DISQUS

I have to disagree with your point about gaming not becoming a proper spectator sport, particularly in regard to Halo or Quake.

Back in the early days of online gaming, a Finnish clan produced a free product for Qizmo for Quake which allowed for the first mass-viewing of clan matches and came to the fore when the top US team (DeathRow) came to play top EU team (Clan 9) in like 1995 and there were 100s of spectators all on their 28.8k modems watching the matches. This has continued to grow today to games like CounterStrike, Warcraft 3 and Quake 4 getting 1000s of viewers for top matches streamed live.

If you extrapolate the growth of online gaming (along with broadband) into the potential market for the viewing of top-level gaming events then I think there are clear opportunities for, at the least, web-based distribution of gaming events with Halo and CounterStrike. It doesn't need to be a 'mass audience' in terms of traditional television because it is a segment of the market - but possibly a large segment and one that is very attractive to marketers (~12 - 24). With continuing generational shift (i.e. the gamers get older!) there will be an ever-increasing market size, opening more opportunity for mass-market services.

More here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6056942.stm regarding the BBC and the CBI (British business organisation) giving evidence to a House of Lords inquiry on the proposal.

Good post - a shame these things are Chatham House rules and so closed from the general public. I particularly liked the ICRA guy putting Reding on the spot with the question about his video Ipod - it seems quite clear that Reding has no idea how to answer that question which is frankly ridiculous considering it is her legislation.

Interesting write up, thanks for that.

Is this the event you will be attending in Brussels: http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activi...
If not I would be interested to hear which it is?

You might be interested in the European Commission's recent proposal for amending the Television without Frontiers Directive. They aim, in part, to harmonise the levels of protection of minors in audiovisual services and racially offensive material across Europe through the new Directive. This would equate to a harmonisation of different Member States national legislation relevant to protecting minors from harmful/offensive material.
What the proposals utterly fail to do is twofold: firstly, they fail to recognise the global nature of the internet means that the 'bad guys' can simply locate outside of Europe and still be as easily accessible as if they were within the EU. Secondly, and more relevant here, they fail to recognise the possiblity of empowering the individual user on the internet to better understand the dangers, i.e. media literacy and better 'equip' their access point with software protection from harmful content, i.e. filters.
It would be interesting to hear a TechLibFront point of view on these proposals, particularly as they are beginning to go into first-reading in the European Parliament.

Good post

Its all about the local loop unbundling, a lot of providers are jumping on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, as you point out, they offer these 'super' hi-speed services but then massively cap them because the only thing people really use 24mb/s is porn+file sharing! The LLU operators are having a real hard time making any cash off their investments - if you want to learn more then I'd recommend Ofcom's Strategic Review of Telecoms and the legal undertakings agreed with BT to (theoretically) implement equality of access.

Agree completely with what you said there. You might also check out some of Martin Geddes' writing at http://www.telepocalypse.net/ on this issue which seems to be pretty level headed.

mate if you wanna see them trying check out the European Commission's attempts with the Television without Frontiers Directive, a horrendous desire to regulate content distribution online.
good post @ http://www.ofcomwatch.co.uk/2005/07/regulation-...