May 01, 2009

BBC HD in catch up

It seems to be a list growing by the hour. No sign of the BBC's US imports (Damages, Mad Men, Heroes) but as the first two of those have their season finales next week that's not surprising. Here's what my V+ has as of 7am May 1st:
  • All The Small Things
  • Doctors (28/3)
  • Gardeners' World
  • Kerwhizz (2 ep)
  • Last of the Summer Wine
  • The Old Guys
  • Reggie Perrin (with its awful laughter track)
  • Robin Hood
  • Tellytales
  • Tonight's the Night
I have a feeling that the arrival of HD in iPlayer is going to be Virgin's sole announcement on HD service improvements this month. I hope I'm wrong.

7 comments:

Richard1990 said...

I don't think any American series will end up on Virgin HD catch-up as I expect the VOD rights to be tied up elsewhere.

Sirius said...

What happened to your "embargoed" news that was supposed to be imminent, Nialli?

Afront said...

virginmedia on Twitter just posted a tweet linking to:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/05_may/01/hd.shtml

Nialli said...

Richard: we've had the C4 US imports on catch up and both Mad Men and Damages are in iPlayer, so you never know.
Sirius: still not allowed to say anything on the blog but I think if you check out some of the forum threads elsewhere you'll see a pretty consistent story emerging regarding linear HD channels now. I wouldn't be surprised if plans have changed - I had a similar thing happen just before one set of VM results last year where I was told something by the company but asked not to publish until it was cleared (I think it was about the Samsung box). Nothing ever came out and the Sky basics story was the lead into the results presentations.
This time around it looks like HD in iPlayer is all we're getting.
They may have decided that it will be difficult to spin a positive Virgin HD story in the shadow of Sky's results this week and changed plans.
I don't work for Virgin so I only know what I'm told. I guess "imminent" is as empty a promise as "coming soon"

Anonymous said...

If it's not happened in the timeframe you were told, can you tell us now what was supposed to have been revealed?

Nialli said...

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/34786572-post848.html

I had similar information from a reliable source at Virgin (though not the press office) and was told that an announcement was "imminent"

Anonymous said...

At 18Mbs the VOD stuff will use up fairly heavy bandwidth, but probably worth it I'd say. I do wish they'd launch ITV HD and C4HD. Although if they launch them all at once they'll get bigger headlines, the idea of waiting till say July (plucking a date out of thin air) is going to be really annoying as every week that ticks by is content gone. Oh well.