simon-may.com » Technology

Sky are hot out the box with 3D TV

Simon — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Wow, I knew we were going to get a 3D offering from Sky but this is something else! So fast… Sky are broadcasting the first ever 3D sports match, a football (soccer for you US types) er on Sunday.

Yep, a world first, and in the UK the first ever 3D sports on TV and it’ll be between Arsenal and Manchester United in the Premier League this Sunday. It’ll be available to anyone with a 3D TV (so no one then) and a bunch of pubs have been given some TVs to use for the show. There’s one in Manchester for Ian to go to.

To support this landmark broadcast, the nine pubs – located in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Dublin – have been kitted out specially with some of the first ‘3D Ready’ TV sets to reach the UK and Ireland. As 3D TVs become more widely available, Sky will roll out its 3D channel to hundreds of pubs from April, allowing football fans across the country the opportunity to experience a live Premier League match in 3D each week.

And also interesting to read how they do it:

To make the 3D preview a reality, Sky Sports will produce two edits of its live coverage of Sunday’s game at the Emirates Stadium, one for its HD channel feed and another dedicated to 3D. Eight specially engineered 3D camera rigs will house sixteen of Sky’s high definition cameras, to provide comprehensive stereoscopic coverage from all angles. The 3D broadcast will be supported by Sky’s dedicated 3D production team and purpose built 3D outside broadcast truck, which will enable live mixing between camera positions, slow motion replays and the use of innovative 3D graphics. There will also be a dedicated commentary team to support the 3D edit.

This is gonna be very cool stuff folks this 3D lark. Sky’s full consumer service launches in April, best get them 3DTVs on the market folks…

Full details in the press release

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Fast ways to find blog content

Simon — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:07:50 +0000

I’ve just made a simple change to the site to make finding some of my content much easier. Starting now if you’re only interested in Windows 7 content go to win7.simon-may.com for cool geeky stuff use geek.simon-may.com and for tech go to tech.simon-may.com.

I’m also moving my random mumblings to items.simon-may.com to keep the main blog focused on exploring technology, as always it’s the single source for all my syndicated content but no longer diluted with randomness.

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B&O laptop is beautiful

Simon — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:11:40 +0000

Wow, the design of this laptop has just blown me away… Asus and Bang and Olufsen have teamed up to produce this stunner. It has all the usual premium features, blazing processor, tons of RAM, HDMI out and Blu-Ray but it’s also packing in B&O speakers and double touch pads. Very nice. Very premium. The cost, very B&O, about £2,000.

Reg Hardware has the low down.

[via @databasejase]

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Sky v Spotify, the winner is?

Simon — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:27:58 +0000

Today BSkyB in the UK is launching their new subscription based music model carefully named Sky Songs, but I wonder how long the idea to call it SkyTunes was banded about in the office? The subscription model they are introducing looks quite similar to the Zune model and to Spotify on the surface and looks set to really mix things up here in the UK music market.

Sky have huge muscles and are certainly the biggest media distribution company to enter the field so far here. Most of the major labels and quite a few independents have signed up and I don’t doubt that this will become a big player in the music market in the UK.

But I don’t like this one little bit, and here’s why

The subscription model is a too complicated though for my liking, but the gist is that you pay either £6.49 and get 1 album (that costs up to £6.49) or 10 tracks to download and keep per month and unlimited free streaming or £7.99 per month for 1 album (that costs up to £7.99) or 15 tracks to download and keep per month and unlimited free streaming. Additional tracks will cost 65p.
This seems to be a “buy an album and get a month of free streaming” deal to me, I mean, that’s the offering here isn’t it? Individual tracks from Amazon are priced about the same, so there’s no benefit there in terms of a reduced cost for downloading tracks, and I have to buy an album to get access to the unlimited subs. I already have free, unlimited streaming from Spotify (for example), so why buy an album?
In terms of a subscription based model Spotify has the best offering (in the UK) at under £10 per month for unlimited music, which I can listen to offline.

I’m sticking with what I’ve got but I wonder how many people will be drawn to Sky’s offering? It’s free for the first month for Sky Broadband customers, so with my bargain hunting hat on, if you have Sky Broadband go get your free album. Then go elsewhere, save more money and get a more innovative service because this doesn’t look like one. I wish Spotify worked in Media Center.

The service is available here: http://songs.sky.com/

And the full press release is here

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EEE PC in your kitchen cupboard

Simon — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:44:44 +0000

File this one under impressive installations. This little video, featured on Make magazine shows a superb kitchen installation of a touch screen EEE PC that’s been modded and had a touch screen added. Looks like a good bit of installation work. Play on full volume in the office on Monday for some interesting looks! (or play it on mute if you don’t want the funny looks).

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The ZuneHD looks awesome!

Simon — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Microsoft’s new music player looks awesome, no seriously it does. It’s got some great technical specs, like an NVidia chip that gives it fantastic graphics, an OLED screen that looks super crisp and HD radio. Some of the leaks around the device are mouth-wateringly good, Ian has a good roundup of some. What I really want to know though is who’s the princess?

Internal shots of the ZuneHD have been published and you’ll see the “princess” reference below…wonder what that’s all about?

