an eye on the techie forums at www.avforums.com and www.digitalspy.co.uk to see how fellow enthusiasts are getting on. And if you're already at the cutting-edge and actually doing it, we'd love to hear from you.

HIDDEN HARDWARE
Just before wrapping up, one more piece of advice to anyone building a media PC or media server: make sure it's always easily accessible. There's often the temptation to hide away a server or media PC as there's little or no need to touch it when things are running smoothly. But as we all know, PCs rarely behave quite as well as we'd like them to. Remote-control software is fine for minor tweaks, but there are times when you physically need to get your hands on your hardware. My own media PC was previously easily accessible as part of an equipment rack, but a recent move saw an opportunity to install it in a hidden cupboard (ventilated of course). The effect was very discreet and I was happy for a few days until I needed to connect something to the computer. Then I realised just how inconvenient its new location was. I had to virtually remove the entire system to gain full access. The revealing thing was not that the system had become less reliable, but that resolving any issues had become considerably more difficult. Before long I plotted its return to the more accessible outside world. This may all sound very obvious after all, if you want or need regular access to something, then don't hide it away. But at some point the temptation to relocate a computer to a more discreet location faces every PC enthusiast. But if that system is in any way mission-critical (and for a media PC that means being ready to entertain at any point), then I'd strongly advise resisting that temptation and keeping it accessible. I'm still fond of the idea of housing AV components out of sight, but for now it's only the more reliable consumer appliances that are disappearing out of view. The media PC is coming back out where I can get my hands on it.

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PLACE SHIFTING & MOBILE PLATFORMS

PLACESHIFTING
Placeshifting can be defined as watching or listening to live, recorded or stored media on a remote device via the internet or over a data network. This is not to be confused with time shifting, which is watching or listening to recorded media locally. There are two kinds of placeshifting. Placeshifting from a consumer electronics device like a TV or cable box or placeshifting from a PC. There are a few devices which currently 'placeshift' media such as cable television or satellite television, including Tv2ME, Sling Media's Slingbox, Sony's LocationFree, and Monsoon HAVA. These devices allow a person to access their home entertainment system, and stream media nearly instantaneously to their computer or mobile device. Several companies have also developed PC programs which allow consumers to 'placeshift' media stored on their PCs to a remote device. Companies which provide PC software are Orb, Avvenu, Sharpcast, CMWare, Oxy Systems, and SageTV. Placeshifting, especially that done with PC software, is similar to remote desktop software like VNC or pcAnywhere in its ability to view and control electronics remotely. However, placeshifting refers specifically to the viewing and controlling of media rather than all general applications, and implementations are specialized and optimized for this purpose. HOW DOES PLACESHIFTING WORK? Placeshifting works essentially by capturing an output and streaming it and displaying it in another location. Placeshifting from Sling Media looks like this (other companies' solutions are similar): The video signal comes descrambled out of the S Video (or component) connection on the cable box and is directed to the Slingbox where it is transcoded into MPEG 4 and sent to a PC. Future plans from several manufacturers are to combine placeshifting technology with other consumer electronic devices, such as a DVR or cable box, eliminating the requirement for another separate piece of hardware. Incorporating the transcoding into the set top box and partnering with content providers would also allow any DRM and conditional access protections to be maintained by eliminating the descrambled output stream. Other plans include set top devices that receive the stream on the other end and transcode the signal back to a standard TV signal for viewing on a regular TV instead of on a PC. HISTORY The history of placeshifting both commercially and legally begins with time shifting. Time shifting is the ability to watch content in a desired time slot. The best known examples of time shifting are the VCR and DVR. Placeshifting began in the electronic workshop of Ken Schaffer in Manhattan and his home away from home in Moscow, Russia. Inspired into the world of electronic innovation by Sputnik. To much acclaim Schaffer shifted Soviet television space to American universities, starting with Columbia University during the cold war 1980s.

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To make his 21st century take on spaceshifting, Schaffer introduced TV2Me "A way to make home TV reception portable -- with high -quality pictures to be watched, and channels to be changed, form anywhere in the world that the internet can reach" Easier for non-specialists to understand, he recoined it with the more commercial cultural term, placeshifting. Schaffer was inspired by his frustration at missing episodes of Seinfeld, Ted Koppel and the Sopranos as he traveled between New York and St. Petersburg. Schaffer developed software and a circuitry that controlled his home cable box and TiVo DVR and allowed video compression to operate more efficiently and to generate a near-broadcast quality picture. Prominent among TV2Me early adopters was the musician Sting who, beginning in 2003, used TV2Me to stay with his beloved Newcastle football team wherever he toured. Two years later, brother Blake and Jason Krikorian, away on a business trip, found themselves missing a playoff baseball game back home. From that trip emerged Slingbox. Released as a consumer electronic product in the summer of 2005, the Slingbox allows users to take the feed from their cable or satellite set top box and over any broadband connection, placeshifting the TV signal. from one location to another. The Slingbox was designed as a consumer product, and is widely available. Placeshifting, as most technologies, appeared first as an expensive general-purpose device using discrete components in TV2Me and eventually as a low-cost, mass-produced, embedded technology by Sling Media and other competitors.

iPod 5G screening Fellins'i 8 1/2 with Sony projector.

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SOME OF THE CLASSICAL PLACE SHIFTING DEVICES

SLINGBOX The Slingbox is a TV streaming device that enables users to remotely view their home's cable, satellite, or personal video recorder (PVR) programming from an Internet-enabled computer with a broadband Internet connection. A Slingbox can redirect up to four live Audio/Video signals from a cable box, satellite receiver, PVR, or other Audio/Video source to the viewer's PC located anywhere nearby, such as in home or office, or, when using a broadband Internet connection, anywhere in the world. To avoid copyright infringement, only one user can access the stream from a Slingbox at a time. This way of accessing content is known as placeshifting.

A Slingbox connects a TV source (via coaxial cable, composite cables, component cables, or S-video cable) to an existing Internet connection. Digital video recorders and cable or satellite set top boxes can be controlled through a separate infrared (IR) cable that lets users change channels from the remote location. Software on a user's computer or mobile device connects to the Slingbox and provides the user interface for viewing the video stream and changing channels. Onscreen virtual remote controls are provided for controlling almost all connected devices. Note that all control inputs are done in the SlingPlayer window via computer mouse. There is no provision for use of hardware IR remote control units while watching SlingPlayer even if the PC has an IR receiver.

TV2ME This is a device that enables viewers to access their cable or satellite television channels from anywhere in the world via a broadband internet connection, launched in 2003 by Ken Schaffer. For copyright reasons, the signal from a TV2Me unit can only be accessed by one customer, although it can support more video streams with sufficient bandwidth. It requires a minimum upstream of 384 kbit/s.

SONY LOCATIONFREE TV LocationFree Player is an internet-based multifunctional device used to stream live (or recorded) video (television broadcasts including from digital cable and satellite), DVDs and DVR content over a home network or the internet. It is in essence a remote video streaming server product (similar to the Slingbox). The LocationFree base station connects to a home network optionally wirelessly up to three devices and can stream content through the network to local content provision devices or across the internet to remote devices. A remote user can connect to the internet at a wireless hotspot or any other internet connection anywhere in the world and receive streamed content. Content may only be streamed to one computer at a time. The user is required to obtain an additional (paid) license in order to stream to another computer.

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MOBIL PHONES AS PLACE SHIFTING DEVICES

MOBILE CONTENT Mobile content is any type of media which is viewed or used on mobile phones, like ringtones, graphics, discount offers, games, and movies. As mobile phone use has grown since the mid 1990s, the significance of the devices in everyday life has grown accordingly. Owners of mobile phones can now use their devices to make calendar appointments, send and receive text messages (SMS), listen to music, watch videos, shoot videos, redeem coupons for purchases, view Microsoft Word documents, and so forth. The use of mobile content has grown accordingly. Mobile music Mobile music is any audio file that is played on a mobile phone. Mobile music is normally formatted as an AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) file or an MP3, and comes in several different formats. Monophonic ringtones were the earliest form of ringtone, and played one tone at a time. This was improved upon with polyphonic ringtones, which played several tones at the same time so a more convincing melody could be created. The next step was to play clips of actual songs, which were dubbed Realtones. These are preferred by record labels as this evolution of the ringtone has allowed them to gain a cut of lucurative ringtone market. As well as mobile music there are full track downloads, which are an entire song encoded to play on a mobile phone. These can be purchased and bought over the mobile network, but data charges can make this prohibitive. The other way to get a song onto a mobile phone is by "side loading" it, which normally involves downloading the song onto a computer and then transferring it to the mobile phone via Bluetooth, infra-red or cable connections. It is possible to use a full track as a ringtone. Mobile music is becoming an integral part of the music industry as a whole. In 2005 the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) said it expects mobile music to generate more revenues that online music before the end of that year. In the first half of 2005 the digital music market grew enough to offset the fall in the traditional music market -- without including the sale of ringtones, which still makes up the majority of mobile music sales around the globe. Mobile images Mobile images are used as the wallpaper to a mobile phone, and are also available as screensavers. On some handsets images can also be set to display when a particular person calls the users. Mobile internet Mobile content can also refer to text or multimedia hosted on websites, which may either be standard internet pages, or else specific mobile pages accessed using a mobile device such as cell phones, PDAs, and other portable gadgets connected to a public network. Such access does not require a desktop computer, nor a fixed landline connection. Services on the Mobile Web can include capabilities that do not exist on the traditional Internet, such as SMS text messaging. However, Mobile Web access today still suffers from interoperability and usability problems. This is partly due to the incompatibility of the format of much of the information available on the Internet with mobile devices and partly due to the small physical size of the screens of mobile devices and other device limitations.

