Ireland in Beta

Last month HMV announced, along with it’s financial results, that it would be moving into the pre-owned games market. HMV recently said “Lots of our rivals have tried to do pre-owned in the past and failed. If we were to do it, we’d do it properly – if not, we’ll leave it on the table.”

Hopefully we see this across in Ireland soon as we can never have too much competition for our over priced high street stores. It is surprise that they have waited so long considering the profit that can be made through this avenue, with other retailers such as Game, Electronics Boutique and GameStop having offered the service for a few years now.

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Chorus NTL have upgraded their broadband packages for the second time in recent months, the new speeds now top out at 20Mbps and are available as a free upgrade for some customers. The packages a few months ago stood at 1 Mbps, 3 Mbps and 6 Mbps for €20, €30 and €40 respectively, when Chorus NTL announced that it would be upgrading to 3 Mbps, 6 Mbps and 12 Mbps packages for the same price by July 1st.

Just as July approached Chorus NTL announced they would be upgrading their packages again effective from July 1st to the following packages:

Chorus NTL Broadband Packages

These upgrades are available to current Chorus NTL subscribers also, just fill out this form. The most surprising change is the lack of a data usage cap on the top two packages, very forward thinking from Chorus NTL but this is subject to fair usage under their Acceptable Usage Policy.

I am still languishing on the 3 Mbps connection and waiting for my upgrade to 10 Mbps, I hope to get it sorted in the next few days and depending on how good the service is I may even upgrade to the 20 Mbps, drool….

Hulu is an ad supported streaming site where users can watch a full range of content from NBC, Fox, Comedy Central, the USA Network, Bravo, Sci Fi, Fuel TV, FX, Style, Sundance, G4, and Oxygen channels. The shows are streamed in Flash video, similar to YouTube, but much higher quality with some videos available in 480p. The service includes television shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, The Daily Show and Arrested Development, it also has sports and a wide range of movies like Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and Bring It On. The shows contain probably about as many ad breaks than is on television in Ireland probably about 5 minutes to each 25 of the show which I don’t see a problem with.

There is one drawback to this service, for international users anyway, it only allows access to US based IP addresses. But there is a way round this that I have been using for a few weeks and it works brilliantly!

AnchorFree’s HotSpot Shield is a free service that anyone can use to create a VPN, all that users internet traffic is routed through this VPN which is based in the US and therefore any site which checks the incoming IP address thinks it is an American based IP address. HotSpot Shield is easy to set up with no technical knowledge and is available for Windows 2000, XP and Vista and Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. Just head on over to AnchorFree’s website, download HotSpot Shield and start it running, you will see the new IP address you have been assigned and you can now go and access all those American geolocked sites.

The service itself is great for using Hulu but I wouldnt recommmend day to day surfing with it, as all your traffic is being rerouted through AnchorFree they can pretty much see everything that you are doing if they so wanted to, also since the product is free it is ad-supported it self, this manifests in the form of a bar in your browser displaying ads. These ads can be closed but everytime you change page it will reappear, another reason to not use this service for general browsing. AnchorFree allows 3GB of free bandwidth within a rolling 30 day window, anything above this you will have to pay for but that allows for about 5/6 free movies a month and probably about 30-40 episodes a month - not bad for free!

Also if you haven’t yet checked out RTE’s online service it’s pretty impressive. I have been using it to watch a few of the Euro 2008 games live and to check up on all the new Apres Match episodes, they also have anything they have produced themselves up there and pretty much all of their radio show. I have to say it is a great service and hats off to RTE for it as they are usually years behind with these advances!

At the Worldwide Developers Conference in California on Monday Apple announced it’s new iPhone, which now comes with an array of new features including 3G support and GPS. On Tuesday, O2 Ireland announced it will be launching the iPhone here on the 11th of July(Apple’s international laucnh date for the initial 22 countries). According to O2’s pres release the iPhone will start at €49 on the €100 monthly iPhone tariff for the 8GB version or €99 on the €65 tariff and €169 on the €45 tariff, the 16GB version is available for as little as €129 on the €100 monthly tariff option, then going up to €169 on the €65 tariff and €229 on the €45 tariff.

With Apple also announcing that $199 and $299 are the maximum allowed retail prices in the U.S. for the 8GB and 16GB respectively, rumors of a future Pay As You Go version have for €299 have been rife.

The 3G iPhone will avail of O2’s HSDPA network which is currently used for their Mobile Broadband service, it will offer speeds twice as fast as the old EDGE based phoneand nearing WiFi speeds. The major downside to all this is the 1GB data cap placed on all the O2 tariffs, oh and the lack of visual voicemail. Both visual voicemail and unlimited data plans are currently available in most countries offering the iPhone includingthe United Kingdom.

Until the introduction of unlimited data plans, users will have to make do with the new partnership O2 has begun with Bitbuzz. For at least the next two years all O2 iPhone users will have unlimited free access to all 155 of Bitbuzz’s WiFi hotspots in the North and South of the country.

The iPhone goes on sale July 11th with O2 and The Carphone Warehouse taking pre-orders from the 1st of July.

“When Rock Band was released in the US, it cost $169, and came with the game, guitar, microphone and drums. Not a bad deal. But in Europe, on May 23? Good heavens. The game won’t come in a single bundle. Instead, there’s two products available at lauch. One is called the “Instrument Edition”, which costs £130/€170. It comes with a guitar, drums, and mic. That’s it. No game. No, if you want the game as well, it’ll cost you another £50/€70. That brings the cost of the game and three instruments to £180/€240. Or, USD$378. Three hundred and seventy-eight dollars. I know, things are always more expensive in Europe, but…damn. Whether it’s MTV or EA behind this price, you can take that price, and you can stick it up your arse.”

