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2020 might be the year 5G hits the mainstream but 2025 is the year we’ll see it start to reach its full potential in the media and entertainment industry. Video is the fastest growing type of traffic today and it is forecasted to grow 45 per cent annually, right through to 2023. In an Ovum report commissioned by Intel, it is forecast that over the next decade (2019 – 2028), media and entertainment companies will be competing to win a share of a near $3 trillion wireless revenue opportunity – but what does this mean for the UK? 

5G will be the driving force behind this wireless revenue opportunity, expected to account for nearly half. We will start to see a huge shake up within the media and entertainment industry, from the way we consume content to more creative live immersive experiences for fans. 

How media demand will drive the network evolution

By as early as 2025, 57 per cent of global wireless media revenues will be generated by using the super-high-bandwidth capabilities of 5G networks and the devices that will run on them. 

The UK will be able to livestream large downloads in the blink of an eye. This will ultimately drive and accelerate content consumption, including mobile media, mobile advertising, home broadband and TV, improving experiences across a broad range of new immersive and interactive technology such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). 

Expanded AR and VR experiences will have the ability to enable a whole new channel for content creators, reaching a brand-new audience due to there being less of a ‘trade-off’ between quality and speed when it comes to streaming. 

The expected average monthly traffic per 5G subscriber will grow from 11.7GB in 2019 to 84.4GB per month in 2028, at which point video will account for 90 per cent of all 5G traffic. Applications and opportunities that are pretty much non-existent now will reach an unprecedented scale by 2028, forecast in the report to grow the media landscape more than $67 billion annually – the value of the entire current global media market in 2017. 

(Image: © Intel)

How are brands tuning into 5G?

In five years, 73 per cent of all mobile data traffic will be media driven mainly by streaming. The UK will go from a culture of downloading to a culture of streaming on mobile devices. 

Intel has partnered with some of the world’s biggest media brands to explore new models and use cases focused on delivering rich, new experiences for people such as sports and movie fans. Warner Bros. Entertainment is planning on utilising 5G and mobile-edge-computing (MEC) technology, running on Intel to deliver new services such as enhanced location-based entertainment and gaming with multi access players. Intel’s MEC will turbocharge the user experience for AR, VR and gaming content consumption – reinventing the future of the landscape. 

Early this year, Fox Sports, Fox Innovations Labs and Intel took part in the world’s first use of 5G for a live golf broadcast during the US Open. Fox Sports incorporated Intel’s 5G technology into its legacy architecture which allowed it to transfer large amounts of data at low latency which removed the cost of running fibre around the golf course. 

From large scale media brand innovations, right through to enhanced content produced by creators, 5G will pave the way for new and fresh experiences globally. Intel is no longer just ‘inside’ your computer; Intel’s technological innovation is expanding to 5G network, consumer and industrial applications and the cloud and beyond.

Alex Gledhill is Technical Specialist, Intel

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Steam is finally getting Australian pricing from November 21.

Valve announced years ago its plans to introduce Australian pricing to Steam, but it’s been a while since we heard anything – until now. 

According to emails sent to Steam developers, which then made their way to Steam forums (via PCGamesN), customers living in Australia will be able to pay for Steam games in Australian currency from November 21.

So how will the currency change work? Well, according to a premature announcement by Steam, Australian accounts with Steam Wallets in USD will automatically be converted to Australian Dollars “at a conversion rate dictated by market value at the time of conversion”. Your library will also remain unchanged.

However, Austalian Steam users will only be able to make purchases in Australian Dollars. Steam has sent out emails to publishers asking them to add an Australian price for their product before November 21, however if publishers fail to set Australian pricing for their games, they may be temporarily unavailable.

This conversion to Australian pricing comes just in time for the Steam Autumn sale .

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EE and Virgin Media have been fined £13.3m by the telecoms regulator for overcharging customers wanting to leave broadband and phone contracts early.

Ofcom said customers were left “out of pocket”.

The regulator said around 400,000 EE customers who ended their contracts early were over-billed and paid up to £4.3m too much as a result.

It added almost 82,000 Virgin customers were overcharged by just under £2.8m. However, Virgin said it would appeal.

Gaucho Rasmussen, director of investigations and enforcement at Ofcom, said: “EE and Virgin Media broke our rules by overcharging people who ended their contracts early. Those people were left out pocket and the charges amounted to millions of pounds.”

Fine ‘not justified’

The fine for Virgin Media was £7m, Ofcom said, with an additional £25,000 for providing incomplete information to the regulator.

Ofcom found that Virgin Media had levied early-exit charges that were higher than customers had agreed to when signing up to their residential contracts. The regulator said this went on for almost a year.

However, Virgin Media said it “strongly disagrees” with Ofcom’s decision and would appeal to the Competition Appeal Tribunal.

“This decision and fine is not justified, proportionate or reasonable. A small percentage of customers were charged an incorrect amount when they ended one or more of their services early and for that we are very sorry,” said Tom Mockridge, chief executive of Virgin Media.

