Which of the new HD channels do you watch?

It's been a month (give or take a few days) since the additional HD channels launched on Virgin Media and I've found myself watching a lot more HD of late, much of it on channels I'd rarely watched previously. FX HD may repeat programming ad nauseum but in True Blood it has one of the best US imports in a long time, whilst Nat Geo HD strikes me as a little more watchable than Discovery but still short of the better BBC documentary series. MTVN HD seems limited and upscaled to me, whilst Channel 4 HD should spark into life a little more once we start the new season schedules in September.
ESPN HD has been brilliant for the footie but I still find it's BBC HD that is filling (rapidly!) my V+ each week - the recent series of River and Coast are backed up on my disc and a few episodes of Desperate Romantics have been recorded in SD just to squeeze on. If you're recording just HD it's a meagre 20 hours of recording you can store, and unfortunately the much-lauded HD on demand with iPlayer just isn't up to scratch yet, predominantly filled with kids' series and soaps (why??!).
The V+ storage is a problem Virgin will get complaints about if they can't engineer a Samsung roll out and a switch to MPeg4 soon.
Another poll then: now that we have more than one, which HD channel do you watch most?

Sky and Ofcom

There was an interesting article in The Guardian this week about BT Vision. BT's pay TV service (basically Freeview plus IP TV) has struggled to lure paying customers away from Sky and Virgin and currently serves a TV customer base of 433k - Sky has more than 9m and Virgin 3.5m. (Any HD offering on the service is constrained by BT's copper-based ADSL broadband btw.) Anyway, what interested me in the article was a comment made by the Chief Exec of BT Retail regarding the regulators and the double-standards of some of Sky's statements regarding the Ofcom report earlier in the summer:

Ofcom wants to impose a complicated pricing formula which it claims will allow Sky to make a decent margin from selling on its sport and movie channels, even after the cost of acquiring the rights has been taken into account.

"It would not make Sky sell at a loss," Patterson [Chief Exec of BT Retail] says. It is ironic, he adds, that Sky has built a broadband business with more than 2 million customers (BT has close to 5 million) by piggybacking on BT's own network, following a deal imposed by regulators, but is unwilling to accede to Ofcom's writ by making its own content available to BT and others.

I hadn't thought of it like that. Sky has talked up the investment made by the company in securing its premium TV content monopoly, but has conveniently ignored the similar situation in the broadband market with BT having made a huge investment and then having to bow to regulatory power to open it up to the competition. Which Sky has been one of the main beneficiaries of.

Funny that...

3D TV - who cares?

Sky has announced that in 2010 it will launch a 3D channel. This week's episode of Chuck on Virgin1 was in 3D. Every summer release at the cinema seems to be boast a premium-priced 3D version. Does anyone care? Is this destined to die like previous 3D fads or is this the real deal? I've put up a poll so vote now or feel free to comment on this post.

ESPN - better games than Sky so far!

They may not be the most attractive games on paper, but so far ESPN has had all of the better games I've watched on TV this season, and all in HD, too. First weekend the Everton v Arsenal cracker, then Wigan v United, then arguably the best of the weekend ties with West Ham v Spurs, and now tonight an absolutely cracker of Liverpool v Villa. Not a duff one yet. Chelsea v Burnley's the next up on Saturday at noon then Spurs v Man U on September 12th. Fabulous. And a fabulous picture, too :-)

Sky Movies channels picture quality improved?

Long time visitors to this blog will know that I have a theory that Sky deliberately reduced the bit-rate on its SD movie channels (both on cable and satellite) to artificially exagerate the difference between standard definiton and the new high definition versions. I'm not saying HD isn't superior, but it struck me as probably more than coincidence that the premium movie channels on cable in SD seemed to suffer a significant quality drop around the time that the majority got HD equivalents on satellite. It wasn't just me that commented, and sites that measure the bit-rates for channels broadcast on satellite appeared to back up what I was seeing.
(Of course, it may not have been Sky being creative with bit-rates - it could just have easily been a technical fault at Virgin - but I do like a good conspiracy theory.)
Of late though, things appear to my eyes have improved on the SD movie channels. Watching Hellboy II and Indiana Jones IV recently I thought the picture was good again, probably the best it has been for some time. Has anyone else noticed this? Comparison with Film4 still suggest the Channel 4 service is superior, but it is less notable now.
It could be to do with the Luxemburg thing Virgin did a few months back (which I thought was just a tax wheeze), it could be improved bit-rates, it could be my eyes getting older, who knows? Of course it's no substitute for us getting the HD versions of the movie channels, but in the meantime any improvement to the (expensive) movie service is most welcome. Even if it is all in my imagination.

