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A UK government proposal to charge citizens with fixed phone lines a levy of 50p per month in order to fund broadband plans in the Digital Economy Bill has been condemned as "unfair" by members of parliament. The Business Innovation and Skills Committee said that most affected by the new levy would not benefit from the ultra-fast broadband services the government is pushing.

The government says that upgrading its broadband networks is the best way to drive further investment, maintaining that such measures are vial to the UK's economic growth. "We believe that a 50p levy placed on fixed telecommunication lines is an ill-directed charge," the committee asserts. "It will place a disproportionate cost on a majority who will not, or are unable to, reap the benefits of that charge."

Also included in the broadband plans is a goal to provide a minimum of 2Mbps Internet anywhere in Britain by 2012. The committee does agree with this part of the goal in principal, although it criticizes the government for not being more specific. Broadband speeds vary for customers throughout the day, and can also vary based on the distance between a home and an exchange.

TiVo Inc. has reached out to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over concerns that the use of Switched Digital Video (SDV) technology by Cable providers will destroy its business. While traditional cable infrastructure delivers all available channels at once to subscribers' receivers, SDV will deliver only the channels currently being accessed.

The benefits of SDV are obvious; savings in bandwidth for one and the possibility of setting up systems with multiple times the channels currently being offered to subscribers. The system requires a receiver to send an upstream signal to a cable headend to request a signal be sent down the cable; a TiVo box cannot do this and relies on infrastructure that allows it to simply lock on to the available signals.

In a nutshell, this means that a TiVo box cannot change a channel on a SDV-based system, whereas a provider-issued box can. TiVo attacks the industry in a filing with the FCC on the issue, pointing out that TiVo is the "only major competitive entrant left standing" in the DVR space. It attributes this position to Cable's historical reluctance to open networks to third-party hardware, as opposed to natural free-market forces.

South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung Electronics is aiming to be the first TV-maker to offer a full HD 1080p LED-backlit 3D television in Europe. It will begin shipments of its 3D-capable units to Europe next month along with expansions of its 8 and 7-series LEDs and 6-series LCDs.

For plasma proponents, Samsung is aiming to ship 3D plasma televisions to Europe in "late Spring". The company will also release its new BD-C6900, a 3D Blu-ray player, and will offer 9-series LEDs and the HT-C6930W home theater rig in Spring.

3D models come with "wireless-ready" capabilities and sport a built-in Ethernet connection to access the company's Internet@TV online applications store. Among the media downloads being offered from the service is software from the History Channel, Cartoon Network, Google's Picasa and BBC's iPlayer.

Twitter has boasted that its users now send out 50 million 140-character-or-less tweets per day, or about six hundred per second. The micro-blogging giant, which is usually mute about much of its statistics, revealed the milestone on Monday. The site had five thousand tweets every day back in 2007, which went up to 300,000 per day in 2008.

In 2009, tweets had grown to an impressive 2.5 million every day, according to Kevin Weil, a member of Twitter's analytics team. "Tweets grew 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day," Weil said. "Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day -- that's an average of 600 tweets per second."

The total number of Twitter users is unknown to the public, kept as an internal statistic at the company since it launched.

Considering that the 50,000,000 figure only represents the amount of tweets made by users, the actual number of tweets delivered by the service would be much higher, with tweets being shown for all followers of a user. Furthermore, Twitter omitted messages that were posted from accounts identified as spam from the total figures.

The European Commission (EC) is set to approve a merger between Orange and T-Mobile, which will create the largest mobile phone company in the United Kingdom. A request from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to the Commission to launch its own independent investigation spurred both operators into action to alleviate any concerns that regulators might have with the merger.

Among the concerns were the dominant share the new company would have over the scarce wireless spectrum and what the merger would have meant to the UK's smallest mobile phone network; 3. Despite being the smallest network in the UK, 3 can be credited with driving price competition in the UK in recent years.

In order to fend off a lengthy competition-probe in the UK, T-Mobile and Orange came to a deal with 3, which is owned by Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa.

Under the new deal, 3 will get access to 3,000 more mast sites across the UK. This would bring its total access to 16,000 sites and give it the largest 3G network in the United Kingdom. As for concerns about the wireless spectrum, T-Mobile and Orange agreed that the new mobile network would give back a quarter of the spectrum allotted to it for use by rivals to provide wireless broadband services.

PreCentral is reporting today that the Palm webOS 1.4 firmware update should hit Sprint and Verizon phones by the 25th, with rollout expected to last for up to a week.

100,000 devices will get the OTA rollout at a time, but users can manually install it from the update launcher if they want it right when it launches.

The update should bring video recording capability, Flash 10.1 compatibility, speed and battery improvements, as well as LED alerts on by default.

According to the New York Times, Wal-Mart is set to purchase VUDU, the premium video streaming service, as a way to compete against iTunes, Netflix and cable VOD.

The move marks the third time Wal-Mart has tried to compete in the realm of video rental. In 2004, it started a DVD-by-mail service, but closed it in 2005 and set its customers right to Netflix as part of a deal.

In 2007, they started an a la carte music download program with full blessing from the major record labels, but killed the service in 2008 after Apple surpassed them as the biggest music retailer in the United States.

Vudu offers the most HD movies, and offers the best quality, but has remained for the most part, obscure, as it does not have broad marketing.

