News round up: Sky, Virgin Media, Amazon, Kindle, NUJ

Sky feels it still has the edge over its main digital rival Virgin Media, despite the latter's new IPTV on-demand unit. Despite the recent launch of the latter's TiVo-powered set-top box, Sky's director of TV product development Brian Lenz believes his firm has little to worry about. In an interview with Pocket-Lint, he claimed the features offered by the TiVo box may appeal to high-end "super-viewers", but will do little to add to the enjoyment of ordinary TV customers. Virgin Media may claim to hold the upper hand in the broadband market at present, with its new fibre service now offering speeds of up to 100Mb in some locations.

Kindle 3 Is Bestselling Product In Amazon’s History

Amazon is reporting that the new, third-generation Kindle has now surpassed ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as the best-selling product in Amazon’s history. On Christmas Day, Amazon says that more people turned on new Kindles for the first time, downloaded more Kindle Buy Once, Read Everywhere apps, and purchased more Kindle books than on any other day in history. The company also announced that on its peak day, November 29, customers ordered more than 13.7 million items worldwide across all product categories, which is a record-breaking 158 items per second. Amazon hasn’t yet revealed the total number of Kindles sold.

Online petition plan for Parliament to go ahead

A plan to allow popular online petitions to be debated in Parliament within a year has been given the go ahead by the government. Ministers will seek agreement with the authorities, including the House of Commons Procedure Committee, to give the petitions parliamentary time. Those receiving most support - probably 100,000 signatures - would be debated, with some possibly becoming bills. The government intends to shut down the e-petitions part of the Number 10 website, which has been suspended since the general election, and open a similar facility on the Directgov website. The proposals have yet to be taken through cabinet.

A million UK children 'lack access to computers'

More than a million school children in the UK still lack access to a computer at home, suggests research by the digital education charity the E-Learning Foundation. The research also claims that almost 2 million are unable to go online at home, and that those from the poorest families are two-and-a-half-times less likely to have the internet at home than children from the richest homes. It is warning that many of the UK's poorest children face being severely educationally disadvantaged by their lack of access to technology as a result.

NUJ opposes Hunt's Sky decision role

The NUJ has claimed that culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is unsuitable to arbitrate on News Corporation's takeover bid for Sky and called for a full Competition Commission probe to be launched. As reported in our news round-up yesterday, Hunt was handed the power to rule on the proposed takeover after business secretary Vince Cable was stripped of the decision. The NUJ points to comments made by Hunt in a June interview with the Financial Times, in which he praised Rupert Murdoch for setting up Sky.