Radio and Telly UK Digital TV News

Sky Digital has just upped the sign-up offer to new customers. As well as the free Sky offer, new customers can now get a £50 Marks and Spencer voucher by signing up online.

You’ll need to sign up by 25th March 2010 to get the voucher. The voucher will be sent within 45 days of activating your viewing. Only available for new customers. One voucher per household and only available for online subscriptions.

Details at www.sky.com/shop/tv

A quick heads-up to anyone looking to buy a Freeview HD box. You could opt for the Humax Fox T2, priced £150 – or save yourself £50 and go for a Bush Freeview HD box.

This Freeview HD box is available for £99.99 on pre-order, with estimated availability on 31st March 2010

Full details: Bush DVB680 at Argos

Film4 and E4, two of Channel 4’s digital services, will shortly be going “HD” – but only for Virgin Media customers.

The two channelsd will be launching exclusively on the Virgin cable TV platform – doubtless a disappointment to Sky HD customers and those hoping for some much needed HD content on Freesat.

E4 HD is set to launch in April at no extra cost to Virgin Media TV users, with Film4’s HD service set to start in the Summer.

More on Virgin Media at virginmedia.com

New addition to the Freeview lineup. TV News 2 has appeared on Channel 90, joining TV News on Channel 89.

These two channels appear to offer entertainment news and movie clips. The channels are operated by the Cellcast Group, who also run the Babestation and Smile TV channels.

Following the recent speculation about the future of the Beeb’s music station 6 Music, it has today be confirmed by BBC Director General Mark Thompson that the proposed closure of 6 Music and the BBC Asian Network is indeed on the cards.

Additionally, there will be a significant reduction in the BBC’s online presence, cutbacks on imports of programmes, and a reported possible loss of up to 600 jobs at the BBC (according to union BECTU)

The proposal is now subject to a 12 week public consultation period. There’s a glimmer of hope – if there’s enough public pressure, the BBC Trust could force a re-think. If you’re opposed to the changes, go to BBC Trust – Have Your Say.

If the plans go ahead, 6 Music could vanish by the end of 2011.

To read the reasons behind the BBC’s decisions, see the article by Mark Thomson at Guardian.co.uk

if you’re looking to hook yourself up to BT Vision for thousands of hours of on-demand TV and films on your telly, then you can get yourself a free BT Vision V+ Box until the 26th of March 2010.

In case you’re not familiar with BT Vision, this is a TV service that lets you watch thousands of hours of TV, films and kids shows, as well as sport from ESPN. Content is delivered over Broadband, and the box also lets you record, pause and rewind live TV. You can also watch catch-up TV from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five. See the review on our BT Vision pages

The free box offer is for those signing up to any of the BT Vision packages, and will save you £45.

To take advantage of the free BT Vision box, go to www.btvision.bt.com

Two new Freeview HD Tv sets have gone on sale today at Comet.co.uk. The Sony KDL32EX403U (32 inch) and Sony KDL40EX403U (40 inch) Freeview HD sets use the Bravia engine for top picture quality, support 7 day EPG, have a built-in Freeview HD receiver and support “full” 1080p HD resolution.

Available today for a reasonable £549 (32 inch) or £749 (40 inch) from www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet

More on Freeview HD

New channel Ideal Extra is set to launch on Freeview Channel 41 from Wednesday the 3rd of March.

This new shopping channel will concentrate on Home and Garden, as is expected to broadcast from 9am to midnight.

Ideal Shopping already operate two shopping channels on Freeview, Ideal World (Freeview channel 22) and Create and Craft (Freeview channel 36)

The BBC is rumoured to be considering axing two digital radio services, 6 Music and the BBC Asian Network, as part of a cost-cutting drive. The Beeb is apparently also planning to scale back its online web presence with a reported 25% of its online content under threat.

6 Music pulls in 695,000 listeners a week, equal to 0.4% of all UK radio listening (Source: RAJAR) and is one of the station’s more popular digital radio services. The loss of 6 Music would also be a blow for DAB radio listeners at a time when the Government is looking to drive more people to DAB ahead of the proposed 2015 FM Switchoff

A “Save 6 Music” Facebook group has already popped up – at the time of writing with over 65,000 members (nearly a tenth of their audience). .

