All about Technology: January 2016

Sunday, 31 January 2016

European VC Creandum Closes New €180M Early-Stage Fund

I can barely keep up with the amount of new venture capital sloshing around Europe, as new funds are closed. And, if my sources are correct, we aren’t done yet. The latest to close a new fund is Stockholm and Palo Alto-based Creandum. ‘Creandum IV’ is a €180 million early-stage fund, and will be primarily targeting seed and Series A investments, but also follow-on rounds,… Read More http://ift.tt/1TwfKHo

You can now fetch yourself some Stan on Fetch TV

Good news for owners of the Fetch TV DVR – After partnering for the launch of Netflix last year, the digital streaming/DVR box has today launched a dedicated Stan app on the platform.

Located within the Apps section of the Fetch TV's menu system, the new Stan app offers integrated access to the thousands of hours of movies and TV shows.

Just like with Netflix, Fetch TV customers will still need a Stan subscription in order to access the content, although new Optus broadband customers signing up to the $90 Entertainment Starter Bundle with Fetch TV will get three months of Stan for free.

Stan-ding on its own two feet

Stan usage won't be unmetered though, so customers on plans with data limits will need to monitor their usage to ensure no excess data charges.

The expansion to Fetch TV comes just weeks after Stan expanded to the Xbox One, and means that accessing the service on a big screen is available to a large number of people.

While the number of compatible devices is still a long way off Netflix's near ubiquitous accessibility, Stan's expansion is still much greater than that of Presto, thanks to apps on devices like the Apple TV and Telstra TV.

Check out the best shows on Stan

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You can now fetch yourself some Stan on Fetch TV

Good news for owners of the Fetch TV DVR – After partnering for the launch of Netflix last year, the digital streaming/DVR box has today launched a dedicated Stan app on the platform.

Located within the Apps section of the Fetch TV's menu system, the new Stan app offers integrated access to the thousands of hours of movies and TV shows.

Stan-ding on its own two feet

Stan usage won't be unmetered though, so customers on plans with data limits will need to monitor their usage to ensure no excess data charges.

The expansion to Fetch TV comes just weeks after Stan expanded to the Xbox One, and means that accessing the service on a big screen is available to a large number of people.

Check out the best shows on Stan

http://ift.tt/1SSm24N

Sky Q pricing officially released - time to start saving, people

The pricing and release date for Sky Q have finally been announced, and the cost doesn't seem as crazily high as we were initially expecting – although the £99 installation charge is going to sting a little.

The base cost of the Sky Q package will be £42 per month, but interestingly there will be no upfront cost attached to the new high-end hardware. By essentially renting the Sky Q boxes to the end user it has managed to keep those initial costs down.

Sky is also estimating that switching to Sky Q will only cost existing Sky+ customers another £12 on top of their current Sky+ package. Though that extra cost will decrease the more invested you already are in the whole Sky ecosystem.

If you're rocking Sky+ HD with all the movies and sports channels, with the multiroom premium on top, then you're already paying £87 / month - the same top package with the Sky Q Silver bundle will only represent an extra £1.50 / month on top because you're no longer having to add an extra multiroom sub on top.

For the serious Sky subscribers then the switch to Sky Q is a total no-brainer.

Though there is a relatively hefty £99 set-up cost, despite Sky maintaining it's the lowest set-up cost for a brand new premium product launch.

Sky Q uses a new technology called 'wideband' which is what lets Sky Q take the entire signal from the existing dish and spread it out around the home via a single Sky Q box. There will though need to be a 'small change' to the existing dish to allow that to happen, which is likely to be part of the set-up costs.

Sky Q will be available to buy from Tuesday February 9, with installations starting at the end of the month.

Sky Q

Gonna cost you...

On first look the £42 per month base cost doesn't seem as high as it could have been, but that won't include the extra premium channels and if you want to bag the Sky Q Silver, with a host of Sky Q Mini boxes and full multiroom access, then that monthly price is going to quickly escalate.

The Sky Q Silver bundle starts at £54 per month and though that includes a Sky Q Mini box to have Sky Q running in two rooms, you also get to have it running on up to two different tablets wherever you are in your house.

