YouView, the new IPTV box that is coming to the UK, has announced that the payment methods will not be handled by YouView themselves. CEO, Richard Halton, stated that, as YouView are not providing the content, it is not appropriate that they handle the payment methods, despite the overwhelming consumer preference for a single point of payment.

This could go one of two ways, I feel, it could either be really good for the consumer, or really bad for YouView. Internet content providers – the providers that have built a business on the Internet, not the providers that are trying to port their TV business over to the Internet – have been forced to work with the way the Internet works. This has led, in some cases, to better ads, alternative business models and, most importantly, content that you don’t have to pay for to get.

The successful content providers have managed to make their business work without charging subscription fees, and hopefully this will translate over to IPTV services. Otherwise, IPTV boxes may just fail to take off. Then again, as TV companies move to the net and refuse to change their business model, leaving consumers with no other options if they want to see their favourite shows.

In a slight break of format, this story is not a linked news story, but an observation brought on by the release of PlayStation Move. As I recently wrote about, Sony have announced 3D Blu-ray support will be coming to the PlayStation 3. They have also hyped up the forthcoming 3D games that will be available for that very console. A potentially interesting line of development, however, is a combination of 3D gaming and motion controlled gaming.

Now, I don’t think that the PlayStation Move (or the Wiimote) will offer the best 3D/motion controlled experience, although it can offer a good one. Think about it; the 3D technology (glasses, for now) projects the game world around you (as long as you’re looking at your TV), and through some clever cooperation between the 3D projection and the motion controlling, it appears to you that you are moving objects by touch, rather than controlling something that moves the objects for you.

I don’t like to tout the wonders of Xbox too often, for fear of being labelled a fanboy, but the idea behind Kinect would be perfect for this. Kinect is still to come out and be tested by the market, so its yet to be seen whether it would work well enough for this, and I’m not even sure Xbox is technologically capable of 3D games, but a hands free motion control system married together with 3D could be the next big immersive experience.

Rumours are surfacing that Facebook are planning to create their own smartphone. I don’t claim to be a legitimate news outlet (more a new pundit) so if you want to know more about the rumours, or how valid they are, click the link below. I want to focus on the ‘if they do’ side of this story.

Firstly, the idea of a Facebook made smartphone seems laughable. The main reason being that Facebook is a service that can be encapsulated into one app! iPhone, Android, and a host of other smartphones can all fit the entirety of Facebook into a single application that sits alongside a host of other applications. Basing a phone around one of these applications seems like a backward step.

The bigger point, however, is the fact that Facebook have failed, on a number of occasions, to respect users privacy. They constantly bring out new features that allow you share more and more information with the world, which is fine, but then they opt you into those features without asking, which is not. Whenever a successful company moves into a market that they have no experience in, there is nearly always teething problems to do with the fact that the company can’t adapt to the new market, and wants to do things the familiar way.

In short; I wouldn’t trust a Facebook phone, and I think there has been sufficient bad press over this issues recently that I wouldn’t be alone.

Some other stuff

Softpedia has a posted a list of websites that, they say, let IE9 show off its abilities. The newest iteration of Internet Explorer (beta release) has been made available for download, and seems to be getting a quite positive response. Microsoft do seem to have made it very Chrome-like, and it does seem to be faster, but I’m not sure I’m ready to move over. Anyway, the idea behind the post is simple; website are (if they are well designed) made to be compatible with older browsers. There are ways to make beautiful websites that still work well in older browsers, and, for accessibility reasons, a lot of sites opt to make their site compatible rather than stunning. The sites on this list show off what a website can look like.

Diaspora, the open-source Facebook alternative, has been released in alpha (very early version), and is already being slated for security issues. Diaspora already has a huge mountain to climb, if it intends to take users away from Facebook. That said, security holes in an alpha release of an open source project is hardly reason to believe that they have no hope of ever succeeding.

A teaser for the new Minox camera, the PX3D, claims that it can take 3D images that can be viewed without glasses. I don’t expect this camera to be amazing, and you’re going to need special digital photo frames/displays to view the images in 3D anywhere else beside the camera’s display, but this is just another example of glasses-less 3D creeping into the market. We have a gaming solution in the Nintendo 3DS, a TV solution from Toshiba, coming out later this year, and now a camera. It is only a matter of time before the technology starts to get really cool!

That was your somewhat groggy first Thoughts on [tech and gaming] News for the week. I hope you had a good weekend, and don’t buy a Facebook phone! Check back tomorrow for Tuesdays news round-up.

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