With mixed emotions Ben Kelly, Simon Dingle and Samantha Beckbessinger discuss memories of Steve Jobs who passed away this week, the iPhone 4S breaking pre-order records, Windows 8 and the future of Nokia, the BlackBerry and Seacom outages, India’s $35 Aakash tablet, debunking the BBM rumour, and much more – including our picks of the week.

Is there still hope for BlackBerry? Can Lenovo make a dent in the tablet market? We don’t know the answers to these questions, but are willing to speculate wildly. This week Andy Hadfield, Simon Dingle and Steven Ambrose discuss the Lenovo K1 tablet, Samsung pulling the Tab 7.7 from its stand at IFA, the Amazon tablet, app stores and operators, iOS 5, the launch of Telkom Business Mobile, Evernote acquiring Skitch, Google shutting down old projects, and more…

The guys over at TWiT.tv invited me onto episode 320 of Tech News Today last week. With regular host Tom Merritt away, the lovely Sarah Lane hosted the show. We discussed the Amazon tablet, Netflix, Samsung, WebOS and a bunch of other stuff. TNT is an awesome show and it’s always fun to Skype into the studio

On Tuesday I tweeted that I was pleased with DStv making it simple for subscribers to cancel their accounts. This prompted replies from people wondering why I cancelled my subscription. I can’t answer that with a character limit of 140, so I decided to put my answer here instead.

About a week before the 2010 FIFA World Cup I bought the new HD PVR 2P decoder for DStv. I had been without DStv for almost two years but made an impulse buy of the decoder when I saw the price – R2000. I wanted to check out DStv’s high definition channels and thought it would be worth having for the World Cup. I set it up myself, after returning the decoder because the first one I was sold had a mismatched smart card.

Watching the World Cup in HD was totally worth it – mostly because it was a great excuse to have friends over. Now, about a month after the event, I have cancelled my subscription. These are some of my reasons:

• There’s nothing on. I really can’t think of anything on DStv that I have an interest in watching. Now and then Discovery HD Showcase will have a decent enough documentary that’ll keep me interested for a short while, but that’s about it. I can’t stand puerile, imported-and-knocked-off reality bullshit like Idols and TV series that are outdated.
• TV is a waste of time and cognitive energy. It’s depressing how much time our species spends lying in front of televisions with our brains idle. I like making things, reading, spending time with my kids and fitting as much productivity into the finite time I have on earth as possible. What do I get from watching television? Even documentary channels have been dumbed down with shows like Ice Road Truckers on History Channel. How the fuck can watching barely-literate Canadians driving trucks in the snow be classed as History? And if you tune into Discovery you get to watch a fat guy building a motorbike. Seriously?
• It’s expensive. Considering the return – null – paying close on R600 per month is just too much for subscriber television. Some things are a waste of money no matter how rich you are. Television is one of them.
• It makes my kids sad. Gone are the days when children’s television consisted of 30 minutes on a Saturday morning. Now there is 24/7 content across multiple channels and the sprogs know it’s on whenever they want it. Thing 1 (my oldest son – I have two) is addicted to CBeebies. As kids’ content goes CBeebies is brilliant and educational. But it’s on all day – and he knows it. It makes him tense when he isn’t watching and he nags for it. I’m sure that CBeebies has its shows available on DVD. I’ll use the money I’m saving to buy him a few. Tonight our house was quiet and Thing 1 spent time playing with his brother, who fell asleep soon after. Win.
• I don’t like sports. I enjoyed the World Cup, but I don’t get sports in general. Grown men watch other grown men throwing balls around and then either celebrate or get depressed based on the outcome. I am yet to hear a cogent argument for why sport matters. I choose to get happy or sad based on meaningful events. There are enough real things to worry about in the world without having to care about who kicked a ball more accurately. I know a vast majority of people will disagree with me on this, but let’s get back to DStv – without sport, what else does the service have going for it?
• I get my news and entertainment on-demand, online. I don’t think I need to do much explaining on this point. We all know how iTunes and YouTube works. I also love watching next-level online broadcasts like This Week in Tech where I can engage with hosts and other viewers in real time.
• Content licensing is retarded. It’s 2010. The world is connected. And yet we still have douchebags in suits that think it makes sense to license things by country and roll out content to different territories at different times. I want to buy my content online and download it at will. Legally. The way content is licensed for pay television windows (an industry term) is silly.
• There are better things to do with 42 inches. Plug a modern gaming console or a Mac Mini into your television and put all that screen real-estate to better use. Even the most inane of video games are more mentally stimulating than Idols and contain a more accurate view of reality than Oprah. Your HD TV makes a really good screen for your computer.
• DVDs are cheap. If I really want to see something I can get it on DVD or Blu-ray and watch it with better quality and less advertising. For less money.

