The rules are intended to prohibit phone and cable companies blocking or discriminating against internet traffic over their broadband networks.
Net neutrality was one of the Obama administrations top campaign pledges to the technology industry.
Read More...
source BBC.com
By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
Thursday 2 December 2010
UK lags on broadband and mobile
Only a tiny percentage of UK homes have super-fast broadband and mobile speeds are slow compared to other nations, Ofcom has revealed.
In its annual International Communications Market report, the regulator said more needed to be done on fixed and mobile broadband.
Read more..
By Jane Wakefield
Technology reporter
source BBC.com
In its annual International Communications Market report, the regulator said more needed to be done on fixed and mobile broadband.
Read more..
By Jane Wakefield
Technology reporter
source BBC.com
Wednesday 24 November 2010
The rising popularity of smartphones have increased need for data on the move
Virgin Media mulls nationwide wi-fi
Virgin Media is mulling the idea of creating a nationwide wi-fi network to compete with rival BT.
It said it had been inspired by cable operators who have launched wi-fi in other countries.
Read more on this here..
Virgin Media is mulling the idea of creating a nationwide wi-fi network to compete with rival BT.
It said it had been inspired by cable operators who have launched wi-fi in other countries.
Read more on this here..
Industry Head of YouTube Dara Nasr explains why the future of video advertising lies online
Dara Nasr
Industry Head of YouTube.
A third of web traffic is online video and Cisco predicts that this will rise to 90 per cent by 2013 so advertisers are taking notee. Recent IAB figures show that although all online advertising has grown, video is driving this with 82 per cent year on year growth in the first half of 2010.
In the early part of 2005 YouTube was born, a site created for friends to share clips. . From these humble origins, YouTube has grown: users are now watching 2bn streams a day on the site and they are now no longer merely watching clips. There are full-length shows, live concerts and sports events to grab their attention. When Harry Hill or Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge debut their new TV shows, they do so on YouTube.
Like other forms of new media, it has taken advertisers a while to crack online video – but this year there’s evidence that they’ve really cracked it. According to Brand Week in the US, Old Spice’s genius YouTube/Twitter campaign has led to sales of their shower gel doubling. Tippex has produced a global impact from a brilliantly interactive campaign which pushed YouTube to its very limit.
Advertisers keen to embrace online video have a range of options. Virals have been a popular way of creating content and seeding it in the hope that it grows. Great creative can provide fantastic results but recent work from Millward Brown suggests that without proper promotion, most of that video will not succeed, instead getting lost amid the pure volume of YouTube’s content.
Undoubtedly the Video On Demand (VOD) market provides the easiest crossover from TV advertising and this is the largest area within video. Pre-roll advertising is continuing to grow and traditional broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 4 have benefited from this hugely. However, this space is changing. The ads are more interactive, driving consumer engagement or click-through which goes beyond pure TV creative.
Buying models are also evolving, giving the user more control over what they see. In the States, VivaKi have run a research project called The Pool which trialed various VOD ad formats, the most popular being the Ad Selector model where the user chooses one of three ads to watch before the content streams.
Similarly, YouTube are launching a skippable ad test where the user can skip the ad if they choose, and the client only pays if the ad is viewed. Both these new formats are priced on a cost-per-view basis which gives the advertiser the benefit of knowing that the viewer saw the ad because they chose to, rather than the ad being enforced upon them or merely serving as wallpaper. These innovations do not replace the traditional CPM reservation model but sit alongside it and perhaps broaden the appeal of pre-roll advertising to a wider group of clients.
Building on that thought, YouTube’s Promoted Video product launched in the UK in 2009 with the aim of allowing advertisers to keyword-target viewers. Again using a CPC model, this marries the search ad model with video. This has been a huge success in the UK with clients including Honda, O2 and Nokia adopting the format. However, this format is not exclusive to large advertisers. SMEs and start-us are using it very much as an entry point into online video advertising.
There has been no bigger success story than Orabrush, a product developed by a retired doctor to treat bad breath. Initially he could not sell the product to retailers so enlisted marketing students to help. Their research showed that 92 per cent of people would not be interested in the product. However the 8 per cent that would represented a huge opportunity. With their help he created a video for a couple of hundred dollars and promoted it on YouTube. Not the most sexy brand but through clever optimisation and relevant targeting, this video has received over 15m clicks and the company has become a multi-million dollar business.
Video will continue to grow in the future not just in popularity but also accessibility. All smartphones have video streaming functionality and we are seeing that smartphones owners are more engaged with and watch more video than those without the high-end devices. Additionally TV sets are now wifi enabled, and they all come with several video apps, allowing viewers to easily embrace VOD from their TV sets.
