Remember the Malaysian made IPTV service called Yoonic TV? It has been merge into Hypp.TV.

The service is now only for Streamyx users and it is priced at RM9.90 per month.

There are over 31 live channels currently and more channels will be added soon. There also Video-On-Demands that includes episod from popular animated series Upin and Apin.

Some of the live channels are Bloomberg TV, Channel 99 Debar, Channels News Asia, Al-Jazeera, Zee Music, WOW TV, Barclays Premier League, Luxe TV, WWE, Fashion TV and more.

Minimum requirement for Hypp.TV inlcude:

• .Net Framework 2.0 and above
• Latest Adobe Flash Player
• Windows Media Player 9 or above
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and above

The service is recommended on Streamyx with speed of 1Mbps and above.

More infor visit www.hypp.tv

SyQic will release the full version of Yoonic TV this  30th November 2008.

The new version will be launched with improvements and made available with new the channels and contents.

Some of the channels include News, Entertainment, Music Video, Lifestyle & Fashion, Movies & Drama, Sports Channels… and more.

Read more about Yoonic here.

After a 19-month battle over Internet radio royalties, a truce between record labels and webcasters is finally in sight that would allow Internet radio start-ups to eke out an existence for at least a little while longer.

The two sides have signaled that they are nearing a compromise that would lower the royalties that online radio stations pay artists and labels for the rights to stream songs to listeners. On Sept. 30, they jointly persuaded Congress to pass a bill that would put into effect any changes to the royalty rate to which the parties agree while lawmakers are out of session.

Still, even if royalties decrease as expected, webcasters must figure out how to bring in enough revenue to cover the costs.

Whether run by scrappy start-ups or big media organizations, Internet radio stations have never found a way to make substantial money from streaming music that listeners expect to hear free. Modest advertising was enough to sustain many of the stations when royalties were a pittance, but online audio advertising is in its infancy and is likely to suffer as companies cut spending in the economic slowdown.

“Most of the operators don’t have enough audience to generate the kind of revenues they need to cover their expenses,” said Dave Van Dyke, chairman of Bridge Ratings, which analyzes the radio industry. “Only a handful can actually monetize these types of things.”

The royalty war began in March 2007, when the federal Copyright Royalty Board changed the fees that Internet radio stations must pay to stream music. Previously, bigger webcasters with significant advertising revenue paid 0.0762 cents a listener for each song, and smaller stations with less than $1.25 million in sales paid 10 percent to 12 percent of their revenue. The new policy requires that all stations pay a per-song fee that increases each year until 2010, when it will reach 0.19 cents. Until 2010, small stations can still pay a percentage of revenue.

Webcasters argue that the per-song fee is unfair, especially when compared with competitors. Satellite radio stations pay 6 percent of their revenue in royalties, with the rate rising to 8 percent in 2012. Broadcast stations pay nothing to artists and labels, under a longstanding agreement based on the notion that radio provides free promotion for their work.

“It is completely unaffordable for Internet webcasters,” said Tim Westergren, the founder of an Internet radio start-up, Pandora, who has become the de facto leader of webcasters fighting the royalty rates. He has said that the new rates would eat up $17 million of Pandora’s $24 million in revenue this year, forcing the company out of business, though he is now optimistic that a new royalty agreement will allow webcasters to pay less.

SoundExchange, the nonprofit organization that represents the artists and labels and collects and distributes the royalties that webcasters pay, said it was up to the stations to bring in enough revenue to pay musicians. Right now, webcasters are “basically giving the music away,” said Richard Ades, a SoundExchange spokesman.

Internet radio stations face a Catch-22 as long as they must pay royalties on each song they stream instead of paying a percentage of revenue, said Dave Goldberg, an entrepreneur at Benchmark Capital and former vice president and general manager of Yahoo Music. To earn significant advertising revenue, they must offer up large audiences to advertisers. However, the bigger their audience, the more fees they must pay.

When Mr. Goldberg was at Yahoo, for example, 5 percent of users generated 40 percent of costs, he said. “Unfortunately, we were incentivized to not have them listen so much, because we couldn’t sell enough ads against those few people.”

Advertising is also hard to come by for small stations without large listener bases. SomaFM, a San Francisco-based Internet radio station with 450,000 listeners, found it could make more money by soliciting listener contributions, like public radio, than it could from advertising.

Even so, a plea on the site says the station will fall $35,000 short of its budget this year. Last year, the station made a $20,000 profit on $250,000 in revenue and put all of it into improvements for the station, said Rusty Hodge, the site’s founder.

