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07-03-2012 04:18 HLN's Dr. Drew talks with actress Elizabeth Berkley about teen girls going online to find out if they are pretty or not.

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Teen Girls ask internet if they're pretty - Video

BSkyBs upcoming over-the-top internet TV service could create a new post-subscription ecosystem for pay-per-view and pay-as-you-go TV shows.

Therell be a spectrum all the way down to individual shows - well see how far we get, finance chief Andrew Griffith said at the FT Digital Media Conference in London.

Imagine a world without satellite dishes. By this summer, Sky, in a bold step, is due to launch subscription movie, sports and entertainment bundles on connected TVs, game consoles and other devices without the usual necessity for its core satellite subscription.

But, although those bundles will be offered on a month-by-month basis, more granular options will also be on offer

Theres a lot of growth left in cable and satellite platforms in the UK, Griffith told the conference. But a psychological barrier has been the need for a dish, a 12-month contract because of the way we put set-top box in to the market and the perception (though not the reality) that you need to buy a bundle.

Over-the-top platforms facilitate new services that are more pay-as-you-go. Thats not necessarily deflating in terms of price - some of those pay-as-you-go services are more expensive - but they could reach out to a much larger base than the 13 million or so people who take (UK) pay-TV today.

Its a far cry from the BSkyB (NYSE:BSY - News) we have come to know, which regards its satellite/broadband/telephone subscription as core, and potentially a step-change for premium TV video...

Soon, Sky will be offering not just Sky Movies and Sky Sports monthly subscriptions over IP-enabled devices, but also content like individual pay-per-view movies via Box Office, individual sporting events or tournaments, subscriptions only to individual drama series and even one-off rental access to individual episodes - all over internet TV devices like consoles, set-top boxes and tablets.

But how much will it cost? Skys new IPTV bundles will likely be priced higher than the new online subscription offers from Netflix (NSDQ:NFLX - News) (6pm) and Lovefilm (5pm), to reflect its better content line-up, but could go cheaper than or equal to the equivalent packages on its own satellite platform. After all, the new offerings wont come with any of the infrastructure costs of satellite.

Were in a market with really good headroom for growth, Griffith told paidContent at the FT Digital Media Conference. Cable and satellite are only in 55 percent of homes, 40 percent of homes have never paid anyone for TV although they have paid for content like DVDs.

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Sky's Internet TV Service Could Offer Pay-As-You-Go Shows

RYE BROOK, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Broadview Networks, a leading provider of hosted voice, data and cloud computing solutions, announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named OfficeSuite Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) as a recipient of the 2011 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year Award.

OfficeSuite ACD is a fully featured hosted application that is integrated with OfficeSuite, Broadviews award-winning cloud-based IP phone solution. OfficeSuite ACD provides robust call center capabilities for business customers, including advanced call routing, queuing, call recording, out-of-the-box reporting, and dashboard functionality.

OfficeSuite ACD delivers the advanced call center features of a PBX or standalone ACD without the need to invest capital in onsite equipment or intensive IT support. It is easily managed in the cloud and administered without extensive training from anywhere via a web browser. It provides a suite of highly flexible capabilities that enable quick and easy prioritization and distribution of incoming business calls, customized hold treatments and advanced routing options that factor in call agents skills, location, experience and other parameters.

We are honored to receive a 2011 Product of the Year Award from INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, said Jeff Blackey, senior vice president of marketing for Broadview Networks. OfficeSuite is just one of the ways Broadview is making it easier for SMBs to run their businesses. Weve incorporated powerful enterprise-grade features into our hosted call center and recording solution and made them available to SMBswithout the need for any new investment in equipment or additional IT resources. Whether for three or 300 users, Broadviews cloud-based ACD is an affordable and easy-to-use solution.

I am happy to grant Broadview Networks with a Product of the Year Award. The editors of INTERNET TELEPHONY have verified that OfficeSuite Automatic Call Distribution displays quality and innovation plus provides real solutions in the marketplace, stated Rich Tehrani, chief executive officer of TMC. I would like to congratulate the entire team at Broadview Networks for their commitment to advancing IP communication technologies.

2011 Product of the Year winners are published in INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, (www.itmag.com). INTERNET TELEPHONY has been the authority in IP communication since 1998.

About INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine

INTERNET TELEPHONY has been the IP Communications Authority since 1998. Beginning with the first issue in February of 1998, INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine has been providing unbiased views of the complicated converged communications space. For more information, please visit http://www.itmag.com.

About TMC (www.tmcnet.com)

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Broadview Networks Receives 2011 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year Award

Public release date: 7-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Dr. Maria Kleinstaeuber kleinsta@uni-mainz.de 49-613-139-39100 Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz

Those suffering from nagging tinnitus can benefit from internet-based therapy just as much as patients who take part in group therapy sessions. These are the findings of a German-Swedish study in which patients with moderate to severe tinnitus tried out various forms of therapy over a ten-week period. The outcome of both the internet-based therapy and group therapy sessions was significantly better than that of a control group that only participated in an online discussion forum and thus demonstrated both the former to be effective methods of managing the symptoms of irritating ringing in the ears. The study was conducted by the Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy division of the Institute of Psychology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning at Linkping University in Sweden.