Virgin Media said it had mistakenly overcharged 1.5% of its 5.5 million cable customers between September 2016 and August 2017.

The company has reimbursed or made charity donations covering 99.8% of its overcharging.

Customers yet to be repaid

EE apologised to customers after it was fined £6.3m following Ofcom’s discovery that over a six-year period the firm did not set out the charges its mobile customers would have to pay if they left their contracts early.

Ofcom said that up to 15 million EE customers had originally been over-billed by up to £13.5m as the company had miscalculated early-exit charges. However, not all affected customers had paid these excessive charges as EE had subsequently waived some of them, leaving £4.3m in excessive charges.

A spokesperson for EE said: “We’ve already refunded customers and changed the way we calculate early termination charges, and we will continue to focus on ensuring our policies are clear and fair for all customers.”

However, Ofcom said that £1.6m of the £4.3m of the overcharged fees were yet to be repaid as EE did not have records covering the whole period. Customers who feel they may have been overcharged should contact EE.

Ofcom said the behaviour of both companies made customers less likely to switch provider, which was against its rules.

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The foundation trying to bring affordable computing to the masses has just taken another big step in the right direction with the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+.

While the Raspberry Pi Foundation has released condensed versions in the past – the original Pi 1 Model A+ came out in 2014 – the Pi 2 or 3 computers hadn’t received that treatment until now.

Retaining the most impressive specs of the Pi 3 Model B+, the Model A+ features a 1.4GHz, 64-bit quad-core CPU as well as support for Bluetooth 4.2 and dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4GHz and 5GHz), but in a smaller, more affordable package.

The team behind the device has improved its overall thermal management as well, and booting the unit from external USB mass storage devices should be a more efficient process overall thanks to some tweaks in that area.

Some concessions have to be made to get the price and size down to what it is however, and that means halving the 1GB of RAM down to 512MB, dropping the ethernet port, and reducing the USB 2.0 ports down from four to one.

While the larger (but still tiny) Model B+ goes for $35 (£34 / AU$64), the Raspberry Pi Model A+ is now available for only $25 (£23 / AU$50) from select resellers.

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How can improvements to the GPU manufacturing process make graphics cards better? There’s no one solution, and today’s launch of the $280 Radeon RX 590 shows that Nvidia and AMD took two wildly divergent paths in the shift to the 12nm process.

Nvidia’s used the extra space and process improvements to cram its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards with radical, futuristic hardware devoted to driving adoption of real-time ray tracing and machine learning in games. The downside? The cheapest RTX option, the RTX 2070, starts at $500. AMD took a different tack: The Radeon RX 590 is essentially identical to the $240 8GB Radeon RX 580 under the hood, but shifting from 14nm to 12nm let AMD eke out much higher clock speeds than before—and prep a new graphics card that challenges the massive price gap between the $250 GTX 1060 and $370 GTX 1070.

Well, new-ish. AMD’s (rightfully) touting the price advantages of the Radeon/FreeSync ecosystem alongside the Radeon RX 590’s release, bolstered by an aggressive bundle of three hotly anticipated upcoming games, but how much more can the company squeeze out of the Polaris GPU architecture? The Radeon RX 580 was already a slightly faster version of the Radeon RX 480, after all. Let’s find out what happens when you dedicate GPU process improvements to cranking clock speeds to 11.

AMD Radeon RX 590 specs, features, prices

There’s no need to delve deep into tech specs since the Radeon RX 590 is, for all intents and purposes, a faster version of the Radeon RX 580 (and RX 480). The clock speeds are the only significant difference, with the Radeon RX 580 topping out at 1,340MHz. That makes the new Radeon RX 590 more than 200MHz faster. (AMD says the Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 will remain on the market alongside the Radeon RX 590.)

AMD

The faster reference clock speed doesn’t tell the whole story. AMD isn’t shipping a reference version of the Radeon RX 590, instead relying on its board partners to distribute custom-cooled models. Some, like the XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy that we’re testing today, ship factory-overclocked—to 1,580MHz out of the box, in the Fatboy’s case. XFX says the card will overclock to 1,600MHz no problem, if you feel like tinkering, as that’s the frequency setting the company’s labs use during testing and qualification as part of XFX’s OC+ program. A card in the box explains how to use AMD’s Radeon Wattman tool to activate the higher clocks.

Pushing AMD’s Polaris GPU architecture this hard doesn’t come easy, it seems. Upgrading the Radeon RX 480 to the RX 580 made an already power-hungry GPU even more so, and turning the Radeon RX 580 into the RX 590 seemingly demands even more energy despite the shrink to 12nm. All four of the custom cards confirmed for the Radeon RX 590’s launch—the XFX Fatboy, Asus ROG Strix, Sapphire Nitro, and PowerColor Red Devil—feature ferocious, high-end cooling solutions bristling with fans and heavy metal to tame this GPU’s higher power draw (which we’ll detail later in the benchmarks section).

