- Tuesday, 9 February 2010
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The INQUIRER - powered by top surgeons at Harefield Hospital
Next generation TV is coming to Britain
TODAY FREESAT ANNOUNCED that a beta version of the BBCs Iplayer television catch-up service will be available on its digital television service next month, while Virgin Media announced that the next generation of its TV and broadband service will be developed and powered by Tivo.
The Freesat announcement marks the first time that the Iplayer has been available on a non-subscription TV service. Although at launch on the 7th December only journalists and 'partners' will be invited, we expect that it won't be long until the rest of you are allowed to join. In fact Freesat expects that as many of its customers as possible will be enjoying the service at Christmas.
Freesat said that viewers will need an actual broadband speed of 1Mbps to watch BBC Iplayer in low res or 2Mbps to watch in high quality. So any country folk may find their repeats of One Man And His Dog even more lacking. Despite this Emma Scott, Freesat’s managing director, said, “We’re delighted to be able to offer BBC Iplayer to our viewers. There’s a great schedule of programmes [that will] be available on BBC Iplayer in the lead up to Christmas with the likes of The Gruffalo, the EastEnders Special and Doctor Who."
Therefore we immediately shelved any plans we might have had to sign up.
Meanwhile over at Virgin Media, executives were bragging about the improved, converged broadband and television services it will soon be able to launch as the result of its tie-up with Tivo. In this case Tivo will be charged with developing the interactive interface for the system, which the firms expect to significantly advance broadcasting and communications.
Neil Berkett, CEO of Virgin Media said, “Tivo's proven track record of innovation, strength of its patented technology and experience in developing best in class user environments, make it an ideal strategic partner for Virgin Media as we move aggressively to bring our next generation TV service to market. The superiority of our fibre optic network combined with Tivo's capabilities, will allow us to offer consumers the most significantly advanced and compelling TV service available in the UK , and we believe will do to the TV market what Virgin Media has done to the high speed broadband market.”
And with that we immediately switched off. µ
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why not offer people a choice - Sky has jumped in with windows media centre why not virgin.
All it requires is an off the shelf cable card solution and let media centre provide the interface as that single box under the telly that is actually a PC can doo a lot more than a fixed hardware Tivo or cable box.. It will never happen though and at least Virgin has now admitted that the interface to their service is sub par or is this to go with a shift to mpeg4 and get rid of the dodgy cable boxes.
"In fact Freesat expects that as many of its customers as possible will be enjoying the service at Christmas."
Wow. Who would have thought such a feat was possible? /sarcasm.
That phrase is just about one of the stupidest i have ever read.
It will be interesting to see how Sky respond to Virgin/Tivo once it dawns on the Sky+/SkyHD subscribers that they've been taken for a ride over the last 4-5 years. The TiVo user interface and associated services are orders of magnitude superior to anything else out there, particularly those from Sky and even the new SkyHD UI.
I look forward to Virgin beating Sky over the head with their new offering in 2010 which, if done properly, will be the first real advancement in TV viewing since the introduction of the original TiVo (everything else since has been a step backwards). Sky took absolutely ages to roll out their new UI on SkyHD, some SkyHD users still don't have it and it's not significantly more functional than the old version - I just can't see Sky competing with the Virgin/TiVo offering any time soon and this announcement represents a real oppurtunity for Virgin.
Such a shame though that the Virgin Media digital network is so limited as this is likely to be the limiting factor which prevents significant numbers of viewers switching to Virgin.
it doesnt matter how good the technology is, if the programmes are still crap then the situation will not improve.
Virgin Media V+ boxes can only get better.
At the moment, they clip the start or end of programmes despite you setting the box to record early or overrun by a whole 10mins.
The user interface needs serious work as you need to slow down in order to change channel or move between operations, it is that slow.
You can't schedule a recording of any of the radio channels!
After watching a recorded programme you're returned to the listings and it often selects the wrong programme so you end up deleting unwatched shows.
When watching Catchup programmes (ch4 or BBC shows) it takes 10 minutes to fast forward into 30 minutes of that programme you had to stop because someone came to the door.
My VHS machine was faster!
There is no bookmark facility on catchup.
Need I go on?
VM have promised me fixes for this for 9 months now. Still no sign of improvements.