Arqiva’s UK based online TV content service SeeSaw started sending out beta invites today. Arqiva picked up the technology that was to power Project Kangaroo before Ofcom squashed the whole cross channel TV catch-up project as somehow uncompetitive. Obviously it’s only a beta offering so the number of available programmes is no as extensive as perhaps it will be when the service launches properly around March 2010. By then the free content will be joined by paid for items and maybe even availability via Wii or iPhone if users express enough interest.

At the moment there’s a smattering of content not available elsewhere. A token range of old school Doctor Who , Blackpool plus the entire IT Crowd and Queer as folk via the 4OD offerings.The least extensive content offerings  come from Five. A quick try out has given a good quality full screen picture quality and stable streaming for me at least.

Whether SeeSaw differentiates itself sufficiently from any independent channel on-line offering and whether it can monetise its service sufficiently to survive long term remains to be seen.

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Cutbacks are everywhere.In the workplace, the public & private sectors. Value for money is the new watchword. Television budgets are being cut in both the public service broadcasting and commercial sector.

Cynics will look at the recent announcement re BBC programming cuts a merely an expedient way of reclaiming the pensions hole of many of its employees but as we’ve seen over many years the BBC is everyone’s favourite scapegoat that constantly needs to justify how the license fee is spent.

Television audiences have been falling for some time as viewing habits are more fragmented. Gone are the days of the three main channels and that’s your lot.

Personally I find the almost old fashioned output model of many digital only channels such as BBC3 and BBC4 a welcome reminder of the past. In ye olden days there was no breakfast TV and minimal daytime TV output. The test card was a common filler during these off peak times.

Many digital TV channels have limited broadcasting hours because they share a channel slot on Freeview (OK technically it’s called a Mux) which means that say CBBC uses the same space allocation as BBC3 but they broadcast at different times of the day.One channel that just looks like two.

Personally I’d have no problem with a more frugal hours output across all channels if it helps them save money and helped place the emphasis on quality.In this age of PVR’s, iPlayer and Video on Demand do we really need to fill up the day with so much television. Perhaps the budgets would be more focused on quality if we returned to reduced hours rather than spreading it more thinly across the current number of hours.

The so called golden age of television had the luxury of less channels and less hours to fill. Maybe an austerity television era could reap some benefits.

Picture by marksmanuk under this creative commons license

An Internet bandwidth test will determine the best quality available to each iPlayer user.

HD material is expected  to later be added to Virgin media boxes , playstation 3 and Freesat at some time in the future.

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Paula Yates highlights the 4-Tel teletext service circa 1986.Oh the fun we had waiting for the pages to come round.

Teletext did make the jump to digital TV though  these days is often a reworking of content available on the Internet which of course has largely taken its place.

Ofcom have now stated that they see no reason to renew a public service teletext license beyond 2014 and so teletext services will slowly become another technology of the past going the way of VHS video recorders, film cameras and other gadget of the analogue era.

The BBC had already committed to phase out its own Ceefax service in the run up to the 2012 digital TvVswitch over. Subtitles are likely to remain on separate streams for digital TV programmes.

It’s thought that hybrid IPTV and Internet service enabled televisions are more likely to appear over the coming years

Photo by lambigred under this creative commons license

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Despite the success of the streaming version of the BBC iPlayer which was introduced in order to allow Mac & linux users access to the BBC’s TV & radio catch up content the BBC was still under pressure to level the playing field with a version that allowed  downloading of content such as was available to Windows users.

Adobe Air

On the same day that Adobe announced that Adobe Air for linux was to move out of beta we find a decidedly low key introduction of an Adobe Air based download service for Mac users (and presumably linux and Windows users too as Air is a cross platform technology).

The first challenge is to actually find the download link for the air application which is deeply hidden within the iPlayer labs section of the iPlayer site (you must be signed up to iPlayer labs to use this new download application). You then have to set an appropriate download location and allocate some of your hard drive space. I allocated 5GB which apparently reserves me up to 22.5 hours of download content.

Hide And Seek

The next trick is to actually find content that is available to download. We still use the web browser based iPlayer but keep our eyes peeled for an additional ‘download’ option next to an individual programmes iPlayer page.

Picture Quality Impressions

The slightly disappointing first impression of two programmes downloaded is that the quality appears to be inferior to the streaming version. Certainly a download equivalent of the high quality streaming option does not currently seem to be available which makes full screen playback of downloaded content a huge let down (is rubbish quality the ultimate DRM?)

Help For ISPs

Meanwhile the BBC is taking steps to head off continuing disquiet from British ISPs concerning their worries over how much the iPlayer is putting a strain on their available infrastructure as the popularity of the Internet service increases. The BBC has offered to make available specific iPlayer content caching servers to be installed by the ISPs into their own distribution networks. Whether this will quell some ISPs demands for payment subsidy for carrying the bandwidth intensive content remains to be seen.

The BBC iPlayer Air application can be downloaded here

Freesat PVR

It’s not been long since the official launch of Freesat and take up in this short period has been good, statistically outstripping any ongoing Freeview purchases though it could be argued that most of the major take-up for Freeview has already happened with only the minority still using existing analogue broadcast signals prior to the total analogue switch off in 2012.

