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Youview TV platform and set-top box coming to UK stores this month (update: priced at £299)

YouView streaming platform and settop box coming to UK xxx

The BBC's iPlayer has become too successful. It either needs to calm down or be put on a more level playing field with on demand services from the other big UK broadcasters -- and it's going to be the latter. Youview -- which has nothing whatsoever in common with YouTube except its name and the fact that it also does video -- is a PVR set-top box that uses both an aerial and a web connection to allow catch-up viewing, and we've just heard it'll arrive in UK stores towards the end of this month. It'll bring together programs from the BBC (which also contributed £10 million of license fee cash), ITV, Channel 4, Five, and Sky, using infrastructure from BT, TalkTalk and Arqiva, and it'll target millions of British viewers who want a "seamless" mix of live and archived telly without being tied to a subscription -- and who don't yet depend on a Smart TV, games console or other converged device.

Update: Youview front man Lord Alan Sugar told us that the box is Humax-built and will cost £299. He also added that there'll be adverts within commercial programs, but not plastered over the EPG or interface itself.

Youview TV platform and set-top box coming to UK stores this month (update: priced at £299) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Jul 2012 04:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/04/youview-uk/

Fastest growing segment of piracy? Live TV

A chart from the report “The six business models for copyright infringement.” Click to expand.

A new Google study entitled “The six business models for copyright infringement,” just released with the UK’s PRS (Performing Right Society) for Music, finds that live TV is the fastest-growing segment of copyright infringement. (To see the others, click on the image at right.) Global pageviews of live TV sites were up 61 percent for the year ending May 2012.

Live TV sites link to illegal streams of network and paid TV. The study looked at 51 live TV sites — it doesn’t mention any of them by name, but a couple of popular ones are Sidereel.com and TVDuck.com, which feature a mixture of legal and illegal content — and found that a third of them are based in the United States.

Two-thirds of the sites are funded by advertisers, and “compared to the other segments Live TV Gateway has very high levels of direct access and referrals from social networks.” Live TV sites are more likely than the other business models to have mobile sites and social network presence “in the form of a social networking ‘action’ icon, for example Facebook ‘like’ buttons, Twitter ‘tweet’ button or similar.”

P2P sites still get the most visitors

Researchers looked at 29 P2P sites; again, while they are not mentioned by name, the largest gets 2.1 million unique UK visitors per month (compared to 1.1 million unique UK visitors at the most popular live TV site). The UK-based study didn’t track monthly U.S. visitors by site, but did look at global page views across categories, using data provided by Google.

P2P sites are the most dependent on advertising of any of the business models looked at: 86 percent of them are funded by advertising.

Overall, “both Live TV Gateway and P2P Community sites, the two largest  and fastest growing segments, tended to link to content on other sites or services rather than host the content,” the researchers found.

To fight piracy, “follow the money”

Theo Bertram, Google’s UK policy manager, said in a statement:

Our research shows there are many different business models for online infringement which can be tackled if we work together. The evidence suggests that one of the most effective ways to do this is to follow the money, targeting the advertisers who choose to make money from these sites and working with payment providers to ensure they know where their services are being used.

The research was conducted by BAE Systems Detica, and you can view the full report here.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Mehmet Dilsiz

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from GigaOM http://paidcontent.org/2012/07/03/fastest-growing-segment-of-piracy-live-tv/?...

Branch aspires to be a simplified, successful Google Wave

Branch co-founder Josh Miller

As a hot, buzzy start-up in private beta, Branch has enjoyed advanced hype thanks to some high profile users and backers. But it also suffers from misconceptions as well because it’s not quite clear to the public what it will be. Is it a form of a private Twitter, or a comments replacement, a publishing tool or something completely different?

