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weComm, the leader in interactive mobile data solutions, today announced that it has partnered with Livestation to deliver live TV news to mobile handsets including Android and BlackBerry devices.

Livestation already delivers high quality live TV streaming services on iPhone for world class news partners such as BBC World News and Al Jazeera. weComm wave On-Demand Mobile Application Platform™,will enable Livestation to deliver live broadcasts from Livestation’s global news TV partners to all leading mobile operating systems. Live TV content will be available for a monthly subscription and the service will provide access to other news formats from the same providers. The companies will distribute the service in a number of easy-to-subscribe methods including through the major mobile handset-manufacturers’ application stores.

weComm’s wave platform uses a client-server infrastructure to deliver high-quality, interactive mobile data services optimized to all major mobile operating systems. The technology delivers content and applications to handsets on-demand, giving the richness and interactivity of an on-device application combined with the flexibility and freshness of an online service.

Matteo Berlucchi, Livestation CEO, said of the partnership: “Time to market is key for us. By partnering with weComm we can now deliver a high-quality, live TV experience very quickly to the market across the broadest possible range of smartphone devices.”

weComm CEO Graham Summers: “Livestation has an extremely well targeted proposition which has clearly excited the world’s leading news channels. weComm is delighted to have been chosen as the mobile partner to help Livestation exploit their fantastic service on a wider range of platforms.”

Here is a couple of small news regarding Livestation:

Jackson Memorial

We are ready to stream the coverage of Michael Jackson’s memorial today at 6pm BST, 1pm EST and 10am PST. The memorial will be covered by most of our news partners so go ahead and pick the one you prefer. We will be hosting a special BBC World News stream on our home page too for ease of access. www.livestation.com

BBC Persian

Last night, the Farsi channel run by BBC World Service went live on Livestation. This addition was planned for later in the year but due to the recent events in Iran and to the block of the BBC Persian website there, we fast tracked the addition on Livestation. The channel is available on our site here www.livestation.com/channels/71 or on the Livestation player.

Al Jazeera English on the iPhone/iPod touch

Apple has finally approved our app for AJE so now iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide (rumored to be almost 40 million!) can download and watch AJE live 24/7 unrestricted for a special intro price of $2.99 (one-off). AJE joins BBC World News which is already offering this service in 16 European countries. More on both here: AJE on the iPhone & BBC World News on the iPhone

Frontline Club events now live and online on Livestation

We are very excited about this one: you can now take part in all the live debates held at the Frontline Club in London (around twice a week) with some of the most influential journalists in the world. The Frontline Club is an organisation championing independent journalism. Past participants include John Simpson, Robert Fisk, Jeremy Paxman, Jeremy Bowen, Christina Lamb, the late Benazir Bhutto, Boris Berezovsky, the late Alexander Litvinenko and his widow, Marina Litvinenko. Their list of upcoming events is here http://frontlineclub.com/events/

BBC World News today announces the launch of the BBC World News app, allowing users of the iPhone and iPod Touch in sixteen European countries to watch the channel live on their Apple devices over Wi-Fi and 3G networks.

The application, which is available to download directly from the Apple AppStore, enables users from the Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland to watch BBC World News live, wherever they are in the world.

The BBC World News app, which has been produced together with online TV specialist Livestation, is available for €7.99 and can be downloaded from the iPhone App Store from 3 June. The BBC’s mobile news site is also included in the App, providing users with one-click access to all the latest international news and sport. The launch will be supported by a series of on-screen activity on BBC World News as well as advertising on Livestation’s website.

Jim Egan, Director of Strategy and Business Development at BBC Global News, says: “This is an exciting new way for BBC World News viewers living in Europe to watch the channel anywhere. With live TV streaming alongside the BBC’s mobile news site the app is a complete on-demand news service. Having a news channel available live on the iPhone at this level of broadcast quality is a world first. We aim to extend this service to iPhone owners in other regions soon.”

Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Livestation, says: “We are delighted to be able to bring BBC World News to the iPhone as we believe this is the first hand-held device that can take mobile TV to the next level, thanks to its superior screen and connectivity qualities. Being able to watch BBC World News live from an iPhone or iPod Touch while in cafes, at home, in hotels or airport lounges is clearly a very attractive proposition. I am confident viewers will welcome the ability to take their favourite news channel with them while on the move.”

BBC World News, the most watched BBC channel, has 74 million viewers a week.

Boingboing report that Steve Wozniak liked the sight of a Dell Mini 9 running Apple OS X. Matthew P wrote:

Got to briefly meet Steve Wozniak as he was doing some press for Dancing with the Stars. I showed him my Dell Mini 9 with OS X Leopard installed on it (and an Apple sticker sloppily applied over the Dell logo.

