Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writiing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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  • Not quite what it seems

    More nonsense in the SCMP today (subscription required):

    Losses from pay TV piracy down 15pc with use of secure network

    Frederick Yeung and Celine Sun
    Nov 01, 2007

    Pay TV piracy in Hong Kong is estimated to result in total losses of HK$213 million this year, down 15 per cent from last year, a poll has found.

    The industry expects losses will be further cut as more subscribers pay for the service through the highly secured internet protocol television service (IPTV), according to the survey conducted by the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia and Standard Chartered Bank.

    Simon Twiston Davies, the association’s chief executive officer, said yesterday: “The IPTV platform is much tougher for pirates and this helps channel operators retain integrity in distributing the content. It is more difficult to hack the system.”

    The survey also found that total estimated losses in the regional pay TV service due to piracy would be US$1.54 billion this year, up from US$1.13 billion a year earlier.

    “The net cost of piracy reduced 15 per cent over the same period last year due to competition driving service charges down,” Lee Beasley, director of Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong), said.

    Legitimate pay TV users in Hong Kong number about 1.45 million. Illegitimate users remain at about 118,000, the same as last year, of which 98,000 are connected through illegal set-top boxes and 20,000 receive satellite overspill signals from satellite receiver dishes.

    So there are just as many people “stealing” cable signals, but they would have paid less this year because Cable TV have cut their charges.  That isn’t quite the impression you might get from the headline or the comments about IPTV.

    It’s also rather dubious to argue that watching a satellite TV signal you’re not supposed to watch is the same as installing a ‘pirate’ decoder. 

    Mr Beasley said the Hong Kong government was estimated to suffer tax losses of US$4.62 million this year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers figures.

    I’m wondering how they know how much people would be paying for Cable TV or one of the other pay tv services if they weren’t “stealing” the cable signal.  The assumption seems to be that each subscriber would pay HK$150/month, but clearly that’s a made-up figure.  As for the “lost” tax revenue, that’s even more fanciful.

    Mr Twiston Davies said: “We don’t expect piracy to have dramatic changes in Hong Kong; it is stable as Hong Kong is a competitive market.”

    He said the pay TV market in the city benefited from market competition. Subscribers were on the rise because of new player PCCW’s Now TV pushing the service aggressively by securing exclusive rights to English Premier League football matches from this year to 2010.

    His association, which represented 128 Asian-based corporations, took legal action last year against commercial distributors of unauthorised signals in public venues such as pubs during the World Cup football matches, he said.

    Keep up the good work, chaps.  Our government needs every dollar of tax revenue they can find.  Don’t they?  Hello?

  • Who needs a computer?

    What is a computer?  Why do we have "computers" when actually what many people need is one or more consumer devices (or "appliances") that do a fairly limited number of things (such as web surfing, playing games, watching movies, and word processing) as painlessly as possible, and without having to worry about viruses and upgrading operating systems and other assorted nonsense.

    Well, maybe.  The thing about a computer is that people may feel they can justify buying because it can do so many things – see, it’s educational and we can use it for work as well, not just playing games and surfing the web.

    Then, of course, there’s the fact that people have been known to use computers for doing naughty things such as downloading video and audio content.  No manufacturer of an "appliance" would get away with providing such functionality, but it’s a simple matter to run the programs under Windows or Linux or Mac OS on your computer.  Of course there are always clever people who can "enhance" so-called consumer devices to do things that were not intended, but that tends to invalidate warranties and can do even worse things.

    Nevertheless, there should be a market for a cheap "appliance" that does a few things quite well.  Shouldn’t there?  Jack Schofield asks Is the £199 laptop a PC or an appliance?

    The £199 laptop is about to hit the UK, in the form of the RM Asus MiniBook.

    RM’s chief executive Tim Pearson [….] explained that RM’s business was increasingly about taking responsibility for the equipment used in schools. However, a typical secondary school runs about 250 applications, including specialist programs for music and video. If every child has a computer, this soon becomes impossible to handle: "The support lines just get too big."

    But Pearson reckons that 90% of educational needs can be satisfied by an appliance such as the MiniBook, with its built-in web browser and office suite. "If you’ve got a fixed level of functionality, it doesn’t matter what the operating system is," he says. "How many of the people who have a BlackBerry know or care which OS it runs?"

    (more…)

  • Bluetits

    What I want to know is this.  Is it possible to wear a bluetooth headset on a semi-permanent basis and not look like a complete idiot?

