An Bord Pleanála has given the green light to the first application it has received under its new fast-track planning process. The application for the re-opening of 7km of railway line between Clonsilla and Dunboyne was dealt with within the 18-week time limit specified under law. There had been 34 objections to the proposal, including one from An Taisce. Ed - isnt there always! 
Apple’s iPhone will be available to Irish customers from March 14.
Users will have to subscribe to O2 Ireland’s service, as the company will be the exclusive carrier. The prices will range from €399 to €499. The monthly tariffs will start at €45. The iPhone has a touch-screen and combines a phone, an iPod and internet.
O2 made the announcement as it reported results for the final quarter of last year. Service revenue was up 3.7% on the same quarter a year earlier to €231m. Customer numbers moved up to 1.646m, up by just under 1% on the same period a year earlier.
Monthly average revenue per user was €45.70, down from €47 in Q3 but up from €45 a year earlier. O2 now has 41,000 broadband subscribers. Chief financial officer Paul Whelan said the Irish mobile market continued to be ‘extremely competitive’ and challenging.
Under proposals being brought before the Cabinet in the next few months, every home and business across the country is to get a new six-character postcode to bring Ireland into line with the rest of the EU. Dublin postcodes will be based around the existing format with Dublin 4 becoming DO4 123, with the last three digits representing a specific house or business.
Meanwhile it is expected the rest of the country will roughly follow the existing car licence plate system, with addresses in Sligo starting with SO and those in Galway with GAL. It is argued that a new national postcode system will improve efficiency by overcoming problems associated with incorrect addresses on mail, although An Post says it is managing just fine without it.
However, it will be a major benefit for marketing companies. It will also help emergency services pin-point specific addresses more quickly. “Postcodes are a much bigger piece of infrastructure than just An Post. It has implications for every business, resident, county council, road.
“We don’t need it for processing, but we will be at the heart of it and will play our part . . . Our system is state of the art and has the capacity to run all different types of coding. We can certainly cater for it if and when it is introduced, and it looks increasingly like it’s just a matter of setting a date,” she added.
Communications Minister Eamon Ryan is finalising the postcode plans and is expected to bring them to Government before the summer.
The game is bundled with the Wii Wheel, but provides five different control options for players: the Wii Wheel, Wii Remote turned on its side, Wii Remote and Nunchuk combination, Classic Controller and even Nintendo GameCube controller.
Sixteen new tracks will be included, in addition to sixteen other tracks from previous Mario Kart games. We’re preying one of those isn’t Baby Park. Multiplayer mode includes four-player local racing and eleven-player support using Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection service. Ten battle arenas will also be available.
In addition, a new Wii Channel will be launched alongside the game - the Mario Kart Channel. Players will be able to monitor their ranking against other players, as well as access and share Ghost Data with each other. The Channel will also allow players to jump into friend’s races, even if they’re in progress, or simply be a spectator. Even better, Nintendo has hinted that it will run special events through the service.
The GAA today announced that RTÉ has secured the rights for comprehensive GAA Championship coverage across television, radio and RTÉ.ie for the next three seasons, guaranteeing free-to-air coverage up to and including 2010.
Today’s announcement ensures that the public will enjoy quality coverage of our national games across all of RTÉ’s media platforms.
RTÉ has secured:
- four live television packages for the GAA Championships
- the Sunday night television highlights package
- all available live national radio rights in both the English and Irish language
- rights to simulcast televised matches on RTÉ.ie throughout the island of Ireland.
RTÉ partnered BBC Northern Ireland to ensure that viewers throughout the island of Ireland will have free-to-air coverage of the Ulster Championships.
Today’s announcement means that the RTÉ audience will, over the next three years, have access to:
- 120 live Championship games on RTÉ Television
- Highlights of every Championship game each week on RTÉ Television’s The Sunday Game
- Live and exclusive Championship coverage on RTÉ Radio 1 and RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta
- Extensive RTÉ News coverage on RTÉ One and RTÉ Two television, RTÉ Radio 1, RTÉ 2 fm, RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, RTÉ.ie and RTÉ Aertel
- All televised Championship matches, highlights and video clips on demand on RTÉ.ie throughout the island of Ireland.
