“Now, even if phone lines and the Internet are inaccessible — for example, in a war zone or after a natural disaster — people will be able to share news and stay informed via Twitter,” the company says on its blog.

“We work with as many carriers as we can to support SMS around the world,” Twitter says. “If your carrier does not currently support Twitter SMS, you can still Tweet. Just use one of our long codes.”

Those can be found here.

As the company points out, Twitter did begin as an SMS service. Over the years, Twitter has become even more SMS-friendly, as evidenced by today’s update.

For example, in 2010, Twitter started letting users in the U.S. follow Twitter accounts via SMS without actually signing up for Twitter.

By now, you’ve probably heard mention of the UARS and its destructive return to Earth, as the satellite breaks apart as it reenters the Earth’s atmosphere. Jokes about metal showers and raining bits of satellite are all over the media’s trend cycle, but is this much ado about nothing? While a sense of impending “oh no, the UARS is gonna fall on me” may be over doing it, it’s good to be aware of potential dangers, especially when they come from above.

A good indicator of UARS’ popularity comes from Google Trends, which shows searches have indeed increased as UARS became more and more topical:

As they are wont to do, NASA has been front and center with their coverage of the UARS’ return to Earth. So much so, in fact, they’ve set up an update page with it own RSS feed, their Twitter feed is active with UARS updates, there’s a page containing history of the vehicle, an FAQ discussing debris reentry, and other pertinent information, like so:

As of 10:30 a.m. EDT on Sept. 23, 2011, the orbit of UARS was 100 miles by 105 miles (160 km by 170 km). Re-entry is expected late Friday, Sept. 23, or early Saturday, Sept. 24, Eastern Daylight Time. Solar activity is no longer the major factor in the satellite’s rate of descent. The satellite’s orientation or configuration apparently has changed, and that is now slowing its descent. There is a low probability any debris that survives re-entry will land in the United States, but the possibility cannot be discounted because of this changing rate of descent. It is still too early to predict the time and location of re-entry with any certainty, but predictions will become more refined in the next 12 to 18 hours.

Besides NASA’s normal quality coverage, there are other entities that are non-NASA related that are also providing coverage, like the UARS Reentry Twitter account, which offers entries like the following:

Speaking of Twitter, the #UARS hashtag produces a number of replies, some of them entertaining and some of them informative:

And:

There’s also a number of videos concerning UARS, and the following does a great job of detailing what happens when the satellite reenters our airspace:

Lead image courtesy of NASA.

Put simply, the battle for your living room and the dollars associated with your living room is heating up and I believe that 24 months from now there will be clear winners and losers. The next 24 months will likely represent the biggest changes we’ve seen yet for mainstream America’s media consumption.

First lets talk about the losers.

1. Cable and satellite providers. The economy is bad. There has never been a better time to cancel your cable and satellite service. As more and more digital media content is being made available through other sources, there becomes less and less of a reason to put up with overpriced cable and satellite TV. The service is bad, the service is expensive, and it’s a high reoccurring fee that is just the type of thing that consumers will look to cut out of their lives as they baton down the hatches. What’s more, Comcast is probably especially susceptible to losing internet customers in this downturn as well as they’ve received a lot of negative PR over their bandwidth caps which could increasingly hit consumers as more and more streaming video (and especially streaming HD video) comes into play.

The lone hold out will likely be the sports fanatic who simply cannot get by on network TV sports alone.

AT&T may fare better than traditional cable and satellite providers because they are aggressively rolling out their high speed fiber Uverse service and *requiring* consumers to buy their TV service in order to get the much faster than cable/dsl internet speeds. It’s kind of chump that they do this if you ask me, but hey, only the strong survive right?

2. Apple. Apple computer’s AppleTV has been a huge flop. Just like Thomas Hawk told you it would be over two years ago when I first dubbed AppleTV the iDongle. I followed that post up with another 10 reasons why the iDongle would fail about a year and a half ago. Apple’s mistake was that they sacrificed user functionality over a desire to tightly control your content and charge you up the ying yang for it. By not including a DVD player (something cheap and easy that they could have done) with AppleTV they force you to buy the content from them rather than more cheaply through a Netflix DVD subscription plan. By not including a DVR they force you to either pay them to watch your network TV commercial free or watch it without them and see the commercials. Apple really missed the boat with this one and could have been well positioned had they done like they did on the iPod and focused on the hardware and giving users functionality while not worrying as much about the content. In the end they would have made more money on both hardware and content, but as it is now the box is too restrictive and will be limited to a niche Apple fanboy audience who love anything Apple makes no matter how crappy it may be.