One of the missing items in this first generation of Freesat boxes is that of a suitable PVR. The first available models are unlikely to reach the market until just before Xmas so I was intrigued to see this fairly affordable Freesat box from Maplins. The Fortec Star FS-440 (snappy name!) has PVR capabilities built in once an external USB hard drive is plugged into it. If you have a redundant sky satellite dish sitting on your wall then the addition of a Freesat box will yield the many free-to-air TV and radio channels the service provides.

For this price it’ll only yield a standard definition pictures but makes for an affordable stop-gap until the high definition capable Freesat boxes come down in price. A word of warning in that this is not a natural Freesat box and may require a firmware update to be applied in order to receive a Freesat EPG .

A little snippet previewing next weeks acts on The Tube from sometime in 1985.Shame I don’t have next weeks show eh.

Amateur
Amateurish presenting (the art of doing it live is lost on some), the opening number sees the breakdown of two radio mics, poor sound throughout, sniping between guests and the usual forced attempts at comedy. It’s so bad you’ve almost got to watch just to believe that 7 hours of telly can be this bad. Every time they cut to the outside of television centre I kept wanting to see a ‘For Sale’ sign on the building. They should have taken the opportunity to flog it off for charity.

Flogging A Dead Horse?
Content wise the highlights are probably now on YouTube. Kylie singing live unlike the mature Spice Girls who mimed from LA, an all too brief Dr Who vignette where an old Dr returns (they said they wouldn’t do that but I guess it’s all for charity, mate).

Taking A Pay Cut? Presenter Terry Wogan had reportedly waved his fee for this years event after it was revealed last year that he was usually paid handsomely to front the money raising event.£19 million was raised this year and laudible though that is I still find it hard to imagine that if many of those who took part donated a weeks wages each that the total would easily have been dwarfed.Whilst I’m not against the idea of charity I’ve always found the prospect of highly paid entertainers piously encouraging the less well off to dig deep into their poorly paid pockets a teeny bit insulting.

Maybe that sounds like the politics of envy but I find the self aggrandizing and pushing of their own commercial product by many participants as slightly cynical and opportunistic together with the slightly patronising way that the less fortunate are remembered and their plight highlighted on this one day of the year.

Roll on next years shameful offering.

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Regulation
When I lived in Australia it was hard to do anything without filling in forms in triplicate. You couldn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages without registering as a business with the government ,given approval and a registration number. Whilst in the UK anybody can literally place an advert in the Yellow pages or online and launch themselves into business.

More TV Fakery
Channel 4 has launched an investigation into the qualifications of child care guru Claire Verity . Channel 4 have received confirmation from the body that awarded her claimed qualifications that they have no records of her attendance. Claire Verity’s clients have included Sting, Claudia Schiffer and Mick Jagger.
She has been accused of child bullying with her advocacy of parenting techniques that include leaving babies to cry, limiting ‘cuddles’ to no more than 10 minutes a day and leaving children outside ‘to air’.

Guru’s a Plenty
A while ago TV diet Guru ‘Doctor’ Gillian McKeith ,who sternly advises people to change their diet by examining their faeces, was found to have achieved her dubious doctorate via an uncredited US mail order service. She has since dropped the Doctor from her name but continues to her be employed using her diet claims despite the sullying of her professional qualifications.

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I’ve always been intrigued as to why so many British TV programmes are not so much sold to the US market as completely remade for the US market. Steptoe and Son became Sanford and Son, Alf Garnett became Archie Bunker, The Office became..er..The Office and soon Life on Mars will be localised for the US.
Sunny Blackpool
Now I hear that Hugh Jackman’s Viva Laughlin drama-musical , essentially a US remake of the BBC series (Viva) Blackpool in which characters suddenly start miming well known songs (wasn’t that a Dennis Potter thing originally?) only this time set against the gambling hotels backdrop of Navada has been laughed out of production after just two showings . The New York Times has dubbed it the worst TV show ever made. Or should that be re-made.

Remake, Remodel, Recycle
I guess our two cultures are further apart than we’d care to realise. Or maybe, as a fellow blogger pointed out, it’s cheaper for US television to just remake our programmes with US actors (and US accents) rather than negotiate all the legal terms for British actors and productions crews (in the same way that music on i-Tunes is often not universally available across all the international on-line stores due to different local licensing agreements?). Heaven knows we couldn’t afford to remake most US series just to ‘localise’ it and so tend to take them as is complete with cultural references that we may not fully grasp.

I suppose we have our own remake culture in the UK with so many TV programmes originating on radio and being re-made for the slightly more ‘down market’ TV audience.

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A hurried decision following the outcries over the choice of the non cross platform format, which was seen by some as a tacit endorsement of a commercial product, has seen the BBC look to partner with Adobe in order to extend the iPlayer to Mac and Linux platforms using Adobe’s acquired flash format as used by many online video web sites such as You Tube. However this means that unlike Windows users the content cannot be downloaded and must be watched in a web browser via streaming (what not even a glorified Joost type interface?).

Hmmm. Can I have a discount on my TV license please?

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