The service, which won’t go public for another six weeks, evolved from Miller’s first idea called Roundtable. That was initially framed as a high-brow content source, pulling in expert commentary from people on different topics. Branch has since been reshaped with the help of Twitter founders Ev Williams, Biz Stone and former Twitter VP of product Jason Goldman, who are investors along with SV Angel, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and others. The service, which closed $2 million in seed funding in March, now allows people to pull in other people into multimedia chats that can be preserved with a URL and can evolve as participants invite others into the conversation.

I recently sat down with Miller, a 21-year-old Princeton drop-out, at his office at Betaworks and asked what the right analogy might be for the company. He said in some ways, Branch is trying to be a simplified version of the now deceased Google Wave, a comparison he has never talked about before. That may not inspire a lot of confidence, but it speaks to what Miller is really trying to do with Branch.

“I think the promise of Google Wave is really interesting. Ultimately, it was too complicated a product,” Miller said. “We’re focused on offering a very simple user experience. We’re really interested in the portability of conversations.”

Google Wave launched to a lot of fanfare in 2009, offering users a real-time tool for collaboration. But it died a year later after failing to gain user traction. Miller believes that Branch can replicate some of the spirit of Google Wave but re-imagined in a simpler format. Users can just initiate a conversation by inviting a person via email or through Twitter or through a bookmarklet that can turn a tweet or URL into a conversation. The conversation is public by default but hidden until someone shares the URL. Branch recently added the ability for people to view videos, photos and gifs inside a conversation. Users can add any one else to a conversation and there’s also a new way for viewers of the conversation to request an invitation.

“I’m trying to replicate a dinner conversation with a the ability to add a plus-one. You can just start with a group and the conversation and group can grow organically,” Miller said. “I think there’s a place for intimate direct conversations.”

Publications like Nieman Journalism Labs and TechCrunch have embedded Branch conversations on their site. The early uses on sites have led some to believe Branch was trying to be a replacement for commenting systems, albeit a pretty private one. A few months ago, Nick Denton instituted a new comments design with “branches,” which prompted speculation that Gawker had stolen Branch’s idea.

Miller said he isn’t trying to court any one use case. He’s hoping that users will find all kinds of different applications for Branch, whether it’s for internal corporate communications, sponsored forums, brain storming or as just a casual hangout area for friends.

But Branch also faces competition on various fronts. Commenting services, IM providers, blogging platforms, email threads, enterprise social services, group messaging start-ups or even Twitter and Storify also compete on some levels with the vision Branch is trying to promote. The challenge is for Branch to carve out enough use cases amid all those existing services while still projecting a coherent identity. But that, Miller admits, could be Branch’s weakness too if it can’t find one killer application.

“That’s my biggest worry. It could be amazing for a lot of things but not great for one,” said Miller. “But that’s our biggest opportunity too, with how many use cases there are.”

Miller has gradually learned to be open to the possibility that he might not have all the answers about his start-up. He said he was already leaning toward a more open approach with Roundtable when he went out to San Francisco in January to partner with Obvious Corp., the new venture by Williams, Stone and Goldman. It was there that he flipped his model away from a content site to a communications platform at the urging of Williams, who told him his users would ultimately help him figure out what the service would be.

Branch co-founders Hursh Agrawal, Cemre Güngör and Josh Miller

That’s been one of many lessons in Miller’s crash course in start-up education. As a junior at Princeton, Miller interned at Meetup in New York. Last summer, he left his studies behind to pursue his first idea Roundtable. Huffington Post and Buzzfeed co-founder Jonah Peretti became an early advisor and initially helped steer him toward building a media company. Now, he’s guided most closely by Goldman, the former VP of product at Twitter who moved out from Obvious Corp.’s San Francisco to live in New York and advise Branch, which has relocated back to New York.

The company just hired its first iOS developer, who will be working to get Branch a mobile app. It’s also hired someone to coordinate with publishers, who want to use Branch on their sites. That could be part of Branch’s revenue story, which could also involve brands using Branch for sponsored forums.

