p.toplearning{font-size: 9px; font-weight: bold; color:#aaaaaa;}

There’s been a fair bit of excitement this morning on Twitter over a story on one of our favourite sites, Boing Boing, claiming the BBC is about to apply DRM to Freeview. The move would prevent equipment from being able to record high-definition TV content unless the set-top box manufacturer has signed a contract with the BBC and is subsequently …

BERLIN–Shelled out several thousands for a Philips Cinema 21:9 television? You’ll be pleased to hear it’s obsolete. Philips has bumped the firmware and added a micro polarizing lens to the screen, to create a prototype 3D TV. The TV gets its tri-dimensional input from a prototype 3D Blu-ray player. Philips said Thursday at IFA 2009 that it’s “actively participating in …

We’re at IFA at the Sony press conference, where Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer reckons the “3D train is on the track — and we’re the ones to drive it home.” 3D is Sony’s big push, but we’re more interested in the announcement of a movie-download service for PS3 and PSP, via the PlayStation Network. Sony has announced its first …

While Panasonic is busy boosting its customer service capabilities through Twitter, Samsung is taking a more old school route by opening seven “Customer Service Plazas” (CSP) across Australia. Two CSPs are already open in Melbourne and Darwin, with Perth and Brisbane due to open their doors by November. Two in Sydney and one in Adelaide are on the plans for …

You can always tell when BBC Worldwide is dipping its toe into the tepid waters of online content licensing because suddenly there’s a new way to watch episodes of either Top Gear, Doctor Who or both. And today is no exception, with the Guardian reporting that blinkbox has done a deal to show older editions via its online streaming and …

Not so very long ago we had the WD TV in for review. We’re old hands at the media-streaming game, but even we were excited by the WD TV, because it cost very little and had massive format support. We weren’t disappointed in person, and our review congratulated it for doing many things for very little money. Bizarrely, it seems …

You know the score: you bought an iPod or iPhone and you find yourself with all of your music on one device. But how do you listen to it on that expensive home cinema in your lounge? Onkyo, like so many other companies, is keen to be the receptacle for your pod-based device with its Digital Media Transport — a …

With the ‘shock‘ announcement yesterday that Toshiba would be supporting Blu-ray with its own hardware this year, we sought some chatting time with the company’s very own Olivier van Wynedaele. A senior executive at Toshiba Europe, he’s involved with optical storage and we’ve spoken to him before about Toshiba’s DVD upscalers and HD DVD players. He’s certainly a chap who …

Freeview recorders are exactly like arms. When you’ve got them, and they work perfectly, you take them for granted. But get one munched off by a shark or alligator and you’re really going to miss it. The cruel vagaries of review loan periods, rather than animal attack, mean we’ve gone without a recorder for a while, and it’s actually painful. …