Online video goes beyond audio-visual advertising; it combines the breadth and reach of TV with the interactivity, creativity and accountability of online. As a result advertisers are now often putting online video at the heart of their plans and the flexibility around formats and pricing provides them with different opportunities for success.
Dara Nasr
Industry Head of YouTube
Industry Head of YouTube.
A third of web traffic is online video and Cisco predicts that this will rise to 90 per cent by 2013 so advertisers are taking notee. Recent IAB figures show that although all online advertising has grown, video is driving this with 82 per cent year on year growth in the first half of 2010.
In the early part of 2005 YouTube was born, a site created for friends to share clips. . From these humble origins, YouTube has grown: users are now watching 2bn streams a day on the site and they are now no longer merely watching clips. There are full-length shows, live concerts and sports events to grab their attention. When Harry Hill or Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge debut their new TV shows, they do so on YouTube.
Like other forms of new media, it has taken advertisers a while to crack online video – but this year there’s evidence that they’ve really cracked it. According to Brand Week in the US, Old Spice’s genius YouTube/Twitter campaign has led to sales of their shower gel doubling. Tippex has produced a global impact from a brilliantly interactive campaign which pushed YouTube to its very limit.
Advertisers keen to embrace online video have a range of options. Virals have been a popular way of creating content and seeding it in the hope that it grows. Great creative can provide fantastic results but recent work from Millward Brown suggests that without proper promotion, most of that video will not succeed, instead getting lost amid the pure volume of YouTube’s content.
Undoubtedly the Video On Demand (VOD) market provides the easiest crossover from TV advertising and this is the largest area within video. Pre-roll advertising is continuing to grow and traditional broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 4 have benefited from this hugely. However, this space is changing. The ads are more interactive, driving consumer engagement or click-through which goes beyond pure TV creative.
Buying models are also evolving, giving the user more control over what they see. In the States, VivaKi have run a research project called The Pool which trialed various VOD ad formats, the most popular being the Ad Selector model where the user chooses one of three ads to watch before the content streams.
Similarly, YouTube are launching a skippable ad test where the user can skip the ad if they choose, and the client only pays if the ad is viewed. Both these new formats are priced on a cost-per-view basis which gives the advertiser the benefit of knowing that the viewer saw the ad because they chose to, rather than the ad being enforced upon them or merely serving as wallpaper. These innovations do not replace the traditional CPM reservation model but sit alongside it and perhaps broaden the appeal of pre-roll advertising to a wider group of clients.
Building on that thought, YouTube’s Promoted Video product launched in the UK in 2009 with the aim of allowing advertisers to keyword-target viewers. Again using a CPC model, this marries the search ad model with video. This has been a huge success in the UK with clients including Honda, O2 and Nokia adopting the format. However, this format is not exclusive to large advertisers. SMEs and start-us are using it very much as an entry point into online video advertising.
There has been no bigger success story than Orabrush, a product developed by a retired doctor to treat bad breath. Initially he could not sell the product to retailers so enlisted marketing students to help. Their research showed that 92 per cent of people would not be interested in the product. However the 8 per cent that would represented a huge opportunity. With their help he created a video for a couple of hundred dollars and promoted it on YouTube. Not the most sexy brand but through clever optimisation and relevant targeting, this video has received over 15m clicks and the company has become a multi-million dollar business.
Video will continue to grow in the future not just in popularity but also accessibility. All smartphones have video streaming functionality and we are seeing that smartphones owners are more engaged with and watch more video than those without the high-end devices. Additionally TV sets are now wifi enabled, and they all come with several video apps, allowing viewers to easily embrace VOD from their TV sets.
Online video goes beyond audio-visual advertising; it combines the breadth and reach of TV with the interactivity, creativity and accountability of online. As a result advertisers are now often putting online video at the heart of their plans and the flexibility around formats and pricing provides them with different opportunities for success.
Dara Nasr
Industry Head of YouTube
Tuesday 23 November 2010
The birth of a UK tech giant
British chip designer ARM will soon be 20 years old. Bill Thompson was there at the start.
During the 1980s I worked at Acorn Computers in Cambridge, helping to develop the in-house engineering systems that were used by designers to create computers like the Archimedes, the popular successor to the BBC Microcomputer that had made Acorn's name during the BBC Computer Literacy project.
The computer on my desk was a BBC Model "B" microcomputer with a whopping 32 kilobytes of memory and, I believe, a 10 megabyte hard drive.
Read more...
During the 1980s I worked at Acorn Computers in Cambridge, helping to develop the in-house engineering systems that were used by designers to create computers like the Archimedes, the popular successor to the BBC Microcomputer that had made Acorn's name during the BBC Computer Literacy project.