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Mobile games Mobile games are applications that allow people to play a game on a mobile handset. The main categories of mobile games include Puzzle/Strategy, Retro/Arcade, Action/Adventure, Card/Casino, Trivia/Word, Sports/Racing, given in approximate order of their popularity. Several studies have shown that the majority of mobile games are bought and played by women. Sixty-five percent of mobile game revenue is driven by female wireless subscribers. They are the biggest driver of revenue for the Puzzle/Strategy category; comprising 72 percent of the total share of revenue, while men made up 28 percent.

Mobile video Mobile video comes in several forms including 3GPP,MPEG-4,RTSP and Flash Lite. 3GP is a simplified version of the MPEG-4 Part 14 (MP4) container format, designed to decrease storage and bandwidth requirements in order to accommodate mobile phones. It stores video streams as MPEG-4 Part 2 or H.263 or MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC/H.264), and audio streams as AMR-NB, AMR-WB, AMR-WB+, AAC-LC or HE-AAC. 4G (also known as beyond 3G), an acronym for FourthGeneration Communications System, is a term used to describe the next step in wireless communications. A 4G system will be able to provide a comprehensive IP solution where voice, data and streamed multimedia can be given to users on an "Anytime, Anywhere" basis, and at higher data rates than previous generations. There is no formal definition for what 4G is; however, there are certain objectives that are projected for 4G. These objectives include: that 4G will be a fully IP-based integrated system. This will be achieved after wired and wireless technologies converge and will be capable of providing between 100 Mbit/s and 1 Gbit/s speeds both indoors and outdoors, with premium quality and high security. 4G will offer all types of services at an affordable cost. Mobishow A Mobishow is a term to describe a broadcast quality programme / series which has been produced, directed, edited and encoded for the mobile phone. Mobishows can range from short video clips such as betting advice or the latest celebrity gossip, through to half hour drama serials. Examples include The Ashes and Mr Paparazzi Show which both were created for mobile viewing. Mobisode Mobisode is a term first coined by Daniel Tibbets then trademarked by his employer, Fox Broadcasting Company]for a broadcast television episode specially made for viewing on a mobile telephone screen and usually of short duration (from one to three minutes). The word is a neologism, coined by Tibbets as a portmanteau of the two words "mobile" and "episode". The arrival of third-generation (3G) cellular services has made the broadcasting and viewing of video footage a feasible commercial proposition.

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According to first-hand accounts from Fox employees who were there at the time, the first mobisode was announced in January 2004 and was 24: Conspiracy, a spin-off of the action-suspense drama 24, although it was not actually the first mobisode to be produced. The first mobisode produced was "Love and Hate", its pilot was produced in January 2004 and later that year completed production. The first two mobisodes sold and commissioned by Verizon were "Love and Hate" and "Sunset Hotel", with 24: Conspiracy being the third. All three inaugural mobisdoes launched at the same time on Verizon in February 2005. Fox followed these with the release of mobisodes of Prison Break: Proof of Innocence, a spin-off of Prison Break in April 2006. The world's first made for mobile horror series was When Evil Calls. Composed of twenty two-minute mobisodes the series marks the first time 'named' actors had been attached to such a venture. The series included Sean Pertwee (Dog Soldiers), Dominique Pinon (Amelie), Jennifer Lim (Hostel) and Chris Barrie (Red Dwarf) as well as Pierce Brosnan's son Sean and Ray Winstone's daughter Lois. It was directed by horror specialist Johannes Roberts (Forest of the Damned / Demonic) and produced by Zone horror and Pure Grass films. Lost: Missing Pieces is a series of 13 mobisodes/webisodes which were released weekly on Verizon mobile phones and six days later on ABC.com between November 6, 2007 and February 4, 2008. Running between 1:223:27 in length, each mobisode fills in a narrative gap somewhere in the timeline from the first three seasons. Featuring new content that is incorporated into the existing storyline of Lost, the mobisodes are considered a canonical extension of the series. Some stock footage and a deleted scene was also used. Although the term "mobisode" is trademarked by Fox, it is also used in media to refer to mobile telephone television episodes not affiliated with Fox, such as the Lost: Missing Pieces (spun off from Lost) It has been announced that the TV series Red Dwarf will feature a preview of forthcoming mobisodes on The Bodysnatcher Collection DVD box set, though is not fully clear what form these shows will take. Streaming TV Mobile video also comes in the form of streaming TV over the mobile network, which must be a 2.5G or 3G network. This mimics a television station in that the user cannot elect to see what they wish but must watch whatever is on the channel at the time. There is also mobile broadcast TV, which operates like a traditional television station and broadcasts the content over a different spectrum. This frees up the mobile network to handle calls and other data usage, and because of the "one-to-many" nature of mobile broadcast TV the video quality is a lot better than that streamed over the mobile networks, which is a "oneto-one" system. The problem is that broadcast technologies don't have a natural uplink, so for users to interact with the TV stream the service has to be closely integrated to the carriers mobile network. The main technologies for broadcast TV are DVB-H, DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) and MediaFLO.

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CASE STUDY - SONY FILMS HEADED TO MOBILE PHONES

By Andrew Wallenstein Mar. 31. 2008.

LAS VEGAS (Hollywood Reporter) - Sony Pictures Television is looking to launch the first movie network on mobile phones in the United States. The studio has signed a deal with AT&T and MediaFLO USA to launch the linear channel as one of two exclusive channels coming to the newly announced AT&T Mobile TV with FLO service in May. The channel, to be known as PIX, will be stocked with such titles as "Ghostbusters," "Philadelphia" and "Stand by Me." Mobile has been viewed mostly as a marketing platform for theatricals in the U.S. With the domestic mobile video category for even shortform clips lagging behind markets in Europe and Asia, Sony is looking to entice viewers with more diverse content offerings. "What you see a lot on the carrier decks is promotional content that people can snack a little on," said Eric Berger, vp mobile entertainment at Sony Pictures Television. "There's nothing currently there as deeply entertaining as these movies." Films have been made available on handsets on an on-demand basis. Sony was one of several studios that contributed titles to content aggregator MSpot, which teamed with Sprint to launch MSpot Movies in 2006. Sony always has been bullish on films via mobile. The studio also was the first in the U.S. to embed full-length titles on memory cards for handsets. Although the prospect of viewers sitting in front of a two-inch screen for two hours seems dim, Berger noted that the objective isn't to keep people watching for the duration of a film. "We recognize that people are on the go with their mobile phone and coming and going," he said. "This isn't for people looking to view a movie for the first time. It's OK to miss the beginning." With AT&T on board, PIX will be available on the biggest mobile provider in the U.S., though the company has yet to disclose the price of the FLO tier. With PIX a part of FLO, Sony allows AT&T to differentiate its service from Verizon Wireless, which has been carrying FLO for the past year. PIX will be available alongside nonexclusive mobile channels including NBC, CBS, ESPN and Nickelodeon, which offer altered forms of their traditional linear programming lineups via multicast transmission. Sony is negotiating with other U.S. carriers to carry PIX but did not divulge which specific companies are in discussions. As for pricing, each distribution partner likely will use a different business model. For instance, PIX could end up ad-supported on one carrier while free of commercials on another that will charge an extra fee. Sony eventually might convert PIX to an on-demand model and might take the brand online as well. The full-length linear strategy is just one of many different content plays with which the studio is experimenting. "We're not doubling down and saying it's only about longform," Berger said. "We'll continue to do innovative things in the shortform universe as well." Films will run on PIX for a month, with additions coming weekly. Other titles coming to PIX include "Memento," "The Karate Kid," "Layer Cake," "Resident Evil" and "Roxanne."

