Television

In general day time TV sucks, I don't get to see much of it now I work full time but at University there was always one show you could rely on for some entertainment - The Jeremy Kyle show.

There was shock and horror in the news today as a judge stated that The Jeremy Kyle show is "a human form of bear baiting which goes under the guise of entertainment".

This all comes after a man head butted someone on the show. It was not aired though Sky News fortunately provided a clip. The man was fined £300 and the Judge gave us this awesome money quote [the programme was aiming to] "effect a morbid and depressing display of dysfunctional people".

I thought this was the idea of the show in the first place but perhaps Jeremy Kyle is helping these people rather than just providing entertainment ;).

The long awaited BBC iPlayer is launching in two days time (on the 27th July) for Windows XP only. The service will allow people to download TV shows to their computers and watch them for a set number of days after.

Channel 4 launched a similar service called 4OD (on demand) a couple of months ago however has been plagued with problems, if the BBC are to succeed with the iPlayer it must not have the following problems that 4OD has:

• Connection - 4OD only allows people in the UK to download shows, that's fine as we pay for the shows however the technology they use to only allow UK people sucks. For about the first month my BT connection was unable to use 4OD because I was apparently not living in the UK. I know some people now who are still told they cannot connect.
• Quality - When making 4OD videos full screen everything is pixelated, I was watching 8 out of 10 cats last night and Sean Locks ear was one giant pixel. The average 45min show is 350mb to download off 4OD yet if I downloaded the same show off a torrent site with the same file size the quality would be so much better.
• Application slowness - 4OD is basically a web page stuck inside Windows Media Player, this means that every time you click a link it loads another page. The problem with this is that the site and application doesn't look like a web page so you expect it to act a stand alone application. This makes 4OD seem incredibly slow to use and painful to navigate.
• Program expiration - This I believe is the biggest problem of 4OD - everything expires so quickly. For most free shows you can watch them for seven days after use. So if you download it on the sixth day and then leave it for two days it will have expired. Also once you have watched a show the expiration date changes. I personally don't see why shows need to expire, the chances are if I have seen it I'm not going to buy it anyway.
• Lame Technology - This may just be me but every time I go to stream a show it gets past the adverts (that don't particularly bother me) then it tells me I don't have the correct license installed to watch the show. It gives me no way to install the correct license and I just have to accept that I can't stream anything.
• Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6, WMP 11 - I don't like applications that force you down one particular route of technology. I have a Mac as my main machine but I don't mind using my PC. On my PC I use Firefox but I'm told I must use IE then finally I use VLC for media but I'm told to use WMP.

The reason Youtube is so popular is that it is so convenient and just works - this is a far cry from the buggy inconvenient 4OD. However 4OD is still a Beta so its allowed to suck to a certain extent!

By the sounds of it the iPlayer is going to equally suck come this Friday but I will reserve my judgement for now.

The BBC has decided to use Windows Media technology for their upcoming on demand online service meaning that only people using Windows XP or Vista will be able to play content. The iPlayer will be launching later this year and will let you download and watch content aired on TV for the following 7 days for free.

Five and Channel 4 already have online paid download services that also use Windows Media and will not work on Mac OS X or Linux. ITV is launching its online download service later this year though little detail has emerged about this service so far.

Its a shame the BBC is not using open standards to protect its content and that a significant amount of public money will be going to Microsoft to fund the service.

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I've just read this article from the BBC about the top 10 Google searches in 2006.For anyone who cant be bothered to read it the top 10 searches are:

1. Bebo

2. MySpace

3. World Cup

4. Metacafe (not the desperate housewives actor - though i'm sure some of his hits counted)

5. Radioblog

6. Wikipedia

7. Video

8. Rebelde

9. Mininova

10. Wiki

The article says a lot about how social networking sites and web 2.0 sites have dominated searches in 2006. In fact this very morning I signed upto facebook (yet another of these social networking sites like myspace, bebo, hi5, wayn, etc etc etc) so it shows how popular they are.

What the article fails to mention is the search on #9 of the list - yes Mininova, the popular (very popular according to this list) torrent sharing site for downloading music, TV Shows, Films and lots more pirated warez.

I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention how well known piracy is online and what a huge demand there is for on demand downloadable content. When will the industry realise this is what people want and that in a lot of cases they don't mind paying a bit for it.

