Tag: Sky
Opinion: BBC Internet 'guru' Ashley Highfield wasn't spectacular, all he did was give cyberspace a 'play' button
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have much money. The best innovators often produce the most fantastic efforts when they’re doing it on a shoe-string. Look at Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he didn’t have millions of pounds when he started it, he simply had passion, drive and a simple idea for something he believed would work.
So the news today that the BBC’s New Media boss is to stand down and move to launch an on-demand video service for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 strikes me as interesting. Ashley Highfield has been feted as one of the most important people on the Internet. But he controls a budget of £74m a year. Surely even a chimp in a tutu could do some decent work with that kind of cash to fund it.
The plan is that “Project Kangaroo” (dumb name for a start) will become the Freeview of the Internet offering more than 10,000 hours of programmes. Now I’ve nothing against that, I love TV. In fact, I’m an addict as my friends will tell you judging by my preference to stay in and watch rubbish on the box rather than going out with them.
Nine in ten UK homes now have digital TV
According to last week’s Ofcom report, nearly 90% of British homes now have access to some form of multichannel, digital TV on their main set.
As the digital switchover continues region by region over the next four years, and thanks to the fact that it’s fairly difficult to buy a TV that’s not digital ready now, be it standard definition or HD ready, it seems that most of us have got the message that it’s good to go digital…
Sky warned over broadband speed claims – had better not do it again or else
Virgin Media and two members of the public complained to the Advertising Standards Authority over a Sky Broadband advert which boasted its service is faster than Virgin’s.
Being a Virgin Media broadband user myself I can attest that it almost certainly is, as is a letter taped to the back of a tortoise, but that’s…
SlingBox PRO and SlingBox SOLO coming to the UK
Sling Media has announced that two of its products (one of which is brand new) are coming to the UK. The SlingBox PRO has previously only been available in the US and Canada. Featuriing four distinct AV inputs (aerial, S-Video,…
BSkyB's new Sky+ advert claims to show What Women Think
Forget juggling a career with motherhood. The real dilemma for today’s high-flying females is figuring out how to go to dinner with their boss AND still watch Prison Break. This is what the suffragettes risked their lives campaigning for all those years ago. Really.
Okay, so it’s not. But it is the subject of BSkyB’s brand new TV ad campaign, which aims to show how modern women can resolve said dilemma by using the Sky+ remote record feature, that lets you set your PVR from your mobile phone. “Because you want to be in two places at once…”
Sony pitching PSP's non-gaming features with GPS satnav and Sky TV downloads
We’ll have to start filing PSP stories under ‘personal media players’ rather than ‘gaming’ soon, such is Sony’s determination to expand its handheld’s non-gaming capabilities.
We wrote yesterday about its Go!Messenger VoIP project with BT, but Sony has also just unveiled plans for a satnav add-on, as well as on-demand TV downloads from Sky.
Sky HD reveal the worst ever football kits of all time
With the Premiership kicking off this Saturday, Sky is proudly boasting about all the matches it’s squeezed money out of its subscribers to be able to show in high definition.
They’ve also found time to compile the top 10 worst football kits of all time, based on a survey of one thousand UK footie fans.
In first place is the 1992-93 season home shirt for Hull City, whose creator took their “tigers” nickname too literally.
In second place, the infamous grey “our players are camouflaged” 95-96 away strip for Manchester United, which was blamed for their 3-1 defeat at Southampton.
In third place, a variety of strips used by Mexico in the 1990s.
Read on for four to ten.
Ocean Blue calls for a single PVR standard
Ocean Blue Software has called for a single standard for digital TV recorders (PVRs). Managing Director of Ocean Blue said that the introduction of Freeview Playback has been a step in the right direction, but that most PVRs contain proprietary software due to a lack of industry standard guidelines.
Ocean Blue would like to see a single brand across satellite, cable, and even IPTV broadcasts. Their Voyager software system is already the standard mandated middleware solution for Freeview digital TV receivers, while Sunrise is a DVB compliant suite of software that can receive analogue and digital video and audio, with Surfsoft being a Freeview Playback standard.
Could Ocean Blue be suggesting that they would offer the best software standard?
Is Sky considering a Facebook deal?
According to Digital Spy, Sky is in talks with popular social networking site Facebook with a view to gaining a permanent presence on the site.
Facebook isn’t averse to advertising on the site, but the article suggests that Sky would like to do more than just run ad campaigns. They’re currently running a campaign to assess whether Facebook users are willing to interact with the Sky brand, and if so, Sky could invest further in the site to promote its services and supply exclusive content.
While many Facebook users (including me) are against the site becoming too much like MySpace, the Applications functionality could open the way for brands, particularly multimedia ones, to input their content onto the site.