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CASE STUDY - PARIS TO HONOUR SMALL SCREEN AT MOBILE PHONE FILM FESTIVAL
The big screen was the star at last month's Cannes film extravaganza, and now France is now honouring the very small screen with a festival for movies made with and for mobile phones. The Pocket Film Festival in Paris aims to showcase an emerging art form and to demonstrate that the mobile phone is rapidly becoming the "fourth screen" in our lives, after the cinema, television and the Internet. The three-day event starts on Friday (local time) at the Pompidou Centre and will show some 200 films from around the world ranging in length from less than a minute to an hour and a half, spanning fiction, documentary, cartoon and experimental video. Australian Emmelene Landon made the 38-minute Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok with a 1.3 megapixel camera on the Nokia phone the festival organisers gave her when she set out on a train trip last year across Russia. She says that using a phone camera is "very intimate, like an interior voice, it was like filming my thoughts." Landon, a Paris-based painter who made two previous films with a regular video camera, admitted to getting a sore arm holding up the phone as she filmed the endless Russian landscapes for her work, a mixture of travelogue and meditation on the soul of Russia. The mobile technology that has brought about the democratisation of film-making has moved on rapidly since the first edition of the Pocket Festival two years ago. Many of the films on show here have a freshness and intimacy that harks back to the days of grainy Super 8 home movies, while others are slick professional productions. Festival director Laurence Herszberg says it is often impossible to tell if a film has been shot on a phone or with a regular video camera. He says the people making creative phone films have changed too. Mr Herszberg also noted that mobile phone companies in Japan, where watching TV while on the move is already a big hit, have begun commissioning artists to make "video ring tones" - very short movies, usually animated, that play when your phone rings. "This is throwing up interesting new modes of financing video creation," said Mr Herszberg, whose Forum des Images film centre has borrowed the Pompidou Centre's cinema screens while its own premises undergoes major renovation. With mobile phone operators keen to recoup their massive investments in the powerful 3G networks, video phone content is attracting increasing attention, and more and more leading TV and film studios are making their shows available on this new platform. Pocket Films invited other movie festivals or film centres around the world that work with mobile phone creation to submit entries for the Paris festival, as well as accepting works from film schools in several countries. Films from Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Korea, China and the United States will be screened over the weekend alongside a crop of French works on the Pompidou's cinema screens as well as on dozens of mobile phones distributed around the venue. The festival, sponsored by French mobile operator SFR, closes on Sunday with cash prizes and mobile phones for the best movies among the 26 works in the official competition. - AFP

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POV - MOBILE TV SPREADING IN EUROPE AND TO THE U.S.

By KEVIN J. OBRIEN, NYTimes.com BERLIN Every day in Switzerland, 40,000 people watch a 100-second television news broadcast on their cellphones. In Italy, a million people pay as much as 19 euros each ($29) a month to watch up to a dozen mobile TV channels. Tiny TV, the kind that is watched on a cellphone, is spreading beyond Japan and South Korea, where it has been available for about three years. Mobile operators across Europe and the United States are investing in new broadcasting towers, mobile devices, and television programming and promotions, even though it is not yet clear that profit will follow. On Sunday, AT&T Wireless, with 71.4 million phone customers, started AT&T Mobile TV in the United States. The 10-channel service, costing $15 a month, includes Pix, a channel with movies from Sony Pictures. AT&T will sell cellphones made by LG Electronics and Samsung that can receive the TV broadcasts. Britain is auctioning wireless spectrum this month that could be used for mobile TV. France plans to award a license for a 13-channel mobile video service in June. In Germany, Mobile 3.0, an investor group led by a South African-based media company, Naspers, plans to start a video service this year. These services join a handful of other mobile TV offerings like those in Switzerland and Italy, all beamed from special transmission towers to tiny receivers in the mobile phones. Until the mobile broadcasting technology appeared three years ago, cellphone operators had to send video as prepackaged clips to individual customers over high-speed, third-generation phone networks. That proved costly to both operators and viewers, and the large video packets slowed other voice and data traffic on those networks. Direct mobile broadcasting does not tax the so-called 3G networks. Japan is the leader in direct mobile television, with 20 million cellphones equipped with TV receivers, followed by South Korea with 8.2 million, according to In-Stat, a research and consulting firm in Scottsdale, Ariz. In-Stat estimated that there were 29.7 million mobile TV viewers worldwide at the end of 2007. That is expected to almost double, to 56.9 million, at the end of 2008, driven by growth in Japan. Italy has been an early leader in Europe, with service beginning in 2006. The largest mobile TV broadcaster on the Continent is 3 Italia, a cellular operator owned by Hutchison Whampoa of Hong Kong, with 800,000 customers, about 10 percent of its total phone clients. The million Italian viewers watch up to a dozen channels. Swisscom offers a 20-channel viewing lineup, which costs 13 Swiss francs ($12.50) a month. For some operators, mobile TV remains a niche service. In the United States, Verizon Wireless has offered mobile TV since March 2007, but In-Stat estimated that it had fewer than 100,000 paying viewers. Robert Briel, publisher of Mobile Broadband News in Amsterdam, an online information service for mobile operators and equipment makers, said he was skeptical about the prospects for mobile TV. People prefer to watch television on larger screens and most adults do not have the time or the need to watch it on a phone, he said.

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TIME SHIFTING & RELATED TECHNOLOGIES

TIME SHIFTING
Time shifting is the recording of programming to a storage medium to be viewed or listened to at a time more convenient to the consumer. Typically, this refers to TV programming but can also refer to radio shows via podcasts. In recent years, the advent of the digital video recorder (DVR) has made time shifting easier, by using a electronic program guide and recording shows onto a hard disk. Some DVRs have other possible time shifting methods, such as being able to start watching the recorded show from the beginning even if the recording is not yet complete. In the past, time shifting was done with a video cassette recorder (VCR) and its timer function, in which the VCR tunes into the appropriate station and records the show onto video tape. The Sky+ service in Ireland and the UK allows one to timeshift. TiVo, DirecTV and other US cable or satellite subscription services offer PVR set-top boxes, often for an additional monthly fee. In cable television broadcasting, time shifting may also refer to the availability of network affiliates from different time zones, serving a similar function of making television programs available at multiple times throughout the day. The legality of time-shifting programming in the United States was proven by a landmark court case of Universal Studios versus Sony Corporation (Sony v. Universal), when Sony argued successfully that the advent of its Betamax video recorder in 1976 did not violate the copyright of the owners of shows which it recorded. In 1979, Universal sued Sony, claiming its timed recording capability amounted to "copyright infringement". However, a district court found that noncommercial home use recording was considered fair use and ruled in favor of Sony. In appeals, the United States Court of Appeals reversed this decision in 1981 giving the edge to Universal, but the Supreme Court of the United States reversed it yet again in 1984, and found in favor of Sony 5-4. The majority decision held that time shifting was a fair use, represented no substantial harm to the copyright holder, and would not contribute to a diminished marketplace for its product. Today, this is widely referred to as the "Betamax case" or "Betamax decision".

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DEVICES
VIDEORECORDER The videocassette recorder (or VCR, more commonly known in the UK and Ireland as the video recorder), is a type of video tape recorder that uses removable videotape cassettes containing magnetic tape to record audio and video from a television broadcast so it can be played back later. Most VCRs have their own tuner (for direct TV reception) and a programmable timer (for unattended recording of a certain channel at a particular time).

