Digital TV Blog

BBC and VM hook up

Virgin Media TV subscribers can now access content from BBC’s iPlayer directly through their TV, without compromising the bandwidth of their internet connection.

Virgin viewers can now automatically watch the last seven days of BBC programmes at no extra charge simply by pressing the red button when watching any BBC channel, adding roughly 350 extra hours of content to Virgin’s already bulging video-on-demand library, which boasts over 4,300 hours of programming, accessed regularly by roughly 50 per cent of the company’s 3.4 million customers. This news also coincides nicely with Virgin Media’s recent ‘Television Liberation’ poster campaign, touting the interactivity of their on-demand library.

Malcolm Wall, CEO of Content at Virgin, said; “We’re delighted to be the first TV platform in the UK to offer our customers BBC iPlayer as part of our on-demand service. The enormous success of iPlayer online has demonstrated the desire TV viewers have for viewing quality programmes at a time that suits them, and now it’s available from the comfort of the living room. Virgin Media is proud to be working with the BBC to continue to lead this revolution in TV viewing.”

The BBC’s director of future media, Ashley Highfield, also chimed in with; “This partnership takes us a step closer to transforming the way our audiences watch TV.” This move paves the way for the codenamed Project Kangaroo - an iPlayer-cum-4oD joint venture between the Beeb, ITV and Channel 4, which is due to be tested towards the end of this year.

Sky TV on demand, on the move.

Electronics colossus Sony teamed up with Sky last year to create a new video-on-demand download service, which would allow top quality Sky TV content to downloaded for viewing on Sony’s highly-specced PSP. The fruits of their labour has now been revealed; the platform is called Go!View, and is available for PSP owners now.

Go!Viewers will be able to choose from a wide range of Sky stuff including The Colour of Magic, episodes from the new season of Battlestar Galactica, and the forthcoming Gladiators (11^th of May, lyrca fans).

Customers can either sign up for a monthly package subscription, or download programmes on a pay-per-view basis.

Blake’s got a new face

It seems appropriate that science fiction has become one of the main ratings battlegrounds in the digital millennium - the award winning remake of Battlestar Galactica drew in thousands of subscribers for Sky when it launched on British screens back in 2004, Terminator off-shoot The Sarah Connor Chronicles pushed the fledgling Virgin 1 channel into prominence, and the hit series Heroes, broadcast both on the Sci-Fi channel and BBC2 sent ratings into the stratosphere.

Sky One have announced that they are to being development on scripts, which could well be based on the cult TV classic Blake’s 7, which originally ran on the BBC for five years, being revived for the 21st century.

The series, created by Doctor Who godfather Terry Nation, was notable for its strong cast of characters, including the vampish Siouxsie Sioux lookalike Servalan, and their ambiguous moral standpoints (sacrificing thousands of lives to save a million, that sort of thing). Events ended somewhat ambiguously, leaving room for a potential follow-up.

As with their successful Discworld adaptations, Sky One would be working on a pair of 60-minute episodes with an independent production company, in this case Blake’s 7 Productions, “a subsidiary of Blake’s 7 Media who owns the licence to the show.”

This announcement doesn’t mean that Blake’s 7 will be returning to British screens for sure – many sci-fi fans consider Farscapeto be its spiritual sequel – however Elaine Pyke, commissioning editor for drama at Sky One, Two and Three, said: “The time is ripe for a revival of a show that represents the best traditions of the genre, not to mention one of the best-loved and most successful dramas of all time.”

Repent ye Sinners!

Tomorrow night, well, technically Sunday Morning, Las Vegas will be rocked by the deafening sound of Joe Calzaghe and Bernard Hopkins meeting in the ring. Extensive media coverage has been rolling on the two, affording boxing fans a glimpse on the backgrounds and psyches of the two fighters.

BBC Inside Sport has been rolling with a 15 minute short film on Hopkins, detailing his time spent inside the Greaterford institution when he was just a teenager, and how boxing gave him the discipline he needed to reform.

“It’s no big secret. Joe is fighting Bernard Hopkins because everybody else either got beat, or beaten by me.” Perhaps mindful of the fact that the fight over here is being advertised as ‘Judgement Day’ (the bout is being touted as both ‘Battle of the Planet’ in the US) Hopkins talks to Inside Sport with an air of destiny, as if “everything has a full circle to it…

“I believe that all this was scripted. From my childhood days of ignorance to my adolescence in the penitentiary - Joe hasn’t fought anybody in any of his fights with my quality or my credibly of what I’ve done in my career. My record shows that I can talk the talk, and I have walked the walk, for many years.”

Hopkins has also been quick to stir up the patriotic feelings of his audience by pinning the Stars and Stripes to his shorts: “When I step into that ring I represent myself and my family, but I also represent the USA. I believe we have the best athletes in boxing and if I have to prove that then I will do so.”

He is conscious of Joe’s ‘Britishness’ (he is, of course, half Italian) and the fact that his opponent has not once fought outside Europe, and even then has fought most of his matches in either Wales or England. But the US, who has hardly heard of him will not know this; Hopkins has done his best to rouse all feelings of a British Invasion, the first wave of which was seen off by Pretty Boy Floyd Mayweather who dealt Ricky Hatton his first ever defeat: “We have to put a stop to your invasion. You want to put us under the Queen’s regime - I’m the black Paul Revere saying, ‘the British are coming again’.”

