3D TV: what to expect; Windows 7 gets even more confusing, and how to fix UK broadband

Words on the Internet? I writes ‘em!

First up, what will we be able to watch on Sky TV when it goes 3D next year?

7.00pm Bruno
Sky Movies Premiere 3D
You know that bit where the focus group sees Bruno’s pilot for a TV programme? Remember THAT bit? Now you can see it again – in 3D!

Six things Ofcom could do to fix the sorry state of UK broadband:

ISPs that deliberately throttle traffic – such as peak-time iPlayer nobbling – or block entire protocols should say so up-front. Ryanair isn’t allowed to replace its planes with trampolines, although we suspect it’d like to. ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to do the tech equivalent, either.

Just when you thought the EU launch of Windows 7 couldn’t get any more confusing, it gets more confusing.

it seems rather silly to wait until you’ve started manufacturing install DVDs before deciding that a browser-free Windows is a donkey.

It’s the tech equivalent of getting married, climbing into the marital bed on your wedding night and telling your partner: “I’ve just realised something. You’re a minger! God, I wished I’d noticed that earlier!”

Sky+ HD: is it worth the money?

Despite my ongoing cynicism about high definition TV, I’ve just upgraded my Sky box to a shiny new HD one – not for the HD content, but because I wanted more storage space (series-linking Waybuloo and Timmy Time takes up more space than you’d think) and the ability to record two things while watching something else. Going through the schedules has been interesting, because I can’t make up my mind whether HD’s any cop or not.

The good: picture quality and sound are superb, if you can get them.

The bad: you can’t get them very often.

That’s partly because of my HD box – it’s one of the models that doesn’t have the new electronic programme guide yet, so ITV HD is absent for another month – but it’s more because there’s an HD chicken and egg thing going on. There’s not much HD content because there aren’t very many HD viewers; there aren’t many HD viewers because there’s not much HD content.

Assuming you’re a cheapskate like me and don’t pay extra for the HD movie channels, there’s not a lot: a best of the beeb (which seems rather heavy on Torchwood and repeats of Wallander), Sky One, FX and Channel 4 (which broadcasts everything in HD, although not everything is filmed in HD). There are a few other channels that I won’t watch and neither will you, and there are some surprising omissions – so for example you can get In The Night Garden in HD, but not Top Gear. I’m not sure toddlers really give a shit whether something’s SD or HD, whereas the cinematography (is that the right word for telly?) in Top Gear’s car features would look superb with more pixels.

The other thing about HD is that when you have it, switching to normal channels is jarring. Everything looks blurry, and the over-compressed stuff on the more obscure channels becomes completely unwatchable. It’s like going to the cinema and seeing a YouTube clip. It’s even worse when the HD channel you’re watching actually shows a YouTube clip – such as Rude Tube on Channel 4. Not that I’d watch that crap, but you know what I mean.

The money? It’s £9 per month extra for basic HD, over and above the cost of the HD box and installation. The box itself is nice (horrible dated interface aside), but unless you’re desperate to see 8 out of 10 Cats in HD – and who is? – then that works out as about a pound per programme: four episodes of House in HD and five other things per month. It’s a lot of cash for not a lot of programming.

One way to reduce that cost, incidentally, is to have a look at the Sky packs you’re getting. Turns out I was paying for a bunch of packs – the news and events pack, the lifestyle pack, the something else pack – that I don’t watch, and bumping them cut the Sky bill by £3 per month. So upgrading to HD means I’m paying about 80p per programme.

Don’t get me wrong, HD is lovely. The installer tells me that demand has recently gone through the roof due to price cuts and supermarket promotions, so perhaps things will change quite quickly, but right now it’s a bit like the Xbox 360 movie service in the UK: a great idea that desperately needs more content.

Do any of you have HD? Am I talking out of my arse?

Cover me in axle grease and throw me to the sexbots

Sexy robots. Oh yes. Yours truly picks five lady robots, and T3′s Katherine Hannaford picks the boy-bots.

How good is Summer Glau? She’s so good that we’ll happily ignore Sarah Connor’s endless moaning and the fact that Glau is so thin her arms couldn’t contain a Duracell battery, let alone a robot skeleton. She’s gorgeous, and she rocks a short skirt in a way that – thankfully – Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t.

With photos, naturally.

“Baby Chef, Baby Chef, he’s praying for an early death…”

When people talk about children’s television, they tend to wheel out the old cliche about the programmes being “…on drugs!” By drugs, they either mean speed – as shorthand for the super-fast cutting and attention deficit disorder many such programmes display – or LSD, to reflect the weirdness of what’s on screen.

Baby TV’s Baby Chef is on drugs too, but it’s not on speed or on LSD. It’s on heroin.

Before I get into this I’d just like to say that Baby TV is brilliant. Toddlers love it, it’s mainly quite gentle and relaxing, and it’s entirely ad-free. But it also shows Baby Chef.

Baby Chef is a simple wee programme. A puppet chef with the amazingly original name of Cheffy Chef teaches toddlers how to cook, with the help of a mute, lipstick-wearing teapot.