DIGITAL VIDEO RECORDER A digital video recorder (DVR) or personal video recorder (PVR) is a device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive or other memory medium within a device. The term includes stand-alone set-top boxes, portable media players (PMP) and software for personal computers which enables video capture and playback to and from disk. Some consumer electronic manufacturers have started to offer televisions with DVR hardware and software built in to the television itself; LG was first to launch one in 2007. It has also become the main way for CCTV companies to record their surveillance, as it provides far longer recording times than the previously used VCRs. Hard Disk Based The two early consumer DVRs, ReplayTV and TiVo, were launched at the 1999 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Microsoft also demonstrated a unit with DVR capability but commercial availability of this software would have to wait until the end of 1999 for full DVR features in Dish Network's DISHplayer receivers. Although ReplayTV won the "Best of Show" award in the video category, it was TiVo that went on to much greater commercial success. The devices have steadily developed complementary abilities, such as recording onto DVDs, commercial skip, sharing of recordings over the Internet, and programming and remote control facilities using PDAs, networked PCs, and Web browsers. The label PVR has almost fallen completely into disuse in the trade news media in favor of the more popular DVR descriptor. The name PVR never really caught on, although its use has not entirely vanished, DVD recorder A DVD recorder (also known as a DVDR, mainly outside of the UK and Ireland), is an optical disc recorder that records video onto blank writeable DVD media. Such devices are available as either installable drives for computers or as standalone components for use in studios or home theatre systems. PCS Software and hardware is available which can turn personal computers running Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS into DVRs, and is a popular option for home-theater PC (HTPC) enthusiasts. Portable media player A portable multimedia player (PMP), sometimes referred to as a portable video player (PVP), is a consumer electronics device that is capable of storing and playing digital media. Digital audio players (DAP) that can also display images and play videos are PMPs. Like DAPs, the data is typically stored on a hard drive, microdrive, or flash memory. Other types of electronic devices like cellphones are sometimes referred as PMPs because of their playback capabilities. Most newer players support the MPEG-4 video format, and many other players are compatible with Windows Media Video (WMV) and the defunct AVI, now mostly used as a container format. Recently, more and more players are enabling compatibility to the DivX video format and its open-source parallel, Xvid. Software that are included with the players may be able to convert video files into a compatible format.

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THE NEW CONTENT DISTRIBUTION LANDSCAPE - POV FROM A MAJOR PLAYER

MOTOROLA'S NICK CHAKALOS DISCUSSES HOME NETWORKS, MOBILITY AND CONSUMER CHOICES By Frank Moldstad As Senior Director of Software Product Management for Motorola, Nick Chakalos has a front row seat for the dramatic evolution of home entertainment distribution. In this interview, he discusses how consumer access to entertainment is being expanded through inititatives such as Whole Home Entertainment networks and seamless integration of mobile devices in conjunction with cable, telco and satellite providers. What is Motorola's role in the new content distribution landscape? It is fairly broad, so let me start at a high level and we can get into details. We work with a variety of cable, telco and satellite providers to deliver voice, video and data solutions through a variety of different pipes. And what we are ostensibly doing there is working on network infrastructure in addition to consumer devices. But also we are looking forward to spending a lot of time analyzing consumer behavior, and consumer experiences that are desired. We want to ensure that what we design from a product standpoint, in addition to what we enable that consumer to gain access to, is the content they want. And we want to ensure they have access to the provider they want, whether they're in the home or outside the home, whether that means on a set-top box, a handheld device, on a laptop, or on a PC. In helping cable/satellite guys get to the market, we have shipped over 50 million-plus digital set-top boxes, including PVR solutions that have shipped 6 million or so high-definition DVR solutions. And we're looking at the next phase for these operators as they move from today's market to one where consumers are asking for mobility. How do they take these services out in the world with them? How do they bring them on to different devices? How do they experience this in the places that they want to? So we have solutions that look at doing that within the home, looking at Whole Home DVR, and delivering broadcast content and video-on-demand content in addition to some of the Long Tail content, making sure that an operator can help a consumer gain access to that, whether it's created by a studio or whether it's created by another person somewhere else. And we want to ensure that they can ride the wave of the phenomenon of consumer-produced content and the social networking aspects to move around that. Utimately consumers would have one account, regardless of whether they're at home or using a mobile solution in another city, they could access the same content and data. That's correct. It is the ability to ensure that, irrespective of device, network, or location, that you can gain access what you want ,when you want, wherever you happen to be. It is kind of a progression from time-shifting to play-shifting to device-shifting as we look at building this capability into a variety of different platforms and configurations. So if I've downloaded a movie at home and I'm on the road, I could tell someone, oh I have that at home, let me call it up. Right. So in demonstrating solutions today and looking to bring to market various solutions that are on the continuum, where we can take a portable media player or a laptop, plug it into a DVR, transfer or copy that content according to the business rule set out in place there, and allow you to bring that with you. Also, if you're on the road and want to access content that you have purchased and/or created, we can give you that ability as well. And as we look at other systems that evolve over time but are probably a couple years away, there will be more network-based solutions. It might be something that is your content but is stored on a network location, and we'll be able to deliver that to you as well. What we're effectively trying to do is ensure that one, we help meet consumer needs; and two, as the operators look to carve out business for themselves or look to extend their brands into certain areas,

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that we enable that. So no matter how the markets evolve and who eventually wins -- although we would argue that the pie just expands for everyone -- that we have a solution that works for all the various constituents we are selling to. It's interesting that you say the pie just expands, because at the same time this is a key point in the evolution of all this for telecom and cable operators, and it's kind of being set up like a dog fight. It very much is, and by the pie expands, what I mean to say is that the amount of content consumed increases. And you're quite right to point out that there are going to be some players that win more than others in the different categories of cable provider versus satellite provider versus telco. There certainly will be some winners and losers there, just as there will be winners and losers on the content side, just as there will be winners and losers on the acess network side. Why is this an attractive alternative for consumers to broadband download services? If you take a step back and look at what these operators do today, they provide a managed service, one where the quality of service is managed and controlled. What they're lacking right now in moving to that world of Internet-related content, or more generally a world where there is more content, there's other stuff that I as a consumer might want that is maybe not on my linear programming cable lineup or on video-on-demand. If these guys are able to pull off a solution whereby they can offer you some of that Long Tail content in a managed service context, meaning that you get it at high quality and you get it relatively easily, with a couple of clicks or less, then you are probably going to be happy using it as an extension of the service you already have. Certainly, one set of consumers is happy to enjoy content in that way. But there is another set of consumers that is just now starting to have money in their pockets and to have some purchasing power -- the 18-to-22-year-old demographic .These folks are happily enjoying and consuming content no matter how many steps they have to go through to get there. They'll enjoy it on a PC or a handheld just as easily as they would sitting on a couch. And certainly that marketplace needs solutions targeted at delivering content those folks are interested in as well. So we're looking at how to do that with those various devices. It's a fascinating time now, especially as we've seen some of the inklings of what's to come, such as the various movie download announcements that have happened recently. There's the YouTube-Verizon announcement, and Comcast is wanting to offer that same capability on their own DotNet platform. So a number of operators and other interested parties see the potential for this ability to deliver what consumers want with the right kind of social networking aspects built around it. People have chanted as a mantra for years that content is king, and generally that is still true, but right now there is a pipeline-building process. And so while content matters, access to content is critical right now. Right, for sure, and some of those barriers are being knocked down by the likes of the YouTube and a couple of other companies that are trying to do similar things, albeit with smaller penetration, or fewer unique visitors per day. But it's certainly a trend that can't be ignored, especially since it's grounded in a consumer dynamic that's occurring. Cable networks and telcoms have some challenges with different standards and devices that are not interoperable. Are you helping them with those ? We' re involved in a few different ways, looking at how to bring interoperability into play, and certainly there are a number of different levels and layers at which interoperability needs to be put into place across devices as they communicate and receive content. There are physical layer standards that we are supportive of that allow devices at a base level to communicate, whether it's the Multimedia Over Coax Alliance [MoCA] or IP networking over phone lines, over the airwaves or over power lines. We've got various investments in those companies in addition to supporting their efforts.

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And when you move up a layer, you've got recognition standards -- "Hello, I'm a device, I want to connect to you." These include things that have been put out by the Digital Living Network Alliance [DLNA], and the P&P AV forum. We're involved in those standards efforts and are implementing those in our products in addition to the physical layer, so devices not only can communicate but can understand what capabilities another device has. And then looking at other standards with respect to middleware solutions or software environments for developing applications, we're supportive of those efforts, and have solutions coming out that support both MHP, which is an international standard for application development, in addition to the North American OCAP Standard that's being developed and rolled out. Not to mention Java and Linux, which are a big element in what we're doing on the set-top box side, in addition to what we're doing on the mobile devices/handset side. And the other part of this in relation to content is looking at the various Digital Rights Management environments and schemes that are in place and ensuring that we support standards in those areas also. So ultimately you are optimistic that all these devices will recognize each other and it's not going to be an issue? That is certainly the place where we want to end up. Are there going to be issues? Yes, there will be. The most positive thing is that I think the industry and those who are participating here understand and recognize that that is the endpoint, that is the vision to have these things communicate. So, now when issues come up they are not show stoppers, they are more things that just need to get solved. Versus in the past, there may have been an approach that looked at those things more as excuses for not getting stuff done. Now at least, we have alignment on the fact that this is the place where we want to be, where are all these devices intercommunicate and these companies are working together to get over that. They've used these things as just speed bumps -- instead of barriers that they erect on purpose. How does Motorola's concept for Whole Home media distribution work, and how will it evolve? Say you have a Motorola set-top box sitting in your living room, a high-definition DVR box with a hard drive on it. You can now take the content that's recorded there and deliver it to different rooms in the house. Consumers who have it just love it, and they say now that I have it on one TV I want to have it on my other TVs, because I want things to work the same.