“The Brits are here, that’s it,” the Executioner told Setanta Sports. “You’ve got the Brits here and I’ve never beat up on a Brit before. Now I get to kick someone else’s ass from across the pond; it’s great, it’s great motivation!”

Joe Calzaghe has consistently weathered all the brow beating, only really responding to Hopkins’ taunts indirectly, painting a picture of a man who would just rather get on with it and let his fists do the talking. He has said of Hopkins that he “is king of talk,” and that “they should give him his own TV show.

“Hopkins, he’s the way he is. He’s going to get in your face and try to intimidate you,” Calzaghe said after the momentous weigh-in at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for the Mayweather-Hatton fight. It was here that Hopkins infamously uttered his ‘I’d never lose to a white boy’ line.

“I said what I said,” explained the Executioner. “People who know me, know me. You can write what you want and you have the legal right to do that. It’s up to Joe Calzaghe to prove me a liar.”

Joe’s father and trainer Enzo Calzaghe has been less charitable. “I know for a fact, he [Hopkins] is a dirty little git,” he told Inside Sport. He said that Hopkins “would rather be disqualified than lose to a true champion like Joe.”

The Italian Dragon is more than aware of the pressure that’s on him - he stands to lose his unbeaten record over a fight which he has had to move up a weight to enter, which Hopkins has announced will be his last. He knows that his opponent is going to go all out to bring him down.

“I’m going to be a legend after this fight,” says Calzaghe. “I’m going there and I’m going to win. Quite simply, you are going to see an awesome performance. This is the night ‘The Executioner’ gets executed.”

Judgement Day will be broadcast live and exclusive on Setanta Sports on Saturday April the 19^th, with the ring off currently slated to start at 3am.

Devil’s Advocate vs Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Homeboy starts off alongside Alex Winter in his mainstream cinema debut Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Saturday, 7pm ITV2), which sees the duo travelling back in time to fetch notable figures from history including Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc and Classical Greek philosopher So-Crates (Socrates) in order for them not to flunk their history class; dropping out would see them not saving the world through the divine medium of Rock and Roll in the future.

The 1991 sequel was also good, but sucked a little bit by way of the inclusion of KISS on the soundtrack. FAIL.

Later that night he reappears as up and coming lawyer Kevin Lomax, in The Devils Advocate (9pm, LIVING) who after representing a highly suspect teacher in a child abuse case, undergoes a severe conscience scouring after relentlessly pursuing the American Dream; money, wealth, power. Charlize Theron and Al Pacino also star – if you’ve got Sky or Virgin and have nothing better to do this Saturday night, check it out.

Altogether now: ‘Another One Bites The Dust…’

Sky have just released a gallery of profile shots of the 12 new Gladiators who are all set to put the contenders through their paces. Redesigned, airbrushed and updated for 21^st Century Digital age combat, the tired old blue and pink leotards of the original series have been consigned to the dustbin and replaced with ultra-sharp highly stylised black and white designs, each of which bears some slight semblance to their character names.

Former British bobsledder Ice, for example, has crystalline sparkly bits on her garb, and Spartan (our favourite, right) is decked out in an approximation of Greek battle dress and the somewhat unfairly named Battleaxe is similarly dressed up like an Amazon warrior-queen.

14 pictures are up on the Sky website now – we’re not sure if Inferno’s sumptuous vital stats are going to be a help or a hindrance in the arena. The gladiatorial line up includes silver medalist Du’aine Ladejo as Predator, who some of you may remember from Celebrity Love Island.

Several other athletic stars make the line up, including 19 year old Wiltshirian heptathlete Lucy Boggis as the Tempest (”bringing furious agitation and commotion”) who is reportedly tipped to be selected for the London 2012 Olympics, and Jenny Pacey as Enigma, who along with Ice, is a former British bobsled team member.

Sky have promised that classic challenges such as Hang Tough, Duel, Powerball and the dreaded Eliminator will make a return, with some newfangled high-tech additions that improve upon, but do not radically alter the premise.

The appropriately surnamed Richard Woolfe, the director of programming for Sky One, Two and Three, told the Guardian that “the games are bigger, the contenders are stronger and the Gladiators are even more unbelievable… we’ve found extraordinary characters.”

Ian Wright and Kirsty Gallacher will preside over the contest with 32 contenders, whittled down from 20,000 applicants, who will battle the gladiators across a series of gruelling events to win a £50,000 prize. Shouting ref John Anderson will also return to the show. Gladiators is set to run on Sky One this year.

Auntie and Ninty bunk up

The BBC’s Future Media and Technology department has announced the inking of a deal with Nintendo UK, that will bring the popular BBC iPlayer to owners of the Nintendo Wii console in the form of an application which streams content to your TV screens over a broadband connection.

