2008 debut for PlayStation 3 Home

Sony is delaying the launch of the Home online world service for its PlayStation 3 console.

Originally slated for an autumn launch, Home is a virtual world in which owners of the PS3 create avatars and socialise with others.

The social networking system is a key plank in Sony's strategy to win customers for its game gadget.

Sony said Home would now be launched early in 2008 but gave no specific date for its release.

Console crowd

Sony said the delay to the Home service was needed to improve the quality of the finished product.

"This is going to be a worldwide service that needs to offer a wide range of functions required in Japan, in the US, in Europe and in Asia," said Kazuo Hirai, Sony Computer Entertainment head, in a speech at the Tokyo Game Show.

Mr Hirai also remained tight-lipped about widely expected price cuts for the PS3 but said it was improving the line-up of software for the console in a bid to attract customers.

With Home, Sony hoped to cash in on the wave of interest in online communities that have made successes of websites such as Second Life, MySpace, Facebook and many others.

Via Home, PS3 owners could socialise with other console gamers and acquire and decorate their own virtual home.

The news is another blow to the fortunes of Sony which, until the launch of the PS3, dominated the console game market.

Now it trails third after Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii. Figures released for US sales by the NPD Group show that in August Nintendo sold 404,000 Wii consoles, Microsoft sold 277,000 Xbox 360s and Sony sold 131,000 PS3s.

Sony offers cut-price PlayStation

A cut price PlayStation 3 (PS3) with a smaller hard drive and no backwards compatibility with previous consoles goes on sale later this month.

The £299 PS3 has a 40-gigabyte hard disk and will be released in Europe, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand.

Sony has also slashed the price of the 60GB model from £425 to £349, as it hopes to ignite sales.

Ray Maguire, head of PlayStation UK, said he expected the PS3 user base to double by Christmas.

Mr Maguire said the release of the 40GB PS3 was a "strategic decision" and not the result of lower-than-expected sales of the PlayStation 3.

"We have done market research, looked at fans' forums and the feedback from consumers is that they are anxious to get into PlayStation 3 but it is too expensive," he told BBC News.

Sony was the market leader in the previous two generations of console releases. However, Nintendo is now in pole position closely followed by Microsoft's Xbox 360.

More than 5.5 million PlayStation 3 consoles have been shipped worldwide, compared with more than 10 million each of the Wii and Xbox 360.

He said he expected some existing PS3 owners to feel frustrated at the price cut for the 60GB model coming just six months after the machine was first launched.

The new PS3 will be unable to play PlayStation 1 and 2 games, has a reduced number of USB ports, from four to two connections, and no slots for memory cards. It goes on sale from 10 October.

"The cost of peripherals for adding USB connections and memory stick options is low," said Mr Maguire explaining the alterations.

He added: "Backwards compatibility was reasonably expensive for us to implement and taking it out enabled us to reduce the price."

The entry-level PS3 is now the same price as an Xbox 360 Elite, which has a 120GB hard drive.

Extra expense

However, the PS3 has built-in wi-fi connectivity and a high definition Blu-ray DVD player.

An add-on HD-DVD drive and wi-fi peripheral are available to Xbox 360 owners at extra expense.

The Nintendo Wii costs £179 but does not have high definition graphics or DVD playback, and relies instead on an innovative motion-sensitive control system.

There is no confirmation on the launch of the 40GB PS3 in North America and Japan, which have their own divergent models and price points.

Mr Maguire said: "The people who want to get into new technology early are prepared to pay a premium.

"We want to get the console to the next level; we have re-engineered the machine to bring the price down."

He added: "We have invested a lot of money in reaching this price point."

Sony is still losing money on each console sold, said Mr Maguire, but would lose less money on the 40GB machine.

"We are in an investment phase," he said.

Sony was criticised last year when it unveiled its £425 price point for the PlayStation 3 with many analysts saying the firm would struggle to win over gamers.

"It has taken us that long to get the cost down, it's as simple as that," said Mr Maguire.

Apple launches TV service in UK

By Marc Cieslak

Reporter, BBC Click

While the current state of web streamed TV might be considerably less than high definition quality, the ability to watch TV from around the world on-demand could completely change when and how we enjoy our favourite shows.

Watching TV shows via the web can be a tricky business. Sure, you can download the latest episode of blockbuster programmes hours after their first transmission via torrent sites. Unfortunately this is normally illegal.

The picture quality of streamed video can be a problem

Apple's iTunes and some broadcasters allow users to pay to download content, but downloading can be slow.

What if you want to watch a TV show immediately, when the urge takes you?

While downloading means an entire file has to be transferred before it can be used, streaming sends a continuous flow of data, meaning it can be viewed before the whole file has been received.