    I can understand people wearing them when driving, and I suppose they are very useful if you are a courier, but is there any other excuse?

    Put it on when you need it.  Take it off at all other times.

    Thanks.

  • The same old…

    One of the more enduring mysteries in football is how certain managers seem to pop up time and again in spite of their conspicuous lack of success.

    Graeme Souness, for example, who was interviewed for the job of Bolton manager:

    Graeme Souness was a candidate on our target list and he has now decided to remove himself from the interview process,” said Bolton chairman Phil Gartside. “Having interviewed him last week, I know he would have been an exceptional candidate for the role.”

    He added: “However, I respect Graeme’s decision to pull out of the process and I wish him well for the future.”

    Personally, I think he should stick to being a football pundit, and I suspect that fans of Liverpool, Blackburn, and Newcastle (amongst others) would agree.   Daniel Taylor in The Guardian has a theory about why Souness pulled out (The strange case of the resistible rise of Gary Megson).

    Football is truly unique: which other industry would be so forgiving to men who have, on the whole, shown so many reasons against employing them?

    In the peculiar case of Gary Megson, the supporters of Bolton Wanderers demonstrated what they thought of it by greeting his first appearance in the dug-out with calls for the chairman, Phil Gartside, to be removed from office and anguished cries questioning the new appointment in the strongest terms.

    It is difficult to sympathise with Megson when looking at his appointment and the role of Mark Curtis, the agent appointed by Gartside to headhunt a replacement for Sammy Lee. For those who do not know him, Curtis has been the subject of complaints to the FA and Fifa and is one of relatively few agents to be disciplined by the football authorities, dating back to November 1999 when he was fined £7,500 for improper conduct, which included an illicit payment, when the 15-year-old Jermaine Pennant moved from Notts County to Arsenal.

    For a long time he has also been the first port of call for anyone in football wanting to get hold of Megson, and he also helped to negotiate the finer points of his contract with two previous clubs. Souness was so shocked by Curtis’s presence at his own interview with Gartside that he withdrew his interest, perceiving it to be a done deal, regardless of the fact that Megson’s win-rate from his only other spell in the Premier League, with West Brom, stands at 15%.

    Meanwhile, it seems that Souness thinks he has a better chance of replacing the recently sacked Steve Staunton as manager of the Republic of Ireland – but he’s up against, er,  David O’Leary.  Well, at least he’s Irish. 

    I suppose Bryan Robson is missing from the “shortlist” because he has a job, but what about Glen Hoddle?  Or Peter Reid – surely he must be available?

    Roy Collins in the Daily Telegraph was also not impressed:

    After nurses, the most under-valued, under-paid group of British workers must surely be football managers, who earn little more than the minimum wage and who have as much job security as a one-legged lion tamer. On top of this, they show nothing but undying loyalty to whichever club they find themselves managing in any given month.

    Look at Gary Megson who, after giving up six weeks of his busy, demanding life to try to turn around struggling Leicester (19th in the Championship when he left) felt he deserved slightly better working surroundings at Bolton. But did he receive the blessing of Leicester chairman Milan Mandaric? No, twice Mandaric refused Bolton permission to speak to him until justice prevailed.

    We now await another tug-of-war as Mandaric seeks to appoint Iain Dowie, who surely deserves a fresh challenge after eight months brilliantly resurrecting the fortunes of Coventry (anonymously mid-table in the Championship). Dowie, you will remember, was ordered by a court to pay almost £1 million to his former chairman at Crystal Palace, Simon Jordan, after claiming that he was leaving to return north. His new club, Charlton, were indeed north of Palace but Jordan waived a compensation clause because he thought Dowie wanted to be closer to his family in Bolton. A move to Leicester would suggest he is planning to get there in instalments.

    It shows how quickly change in football, because it’s not that long ago that Dowie would have been favourite for the Bolton job itself – and frankly it’s hard to see how he could be any worse that Megson.  Maybe he’ll get his chance in a few months.

  • In Search of Perfection

    ATV World are showing Heston Blumenthal’s series In Search of Perfection on Tuesday nights.

    I’ve only watched one so far, but it was a wonderfully bizarre program.

    When Heston does sausage and mash, you won’t be surprised that he goes to great trouble to source the finest organic pork and even travels up to the farm to see the happy pigs.  You probably also won’t be surprised that he boils the sausages and then finishes them in a frying pan.

