Internet TV in airplanes next year

By mid 2006, airlines will be able to offer passengers access to Internet television, provided by Connexion by Boeing, in seat back monitors, reports vnunet.com.

The technology could give passengers access to on demand movies or let them watch live television broadcasts while in mid-air. It will be up to the airline to decide if and how much they charge for the service.

Internet television will debut with four channels on Singapore Airlines this year, but programmes will be available only on laptop computers that are equipped with Windows Media Player 9.

"Increasing adoption by airlines is one of the service`s major obstacles," said Connexion by Boeing president Laurette Koellner. "Some airlines don`t feel that they need to be the leader."

Almost two-thirds of outsourcing deals are failing because organisations are only paying lip service to the small print in the rush to make cost savings, according to new figures.

The statistics, provided to silicon.com by management and outsourcing consultancy Compass, reveal that about 59% of all outsourcing contracts fail.

Despite the high level of failures and the high profile moves by the likes of JP Morgan and Prudential to bring their IT back in-house the amount of "in-sourcing" activity is still relatively low at about 5%.

"In the frenzy to make cost savings, companies are only paying lip service to governance and often adopt a policy of 'we`ll agree to agree later on,` when signing contracts," said Compass Management Consultancy managing director Andy Chestnutt.

Mobiles are becoming "media channels" as music, games, gambling and adult content clamour to make the industry worth $42.8bn (lb24.6bn) by 2010, BBC News reports.

Analysts at Informa Telecoms predict the way people pay for content will change as content providers target people directly, outside operators.

Mobiles will support MP3 audio formats as standard, just as cameras are standard on mobiles now and models that have enough memory to hold 50 to 60 full tracks will become common place, said senior analyst at Informa Simon Dyson.

This will make the mobile the most popular mass-market digital music device within the next five years, but by virtue of the mobile being so popular in the first instance.

"What you will see is more use of buying a download that you can use as a ringtone, or video streaming with it rather than just the ringtone," said Dyson.

Oracle has released two sets of database patches to fix flaws in previously released security patches, pcworld.com reports.

Oracle said that it has identified problems with two of its security updates. The first relates to a critical patch update in April, which fixed 70 security flaws in Oracle databases and application servers.

Earlier this month, Oracle confirmed that the April critical patch update was flawed - a step was missing from the installation script.

Last week, however, Oracle confirmed in an e-mail to customers that the July fix for the April update didn`t work properly.