In an industry first, all of the commercial TV broadcasters have announced today they will provide an electronic program guide to all manufacturers of free-to-air personal video recorders and similar services.. Julie Flynn, chief executive officer of industry body Free TV said the announcement was a “critical plank” in the transition to digital adoption. “Free-to-view …

We recently looked at a BBC R&D white paper about using MIMO to transmit high-definition TV using the space left over from the analogue switch-off. As a result, we were invited to go along to Kingswood Warren, the home of BBC R&D, to see a demonstration of the system. Kingswood is home to BBC research into technologies that will eventually …

HD DVD is undoubtedly suffering from a lack of support, both from movie studios and hardware manufacturers not called Toshiba. Tosh is totally committed to its format, however, and intends to release two interesting and important updates in the coming months to keep its players on top of their game. The first of these firmware upgrades, available now, adds Web …

As promised, here’s the second of this month’s competitions and, again, we’re kicking ourselves at our bewildering generosity. This time we’re giving you the chance to win a brand-new 32-inch HD Ready LCD television from Panasonic. If you’ve been eyeing up high definition TVs for a while but are struggling to save your gold nuggets, listen up: we’re giving away …

The Humax 9200T is nothing new — we first reviewed it in November 2005 and generally liked it. So why bring it up again now? Well, Humax has discontinued the old model and replaced it with two new ones with a Freeview Playback sticker on the front. To celebrate this sticker — and the spec standard it represents — the …

American mega-network NBC, part of the Universal group, is claiming that piracy is damaging the corn industry. Rick Cotton, general counsel for NBC/Universal, believes that more people watching pirated movies means less popcorn is sold at cinemas. Therefore, piracy is hurting innocent farmers. No, really, someone from NBC actually said that, and from what I can tell kept a straight …

You remember Napster, right? Not the legal one, the one that went before it, the one that meant universities across the world had to get bigger Internet pipes just to cope. Napster started the revolution of digital music and introduced the world to a new idea: getting media over the Internet. Now Napster has gone legit, but we probably wouldn’t …

Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple, is an emerging force in the mobile phone business, thanks to the snaking lines of gadget fans who queued up last week to buy the iPhone. But now he faces a headache in an industry Apple already dominates–digital music. The Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, last …

It’s not often we get to make up a word, but our friends over at CNET.com have introduced the term ‘colour-changey‘, so we feel it’s fair we can add our own word to the vernacular. If you use ‘swivellyness’ often enough, dear readers, this time next year it will make it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Hey, it worked for …

I’ve seen adverts for Freeview Playback and noticed that there are a couple of Freeview receivers with the logo on them. What is it, and why should I care? Tony You should care because those nice people at Freeview, and the hardware manufacturers, are trying to make your life a little better with technology! Put simply, Freeview Playback is designed …