Taken from http://kotaku.com/377168/europe-totally-fucked-over-on-rock-band-pricing

Matt Stone and Trey Parker have always advocated fans downloading their episodes online and this week they have put their money where their mouth is and made every South Park episode free online. The streaming episodes are available from the South Park website, www.southparkstudios.com, and every episode form the last eleven seasons is now available including the second episode of the twelfth season, Britney’s New Look, although for some reason the first episode of the new season isn’t available yet.

The best part about this is it is available to Irish users unlike services like ABC’s Hulu and BBC’s iPlayer which are both geo-locked, meaning only IP addresses from the United States and the United Kingdom respectively work with the services due to agreement with networks around the world and copyright laws. Unfortunately Canadian viewers aren’t so lucky, and the service seems to be blocked for them.

The episodes are very good quality and the speed is good enough that you can start watching an episode within a minute or two. There is only one downside to the service and that is, as usual, advertisements. During each episode there are three ads that play when a normal break would have been taken during the episodes original airing. These ads don’t last very long but cannot be skipped although users not wishing to view them can easily switch browser window.

Although I am more than happy to watch the ads if it means I don’t have to wait for the episodes to come out here and don’t have to wait for them to appear on torrent sites and Rapidshare. Hopefully other content providers and producers take note and follow suit!

You can find all the episodes at www.southparkstudios.com/episodes , enjoy!

Hey all (or no one)!

I’m not quite sure if there are many people reading this blog at the moment, but it is quite Apple heavy at the moment - when I really get my teeth into this blog it will be more focused on all technology stories that may interest Irish readers. Feel free to give me feedback or leave comments on the stories!!

Ross

According to rumors this week Apple is currently negotiating with the major labels to offer a subscription service through iTunes. An unnamed top Apple executive also released details of a one-off premium scheme Apple may run with the iPod which will give customers unlimited access to the iTunes catalog.

I can see the scheme working as follows; you buy your new iPod for $439, which used to be $399 without the premium,  and with that you get unlimited access to the iTunes catalog for that iPod alone. That means any songs you download to that iPod and can only be played on the iPod, therefore a separate license will be required to allow the tracks to play on your main iTunes library and other devices like Apple TV etc. So for an extra $20 a month you get full access to the catalog, so that means Apple will get $300 from every customer that signs up in the first year, and then $240 a year every year after.

If there are 30 million iPods sold in the next year alone and, I estimate 75% take the monthly contract up will mean that the licensing scheme will generate $7.05bn annually, now if you consider that music sales last year in the US amounted to under $12bn, now for Apple alone to be generating around a third of the music industry’s world wide sales would make the current climate in the industry much more palatable for the labels. Even at $10 a month it is still around $4bn a year and that’s just from new iPod sales, not counting the 50m customers who are already using iTunes.
Then once iTunes opens up to other digital media players (either once they are forced to by anti-competition laws or when they have enough of a market share on iPod thats they just don’t care anymore), Apple may get another 10 million users who pay $20 a month for a similar service - another $50m for Apple and $150m for the record companies annually!

The only reason i don’t see this happening is due to a point brought up on MBW, the record companies are scared of giving Apple that much power, at the moment the labels are giving better deals with other online distributers so as to promote competition in the market and so apple don’t become a more dominant force in negotiating with the labels.

So there has been a lot of press in the last few weeks regarding the price plan O2 has made available for the iPhone. I put together a list of the plans and prices for the iPhone from five of the countries it has been launched in Ireland, United Kingdom, Germany, France and the U.S. Hopefully I will get around to updating it with Austria’s plans.[updated]

From a quick look at the plans Ireland is getting it as bad as some have made out, while we are the only country without unlimited data countries like Orange and T-Mobile aren’t really unlimited and O2 Ireland actually looks better on the bottom and middle tier pricing.

I think we will see some movement on those plans in the next 6 months, probably when the iPhone 3G come out here, but the only real change I would be looking for is truly unlimited data. Also it’s still worth a trip to New York to pick up a few iPhones if you’re willing to unlock it. There is €180 in difference between buying the iPhone here and in the U.S. but remember that price doesn’t include sales tax.

iPhone Prices

Irish Plans

Contract length: 18 months

UK Plans

Contract length: 18 months

German Plans

Contract length: 24 months

French Plans

Contract length: 24 months

US Plans

Contract length: 24 months

UPDATE

Austria Plans

Contract length: 24 months

*Weekend minutes not included, 120, 180, 300, 480 respectively
**Orange says it may take measures against users who exceed 500MB of downloaded data
***Limited to 200MB, 1GB or 5GB of data respectively after which speeds are limited to 64kbps
****Weekend minutes not included, 5000 for lowest plan, unlimited for the rest
*****All prices from the U.S. do not include tax.

It was recently suggested on TWIT that Bono’s investment company Elevation Partners, which has $1.9m to invest over the next 6 years. Jason Calacanis, of Mahalo.com,suggested that the recent change in licensing on Wikipedia means the board of Wikipedia could potentially go from a non-profit organisation into a for-profit company. Estimates of the company’s worth have run as high as $5 billion dollars if this were to go through. The speculation was sparked when Elevation Partnersthrew a party to celebrate Wikipedia’s new compatibly with Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons.

Recently Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, asked the Wiki community to suggest copyrights to purchase if there was a fund of $100m to free up copyrights. According to Jimmy, he had spoken to someone recently who may be able to fund the purchase of these copyrights. Bono maybe? Jason went on to say that if Wikipedia even just ran ads on the site they could easily clock up about $100m a year, but Jimmy Wales has refused to consider it.

Well we could find out soon enough?