Monday 22 December 2008

Consuming Content Differently

A record 15 million people may have tuned into watch the final of X Factor last weekend, I wasn’t one of them.

We headed out to the supermarket for a spot of pre-Christmas shopping. While the rest of the country was tuned to the Grand Final, the shopping isles of Tesco were completely empty.

When they got home around an hour after the show had sta
rted they were able to skip the adverts and annoying pre-song interviews thanks to the joys of a PVR.

I wonder how many other viewers opted for a similar tactic it’s just so easy to do, as a consumer this makes a lot of sense but for the advertisers paying for prime time exposure this isn’t what they want to see.

Friday 19 December 2008

ITV in Catch Up rebrand

Almost 12 months to the day that the BBC launched iPlayer, ITV is renaming its itv.com on demand offering. From today the ITV platform currently know as Catch Up will go by the moniker of ITV Player. The service allows punters to view a selection of the best ITV shows for 30 days.

Thursday 18 December 2008

Undocumented TV support for the iPhone

Both the Apple iPhone and iTouch have TV support but it hasn’t been published as part of the specification. So how do we know? According to Make Magazine, the developers of Moto Chaser, a motorbike race game, set up a demo of the iPhone's video-out capabilities in only an afternoon after being set a challenge.

Using the undocumented MPTVOutWindow class and iPod A/V cables, it's possible to program an iPhone to have television output. What's cool about this is that since the iPhone be both the game platform and a controller, since it contains Wiimote-like accelerometer features.

Neat eh?