Earlier today I decided to check out coverage of the opening ceremony at the Olympics on the BBC website. So, I clicked in using my 3 mobile broadband service (which was on a HSDPA network with full bars in the middle of Cardiff). Instead of performers and fireworks, I was informed by the BBC that I was not in the UK.

This begs the question where 3 get its IP allocation from and shows the continuing issues with geotargeting content. The Olympics is amongst the biggest of prizes to hack, although, since it appears on free-to-air channels in most of the world, the IOC has little to lose commercially.

This shows how old fashioned national broadcasters are beginning to appear. I’m awaiting the arrival of the global channels..

Continued here:
Global Channels

My regular correspondent and former colleague Pete has sent me this link, which is priceless. Clearly, there’s scope for a married sex channel in there somewhere…

But in the middle of this nonsense somewhere is the realisation that a generation of kids are growing up with ready access to sexual content; the effect of this is hard to predict. Holland, a country with perhaps the most liberal attitude in the world to sex, has one of the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy and also, reportedly, low rates of promiscuity.

Television, from its inception has been closely regulated and controlled in accordance to changing mores, but the internet has no such controls.

The rest is here:
No TV Sex Please, We’re Married!

A meeting with an Irish speaking colleague today got us thinking about how internet TV can help minority languages. Both Welsh and Irish are making a comeback after centuries of decline, but they are doing so in a world dominated by Anglo-Saxon media.

Languages are disappearing faster than endangered animals. About 7,000 languages exist in the world today, but 80% of the world’s population speak just 83 languages, and only 0.2% speak the rarest 3,500 languages.

A major reason for this linguistic confluence is the domination of English language media (as well as, to a smaller extent, languages such as Arabic and Russian).

The low cost of entry offered by internet TV enables any linguistic community of culture to be able to consider self-broadcasting. I am working on a project that will specifically do this in Wales. The additional problem, however, is that the speakers of many of these languages have never seen a computer, let alone have access to broadband.

But, in places like the US, Australia and Europe, there finally exists an opportunity to turn back this sad tide and preserve the little languages. Many will argue that they are not needed, or deserve to exist. Well, you could say the same about the Giant Panda, or opera. The world would be a less rich place without them.

More:
Minority Report

So, we’ve reached the early bits of the 21st century, only to find TV companies (Sky) selling themselves using door-to-door salesmen.

To me, this says less about the viewer than about the ability of TV to market itself.

If you don’t want sports, most TV is available free in the UK (as long as you don’t live in a Welsh valley as I do – where you have to pay a TV licence despite being incapable of receiving digital or analogue TV or radio), so why do nigh on 9 million households pay Sky ? Well, because they’re willing to put people on the pavement. They sell their service like no one else.

The BBC doesn’t need to sell – it just needs to terrify the population into paying their licence fee through their obnoxious ads; ITV isn’t sure where it stands in all of this and is seeing its audience disappear to more savvy operators. But as the recession bites, why spend that £20 – £50 a month when you can get it for free ?

Sky’s pounding of the pavements is a smart move, but may not be enough in the face of ‘free’ competitors.

View post:
Pounding The Streets

The disparity between the regulations that broadcasters in the UK, such as ITV, and Google trade under are truly ludicrous. You either regulate video content or you don’t. YouTube’s self regulation is laughable, but that’s the nature of unmoderated content. Now it seems that the legislators are waking up to this.

This is a long standing issue – are ISPs responsible for the websites on their service, or are publishers responsible for what their authors write?

Personally, I believe that there’s a simple measure for this. Any party benefiting commercially from the provision of content (not services) should be regulated. YouTube should be brought under Television Without Frontiers regulations.

And this isn’t an issue isolated to the UK; there is an increasingly long list of countries where YouTube has been banned. But there is a dark side to this. I reckon that the only reason more countries haven’t blocked YouTube is that its influence is not yet significant, but this may change and there is a danger of political censorship overtaking moral censorship.

Excerpted from:
Unlevel Playing Field