Catch Up by Name, Real time in everything but...

Like most people I suspect, new technology tends to politely step forward and introduce itself in a couple of ways: RSS and other internet related mediums and the good, old fashioned word-of-mouth. Through an old friend from my music days in Doncaster on Facebook, I was introduced to TVCatchup.com. It appears that I'm slightly behind the times as browsing some of the forums it seems like the site has been up for well over a year! However a new and recent addition to their service offering, and the way I stumbled across TVCatchup.com is their iPhone offering. Although currently in beta, my first impressions are that you could not wish for a more simple yet effective service. Simply navigate through your safari browser on the iPhone to iphone.tvcatchup.com and from the main menu select the channel you wish to watch. A video stream then loads and away you go!

As of posting the channels available on the iPhone are: BBC's One/Two/Three, ITV's 1 and 2, Channel4, Five, Film Four, E4, More4 and 4Music. The website has a few more channels to offer, listed here.

I've tested the service on my phone a couple of times now: firstly in the office on a 8MB connection, then my home network which is 2MB. Connection over WiFi seems fine. The feed is naturally a few seconds behind that of live TV. While watching the England v Belarus game on ITV1 the TVCatchup feed on my phone was 40 seconds behind. Football is a useful medium to compare as it has a timer on the screen! In the office I could only compare what was on the BBC's website for BBC One and that was a shorter delay, maybe 10 seconds. In the grand scheme of things the delay isn't really any sort of issue, such is the quality and near real time programming provided.

I've heard a couple of other reviews from people using it in more remote locations: The BBC's Rory Cellen-Jones used it on the train with a 3G connection

and had a few time-out issues. In his defence he also said the iphone radio service WunderRadio (another fantastic iPhone app) suffered a similar fate. I can testify to as much when using it on trains. Other tweets experienced similar success to mine, as @allaboutiphone's screenshot can testify.

Overall the iPhone offering (it's not technically an app as it's only available through the safari browser) is in my mind a success; especially considering it's still in beta. I was a bit surprised that I didn't have to sign up to anything to view the iPhone feed, and there were also no signs of commercial revenue generation either (sign-up fee, ads etc.). Perhaps this is still due to the service being in beta. Singing up for an account on the website did answer a lot of my questions, if leaving the biggest one unanswered.

The website is sleek and simple. You can view the channels that are available and a TV guide without needing an account. You can also view the forum messages without signing up. Understandably to watch any channels, sign in is required. This is why my questions began to flow and answers became slightly confusing.

Upon signing up the first thing you encounter is a message congratulating you on your ISP (named) is compatible with TVCatchup. Good to know in that I can use the system, but I'm extremely intrigued as to why this is an issue. I can assume it has something to do with rights or access, but it is bemusing why this is decided at the ISP level? I've looked through the forums but can't find any answers there either. Will probably post a message and report back...

Signing up for the website did answer questions as well as creating them. Before watching my first stream there was a 30 second TV advert (for Smirdoff Vodka). That's the business model and revenue generation thing addressed. As part of the sign-up states they will never charge for the service, I guess all their eggs are in the advertising basket.

T+C's were interesting: small capital letters with a grey font against a white background. In other words 'we don't really want you to read these'. Naturally I did, as I wasn't sure whether this service was a) legal and b) underpinned by the TV licence. It appears the answer to both is yes, although interestingly there is no burden of proof to ensure you have a valid licence to watch the channels. This is not dissimilar to the BBC iPlayer or 4onDemand, although both offerings are provided by organisations that already adhere to licensing. Students are exempt from this provided a pre-requisite check of 1000's of loopholes can be satisfactorily answered!

I've only used the site for a very short space of time so I don't know the frequency of adverts or any other restrictions. I will report back these in due course. Even though the football was not a major international match, I was pleasantly surprised the system stood up well and didn't crash. That's in no way vindication of the rest of the site but it's a good omen that reliability issues will be kept to a minimum.

So the big question: why is it called catch up TV when you can't watch any historical programming? I'm not complaining as I'd much prefer a live feed over an amalgamated 'on demand' service, but it does interest me (infuriate if I'm honest!). Again the website doesn't provide any answers so I'll keep working away at that one too.

To conclude then, an excellent first impression of an innovative and void filling offering. I do hope it's legal and that they continue to innovate and improve their service offering. Hopefully technological advances can iron out some of the 3G issues reported by some users when on the move. That'd be good for more than just this application.

UPDATE: Bizarrely, no sooner had I posted this then I followed a link on Twitter to TVCatchup's FAQ's. These answer a lot of my questions! (thanks to allaboutiphone.net)

HulloMail is good, but is it a short-term answer to Google Voice?

Yesterday I stumbled across HulloMail for the first time. (To reference all my sources correctly, it was through an article in The Register that had been posted on Twitter by @allaboutiphone). In short, HulloMail is a service that diverts your voicemail away from the default offering provided by your mobile phone provider to HulloMail. The primary advantage of such a service is that is offers the next generation of voicemail; something only O2 in the UK through the iPhone can even attempt to match through their Visual Voicemail. Essentially visual voicemail works like email in that it gives you a view of who has left a message and the date/time so you can choose what messages you listen to.

