Ofcom have announced their plans for a 4G spectrum auction. Will we see repeat the outcome of the 3G auctions where £22 billion was raised, which came close to sinking several of the operators? The consensus is, "no." Ofcom has predicted £1.4 billion, and there are estimates of up to £4 billion being possible. This is far more rational. I was working for Ericsson during the early days of 3G and it's interesting to see the similarities. The sorts of things predicted to happe

Good article in Broadcast Engineering: Cloud PVR spreads over Europe. The "Cloud PVR" (Or DVR, if you're in the US) is a bizarre sort of thing, designed to solve a legal problem, not a technological one. It boils down to this - if a distribution company such as a cable of satellite operator, as opposed to a channel, allows you to replay a programme on demand that has been carried over their service, they then have to pay additional fees to the license owner(s) of that mater

Upcoming Roulette Events | Memorial for David Gamper I'll be performing in the concert tomorrow.  If you're in NYC, please come.

On YouTube, Amateur Is the New Pro - NYTimes.com. " A history of the entertainment  business could be framed as a series of experts asking, “Who the hell wants to watch that?” When the answer is “more people than you think.” What you call TV on the internet?  "TV." There is the kernel of another story in this article and that is the one about how the approach to making videos for YouTube changes as their creators become more popular.  They are inclined to increase productio

There are so many posts out now about the potential trend of "cutting the cord." In other words, dropping cable and satellite service and relying on free to air television and internet streaming. Well, I've gone even further that that - I've even cut the cord to the rooftop aerial and am getting all my media via the internet - radio and TV. I've already covered the radio bit. That was about convienence and functionality. The TV part is a bit different. It was driven by interi

This is coming from a scholarly publication perspective, but the problems the author describes are almost identical to what we're facing in broadcasting. In a nutshell, we are generating data at a rate faster than Moore's Law can keep up with. Unless that rate changes, it's just going to keep getting more expensive to store our media no matter how much the price of the hardware goes down. So the question is - do we just just accept that as the price of doing business, or do

This is a talk I gave last year at Culture Hack Scotland on the topic, "Is coding an art?"

There's a lot of focus on "big data" these days after the recent Facebook IPO. The term is becoming as ubiquitous at "the cloud." There's a great line in Michael Wolff's article, "The Facebook Fallacy," at the MIT Technical Review. "The company knows so much about so many people that its executives are sure that the knowledge must have value." That sums it up in a nutshell - "We have so much of this stuff, it MUST be valuable. We just don't know what that value is yet." This

In the 121 years since the invention of the motion picture camera, the worlds of production and post production have operated as two connected, but completely discrete units. The production side, an optical/chemical/mechanical process, essentially unchanged from the Victorian era until the widespread adoption of the portable video camera (until recently, almost all feature films still used Victorian technology, now only most of them do.) The portable video camera, although r

There is intense focus at the moment on the potential of IP delivery of media. A slew of acronyms like VOD, OTT, and IPTV are being joined by terms such as, “second screen,” “orchestrated media,” “lean back,” and “lean forward,” viewing with more to come. To date, the majority of effort in this area has managed to recreate the experience of watching television, but with a much less friendly user interface. VOD and catch up TV have eliminated the walk to the video store and t

Current situation Non-linear editing, fast computers, and high-speed data networks have gone a long way in changing our approach to post-production and is now making significant inroads into distribution; but as of yet, the production process has changed very little. In the second decade of the 21 st century, we are still saddled with an 19 th century, Victorian era workflow. Clanking, whirring cameras constructed with motors, flywheels, belts and levers; arcing HMI lamps ou

I gave my wife a portable radio for Christmas. It has FM, DAB, Internet, WiFi, UPnP and network folder sharing. Essentially it does nothing that the computers in the house can't do, but for some reason it's opened the world of audio programmes in a way that our computers have not. We spent the holiday listening to WFMU, resonance FM, Drone Zone on SOMA FM, Radio 4 Listen Again, and strangely enough whenever we tuned toWNYC and WGBH we seemed to always get the BBC World Servic

I only took four years, but here's a new one: March Loop by Cinema Volta

Another new track and this time you didn't have to wait six months for it. This track was made very simply with just my Les Paul, my eBow and a really long, dense reverb courtesy of RaySpace. There were no looping or harmonic effects used at all, which is unusual for me. Infinite guitar 1 It's interesting how an instrument can guide you in certain directions. My Strat leads me to play mostly in A and G, while my Les Paul demands to be played in E.

Here's a new track done with a new guitar on a new computer with new software in a new apartment in a new city in a new year. I recorded this in my flat in Glasgow with my brand spanking new ebony Les Paul custom on an Intel iMac using Cubase 4. New Guitar 2, 24th February, 2007. I did use some old stuff to make this as well, primarily my very, very old eBow. I also had to use Cubase SX 3 to do the final master because Cubase 4 doesn't support dithering yet.

I told you this would be sporadic. Here's a slow guitar mediation. It's just something dashed off pretty quickly, has a lot of distortion, but I like it anyway. Guitar Mediation One, June 16, 2006.

Sten Hanson recently had a birthday celebration at Fylkingen here in Stockholm. Sten's old friend and my fairly new friend Charlie Morrow was not able to make it over from New York for the event, so he asked me to assist him in a collaborative piece. He chose two tracks, one of his and one of Sten's and I assembled them into this track, adding some of my processes as the glue to hold them together. Sten's Birthday Now for the fine print. This track is not covered by the Crea

Here's another Guitar Meditation. Guitar Mediation Three, March 26, 2006.

Here's the first of the tracks. Guitar Mediation One, March 30, 2006.