News

I think music should be cheap, with old, unwanted albums available in MP3 for the cost of postage and the second-hand CD (that's 1.26GBP for old Rihanna, REM and Britney albums that people have unused in their attics from Amazon).  I don't want really want CDs winging their way by mail to me, and inhabiting my house, I'd rather buy and have it on my hard drive (or cloud-locker etc.).  Surely the MP3 prices should match the valid second-hand sellers?

I've created a new SSD page with links to buying solid state drives (SSD).

High-definition (HD) is coming to Freeview in the UK during 2010. London should get HD in March 2010 (see the Freeview HD page for more information). See the Freeview HD rollout map for more information.

You'll need new digiboxes to pick up the new signals, and new recorders to record them (a bonanza for manufacturers). During 2010 BBC HD, ITV HD and Channel 4 HD will be launched (and possibly a Five HD channel). The main draw will be the World Cup in HD.

See the BBC HD schedule, Channel 4 HD (the standard channel with some programmes in HD) and ITV HD to see if there's anything that takes your fancy right now.

It's exciting that 4 channels of terrestrial Freeview HD should arrive in parts of Britain next year. London is on the roadmap for 2009:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/22/london_high_def/

Unfortunately new players will be needed to receive the HD signal as it's encoded differently. Buyers of older equipment will be left out in the HD cold. I don't know whether it would be technically possible for manufacturers to update older equipment with software updates.

The channels will only be in the lower 720p HD resolution (HD comes in two resolutions - 720p and 1080p/1080i): http://www.avforums.com/forums/home-cinema-tech-news/737341-freeview-hd-plan.html
In comparison,  standard definition TV is 576p (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/576p) and also narrower.

There is limited capacity for HD channels on Terrestrial TV as the bandwidth available is limited. Satellite (Freesat and Sky) and cable have more bandwidth available and will continue to be able to broadcast more HD channels.

A while ago I wrote about how youtube was catching myspace and facebook.  Well, according to Google's trends it has overtaken them.  But what is still surprising to me is how strongly Facebook is still growing (as mentioned in this BBC article called Facebook over? Only in Islington).  Facebook doesn't look to have "saturated" any of its markets, whereas Myspace looks to have saturated the US according to the Trends graphs.  Bebo, on the other hand has yet to get off the ground in Canada or the US.