The rise and rise of subscription streaming services continues, with UK media regulator Ofcom revealing that memberships to the top three web-based video distributors (Netflix, Sky’s Now TV and Amazon Prime) now outnumber legacy pay-TV subscribers in Britain.

Netflix, NOW TV and Amazon Prime amassed 15.4 million paying account holders, while pay-TV services including Sky’s legacy satellite service only hit 15.1 million subscriptions.

Showing the gigantic rise of Netflix, it accounted for 9.1 million of that 15.4 million  figure – a rise of 32 percent.

Money matters

However, look at revenue generated by the two different distribution methods, and it’s another story entirely. Video on demand services in the past year up to March 2018 made £895 million, a figure thats dwarfed by the £6.4 billion collected by Sky UK, Virgin TV, BT TV and Talk Talk TV.

But the shift is undeniable – as smart devices proliferate, broadcast television viewing sessions fell to just around three hours a week on average. YouTube, with its massive, varied and often amateur content maintains the biggest overall share of viewing time.

With the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV committing less money to new content than it has over the past 20 years, and services like Amazon moving into spaces (such as Premier League football coverage) traditionally dominated by traditional broadcast TV players, it’s starting to appear increasingly bleak for the old guard.

http://www.techradar.com/news/netflix-and-streaming-service-uk-subscriber-numbers-overtake-pay-tv

To make your busy lives simpler and to help you keep on top of everything on your daily to-do lists, Google has announced that, starting this week, Assistant will provide a “visual overview” of your entire day when you you open the app. 

Google Assistant will pull together personal information, appointments, reservations, scheduled meetings, reminders, and much more to offer a curated snapshot of what your day will look like.

Right up top will be your commute details, be it to work or for a meeting, but as you scroll down, you’ll be provided with all the other reminders you need, in chronological order, including flight times, delivery information, bill payment reminders and more. 

This overview will be updated throughout the day – Android users can access the updates via a new icon that resembles an empty box located at the top right corner of the Assistant app, while iOS users will be shown regular updates as soon as you open the app itself.

Assistant will also send notifications to your phone for upcoming events and reminders, and even alert you if your flight has been delayed.

Future plans

Google is determined to make its digital assistant more proactive and will “continue to add more useful features to your snapshot over time”. One of those new features will be the integration of notes and lists you have on Google Keep, or third-party apps like Todoist, with Google Assistant.

Google also plans to add a “new discovery section” to help you find things to do around your location. The search giant will also integrate parking locations to Assistant, so you can remember where you parked your car, and will also add personalized recommendations for music and podcasts.

While this consolidation of information into a single view can reduce the need to juggle myriad apps at precisely the right times so you don’t miss anything, we’ll have to wait a while for it to happen. For now, though, you’ll need to be patient for just a few days before you see Assistant’s new visual snapshot feature appear on your device and begin to make life – or at least your day – a lot easier.

http://www.techradar.com/news/latest-google-assistant-update-will-add-a-visual-walkthrough-of-your-entire-day

New figures provided by NBN Co to a Senate Estimates committee have revealed that many of the broadband network’s fixed wireless towers are oversubscribed, leading to congestion for many rural and regional customers. 

When the fixed wireless network was originally being designed back in 2011, the assumed take-up rate (that is, the percentage of premises that qualify for access to the network which actually end up subscribing) was just 20%. In many areas, that appears to have been a significant underestimate, with over a quarter of the network’s 1,972 fixed wireless towers seeing take-up rates of 50% or higher. 

NBN Co has declined to identify the specific towers with higher-than-expected take-up rates, with the rationale that “[i]n almost all cases where congestion is occurring, only a portion of a given tower coverage area will be potentially impacted”. 

Fixed wireless towers typically contain multiple ‘cells’ which provide the connection between the tower and users. Under Senates Estimates questioning, NBN Co did however clarify that congestion “has predominantly arisen within areas where the fixed wireless service has been available for several years and reflects both high take-up and changing usage patterns”.

“Working to fix the problem”

The fixed wireless network currently has around 240,000 active subscribers – a number which is expected to grow to 400,000 in the near future – and NBN Co has recently changed several aspects of the service, including cancelling the top 100Mbps speed tier and doubling the monthly data quota per user. 

In response to the new congestions findings, the government-owned corporation said that it was “working systematically to provide capacity relief across the range of congested cells” and that it was “proactively informing specific households that will be impacted by cell capacity upgrades”. 

NBN Co has previously stated that its goal for rural and regional users is to provide a broadband service of at least 25Mbps. A report on IT News estimated that only around 9% of fixed-wireless customers (or just under 22,000) were subscribed to the higher service’s 50Mbps speed tier, which is more expensive that its wired counterpart.

http://www.techradar.com/news/nbn-cos-got-a-new-headache-fixed-wireless-congestion