KEY POINTS:
If there's one event at which I'd like to be a fly on the wall, it is the meeting of tech and media luminaries that takes place in Sun Valley, Idaho each July.
Last week, the private jets again flew in a mix of billionaires and new-economy money-makers riding the latest wave of internet and media mergers and acquisitions.
News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, Walt Disney boss Robert Iger, Time Warner's Dick Parsons, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Microsoft's Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google fame, Intel's Craig Barrett, the two Michaels (Dell and Bloomberg) and investor Warren Buffett, shared canapes and champagne at this year's event.
The presence of executives from Sling Media and Joost represent the convergence of media and internet.
Sling Media's Slingbox allows users to watch their pay TV feed on computers and phones anywhere in the world. It has also unveiled Clip+Sling, which allows users to record TV show clips and upload them to the internet or send them to friends. Sling plans to build an online community that will differ from Youtube in that professionally made content will be uploaded.
US broadcaster CBS has teamed up with Sling to have its TV shows clipped. Its angle is that new forms of advertising can be created to go with the short clips of its content.
Joost founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis were attending for the first time, but their peer-to-peer music download service KaZaA and the free internet telephony system Skype, have contributed greatly to the favoured model of web content delivery.
Their latest baby, Joost, a free TV-on-the-web service, has the media barons' interest. That's because unlike KaZaA, which people used to take copyrighted music for free, Joost is designed to protect media companies' content. The idea is that short advertisements viewed by web users underpin the economics of the service.
Sling+Clip and Joost represent a big risk for the old media players.
Still, they're shrewd enough to realise that they face the greater risk of losing their audiences entirely unless they embrace the web.
An eye on the speedo
So you're surfing the web on your home wireless network and pages are taking an age to load. Is it a problem with the internet into your house or the wireless connection?
Router maker Belkin has come up with the N1 Vision, which has an LCD screen that clocks wireless network upload and download speeds and bandwidth usage and displays network access keys.
The router supports the new 802.11n wireless standard, which boosts connection speeds well above 100Mbps (megabits per second). Price: US$200 (NZ$255).
www.belkin.com