These are just the most front of mind reasons for why I don’t see the value of having a pay television subscription. If television channels were provided as part of a triple-play telecommunications package I might take them. In their current form there is just no value. I’m not a TV guy.

What are your reasons for not having pay television? And, if you disagree with me, why do you see value in having it?

On the eve of the World Cup 2010 kickoff in South Africa Leo Laporte and I discussed technology at the tournament and how South Africa has been upgraded for the biggest event in human history. We talked about 3D television, stadium bandwidth, Google StreetView, social media and gigapixel image technology, amongst other things. Check out the video above for our full discussion.

CNN says the app is part of its ‘My South Africa’ brand campaign that was launched two years ago to raise the profile of South Africa to business and leisure travellers in the lead up to World Cup 2010.

The app allows users to view South African city guides, maps, travel tips and World Cup information and view photographs, send messages to friends, find weather and financial information and a range of other things. It’s clearly geared for tourists but should be useful for local users too.

Rani R Raad, senior vice president for advertising sales at CNN International said that the release of the app signified a change in how CNN engages with advertisers and their audience.

“As an in-house commercial team, it’s great to be able to take on the most creative of agencies and capitalise on harnessing the My South Africa concept into a highly relevant application around the biggest football event in the world. We look forward to seeing this App take the brand engagement potential to new heights,” said Raad.

William Prince, global manager of e-marketing for South African Tourism said, “This new iPhone application allows South African Tourism  to offer rich, engaging content that is very specific to the users and presented in a new and dynamic way. The content is fresh, accurate and appropriate for those traveling to South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup™, and allows the users to share all their stories and experiences straight from the iPhone.”

“The City Guide, the FIFA information and all of the additional functionality that the application offers, takes our brand to a whole new level. We’re very pleased and excited about the opportunity to do this with CNN Ad Sales and to extend the campaign into the pockets of our consumers,” he added.

The CNN iPhone app was created in conjunction with Turner Commercial Productions and Creative Spark Interactive in South Africa.

The app is linked to the My South Africa website, where there is a link to the free download.

Sitting back and reflecting over the past two years makes me realise how lucky we are to have enjoyed the support that we have from our families, friends and fans. The show owes its survival to the support of a group of the most awesome people I’ve met – but more about them later.

Since we intend to broadcast every one of our shows live from now on we are committed to starting on time at our usual 4pm (UTC+2) slot every Friday. This is not an ideal time, but is the only point at which we can get most of our regular panel together. We are looking at other potential broadcast slots and might announce a scheduling change soon.

On the technical side we had to work on a shoestring budget as the podcast is yet to make any profit. We’re planning to change that soon, and the intention was always to grow this slowly and make it scalable for when the economies of the local market align with our vision for broadcasting online in it.

That in mind, we chose to broadcast the audio-only version of the show using an Icecast server that runs out of the data centre of our bandwidth sponsors, Internet Solutions.

Icecast is an awesome piece of software and ideal for our needs, providing a standardised stream that is widely supported and enables us to cater for thousands of concurrent listeners while providing the audio on local (South African) bandwidth.

To get the audio from our “studio” to the Icecast server we use an excellent piece of software from Rogue Amoeba called Nicecast. I’m a big fan of Rogue Amoeba’s software in general, and we use Audio Hijack Pro to do complex recordings of the show that require Skype calls to be supported.

Using Nicecast in conjunction with Audio Hijack Pro also has the advantage of us being able to stream and record audio on the same computer. And by now you would probably have realised that we run Macs end-to-end in our makeshift studio, although we will likely use a PC to drive our video setup in the future and we are experimenting with software solutions for live video mixing since we can’t afford to get something like a Tricaster just yet.

The rest of our setup is standard stuff. We use Shure microphones and a simple 8-channel Behringer mixer. Our live video is streamed using Ustream and the built-in webcam on a Mabook Pro. This suffices given the limit on bandwidth that we face, both for our upstream and the average downstream of our viewers. The audio for the video stream is provided from our main mixer, allowing us to bring in Skype callers.

So video is on international bandwidth and audio on local, which we feel is a good enough solution for now.

The first broadcast went relatively well and raised some good ideas for how we could make it better in the future.

We also have some new office and studio space, thanks to the awesomeness of Don Packett and Richard Mulholland at Thunk! Perspective Lab, and we will be kitting this out over the next few weeks using clever tech to get around our tiny budget.

We made fun of that fact that we don’t have a studio at the moment by packing heaps of boxes around an old coffee table that we broadcast from last Friday, pretending that we were at Brett’s mom’s house, in her storeroom. Apparently some of live viewers took us seriously on that.

The ZA Tech Show started as a group of technology journalists drinking beer and talking about technology on a Friday afternoon and we plan to keep it that way, preserving the camaraderie and raw, honest discussion that has made the show as popular as it is.