Nokia and Sky have teamed up to introduce a new application that will give smartphone users a way to watch live Premiership football matches on their Nokia handsets.

The app is free from the Ovi Store, and will also allow users to watch on-demand highlights, or program their Sky+ boxes to record the games.

So far, the app is compatible with the Nokia N97, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the Nokia 5530, with Nokia 5230 and X6 support expected soon. 10 other handsets will get a watered down version without live broadcasts but with the other features.

Rupert Englander of Nokia adds (via PCAdvisor): "Modern lifestyles have driven demand for great mobile content and services on-the-go, and it's great to know that this app will make a real difference to Nokia users."

Google has been sued today by Harvard Law School student Eva S. Hibnick, who has started a class-action lawsuit against the search giant "on behalf of Gmail users," claiming that the new Buzz social networking service is a breach of user privacy.

Buzz is a voluntary add on to Gmail, but all users are automatically enrolled and have to opt-out if they don't want to use it.

"The social networking industry is going too far," Hibnick added, saying she was disgusted that upon opening Gmail, she was already being "followed" by people on her contact list that Google had chosen for her.

Law School student Benjamin R. Osborn, who is aiding Hibnick, doesn't say whether he believes Google intentionally breached privacy. "I don't know what Google’s motive is in all of this," Osborn says, via the Harvard Crimson newspaper. "I think they were just trying to jump-start their social network." However, "[Buzz] has already violated people’s privacy. Damages have been incurred. And we want Google to change its conduct in the future."

In early January, YouTube launched a video rental service that allowed users to rent films from the Sundance Film Festival. The service has not necessarily strived, but today the streaming giant has announced an expansion of the service.

The films cost $3.99 to rent for 48-hours, but the NYTimes reported that YouTube and the content providers only netted $10,709.16 in revenue, from 2684 views.

New publishers that have signed up for the service, however, include Anime Network, Bay View Fitness, Cerebellum Corp, FineCooking, FineWoodworking.com, FitnessChannel, FUNimation Entertainment, GolfLink.com, Language Tree, Questar Entertainment, Terwilliger Productions, TravelVideoStore.com and UFOTV Studios, says NewTeeVee.

Pricing and availability will differ by publisher.

Last week we reported that Ubisoft's new Assassin's Creed 2 for PC was given DRM that requires a constant Internet connection for the game to work. If your Internet drops for any reason, you are kicked from the game, losing all progress you have made since the last save.

Ubisoft has defended their actions today, via an interview with CVG.

The full interview (definitely worth reading if you were critical of the previous article):

What's the problem this DRM is trying to address?
Ubi are increasingly concerned about piracy on the PC.
"It's a huge problem - you know it, I know it, other people know it. It really is a very important issue that all serious companies need to address," says their spokesperson. But they also believe that their online services will make PC gaming better. "The real idea is that if you offer a game that is better when you buy it, then people will actually buy it. We wouldn't have built it if we thought that it was really going to piss off our customers."

So what's in it for gamers?
Ubi say there are three advantages to their online services. The first: you don't need a disc. The second: that you can install the game on as many PCs as you like, as many times as you like. And the third: the automatic uploading of savegames to Ubisoft's servers.

Mitsubishi has unveiled new upscaling technology today, one that will upconvert 1080p Full HD content to 4K2K.

The company says the upscaling is possible thanks to new algorithms and software.

Mitsubishi does note that the tech cannot yet upscale Blu-ray content, despite support for HDMI 1.4.

The technology will be added to upcoming 4K2K HDTVs, in the same way that current TVs have SD upscaling technology built-in.

A man arrested for recording 2008's mega-hit movie The Dark Knight has been sentenced to 2 years in prison and ordered to pay nearly $25,000 in restitution.

The sentence isn't exactly surprising. Recording movies in a theater has been a federal felony in the US since 2005, when the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act was passed.

What's much more interesting in this case is the MPAA's official statement on the sentence (PDF). They're calling it "an appropriate sentence for a very serious crime." And the reason given? It's because "The theft of films by camcording is a serious threat to the health of the motion picture industry."

Perhaps this case isn't the best one for making those sorts of arguments. Despite widespread availability of the movie through P2P networks, The Dark Knight was the top grossing movie in the US for all of 2008 by a wide margin.

With more than half a billion dollars in box office receipts, it beat the number two movie, Iron Man, by more than $200 million according to the MPAA's own figures (PDF). In fact despite slightly lower theater attendance for the year, The Dark Knight eventually became the fifth highest grossing movie of all time.

Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff has stated that the company is currently developing an app that will bring music videos to your HDTV via the upcoming Boxee Box set-top box.

The company has distribution partners in YouTube and AOL, and is looking to continually expand.

Boxee, which is currently in beta, has said they have almost 1 million users that have downloaded the software, and that number is expected to continue growing.

Vevo is a joint venture between Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, using YouTube as a backend, and with financial support from AT&T and Abu Dhabi Media Co..

9-to-5Mac has reported an interesting finding today, showing off what seems to be pretty concrete proof that future iPhone OS products such as later model iPads or iPhones will include video chatting support.

Found tucked away in the 3.2 SDK, are a few icons relating to video calling, such as "decline or end video" and "accept video."

There are also some video chat related strings, as pictured.

Of course it makes more sense that this may only be available for the iPad (which is expected to have a front facing camera) but future iPhones may get a second camera, it wouldn't be that far out of the realm of possibility.