Motorola's DCT6400 series set-top can be networked over a home's existing coaxial cable network interface module (NIM), streaming recorded programs and delivering DVR content to DCT 2500 set-tops via NIM modules in other rooms.

We saw that even in the early days of digital cable. Someone would sit in front of a set-top box enabled TV in one part of the house and they had a certain experience when they walked to another TV with a different box on it. The experience was totally different, and they asked why. People get confused by that. It's the same with DVR -- they say why can't I have it on my other TV? And this whole house DVR system allows for a set-top box that sits in one location, so it leverages just one DVR set-top in the house with less costly set-tops at the other locations. Instead of putting a big set-top box on each TV, now you can do it more cost-effectively and allow one set-top to record all this content. That way, each user in the different rooms can enjoy content playback from that one location. So they get the same DVR experience on every TV set. It grows from that concept into, now because I can stream signals or content around the house, I also have in effect a home network. I can hang a PC off that network and be able to look at music and pho-

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tos that might be on my PC. I can connect storage devices or I can connect other set-tops with storage that now suddenly become part of my home area network. So as a user, I can now go to any TV in the house and click my recordings and see all the recordings I have in the house as if they existed in one location. I can see all the music that happens to be in my home network, no matter whether it happens to be sitting on PC 1, 2, 3 or 4, or even a music service offered by my operator as if it's just one location. So from a consumer standpoint, we start to simplify their quest for getting their hands on content, and it's done in a very natural way. They don't have to think about geography, such as where did I save that music title to my PC? Where did I record that? So you eliminate those complexities for the user. And since it's a network, ultimately other things can be tied into it -- like the security system, the lights, or even things in the kitchen. That's correct. Over time there is nothing technically that limits what you can do. All of the management and controls are in place. Do you get involved in helping third parties with interface design? All of this has the potential to be very complicated for consumers. Yes it does. In fact that is certainly one of the key takeaways when we go and spend time with consumers understanding what it is that they want to do. We spend a lot of time at Motorola ensuring that from an overall vision standpoint we have good alignment with what consumers need and what their pain points are, and then design the right products to help them. We've also experienced firsthand what happens when user interfaces are not designed as well as they should be. So we are spending a lot of time looking at how to make things simple and easy for customers. It's certainly one key facet of this, and things may fall apart if that is not handled correctly. That's especially true for a certain customer base, and as we said earlier, there are other customers who are a little more tolerant. But as we look at mass adoption, you certainly need something that is intuitive and easy to use. Pay-per-view has been around for a while in various incarnations. What makes it different now? What has happened in the last year or so is that the number of titles have increased, and some of the usability aspects have been improved as well. As you said earlier, if interfaces are not designed in the right way there are going to be problems. We've seen that in pay-per-view and video-on-demand systems in the past, where it was frighteningly complex to try to figure out how to order something. First you had to know which network it was on or who was providing it. Was it Showtime video-ondemand, or was it HBO video-on-demand? Things were siloed in that respect, and you had to struggle to get through it. We benchmarked a lot of services and they were very difficult to try to use. Mobile content is becoming part of the same overall system, which is interesting because it removes the barriers between media playback locations. Sure, and again it helps in looking at this from the standpoint of what a consumer wants to do and looking at the various segments. And also geographies, for that matter. If you look around the world, mobility is more important in some areas, especially in parts of Asia -- Japan, Korea and in the wealthier areas of China for sure. There are solutions rolling out there that will portend what will happen in other markets that are a little slower to take that up. But again, it's another key element and a segment that needs to be addressed. If you look at adding mobility to the variety of services that an operator has, it's certainly an important growth area for them. And mobility not only means mobile phones out in the world, but also just mobility within the house for people to be able to enjoy content where they want to. There's an old phrase from the home video industry, watch what you want when you want it. Yes, and now we add where you want it, on what device you want to. All of those things start to become important. And at the end of the day, all we're trying to do is ensure that the consumer can get more control over how they experience content. And any time you can do that in a way that is simple and easy to use, usually you win.

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FUTURE..?
DESIGNERS DEVELOPING VIRTUAL-REALITY 'COCOON'
By Mark Tutton

LONDON, England (CNN) -- You're walking along a street in Roman Pompeii at the start of the first millennium when you notice a spectacular stone building. You reach out towards it and your guide informs you it's a temple to the god Jupiter, built in 200 BC. With a flick of your wrist you save the data and, school assignment complete, you step out of your Cocoon and back into your living room. Educational historical journeys are just one possible use of the Immersive Cocoon, a walk-in virtualreality pod being developed by NAU, an international design collective that aims to revolutionize the way we interact with computers. When complete, the Immersive Cocoon will be a sleek and shiny human-sized dome. Step inside and you'll be enveloped by a 360 display screen and full surround sound. When the software boots up, instead of using a joystick or mouse to navigate the screens, motiontracking cameras will follow the movement of your arms, legs and face, and a motion-sensitive platform will detect if you're walking or jumping. "You've got display, sound and interaction all combined to create this fully immersed digital experience," explains Tino Schaedler, the architect-turned-film designer who is one third of NAU. "It is completely different from me sitting in front of a screen, looking at a little picture and typing something in -- almost like the experience is reduced to my brain and my fingers. In the Cocoon we have the whole body immersed inside." Videogame players will immediately recognize the Cocoon's gaming potential. The motion-tracking cameras and wrap-around visuals could make for an incredibly realistic gaming experience, where you use your whole body to fight off enemies who approach from all directions. But the Cocoon's potential extends far beyond gaming. Imagine having a Cocoon in your home, connected to the Internet. Its unique interface means that rather than inputing commands with a keyboard or a moving a cursor with a mouse, you can simply reach out and 'grab' information from all around you. If that sounds like science fiction, it may be because the 3D motion-tracking system was originally developed by John Underkoffler, whose work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology inspired similar 'reach out and grab' technology in the sci-fi movie "Minority Report." NAU sees the technology as part of a trend away from traditional interfaces towards more intuitive ways of interacting with technology, a trend they say has already begun with existing mainstream devices such as the motion-sensitive controls of Nintendo's Wii gaming system or the touch-sensitive display on the iPhone. Schaedler says the Cocoon could re-shape our working environments, allowing home working and virtual meetings where you could talk with virtual versions of your co-workers in detailed virtual environments.

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The Cocoon also could be the perfect medium for interacting with virtual public spaces -- 3D renderings of libraries, museums and art galleries that can be visited online. Blazing a trail in the development of these spaces are New York architects Asymptote, who developed the New York Stock Exchange's 3D trading floor and have designed a virtual Guggenheim Museum. Asymptote co-founder Hani Rashid explained to CNN that the Guggenheim Museum wanted its artworks to be viewable via the Internet. But rather than use a standard web site layout, the Guggenheim wanted to create a virtual space as striking as the architecture of its New York museum. Asymptote came up with a futuristic design that Rashid describes as "a perfect hybrid of electronic space and physical space." Although the project is currently on hold, it offers a tantalizing glimpse of a future in which virtual spaces are designed with the same attention to detail as real physical buildings. Rashid and Schaedler are a new breed of architect who are as comfortable in the virtual world as the physical, and they agree that as the Internet develops into a 3D medium, it will be architects who design the interactive virtual spaces. Rashid says, "Ultimately, architects think spatially and where there's a spatial issue we're the ones trained historically to figure out how to make people understand and feel the emotional, physical and artistic side of a space." NAU hopes to complete its prototype Cocoon by October 2009, with models commercially available by 2014. Initially, it's intended to be used in public spaces or to be leased by companies, until the technology becomes cheap enough for the consumer market. But where NAU are creating an escape from the real world, others are working on ways of merging virtual information with the real world. Scott Fisher is the Chair of the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California. In the 1980s he helped develop the archetypal 'glove and goggles' virtual reality system at NASA's Ames Research Center. Since then he has worked with Japanese mobile communications giant NTT Docomo on a kind of technology known as "augmented reality." Where virtual reality immerses you in an artificial world, augmented reality lets you go about your normal life, seeing the real world with additional information superimposed on it. "You might be walking down a street in Tokyo and you could see information about a restaurant that you're walking by, or you might walk by a store and see information about what's on sale there," explains Fisher. This kind of technology has been used for years in pilots' heads-up displays, but a personal augmented reality system requires some sort of portable display, such as a headset. Prototype headsets were once cumbersome things you wouldn't want to wear in public, but modern designs are moving towards something resembling a regular pair of glasses and researchers are working on incorporating the technology into cell phones. Fisher says "This kind of augmented reality is still pretty much in the research stage, but there are a few companies that are about to start marketing, so we'll see things coming out commercially in the next few years."