I have to admit, the first time I heard about it, Branch sounded a little elitist. And it also made me believe that it would work more with users who had a big following of fans interested in seeing some interesting conversations preserved. But it looks like Branch is really trying to be more of an all-purpose tool. I, for one, was a little sad to see Google Wave go though I liked the idea of it more than the actual product. I’d like to see if Branch can evolve and become more of an every day tool in that same vein. It will be a tall order and there’s no guarantee Branch won’t face a similar fate as Google Wave.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/03/branch-aspires-to-be-a-simplified-successful-goo...

Netflix just became cable’s biggest TV network

Netflix subscribers watched more than one billion hours of video in June, according to the company’s CEO Reed Hastings. That means that U.S. subscribers watched around 80 minutes of Netflix per day last month, which makes the service more popular than any traditional U.S. cable network, estimated BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield.

Hastings revealed the new number in a public Facebook post Tuesday morning, which also had him congratulate the company’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos:

“Congrats to Ted Sarandos, and his amazing content licensing team. Netflix monthly viewing exceeded 1 billion hours for the first time ever in June. When House of Cards and Arrested Development debut, we’ll blow these records away. Keep going, Ted, we need even more!”

Greenfield took it upon himself to do a little back-of-the envelope math based on that number for a blog post Tuesday (registration required), and estimated that 90 percent of that viewing originated in the U.S. He also suggested that Netflix had around 24 million U.S. subscribers in June – we won’t know the exact number until the company releases its quarterly earnings later this month. Based on those numbers, Greenfield estimated that U.S. subscribers watched an average of 80 minutes of Netflix every day last month.

That puts the service right up there with many traditional TV networks, and in fact could make it more popular than all of the U.S. cable networks. We don’t have June viewership numbers of most cable networks yet, but based on earlier trends, he concluded that Netflix was the most viewed cable network last month. Equally impressing: In households that have Netflix, it even beats broadcast networks like ABC and CBS.

Netflix has long positioned itself as not a cable killer but a cable-like network, competing with HBO and Showtime as opposed to TV itself. Regardless of these semantics, the recent numbers show that Netflix is definitely starting to eat into cable networks’ market share.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-june-one-billion-hours/?utm_source=feedburner...

Maxwell's demon goes quantum, can do work, write and erase data

James Clerk Maxwell, who postulated a "demon" that could extract usable energy from random thermal fluctuations.

At any temperature above absolute zero, particles in a system move randomly, an effect known as thermal fluctuation. The random character of the fluctuations means they cannot be put to work in a mechanical sense (the measure of the energy unavailable for work is called entropy). 19th century physicist James Clerk Maxwell proposed a tiny intelligent "demon" that could harvest the thermal fluctuations to restore their usefulness; later work in the 20th century showed that the demon itself would have entropy, which would keep the thermodynamic books balanced.

What began as a thought experiment well over a century ago has potential interest for a variety of microscopic systems today. While the intelligent demon has fallen by the wayside, contemporary researchers are replacing it with a mindless quantum mechanical device, one that can manipulate thermal fluctuations and record its actions in some kind of memory.

Particularly, Dibyendu Mandal and Christopher Jarzynski at the University of Maryland have shown theoretically that we could make a quantum demon that would extract usable energy from thermal fluctuations, store information about its actions, and then erase the memory. This is an advance on previous Maxwell-demonic work, which never described their operations in a physical way. In principle, this demon could be used to control feedback, create nanoscale devices, and perform other functions in contexts where thermal fluctuations are significant.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/07/maxwells-demon-goes-quantum-can-do-wor...

Why You Should Embrace Twitter Lurkers




Mashable OP-ED: This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Please do not unfollow Twitter followers who are inactive, no matter how long it's been. There are many lurkers, searchers and readers who may never tweet, but still have a great deal of value.

What is that value? Well, there are active users on Twitter who dominate the conversation the way some dominate a cocktail party. Then there are those that don't. Although, they tend to stand out in other ways, particularly in numbers. For example, of the more than 100 million active users on Twitter, half log in daily, but only 60% have tweeted in the last month. What this should tell you is that so-called lurkers account for a large percentage of the average Twitter audience.