AMD

The XFX Radeon RX 590’s “Fatboy” cooler is basically the XFX RX 580’s GTS cooler on steroids—hence the name. The dual large fans on the sculpted shroud still make the card look kind of like a surprised owl. But the primary heatsink is much, much thicker: 25.96mm on the Fatboy, compared to 16.96mm on the RX 580 GTS models. That gives the heatsink a total surface area of 368,866mm², or nearly 125,000mm² more than the RX 580 GTS. Thick composite copper pipes snake throughout the thick heatsink, which sits atop a unibody VRM heatsink that facilitates better heat transfer to the main cooling apparatus.

This is a serious cooler—and, no surprise, a triple-slot graphics card. XFX equipped the Radeon RX 590 Fatboy with a branded backplate to keep all that heavy metal from sagging and help dissipate heat.

No stranger to blockchain projects, Microsoft today released a blockchain development kit on its Azure cloud platform designed to enable seamless integration of blockchain with Microsoft’s and third-party SaaS offerings.

“This kit extends the capabilities of our blockchain developer templates and Azure Blockchain Workbench, which incorporates Azure services for key management, off-chain identity and data, monitoring, and messaging APIs into a reference architecture that can be used to rapidly build blockchain-based applications,” Marc Mercuri, principal program managers for Microsoft’s blockchain engineering team, said in a blog post.

Microsoft said the SDK will enable businesses to get distributed ledgers up and running quickly and build applications in days instead of what traditionally has taken  months.

Users will be able to integrate blockchain workflows with existing systems and applications leveraging Microsoft Flow and Logic Apps, and extend capabilities with a REST-based API for client development and a message-based API for system-to-system integration.

Microsoft pointed to previous blockchain-based apps that it helped build to create a transparent electronic ledger for supply chain financing in Nigeria or ensure tracking food supply in the UK.

“As patterns emerged across use cases, our teams identified new ways for Microsoft to help developers go farther, faster,” Mercuri said.

The initial blockchain SDK will focus on three capabilities: creating connecting interfaces for things such as mobile clients, IoT, SMS and voice systems; integrating data, software and media that live “off chain” such as Office documents, video and CAD files; and deploying smart contracts and blockchain business networks.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced it was planning to pilot a blockchain-based digital ID platform that would allow users to control access to sensitive online information via an encrypted data hub.

The decentralized digital identity management platform would allow users to own and secure access to their online persona.

Over the past year, Microsoft said it has been exploring how to use Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies to create new types of digital identities to enhance personal privacy, security and control.

End-to-end blockchain solutions require integration with data, software and media that live off chain,” Mercuri said. “External updates and events can trigger actions on smart contracts. Smart contract events and state changes can then trigger actions and data updates to ‘off chain’ systems and data. These external systems and AI will also need the ability to query attestable data from smart contracts to inform action.”

Amazon, Google and IBM have already launched SDKs for permissioned business blockchains. And the Linux Foundation’s open-source blockchain collaborative, Hyperledger, has also released SDKs, or modular frameworks for building, deploying and running business blockchains.

“The Azure Blockchain Development Kit is the next step in our journey to make developing end-to-end blockchain applications accessible, fast and affordable to anyone with an idea,” Mercuri said. “The resulting applications will run atop a network that has higher rated cloud performance than other large-scale providers and enable federating identities between participants using Azure Active Directory.”

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There are many factors to consider when buying a new business laptop for yourself or others in your organization. To help you make the best decision, we’ve put together this quick guide to the things you should be looking out for when making your purchase.

Sponsored by HP.

How will you use it?

The most important question to ask before drawing up your shopping list is what the device’s day-to-day duties will entail.

If it’s just for producing reports, presentations, and spreadsheets, then all modern laptops will easily cope with these tasks. But if you need to replace a desktop machine, you’re better off going for models with larger 15in or 17in displays, as they provide a more comfortable experience for users.

HP

Video editing, graphic design, product development, or more technically demanding jobs will require a powerful processor, at least a 7^th generation Intel i7, plus a minimum of 8GB of RAM, with 16GB being preferable. A range of ports for accessories is also a good idea. These combinations are found on the Workstation class of laptopRemove non-product link, such as HP’s Z-rangeRemove non-product link which are built with exactly this kind of performance in mind.

For the executive level, you’ll want a device that looks premium, both in design and build. Slim form factors, HD+ displays, and high-grade materials are the current standards, with the new HP Spectre FolioRemove non-product link representing the pinnacle in terms of exquisite aesthetics and formidable power that will never look out of place on a boardroom table.

HP

Which software do you want to use?

Another key consideration is the software your business uses. If it has a range of applications, with some dating back a few years, then you’ll need to make sure they all work with the operating system that comes on the laptop.

Apple MacBooks might seem desirable in the stores, but if the applications you rely on aren’t compatible with macOS then they’ll just end up as very expensive paperweights.