Ménage à trois

The newest buzzword on South African telecoms consumer activism sites these days seems to be ‘triple-play’. This term that has been appearing more and more regularly on articles on sites such as ITWeb and MyADSL refers to service bundles that include high speed internet access, voice telephony and pay-TV. While no such service is currently available in South Africa, a number of companies are currently planning such functionality, with some already in the testing phase.

These developments are interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, both SA’s fixed line telephony and pay-TV sectors are currently monopolized (by Telkom and MultiChoice, respectively), though a new competitor in the fixed line market has been granted a licence to operate and should begin offering services sometime in the middle of 2006. This interest in triple-play by companies including Telkom, Vodacom and state broadcaster SABC mean that for the first time these companies will be facing serious competition, and strangely enough from companies that each hold a monopoly of sorts in their own sector.

From the consumer point of view, this is great for a number of reasons. On the fixed line and broadband side of things, it’s no secret that Telkom could do with a bit of encouragement to drop prices to reasonable levels, and for Telkom’s IPTV approach, a 3Gig capped sub-1MBps ADSL connection will simply not cut it, and they will be forced to drop these prices (and raise or altogether abolish the cap) to make IPTV viable using their services. Lowering broadband costs will also make VOIP a more viable and cost effective voice telephony alternative. From a pay-TV view, South African’s currently have a very limited choice, with ironically-named MultiChoice’s DSTV being the only solution-and at about R450pm for 100 channels, it’s not a cheap solution. With Telkom, SABC and possibly even Vodacom looking to move into the pay-TV market, DSTV will be facing some stiff competition. There is also a new broadcaster - Black Earth TV - looking to enter the market, apparently with a package that will eventually provide about 500 channels for R100 a month, which will definitely make things interesting.

Another interesting development is that SA’s TV architecture will soon be pulled out of the dark ages. The vast majority of South Africa’s broadcasting is still analogue, but SABC is in the process of securing funds to be able to switch over to digital broadcasting systems, which will not only provide better quality to the consumer and lower cost to the broadcaster, but will free up the very cluttered spectrum for more broadcast allocations.

It looks as if the next two years will be extremely exciting for South African broadcast and communication technology, and it can only benefit us, the consumers that have been screwed over for far too long.

More on Google.cn

The Official Google Blog has been updated with a post containing the statement submitted by Andrew McLaughlin, Senior Policy Council for Google, to the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus on "Human Rights and the Internet -- The People's Republic of China" to be held today. Mr. McLaughlin will not be able to attend the event in person, however his statement details the reasons behind Google’s decision to provide localized (and restricted) versions of their search, news and image services in China as well as some of Google’s views on information controls and how they are handled, and should be handled in future. This statement is basically a rewording of the earlier post on the topic on this blog, so there’s really nothing new. They again defend their position, though state that they do not feel the situation is ideal and admit their approach was an unfortunate compromise.

Take it as you will. I still maintain my stance on the situation.

More game sharing.. but only a tiny bit more.

Yesterday Biggie and I tried out the game sharing multiplayer built into Burnout Legends on the PSP. After trying out the WipeOut Pure game share available on the MediEvil UMD, we expected it to be quick and painless. Damn were we ever wrong.. Unlike the WipeOut Demo, that apparently game shares all the game data in the initial transfer, it seems as if the Burnout game sharing functionality actually loads the entire level over the WiFi before each game, and doesn’t allow any sort of quick retrying. What this essentially means is that you spend about 3-5 minutes waiting for the level to load before actually getting a chance to race. Of course once the racing actually starts, it’s an absolute blast. There is absolutely zero lag, and the racing is solid. Of course the spectator is great as well.. and I think if it wasn’t for the insane load times (we only got two races in the space of half an hour!), everyone would have enjoyed a go, I’m sure.

While the idea of loading levels over WiFi is great in the sense that as levels and cars are unlocked, you could try them in multiplayer, I don’t think the developers ever really bothered to try the gameshare multiplayer. If they had, they might have tried speeding up the load by compressing the data or something. I suppose it’s a good tactic to get you to buy the game though so you can play multiplayer without the loading hassle.

Irony is..

Using a save game bug in GTA:LCS to bypass the security in PSP firmware.

Seriously, I’m amazed that the gaming press have not been capitalizing on the incredible hilarity of the fact that a game that is all about breaking the law, and belongs to a series that is known for controversy and frivolous blame-shifting lawsuits is the tool that allowed hackers to run uncertified software. Now I don’t by any means support piracy, and unfortunately these developments help pirates as well, but I really wish Sony would wake up and realize that if they just opened up the PSP to legitimate ‘indy’ development, there would be a whole lot less crackers trying to get around bugs in the system to run things. The PSP is an ideal homebrew development system, and there are lots of talented people out there that would love to be let loose on it, but don’t have the funds or inclination to do fulltime dev. Maybe Sony is just trying to protect license-paying developers that are churning out shit games by keeping the free-but-great competition away?

This latest obstacle in Sony’s attempts to keep ‘illegitimate’ software off the PSP is a somewhat unusual in that it does not seem to be at all dependant on security flaws in the actual PSP firmware, but rather on a bug in the save/load mechanism in GTA: Liberty City Stories. I am sure it will only be a matter of time before Sony figures out a way to block this with a firmware update (their developers are probably working on it 24/7) but at least we’ll probably get some cool new add-n. It seems that every time crackers get through the PSP’s current security, Sony release a new security fix and sugar coat it with something cool. Maybe we’ll finally get a working version of the personal organizer and email software that was leaked onto the web last year?