3DGalaxy

I feel like I’ve been wishing Apple to put some video content on iTunes UK for so long now. The thing engadget posted about apple changing their UK apple tv page to not show any tv shows or movies and simply pictures of peoples home movies made sense, is just dissapointing, and also makes me wonder how many people here will buy one until movies are announced. I’m sure people will, but only those who rip their DVDs or want to watch podcasts (or even HD podcasts) and other net video content on their HD TV. I know I would be one of these people if we had an HD TV.

There are lots of shows that I would consider buying that aren’t available on DVD here (adult swim stuff) plus some movies like toy story and others maybe. We have toy story on video but now that video is all but obsolete and I would feel like punching myself after having to deal with a crappy tape I’d like to buy it again digitally.

Some of the stuff I would buy using the service: viva la bam, jackass, aqua teen, robot chicken and probably a load more when I think of them and some movies of course, although I tend to like animated and comedy movies rather than the more traditional genres.

I’m assuming the reason there is no content on the UK store yet is something to do with the BBC license fee. You would think it’s fine as long as the BBC don’t put any shows up on there but I’m skeptical. For example for those of you who aren’t aware, we pay a BBC license fee which pays for the ad-free BBC media over TV, radio and net. This fee, if not paid means you aren’t legally able (but not technically) to watch TV at all, even if you never watch bbc channels which is totally ridiculous and needs to be revised drastically.

Whether or not we get iTunes downloads soon or not, and regardless whether the license fee has anything to do with the delay, I still think something has to be done to make it more modern and fair. I think the people who don’t pay their tv license should be blocked from recieving bbc channels over freeview, cable or satelite and be able to view all the commercial channels. The bbc would be funded purely by the people who want to watch it. Now that makes sense to me.

While I’m on the subject of movies, TV and HD, I am so frustrated with the snails pace of HD adoption in this country. It’s taking forever seemingly where the US is blazing ahead with loads of HD channels and content. Over here we have just the sky channels in HD which to be honest I don’t really care about much. Virgin Media customers like ourselves seem to have it especially bad since we’re expected to pay £15 on top of the already fairly high and unjistified cost for only one channel in HD. That channel is BBC HD which we already theoretically pay for in our license fee (see this makes more sense as I go along). There is some HD content on-demand but you probably have to pay yet more for it so I guess it doesn’t count.

I had a thought tonight about HD how it’s developing well in some areas and frustratingly slowly in others. I think there has to come a point in the near future where HD becomes a standard feature for cable and possibly satelite. I mean considering firstly that digital is now free there has to be a way to justify the cost of pay services except the extra channels you get which aren’t exactly essential viewing most of the time. I mean for example MTV UKs “new shows” are repeats of new US shows shown in the states a couple of months earlier. For example I think Bam’s Unholy Union is starting soon when it’s been out for ages on iTunes now in the US.

There are three main points coming out of this. Firstly this country has to reinvent the way it deals with the bbc and the TV license. Secondly, there has to be more of a level playing field between the US and the UK and a more streamlined way of delivering content at the same time both sides of the Atlantic over traditional TV, net on-demand and iTunes and other download services.

Finally, HD has to take real strides in the next year in several areas. It has to get cheaper to buy TVs and cheaper to get the services. It has to become easier for people to choose a set. (Non-tech minded people don’t know the difference between 720p and 1080p except that one is bigger and they won’t know what the actual picture difference is). It also has to become easier for people to understand that just because they have an HD TV, they won’t get an HD picture for free. Then there’s the issue of getting far more HD channels available.

Despite the fact that there will be lots of content in HD online in the next year that will be abe to be played on your TV via Apple TV or something similar, and games can be played in HD now via the consoles, not to mention movies and TV show releases on HD format dics, those combined aren’t enough to make HD become the standard. TV has to catch up in a big way for it to happen.

It’s felt like ages since the PS3 launched in the US and Japan but now it’s finally here in the UK and Europe. It’s actually widely available straight away and didn’t sell out. I think most people were predicting that to happen but you never can tell seeing as Sony have a great fan-base over here for gaming, or so they did if today was anything to go by.

The updated 360 in black is pretty much confirmed at this point and according to engadget and others, it will come out sometime in April, have HDMI, a 120gb hdd and be limited in quantity meaning that when these more expensive black versions sell out, all the premium systems will start to ship with hdml and the larger hdd (and hopefully stay at the same price). They may go as far as to put hdmi in the core edition but I think instead what they’ll do is replace the core system with the non-hdmi premium at the lower price point with the 20gb hdd.

I do want to get one of these consoles at some point in the next year or so but I can’t really chose. I’ve posted about this many times before but the circumstances keep changing. I think blu-ray is the real deciding factor between the two machines and my inability to self-declare blu-ray the winner prematurely. At this point I would probably go for a reduced price premium with component but I guess if we were to get an HD TV soon I might want to get HDMI instead.