We believe that the future holds big things for the show and we look forward to sharing that with our listeners, and now viewers, live =)

Brett Haggard, Ben Kelly, Duncan McLeod and Jon Tullett are the crazy f*#kers that started this thing with me and it was great to have them all back on the show for episode 100. Since then Toby Shapshak has become a regular on the show and deserves a special mention.

Since starting the show we’ve also added Candice Jones, Samantha Perry and Aki Anastasiou to our list of occasional guests, along with Will Hahn who dials in from the USA every now and then and who has offered us amazing support.

Mark Shuttleworth, Stafford Masie, Mike Stopforth, Dwayne Bailey, Saul Kropman and other guests have appeared on the show over the last two years and added massive value for our listeners. And, away from the mic, we’ve been blown away by the awesomeness of the guys at Thunk! (mentioned above), Emerging Media Communications, Lenovo, Tribeca, Puruma, Text 100, Microsoft, Nokia and other companies that have come out in support of the podcast in various ways.

We also owe a serious debt of gratitude to the guys at Internet Solutions who have offered amazing support and who sponsor our local bandwidth. Jason Bronkhorst and Charl Malherbe at Infiltrate Media have also been legendary and designed both the ZA Tech Show and ZA Car Show logos.

I’d also like to thank our friends at the TWiT Network in Petaluma CA, especially Dane Golden and Leo Laporte who I consider mentors in the game of online broadcasting. Without knowing it they’ve provided inspiration and know-how for our show via their online knowledge-base and, more recently, they allowed us to broadcast over their wildly popular channel from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Finally, I must thank my business partner and friend Craig Rodney who glues this whole thing together from a business perspective.

It’s been a wild ride and it ain’t over yet. Here’s to the next 100!

When Apple announced the iPad in January I watched live coverage of the event on my favourite online channel – TWiT. Presenter Leo Laporte and a group of US-based journalists did a better job of covering the occasion via online streaming video than any of the conventional news channels. It was raw, on-demand journalism and a clear indication of things to come.

Watching the stream in South Africa was painful at first. The standard quality stream from TWiT requires 1000Kbps for smooth viewing, and while my Telkom 4Mpbs ADSL line is capable of four times the minimum requirement I still had to switch to a 400Kbps stream to avoid buffering delays.

My ADSL line is also not the norm in South Africa where most people have to contend with choppy wireless connectivity or slower DSL speeds starting at 384kbps. At those speeds, and with the latency and packet loss of wireless, accessing Youtube is a challenge, never mind streaming live video. Whereas in most of the developed world a 1000kbps stream is peanuts – you could watch it smoothly while running bitorrent and speaking to your mother on Skype.

So while South Africa sits in the dark ages, so to speak, the rest of the world forges ahead, binging on online video. In the USA users stream movies via Netflix on their Xboxes and other devices, or watch television on online services like Hulu. Youtube now accommodates high definition video, and if you live in South Korea or Sweden you’ll be able to watch those massive, high resolution files without any buffering.

For most South Africans even a short, low resolution video file requires minutes of buffering before it can be enjoyed without hiccups.

Local video services like Zoopy have gone someway to bringing us video services on local bandwidth – which does make a positive difference. What we need is more local content producers and aggregators to make services available domestically, and to fill the gap until our bandwidth catches up with the rest of the world. But even if we did have the equivalent of a local Netflix, it would still be challenging to watch a feature film over local bandwidth, because our domestic networks are an even bigger problem than the lack of international pipes.

In January I watched high definition video streaming wirelessly to a car connected via LTE in Paris – something I can’t do with my desktop computer at home. When you experience online video or IPTV in a developed country it makes you realise just how far behind the curve we are in South Africa.

This is especially sad given the possibilities that video holds for developing countries. Video bridges the gaps created by literacy and travel constraints, allowing teachers to show pupils things without the latter having to read. The teacher can also be anywhere in the world and the content can be prepared ahead of time. It isn’t the solution to the puzzle of education in Africa, but it could be a prominent part of it.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that we are making progress in the race to catch up with the globe when it comes to broadband – and perhaps even leapfrog most of the developed world when we get there.

At the moment, however, we are falling behind even our African counterparts, like Nigeria and Kenya where domestic networks and regulations are fast progressing to unlock international bandwidth in a meaningful way.

In South Africa we still face regulatory hurdles and a hybrid industry where old meets new in a unique way, and within a chaotic, deregulated market.

It’s going to take time for the dust to settle, the regulator to process the likes of local loop unbundling and spectrum allocation, and older networks to be consolidated with up-and-coming competitors. We also need the additional international capacity, and accompanying economies of scale that will come from undersea cables like WACS and Eassy, to bolster what has begun with Seacom.

It’s happening, but not fast enough for impatient geeks like me. In the meantime I’ll have to stick to more conventional means of obtaining video, and be thankful for my 4Mbps DSL connection, limited as it is.