Is HD TV finally worth paying for?

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I remember when we first started talking about HD. Back then it was this mythical beast that would tear apart video as we know it with its millions of pixels, and leave us all cursing standard definition for being as fuzzy and vague as Colin Jackson’s “expert” Olympic analysis.

Then it arrived and we loved it. The first time I ran a 1080p video on my 40in TV, my non-techie housemate grabbed the controller and kept replaying the same HD movie trailer for what seemed like an hour, so enamoured was he with the detail. Those of us with a PlayStation3 or Blu-ray player can enjoy the delights of HD by renting movies, but TV has been much slower out of the blocks.

Put simply, even a drum-beating HD lover like myself can admit the line-up of HD channels just hasn’t been worth paying for. Cable customers with Virgin’s V+ box can watch several free channels like BBC HD (and enjoy the excellent Olympic coverage, Jackson aside), but Sky HD is the big gun we all pinned our hopes on. And it’s expensive. Very expensive. (more…)

Technology the real Olympics winner

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Opposite me, David Bayon is picking away at his salad while watching the gymnastics (he’d like me to write that he was watching something manly, but we all know the truth). Jon Bray was watching the long jump. And to follow a whim, I fired up the table tennis highlights. We have, somehow, slipped with barely a murmur into on-demand internet TV, and it’s fantastic.

Even the resolution is high enough to impress. Bayon (now switching his attention to athletics) has just exclaimed “you can see her heart beating” as he watched one of the 400m runners stand ready for the race.

It takes something like the Olympics to show us how far technology has come. The BBC iPlayer has been around in one form or other for the last two years, and we’ve become used to it. But do you remember how you last watched the Olympics? If you’re anything like me, it was mainly via a highlights programme on terrestrial TV. I’d have been lucky to see two minutes of table tennis. If I wanted to, I could watch 50 minutes’ worth, or fast forward to precisely the match I was interested in.

Now we’re all casually firing up our browsers, streaming live or pre-recorded events direct to our display. Makes you wonder how far things will have improved by London 2012.