3. Roku. A lot of fanfare was made when the Roku box first came out with people saying it was the best thing ever, blah, blah, blah, blah. While having a few month lead time on comparable streaming Netflix boxes, as Netflix broadens their streaming service to other platforms it just won’t make sense to buy a Roku box when you can already get streaming Netflix on more popular and currently owned devices. More on the Roku here.

4. Movie Theaters. A lot of people say that the movie theater business will be resilient in this upcoming downturn in the economy. After all, movies thrived during the Great Depression right? True point. But back in the Great Depression there was no HDTV, no Netflix, no DVDs, no giant plasma TV screens or home theater sound systems. The movie theater has been a rip off with greater home entertainment competition for the last 3 years, but the economy has been good and people still went to the theater anyways (albeit in declining numbers). Not anymore. Watch the movie theaters go the way of the dinosaur as the consumer tightens back and chooses more economical entertainment at home vs. going out. If you’ve always wanted a photograph of your favorite theater’s neon sign, now’s the time to get it before they go out of business.

5. Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray players and discs are too expensive and a rip off. Sony won the battle by becoming the de facto high def DVD standard after wiping HD DVD off the map, but they lost the war. With streaming high def content and free OTA HDTV there is no need to pay all that money for Blu-Ray.

Now on to the Winners.

1. Netflix. Clearly Netflix has made the right move in investing so heavily in streaming technology. Netflix’s DVD rental and watch now service are both winners. In the past week we’ve seen announcements that Netflix will begin streaming it’s service on both Microsoft XBox 360s and TiVo units. If you have either of these units there is a strong case to be made that with a three disc Netflix plan for $19.99 a month you can have better content to watch at any given time than you can with your cable or satellite provider. If I were Netflix I’d start pumping this message big time. Why pay Comcast or DirecTV $80 a month when you can get better content from Netflix for $20. This is a clear value proposition for the consumer. Even in a bad economy people need something to distract them from their daily woes. And while people might not shell out $80 to take a family of 5 to the movie theater (parking, popcorn, soda, wayyy overpriced tickets, etc.) or pay $80 a month to Comcast or DirecTV for TV, they will pay $20 a month to get a very strong substitute from Netflix.

2. Microsoft XBox 360. The new Microsoft XBox 360 is out just in time for Christmas and may be the most tempting thing for people to try and buy even in this bad economy. Microsoft and Netflix announced this week that they will begin streaming *high def*, yes *high def* content to this new box. They are going to start with only 300 high def titles, but watch for this to rapidly expand in the near future.

Microsoft’s going to try and get a pound of flesh out of you of course by requiring an XBox live "gold" membership which is also kind of chump in my opinion, but this new box is clearly a winner.

3. Microsoft Media Center. Microsoft’s Media Center technology is getting better and better. Charlie Owen, from the Media Center team over at Microsoft, put out a great post earlier this week highlighting some of the things that we have to look forward to with Windows 7.

Many of Media Center’s changes are cosmetic — a cleaner better designed layout and interface. But there are some substantive content changes as well. Probably most significant, the next version of Media Center will support the H.264 high def video format. This means that high def H.264 video files can now be consumed on your television through a Media Center PC or Media Center extender. The significance of this is that the H.264 compatibility opens up the Media Center to a very popular format used for cheap pirated video content. Now I’m not advocating video piracy with this post, but the fact of the matter is that millions of people watch pirated H.264 format video on their computers every year. Now instead of having to watch the latest pirated episode of Dexter on your computer alone, you can now actually watch it from the comfort of your couch with your XBox 360 Media Center extender.

The power of Media Center plays in perfect concert with the power of the XBox 360.

All XBox 360s act as Media Center extenders. This means that if you have a Vista PC in your home (and more and more people do/will every day) you can stream your photos, music, home videos, and TV complete with a DVR if you have a TV tuner in your PC.

Could be a winner / could be a loser

1. TiVo. TiVo is certainly a consumer favorite. People that own them are very, very passionate about them. In addition to a new DirecTV service coming out next year and current offerings on the cable company platforms, TiVo today announced their own partnership with Netflix in what has been a much talked about on again / off again sort of relationship over the past four years or so. Being broadly rolled out in December, the new service will put more than 12,000 titles on the TiVo platform coming from Netflix. The service won’t be available on all TiVo units (it will work on Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL units) but makes a TiVo a much more compelling option for consumers.

TiVo already has one of the best DVRs in the business and this new Netflix streaming option makes it even more attractive. Still, TiVo is an expensive option. Consumers either have to pay a $12.95 per month annual fee with TiVo or they have to pay an additional $400 charge for lifetime service. These high fees may keep some consumers away from TiVo as an option. Also there is no confirmation yet from TiVo that they will be offering the HD streaming option that the new XBox 360 will.