    What might surprise you is that he doesn’t believe that sausages should be 99% meat, instead preferring to include more ‘filler’.  This is a traditional ingredient, and it gave rise to the joke about a German saying how much he likes English bread, but can’t understand why we call it "sausage".  Obviously Blumenthal is not including as much filler as those mass-produced sausages, but he does feel that some is required.  And he’s probably right.

    Still on the bread theme, you might also be surprised that this recipe (which appears in modified form in The Times) calls for mass-produced sliced white bread:

    Lay 6 slices of sliced white bread on baking sheets. Place them in the oven and leave for 30–40 minutes, until the bread is an even dark brown colour throughout. Break up the bread and put it into a large bowl. Fill the bowl with cold water and set aside for at least 1 hour.

    Drain the soaked oven-baked bread pieces into a colander set over a bowl, then squeeze the bread to extract as much water as possible. Pour 400ml of the toast- flavoured water into the jug containing the spice mix, stir and place in the fridge to chill.

    Yes, that’s right, the bread is used to make toast-flavoured water.  Not an ingredient that I’d ever have considered….   

    You also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he went to great trouble to find the best treacle for Treacle Tart.  What you probably wouldn’t have expected was that after all of that he would decide that none of them was as good as Tate & Lyle’s Golden Syrup.

    I guess he knows what he’s doing, but eccentric doesn’t even begin to describe his approach to food. 

  • 51 channels?

    Just over a year ago I mentioned that the BBC would be launching several new channels in Hong Kong and elsewhere.  Those channels (BBC Knowledge, BBC Lifestyle & CBeebies) are now available in Hong Kong, but apparently that’s only the start of it (according to The Guardian):

    The BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, is to launch a further 30 channels internationally, as well as a high-definition outlet and an on-demand service in the United States, as part of the next stage of its aggressive expansion plan.

    The launches, which will be based on four thematic brands – BBC Entertainment, with shows such as Doctor Who; BBC Knowledge, featuring programmes such as Top Gear; BBC Lifestyle, with What Not To Wear; and children’s outlet CBeebies, featuring the Teletubbies – come on top of 21 channels it already plans to launch before the end of this financial year.

    I hadn’t heard about the 21 new channels, let alone the 30 more.  That would be the Doctor Who channel, the Top Gear channel, the Michael Palin channel, and so on, I presume.

    A high-definition channel would certainly fit in well with Now’s strategy, as would an on-demand service.

    Meanwhile, my attempts to subscribe to these 3 new channels, have not been terribly successful.  PCCW appear to have designed their phone system so it is impossible to speak to someone, and instead they encourage you to subscribe online.  Which is all very well, but this system cannot (as far as I can tell) let you know how much extra you will have to pay for the additional channels.

    The problem is that they have all manner of strange offers, based upon combinations of channels and the total monthly payment, and they don’t provide customers with a breakdown of how much they are paying for each channel.  Also, I would be upgrading from BBC Entertainment as a a single channel to "the BBC 5" (it includes BBC World, which I don’t need, as it also on Cable TV).  No price is quoted for that on their website.

    I’d be quite happy if I could choose channels online and see the actual price I would pay, but they don’t seem to offer that service.  I have always suspected that they do this deliberately, so that if you really want a channel you pay full price rather than waste time talking to them on the phone.  I’m not going to fall for that one.

  • Free stuff, absolutely no catch

    It seems as if it’s impossible to sign up for a credit card or a pay-tv or broadband service – or almost anything which requires a long-term contract – without getting a free gift.  Banks give stuff away if you meet certain criteria (my favourite current offer is the one gives you a free plane ticket if you invest a minimum of HK$5m.  As if someone with that sort of money is desperate for an economy class ticket – yes, you heard that right – to London…).

    For subscribing (or re-subscribing) to a bunch of channels on Now TV, I qualified for three glittering prizes (tickets to Camp Disney on a randomly generated day, a Discovery Channel backpack, and a 9" football-shaped mini TV).

    Er, thanks.

    Thanks for nothing, as it turns out, because I didn’t actually end up with any of these highly desirable items.

    I received a letter telling me that I needed to go to pick up the ‘gift’ from a redemption centre within 30 days.  I went to lovely Mongkok.  There was a queue stretching right out of the front door of the building.  I went home again.

