Due to legislation pending approval in Korea, Korea Telecom (KT) has decided to trial, and ultimately launch, an IPTV service in Russia.

The president of KT suggested a trial service will being in August ahead of a full service launch next year. Thirty Russian channels will be broadcast in real-time over the internet in addition to other shows, films and sports being available on demand.

KT was hoping to launch the IPTV service first in its native Korea - to the point where it delayed overseas offers. However, legislation relating to IPTV deployment must be passed in Korea first and it’s currently still pending approval.

As a result, KT decided it must push forward with its overseas interests. The company is still keen to roll-out IPTV in Korea swiftly to help boost the media industry.

[Via IPTV News]

Online TV Listing website MeeVee is aspiring to become the TV Guide for “television in an interconnected world”, according to the company’s CEO.

MeeVee, which originally launched in 2005, claim to be the first online destination to bring together traditional TV listings and online video from hundreds of sources. The website currently attracts 3.4 million unique visitors per month.

The idea behind the site is for people to be able to discover new entertainment content - whether it originates online or on old fashioned TV. People can customize their own guides and the site will suggest new content based on individual preferences.

More vloggers are setting up their own video blogs on independent blogging platforms, causing an overall decrease in the percentage of vlogs on YouTube, according to a quarterly Mefeedia survey.

The number of independent vlogsites are up a total of 7% this quarter. The popular vlogging platform Blip.tv seems to have benefited the most from this shift, registering a 17% rise in just three months and now hosting 56% more vloggers than YouTube.

Over the past few days we’ve published a series of posts that take an in-depth look at the growth of the cell phone and mobile devices as a mass media tool.

We started with print as the world’s first mass media, moved onto sound recording, then the 1910s brought cinema, followed by radio, then TV, before we were hit by the internet in the mid 1990s. Now the time has come for Mobile as the 7th mass media…

Mobile Mass Media - 3 Part Series:

• Part 1: Mobile Mass Media | The Grass Roots Of The Mobile Phone Technological Revolution
• Part 2: Delivering Content On Mobile Devices | The Growth Of Mobile Mass Media
• Part 3: Mobile Mass Media Creative & Advertising Models | Mobile Phones Are The Future

These in depth anaysis were originally published by Alan Moore of SMLXL.

The guys at the Eclectro Music blog have started a new weekly live DJ set on the web using Ustream. This is a neat new use for the live internet video platform. You can tune in to the live DJ set at 21.00 CET every friday.

The live show has a DJ streaming his one hour set via line-in and webcam from his living room. Everyone can then gather on Eclectro to listen and chat.

My gut feeling is that this that these sorts of live music venues won’t really get the attention they deserve - but I hope I am proved wrong.

Wilbert Baan, one of the live internet DJs shares his views on the use of this new technology:

Juniper Networks are the company behind the E-Series Routers, a system allowing IPTV providers a greater level of choice and give more targeted  advertising services.

“Juniper Networks has added the E-120 Router to their E-Series which offers providers the ability to give media agencies and programmers viewing data with a level of detail that even Nielsen can’t provide,” said Gary Southwell, Juniper’s director of multiplay solutions. 

“It’s no longer a sample of subscriber activity, it’s a per channel, per time slot, per ad slot view of actual IPTV usage.”

“The E120 addresses a major concern for service providers, specifically how to cost-effectively scale their IPTV services to reach a larger subscriber base served by smaller, space and power-constrained sites,” said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst, Broadband and IPTV, Infonetics Research.

Last month, NBC Universal filed comments in the FCC’s proceeding on “Broadband Industry Practices.”

NBC asked that the FCC require that ISPs institute “bandwidth management tools”, code for network filters, to try to stop the Internet infringing copyrights.

Public Knowledge recently filed their response, joined by Consumer Federation of America, EDUCAUSE, EFF, Electronic Privacy Information Center, FreeCulture.org, Free Press, Knowledge Ecology International, Media Access Project, New America Foundation, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

NBC’s comments (read them here) are filled with ludicrous claims.