Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Online retailer Amazon and popular US digital video recording service TiVo have announced a partnership which enable TiVo customers to download TV shows and movies directly to their TV using the Amazon Unbox service. The new service is expected to provide serious competition to rival products from both Microsoft and Apple which require users to have a computer for downloads.
TiVo is a consumer video device available in the
US which allows users to capture television programming to internal
hard disk storage for later viewing.
There are currently more than 4 million TiVo users in the US, who pay a
modest monthly rental on multi-year plans to rent the set top boxes.
However, the new Amazon Unbox service will only be available to the
less than 40% who subscribe to the newer TiVo Series 2 or 3 services.
Microsoft enables users to stream downloaded TV shows and movies from
their PCs to their TV sets using the Xbox 360 games console while Apple
is set to release a set top box called Apple TV which will similarly
enable iTunes downloads to Mac computers to be streamed to the TV.
However, the TiVo and Amazon Unbox service poses a serious threat to
the home computer as digital video entertainment unit, requiring no
upfront cost and expertise for the computer averse user.
In addition, unlike Apple's iTunes, the most popular online download
service for music and increasingly popular for TV and movies, the
Amazon Unbox and TiVo service will offer a movie rental plan. Prices
for movie and TV show purchases will mirror that of iTunes starting at
US$9.99 for movies and US$1.99 for TV episodes, while 24-hour movie
rentals are being touted to start at US$1.99.
Amazon has already lined up deals with major TV and movie studios
including Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal, CBS and Fox, and is
holding talks with others. Even Disney, which has a close relationship
with Apple through the Steve Jobs Pixar connection, is reportedly keen
to get on board.
The downside of movie downloads is that it can take hours to download a
full length movie. However, users can begin watching after a few
minutes, while the download is in process. Another problem with the
increasing popularity of bandwidth hungry video downloads, which has
been recently raised by a number of Internet players is the danger of
overloading the Internet with huge quantities of data that it is not
equipped to handle yet.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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