iPlayer For Freesat Imminent

Image via Wikipedia

There are, believe it or not 600,000 Freesat users in the United Kingdom. In the run up to Xmas there will be a renewed awareness campaign for the free-to-air satellite cousin of Freeview (the free-to-air via your TV aerial digital service).

Xmas Bonus

Freesat owners will be getting an early Xmas present with the arrival of the BBC iPlayer service for Freesat boxes that can connect to the Internet. Mostly this tends to be for HD boxes that already have the requisite ethernet socket.
Also a small number of (OK two) locations will be enabling HD content for Freeview itself as the first generation HD capable Freeview boxes go on sale. Expect to see existing non HD set top boxes and PVRs drop in price as old stock is cleared.

Blank Canvas

Meanwhile the BBC trust has been told that Project Canvas, the joint venture between BBC,ITV, Five and BT to bring on demand content to viewers via  suitably enabled TV sets and Internet enabled set top boxes will likely cost more than £115 million in the first fours years of its operation with £17 million recouped via revues the service will bring in at the end of this period. Questions remain as to what extent ITV and Five would be in a sound financial position to afford the estimated £25 million a piece that they’d be required to put into the funding pot.

Project Canvas has been a contentious undertaking in that it allows non-public service broadcasters to become partners with the bbc which was not the case when originally conceived. BSkyB would be welcome to provide services on the platform but cannot become a partner in the project.

Kangaroo Court

Canvas also has to walk carefully in the shadow of the now defunct Project Kangaroo which proposed a consolidated video on demand (VOD) platform with content from BBC Worldwide,ITV.com and Channel 4’s 4OD which was planned to launch in 2008 but was eventually blocked by the competition commission this year.

Related articles by Zemanta

• BBC’s Project Canvas could reach 3.5m homes by 2014 (telegraph.co.uk)
• Charge for iPlayer, says ex-BBC chief (guardian.co.uk)
• Video-on-demand converts ’shifting away from traditional TV channels’ (guardian.co.uk)
• BBC spends nearly £1m on unapproved Project Canvas (telegraph.co.uk)

BBC Launches Democracy Live

The BBC has launched a new web site dedicated to live and on demand coverage of the UK’s national political institutions and the European parliament. Interesting to launch at a time when our faith in political institutions is being sorely tested. Who knows maybe such sites are a flag stone on the road to a greater interaction between voters and the institutions that claim to act on their behalf.

BBC Democracy Live

Related articles by Zemanta

• BBC launches Democracy Live with ’speech-to-text’ search (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

The I Inside

Image by ocean.flynn via Flickr

The BBC’s Horizon is perhaps not the TV programme  it once was (some have accused it of dumbing down of late) but it can still provoke thought. Monday evenings TV outing tried to answer what exactly is consciousness albeit simplified to the question ‘Where am I? ‘. I’m not sure that anyone can answer that for certain but for me it raised an almost worrying prospect that the body influences the mind just as much as the mind influences the body.

In my own thoughts (wherever they may begin and end) I’ve probably just thought of the body as a shell for the ‘I’ inside.

I and you without a body move

The prospect that consciousness could even just  be the side effect of neurons firing in a particular way and reliant on a certain biological structure in the physical brain perhaps dents my own feeling the ‘I’ inside the body would desperately enjoy being freed from the constraints of the physical body. It sound much more like a co-dependency arrangement.

The point at which we become self aware seems related to a certain point in our development. Perhaps even at a point that the physical brain reaches a certain point of physical formation. The body may even be the one that’s really in the driving seat.

The programme also dealt cast a modicum of doubt over the notion of autonomous free will and determination. Maybe we are more at the mercy of random electrical impulses than we would like to contemplate.

For UK viewers the Horizon programme is still available for a while on the BBC iPlayer

Related articles by Zemanta

• It’s all in the brain (openparachute.wordpress.com)
• Rethinking the self (snarkmarket.com)
• The Unity Of The Mind – Or Not? (scienceblog.com)

Monophonic Minority To Polyphonic Ubiquity

more about “BBC – Press Office – BBC Four autumn …“, posted with vodpod

BBC4 explores the historical quirk that was Synth Britannia on October 16th (with the usual time shifted repeats on and around that date). Obviously of interest to anyone who ever fiddled around with a synthesizer (that’d include me then) or anyone who has a passing interest in the influence that the early years of electronic music had on the British music scene of the late 70’s to early 80’s.

Also this autumn BBC4 will be exploring Metal Britannia. Not sure I’ll go out of my way for that one but each to their own musical tastes eh.

Our Love Affair With Technology

I caught this amusingly creative trailer the other night about an upcoming series called Electric Revolution on BBC Four which apparently will examine Britain’s current love affair with technology. Looks like it’ll go into the history of gadget dependency and then subject families to periods without modern tech. What will we learn if anything?

more about “Developments in Technology – Electric…“, posted with vodpod