He said, “Oh my god, that is so COOL!”

And: “Is that really the color you wanted?”

Then he graciously signed it. I then ran away and giggled for about 45 minutes.

Steeve Wozniak no longer “work” for Apple (even do se still remains an employee (and receives a paycheck)) but is regarded as one of the most influent contributor the the Apple platform beside Steve Jobs. In 1970, Wozniak had become friends with Steve Jobs, when Jobs had a summer job at the same business where Wozniak was working on a mainframe computer.

On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer. In 1980, Apple went public and made Jobs and Wozniak multimillionaires. However, Jobs refused to allow some members of Apple to receive stock options, so Wozniak decided to share some of his options with the rest of the team by either giving it away for free or at a heavily discounted price. This was dubbed “The Woz Plan”.

I wonder what Steve Jobs think of OS X on a Dell mini. Somehow I doubt he would say the same thing!

This Dell Mini 9 will probably be worth a fortune on eBay… but just don’t say that OS X is installed on the thing or eBay will pull it

If you would like your own Steve Wozniak Cool DellMini 9 OS X netbook then head to mydellmini.com where you will find the how-to and DellEFI to do the magic.

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boxee’s private alpha went well beyond expectations. over 200,000 people signed up.. today boxee is opening their alpha to all Mac, Ubuntu and Apple TV users. Windows is also moving into private-alpha (which means you still need to get invited, but boxee is going to release thousands of invites every week). bear with them as they scale…)

new applications in this release:

• BBC iPlayer (UK users only) – boxee could not ignore the calls from London-based users for proper iPlayer support. it is a huge success in the UK (bigger than Hulu in the US), and it provides access to a huge selection of tv shows and radio in great quality. too bad it is only accessible from the UK.. BBC-if you want worldwide viewers, boxee is waiting here with open arms!

• Joost – in the survey of video applications people wanted to see on boxee, Joost was #1 (iPlayer was #2..). Joost has a great content library with TV shows, web videos, music videos and movies. you can browse the different channels and search through the entire Joost library.

• MTV Music – when MTV Music launched a couple months ago it got great reviews from users. it is a perfect service for the TV. they started by letting users play music videos from artists they come across on boxee. now you can go into the MTV app and conduct searches by Artist/Song or just browse.

bug fixes & enhancements in this latest release:

• dual screen support
• Netflix streaming improvements
• Search in Hulu
• ffwd, rewind, pause in Comedy Central
• improved mouse support
• 3 digits episode numbers recognized
• giving folder.jpg its proper priority
• updates to SMB library
• updates to video and audio playback libraries
• updates to Flash player

boxee also created developer.boxee.tv, which provides basic guidelines for developers who want to build apps to run on boxee. this will continue to grow over the next few months based on users requests. an early example of using the boxee API is work done by Orange Labs (from the France Telecom group) who created a boxee application for their photo sharing service Pikeo.

Last night the dev team at Livestation released the application to 50 beta testers. Being one of them I rushed to download and install but was stumped by an error message:

I really tried everything to get it going. I even restored my iPhone to 2.2 as a new phone, no backup restore and still the same thing.

I have verified that the Livestation test profile was loaded correctly by looking under Settings – General – Profiles and it is! It even read as verified… not sure where to go next.

Dev support at Livestation are reporting that many users have this issue but not all of the testers… so could it be related to the version of iTunes? I am running the latest and greatest under 10.5.6?

Any ideas?

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• LiveStation’s demo of live TV on your iPhone

I just got an email from Livestation stating that I qualified for one of the 50 iPhone Livestation application test licenses!

Here are the details of the emails:

Dear Livestation iPhone guinea-pig,

Congratulations, if you’re receiving this email you made the cut.

First of all, thanks for volunteering. We hope that all the crashes and glitches you’ll encounter will be nothing compared to the joy you’ll get by outclassing any of your friends with those old-looking iPhones that can’t even receive live TV.

Here’s what’s going to happen in 5 simple Frequently Asked Questions style. These instructions are up-to-date on our site at http://www.livestation.com/iphone_instructions in case you lose this email.

1. When do I get it?
The number one question.

We are working really hard right now to bring the alpha version out. You will get an email as soon as we are ready. We’re hoping for the first release to be tomorrow Thursday 18th or Friday 19th, i.e. soon, very soon. We’re ironing out some last minute obvious bugs, tidying up some error messages – translating from “developer” to plain English – and other small changes.