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CILECT MEMBERS' CONTRIBUTIONS

TELEPHONE COMPANY AS A DISTRIBUTOR.
By Angel Blasco Director, Escuela de Artes Visuales, Madrid Head of Films, Telefonica Corporate Content Unit Abstract: As Telco see decreasing margins in voice business they find new ground in data transmission and Entertainment Content. Internal debates around Access vs Content. Should Telcos be involved in content creation or just provide access? Digital Platforms ran by telcos IPTV, Broadband, and Mobile Services- become Distribution platforms for Content, and also Promotional Platforms. Content vs. Services. Professionally generated and User generated content flood the new Media. User Moderated Content gains weight. Interactive business models such as VOD or FOD combine with Subscription oriented offers always competing for the Interest of the Users. Increase of available Bandwidth and process speed, multiplication of Devices, and general User Involvement address the Industry towards a Digital Big Bang or a Digital Content Tsunami.

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WEB SERIES AS A NEW CALLING CARD

by Brigid Maher Assistant Professor, School of Communication, American University INTRODUCTION: THE NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE Todays new media landscape has fractured the traditional television distribution model in the United States. Audiences are no longer limited to the television box as their source for entertainment and they can view network and cable entertainment using their mobile phones, hand held media devices and computers using the Internet. In the United States, viewers can use aggregators1 such as Apples iTunes2 to download and view network television offerings as well as podcasts and web series. The user-generated content site, You Tube3 is as ubiquitous internationally as a source of entertainment as it is in the United States. Many users take their participation even further by uploading the latest Hollywood bootleg and television series using bit torrent technology4 to tease these files from relative hiding. 3G networks5 have enabled fast sharing of information using mobile phone and hand held devices, further shifting the landscape of how audiences interact with their entertainment. The traditional model of families organizing their day to watch a narrow selection of content offered at specific times through the living room television has been replaced with radical freedom for individuals to choose the time, place and medium for viewing a rapidly expanding universe of content. As a result, television networks have experienced big drops in viewership over recent years. Primetime broadcast ratings have declined by 7% in total and 8% for the 18-49 age group6 during this falls network season alone. The new kind of mobile viewing, made possible by the world wide web, allows for a new kind of place shifting or viewer experience. As a result, a new style of storytelling has emerged to take advantage of this dynamic viewer experience. Audiences are looking for shorter, swifter stories and formats that they can share virally through the Internet. WEB SERIES AND INDEPENDENT PRODUCTIONS Web series erupted on the entertainment scene in the early 2000s, and have gained traction for audiences in the last two years. Web series are programs distributed on the Internet or using mobile technology. Each webisode is typically 5 to 10 minutes each. This is in contrast with the 22-minute length of the traditional television sitcom. The total running time per episode can vary greatly depending on the narrative itself since webisodes do not have the same commercial limitations of its network counterpart. Independent media makers are creating new distribution models to distribute web series through social network and serial hybrid sites to access niche or specialty audiences. Web series take advantage of existing niche audiences that have established cyberspace enclaves. For example, The Guild is an independent web series and was conceived and written for gamers, about gamers by a gamer 7 that is distributed via the web into the very active gaming cyber enclave. The series features Codex played by Felicia Day who spends most of her time playing an online role-playing game with a local gaming

Aggregator are web or stand alone software that uses RSS feeds and will notify users of any updates in information, such as podcasts, blog posts, or news articles. Users can subscribes to these feeds and can view them using a consolidated view in the Aggregator. 2 iTunes <http://www.apple.com/itunes> 3 You Tube <http://www.youtube.com> 4 Bit torrents software allows users to share files to one another over the Internet by multiple parallel uploads by members of bit torrent community. 5 3G is the third generation of mobile phone standards, which enable users to have equivalent Internet speeds to broadband. 6 Gorman, Bill. Broadcast Networks Lose 7% of Viewers, 8% of Adults 18-49 This Season. TV By the Numbers 08 Oct. 208. <http://tvbythenumbers.com/2008/10/08/broadcast-networks-lose-7-of-viewers-8-of-adults-18-49-this-season/5940> 7 Watch the Guild. <http://www.watchtheguild.com/about>

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guild and deals with humor and the blurring of reality that can happen with such an obsession. The series is supported independently through PayPal donations. Although this was launched for niche audiences, The Guild won Best Series at the 2007 You Tube Awards demonstrating its successful crossover appeal.8 Another web series, Galacticast9 launched in 2006 as a weekly comedy series that parodies sci-fi and fantasy shows. The creative duo went on to produce three seasons of the show before taking both a creative and personal relationship break. They report that the show will go on as they have developed a large following in their native Canada as well as in the United States. NEW ADVERTISING MODELS The advertising world has also seen how web series can be used to promote niche markets for women, promotion of new books or even the US Postal Service. They all see how the small screen can lead to a bigger screen. In the Motherhood10 is a web series sponsored by Sprint and Sauve and solicits story ideas submitted by the 21 million+ audience made up primarily of mothers. The stories range from being a mom on Valentines Day to coping with a difficult mother-in-law. The show features Jennifer McCarthy, Leah Remini and Chelsea Handler and has just been picked up as a midseason replacement on ABC.11 The show debuted in 2007 and demonstrates a successful advertising model to promote products outside of the traditional television audience. Recently, after two years of development, the USPS launched a four part series The Mark of the Eagle12, which features a mail carrier as an unlikely hero for the common man. NETWORK REACTIONS Networks see web series as a new opportunity to tap the youtube youth in an attempt to regain lost viewership. NBC and CBS have both adopted distribution models to buy popular web series and redevelop them for networks. NBC launched the popular web series Quarterlife13 as a network offering in January of 2008. Quarterlife boasts to be an independent web series and social network. Although it could hardly be called that, as it was created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick. Both were creators of My So Called Life and a number of other shows for television. What makes Quarterlife unique though is that it does fully integrate and build a social network out of the web series rather than just launching it from a promotional website and You Tube, which is typical of most web series. The social network reflects the series internal content and how social networks have become an integral part of the identity of youth between 20 and 30. Quarterlife failed to connect with audiences though and NBC pulled it from its spring line up only two days after its premiere.14 CBS and NBC have also developed web series respectively with Clark and Michael15 by CBS and Gemini Division16 by NBC. NBC has even gone so far as carve out a piece of the web based video market and co-launched Hulu, which allows you to watch television series and movies without worrying about copyright infringement.17 Joost18 is another legal site web based video service housing traditional content on the web.

