ISPs see pay as you go broadband as solution to bandwidth hogging

NTL is playing down talks that it is testing pay-as-you-go broadband services. Various newsgroups, including hthell:world, are claiming that the cable provider is testing two potential services: pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and pre-pay. However an NTL spokesperson told us that it is merely an 'infrastructure and technology trial'. ...more

For new Zen, less is still Xtra

There's a new version of Creative's Jukebox Zen Xtra portable music player. The existing 60GB model now has a younger brother with a capacity of 30GB. According to Creative, however, the mid-market model does have the full feature set of its older sibling, in terms of the MediaSource interface software. ...more

US Navy orders 260 Xserves

Lockheed Martin has placed an order on behalf of the US Navy for 260 Apple Xserve servers running Linux. As well as being the biggest server sale yet for Apple, worth around $1.9mn, the deal is remarkable for the fact that the machines will not be running the Mac OS X Server software that is normally installed. ...more

QuickTime 6 unveiled in preview

Apple has released a preview version of the next version of QuickTime, its multimedia authoring and streaming software. The major new feature of QuickTime 6 is support for the new MPEG-4 (.mp4) video encoding and compression format, which enables QuickTime to deliver high-quality, standards-compliant video that can be streamed on the Internet across a range of bandwidths. ...more

UPDATED: Real claims a million tracks a week in music promo

Real Networks sold three million songs in three weeks, the company has announced, as it ends its 49 per song promotion on its online music store. What proportion of those were bought by iPod owners exploiting Real's Harmony technology which hacks Apple's digital rights management is not known. Apple has said that it will close this loophole and if it does it will leave a lot of Real customers with songs that they can no longer carry around. ...more