Media News - Tuesday, August 05, 2008

YouTube to show Olympics in Africa, Asia, Middle East

Google Inc.'s YouTube, the most popular video-sharing website, will show daily coverage of the Olympic Games in India, Nigeria and 75 other countries where broadcasters haven't bought exclusive rights to the programming. The International Olympic Committee said today it will produce news segments and sports highlights. YouTube, owned by Mountain View, California-based Google, will block the content in areas where video-on-demand rights have been sold to others. Google, which gets most of its sales from text ads next to online search results, is seeking ways to boost revenue from YouTube. The company is testing ads inserted into videos and still hasn't found the “perfect” business model for the site, Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said this month. The Olympic video segments will begin 6 Aug. and will air throughout the games' 17-day run. (Bloomberg)

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Microsoft sees end of Windows era

Microsoft has kicked off a research project to create software that will take over when it retires Windows. Called Midori, the cut-down operating system is radically different to Microsoft's older programs. It is centred on the Internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC. It is seen as Microsoft's answer to rivals' use of "virtualisation" as a way to solve many of the problems of modern-day computing. Midori is believed to be under development because Windows is unlikely to be able to cope with the pace of change in future technology and the way people use it. Windows can struggle with more modern ways of working in which people are very mobile and very promiscuous in the devices they use to get at their data - be that pictures, spreadsheets or e-mail. Midori is widely seen as an ambitious attempt by Microsoft to catch up on the work on virtualisation being undertaken in the wider computer industry. (BBC)

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Iran: Millions of young people in search of ‘virtual sex’ says official report

A government-linked youth organisation says that 55 percent, or 12 million Iranian young people, access hard or soft porn websites daily in Iran. This is the conclusion of the report by Houshangh Fakhrzarin for the National Youth Organization, a group affiliated with the Iranian presidency. The report came amid a bill currently being examined by the Iranian Parliament which make punishable with death the creation of websites with "sexual" content or content deemed to be "against Islamic morals." The report says that despite the blocking of the websites by the government, "Many users find ways to circumvent the ban by using powerful proxies.” Over 200,000 websites are banned or censored in Iran. According to the report, the websites most visited by Iranian youth contain nude females, followed by 'candid camera' websites and famous actresses in provocative poses. (Adnkronos International)

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Namibia’s fixed line operator goes into mobile services

Namibia's fixed telecommunications firm, Telecom Namibia, said government must grant it a licence to diversify into mobile telecommunications as it battles for a market pie in the increasingly competitive market. Telecom Namibia, wholly owned by the government, said the future was not bright for fixed line operators, adding that national public telecommunications services could be provided over fixed or mobile wire line or wireless network links, using available technology. This would also enable the telecom company to provide international telecommunications, including the operation of international gateways. Telecom Namibia Managing Director Frans Ndoroma told journalists the terrestrial telecoms provider was now muscling into a market dominated for years by privately-owned MTC, the country's largest mobile telephone and mobile services provider. Ndoroma said that despite Telecom Namibia being restricted to fixed telecommunications services, only mobile firms, MTC and latest market entrant, CellOne, were rolling out wireless and fibre-optic networks to snatch fixed line revenues from Telecom. Beating a hard line stance against regulators in the telecoms sector and the government, Ndoroma said a proposed new communications bill should address the issue of Telecom Namibia being allowed to operate a mobile firm. (Africa en Ligne)

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Writer exposed Soviet horrors, secret history

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system. Solzhenitsyn's accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile and international renown. He wrote more than 20 books, drawing on his experience as a political prisoner in his early works, including "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. He was stripped of citizenship in his homeland, moving to Switzerland in 1974 before immigrating to the United States two years later. The periods he spent in various camps and prisons were documented in works such as "The Tenderfoot and the Tramp," "The First Circle" and "Ivan Denisovich.” For almost two decades, he was rarely seen in public, with the exception of his commencement speech at Harvard University in June 1978. On that occasion, he lambasted the moral decrepitude of Western society, which stood at "the abyss of human decadence" and "in its present state of spiritual exhaustion, does not look attractive." (Detroit Free Press)

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Fox International Channels to promote WSJ Americas

Fox International Channels and The Wall Street Journal plan to expand an agreement to work together that will see the newspaper's content promoted on television networks in Latin America. Although Fox International Channels (FIC) does not own news networks in any of its 16 channels in Latin America, it will begin advertising the content from the paper's The Wall Street Journal Americas Spanish and Portuguese language site. FIC and the Journal are owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The agreement represents the latest development how Murdoch aims to use the sprawling global assets of News Corp to expand the Dow Jones franchise, which he purchased for $5.6 billion last year. Little known in the United States until a few months ago, Fox International Channel owns .Fox Networks, an online advertising network that sells unused ad inventory on websites outside of the United States. In May, FIC launched Worthnet.Fox, an ad network focusing on financial news and investment advice, and struck a deal to be a third-party ad sales representative in the region. (Reuters)

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