Not subscribing to the O2 pay-monthly iPhone tariff visual voicemail is one of the few features of the iPhone that isn't available to me. HulloMail offers a free workaround of this service, and in my opinion it is already better than the iPhone's offering. Firstly, HulloMail uses Gmail technology to store your voicemail messages as mp3's and then emails them directly to your Inbox. You can access your voicemail from any internet enabled location, even when you don't have your mobile to hand. It also offers a customisable text messaging service which is similar to O2's, in that when you have a new voicemail, it send you an SMS and you can call the phone number (local 01 number too!) and listen to your message. It will also tell you if someone called but didn't leave a message. This doesn't interfere with the missed call function on your iPhone, so a full audit of sent/received calls is still available.

An impressive additional feature is that you can sync your contacts with Google and other providers, so instead of a list of numbers you can see names of people who've left you a message. This sounds straight forward when you consider listening to messages from your phone, but it takes on a different and more impressive function when you're checking your messages through your email! In Gmail, HulloMail will also create and label and label all messages as well; keeping things neat and tidy!

The upshot of this new approach is that your voicemail is now more accessible, with greater control over how you listen to your messages and has the added, and

probably key, benefit of being stored forever and simply to retrieve! It's a bold and innovative move from HulloMail and one that I'm sure will catch on to other, bigger players in the market place before too long. Which brings me to my second point...

Like most people who consider themselves to be cool, but in fact others would probably judge as Geeky or techy, I sign up to a lot of innovative service in the beta stage. (I'm currently waiting either to be invited by Google directly to test Google Wave, or for my invite from a very kind @artinliverpool for the invite they sent me to come through!) One service I was looking forward to getting a sneak preview of was Google Voice. Unfortunately when it did come through I was left disappointed as it's currently only available in beta in the US. (I might change my language settings to US, see if that works!)

From the preview information and marketing copy I can find of Google Voice, it's very similar to HulloMail. However and unfortunately for HulloMail, the list of additional features is also very impressive! In addition to shared features of being able to listen to voicemail on the web and receive notifications via email and SMS, Google offers voicemail transcripts to SMS and email as well as a host of calling features, conference calls, call screening and just about everything else you could wish for! The demo really does look exciting (if you like that sort of thing).

I've always been something of a loyal customer when it comes to technology: not afraid to change, but willing to stick with what I've found good service in the past. In theory that should persuade me to stick with HulloMail over Google Voice, but I suspect I won't. As I've posted about previously, I'm a big Google fan. Not only do I like their approach and the applications and services they produce, but increasingly it is becoming easier to adopt Google's version of the latest technology because I'm using so many other Google applications already! (one notable exception is the Andriod phone, but I'm not ruling it out). People may cite Microsoft as a dangerous precedent, but I believe that Google leant many lessons from how Microsoft developed during the 90's and have built a strategy that tries to ensure they won't repeat their mistakes. Their pricing and commercial model, for example, is so different, they shouldn't be labelled as Monopolists (is that a correct noun?) quite as readily as Microsoft were.

However, no amount of Google praising and reassurances that they will be a 'different' will be of much comfort for the likes of HulloMail. A great, innovative product built by small team of both technical and entrepreneurial minds, but still under a very real threat of trailing in the dirt of the new corporate machine.

Schubert: Symphony Number 8 in B Minor (Unfininished)

The season has restarted for the South Liverpool Rehearsal Orchestra (SLRO) so I thought I'd continue to discuss the repertoire as the year progresses. First up is Franz Schubert's Symphony Number 8 in B Minor. My limited knowledge of Music History (A Level Grade C) informs me that this is the 'famous' Unfinished symphony. It's left to Wikipedia to provide further explanation: to summarise no-one really knows why it remained unfinished, despite Schubert living a further six years after the first two movements were written. Of all the reasons suggested (a finale was written but used in his incidental music to Rosamunde and a scherzo does exist but only sketched in Piano form) the theory that seems most realistic is that the form of the symphony was not common for a Viennese composer of his time:

One possible reason for Schubert's leaving the symphony incomplete is the predominance of the same meter (three-in-a-bar). The first movement is in 3/4, the second in 3/8 and the third (an incomplete scherzo) also in 3/4.

In terms of my first impressions of the symphony (we've only played it once thus far), I'm primarily glad my part is written in Bb! I've always struggled with transposition and this hasn't changed since starting to play regularly again. I haven't really formed an opinion as of yet and will probably update this post over the course of our rehearsals. This post is primarily a selfish one in that it affords me an opportunity to look into the background of some of the music we play, hopefully in an attempt to enhance my interpretation and own performance. This is something I've decided might be a good idea having heard Alison Balsom's rendition of Haydn's Trumpet Concerto during the Last Night of the Proms. My Grade 6 and 8 recitals weren't quite the same!

Google Wave: The 10 Minute Demo!

The other day I posted about Google Sync and Google Wave. That included an 80 minute video demonstration from Google on Wave. Even I couldn't be bothered watching all that!

Courtesy of Lifehacker I've found this condensed, 10 minute version. Hope this is more manageable!