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Howard Stern and his merry band of entertainers could be looking at shifts in the corporate structure if Google were to deliver on what’s either a really hot rumor or a mischief making writer spinning out the end of a long Friday.

The rumor first appeared on ClickZ, with Zachary Rodgers stirring the pot on a blog entry:

A high profile source is pretty convinced ol’ Goog is on the verge of snapping up Sirius Radio. Heard anything of the sort?

Well, no, honestly, and neither has anyone else, it seems. If it is in the cards for Google to buy itself a satellite outlet for its dMarc/AdWords radio advertising, several things have to happen.

Seeking Alpha blogger Tyler Savery said the proposed merger of Sirius with satellite radio rival XM could get in the way:

So while Google buyouts are fun to consider, any company trying to buy either Sirius or XM would have to do so with very limited cooperation from either company. That adds risk to such a transaction.

Thanks to the various bureaucratic gymnastics involved in the Sirius-XM merger proposal, Savery thinks that deal could be approved and wrapped up before the end of the year. Perhaps Google will be able to deliver Sirius as a holiday gift to its employees and shareholders.

WorldView-1, which was launched yesterday, represents an all-around improvement over what was previously available.  DigitalGlobe calls WorldView-1 “the most agile satellite ever flown commercially,” and states, “WorldView-1 will have an average revisit time of 1.7 days and will be capable of collecting up to 750,000 square kilometers (290,000 square miles) per day of half-meter imagery.”

In more accessible terms, that translates to an area the size of Chile.  Once WorldView-2 gets going – a launch should take place in 2008 – the pair will be able to cover an area on par with Mongolia.

Unfortunately, users of Google Earth probably shouldn’t expect to see much new material in the near future.  Even though WorldView-1 is already up, the Google Earth Blog’s Frank Taylor notes, “[I]t typically takes about 6 months for a satellite to be fully tested after its launch before new data becomes available for use.”

Taylor later continues, “It will still be typically several weeks to a few months before new data is put into Google Earth.  In addition, the satellite is still dependent on having the right weather conditions before getting a good photo (no clouds, haze, smoke, dust, right angle of the sun) worth putting into Google Earth.”

So hold onto your hats.  And if they’re big enough – think 20-inch sombreros – they may be visible in Google Earth at some point.

Sydney Gets Fuzzy Under Google Maps

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Australia 2007 Summit scheduled for September 2-9 in Sydney will bring in powerful political visitors like US President George W. Bush, protestors and their causes, and potentially the spectre of terrorism. We don’t envy the work Australian security professionals have to do in Sydney in preparation.

It’s been suggested by the Sydney Morning Herald that such preparations have extended to cyberspace, specifically that niche served by Google Maps and its satellite imagery. Views of Sydney from above have taken a turn for the blurrier, with the Herald hinting at national security requests resulting in Google taking down some of their best imagery:

Users of Google Maps Australia could previously zoom in for satellite views as close as 25 metres above the ground in much of Sydney, but now maps of the CBD are blurry even when zoomed out to 300 metres. Where individual people, tree branches and garbage bin lids were once visible, they can now only be seen as vague outlines of objects.

The high-resolution satellite images, which were introduced this year, appear to have been replaced by lower quality versions for the Sydney CBD only, and not for suburbs like Bondi Beach and Point Piper.

The article indicated how updates to imagery of Washington DC did not include much of the downtown area, where lower resolution images remain the norm.

Google has blamed the Sydney image downgrade "as a result of a commercial issue with a supplier." That’s a strange claim, as Google just happens to own Keyhole, a satellite image company that has mapped the world.

Clearwire Finds Partners

The agreement will allow both satellite companies to offer Clearwire’s high-speed Internet service to their customers. Clearwire will be able to offer the video services of one or both satellite companies to its customers.

The three companies will be able to offer high-speed Internet, video and voice in all Clearwire markets. The launch is planned for later this year.

DIRECTV and EchoStar will be able to sell Clearwire’s services on a stand-alone basis.

"By expanding the reach of our services through DIRECTV and EchoStar, and by incorporating direct-to-home satellite video services in our own distribution channels, we believe we have an opportunity to significantly expand our business opportunity," said Perry Satterlee, Clearwire president and chief operating officer.

"By choosing this bundle option, DIRECTV customers will now be able to enjoy Clearwire’s fast, reliable and secure wireless broadband network that works great at home and on the go," said Bruce Churchill, president of New Enterprises, DIRECTV.

Google To Supply Dish Networks Ads?