Erik Huggers, (a man who sounds like a cutesy cartoon Viking) of le Beeb revealed that Nintendo Wii owners will be able to stream BBC content directly to their tellies via their console via the Opera browser feature of the Wii, a move which should equal joy for twentysomethings across the nation who until recently were forced to watch grainy, low-res episodes of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe on YouTube via their TVs via their Wiis.

“Working with Nintendo marks another exciting milestone for the BBC iPlayer,” Huggers said. “It underlines our commitment to reaching new audiences by making the BBC iPlayer available on as many platforms as possible.”

Once the iPlayer service for the Wii is live, a notification message will be sent to all Wii consoles in the UK currently connected to the internet. In other cross-platform console and digital telly news, BT Vision have hooked up with Xbox 360 manufacturers Microsoft, and Sony are preparing to launch their Play TV install app for the PlayStation 3 which turns their shiny black boxes into a combined games machine/Freeview receiver with record and rewindability.

Louis Theroux’s African Hunting Holiday - BBC Two, Sunday

Yesterday, we saw Louis Theroux travel to the Limpopo Province in South Africa to investigate the lucrative hunting industry, which, rather than driving animals to the bring of extinction, has done the exact opposite – or so its members claim. Hunting in South Africa is big. Animals are bred solely to die on private game farms at the hands of affluent western tourists, mostly from America. The cost of a bagging a trophy kill ranges from as little as $250 for a baboon to as much as $50-100,000 for a rhino. Right at the start of the programme, we see Niki, a young girl bagging her first kill; a warthog, shot “right through the lungs” with a crossbow – they only allow bow hunting on their property, as the noise of gunfire distresses the other animals.

Louis met tourists to try to understand their thrill of the kill, joining them as they go hunting. He meets Ann-Marie from Cleveland who originally only came to accompany husband Paul, but finds herself caught up in it and eventually embarks on a hunt of her own – she tells Louis that you always remember the rush of your first kill. When it came to pulling the trigger himself, Theroux just couldn’t do it. “I am not feeling an urge to do it. I am feeling an urge not to do it,” he told a hunter.

Towards the film’s end, a lion tamer, one Piet Warren, loses his rag with Louis when probed with yet another question: “I hate f***ing elephants because they eat every good-looking tree. They don’t eat a shitty bush.” Conversely, hunting game in private reserves has seen several species of plants and animals that were approaching extinction flourish on land that was once intensively used for cattle grazing.

Whilst not as explosive as last year’s Most Hated Family in America, the documentary took an interesting look at what compels people to hunt, and the often overlooked positive side-effect of a controversial industry.

Louis Theroux’s African Hunting Holiday was broadcast on Sunday, April 6th on BBC2, and is available for viewing on the BBC iPlayer for the next 6 days.

I… I will be king. And you… You will be queen.

The first season of Heroes was a great success, blending the multi-strand piecemeal plot elements of TV shows such as 24 and Lost, with a pulp comic book feel which at times seemed to nod to works such as Watchmen, Sin City and X-Men. The dialogue was at times, clunky and laden with a fair dose of cheese, but audiences overlooked this as the labyrinthine narrative gradually, sometimes gracefully, unfolded, throwing up cameo appearances by former Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston, George Takei (Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu), Erick Avari and ex-droog Malcolm MacDowell.

The show was first broadcast in the UK last February on the Sci Fi channel (Sky 129, Virgin Media 135), and then later on BBC2 where it pulled in an audience of 4.3 million.

The second series has got off to a fairly rocky start in the US, beleaguered by complaints from viewers about the comparatively slow build up of events, and by complications arising from the writer’s strike. Series creator Tim Kring spoke to the BBC before Christmas about the problems and how things eventually pick up:

“We assumed the audience wanted season one - a build up of intrigue about these characters and the discovery of their powers. They wanted adrenaline. We made a mistake - we took too long to get to the big-picture story, The message is that we’ve heard the complaints and we’re doing something about it.”

Without wanting to give too much away for those who have not yet sat through the DVD box set, the second series follows on four months after the climactic finale of the previous series (the first episode is called ‘Four Months Later’) and details how the survivors attempt to return to ordinary lives and come to terms with their abilities. Hopefully we’ll be able to figure out what that bloody symbol means.

Heroes will again take pride of place on BBC2 starting this month, and hopefully, follow-up episodes will run over on BBC3 immediately after the terrestrial broadcast.

Second generation set-top box available this year

Virgin Media are again offering new and existing TV customers the option to upgrade to their V+ video on demand service for their TV packages. Subscribers who sign up for any of the £16, £25 or £35 per month will pay just £75 for the V+ Box, which had previously been £150 for installation fees, with all online orders qualifying for an additional £10 discount.

Virgin have announced that it will be trialling new software on existing V+ boxes, in a bid to clean up several problems plaguing viewers such as sound drop-outs and recordings ending early. It is also expected to re-enable the VCR SCART outputs when the box is in HDMI mode, something which has infuriated owners of expensive new HD enabled TV sets. Virgin plans to send the software update to PVRs in several areas shortly, after which it will be distributed nationally.

Virgin Media are also busy working on their new PVR, and it is estimated that the new V+ set top box could be released during the second half of this year.