    Even better was a gift from a large bank.  Off to the redemption centre I went, piece of paper in hand.

    There was a notice posted on the door of the obviously closed office, stating that they had run away to TST and hoped that I couldn’t be bothered to go there and pick up my gift.  OK, I made up that last part, but they had moved without any warning.

  • Simple jobs made difficult

    Changing a fuse should be easy, right?  Not in my kitchen, it isn’t.

    The kitchen has a built-in fridge, washing machine and microwave oven (all from the same manufacturer).  Which is all fine and dandy, but which idiot decided that each appliance should have its own electrical socket? 

    Fuses are designed to blow if there is a problem, and it is supposed to be very easy to replace them.  Isn’t it?

    Well, replacing the fuse is easy, of course, but to get at the plug you need to pull the appliance right out.  Each appliance has its own purpose-built slot, so you can’t easily get hold of them – or move them from side-to-side – to ease them out.  The fridge is huge and almost impossible to move, and of course washing machines are deliberately designed to be very heavy.  OK, so the microwave is a bit easier.

    It’s a triumph of form over function.  Yes, it looks neat and tidy to have the plugs and cables hidden away where you can’t see them, but no-one has thought about changing the fuse.  Won’t happen, right?

    Surely there must be a simple solution?  I’m not an expert by any means, but couldn’t they, er make a hole (like the ones they have in most desks these days) for the power cable, so that the plug could go into an accessible socket?  Or how about some sort of arrangement where the plug itself doesn’t have a fuse but you have a fuse or circuit-breaker somewhere else.  Somewhere, you know, accessible.

  • Anti-theft devices

    I went into to a stationery shop to buy a toner cartridge for my printer.  A thimble-full of ink for only HK$100 – thanks very much, people who design printers.

    What amused me was that the shop had used plastic ties in an attempt to prevent customers from stealing these hugely over-priced items.

    Which was not very effective, because

    • This is a stationery stop, so if you really wanted to cut the plastic it’s not exactly a problem to find a pair of scissors.
    • An even simpler solution is to open the box, and take out the toner cartridge.  The box is still securely attached to the fixture, but the toner cartridge has gone.  Yes, you can do this – I opened the box to check that it was the right cartridge.  Then I put back and had to ask the staff to come with their special pair of scissors so I could buy it.

    Good thinking, that man.

  • No time

    Help!  I think I’m running out of time in the day to listen to all the podcasts I download.

    Football Weekly (from The Guardian) is now twice a week, and the BBC has started to offer many more shows, including the News Quiz, the Jonathan Ross show, and even The Archers.

    As luck would have it, I can just about keep up, in because Danny Baker’s All Day Breakfast Show (ADBS) is temporarily on hold – they started charging for it at the start of September, and then suspended it after a week.  I don’t fully understand what is happening here, but the basic problem appears to be that iTunes don’t offer the facility for paid podcasts. 

    You can get round this (as happened with Ricky Gervais) by doing it as an audiobook, but allegedly they can’t be updated every day.  Wippit, the company behind ADBS, tried to make it available for download themselves, but apparently their server was not up to the job.  I waited and eventually paid £2 to get the first week’s shows through Audible, and that worked OK, but it’s not as simple as having iTunes download it automatically.

    Meanwhile, Danny Baker has started another free podcast – this one’s a football show with Danny Kelly.  The two of them both started out as rock journalists, and both are real football fans (Baker supports Millwall, Kelly supports Spurs).  They have worked together on various radio shows (on Radio 5, Talk Radio, Virgin, BBC London, and any other station that would hire them) over the years, mainly ranting about football.  Last season Danny Kelly was doing football podcasts for The Times (which I hated), but this is much better – they clearly enjoy working together, and I certainly enjoy listening to it.

    Baker & Kelly (as it is called) is still available free via iTunes, though they are talking about charging for it.  I’d happily pay for it, but they need to find a convenient way to do this.

    As for the (free) BBC podcasts, well I’ve never listened to the Archers, and I’m not about to start now.  However, I did enjoy listening to The News Quiz in the days when Barry Took and Simon Hoggart were in charge (particularly in the days when there was a Private Eye team), and Sandi Toksvig seems to do OK.  Apparently the current series is the 60th.

    I’ve also enjoyed what I have heard of the Jonathan Ross podcast.  Again, he appears to be having a good time (and who wouldn’t, given the amount he get paid by the BBC).