Google’s arrival in the television advertising market should be a good event for viewers and advertisers, but a negative for the agencies that traditionally dominate it. The measurement and targeting Google wants to deliver represents a departure from the ‘fire and forget’ model that drops irrelevant advertising on people like Google’s top executive.

An agreement with Dish is just a rumor right now, brought up by Matt Marshall at VentureBeat. It’s a rumor that will shake up a lot of ad executives faster than a carafe of espresso if it comes to fruition.

Between Dish and Google, the two could mine a wealth of personal information to make an advertising venture a highly personal experience for Dish viewers:

But a Dish partnership is notable because of how interactive the Dish experience has become. Users already use keywords to search for programming, choose themes they like and create custom guides

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/google-could-dish-satellite-tv-ads-2007-03/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/al-jazeera-launches-english-service-2006-11 http://www.webpronews.com/al-jazeera-launches-english-service-2006-11#comments Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:51:58 +0000 Neville Hobson http://www.webpronews.com/?p=32943 Al Jazeera launched an English-language service yesterday that, inevitably, attracted criticisms in the US and elsewhere where some see the station purely as a mouthpiece for Osama Bin Laden. ]]> Arab TV network Al Jazeera launched an English-language service yesterday that, inevitably, attracted criticisms in the US and elsewhere where some see the station purely as a mouthpiece for Osama Bin Laden.

The station has consistently denied any such linkage, according to a BBC report.

Whatever anyone’s perception is of Al Jazeera, there’s no doubt that the station has significant influence today, not only in the Arabic-speaking world:

[] Two years ago, al-Jazeera was named in the global InterBrand survey as the world’s most influential media brand and the fifth most influential in any field, after Apple, Google, Ikea and Starbucks.

That’s some recognition. And there’s more.

It will be interesting to see how Al Jazeera progresses with this venture when the notions of free speech and democracy in the Arab world are too often seen in Western eyes as an oxymoron. Here’s how they describe themselves with this new service:

Al Jazeera English is the world’s first English language news channel to be headquartered in the Middle East. Broadcasting from within the Middle East, looking outwards, Al Jazeera English will set the news agenda and act as a bridge between cultures.

That’s an outstanding objective. And take a look at the station’s code of ethics. Remarkable.

In addition to cable and satellite, you can receive Al Jazeera English on broadband, IPTV, ADSL, terrestrial and mobile phone platforms.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/al-jazeera-launches-english-service-2006-11/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/googles-big-deals-2006-08 http://www.webpronews.com/googles-big-deals-2006-08#comments Tue, 08 Aug 2006 16:27:31 +0000 Nathan Weinberg http://www.webpronews.com/?p=30790 Google’s had some big deals the last week, and I’m going to lay them out quickly for anyone who didn’t read about them elsewhere while I was gone.

First, Google announced a deal with XM Satellite Radio to provide commercials on their non-music channels. I was wondering how Google planned to use dMarc radio advertising, since regular radio isn’t the right platform for most of Google’s long-tail advertisers, and they show us all how smart they are. While XM has millions of subscribers, they are scattered among over 100 channels, and Google can put cheap, targetted ads all over the platform. XM needs revenues, and Google can quickly dominate this field if the technology and advertisers come together. A great move.

Yesterday, Google announced a deal with Fox Interactive, owners of MySpace (the most popular site on the web, according to many sources), to provide search and text/keyword-based advertising. Google gains exclusive rights to targeted and text ads across those sites, most notably MySpace, through 2010, and right of first refusal on other advertising. Google guarantees MySpace $900 million a year, so long as MySpace continues to deliver the traffic.

In theory, it is a great deal. MySpace could have tipped things in a bad way towards a competitor if Google had not made this deal, and Google should be able to meet the revenue requirements. Google gains a huge amount of ad inventory and visibility as well. Of course, there are always things that could go wrong, and if Google were to fall on hard times, a popular MySpace combined with a weak ad market could mean Google paying MySpace far more than it is worth. Either way, Rupert Murdoch gets his money back almost twice a year on a $500 million aquisition, making everybody look like an idiot.

Biz Stone jokes:

“You keep doing what you’re doing and we’ll give you a billion dollars. Mmmkay?”

Finally, Google and Viacom announced a deal to distribute video clips and advertising. Google will make the clips available to AdSense partners, who can choose to include them on their sites for a split of ad revenue between Google, Viacom, and the site publisher. Google will also sell some Viacom videos on its site for $1.99 apiece. It could be very interesting to see what sort of form these videos take. For example, if I were doing a videoblog, and could insert a video ad in my video post and earn AdSense cash from it, I’d consider that a huge convenience over typical ad sales, and a great way to guarantee some money.

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