This is, of course, perfectly normal in the world of kids’ TV.

What’s not normal, however, is the theme tune. I believe that Baby Chef is made somewhere in Europe, and the YouTube clips I’ve been able to find of it have a brilliant theme tune recorded by someone who sounds like a cheaper Pavarotti. Here in the UK, though, the theme tune has been handed to somebody who (a) doesn’t have any timing; (b) couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket; and (c) hates himself and wants to die.

It’s extraordinary, it really is. “Baby Chef! Baby Chef!” sing the kiddies. “Cooking is a lot of fun”, Baby Chef honks back, putting the shotgun into his mouth. “Baby Chef! Baby Chef!” the children coo. “It’s fun for everyone,” Baby Chef sobs, his finger tightening on the trigger.

I’m not making this up. Check it out for yourself: BabyTV’s on the second or third page of Sky’s “Kids” category, and Baby Chef’s on at 9am.

Or at least, he was today. I’m not convinced he’ll still be around tomorrow.

TV tweets are killing the cliffhanger

Aaaaagh!

The last time we looked, that big box on the Twitter homepage says “What are you doing?” Maybe it changes at 9.55pm on a Wednesday night to say “Why not tell the entire planet who’s been fired on The Apprentice?”, or maybe Americans get a special version that says “Quick, tell the Brits who dies in Season Five of The Wire! It’s not on there for months!”

Hallelujah

Popjustice nails it:

The fact of the matter here is that the best ever version of ‘Hallelujah’ was by Jeff Buckley and the worst ever version of ‘Hallelujah’ is Bono’s. Every other version of ‘Hallelujah’ between now and the end of time will sit somewhere between those two recordings.

As for whichever ‘crusades’ are currently running regarding the Buckley version – apparently there’s one in The Sun – we fail to grasp how any of this is a ‘real victory for real music over Simon Cowell’s plastic pop rubbishzzzzzz’ given that none of it would be happening without The X Factor. “Readers! Let’s really teach Simon Cowell a lesson and show him that he’s powerful enough to get Jeff Buckley in the Christmas Top 5 without lifting a single finger.” “Oh and let’s show that The X Factor is manipulative and not about music by making people buy a song not because they like it but as a token of their dislike for something else.” LOGIC FAIL.

BBC to ITV and C4: fancy some iPlayer action?

Blimey.

The BBC is planning to offer Channel 4 and ITV the free and open use of its iPlayer online video technology, according to sources close to the corporation.

Screenwipe: writers on writing

This week’s episode of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe was fascinating. Instead of pouring bile on the usual deserving targets, Brooker sat down with the writers of Doctor Who, Peep Show, Hustle, Shameless and the IT Crowd and asked them to talk about writing. Which they did. Russell T Davies was a particular delight, but I found the whole thing fascinating.

In particular, I was surprised just how universal some things are: impostor syndrome, the feeling that writing is the easy bit (it’s the thinking that’s difficult), the importance of editing, editing, editing and then doing a bit more editing, the problems of drinking too much (booze at night, coffee by day) and writers’ complete inability to even start writing until the voices in their head tell them to get working.

If you’re interested in writing, not just for the telly but in general, it’s well worth your time. The clip I’ve embedded is the first part; the whole thing’s currently on iPlayer.

From the archives: Everything you need to know about Internet TV

Until recently internet TV tended to involve cameras pointed at cheese or happy slapping clips on YouTube, but the telly times are changing. Internet TV is coming!

It’s incredible how far we’ve come. In the bad old days you’d spend £200 on a TV set, another £100 on a video recorder and you’d get your programmes for free. Today, though, technology has made everything better. All you need for internet TV is a £1,000 PC, a £20 per month broadband connection and a portal into a parallel universe where instead of throwing slippers at the screen when the broadcaster shows repeats, you reach for your credit card instead.

We’ve seen technology do some amazing things, but we never thought it could get people to pay for repeats. But that’s exactly what’s happened: by calling their old tat “archive material” or “premium content”, internet TV services are successfully persuading people to pay 99p for old episodes. Presumably the broadcasters could paint lipstick on a pig, tell everyone it’s Madonna and get the same people to shell out £100 on tickets to see it dance to disco music.

According to technology evangelists internet TV is just the beginning. They say that everything we currently get over the air – such as TV broadcasts – will eventually be piped into our homes, and they also say that the reverse is happening, so everything we currently get via pipes will come through the air. Which means that somewhere, someone is trying to transmit water over Wi-Fi.

[Originally published in Official Windows Vista magazine]

Oh no! Mr. E has lost his blanket!

Squander Two recommended that I check out the BBC programme In The Night Garden, which is aimed at young babies. And he’s right, it’s brilliant – but something about it has been nagging me for a while, and I’ve only just realised what it is.

The main theme tune sounds like Eels. Not “a bit like Eels”; I mean “every time I hear it I’m expecting E to start singing about death and cancer and stuff”.

You can hear the theme here (link goes to a YouTube parody, which is basically the theme with some added drums) and a very similar Eels track here (Windows Media format).