If you want another Sky Q Mini box to take full advantage of all the tuners in the Sky Q Silver box that's another £99 for you, Mr. Reader.

But then Sky Q is the top tier of Sky's TV packages and represents its new 'fluid viewing' ethos in its entirety. Though at launch there is still no 4K Sky service, that's due to follow later in the year.

The Sky Q big-boy set top box, the Sky Q Silver, is the pinnacle of its total package, with the full complement of 12 tuners enabling it to spread Sky TV to the four winds around your home. You can record four different channels at the same time and can still watch a fifth if there's just that much good stuff on at the same time.

Sky Q

But the whole point of that fluid viewing game is to push past the idea of multiroom and offer a seamless viewing experience throughout the whole of your home and, for the first time, outside it too.

Those Sky Q Mini boxes help push up the price, but plumb into two of the Silver box's tuners and another two of those tuners let you also fire the exact same Sky Q viewing experience to another two tablets concurrently.

You can also take practically any of the recorded content you've got on your Sky Q box and transfer it immediately to any connected tablet to take out and about away from home.

So it may well be rather pricey - though not much more than the existing top tier package - but it's a TV package designed for the modern way we consume our media, without the physical restrictions which have put barriers between us and the TV we love.

You just have to pay for the privilege…

Hands on: Sky Q Review.

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New Now TV smart box arriving this year, along with a new interface

A brand new Now TV Smart Box will launch later this year, with Sky confirming that current box owners can look forward to a major new user interface overhaul as well.

The box, developed with Roku, has yet to be given a price or release date but further details will be released in the coming months.

Existing owners of Now TV boxes will benefit as well, with a new UI that is built around a new homepage.

"The launch of our new homepage on the Now TV Box will make it easier than ever for our customers to quickly find and watch their favourite shows," said Gidon Katz, Director of Now TV.

"And when the new Now TV Smart Box arrives later this year, it will be the perfect one-stop box to get a contract-free, flexible way of watching the best of pay TV and free-to-air content all in one place."

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Opinion: It doesn't really matter if Sky Q can't deliver the full force of 4K

Full 4K or hobbled Ultra HD?

Sky is soon to launch its premium TV service, Sky Q. It's a high-end connected platform which has the potential to deliver almost everything we could want in a modern TV experience.

We recently got our hands on the Sky Q system, and you can colour us very impressed indeed. The combination of the latest set-top box technology, seamlessly accessible content – whether recorded, on-demand or live – and the ability to watch on practically any of your screens in or outside of the home makes Sky Q a really powerful setup.

The best TV shows to stream right now

However, while our time with the new system has gotten us very excited about the future of Sky's premium platform, it's not without its potential problems, the biggest of which is whether the top-end Sky Q Silver box is actually going to be capable of flinging the full force of 4K video into our faces.

Does Sky Q have the technical chops to give us the Ultra HD experience we want, or is it more important for it to have all the content?

Sky Q

4K stunts

Sky Q's 4K Ultra HD service isn't going to be available at launch; it's set to be introduced later in the year, when the volume of 4K content is in place, and when there are more compatible TVs out there to actually watch it on.

"What we wanted to do is to make sure when we launched it it wasn't a stunt. That we really had a breadth of content across not just a couple of sports matches," explained Andrew Olson when I went to play with Sky Q.

Olson is the Director of Product and Planning at Sky, and very much the daddy of Sky Q. And his comments really highlight both where Sky sees 4K content at the moment, and how it regards its closest 4K competition.

The first actual 4K broadcast channel went live last August, when BT Sport launched its BT Sport Ultra HD channel with the Charity Shield football match at Wembley Stadium. But the channel isn't exactly awash with 4K content – there are just five live Ultra HD football matches showing in February.

I reckon even BT Sport would admit it got onboard the 4K broadcast train pretty damned early, and that it was more about getting there first – and beating Sky to the punch – than about creating a constant 24/7 stream of 4K sport.

BT Sport UHD

"When everyone moved from SD to HD it was very much sport that lead that," BT Sport MD Delia Bushell told me as I stuffed lavish bite-sized deserts into my face at the Charity Shield last August. "So I think again it will be the same for Ultra HD.

