Merry Christmas & Happy New Year from all of us at OzCableguy & OzTechnologies.com. Thankyou to all of our customers and suppliers for our continuing success.
The office will be officially closed from the close of business on Friday 21/12/07 to be back to work Wednesday 2/1/08 but we’ll still be processing and shipping all Internet orders received in that time (allowing for availability of couriers due to shut downs and public holidays etc) and keeping an eye on the emails. The phone will be on divert but if you have a hassle or query that isn’t answered in our FAQs please email us and we’ll take care of it asap.
2008 sees us with a new Labor government and the likelihood of a new FTTN (Fibre to the node) broadband network in the next year or two which should see some exciting new opportunities for cablers, techies, retailers and ISPs not to mention consumers. In the meantime 3G wireless broadband has really taken off with some strong competition between ISPs seeing some really awesome deals getting around at the moment along with a new batch of products to help share it on a network.
VoIP continues to develop and gain market share from PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) even amongst home users. I see wifi & cordless IP phones becoming increasingly popular both in and around homes and more user friendly products and technology hitting the market specifically aimed at this type of user.
HDTV is about to become very big news. Fingers crossed issues with EPGs (Electronic Program Guide) and copyright will continue to fall by the wayside. Sales of Microsoft Media Centre could have been much better in the early days if it wasn’t for Channel 9’s reluctance to make programming information freely available. (Hello? Can someone say “NineMSN”. Where’s the love?). Some clever people in the forums at XPMediaCentre.com.au were writing scraper applications that could lift the data from Nine’s website which led to a fun cat & mouse game for a while as Nine kept changing their site format to try to stay one step ahead. In the meantime IceTV wrote their own programming information for their subscription EPG service only to end up having to fight Nine in court. Thankfully IceTV won which is great news for the future of multimedia technology in Australia and Aussie owners and producers of media centres and digital recorders.
The battle continues but things are improving. On my Foxtel Cable service I can now see programming information for all Free To Air Channels except Seven.
A joint effort between Channel 7 and Engin will unleash a subscription based TiVo onto the market very soon. Perhaps Nine will produce something similar with Microsoft or maybe one of the Media Centres that companies like Netgear and D-Link produce which rumour tells me may include models with hard drives and TV Tuners very soon…
I think it’s going to be a very exciting year ahead! 