The commercial station Absolute Radio has made an interesting statement. According to a report in The Times, the national commercial music service has announced that it would be prepared to buy 6 Music from the BBC, and run it more efficiently that the BBC has been doing.

The story rumbles on, with the BBC stating that discussion of the closure of 6 Music is “premature”. As the body of support continues, could we see a stay of execution for 6 Music? Don’t touch that dial.

News and Finance channel CNBC has joined the Freesat channel line-up from today.

You can find CNBC on Freesat channel 210.

A few days ago, we announced the arrival of the first Freeview HD set-top box, the Humax HD Fox-T2. Mere days later, we’re able to announce the first integrated TV with Freeview HD.

The Panasonic TX-P42G20B has built-in Freeview HD and Freesat HD receivers. It’s a 42 inch plasma TV that goes up to 1080p resolution, with a refresh rate of 600Hz. An optional wirelss dongle offers Internet access, and there’s an SD card to let you view photos and videos.

The Panasonic TX-P42G20B Freeview HD TV set

The Panasonic TX-P42G20B is available now in the UK from Comet.co.uk

For a limited time, get £60 by using the code AW60 at the online checkout. Code expires 27 Feb 2010.

SeeSaw, a new Internet-based TV service, has gone live today.

SeeSaw offers TV content from the BBC, Channel 4, Five, and a small selection of ITV content. SeeSaw was created after Project Kangaroo was outlawed by the Competition Commission in 2009.

SeeSaw is currently offering over 3,000 hours of TV content including Green Wing, The Apprentice, Doc Martin, The IT Crowd, Fifth Gear, The Hustle, Dead Ringers, Queer as Folk, Fonejacker and Dr Who.  SeeSaw is also offering catch-up TV from Channel 4, E4 and Five

SeeSaw is currently free, but you have to watch an ad before the show of your choice starts. Premium-content TV shows are expected to be offered from Summer 2010.

Take a look at www.seesaw.com , or see our SeeSaw Page

The race to get the first Freeview HD receiver to the UK market has been won – by Humax.

The Humax HD Fox T2 is now available, offering subscription-free access to BBC HD and ITV 1 HD.

The Humax HD Fox T2 has an 8-day EPG, HDMI socket, 2 x SCARTs, Dolby Digital Audio Output plus Subtitle and Audio Description support. It has a USB socket for playback of xVid, MP3 and JPG from a conected memory stick or external drive. It supports contents sharing with other devices such as PC and NAS through Home Networking, and has an Ethernet port for connection to online services as BBC iPlayer (coming soon).

It’s important to note that at the moment, Freeview HD is only available in the Granada and London regions.

The Humax HD Fox T2 is on sale now, but hard to find. We’ve listed online suppliers and the best prices on our dedicated Fox T2 page.

More details, photos and specs at http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/humaxhdfoxt2.html

UPDATE: Our podcast team has released an audio file of their first impressions. Take a listen at Humax HD Fox T2 First Impressions

Freeview has just launched its first iPhone app, offering access to TV listings for over 50 Freeview channels, including BBC HD and ITV 1 HD.

The Freeview HD App includes a “top ten channel list”, a powerful search option, the ability to re-order your channels, and access to Freeview’s Twitter feed for news and programme recommendations.

When you view a listing, you’re also presented with “if you like this, we also recommend”, which throws up some rather interesting results on occasion!

An odd choice to call it “Freeview HD” when Freeview HD’s availability is currently so limited, but this may mark the start of Freeview’s big push to increase HD awareness.

All-in-all, a well designed and powerful little app, great for iPhone and iPod Touch wielding Freeview fans.

“Freeview HD for iPhone” is available for free from the iTunes App Store

Sky is now offering a one Terabyte Sky+ HD box. This increases storage space for TV shows by four times.

The new Sky+ HD 1TB box offers all of the features of the normal  Sky+HD box (including Sky Anytime), but with much recording space – up to  240 hours of HD programming.

The 1 Terabtye Sky+ HD box is available now for £249. Full details at sky.com/1TB

Just a reminder that Sky is currently offering the standard Sky+ HD box for free, with a £25 M & S voucher for a limited time. A great time to get the HD box even if you don’t sign to the HD pack yet. Details on our Sky+ HD page or at Sky’s HD site.