It's ashame the BBC stay so politically correct when it comes to reporting these sorts of results, you will notice that on the right of the article there are links to Bebo, Myspace etc but not to Mininova. I wonder why...

For the 7th year running I’m now addicted to Big Brother. Channel 4 seems to have done a good job getting a mixture of the population together to provide a summer of entertainment.

The first week was plagued by Shebaz, a self described “paki puff” who managed to alienate most housemates. It’s a shame he left as he did provide some quite interesting entertainment, how someone can be so ignorant towards everyone else was funny.

Last nights fight between Sezer and Richard was to be expected. Sezer has been quiet compared to some of the others and it was good to see him talk back to Richard over all his bitching.This year has the most people walk from the house, perhaps because of the stress or perhaps they are just weaker characters? So far four people have left the house for various reasons.I have been trying to watch Big Brother where I can but because of other commitments and Celebrity X-Factor this week it’s been hard to fit it all together. It seems the other channels have managed to provide more entertainment even after all the troubles the Big Brother house has caused.

It’s not clear whom I want to win, as I can’t really say there is one person in the house who I think is best. If I found a Golden Ticket it would go straight on Ebay!

More Here.

Tim Westwood was in our SU last week so we caught up with him and got this quick interview. He manages to pimp our toy car with some "self pimping"? (not recommended) and he is a master of self-promotion!

Westwood on Google Video

The interview is by Bill Bennett and I filmed and did all the editing.

It’s done, yes our follow up film about Sheep is finally online to download for free.

You can check it out on the Sheep website:

http://www.imafish.co.uk/video/sheep/

The whole film was produced on an almost £0 budget using only the equipment we already had.

Kodak Camera - CX6330 (Worth about £100)
Sony Camera (Worth about £200)
iMac G5 20??
iSight

Edited using iLife 05 (iMovie, GarageBand and iPhoto).

Most of the filming was done on the Kodak camera as the Sony camera had a tendency to blur video more than the Kodak one. All the audio was recorded after using an iSight webcam.

The documentary was filmed at Attingham Park near Shrewsbury one cold morning after Christmas; we found many of the sheep to be rather camera shy though some may have a future career in the movie industry.

You can check our some photos we took at Attingham Park:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pwhite/sets/1692508/

Enjoy!

Pete White & Matthew Shannon

I’m back at University now and I had my first lecture today. It’s my final year so all the modules are allot harder and I have to write a dissertation. Last year went well so I’m hoping to build on my successful modules this year.

We have a new house which is really nice, got myself a Freeview box today and after rewiring some of the house I can now get most of the Freeview channels on my TV. E4 is nice to have as well as ITV2 and the other entertainment channels. I have still yet to find anything to watch on BBC3.

I finished off the Blender movie website and the documentary is now online to download, its taken a bit longer to finish the website just because of the sheer content on it.

You can view it at www.imafish.co.uk/video/blending . I’m happy with the outcome of the film but after some feedback there are a few things we could have done different. Shannon and myself are planning another short production for around Christmas.

Ideally we need a new camera however something like this would set us back about £1500 for a good one, donations are appreciated.

The DVD is now available for the blending documentary is now available to order.

The documentary itself is free however we are charging a small amount of £4 for the DVD and delivery.

Any profit from this £4 will be put into our camera fund so that we can save up for a new camera.

The DVD contains the documentary, production video, out-takes, trailer and the photo gallery.

All of this will be available online for free within the coming weeks though will require broadband to download it.

You are free to distribute and copy the DVD as many times as you like.

Though we will be asking for donations to fund future productions and for our new camera.

I will put an order form up in the coming days for anyone who can't get hold of me directly.

We now have a 45sec teaser trailer available for download. There are three versions available depending on your connection. Each requires Quicktime 6+ ( www.apple.com/quicktime ) in order to play.

http://imafish.co.uk/video/blendertrailersmall.mov (1.1mb - Dialup: 28k Poor Quality)

http://imafish.co.uk/video/blendertrailermedium.mov (3.5mb - Dialup: 56k Good Quality)

http://imafish.co.uk/video/blendertrailerlarge.mov (24.7mb - Broadband: Best Quality)

We hope to have the final documentary available next week.

The track used on the trailer is Martin Solveig – Jealously.