For my hour long commute in to work every day, I couldn’t imagine being without a media player to watch videos on, and listen to songs and podcasts on, to keep me entertained on the journey.

Unfortunately, at the end of October my beloved Creative Zen Vision:M suddenly died on me in the middle of my commute. 

It was no great surprise that the media player finally gave up the ghost, as it has been with me every workday for 2 or more hours a day since I got it for Christmas 2006. 

It was a fine media player and I would have gotten another one except Creative wasn’t making them any more. Besides, the new Microsoft Zune was out with better features at a much cheaper price. 

So naturally I decided to “join the social.”

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The BBC iPlayer relaunched at the end of last year, with the British Broadcasting Corporation trying to iron out some of the bugs, and make the service available for all.

After 20 days out of beta, the BBC announced that the iPlayer has racked up 1 million viewers, and more than 3.5 million programmes have been viewed using the television on demand service.

That’s an average of over 250,000 programmes either streamed or downloaded every day since the Christmas Day launch. Quite impressive for a UK based operation showing just BBC programmes.

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After last month’s announcement that DixX support was coming to the Sony PS3 games console, there was speculation that the same would be happening on the Microsoft Xbox 360 soon.

It now seems that in the latest dashboard update, there was the inclusion of limited DivX support, although it’s not 100% functional, and Microsoft tried to call the files anything but DivX.

The Xbox Team’s official blog announced:

“[The Xbox 360] now supports files encoded using MPEG-4 Part 2, Simple and Advanced Simple Profile, [which are] often referred to as Xvid or DivX video files”

This is sure to be great news for the millions of Xbox 360 owners, as it increases the library of media content they can now have access to through their trusty consoles.

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Hey everybody, Microsoft is making an attempt at entering the online media realm!

And they’re taking on the big boys like Flickr and YouTube with an all encompassing digital media hub.

Yes, it’s true. Haven’t you heard? Shocking it is that the world has so far failed to take notice of this revelation. 

Much notice, anyway. As reported in CNET’s Webware publication – and not many news outlets elsewhere – Redmond has let known its intentions (via a job posting, no less) to make itself a much more viable competitor in the realm of online media.

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A host of media companies have launched a new push to force user generated content sites such as YouTube to tighten up their copyright controls.

Disney, CBS, NBC, and Fox, along with Microsoft, Veoh, and Dailymotion, have jointly issued a document they call “User Generated Content Principles.” 

In a nutshell, the guidelines call for sites hosting UGC to automatically block content that matches copyrighted material submitted by copyright owners to a back-end database.

Nothing New

These aren’t new proposals—the studios have been pressing for automated filtering on YouTube and the like for quote some time now. But the presentation of these proposals as a set of “principles” is new, and somewhat misleading.

Typically, we see voluntary guidelines issued by industry groups as a self-regulatory measure, to ensure best practices are followed in the absence of regulation. But here, it’s not self-regulation—the biggest names in the UGC business aren’t there. 

Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Yahoo are all noticeably absent from the video sharing services, as are a number of other channels for UGC, like blogs and other forums that allow the posting of media. Those who are present are those who would seek to regulate the business of others.

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Viacom, Disney, Microsoft, and MySpace all have a couple of things in common?

Apart from being huge media companies with a lot of financial clout, they also want to set some “guidelines” in order to maintain copyrights online.

The four (seems a strangely small group considering the proportions of the effort, no?) have joined hands to work to establish a commonly acceptable system which will purportedly “stop pirated material” from proliferating and generally protect copyright rules from widespread subversion.

And all four will fail at the job. Well, okay, maybe they will, maybe they won’t. To tell you the truth, I’ve no clue how things will shake out. 

But I kind of find it troubling that corporations are working in unison on technologies to address the issue of peer-to-peer piracy and whatnot, rather than, you know, the institution whose role it is to protect copyright law: government. 

So troubling, in fact, that one can’t help but get a little suspicious about the true intentions of this wee project they’ve all bandied together on.

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Microsoft have announced the forthcoming release of Internet TV, a feature which will allow people to enjoy a range of television and video content on their PCs and TV sets without a TV tuner in their PC.

On September 28th 2007, US users of Windows Vista Home Premium edition and Windows Vista Ultimate edition will find the new beta release inside Media Center.

The free service will be supported by advertising from YuMe Networks, which, interestingly enough, is a competitor of Podaddies which has recently been working with Apple.

At launch, expect over 100 hours of streaming content including full episodes of various television shows, full-length music concerts by popular artists, movie trailers, MSNBC news segments and sports clips from FOX Sports.

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