As we reported in December 2009, the digital text service from Teletext vanished from our screens. The owners, Associated Newspapers, stated that the service had been making a loss and that there was no longer a viable business model under which the service could continue. The service finally switched off on the 16th of December 2009.

That’s not the end of the story though, as some teletext services from Teletext Ltd are still being broadcast, notably Teletext Holidays (which presumably is still able to generate some cash) and some services for Channel 4.

A couple of days ago, Ofcom, the UK regulators, announced that it has revoked Teletext Ltd’s licence to provide a public teletext service. The reason? Teletext is no longer providing news and regional content. Ofcom contacted Teletext Ltd, and on the 26th January, Teletext wrote back, stating that they’d not be reinstating the news and regional content. Accordingly, OfCom had no choice by to revoke Teletext Ltd’s licence.

As far as we can tell, the revocation applies to the public service licence for analogue TV and Freeview – which means that commercial services are probably not affected, and services on other platforms, such as Sky, need not be affected either.

At this time, it’s not clear to us what services will continue to be offered by Teletext Ltd. A service (of sorts) is still available on Freeview channel 101, and other text services in the 100 number range are still operating. We’re not sure whether any of these are set to cease as a result of the revocation, or whether the licence now gets open to a potential new licensee (although in this current climate, we suspect this is unlikely). We’ve been told that subtitles service on page 888 won’t be affected.

Anyone out there actually using any of the various text-based red button services out there? Would you miss any of the services if they were switched off?

Show 48 of the UK’s TV and Tech podcast, FrequencyCast is out today.

Brought to you with a little help from Radio & Telly, the show takes a look at ways to get more from your telly and gets hands-on with two media players. We also run down the latest tech and TV news, and answer listener’s questions. If you ‘ve bot yet given the show a try, please do – you might just like it…

You can download Show 48 direct to your MP3 player or listen online at http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/latest.html.

If you have an iPod or iPhone, get shows faster by signing up via iTunes.

Comments on the show, subject suggestions, and your questions, are always welcomed!

Share and Enjoy,

The FrequencyCast team
www.frequencycast.co.uk

Sky has today updated its offers, and there have been some odd changes.

For a start, the traditional Sky+ box seems to have vanished from the box lineup. Also, you can now only get the basic Sky box as a “multi-room” second box.

This means that the only box open to new customers, is Sky’s top-of-the-range Sky+ HD box (pictured).

You can get the Sky+ HD box for free, provided you sign to Sky’s £10-a-month HD service. Otherwise, take the Sky+ HD box without the HD channels for a one-off £49.

The intention here is clear – by withdrawing all but the HD box, it’s a push to get Sky HD boxes in as many homes as possible, hoping that as more of us get an HD-ready telly, we’ll want to get some HD programming on our tellies.

Still – while Sky’s doing this, it’s good news for new customers who get a top-end box that’s HD-enabled and with the new-style programme guide for nothing – making now a great time to sign up.

Details of Sky’s latest offer: Free Sky+ HD box. There’s also a £25 Marks and sparks voucher on offer too…

Remember Project Kangaroo? The service that was set to be a little like the BBC iPlayer but combining TV content from BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4. It was canned in 2009 after a review by the Competition Commission.

Well, it’s back. Now known as SeeSaw and with a slightly different offering, this is due to launch within the next few months offering TV content from a number of suppliers, most notably BBC Worldwide, on either a free, ad funded or pay-to-view model.

SeeSaw has just entered a public beta test phase, and if you’d be interested in trying out SeeSaw ahead of its public launch later this year, go to www.seesaw.com

We’ve created a new page, outlining what we know about see saw so far: SeeSaw Explored

From tomorrow, Friday the 22nd of January, until this coming Sunday, sports channel ESPN will be free-to-view.

The weekend’ sporting action will be free on Sky, Virgin, BT Vision, Top Up TV, TalkTalk TV and Freeview.

The lead event that will be shown free is the Inter vs AC Milan, live on Sunday night from 7pm (David Beckham). Other freebiews include Motherwell vs St Mirren, Juventus vs Roma, UFC Best of 2009, LA Lakers at NY Knicks, and more.

For details of how to watch ESPN, see our ESPN Sports page.