Telegraph: IPTV joint venture YouView delayed until next year

YouView, the IPTV joint venture billed as the new Freeview, is to miss its July target launch date and will go live in early 2012 instead, the Telegraph has revealed.

YouView chief executive Richard Halton said it was important the development was “not rushed”. When it launches, the box will offer a seven-day TV catch-up service and other on-demand web TV services. Analysts are concerned that the delay means the product will already be obsolete by the time it is ready.

Screen Digest head of broadband Dan Cryan told the paper: “With more and more TV catch up services, such as the iPlayer, coming to the living room TV set using the browser, YouView risks becoming irrelevant.”

The initiative is a joint venture between the major terrestrial broadcasters, BT, TalkTalk and transmissions giant Arqiva.

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#FollowJourn: @mumbrella/Tim Burrowes

#FollowJourn: Tim Burrowes

Who? Previously editor of B&T magazine.

What? Now runs Mumbrella – a website dedicated to Australia’s media and marketing industries.

Where? @mumbrella or Mumbrella.com.au.

Contact? tim [at] focalattractions [dot] com [dot] au

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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• #followjourn: @chriscondron/head of digital strategy

FT.com: BT starts trials for new advertisement targeting technology – based on users’ web habits

Today BT begins its trials of Phorm – a technology that will target advertisements at consumers based on their web browsing habits.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Bergens Tidende asks users to map traffic hotspots

“Bergens Tidende, our local paper, has a shining example today of how a local newspaper can gather and report local news simultaneously by coordinating reader participation in a very easy-to-contribute mashup focusing on an issue of huge importance to Bergeners right now, though it’s of absolutely no wider interest”, writes Jill Walker Rettberg, an associate professor at the University of Bergen, on her blog.

That issue is traffic: Bergen, a city on the west coast of Norway, is currently building a light rail system through Bergen, and the road works and constantly changing detours are causing major traffic problems.

“We decided to do something different to report on the exasperating traffic situation in the city, ” Jan Stian Vold of Bt.no told me.

What the news site came up with, in addition to their normal coverage, was a Google Map where readers could plot in where they encountered traffic problems.

It asked its readers: ‘Where are the bottlenecks in the Bergen-traffic? How does the construction of the light rail system effect you?’

Walker Rettberg is also rather impressed by the anti-spam measures: “You enter your mobile phone number and instantly receive an SMS with a code that you then type into the website to confirm that you’re an actual person and that you’re a different person to all the other people who’ve entered their comments,” she writes.

This works as an efficient way of identifying people as all mobile phone numbers are registered by law in Norway.

Requiring users to register does raise the threshold for participation, but this has not deterred Bergeners, as around 400 people have reported their traffic problems so far, according to Vold.

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