2. How do I install?
Follow these easy steps.

1. You send us your Device ID (everyone bcc’d on this list has done so already, and already been added in the Ad Hoc profile of the current development build… )

2. Download the application zip file from the link we will provide in the release email. Download this file to your computer somewhere easy to find (for example, not in your temp directory!).

3. Unzip/uncompress the content of the file into a new folder.

4. Plug your device in and run iTunes.

5. In iTunes, select Device, ie your iPhone, and select the Applications tab.

6. Drag and drop the contents from the new folder to the Applications tab on iTunes.

7. Check “synchronize application” and “selected applications only”. Select “Livestation” only as the app to synchronize with your device. This step transfers the Livestation app to your iPhone or iPod Touch

8. Go to your device – you should see the Livestation logo. Click and enjoy!

3.What can go wrong?
The main area that can give you problems is going to be around connectivity. In our testing, the service works best on good, stable connections. Wi-Fi will work better than 3G but then again, if you have a strong 3G connection the service will run very smoothly too.

Note on iPhone firmware 2.2: there seems to be a problem running continuous streaming on iPhones running the latest firmware 2.2 on the 3G network. We are not sure what is causing this but you may experience sudden start/stop behaviour in the streaming due to sudden drops in connectivity. This was not observed on the previous firmware 2.1 and we hope 2.3 will resolve this problem.

4. How do I receive updated software?
There are two ways of learning about a new version. In this early phase we may release updates to the software as frequently as weekly. Some upgrades will be because of a “breaking change” – this is where we have had to break old versions to either fix a bug, or introduce a new feature. This is a consequence of trying out alpha software.

1. We will send out emails telling you of an updated version of the application. Just follow the installation steps above with the new version.

2. If you run an older version of the app, you should receive a message telling you there is a new version and asking you to upgrade every time you run it. Follow the install process as before. Check your email to see if you must upgrade.

5. I think I have a bug or request, now what?
As with updates, there are two options, depending on what you just noticed happening.

1. If Livestation crashes, then please restart Livestation, go to the “About” dialog and press “upload error log”. This can take 60 seconds or more depending on your network connection. Please email us to tell us how and when the bug happened on team@livestation.com.

2. If you cannot start Livestation, or for any other reason/bug, then email team@livestation.com with your bug report.

3. In the email to team@livestation.com please include:
- iPhone or iPod touch
- device & firmware version – 1.x or 2.x
- network – were you on wifi or 3G at the time.

For example :
“I lost the list of channels after 15 minutes usage. I’m using an iPhone, on 3G at the time, on 2.2 firmware.”

You asked for it and, yes, you are about to get it. We love Livestation on the iPhone and we hope you will too.

Thanks again for helping us.

Jari

Mike Volpi told beet.TV that Joost will be available shortly on the iPhone over 3G cellular network connections. They chose to stick to WiFi to start with to make sure the technology would work as expected over solid WiFi connections. They will soon update the application with a version that will allow Joost video playback over 3G.

The list of supported video will be limited at first to the ones encoded with an mp4 profile suitable for the iPhone and 3G bandwidth… so don’t expect all 46,000 to be there day one.

I am glad I have a 6GB cap on my data plan via Rogers. I might start to chew more and more on it as I watch more and more video over 3G

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• Joost Launches Video iPhone App on WiFi; 3G Capacity Coming Soon

Livestation has been busy working on an iPhone/iPod Touch application that will let you watch live TV on your device over WiFi network connections.

The new application is not yet available but will be demonstrated live on Livestation on Thursday 04 December at 5pm GMT and will be available on a Livestation special channel both on our website, and in the player (the channel will be called iPhone Preview).

Visit the chat room in the player during the broadcast and ask Matteo questions, a selection of which will be read out live on-air. If you can’t wait until Thursday, here is an exclusive preview:

You can keep up to date with the development by chacking www.livestation.com/iphone.

I suspect many more internet based solutions like Livestation, Hulu, Sling will soon announce coming application for the Apple iPhone platform. This platform is king in the mobile data access space and no one should ignore it at the cost of being left behind.

You may recall that Joost recently announced their player for the iPhone and now everyone will be scrambling to get theirs out the gate to not give them too much of an edge.

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• Joost gets back on our radar with iPhone app

The amazing folks at Boxee have done it again.  They have now figured out how to make it run on the newly upgraded AppleTV 2.3 OS.  More info in the boxee blog post.

It is now for the feint of heart but well worth the trouble I think.

I have captured a quick screencast of what the current version of Boxee look on Mac OSX.  Watch the beginning of the clip for the email address where you can request an invite to try the Boxee beta client.

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