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O2 Ireland has accepted a 3G 'B' licence in Ireland, which places minimum requirements on the company for 33 percent demographic coverage by the end of June 2006 and 53 percent demographic coverage by the end of June 2008. The licence fee is EUR114.1 million and phased over 15 years, with the first payment of EUR44.4 million required now. Ireland is the most recent country within the O2 Group to have been awarded a 3G licence. The Group already has 3G licences in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands.
The personal video recorder (PVR), a device that can pre-record programming to a hard disk or re-writable DVD, is set to become a key part of the European home entertainment world, but it will take longer than many expect to become mass-market. With most recent studies predicting good growth for these home entertainment units, a report from media analysts Screen Digest suggests consumer adoption will initially remain slow.
According to 'Personal Video Recorders: Market assessment and forecasts 2001-2006,' the European market will not take off until the introduction of integrated PVR technology by consumer electronics manufacturers. From currently a little under 100,000 PVR households, Screen Digest expects a total of 5 million European homes to have at least one PVR system installed by 2006, approximately 3 percent of all households with a television. This is in contrast to the US, which the study suggests will have an installed PVR base of 15 million by the end of the same period, amounting to 14 percent of all American television households.
Xonen Technologies, a developer of optical disc technologies and mastering equipment, said today that it will launch its latest "solution portfolio innovation" called the QUAD Micro. From next month it will be available in the US. The QUAD Glass Mastering product platform was launched in Frankfurt, Germany this May.
Irish IT company Cinehub has announced that it has been awarded a EUR1 million contract by 20th Century Fox. Dublin based Cinehub develops IT solutions for the global entertainment industry. The Virtual Production Office (VPO) is already used by studios, broadcasters, networks and independent production houses around the world. The new contract will mean the company's product is used to manage production on shows ranging from The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle to 24. MGM already uses Cinehub's VPO to manage a number of shows including Stargate.
KPN Mobile has passed the 100,000 mark for i-mode customers in the Netherlands and Germany. So far there are already more than 23,000 subscribers in the Netherlands and 77,000 with E-Plus in Germany. The expectation is that one million customers will be using i-mode sometime in 2003.
iQ Content is launching 'Writing for the Web,' a one-day workshop aimed at improving content creation skills. More information on the Dublin-based course is available from the iQ Content Web site.
Dell is extending its alliance with Red Hat to jointly deliver services designed to deploy Linux in businesses. The new services will help customers migrate from proprietary Unix systems to Linux.
Network Appliance, the storage products maker, reported that first-quarter revenues jumped more than USD6 million over last year, to USD206.8 million. Revenues for last quarter were USD204.9 million.
News Corp., owner of the Fox television network, the Times newspaper and a big stake in the Sky satellite TV operation, suffered the largest annual loss in Australian financial history after writing down its stake in Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. by a further USD1.9 billion in the fourth quarter.
The UK government's efforts at effective e-government have taken another delicate step with the re-launch of the 1901 census Web site, which contains searchable records for over 32 million people. It is set to go back on-line after crashing under the weight of requests when it was first launched in January. The site was expecting 1.2 million hits a day but actually received more than one million hits per hour.
The Yankee Group predicts that 7.44 billion unlicensed audio files will be swapped in 2005. That's up from 5.16 billion files shared among consumers aged 14 and older in 2001. But after 2005, the group believes free music swapping will begin to decline. This will be cold comfort to the recording industry, which claims that Internet piracy of music has cut 5 percent from music sales in both 2001 and 2000.
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