The business is costly even for big companies. In June, AOL teamed up with CBS to combine Internet radio offerings, in part because AOL found it challenging to monetize its 250-channel radio service, said Lisa Namerow, vice president of AOL Radio. CBS now sells ads for AOL’s stations.

Mr. Westergren said Pandora could stay afloat on ad revenue if royalty rates were not so high. But on Oct. 16 he laid off 14 percent of his staff, citing “the current economic turmoil.”

In general, luring advertisers has been challenging for Internet radio sites. Display ads, the only type Pandora runs, do not work well with radio, Mr. Van Dyke said. “Most people, frankly, who are listening to Internet radio minimize the browser so they’re not seeing the ads,” he said. Furthermore, many people tune in on mobile devices like the Apple iPhone, making it even less likely they will see an ad.

Stations that insert audio ads into the listening stream risk alienating users. When SomaFM tried running them, it received many complaints and listenership dropped off sharply. “Since there are services out there that are ad-free, there is a reluctance to be the first one of the major ones to put an in-stream ad in,” said Doug Perlson, chief executive of TargetSpot, the largest Internet radio ad network.

TargetSpot offers advertisers the ability to fine-tune pitches based on sex, age, location and favorite music genres — a level of specificity unavailable from broadcast radio. Over the long haul, Mr. Perlson said, he expects such specialization to take off.

Charging users to listen has not proved to be profitable. Pandora and AOL tried it for a short time, but could not get people to sign up.

Online stations do make a bit of money when listeners click through to Amazon.com or Apple’s iTunes to buy a song they have heard, though such referral fees account for less than 5 percent of revenue at most stations.

If Web radio fades away, the biggest victims could be the independent musicians who are not played on most broadcast stations.

Josh Fix, a San Francisco musician who lived in his office for a while to save money, credits Pandora for raising his profile. He recently signed on with an independent label and will embark on a European tour in February to promote his album, “Free at Last.”

“It’s almost impossible to get on the radio,” he said. Online, though, “someone hears the music on Pandora, blogs about it and then others pick up on it.”

Mr. Goldberg of Benchmark Capital said the labels would be hurt if Internet radio disappears and the 54 million listeners go elsewhere. “People are still going to listen to free music,” he said. “They’ll just go places where the labels don’t get paid.”-NYTimes

Samsung Electronics Co. is equipping Blu-ray DVD players so they can retrieve movies and TV shows from Netflix Inc.’s Internet streaming service, accelerating Netflix’s push to develop more delivery methods beyond the mail.

The deal, to be announced Thursday, could set the stage for Netflix to embed software connecting to its streaming service directly into television sets made by Samsung.

In a statement, Netflix and Samsung said they are planning to plant the streaming capability in a variety of home entertainment products. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive officer, declined to elaborate on the other possibilities in an interview.

This won’t be the first time that Netflix has piped its online content through Blu-ray DVD players — devices built to show movies in high-definition quality that outshines traditional DVD players.

LG Electronics began selling a $350 Blu-ray player with Netflix streaming earlier this month.

Netflix currently has nearly 8.7 million subscribers, most of whom still go online to request DVD rentals that are mailed to them a day or two later. But the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company has been trying to provide more instant gratification with a 21-month-old service that beams movies and TV shows over high-speed Internet connections in less than a minute.

After a slow start, the “Watch Instantly” service has been become more popular as Netflix expanded the selection to include more recent titles and forged various partnerships that have made it easier to watch on a big-screen TV instead of being tethered to a personal computer.

A Silicon Valley startup, Roku Inc., has been selling a $100 device that streams Netflix’s service to TVs for the past five months and Microsoft Corp.’s popular video game console, the Xbox 360, will become compatible within a few weeks.

Samsung’s connection to the Netflix service will work through two Blu-ray models, the BD-P2500 and BD-P2550, that have already been on the market. Consumers who already own those Samsung models will need a free software upgrade to make the players compatible with Netflix’s streaming service. Future models, carrying a suggested price of $400, will have the Netflix feature built in.

Fetching the movies and TV shows from a streaming library of more than 12,000 titles requires a minimum subscription of $8.99 per month that also includes DVD rentals delivered through the mail.

Netflix is aiming to make access to its streaming service a standard feature in all Blu-ray players, much like Dolby sound has become a staple in consumer electronics products, Hastings said.

Although they are still in relatively few households, Blu-ray players are expected to become more prevalent as prices fall and more consumers upgrade their TV sets to take full advantage of the February transition from analog to digital transmission.

With the sagging economy causing consumers re-examine their spending habits, Netflix can use every edge it can get. Subscriber growth has been running behind last year’s pace in the past two months, a trend Hastings expects to last through at least the rest of the year.

