BBC And ITV In HDTV Alliance: Hell Freezes Over After All April 28, 2007
Read more Gizmodo UK , HDTV , TV
I realise there’s a lot of acronyms in that headline but bear with me. The BBC has just gotten permission from its overlords – the BBC Trust – to do a deal with a minor demon (ITV) in an effort to claw back some of the fledgling high-def TV market (HDTV) market from the Lord of Darkness itself (Sky).
The service, called Freesat, will launch next Spring and will offer consumers 200 channels of standard and high-def material with no subscription fees. Woo-hoo! Consumers will have a choice of equipment including both SD and HD receivers, a HD personal video recorder and an integrated digital television. This is good news and provides at least some form of future-proofing for Freeview. The Freesat service promises to fill any current Freeview coverage gaps and, as mentioned, will have no subscription charges.
Since I’m just about to pop my HD cherry with pricey Sky HD, I just wish they could have moved a bit quicker. How much the Freesat dish and installation will cost though, is still a mite fuzzy.-Martin Lynch
Editor | Martin Lynch
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Cool, I might get one of this
once i see how it works
Just in time for Euro 2008 perhaps ?
Save yourself some cash if you wanna go HD now. Buy yourself a box on Ebay (anything from £99 - £180) and put it in yourself. If you have Sky Plus already, you just take out the old box, put in the new one, call SKY and away you go. Saves you a load of cash!
If this is going to be sucessful they need to make it as cheap as freeview. ie. £20 boxes and cheap instalation of the dish. what would be really cool is if BT got their arses in gear and upgraded the network so we could have iptv with full 1080p HD broadcasting.
i was almost certain SKY bought alot of ITV Shares, could be wrong but i thought their were an alliance :P
sky baught around 17% of the shares which isnt strictly a controlling share, although an investigation into it.. .i think by the competition commision... said this is harming tv and sky should sell their shares..
"I realise there’s a lot of acronyms in that headline". There actually isn't a single one - they're all just abbreviations. Look up acronym in a dictionary and you'll see what I mean.
Andy, acronym's = BBC, ITV and HDTV. What are you on about?
Sheesh!
"Look up acronym in a dictionary and you'll see what I mean".
But if that was too hard to do, I'll explain here. An acronym is an abbreviation that spells a word. You then say the word instead of each letter. Common examples are LASER and RADAR, which both stand for something, yet which are said as a word. BBC, ITV and HDTV are not acronyms because they're not pronounced as words but rather each letter is said individually ("bee-bee-see"). Generally, an abbreviation needs vowels in it to be able to function as an acronym.
Don't worry, you're not on your own. It seems the whole world these days thinks every abbreviation is an acronym.