Of course home is launching for PS3 later this year and is great, but like I said before it’s not going to be a system seller on it’s own and needs to be backed up by some great games which are lacking at this point.

Another thing to take into consideration is the Xbox hardware and the fact that it has been known to brick pretty frequently. Sony have a good reputation for making quality products so I would probably feel more comfortable with the PS3 as far as reliability issues go.

I was just listening to the engadget podcast earlier where the guys were discussing the Xbox Elite and the PS3 and mentioned the fact that even the elite won’t have wi-fi which they said is pretty dumb considering most people don’t have ethernet in their homes. I couldn’t agree more, this is why I bought a router in the first place, to get away from the problem of how to connect devices together at home.

I just can’t understand how Microsoft can think that wi-fi isn’t an important enough component to just shove it in there. How much would it have cost them to just put a wi-fi adapter in there? I doubt very much and what’s the deal with charging £60 for an adapter? I bought a linksys one for about £16 a year ago so I don’t know how they came to that price. As far as I see it, I would be paying £100 on top of the price of the console to play online due to the cost of Xbox live (£40) as well as the wi-fi adapter. In this department I’d much rather just pay the outright cost for the PS3 and get wi-fi built in.

I think I’ve confused myself more in this post with points for and against both systems. I guess we’ll just see what happens with wi-fi, blu-ray and hdmi in the near future and see what happens.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while but kept forgetting until now. PBWiki are a great company that provide free wiki services similar to those offered by wikia. However I think PBwiki is better for a few reasons.

The first being that wikia uses the wikimedia engine which makes it obviously look exactly the same as wikipedia. While this isn’t exactly a bad thing, it may confuse people and also make people not realise that a wiki is an actual type of site and a way of collaborating, rather than just the short name of the most known encyclopedia these days.

The new thing that really helps keep it above wikia in my estimation is the new rich text editor which they had been talking about for what felt like ages before they introduced it recently. It works great and really kicks wikimedia pretty hard because people are put off editing wikipedia entries because they don’t know how to code.

Of course it’s not really that hard to edit existing wikipedia entries but if you want to add in an image where there was none before or add a table of contents to a new page, it can be difficult to people who are new to it.

The pbwiki editor on the other hand completely eliminates that problem by allowing anyone to create great looking pages for their wiki with ease, complete with plug-ins like flash (youtube videos) among others. You can even add a basic chat box which although isn’t that useful will certainly give younger people or people relatively new to web design a kick.

The only thing I don’t like too much about pbwiki is that you don’t get that many ways to make your wiki look unique in terms of the layout. You get a few options for layouts in the free package but I guess seeing as you only get one real choice with wikia it’s not really my place to complain, especially when you do get more customization features in the paid version, plus the ability to host a domain at the wiki which to me is really cool. I love the idea of having a whole website as a wiki allowing the whole thing to be edited at any time by anyone.

So in short, if you need an easy to use and fairly customizable wiki, look no further.

This week Sony announced Home, a virtual world that PS3 owners can connect to. It won’t be too unfamilar to you if you’ve ever visited second life but the graphics on Home seem to be significantly better, although controlling with a sixaxis is never going to be as good as a mouse (or even a wii-mote) for pointing at things with, although it seems very plausable that you’ll be able to use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard with your PS3, or even a wired one.

The big question is however, is this the feature that really starts to turn the PS3 into something more people will want to pick up? For me, probably not. I mean it’s a virtual world and not a game really, and even if it does have great graphics and cool features I still won’t buy a PS3 for it. I would buy a PS3 to play games and movies (if blu-ray wins) mainly, but this will be a nice freebie (I hope it’s free anyway). It just doesn’t cut it as a feature which would actually sell consoles despite it’s flashiness.

Then again, (resuming writing this post after wating the youtube video above), wow, it looks great graphically and functionally. Second Life will have some trouble competing with this unless it gets some major upgrades before this is released. I’m not sure however if this will allow people to buy and sell things with real money so I guess if it doesn’t which looks fairly likely then SL will at least keep a lot of the business people, although who will they sell to if everyone else is on home?

I’ve been thinking recently about how much negative press Sony has been taking on the PS3 and I’m just coming to the conclusion that whatever happens, the PS3 will be a success. While a lot of former Sony people make the switch to Microsoft’s console or the wii, I’m trying to remind myself that people are fickle. Like when the gamecube was the kiddie console and the PS2 was the best thing ever. Now the opposite is happening so who’s to say it won’t flip around again?

My prediction is a pretty obvious one but I’ll say it anyway. If blu-ray wins against HD DVD then the PS3 will be a huge success. If it fails it will be a modest success. We’ll see what happens but things are starting to look a bit brighter for Sony. But what they really need is a reason for people to pick up the console in the first place. Meaning lots of great HD games.