According to the German Tinnitus League (Deutsche Tinnitus-Liga, DTL), two percent of the population suffer from moderate to unbearable tinnitus. But the symptoms of tinnitus can be successfully managed by means of cognitive behavioral therapy. However, not everyone has the opportunity or the desire to take a course of psychotherapy. As shown by the German-Swedish study, those affected by tinnitus can now achieve the same level of outcome with the help of an internet-based therapy program, which encourages them to adopt individual and active strategies to combat their tinnitus. For the purposes of the study, the training program developed in Sweden was adapted so that it could be used for German patients and then be evaluated for its effectiveness.

The study showed that distress measured using the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory was reduced on average from moderate (40 points) to mild (29 points) in participants who completed the internet-based training course. The results for subjects in the cognitive behavioral therapy group were also very good, with distress levels being reduced from 44 to 29 points. In contrast, there was hardly any change in this respect in the control group subjects participating in the online discussion forum. Their average distress level was 40 points at the beginning of the study and remained at 37 points thereafter. "Our internet-based therapy concept was very effective when it came to the reduction of tinnitus-related distress or, to put it another way, at increasing the tolerance levels of subjects with regard to their tinnitus," concludes Dr. Maria Kleinstuber of the Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy division at JGU.

At the same time, another interesting result was produced with regard to the preferred method of therapy. A significant number of subjects were initially skeptical with regard to the internet-based therapy concept and expressed a preference for the group therapy course. However, they were randomly assigned to the groups. To everyone's surprise it turned out on the completion of treatment that there was no difference in the effectiveness of the two strategies. "This means that the internet-based therapy concept produced as positive a result as group therapy despite the initial skepticism," says Kleinstuber. Initial evaluations indicate that the effects of both therapy forms were still persisting after six months.

The authors of the study propose that internet-based forms of therapy should be increasingly used in the psychotherapeutic treatment of tinnitus patients. Furthermore, they call for additional research on patients' skepticism of internet-based therapy, particularly in view of the long waiting times and the lack of outpatient forms of therapy.

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

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Internet-based therapy relieves persistent tinnitus

Public release date: 7-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Jan Zverina jzverina@sdsc.edu 858-534-5111 University of California - San Diego

On a January evening in 2011, Egypt with a population of 80 million, including 23 million Internet users vanished from cyberspace after its government ordered an Internet blackout amidst anti-government protests that led to the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The following month, the Libyan government, also under siege, imposed an Internet "curfew" before completely cutting off access for almost four days.

To help explain exactly how these governments disrupted the Internet, a team of scientists led by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego conducted an analysis based largely on the drop in a specific subset of observable Internet traffic that is a residual product of malware. Many types of malicious software or network activity generate unsolicited traffic in attempting to compromise or infect vulnerable machines. This traffic "pollution" is commonly referred to as Internet background radiation (IBR) and is ubiquitously observable on most publicly accessible Internet links.

The analysis marks the first time that this malware-generated traffic pollution was used to analyze Internet censorship and/or network outages, and the researchers believe this novel methodology could be adopted on a wider scale to create an automated early warning system to help detect such Internet reachability problems in the future.

"We actually used something that's generally regarded as bad traffic pollution due to malware for a beneficial purpose, specifically to improve our understanding of geopolitical censorship behavior," said K.C. Claffy, CAIDA's founder and principal investigator for the research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Added Emile Aben, part of the research team and a system architect with the Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), an independent organization based in The Netherlands that supports the infrastructure of the Internet through technical coordination: "We believe that research such as this has security relevance and implications for every nation in the world."

Specifically, the research team including scientists in Italy and The Netherlands used UC San Diego's Network Telescope, which consists of a globally routed segment of Internet address space that carries almost no legitimate Internet traffic. Also known as a 'darknet' because this subset of addresses does not have any devices assigned to them, the UC San Diego network telescope collects what could be considered "garbage" of the Internet, such as traffic due to mistyped IP (Internet protocol) addresses, malicious scanning of address space by hackers looking for vulnerable targets, backscatter from random source DoS (denial of service) attacks, and the automated spread of malicious software, including botnet and worm activity. The team also used other multiple sources of large-scale data available to the academic community, such as global routing signaling information.

"Using a combination of this data allowed us to narrow down which forms of Internet access disruption were implemented in a given region over time, but the malware-induced traffic helped us uncover things that the other data did not reveal," said Alberto Dainotti, who recently joined CAIDA from the University of Napoli Federico II in Naples, Italy, and served as lead author of the study, called Analysis of Country-wide Internet Outages Caused by Censorship. "Among other insights, we detected what we believe were the Gaddafi government's attempts to test a firewall to conduct higher precision host-based blocking while they were executing the coarser approach of router-based disconnection."

"On a larger scale, we were able to analyze how regimes go about bringing down an entire country's Internet infrastructure," said Aben.

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Internet censorship revealed through the haze of malware pollution