television « Ben Hanbury

Archive for the ‘television’ Category

SUPER high definition

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

There was an interesting demo today in the foyet of the BBC Media Centre, basically it was a showcase of the new SUPER-high-definition TV (yep high def just wasn’t high enough!). Anyway it’s a joint venture between japanese company NHK and the BBC and it was pretty darn impressive! Though it’s quite difficult to describe without seeing it in person I’ve found the below image off Wikipedia, the yellow and the light turquoise rectangles are the current 720p and 1080p resolutions - the large blue one is SHD.

Anyway apparently it’s being aimed at homes rather than cinemas and is due in about 20 years. However apart from needing a mammoth screen and 22 speakers it’s also gonna need a pretty hefty hard drive in your living room as 20 minutes of footage takes up about 3,600 gigabytes!

Posted in bbc, technology, television | No Comments »

new version of iPlayer on the iPhone …

Monday, September 29th, 2008

last week a new version of the mobile version of iplayer for the iphone and nokia n95 was released. the big update this time is that on-demand radio is now included … anyway it’s looking and working really smoothly now and is a massive improvement on the initial version launched a few months ago. more info on the bbc internet blog

Posted in bbc, radio, technology, television | No Comments »

Sneak peak at the new iPlayer website

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Here’s a sneak peak of the new iPlayer website that will be launching soon - the big difference from the last site is that radio is featured alongside tv making it a one-stop shop to access all of BBC’s on-demand content. There’s a big change in the audio playback which will now mostly be high quality stereo in flash (with the aim of gradually getting rid of all the crappola windows and real playback) and the TV playback size has increased to 640px wide.

Other features have been added such as the ‘Last Played’ function which remembers what you’ve watched or listened to and allows you to resume playing from where you’ve left off. Also a full schedule and list view to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

I’ll write more on this at the launch, in the meantime you can find out more on the BBC Internet Blog or view the promotional video on the Media Guardian website.

Posted in bbc, radio, television, web | No Comments »

iPlayer on TV

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Big iPlayer news today - the service has had it’s first launch onto a TV platform, starting off with the Virgin Media set top boxes with other services to follow. More info on the BBC internet blog

iPlayer on virgin tv

Posted in bbc, television | No Comments »

The ENEMY!

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Interesting to see the new ITV Catch Up site, there’s a couple of things that I like about it (though there are a LOT of bugs when using it on a mac) - My main gripe is that rather than using flash video (which everyone has) it uses Microsoft Silverlight (which no-one has?!)

Posted in television, web | 1 Comment »

iPlayer news

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

It’s been quite a busy few weeks getting some designs signed off for the next release of iPlayer. In the meantime there’s been some pretty cool developments - firstly it’s now become one of the few video sites (the only other one I know of is youTube) which will work on the iPhone and iPod touch, this is because it can stream in H.264 as well as flash - more info on the BBC internet blog and in the Guardian.

The other thing which has been quite interesting has been a couple of iPlayer clone websites which essentially use the same content and flash player but reorganised into a different site. My favourite version of this is iPlayerList which has the strapline “Making the unmissable, browsable” a little dig at the fact that on the current site, which is very picture heavy, it can be difficult to browse through content quickly and easily (this is something which we’re remedying for the next release).

Anyway it’s actually a really great site, with RSS feeds of programmes, related blog posts, it also pulls in related video from other video sharing sites. I think the main point seems to be though, that if you can easily find and play content it really doesn’t matter what the site looks like?!

Posted in bbc, television, web | No Comments »

Retro ident music video

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Really like the new music video for the Justice track ‘DVNO‘ which takes a poke at the old retro tv idents. One of them inparticular reminded me very much of the old BBC video ident - so cooool!

Posted in bbc, motiongraphics, music, television | No Comments »

Radio Visualisation: Watching Live Radio

Friday, February 15th, 2008

Am currently watching Mark Kermode’s Film Reviews live on Radio 5 … the quality of the stream is pretty good and it’s actually quite interesting viewing - another example of the blurring between TV and radio?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive

Posted in bbc, motiongraphics, radio, television, web | 1 Comment »

Surround Video

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

An interesting development to come out of BBC Research and Development recently - ‘surround video‘

“Surround Video is a means of visually immersing the viewer into a TV programme.

It is like surround sound, an optional extra that enhances viewing on a normal display. The idea is to use a wide angle (or fisheye) camera fixed rigidly alongside the normal camera shooting the programme, and to project the image onto the walls, ceiling and floor of the viewer’s room.

The image is scaled and positioned to ensure that it aligns up with the existing TV, and warped to compensate for the distortion effects that come from the wide-angle lens and projection system. Although the projected image will be dimmer and of lower resolution than the main image, it nevertheless gives a strong feeling of immersion, particularly with motion cues being visible in the viewer’s peripheral vision”

Posted in bbc, motiongraphics, television | No Comments »

BBC Three Rebrand

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

So it seems BBC Three have gone for a bit of a rebrand, along with a new multiplatform vision which will include becoming the first channel to be broadcast live across the internet as well as on tv (though if you missed your weekly hit of “Can Fat Teens Hunt” on either platforms then don’t worry as you can always catch up with it on iPlayer too!)

I quite like the new logo, though it does seem mighty similar to the Heart FM one?

Posted in bbc, design, television, web | No Comments »

Ben Hanbury