Calibrating an LCD TV

If you have a flat panel TV and haven't calibrated it yet, chances are you may be short-changing yourself on picture quality. My LCD is over two years' old and I still tweak the settings every now and again, largely in an unscientific "looks a bit too red" kinda way.
Anyway, if you want to do it more scientifically here's a handy guide on The Register to follow to maximise your televisual experience.

Living HD testing

There are previews showing on Living HD (channel 110), albeit just in standard definition to my eyes.

BBC HD problems?

I hadn't noticed myself, but apparently there are quality issues with BBC HD that have led to them issuing the following statement:

"The BBC has deployed a new set of HD encoders. The current bitrates were picked after much side-by-side comparison of the old and new encoders using a wide range of programme material. While it is impossible to achieve parity in all formats the new encoders were judged to be giving equal or better quality in most cases."

"However, there is no test like putting these to air, and when we did, a reproducible problem was identified on certain types of material. We have shared this information with the coder manufacturer so they can investigate further. "

"The particular problem does not go away with higher bitrates, so whilst an investigation and fix are awaited some changes have already been made to the encoders to try and mitigate the effects. In addition, the new encoders also fixed other problems, unrelated to picture quality, which the BBC received complaints about."

There's more on this on the What HiFi site.

"Sky+ HD - it's what your HD ready TV was made for"

Well we knew that, but now Sky is reminding the great British public in a big way.
Sky spends more than double what Virgin Media does on advertising its services - and is in fact one of the biggest advertisers in the UK - and it has dug deep into its pockets again with a massive promotion of Sky HD in today's press, two page colour ads in every paper, belittling Virgin's six HD channels compared to (up to) 34 on Sky HD.
It's not a fair comparison - half of the channels Sky has in HD are not made available to VM as they are Sky-owned, and the VM service is free to XL TV customers whereas on Sky you pay extra - and as with all Sky and Virgin ads the devil is in the detail, but it does show that Sky is going to take Virgin's move into HD seriously. Possibly more seriously than Virgin themselves.

Who still watches "live" TV?

A recent OFCOM report on TV usage suggests that more and more of us watch our TV timeshifted. Here are the headlines:

• At the end of March, over a quarter of UK homes (27%) had a PVR ("Personal Video Recorder", such as the V+ or Sky+), representing an increase of 29% since September, 2008.
• Around 9 million PVR's have been sold in the UK, the majority (over 5 million) of which are Sky+ boxes.
• Around a fifth (19%) of viewing in Sky+ homes is timeshifted, while in homes equipped with Virgin Media's V+ PVR service 12% of viewing is timeshifted; in Freeview PVR homes, meanwhile, around 9% of viewing is timeshifted.

The full text of the report's TV section is available online at: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/cmr09/CMRMain_2.pdf

So if you have a V+, do you still watch live TV (excepting sport or news)? I hardly watch anything when it's actually broadcast these days, the only exception really being what I'd call "event" TV, stuff I choose to watch at the earliest opportunity (Lost being one of the few examples of this). In fact, I think I actually watch less TV than I did before the V+, but I'm more selective in what I watch.
Which presents a problem with the new HD channels still being the less efficient compression of MPeg2. My V+ hard disc just ain't big enough to record several episodes of an HD series without the disc groaning under the size of a few hours of HD. What's more, the HD section of iPlayer seems to be extremely hit and miss, which means my (manual) series stacking of Desperate Romantics and Being Human has been recorded from SD rather than high def as I know I won't get around to watching them for a while. Anyone else struggling with this? I find that I only record HD programmes if I plan to watch them the same week now, which makes the whole thing somwhat frustrating.