You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/ytawards07winners Galacticast. <http://www.galacticast.com> 10 In the Motherhood. <http://inthemotherhood.msn.com/ 11 ABC to develop 'In the Motherhood' for midseason. Hollywood Insider. 11 June 2008. <http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2008/06/abc-to-develop.html> 12 Mark of the Eagle. http://www.markoftheeagle.com/ 13 Quarterlife. http://www.quarterlife.com/ 14 Martineau, Jarret. Web Series 'Quarterlife' Cancelled by NBC, After Ratings Bomb 28 Feb. 2008. <http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/web-series-quarterlife-cancelled-nbc-after-ratings-bomb> 15 Clark and Michael. <http://www.clarkandmichael.com> 16 Gemini Division. <http://www.geminidivision.com> 17 Hulu. <http://www.hulu.com> 18 Joost. <http://www.joost.com>
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MOVING BEYOND NETWORKS Producer and Writer Joss Whedon is best known for his dramatic series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. Yet, during the Writers Strike earlier this year, he envisioned a way around the profit limitation for writers on network series. Out of this pondering, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog19 was formatted as a web 3-webisode miniseries. The project crashed its web server upon release in summer and shot to number 1 on iTunes. The project allowed Whedon to have complete creative freedom as well as retain a much larger portion of the profits than ever possible with a network show.20 THE WEB SERIES AS A CALLING CARD Web series have become a new distribution launch pad and calling card for our emerging storytellers as they venture into the new media landscape after film school. We Need Girlfriends21 was launched in 2006 and developed by Rag Tag Productions and follows three young men who are dumped by their girlfriends upon graduating from college. The series deals with humorous problems facing young 20something men, such as customizing ones my Space page to make your ex-girlfriend jealous. The series was developed by recent graduates of Hofstra Universitys School of Communication program in New York. After a year, this project was picked up by Darren Star for development on CBS.22 NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN STORYTELLING AND DISTRIBUTION EMERGE The challenge is how to adapt storytelling for shorter duration viewing that may take place anywhere in the world. This means changes in story structure, shot composition and shifts in editing style. So far web series tend to take two different styles, that of a video blog or a condensed sitcom. The video blog is reflected in the series such as Quarterlife, The Guild, Gemini Division, and Dr. Horrible to name a few examples. The main character talks directly into the webcam to his or her followers or to contemporaries online. Although this strategy integrates and reflects the medium, it also risks becoming a bit tiresome as a bookend unless the series begins to evolve past the device. Other styles of web series, such as In the Motherhood and We Need Girlfriends simply works within the 5 to 10 minute time limitation but provides fairly traditional set ups. We Need Girlfriends will show a series of exterior shots of the characters apartment building before moving into the story like a traditional sitcom. Web series enable exciting distribution developments in the way they create and establish new audiences through their website and communities. Many of these series have MySpace or Facebook presences to promote their shows in addition to websites. The series often offer multiple formats for viewing and are accessible at iTunes. We Need Girlfriends offers formats for Quicktime, Windows Media and iPod. The Guild has a series 1 DVD for sale off of their site for viewers who want a higher resolution version. The web series are actively promoting viewers to watch the shows at their convenience, creating a place-shifting environment for media consumers. Another development is how web series alter storytelling and editing. Hollywood shorthand was a term used in the past to describe how movies would abbreviate moments that they assumed audiences understood. A new webstory shorthand has evolved in its place and involves nonlinear story telling, use of quick flashbacks for quick back story context and fast paced editing. A five-minute webisode can now tell the same story that was once told in a twenty two-minute sitcom. This demonstrates that audiences have evolved in understanding the visual narrative language. Audiences can absorb faster bits of story information than ever before whether watching on a phone or on the web. An interesting question is whether webisodes may change how such stories are photographed. Television moved shot compositions closer and more intimate and so web series may as well due to the even smaller viewing size. Web series already use the video blog device, which uses a close-up shot. In

Dr. Horrible. <http://drhorrible.com> Marshall, Rick. Comicmix. 15 July 2008. Interview: Joss Whedon on 'Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. <http://www.comicmix.com/news/2008/07/15/interview-joss-whedon-on-doctor-horribles-sing-along-blog/> 21 We Need Girlfriends. <http://weneedgirlfriends.tv> 22 'Sex' Creator Finds 'Girlfriends' for CBS Zap2it. 2 Nov. 2007. <http://www.zap2it.com/tv/news/zapstarweneedgirlfriendscbs,0,7457789.story>
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looking at a vast majority of the web series out there, the compositions still remain tv close, yet the form is still evolving. CONCLUSION: ADAPTING OUR STUDENTS TO THIS NEW LANDSCAPE Students in film school need a background in traditional directing and storytelling. Yet writing classes for shorter formats and nonlinear story telling may be a next step. Along the same line, students should enroll in editing classes as well to learn how to rewrite the script once the series is in the can. Producing classes can work from general Hollywood case studies to include contemporary case studies of students work in the present and audience and outreach development. Students also need to arm themselves with the latest digital and online skill classes to enable them to seamlessly multipurpose their work for multiple platforms. The advantage is that students can shoot a web series and define an audience before they even graduate from film school. Although the web series phenomenon is still a relatively new concept, ex-film school graduates have already created a foundation and calling card model for our students to work from.

APPENDIX Please note this is not an exhaustive list of web series.

The All for Nots:

http://www.theallfornots.com/ http://www.clarkandmichael.com/

Clark and Michael:

Denton Rosehttp://www.dentonrose.com/
Dr. Horribles Sing Along Blog: http://www.drhorrible.com/

Foreign Body: http://foreignbody.tv Galacticast. http://www.galacticast.com/ Gemini Division: http://www.geminidivision.com/index.shtml The Guild:
http://www.watchtheguild.com/

Independent Film Channel. Web Series. http://www.ifc.com In the Motherhood. Nocturnal.

http://www.inthemotherhood.com

Lonely Girl 15: http://www.lg15.com/lonelygirl15/?p=696

http://www.nocturnalwebseries.com/ Quarterlife: http://www.quarterlife.com/ Something to be Desired. http://www.somethingtobedesired.com/

The Superficial Friends: http://www.heavy.com/channel/1179

We Need Girlfriends. http://weneedgirlfriends.tv/

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WIRELESS MOBILE INTERNET AND ONE-MAN BROADCASTERS AT CANDLELIGHT DEMONSTRATION

By Wangtae Lim Professor, Film Art Department DIMA, Dong-Ah Institute of Media and Arts

I. WIBRO, THE WIRELESS MOBILE INTERNET SERVICE These days wireless internet is getting more and more popular. You can connect to the high speed internet even in a hotel, an airport, or a college campus. You dont have to go back to your desktop computer with wired internet for checking your e-mail. You just do it with your notebook sitting under a tree of your campus. Though this wireless internet technology frees you from any wired connection, it has some confinements as well. It is not possible for you to use the internet once you leave the boundary of the AP (Access Point). And even though you are within its reach, your internet connection will break if you move fast with the notebook. WiBro is the answer to take care of these confinements. WiBro stands for Wireless Broadband Internet. It is the name of the wireless mobile internet service in South Korea. Its the most advanced information technology in this country of connectivity and bandwidth. WiBro lets you connect to the high speed internet even when you are in a fast-moving car or a running subway train with the speed of 100 km per hour. HPi (High-speed Portable Internet) technology developed by ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) of South Korea made WiBro possible. While WiBro is the name used in South Korea, Mobile WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is the name in the international venue for the same technology. As of October 2008, WiBro is in service in 19 cities of South Korea. The speed for downloading is 2.0Mbps while 1.2Mbps is for uploading. But the maximum speed WiBro can achieve is 5.2Mbps for downloading and 24.8Mbps for uploading. ETRI and Samsung Technology are now developing a more advanced technology called WiBro Evolution which services 400Mbps speed at the speed of 120km per hour. The monthly payment for using WiBro is about US$20-30. You buy a WiBro USB modem and stick it into your notebook. And youre set to go. You can also purchase a notebook, a cellular phone, or a PMP (Personal Multimedia Player) which has WiBro modem already installed. This technology means the students of our time can distribute their audiovisual contents using wireless mobile internet even in moving vehicles. They can not only upload their graduation thesis films in a subway train but also view the short films in the net [PMP with Wibro modem] competition section of an international film festival on a bus. A student backpacking traveling in Europe can connect to the internet in a running train and watch his favorite TV episode he missed last week. II. AFREECA, THE INTERNET BROADCASTING PORTAL WiBro also means you are able to work as one-man broadcaster. If you have a WiBro notebook with a web camera, you can have a personal TV station which broadcasts live. What you need is to join such internet TV broadcasting portal as Afreeca. Here you can open your own TV station for free in just 3 minutes. At the same time you air something live in a subway train, you can even enjoy real time chat-

