know | Future

The BBC has started a trial with several thousand users that will allow them to download favorite TV and radio shows up to seven days after they air. The files are encoded with DRM code that will expire the content after the seven day window. This is, as far as I know, the most ambitious project of its kind and blazes a trail that many will follow I suspect. Imagine the posibilities, a content producer could distrbute the show using P2P maybe driven by bittorrent or a variant thereof, sell their own advertising and cut the networks out of the loop completely. The fracturing continues…

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PC Magazine (via Engadget) has been nice enough to round up three popular XM2go devices and stack them up against each other. As you know XM2go is TiVo for your XM receiver which allows you to store XM audio content so you can listen even if you are in the cellar counting your bottles of Chateau d’Yquem. Their conclusion? They are big and power hungry as befits a first generation product. Me, I am waiting for christmas when I can get a combined XM/MP3 players to be fueled by the XM Napster alliance (more on this here). These new products may send radio stations to reconsider the heavy investment needed to do HD radio and just start an advertising supported podcast.

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Now that cellphones are outselling computers at the rate of three to one, Yahoo! Mobile senior VP Doug Garland in an article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer lays out the search giant’s strategy to hedge their bets and capture those eyeballs. Predictably the primary focus for now is in Japan, where a majority of people get their Internet on their mobile. Yahoo! will start testing pop up text ads on their mobile search page in Japan as well as auctioning off ad space on their UK mobile travel page.

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