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/03/twitter-follow-lurkers/?utm_source=feedburner&...

Marvell’s Weili Dai on TV’s future: the tech is ready

The future of TV, according to Marvell co-founder Weili Dai, is a little bit like pizza. Different people like different toppings, and different companies may have different recipes for their tomato sauce. But no matter what, it always needs a good dough. “We make the pizza dough,” Dai told be during a phone conversation Monday.

Marvell has been in the news in recent months because of its Arama 1500 chipset, which powers a new generation of Google TV devices, including the new set-top-boxes launched by Sony and Vizio at Google I/O last week. Dai told me that she sees Google TV emerge as “one of the key platforms” in the smart TV space. “It’s the infant stage of Google addressing the big screen,” she admitted. But that’s exactly where Android was just a few years back. Just like Android on mobile phones, Google TV will pick up steam, Dai explained: “A snowball effect will happen.”

One of the issues that held back the first generation of Google TV devices was their high retail price, with Logitech’s Revue initially selling for $250. Vizio’s Co-Star, on the other hand, is going to be sold for $99. The price reduction is possible because ARM chips like the Armada 1500 are much cheaper than the Intel chipset that was used for the first generation of Google TVs.

However, Dai doesn’t think that there will be just one platform ruling them all. “You will see multiple ecosystems,” she told me. To take the pizza metaphor further, there’s room for both Roundtable and Pizza Hut – and possibly even for new innovators that think outside of the box. “I hold chocolate sauce too if they not decide to use tomato sauce,” she joked.

So what is Dai’s vision for the future of television? At the center of the experience will be a TV wall in the living room, powered by an entertainment center that is interconnected to everything else, including smaller displays in the kitchen and bedroom. But don’t just think screens: “The furniture around you all will have smartness in it,” she said, adding: “We are gonna experience a very different lifestyle.”

Granted, it might be some time before consumers will live in this kind of smart home. But the key may be to start with making TVs smarter, and Dai expressed confidence that the technology to get this done is ready. Now it’s up to the OEMs to market those devices to consumers and to content folks to come on board and embrace these new platforms. In other words: Make those tasty pizza pies irresistible, and get them in the hands of the hungry masses. Said Dai: “The dough is ready.”

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/marvells-weili-dai-on-tvs-future-the-tech-is-ready/?u...

20 TV Shows With the Most Social Media Buzz This Week




Sunday night's broadcast of the BET Awards 2012 tops this week's social TV charts, leaving the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship game between Spain and Italy in the dust. We think it was Samuel L. Jackson's impersonation of Nicki Minaj (complete with fuschia wig) that did the trick.

EURO 2012 remained pretty buzzworthy through the last week of the tournament. But now that Spain reigns victorious, there will be room for other programs at the top of the charts.

Kanye West, Jay-Z, Beyonce and Chris Brown were the big winners at the BET Awards — each took home two awards. Of course, the real winner of the evening has to be Blue Ivy Carter, who proudly repped mom, pop and Uncle Ka…
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More About: Entertainment, infographics, Social Media, social tv, social tv charts, Trendrr, TV

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/02/social-media-tv-chart-7-2/?utm_source=feedburn...

5 Chinese Social Networks You Need to Watch




Connections mean “power” in China. This is why social networks have become part of the relationship-building fabric of Chinese society. The numbers certainly bear this out. Roughly half of China’s 513 million netizens are using social networking sites, and all of these social networks are home grown.

While it’s true that the government makes it virtually impossible for foreign players to enter the social network market in China, some consumers use VPN services, which provide access to sites like Facebook. But even if China allowed outside players, Chinese companies have the natural advantage of understanding the nuance of the Chinese consumer. This is why the following five s…
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More About: china, contributor, features, social networks, trending

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/02/china-social-networks/?utm_source=feedburner&u...