Netflix is hoping to soften the blow charging an additional $1 per more month to about 500,000 subscribers who rent Blu-ray DVDs. The surcharge is effective Nov. 5.-AP

Do you see what I see?

Look like Low Yat is about to offer LowYat TV.

I believe this will be a video sharing site where users can post up videos.

A DNS check shows that it is hosted on the same server as Lowyat.net:

ns3.solurix.net
ns1.solurix.net [202.190.197.144]

Let’s see what it has to offer!!!

Time dotCom, a web based service portal and ISP operator has quietly launch its new Broadband TV service called BBTV.

The service is currently available for free to users with a TIMENet account, however Time will introduce a subscription based model after 15 September 2008.

BBTV is develop by Yoonic.TV. It is similar to the Yoonic PC software but branded as BBTV with over 20 free channels.

I believe BBTV is using the same hosting as Yoonic and it seems that streaming has been worst since Yoonic was introduced to the public. Yoonic should seriously consider to upgrade their hosting bandwidth.

To use BBTV, register yourself a free TIMENet account here.

Similar to Yoonic, your computer must be installed with at least .Net Framework 2.0 and Windows Media Player 11.

A guide on BBTV can be found here.

Download BBTV

Now you can watch over 25 local and international channels free on you PC.

Introducing Yoonic, a broadband based TV service. Users can now watch a wide range of channels for free including FashionTV, RTM1 and RTM2, also programmes like Korean serials such as One Fine Day, Sweet Spy and Sad Love Story, and local shows such as Islam Nusantara and Kota Warisan.

Other contents like CNN, Bloomberg and CNBC are currently being negotiated to make it available on Yoonic.

Currently, there are over 1,000 subscribers and growing. Yoonic is free for now.

To start using it, register for the service here- http://www.yoonic.tv/register.html

PC Requirements:

• .Net Framework 2.0 or above

• Windows Media Player 9 or above

• Latest Adobe Flash Player

• Internet Explorer 6.0 and above

I believe that the channels are being broadcasted from Yoonic’s server in Glenmarie, Shah Alam. I have tested the streaming with Streamyx 384Kbps and some channels works fine while most of it don’t. Yoonic’s recommended streaming speed is at 1Mbps and I do not recommend streaming Yoonic using wireless 3G since this application requires smooth streaming.

In future, Yoonic plans to charge a small access fee to users who wish the use service however there will not be any charges to view the contents. In other words, you pay a small fee and get to access all the channels.

Yoonic is a product of SyQic Capital Sdn Bhd. Based in Malaysia, one of its owner include Jamal Hassim who is the founder, managing director of Channel 9.

New data released Wednesday show online views of videos soared 66 percent in the U.S. in February from a year earlier, with TV networks grabbing just a pittance of those eyeballs.

The numbers from comScore Inc. underscore a problem being discussed by network executives this week at the National Association of Broadcasters annual meeting in Las Vegas, as they search for ways to drive viewers to their Web sites and TV channels.

Some networks said their online strategies involve trying to stay ahead of video pirates who upload broadcast content online just minutes after it hits the airwaves.

The culprits often post the footage on Google Inc.’s YouTube, the dominant video service in the new survey.

YouTube racked up one-third of the estimated 10 billion views of online video in February, up from 15 percent last year, according to comScore.

“We still see our content pop up on YouTube,” CNN.com Executive Producer Sandy Malcolm said during the broadcasters meeting. CNN is a unit of Time Warner Inc.

“You deal with it,” she said. “You try to work with them on rights and things, but I don’t think you can completely stop it. You just try to beat the tide and try to get your content out as fast as you can.”

Excluding AOL.com, Time Warner sites including CNN.com grabbed just a 1.3 percent share of video views on the Internet in February, or roughly 133 million views, comScore reported.

Other TV-based entities remained back in the pack, with Walt Disney Co.’s ABC.com attracting 98 million views, or a 1 percent share.

Even as the YouTube juggernaut continued to attract more viewers, comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman said TV networks were fighting back.

He cited last month’s launch of Hulu.com, a video Web site that’s a joint venture of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal and News Corp.

“It seems there’s a certain amount of attention and investment going online right now,” Lipsman said.

The move was necessary to adapt to “irreversible shifts” in the content delivery business, said Sheau Ng, NBC Universal’s vice president of broadcast and consumer technology.

“The point is to make legitimate content easily available,” Ng said. “At the same time, you need to tell the local police watch out for this counterfeit stuff.”

Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar said the joint venture was taking “an offensive approach” against rogue video traders such as users of the BitTorrent file-sharing system.

Hulu embeds video ads in its streams, which can be clipped, e-mailed and posted to other Web sites, all while the company continues to track viewership and maintain ad revenue.

“I don’t think piracy will ever be shut down,” Kilar said. “The best way to compete in that environment is to create something and embrace something like a Hulu.”

YouTube said it has made efforts to clamp down on pirated content and since October has offered content owners the chance to slap ads on even unlicensed video copies and share revenue.

“We’re happy to partner with any and all content creators to do with their content as they wish: monetize it, track it or pull it off the site,” YouTube spokesman Ricardo Reyes said. “We don’t want infringing content on YouTube.”

BBC, the government-mandated British broadcaster, said the rapid move to online viewing among young people was a potential threat to its fee-collecting structure.

In December, it launched its iPlayer, an online service that replays TV shows for a week. It has since had 42 million streams or downloads.

“Are our younger audiences drifting away from the TV as the centerpiece of their experience? Absolutely,” said BBC’s platforms executive, Troy, who uses only one name. “This is our next generation of license fee payers. If we don’t respond to the need to make ourselves relevant and accessible in new and convenient ways, we risk losing our relevance with the very people that fund us.”

Clyde Smith, senior vice president of global broadcast technology and standards at Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting System, said online details and clips of shows can create incredible brand loyalty, even if some “sampling” occurs.

As an example, some fans have downloaded audio copies of popular TBS shows, re-enacted scenes with puppets and posted the shows back online — which he called “viral marketing.”

In other instances, fans have copied versions of programs like “Frisky Dingo” from its Adult Swim channel and reposted them elsewhere on the Internet, without regard to the royalty rights of the show creators or the associated advertising dollars involved.

“Quite frankly, we can’t afford to produce it and run it just one time and then have it distributed everywhere,” Smith said. “What are the risks the industry’s willing to take in the new media spaces? I think that’s what the industry is deciding right now.”-AP

Tired of reading the articles on this blog? :evil: Why not listen to it??? :twisted:

Thanks to vozMe, you can know listen or download an article as an MP3 file with a simple click within Malaysia Technology Blog!!

You can also visit vozMe.com and type in the text to create your MP3 file. There is an option to add vozMe to your browser where it will read the words highlighted within your browser.

Start clicking the vozMe icon below each post to start listening. :lol:

Google has launched new digital “watermarking” technology on YouTube in an attempt to stop copyrighted movies and TV programmes from appearing on the popular online video service.Called YouTube Video Identification, the new technology has been in development for months with content partners including Time Warner and Disney.

Over six hours of video are uploaded onto YouTube every minute and since it was bought by Google last year for $1.65bn (£810m), the site has increasingly been targeted by media companies who accuse it of aiding people in breaching copyright.

Last March, Viacom, owner of Hollywood studios Paramount and DreamWorks, launched a $1bn lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement.

The new technology, launched in “beta test” form yesterday, allows media companies to send their content to Google so it can be digitally “fingerprinted” or “watermarked”, allowing them to control what happens if anyone tries to put all or part of it on YouTube.

Media companies can prevent clips from or an entire watermarked programme or movie from ever being uploaded to YouTube; or they can allow this content to be put on the site and track how many times it is watched; or allow their content to be uploaded by anyone and make money from it by using Google’s advertising platform to place adverts alongside it.

Google maintains that the technology goes well beyond its legal requirement for dealing with copyrighted material on YouTube.

Find your copyrighted clip

But the new technology will not deal with the estimated millions of clips of copyrighted material already on the website. Media companies will have to follow the traditional route of finding their copyrighted material and demanding YouTube remove it.

Google already watermarks copyrighted clips that media companies want removed so they cannot be uploaded by someone else. But that only works if someone attempts to upload the same clip. The new technology, however, watermarks an entire movie or TV programme so none of its can be put on the site without its legal owner’s knowledge.

Anyone trying to put this type of content on the site will see a warning message telling them the content’s owner has barred it from YouTube and telling them they can appeal the ruling if they feel the content is not subject to copyright.

“Only the rights owner can know whether their content is available online with their permission or not – no technology can replace this,” admitted a spokesman for YouTube. “But what technology can do is make it easier for rights owners to express their decisions about how their content is used online.”

“This is what we have built – a simpler way for rights owners to express their content policies. This means that rights owners who want to use and help us refine our video ID system will be providing the necessary information to help us identify their work, and what they want done when that recognition happens. We aim to make that process as convenient as possible.”-Guardian Unlimited