The computer on my desk was a BBC Model "B" microcomputer with a whopping 32 kilobytes of memory and, I believe, a 10 megabyte hard drive.
Read more...
Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing's papers auctioned
Alan Turing killed himself after being prosecuted for having a sexual relationship with a manPapers published by World War II codebreaker Alan Turing are expected to fetch about £500,000 at auction later.
The Manchester University scientist, who killed himself in 1954, created a machine at Bletchley Park to crack messages in the German Enigma code.
Last year, the then prime minister Gordon Brown gave him a posthumous apology for the "appalling" treatment he received for being gay.
The documents will go under the hammer at Christie's in London later.
Turing, who has been called the "father of the computer", published only 18 papers in his short career.
He was prosecuted for having a sexual relationship with a man and two years later he committed suicide by biting into an apple which he had laced with cyanide.
He was found dead at his home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, where a plaque has been erected to pay tribute to him.
Turing's Bombe machine is viewed by many as the ancestor of the modern computer Since it was announced that the papers were going to be sold, IT journalist Gareth Halfacree has been trying to raise the cash to buy them and donate them to Bletchley Park Trust in Milton Keynes.
So far he has raised £85,000 having just received a £62,784 donation from Google.
"We are still a bit short of what we need but I still hope that Microsoft or Apple might donate at the last minute," Mr Halfacree said.
Bids for the collection, which contain his first published paper, his pioneering work on artificial intelligence and the very foundations of the digital computer, have to be submitted by 1030 GMT.
They will go under the hammer at 1400 GMT.
Mr Halfacree added: "If we do not raise enough, which is looking increasingly unlikely, I hope whoever buys it donates the papers to Bletchley Park so we can all benefit from them."
He said the money he has raised so far will still go to the trust whether it is used to buy the papers or not.
Viewers May Be Willing to Watch More Ads Online
VIEWERS of television shows on the Web have grown accustomed to 15- and 30-second commercial breaks — a fraction of the time given for commercials on traditional TV. Would they accept TV-style ad loads?
Jack Wakshlag, the chief research officer for Turner Broadcasting, the parent of TNT and TBS.
He says the answer is yes. Research conducted by Turner suggested that programmers could surround the online streams of shows with even more ads than TV broadcasts have.
Regardless of the ad load, Mr. Wakshlag said in an interview, “people will spend approximately the same amount of time watching episodes online.”
The research comes at a pivotal time for programmers like Turner, which would like to extend TV-style ad loads to the Internet. Turner and others are slowly extending their programs to the Internet for existing cable and satellite subscribers only, a concept sometimes called TV Everywhere. Heavier ad loads and restricted access will go a long way toward bringing TV on the computer in line with TV on the living room set.
To conduct the test of online viewers’ behavior, Turner randomly assigned three sets of anonymous visitors to tnt.tv and tbs.com to a specially built video player. There, the first set was shown about a minute of ads an episode; the second was shown 8 to 10 minutes of ads; and the third was shown 16 to 20 minutes.
Viewers of 30-minute TBS sitcoms like “Meet the Browns” watched, on average, 40 percent of the episode, including the ads, if there was one minute of ads and 37 percent of the episode if there were 16 minutes of ads. Viewers of hourlong TNT shows like “Memphis Beat” watched 59 percent of the episode if there were one minute 15 seconds of ads, and 49 percent of the episode if there was 20 minutes of ads.
Mr. Wakshlag’s takeaway was that viewers watched, on average, for the same number of minutes no matter how many ads were embedded within. Indeed, the Turner research highlighted one of the oddities of online TV viewing: viewers often do not watch an entire episode, just as they channel-surf while on the couch.
Turner also found that the commercial retention rate for online video was higher than for traditional television.
Mr. Wakshlag said the research, which was done in concert with Magna Global, affirmed that people would trade ad exposure for access to programming.
The CW network has reached the same conclusions in a real-world test. CW, the home of “Gossip Girl” and “The Vampire Diaries,” announced last spring that it would increase its ad load on cwtv.com, and since then, it has reported gains in video viewing and visitor retention. According to the measurement firm comScore, the Web site averaged 57 minutes of video viewing (a total of ads and content) per visitor in September, up 140 percent from the same month in 2009.
Some in the television industry continue to proselytize for fewer but better ads. Hulu, the dominant Web site for free TV viewing, notes on its Web site that it has about one-fourth the ad load of traditional TV, and that advertisers pay a premium to be in its less cluttered environment.