"Live sport is always where it crystallises the step-change in the viewing experience. So, for BT Sport to come first launching Ultra HD, for us, is a real milestone."

However, at the moment BT Sport Ultra HD is an almost dormant channel, which only sparks into life when it has a live event to broadcast in 4K. The rest of the time people stick with the standard HD channels.

Sky is looking for its Sky Q Ultra HD package to be something that becomes a complete replacement for some of its HD channels.

"We have movies, we've got entertainment and we're really trying to launch the broadest service we can," said Olson. "So that it's something customers will use all the time, not just a stunt."

Tech over content

So Sky reckons it's going to have the content edge over BT when it does finally get around to launching a proper broadcast 4K service – but will it have the technological edge?

Sky Q Silver back

Our main concern is around the fact that the premium set-top box of the service, the Sky Q Silver, only has an HDMI 1.4b output at the rear. That's the connection which is set to be jammed into your 4K TV to flood the screen with lovely Ultra HD visuals.

Unfortunately, HDMI 1.4b is only rated to carry 4K video at 30Hz, which essentially translates to a 30fps speed limit on moving images.

Sky does say it's going to be updating the Sky Q Silver for Ultra HD playback, but won't go into specifics as to what that means. If there is HDMI 2.0 silicon sleeping inside the Silver which just needs a little firmware loving to wake it up later in the year then we're all good; but if not then Sky Q, especially on the 4K sport side, will suffer.

HDMI 2.0 is the current de facto standard for premium 4K playback from Ultra HD Blu-ray drives and, more importantly, the Humax UHD box that comes with the BT Sport Ultra HD subscription. And it's the connection which will allow for the full 4K experience running at 60Hz.

BT Sport Humax UHD

BT Sport's 4K channel plays its Ultra HD content back at 50fps, and for live sport that makes a real difference. With a combination of the extra visual fidelity afforded by 4K pictures and the doubling of the traditional TV frame rate, live sport feels far more like you're watching through a window rather than on a screen.

If Sky Q can't match that experience, then its advanced premium platform is going to look rather last-gen by comparison.

We've reached out to Sky for confirmation on what the Sky Q Silver box is going to be capable of outputting, but it's remaining tight-lipped on the technical details of its upcoming 4K service.

Off the pitch

If Sky wants to be the king of 4K sport then it not only needs to have the content nailed – it needs to have technical parity with its main rival for live sport licensing.

Outside the realm of sports, though, does it really matter if Sky Q is only able to keep on treading the same 24fps tracks we've grown used to over years of watching movies and TV shows?

Sky Q

Sky is aiming to have both movies and standard TV running in 4K when it launches the Ultra HD service later in the year, and my experience using the 4K Amazon Fire TV box with its 30fps limit makes me think it's not going to matter a whole heap.

Watching the latest Amazon content, running in both 4K and HDR from Prime Instant Video, I'm not at all worried about the frame rate. After all, most video is shot at the lower end of the frame rate spectrum anyways.

The general backlash against The Hobbit and its high frame rate (HFR) showing has probably fed into a distrust or disinterest in moving the game forward any time soon.

In the end it all comes down to how Sky goes about selling its upcoming Sky Q 4K service. If, as we kind of expect, it looks to launch just before the new football season in August, touting itself as the home of 4K footie, then it could suffer from not matching BT Sport's more high-end offering.

But if its main aim is to offer a total Ultra HD entertainment package, then that 30fps speed limit isn't going to amount to much more than a marketing duel with BT.

Hands on: Sky Q review.

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TechRadar Deals: Cheap TV: The best TV deals in January 2016

Cheap TV Deals: September 2015

If you're looking for a cheap TV deal, you've come to the right place.

There are lots of great prices out there for TVs of all shapes and sizes, so no matter what your budget is there's no reason to pay over the odds.

The days of paying £1,500 for a 32-inch TV are long gone as you can see – you can now pick up 32-inch models for under £220!

You can also find 50-inch TVs for less than £450. So take a browse through our list of the best cheap TV deals available right now, and find yourself a bargain!