Japanese high-tech giant Toshiba today announced its withdrawal from the high-definition DVD business, conceding defeat in a long-running format war with rival Sony. Toshiba said that it aimed to end sales of its HD DVD machines by the end of March, clearing the way for the Blu-ray format developed by Sony Corporation and its partners to become the industry standard.
‘We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,’ Toshiba’s chief executive Atsutoshi Nishida said. In a replay of the VHS-Betamax video cassette format war in the late 1970s, Japanese high-tech giants had been battling to set the industry standard in next-generation DVDs with two rival formats that are incompatible.
But Toshiba and its HD DVD partners suffered a series of heavy setbacks, with Hollywood titan Warner Brothers and US retail giant Wal-Mart both throwing their weight behind Blu-ray.
Consumers and investors cheered an impending end to a format war for next-generation DVDs, with share gains for both Toshiba, on the verge of abandoning its HD DVD discs, and Sony, the leader of the rival Blu-ray camp.
Both formats have the space to hold high-definition movies, but growing support from Hollywood and big US retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores has given Blu-ray a crushing lead. However, overall sales so far have made up only a small portion of the $24 billion home DVD sector, as shoppers, faced with machines that played only one type of disc or the other, have held back.
Toshiba said today that no decisions had been made on HD DVD, but a company source told Reuters over the weekend that the company was in the final stage of planning its exit. An end to the war means consumers can now be sure they won’t be stuck with a 21st century equivalent of Betamax - Sony’s videotape technology that lost out to VHS in the 1980s - and should help accelerate the shift to the new DVD.
At the core of both formats are blue lasers, which have a shorter wavelength than red lasers used in current DVD equipment, enabling discs to hold up to five times as much data. Toshiba had billed its format as less costly for the industry as it allowed some existing DVD-making equipment to be reused, but Blu-ray allowed for more content to be packed onto each disc.
Toshiba will likely suffer losses of hundreds of millions of dollars to scrap production of its equipment and other steps to withdraw from the business. But analysts gave high marks to Toshiba’s quick move to pull the plug on HD DVD just two years after launching its first players. It took Sony more than a decade to quit Betamax.
Giovanni Trapattoni has been appointed as the next Republic of Ireland manager, according to a report in today’s Irish Examiner. The FAI three-man selection committee travelled to Austria to meet with the Italian legend who the paper believes will commence his new role when his contract with Red Bull Salzburg expires in May.
FAI chief executive John Delaney could fly out to meet Trapattoni’s advisors in the next 24 hours to put the finishing touches to a deal that could be worth in the region of €1.4million per year. Delaney confirmed this afternoon that a board of management meeting of the association will take place later this week to ratify their new man.
Delaney said one name has been put forward by the three-man selection committee and a press conferance to announce Steve Staunton’s successor will take place after the management meeting on Wednesday evening.
Is ITV involved in HD?
ITV has committed to launch an HD channel in 2008. ITV1 HD will feature the best of ITV sport and drama in stunning high definition quality. It will begin as a two-to three-hour peak time service that will extend its hours as HD audiences build.
HD is already capturing public imagination and industry forecasts suggest that the number of HD ready sets could reach 30 million by the end of switchover.
The launch of ITV1 HD will ensure that ITV is at the forefront of the HD revolution for our viewers and advertisers.
Freesat
A new digital satellite TV service from the BBC and ITV. Scheduled for launch in 2008, freesat has no monthly subscription, just a one-off payment for the digital box, satellite dish and installation. ITV HD content will be available via freesat.
CROKE PARK could be in line to host a Premier League match after revolutionary proposals were unveiled yesterday to cash in on the League’s global appeal.
The plan is to introduce a new round of 10 competitive fixtures, to be played abroad each season. These could be worth around £5m to each of the competition’s 20 clubs.
Some of the games will be played in faraway places like Beijing and Sydney but, with travelling sure to be an issue, Dublin will also be considered if the money on offer is right.
Although the league’s chief executive, Richard Scudamore, said yesterday it was too early to predict the windfall for clubs, an initial business plan estimates it could make between £40 and £80m each year. That could represent a 10pc boost to their annual income on top of the £900m-a-year they receive from the current TV deal.