Amazon almost have their preorder site ready to go, so who’s preordering?

[via Zunited]

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How much are your memories worth?

Simon — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:25:00 +0000

This is a little off topic for Media Center but you’ll see the link in a little while. One of my contacts on Twitter got in touch about the ~~latest~~ first Panasonic Blu-Ray recorder available in the UK and it looks like a very cool unit, in fact it’s not far off got most MCE features built in, which is an interesting move. What this really shows is that there’s a very genuine consumer desire for the features we take for granted with Media Center and competition is good for spurring innovation – the compression that this box can do around HD content’s really interesting.

What got me interested though is that they’ve worked out just how much our digital memories are worth to us, using a very clever mathematical formula…in the UK 4 in 10 would sell their Christmas for less than £500 but a wedding would go for £3,000,000…I’ve already asked “D” if she’s willing to sell ours next year and she said “yes, as long as we spend the money on another one!” any offers?

You can work out the value of your memories just here using the spreadsheet, and check out Panasonic’s Blu-Ray Media Centre worrier just here. Take this into the context of how you can backup and archive those memories and suddenly you’ve got a business case built to use to sell it to the holder of your purse strings.

So folks, I’m guessing I know the answer, but would a box like this make you move away? I know it wouldn’t make me move but it’s an interesting question for Sunday evening.

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BBC video on Microsoft’s Future home

Simon — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:10:00 +0000

Just stumbled over this on twitter but unfortunately I don’t remember who from, sorry. The beeb have been to Microsoft’s future house to look at some of the tech that might be coming into our homes in the future, the video is here

There’s some clever stuff like visual recognition of your clothes to tell you what temperature to wash them at, and of your drugs (prescription only) to tell you how much to take and some nifty dining room table stuff that’s more suited tot he office really. Cool stuff all in all, the focus is on digital living rather than media, but it gives us an insight into the thinking inside Microsoft’s research teams.

Posted by Simon May, follow me on Twitter or if you like email me

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Long term test – the new Jawbone

Simon — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:00:57 +0000

When I was in the states a few weeks ago I picked up the new Jawbone from an At&T store. A small sleek black unit, with hidden buttons, leather bound ear loop and the killer feature “Noise Assassin” technology. Well I’ve been using this device for lots of phone calls, from both my BlackBerry pearl and my T-Mobile Touch Plus (HTC Touch Dual) and I’m now ready to talk about using the device on a day to day basis.

You can read the full review at Mobile Tech Addicts…

Technorati Tags: jawbone,review,2,new,bluetooth headset

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Squezebox part 1: Squeezebox Duet Installation Experience

Simon — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:00:00 +0000

Technorati Tags: squeezebox,squeezecenter,mcesoftsqueeze,softsqueeze,fry’s

So time for my long awaited Squeezebox Duet review, actually make that series of posts. I first read about the Squeezebox when it was announced, and Automatedhome.co.uk also has great review.

Whilst I was in the states I picked up a Squeezebox Duet from Fry’s in Seattle, it was actually on sale on Memorial Day weekend, so it cost $349 + TAX. This thing is brilliant!

When I got it home it was a doddle setup. First off, I bought this in the US, so power needed to be sorted out. The power supplies are international and can take anything from 100 to 240v input, just a case of changing to the UK adapter.

The next thing to do was to install the SqueezeCenter 7 software on the Media Center. Again a simple process, no install glitches – but I did have to manually start the scan of my music library. About 20 minutes later it finished and had catalogued all the albums.

Next I installed softsqueeze3 on the Media Center. This is a cool bit of software that emulates a squeeze box. After configuring it with a name and pointing it at the SqueezeCenter installation, a web address on port 9000, it was able to access the media fine. So I turned on the Duet controller.

The controller picked up my Wifi network and asked me for the security setup. Then it found my SqueezeCenter server automatically, and, I was a bit surprised about this, it let me select my SoftSqueeze installation on the controller. All of a sudden my Media Center was pumping out tunes controlled by my Squeezebox Controller!!

Very cool. This thing can control any squeezebox!

So I went into the kitchen and setup a micro hifi and plugged in all the stuff for the Squeezebox Reciever. I pressed the button on the front and… the controller sprang into life and picked up the receiver, automatically configuring it! Next thing I know I’ve got some Fun Lovin Criminals bouncing out of the stereo in the Kitchen…and it sounds, GREAT!

Wondering what else this thing can do I found the ability to sync the output from the Kitchen Squeezebox Reciever with the Softsqueeze installation in the lounge! This is going to be great when we have a party.

Next I went into SqueezeCenter, which is really the heart of everything and found that I can control all the squeezeboxes through the web interface. Including being able to make changes to them. So I did, I changed the names, the Softsqueeze to “Lounge” and the Duet Reciever to “Kitchen”.

This is becoming one cool whole house audio system. Need to sort out Media Center integration though, enter MCE Softaqueeze.

How would I rate ease of installation 5 stars, Ease of use 5 stars. I love this thing.

Comming soon:

Part 2 – Overview of the Squeezbox controller

Part 3 – Looking around SqueezeCenter

Part 4 – Extensions

Part 5 – The wish list