One of Hulu’s principles, as expressed by its chief executive, Jason Kilar, is, “When it comes to the amount of advertising, lighten up.” In an address at the industry conference NewTeeVee Live this month, Mr. Kilar compared the four minutes of ads on the half-hour “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in the 1950s with the eight minutes of ads when NBC broadcasts “The Office” now, and said, “Where we are today is not the ideal balance.”
Hulu has been at the fore of coming up with ad products that give viewers more options to, for example, select among three types of commercials by a car company. Still, some Hulu users have noticed an uptick in the number of ads being streamed lately, perhaps evincing the complex calculations that are under way in the industry to increase ad loads and, in doing so, increase revenue for media companies.
Asked about the recent uptick in ads, a Hulu spokeswoman reiterated that the site had “less than half” the ads compared with “what is found on traditional TV.” The company said the lighter ad load and the tailoring efforts had “resulted in the advertising spots on Hulu being measured as at least 55 percent more effective than the same ads in traditional channels.”
The ads on Web sites like hulu.com, tbs.com and cwtv.com will continue to be better customized. But if this year’s tests indicate anything, it is that there will also be more of them.
Jack Wakshlag, the chief research officer for Turner Broadcasting, the parent of TNT and TBS.
He says the answer is yes. Research conducted by Turner suggested that programmers could surround the online streams of shows with even more ads than TV broadcasts have.
Regardless of the ad load, Mr. Wakshlag said in an interview, “people will spend approximately the same amount of time watching episodes online.”
The research comes at a pivotal time for programmers like Turner, which would like to extend TV-style ad loads to the Internet. Turner and others are slowly extending their programs to the Internet for existing cable and satellite subscribers only, a concept sometimes called TV Everywhere. Heavier ad loads and restricted access will go a long way toward bringing TV on the computer in line with TV on the living room set.
To conduct the test of online viewers’ behavior, Turner randomly assigned three sets of anonymous visitors to tnt.tv and tbs.com to a specially built video player. There, the first set was shown about a minute of ads an episode; the second was shown 8 to 10 minutes of ads; and the third was shown 16 to 20 minutes.
Viewers of 30-minute TBS sitcoms like “Meet the Browns” watched, on average, 40 percent of the episode, including the ads, if there was one minute of ads and 37 percent of the episode if there were 16 minutes of ads. Viewers of hourlong TNT shows like “Memphis Beat” watched 59 percent of the episode if there were one minute 15 seconds of ads, and 49 percent of the episode if there was 20 minutes of ads.
Mr. Wakshlag’s takeaway was that viewers watched, on average, for the same number of minutes no matter how many ads were embedded within. Indeed, the Turner research highlighted one of the oddities of online TV viewing: viewers often do not watch an entire episode, just as they channel-surf while on the couch.
Turner also found that the commercial retention rate for online video was higher than for traditional television.
Mr. Wakshlag said the research, which was done in concert with Magna Global, affirmed that people would trade ad exposure for access to programming.
The CW network has reached the same conclusions in a real-world test. CW, the home of “Gossip Girl” and “The Vampire Diaries,” announced last spring that it would increase its ad load on cwtv.com, and since then, it has reported gains in video viewing and visitor retention. According to the measurement firm comScore, the Web site averaged 57 minutes of video viewing (a total of ads and content) per visitor in September, up 140 percent from the same month in 2009.
Some in the television industry continue to proselytize for fewer but better ads. Hulu, the dominant Web site for free TV viewing, notes on its Web site that it has about one-fourth the ad load of traditional TV, and that advertisers pay a premium to be in its less cluttered environment.
One of Hulu’s principles, as expressed by its chief executive, Jason Kilar, is, “When it comes to the amount of advertising, lighten up.” In an address at the industry conference NewTeeVee Live this month, Mr. Kilar compared the four minutes of ads on the half-hour “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in the 1950s with the eight minutes of ads when NBC broadcasts “The Office” now, and said, “Where we are today is not the ideal balance.”
Hulu has been at the fore of coming up with ad products that give viewers more options to, for example, select among three types of commercials by a car company. Still, some Hulu users have noticed an uptick in the number of ads being streamed lately, perhaps evincing the complex calculations that are under way in the industry to increase ad loads and, in doing so, increase revenue for media companies.
Asked about the recent uptick in ads, a Hulu spokeswoman reiterated that the site had “less than half” the ads compared with “what is found on traditional TV.” The company said the lighter ad load and the tailoring efforts had “resulted in the advertising spots on Hulu being measured as at least 55 percent more effective than the same ads in traditional channels.”
The ads on Web sites like hulu.com, tbs.com and cwtv.com will continue to be better customized. But if this year’s tests indicate anything, it is that there will also be more of them.
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