A streamed file will often open in a matter of seconds, whereas downloading can of course take much longer.

However, streamed files typically do not remain saved on your hard drive.

Traffic growth

There are however a couple of drawbacks. Reliability is one: there are few things more frustrating then watching streamed content and then losing the stream.

Channel 4's on-demand service launched earlier this year

And if you can achieve a decent streaming rate there is still the issue of image quality. Most streamed TV shows do not exactly give HDTV a run for its money.

"One of the challenges is that the internet really isn't set up to deliver high resolution video, and so it needs assistance, help and support to enable it to do so," said Phill Robinson of CacheLogic.

"There are basically two exabytes of traffic that flow over the internet. We have got to that level of traffic growth over the last 20 years. It's going to rise and quadruple over the years to eight exabytes.

"That's a huge volume of data that's going to be shipped over the internet, and the reason is the delivery of video, which has huge file delivery requirements sitting behind it."

Illegal content

Major broadcasters around the world have adopted streaming as a method of viewing limited amounts of content on their websites.

Several companies are suing YouTube over copyright issues

But with just a few web searches it is fairly easy to find and watch hit TV shows via streaming.

In many cases entire seasons are available to view on-demand. The problem is, they are rarely available from the sources that actually own these shows.

While sites like YouTube have publicly been forced to remove copyright content, a host of smaller, below the radar sites provide links to streamed TV shows.

While the sites themselves do not host any of the programmes, they instantly direct users to sites that do.

Traditional broadcasters and movie studios have been comparibly slow in putting their content on the internet because of the problems associated with making money.

"There is sort of a standoff," explained Mr Robinson, "where you can quite easily get illegal content onto your PC, but it's more difficult to get legitimate content onto your PC. With illegal content there is no quality of service, the actual resolution of the videos is quite poor.

"Eighteen million people watch Desperate Housewives every week in the United States. If we were to encode that at a high quality resolution, to deliver over the internet say 2mbps, then it would require 36 terabytes a second of capacity for those 18 million people to watch it over the web."

He added: "The entire internet around the globe runs at between one and 10tbps, so just to deliver one programme to its existing viewing audience would require us to triple or quadruple the current capabilities of the web."

Potential solutions

But technological help is at hand to change the way the internet works.

Caching, having multiple copies of a file on machines closer to the consumer can help with the problem of file delivery latency, and peer to peer (P2P) allows people to share a file amongst other people who have already used it before from their PCs.

We want to deliver special and also niche content which are not easily available though other platform Valerio Zingarelli, Babelgum

"The solution is to combine the two in a hybrid network," Mr Robinson said. "So we have a new generation of P2P technology with a new generation of cache technology that work together to blend the bandwidth from the caches as well as the peers.

"Then we can guarantee a broadcast quality experience from the very first second of the delivery of that particular piece of video."

New services

Recognising the opportunities offered by streaming and P2P, a host of new media outfits have sprung up, each with a different approach to conquering this new video frontier.

Valerio Zingarelli of Babelgum said: "We want to deliver special and also niche content which are not easily available though other platforms.

"Of course we have to propose something which is easy, which is not expensive. For this reason, we are using very simple traditional web connectivity, narrowband. We think that no more than 600-800 kbps is necessary for delivering our content."

An altogether different take on streamed TV, LiveStation uses software acquired from Microsoft's development labs in Cambridge.

The clue is in the name. LiveStation plan to stream news, sporting and entertainment events to computers as they happen.

"I think that people will consume content on the IP platform the moment that the quality of the user experience is good enough," said Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Skinkers.

"The biggest challenge that we are facing is that the internet infrastructure was not originally designed to support video, you have a lot of bottle necks. But it will take some time for that to be resolved."

All of these offerings are currently still in beta testing, and promise to launch in 2008.

While resolution and reliability issues surround streamed TV, for the moment its widespread appeal remains limited.

Apple iPhone warning proves true

An Apple software update is disabling iPhones that have been unlocked by owners who wanted to choose which mobile network to use.

Earlier this week Apple said a planned update would leave the device "permanently inoperable".

Thousands of iPhone owners hacked their expensive gadget in order to unlock it for use with other mobile carriers and to run a host of unsupported programs.

There are also reports of the update causing issues with unaltered iPhones.

On Monday Apple issued a statement in which it said many of the unauthorised iPhone unlocking programs caused "irreparable damage" to the device's software.

The company said this would "likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed".

That warning has now proved correct as many owners are reporting their phones no longer work following installation of the update.

Apple requires iPhone owners to take out a lengthy contract with AT&T in the United States but there are a number of programs on the net that unlock the device for use with other networks.

Some owners are reporting on technology blogs and Apple's own forums that the update is deleting contacts information, as well as photos and music, on iPhones that have not been modified in any way.