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ting with your viewers. In Afreeca broadcasting is neither serious nor formal. Its a lot of fun. Any one of us can be what they call BJ (Broadcast Jockey) and create a very unique TV program. More than 50,000 BJs are now working at Afreeca. Some of their shows got very popular that their broadcasters are now called Star BJs. You Kun is an 18 year-old girl who wants to be an actress in the future. She is a Star BJ who holds a program called Dance TV. But she is not a professional dancer. She is not good at dancing, either. Thats why she goes to a dance school everyday and she shows what she has learnt that day in front of her webcam. More than 3,000 people registered for her show and over 400 viewers will watch her program everyday. If you are a devout fan of her show, you will be given a status called manager. This means you have an authority to protect her and her program from abusive viewers who leave obscene dialogue in the chatting window. In spite of such negative side of real time chatting, she loves that she can talk with her viewers while she is on air. Its because she is making her program together with them. For example, one of the viewers may ask her to sing while she is showing how to dance and she can accept that proposal. Kim is a taxi driver who is really into computer. Thats how he has a personal internet broadcasting station in his own taxi. The moment any guest gets in his taxi, s/he is on TV live. At first, his guests feel intimidated by the fact that they are watched by anonymous viewers. But Kim is dexterous in making them relaxed. Some of them will even sing because Kim offers some discount of taxi charge. His program also has several hundreds of viewers every day. III. ONE-MAN BROADCASTERS AT CANDLELIGHT DEMONSTRATIONS Those who have personal internet broadcasting station and who are active in reporting social issues are called in Korea one-man media or one-man broadcasters. These people were perhaps by far the most important part of the candlelight demonstrations in the spring of 2008 in South Korea. When the government decided to resume U.S. beef imports, many Koreans were angry because they were not so sure of the security of the beef. While there were a series of debates nationwide on whether it was safe or not, many people gathered every night at Seoul Plaza in front of Seoul City Hall and began nonstop demonstrations. The plaza is a grassy expansion which has now become the symbol of protests in South Korea. Ordinary people from different backgrounds showed up at the plaza. Quite a few people from such nonpolitical groups as private and online clubs also joined the demonstrations organized by the Peoples Conference Against Mad Cow Disease. Many members of Miclub, an online community of women who share information on rearing child, also took part. They offered tea or coffee to other demonstrators during the protests. Another club which consists of single girls in their 20s came to join as well. The young women of mini skirts and high-heeled shoes walked alongside other demonstrators through the downtown streets of Seoul. Other groups like baseball or soccer clubs also took part in the rallies. While the demonstrators in the past were armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails, those of our time fight with digital cameras, cellular phones, and the internet. During the non-stop demonstrations, about two thousand one-man broadcasters equipped with WiBro technology worked actively covering every minute detail of daily demonstrations. And more than seven million people watched their live broadcasting. Quite naturally the impact of the live coverage by one-man broadcasters was explosive. Because the broadcasters were exactly the same ordinary people, millions of viewers trusted their conscience to tell the truth. That was how so many ordinary groups of people decided to join the demonstrations. 105
[Candlelight Demonstrators]

The tremendous power of one-man broadcasting shocked two groups of people in particular. First, the government officials were perplexed by the powerful influence of the broadcasters on people. It was literally beyond their comprehension. However sincerely they tried to persuade the demonstrators and however hard they attempted to suppress the demonstrations with riot police, the protests would never stop. The officials knew that behind such strong solidarity among the protesters lied the persuasive power of one-man broadcasters. In the end the government arrested the CEO of Afreeca hoping that the live broadcasting would stop. Secondly, people from the mainstream media stood aghast at peoples unanimously favorable reaction to one-man broadcasters. The demonstrators at Seoul Plaza told the media in power they did not altogether trust what they reported daily while they gave full support to one-man media. One-man broadcasters actually have very competitive edges in that their live programs have no time constraint. While the 9 oclock news in the evening from major TVs can cover the demonstrations only briefly, one-man media can broadcast them in their entirety every night. One-man media has no location constraint, either. People do not have to sit in front of TV sets in order to view their live programs. They can just open their cellular phones in a subway train to watch live whats going on right now at the demonstration that night. All in all the candlelight demonstrations gave the mainstream media a lesson that they should report things much more professionally than one-man media and try their best to acquire full trust from their viewers and readers. The emergence of one-man broadcasters is characterized by both videocracy and interactivity. Videocracy stands for video democracy. It means the digital video broadcasting of one-man media has contributed to the improvement of democracy. One-man media is democratic because virtually any one can make his/her own TV program and send it on the net. Broadcasting does not belong to some chosen few any more. It is also democratic in that it reached those who had been indifferent to social and political issues, and brought them to Seoul Plaza for a succession of serious protests. Another virtue of one-man broadcasting comes from its interactivity. Thanks to WiBro technology, your TV program can enjoy the benefit of live chatting. While you are airing something, you can instantly check its reception by your viewers. You keep communicating with your viewers and make a program they want. Your viewers are no longer passive audience but active participants in making TV programs with you. Interactivity is something those traditional broadcasters can hardly imitate. One-man broadcasters played a very active and positive part in candlelight demonstrations. Their video cameras that amounted up to 2,000 in number at one time captured and sent live on [A Demonstrator with WiBro Phone] the net any violent measures the riot police took in order to dissipate the demonstrators. That was why the police got extremely cautious in using violence against people. And that was how the very long series of candlelight demonstrations could end less violently than any protests in the past. One-man broadcasters also played a role of an alternative media to those traditional ones. People believed this new media would broadcast nothing but the truth while traditional TV stations and newspapers were biased according to their political relationships with the government.

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While one-man broadcasting has virtues like this, it has some shortcomings as well. Unlike peoples expectation that it was always true, a few of the broadcasters manipulated the truth in order to instigate demonstrators. One broadcaster showed the viewers a woman seriously beaten telling them the violence was done by the police. It was such powerful news which made people very furious. But it turned out that it was actually a police woman beaten by the demonstrators after her uniform had been taken off. Other information on the net which turned out to be a lie later was that a girl was killed during a demonstration. It is evident that its possible for any one-man broadcaster determined to cheat the viewers can create something not true and send it on the net for billions of people. And its very likely the angry viewers would reproduce the news with a bigger scale and spread them to more people. So its very important for people to be careful in distinguishing facts from rumors. And the conscience of one-man broadcasters is equally important as well. IV. CONCLUSION Ppali Ppali (which means fast fast) has long been known to be the Korean words which characterize the impatience of South Korean people. It seems that they are in such a hurry in almost everything. But in the era of information technology where speed really matters, that character is now considered to be a very positive trait of South Korean people which actually advanced the level of its IT industry. WiBro technology democratized broadcasting in South Korea. As the result, many Koreans have become one-man broadcasters and their live broadcasts played an important role in candlelight demonstrations. This new way of distributing audiovisual material over the fast speed wireless mobile internet really does affect people and its society. And thats all the more reason why we should be prudent in deciding what to believe and what to suspect among the vast information created by thousands of one-man media.

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MOVIES ON MOBILE PHONES (ABSTRACT)

By Li Wei, professor of the cinematography department, BFA, China As an important component of new media, mobile phone movies are more and more concerned by the public and movie distributors. The rapidly increasing mobile phone use and the improvement of video recording, transmitting and display technology on mobile phones offer us more possibilities to link movies and mobile phones together. The topic of movies on mobile phones actually includes two parts of content, firstly, movies released through mobile phone net service; and secondly, movies shot by the video cameras of mobile phones. Whether which aspect we are talking about, the most significant thing of movies on mobile phones is the popularization of mobile phones. Film distributors are realizing that the existing mobile phone net service might contribute to their film releasing because the mobile phones in everyones pocket could become the terminals of extended distributing lines. 3G technology actualizes movie clips to be downloaded and played in real time. Although the quality of image and sound is still limited by the band width, the phone users tend to admit it for conveniently getting what they want whenever and wherever the mobile phone service is available. It is obvious that most audience wont enjoy a 90 to 120 minute film on a mobile phone because of the relatively low quality. But for those short productions such as music videos, short features, documentaries, and animations, mobile phone is getting more competitive than cinema, TV, and even internet, especially among the youth. Regarding the topic of shooting movie with mobile phones, the popularization of mobile phones plays a very important role as well. Like watches and pens, today, mobile phones are something always carried with us. It leads that any aspects of the world and our life might be recorded, sudden events, interesting moments, private occasions; anytime, anywhere, anything. Never was our life recorded vividly and lively by moving images as today. Comparing with film cameras and DV cameras, mobile phone cameras offer us something recorded not on purpose. This new impression of image makes up the lack of image quality. Being more popularized than DV cameras, mobile phone cameras offer more people the opportunities to express by movie forms. Whether for releasing or shooting movies, mobile phones are becoming a new platform for movie. The development of technology will solve the quality problem, and offer us more possibilities we can or cant imagine, on business, society, and culture.

BEJING ABSTRACT
By Peter Hort Course Director, BA Film & Television Production, Westminster Film School, UK Ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, so we clearly no longer live in a world where audio visual material is a scarce resource but historically, this scarcity is what the TV and film industries have been predicated on. The scarce resource nowadays would seem to be the attention of the audience, and even though the potential audience is bigger than ever, we have reached the situation where nearly everything out there in what has been termed the attention landscape is ignored by nearly everybody. How can we (and our students) ensure that student films find an audience in this exciting but challenging new environment?

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Note: Majority of the texts included in this Report were taken over from different web sources primarily Wikipedia, number of on line magazines, independent sites and some manufacturers sites. Consequently, not all the rights are cleared. So, please, use this Report only academically

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